The End of All Things

For a couple months now I’ve been goading my friends about the Large Hadron Collider and its promise to destroy the world.  On some level I’ve known that it’s impossible (or at least highly unlikely) but I’ve kept up the Chicken Little act for a simple reason: I want someone to throw a kick ass End of the World party.  Of course no one did, and for good reason.  Our country has been bombarded with supposedly life-ending scares since the time of the A-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll.  It wasn’t too long ago that everyone was worried about bird flu, or mad cow disease before that, or Y2K before that, and so on and so forth.

It seems that in the last 50 years, the only credible threat to our way of life came in the form of a few planes, and I’m wincing to even call that credible.  The danger was real, at least, and the majority of us didn’t see it coming.  When TV pundits could have been talking about terrorism, they instead talked about computer glitches, and the result was a nation blindsided by an unforeseen hazard.

In the years since 9/11 we’ve talked plenty about terrrorism, but always in the hysterical, fear-mongering tones formerly reserved for ill cattle and comet-worshipping cults.  And once again, our inability to have a substantial, rationale conversation about the problems facing America has manifested itself in another avoidable-but-now-unforeseen problem.  Ironically enough, the threat facing us now comes from pretty damn near that sacred spot we all promised never to forget.

The end of the world is here, really here, and this time I don’t feel like partying.  We’re on our way to mass catastrophe, and it doesn’t look nearly as sexy as the movies made it out to be.  There are no explosions, no alien invaders, no planes falling from the sky.  There’s simply a whimper and a room full of silent people all too embarrassed, too proud, and too stupid to admit that this whole damn thing was a giant mistake.

We’re witnessing the ultimate admission of the failure of the free market, and yet no one is willing to admit it.  We’re being asked to believe that these bankers are our sisters and brothers, and that their problems be looked upon with compassion.  Meanwhile, none of them can find pen and ink to write a note that says, “I’m sorry,” but they had no problem furnishing a request for the keys to the Treasury.  The fucking nerve.

The corporate media institutions that scoff whenever someone has the audacity to claim that America isn’t God’s gift to the world are trying hard to figure out what the hell happened.  Their heroes – those brave, conservative economic wizards whose unshakable belief in the free market is the backbone of this country – have just been shown to be completely and totally wrong.  Wrong on government.  Wrong on deregulation.  Wrong on capitalism.  And yet they know – they’re sure – that those “crazy liberals” can’t have been proven right.  That would just be silly.  But then again, wasn’t it the Progressive Left that clamored for more oversight after Enron?  And wasn’t it Bush and the Repubs who wanted to privatize Social Security and invest it in the stock market?  And who was it that stopped him?  The Democrats may not be good for much, but their frustrating ability to accomplish nothing has at last proven useful…this time.

But it may well be to no avail.  Unless the media – and through it, America – chooses to accept the sad truth implied by the weeks events, we’re doomed.  We’ll go ahead and hand over more cash to the men who just lost all of theirs in the vain hope that they’ll set it all right again.  As a nation we’ve got the tragic acquiescence of a gambler’s wife.  At least the gambler’s wife gets marital rites out of it.  We’re just getting raped.

It’s still not too late.  We could take the $700 billion and build health care and housing to weather the storm.  I’m serious.  This isn’t Hoover’s depression, after all.  It’s much worse.  If Hoover had been handed $700 billlion in 1929, he very well could have fixed the economy single-handedly.  That’s because Hoover’s dollars were backed by gold.  They meant something.  Our dollars are backed by our belief in them, which is a lot like being popular in middle school.  It doesn’t mean anything, and it only works if you can trick everyone into believing that it’s true.

So why even try a bail-out?  If it’s money we don’t have, if it’s only going to depress the dollar even further, if we all KNOW that our way of doing business is fundamentally flawed, why not take the little confidence we have left in our economy and put into something that we KNOW will help people?  Maybe the long-sought but never-realized triple whammy of housing, health care, and education could be the solution to greed, theft, and deregulation.  But wait, they say, that’s socialism!  Really?  And what’s it called when the government owns the bank?

Capitalism is dead.  Like the Large Hadron Collider, it was an experiment too large, benefiting too few, and at too great a cost to the many.  At least I’m lying about the collider.