WE THE MEAT PEOPLE

      antony gormley

Christmas is over. It was an interesting low-key type of Christmas. There was a time I suspected the rarity of decorations on houses this year could be attributed to Fox so-called news stressing War on Christmas. There's more going on than fewer outside lights tell. My feeling after some time has passed and Christmas has passed is that this was a subdued, quiet Christmas. Nowhere have I seen any zeal about Christmas this year. I hear shopping was down this year, which may or may not mean something other than the Depression we of the working class have been in for a decade. That's not new this year. The television commercials have been full volume and constant. Merchants were desperate, pre-Christmas sales, whatever it took to get some business. More and more Christmas business goes to the discount box stores with sweat-shop factories in Asia destroying communities there like here, just in different ways. Online shopping must have been moving in on the shopping experience. I don't hesitate to go online for something instead of a store. If it's a local store, a store in the county, I'll buy there first, even when it costs more than driving 30 miles to give my money to the Waltons of Arkansas, who live underground with guard towers above ground because they're afraid of the meat people.

Anyway, I stay out of Walmart until it is something I can't find anywhere else that I don't want to buy online. Dollar General in Sparta is good enough discount place for me. Laundry soap is much less there than the grocery store. Cat and dog food and supplies cost the same as grocery store. I have certain items I get there every month, as do many others. It's a booming place, always busy at the register. For clothes items, Gil's Jeans n Things in Sparta is a good discount place for clothes. Gil came here by way of Hong Kong where he gets a lot of his clothes that are factory seconds with a flaw that didn't pass inspection. Gil is clever like that. He delivers good clothes at a modest price, and being Asian, from Poona, India, originally, he'll haggle with you and arrange a new price if you want. His store is a little spot of Asia in Sparta. Inside the place, it is packed, stuffed with stuff. Behind the counter he has his cubbyhole with newspapers and television on CNN all the time. Gil keeps himself informed. He actively sells clothes too. When I go in to get something, he will show me something else along the line of what I'm looking for at a very reasonable price and I buy them both. He doesn't stop until you tell him to stop. The way he does it is not objectionable, in your face at all. It's conversational. He'll put his hand on a stack of sweatshirts and tell something about them and the good price. He's good. He raised several kids and put them through college on what he's made at his little shop on Main Street with the year round liquidation sale.

Small town businesses are especially feeling the Depression, because what business there is goes to the discount box stores. Inflation has taken another big surge while wages have stayed the same since 1980, the kickoff of the Reagan Revolution. By now, 32 years later, inflation has impoverished us, the people who work for a living. We're being brought consciously down to the level of the Third World so we can get jobs back in America when we'll work for $2 an hour just to have a job. Obama can't save us. The republicans are pumping up the pressure of the backlash that feels like it's on a verge. After 30 years of guerrilla strategies attempting to put the democrat party out of existence, it's looking like a backlash of karmic return. The republicans have made it clear they are not going to let us out of the economic Depression they put us in deceptively and are keeping us in with deception. Their mascot animal is far better the Fox than the elephant. They insult an elephant. They insult a fox too. George Orwell nailed them: some pigs are more equal than others. A big pink pig raised for the slaughterhouse with Rush Limbaugh's face. It befits their collective character better than an elephant. Jackass is good for the democrats. They had their period of time doing what the republicans have been doing over the last third of a century. They were the racist party for a long time. In the Sixties the shift began away from racism for the democrats. The republicans lured the racists dissatisfied with the new democrat party and GOP became the racist party.

Sparta is not going to pick up business and it is not going to thrive. The big box discount stores are in the five surrounding counties, a five-pointed star with Sparta in the center, 30 miles in each direction. In a county of people who need discount items, it's looking like only discount stores are going to be left before much longer in the long decline of this republican Depression. They are systematically taking our power away from us, the decision by the Supremes that corporations are now people instantly stripped us of any power. We are now the meat people. Starting now our future is peasants, slaves, beasts of burden that will be happy to live in cardboard slums like in India and Mexico, skilled in varieties of theft. The prisons will get worse and more crowded. Again, Obama is not going to be allowed even the illusion that he could help we the meat people. The corporate people are making laws now having the Occupy movement declared terrorist so they can start arresting the demonstrators and putting them in the FEMA camps. The corporate people are systematically shutting down the meat people, using the easily manipulable among us to bring all the others down. The crabs in a bucket syndrome.

I am not the only one thinking these and similar thoughts, all of them from different vantage points and manifold reasons, all pointing to this "economic downturn" created by republicans and now held down by republicans. We the meat people are targets. What is being done in marketing now is called "targeting." Every one of us is being targeted. Targeted to get our money. We're tin cans on fence posts. I'm happier than ever that I am unplugged from the television influence. I'm glad I don't have enough money to be able to afford anything they advertise, so none of it is tempting. I can't even think about having a new Lexus. Watching football on weekends with friends, I can enjoy the visuals in the commercials that are mini-films, half-minute films, like the babe in black on the motorcycle riding all over USA. Beautiful short film. Monster pickup truck ads with big four wheel drive splashing mud and pulling manhood maneuvers like climbing a rock pile to Bob Seeger screaming Like A Rock. I don't want any of those pickups. I couldn't even afford to buy a license tag for one or pay the insurance, let alone make monthly payments for ever how many years. The big tires are expensive. I couldn't pay the county taxes on one. I don't want a ratchet set with a twisting handle and a bag of fittings for 19.95 plus ten dollars shipping. I don't even want a Papa John's pizza or a Red Lobster special-all-you-can-eat. I don't want a Big Mac.

It makes me happy to see I'm disconnected from that mind. I live in a world of people connected to it, meaning I am the same as connected because everyone in my world is connected. As the television becomes the culture of everyone I live among, it becomes my culture too without me even watching it. No matter how one sees it politically, we the meat people are in a pickle. Our power has been taken away from us by the corporate people. There has been a coup. They won. We lost. We didn't even know it was happening. It was done in deception behind closed doors like a cat creeping up on a bird. These are my thoughts on the malaise I feel in the Christmas spirit this year. Not everyone sees what I see. Each one, each belief system sees this "downturn" in their own terms, in their own interpretations. Though we're all seeing it from different points of view, we're all seeing the same thing, like we're standing in a circle around a big hole. Everybody has their own ideas about why and wherefore, but none of it changes the hole inside the circle everyone is looking into. I can talk with somebody I know with totally different political points of view and be in agreement that the standard of living for us is going down fast. It's the mentation around the questions of why that we can't talk about; we silently agree not to talk about it. Otherwise, both our backs will go up and we'll get louder, then somebody will get pist off and walk away in a huff plotting revenge, or kick somebody's ass.


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