Being a Lobster of hope
Swimming to freedom as the ship sinks
By Dan Piraro
Audio production by Sound Legacy
(Comic by my partner in Bizarro, Wayno®)
This aphorism recently floated across my screen:
When you think there’s no hope, remember the lobsters in the tank at the restaurant on the Titanic.
The wisdom of those words slapped me in the ass like hot butter. Then I realized it is sort of what I’ve already been doing. (The remembering, not the butter-slapping.)
As the country I’ve come to know and believe in is being flushed down a gaudy, gold toilet, engaging in wars of material conquest as though it were Russia, I’ve been wondering if it might somehow work out for the best in the end. Could all this turmoil and suffering wake up enough people to turn the tide and rebuild our government in a different direction? Could this be another painful but necessary step toward a planet based on compassion and cooperation rather than greed and dominance?
It’s a long-shot fairytale ending, I know, but when our current titanic systems of government and economics finally sink to the bottom of the ocean, to the din of a small band of billionaires playing an AI-generated tune as they drown in their own icy greed, maybe we lobsters who remain will swim away in a flood of revelation and reason.
Sensible citizens of the West agree that the US is suddenly and surprisingly going to hell under the direction of a Nazi copycat regime. Of the many clever, recent protest signs flooding America’s streets, one that caught my eye read, “I was told there’d be handbaskets.” (The phrase in your region may be “Going to hell in a handcart.”)
Most of us thought that what’s happening now can’t happen here, and we are shocked by how suddenly the American experiment in equal opportunity, human rights, and self-governance is being scuttled.
But it isn’t as sudden as it seems, and it isn’t the first time.
A brief look at the history of humans vs. humanitarians: For at least the last ten thousand years, small, privileged handfuls of the wealthy and powerful have consistently ruled over the rest of humanity with unconscionable brutality. With very few exceptions, it is only in modern times that any large government has declared that basic humans (non-rich, non-powerful) should have basic human rights.
Up until around 150 years ago, slavery was legal in most of the world. In the US, in the 1860s, more than half a million people died to either defend or defeat the practice. By 1900, with the Civil War behind them, Americans considered this style of malignant cruelty-for-profit a settled issue. We’d washed our hands of such barbarism for good.
But it was only an illusion.
The slaves-are-fine-if-you-can-get-away-with-it class never gave up; they only systematized it in the form of poor education, limited job opportunities, and low pay. The wealthy few were still cracking the whip for most of the rest of us, and getting obscenely rich off the sweat and misery of others.
Although we may think the current trend of handing control over our lives to ruthless oligarchs is a new idea, it’s not. Americans did exactly that around a hundred years ago when a previous group of smug, super-rich, privileged assholes took control of every arm of the government and judiciary, and began raking in cash like a Shop-Vac inhales sawdust.
They were dubbed “robber barons,” and they amassed generational wealth and created the Great Depression while the rest of America stood in line for a crust of bread. That previous group of shameless assfruits threw the original “Great Gatsby parties” as the rest of the country huddled around trash fires in homeless campsites all across the country. That nightmare of greed and cruelty went on for more than a decade.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, forceful invasions and brutal, racist-driven genocide were being ramped up in Europe by the original Nazis (whom the Tangerine Tumor and his cronies have openly admired), which led to half the planet being at war, and a noticeable decrease in the population of basic humans asking for basic rights.
Big-budget Hollywood musicals aside, the first half of the 20th century was a terrifying, ball-busting bitch.
But after that particular “Titanic” tribute to feudalism sank, we lobsters who remained swam away and remodeled our government into something that served more than just those citizens with multiple mansions full of priceless art and sleds named Rosebud.
Those early-20th-century Americans woke the fuck up and turned to progressive Democrats — yes, Rupert Murdoch, the Democrats — to build a government that allowed virtually everyone to afford essentials, get an education, live indoors, and bring home more than 1/300th of their boss’s pay. (Citation)
With multiple social safety nets in place, we thought the robber barons were gone for good. But that, too, was an illusion.
So how did we get here again?
Well, as generations of Americans enjoyed the fruits of social safety nets, we became spoiled and complacent. Bad things usually happened “elsewhere,” while we Americans sat in our vibrating recliners watching Monday Night Football, complaining that the pizza delivered to our doors wasn’t hot enough.
We mistakenly thought we were entitled to human rights and common comforts, and that no one could ever take those things away. We assumed we didn’t need to do anything to protect those rights, such as bothering to know more about the people we were voting for than what the slogan on their hats said. And worse, almost half of us didn’t think we needed to vote at all.
Meanwhile, the super-rich assholes who survived the sinking of the Civil War and Great Depression Titanics never went away. These shameless comic-book-style villains go into hiding for a while, but they always reemerge. Sadly, there’s never a shortage of despots and would-be dictators arrogantly shitting in their solid gold toilets and onto the heads of “We the People” from AI-generated fighter jets.
These self-appointed supremacists from yesteryear raised their descendants on the same greedy soup of arrogance and privilege, and continued to complain about the lazy poor, dishonest foreigners, and unpatriotic “thinkers” who harbor a hatred for America; their enmity for freedom, the fairytale goes, is evident in their desire to care for lazy non-white people with taxes collected from hard-working white folks. They labeled basic concern for your fellow man as “socialism” and convinced the uneducated that this word is somehow synonymous with slavery.
Enter the aforementioned Rupert Murdoch, that champion of something that is actually synonymous with slavery: unregulated free-market capitalism.
By launching a multi-million-dollar propaganda channel that looked like a real news service, he began to attract viewers with flags, conspiracies, and fashion models, where facts and journalism would be on a legitimate news channel.
Even their original motto was a lie: We report, you decide. The subtext was, “We’ll tell you what billionaires want you to believe, and you can pretend you came up with it yourself.”
And they did.
Convincing the struggling middle class and poor to surrender their social safety nets and climb into the aristocracy’s lobster tank seemed like an impossible task, but Murdoch understood that all it would require was a steady feed of conspiratorial bullshit wrapped in a flag. Turns out if you give uneducated folks plenty of patriotic-sounding grievances and attractive teleprompter readers, they’ll sign up to be a billionaire’s next meal.
Now, just eleven months into the latest Titanic’s voyage, many have lost their jobs, their farms, their food assistance, and benefits of all sorts. They may soon lose their health insurance, too. And most recently, Americans may be going to war on multiple fronts, including with our most valuable allies, NATO, and our own military on the streets of our hometowns.
So why do they continue to vote for GOP candidates when Republican-led states are ahead of blue states by a wide margin in such glamorous categories as poverty, homicide, suicide, divorce, spousal abuse, homelessness, teen pregnancy, rape, welfare recipients, crime, drug addiction, and more? (Citation)
Because with the help of Fox News and the internet, Republicans have systematically replaced education with propaganda. Knowing history makes folks less likely to repeat it, so Republican legislatures are more likely to ban books than to encourage anyone to read them.
Now that they’ve commandeered the ship, we’re all in the lobster tank together once again — red, blue, independent, and non-voters alike — as we steer straight for the same damned iceberg.
It may be wishful thinking, and I may not live to see it, but I hope those who remain after this ship of fools sinks will have the sense to build a better boat and put it into the hands of more responsible sailors.
For the time being, I remain a lobster of hope and will continue to work toward a way out of this pot before the water starts to boil.
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