3/29/2009

Ranting from the top floor across the city

Lou sings Lisa says as I sit above a city soaked this morning, drying out in March superzero breezes, sweet pre-sunset shadows and light. It's been a while, as we bloggers say, I've been so bad, feel guilty to've been away, but hey I didn't have to be here, you're lucky I even take a dump here! I'm a victim of my rules, and so anyone's morality makes everyone a fool. Trouble is top stuff doesn't follow Western timelines, three dimensions, it's more like horizontal heuristics, the stuff of thought generated via semantic linguistics - or so I'm learning from an unreadable book I just have to mention.

I switched where I sat, and that is the source of this scat. When I peek across the city, bombarded by baroque, as towers grow from mounds of dirt, where faroff sun-dried cyclists prompt mental microflirts, you get perspective, or maybe just discrete novel excretive blarghblectives, whatever - I can't be against anything new - as I rub the velvet of my button-down shirt.

3/11/2009

God uses a Mac

(or at least Bono does)
Go, shout it out, rise up
Oh, oh
Escape yourself, and gravity
Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak
Shush now
Oh, oh
Force quit and move to trash

~Unknown Caller by U2

3/09/2009

Meltdown?

(My hardline-conservative yet somehow marxist comment on "No more cash for CBC, Heritage Minister says" ~www.globeandmail.com)

From my few years observing the cosmos, here's what I've learned of how the Canadian economy works when things go bad: Those closest to the Government are able (via lobbyists and their friends) to line up first at the trough to save their skins. Those closest to the trough (CBC, car makers) are the ones who deserve the money least, because they have been coddled the longest. [This includes the government workers themselves who basically control the trough, who ARE the trough - and who are most hysterical about a downtown in the economy, because it means we may actually wake up and demand accountability for our vote and our money.] Those who have been coddled the longest are theoretically most able to withstand the downturn because they've been getting the money all along, but they are also the ones who cry the loudest when things go bad.

This recession is not a tragedy in and of itself, but only a tragedy of relative expectations and disappointment. Our society is ridiculously wealthy and incremental decreases in GDP will cause no suffering that compares in any way to the great depression of the 1930s. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, because the squeaky wheel is the one that doesn't do any work. Those who suffer most are also the most accustomed to suffering when things go bad are furthest from the trough, because they have learned to live without government support. Call it the virtue of honest work, the spirit of capitalism - the lack of honest work, the prevalence of cronyism --> This is how the establishment remains the establishment: by milking honest workers, honest workers who have learned not to depend on government to bail them out but to work to find a way no matter what. This is also why voting is important, so we can deliver justice at times of reckoning which are right now.