There is no more perfect phrase for the psychological climate in America than "fear and loathing". That phrase is from the fevered genius of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and all rightful credit is his. That is an ugly but neccessary preamble in this land of litigation and hustle and profit at all cost., etc...but things like that must be said or risk be taken down by the snarling dogs of legal recourse. Regardless, and all apologies aside, let the point be made: America is lost and searching. Despite the trumpeting of the tired nonsense that America is great, and sound, and will return to its brief and sparkling glory. The brutal point and ugly truth is that America has lost its way... America is no longer America. When every dollar that is spent to annihilate our "enemies" is equally invested in trying to coexist peacefully...When other cultures are respected and embraced and thought of as important and not just strange and different and in need of Americanizing....When lying and deceipt lose their currency...And when depth of spirit is as valued as depth of bank accounts... Maybe then, the promise of the original concept will have a chance of being realized. The world is watching...and loathing.
"Something is happening here, But you don't know what it is, Do you Mr. Jones?" --Bob Dylan
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In an old "Hey Rube" column, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson refered to this Dylan lyric and offered his astute psychosocial commentary.
http://espn.go.com/page2/s/thompson/001120.html
While I couldn't agree more, I see things a bit differently and would offer another perspective.
This is a subject that has been a personal preoccupation for decades, and just when an analysis begins to make sense it ratchets up to a whole new plateau. One aspect of American culture has become clearly paramount: a widespread acceptance of the philosohy of personal survival and welfare at all cost. Truth matters only when it is personally beneficial. Plausible deniability, a modus operandi of the ruling elite that grew out of the dark age of Nixon era Washington and found full bloom under Reagan, has now become solidly rooted in the fertile compost of America at large.
Nobody, it seems, will take responisbility for anything. Not only is there ubiquitous denial of anything compromising, there is an odd counter-phenomenon of a willingness to accept unwarranted credit. People everywhere are pretending to be talented and famous, and, oddly, accepted as so. Up is down and down is up. What IS happening here? We fell down the rabbit hole a good while back and it is, collectively, just now beginning to dawn on us. The tragic consequence is magnified by a sense that the cultural tools to cope with this sort of problem have eroded as well. We have come to embrace bullies and demagogs and are loathe to listen to hard truth. We want a yellow-brick road to candyland and don't want to recognize we are lost in a pointless forest.
This ethic of survival at all cost is in striking contrast to the indigenous American philosophy that "..today is a good day to die..", an elegant and zen-like reverence for divine will. Without this kind of acceptance and desire, on a broad scale, for an authentic existence, the world will grow ever uglier and more vulgar. Fights regularly break out in the stands of high shcool football games, men are killing each other over little league baseball, soccer moms are arrested for assault and running amok...on and on. Look at the recent presidential election...sheesh...it all has the same smell: "...my dog's badder than your dog...even if I have to cheat to prove it".
Are we doomed? George Harrison thought so, and considered naming his last album "Your Planet is Doomed, Part One". He declared, "The world is going mental as far as I'm concerned...Basically, I think the planet is doomed". George went on to say that things are speeding up because of technology and "...everything that is happening". "Everything" paints it with a bit of a broad brush, but he was certainly onto something.
Fatcats grow fatter these days, while poets and painters starve. White collar criminals retire to gated communities, sometimes after a short stay in a countryclub prison. Vile toxins bubble up not only in the culture, but also in the landscape and in the drinking water and those that grow wealthy from it die and pass on their ill-gotten wealth or live in quiet well-feathered obscurity.
It is all finally coming home to roost, and while some might agree, it does little good to don a sandwichboard and take to the streets proclaiming "THE END IS NEAR!"...yet, is way past time to pay casual regard. The signals have become too evident, too blatantly obvious. Clearly the message is on the verge of filtering down to the mainstream. When that happens, it will be, as usual, too late and entirely out of our hands. Perhaps it is too late already. But what is there to do?
There is no easy remedy for the self-indulgence that plagues America. It is so reinforced by our impatient ways, and so woven into the fabric of our culture. Until this black tide is turned by soul searching and self-realization on a mass scale, nothing will change. If and when it does, it is probably too late anyway, things are that bad. Why bother? Life as it is will go on, at least for a while, and the ethos that 'anything that enhances the bottom line is good' will continue, and the storm clouds will continue to gather.
Oh, and now there is this "war"...
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Our Candidate: KINKY FRIEDMAN 
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"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." -George Orwell
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Big Darkness Soon Come...
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The Bush family reeks of fraud and bad karma. But even worse than our wretched, gibbling president are the cowardly whores in Hollywood who are currently smearing film stars and music people like Johnny Depp by calling them unpatriotic Americans who righteously question the wisdom of invading a whole nation of Islam -- 1.8 billion worshipers -- which is a dangerously stupid idea. Disagreeing with Donald Rumsfeld about bombing anybody who gets in our way is not a crime in this country. It is a wise and honorable idea that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin risked their lives for. These thieves in the White House are so crazy with greed and power, and they are causing so much drastic damage to the world we live in, that they are the ones who should be put on trial for treason. ---Hunter S. Thompson ---
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"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe, "101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution" (1999)
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"The time has come , the walrus said, to talk of many things...." Where is Lewis Carroll when you need him? We are officially down the rabbit hole now and many things remain left untalked about, aside from cabbages and kings. More along the line of cabbage-headed would-be kings...which sounds more the realm of Rudyard Kipling, who's contribution is welcome and sorely needed in this instant cabal of sorts.
Today, as I gathered up the roadkill from my wild ride along the information superhighway, I stumbled upon a new jewel of a word --kakistocracy--. If your immediate jeopardic response is "what is government in khaki pants, Alex?"...you, like me, would be only slightly wrong. It is BAD government in khaki pants. Not just bad, but government by the most unsuitable and unscrupulous people. And though there is no mention of khaki pants, I can only assume that detail is taken for granted.
kak·is·toc·ra·cy
plural: kak·is·toc·ra·cies noun.
bad government: government by the most unscrupulous or unsuitable people, or a state governed by such people
(Early 19th century. From Greek kakistos "worst" + -cracy.) Thesaurus *
kak*is*toc*ra*cy Pronunciation: (kak"u-stok'ru-sE), [key] n., pl. -cies. government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.
kak·is·toc·ra·cy
Noun. Inflected forms: pl. kak·is·toc·ra·cies Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. Etymology: Greek kakistos, worst, superlative of kakos, bad; see caco- + -cracy. The American Heritage® Dictionary
So, now it is established, we are living in a kakistocracy.
What to do? What to do? What to do?... Wait, shouldn't that be a representative kakistocracy? We will have to look into that, but that still leaves us wondering what to do about it? We are governed by the most unsuitable and unscrupulous people. A true dilema. As luck would have it, my careening through the ether also netted the claim by Soviet authorities that they had encountered the lair of a Yeti, referenced as a 'wigwam". Now, all architectural possibilities aside, this struck me as a bonanza for those concerned souls in their desperate attempt to overcome the bottleneck in the political genepool. It may offer us our only hope of breaking free of our self-imposed, blind-alley
kakistocracy.
Buy a cool t-shirt here:
http://www.cafeshops.com/indigobusiness
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and the light grows ever dimmer...
dim bulb productions
http://www.cafepress.com/indigobusiness/ 
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