The bitter American
It seems to me that the image of the "Ugly American" has been replaced by the "Bitter American".
The bitter American is jealous of people with a lot of money. The Bitter American resents that a lot of money and power is centralized in the hands of a relative few.
The Bitter American is bitter about paying taxes. He is bitter about the government taking money away from him under the auspices of taxes and to pay for societal programs.
The Bitter American does not realize that the government behaves and distributes the money for his behalf. Furthermore, the Bitter American can't see that the government is not a possessor of money; it is just a channeler of money. Money in from the population, is the same as (money out to the population plus administrative costs). The government is not the Congressmen, the Senate members, the tax collectors and the garbage men. These are employees of the Government, as the Government is none other but the Will of the People.
The Will of the People is a funny concept; apparently the government and its actions does not fit any one person's will in the entire population of 30000000000000000. (Lost count of the zeroes. Put in extra ones just to be on the safe side.) Yet it is the sum vector of all the will-vectors, to try to put it in a visual way, of all those who help shape the nations' course of action: the voters, the representatives.
So what's my beef. My beef is the bridgeable schism of what constitutes the government, and what the Bitter American figures constitutes the government. According to the Bitter American, Government IS this enormous bureaucracy, and the people who draw money for their own benefit from the taxpayer, are leeches on society. They hardly do any work, and yet they get a pay cheque and benefits better than those of most working saps.
Whereas the government is a combined will of all the individual wills of the people. In America, the Government is the People's Will.
My beef is with the serious displacement of reality for the sake of the agenda of bitter, jealous illusions.
Do you see my concept? Do you agree, or not, and if yes, then why not?
The bitter American is jealous of people with a lot of money. The Bitter American resents that a lot of money and power is centralized in the hands of a relative few.
The Bitter American is bitter about paying taxes. He is bitter about the government taking money away from him under the auspices of taxes and to pay for societal programs.
The Bitter American does not realize that the government behaves and distributes the money for his behalf. Furthermore, the Bitter American can't see that the government is not a possessor of money; it is just a channeler of money. Money in from the population, is the same as (money out to the population plus administrative costs). The government is not the Congressmen, the Senate members, the tax collectors and the garbage men. These are employees of the Government, as the Government is none other but the Will of the People.
The Will of the People is a funny concept; apparently the government and its actions does not fit any one person's will in the entire population of 30000000000000000. (Lost count of the zeroes. Put in extra ones just to be on the safe side.) Yet it is the sum vector of all the will-vectors, to try to put it in a visual way, of all those who help shape the nations' course of action: the voters, the representatives.
So what's my beef. My beef is the bridgeable schism of what constitutes the government, and what the Bitter American figures constitutes the government. According to the Bitter American, Government IS this enormous bureaucracy, and the people who draw money for their own benefit from the taxpayer, are leeches on society. They hardly do any work, and yet they get a pay cheque and benefits better than those of most working saps.
Whereas the government is a combined will of all the individual wills of the people. In America, the Government is the People's Will.
My beef is with the serious displacement of reality for the sake of the agenda of bitter, jealous illusions.
Do you see my concept? Do you agree, or not, and if yes, then why not?
Comments (21)
Trump somehow manages to be an ugly American in America.
@Bitter Crank
I think this post is a more or less underhanded attack at you!
I did not write this... it is nonsensical. I don't know how it got there into the opening post. Absolute mystery to me.
Okay, I get it: I need to accept comments that come in. All this is new procedure to me.
Praxis, you got it right on. The "haves" are still in the old role.
What is the source of bitterness? Disappointment? Failure? Betrayal? Crushing experiences? Bad parenting? Exclusion from one's peer groups? Overbearing siblings? I don't think people become bitter because of taxation, distribution of wealth, and the like. Personal experiences that expand the gap between aspirations and achievements might be strong factors.
Politicians have always [figuratively] built drainage systems to bring people's feelings of disappoint and failure to stagnant collection ponds where it can putrefy and then be used to further spoil the public mood and perception of reality. Hillary Clinton was slimed by the effluent of the pond, for example. I wasn't enthusiastic about a Clinton administration, but I also resented her being made into a devil.
'The People' really ought to be outraged by the performance of both political parties in their general failures; they should be enraged by their continuing exploitation by the rich. They should focus their wrath on the practice of the ruling class to manage the country for the benefit of themselves. Will they? Probably not -- and not because they are stupid, duped, or ignorant. It's just that real human characters like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump make much more compelling targets.
I've known some extremely rich people, who were self-made men. Their biggest piss-off? Their lives not being much different from that of the ordinary man. They are financial giants, they expect extraordinary entitlements, like double the lifespan, or triple the sexually active period of their lives. They demand perfect health, perfect scores for their children at school, and perfection from everyone around them. These people are not happy... their own success made them full of future expectations, and they are really short of the target.
Whereas me, to live with the words of Paul Spenser, "my parents now think I'd be lucky to amount to nothing".
Life is just a bowl of oat bran... every morning wake up and it's there. Don't let no rich people tell you otherwise.
Something similar happened on the Trump side, as well. The guy has a lot of problems, some significant and some petty. A lot of attention was given to the petty problems, to embarrass him, laugh at him, and just generally mock him. I have friends who voted for Trump, and they got to the point where they could not hear any criticism about him, even the really legitimate ones, because they came to see all criticism of him as petty insults.
I'm not so sure if this kind of thing could be called bitterness, as I tend to think of bitterness as secret hatred, but it certainly does seem like it was a rather bitter election in the sense that it had basically become a matter of choosing the least worst option.
I think "malcontent" would probably be a more accurate word for many Americans; not happy with the system and yet also unwilling to do what it takes to change the system.
I am certainly a malcontent. I've been very unhappy with the system, and I've been willing to do what needs to be done. Changing our (or any established) system requires a change of consciousness and thinking in the population (the real revolution) before concrete changes can be instituted. Personally, I don't think we can engineer that change, and I am in the dark about what sort serendipitous events would bring about a revolutionary change of thinking and consciousness.
I've talked to a lot of people about this, and the most common answer I've heard is that many people want change, but most of them believe they can see something the others can't, and they're just waiting for everyone else to catch up with them before they will do anything about it.
It's a bit like a concept Jesus promoted, where he said that his followers should not allow money, or the things money can buy, to be the motivation for why they work. Instead, they should just work for the benefit of others. Most people can see that this is a good philosophy, but it comes across as highly impractical, mostly because we all know that humans invariably disappoint one another. If I help someone for free, what if no one helps me in return? I could end up giving all my time and resources away to a greedy world who just wants to use me up. The easiest conclusion is that, while "working for love" is a good theory, it's not practical unless everyone is willing to do it . But this is a catch-22, because if everyone waits for everyone else to make changes, then nothing gets done, and instead we end up with a world full of hypocrites who believe the best about themselves but never get around to acting on that best.
I believe this is where the concept of personal integrity really shines through, which gets back to the point you made about our inability to engineer change. Integrity and character can't be engineered or coerced. It can only be demonstrated, taught, and influenced in the hopes that others around us will be inspired to also try acting with integrity. It's a losing battle and yet, that's the point of integrity; people who exercise goodness still win even as the world around them falls apart and they are killed for it.
Socrates was sentenced to death, but I do not think he lost at all and I do not think he saw himself as a loser. Although he died, he won, and he won gloriously precisely because he did not back down on his personal integrity. He actually seemed to see his sentencing as a proof of victory, like some kind of personal achievement in his life. He didn't wait for everyone else to be willing to die with him.
Thousands of years after his death, his testimony reaches out from the grave to convict the sincere. That is what we need today.
Self imposed [s]inflicted[/s], implied expectations, on anyone but thyself.
I have been doing that incessantly, and old replies to this thread that had been "accept"-ed before need to be "accept"-ed again.
This is very tedious, and I don't know how this reflects on the site, as I can only see my browser.
HELLLLP!!
No. All comments are viewable. If you set up the discussion in the 'question' mode, as you've done here, then you get to pick a reply as the answer to your question. You don't have to do so, it's optional.
He is on his way to kill Alyona Ivanovna, that rent seeking wallstreet bitch. Good riddance... but maybe we should ring the police to save us the nightmare that is a Dostoevsky length novel.
Sorry, and I extend my empathy and sympathy to the participants of this thread, but I don't have enough hours in the day to spend on such imbecilic procedures that this site is forcing me to do.
I have never operated this way, and I shan't, I refuse to.
I will still participate in others' threads, but I shan't ever open my own again.
This is for the birds.
Again, apologies to those who were interested and supported the thought.
Thanks, Sapientia.
Okay, everyone, please feel free to carry on as usual. I shan't be accepting posts from here on, but that is only a time-saver, not a reflection of my opinion on the quality of posts.
You're welcome. Just to be clear, if you don't want a discussion to be in the 'question and answer' style, all you have to do is not tick the box next to where it says 'Question' when you create the discussion. (See the picture below). Discussions are not set up like this by default; it's because you've selected that option when creating the discussion.
The elitists are the ones that influenced the Democratic primary - giving it to Clinton. Trump seemed more a result of the "Will of the People" - although the will of People desperate for real change. Most of the people who voted for him simply wanted something different - an outsider - but Trump is part of status quo - part of the very swamp he claims to want to drain. You don't have to live or work only in Washington DC to be part of the swamp.
What we need are people that aren't part of the political game - real, hard-working people that don't have the goal to make politics a life-long job - that aren't in it to fatten their own pockets. Politics should be non-profit with no benefits above what regular government employees receive. There needs to be term limits and serious campaign finance reform. Finally, we need to eliminate political parties as they have become hypocritical to the point of being nonsensical. The two-party system is antiquated. This would be a beginning in making the Angry American more of a Happy American.