The angels in the closet

For pessimists things have never looked rosier. With economic depression, unemployment, environmental disasters, and endless armed conflicts, modern civilization’s final destruction is nigh. All the pundits can hardly conceal their glee at being right.  I pray nonstop that they are wrong.

That there’s a cultural decay in the West is hardly worth debating. A powerless and increasingly cretinized citizenry has been brainwashed into a state of domesticated conformity, with unelected technocrats totally controlling our lives.

What everyone’s talking about here is—surprise, surprise—the euro. The struggling currency’s latest frantic prop-up has the morons seeing glimmers of hope and plunging into stocks, bonds, and commodities, thus pushing prices higher. Then the bad news emerges and nervous investors dump their positions quicker than you can say, “sucker.” Then the whole cycle begins all over again. Yet they continue to discuss it ad nauseam everywhere, driving me back to the chalet to get away from the Wall Street geniuses.

And then there is Switzerland’s latest import, the delightful Madonna, who bestowed upon the Swiss citizens her sublime presence.  She has invested so much effort to generate an anti-bourgeois image, deprecated and vilified most things that bourgeois people hold sacred, made her millions, and now can relax among them enjoying those much maligned bourgeois comforts. 







And why not, we have been encouraged to believe that nothing is unthinkable, and certainly every demon in every closet has by now come out.  Have we put in their place “the better angels of our nature”?