by JerkyLeBoeuf » Fri Jul 07, 2006 3:05 am
Late last night, as I lay on my musty futon, staring at the ceiling, attempting to summon up the necessary gumption to push my lard-shrouded carcass from the floor and turn off the light so I could settle down for my habitual eight-hour session of soul-shattering nightmares, my attention was drawn to a curious procession of nearly imperceptible dots marching mechanically across the bedroom ceiling. <br><br>After lumbering painfully to my feet and straightening myself out, I craned my neck, squinted, and took a closer look. With mounting revulsion, I realized that the ceiling was carpeted with tiny, crawling, translucent spider-babies, no doubt recently hatched in one of Chateau LeBoeuf's many dank, dark, unexplored corners. <br><br>There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, many meandering aimlessly as newborn spiders tend to do, but most circling the ornate, convex light fixture that provides the sole source of illumination in yer old pal Jerky's sanctum sanctorum. A few prodigies were testing their silk, repelling floorward on invisible youngling strands. <br><br>As my head began to fill with visions of spiders dropping onto my slumbering shape -- crawling up my nose, into my mouth, becoming entangled in my hair, et cetera -- stupefied revulsion gave way to white hot fury. I snatched up a cigarette lighter from my computer desk, adjusted for maximum flame, and dispatched a half dozen of these brazen creepy-crawlies from this mortal coil. I noted with no small satisfaction that they boiled away like tiny flakes of candle wax, instantly disintegrating into puffs of smoke. <br><br>Before the night was through, dozens more met their maker at the business end of a damp paper towel. I allowed a handful to survive because their wanderings had inconveniently positioned them where killing them would have required moving furniture, but I rationalized their presence as a worthy safeguard against flies, and eventually settled into an uneasy slumber. <br><br>When I awoke the next morning (afternoon, really), I fired up my computer and learned that Kenneth Lay, ex-CEO of Enron, recently found guilty and awaiting sentencing for bilking employees and shareholders out of billions in an elaborate ponzi scheme, had succumbed to a "massive heart attack" at a posh Colorado retreat. <br><br>Judging from your e-mails, my initial reaction to this news of yet another inordinately convenient tying up of a loose end was pretty much the same as yours, that being: "Let the conspiracy theories begin!" Yes, in Interesting Times such as these, it takes a steely mental discipline not to immediately succumb to the paranoid reflex. <br><br>Lay had to know, for instance, that a presidential pardon was politically impossible. Was he, in preparing for his pending appeal, perhaps getting so desperate to avoid spending the rest of his heretofore luxurious life in jail that he would willingly spill the beans on his criminal cohorts in the White House? Insist that he was only "following orders"? Provide the court with whatever unshredded Energy Taskforce documents remain in existence to prove such? And, if so, did The Powers That Be catch wind of, then put a stop to, his plans? Or did Kenny-boy, with a little help from his friends in high places, arrange to be Elvised to a well-appointed piece of Costa Rican real-estate where he might live out the rest of his natural life in the kind of splendiferous ease and comfort to which he had grown accustomed, while some unlucky look-alike provides a feast for worms in his soon-to-be-alleged grave?<br><br>In the end, does it even matter? Until recently, yer old pal Jerky would have answered that question with an unqualified "of COURSE it matters!" But does it really? Does any of it matter? The White House attempt to revoke the First Amendment in the case of unfriendly media… does that matter? The fact that the average Iraqi is worse off today than he was under Saddam "Hitler" Hussein's reign, that the soldiers who were so cavalierly dropped into that hopeless morass by a gluttonous herd of degenerate profiteering swine are turning feral as the months and years tick by, and who even now are being used and abused as propaganda props for reasons both electoral and otherwise… do these things matter? Or, perhaps more to the point, does it matter whether or not we believe they matter?<br><br>I'm beginning to think, especially in regards to that last part, that it doesn't. I'm beginning to think that maybe this sorry state of affairs is irreversible, and that some sort of Great Reckoning is inevitable, hard-wired into our collective DNA. Pardon my Spenglerian musings, here, but perhaps what we are experiencing is nothing less than the endgame of liberal democracy. Perhaps even the poisoning of democracy, itself -- apparent to anyone willing to open their fucking eyes -- is a part of that unavoidable destiny. Perhaps we are reaping the whirlwind, living the prophecy scratched upon the seed. <br><br>And perhaps Ken Lay is just another spider, dropping from the ceiling of history into the cleansing flame of oblivion. Perhaps we all are.<br><br>Perhaps.<br> <p></p><i></i>
