Fred Aiken Writing

Most of them. That’s a cop out. But I’ve also been told by my wife that I’m a contrarian, so it’s fairly easy for me to disagree with just about any opinion out there, and public figures are usually the worst about sharing theirs. Especially since a lot of public figures seem to share their opinions about topics they know very little about with a sense of entitlement and superiority that is just ripe for backlash and general ire.

Though the main offenders of my dislike are politicians. I don’t like that they can be so easily bought. I don’t like the fact that most of them sound exactly the same and do the same thing and are influenced by lobbying groups so frequently, despite all of them generally saying how the way things are isn’t working. I hardly see any difference between any political party or politicians. I don’t like the fact that there’s a minimum age requirement to hold certain political offices but there’s no maximum (personally, I don’t think anyone over the age of 65 should be in office). I don’t like that most of their arguments are nonsense when broken down and analyzed. I don’t like that political figures don’t have to have any critical thinking skills, especially if they’re willing to sell their vote to the highest bidder. I don’t like how over the past 50 years politics have become more of a circus than a representative governing body.

There’s probably a lot more to dislike about politicians. There always is.

The main problem, I feel, is that the argument seems centered around the size of government, which makes no sense. Small governments and big governments grow and retract with the flux of time and its population. The main concern should have also been whether the government is responsible and held responsible for its and its players’ actions or inactions. But funding efforts seem to always be directed at limiting or completely demolishing any form of oversight by governing officials, both in state and federal levels. Maybe not all states. I can only really speak to the state that I live in, really, since that’s the one I’m most familiar with. Though from the news that I occasionally hear, it does not seem like other state politicians and representatives are much different.

The main culprit, the public figure that I guess I really don’t agree with, is Barry Goldwater. That also kinda seems like a cop out, since obviously he’s very much dead. But I find that he holds a good chunk of the responsibility of why politics have become so polarizing.

Granted, I’m not nearly old enough to have ever voted for Goldwater, nor did I even live in the state in which he held office–though he did have a bid as the 1964 presidential candidate that he lost in the end to LBJ. But I do feel that it’s often times the losers of elections, especially executive branch elections, that are often looked over in terms of their influence on the larger scale and in future campaigns.

The main aspect of Goldwater’s campaign that I find particularly invidious and consequential to modern politics that has sullied the waters was his primaries acceptance speech in which he said, ‘extremism is no vice’. I think that spoke volumes as to the type of candidate he became, and became the rallying cry on which modern politics has hung its mantel on, on both sides of the aisle.

But, like I said, it’s kinda punching down to disagree with a dead guy. I mean, there’s also plenty of other dead guys to disagree even more so than Goldwater. There’s the usual suspects of mass murderers and political bullies, both dead and alive. But there’s already been plenty of discussion and analysis over how and why those public figures were disagreeable.

I think more focus should be placed on the legacy of Barry Goldwater on how he failed future generations by ushering in modern extremism in politics.

In terms of actual living public figures, then I guess I’d have to say I mostly disagree with Joe Rogan, Dane Cook, and Elon Musk. The two former for being comedians that aren’t funny. I know Joe Rogan has a podcast that’s pretty controversial, or so I’ve heard. But I’ve never actually listened to it (mostly bits and pieces, but nothing substantial), so I can’t really speak to what’s either offensive or not when it comes to what he does on it. But I remember listening to Joe Rogan and Dane Cook’s comedy in the late nineties and early 2000’s, and their humor and jokes were always so very bland and unoriginal to the point of offensiveness.

And in terms of Elon Musk, well, I guess I could also add Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet on that list too. I’m just not a fan of people that were capable of accumulating wealth and then, as a society, their ideas and opinions somehow matter. I especially don’t like Musk, because unlike the other rich people I listed, he’s never actually had an original idea or business his entire life.

Elon Musk is a serial idea swiper, and he’s mostly ever been capable of using his wealth to accumulate companies from people that had much more vision than he and making it appear as if he founded the damn company. He also has that petty energy of a petulant grown-man-type toddler that always needs to whine and complain, even though his accumulated net worth is more than some countries’ entire GDP.

But, as with everything else in Elon Musk’s life, he’s not unusual for a rich guy. I think if you throw a dart at a list of billionaires, then you’ll hit one that’s squandered the usefulness of their wealth on petty, simple-minded projects and endeavours. Like Bezos weird, overly phallic rocket that went to space, but only barely. Or Musk’s acquiring Twitter to normalize his social media addiction. Or Zuckerberg doing whatever the hell he thinks he’s doing with virtual reality. Either way you split it, it just seems like rich people, because they’re so damn rich, act on a different level with their money than the rest of society. Because they have more than what one reasonable person could do with in a lifetime, they all seem to spend it and throw around their money for the dumbest of reasons, and no one bats an eye because, well, they have too much money so society somehow deems them smart or witty or cutthroat or any number of descriptors other than mostly pretty lucky and entirely problematic.

So, yeah, I think I don’t really like these sorts of thought exercises. My wife tells me that I’m too negative, and that I’m prone to be super critical and judgmental too quickly. Which I can’t really argue with. My default stance on things, no matter the topic, tends to be contrarian and argumentative. I’ve been trying to work on that, but, well, like most things, it’s a work in progress. So, maybe my disagreeing with certain specific public figures says more about me and what I’m going through than it does about them.