The past week has been bewilderingly emotional. We celebrated the start of a wonderful new life, and the ignoble death of a close family member. My boss at work was very understanding and let me go early, and work from home the next day. Whenever someone you love dies, it triggers a load of existential angst (amongst other emotions). But combined with the sense of confusion and astonishment we both feel daily when we listen to the radio, it’s been hard. The USA is a big country, and so it can be very jarring when you hear people, from the same country, talk absolute bollocks. How, now that we have such excellent access to news, journals, books and thoughts, can anyone be so badly…wrong ? The only sensible answer can possibly be brain damage.
The biggest giveaway is the frequency that a well known word is used over here: Freedom.
I work in a building in the “Freedom Business Park”. The building next to ours houses an eatery known as “The Freedom Cafe”. A common soundbyte heard on any news program involves some baseball-cap wearing moron explaining their resons for voting for McCain: “Obama wants to take away our freedom because he’s a Socialist.”
I wish he was a socialist.
Weirdly, the same people who complain about the prospect of losing their freedom, are only too happy to bend over and let the big corporations fuck them up the arse in the name of free market economics.
Anyone from Europe (even from the UK) would be horrified to find out how much Americans pay for gas, leccy, mobile phones, and healthcare. But the stupids here seem to think that because the prices they pay aren’t “tax” means they are free. This is the most subservient, gullible and suggestive nation on earth.
$700bn is enough to sort out all of the health problems of everyone in the world several thousands of times over. So why are we giving it to a bunch of greedy bankers ?
