We Are the 47% (redux)

I was interested in Carl Watson’s previous article on the 47% of students in the public school system of America, that slightly less than half who can read or write at grade level. And, as an obsessive compulsive with a fascination for numbers, I felt I needed to put in Stoad’s two cents on the new 47% statistic. This of course is the one announced by Mitt-boy Romney who contends that 47% of Americans are entitlement-sucking freeloaders looking for a handout. Roman Stoad is proudly one of those 47%, and not for any of the reasons Robo-Romney has elucidated in his in-eloquent way (you think he could be programmed with better language skills), but rather for the reason that Roman prides himself on his anti-authoritarian, anti-consumerist, anti-money-grubbing, anti-egoist, dare he say “quasi-communist” stance that all people (who after all have not asked to be born in this world) deserve at least respect and a chance to work and live.

Now Roman is no one man “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” spouting platitudes about “living a productive life,” nor is he any walking “Clinton Global Initiative” promoting worldwide industrial development and economic capitalism. Rather Roman is his own foundation, an American Individualist, and I don’t mean an Ayn Ryan take-whatever-you-can-take type of individualist, but rather a free-thinker, a compassionate atheist, and his Foundation, such as it is, is the Common Man. Too long the Mitt-boys and the Little Lord Bushes, and all the other well-born ”self-made” men (even Ayn Ryan himself was born into a wealthy family) have propagated the meme that they did it alone, on the strength of their own character. Bullshit, I say.

Here I tend to agree with Obama that these “self-made” assholes didn’t make themselves at all. They didn’t build the roads or the infrastructure (blue collar workers and slaves did that). They didn’t make the products they sold (blue collar workers and slaves did that). In addition these self-made men depend on the government they pretend to hate to write and uphold the laws that allow them to take their self-made money away from those who actually made what these self-made claim to have made. And if that sounds complicated or convoluted, consider this: that the self-made also depend on their hated government for their tax breaks and their subsidies and their corporate welfare to stay afloat as they pass themselves off as “job-creators” (another form of propaganda) to the gullible public who they are increasingly less likely to employ anyway. And so to Mitt Romney and Ayn Ryan I say, “My people are coming! We will ride our dressage horses, stolen from your private stables, onto the front lawns of your mansions and we will eat the succulent flesh of your fattened bodies when the economic divide becomes so extreme that revolution becomes inevitable.”

Now you, dear reader, may well wonder wherefore comes such radical rhetoric from a peacenik like Roman Stoad. Well, the other day, on my travels through the soup kitchens and thrift stores of this great land, I ran into a Tea-Party lady who claimed that the last resort of her clan would be the uptake of weapons and the ultimate takeover of the government thereby. These people of course are living in some kind of “Classics Illustrated” version of the American Revolution, where good moral (white) Americans engage in righteous battle with tax collecting Autocrats and Monarchs. It is revisionist and simplistic history, and one might as well attach one’s political philosophy to Star Wars, or the Terminator franchise. And while Roman can’t agree with their comic book worldview of politics and freedom, he can certainly agree with their militant back-to-our-radical-roots ideas of governmental takedown. He can say to those righteous Right Wingers, “Hey, you started it, with your talk of guns and revolution, you who call yourself high patriots. Well, Roman Stoad is a Patriot too. He is a patriot of the 47% percent who have no hope, those against whom the game is rigged and for whom the bell tolls every morning at 9 am down on Wall Street.”

And to Mitt Romney, he better be careful about throwing around statistics. 47% is dangerously close to half the population. That’s a lot of fucking people (about half of whom can’t read!). Seems to me like he wouldn’t want to make them angry. But maybe he’s just out of touch.

I am Roman Stoad, man of the masses

When my shopping cart grows empty of food

It will be filled with weapons