Sunday, November 20, 2016

Walter Mitty reloaded: the fantasies of bureaucratic resistance

If you don't know James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", your friends of The New Yorker magazine have it here.

In case you prefer a movie version, please go with the 1947 reel, the 2013 remake is crap.

Also, in the extremely unlikely event that any Breitbart readers find this here post, this special note is for you: Don't get confused by the section header "Fiction". This short story really is a propaganda piece by the far left designed to show meek liberals as heroes and foment resistance against white Christians. And yes, the date stamp 'March 1939' proves the internet has been around for all that time, kept hidden, first by the Socialist Harry Truman after WW II, then by 'I don't remember where I was on the day of the JFK assassination' Daddy Shrub.

So, why talk about Walter Mitty today?

Because some might have missed the clue in the post title?

The daydreaming hero reminds the blogster of the fantasies about bureaucratic resistance to the potential assaults by the new Trump administration on civil liberties and freedoms.

No, the blogster is not trying to say all resistance it futile. Hey, we even give you a link to a "HowTo" for interested government workers.

To show our good faith, we go one further and provide a link to the CIA's release of that old standby, the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual. You really want to read the latter because it has sections that you will recognize from daily working life in any modern large organization.

Should the release disappear - things happen, you know - you can always email us for a copy.

We have even seen a powerful law expert write about 'should I stay, or should I go' for lawyers in government.

This being said, the blogster would like you to exercise some caution with the piece you can find behind this tweet: What happens when a government employee doesn't do what they're told to do? Sometime they become a hero.

It is in the New Yorker, almost 80 years after Thurber, bless their hearts.

The tweet does have that most crucial caveat of all 'sometime' in front of our modern day Walter Mitty reference.

The blogster would like to point out, though, that the vast majority of us will never attain that coveted hero status.

Because it is hard.

Because we may have a family to feed.

Because a work slowdown may be all nice and dandy as long as we blame it on laziness or a "need for more training" but will unleash vicious retribution when we come out as motivated by "the constitution" or "freedom".

Hanging out by the watercooler or the coffee machine and exchanging witty remarks with co-workers is as far removed from throwing a spanner into some evil gears as Planet X is from the sun.

'We are all in this together' generally means, we sound off but continue to comply.

If it were not that way, none of the big dictatorships some of us can still remember would  have happened in the first place.

If you enter 'resistance mode', you will probably become somewhat lonely - not necessarily from the perspective of an outside view. Your friends and family will still be there, at least as long as you don't tell them.

The loneliness is mental.

And it is powerful.

By all means, do follow your conscience. As you get older, you may realize that this is all you have. Although the people you are up against are remarkably different in their mental wiring.

Read or watch the Walter Mitty tale, sit back, smile.

And make sure you understand that the operative word is 'sometimes'.





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