Julie on “Life of Julia”, Mike on Not Being a Number

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio & Transcript – When you’re a number and you’re nothing more than an economic statistic — what are people running around saying?  What’s this election about?  “It’s about jobs.  It’s about the economy.”  How do you measure the economy? “I don’t know, but I know when that jobs report comes out today, I’ll be looking for that number.”  The numbers, the whole study, the infatuation, the obsessions with numbers and numeric and statistics is the undercurrent that runs through all that the state is allowed to, and with our sanction, gets away with.  You’re just reduced to a number. Check out today’s audio and transcript for more…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Speaking of Julia, how about Julie in Georgia next.  Hello, Julie.

Caller Julie:  I don’t understand this world today.  I don’t understand all this, really, I don’t.  I do not know what has become of the American people and the American backbone and the belief in the individual.  I don’t know.

Mike:  Well, the individual is no more because the individual is nothing more than a number that is to be counted, made a statistic of, is part of the unemployment report that we’re all so waiting around with baited breath to hear later today.  The individual, the beautiful creature of God, cannot exist in the same sphere of the number that is just part of the larger body politic.  You’re not an individual anymore.  You know what you are?  You are a mine.  You are a mine that the elite, slave-driving, government class uses to — you’re an ATM, not a mine.  You’re an ATM machine.  They tell you to go to work.  You dutifully abide.  You go.  They confiscate, if you make over $88,000 a year, 51 percent of everything you make, and then they spend it on your behalf under the aegis that [mocking] “We’re smarter than you are and we know how to spend it better.  Besides, there are poor people out there that will never go to work because we told them not to, and we have to have some money to feed them and keep them fat and healthy.”

You are a mine.  You are a mine that the elite, slave-driving, government class uses to — you’re an ATM, not a mine.  You’re an ATM machine.

So you’re not an individual anymore.  Julie, this is one part of the conservative movement that the conservatives have absolutely botched.  This is why I say they’re not conservatives in many instances; they’re decepticons.  The part of it that they have botched is that there is more to being human than participating in economics.  That should be self-explanatory.  How did Charles Murray put it when he was on this show?  “The human conservative recognizes and abides by the rule of obedience to the unenforceable,” meaning that there is something larger in life.

There’s something above us.  There’s a reason why you don’t do bad things.  It’s not because the market says you’re going to pay for it if you screw up.  It’s because, handed down through generations, men have always wondered why we’re here.  When you wonder why are we here, since that question is a great mystery, and since the great mystery cannot be solved scientifically, it’s why we have erected these institutions we know as religions and churches and faiths.  That’s part of the human condition.

When you’re a number and you’re nothing more than an economic statistic — what are people running around saying?  What’s this election about?  [mocking] “It’s about jobs.  It’s about the economy.”  How do you measure the economy?  [mocking] “I don’t know, but I know when that jobs report comes out today, I’ll be looking for that number.”  The numbers, the whole study, the infatuation, the obsessions with numbers and numeric and statistics is the undercurrent that runs through all that the state is allowed to, and with our sanction, gets away with.  You’re just reduced to a number.  [mocking] “It’s not so bad.  Just look at the latest polls.  Thirty-eight percent of people are just like you, so you don’t have it so bad.”  Maybe I don’t like being part of the 38 percent.  Maybe 38 percent stinks.221

If you are old enough to remember what it was like before color film, and I don’t know if there’s anyone in this audience that would be old enough, but you can certainly watch old television shows and movies.  Just look at the demeanor, at the almost placid, peaceful nature of what appears onscreen as the human condition since we had film to record it.  You can almost see the dividing line, Julie.  You can almost see that somewhere around 1970 or so, maybe in 1965, that got cut.  Then things turned dark.  Johnny Cash just couldn’t be the man in black who we loved to listen to his records.  No, he had to be a dope addict.  He had to be a wife beater and what have you.  I’m just giving one example here.  We embraced, I say we, the popular culture embraced the darkness and we have been possessed of it ever since.

I really don’t know how to describe it other than, one of the other things that we used to be really infatuated with was literature.  I don’t just mean reading the latest Harry Potter novel or the latest Hunger Games book, I mean real literature, poetry, things that are written prosaically.  They’re really just wonderful to read, very peaceful, calm and relaxing.  That’s part of what being a human being and an individual used to entail.  The individual was not always just the man, or the woman like yourself, Julie, who must go out, must earn, must meet the statistic, must produce, and must be counted.  To reduce yourself to that, to me, is antithetical, not only to what I think the American ideal was, but to what the conservative ideal ought to be.

End Mike Church Show Transcript