America, America, Incompetence Has Shed It's Disgrace on Thee

 

For someone born in 1954 and who lived in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s it really is hard to see twenty-century America as anything but a pale reflection of what used to be. In the America of my youth, for example, there were good paying jobs with benefits often for life for working class and middle class Americans because stuff was actually manufactued in America. Populist spewing economic elite demagogues did not make the obscene amounts of monies and perks they do today and the gap between the richest and the poorest Americans and income equality while these were present were not as great as it has been since Ronnie Reagan. There were newspapers and television news outlets that reported facts and who actually did investigative journalism on important and significant things like Vietnam and Watergate rather than celebrities. Right wing populist wackos, White supremacists, and evangelical nutcases while around were not as prominent and as influential as they are today in the parts of the US that don't seem to have moved very far beyond the Stone Age. There were those who risked their careers to reveal to the American public the secrets of the ever growing national security and military-industrial state. There were exposes of American imperial covert actions in Congress, for instance. There were those who could and did see through the mythhistorical and demagogic bullshite of mythstorians, politicians, and capitalist shills, pointing up the fact that not everything was perfect in 1960s and 1970s America. I, for instance, grew up in segregated Dallas where even the free swimming hours in local park pools (mine was the Pecan Grove Park pool) were segregated by race and gender, though I wasn't aware of the former because there were not Blacks or Hispanics in the neighbourhood or in my school.

These days incompetency--economic incompetence, political incompetence, and cultural incompetence-- seems to be the dominant American way of the epoch. For instance, when a car passes in front of my flat my over the air television signal far too often disappears. Portable CD players turn themselves off when selected cars go by on the street in from of my house and they always stop toward the end of a CD. Digital TV feeds periodically disappear in time and space and satellite feeds disappear and sometimes other waves interfere with the TV giving this watcher that no-undestandable voice of god effect. DVD's--which were initially hawked by snake oil salesman as indestructible--and blu rays sometimes have missing menus, sometimes have missing content, sometimes freeze and fragment, break too easily when you are taking them out of the case, and sometimes come in packaging designed by engineers who seem to think that a book should be judged by its cover and come complete with packaging that damages what should be the central concern of these engineers, the DVD itself. Thankfully, blu rays are, for the most part, better able to withstand moronic packaging. Speaking of blu rays By the way, the Universal blu rays of the Dracula films looked good but the morons who designed the discs made it impossible to return to the film except by opening and closing my LG blu ray player and starting all over again. The Marengo DVD of Nothing Sacred and A Star is Born has the summary and time for Nothing Sacred under A Star is Born and the summary and time for A Star is Born under Nothing Sacred. My Warner Brothers DVD of Night at the Opera stopped between scenes 13-18 with several more scenes to go. This was just the latest of a number of WB DVD.  Needless to say, I boycott WB DVDs and blu rays. 

Television stations, like Comet (an enduring testament to the incompetence of populist gilded silver spoon in mouth Sinclair) and WYBN in the New York Catskills (another incompetently populist run "corporation"), generally run commercials over the films or shows half of the time on, for example, the Nostalgia network including at the end of movies meaning that the viewer misses the last two or three minutes of them making them even more difficult to make sense of than YouTube film or TV show reaction videos. The plods at WYBN, by the way, are so incompetent that they haven't even changed the channel names on the digital TV schedule such as Cozi and World that havent been on that station for years, they ran a commercial for Curtis Lumber that referred to a special that expired in September well into November, and currentely they are running a weather report on channel 14.6 that is off. Channel 25 WVBG which used to be run by the right wing incompetents who run WYBN is now run by equally incompetent right wing Christian fantasists, paranoics, and conspiracy theorists, and is, like their former parent, characterised by freezing and disapperaring channels. I should point out here that these right wing incompetents, who can't even run TV stations, want Americans to trust them to run governments. That many in the US think they can run them competently is a mark of how idiocratic the US has become.

Right wing TV stations and networks aren't the ones run incompetently in the US. The morons at Start TV, a partnership between CBS and Weigel, a network that rarely adds new shows to its endlessly repetitive lineup, started showing a new show, Nashville, at 10 pm but suddenly shifted it to 1 pm dead zone in the middle of the series. When the new series of the English remake of the Belgian programme Professor T premiered on PBS that network showed a promo for the Belgian original rather than the English remake. Thankfully, this, and something similar, only happened once The PBS Inspector Lewis series 5 blu-ray, which bizarrely is not numbered according to the original British series numbers, does not have any menus on either disc meaning that the episodes in this "series" cannot be accessed. PBS's "Democracy on Trial" on Frontline ended with a half hour to go to be replaced by Amanpour and Company thanks to a muckup by WMHT. Fox did a hack job on its conversion of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer to digital and 16:9, not surprising given the source. WZPJ TV, channel 4, Albany, had a channel 4.2 with no sound and a channel 4.4 with no picture, something that almost makes one believe in divine intervetion. Additionally, WZPJ's 4.1 and 4.2 periodically lose their signal input during the day.

American incompetence, which has been made worse by the new digital media, isn't simply a television, DVD, or blu way thing. Personal computers are sometimes defective when you turn them on. I once bought a Dell laptop which gave me an error message when I turned it on for the first time and which I exchanged for an Apple after several unsuccessful returns to Dell for fixes that never came. I have submitted three requests for the transfer of my medical records to my new GP--my old one retired-- to the corporation that handles records for the St Peter's Health care corporation here in Albany since June and my new GP has still not received them. Citibank could not send a confirmation message to my email, only to my which was impossible without hanging up on them. Thankfully, however, they could and did cancel my card without the need for a mobile phone confirmation. Vizio makes a soundbar that is difficult to put the power chord and the HDMI Arc cord into and, to top it off and to do something that has never been done before in the history of the universe, they have designed a remote for the soundbar that cannot be opened even after watching tutorials on YouTube of by going to the Vizio website. That Vizio has a website that tries to explain how to open the remote says it all and suggests that Vizio designers graduated with honours from Moron U.  Designers and engineers! Though Thorstein Veblen praised engineers as the real movers and shakers of civilisation today’s digital engineers and designers seem to be brainy morons who never use the moronic things they design.

Speaking of corporations, trying to navigate the maze of incompetent machines on corporate phone lines in order to speak to a real person is akin to having all of your teeth pulled at once followed by a chaser of a railway spike through the head. Using some online pay systems is like being forced to endure an unbearable fifteen minutes of bad, really bad, Vogon poetry. Beyond that there are the kafkaesque bureaucratic absurdities. I recently called TIAA-CREF to request that a form be sent to a personal address that they have had for at least ten years. They refused saying they are just doing their jobs. Private corporate absurdity run amok.

And then there is Amazon incompetence, which deserves a special book of its own. I have grown weary of dealing with banal politically, ideologically, and culturally correct corporate fascists like Google and Amazon. I have moved all my email from Gmail to Yahoo. I am now trying to delete my Amazon account. I thought I had accomplished this today by cancelling an item Amazon should have cancelled long ago since it has been sitting in my not yet shipped orders since April making it likely unavailable. Several hours later, however, I get an email telling me my account can't be exterminated because there is an open item in my account. And so the ever more moronic Kafkaesque circle turns in the brave new digital world. 

Incompetence is not only technological It is also part of American political and economic culture. Some of this incompetence is intentional. Republicrats, that populist faux conservative merger of Republicans, Birchers, and Dixiecrats, really don't want the federal political system to work or function.Much of it, however along with hypocrisy,and corruption are an integral part of American politics and corporations and no one seems to care beyond the knee jerk rhetoric that flows out of the gobs of many as mantras. Myth, for many, is preferable to facts and anti-intellectualism seems to be even more prominent than it was in the past in this nation with a long history of anti-intellectualism. Demagoguery and the manipulation of the masses is a profit making corporate enterprise stocked with political consultants and advertising consultants trained in the "fine" art of professional bullshitting, bullsthitters who have been able to convince the masses that rich fecks are the real victims of a tyrannical political system. Let's not forget that whinging is the real American national pasttime: Poor poor pitiful them. The American corporation Car  Shield cites a paraphrase of Thomas Paine in one of its morally challenged propaganda missives as a quote from the most radical of the American founding fathers. Political, economic, cultural, and ideological correctness of American left, liberal, conservative, and populist right is common in social media, the sports world, military advertising, and academia.

Goodbye competent America. We hardly knew ye. All hail the brave new digital crapolution!