One War

Recently I commented on Smoking Mirrors that I no longer visited sites that stopped posting Visible's work. Ah, but that didn't include Donald Hunt's economic essays. And now, here I am exposing myself as, errrr, a liar-by-omission because I neglected to include this very disclaimer in my comment. Actually, at the time I made that comment, I was sincere, but the global financial crisis is such a Rubik's Cube of torture in the war on the little people's survival in this world, I consider it a principle element of our own survival strategies to try to understand it, as much as we can understand something that morphs and feeds and grows into full blown indiscriminate evil with increasing opacity in rhythm with humanity's heartbeat.

While we are gathering wood or fertilizing our soils or documenting the last remaining open spaces of the 19th and 20th centuries, there will be times you will ask yourself what happened or what could possibly come next and after that, and that, and that. Still, despite reading, talking, looking at it, breathing it, I'm just as much in the dark as anybody.

My dual loyalty would then be to the truth and to survival. No blame.

I have no idea why Sott has Donald Hunt's works co-authored by Simon Davies now. It seems that pairing came around when they achieved their funding goal, coincidentally while dumping Smoking Mirrors. They used to have a forum too, which also appears to have been eliminated in the restructuring. One of the few times I posted there was during the early Laurel Canyon series in which I trashed it as incredibly myopic and regional crack-crazed gossip driven by McGowan's moral lens of six degrees of false desire. Regardless, I still check in once a week to read Mr. Hunt's spectacular analyses. Mr. Hunt, BTW, came to my defense on that thread, apparently he was there too. Truth is his sword and only the truth. What we can learn from Wednesday's entry is dire. And what's more, as we read along, we know this is what is happening, but because we are the little people, pounded with news designed just for little people, you'll be hard pressed to find this kind of analysis coming from certain journalists who like Sott perhaps, are beholden to to keep themselves alive in whatever manner to which they are accustomed by claiming they "provide a service". The little people mostly forgive them, what do they know anyway, and go right on reading and funneling their severance pay into the paypal vacuum bag.


If we were to synthesize most of what is being written and read, we could liken it to press releases from the Illusion, a huge, superpower colony consisting of perhaps aliens, or not, with technologies we cannot begin to conceive.

There are two worlds.

There exists the world of the truth, our real world, and the world of the Illusion. The Illusion, for example has its celebrities, its uniforms and its groupies, its insurances, institutions, its history, its military security complex, its money economy, "F.I.R.E.", its laws and its law enforcement, its corporations, its reams of forms and complicity agreements, its medical/pharmaceutical universe, its agriprocessors, its slogans and logos and its endlessly self-replicating spawn of byproduct offspring. Yes, there's plenty more, but you get the idea. We could, if we think about it long enough, perhaps see it as one all-encompassing system powered by false desire, i.e.; money and ego.


Plenty of people work very hard overcoming obstacles trying in vain to keep one foot in both worlds. They choose to believe it can be done and after all, for these people it must be done since they believe they have no other option. They have grown dependent on false belief which can be defined as false hope. The Illusion specializes in not being there when you actually have a need for their advertised services, like that moment when your computer breaks down, like those moments when some consumed merchandise proves itself defective and the warranty (forms/insurance/agreements/logos) expired. Oh, but they can always be found yukking it up with pole dancers weaving in the background at the pizzeria chowing down a few oversized submarines while outdoing one another imagining new and evermore clever ways to hijack the soul of the little people. One thing they seem to do on a regular basis is merge by swallowing themselves and reappearing in disguise. Kweisi Mfume famously noted "When they are tired of arguing with you, they send in someone who looks just like you to finish it off."


The little people, at last count, are losing the battle. If they are not running for cover from white phosphorus, they are glued to barstools accelerating their internet connections. This is a sad fact, but only one out of perhaps millions and billions of sadder facts. As Don Roberston put it "... The truth is, the empirical creations that give sustenance to our existence are all coming undone ... "

Then what, now, is the difference between our depressions and the Depression? A stimulus package and an antidepressant? Does the Illusion have the dough to back up its desire? If yes, the jig is up.

photo: Getty Images