Striptease

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How very Goyaesque.
I hear what you are saying, Robert, but no one else can—or wants to.

Or not enough people, in any case. And not the ones that matter. None of the decision-makers. And not enough of the decision-takers (those who have to take it, in the end, and wind up living with the decisions made for them by the ®deciders that they voted—or not—into office). It looks like people are jut swallowing it all, hook, line, and sinker. What else did you expect, when all the decision-makers, the representatives of the people, left or right, are practically all on the same page?

Regardless of how many Nobel prizes of economics Paul Krugman is awarded, it doesn't seem like anything of what he or you might be saying about this Orwellian dystopia is going to make one iota of a difference in the end.

And this is why:



In Striptease, a play by Polish dramatist and writer Sławomir Mrożek, two characters - one an intellectual, the other an activist - find themselves inside a room where a gigantic hand instructs them to remove their clothes until both act out an elaborate dance of rationalized submission.



I've often wondered if this is what it must be like to be a "New" Democrat.



Rationalized submission is basically what has been happening to dissent in this country, over the last two decades. Most of the people who were indignant under the presidency of George W. Bush, have now just simply become resigned under the presidency of Obama.

This is what happens when hope is no more.

Is this stage 4 of the Kübler-Ross model, or have we entered stage 5 already?

I wish I could say it is a local phenomenon. But things are just about the same—and worse—on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.