Who did it? I mean, the thing, with the oppressive vibe in the air and everyone feeling worse and worse, and right-wing dominance slowly rolling like a fat play-doh tsunami across the backs of the good people, who all feel frozen?
Who was it?
No one. You didn't do anything. We didn't do anything. It just happened. Didn't we shower ourselves with stars? Didn't we charge it all to our credit cards? At christmastime, they bought us transformers and cabbage patch kids. Plastic toys, petroleum byproducts, the ultimate ritual celebration of an oil glut won by military might.
We handed ourselves a crumbling standard of living long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, when we ate at the fast food chain and shopped at the big box store because it was so convenient and what's the difference, anyway?, gutting our microeconomies. Now the streets have been swept of vendors and small-time hustlers and mom and pop stores that are the real blood and the cavernous concrete blocks that replaced them are empty. Oh look, there's a new bank on the corner.
The American Dream, Everything's Going To Be Hunky Dory Forever, it's not that petrocollapse was going to kill and bury it, and we all frolic in the woods picking huckleberries, it's more that the Dream will live on like a horrible undead cyborg kept preserved by glistening video games and leisure technology, and the vast majority of us will collapse inward, living low-maintenance lives of the mind as the cement walls rot.
How the hell was this going to end any other way when horrible new englanders are bitching and moaning about offshore wind farms being an eyesore?
This is America and we are indolent and woke up too late. I'm so angry at Reagan and Bush, Sr. and american christianity for keeping me asleep for the first half of my life.