“The US is going to hell,” we told the group at the Watergate last night.
“You mean the economy is really going to get worse, huh?”
“No, I mean it’s going to hell.”
We had been invited to watch the State of the Union address with a group of dinosaurs…a group approaching extinction with dignity and intelligence. You might call them ‘thinking conservatives,’ ‘paleo-conservatives’ or ‘constitutionalists.’ Whatever they were, they were not like the scoundrels currently running for the Republican nomination or the yahoos who vote for them. They were more like a renegade, retrograde group…like a secret society of White Russian intellectuals after the Revolution of 1917. They cling to hope…that the nation will come to its senses…that the constitution will again be honored…and that the old republic, established by the founding fathers, will be resurrected…
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Tax Laws, Corruption and Other Reasons to Expatriate
Here’s a meaningless abstraction for you, Fellow Reckoner. You ready?
US GDP grew at an annualized rate of 1.7% for 2011.
Now, what does that sentence actually tell us? What does it reveal about life or the quality of it; about the long arc of history and where we are along it; about the Heavens above us, the Hells below and our place in the present somewhere in between? What useful piece of information does this arrangement of letters and numbers divulge that has this morning’s news wires so abuzz with excitement?
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