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Close.Interesting word. Depending on how you pronounce it, you can be zeroing in on your target, or missing it altogether.
Denmark closed its borders. Minnesota closed its doors. Stauss-Kahn is closer to freedom. And the Greatest Depression is getting closer every day.
You can be a closer and get brownie points at work. Or you can be a closer and be the last man out when the factory shuts down. Kind of the opposite of a Wally Mart greeter.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades, but we all love to get close to our significant squeezes.
A lot depends on what preposition you put with it, too. Close up, close down, close in, close out, close to, close with. Close the door, close to the door.
Back to Strauss-Khan for a minute. Looks like the New York prosecutors read this column, since they have decided, as we did some time ago, that the whole 'raping chamber maids' story didn't smell right. Last we saw, he had slipped his house arrest, and the maid was headed for deeper water. What's interesting to note is that as soon as a new head of the IMF was beknighted and ensconsed, Strauss-Khan found himself quite a bit freer. We're smelling a different rat now. This story got more exposure than Lady Gaga's not-so-interesting breasts, and now they're all standing at the boarding gate waving him good-bye? C'mon. Do you really think we're that stup...don't answer that.
Speaking of reading this here column, looks like Wisconsin schools are suddenly flush with money after they put the reins on unions. Did we call it, or didn't we? We have nothing against unions, per se. At the time they were in vogue, they served a vital purpose. However, they have become nothing more than fronts for mafia and gangsters, fat and bloated from their own success.
On top of that, the public service is no place for unions. If you want better pay and bennies, get a real job in the productive sector, so your servants to rob you too. Sorry, bub, but when you are living off of my dime, you should be grateful to have food on your plate in the first place.
We here at LFS are all for screwing the corporate giants. Lord knows they've bent us over for far too long. But government employees work for us and take our money (at gun point) to do it. Collective bargaining on their part should be limited to begging to keep their jobs every fiscal year.
In other news, Texas closes the legislative special session by allowing TSA to get too close to your goodies. That the Perry/Dewhurst team are a traitorous bunch of NeoCon scum is obvious, but what do they have on the rest of the servants in Austin that makes them lapdogs?
How anyone could submit to TSA's illegal and immoral groping is beyond us, much less willingly allow their wives and daughters to be personally violated in such a gross and public manner is indicative of mass psychosis.
Obviously, the American male has closed down his higher reasoning and is close to being extinct.
Washington state has closed its tourist bureau and is close to a Minnesota Mambo itself. Florida has enclosed pink slips with many of its public servants' payslips. Many states are closing schools and libraries, and California is close to splitting in two. At the same time, the US is no closer to a solution to its fiscal stupidity.
Many countries are closing parts of the internet to their citizens because it represents a direct threat to the hegemonic sovereignty of government over every aspect of people's lives. They are using the threat of cyberwar as justification, yet those same governments are the perpetrators of the cyberwar. Makes close to no sense, or does it? Perhaps they need more bandwidth to launch their idiocy into cyberspace? Gives a whole new meaning to the term, "Grow a backbone."
Every day we move closer and closer to the inexorable demise of the prevailing paradigm. We are in a bus careening down a perilous mountain road, completely out of control, and we are wringing our hands over whether the engine oil was recently changed. This is very close to being textbook insanity.
It is akin to organizing a shuffle-board game as the Titanic goes down by the bow. We are hoisting sails in the hopes of gaining speed while the ship's pumps are overwhelmed by the onslaught of water in the ballast. We are tossing out the baby while fretting over the safety of the bathwater.
We love a good metaphor around here.
It's the closing days of Western Empire. Our sun has set and our flag is lowered. We have squandered our moment in history out of sheer greed and avarice. Many say, "The elite would not endanger themselves, so we must stay close to them!" Au contraire. As personal witness, we have seen first-hand the ability of someone who has lost all contact with reality destroy themselves and everyone around them, by being trapped in a model of reality that is flawed at its very core. Closeness to the perpetrators will only hasten the inevitable demise, not protect against it.
Megalomania causes one to envision a personal cloak of invincibility, so that one is blind to the many holes in the armor. Throughout history, we see repeated examples of people drunk with their own success and imagining themselves incapable of error. Just because the ladder of domination has withstood so far, does not mean that the next rung will sustain the weight, or that there is even a next rung at all.
The PIIGS are close to complete implosion. Denmark is withdrawing into its peninsular nest. Gross Britain is anxiously watching the subjects get restless. The US is on the verge of a collapse that will be the grist of history texts for hundreds of years to come.
Even if we stop dead in our tracks, the precipice will continue to move ever closer. Nothing can stop the Laws of Economic Gravity.
As a civilization, we have built a mountain by digging the dirt out from under our feet. No matter how careful we are, we must inevitably fall into the pit, while admiring the product of our cleverness.
When we attend the funeral of a friend, whose profligate lifestyle led to their untimely death, we don't marvel at the tragedy of their passing, we nod our heads in knowing that their choices made the current situation unavoidable. Perhaps we admire their achievements, possibly envy some of their experiences, but we still feel justified that our own reserve leaves us living while they are dead.
The weakness of any paradigm are the assumptions on which it is founded. We have assumed that debt was properity, while closing our eyes to the repeated examples, both personal and historic, that this is not true. Every mouthful of food we take is a mouthful denied to someone else. Every dollar of debt we use is a piece of future properity that we will not have.
Remember the Canadian guy who started the jogging craze? His name was Jim Fixx. He died of a heart attack at 55 while jogging. Brings you close to tears, doesn't it?
As we close this chapter in human history, there will be many who will bemoan its passing, yet the aware person will see that we have carved our own headstone. It is difficult for the individual to conceive of things so much larger than the Self. The scale of our hubris has outstripped our ability to deal with it, even on a conceptual basis.
The hardest thing for humans is to come to grips with their own failure, but if our progeny is to survive, we must do so and quickly. Look at the way the Army Corps of Engineers has fought the flooding Mississippi. Accepting the inevitable flood, they have calculated when and where to release the onslaught.
In dealing with our creation, we must take the biblical advice and pluck out the offending part, in order to save the rest. When a physician is dealing with a gangrenous extremity, his choice is to amputate or risk losing the patient entirely. The climber whose arm was pinned beneath a boulder had only one choice, cut off the arm himself or die.
We are closing in quickly on this singular choice. Will we sacrifice everything to keep the paradigm whole? Or will we chose to amputate the offending parts to spare the more vital systems?
Close. Closer, Closing. Closest.
