Are You All Right?

by paradox

Shark month has always been an excruciating annual American political evolution that even no junkie should put him or herself through, and although I was wise enough for once to basically stay out of it (a few raised middle fingers here and there, that’s all) I did once again bear witness to the ever-alarming detached absurdity of it from babbling officials, ridiculous bombastic liars on the national mall, and poll numbers which the good E.D. Kain of Balloon Juice charitably described as “frightening.” Welcome to the recovery.

Such is the phrase facilitating two very well-earned knifings of our awful leadership this morning, but before I get to that what’s truly troubling and motivating me is a horribly baffling American political and cultural phenomena more baked into the United States psyche every day: how brutally tough and unfeeling we are becoming as a people.

Unemployment and endless militaristic war are mercilessly grinding millions of our people down to lives of endless fear, deprivation and misery. Even if there is an awareness among public officials what an endless horror show it can be to lose a career—meaning self-identity, the ability to keep a roof and eat, for piffling starters—it’s still just time to whistle along as we kick some Al Qaeda ass and act like we’re doing something for the little people with a small business bill.

What’s happened to our people in DC? I don’t know. I do not know how they don’t see and comprehend what’s so screamingly obvious to every other ordinary American, that a career and job are the cornerstone to any kind of meaningful life, without good jobs for most of our people everything else America can and might possibly be just never happens. Misery and awful endless pain are the “freedoms” they hate us so for when you’re out of work, why are we putting our people through this when it’s so easy to be vastly better?

Treasury Secretary Geithner smashed the new brutal boot of American toughness into our faces—while simultaneously humiliating liberals and the Democratic Party--earlier this summer by proclaiming with the amazing confidence of the utterly clueless that the legions of good Americans who did so well for decades but who are now losing everything in an agonizing slowness that look, dudes, we’ll set you up with a new career skill set and our emerging global economy of benign goodness will deliver America again. Seriously.

What an insulting fantasy, as if little people Americans couldn’t figure out in two seconds that no entity was going to magically appear to give them year’s worth of training or education, let alone that there’d be a job market after the Treasury Fairy fed the kids during the great time of re-skilling. What the message every little people American instantly got was to hell with your life and country, all it’s worth is bullshit fantasy about your precious core values and existence, get used to the brutal reality of never having it come back. Fast.

To those who have lost their jobs and hope seems but a very distant memory, all I can say is that I am so deeply, deeply sorry. Are you all right?

I don’t know when generally things are going to get better. I don’t know why our leadership stopped caring and got so frightfully mean. We were not this brutal and unfeeling when I was growing up, things have changed horribly fast, and I’m just so sorry.

This impossible reality has of course spurned the furious much-discussed uproar within the Democratic Party, shark month all the way all the time, to which we were again all humiliated as Americans when David Axelrod minced over to Politico August 23rd and anonymously (right) mouthed the mush that the campaign was in many ways premised on the idea that people wanted to stop some of the ‘80s and ‘90s that made a lot of noise but not a lot of progress.

You think I’m stupid, David. Anyone with a modicum of political sense knows and hears David Axelrod behind those quotes with a Gun’s Roses intensity.

There’s the utter horseshit of the utterly clueless again, the “noise” of the 80’s and 90’s was the Republican Party and enabling media beating the shit out of liberals and Democrats.

What really drives the knife home, Mr. Axelrod, is the fear and cowardice by hiding with anonymity, the disgusting stance of obsequiousness to what should be core values. Not only are you vastly wrong, you’re laughably weak and malleable with core beliefs like that, which of course the Republicans instantly know. Even you know it, David, otherwise you wouldn’t hide.

For those who have lost and are losing everything total political failure like that will only deliver more years of misery in the wilderness, if one makes it all, and I have no answers, only sorrow and the plaintive question of are you all right? Maybe when our people in DC remember what it feels like to ask things will change. If somehow we become much less tough, brutal and unfeeling.