Post-Election Nightmare

With the Devil safely back in his pen, the world seems a chirpier and more certain place. No, this is not an ironic comment. With the Republicans in power, hastening the collapse and furthering the divides, at least we know where we are, and the battle lines are clear cut. Some of my Democrat friends are bad tempered, even tearful as the Right march on to ascertain the extinction of society as we would like it to be. But have they no imagination ? Have they not read science fiction ?

Science fiction is a genre I have always loved, as it makes guesses about the future and then improvises a plot based on a world different from our own. The comfort of even the darkest sci-fi is that it presumes an existance beyond the contemporary. The mistake of sci-fi is that technological developments rely on economic continuity, and this is an assumption which, looking at the dearth of basic natural resources, just is not going to happen.

The Democrats would have preserved capitalism in a fluffier less brutal way, and BIG BUSINESS would have had to increase it’s PR budget under them, but that’s about it. Renounce greed and squander profit ? No way. American capitalism is the dominant force for good, evil and otherwise. It may relatively soon be superceded by Chinese capitalism, but for the moment, it’s the winner in a race of one.

People think that the human world will develop (advance, even) without the collapse of capitalism’s strangehold on the ecosphere, but I can’t see it. Western politics of all shades is funded by and props up Corporations, and so it shall be, world without end, Amen, until we humans are a species without a grain of food to eat or a drop of water to drink, sharing the planet with rats, cockroaches and flies, on our knees and praying for God to come and save us from what we have done.

If I sound depressed, and cynical, I’m not. Know your enemy is my message.

To indicate my lack of bias, here’s how four British papers reacted, two left, two right.

I particularly like the way that The Independent has illustrated the moral hypocrisy of the Bush administration. But I wonder whether it would have been so illustrative had there been a less abrasive, Europhile, apologetic Democrat White House incumbent during this incredible period of blatant human abuse.