Commenting on the French Revolution, somebody-or-other said it was still "too soon to tell". I find myself agreeing with that more and more, along with a dawning realization that constitutional democracy sort of came into being alongside banking, which made it possible to buy votes and governments. I know the arrival of the billionaire industrialists was the end of America as a land of free and private farmers. I know that the liberalism we claim as our heritage is a privilege afforded by the same extreme affluence that makes it so easy for us to devolve into apathy, sloth, and narcissism... what allows us to value life so highly also tempts us to care nothing for community or civic virtue.
I feel that since 2001 we have been living in an age of post-history. Reason and enlightenment and free press and the informed populace it is supposed to prop up... it's officially dead. Nothing to see here, folks. The golden age is over and the darkness will be fast upon us. I think it will be a sort of drab, stupid, stultifying darkness, though... a slow roast apocalypse of idiocy while we ride the dying momentum of the squandered wealth our ancestors left us to while away the hours of our squandered future.
My only problem is that this is the kind of conversation I usually find myself trying to make on a first date.
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