Future Hocks

My only hope is that the big Lebowski kills me before the Germans can cut my dick off.

If you think that the passing decade saw America at its full, retarded apotheosis, then I say you've got another thing coming. As much as the stench of rot emanates from the cracks in our civilization's crumbling sidewalks, we remain in truth the preeminent smasher-upper of things on this, the good Lord's blighted garden, and though it is now fashionable to imagine the Chinese dashing past us in the home stretch, it will be a long time indeed before they manage to extricate themselves from the lumbering pas-de-deux in which they lend us the money that we use buy their goods, thus returning said money to their national coffers in an infernal economic perpetual motion machine that, though a fraud like all perpetual motion machines, is a damned good and durable one.

At last count, we were admittedly, openly, actively engaged in offensive military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, with a fifth, Somalia, a not-so-distant memory, and our government's media interlocutors are hastily prepping the ground for the further expansion of our china shop routine to Muslim Africa. Worrywort liberal technocrats of the Krugmanite variety worry endlessly that we are a civilization on the decline because our most recognizeable national symbol has horribly metaporphosed from the eagle clutching the fasciae to the Sam's-Club fatass using her cart less as a receptacle for purchases, more as a makeshift walker as she wheezes in diabetic near-catatonia from frozen, fifteen-pound bags of denatured chicken parts to palattes of quadruple-ply toilet paper, but as the saying goes, this is a feature, not a bug. While good progressive types bray that the traitorous Obama econ team is feverishly working to reinflate the bubble, as if Larry Summers et alia were unaware of their own project, from my cheap seats it seems the perfectly reasonable thing to do, if indeed your ultimate goal is the maintenance of a vast, underliterate, overweight, edge-of-poverty, reactionary, religious, chauvinistic, bovine, compliant, wage-slave comsumer class down whose ever-hungry gullets you can shove ever more crap in order to fund the vast and indifferent engine of hegemony. Do you think America is going to get any less fat and stupid over the next ten years? Whyever so, when precisely that society has so well served the interests of expansionism? I was in a Wal-Mart last week and saw a man the size of seventeen of me zipping around in a Rascal. On the back-end of the seat was the old, familiar bumper sticker. "These Colors Don't Run!"