Reply #45: "....but why not be honest about the reasons for it?"

[DeSwiss]

- Meegbear! Are you effing kidding!?!?!? We can't handle that much TRUTH!

So. That. Will. Never. Happen.

K&R

Let somebody else fix it while I grab a salad

Sad lot that we are as a species, not everyone is a moral pig. Millions of individuals, some governments even, are unnerved by what is happening. In America the best among us are outraged, and protest that officialdom has failed us. Unfortunately, we are officialdom, indirectly as that may be. Because we are mankind and mankind is all inclusive, organically and forever --­ forever having turned out to be rather shorter than we thought. If officialdom has failed us, it is because we have failed ourselves, and in many respects, our official governments provide us with a collective excuse not to act personally.

Mainly though, aware Americans are watching and waiting for someone else to make an important move. Guts are nonexistent in Americans these days, programmed out of us during the posh captivity of the "cheap oil fiesta" that drove our grotesque and brief civilization. Still, if ever there were a time to show some guts, it's now. Not by protesting ­ -- which has become a security state supervised liberal pussy sport -- but by giving up the material life, the consumer life. Damned near all of it. Including all those leftie and alternative books from Amazon -- sitting on our asses reading and drinking green tea just because we can afford to is just another type of inaction and consumerism. It's the only real act of protest possible by the prisoners of our consumption driven monolith. True, you'll be just one iPodless and carless little guy throwing a single stone at the United States of Jabba the Hutt.

But assuming you're still capable of any kind of life after the stellazine mind conditioning we've all been administered for past 40 years, I've got folding cash that says you will own your life in a way that seemed previously impossible. Hanging onto or chasing the bling is over with anyway, as dead as the economy. The Olive Garden and Circuit City are still open, true, but only because the hair and nails still grow on Jabba's corpse. Would somebody please quit pretending he's alive and yank the feeding tube?

Scoffers abound, those lurching, undead cud chewers whose best lick is: "Aw, if things were really that bad somebody would be doing something about it." Asked who that somebody might be, they usually come up with "the government." Or science or the stupidest of all, the Free Market Solution. In other words, they haven't the slightest fucking notion other than that there is some great governmental or commercial force that governs their destiny ­ -- one so vast that, like god, they don't have to understand it, just swear by it and trust it, even if they don't know exactly what the hell it is. What it is of course is good old fashioned pillage. But Even Alaric the Goth limited pillage to three days ­ with an extra day of rape thrown in if it had been a particularly good siege.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/02/nine-billion-li.html">~Joe Bageant, Nine Billion Little Feet