By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
I don’t know about the rest of you people, but I could do with a breakage in our political fever at the midterms. It’s dire to imagine how little more this can all go before imploding with senseless rage, exhausted resignation or both.
We have a president who is clearly in the final throes of a decadeslong psychotic break that combines the vile excess of Caligula with the frenzied final days in Hitler’s bunker, watch parties for a primetime public execution, a billionaire class of degenerate techno-fascist wackos who act like the French Revolution never happened, a former-ambassador a shakedown to pay her Amex bill, active genocidal imperial wars, mega-storms fueled by a collapsing global climate and the beggaring of three whole generations of people who supposedly live in the Greatest Nation on Earth but for some reason need a subscription app to complete even the most basic tasks.
It’s enough to make a person long for a prolonged EMP burst and return to subsistence farming. That’s not likely to happen (or at least not in a way that would be remotely bucolic). Rather, what I’m fearing is the permanence of an “inflationary mindset,” which I heard described by Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Beth Hammack during a recent episode of PBS News Hour.
Essentially, she said that regardless of whatever “good news” we might receive regarding the mass of hyper-fictions that we shorthand as “the economy,” the real danger is that producers, retailers and consumers will adapt to ever-increasing prices as a fact of life and adjust accordingly regardless of real conditions.
Anticipating never-ending supply shocks, producers and retailers will preemptively pad their pricing to maintain margins. To protect themselves from the expected predation of supply-side profit-seeking — and assuming the buying power of their dollar will perpetually erode due to mysterious forces beyond their control — consumers then assume their position in the parasitic relationship and dutifully pull out their credit cards for short-term maintenance of daily life while guaranteeing long-term penury.
Essentially, if we all just shrug and reckon we’re perpetually going to be screwed, it won’t matter if there are policies proposed or adopted to fix or even improve things — we’ll mindlessly maintain the very systems that screwed us in the first place.
It’s a case of economic Stockholm syndrome that clears the ground for establishing a perpetual post-industrial peasantry, with all the socio-cultural, political and religious degradation, domination and victimhood that implies.
Whoever you’re planning to vote for and why, my plea is that your decisions are rooted in rejecting the grifters who benefit from this cyclical dysfunction, which I propose is the real partisan battle of our age. It’s not Republicans or Democrats, nor Independents, Libertarians, Constitutionalists or whatever — it’s between the thieves and cynics and those who support the constructive power of community as translated through actual governance to the benefit of the most and harm to the least.
This shouldn’t be an idea with which it’s hard or controversial to agree. However, that “inflationary mindset” has already trickled down to practically every level of everyday American life. The good-intentioned parents, preachers and teachers have told and taught us to strive toward finding ourselves on the right side of social, economic and political justice, but every example of “success” — from government to finance, technology and pop culture — invites us to ceaselessly angle toward the upside of injustice.
That’s the mentality of too many of our leaders and their followers, and the weight of these accumulated crooks is too much to bear. So, on Nov. 3, throw out the bums and reject the bums waiting in the wings. Who knows how many more opportunities we’ll have to do so before the fever breaks or takes us.
