You know that feeling, right? You get it watching the news, facing yet another rejection, another closed door, waking up for the twenty thousandth morning in a row. It’s that feeling of impotence, of legs filled with cement, of desperately pounding on them just to get them to work, to carry you through the mire. You can’t move. You’re bogged down in a world not of your making and you’ve been rendered motionless, powerless, unable to affect even the basest change. Some people get so fed up with that feeling they’ll take a lifelong dead sprint on a hamster wheel in lieu of it. You never get anywhere on that wheel, but you get to feel like you’re in constant motion.

I haven’t given a shit about late night television for years. In fact, I didn’t really start paying attention to the Leno/Conan thing ‘til last week when Kurt Sutter, creator of Sons of Anarchy, posted an open invitation in his blog to Conan O’Brien to join the cast of SOA as an Irish terrorist (which I still think is an utterly fucking fantastic idea. It’s not like Conan needs to do anything for the money at this point). Today I read that’s it official: NBC is paying Conan O’Brien $45 million dollars to take a powder and reinstalling Jay Leno in his time slot.

It’s a mind-boggling clusterfuck from every angle. It is backwards thinking re-re-redefined. Here’s the thing. NBC making a horrendous programming decision is nothing new. I also have no sympathy for Conan or animosity toward Jay Leno. They’re both fairly-talented-to-mediocre multi-millionaires. They don’t matter to me. Bill Hicks died before he got to do Earls of the Underworld, I’ve long given up on the idea that a stand-up comedian can change the world with a monologue.

This situation, however, and the bludgeoning stupidity of it represent a larger revelation for me. That is this: The people in charge are just that. They’re people. They’re dumb, twitchy animals, 99.9% of them just terrified for their jobs. They make stupid, obvious, fear-based decisions. What’s more, they make these decisions with little-to-no misdirection. They are bad street illusionists in five thousand dollar suits. There’s no spin hive mind. There hasn’t been for quite some time. They’re operating autonomously, obliviously, and for a simple reason.

You’re really just not going to do anything about it. Ever.

Artists, creators, fans, consumers. Your ignorance is the ultimate shade. And you’ve chosen it for yourself. You’ve pared your life down to the essentials, you’ve accepted that life is better in the Matrix, and you’ve stopped seeking. Information, truth, accountability, even common sense are no longer sought by the masses.

Every fact is on record. The essential fallacy of the media, the corruption of the government, the evil of corporations, none of it sealed or sequestered on microfilm hidden in secret bunkers. Royal Dutch Shell is still murdering Africans like it’s going out of style. They don’t try to hide this, they just don’t put it in commercials between segments of American Idol. Do you think about it every time you pull into a Shell station, or at all? Can you afford to care? And when it comes to guns, drugs, and murder, the United States government is and ever has been the world-wide industry leader. These aren’t the wild ravings of a conspiracy theorist. Again, they’re just the facts on record.

Entertainment and the news media are the same bag, albeit less destructive in an overt pain-and-suffering way. But that’s getting pretty broad, right? We were talking about late night television.

NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, the world’s largest company, with controlling stake held by Comcast, the world’s largest cable company (it’s worth noting that at a certain level, corporations and government become interchangeable). There is nothing in which GE doesn’t have its hand, no medium they don’t have influence over. Whether you’re trip is music, movies, books, broadcasting, or fucking Egyptian cabinet making, the decisions made by high-level executives in this organization directly affect, for the business-minded, your nut and/or your pursuit of that nut, and, for the creative-minded, your pursuit of higher art and/or ideas.

And these are the decisions they’re making. This is the mentality with which they’re shaping these industries.

These are the jokes, folks. These are the fucking jokes.

Self-imposed ignorance and broken gatekeepers, that’s what it boils down to. In the end scene of Point Break of life you can either be Keanu or you can be Patrick Swayze. You can decide the fifty-foot set is totally closed out, or you can grab your board and ride that wave to everlasting glory. You can take an attitude of nihilism and live in a state of perpetual bystander apathy, or you can recognize that the used rubbers holding the keys need to be discarded and, at their core, they don’t have the brains or balls to stop you. You can choose to see their poor choices and fragile egos falling like the tumblers on a giant lock, and if you race across it at just the right time and in just the right sequence you can make it to the other side.

And once you’re there, you have another choice. You can play their game, or you can change it.

Look, at base I just want to write my little stories and get them out to as many people as possible and live my life and maybe be able to buy myself something pretty every once and while. I’m not the guy who is going to affect major change doing that. You might be, though. Whether it’s making policy, making music, making movies, writing books/columns/articles, if you can get past the idea the people in charge know so much more than you do and by proxy have the right to keep you out, you just might be a natural born world-shaker.

And who knows, one day I may want to write something that changes the world. I’d rather deal with you than them.