Downward Spiral

Deep into summer here on the Platinum Coast, long evenings with clear skies and the day’s heat finally abating, diffused sun falling through the eucalyptus trees. Tonight I am thinking about Hunter Thompson who put a pistol to his head six years ago and pulled the trigger. Dr. Thompson wrote – a full three years before Sarah Palin thudded on the national stage and proved his point beyond any reasonable doubt -- that America was locked in a downward spiral of dumbness.

All you need do is switch on the TV and watch the news for three minutes, white noise on every channel about the debt ceiling and the potential default by the world’s leading debtor nation. President Obama stands on one side, his weak spine barely holding him upright, while John Boehner and his Nazi lapdog, Eric Cantor, stand on the other. Nobody mentions that the debt ceiling crisis is wholly contrived and manufactured, a faux crisis if ever there was one, nothing more than blatant opportunism on the part of the GOP to further emasculate government, continue the rollback of basic entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, and score political points with anti-tax ideologues ahead of the 2012 presidential election. The BS is so thick and noxious on both sides that only a policy wonk can begin to understand the deal, but maybe all you need to know is that the debt ceiling was raised at least a half dozen times – without debate -- during the W. Bush junta.

For all their disdain of government and praise for “free markets” as the cure for every human problem, from toe fungus to cancer, I haven’t heard Boehner or Cantor offer to relinquish their government salaries, gold-plated health benefits, or guaranteed pensions as a symbolic gesture of austerity. When public servants in Wisconsin or Ohio or Indiana are demonized as the cause of budget deficits, stripped of their collective bargaining rights or forced to accept unpaid furloughs and pay cuts, Boehner and Cantor have nothing to say. Austerity is fine when it happens to someone else.

Slice it any way you want, hypocrisy is hypocrisy and Washington DC is brimming with it. The poor and the elderly and the unemployed must sacrifice, you see, lift themselves by their own shoestrings and learn to stand on their own while those with the most are exempt from any and all sacrifice.

The tables are rigged and the game is fixed. In America, the wealthy always get out of jail free and always pass GO on their way to the bank.

Downward into the swirling vortex, twisting, turning, spinning through icy air, past common sense, past moderation, past compromise, past empathy for the less fortunate, past sympathy for the unlucky, past forgiveness for the damned, past overflowing jail cells, past cemeteries, past toilets clogged with shit, past troughs filled with piss, past denuded forests, past polluted lakes, past windowless factories, past the truth, past popes and cardinals and bishops, and past corporate chieftains perched on golden thrones.

What does it mean? Everything. Nothing. The sun drops behind the eucalyptus trees. The smell of lighter fluid drifts on the evening breeze. A man and a woman argue in Spanish. Far off a Southern Pacific freighter rumbles through town.