Back in the USSR: She didn't like it there, and now it's here (MUST-READ)

[Mark Crispin Miller]

Frogs in Warming Water: Abuse Is Abuse Is Abuse

https://tessa.substack.com/p/frogs-in-warming-water-abuse-is-abuse

The sense of sanity is gone.

Tessa Lena

Whom do I hear?
Is it still you, or is it your fear?
Is it your hive,
Or is it your inner child,
Saying what’s necessary to say
To remain alive?

Yesterday, I walked out of my building and saw a food line going all around the block. I felt a sting in my heart. I felt a feeling of disgust and buried grief so massive that I nearly threw up. A tiny group of corrupt, fork-tongued corporatchiks are stuffing their suspiciously evenly tanned faces—no trace of mask—while regular people are getting paler and the bread lines are getting longer. The comfy hypocrites who have never skipped a meal are pontificating about the benefits of lockdowns—more lockdowns for the peasants, please—and sending virtuous tweets about saving lives, while lives are ending, businesses are closing, my vibrant city is going rogue and anxious, and the people who can’t hide behind a screen are picking up the tab.

A scream of anger and grief.

The lies and the abuse by the corporatchiks are worse than Pravda.

Still screaming.

Pravda? Why?

Because I remember how Pravda reported the news, and I resent the resurrection of its reporting style in today’s allegedly democratic American media. This insults my senses tremendously. It shouldn’t be! It’s been established three decades ago that Pravda’s approach to reporting was lame and toxic, so who brought it back?!! I feel like I need to take a shower every time I accidentally intake it. The robo-tone! The exaggeration! The blatant propaganda! Yikes. It’s like a creepy time machine.

I grew up in Moscow at the ruins of the Soviet Union, in-between empires, in the middle of what at the time felt like a sacred collective song of freedom (and what in reality was the soundtrack of western corporations moving in and clearing up the space with fuzzy words). But even though Western multinationals were full of it and the local oligarchs were cruel, the people actually craved a liberation. After seventy years of marching to the lying algorithm, the people wanted honesty. Pravda with all its angular hype, its robotic outrage, and the absoluteness of its every sentence was unapologetically laughed out of the room by my peers who were hungry for spiritual and political freedom.

The act of laughing propaganda out of the room shaped me profoundly. I am liberal in the most primal, apolitical sense of it. I am an artist. I believe that people can choose to think whatever they please, and that the authorities should keep out of people’s faces based on the fact that the authorities are never honest. I believe in sovereignty and sincerity. I understand the low value and the high cost of the establishment-manufactured notion of “public good.” I feel that sustainable solutions are spiritual in essence and come from training the senses to grasp complexity and wisdom—and that algorithmic fixes suck. I believe that every human being has a unique and important purpose, and that respect for every individual’s free will is a precondition for having a harmonious society. I also believe that the “collective” boot and the “commercial” boot are two faces of the same boot, just painted in different colors. Or maybe just left and right?

So let’s look at left and right.

Click on the link for the rest.