CANINE VIRTUES
By: Mara Leverkuhn
Tags: Politics, Labour Party, Rant, Jeremy Corbyn, Literature

a human’s best slave

So I’m supposed to be The Word’s official immigrant, sharing from my outsider, pariah wisdom. Here it is again.

The Dog Incident

I went to Romania for a wedding. Lavish, decadent wedding with hundreds of guests and food that is not plastic/GMO/pesticides/computer generated/sugar laden. Anyhoo, visiting the medieval meadows and gypsy junkyards I call home, after a drunken moonshine stupor a relative gave me comprehensive tour of her riches; these included a young dog, chained, in a cement enclosure, left and forgotten. Before you shout animal abuse, ..industrialised agriculture, yeah? You eat cheese from gangraped cows. And vegetable flavoured Roundup.

Can’t stand dogs: subsmissive & sycophantic. This one, yellow and frisky, piqued my curiosity. I stood watching it jump up and down, Bambi eyes circling the enclosure. Never seen a creature so happy to see me. Talking to dogs isn’t my forte, so I told my relative to open the gate and offer temporary freedom to this desperately lonely soul. Seemed the only thing I could offer.

Tragedy is when the jail is within. Tragedy is when the dog can’t fathom freedom cuz it doesn’t know what it is. The fetters written in the DNA. The servile frantic doggy kept running in circles but carefully avoiding the open gate, and I stood waiting. Was it trying to demonstrate obedience by avoiding escape? Devotion to its oppressor more precious than freedom?

Humans did this: they bred slaves. Most of them animal. But some of the slaves are human also. Civilisation is very good at making them. The dream you grow up with as a kid is the progression’s been towards freedom, equality and democracy. The opposite happened. And history made clever slaves, that read the Guardian, buy grills for their gardens, drive to a cubicle everyday and post pics of their offspring on Facebook.

And don’t bite the hand that feeds. Farm animals are well fed by their owner. They don’t know he’s going to slaughter them. Guardian reading slaves don’t know the neoliberal prosperity is pacification/distraction from the theft of their future. Busy buying shit they don’t need, they don’t notice NHS isn’t there anymore. And when at 70 they’re discarded from the work force — no option but to go home and die.

It’s everybody’s fate. But they think it’s just for the poor, the scroungers.

You see them on Twitter defending Tories. Calling Corbyn unelectable. Barking dogs. Trained to obey and not question. Being fed just enough MSM propaganda to recite PR mantras like “unelectable” in the face of the most popular leader who created a mass movement. They vote for their oppressors. They value shiny crap more than their own freedom.

Corbyn’s been elected again, and even Tory journalists like Peter Oborne hail this as new movement in politics, more about truth than oratory. He’s the Don Quijote of the anti-austerity crusade, making good look cool. Who thought a bike riding veggie with a face like a medieval saint, will be the new rock star? That’s hope and triumph of life in face of adversity. Like weeds pierce through cement. Refreshing to see a human face that shows bitterness and dissatisfaction; too long queasy watching those slick Kens and Barbies of the TV world. Yes, he’s no Cicero, he’s no model, because he’s 100% dignity and soul. In the face of Tory Britain, through the collective delusion, only a handful of people have this unperverted unrelenting love for people and the future — and the people they love and seek to liberate are trained to bark at them. Which is worrying, because they’ll then not vote for them.

I know the incoming objection: “this isn’t communist Romania, dear, this is a free country” — which I often hear one way or another. And yes, you’re correct, it’s not. In that, it’s much worse. You see, for an advanced empire to function, you need technocrats for slaves. You need engineers, doctors, journalists, office bitches, CEOs. They will need to spend a certain time in schools, become semi-intellectuals. They need to be not aware the system is rigged and meritocracy is a lie. They need, therefore, mind control. This comes in the form of state of the art culture and media, which only the West has created to a very advanced level. I talk to students who candidly tell me they worship Bernays for the art of spin. You worship the man who said the public mind needs to be regimented? for people to behave as they’re told, against their self interest? Bernays manufactures consent. PR rules the postmodern world. Men and women cannot be trusted to think for themselves. Their opinions are simple programs served by the media so they rally monolithically against their own saviour. And call him out on his clothes, while worshipping the besuited butchers yielding closely the worlds’ riches, leaving behind devastation, deforestation, piles of bombed cities, assassinated whistleblowers, terror.

Humanity’s enslavement is complete if you don’t wake up this instance and stop allowing the propaganda to sip into your brain like a worm. The lower class is desperate and honest; the high class is evil clever; but the middle class is just meek sycophancy — the glorified mind slaves. Stop letting the limbic system take decisions against your abstract thought; confusing immediate bland prosperity for happiness. Just because you, deluded middle class, can still wallow in obscene consumerism and mindless distractions, doesn’t mean the long term cost of that isn’t totally devastating FOR ALL. Excess, luxury, waste, work, consumption: are evils, they’re mechanisms of your own control and deflection. Hamsters on a wheel producing and consuming so that the machine gets richer, while no advancement of our own is made, beyond the colored crap we buy. The Tory delusion couldn’t work if not for the cooperation of the middle class, the most obedient, complacent, weak of all social classes. Respectability and economic compliance seem sacred to them — they need to wake the fuck up.