Hard Times

My mind receives the data. A pattern is recognized, through the tubes electric signals fired. "I've heard this one before, it's, uh,"--

Not important.

They say that a recession is either on it's way, or that we're already in one. A recession is defined as the process by which a market adjusts itself to take into account the fact that much of what was reported as earnings doesn't actually exist.

It's not that we're making less than we were before the recession, it's not that less work is being done, it's that the rest of the world no longer believes the values we assign to ourselves on paper, or to our paper.

it's dangerous to not tie the worth of your currency to anything real, to give most of it away for cheap plastics and a war or two. The privatization of all aspects of American life are beginning to mean what privatization traditionally means in the third world, foreign ownership of national infrastructure and shrinking access to society for the lower classes.

The Chinese and the Arabs aren't even interested in profitability at this point. Owning America is just a burden assigned to them by virtue of all of the increasingly useless dollars we've stuffed them with for the past thirty years. They inherited a country without a functioning infrastructure or clear role to play in the world economy, now that simply being consumer #1 is no longer a viable economic model. The previous owners were more than happy to give it to them, convinced as they were that nothing good could ever come of the place anyway.

Imperialism required a historical narrative in which this country had achieved perfection, and was therefore left with nothing to do but spread said perfection like a cool margarine all over the globe. That historical narrative rings true to many a fucker, and it's for that reason the language of black dissent as expressed by Jeremiah Wright might seem threatening or hostile. It is a narrative that we must do everything in our power to destroy as it is the main obstacle to progress.

It allows the status quo to paint reformers as trying to subvert something worth saving and emulating. The expression of grievances and the articulation of wrongs is the first step in their correction. It should not require overcoming personal pride, getting people to express disappointment in America as it exists vs America as they understand it to promise.

2001, 2002, 2003, 2004. Liberals, democrats, were right about things because their solutions would be better in the context of the war on terror. Smug, don't they know killing one only makes more terrorists, we are the ones who talk, etc.

We lost because we bought into their toxic bullshit about America being totally perfect and only able to feel external harms placed upon her by our dark skinned adversaries.

Culture and history are things dissected ten years after the fact by B-list celebrities and their punchlines on VH1...

Not to be made, certainly not a conduit for social justice and progress, culture and history are passively observed on the TV.

The disengaged, those whose escalating opportunisms have left us here, all personally blameless. But collectively we are not worth the biological mass we have been given. At least the nazis ended with fourteen year olds fighting the red army with rifles in the destroyed capitol. In our opium dens of electronics and diminished imagination, we laugh at the concept of prisoner rape like we're in any way detached from responsibility. We're the fucking champs.

I believe you, Mr Obama. I believe you will do everything a President can do to activate a culture of civic engagement and responsibility. I just don't know that even the highest office in this country has the power or authority to undue the toxicity of our arrogant laziness.

I believe also that you will get the shit thrown your way, that the Barnum and Bailey economy is pulling one last elaborate deception to keep this zombie nominally alive until Bush leaves, but at that point the men in the ties will flip the switch, and they will say Carter. The reporting of the constant death in Iraq will once again take precedent over entertainment news and your policies will be blamed. Forty years of regress since 1968 have left us here, but 9 out of ten still think history only makes things better.

Even the presence of saints isn't enough to avert a Dark Age. The language of integration and progress and hope is the new Latin, and the monks are retreating into the monasteries.

But it's not a country for people like me. I'm glad I'm not a Kennedy.