Ejaculatio Praecox, Once More

American conservatism -- intellectually ascendant during three decades in which relatively low taxes and a stable money supply produced the greatest accumulation of national wealth in history -- is now staring into an abyss. It has been voted to the edge of political irrelevance, assaulted by a European-style budget and overshadowed by a new president of colossal skills and unexpected ambition.

-Michael Gerson

Gerson is cute when he puts on his thinkin' cap. What happened over the last three decades was this. Low fuel costs, improved communication technology, and the political disintegration of a competing economic sphere allowed companies to shift production overseas. Cheaper labor combined with inexpensive transport made it more profitable to build shit there even if the main consumer market remained in America. With the end of an effective labor movement and the decline of productive industry, real wages stagnated, but financial institutions, ever more central to the so-called service economy, made it increasingly easy to obtain credit. The "engine" of the American economy became the consumption of commodities produced cheaply overseas and sold domestically. The financial institutions playing the credit game conceived of a series of increasingly elaborate hoaxes to make what was at root the provision of seemingly limitless IOUs to individuals and businesses regardless of collateral assets or ability to repay seem like a profitable business model. The only major area of non-military domestic production that remained viable and vibrant was the construction of bullshit, half-assed houses in which Jenn-Aire 8-burner ranges and Sub-Zero side-by-sides gave the nouveau riche sheen to 6,000 sq. ft. houses with 4" interior walls and brick on the street-façade only. Successive governments, declaring home-ownership a sort of human right, not to mention patriotic duty, along with their colluders in the Fed, made monetary policy to encourage easy lending and financial institutions folded that in right along with consumer credit to drive a go-go economy of trade-up houses, credit-card purchases, and new cars every 18 months. The Ponzi-themed fantasy-game of infinitely rising home prices made everyone feel richer than they really were. The inevitable point at which the money due would become unrealizable seemed . . . evitable. The stocks of the shell-game players kept rising, buoyed by the titanic confidence of those who believed that cycles and bubbles had been beaten. The foreign nations who sold us greater and greater quantities of oil and produced greater and greater quantities of shit for our domestic markets bought our currency and financed our consumption. The greatest, Babelian tower of horseshit phoney-baloney non-wealth ever in the history of everything anywhere amen hallelujah inshallah was constructed over thirty years in an orgy of bland consumptive excess that would impress in a Satanic sort of way were it not so monumentally crass, asinine, soul-vacating, and chintzy. We were not even good at being gaudy, as the above-mentioned mass-produced mansion and its matching driveway Hummers suggests.

The "greatest accumulation of national wealth in history" was accompanied by the greatest accumulation of national debt, and when the payables exceed the receivables it is wise to reconsider your business model, even if day-to-day cash flow means you're still making payroll. There was of course one other major domestic industry that remained productive, and that was the industry of Death, the great Mammon of Defense, the now-in-the-trillions annual expenditure of wealth on maintaining the national capacity to destroy the world. This lovely companion to our cossetted lifestyles was likewise built on a totally faulty premise: that the ability to destroy the world equates with an ability to control it. Our capacity to maintain colonial possessions being somewhat lesser than we imagined it to be, despite the awesome ability of our various cocksucker missile jockeys to blow shit the fuck up, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of looking like loudmouth punks and being broke-ass bitches. Sucks to be you, America! Guys like Gerson view America through the moronic, Trump-like, combed-over gaze, congratulating its gaudy-suited, pin-striped, shiny-tie self on masculine vitality as it buys bottle service for all its bitchiz and roolz up in the club, a three-decade-long, brain-addled, boozified, crunkulated, ape-gape, roof-raised, two-turntable fuckwit bridge-and-tunnel courtship that has finally stumbled with its big-titted, probably-a-tranny conquest back to the charge-plate penthouse suite wherein, thishasneverhappenedbeforebaby, America's teeny weeny peenie shoots its paltry load all over the inside of its Calvins before she can even loosen America's fucktarded Regis Philbin tie.