Bollettino

LI has made a couple of resolutions and had a couple of revelations due to the return of the Confederacy.

We’ve lived in the Confederacy most of our lives. We were educated among middle and lower middle class suburban Atlantans. We’ve been class conscious all of our political lives, on the side of the working class, etc., etc.

Well, it is time to say goodbye to all of that.

There are times when history does strike a bell. In 1933 in Germany, in 1995 in Serbia, etc., etc. When the working class comes out in their numbers to ward off the Other – Jew, Gay, Croatian – one has to make a choice. My choice is: fuck the working class.

Clearly, there are things that need to be done. One is to support wholeheartedly Bush’s economic mission. That mission can only help the investor class that lives in the Blue states. Those states, by a miscarriage of history, are yoked together with such devastations of the intellect as Oklahoma. Clearly, the thing to do is to dry the money up. Any look at the map of who has what will tell you that the poor states – the North Dakotas, the Nebraskas, the Louisianas – vote consistently against the very programs without which they could barely survive. Northern liberals have consistently felt like the sacrifice was worth it – that to help the working class and poor in New York City survive, they would vote for programs that took money out of New York and put it in Louisiana.

That should definitely stop. The New Deal, based on a compromise with Southern whites, is dead. And when something is dead, as Nietzsche (or was it one of the Ramones?) said, kick it as hard as you can. While we doubt that Blue state politicians will have any clout at all in the next four years, we do think that they should loudly and strongly support the destruction of those programs – the end of Social security, the end of the income tax system, and surely the end of Medicare. Those people who get their opiates from God, waddle to the polling booth to elect the latest homophobic psycho-path, and go to the drug store with their government support ‘script” – no mas. Let them drown in their aches and pains.

As for the Republican attempt to tamp down the benefits of the National Guard, and cut Veterans benefits – this should be promoted to the max. The biggest danger in the world today is the Confederate superpower. Luckily, it has its weak points. A population that is belligerent, but unwilling to sacrifice the least little twinkie, cannot easily encompass an empire.

We’ve been reading the curiously mute stories in the British press (one of our resolves is to read sparingly, if at all, in the American press) about the Satanic bond between Blair and Bush. Labour lost its vampire’s soul a long time ago. We think Jackie Ashley in the Guardian has it right:

“Apart from the fact that they speak English and have two legs apiece, it is hard to think of anything American conservatives have in common with European liberals. Tony Blair pooh-poohs the idea that Britain faces a choice between America and Europe. Now, it will be evident to everyone, there is a very clear choice, and the choice has to be Europe.”

Blair will never make that choice. He chose Bush a long time ago. That his natural constituency still can’t believe he made that choice simply shows that the effects of ideological opiates can be long lasting. We definitely hope they get over it.

Europe, however, has taken the sloth’s course for the past sixty years. Understandably, they have allowed one superpower, the U.S., to spend the majority of the money spent in the world on military matters – and they have watched without reaction as that power has pursued third world economic policies, becoming a sort of elephantine Argentina. This is only going to get worse. It is a most unlikely prospect that American households will experience the type of growth in wealth that would match the growth in their endebtedness over the next four years – in fact, the opposite is the better bet. There are a conjunction of interesting circumstances here, and the hinge factor will be the probability that the cost of oil will soon have to figure in terrorist attacks on oil facilities, given the probable expansion of hostilities in the Middle East to Iran (and, too, given the cycle of the overthrow of governments in the Middle East, surely the American allies there are due for a hit. I’d guess Egypt), and the let it bleed war in Iraq. These things have been looming on the margins. Surely they are eventually going to impact the ability of the American government to borrow. At a certain point, that the American consumer eats up all the junk the world produces has to be adjusted to the fact that to do this, the American consumer borrows all the money it can to eat up the junk. Europe is surely going to have to start looking East, to China, for a countervailing ally, and also as a market.