Dear Dirty America

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We’re All Astronauts In the Land of Hallucination

October 14
22:34 2012
ADAM MICHAEL LUEBKE
Los Angeles

Everybody can breathe a sigh of relief. Space shuttle Endeavour has finally been brought home to the California Science Center. But hold your applause. From the Land of Hallucination:

The 85-ton orbiter pulled up next to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and ground to a halt so that the mayor and others could officially mark its arrival at the park near the USC campus.

Today everyone in the city of Los Angeles is an astronaut,” said L.A. Fire Department Chief Brian Cummings at the news conference.

If you’re nine years old, Brian Cummings statement might be exciting, maybe even mind-blowing. But we’re not all astronauts, and that’s one point we cannot accept. Just like we’re not really a part of our favorite sports teams. It’s not our win. It’s not our glory. It’s circuses and perpetual, meaningless parades that dim the focus on the real, much more serious issues.

We’re all astronauts? What a bunch of horseshit. Most of us can’t stomach walking four blocks to the local grocery store. How could we survive being blasted into space? It seems like the bleaker our economy gets, the further our population regresses into infantilism.

We’re a war loving people too fat and lazy to care how much pain and destruction we’ve allowed our leaders to wage on the world. We’re impoverished and our gratuitous way of life is unraveling. We’re decaying. We don’t want to admit it.

As John Bennett writes of the crumbling American empire in his Shard called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: “The payback once the bubble bursts will be brutal.”

Space shuttle Endeavour’s final destructive mission through the streets of South LA has been disastrous, costly, and unnecessary. We’re reveling in past achievements while we can’t straighten out our lives on this planet. The stock market is built on air because of the Federal Reserve suppressing interest rates. The unemployment rate went down to 7.8 percent, but not because so many jobs were created, but instead because so many millions of Americans have stopped looking for work.

Four or more people apply for every minimum wage, poverty-level retail position that does open up. Yet we take great interest in allowing four hundred some trees being chopped down and traffic snarled so a big fucking space ship can be towed through our streets.

And then our officials tell us we’re all astronauts. Dear Jesus, we need to get a grip on reality. We’re not all astronauts. We’re getting poorer. Our wages are plummeting. Our middle class has been destroyed. JPMorgan Chase had a $5.3 billion profit last quarter, even though they’re greatly responsible for packaging toxic debt into our mortgages and loans. They’re doing just fine. Are you?

The only way the American people have been destroyed so easily is that they’re too busy hooting and hollering over the hollow victories of their favorite sports teams. We’re focused on the latest celebrity deaths — Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Dick Fucking Clark. We have no time to learn about the banking system, the Federal Reserve, or the platforms on which our presidential candidates are running, but we have time to wave our flags at the passing of a behemoth space shuttle.

We’re the most pathetic group of astronauts I’ve ever seen.

SEE ALSO

No space shuttle celebrations: Endeavour’s journey through South LA becoming a farce

Do Obama’s predator drone strikes make him a serial killer?

Wells Fargo charges their poorest customers unnecessary fees

We get used to

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2 Comments

  1. Donald ODonovan
    Donald ODonovan October 15, 17:51

    Here’s hoping that at least a few of LA’s 3,000 homeless children will get the astronaut bug and blast off in their cardboard boxes. Probably their best bet because their chances in LA are slim and none, and some say it’s a human-hearted universe up there…

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  2. Charles Frith
    Charles Frith October 17, 09:43

    A great post. May I also add somewhat controversially that the Shuttle never went further than 200 Kilometer’s orbit and so the pressure to understand why NASA can’t go back to the moon includes did they lie about some details for Apollo 11?

    Reply to this comment

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