The International Writers Magazine: Reality Check USA In The Age Of Avarice

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Welcome to the People's Republic of America • James Campion Presiding Over The Ashes Of Free-Market Capitalism This is a valley of ashes!--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. - F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

And maybe all the things You thought you got coming to you Ain't coming to you Not in this life And maybe all the promises You thought were broken Were never really made Promises never made - Dan Bern - Toledo

Calvin Coolidge's doomstruck "Every Man For Himself" convention speech of 1924 roused the tycoon brigade and whipped off a flapper-rich parade of blank checks from Wall St. to Main St. The Roaring Twenties were already careening into what F. Scott Fitzgerald later called the "greatest orgy of excess and greed known to modern man".  That night Coolidge was for all intents and purposes reciting The American Manifesto, the "Where's Mine" siren to every Mr. Jones who lived under the illusion that a Golden Ticket was the birthright of a generation. Slick hucksters with nary a piss pot began living high on the hog on the backs of millions of ghetto rubes and sucker farm hands who were soon to be flattened by The Crash.

    That was the year of the Awakening, when Land Barons & Fat Cats found Jesus and ran hat-in-hand to Mother Government, forging a golden age of American Socialism. The New Deal's avalanche of investigation, transparency and oversight saved us from ourselves before WWII thinned us out for the Baby Boom and helped to wipe clean the nasty memories of economic suicide.

    This was the vacuum later filled by Ronald Reagan and an eruption in rapacious lunacy to rival the darkest days of Nero. An army of yuppie zombies spent the Sleepless Eighties gorging on the fleshy innards of the crumbling middle class. Blind surfs who couldn't be bothered knotting the thin power ties were ushered into a nether world of sad excuses and poorhouse hand-outs. But soon the Savings & Loan Crisis forced Mother Government back into the arena to wield her mighty rolling pin of taxpayer relief to the tune of $160 billion.

    Fast forward to the Zany Nineties when everything appeared invincible in the cyber boon. Geeks got rich bilking nerd wannabes and consumer addicts while corporate lackeys spent trillions on researching how to rape the new Wild West. But it all went belly up in the summers of 2001 and 2002. It was not disaster but portended one, so there was nowhere for the money men to scramble but to Real Estate, where the Bubble was filled with the hottest most expensive air and Credit flowed like sweet nectar. No one claimed to see the bottom, thus it was called bottomless, and "no bottom" means not having to pay up. Ever.

    Oh, the land of Every Man For Himself returned in spades and mere speculation morphed into a riot of flat-out gambling. Eight year-olds and homeless junkies were good for six-figure plastic and hardened criminals on the lamb were buying up property on fake leases with fluxuating interest rates that began to expand with the fine print. Things looked so rosy in the lending field there was enough fun money to cover a nation. Shit, it covered many nations, all the way to China, via the White House, chief.

    Ah, but the hardest lessons are learned by those in promise to the Piper. The Piper always comes, and sometimes The Piper comes in the form of a bank. And when the bank needs your capital and you have none, we all have a problem, especially when those banks are attached to the teat of Mother Government. And this is where we find ourselves today, bub, because Mother Government is us, and we have to pony up with $700 billion to slate The Piper or the Piper will get his one way or the other.

    The president can't stop The Piper, nor could Congress, God or God's God or even General Motors or Standard Oil or Donald Trump or The Saudis.

    And it became frighteningly apparent these past weeks the gang running for high office knows even less about this than you. Listening to Barack Obama talk about economic crisis is like the aimless rambling of a man learning that his wife has been moonlighting as a hooker and his kids' college fund had been dumped on a three-team teaser. But it was far easier to stomach than John McCain, who appeared as a doddering stroke-victim wandering the halls of a sanitarium bellowing incoherantly about how he must suspend bingo and save the uiniverse. It's as if the very notion of how money works is as alien to him as speaking without mini-flashcards.

    These people talk as if The Market is some kind of ancient dragon that has devoured innocent Americans. It is not a mystical beast, it is the creation and manipulation of Americans; ones with retirement funds and pensions and college investments for their kids and leans on their cars and loans for their homes. And, as usual, it is never anyone's fault. It's the system! It's the policies! It's the evil Moneylenders!

    Either way, we'll soon be the proud owners of the fragments of Coolidge's maniacal mantra. We will embrace the victims of Captilalism and become a government-run Market controlled by The People. That's right; the People's Republic of America. The concept of a free market system is not only wounded, it is dead, and its ghost is named Socialism. The government, bloated beyond precedence and under the umbrella of a loser gaggle which still possess the balls to refer to their party platform as Conservative have sunk the ship. Now it will be time for a clean-up, and no matter what poor sap is unlucky enough to helm this gory economic afterbirth, it will ultimately be ours to control.

Where's all the big government, Liberal bashing now?
Sorry, you can't hear it under all the gimmie...gimmie...gimmie...
Freeloaders, deadbeats and gamblers rejoice!
We've got your back.

© James Campion Sept 26th 2008
realitycheck@jamescampion.com

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