Joe Bageant: Round Midnight

http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant02242010.html

Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn. While my good Mexican neighbors along Zaragoza Street sleep.

Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.

I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the U.S., but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the US debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America's perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation -- I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.


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http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant02242010.html

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Ol' Joe keeps coming up with insightful analysis. He says he's tired of thinking about it. So am I.

And yet, here we all are.

Like being on a Party Train headed over a burned out, collapsed trestle, but everyone is so busy partying and watching the wall-sized Plasma TV that they just laugh and sahke their heads at a though the train is about to head into the gorge ahead.

CAN the one last infusion of Funny Money and natural inertia keep the Economic Shell Game going for much longer? Maybe so, for a little while longer 20 years tops.

20 years seems absurdly optimistic but never underestimate inertia...

listen. conning people is EASY. That's why, in jail, the confidence man is worse off then child molestor- after all, who can you trust? Stealing candy from baby is EASY, cuz baby is tiny lil silly fun loving thing who thinks all's a game! The people are being defrauded, and the resources used to both condition them to expect it, and to resent anything preventing it, are VAST, probably as vast as anything in human history. The bible calls it 'evil' but the reactionaries have stolen the term to use on their victims, so be careful. The reactionary right is the purest 'evil' on earth, in terms of untrustworthiness, always have been, and it can't hide.Rush Limbo can claim he's 'number 1 in the sun' and ken starr can get Deans job at Baylor University and Cheney can get a 10 minute standing ovation from crowd at Grummonds theatre- but the truth still is enough to hang the bastards so let's never give up! We gottem by the balls, believe me...cuz they're liars. And that's all we need to point out.
Item: notice they ALWAYS claim the media is liberal, when it's obviously not. That's for a reason

exception. He's been squinting hard at the fuzzy outline of our American experiment and it seems he's gotten it in focus. Very unsettling.

Thanks for posting this, tom_paine.

Now, let me go back to my petty business endeavors so I can keep paying the mortgage and get my boat running again.

Recced with abandon.