OH...The HUMANITY!

There’s a great scene in that Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles (http://www.amazon.com/Blazing-Saddles-30th-Anniversary-Special/dp/B0001Z4OXS/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1400087266&sr=1-2&keywords=blazing+saddles), in which the Governor demands a “Harumph” out of everyone around the table, after loudly declaring, “Gentlemen, we NEED to protect our phony, baloney jobs here!”

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.

Donald Sterling isn’t even a rare, let alone singular example of the outrageous excesses of the “best & brightest” among us. We’ve seen it recently in the cases of Oscar Pistorius of South Africa (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/06/oscar-pistorius-murder) and Bruno Fernandes of Brazil (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2579411/Goalkeeper-girlfriend-kidnapped-murdered-fed-dogs-allowed-prison-12-months-22-year-sentence-continue-play-professional-football.html)...both were focused and driven high achievers who murdered their paramours, Pistorius allegedly in a fit of rage and Fernandes, angered at a woman with whom he’d had an affair (Eliza Samudio) demanding child support for the child that union produced. The Samudio murder was particularly gruesome, as Fernandes reportedly had Ms. Samudio handed off to a crew of killers he knew from his days growing up in Brazil’s slums.

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.