give me control

“Give me control of a nation’s currency, and i care not who makes it’s laws”

This famous quote of Mayer Amscheid Rothschild’s, contains more than a little pith when it comes to pithiness. And the pith of the pith is in the first three words… “give me control”.

Just what is it within the hearts of certain individuals which causes them to wish for, scheme for and even kill, in order to gain control over their fellow creatures? Difficult to really say! I am not a psychologist, in fact i am not a gist of any stripe so the world of psychoanalysis shall be left to those with those skillsets, but i do have some experience with people who see themselves as somehow endowed with the ability to manipulate, lead, dominate and otherwise destroy the fundamental joys of life of all those within their clutching, greedy, grasping grippers.

Being involved in a children’s camp many years ago, the time came to leave my position for a few days, and so i delegated my exalted role as camp maintenance man to a kid whom i believed would be best suited for the temp position. I was taken a bit aback by his response: “Finally”, he stated, “some authority!” I didn’t quite know what to make of it at the time and i am unaware of what his future has led him into, but i would not be at all shocked if he has found some employment in the managerial field somewhere. He obviously had a fair heaping of what i am talking about in this piece.

Look around a bit and you see it everywhere. In places where polite requests would accomplish even more co-operation, how often do signs use the simple word “please”?

Now to be fair, I suppose that if all the signs in the world used the word please, perhaps people would begin to lose their fear of the consequences of disobedience to the state or the business and just begin opting out, in spite of the niceness of that little word, but it would make for an interesting experiment, would it not? Please stop, please exit right, please keep your speed down a bit for the sake of the kiddies, please don’t enter this one way street. It could go quite badly for you…. I could go on but I do enjoy the thought that perhaps someone, somewhere, in some obscure basement underneath four floors of creeps, weirdos and brainwashed “news” addicts, actually reads my articles to the end.

This control thing was a biggie for Mao Tse Tung apparently, who just couldn’t seem to get enough of it. Fascinated by what means people use to rise to ridiculous extremes of power, i once slogged my way through the book “Mao”, a seven hundred page rehash of the life of the Great Chair Man Mao. What a fascinating story of a farm kid who rose to such extremes of power that he killed something like 60 to 80 million of his own people… in peace times! As just one example of his lack of ruth, a marching army he sent out to conquer and subdue villages was extremely successful in their pursuit for their great leader until they ran out of supplies and began to starve at which point, Mao had them buried alive. Well, I suppose eventually it is time to trade in the old chevy but still…

The means he used to control his underlings was quite a read as well. Sometimes he would coerce them to commit some sort of a crime, such as a murder of someone he perceived as being in his way or whatev, and later would bring up the crime and use it as blackmail to force his worshipful underling to commit the next and the next… There was no escape at this point. To stand up to him and refuse was a certain death sentence.

If there was any sort of creativity in the land, such as an exquisite dwelling for example, it would be demolished as being too extreme a display of wealth, and replaced with a concrete bunker, ugly but functional. There is not much information in this book about whether his women were also chosen on this basis but he was pretty tough on them as well it seems. I do not think you would have enjoyed living under the reign of Mao Tse Tung if you were an especially fetching young lady.

The man rarely bathed, his teeth were blackened and his breath foul, presumably because he felt keeping physically clean to be a sign of weakness or something. But back to the control thing. Mao seems to have been obsessed with obtaining nuclear weaponry and spent years playing Russia against his own overlords in China , prior to him taking full control of China, telling the Russians the weapons were needed to withstand the Chinese and then telling the Chinese leaders the weapons were needed to defend from the Russians. Apparently he finally died without realizing his vision of total world domination and we can be thankful for that little item of world history or doubtless we would all be slurping ichiban noodles and wishing for a little shiny packet of flavoring at times, but regardless, the point remains that power seems to be a magnet for certain people and not for many of the rest of us.

In fact, a friend has voiced the opinion that the mere fact someone wants to be a cop should preclude him from the position! Now, I’m not sure i’d be willing to go quite that far but perhaps there is something to the idea, and if we carried it a bit farther, what is it exactly which makes people run for office in the first place? And please don’t tell me you buy that endlessly repeated statement about friends and family suggesting they should run for office! If that were the reason, why oh why didn’t they also take their advice when they were told to go jump in the lake?

911, the financial crisis of 2008, and lately the rename of the common cold, have all resulted in enormous increases in governmental power, so much so that almost any dictate, mandate, suggestion or whisper from an overlord is resulting in mass compliance. Of course there are those who dare to stare back at power, realizing the falsity of it and the fact that these authorities have heart beats and circulation systems quite similar to the rest of us, and the entire theory of their superiority deserves to be questioned in the first place, and then, “just say no” as we were told to do when offered elicit drugs mere decades ago. Strange how the same slogans of yesteryear are becoming useful once again, ain’t it?

“Just say no” to big government. “Just say no” to masking requirements. “Just say no” to the vex, and so on. Not so hard really, to utter a simple word such as “no” and mean it, which really is the tough bit. Other versions include but are not limited to: “I will not comply”, “Up yours”, “No way, Jose'”, “Go jab yourself”. Use your creativity, the possibilities really are endless. and after all, what is it we are so afraid of in the first place?

After all, bullets can be removed, unlike the vexxene…