A friend of mine — who is a writer and therefore automatically suspect — recently posted her version of what the American Dream should be.
I’d call this…shall we say…more inclusive than the original. My immediate response was that a whole lot of her fellow-Americans would call that Communism with a capital C. But when I looked at what she wrote and discovered that it summed up my own philosophy pretty well, I had to ask myself the obvious question.
Now, I have always considered myself a rather wishy-washy Canadianly moderate liberal, so the question took some thought. But I went to my trusted source of research data (social media, of course) and let my paranoia run away with me.
This is what I found, and let me assure you that this is not the wild a wooly anti-everything media of the Righteous Right. This is mainstream stuff.
Take, for example, my opening image. Now, we see this sort of stuff all the time from well-meaning citizens of the centre-right variety. And I ask myself, why do good-hearted people believe this stuff, and do they realize what it’s saying and its effect on its victims?
Well, the easy answer to the last question is, no, they don’t catch all the nuances, so let’s do a little simple analysis. What does this statement suggest?
- All poor people are lazy.
- All poor people are quite able to work if they wanted to.
- The money given to poor people is taken directly from seniors.
- The virtue of working hard all your life gives you the right to receive more than others.
Of all these pieces of nonsense, only the last one is even partially arguable.
But it isn’t the nasty lies that this statement propagates that bothers me. It’s the intention of the total meme that people don’t get.
Publishing this set of falsehoods is a bit of a magician’s trick. When you don’t want your audience to see what you’re doing, you draw their attention to something they really want to see. They’re having so much fun with that, you can shoot off a cannon on the other side of the stage and they won’t notice it.
Moving the magic into politics, the very best illusion of all is to get your victims blaming each other for the problem you are causing. Then the “shooting off a cannon” becomes a bit more literal, as is happening to Ukraine right now.
So — conspiracy theorists get your pencils out — this is a standard theme that the rich, elite proponents of predatory free-market capitalism are spreading around to keep the poor, seniors and the working poor distracted from how they are being exploited. Or, since a picture is worth more words than I usually put in a post:
Now, how communist is that?