Right Wing Fanatics Of The World, Unite!

I may have stumbled upon the new voice of the American Right. Get a load of this (mistakes in the original):

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blinds the foolish.

Okay, he may have a point there, but even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in awhile. But continue on, dear reader.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the “winning” side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the “winning” side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. …

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

The author then condemns Obama’s socialist takover of GM and even describes Barney Frank as a “social pervert basking in his homosexuality”. Truly, here is man after Pat Buchanan’s own heart.

Of course, if the Republicans want to include this fellow in their camp they’re going to have to pitch a very big tent indeed, one that just might cause St. Reagan to fidget in his grave, because the author is a reactionary Russian nationalist named Stanislav Mishin and the article was published in Pravda.

Who could have guessed that Pravda was the one Soviet institution that would have no trouble adapting to changing times? I found this article linked on Drudge, and one of the advertisers on the Pravda site is a pro-Ludwig von Mises outfit (Mises was the founder of the so-called “Austrian School” of economics, which preaches pure laissez-faire capitalism). What comes around goes around, I guess.

The next time I hear some Republican sounding off about taxes, socialism, the gays, or any of the other Pavlovian buzz words that make conservatives foam, I'm going to look him square in the eye and say, “If you don’t like it, Bub, why don’t you move to Russia!”

Commodes On Legs

Harvard Business School celebrated its 100th birthday last October. What, you weren’t invited? The Dean of that fine institution, Jay Light, gave a speech in which he touched on the current economic crisis. Have a look:

“We all failed to understand how much [the financial system] had changed in the past 15 years or so, and how fragile it might be because of increased leverage, decreased transparency and decreased liquidity: three of the crucial things in the world of financial markets. We all failed to understand how that fragility could evidence itself in a frozen short-term credit system, something that hadn’t really happened since 1907. We also probably overestimated the ability of the political process to deal with the realities of what could happen if real trouble developed.

What we have witnessed is a stunning and sobering failure of financial safeguards, of financial markets, of financial institutions and mostly of leadership at many levels. We will leave the talk of fixing the blame to others. That is not very interesting. But we must be involved in fact in fixing the problem.”

There you have it — the concentrated worldview of our elites, offered up in a neat little package and delivered with admirable succinctness. We screwed up; we failed; we overestimated this; we underestimated that; But we must be the ones to be called upon to fix the problem; and let’s not cast blame, that’s so boring (but notice how he takes a swipe at the ability of the “political process to deal with the realities of what could happen if real trouble developed.”

Remember, that’s the institution that produced George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John Thain — the guy that drove Merrill Lynch into the ground while buying a $2500 dollar paper machier garbage can for his office bathroom and spending $35,000 for something called a “commode on legs,” which was a desk used to store chamber pots before the invention of indoor plumbing (everyone who’s anyone has one these days) That institution bears the same relation to the current recession that the Nazi Party bore to World War Two, or that pig shit does to Swine Flu. If it weren’t for Harvard Business School, there’s a chance that none of us would have ever heard of mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, or “commodes on legs,” and we’d still be dwelling in Eden this very moment. Yet here is its acting chief, pretending that this gigantic mess is some causeless act of God, unforeseen and unforeseeable, the kind of thing that hasn’t happened ’round here since 1907, don’t ya know, instead of the predictable result of calculated and deliberate human action, the kind taught and encouraged at his own school.

What we see here is a ‘stunning and sobering’ glimpse into the mentality of an entrenched aristocracy, the kind that does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, with the perfect self-assurance that no matter how badly it screws up, it will always be there. The United States of America is their private farm, and the rest of us are just pack mules, just their commodes on legs.

Poverty With A View

The other day I found a stale old fortune cookie in the back of one of my kitchen drawers, so for shits and giggles I busted it open. It read, “It takes more than an accountant to measure the wealth in your life.”

So I started looking around. Maybe I’m dwelling in a cornucopia of riches and I just don’t notice it. What I need is a new perspective. After all, I live in one of the most beautiful locations on planet Earth: Lake Tahoe, Jewel of the Sierra, America’s All Year Playground. What could be better? I drift off to sleep every night to an eerily beautiful chorus of laughing coyotes. Raccoons occasionally scratch at my sliding glass door begging for scraps of bread, which I sometimes give them when I’m drunk and feeling large. A mother bear and her two cubs live in a little wooded area just beyond my back fence and often poke around my yard (they’re best neighbors I have, at least since they stopped digging in my garbage, which they promptly learned to do after figuring out there was nothing in it except empty beer bottles and cigarette butts, ha ha).

If you overlook the fact that there are no jobs here, no money, no opportunities, no culture, and fewer available women than in the fucking Klondike, it’s a swell place!

I’m exaggerating, of course. If it was that bad I’d pack up and move to Reno. But I do think it’s fair to say this town’s been going downhill ever since the white man booted the Washoe Indians out and installed casinos in their place. The main drag used to be called Bonanza Road because it was the principle thoroughfare between Sacramento and Virginia City, Nevada after the Comstock silver lode was discovered in the nineteenth century. (Now the only reminders of those spacious days down in Nevada are mercury polluted rivers and leukemia clusters, but I digress) (Oh yeah, and whorehouses) (Oh yeah, and Republican rednecks. I once got cut-off down there by a guy in a jeep with a bumper sticker that said, “Off-Roaders For Bush.” Ponder the meaning of that for a while: Off-Roaders For Bush. Talk about bein’ in Heaven! To these jaded eyes, that pretty much sums up Northern Nevada, so I’ll move on.) After awhile, the place was so badly logged out in order to provide lumber for the silver mines it was denied national park status. This lowered the property values, enabling wealthy people from the San Francisco Bay Area to buy it all up for a song and build gigantic summer homes along the shores of the lake. Sound familiar? Now Bonanza Road is just plain old US Highway 50, and it’s basically a dump (although the trees, of course, are back). It contains all the elements of an excellent trade route and little else; that is, of course, until you reach the California/Nevada state line and hit the casinos. You go from Appalachia to Vegas in one block.

Good times!

The casinos are glitzy mausoleums where washed-up performers go to die. It’s depressing. I think Beyonce hit town a couple of summers ago and it was the biggest things since boxed wine. This summer the decayed remains of REO Speedwagon are opening up for Styx, or Journey, or some other vestigial remnant of Rock ‘n Roll’s inglorious middle age of the late seventies, early eighties (you know, before Madonna and Cyndi Lauper came along to redeem the aesthetics of our culture). One of the clubs is called the Horizon, which we call ‘The Ho’. It used to be named the Sahara Tahoe and was Elvis’ turf. He used to buy all the female employees roses on Mother’s Day. Bill Cosby used to perform there as well, and someone who worked there told me he was the biggest prick in creation. On the other hand, I’ve also heard that Willie Nelson is the coolest guy in creation, and I believe it because I can’t live in a world where it isn’t true.

The most interesting thing about this place is the apocryphal tale that Jacque Cousteau took a mini-sub to the bottom of the lake and, upon re-emerging, declared that “the world is not ready to see what’s down there.”

That sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? The world is not ready to see what’s down there. Evidently, the mobsters who started the gambling racket up here used to dump their victims into the lake, where the cold temperatures suspend the bodies at a certain depth and prevent them from decomposing. In addition, the Washoe Indians used to swaddle their dead and heave them into the water as well (I don’t know if this is true or not; a drunk carpenter in a local redneck bar told me that once. I report, you decide). So the story is that the bottom of the lake is blanketed by a garden of corpses, frozen in place, some clad in pin-striped gangster suits, perfectly preserved for all eternity. But don’t call Geraldo just yet. It turns out Jacques Cousteau never came to Tahoe, and even if he had, any corpses in the lake would have been fish food long ago. A marine biologist from UC Davis looked into the matter. So that’s that. Besides, as previously noted, the most interesting corpses here are all above ground.