retrospect killed the progressive star.

it's been a big week for the "told you so" crowd. i've said before that knowing too much can lead to apathy, and it's never been more true than it is right now. the war rages on indefinitely, things in the middle east are falling apart, the value of the dollar is plummeting, the treasury is being systematically raped, yet americans still have their heads up their respective asses over gay marriage, immigration, and joe lieberman's majestic fall from grace. personally, i'm looking forward to kicking back and watching our once-great nation crumble before my sweet brown eyes. o'reilly, this isn't because i hate america; i have great admiration and respect for those who dreamed this crazy shit into existence in the first place. i just hate what industry has done to it and its people. it's as if we know our time as a nation is winding down, and we're trying desperately to hold onto any glimmer of a life we once knew, where girls were girls and men were men. but mister, could we really use a man like herbert hoover again?

at first glance, the '40s and '50s were pretty great. the big war was over, everyone was getting laid, dames and dollars were at an all-time high, and the 'american dream' was born. but let's look at things objectively. while we were polishing our kenmore appliances in pearls and heels, most people in hiroshima and nagasaki were still trying to get the plutonium stains out of their carpet. this "golden age" was ushered in by unprecedented death and destruction. so, the pile of horse shit in the road has a flower growing in it. you still going to stop and fucking smell it?

by this time we had long replaced the state-sanctioned enslavement of blacks with the status-quo servitude of women. imagine a time where individual human beings--people with minds and hearts and thoughts and emotions--were conditioned to believe that their only worth lied in their inferiority and loyalty to other people. every decision, from what to make for dinner, to what polka-dots to wear while vaccuming the rug, was made to please, satisfy, or at least orchestrated so as not to disturb, their male counterparts. so, a woman stays home all day, cooks, cleans, deals with all the shit the children do, all so a man can come home, sit on his ass, drink six martinis, and pass out in his fucking chair? sweet deal for the guy, but how come? because he has a job? imagine how pissed women must have been when they finally entered the workforce and realized that they'd been duped into man-worship for a couple of centuries. housework has always been much harder.

and this only covers white people, the folks who supposedly had it best during this era. being black in the fifties is probably comparable to being jewish in lebanon right now. separate drinking fountains, bathrooms, schools, bus seating, and (in some places) sidewalks. sidewalks. this is a bruise on the american psyche which speaks for itself. granted, rosa parks wasn't a suicide bomber, but still.

politicians like to appeal to older or more conservative voters by invoking images of the nuclear family, carefree, skipping into the sunset. but once that sun went down, what was left was a lot of injustice, inequality, and general ugliness. we started cleaning up the whole mess in the 60s, but there's still a long way to go. with all of its problems, i still prefer 21st century life, although some evil has been replaced by new evil (in the 50s, if you were black, the government simply ignored you. now, they leave you to die --katrina). how good can a country be when its quality of life is better for some citizens than others? you can't hit the breaks, you can't go back, and honestly, we don't want to. so stop trying.