Fry the Frag

Maybe it’s the distance. Maybe it’s the quantities of whisky drunk last night. Maybe it’s talking with Adam K. again after such a time. d) all of the above. Perspective on Amerika seems to have come. Without suggesting that what we have here (Urop) is any better / more hopeful / a path to follow. As we’re all down that same road. Heading down. Beautiful beaches in the Crimea covered knee deep in picnic detritus, because, hell, we’re on holiday. (Passing cultural offensiveness, New Eastern Europeans are now leaning on the ‘we suffered under communism, so we can now do what the f*** we like’ quite as much as arrogant and vapid young New Yorkers lean on the holocaust, to the despair of their own grandparents)
Anyway, allegations (untrue) of anti-anything notwithstanding, there is also a niggling flashpoint in that friends of mine have forwarded a general e-mail exhorting me to fly the stars and stripes on September 11th – which I shall certainly NOT be doing – with the added nudge that we should fly the flag every single day… and they’ll be around to check up on me, no doubt. I know it’s adolescent, but it does tempt me to fly the Iraqi or Palestinian flag. (I won’t, don’t worry, neighbours). So, now back to business sort of, as I have been thinking about edyukayshun. Despite my arrogance and cynicism, I find the American education system rather good. It’s such a clearly marked divide between system and culture. The system has been organized and built with intelligence and good intentions. Hell in a handcart. But there’s no culture of education, so, promptly at 2.30 every weekday, everything built up just dissolves away, is dissolved away in an acid rain of cupidity. Make money, make money, makemoremoney. Against that incessant drumming, a few half hours spent empathizing with Gilgamesh, or figuring out layers in a Japanese print only makes you into a vaguely fey curiosity.
Or, as we discussed it last night, if you somehow are immune or allergic to this, you go crazy. Or, vice versa, if you are crazy enough, make yourself crazy enough, systematic derangement of the senses as Old Arthur had it, you can develop an immunity.
Over here, this virus is raging eastward. Britain has garnered some kind of resistance, usually by being Bolshy and Clockwork Orang-y, too fat, lazy, violent and stupid to do as you’re told, on the notion that the kick in the face is better for you in the long run than the hand in your pocket. Or your hand in everyone else’s pocket, it’s a sad sort of prognosis, just deciding which hand goes into which pocket, isn’t it?. And no kind of career for a right thinking young man or woman.
OK then, what else do we have to offer? Something better than sitting at the cash desk of a 7-11, I hope … or sitting outside a 7-11 with a cardboard sign around our necks. I’m no Silent Bob. To mis-quote another Bob, all is not lost, Cinderella, all is not lost. Not yet. Not when Al Gore can make a comeback via MTV. Sheesh.