2008 Happy Weekend, Everyone! (With Another Message of Impeding Doom.)
posted by July 25 at 14:56 PM
onFrom me, and now Matt Taibbi:
These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.
See you at the Block Party.
Comments
Are you trying to tell me that after more than a year of round-the-clock, high-intensity, cross-country travel in order to report on a the most expensive ever primary season with the highest ever voter turn out and tireless invective-spewing morons trying to tell us whose presidency will rain fire on our heads the fastest and fieriest, this likely underpaid beat writer is feeling a wittle despondent about the state of American politics?
Fascinating.
More along people...nothing to see here. Please get back in your SUV's and head to Costco...
Matt Taibbi is a cynical little fucker enthralled by his own smug bullshit. His story is always, "I am Matt Taibbi, and I'm better than everyone!" Fuck him.
Luckily, I'm still able to ditch America and go live in Canada should the need arise - and/or we actually have to pay the piper for all the hundreds of trillions we borrowed for these past eight years of hell.
Every four years, we're fed the same stuff by partisans, if not the candidates - if the other guys wins, the world is doomed. This is the most important election since who-knows-when.
So one of two things is happening: (1) we magically manage to elect the correct non-disaster candidate every four years or (2) we keep getting fed overheated, hyperbolic bullshit by people like Matt Taibbi.
I vote (2)
Killface says:
Welcome to you're "Doom!"
@5: You don't feel the situation we're in is appreciably worse than in other recent election years?
The system isn't going to change for you so you should learn to adapt to it. Embrace the system and survive or fight it and be destroyed. It's the same story any student of history has seen repeated many times.
As impassioned and forceful as your language is, it isn't even in the ball park of where it needs to be to enact any real change. You're just whining about observations you've made. You have no plan of action, no leadership with teeth, and therefore, you are irrelevant.
Join the yuppy trash that infests Northern Virginia and get your slice of the pie. Manufacturing and other low-skilled trades are all but dead. If you want to survive in neo-imperial America you need to be a member of the technocracy or bureaucracy that greases its wheels.
Economic forces destroyed the agricultural base in America, forcing the population to congregate in its metropolitan centers and toil away in the factories. In the past few decades the nuclear family has been destroyed, giving rise to the isolated, narcissistic, hedonistic American life style prevalent on the coasts. Now, we are seeing another cultural and societal shift brought upon by economic (and technological, thanks to the internet and related technology) forces.
Adapt or die. From the perspective of the people that own you, a cold, methodical perspective, there is no reason for you to have disposable income. What do you do with it? Waste it on things you can't afford and dig yourself into a lifetime of debt based indentured servitude. Better for the owner class to have your money and do something useful with it than for it to sit in a jar buried under your house.
That is how they see you, mindless, consuming, animalistic, undisciplined. That is why you are micromanaged at work, that is why you only have 10 days of vacation per year, that is why you are forced to adapt to the 9-to-5 work day via behavioral manipulation in the schools from the time you are 5 years old.
Embrace your slavery or be trampled and irrelevant, you have no other choice.
I will impede all dooms.
Wait, @8: Which one is the blue pill and which one is the red pill?
Just take both, Paul.
Eat two whole pills? That's too much work! Do they make purple?
Impeding doom would be a good thing, wouldn't it?
RonK,
Typo masquerading as wit, or wit masquerading as a typo? I'll never tell.
Matt Taibbi is HOT!
JG -- Either way, "The Impedance of Doom" suggests itself as a pulp nerd-fi title ... details left to the aspiring writer.
** second of a trilogy, between The Reluctance of Chaos and The Coils of Telos
p.s. - in re the Coils of Telos, this remarkable research brief provides invaluable background (with schematics!), as well as the intriguing observation
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