Ding dong….
Ding Dong! The Freak is dead. Which strange Freak? The megalomaniac Freak!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Freak is dead.
Wake up – sleepy heads, rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Freak is dead. He’s gone where the boy-diddlers go,
Below – below – below. Yo-ho, let’s open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong’ the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know
The King of Freaks is dead!
US (total) financial meltdown?
Today, I spent most of the day re-reading essays I have collected over the last year or so on the concept of the ‘military-industrial complex.’ I had a pile of articles that came from the 1960s and early 1970s which tended to focus more on the financial/economic aspects of the US military-state. Doing this also necessitated (to legitimately answer my questions but also to get in a little procrastination) googling various terms, writers, concepts.
Of all this web-searching, some themes started to emerge… which often pointed to the link between maintaining a military-industrial state (which could be thought of as ‘unproductive’ economically) and rising levels of debt, long-term currency devaluation… basically, the burden of costs associated with maintaining military/economy super-power status. Again and again, I kept coming across Nixon’s ending of the gold standard and the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system, mounting US debt, deficits, trade deficits, etc.
At any rate, here are two interesting articles among the many that emerged from these web searches:
The second, since it is so recent, is a little more alarming in that the author, who seems to be a credible financial analyst of the international scene, predicts there will soon be another major US financial/currency default. Here are some of the many interesting tidbits:
“The world, as a whole, is passing through an unprecedented and uncharted territory in terms of scale and scope of current financial crisis. Never before such large scale credit losses were recorded, and never before a sole super power was so indebted to the world. The implication of credit losses and potential default by USA is far reaching and affects almost all people in the world.” …
“The rising price of gold is an indication that quietly countries are shifting their reserve in gold. No one wants to create panic which will lead to massive sellout of US dollar leading to its depreciation to unacceptable levels. But the question is up to when this unnatural position can be maintained. In their self-interest, countries will opt out of US investment trying not to alarm others.” …
“If world musters courage to stand up against USA and come up with an alternative reserve and trade currency. The fate of USA as super economic and military power will be sealed and it will become another Great Britain or France-ex great power. It will rapidly close all military bases and withdraw to its soil to save money.”
Hmmm….
Sometimes I marvel at the world
I recently went looking for a quote I had read some years ago. I suspected it was from an essay in either Harper’s Magazine or the Atlantic Magazine. The quotation came from a young American woman who told the author of the essay that she always assumed Jesus was an American. After a quick web search (I was a little astounded how many results for “Jesus was an American” came up), I quickly located it:
Some years ago, at the University of California, San Diego, a young woman raised her hand in the middle of a seminar I was then teaching on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian Era. She seemed genuinely disturbed by something. “I know you’re all going to think this is crazy,” she said, “but I always thought Jesus was an American.”
A lovely moment. What she had articulated, as succinctly as I had ever heard it articulated, was the spirit behind three and a half centuries of American history: America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation. What she had expressed, with an almost poetic compaction, was the core myth of America.
Mark Slouka, “A Year Later: Notes on America’s intimations of mortality,” Harper’s Magazine, Sept. 2002, p. 36.
At my age, I have come to realize that I surely do not understand much about this earth and its people. The fact that a young college student would honestly believe that the historical figure of Jesus was an American says a lot I guess about the ‘world’s only superpower’ and its myth-making, its education system, its sense of inherent exceptionalism, and its overall culture. I am still dumbfounded by this quote and still am not sure just what to make of it… but thought I should share.