[PEN-L:781] Re: I told you so. II

[valis <valis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth Stalkin' Tom Walker, in part:

> Crisis? What crisis?
>
> If "the crisis" is a public relations crisis, perhaps for the time being it
> -- and golfing season -- is over.
                     .........................................
> Instead of the spectacle of a bubble bursting, I would listen for the sound
> of someone sitting on a extremely large and seemingly inexhaustible whoopee
> cushion.

Great rap, Tom, but you'd have to swallow a python and barf tofu patties
to wake up this list; I believe it's emotionally exhausted, damn near
clinically depressed, in fact, from entertaining a minute-to-minute
expectation of systemic collapse since the day the ruble went south,
subjective eternities ago.

Just as well; if it _does_ unmistakably occur, with household names
galore jetting off to rendezvous with their numbered bank accounts, etc,
in what sense would the members of this list be able to seize the moment?
What could they offer workers who realize that something must be changed,
but also don't want to spend the next 30 years haggling with bureaucrats
for an extra roll of toilet paper?

Eric Sommer, a brave but alien organizational toiler from the planet PSN,
had the gauche temerity to land here the other day and ask, "Gritty little
details, anyone?"  I could be wrong, but I think he wants to work out _an
actual program_ for the time and place where the rubber meets the road,
that is, for members of the class that I, in my despair, have pretty well
written off.  Something beyond academic banter, he asks: Oh, silly fellow,
that would be a revolution right there.  But to imagine such a thing is,
I'm convinced, as mad as expecting something other than guffaws and racing
pulses in a pre-teen sex education class.  It's just asking too much.

Anyone for some field work in Chiapas?  Remember Chiapas?
                                                                   valis


     "The people can have anything they want.  The trouble is,
      they do not want anything.  At least they vote that way
      on election day."
                                               -- Eugene Debs