The Written Peace: Open Forum of April 6, 2005

The Dark Wraith has returned from the land of firmament and shadows. The world of form and tangibility overwhelmed important blogging for several days, primarily because of a recurring duty to train workers who were laid off last year from their jobs at a large factory on the outskirts of the city. The total number of workers so affected was well in excess of a thousand, and the corporation—whose stock rose nicely upon the announcement of the downsizing—pays a sovereign fee for someone who can spend four hours teaching people everything about algebra. Bear in mind that none of these broken, demoralized, unemployed men and women have been in a classroom in fewer than twenty years, much less in a college classroom having several semesters of remedial algebra poured down their throats in a marathon, four hours in Hell with a pompous, thundering jackass of a college teacher who sometimes actually believes he can do something positive for such broken lives.

Unfortunately, that optimism passes fairly quickly. Fortunately, the cynicism is replaced almost immediately by the reminder that this corporation pays a freelance corporate trainer many times more per hour than a real college pays its regular staff of teachers.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says that gasoline prices should "cool down" in a while. Now, why does he say that? The less-than-cynical answer is that, as interest rates rise domestically, the value of the dollar should begin a long, slow climb out of the pit of Third World currencies. That should make everything imported to the U.S.—including oil—become cheaper. The far-too-cynical answer shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

One way or the other, a brutally cynical person might argue that a whole lot of people in this country countenanced the appalling invasion of Iraq in the belief that we would have our very own captive nation of oil wells as the spoils, thereby guaranteeing an ever-flowing, cheap supply of oil well past the time when other nations would begin to suffer from the effects of petroleum reserves depletion.

People here in the United States are now learning a lesson seen in the streets of other empires of history: the spoils of empire do not flow to every citizen of the aggressor state. Instead, they flow in the same way as do all benefits in a brutish world: to the powerful, who become more so with each new adventure, even as the commoners bear more and more of the many and surprising costs. Now that the people of this good nation are learning anew a lesson of the Ages, it will be interesting to see how long they suffer those who would stride above the global wreckage left in the wake of empire's inevitable excess.


Say what you have to say, here. The Dark Wraith will certainly do so, too.