Our caveman aquarium

~
Tomorrow I'm kicking off two projects, one journalistic and one fictive, and both are geographic: one is about the success of Paris's petite ceinture, the other set mostly on Virgil Avenue.

This has proven to be a highly entertaining presidential election to-date. I think the outcome has already been determined--how else can you explain the nonchalance of one candidate and the desperation and bitterness of the other--but there will certainly be enormous amounts of amusement nearly every day, as nonchalance offsetting desperation makes for great theater. Only one person of the four candidates is really qualified to be president, yet he's become nearly invisible because of all the drama between the three others, who are really more like American Idol figures than presidential candidates. Also, the current president, Karl Rove, and the tragic Clintons continue to meddle with mixed messages every day, making not four candidates but eight, including these four puppetmasters; the not-quite-phantom four are still for nobody but themselves, unwilling to let go even as nearly everyone else wants them to.

What kind of country will it be? One emphasizing arms and war or one promoting culture and intelligence? The former path has turned the American dream into an out of reach nightmare for anyone not willing to sell themselves into corporate slavery, not willing to get into the bracket where they are obliged to give fifty-four percent of their annual tax income to the Pentagon; the latter path is lackluster enough, except that it isn't the former path. One thing is certain: the central fact of all our lives is that we live in a country that is so badly managed that it now spends nearly as much as the entire rest of the world on military expenditures. This for a country that only borders two states, neither hostile to it.

Small and quiet are my own projects. I don't know how else to be in loud, noisy, bellicose America, a country where people are taught first and foremost to exploit each other, and next to exploit everyone else.