Jan. 18, 2010 (3QuarksDaily) -- Before I tell you how I'm a coward, and how Dick Cheney is a coward, and how President Obama is a coward, and how everyone in America is a coward, I want to suck you into my story by starting on a positive note.
To wit: I have a failsafe strategy for when I'm gobsmacked by the exceptionalism of our incompetent institutions, like the Fed missing the bubble, our intelligence services not nixing the visa of the Explosive Gonads Bomber, our incompetent pols giving an incompetent Wall Street the right to ruin us again in a few years, the Senate letting Joe Liebermann take one last bite out of the healthcare bill, or the CIA putting out the welcome mat for a triple agent who's about to blow them up. And then there's Obama asking ex-Presidents Clinton and Bush to help Haiti, when Bush destroyed Haiti's democracy in 2004 and Clinton's been trying to turn the country into a sweatshop.
I've got this default setting that stops me from foaming at the mouth in Sartrean nausea and grinding my teeth into Heideggerian nothingness. Here's what I do: I sit myself down and zen in on how much I still love our failed state of America, and how there are things about America that are actually exceptional.
Freedom of speech. MLK. Geeks. The internet (invented by the Pentagon). Entrepreneurs. Paul Krugman. Elizabeth Warren. Steve Jobs. Our generosity to disaster victims. 24/7 innovation. Matt Taibbi. John Cassavetes.The Great Gatsby. Flash drives. Sylvia Plath. Wallace Stevens. A can-do attitude that once landed us on the moon.Andy Warhol. Bob Dylan, still doing it.A Streetcar Named Desire.The Decemberists. Warren Buffett.My Fair Lady.New York women who don't take crap from men like women do in other countries yet give better blowjobs than women in other countries. And Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Meditating on these things of wonder and beauty helps. Especially these days.
The incompetence of our institutions is bad enough. It's the spin from officials embedded in these institutions after their organizations have stepped armpit-deep in doo-doo that really grates, and makes one almost wish we lived in a post-Baudrillard simulacrum where one could call Jack Bauer for some assembly-line-waterboarding of everyone connected to Washington and Wall Street.
The all-time winner of the Cretin Award for Supremely Smug Self-Delusion has got to be Lloyd Blankstein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who said: “I'm just a banker doing God's work.” Did he ask the Onion for that one? This is a firm that shorted the derivatives they created and sold to pension funds and the like; in one case the derivatives tanked in months. AsFinancial Crisis Inquiry Commission Chairman Phil Angelides told Blankfein this past Wednesday: "I'm just going to be blunt with you. It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars."
1. SOME WEIRD US-SPECIFIC PSYCHOSIS?
more
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/01/whats-wrong-with-america-were-cowards.html
