I believe I have previously argued the point that if we live in a chaotic world today it is due to the economy ruling every facet of our lives, which explains the criminal behavior of those in power at the time of the mad rush to invade Iraq, which was basically a war for oil, and the present inadequacy of government in regards to effectively dealing with the gulf disaster and the lack of major oil industry reforms. That's because the politicians are pupets who lack verve, and everything is so corrupt in a economic state where there is an intimate raport between democracy, corruption and economic development, the triangulation of these three factors explains much in regards to the fiancial doings of Wall Street of late, its fiscal bailout with public funds by Washington and the insane abstraction of the State during the Katerina affair (read Dave Eggers, Zeitoun), and now the Gulf oil diaster. Though we can't hope for a brighter future given that today's American youth have been bred on the basest superficiality. I am always struck by the superficiality of today's American twenty-year-olds, by their lack of interest in anything but their insensate craving for amusement. And it is impossible to have a proper conversation with these young American citizens. I cannot remember having a conversation, or even an amusing exchange of words, with any of them. When they are not drinking are druged on Facebook, they just stand around, stolid and humorless, visibly tormented by a deadly boredom that will afflict them all their lives because they had done nothing about it while there was still time. It's too late, I've thought, for any of these young people to escape this deadly lifelong boredom; by now they're almost completely taken up with their fancies, thier jobs, their boys and their girls, totally absorbed in their perversely superficial concerns while the world around them is going strait into the gutter. Talking to them, one finds that they have nothing in their heads but this ghastly superficiality and think only about their future finances and their cars. When I talk to one of them, I've thought, I'm not talking to a human being but to an utterly unimaginative, single-minded show-off. Whereas the American 40-year-olds are no better as I have come to discover in my dealings with them, both back in the homeland and abroad, especially among those I once knew and thought of as dear friends. American 40-year-olds are by-in-large vulgar and stupid, I've thought, and they deserve the country and the world they in which live. We are pleased to see someone we have known virtually all our lives and shake hands with him, but in no time we find that he has meanwhile become an idiot, I've thought. And the young people are even more stupid than their elders, in whose stupidity there is at least a modicum of the grotesque. We always imagine, mistakenly, that others will have developed, in one direction or another, as we have. But we are wrong: most of them have stayed put and not developed in any direction, becoming neither better nor worse, but merely old and totally uninteresting. We expect to be surprised to find how somebody we have not seen for ages has developed, but the real surprise is to discover that he has not developed at all, that he is simply twenty years older, that he is no longer slim but has a paunch, and that he wears big tasteless rings on fat fingers that were once attractive. We expect to have much to talk about with this or that old friend, only to find that we have nothing to say to each other. We ask oursleves why, and the only answer that occurs to us is that the weather has changed and that there is a national crisis, that capitalism has now shown its true colors, and so forth. Having imagined that our friend of long ago is still our friend, we discover in no time that this is a cruel error. With this man we imagine that we can talk about painting, with that woman world events, or so you think, but you are wrong: all they can talk about is cooking--how this soup is made the best way--or what a pair of shoes costs in Manhatan and a similar pair in Philadelphia. What good conversations you were once able to have with a certain person about history, you think, or with another about architecture, but it turns out that the historical interests of the one and the architectural interests of the other got bogged down twenty years ago in the morass of growing up. You can no longer find any purchase, anything to hold on to, and they are put out by this, without knowing why. Suddenly you are someone who annoys them. It will be a more or less ludicrous wedding, I had thought before leaving Rome for Philadelphia, and afterward it struck me as far more ludicrous than I had dared to imagine. But the only comment I had heard from others was that it was a magnifient wedding, a wedding to end all weddings, as they say. I'll take care to not no to express my opinion because theirs is the one that counts, I thought. The wedding service itself, however, was thoroughly entertaning, exquisitely comic. The chapel was of course packed to capacity. Having a sharp ear, I was able to hear everything the priest said. As he was slightly drunk, there was something improvised about his conduct at the service, which was therefore not at all boring, as is usual on such occasions, but amused everyone. Only my mother must have been sweating blood, as they say. In his address to the bridal couple the priest interwove fact and fiction and concluded with the general proposition that all life was life in the Lord until the end and nothing else. But at the climax of the ceremony, when he had to ask the bride and groom whether they would take one another as their lawful wedded husband and wife, he forgot the bride's name and, after a noticable pause, had to call for help and ask someone to tell him her name. He had forgotten the bridgroom's name too. This caused even louder peals of laughter than the first instance of priestly amnesia. I was tempted to shout out wine cork manufacturer over the heads of the congregation but just managed to restrian myself. So this bit of meanness on my part remained a secret, I thought. It is always ridiculous when the bride says I will, but even more ridiculous when the bridegroom says it. The marital vows inaugurate a marrital yoke. Nothing else. And their is nothing people long for more than than to say I will and thereby surrender themeselves to their own annihilation, I thought. It seemed to me that I had witnessed a little self-contianed comedy or farce, such as our electoral campaigns, and I felt a great desire to applaud when the priest had delivered his last line and disappeared with the altar boys. But again I controlled myself. The little centuries-old nuptual drama, I thought, culminates in the words I will. Like some political rhetorical catch-phrase, and I immediately thought of the Obama electoral campaign: Change, Yes We Can, which has proven to be a farce too, though not because of the president's ideological intentions, but due to the fact that the economic forces that really govern the country won't allow the change the nation absolutely needs, especially after the disastrous policies of the two-term Bush administration, to come about. We hope to develop not into the sort of person who automatically becomes a cog in America's financial and economic mill, like everyone else at the wedding, but into one who could properly be called a free agent. To do this we had to leave the country and take up residence in Rome. Americans suffer from an addiction to this financial and economic mill, while the only thing that buoies its national dept and therefore pays for its military aparatus, which it uses to beat and cower the rest of the world into submitance to its financial and economic mill, is China. Since its foundation America has had this craving for its economic and financial mill and its blind faith in progress, so that now a natural life their is no longer possible. The oil filth being spewed into the gulf has merely become the latest environmental metaphor for the befouling of the country's citizens' natural lives.
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