I'm digital

I've decided to go digital; to give up the kind of thinking that goes along with gelatinous biological brains and let my thoughts be the product of magnetic patterns on spinning discs and the movement of charges across doped semiconductor junctions. It's amazing how clear things become without the hormones. It's remarkable how far you can see when the emotional soup is gone. I've decided I don't give a damn any more and why should I? You can't squeeze tears from monocrystalline silicon.

So if I see the pathetic end of the United States of America as anything but an increasingly irrelevant, ever petulant and narcissistic giant with little left but monstrous weapons and antiquated mythology as a claim to dignity, it doesn't bother me. Just look at Shanghai and then look at Detroit and tell me how our unending gobbling about rights and duties and liberals and conservatives aren't just aftershocks from an argument settled elsewhere a while ago. The world isn't going in our direction and our direction isn't going anywhere. All our concepts, whether they're from the danger-free and packed in cotton safety state side or the every man his own alpha ape, armed and dangerous fantasy camp, are already irrelevant. We obsess, we make ourselves impotent arguing about making happy meals illegal and whether we should have public education. In the fastest growing and largest country on earth, they shoot you for drunk driving and they're financing our consumerist binge drinking.

The greatest cities, the longest bridges, biggest dams and buildings - the fastest growing economies: they're all elsewhere and in countries with little respect for our ideas of personal liberty and where our individualism is seen as childish and antisocial and obstructionist. Sure, we'll go on yammering about mama grizzlys like this was the 9th century, and small town values and dietary fads, mysterious toxins and quack medicine. We'll still mistrust any new technology and talk to the spirits in pieces of quartz and call on their undetectable energy. We'll still wrap ourselves with bright pieces of red, white and blue and strut about like peacocks, booming about being the best, the biggest, the bravest, the most important -- and if we continue to subvert, dominate, steal and kill on our long downhill road to penury and oblivion, it will still be all about freedom and saving the world. They can ride from Beijing to Shanghai at 300mph in air conditioned comfort in the time it takes us to be x-rayed and manhandled in our decaying airports. I can't even take a 60 mph train to Chicago from here, or go there at all if it snows.

We quibble about our divine right to drive a Hummer or our divine duty to drive a Prius -- they build the biggest hydroelectric plant on the planet even if it means wiping out 5000 years worth of archaeology and displacing millions. They buy more Chevrolets then we do. They're building moon landers and aiming at Mars. We can't afford to go to the doctor.

No, when Haiti begins to look down and laugh at us while we bellow about smaller government and trickling wealth and creeping socialism, there won't be much left but our bloated delusion of relevance. It won't end with a bang or whimper but with the antic, puppet show grotesqueries of Beck and the nasal bleating of Palin. But it will end.

Will we hear the laughter eventually? Of course I won't notice or care if we do or don't. I'm digital.

Death Panels never die

I haven't heard a peep in the news about this being VJ Day; the day when WWII was over and the last military victory the US ever had. Sure, we've blown many things up and lost tens of thousands of our soldiers and killed millions of people, but those weren't so much wars as attempts at interfering in other countries that had not declared war on us, some of them based on invented scenarios.

I tuned in to MSNBC this afternoon wondering if this country of born-yesterday geniuses would bother to remember the end of the largest, deadliest war in human history, but what I got was a panel of simpletons trying to lend dignity to the idea that having Medicare pay a consultation fee to your doctor should you happen to seek counseling about what to do if you have a fatal disease will lead to summary executions.

"It's the slippery slope argument - it's easy to see how you can go from the government being involved in health care decisions to the government executing you."

say the smug voices. No it isn't actually, not even if you're currently hospitalized with paranoid delusions. It isn't because paying your doctor bill is not getting involved in the decision making. It isn't because there is no slippery slope argument, only a slippery slope fallacy unless you can establish that paying someone's bill gives you the right to kill him - and you can't.

Yesterday I replied to yet another viral e-mail purporting to show how Barak Obama is insisting that Our military personnel should "pay their own damned insurance since they're volunteers." It was followed by endless expressions of undying hate. Of course it's another fraud -- I've yet to get one that wasn't -- but in return for my polite reply showing how the words came not from Obama but from the comedy writers at the Daily Show, I got an e-mail so hideous and grotesque with hatred of "liberls like me" it was quite incomprehensible.

When it gets to the point where ordinary Americans with ordinary, respectable lives and credentials are less coherent, more hate filled and more willing to believe the utterly preposterous simply because our president had a black father, there is reason for the reasonable to worry. There is great temptation for many of us simply to wash our hands of this dirt and let the country go the way of the Third Reich.

"The Death Panel idea has legs because it's easy to understand"

said the Republican apologist on MSNBC. Lies are designed that way, the truth just is what it is. Let's hope the country is more than it seems.