Strange Times

The Dow lost another five hundred points today, and it dipped below 9,500, which was, or so an expert on CNBC said, the point of resistance. In the last two days the Dow has lost nearly 900 points. Over two trillion dollars have been wiped out of retirement accounts. And John McCain says it's time to turn the page on the economy and start talking about something else.

McCain wants to talk about Obama's connections to a sixties radical that liked to explode bombs. But Obama is having none of it and refers to the Keating Five where McCain got caught up in corruption. Joe Biden is off the scene for awhile so to mourn his mother in laws death, and Sarah Palin has assumed the role of a pit bull with lipstick. She is busy making a fool of herself by winking at the camera and trying to talk folksie so as to attract the vote of the white trash and Joe sixpack. The thought of McCain winning the election is very scary. It's not that he's all that bad, it's just that he might die, and then we would have Sarah Palin as President.

I watched live coverage of her today as she spoke to the choir. She said the right buzz words and the crowd responded as expected. Right on cue they would jeer, and right on cue they would cheer as if it was the first time they'd heard such wisdom. Do they pay those idiots to respond on cue? Do they take the television audience to be fools! Probably so. But the reality is that it is an attempt to fool the televison audience into believing that this is what America really thinks. Both sides are as bad. And both sides are trying to create the truth.

The age old notion about the concept of truth being the reality of all realities is dead and gone. W.B. Yeates saw it coming at the beginning of the 20th century. Then later on C.S. Lewis and George Orwell gave their own dire warnings. Orwell was an insider, and even though he knew he was dying he secluded himself in a remote house in Scotland so as to write 1984. He died soon after finishing it. That an intellgent and sane man chose to spend his final days writing a book knowing that he might not even live to see it published says a lot. And, if my memory of facts is correct, he didn't live to see it published. His book, 1984, might well have been the last gasp, the last warning, about the loss of freedom.

In a way, it was the old concept of truth that held our leaders in check and inspired the greater good, but it was a religion that held it all together. The slow death of Christianity that began in the 19th century slowly let loose what W.B. Yeates called "The Second Coming", and in the 20th century all of hell seemed to break out. But it wasn't Satan behind it, it was the elite of mankind embracing their new found freedom to do as they wish. The old concept of truth died with Christianity. It was replaced with the knowledge that there is no such thing as truth, and there is really no such thing as anything - that we do not make up with our imagination. We are nothing but an accident, there is no God watching over us, and we are simply making things up as we go along. The truth is nothing more that a product of the strange ability of language. And it is language that enables us to lie. And if we are only making thngs up as we go along, then...we get Sarah Palin as the leader of the free world. Surely, I have slipped into an alternative universe.