That’s kind of what’s gone on in the media lately, EVERY
“journalist,” EVERY commentator, on news shows, sports shows and entertainment
shows HAS TO excoriate Donald Sterling, or risk being suspected of being a “racist.”
Worse STILL, somehow anti-black bigotry is seemingly
defined as “racism,” when the reverse tends to be politely overlooked! Fact is,
there’s precious little of the virulent anti-black bigotry that existed just
decades ago, sadly the same CANNOT be said for the virulent anti-white bigotry
of the Nation of Islam, the Five Percenters, the Black Israelites, etc.
Donald Sterling is almost certainly an asshole, BUT
contrary to a very comfortable MYTH, many of the "best &
brightest" among us are deeply flawed, often anti-social and utterly
ruthless people. Very often super high achievers are singularly driven people.
They take a laser-like and single-minded focus on the one thing they excel at,
often at the expense of developing social skills, being well-read,
well-rounded, or otherwise decent people.
WHY is that at all surprising? ONLY the most
ruthless sharks get to that rarefied air of the Billionaires club. ANYONE who
thinks Sterling amassed his wealth by ever backing down or apologizing to
others is nuts. This guy's been a ruthless, cut-throat, highly litigious
individual his entire life and he’s probably NOT going to stop being that NOW!
We hold to many myths to preserve this thin veneer
of civility. Some would argue that the fact that most of us cling to, at least
the illusion of humanity and decency shows that, at heart, we all WANT to be
that, even if we often fall short.
I’m more cynical about that, myself. I think most of
us admire the ruthless sharks among us, that even if we don’t act as
ruthlessly, we’d very much like to, so I hold us humans in pretty low regard,
so far as civility and humanity go.
Zac Bissonnette has chronicled Magic Johnson’s
association with numerous “predatory financial services” scams that have
primarily “targeted low income communities, from Jackson-Hewitt’s refund
anticipation loans, to prepaid credit cards, to his partnering with Washington
Mutual in a subprime mortgage scam. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AVP7cUPAhM)
John McAfee (the anti-virus creator) is suspected of
murdering a neighbor (Gregory Viant Faull - http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/05/12/john-mcafee-portland-belize-mysterious-murder/2135255/) in
Belize. McAfee initially
avoided Belizian authorities, saying that he’d always been afraid that the
police would kill him, in refusing to answer their routine questions. Subsequently,
Belize's prime minister Dean Barrow
has called McAfee "extremely
paranoid, even bonkers". McAfee
fled Belize when he was sought for questioning concerning the murder,
but was caught in Guatemala for illegally entering that country and his request
for asylum there was denied.
Only the most driven, the most obsessed, the biggest
sharks rise to such levels and yes, people of that ilk have their flaws...often
many, MANY great flaws. The “best and brightest,” the most productive, etc.,
are rarely “the nicest, kindest and most decent,” that’s just the way it is.
WHY should that surprise any of us?
How pervasive is this ruthless, shark-mindset? In
the late 1970s after the Trilateral Commission (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission)
issued a report titled, “The Crisis of Democracy” (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0814713645/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=3F4Q0Y2GSP126&coliid=IGH7BEARBDV02)
in which, among other things they expressed the concern that many of the social
and economic problems have resulted from an over-educated populace that had
unreasonably high expectations concerning quality of life. During the Carter administration
all of the top positions in the government - the office of President,
Vice-President, Secretary of State, Defense and Treasury - were held by members
of the Trilateral Commission, and the National Security Advisor (Zbigniew Brzezinski) was
its director. Many lesser officials also came from this group. No less a
Leftist that Noam Chomsky noted, “It is
rare for such an easily identified private group to play such a prominent role
in an American Administration.” The Trilateral Commission was set up
byDavid Rockefeller in 1973.
Chomsky asserted that, “Its vision of "democracy" is reminiscent of the feudal
system. On the one hand, we have the King and Princes (the government). On the
other, the commoners. The commoners may petition and the nobility must respond
to maintain order. There must however be a proper "balance between power
and liberty, authority and democracy, government and society."
"Excess swings may produce either too much government or too little
authority." In the 1960s, Huntington maintains, the balance shifted too
far to society and against government. "Democracy
will have a longer life if it has a more balanced existence," that is, if
the peasants cease their clamor. Real participation of "society"
in government is nowhere discussed, nor can there be any question of democratic
control of the basic economic institutions that determine the character of
social life while dominating the state as well, by virtue of their overwhelming
power. Once again, human rights do not exist in this domain.” (http://www.chomsky.info/books/priorities01.htm)
When the primary global leadership see their own “best
practices” as rooted in a feudal-styled system, they prove themselves no more “evolved,”
no more civil, or decent than the likes of the Bruno Fernandes’, the John McAfee’s
and the Donald Sterling’s of the world!
It would be a good thing if the outrage over the Donald
Sterling affair was about our collective mythos falling, but it’s not. Sadly
and disastrously, it’s mostly about “the evils of white “anti-black racism”),
which pretty much amounts to chasing unicorns.
But the real cost is that some very ugly issues get
ignored. One of the very few to point some of these out has been yet another
committed Leftist, Bill Maher, who correctly pointed out, that we SHOULD ALL
have a HUGE problem with the way this private conversation was made public.
That's the sordid part of all this that most people would like to simply
ignore. YES, today, many of the same people who excoriate Nazi Germany's "informant
culture," where children were taught and encouraged/rewarded for
reporting relatives who weren't “pro-nazi enough,” seem to laud this behavior
by a possible blackmailer. I think that's called hypocrisy.
As I’ve said, I have long ago acquiesced and
accommodated myself to the new realities of the surveillance state in which we
all live. I have 3 video cameras set up in my car, a half dozen outside my home
and more inside my home. I have NO expectation of privacy outside my front
door.
I also know how easy it is to track cell phone calls
and record them (I've done it myself)...Newt Gingrich had some of his private
cell calls made public years ago. It's easy to do and those who cheer when a
Gingrich is brought down HAVE TO (yes, it's a legal mandate...implied within
the law) also support the SAME being done to those they might support...or
perhaps even themselves! It IS what
it IS.
Once we accept the righteousness of such an
intrusion in one case, it is de facto accepted in ALL others...or, in the
Latin-rooted legal term..."No BACKSIES!"
That SHOULD BE a problem for
most of us, hell even I (who endorse much of the modern surveillance state)
object to and worry about much of this private data-mining, BUT instead, most
of the talk today STILL centers around this national obsession with our
masochistic self-flagellation over race.
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