There are no classes in our classless society except those we ignore.

It’s a real gas pretending to be what we aren’t while denying what we are.

It is a privilege to live in a classless society in which class divisions grow by the day. Because, how can we have class divisions in America when we’re all middle class? As Scott Tucker puts it, “Like a magical incantation, the phrase ‘middle class’ served to submerge the general public in a warm bath of classless solidarity.”

Since we are all middle class, no child goes to bed hungry; we have no homeless sleeping in the doorways of our shuttered stores. No parent frets over a fever racked child because they are without health insurance. No family has a kitchen drawer full of maxed-out credit cards because they are desperately trying to keep up the appearance of a comfortable middle class lifestyle as their standard of living slowly sinks with the setting sun.

In our classless utopia, there is no racism. We are a land of equal opportunity for all who are well heeled and well connected. Endless prosperity is ours even though our deserted factories rust and decay. But, who cares as long as we can continue to charge cheap imports made in the sweat shop of countries that are torn by class divisions.

And overseeing our classless dreamworld is our oligarchs, snug in Kafka’s castle hidden in the mist atop its mountain.

There is one exception to this classless world of ours. Our oligarchs live in fear of class consciousness but do all they can to fan the flames of class resentment. The more poor whites look down of poor blacks and poor Mexicans, the less the chance that the poor will, some day, realize that they’re all in the same boat and become pissed off enough to march up the mountain towards the castle with torches blazing. This resentment is especially important as more and more of the middle class join the ranks of the poor.

Class resentment paralyzes, which is why the traditional wedge issues like gay marriage and illegal immigration are such powerful weapons. Our oligarchs want America to remain a corporate state. As Tucker says, “There is a world of difference between class resentment and class consciousness. Politically, this is indeed one of the sharpest dividing lines between fascism and socialism.”

The American public has been properly conditioned to view socialism with such abhorrence that they will rush to embrace fascism if given the choice, which, of course, they never will since that would be too democratic and be too reminiscent of a classless society, which we are even if we aren’t.

--Belacqua Jones

Upgrading Capital Punishment

If there’s one reason the country’s in such a sorry shape it's wimpy executions. Let’s face it, lethal injections are nothing more than a penal ER. This negates the whole purpose of the execution, which is to instill fear in would-be perpetrators by prolonging the agony of death and doing so as publicly as possible. A slow death in prime time would send a powerful message.

There is one form of execution that not only meets the above criteria, but, if handled right, could prove to be a substantial revenue stream. I am speaking of that God-fearing, biblically sanction form of capital punishment, stoning.

Death by stoning is long and drawn out, and you could prolong the agony by making the condemned wear a bicycle helmet, thus placating the consumer safety lobby. The deterrent effect is obvious.

And think of the money it would generate if it were televised. It would be an easy thirty share. The charge for a thirty-second spot would put the Super Bowl to shame.

But it doesn’t stop there. Let our country’s corporations pay through their noses to put their corporate logos on each stone.

But the really big bucks would be in auctioning off the right to cast the first stone. Our bankers and politicians would fall all over themselves for this privilege.

The public is ready for the transition to agonizing executions. Duly desensitized by slasher films and torture memos, it is primed for the gore of a bloody death.

--Belacqua Jones

Increasing Probability by Not Increasing It

There is more to the mainstream media than propaganda. Its main function is described by one of those psychological terms that say everything by saying nothing. Our oligarchs are well aware than an anxious public is much easier to control than one that is unafraid. Anxiety isolates; courage is the foundation of solidarity, and we saw how much trouble solidarity caused in Poland.

It is the media’s duty to stimulate a state of availability heuristic in the public. This is the ability of the mind to subjectively increase the probability of an event happening in direct proportion to the ease with which it can be thought of. In other words, if the media shills something, like swine flu, then the public believes the probability of their catching it increases as the media coverage increases even though the probability remains unchanged.

The availability heuristic offers all sorts of possibility to the state. Its sophisticated application enables to state to direct the public’s anxiety in any direction it chooses.

For example, the probability of being killed by lightening is 1:280,000. Let’s say the state wanted to create an irrational fear of lightning. All of a sudden the media is flooded with stories of lightning strikes. “The Lightning Threat” becomes the lead story on the evening news. Survivors of victims tell their tearful stories. A computerized map illustrates the number of lightning strikes by state. Long shots of clusters of police cars, fire trucks and ambulances, their red lights flashing, clustered around the body of another lightening victim, fill the screen.

Congressmen introduce legislation mandating that anyone leaving their house during a thunderstorm must wear a lightening rod strapped to their head

And the public buys into it because, in their minds, the probability of being killed by lightning has increased even though it remained the same.


We saw a stunning example of this in the years following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The idea of emancipated blacks is anathema to our democracy, so it was decided that if we couldn’t segregate them, we could incarcerate them.

All of a sudden, crime made the front page and the media was resplendent with images of “perp walks” that featured only black suspects. As these images flooded the airways and newspapers, the public came to believe that the probability of being a victim of a black criminal had increased even though it remained unchanged.

The ploy succeeded beautifully as blacks began to fill out jails, and politicians fell all over themselves trying to prove how “tough” they were on crime.

Goebbels was such a primitive. It wasn’t his fault, though. He didn’t have the advanced tools of modern psychology at his disposal.

--Belacqua Jones

How to give the torture test.

It’s time we put an end to all this torture talk by declaring that there is no longer such a thing as torture. The entire concept of torture has been defined away in a series of policy statements.

The beauty of policy is that it can coat the most garish of brutalities with the beige slime of value-free language thus removing the atrocity from the cauldron of evil and reducing it to a matter of bureaucratic routine.

Our Department of Justice has stated very clearly that if a procedure does not kill, cause the loss of a bodily organ or the loss of a bodily function, it is not torture. And they should know because they're all lawyers. In other words, if the subject leaves the interrogation room alive and with all his organs in place and functioning, he wasn’t tortured, no matter how bloodied or traumatized he is.

There is an easy test to demonstrate this truth, which I call it the Gonzales test. The next time someone complains about torture, ask them to place the first joint of their index finger on a hard, flat surface. Then take a ball-peen hammer and slam it down on the fingernail with all the force you can muster.

It hurts like hell, but it ain’t torture because:

· It didn’t kill them.
· A fingernail isn’t a bodily organ.
· No bodily function was impaired except picking his nose.

Case closed.

Carry the ball-peen hammer with you, and the next time some bleeding heart starts moaning about the evils of torture, ask him to place the first joint of his index finger on a hard, flat surface…

--Belacqua Jones

Raising Innocent Children

We have disabused ourselves of much of the Victorian baggage that found its highest expression in the grey flanneled conformity of the fifties, with one exception—a belief in the innocence of childhood. The reason it’s held on for so long is that it’s a cash cow for educators and marketers, even though the distinction between the two is beginning to fade.

It is, however, an innocence limited to children with blonde hair and white skin. Children who fall outside this category are expendable with the degree of expendability increasing in direct proportion to the darkness of the skin. It’s okay if Haitian children eat mud pies as long as our children are fed a healthy diet. It’s not racism; it’s economics.

The children of hunter-gatherers and sustenance farmers face two choices: either become wage slaves or die. The transition to wage slaves is only possible if the children are herded into classrooms where they are taught both the value of being on time and how to endure make-work expanded to fill a preordained period of time regardless of how mindless it is.

This is called saving their souls.

If they are lucky, such a transition prepares them for a career in the village sweatshop. If they are not lucky, they win a shanty in the nearest metroslum.

It’s different for towheads. They are raised in sanitary bubbles where their innocence is protected with a vengeance. They are preened, pampered and catered to. They are strangers to disappointment, hardship and hunger. Life, for them, is a horn of plenty from which pours an endless stream of toys and electronic gadgets designed to stimulate and distract even as they numb the intellect.

Within these bubbles, the darkness and misery of the world are shut out, and the young grow up into lives driven by exceptionalism and entitlement. No child starves within the bubble; no child has it viscera splattered over the pavement by a bomb.

Within the bubble, all is light and gaiety even though the light is artificial and the gaiety forced.

The upshot of all this is that the grey conformity of the fifties has been replaced by the polychromatic conformity of the oughts. (At least in the fifties you could smoke in a restaurant.)

Towheads are the children of the light who, when they grow up, will continue to spread the doctrine of darkness to the hunter-gatherers and sustenance farmers of the world, if any are left.

--Belacqua Jones

Swine Flu Saves the Day

Bigotry doesn’t grow on its own. Not only must it be nurtured and cared for, but it requires massive doses of the fertilizer of anxiety and fear before can reach its full potential. This is why we have a media, to insure an unlimited supply of said fertilizer.

However, not any old fertilizer will do. An efficient fertilizer is one that pushes one of the many hot buttons within the public’s psyche. For decades, Communism was a great fertilizer, but not because it offered an alternative to capitalism. What incensed the public about the communists was that they were “godless,” and nobody messes with God.

(Before going any further, we must distinguish between hard bigotry—overt racism—and soft bigotry, which has the benevolent aim of elevating our “lesser beings.” Hard bigotry sneers; soft bigotry smiles. Hard is for the lower classes; soft is for the educated classes.)

After the fall of the Soviet Union, bigotry fell on hard times. With 9/11, it looked as if terrorism would fill the void. Unfortunately, while collapsing buildings make one hell of a media show, terrorists and Islamofascist simply didn’t touch any of our hot buttons. And without an inflamed hot button, there can be little or no bigotry.

All of this is about to change. The media is now churning out a new fertilizer that approaches perfection. It doesn’t just push one hot button, it pushes multiple buttons.

A recent phenomenon is the appearance in supermarkets of sanitary wipes so shoppers can swab down the handles of their shopping carts to protect themselves from the crud left on the handle by the previous low-life shopper.

The wipes feed into America’s chronic germophobia, bacillophobia and bacterophobia. However, all of these are but symptoms of the mother of all phobias, mysophobia, an irrational fear of dirt. These are all media produced phobias that have the public popping antibiotics at the first appearance of a runny nose, while scrubbing themselves down with antibacterial soap as they slather antibacterial lotion on their hands.

Thus was the public primed for the appearance of The Swine Flu Threat.

It doesn’t get much better than this because it feeds into the public’s mysophobia. Pigs are dirty; dirt carries germs. Therefore, where other types of flu are benign, swine flu must be virulent because it comes from dirty, germy pigs.

Even better, it comes from the land of illegal immigrants, Mexico.

Already we are hearing cries to seal the border to protect the American people from this threat to our well being. We’re not prejudice; we just want to stay healthy so we can enjoy the good life.

It makes no difference that swine flu differs little from the garden variety flu, or that every year 36,000 Americans die from this garden variety. Swine flu rocks as a media event! Cable anchors are breathless as media medical consultants intone. The numbers are duly tallied for each state as Obama calls for $1.5 billion to prepare the nation for the pandemic he says is not a threat.

Schools are closed; flights are cancelled; suspected victims are quarantined; restaurants and theaters are shuttered.

And America eyes the border over which hordes of infected illegal immigrants pour.

Bigotry is such fun when it surfaces. Thanks God for our pigs.

Our Empire of Boredom

Empire’s driving force is neither strength nor brutality. They are important, but they are only the tires on empire’s vehicle. The engine that sets empire into motion is the serene barbarity of the civilized.

Strength and brutality are children of dysfunction. But serene barbarity is the child of normality and reason. The serene barbarian uses his gifts of abstraction and reason to neutralize the restraints of morality because he believes that his barbarity is not barbarity but is a moral act that is serving his nation's destiny, whatever that is.

The serene barbarian is smooth of face and bland of features. Seated at his desk beneath a bank of fluorescent lights, he sets into motion the banal policies that leave blood and destruction in their wake. All the while, his face is open and pleasant as he pauses to stare for a moment at the picture of his wife and child on his desk.

The paradox of the serene barbarian is that he was raised as an innocent. He never knew hardship or saw a body torn and bleeding, nor has he ever been a victim of misfortune. His barbarity is one nurtured by boredom.

The serene barbarian thrives because the Devil has repositioned himself. There is no more sulfurous smoke or burning pits of eternal damnation. No more do you find him at moonlit crossroads. Now he strides towards you across a restaurant floor dressed in a Brooks Brother suit and wingtips. He takes you by the hand and tells you how glad he is to see you, and in the warmth of his greeting, all your doubts and anxieties vanish and you feel you have found peace and identity.

It’s all so serene, so peaceful, so comprehensive.