THE CRACKDOWN
Courtesy of Jason Louv at Dangerous Minds
The biggest stock market crash in history and Greece falls apart, shaking the core illusions that prop up the US and EU…. Sweet fuck what a week.
In the US we have the ultrablack humor of seeing how illusory our “system” really is; the Zeitgeisters of the world have been bonkering on for years about how the fact our system is based on greenbacks “magically” produced by the Fed makes our economy an illusion. Well, yes, but if anything, Thursday showed how understated they were being: the entire global economy, apparently, can be brought down by somebody’s finger missing the “m” on their keyboard and hitting the “b” instead. Magic tricks indeed. Meanwhile, in the EU, the continued disintegration of Greece is calling the series of bluffs that underpin the stability of the European Union like it’s 1968 all over again but without the clothes.
It all feels like a big joke that people are tired of perpetuating. “Let’s play hypercapitalism” is getting a bit old from the looks of how people are reacting to it. It’s been old for generations but now the promised payouts seem to be hardly worth the pretense; why stay at the table when all you’re likely to win is the new Usher album and maybe, if you work really hard, a good three years at some point in your life where you can pretend you’re living the house-cars-kids American Dream before they fire you and take all their toys back and leave you with the bill?
Yes, I propose that what we’re seeing is people calling the bluff. It’s less a failure of a system that we all know was broken anyway and more a lurch towards something better, towards simpler living and a refocus on the really important parts of being alive – like building a soul instead of more mini-malls. (I may or may not have crunched the detailed astrological math on the stock market crashing in order to back up this statement. That shit’s for hippies anyway.)
So welcome again to 2010, the year of vomiting up as much as we can of the last 2000 years of this utter bullshit patriarchal woman-hating child-hating life-hating nature-hating nonsense. You’ll want an empty stomach when you’re coming up at the party anyway, so have a few glasses of water and here’s hoping you have somebody to hold your forehead while you yak.
In the meantime, watch this small masterpiece from German death diva Billie Ray Martin (via Loki23). It’ll make you feel much better.
