Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Whatarewegonnadoooooo, IOZ? Whatarewegonnadoooo!? America's engaged in disastrous foreign wars and is torturing people and the economy's going bust and Sarah Palin's daughter is going to give birth to a space-oddity superbaby in the orbit of Jupiter and and and and. I mean, yeah, the world sucks. You wanna fight about it? You think you've got it bad? This shit is nothing compared to the seriously bad times. Put that in your 9/11 and smoke it.

We're all going to die and we may as well get used to it. The constant drive to improve our lot is a kind of atavism I just can't get behind. I'm a selfish bastard and I love my creature comforts and I'll claw my way to any luxury within reach, but political activism? Reform? Revolution? America ended up with the South. The French ended up with the Terror, and then Napoleon. Look at that Solzhenitsyn asshole--dude wails about the horrors of Soviet Russia and the gulag. With good reason. He certainly got the short end of that stick. Then, barely a decade after the Wall and he's ubercreepster KGB-man Bad Vlad's BFF, yodeling about pan-Slavic unity, just one more Orthodox crypto-Czarist on his deathbed. If I ever joined a revolution and, Titans forbid, turned out to have picked the winning side, I'd become just as much a blood-drinking monster as the current gang. It's a lifetime's work to look at things the way they are without bothering to change them. If you're going to risk your life, risk it on a black hole or something else truly useful, or entirely purposeless, which are often synonymys in my dictionary.