Nothing to Gain in America

The last two times I have blogged, I did not write what I meant to write.  I had every intention of criticizing television and its decline from the Golden Age.  Then again there have been times in my life fervently I believed that watching "that box" truly could rot your brain.  It ebbs and flows like most things, like life, like water.  There are ups and down.  America is down and has been since Bush was in the White House.  I watched his movie recently, W., and it seemed almost like a parody.  I always have said he was one of the worst presidents we have had, and our country has not recovered from his misguided corporate lobbied policies.  "Storm is Coming," which keeps showing up in my Facebook newsfeed, says most of it.  America, or rather those that control America, the money, have sought to eradicate God from our existence.  You would not know that from living in Fayetteville.  There are bible compounds all over the place, large complexes with names like Berean and Manna.  I don't know what they are or what they represent religiously.  What I do know is that they are tax shelters taking advantage of their "non profit" status.  We here in the American South are excellent at fraud.  It is in our blood.  Those damn Confederates are just a lot of slave-owning, plantation-running, red necks.  I am surrounded by it.  After living back in Fayetteville since my youth, it has become apparent to me that the folk living here, that have stayed here, the locals, are sheltered.  They have not been to other places.  They have not experienced other more enlightened things.  Big Harry's Tavern is about the extent of it.  There is no jazz, although the elites have founded a good symphony orchestra.  For it to be as good as it is, most of its players live and are from other places.  Only one or two actually live in Fayetteville.  How can you call it the Fayetteville Symphony?  They drive from as far as Charleston, Greensboro, and Ashville.  It is amazing to me that it functions this way.  Many businesses in North Carolina include commuting great distances.  At the health clinic where I used to get ship physicals, the doctor who runs the place is Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at the hospital in Rocky Mount and lives in Raleigh.  ?  My days of slogging up and down I-95 with my musical equipment in the back of my Toyota Tercel wagon are over.  Never do I want to waste my time doing that again.  Rather I enjoy composing music, recording music, cooking, and working in the yard when Fort Bragg permits.  Today and yesterday the temperature in Fayetteville is seven degrees hotter than surrounding North Carolina towns.  It is not because we are in a "hole."  This has been a common assertion since I have lived here.  Fayetteville is hot because it is in some kind of topical depression.  If anything that would be the Cape Fear River Valley.  Okay.  Fayetteville is hotter because of Fort Bragg.  When the 82nd Airborne is deploying they are flying aircraft continuously hauling soldiers afar.  Likewise their gear must meet them at the destination, and the responsibility rests upon the Cape Fear Railways and CSX-T.  Cape Fear Railways assembles the two-mile-long munitions trains underground at Fort Bragg, and CSX-T picks them up at Fort Junction.  Likewise aircraft fuel must make it to Fort Bragg, and I believe it also is via CSX-T and the Cape Fear Railways.  If one takes a look at Fort Bragg with Google Satellite you can see the black tanker cars lined up at the fuel depot which also is the depot for uncoming truck cargo.  It is the closest point to Fayetteville on Bragg Boulevard where Iron Mike used to stand.  The aircraft fuel is unloaded here and is carried by pipeline to Pope Field and Simmons Army Airforce base.  There is a reason they closed Gruber Road at the Boulevard and at 292.  I think the pipeline runs directly underderneath it to Simmons to fuel their helicopters.  Upon another look at Google Satellite it is easy to see where the preexisting tracks at Fort Bragg strategically were placed underground.  That mainline running from the Honeycutt Marshalling Yard would divide the entire post in half.  It would be like downtown Fayetteville when they deploy those two mile long munition trains.  Fayetteville has been trying to solve this problem for decades, and a solution was offered that is simple.  A new section of track must be built so that these munition trains do not have to back up onto the Vander line transecting Russell Street.  Trains must back down this track and cross the CSX-T mainlines through the crossover.  Then they on the other side switch to the local line that goes directly to the CSX-T Milan Yard.  This is what CSX uses for their local freight.  It goes to the yard on Russell Street that is shared by Norfolk Souther, CSX-T, and the Aberdeen and Rockfish.  The munitions train pulls right to the Milan yard until it clears the Vander line on Russell Street.  Then it goes south on the CSX-T mainline to Pembroke where it performs the same maneuver to get to Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point south of Wilmington.  I think it is the Koch brothers that supply Fort Bragg with its aircraft fuel.  Why else would Texas oil tycoons have a presence in the Carolinas?  That is big business, and it stands to reason that the Koch's, the Department of Defense, and CSX-T pretty much control everything that is happening.  This is all because still we are engaged in the longest war in American history, the War in Afghanistan.  Those abundant natural resources are just too good to ignore.  Consequently America really is bankrupt at least for the common people.  The majority of our money, that which Bush dipped his hand into the piggy bank of the AMerican people called Troubled Assets Relief Program which spawned America's Tea Party, went to pay off those Wall Street Investors who bet against the American economy during the financial crisis of 2008.  So watch "The Big Short," and you will understand that Hank Paulson told W. that we had to pay off this handful of investors to prove the economy would not collapse.  Henceforth they took our hard-earned-cash and stashed it overseas, like Apple, like General Electric, and the rest.  Our money is sitting in huge foreign bank accounts rather than circulating through the American economy like it should for Capitalism to work.  It is a shite state of affairs.  While America has been successful disguising the presence of God in our culture through media, Rupert Murdoch, et al, it cannot change that evil only can manifest itself through human form.  For evil to live, it needs a human host, a vessel to do its bidding.  America is rife with evil, thus America is rife with evil people mostly running the country in cognito lining their pockets with the money of the American people.  I have come to realize that there are grievous evils in our world, and if one takes a look back always they have been there.  They just are candy-coated through the media.  Again consciously this is not what I meant to write, but it came out.  What I do want to say is why television is experiencing decreasing ratings.  Isn't it obvious?  Maybe if you are a millennial and never have seen television programming from the Golden Age when entertainment still was based on Minstrel Shows.  (That was when white entertainers put show polish on their faces to play comedic black slaves)  Ouch.  Television cannot endure without the same criteria for any art form, although often it is not art.  It should strive to be.  Simple television cannot endure where there is more commercial programming than content during a show.  There are so many commercials shown in a row and for so long, it is easy to forget what program you are watching!  This is frustrating, trying to watch a show, and being thwarted.  Who in their right mind would make it difficult for a viewer to watch?  An idiot.  Likewise the cinema experience is doing the same thing.  When I went to see Alien Covenant a few days ago, I had to sit through a half an hour of product commercials!  Good grief, at the movies?  It was interminable and tortuous.  People are not going to watch television if it is not fun and entertaining.  It can and should be educational.  It cannot be manipulative.  It cannot be patronizing.  Television today is all of these things, and the same idiots who are running the large evil corporations must be the same people producing television.  They are not very smart.  When General Electric sees fit to produce a You Tube video glorying a Tier 4 diesel/electric freight locomotive, one of the most polluting machines in existence, then it tells you something.  It tells you that they know it pollutes, and they are trying to cover it up.  Like society has been doing for over a decade, we are exploiting millennials.  Current television commercials patronize viewers with vignettes depicting the most ignorant human beings in existence.  Either they are stupid, or they are at wits end trying to battle the machine in America.  They are Zombies in denial of America's shite state of affairs.  Maybe we all can sympathize with this perspective.  Just eat it.  Candy.  Fast Food.  What do we have to lose.  Certainly there is nothing to gain in American anymore.