well, i'd rather be intelligently depressed, than blissfully ignorant, no way back to that, since blogging came to stay.

you speak the fears we rarely dare to name, de, and i for one am very grateful.

i gave a rosy-with-the-light-of-spring vote of 25%, normally i would be in the last category.

america is a mostly (sorta) educated country, with a lot of people who share a generously healthy dose of what passes for common sense these days. they are also liguistically and technologically connected in ways that are beginning to seriously subvert the rich capitalist white boys-with-token-minorities status quo. i can't believe they will stay under the radar for long, let alone ever.

as many have pointed out, like howard dean, fr'example, WE have the power, and could bring the truman show crashing down with a general strike as crowbar. add ghandi-level civil disobedience, and 'they' have to show the exceedingly ugly and unjustifiable cards left in their hand.

they do not seem to have any problems with doing so, and persuading vassal states like europe to go along, overtly or covertly, but sooner or later they will have to go too far domestically, another kent state, for example, or some scamdal-du-jour will be the last straw....wtc traced back to the WH would qualify, or some other 'terrorist attack' and the removal of all civil liberties, or....take yer pick, the list is long!

the whole ball of wax is so totally unsustainable it's a stone miracle it's holding together at all.

if the usa is 'asked' to give up too much empire too quickly, the yes, it's back under the covers again...spent most of my mental life there anyway, so used to that funk...

if we did muddle through though, i'd find it more dignified to have done a little more than that to help bring it about, so right now i'm clinging like a polar bear to a melting ice spar to the comforting illusion that the space brethren are watching o'er us....or that dkos' readership will quantum leap to 12. 20, 40 million readers and suddenly a gaggle of inspired populists will break loose, form a new 'grown-ups' party, led by a cross between bill moyers, jim hightower, amy goodman, and studs terkel, with a dash of bonnie raitt for added colour....hemp will be legalised, and people will chill, working 20 hour weeks and swapping dvds on bittorrent, and leaving 'success' behind, releasing the inner slacker and realising if everyone was a bikeriding vegan there would be no need for resource wars and we could all stay home and play donkey kong, or piano, or a novel blend of both...and the oil would never run out because hemp grew in every ditch and alley, and thc had located and uploaded to every cannabinoid receptor still single..

and the earth snored on in untroubled slumber...while we silly humans did what we do best....how did kurt put it...just fart around?

being goofy and prolonging the ecstasy

ecstasy |?ekst?s?| noun ( pl. -sies) 1 an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement : there was a look of ecstasy on his face | they went into ecstasies over the view. See note at rapture . 2 chiefly archaic an emotional or religious frenzy or trancelike state, originally one involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence. 3 ( Ecstasy) an illegal amphetamine-based synthetic drug with euphoric and hallucinatory effects, originally promoted as an adjunct to psychotherapy. (abbr.: MDMA) .ORIGIN late Middle English (sense 2 ): from Old French extasie, via late Latin from Greek ekstasis `standing outside oneself,' based on ek- `out' + histanai `to place.'

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty