CRINGING BULLIES AND PINHEADED BABOONS

It’s an amazing world we’ve built for ourselves -- a cacophonous brain-squonk of hollow stupidity, dominated by cringing bullies and overbearing cardboard cut-outs of simulated humans wallowing in the steaming, stinking puddles of their own pathetic servility. A microcephalic baboon cage most foul.

(Anyone who’s attempted to shop at a 24-hour Safeway at 5:30 in the morning, then followed up by having the shitheads with the pierced faces at the groovy midtown coffee house disconnect your wireless internet connection and change the channel on the electric Muzak machine to some “death metal” noise pollution, and then topped that off by unwittingly biting into a blueberry scone covered with mold, all the while being harassed by the largest mosquito you’ve ever seen ... knows exactly what I’m talking about.)

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Seriously. The less-than-pithy term “cringing bullies” suddenly popped into my leaking brain-bag the other day at work, as I re-witnessed a modern ritual for what must’ve been the 10,000th time: over-officious demi-supervisors, scowling faces freshly removed from the nether cracks of their immediate boss/masters, “inspecting” the personal belongings of departing employees. Two things about such a scene immediately jump to the fore, competing to see which one will finally trigger that long-anticipated terminal apoplexy: that an employer assumes it has the right to poke around in your stuff, whenever the hell it wants; and the incredibly meek and subservient manner in which most of the nitwits and birdbrains submit to such outrageous perversions.

The deeply closeted Stalinists by whom I happen to be employed obviously assume they have the legal authority to violate the privacy of anyone they wish, under any pretext or circumstance, mainly because no one has officially challenged them on it; they do it because they can, as the old joke about a dog goes. Anyway, they claim that this police-state activity is necessary for reasons of “security,” which actually means, in their warped and twisted corporate view of the world, “security” for themselves and the “company” against their own employees -- since, as we all know quite well, any poor unfortunate scumbag who gets paid by the hour is simply not to be trusted. They’re thieves and liars and contemptible lowlifes, by definition.

I’ve always viewed these rather penny-ante control mechanisms -- which include, in addition to the “inspection” regimen, such gems as electronically-controlled locks on all interior doors and a “biometric” time clock -- as little more than a pale reflection of the times, inspired by the disinformation and carefully modulated paranoid fear-mongering so well practiced by the Neo-Con elite. It’s interesting to note that none of these artificial “security” measures were deemed necessary during the 1990’s; they’re a 21st Century innovation.

But getting back to the “cringing bullies”: as a term of derision and contempt, it’s applicable in a 360-degree circle, as it were. I pin it unreservedly to the morons who submit so willingly to all sorts of employer-sanctioned indignities, mostly swaggering twenty-something punks who wield their car stereos like bludgeons and who can’t seem to complete a sentence without artlessly tossing in a half-dozen superfluous f-bombs and other choice expletives. Wearing that assumed tough-guy attitude derived from the most egregious excesses of pop-media culture, they bravely turn into compliant piles of servile jello when confronted with each successive violation of their privacy, and their human rights in general. It’s difficult to understand, really, since the Junior Gestapo Enforcers who so gleefully sniff around in the darkest and most obscure recesses of various handbags, knapsacks, and lint-filled trouser pockets, are themselves the most ridiculous and pathetic “cringing bullies” of them all. The young, slave-mentality blockheads would be surprised to learn, probably, just how effective the judicious use of angry invective can actually be, if used intelligently -- just a couple of carefully-timed “Get your fucking hands off my laptop” and “If you place one finger on me, I’ll break your goddamn arm” and the ambitious mediocrities in their supervisor suits tend to sag and wilt, and pretty much leave you alone. At least, that’s been my experience with these dirt-suckers.

Is there some kind of lesson lurking around in the middle of this badly-written and typically amorphous screed? Perhaps, perhaps not. There might be something to be said for the idea of rudely calling the bluff of incredibly pretentious employers who lack the cojones and fortitude to back up their police-state proclivities; it’s something else entirely when trying to apply that to the desperate situation our constitutional republic has been, and is, facing these days. But, as somebody somewhere has surely said, one can always hope -- which is a statement that doesn’t come very easily to a cynical windbag like myself; maybe, at least as a catalytic starting point, all we need to do is shout “Get your fucking hands off my civil liberties” and things just might work out OK after all ...

Yeah, right, and I guess I’ll order another moldy scone and wash that mess down with a warm glass of beer and get stuck in another traffic jam with SUV-driving baboons who want to transform me into a biological speedbump. That seems much more likely.