Henry Rollins says America's real safety net is drugs, alcohol, cheap food and free porn.
And, to put a point on it, he's not enthusiastic about building a better America so long as we have an unending tide of unfree foreign labor.
Since I’ve been alive, the country has operated like a stick-shift car, driven by someone who has no idea how the parts work. There’s been a lot of damage without a lot of movement to show for it. For many wealthy people, the poor are, for lack of a better term, a pain in the ass.
“Illegals” often are preferred in the workplace because they know they have no recourse and just take it. This harkens back to a time when, for a stark minority, America was truly great. Slavery and indentured servitude were perfect deals. These other Homo sapiens were considered subhuman. They took what they were given and did what they were told.
Imagine how angry early America’s rich were when they lost the right to own a person. Look at what they did to preserve their way of life; see how tenaciously their ancestors cling to these values and seek to roll back progress.
Just think how pleased Paul Ryan would be if millions of Americans would finally do the jobs that Americans don’t want to do, for the wage that the boss tells them they’re going to get. Try to calculate the level of Mitch McConnell’s joy when millions of Americans would, rather than have the audacity to demand affordable health care, just die off when the quality of life determined by their pay grade ushered them to the end of their existence.
The plea for equality is a hoarse cry in a country that was birthed in and operates on inequality. There’s enough money and resources to allow all American citizens access to health care, but it has simply never been a sustained priority. It’s been fascinating listening to politicians and think tankers assure interviewers that the health care plan that was recently given a toxic bill of health by the CBO is the smart and sustainable replacement to Obamacare. They’re trying to open a lemonade stand that sells piss. Not a single one of the members in either house of Congress will ever have to taste it.
There is no existential threat to America that rivals what America inflicts upon itself. Centuries of this is one of the reasons Americans are such rugged individuals. I say this with no irony. I have been all over the world and have witnessed some rough scenes, but none of these places were self-promoted as the greatest country in the history of humanity. That being said, America is still one of the harshest places I have ever been to. For a large fraction of the American population, this country is a coast-to-coast school of hard knocks and sucker punches. It has always been this way, and that’s one of the reasons why “Obamacare” was met with such opposition. The Affordable Care Act, like the president, threatened too many long-standing ways of the road.
The new bill, a version of which could very likely become law, will be back to business as usual. The “safety net” is more pretty talk than anything else. The real safety net is drugs, tobacco, alcohol, cheap food, free porn and other ways to cheaply distract oneself from the pain of contemporary general population lockdown. There’s no safety in any of it, just something to get you through for a little while.
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