As The Cookie Crumbles: The Old "CTRTW"

We've all at one time or another idly speculated with the megalomaniac game of "What I'd Do If I Ruled The World."

But the prior question is just as interesting: What do you need to do to take over in the first place?

I've often thought that if I were on the "CTRTW"--that's the "Committee That Rules The World"--and our design was to surreptitiously, but irremediably and irreversibly, fatally undermine the "grand experiment" of USer 'democracy,' and then to corrupt its mythic residue to my own designs, I would radically "problematize" the whole idea of "gummint" itself.

I would aim to make it STOP working. I'd make people dread encounters with the State. I'd make 'em wonder, with every breath, if 'freedom' was really worth it. Is liberty worth THIS MUCH hassle? And I wouldn't have to do ANYTHING any differently than every president since Johnson has done, to foster an increasingly toxic, 'institutional disenchantment' among "average citizens" with their frustrations with their own popular sovereignty.

I would, first, arrange it so that BIG MONEY was in control of the "public media." That's key. Rebels ALWAYS take over the TV stations first, cuz you gotta control the message. You don't have to exert control over every individual's every thought. It's enough to control the 'frames," and the 'vocabulary'--words and images--and the 'trends,' the perceptions. When you've got that much influence, thought control takes care of itself, cuz there's only so much you CAN think...

And I'd turn politics into a circus, a kind of pseudo-sport, like "professional wrasslin'." The wrestlers ALL work for the same guy, the same company, no matter what ostensible role they play in the ring. Good guys, bad guys, they're interchangeable from one night to another. It's just spectacle though, like kabuki drama, which it also resembles, it has a didactic function too.

I would see to it that the overwhelming majority of citizens were irretrievably indentured, through easy credit and/or "home ownership, to the dominant, PRIVATE, CorpoRat/State financial structures--with credit cards functioning as mobile contracts of indenture to the company store.

I would arrange it so that the people elected to 'represent' the interests OF the 'people" would, instead, mainly come from, and PROUDLY owe their primary social , political, and economic fealty to the Ruling Class. My "party" system would be stratified by class, with easily identifiable winners and losers...

I would direct things so that my "Executive/Presidential" officers were both buffoonish and ineffective sock-puppets, who were were as divisive--but as philosophically similar to one another--as possible, thereby serially alienating one, then another, then another, then another constituency, until NO 'president' would really 'represent' the country, but only the interests of their CorpoRat Bosses.

I would exhaust the public treasury with ruinous, futile, immoral, bloody--but small-scale--international wars of opportunity and or avarice; then I'd use the ensuing financial crises enforce 'austerity' on the people, whom I'd use my media empires to blame for their own plight, while simultaneously extolling their "exceptionalism."

I'd unfairly use loopholes in federal banking regulations to dispossess the 'uppity' folks--whatever race/class--of the things they thought they had "earned." Depressions don't hurt EVERYBODY. There's around 5% who do SPLENDIDLY, thank you, repossessing the tchotchkes and gew-gaws--you know, like houses and cars--which the rubes thought they'd bought, but which they would shortly learn, to their dismay, that they had in fact only leased.

I'd blame EVERYTHING on the "political culture," on the seeming impossibility of legislative consensus, and one day I'd spend a couple of million dollars and I'd get together a "patriotic," oath-loyal, stridently moralistic Committee of Private Citizens and I'd pledge to "RESTORE" America,!!!" if you people would just LET me.

I think they're just about ready to completely throw off the masquerades of 'democracy,' and maybe even 'politics' itself, and exchange if for the 'discipline' of the boardroom. No more moral hazard here, you betcha!

They usta say beware the man on horseback; today, it's the demagog in the $15,000 suit and the private jet. Beware, cuz they're the same guy, hippies...

Oh, yeah! OCCUPY WALL STREET!!! and I'll see ya at the beach...