Reply #18: It's not DU so much

[Lexingtonian]

though I agree, things used to be more fun here when people had actual conversations and revealed interesting things about themselves. It feels thinner as a community now, but the comradery is/was based in pretty virtual reality in the first place.

But DU is more uncreative and less full of life because, well, the whole country has been degenerating in those respects for three plus years; DU reflects a crosssection of large parts of the society and can't escape the trend. The wealth accumulated during the Clinton days is consumed, the philanthropic optimism and innovation it gave rise to has vanished. The country's business these days consists of making its plutocrats richer, applying itself to killing people in the Middle East, and becoming utterly absorbed in the political conflict about the domestic balance of power.

Just about everything that is going on in public and professional life is radically politicized and turned brutish, and it certainly bleeds over into personal life too. There is a dark cloud over the whole society, and it's that everyone feels their lives being ruined by the domestic conflict. The corporate wealth/power Establishment, whose fate is the essential object of the fighting, of course has the media tell us that the sense of gloom and destruction is All Due To The Terrorists And Saddam Hussein, Well- All Them Ay-rabs.

In short, everything the country is doing is stifled and mediocrity and beside the point. The Presidential election, which demonstrates which side has the majority of people willing to fight and whose stakes are whether the Establishment turns Modern or stays Pre-Enlightenment feudal lords for a while longer, is the epitome and, in some sense, all that is really going on in this country of 290 million people.

It's degrading, really. It's all a waste of four years of every citizen's life because we've all spent the time being held hostage and plundered by the immoralists and the stupid. The good news is that when our side defeats their alliance they're defeated in a historical way- their Party will implode, their social reactionaries will collapse and their faux paganized Christianity they pretend to and their whole medieval European social ideal with it. Their plutocrats will have to accept their confederated kingdoms- their Corporations- being defeated, stripped of privileges, and getting, well, federated with the society rather than parasitizing it.