Apropo to Nothing

Two bits in the news this morning. First, the US porn industry wants a bailout. I can't imagine Flynt is serious, but it does show up the random, scatter shot logic of our government's approach to the financial crisis. Not that I fault the governments actions up to this point, since I think they had no choice but to bail out the finance industry and the Bush bailing the autos was required responsible behavior vis a vis an incoming Obama administration. At least opponents of everything the government does can rage against the machine. The rest of us are stuck in theater of the absurd. As long as we are propping up private enterprises, why not use taxpayer dollars to role play rescue with Larry Flynt? The depressing thing about the news lately is that the news is terrible and even when you laugh at something you feel a little disgusted that it is not absurdist theater or even reality tv but rather an alternate reality made flesh in which the usual buffoons come off with more financial acumen and just as much dignity as the one-time sober guiding institutions of the country.

Second, two German lovers - aged six and five - try to elope to Africa. This is from the Guardian newspaper, and the Guardian newspaper is depressing because it is always down on its own society's institutions and possibly even the principles on which those institutions are based and certainly on the heritage of those institutions. So it is depressing. I myself was on the website because I was anxious to read "West Will Pay For Bloodbath." So in that context it almost makes your eyes well up with tears that even in this absurd and angry world where I and my descendants are going to pay for the Guardian's bloodbath it is still the case that young lovers will decide to go Africa. Adults will know that this trajectory of Europe to Africa adventurism conjures up shades of imperialistic appropriation of an entire continent's symbolic meaning as loci for concepts of the "exotic" and "escape". But despite the fact that even at a tender age these young people had absorbed stereotypes, still there is something touching about leaving winter with the one you love for swim trunks and a "stroll in the sun."