Going down slow

I have had my fun, if I never get well no more.
All my health is failin on me, oh yes, I'm goin down slow.

Please, write my mama, tell her the shape I'm in.
Please, write my old mother, tell her the shape I'm in.
Tell her to pray for me, forgive me for my sin.


-Howlin' Wolf-


Conservative financier though I may be, I'm always condemned as a Liberal by those whose ignorance, superstition and general malice has been packaged and sold as Conservatism. I'm also told that I'm cheering for America's defeat because I so often seem to be pointing to evidence that our current course will soon take us on the rocks. It wouldn't be at all surprising then if I were indeed gloating over the slow motion shipwreck that is sinking our financial institutions one by one, just as I've been predicting all these years, and for the very reasons I've given. I'm not, of course, gloating over all the suffering Republican preoccupations have been causing and will likely cause much more of. It would, I fear, take a disaster of gigantic proportions to wake them from their idiocies just enough to notice that we're not in prosperity any more. It's the rest of America that needs to know that we're taking on water faster than the pumps can handle and listing ever further to starboard. It's not Palin's daughter, it's not small town values, it's not Gay marriage, it's not selling oil leases off Florida - it's the economy, stupid. It's what the crooks and the gibbering Jeezmongers have done to the economy.

The credit crisis now has Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Merril Lynch following on the heels of Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae while the universe of public and private debt expands on a cosmic scale. It's the economy, stupid and if it can be fixed at all after 8 years of Bush's Animal House party weekends, it won't be fixed by people who brag that ""The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should" and tell us he would rely on Greenspan while Greenspan is calling him a bungler. It won't be fixed by some corrupt small town mayor who doesn't actually know what Freddy Mac is or who owns it. and most of all it won't be fixed by candidates cramming freaky-fringe religious rubric down our throats and lying like unholy hell about what their positions were last week.

Flag pins won't save us, nor pledges nor patriotic songs, in fact the nitwit nationalism growing like a cancer in America is a part of the problem, but it's the economy and we are stupid, or preoccupied or afraid to admit just how deluded we have become since Reagan convinced all the idiots to vote Republican. They're still championing the same nonsense that blew the hole in our hull and they're still lying about what they said and did only months ago. The Republicans are still telling us it's all right, that the termite eaten structure of our economy is sound. To me it's a bit like telling the Titanic passengers that land is only three miles away -- straight down.

No, I'm not gloating, but if I'm dreaming that the earth will open up and swallow the people who perpetrated the sell-off of our birthright and our future, I think I can be forgiven.