White Picket Fence

Back!

Sorry, that wasn't me demanding that you step away, in a tone of defiance or defense. I was trying to announce, in a sort of LL Cool J kind of way, that this is my triumphant return to the forum of working really hard to produce substandard prose-style entertainment for an audience that, according to the traffic tracking features built in to the hosting software, is made up of 90% spam visits from Russian amateur porn and online prostitution advertisement sites. To the 10% of you who are human readers, and not limited to literacy in Cyrillic: I cherish your patronage and continued patience!

I have returned to you, of course, from self-imposed exile on the first stop in the island chain known as the American Gluttonies. I'm not sure where they're located exactly. I imagine somewhere in the Atlantic off the coast of the Carolinas, well south of sunny St. Continence and directly windward of the looming and inhospitable Lesser Diabetia.

Like all vacations, I've come back to you several pounds heavier, several pounds-sterling lighter and coarsely embittered by the amount of work required of me, left to pile up in my voluntary absence. I suppose I could have delegated while I was gone, left some tasks to some surrogates or underlings so that I might be able to return from a break genuinely rested, unburdened and out from under the piling mound of burnout and stress-rage that will lead inevitably to the defeat of my still very human soul, but what am I? French? This is America. It's what we're best at: working ourselves three times harder than necessary to achieve half the result over a longer period of time only to be guaranteed nothing of the most basic of human dignities when it is all over. "Quality of life" is for socialists.*

You know, like those commie agitators trying to fight their way above $15,000/year by staging a nationwide work action today. Can you even buy some of that sweet-ass Obamacare on $7.25/hour? Obviously you're going to get free coverage if you're a minority of some melanin shading richer than eggshell, a Muslim terrorist (redundant!), an abortionist or a guy who happens to be married to another guy. But for the rest of us who are working for a living, we gotta come out of pocket just because we have the option between that and the comprehensive packages of health coverage offered by our employers. See how in this country the poors and the ethnics get all the breaks?

I guess I talked about something similar the last time we were alone together, you and I, but I guess it's only now really crystallizing for me the way in which these do-it-yourself, bootstrap-pulling-upping, scrappy little global multinational corporations are being propped up by taxpayer money. If you're able to maintain your low-low prices at the Wal-Mart or McDonald's because your employees are paid so little that they have to rely on federal aid programs for food, housing, electricity and medical care, that's a pretty direct example of an enormous government subsidy propping up your rugged individualist capitalist free-market enterprise. Keep that up if you want to, but eventually Rush Limbaugh is going to find out about it and he's gonna be plenty mad, you guys. He's not afraid to make a logically incoherent argument about things he clearly does not understand, even if the opponent is the Pope.

But then the Pope is from Argentina, or as most of the Limbaugh demographic would understand it "some class of Mexican," so the swarthy Spanish-speakingness automatically disqualifies his criticisms.

I think the right-wing types are justifiably confused. Being honest, I can't remember the last time there was a large-scale work stoppage in this country for any reason that wasn't to do with a major sports league. Ever since Reagan skullfucked the air traffic controllers, the only association our news media or the public at large has with any kind of strike is when the super-rich fight with their insanely-rich employers over who gets what percentage of a couple billion dollars.

It's logical I guess to see that, now that the manufacturing base has dried up and blown away, taking the core of the union culture in this country with it, the only other place where union organization may take a foothold would be in the service industries. It makes sense seeing as a huge percentage of our economy now is devoted to customer interaction rather than the making of things. These jobs that used to be for teenagers to save up weed money are now the primary employment for people with families in an unskilled labor pool that leaves them no other options.

Don't count the powers of entrenched free-market true believers out, though. It's a mistake to misunderestimate one's enemies, as some of us have learned. They already got Mandela. And the Obama impeachment is coming next.

My own opinion is that they're scared because they know what we know and everyone knows: the only thing more powerful than money? Sex. It transcends economic systems or even physical borders. I know because I'm getting hit up for it all the way from Russia. Well, in exchange for money to be fair, but still! They know better than to try and sell me cheese or furniture.** There may be some problems we can't just spend our way out of, but whether or not it's possible for us to fuck our way out of it, by God, we're going to try. We're not even going to wait for anyone to ask. The reign of the entitled rich white dude is swaying in the hurricane breeze of exotic ass-getting. When the revolution finally comes, it will be in the form of an army of mochaccino babies.


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*It was an even better American-style vacation for me because I didn't actually go anywhere or even stop working at my normal day job. I just missed one day of blog-post-writing. But I'm such a hard-core American, even that was able to deliver that light-but-sharp sting of self-rebuke across exposed buttocks of my soul.

**Somebody say "cheese furniture" and I can guarantee you a conversation.