"Scrambled eggs what he says
He accuses me of treachery
Got the nine lies, got the wide eyes
Got a failing grade in chemistry"
He accuses me of treachery
Got the nine lies, got the wide eyes
Got a failing grade in chemistry"
Rasputina - The Mayor
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"It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war,—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England,—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was—petticoat government. Happily that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle."
Washington Irving - Rip van Winkle
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I feel somehow obligated to speak on today's election here in the States before the results are in, as it certainly feels like one of those historic moments right before the purges ramp up and people like me get disappeared. Problem: after a decade of nonstop media obsession, I would rather talk about anything, anything other than Donald Trump! Come on, wouldn't you rather hear about my bowel movements? See, I found this half-jar of giardiniera in the fridge that I thought was still good, and, well, the results expressed both voluminously and incons-
- no,wait, we really should probably hit the politics angle.
I haven't bothered with electioneering here not only because I... just don't... and not only because of the sparse handful of you who'll read this most live outside the U.S., or because of my general opinion that humans are degenerate apes that've proven incapable of rational self-determination and so countries deserve to reap the fruits of their collective stupidity (hi Britain, how's your "independence day" coming along? shut up; don't care) but because whichever party wins will inevitably subject me to some manner or another of bigoted populist pandering witch-hunt. Matters little whether because I'm born the wrong sex or skin color or because I speak with an accent and don't pay lip-service to their magic sky-daddy, or because I'm unwilling to deny evolution or sexual dimorphism or whichever brand of science denialism both sides are championing now.
A Rip awakened from before Y2K would certainly have some adjusting to do. The once infamously apathetic American voter may appear more politically engaged now, but while election turnout has markedly risen since I was in school from ~52% to ~66% it's more noticeably produced the rampant activism and political violence and rioting we've been seeing from fanatical fringes. And, interestingly, the good cop / bad cop game doesn't seem to have ended. The entire system simply regressed further and further and ever further into reactionary dictatorship. The "liberal" wing now perpetually threatens half the population with being fired/jailed without evidence as born criminals and promotes the same authoritarian speech policing once criticized in conservatives, only with "under god" replaced with forcing you to call narcissistic twits by the royal "they" while the "conservatives" have devolved into some breed of mindlessly Luddite rampaging caveman.
So really, the choice has once again been the same refuge in the lesser evil it's always been (within my lifespan at least) not to improve anything but to slow down the pace of the multibillionnaires chopping the place up to sell it off for parts to each other. Except for the odd quirk that the Republicans, ostensibly facetiously once party of small government, have switched to openly pushing to enthrone their golden shower boy as a theocratic emperor. The many voices raised in consternation at how America could have reached this point seem to miss a detail long obvious to me as a damn dirty furriner, and which I've addressed with regard to religion: it was always there. Theocracy and authoritarianism dragged the country down from the very beginning. That starry-eyed notion of the pilgrims/puritans sailing from merry olde England FOR FREEEDOOOOMM! ignores the basic observation that the "freedom" they sought was to impose their own totalist superstitious dogma upon a society they could isolate from mainstream European culture and control with an iron fist. Americans were saved from their own stupidity by an overarching Federal leadership imposing limits on their power to abuse each other (and whose ideas, like it or not, mostly came from French salons) but that diseased fetish for theocratic absolutism has lingered two and a half centuries in every last Podunk and every last backwoods hick sect.
Depressing thought, neh?
Here's a vacation picture to make you feel better:
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| "let the bird of loudest lay / on the sole Arabian tree / herald sad and trumpet be" |
That tree's not really in Arabia, but in southern Italy. I'd've posted pictures of the waterfront or the statue of Saint Frankie preaching to the birds, but those are readily found online so instead I'm platforming that local. I liked Sorrento, despite spending only one night there. Instead of a gaudy tourist trap crawling with grifters it imparted the cleaner, purposeful, more functional feel of a working town which just happens to have a dramatic history and tourist-friendly amenities. While I snapped a few shots of Sorrento's seafront and hotels, I realized only after downloading everything that among the literally thousands of such snaps, and despite having spent several nights there, I had no such pictures of Naples. It's not worth picturing. Of Napoli's museums and historic sites? Oh, my, yes, hundreds upon hundreds, and it's just too much to take in. But of the town itself? A couple of shots from atop Vesuvius, far enough away that you can't see (most of) the grime.
Want a one-shot impression? We were standing in line for taxis in front of its central train station. The wind kicked up, prompting the whole crowd to hold our breaths and shield our faces not merely from cigarette-laced dust but from a wave of dirty napkins, straws, paper bags and polyethylene in a myriad configurations.
And it's hardly the only such problem. It's hard to miss the half-renovated, half-abandoned buildings, the cracked and water-holed sidewalks splashed with last night's urine and beer limoncello vomit, the end-to-end kilometers of gang graffiti, the obviously unprepared tour van driver who's just as obviously somebody's cousin, the semi-legal Africans sleeping on mattresses out in the streets behind your four-star hotel with rooms the size of bed-plus-20cm and missing bathroom door, etc. This is all in the historic town center mind you; this is the lavish, gussied-up facade Napoli puts on for the whole world! You might protest this is a poor town, but why is it poor? Campania as a region pulls in some of the world's heaviest tourist trade. From what we paid and guides' comments, Pompei, by itself, can rake in half or even a million dollars on a good summer day in admission fees alone. Tack on room&board, transportation, tchotchkes, endless other attractions and every other tourist tax you can think of... yet somehow the city still looks like an East-European slum after the fall of communism. Where does all the money go?
The garbage problem at least is well-documented, and blamed on organized crime. Here's the thing though: Sorrento is also visible from Vesuvius, and is in fact contiguous enough to be considered an outlying suburb of the greater Neapolitan metropolitan area. So I'm having some trouble thinking it's not subject to the same criminal temptations. I guess it all depends on the quality of local mafioso you're lucky enough to get running your life.
The last decades have seen an increased trend in separatism, be it Brexit, Catalonia or Texans always running their mouths about seceding. The pretext is always some naive jabber about FRREEEDOOOOMS! and many in the U.S. have been half-joking about an official split between red and blue states. But I got news fer ya, pilgrim. That impulse has nothing to do with freedom and everything with the endless numbers of would-be authoritarians eager to fence off their own little fiefdoms, all the pastors and bishops swearing boy scouts and altar boys to silence, all the corporate autocrats eager to deregulate until their money can buy and sell you, each god-kings unto themselves. Deliverance is no egalitarian wonderland. A federal government or a world government is no more inherently oppressive than a slaver state or a mafia political machine or the boss of a factory town or a street gang shaking you down or a mother locking her children in the closet... except that it represents cooperation among the underclass. The rich never have trouble cooperating. The East India Company enriched plenty of Oriental and Occidental mafiosi. Naples' Camorra shift drugs, forged currency and violent force from South America to Russia to Africa to Iraq. Brexit, the anti-immigration separatist measure, actually increased British immigration, especially illegally and from third-world countries. If the Federal Trade Commission fails, Jeff Bezos will still have no problems trading federally. He just won't be getting taxed for it even to the little extent he is now. But he'll still be taxing you with every mark-up.
The absence or impotence of a central government merely leaves your fate to governance by your town's most cut-throat tyrants, petty tin-pot despots who can and will rob you, kill you, whore your ass out or choke you with garbage at their own whims.
