Exhaust Fumes

Camus said that beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. This is a fairly easy thing for me to believe; I have discovered that the more fully I become aware of the world around me the more anxious and dissatisfied I become. Age-old questions to which there have never been answers are bothering me now as they have other contemplatives for thousands of years, and no more progress has been made on them than on alternative energy. Questions as to the proper nature and application of the sexes, the formula of happiness, or the dilemma of a universal morality. For millennia we have considered ourselves civilized, but why? Because we cleverly crafted the spear, then the rifle, then the bomb? Because we have developed vast systems of subjugation from which there is no escape? Because we promote our own ways insistently and ethnocentrically, labeling our culture as “high culture” and crushing any who refuse to be indoctrinated?
I say that no man can be considered civilized for as long as he eats well and another goes hungry. I say that no man can be civilized whose home was built by the homeless. I find myself wondering what the hell we are doing presuming to tell anyone how to run their countries, trying to “spread democracy” and all that bullshit when we haven’t even proved that the system works yet. The Iraq war itself is symptomatic enough of that, that democracy served the intentions of the president before those of the people or even of the Congress. This isn’t even anything new, although usually it is not so blatant when government gets its purposes reversed. Often it is something subtle, like taking some shavings off the civic budget for an inflated paycheck, or jumping in a businessman’s pocket to keep the market’s “invisible hand” a little lighter, but it has been going on for pretty much as long as we’ve been used to the Constitution enough to exploit, ignore, and insult it.
The best part is that politicians have created an impression among the people that there is nothing wrong with this, that government naturally functions this way. We’re supposed to watch the president get waited on hand and foot twenty minutes away from where his constituents are living in one of the nation’s hardest ghettos and ask no questions about our tax dollars and our healthcare and our rights and our government’s duties to us. Here we are, in today’s world, preaching our old nationalistic doctrines of capitalism and democracy, claiming to be the greatest nation in the world when we are only the laziest, the most pathetic and squalid, the nation which could’ve been great and gave it up to chase its own money. We are not the strongest nation in the world economically. We are not the strongest nation in the world militarily. We are not the smartest nation in the world, we are not the hardest working nation in the world, and we are not the happiest nation in the world. Apparently, we’ve been wasting breath on over fifty years worth of Americanized rhetoric insisting on the superiority of capitalism and the folly of socialists, because the socialist nations in Europe have been showing us up. We even had an 150 year head start on some of these nations, that only recently restructured their countries after the world wars, and they’ve managed to pass us by in terms of quality of life, even though we’ve been exercising our precious Constitution for such a long time.
It’s not that the Constitution “doesn’t work,” it’s that we won’t let it anymore; we think we’re far too clever and see every gap and loophole as an opportunity to rape the intent of the founding fathers by seizing for ourselves a scrap more of wealth and influence. Even trying to fix and amend the Constitution we are making it worse. Why do we ask for amendments regarding same sex marriage when no one is looking to do anything about poverty and hunger? What matters more? Who gives a fuck about the sanctity of marriage if your average couple isn’t eating? All our focus is misdirected and none of our intentions are noble. We didn’t go to Iraq as liberators, but as beggars thirsty for oil. If we truly gave a fuck about human rights and the dignity of our species and the spread of “civilization,” where was our liberating army during apartheid, as Mandella sat in a cell for forty years? Maybe fucking over Africans is becoming a tradition for our government.