I am so fucking American. That's my beef with beef lately. I understand that the economy is going through a massive contraction the likes of which my generation has never seen. I understand that we're at least fifty years past the point at which we can consume natural resources at the rates we are accustomed. Nevertheless, I am unable to save and unable to slow my consumption by any meaningful degree, because I'm caught up in a wholly American conundrum. I don't mean the simple addiction to spending and consumption that even the news media is now harping on, I mean the following: real conservation, of both money and resources, requires an attitudinal adjustment towards, well, conservatism. And while nothing could be more ideologically divorced from the Neo-Conservative agenda than driving less and growing your own food, I still rebel against any kind of conservatism at all. I want limitless blue skies of opportunity, the birth right promised me in grade school sing-alongs. I want purple mountains majesty, goddammit, an I don't want anyone spoiling my party tellling me they've all got their tops blown off for copper mines.
What I mean is, I want to throw big, lavish parties, I want to buy a house and pimp it out with hydronic heating and solar panels and a stainless steel water catchment cistern. I want to carve a 30-ft tall granite monument to Reggie Jackson outside a brand new A's Stadium in Jack London square, across from Yoshi's running a monthlong residency of Cecil Taylor (which would cost the club more than season tickets to the A's). I want gold benches in the Lake Merritt BART station.
And I don't want any hemming and hawing and bean-counting, and neither no EIP's from no EPA. I want an endless stream of irrationally optimistic action from every single American, and I want it to begin right now. Let the future be damned because it's already gone anyways.
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