Yesterday I decided to write something, I can't imagine doing this
professionally, with just this tiny piece I feel too emotionally
exhausted to defend it's veracity or really comment on any of it
but I thought someone here might find it interesting.
It's mirrored on my little static server
http://thewebmustdie.com/
CC-BY-SA with love from Paris
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It's getting colder out, I still have the window cracked and true to my Yankee upbringing I refuse
to turn on the heat. New England Winter sets in slowly, every day is just a little bit colder than
the day before. As long as the stove isn't burning it's still Fall, but Fall turns into Late Fall
and then into Late Late Fall and we tell ourselves that the inch of snow we woke up to see will
surely melt by tomorrow. Surrender comes with the strike of a match. Once the stove is burning
there's no going back but the feeling of defeat and the long Winter ahead is buffered by the warmth
radiating off the stove. It is this time of year that in hardware stores and coffee shops across
New England, old timers say to one another "have you started your stove yet?".
It is also this time of year that zombie Santa Clause rises from his grave. With the eyes of a
crackmonster who hasn't seen sleep since Thanksgiving, he wanders the lonely Televisions and
Department stores desperately imploring someone to buy something. Buy something, you owe it to
your family, give them the gifts of greed and want, it will wash away the year's sins. Put it on
your Master Card, next year will be better.
The past few weeks have left me feeling nostalgic for an America that maybe never was and will
certainly never be again. Before the obsessive masturbation of the fear instinct, before the police
turned into an occupying force, back when the junkie on the corner was a gainfully employed used car
salesman.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Loud music, good whiskey and fast automobiles.
The debunking of this mythical place I called home would not have troubled me so were it not
the debunking of everything it stood for. Toward the end, Conspiracy Theory provided a last glimmer
of hope for the Ideals on which The Republic stood. The vain hope that some overlooked detail
about The Grassy Knoll or the Plane At The Pentagon would negate the cold reality that given the
right to vote, the average person will elect and re-elect Nixons and Bushes until a nation is
plundered, discredited and defunct. Every Jimmy Carter, every Barack Obama, everyone who
has ever tried to change things merely swam against the tide. A tide of ghoulish monsters who
will keep on electing their ghoulish monster presidents until the whole freak show comes grinding
to a halt.
64 years ago, times were better. After World War 2, Europe was rebuilding and in the eyes of
Western Europeans, the US had saved the world. Gold flowed into Fort Knox and investment into
Wall Street, for the first time in American history, there was a middle class and they bought
houses and cars and Televisions. For the first time they could proudly watch the cowboys win the
west every Sunday night. This would be the blessing of the 20th century. The curse, that every
year would be a little bit leaner and a little bit more wretched than the last.
Thinking back of the terrible atrocities committed in the later half of the 20th century, one
can't help but imagine a group of old men sitting around a table facing The Devil in a balance
sheet. The American Way of Life was never particularly sustainable, when Europe got back on it's
feet and took back it's gold and investments, I imagine the nervous meetings. The looming economic
catastrophe from an overextended financial system and a population who'd tasted the good life and
wanted more. Faced with a hole darker and deeper than the Great Depression, fearful men made a
cheap decision. With a few financial hat tricks backed up by things too horrifying to mention,
the system would not implode, instead it would rot away bit by bit.
I do not wish to think of the United States as it is today. I prefer to remember it through film,
to experience the open road and the enormous Red Convertible sailing down the interstate at 100
miles an hour with the radio blaring. It may not be real but it is the America I wish to remember.
There is also another America, inside of your pocket and on my desk, a series of tubes as it were.
A place which could never have existed without wild and unruly spending that only an Empire can
muster. As the Pyramids are to Egypt, and The Wall is to China, The Internet can only be the Great
Wonder of America. And it could be no more fitting that America's great wonder would be, an open
road, a road spanning every continent and crossing every ocean. A road complete with the swindlers
and the highwaymen but a road none the less. And somewhere down the road, somewhere, anything is
possible. Just Press Search.
-----EOT-----