It's the end of the world, and I feel fine

Shortly after moving here I remember watching a Major Teevee Movie Event called Amerika, about the Soviet occupation of the former America following some offcamera significant event or other. The Newspaper o Record made sure all us mouthbreathing lipmoving readers knew which night the all-over ruined architecture of Our Former Nation's Former Capital, and by extension our own former miserable yet curiously unimportant lives n livelihoods, would be showcased; as I recall it was showcased through the windshield of a pretend Soviet helicopter orbiting the Capitol dome, or matte painting or miniature or whatnot, which had a handsomely art-directed hole allegedly blown out by a bazooka-totin' partisanist something or other. Somewhat later I picked up a copy of Newsweek with a picture of an exploding White House on the cover. The headline was "Boom!"; one wonders how many and how long the grownups met in their editorial cabal to settle on that one. The article was a feature on a Major Malloplex Movie Event called Independence Day which also featured exploding Empire State and Capitol Records Building miniatures rendered lovingly in equal opportunity miniature and matte destruction, albeit neither the beauty cover shot for Newsweek nor lovingly recreated in IMAX for, um, the Smithsonian. Not that long ago Our Nation's Malloplexes featured global warming glaciers appearing out of story nowhere to engulf New York New York, the town so nice they named it twice --and, given prevailing weather patterns presumably my home, place of employment and person were both securely at the bottom of said glacier. In the last month we 've had a digitally kudzufied Brooklyn Bridge and a digital flying Statue of Liberty head digitally degraded to look all YouTubian n such, this last coupled with the trailer for Star Trek XI which is promising to return to the utopian Roddenberry future imagined in The Original Series -- one can clearly hear John F. Kennedy urging us on to the moon, Smilin' Al Shepard wishing John Glenn Godspeen, and Neil Armstrong announcing that the Eagle has landed before Leonard Nimoy whispers "Space ... the final frontier" all actorly n such while protoBorg weld up a digital Enterprise not in SpaceDock, cue the rough beast fanboys slouching. Thus setting up a big ol' steaming heaping serving of Consonant Dissonance for those malloplexians who failed to leave their brains in their little pink houses, value added with their admission.

I'm thinking that there's a thesis project for someone willing to play Find the Link among these examples of apocalypse, the ends of terms of certain sitting Presidents, the then-current general condition of the economy, and the agreed-upon accuracy of American popular art's reflection of the Zeitgeist. I'm wondering about this while trying to keep my head down and my powder dry during an increasingly dreary primary season which seems mostly an exercise for Certain People to scold us peons for not hurrying up, getting with the Program, and confirming the Fixes that have been In for the past two years, while assorted groups of taxpayers and voters remember certain remarks consigning their persons to Flyover America and, well payback certainly is a painful rectal itch, ain't it.

Monetarily, times are tough. I'm not liking it. I'm not seeing much to be optimistic about. It feels like 1991 again, kinda, but I don't recall civilization as we know it ending at that time, unless one counts the election results as proof. I'm considering that the American empire probably has come and gone siccing transit on Gloria Mundi her own bad self; the euro isn't all that happy a substitute especially once those Brits, crafty Deutschers and Franish persons decide to hell with this and go back to their own homegrown and much prettier currencies, and that if we were really foresighted parents we'd be making sure the guyses were fluent in Chinese, that is if we were cleverly and subliminally setting them up for worldly success for the rest of their lives. And I'm also considering that some of us are trying to talk the rest of us into a recession, probably as an election strategy. And I am really not liking that, not one little bit.

Now I am not an economist, don't play one on teevee. and am having personally one devil of a time keeping my personal head above the immediate and certainly rough financial waters. And I normally have no truck for conspiracy theories, because conspiracies are work and people don't like to put that much effort into work. But I also know a thing or two about th tools o th authorial trade, and the artful deployment of smoke and mirrors, and I'm hearing way too much hollering and not enough prooftesting comprising the Recessionalypse Now drum solo, which itself is sounding more and more akin to the young lepetomane Buddy Rich demonstrating how to whack a few strategically placed noisemakers louder and faster n any hombre for a hunnert miles around and trying to force us to gape like jeeters at how goshdarn frantic and unknowable it all seems. And I see the nozzle of the smoke machine in the wings and the fingerprints on the mirrors, and I wonder what those jaspers are doing behind that curtain, anyway.

My g-g-g-generation has been merrily demonstrating simultaneous ineptness and shamelessness for way too many decades now, running increasingly on the diminishing returns of what's left of our parents' good will. I begin to understand why the Xers hope we die before they get old. And I suppose the sorry lot o midgets running for Supreme Leader of th Free World, every one of them ready for their closeup, is fully expecting to be digitally enhanced by hired mythmakers (no writers need apply) into something more Presidential in about three weeks or so Eastern Standard Time, at which point the election will be declared over and We the so-called People can return to Flyover America, press our noses against the explosionproof smoked glass dome over the Beltway and let our betters get on with the business of running the country into the ground. I think that's why we get served tasty supersize apocalpyse burgers with a side o recession fries at these turning points. It keeps us from doing something off-script like looking too closely at the Best Candidates the System Can Spit Up, proclaiming them spinach, and finding and electing a real leader

We've been known to confound these wisenheimers before, and I suspect that if we got our hands on primary sources we wouldn't find a lot of newsprint remarking on how Presidential those Lincoln or Rosenfelt fellows seemed. I do recall that we elected more than a couple of Supreme Potentates on the basis of their remarkable resemblance to Roman statuary already enshrined in the Halls o Congress, I'm looking at you, Messrs. Harding and Hoover. That's the problem with being from Missouri: when somebody comes along heralding the imminent arrival of th Four Horsemen of th Apocalypse who are turning the corner and heading down my block, well ... show me.