2013/14 Hokay Hey

Hokay Hey.

So many people have died this year. Several of my friends, many friends and family of friends, celebrities, journalists, women in Central America, children in war-torn countries. Today, it is Thatcher’s day. Hokay hey. “Hokay hey” means something like “It is a good day to die.” It is a Native American proverb, used by proud people and warriors when they consider it a good day to go and fight. Meanwhile, other people consider it a good day to rest forever. “The world is so beautiful, it will be the same when I am not there anymore.” It is just a matter of perception, I guess, or timing...

I have seen that proverb around, even in Tehran, and while that was completely coincidental, and maybe even unintentional, it added nuance and different angles to a story that needed to be covered up. But now the headlines say Margaret Thatcher has died. She sold off council housing and destroyed labor rights and labor organizations. Society did not exist, in her opinion. So, a European Union was unthinkable in the first place. Ken Livingstone is right about her: check him out. Of course she is human, but she is also far right of herself. Deregulation and privatization. She was the frontrunner in what turned out to be the destruction of a social form of democratic society that was taking place in Western Europe. We had a social welfare system, national water, electricity, and communications companies, pensions, social housing systems… Now, that all sounds like Communism.

Western Europe reflected back to the East as the East did to the West, and finally, the West created more desire in the East than the other way around. That is why they fell for us. Hollywood did the trick. Meanwhile, for many years we have reflected on our society in relation to neighboring Eastern Europe. But Thatcher was the beginning of the end of that. She raised the UK to new heights, as they say, opening the door to financial cowboys, intensification of complexity, which finally became the platform for virtualizing wealth. Some kind of Pandora’s Box strategy. After us, the deluge. The UK was not at the end of its power, nor was Europe, but it certainly was the end of morality among the elite. And Margaret Thatcher herself admitted that in a marvelous song by the Dead Kennedys. They have a song, or actually a remix, called “Kinky Sex Makes the World Go Round.” The title does not really cover the content: it is much more serious. Just copy & paste the title and search on YouTube. They took the last straw and went global with all their financial activities. After salt, centuries ago, now gold was abandoned as an indicator of wealth: power to the numbers, the ones and the zeros.

Now, 30 years later, at the tail end of the little “positive” wave they created, we have situations like this: Tax Havens (off-shore banking) invoke the Bank Secrecy Act to become utter Treasure Islands, where today’s Financial Pirates hide their Booty (see also theIndependency Project). The existence of these Treasure Islands permits, and even promotes, large-scale corruption (institutional, corporate, and criminal corruption). Corruption is the single greatest cause, the underlying disease, if you will, of a multiplicity of serious ills, or symptoms, including war, crime, human rights violations, general injustice, and the destruction of the environment and our planet.

I must say that Tony Blair did his very best to finish the job, so this is not all Maggy’s doing. European countries show their nationalism through just these kinds of actions, which are popular and self-serving. Maybe Blair, too, will die this year. Maybe all the prime ministers who are willing to go to war to promote self-interests will die this year. Death has been tailing us for such a long time that in the end, you might be surprised to find it suddenly in front of you.
But Hey
Hokay Hey