Thursday, June 15, 2006

For Whom the Bell Polls: Jail to the Chief


Poll time: It's a "baby bounce" at home thanks to Al-Z. But before you crack another bottle of bubbly, President Pestilence (the first one was for Karl's legal teflon act), remember: the world still hates you.

So this one's for you, Chief. Hail, Hail (the full text of this piece is here).


In our Western culture, [the slavish following of "chiefs"] remains much the same. You don't see it? Then look at these titles from the realm of corporate America:

• CEO (Chief Executive Officer)

• CFO (Chief Financial Officer)

• COO (Chief Operations Officer)

• CIO (Chief Information Officer)

• CTO (Chief Technology Officer)


There may be others; but these are the most familiar. Common to them all is that word, Chief. People holding this class of jobs are paid something on the order of 300 times a fellow in the mailroom or a woman in the secretarial pool. Even an average professional-level employee making 70 or 80 thousand dollars a year would have to work for 20 to 50 years to equal what one of these Chiefs "earns" in one.

Then we come to the great political Chief of America, the one celebrated in the song, "Hail to the Chief". Here, the disparity is not so much about money (though that is a factor more related to the political machinery that drives him forward into office), but rather about power. These past six years, we have witnessed a great decline in the strength, morale, and economic vibrancy of this nation, due to the despotic power-grab of an incompetent Chief with a vast political machinery behind him. He has wrought death, ruin, despair, and apathy among a once-great people; even as he has proclaimed himself and his cronies a vast success, in an Orwellian Newspeak distortion of language, a foreshortening and strangling of truth.

I hope it is clear by now that the enduring answer to this trouble is not to install better Chiefs—that is only a partial and temporary solution that collapses as soon as another Nero, another Caligula, another Hitler, another Saddam, another Bush, arises and takes power. If we want to find a more natural and permanent solution, one that is in tune with Nature and truth, we have to probe deeply into the souls of ourselves and our communities. We have to find the cultural rot that must be expunged from within; we have to clearly identify the decadent beliefs and their representative words, titles, and phrases that tend to perpetuate the assumptions of human delusion. In short, we have to kill the belief that fuels dependence and inequality: we have to assassinate the Chief within ourselves, our communities, and our nations.

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