The Era of Hope is Dead

It has come down to this. Our political system has failed us repeatedly, given us error upon error of common sense. Corporations are considered worthy of the rights of Man, given the keys to the kingdom and the hen house. Without conscience, or remorse (unless monetary) these eyeless, soulless creatures (or cretins) devour everything in sight. K-Mart fucks Martha Stewart Living and produces a new wardrobe. Wal-Mart and Sony Records have a love tyrst, though no surviving albums reach the Billboard Charts. Ronald McDonald has pedophilic urges for the boys and girls desirous of his throbbing Happy Meals, while Burger King gives blow-jobs to migrant workers in the fields.

Life takes Visa now, but still dabbles in cold, hard cash and overdraft fees. We are little more than grist for the mill, being slowly devoured by creatures with little more than a board of directors for a brain. These heartless beings deploy marketing campaigns to convince us of their benign intentions, masking their lascivious smiles and leering eyes with warmth and compassion. Nothing is safe. All is lost. All is vanity and the presumption of fairness is a ruse used to offer us a chance at salvation and a house with the white picket fence and two and a half kids, when in reality we are bought and sold on the NYSE like so many products and commodities. Our futures, the meaningful lives we were meant to be living, are traded along with petroleum reserves and oranges.

But don't worry: Hope is on the way. A new shining face, another rising star in the political realm will save us all from the demons of the night. But lo, he is fated to go supernova, his message of change splurted out on the sheets like so many drunken revelers at an orgy. Brand D and Brand R scramble for control of the reins of power, while the tired, the poor, the downtrodden become ever more so. Little changes, but the faces and the names. The rules stay the same and that old refrain from the Who wafts over the air: "Meet the new boss; same as the old boss."

And still, we make up new myths by which to live, giving undue influence to charlatans and hacks from Alaska, real Americans in pickups driving around the back country roads of the real America. And each night we tune in for more of the same from the big three corporate news agencies telling us what to think, what to believe. There is no hope for us, the damned. Nothing and no one can save us from ourselves. We are lost.