THINGS AREN'T AS BAD AS YOU THINK -- THEY'RE WORSE

If you're one of those intelligent people out there who believes that our country, the United States of America, is dangling precariously head-first above the business end of an overflowing porto-john frequented by a gang of flatulent curry-eaters with intestinal disorders, guess what -- things aren't really as awful as you might imagine. Actually, they're much worse.

Now, you may have figured out by now that I'm not especially burdened by the inane stupidities of unbridled optimism or the dangerous delusions of positive thought -- that would seem rather obvious; must have something to do with the way my brain-pan is wired together, I suppose. Anyway, consequently I'm not likely to have too many nice things to say about pretty much anything, under just about any conceivable circumstance. Even sober, my predisposition to (seemingly) despise all things is as blatantly apparent as a glowing, pus-filled sore on the forehead of your average street-drunk lunatic (or, now that I think about it, the street-drunk lunatic as a whole). In any case, wherever this hyper-critical predilection comes from, it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm merely indulging in normal self-conscious hyperbolic exaggeration and overblown melodramatic horseshit with these inchoate and grammatically questionable ravings of doom and destruction. My thoroughly jaundiced view of people and institutions -- this self-contained negative skew towards most things -- doesn't change the plain, essential fact that we are in rather deep trouble, here in the diseased bowels of Bushworld. In fact, our puny imaginations, coupled as they are to our practically non-existent attention spans and trivially distracted psyches, can't even begin to truly get a grip on the real nature of the corporate-inspired catastrophe breathing down our necks.

This past week, Air America's Mike Malloy turned me on to a new 9-11 film, called Loose Change. Apparently, Malloy succeeded in pointing a veritable crap-load of people toward this little movie, if the frustrating inability to access their website for several days is any indication (as an aside, I did finally manage to download a copy of Loose Change, in Windows Media format, through www.question911.com). The significance of this digression is that if you weren't convinced before that the real centers of power in this country -- the military-corporate nexus, the PNAC crowd, the petroleum Nazis, among others -- are playing us like the idiotic, credulous, empty-headed fish that we are, then you certainly will be in the aftermath of this film. The fool's gambit we're all pretending doesn't exist; the misguided faith we assign to organizations and institutions that are already hopelessly compromised; the fatal misdirection of energy and vitality, on the part of otherwise well-meaning individuals and groups, chasing red herrings and other meaningless phantasms ... All of these harsh, unpalatable realities are brought out into high relief by the revelations in Loose Change. We are being completely, utterly, totally, and terminally bamboozled by a cultural/economic/political conspiracy without parallel in all of human history. As I said, it's far worse than our pathetic intellects can even imagine.

Well, at least we still have beer -- the one last thing in existence we can really count on.