Ran Prieur and Ecclesiastes

[juno jones]

December 14. Just over the last few weeks, it seems like America has turned a corner... a vertical corner. Our daily actions are the same, but on the level of mind, or spirit, we've dropped off a cliff. You can see it on the left, where the attitude toward Obama has flipped from excitement to disgust. You can see it on the right, where only a few elderly people still look like they're making arguments, and everyone else looks like they're having a seizure. And you can see it in the conspiracy crowd, who are telling increasingly ridiculous stories that this is all part of a plan, because the alternative is too troubling.

It is said that Obama is wearing a mask, being a deceiver, as if he carefully pretended to be a progressive activist for a quarter of a century because a time traveler from the future told him that would get him elected president in 2008 so he could pursue his secret right wing globalist agenda. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- but it's hard to imagine two presidents more different than Obama and Bush. The fact that the country is moving the same direction under each of them should tell us something else: the president is not the boss. Obama has never worn a mask -- Obama is the mask, and not a very good one. It has never been more obvious that America is an ossified dying empire with a suicidal inertia that no leader or movement can stop. If Sarah Palin, Dennis Kucinich, or Carrot Top were president, the system that the president pretends to run would still be bailing out banks and insurance companies, escalating wars, hiding atrocities, and generally chugging along to its ruin.

http://ranprieur.com/archives/028.html#fallethsuddenly

I'm not always a fan of this guy's blog, but today his fatalism tastes right. And to give us the bittersweet comforts of Ecclesiastes, fitting.

This vanity too shall pass.