another old rant

The slough of late night television is periodically interrupted by boring live coverage of Dinkytown soccer riots, take two, and as I watch numb-drunk fanatics work out some nameless and inexplicable enthusiasm against traffic lights, all my cynicism and dismay rolls out again like a sluggish wave. For this I call the Governor’s office to protest the defunding of higher education? I want to call Tim Pawlenty and explain my revelation: the problem is not that there is not enough money spent sending people to college: the problem is that the selection process is critically flawed. Every single person in that milling crowd of pointless destructiveness should be summarily thrown out, and if there were any justice press-ganged into the salt mines under the Great Lakes, there to toil until they drop dead for the savor of my daily meat.

And I think, as I must think a hundred times a day, oh Jon, judge not. There is no point getting worked up over the individual motivations of any of these grinning numbskulls. But it is easier on my mind to simply hate them as worthless individuals. Because the underlying truth, while less personal, is more frightening. It is the fact that, without any real justification, and in the unlikliest of trouble spots, a cradle of prosperity and good fortune, human beings can transform just like that. This is not people behaving like animals, this is something worse. This is a mass of people behaving as a single, malignant organism, fueled by beer and lurching photopropically towards fire and and television cameras, like a cancer or a virus. Like army ants. The fact that the majority of these people will go on to receive an education instead of a sound beating makes my blood boil, nonetheless.

Suffice to say, intermittent incidents of crowd-displays of love for the U.S.A. in Iraq don’t particularly give me a warm fuzzy. Nothing of value comes out of a crowd of human beings, which is why Democracy is such a sham. The shame of the age that I live in, and of these United States, is not what the gang of lowbrow thugs, crooked businessmen and meanspirited zealots who are running things in Washington at the moment are doing to the underlying principles of personal liberty, but that the majority of even the people who don’t have something serious like poverty or grave illness to excuse them are too lost in their private world of materialism and the idiot-circus of popular entertainment to notice or indeed care.

On the television the advertisement shows one of these snarling behemoth vehicles rolling down the street to some fuckable dance beat, and inside the buildings all the people can’t help but turn from what they’re doing to check out the spectacular ride. But the joke, delivered with that unironic flair that more and more characterizes mass culture, is that, as we move into the interior of the car, we see that the leering, pencil-necked shit behind the wheel is completely unconcerned with what any outside reaction to his spectacular rolling status symbol might be, preoccupied as he is with his two model passengers who he will no doubt be fucking, both at the same time, at some point in the near future.

Doomsday

How it’s gonna go, the whole world will so
slowly turn more tainted and poisonous
one day we’ll wake to find everything pickled in the brine
of our wasteful and profligate detritus

How it’s gonna go, one enormous blow
when we finally go over the edge, press all the buttons
In the night while we sleep peaceful
Death death cruising in from above us

How it’s gonna be, we’ll learn to hate technology
Before you know it we’ll have torn down all we made
Before we know it we’ll be gathered ‘round the fire
fighting with sticks and stones and stolen blades

How it’s gonna wind up, we’ll finally dry the vine up
Use every last drop and dollop of goodness we have left
Having reached the pinnacle of useless industry
we’ll wither away and die for lack of daily bread

How it’s gonna face us, the comet come to erase us
the asteroids, the rogue planet flying through the void
Doomsday, our final end
under the stars the cycle turns again
world without end, nothing created or destroyed

How it’s gonna go, everything will just go more and more slow
we won’t notice it, we’ll be slower too
it’ll all just wind down slowly over years
there won’t be a damn thing we can do

Plinth

What is the structure what is the basis
what is the underlying form
we claim a basis we claim a knowledge
we claim a vaccine against the worm
There is no basis there is no structure
this whole town is built on sand
all that we’ve built and all we’ve collected
Not one stone will stand
There is no plinth
there is no bedrock
we’re on swiftly shifting ground
this should come as no great shock
Don’t look for answers
don’t rock the structure
we all hold on with our eyes shut tight
hands over our ears mouths stuffed with refuse
fearing the fast approaching night
Huddled in doorways lamps that are half full
not one stone will be left to stand
All that can be shaken will be shaken
making the way for the Promised Land

this is what is up with this.