The stupid tax (lottery as class war)

The transfer of wealth never looked so diabolical.

I.

They once asked JP Rockefeller just how much fucking money did he need anyway? His answer: Just a little bit more.

II.

When I ran around with OWS I learned that I myself was a part of the top wealthy 4%. I make under $40,000 a year and I still fell in the top 4%! That is of course compared to the entire world. Which, apparently, is one ramen noodle soup away from dropping over dead.

 You can throw your annual salary into this website to see where you land. globalrichlistDOTcom. Like Rockefeller, I always think I need just a little bit more.

III.

People who have never been rich assume that rich means infinite money, when it really just means more money and a higher level of consumption. But if you are buying things to fill that empty pit in your heart, no amount will suffice. Not even a  lottery pile.

More money, spent with the same attitude, the one that’s seeking an identity and a holy inner stressless peace by buying things, isn’t going to kill that poverty feeling. When you live so precisely at your means that $50 a month makes a difference, no amount of money is going to help you; you’re just going to buy more and bigger houses to starve in.

IV.

I blame King James I personally. Apparently he started a lottery to help the fledgling Jamestown Colonists. The idea took root in the new country and by the time the colonists told the king to go fuck himself there were 164 “known” colonial lotteries funding just about every government task you could think of. Put that in your tea and drink it. Sure, it helped the more puritanical sleep soundly knowing they were not actually gambling but rather participating in a voluntary tax. My ancestor tried a variation of this defense. He was the guy chained in the stocks who said he wasn’t butt fucking sheep per say but merely participating in some harmless “voluntary” cross breeding. Sadly, they weren’t persuaded- but- enough about my family tree.

V.

Now wait just a minute N., a tax is a mandatory or compulsory payment, and playing the lottery is voluntary, so lottery revenue cannot be a tax you jack-hole.

You’re confusing the purchase of a product with the payment of the tax on the product. True, the purchase of a lottery ticket is voluntary, but the tax portion of the ticket price is not, just as a sales or excise tax is compulsory on a voluntary purchase of alcohol, clothing or books. The voluntary nature of the purchase does not make the tax any less of a tax. Using your rationale, we’d have to say that because the purchase of a dildo is voluntary, the sales tax on the dildo is not really a tax. Just try to buy a $20 dildo and hand the cashier a $20 bill, but refuse to pay the $1.40 (.07%) sales tax and leave the store waving dildo in hand. “I’m not funding anymore government abortions with my $1.40! Its going to chic-fil-a instead!!”

The only difference between the lottery tax and sales or excise taxes is that the lottery tax is built into the price of the ticket, rather than reported separately.

Fuck off N. Here is YOUR missed connection. It’s a recreational activity. If you can’t afford it, don’t play. Otherwise quit the bitching.

This argument seems to suggest that the lottery is akin to a sort of user fee, or a charge paid to the government for a specific service, by the people who use that service. Lotteries are a government enterprise and a source of tax revenue, and must be evaluated as such.

If the governing body’s intent was simply to meet the needs of a person who paid for a service or product, the payment is probably a fee rather than a tax (a toll on a bridge for example). However, if the intent was to raise revenues to benefit the community at large, then the payment is a tax. The lottery clearly falls into the latter category since legislators create lotteries to raise money for projects that (supposedly) benefit the community at large.

And the tax burden is shifting from the wealthy and property owners to lottery players. That is to say, the poor. And you line up at the counters to do it. 

Where do you think that mega millions jackpot came from? Answer: Out of the pockets of poor people. State lotteries posted more than $53 billion in ticket sales in 2006 (the last year for which I found data). And 99.999% of those ticket buyers, which includes you, are losers. Don’t take that personally. It just means you didn’t win. So quit waving your dildo at me.

Rich people usually don’t play the lottery, the poor do, working class, the disabled and welfare recipients. Hence, the lottery can be viewed as a tax on the poor, which is redistributed to people who already have jobs. Who, by the way, will give half of that money back in the form of taxes. Thats a huge transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

That’s also called a racket where I come from. The media’s the barker, and we’re the rubes.

I’m just playing a fantasy. I know I won’t win, I just like being a part of something plus the revenue goes toward education and...

Yep. Its a tax on the stupid.

N.

Zombie as missed connection (mourning dew)

Black Friday as the denial of death

I.

The first Zombie movie was in 1968. And no, they were not called zombies in that movie either. Fun fact: Romero’s Night of the Living Dead considered them ghouls. It was the viewing public/media that began to call them zombies. The idea was something reanimated dead people. A small reference in the movie to a reason for the dead reanimating is a radio broadcast of a satellite reentering the atmosphere and exploding. Radiation was the fear then. You know, Godzilla and all. 

Our fears have evolved. Load up on your anti-bacterial soap kids, an I am legend plague is coming. No actually the fear is growing up but that doesn’t stimulate your narcissistic tastes so I’m taking the long route.

Prior to that a zombie was from Haiti (think Serpent and the Rainbow). A part of the witchdoctor-slavery system. A precursor to modern capitalism really but that post will have to wait. Vampires could also make zombie-like ghouls. Vampires are clearly the upper class collecting capital (blood) from the lower class. The undead were a byproduct of that hidden massacre. Van Helsing and his updated version Blade are marxist revolutionaries.

 In Zombieland, when a dead human scurries down the street towards you, they say a zombie is coming because in the movie itself there is an awareness, a history implied, that the characters know what a fucking zombie is. The Walking dead is not an alternate universe. Everything about it screams 2010 US of A. So what do you call it when no one in it mentions something that everyone should be aware of? Repression.

“Walkers, biters, lamebrains, the dead” are all names that the characters try to apply to what they should obviously be calling zombies. They don’t because this show isn’t about zombies. 

II.

So enlighten us genius...What’s The Walking Dead really about?

Easy there governor I’m getting there. Every season so far we are presented with people who cannot move on from a loved one dying/turning. They died and part of them moved on. But another part of them remains, comes after us- albeit slowly. 

In episode one Morgan who cannot shoot his turned wife. Shane, haunted by the family he must let go of though he thought he had earned. The sister who must watch her sister turn. A brother who must move on with a group that effectively killed his brother. A christian man who must face the world is not sick but dead. That his wife and children cannot be healed. A lost daughter who must be put down. A valued member who must be put out of his misery. A son who must kill (again) his mother so she doesn’t turn. Turns out everyone is infected. However you die, turn you will. 

Now we have the governor whose little girl is kept in a state of undead waiting, one presumes like Hershel’s barn was. Waiting for the big other to come and fix it but now mourning that alas, he isn’t coming.  Unlike Hershel though, the governor is taking matters into his own hands. By sheer will he will fix things and return them to normal. Like the quaint town he has fortified.

III.

But why repress the name zombie? Because when you fail to mourn the death of a loved one you get anxiety. Anxiety leads to projection. And projecting all my terror into an external enemy is what a zombie is. They are the hate, confusion, rage and death that I feel. And I can dispense with that by putting a bullet thru their brain.

But that’s not mourning. And so when I turn around there are 6 more. 12 more. A world full of things that are coming after me. Rick’s rage in the prison is an apt description as any. He will kill until he tires of doing so. There will never be a shortage of zombies.

Until I run the ritual right, I can’t mourn properly and I can’t move on. The (preposterous) phone call to Rick is an attempt to run the ritual right. To do what is right and grieve. To experience the loss in all its terror and own it. Sometimes this must be done regularly, hence the name ritual. A Father would then be there for his grieving son. Lead him thru the ritual of mourning the death of his mother (or whoever). That is the right thing to do.

Does anyone still remember what is the right thing to do? Of course not thats why we have zombies.

IV.

Incomplete mourning has left us trapped in our own heads, and so day in and day out we try to (not) shoot our loved ones who are (not) completely dead, repeating it over and over, working through it until we master the material.  

We can spend the rest of our life in repetition compulsion if we want, but time marches forward and like everything else in life it comes down to a binary choice: we'll either get over them or become them.  It is inevitable.

That's why there's no sense in putting it off, and you certainly can't avoid it-- it follows you around. There are never enough bullets or arrows. No hideout that can withstand the slow methodical onslaught.

V.

The unspoken part of mourning is that sometimes we wished that the dead person was, well, dead. Children under 10 think the world is magical and if you hate someone then you can an affect their demise. The guilt of secretly at times wishing your parents, your boss, your spouse even your kids dead is repressed. Like a child we fear we somehow caused this. Made it happen by our ghoulish daydreams of a life without them in it. Ah the freedom. The things we would do with that other life instead of the one I'm living now. And then when they die, we know we thought those thoughts. We killed them.

Sure we didn’t kill them but the unconscious doesn’t seem to know that does it?

 It lingers. Rises up and begins to slowly stalk us. It is the zombie we want to put down for good but can’t. If we could just tell our loved one, explain it. Have one more shot to make it right, that I didn’t really want you dead. I was just being selfish and moody. I really need you and still do.

Thankfully, generations much wiser than our own figured out that these rituals help us do just that. God can and does forgive us. And you learn by doing. But we value beliefs more than actions so we create ever more elaborate beliefs and mock the old ways all the while doing nothing. 

In that sense The Walking Dead is THE american show of our day. It is unable to name itself because we walk around endlessly avoiding the dead. The walking dead. Or - What do you get when you get so good at denial, that you extend it to the inevitable?  You get American zombies. Denial of death. And what better way to deny death than shop. That is, to consume endlessly. 

N.

Marco! (Polo!)

That is one ugly f'in unicorn

A critique in 6 movements.

An open response to a craigslist reply. Original in bold.

 “Have you ever been stopped dead in your tracks?”

This is just your identity seeing a co-star that would further improve your identity. Your brain is like a talent agent looking for a supporting cast for you, the star. Appears you found one.

“I can't sleep, I can't focus on work, I can't ride down the street without you in my head. Baby you have me so twisted inside I feel like I'm just going in circles.”

Your twisted all right, like a psychopath pretzel. It’s not the other person of course that twists you but your DESIRE to possess the other person. You want to to have them in your sitcom, or Rom-com. I suspect its more a horror flick but horrors the ending for sure. But I hate when I jump ahead like that.

“This must end soon, I must to have you in my life!!!!” 

Yes, because other people serve no other purpose than to be in or out of your life. It’s not like they have jobs or commitments, beliefs, dreams that in no way, shape or form include you. Nope. What matters, what only matters is that you have a need. We haven’t heard anything about WHY this person has you feeling this way. What it is about them that is unique and endearing. 

A gi-normous penis maybe? Shares the SSI check generously? Can wear his pants down low like nobodies business? He’s good with kids not his own? 

All we get is your feelings because, well, thats all there is to this story.

“I always turn the radio when those mushy love songs come on, but since I've met you I find myself listening to them, singing them in my head when I think of you” 

And when this dreamy guy is no longer needed in your movie, he will join the countless others whose memory simply has you turn the station. We are not singing THAT tune/guy anymore, are we? What is easily entered into is also easily cast aside. Turned like a knob on a old car’s radio to something new. And who listens to radio anymore?

“(which is every second of every day)! When I'm with you, everything goes away.” 

The compulsion, the drive is what makes people think they must be in love. But let us contemplate for a moment that we always feel like this when we meet someone new who we are sexually aroused by. Have we not felt this before only to then learn, oh, they are an average, everyday asshole, just like the last one. Just like us.

Another person cannot be the object of this intense desire for long without a.) failing and b.) failing.

“All is right in the world, just by the simple touch of your hand. I miss you baby!”

A fetish is something, not always perverse, that takes the place of another object that is too painful to have close. A man may seem fine after the death of his wife but he cares for his deceased wife’s cat with extreme finesse. Weird right? But not alarming. However, when the cat finally dies he loses it. Really loses it because the cat became a fetish disavowal. A stand in to keep the real and excruciating pain of his wife’s death from impacting him. The fetish helped him maintain. You might think thats a good thing. Hey, he made it to work, ensured the kids were ok, even seemed pleasant at a party. 

But like the above ad we are dissecting, it (the fetish with new man lover) isn’t real. The compulsion is to avoid not just loneliness but the despair of who we are/who we are not.

All in all I counted 16x you used the words ‘Me’, ‘I’ or ‘my’. So this post is really about you. Not your beloved. 

Notice when the words relating to others is used, like the word “you” its not about them but STILL about yourself. Gotta love narcissisms resilience as we never learn a thing about the ‘you’ person that this post claims to be all about!

“You...in my head”
“You...have me twisted”
“You...in my life”
And “You...I find myself”

 So Marco Polo goes to Java, and sees a one horned horse, and figures, hey, it's a unicorn. Fucking A! But it was a rhinoceros. Marco Polo wasn't a dummy, because he had to make a choice: either he modified his understanding of unicorn to fit the animal in front of him, or else he would have to believe he discovered an entirely unknown animal.

We make a similar choice every day, about everything. We are trained to care only about identity. What is my motivation in todays scenario we wonder internally, constantly. Who am I today? What do I want to be? Who would help my identity by being next to me?

It never occurs to us to say, what can I do for them? How might I act to make their lives better up to and including sacrificing what I might want?

Choosing to be just one thing, with all our will, despite resistance internal and external remains the rhinoceros that we cannot name.

N.