"WE ARE FUCKED!!" -- ALWAYS HAVE BEEN

Web-meandering in recent days brought me to a blog post that ended, in about as emphatically opaque a manner as possible, like this:

“We are FUCKED!!”

Now, it’d be tough to argue with such a statement, as we do seem to be teetering precariously over the Neo-Con abyss, blandly awaiting the last good shove that finally sends us over the edge. By any objective method of measurement -- the existential “fuckedometer” that some people carry around in their heads, perhaps -- we are, certainly, stuck in the dark hole of extremity, rapidly approaching a multi-forked constitutional crossroad where every choice of direction is fraught with unspecified dangers, perils, and pitfalls. Fucked, indeed.

I’ve spent the last couple of days chewing on this expression of despair (among others), this bald declaration of anger and frustration at our sheer inability to affect the fundamental course of things. While it’s impossible to gainsay, at least in any intellectually honest way, it nevertheless starts to stick in my mental craw the more I give brain space to it.

Yeah -- we’re fucked alright. But then, when were we ever not fucked? When was there ever a human being who was ever spared the extreme discomfort of getting stared down by the harsh exigencies of reality? Who’s never, sooner or later, had to come to terms with the absurd fictions of permanence, security, and immortality? Name one individual who’s managed to avoid being terminally flashed by the drool-dripping, scythe-wielding, pervert-in-a-raincoat otherwise known as the Grim Reaper? When were we ever not destined for dissolution in the boneyard or ash heap?

In this vein, substitute nations and/or societies for individual human beings, and it’s rather obvious where this is going.

Believe you me, it isn’t as if I’ve suddenly broken-out in a rash of equanimity as far as the dangerously amorphous condition of “representative democracy” is concerned. Hardly. In fact, I blither and dither and howl and rage, kick shit around and break things in half, and become nearly immobilized with stationary panic as much as ever. More than ever, probably. But now, after much time spent allowing the perfectly flat, nuance-free declamation We are FUCKED!! to re-arrange the cheap plastic cognitive furniture on my psychic patio, I’m compelled to tack on an addendum, a qualifier, of my own, which I’ve basically already mentioned: ...and we always HAVE been!

That’s the hard crux of the matter. We’ve always lived an agenda that wasn’t our own, we simpleton Americans. Silly people! Of course most Americans are lazy, intellectually hollow chumps, easily manipulated by misinformation, disinformation, and outright falsehoods -- we’ve always been so. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, Bush and Cheney and the rest of the hard-core Neo-Con Sturmtruppen haven’t really concocted anything of particular originality in their warped and polluted vision of a corporatized America; their only true innovation has been to drop the age-old and outmoded pretense that there’s any such thing as a “democratic republic” on the continent of North America -- and, naturally, they possess the ambition and ruthlessness to re-model, whatever it is, over in their own sick image. They bring nothing new to the table, the table that’s weighted down with the overflowing minced-meat pie that used to known as the body politic. They’re just more than willing to start carving it up, is all.

So, yes: We are FUCKED!! Always have been.