So it is in 2014 that the Doctors of Doom may be laid to rest in the sweet repose of their composting toilets, survival bunkers stocked with can-o-trail mix and enough fire crackers and Grand Pa’s 12 gauge shells to provide a heady amount of grave items, Emergency Essential food grade buckets filled with viscera carefully removed, eyes and brains candied and placed in jam jars placed next to the pickles and preserves that had been there already from some previous canning session circa 1987, stocks of gold trinkets and intended trade items all assembled for their journey to the after life where they will opine on Peak Fire and Brimstone, and the Ponzi scheme that is Heaven, what with the bonds that were taken out to build the Pearly Gates (or Gates of Hell) being bundled and sold to middle investors in Purgatory, a neatherworld of spirits that exists or does not depending on what Vatican Council or Papal Bull or Vicar or dead atheist scientist has pronounced.
It has indeed been a ride. A long ride from the crash of Wall Street, seeing assets vanish in a cloud of debt, watching the Middle Class lay low, listening time and again about new numbers and benchmarks not seen “Since the Depression” except that while the comparisons to the Depression abounded in the media, and sundry Doomers predicted riot and rapine, we did not get an FDR, nor a LBJ but a BHO who gave us a politically correct more liberal-y version of the same trickle down Chicago school bullshit we had been happily eating as dog-poo mud pies for thirty years except that by “politically correct” we got the NSA and dido war by “liberal” we got the classical Liberal that is the politics of Gladstone which by today’s standards we would call Conservative, if not downright preparing us for a modest proposal and workhouses except indeed Irish children are far too stringy to make a good meat pie and we have already outsourced the workhouses to the charming vistas and low valleys of the Third World.
But it is the Doomer and all h/i/er/s prognostics that have fallen flat, a face palm of digital proportions. It seems that in the heady days of 2008-2009 when the world seemed pregnant with all potential melt-downs and clusterfucks, when it seemed that as friend after friend lost their job with benefits and friends with benefits to be replaced with menial labour or long-term unemployment, house after house was repossessed, entire sections of my own town papered up by notices by the Sheriff that the property was impounded by armies of Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton lookalikes. The keystokes pounded out angry belle letters and maladroit missives recording and analyzing how bankers made off with foundation endowments and old-lady-cat-food-money that we all were to see the end of America as we knew it, that the system was going to implode, finally, truly, completely and that this mad ride of wars and corporate profits, massive changes in society and technology, costs of oil inputs and gas exports, rice at Costco, condoms at Walmart, that all of this would come to a crashing burning itching flaring nasty end but in that end, some of us proposed, we would as The Phoenix (not the band that keeps finding its way into my playlists on Pandora) would rebuild another world. And for a time, it seemed that this would be the case, that the End Was Neigh and we neeeded not even make those sandwich board signs saying such we saw in yea so many New Yorker Cartoons or Mad Magazine of such-and-such a vintage but could just let the chaos take its course and sort out the Just and the Unjust in a very millennial-protostant-sorta-way.
And so it was that a network of bloggers took the to the blogwaves and ranted and raved, this author included, dear reader. As the bottom dropped out of so many lives, the fortunes of Everyman plummeted, and the smug bankers and neo-aristorats lined up at the trough of money, digital barbs and clever puns, posted broadsides, mawkish meditations and more than enough spider-ed images with sublime captions as so many private citizens turned netizen digital journalists hurled their version of bricks and incendiary devices little pointed verb modifiers and verb-ed nouns and more than enough gerunding. It was the barricades of our generation, a generation that for the first time gathered peaceniks of the Vietnam War vintage, college students graduated and jobless, and every age in between as well as spectrum of politics together in one seething. Doom was an insurrection against the rotten system that had been ever more becoming more stinky nasty dirty ick and in some ways was shoving its member up our own collective colon and those who wrote knew nothing else to do but take it and rage away one blog at a time. Having read post after post, prediction and isolated evaluations of the situation, several people split into camps and took on their own philosophical schools as to how exactly we were being Fucked, by whom, how frequently, and with what speed of vigor. This became a genera in-to-of-itself and in some belated retrospect a shiver of regret shudders through my spine as I consider to wit how much time I have lost in spending hour upon hour watching documentaries on our Fucked, interviews with people who knew the Fuckers, and articles and blogs documenting or itemizing the Fucking we were taking. To the end, I became no more versed in the financial Kama Sutra, I was just ever more angry and sardonic, filled with spite and rage, knowing that my poo shute was red and raw from this or that governcporproment entity or individual Master of the Universe, that the system had become corrupt and crazy but there was nothing I could do, since the crimes against us came to light after the fact, the people and entities who did it were too big to fail, I and everyone I knew was powerless to stop, prevent another encounter, or redress whatever crime had befallen us. So we ranted on. And to this body of work issuing itemized reports of the crimes of the financial world, the fake wars, the false spikes in raw materials (anyone remember the copper spike?), the moment it seemed the Euro was going to replace the Dollar, the daily bad news and rise in screweditude, the time gas went up like 40 cents in a week, the edge we stood near as this or that upper manager further was bestowed a bonus or other award, that the camps dug in and Doom was born following the Dig In or Bug Out as those extreme events continued and the ranks of unemployment and foreclosure grew and no event was too crazy for us to endure and we had to open our mind to the possibility that we could fall into Road Warrior or some totalitarian state or the United States would split up into various nations all using energy in various ways that looked like Steampunk but smelled more like Little House on the Prairie… if we could smell what life on the frontier actually smelled like. Then, Hopie Changie came to town. And he seemed Hopie and Changie, real full of this stuff, like it dripped off him in big gobs and sploodges.
And then He was elected. The First [half] Black President (TFBP) and for a moment some of the more main stream Doomers took a deep breath.
And some Doomers waited.
And other Doomers continued to say “hey man the system is so broken you can take your TFBP and shove him cause, like, we got this one.” This camp may have liked BHO but still affirmed they liked their EOTWAWKI better and this SHTF would arrive on time and according to the Prophecy at the conjunction of the three suns or some such shit. And some waited for Hope and Glory, and others waited for Doom and Gloom. Bankers punished or system exploded.
And, both were, deeply, deeply, deeply…. disappointed.
The Hoppie Changites were delivered Bush Lite, which is ironic because he is TFBP but never let the package inform the message or something something can’t change the base without altering the superstructure…. or can’t stop the rain on my window sill….
The TFBP crowd was let down for seeing the system continue, as well as continue to expand which was like say what? How is He doing this? Didn’t He say such n such when He spoke, didn’t flowers spill from his mouth and He spoke of all manner of wonderful things? However, things have looked entirely the same… except your mortgage is now serviced by some Bancorp you never heard of, your student loans have passed hands more times than a cheerleader at homecoming game kegger (there is an alter boy version of this too), and your 401k looked like you would have had more luck gambling and doing blow with hookers since you’d at least have had more fun burning your way through your kids inheritance/money you needed for your old age. The banks were paid off. The corporations paid in full. The leaders of those who caused this entire mess, ignored. Business as usual continued, albeit with a few more minorities and women at the helm proving they are indeed equal to Dead White Men, since they seem to enjoy the same gated communities, country clubs, and benefits as those Old Boys in their Network. The rest of us boobies got to fight over the crumbs, focus on “social issues” and otherwise mope about. Some kept going with their Faith in Uncle O and his closure of Gitmo, his commitment to Main Street, his investing in kids cause the little cunts are our future and shit, and his helping the little guy, but puppet is as puppet does and it doesn’t matter who sits on the throne in the White House since that role is more like Queen Elizabeth, a Constitutional Presidency whereby the leader has a ceremonial role and gets a few cool palaces and a couple of peace awards created by dynamite barons but otherwise cannot change the system already set in place… Something like base blah blah blah superstructure… blah blah blah worker’s consciousness… revolution or you can’t change one ingredient and expect the entire cake to taste differently.
The convinced Doomers also stuck to their guns, and by that I mean beans, bunkers, and bullets for years into the rule of Uncle O and His Corporations. Many Doomers – this one included, looked to certain signs that we were to head to collapse. This or that blip and fart in the economic data indicated that we had reached a point where the tipping point from that book of the same name mentioned after a few chapters to set up the concept, and that we were to see that tipping point in a week or in a month and this tip would tip us over The Tip Abyss and tip into so many tip tribes ruled by tip people who had figured out how to hook sails to motorcycles and ride about using the wind and how to pillage villages using organic renewable violence and take our dry pork products and vacuum packed we saved in said food grade buckets along with the beans, rice, and magical dry ice cream eaten by astronauts on one of the 1980s space stations that when you added water, tasted like the memory of your most disappointing childhood moment.
With reports of a recovery and so much data to move us there we see several things. First, we see that the Powers That Be (TPTB) are dynamic and like the Matrix can shift and change as needed. The system has found out how to self-replicate. They need money, they print it. And this is new, and won’t lead to some 1920s Weimar Republic thingy because history does not repeat itself. The technology is different, the world is different and those who cling to old metaphors to describe new things continue to add the suffix scandals with “gate” or don’t toss their shoes at the TeeVee when the “reporters” use the term like “bridgegate” or journalismisdeadgate. We can see all the money the system needs printed and not see collapse.
As a replacant the system is a perpetual motion a machine that like Skynet will defend itself even after the original creators are gone. Hence, Uncle O is strapped into a machine not of his own making, but he becomes part of the code, as it were. This system is here for good, or at least our lifetimes. It will resist change from all levels and with each increasingly fat and sassy generation will meet less and less resistance. Or is that fewer? Doom had come and gone since we cannot anymore predict an event that won’t happen. No revolution. No jobless marching here and there. No Occupy Toilets and certain named storms. No dollar shitting the bed. No one day you wake up and the world has changed. It changed. Long ago, and you are powerless to change it back or push it forward. The majority of us are corks on the ocean, and it is far larger and deeper than we little things can ever imagine.
To this we must consider the next evolution of Doom. The next step in TEOTWAWKI when we know TWBACIOLTSWMDWI (there won’t be any change in our lifetime so we must deal with it).
What it means to deal with a system that continues to grow and feed, that cannot be stopped, we will need to individually consider as we must consider what it means when corruption, war, and economic inequality have become the new American Way, the new American Dream. This blogger understands that time has run out on Doom. It is Doomgate, a stale and elderly trope. We must now look at this new leviathan – Skynet perhaps a good term – and understand that we cannot resist, occupy, protest, or vote that this energy won’t be corrupted or harnessed and used to power The System. So beans, bullets, and bunkers? Or need we find another alliteration?