Joe the Plumber: the great American meltdown

Weblog
17 October 2008

Those of us who have watched the debates between the two contenders for power in America must be marvelling at the great American meltdown. Within months now the so-called ‘big three’ car companies… General Motors, Ford and Chrysler will formally declare bankruptcy… millions of people will lose their jobs; the country itself will enter a period of hard knocks that could make the great depression look like a Sunday school outing, and we are engaged in the spectacle of watching a collection of intellectually inept morons debate issues concerning some mythical Joe Six-pack, Hockey mom, and Joe the plumber and whether these people will be able to pay for obesity care.

Talk about pride before the fall.

No wonder half the eligible voters in the USA don’t bother to go to the polls. Are there actually any intelligent people out there who feel they should vote… for what? More of the same?

It is simply not possible to even start to evaluate the crisis facing the world without acknowledging a simple truth: Gresham’s law: that “bad money drives out good” so obviously applies to social systems. What Nietzsche described as the politics of resentiment … the politics of me... me... me... eventually ends in disaster. It has happened before… To the Egyptians, the Hyksos, the Medes the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans The Brits; and now, in our lifetimes, to America.

The land of the free has just moved in one giant leap for mankind into the era of government control over the money pipelines; while the candidates for power are completely unaware of the shift… There were two issues: the economy and health care, where the candidates actually swapped ideological positions and were each completely unaware of the fact. Was anyone home when the place burned down?

What we know from the debates is that Barack Obama is a plausible idiot and John Mc Cain is hovering on senility… The country that gave us an intellectual half-wit called Bush is about to elect an equally inept successor… It really doesn’t matter who wins nothing will change: the laws of thermodynamics are in play. The Titanic has hit an iceberg, the ship is going down, a dependent world is sinking with it and the candidates are debating who has the nicest deckchair.

Personally I look forward with considerable glee to the collapse of General Motors. I hope fervently that every arsehole worker who ever pitched up to work drunk on a Monday morning and produced the shit that I gullibly bought, gets exactly what is coming to him… For the executives who drew exorbitant rewards for presiding over a metal scrap heap we only have to look at Senator Mc Cain to see that all their ill-gotten wealth will only bring a more comfortable case of Altzheimers.

To the moguls and the half-literate minions of the mass media. When you dumb down to deal with the alleged “Joe the Plumber”, you take yourself down as well. You can only become what you so fervently preach… there is no escape from the slide to mediocrity: once chosen the path leads inevitably to the desired destination.

The Apocalypse so long predicted, awaits us with glee.