Mr. Vidiot's take on Stewart v. Cramer

posted by The Vidiot @ 7:37 AM Permalink

I got Mr. Vidiot to pry himself from his dissertation long enough to watch Stewart's Cramer interview. While he wasn't entirely pleased to lose that 20 minutes, it did get him to pontificate a bit over lunch.

I was first interested in why he thought Cramer would even go on the show, knowing full well that he would be eviscerated. Mr. Vidiot poo-poo'd me and said that obviously, for both men, it was a ratings boost. Since I couldn't convince him otherwise (even though I think Cramer took too much heat and that he's going to be released by the network soon), I tried another tact.

"So," I said, "at the very least, someone is pointing out the contradictions. SOMEONE is saying, 'this is a load of crap' and pointing his finger at it all." Again, Mr. Vidiot was unimpressed with Stewart's performance since he considered it, well, a performance done in the interest of ratings. However, one thing Mr. Vidiot did concede was that now, for the first time in the history of the capitalist world, people are beginning to see the cracks in the system. They're there, laid bare and people are just now beginning to say, "Hey, this is really f-cked up." He said, "The things I say don't sound so radical now, do they? You've got people all over the place saying, 'government always lies' and 'the powerful do whatever they want and we're just cattle to them' and 'what is money anyway?' I don't seem so crazy anymore."

And he's right. Look at what Josh Marshall wrote last night about the AIG bonuses:

I don't believe the bonuses themselves are the heart of the matter, nor the fact that they're going to the very executives who caused AIG's implosion or even the galling reality that, since all money is fungible, they're being paid with taxpayer dollars. What's really driving this forward -- and what makes it such a dangerous moment for the White House -- is the jarring image of the administration's impotence. [emphasis mine]

He goes on about AIG telling the government we don't care what you don't like.:

There's a beggars can't be choosers problem there. And the disconnect is so mighty that it fuels the impression that the whole enterprise is not what it seems, not what we've been told, that in addition to picking up the tab we're being played for fools.

Indeed, we're being played for fools, and we as a people have been played for fools for centuries now. I'm not sure Marshall means it in the broader sense that I do. But he got the tip of it right.

The people are beginning to notice. The people are beginning to realize that we've been lied to, that those rich and powerful people have gotten rich off our blood, our sweat, and our labor and that we have basically handed them their lifestyle on a platter while we groveled off to our lowly little lives. Meanwhile, we all believed that if we just worked hard enough, we could be just like them. If we gave up enough of our lives to hard work, we too could have a mansion and a vacation home and jewels and cars. We believed that if we just did the right things, toed the line and followed the rules, or broke the right ones, we could become powerful too. Hell, anybody could be president, right?

But that's not true and it never has been true. They only convinced us it was true. They are who they are because of where they were born, where they went to school, who their parents knew, where their parents went to school. We are not a part of that. Sure, one or two of us might jump up into their strata out of sheer luck (more rare than you can imagine) or perhaps chosen by one of them for some reason like marriage. And in the past, we would cling tenaciously to their story, that yes, it happened to him/her, so it could happen to us.

But perhaps we're beginning to understand the numbers now. And perhaps, it is time to realize that there are more of us than there are of them, that there always will be and that they would be terrified of us if it weren't for all the methods of social control and retaliatory violence the possess.

And perhaps it is time to do something about it.

Labels: capitalism, cramer, Daily Show, jon Stewart, power elite