Wheee!

How exciting! The whole world is beginning to veer out of control. Things are in an incredible mess almost everywhere. At the moment President Obama seems to be the only voice of sanity anywhere. Of course he seems to have little support from a Congress that seems to thrive on inactivity and negativity. Europe is having trouble getting its act together, with Greece being the major but hardly the only problem for the European Union. And oh boy! Here at home things are going just swimmingly with thousands marching in the streets and more joining them every day. Excitement like we haven’t seen since the 60’s. In Oakland the first general strike since the 1940’s has been at least a limited success and there are reasons to believe more such strikes will follow. Wall Street is flabbergasted, not knowing what to make of it all, and insisting they are really just good criminals at heart doing their duty as they should. Our young people who were conned into borrowing money for their education (that should have been relatively free) are now thousands of dollars in debt and unable to pay it off because there are no jobs. Wall Street wants to know what they want. Hundreds of thousands have lost their homes, many because of illegal foreclosures, Wall Street wants to know what they want. Millions are without health care, Wall Street wants to know what their beef is, and the beat goes on. Wall Street doesn’t see anything wrong with the fact that the upper 1% have seen their fortunes increase by 275% in recent years while the middle class has either stayed where they were or declined in income. Wall Street keeps asking, innocently no doubt, what do they want? There is nothing strange about this, if you are an utter and complete greedy nincompoop with neither ethics nor morals. Hey, it’s the American way.

On the political front the Republican comedy hour continues. Their front runner for the nomination, Herman Cain, has now indicated that his claimed study of world affairs failed to inform him that China has had nuclear weapons since at least the 1960’s. Wow, just what we need, an astute student of Foreign Affairs. I guess it won’t matter much as his ship is about to sink on the shoals of sexual misconduct, a seemingly common affliction among Republicans (and sometimes others). The Great White Hope, Perry, who was to overtake the widely unlikable Romney is similarly in trouble for what some believe was a drunken speech (but which he believes was a great success). Michele Bachmann’s apparent insanity has finally been too much even for the right wingers and she is now I am certain out of the picture. Ron Paul and Santorum were never in the picture, and amazingly Newt Gingrich seems to be gaining a bit of ground. Do Republicans really hate Romney enough that Gingrich could actually end up on top? Nothing would surprise me at this moment in our collective insanity. Stay tuned, the end of the world has not occurred yet but it is surely on its way.

Now there is more talk about Israel launching an attack on Iran. This is apparently being held in abeyance as there are those in the Israeli administration that still think they can convince the U.S. to do it for them. The idea of attacking Iran is so insane we cannot dismiss it as a possibility. After all, we did attack Iraq, we’re staying in Afghanistan, sending troops into Africa, provoking Pakistan and others, it seems there is no insanity too great to inhibit our grandiose war machine, currently being defeated by a rag-tag bunch of Afghans with little more than rifles. When UNESCO admitted the Palestinians the Israelis immediately authorized more illegal building in the West Bank, what’s wrong with that? I guess our response is something on the order of “Bad Israel” you maybe shouldn’t have done that (but there is nothing we can do about it as you are the supreme power when it comes to anything you wish to do). Poor Israel, spreading its cancer all over the West Bank, for which there is no effective cure (nor, apparently, anyone interested in finding one).

There is nothing wrong, I guess, when our citizens are crying out for jobs, for Congress to spend time passing a completely meaningless bill confirming that “In God We Trust” is, indeed, our national motto, as it has been for years. Nor, I suppose, is it wrong to be spending time on anti-abortion legislation when the need is for jobs, or passing bills to allow guns in churches and bars, or even better, taking food stamps away from hungry children to provide more tax breaks for corporations. All of this in what is now about the whackiest world ever, just seems to be business as usual. Many do not find it at all strange that lots of young people get their best news from comedy central. This is appropriate as human society has now become little more than a comedy of errors. Where will it all lead, what will become of us, where might we be going, what on earth are we thinking, aaagh, what is the ultimate real? Is it all just a bad joke being played on us by the Great Mystery?

Keep at it Obama, maybe you can get bipartisan support for a tenth of one percent increase in taxes for those making more than half a billion a year. Naw, that would be completely unreasonable and would no doubt cost jobs.

One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.

D. H. Lawrence