It was a gray and wavy day when the U.S. economy finally fell apart–like cellophane placed unskilled over a pencil eraser.  It was October 3rd, 2012–almost four years from the day that the Great Economic Credit Reform of 2008 was passed.

Columbus, Ohio has always been known for its bars and restaurants and today was no exception despite the reality that there were very few functional public establishments left after the credit dried up.  Many businesses and institutions floated their immediate future on credit–their payrolls, their current stock, their long term viability–which meant that when the easy credit dried up so did their long term prospects, their option to own their current month’s payroll, and the stock on their floors.

When people stopped buying they also stopped building.  The construction industry, from the timbers in the forests to the cranes on the 87th floor–was all predicated on the illusion of an ever-growing future fueled by inexhaustible resources.  This was the 13th most ignorant fallacy of reasoning that American citizens had ever deluded themselves over.

An inebriated man shuffles with the scuffle of worn up and worn out tennis shoes that he lifted from the empty racks of a Kohls store that had been abandoned for three years.  The shoes didn’t match but they were the same size.  The man became the country and had been looking to remove its burden from his shoulders with every drop of whiskey he could beg borrow or steal.

After walking nearly three hours in the brisk windy streets of Columbus, the man finds the bar in which he will take his next drink.  Columbus still retained a bit of its former beauty as it lay nestled and forgotten on the banks of the Olentangy river.  George Washington’s best friend surveyed this land and found it agreeable and planted a flag and started a war with those who lived around here before them.

The drunk saunters into the bar and sits on the floor next to a man wearing a snipped off tie and a fairly clean but wrinkled dress shirt.   The drunk takes a shot of whiskey from the beast of a bar man with his handle bar mustache and balding head.  Whiskey is the only drink anyone serves any more because it tastes like the failure now the foundation of everyone’s lives. And everyone drinks for free as long as it lasts.

They had seen it all being lived around them and they worked for their mortgage and their kids educations and their two vehicles and the gas that went in them. They bought firearms and took classes for the permits and they carried them around to defend themselves or any other good person from being attacked in public. Many of them had to fire their weapons in this self-chosen service to their community and a few of them killed another person as a result.  They just woke up one day, stepped out the door to do their shit and ended up ending another person’s life.

Many of the towns and villages across the country became self-enclosed and isolated as that was initially the place that the multitude of hopeless and helpless gathered to seek strength in numbers.  The problem was that human beings had become so isolated in their worship at the alter of the Cult of Individuality that they had forgotten what it meant to work in a close-knit community.  There was much violence and murder in the early days of the collapse, back in ‘10 when they were saying words on the 24-hour news channels like blip on the radar, small setback or the always famous potholes in the road to recovery.

The drunk man who was now the country looked at the drinking man with the clipped tie, gestured a toast and both drank to pissing into the void.  The drunk asked the man what was with the tie.  The man told him that he was one of the last financiers left trying to save the global exchange market and that when it had finally died and the body had grown cold, he grabbed the scissors on his desk and clipped his tie.  He said it felt like the right thing to do.

The man gestures to the bar tender for another shot and doesn’t look at the drunk but talks to him all the same.  He says that we live in a world of scarce resources and these scarce resources, based on their price and the other party’s willingness to pay that price, are supposed to be allocated to the most efficient uses.  That’s what market pricing does–it puts a value on our limited resources and makes sure they get to the most effective places.  It’s the beauty of the free market when it’s unhindered by political regulation.

He pauses and reflects a moment and asks if the drunk ever read that book Atlas Shrugged.  The drunk says no and the man goes on.  He said that the people leading us were pretty much the scum of the earth.  He said that our country just went financially bankrupt, that we didn’t even make it 250 years without suffering an economic collapse of the collective value of our labor.

But then again, he says, leadership all over the world, in business, politics, and even art has been morally bankrupt his entire life.   He says that our politicians took our currency (which wasn’t tied to physical assets like gold that can be weighed and measured), and they created a bunch of fake value in the treasury which had no merit, no backing, and inspired no faith in other countries around the world.  He said that our currency used to be considered as the world standard of exchange in value and stability and now look at it.

The clipped tie man takes his drink and says the thing he was created to say, possibly to this drunk and possibly in this place.  He says a thing so powerful and true that it could have saved the world if the believers were wise enough to listen to it when they had the chance to do something about it.

The man drank the whiskey, gritted his teeth and kept his eyes closed as he talked.  He said the standard of our currency is the standard of our character.

The wealth in the vaults of a country’s treasury is supposed to equal a portion of the collective value of its citizens’ labors, dreams and ambitions.  Our government sold off on our dreams in 2008 and they didn’t even think twice about it.  He says, I wonder what the founding fathers would have thought of that. He says that he told a lot of bad lies in good places in his life and wondered what the founding fathers would have thought of him.

The beast of a bar man walked up with two amber colored bottles.  He offered them to the drunk man who was his country and the snipped tie man who was nothing anymore.  The drunk reached out and took the bottles and handed one to the man with the slouched head who still sat next to him.  The bartender said that those were the last two he had, hell probably the last two in the city or all of existence.  He kept them cold in a bag he placed in a secret spot of the Olentangy and that these were the last two cold ones left and the men looked like they would put the best use use to them.

The drunk looked at the bottle and smiled.  He said hey do you remember these?  The labels on the little mountains turn white when the beer gets warm.  The man looked at his bottle and the drunk saw the tremor of a smile threaten the gloom of the man’s mood.

The drunk put his arm around the empty man’s shoulder, clinked his bottle to his and said here’s to pissing into the void.  The man straightened up a bit, looked at the drunk, raised the last cold beer he would ever drink that had the little label that turned from blue to white and he said we’ll do it better next time.

The sun slipped away and the banks of the Olentangy settled into the darkness one more time with the people who loved living in the drunken peace of its presence.

photo credit: DerrickT

a

The Last Two Cold Beers on Earth: Responding to the Great Credit Repair Bill of 2008

My grandfather taught me two great things:

1. A real man grows a beard out every year in the Fall/Winter”
2. Never argue with an idiot because they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

You can’t argue with a fool who believes the literal “End of the World” which will look ridiculously like the whole Fire Breathing People Eating Jesus portrayed in the final novel of the Left Behind series of books.  They’ll defeat your logic with their imagination every time and you will be left frustrated and demoralized at the depths of ignorance that the human psyche can still mobilize a base of operations from.

And it’s impossible to prove a negative with reason and the scientific method (which are the only rituals of practice the intelligent amongst us should still be indulging in); but morality factors into this also.  Consider Kant’s work in The Metaphysics of Morals where he asks the question why human beings will spontaneously risk their lives to save the lives of others–without even thinking about it.

Kant’s answer, simplified, was that a metaphysical realization takes place when we see that little child about to get hit by a moving vehicle–the realization that on the ultimate level of being, we are all of the same source energy and we are all one.  This realization supersedes all temporal experience, reason, emotion and the entire mechanism of thought which produces the collectivized image of ourselves (which upon examination is actually a loosely held together ball of seemingly distinct memories with attached emotional responses).

As any other intellectual masturbator will tell you; there are few things more satisfying that getting lost in the evolution of a great series of connected thoughts on a topic.  There are few better “mental pumping sessions” than this ground shaking little bit of philosophy from Kant.  But I learned this past few weeks that it’s not just abstract.  I saw this happen on a large scale in my community when the wind storms blew through and knocked out a majority of the state’s electrical power on Sunday September 14th, 2008.

I was driving home from Cleveland in a hunk a hunka Cadillac which was still getting pushed all over the road like a geek on a bad day. For a brief span of hours, it was the year 1901 in central Ohio again.  Kids weren’t sitting with dilated pupils in front of liquid crystal displays with 1,080 lines of high definition resolution.  They were huddled up on couches with books and flashlights (probably not available in 1901). Neighbors were helping each other (and continue to this day) take cover and recover from the storm.  Neighbors were talking to each other because talk is all we had left to take control of in the aftermath of those warm and dangerous winds.

Ohians are good people–I can’t speak for you people in other states.  When it comes down to it, we Buckeyes (and I’m not just talking about the football team here) will make it work with what we got.

photo credit: Bob Jagendorf

• “If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind” is a Grateful Dead line from “Franklin’s Tower.”

a

“If You Plant Ice, You’re Gonna Harvest Wind”: Lessons from the Great Ohio Wind Storm of 2008

Folks, can we face something here seriously? When you have a government…

• …that takes control of the major borrowing and lending institutions with funds provided by questionable taxation methods…
• …that regulates and controls the ways and means of the exchange of goods and services to the extent that ours does…
• …that has built an economy upon war and the spoils of war…
• …that is engaged in an unwinnable struggle for the last remaining fossil fuels on the planet instead of focusing on developing methods and technologies for alternative fuels…
• …that practices open tyranny by seizing property of its most productive citizens to redistribute it unfairly and unwisely to its least productive…
• …that blatanty abuses its 10th Amendment directive to respect state governments and their individual citizens respectively…
• …that engages in torture and espionage as means of maintaining social order…
• …that holds elections like advertising campaigns and favor bargaining bazaars…
• …that has forgotten that individual liberty is the measure of social justice and civic responsibility…

…you have a socialist tyranny that is teetering on the brink of self annihilation.  Social forces cannot hold in the center when the individual searching for happiness through free expression and free trade is suppressed in favor of the illusion of a group identity and the figmentated imaginate of a social stability without true and absolute freedom for the intelligent individual citizen who has armed themselves with knowledge and forthrightness.

If it walks and talks like a douche, chances are there’s a bag for it close by.

a

When it Walks Like a Douche and Talks Like a Douche…

Today is the seventh anniversary of the second worst attack on American soil (I count the British attack which burned the White House during the War of 1812 as the worst attack but I don’t measure by body count).  This is the day that the Illuminati of our country would like for us to come together on to renew our hatred of all things Islam and our commitment to the war against Arab control of our planet’s fossil fuels.

But I’m not going to renew that commitment today.  I’m going to propose something different.

Instead of congregating to affirm our hatred and commitment to war for resources as the primary driving engine of our economy; how about if we commit instead to improving the human condition through application of our creativity, ingenuity, and compassion?

What if instead of sending aid to foreign dictatorships and struggling democracies, we allow those tyrants and starry eyed freedom fighters to wade into the evolutionary gene pool of history and test their own meddle to see if they have the stuff it takes to found, fund, and fight for a Republic based on individual freedom?

Despite what the haters of George W. Bush say; he and his father and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the entire cadre of oil warriors did exactly what needed to be done to preserve the possibility of making the choice that we Americans are about to make (and I’m not talking about the pending national election here).  Those Oil Warriors had to secure what little remaining fossil fuels are available on this planet because the function of any organism is to survive and the blood of our country is oil–love it or hate it you must accept this fact.

But just because it’s a current fact doesn’t mean it has to be a future fact.

We can make a choice right now to act responsibly in our environment beginning with the demands we make on ourselves and our families in our own homes.  Then we must hold our elected representatives responsible to these expectations as well.  We must hold the businesses we work for accountable for their actions and if they refuse to comply–this is an at will work world my friends and we have the power as individuals to choose where we dedicate our time and skills.

Responsibility begins with individual choices, continues with individual expectations of our political and economic systems, and ends with confirmation that these expectations are being carried out.  And severe punishment should fall on any system that doesn’t comply with the will of the people up to and including it’s total and absolute dissolution.  This is not a new idea–go pick up the Declaration of Independence and you’ll bear witness that the scream I just made is but a dismal echo compared to the group of men who layed it all on the line 240 years ago to create a society based on the pursuit of individual happiness where protecting each citizen’s body and one’s property was the only business of law.

So I don’t blame our 43rd President for the state of the world any more than I can blame Abraham Lincoln for the Civil War.  These men were products of their time and their presence and function met a need of history.  But the needs of history change and if the citizenry is too demoralized, too ignorant, and too apathetic to follow the current when it changes, they will end up in a stagnant swamp–sinking to the depths and drowning slowly.

Like Maynard said in “Swamp Song”:

My warning meant nothing–
you’re dancing in quicksand.
This bog is thick and easy to get lost in
when you’re a stupid belligerent fucker.
This bog is thick and easy to get lost in
when you’re a dumb ass belligerent fucker–
I hope it sucks you down.

The war for oil has served its purpose–the purpose of giving the global human community a choice of whether we ride the wave of change that history, ecology, and the better angels of our natures are demanding of us right now or if we retire to the evolutionary cess pool to await the inevitable drop at the gallows pole.

We still have the capability of turning this slobbering and bloody machine around.  It’s time we grew some balls and did it.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

a

Reflections on 9/11 About the End of the Bush Administration and the Future of Humanity

photo credit: Lampeduza

This is a big story here in Columbus.

A group of teenagers on the west side of Columbus were out at 2:00 in the morning throwing eggs at cars.  One driver wasn’t having it and got out of the car, chased a kid down on foot and executed him with a shot to the face.

I’m not saying the kid deserved it.  I did stupider shit than this when I was younger.  But as I look at this as a car owner, a home owner and a tax payer; I’m thinking that it doesn’t make sense to eff with other people’s shit.  You just don’t know who you’re dealing with and there are some crazy em effs out there who would just as soon shoot you as say hi to you.

Leave OPP alone, kids.  Let this boy’s death be a lesson to you.  Don’t poke tigers in cages–the bars usually go away at some point.

a

Let This Be a Lesson–Don’t Eff with Peoples’ Shit