The Evil of Two Lessers

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Tue Aug 8 14:13:27 PDT 2000


``One way or another, this country will be marinating in morality for years to come.'' Carl Remick

It's pretty damn weird, considering that the moralists lost the impeachment battle. Where's this shit coming from?

Doug -----------------

If the government dismantles its own ethical, social, and political regulation of the economy by adopting the specious concept of free market neoliberalism, then that only leaves regulating the moral conduct of the people by default.

If you abandon rule over the boardroom then rule defaults to oversight of the bathroom and the bedroom. In other words, what else is there to govern?

Obviously the government is regulating the economy in the interest of those who benefit the most and as opposed to regulating it in the interest of those who benefit the least. It just sounds better to say they gave up rule over the boardroom, for ruling over the tolite.

And even this lets them the hook. Because in another direction, the purpose of regulating the moral conduct of the work force is to make it more productive or at worst, maintain as high a level as possible.

``I think what I hoped would happen with the impeachment thing did happen--it put a temporary end to family values moralizing, not all moralizing. I'm with Doug, tho, I'm sickened with the idea that all of our candidates have to claim some higher moral authority to be viable.'' (Christian)

So am I. But moralizing in rhetoric is the only way to give a dramatic effect to an otherwise rather bland sequence of ideas. Or rather, it substitutes for any form of logical or pragmatic development of political positions. Moralizing basically colorizes a grayscale image on the one hand, and on the other it masks the compositional armature of the image at the same time.

What does that mean? Moral discourse is inflamatory, emotive, and dramatizes a bland position and it is fed by the hypersaturation of mass media. To get heard, you better start screaming fire, blood, or butt fucking otherwise nobody will pay any attention. In other words if there is no moral conflict there is no drama, and if there is no drama, there is no interest.

However, we are over saturated and are entirely numb to these effects since they have been over worked. So in the end there is simply nothing. Well, that's not exactly correct. There are always sex, violence and drugs. But each of these share with moralizing discourse the same endgame of total saturation. Until we arrive at:

``CB: Technically speaking, this is a Night of the Living Dead phase of capitalism. ( See Dante for details).''

Chuck Grimes



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