Merry Robin Hood in America

The appointing of an academic to a federal cabinet position in American government is paradoxical.  The appointing of Holden Thorp to the chancellorship at UNC-Chapel Hill also was paradoxical.  Erskine Bowles baited his trap, and Holden took the bait.  Upon reflection it is copacetic.  Academia, under the tutelage of George Bush, has gone the way of corporate America.  No longer is it a grass roots organization to provide enlightenment to students.  It has become big business, and in America big business has become "Fuck you," to the American people.  Big business has become we will make as much money as humanly possible.  Screw humanity.  Screw the planet.  It is of interest the the earth and humanity are expendable.  We are on a course of extinction, and yet no one in big business seems to care.  In fact big business is the cause of this misguided course.  Could it be academics in high ranking cabinet positions in America's federal government cover this up?  Does the Washington lobby line their pockets with power and money?  Is this why 100% of the legislative decisions made by Congress do not consider public opinion?  We no longer are America.  A new name for this country must be coined.  Perhaps Nottinghamshire?  We have since 1776 become the same country against we rebelled with our Revolutionary War.  Perhaps we no longer are British, but certainly we have an aristocracy.  While America is a republic, no longer are we democratic.  Democracy has failed as has capitalism.  The economy in America has failed for a few simple reasons.  Americans do not have enough money to spend.  Therefore the businesses that have made America tick over the last two centuries now are defunct.  Americans cannot afford to buy their products.  Often I wonder why all of the traditional cultural trends of America have died.  Fashion is dead.  Music is dead.  Somewhere a while back the legends of the fashion industry died off and someone made the decision that ugly, skinny, waifs now were to be America's fashion models wearing loin cloths.  The traditional model of fashion, like art, became an anything goes.  Television is like this today.  There is no artistry.  There is no concept.  There is no talent.  Anything goes as Cole Porter would pen.  In his case anything was bisexuality.  So be it.  There have been few greater American songbook composers, just as there have been few greater classical composers than Tchaikovsky.  I listened to his violin concerto last evening on WCPE, and it was remarkable.  Nottinghamshire is not remarkable.  We are mediocre.  The only way America can retain the title of superpower is with our Department of Defense.  Under the leadership of newly appointed Secretary of Defense, Ashton Kutcher, surely the fond memories of Viet Nam will return, and we will laugh at them.  I never pondered the idea that a Cabinet Secretary in our federal government was a CEO, and yet that exactly is how Ashton Carter is painted in an interesting article by a past Washington Post and New York Times writer.  Carter ejected Ted Gup from his class on national security, although he was a fellow of the Harvard's Shorenstein  Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy.  Gup has yet to stop bristling.  Why would Professor Carter make such a spectacle?  It seems he has a reputation for callus and unruly behavior, but we as the American people would not know this.  Seldom upon he is reported.  The answer to that predicament lies in an enlightening video presentation posted on Facebook.  While I have come to understand that Facebook is both a culturally worthless and dangerous social media application, providing an almost public platform upon which to voice opinions is useful.  Most often it is not used for this, and it should be.  I can't remember the author of a particular video posted on Facebook reflecting upon the history of slavery in America.  It was telling.  It was telling because for the first time someone else explained what always I have known about America's media.  They are owned by the same big businesses that run America.  They are pawns of corporate Nottinghamshire who locate their headquarters in any other country except their own.  Often I rant about the growing uselessness of technology and computing.  We can compute faster, but the ideas have died.  No longer do we care about innovation or ideas in America.  We care about money.  When the earth dies, what will you do with that useless paper tender?  No one has stopped to understand that the iPhone is a bad idea, and that it has changed American culture for the worst.  No one has stopped to understand that a majority of Americans are walking around socially dysfunctional staring into their palms.  No one has because Apple has posted record profits with sales of its iPhones.  Whose responsibility is it to point out that corporate profits do not matter to humanity?  Once it was academia, but that great organization has run the course of big business.  When there are no commodities and thus no jobs to sell them, it is pointless.  We live a pointless existence, and I am struggling to ascribe meaning to it.  This meaning for me has turned from the creation of meaningful music to an interest in reestablishing a healthy American economy devoid of technology.  Technology, contrary to popular belief, has killed our economy.  It has converted a once individualistic free-thinking society into submissive and docile Borg.  Big business has won, and America has lost.