Fear & Loathing on Furlough

Fear & Loathing on Furlough

The Ides of March are upon us and I’m vigilant as the soothsayer’s warning echoes across the looming fog of history. Caesar and Rome were but the first act of the American Dream.
The Roman excesses and perversions are nothing compared to the frivolity, greed and abuses we Americans have perverted our lives with.
The next three days are my penance for my contribution to the collective American sin, as I’m off unpaid per corporate orders. It beats being laid off permanently or not having a job at all and these unpaid days off are the way many American companies are using to preserve the black on their bottom line.
It’s all about the Benjamins, as the rap song goes, and in America in 2010, it’s especially all about the corporate cash. The individual can go broke, lose their home or starve so long as the conglomerate is preserved. To save our high-stakes houses of gold, we’ll mortgage the solvency of our great-great-great-great grandchildren.
It’s all about the top two percent, the extreme upper crust, of our age. They must not suffer!
It makes the sins of the gilded age of Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers seem slight. These hypocritical greed-mongers are making more money and only want to make more money and they have the power where it counts to keep doing that.
The politicians who control the purse-strings are pawns in their game and no matter what anyone says that game is rigged.
Joe Sixpack is and always will be the loser. No politician, be them red, blue or shades inbetween, has the common man at heart or mind. (Politicians don’t have souls so I won’t go there.)
Instead, they’ll get us revved up over health care, debating something that doesn’t effect the ruling class. They’ll spread fear of change and play the “Red Card” that “socialized medicine” is some sort of evil at the same time they benefit from government-funded health care that’s the best in the world.
As a people, we’ve fallen for the trick and swallowed the bait and they’re reeling us in even as we’re still reeling from the effects of this economic recession and they’re finding more and more ways to squander the cash in taxes that we work so hard for but they spend so easily.
It’s maddening to be used like this. As I sit here, being paid less to do a job that I’m already underpaid for, it makes me seethe to think about these corporate bigwigs who keep getting richer.
They don’t care that they’re creating an untenable situation and causing problems that aren’t offset by the cost-savings.
All they care about it their bottom line and it’s enough to drive a common man over the edge.
Some men have been driven thus, but for the most part we’ve swallowed this bitter medicine with little complaint.
What’s frustrating is there’s little we can do. The politicians are all the same: Democrat, Republican, tea or coffee drinker, once they’re elected they drink the Kool-Aid and join the select society that only cares about furthering itself.
The only way I can see where someone can seek solace is to withdraw in the fashion of Henry David Thoreau and to take to the woods, unplug and unwire, and “simplify” life so that it’s something the greedy men can’t take away.
All they care about is money, so they have no use for an aesthete. And the real affluence that men possess is the substance of their souls: what they dream and create with their minds or fashion with their hands not for a wage but for the satisfaction of creation. It’s to scrawl ‘Kilroy was here’ in the sands of time.
That’s what I’m living for and I’m thankful they can’t take that away.
Like Caesar and Rome, the American house of cards will one day fall. But the American Dream and Great American Creations will live forever.
So there!