An Inconvenient Truth

Right after 9/11, I used to think that it was a good thing Al Gore didn't get into the White House. After all, the conventional wisdom was that rooting Al Quada from Afghanistan would be an impossibility that would stick us in a quagmire worse than Vietnam. And if there's one word to describe Al Gore, it's Conventional Wisdom.

Now, I think it didn't matter much which of them got elected. In the larger arc of American civilization, these last eight years have basically been a push. We had some barbarians rampage briefly through our territory. We've had a minor foreign adventure in the Middle East and generally scared/pissed off the other states in the world. The economic system hasn't changed much. Neither has the educational system. The political system remains dysfunctional.

What feels different is the degree of general fucked-uppedness, precisely because very little has improved or changed much at all over all that time. So the problems we had before are much more acute now. The economic problems in the socialist corporatism that we generally mislabel as a Free Market have only been exacerbated, if anything, by mindlessness and inertia.

Whoever wins the presidential election in November will make no difference in this situation whatsoever, either. The People really, really don't want them to anyway despite all the bitching to the contrary.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." H. L. Mencken