Electronic Fertilizer (Butler Shaffer)

Butler Shaffer blogs:

I would like to figure out a way to transform all the nonsense heard on television - especially during holidays, all of which have been converted into empire-praising - from electronic to organic forms. I figure I could then package and sell this stuff as fertilizer for people to use in their private gardens, lawns, strawberry patches, etc.

One such bit of bilge has to do with the "men who fought for our freedoms." It should be self-evident that soldiers - particularly those conscripted into service - didn't even fight for their own freedoms: how could they have fought for mine? Furthermore, the war system always results in a diminution of freedom - whether "we" won the war or lost it. The state expands its powers over us because of war, something the state has learned - while most of us have not - by labeling most of its political programs as "wars": the war on drugs, war on poverty, war on terrorism, war on cancer, war on drunk-driving, etc., etc. Finally, the question is never asked: how can a man who is fighting and killing others be pursuing "freedom?" Of what is one "free" if he is in mortal conflict with others?

Then there is the trendy clap-trap about "giving back" to society. This is one of those cutesy phrases whose meaning is so vacuous as to communicate no concrete meaning to any intelligent human. To contend that I ought to "give back" is to suggest wrongdoing on my part; that I had obtained some benefit at the expense of others for which I ought to offer recompense. It is the secular age's moral equivalent of Marxist "exploitation" theories. In either instance, the state intervenes as the vehicle to correct the wrongdoing, whether by urging - or compelling - us to "give back" what rightfully belongs to others.

If my efforts to convert electronic into organic energy succeeds, I may come up with the means of ending starvation on the planet!