We are colonized by a nation of wankers

Yo, Joe!

Just wanted to drop you a quick note from the frozen north (Winnipeg, up in Canada) to tell you how much I've enjoyed what you've got to say. Well, maybe not enjoyed -- understood, frequently agreed with and occasionally been deeply angered by.

In the film "Trainspotting", there's a scene in it where one of the Scottish drug addicts goes off on the English, and then his own people. Perhaps the most telling line is: "We're colonized by wankers."

All too frequently, that's exactly the way I feel about the U.S. True, we've got a full crop of our own homegrown wankers, but my god, it's tough to get a word in edgewise when you live right next door to that frigging noise machine.

One thing I would like to thank you for, however, is forcing me to rethink my feeling about your people -- who are actually a lot like my people. My family is likewise Scots-Irish, grudge-nursing, grievance-bearing white trash. About the only positive is that we at least actually hung onto the farm.

I've frequently been puzzled and confused about the affinity these guys hold for the right side of the spectrum (or at least as far right as it gets up here) which frequently consists of some of the meanest people I've ever met. But then again the lefties are some of the most entitled jerk-offs I've ever met too.

Ah well. My only consolation these days is that this cheap hood has struck his bargain with the world. And the best I can do is hold on in the onrushing tide of history and hope for the best. But with 6.7 billion of us and me not exactly coming from the Richie Rich set, there's damned little I can do about it. I write, I rage, I sing. But I don't expect to change any of it.

My happiness comes a lot closer to home. And it will damned well not involve buying any of the 'joy' these assholes are trying to sell me. Fuck it. I'll walk to work, cook my own meals and find pleasure in things like my friends and my garden. And I'll do everything I can to never give these jerks another dime if I can help it.

Naturally I'll have to if I don't want to starve to death, but I'll do my part when it comes to throwing a monkey wrench into the perpetual growth machine. It won't likely matter, but I do what I can to rage against the machine, like the man said.

Hope life is good for you, or at least not too bad. Keep writing, I'll keep reading.

Best,

Gord
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

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Gord,

To my mind, what we are talking about here is freedom, the good old spirit of yeoman liberty -- not much of which has ever existed for most people, but even less so today. When I stop to think about it, no one in my family has ever experienced it as a life long proposition. I think my grandfather on his mountain farm probably felt it at times, but certainly my parents never did. And the time I most associate it with personally was the Sixties, though I sometimes wonder if that was not just youthful joy in life, I do know that psychedelics gave me a good look at the real stuff of it. And I am certain (though they would strongly disagree) that my children have not experienced citizen liberty thoroughly and never will.

Now, with six billion of us asshole to belly button in competition with each other for space to spit, there is sure to be a necessary further diminishment of genuine liberty.

As to being a nation of wankers, I think there are moreover three categories. That portion of us who accept life in a bovine herd like fashion (the true hominus wankus), those who catch the scent of liberty but fear it because it involves risk, and the very few for whom it is a congenital howling in the bones.

In art and labor,

Joe