The Dead Zone Decade

When VH-1 coughs up its hairball of false nostalgia for the Bush decade a decade from now, they will find that music and fashion and graphic design and commercial tropes that seemed fresh and fun in 1999 felt precisely as fresh and fun in 2010, they will find that the anti-french, anti-latte, anti-nuance, anti-science, anti-Geneva Conventions Appleby's America crap narratives endlessly circulated through the media puke funnels into phony consensus lodged in no one's spirit and in no one's memory, that nothing happened, that nothing began, that nothing was made, that even all the death-dealing dwelt in death...

The 90s GAP commercials have returned for the 2009 holiday season, the streets of Paris and San Francisco fill the screens of American films and television commercials again with the romantic vibrant French surrender monkeys and Pelosi values that almost no actual Americans ever really hated however loudly the corporate-militarists barked to the contrary for a decade, and even Appleby's now promises sandwiches with arugula on artisan bread in a last-ditch pitch for survival in the reality-based community we are all incarcerated in whatever our denialism to the contrary, and just look at all the non-closeted faggots and uppity negroes and competent women reflecting the real world back to us on our television sit-coms and home-renovation shows, all as if to cry out in anguish, in panic, in denial of all the denialism, it never happened! Bush never happened! America did not expose its rot, its rancidness, its ridiculousness to a world now yawning and calling in its debts, the regularly scheduled programming is to resume, the never begotten need not even be forgotten...

Even while the Teabbagers scream even now to illegalize abortions and re-closet queers and to deny the science on which they depend to survive and to murder or incarcerate or draft all the brown people into the wage machine and the war machine, weeping that White Warmaking Wal-Mart Baby Jesus wants Our America back for the Real Americans, in a full froth of hysteria and hate they want back the lie that passes for the life of dead-eyed life-sucking Republican life, the America that never really existed and that nobody really wants, all the while a few evil old angry white men with lies in their eyes lies in their lives making fists of their hearts smelling of death and madness hold hostage the Change millions voted for, the Chance millions broke their hearts for, the Sanity to save something of the world to save some few lives to correct course the least bit before all hope is lost...

And even now we are shutting down, just plain bushed by the decade of Bush, starting already to sleep-walk through the actually demanding shattering realization that the death-dealing dot-eyed denialist epoch of Republican rule was a vast wasteland of heartlessness, thoughtlessness, lifelessness, an unreality teevee show with an ugly fake tan and a beer gut and a soulless leer with twice the commercials and a logo in the corner of the screen that never goes away, that grinds into your brain to the place where consciousness and conscience should reside, denying a decade of denialist death in life that none of us will ever get back, and from which we may never in fact recover...

Meanwhile, the futurologists ever more hysterically still declared that technology is accelerating, that acceleration of acceleration is accelerating, a kind of stillness in their silly thrill shrill shilling unstillnessology still, we are rushing still ever toward that sooper-human "post-human transition," toward that sooper-intelligent post-historical "singularity," rocketing onward up and up, is all this on the up and up? and in the pastel-hued tonalities of soft-porn the television commercials match their hysteria, hawking fetish-phones in petrochemistench bubble-wrap already tugging toward landfill and happy-pills and boner-pills in consumer go-getter bubble-brains tugging toward suicidal depression and cardiac arrest IP-enclosure side effects in the unread small print scrolling by at the spped of light, while all the super-sonic passenger planes were grounded and our space missions exploded and our computers bloated and stalled and our actual health outcomes degenerated and our water and crops and energy supplies shuddered and our biosphere fever-sweated...

And all the white boys with all their plastic-digital toys lie louder and louder, especially to themselves, and flap their hands and show off their thumbs-up in their faith in The Future, high-five future-sooper-tastology, no limits, man, looking for all the world like the most abject fools imaginable, futurological fraudsters making one last desperate pitch for that death-dealing something for nothing knee deep in the shit of the financial fraudsters and hucksters and corporate-militarist scenarists who prepared the way for them, one last techno-immortalizing digital-totalizing plastic-fantastic teledildonic robo-nano-bio-neuro-info cornucopiasmic geo-engineering late-night informerical or motivational seminar or Ponzi scheme or think-tank pie-chart, one last faith-based initiative to eat the world to build a crappy crumbling McMansion before they do us all a favor and blow their brains out.