The Extrinsic Finality of the Union

Obviously nothing that Barack Obama or the Republican whatsisface who offered the rebuttal or whatever said was interesting in any particular. We are going to build a wind-powered nuclear factory that will cut the deficits of the future today in order that some dead kid not have sacrificed in vain, in America. What I am interested in is the weird teleology, which holds all of us, each and every one, to be slaves of the future. I mean, I am all for some modest sense of stewardship in the name of The Children until the asteroid hits, but if you listen to what these nutcases are really saying, if you consider the framework in which their platitudinous oratory sags like a poorly girded floor, it is effectively that each human life is a prison term; that within the global gulag we must toil relentlessly to dig the ditches for our jailers, who are the succeeding generations. But of course, each succeeding generation is in turn enslaved by the next, and they in turn by that which follows, and so on and so on, until at last some impossibly distant Stapledonian starfucker looks over his diaphonous shoulder, checks us all up and down, bats his dark eyes quickly, and sniffs off in the other direction, like the prettiest boy in the bar.