Posthuman Blues

This afternoon at the coffeeshop: fat, balding man and his ugly wife throw a tantrum about the price of the coffee. I was dizzy with anger at these morons and I don't even work there. The male specimen was really getting into his role as Defender of the Common Consumer, yelling at the top of his lungs, requesting completely irrelevant biographical details from the manager and punching numbers into his cellphone. He wanted names, dates. He wanted to know who owned the place. He was consumed in a righteous frenzy of masculinity and totally fucking enjoying it. He even threatened to take his business to Starbucks. How original.

Displays like this are the last refuge of the ineffectual. How temptingly easy it is for these meat-headed bastards to play Hitler to some blameless, anonymous face behind a counter. I don't believe in "hell." But if such a thing happened to exist, I sincerely wish such people would promptly go there, preferably to rot.

In other news, "Ah-nold" has predictably won the California election. Here's a guy who openly expresses his admiration for Adolf Hitler . . . and people vote for him. American democracy is an ugly farce. George Bush could spend his 2004 campaign promoting genocide and he'd still win so long as he's framed by the proper iconography. Americans pay lip-service to this love of "freedom" that we supposedly have, but most of them are as empty and fragile as the man in the coffeeshop, ready to abandon any loyalty to principles at the drop of a hat if it means a quick ego-massage or the chance to make-believe they're somehow important or noteworthy in the depersonalized milieu that is the early 21st century.

John Brunner was right. We have more information than we know what to do with. We're all solipsistic tyrants thrashing and twitching in choreographed planetary death-throes and pretending we're having a good time. We can order pizza online, so who gives a damn if our armed forces are busy slaughtering an entire culture to prove the machismo of a single worthless, unelected politician?