Life was obviously better before the InterNet.  We all had much more time each day for other frivolous activity, (real surfing rather than the sedentary kind), Wikipedia and -leaks thankfully didn’t exist, Spam© was still mystery meat, I had a wonderful, flirtatious telephone relationship with my cool travel agent, (what’s-her-name), and cookies were mostly yummy snacks.  Does anyone else see a correlation between the meteoric rise of the Worldwide Web and the decline of… almost everything else?  Throughout history, information has always been dispensed in a semi-reliable manner, full of misdirection, embellishment and opinion, questionably corroborated, if at all.  But before the WWW, the doses of such confusing data were minute compared to today’s constant intravenous drip.  I’ll admit I’m a hopeless junkie, but, (maybe because I’ve never lost my three-year-old’s need to question everything), I still marvel at the piles upon piles of baseless crap that are cyberly dumped, tweeted, forwarded and regurgitated as fact.  We have lumbered into the 21st Century with the tools to nudge life on Earth closer to utopia and used them instead to cast ourselves as characters in a doomsday graphic novel, except without the superheroes.  None of the so-called big issue problems, food & water, health, education, energy, jobs and the economy, require degrees in rocket science to solve, (well, maybe energy, but we’d have to tackle that education thing first), and yet the response at every level is panic, chaos and half-measured, unhelpful and unpopular knee-jerk reaction.  We have simply given ourselves over to a scenario-driven existence relying on incompetent governments and profit-hungry corporations and magical religious dogma, all of which keep us confused, off balance and afraid.  We are constantly being reminded that the big picture is too big for any individual to influence, giving rise to Tea Parties of reactionaries driven only by fear and anger, whose platforms are constructed of contradictory slogans too often in opposition to their own welfare.

Next week’s mid-term elections will be the most expensive in history thanks to the ridiculous ruling of the Supreme Court allowing anybody to spend unlimited funds to promote any cockamamie idea or candidate.  (Note:  you only need to buy 5 out of 9 to do any fucking thing you want).  Is it any wonder that there are a shit load of preposterously unqualified individuals who are but a few outrageously expensive votes away from the House or Senate?  And, we’re not alone.  The whole world seems to have bought into the mythology behind the global recession, ignoring the fact that all of the super-wealthy insurers and moneychangers and corporate manipulators are fatter and wealthier than before the The Event that they created, (sorry if I spilled the beans, NBC).  The horror that continues for the millions of unemployed and already or soon-to-be homeless has not prompted an intelligent well thought out or well meaning response.  Only token measures against the perpetrators have been proposed or enacted as country after country begins to dismantle the nets of social responsibility for which they exist.   I don’t know if watching this is funny to the fattest of cats with all of the chips, but they must be smirking or giggling as the rest of us run out of feet to shoot ourselves in.  However, you can be certain that if the herd of babbling lunatics on next Tuesday’s ballot manage to take over the asylum, (even though the rent is too damn high), the gales of laughter will become deafening.  At least, that’s what it looks like from where I sit.