A fly as big as a blue whale

“I met murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh”

Saint Augustine remarked that man is born between a shit and a piss; it is the ambition of the Bush administration to die there. The shit, of course, has been amassed over eight shameful and inglorious years, that began in an act of supreme and criminal negligence – the Bushian indolence as our nineteen gremlin hijackers were able to pretty much do what they wanted (a crime so foretold that they could have put an advertisement in the fucking newspapers), followed by the shock and awe of a paniced president who came to his senses when his advisors pointed out the political advantage he could reap by not doing his simple duty to crush the very crushable al qaeda. The murder of Americans – and the numbers mount, from the incompetent war in Afghanistan to the crime of Iraq – was a small price to pay for robbing the wealth of the country and putting it in the pockets of the few and unscrupulous; as for the massive death toll inflicted on the Iraqis, the untold suffering, the four million refugees, here was a supreme Bushian performance piece indeed. While vacuous chants were intoned by our clueless President to a liberty he so dislikes in the U.S. that he has done everything in his power to strangle it, our real politics consisted of ethnic cleansing, bombing the innocent, razing cities, and arming militias. Our best friends, the Saudis, meanwhile, financed al qaeda and financed a Sunni insurgency, to which our reply was to censor this macro story from ever being told at length in any American newspaper – and certainly not on American tv, a machine that produces cretinization, 24/7.

Even the bubble enabled by Bush appointees was shabby, as far as bubbles go – having fixed the system so that productivity gains didn’t budge the incomes of the 80 percent of Americans who work for a living, instead of whatever it is the upper management class does, the Bushites contrive to make every house its own little casino – tap the automatic wealth that comes from selling property amongst yourselves even as you ignore the natural limit set by your declining incomes! What a great scheme, and how the Gaderene swine, peckerheads and warriors by proxy, rushed into it! The ownership society, as sponsored by Visa and Mastercard.

And now we have the brilliant budget, the last budget, the testament of the collected thinking of the man his admirers call President Backbone – a name that is too modest by half, as this is a president who not only exhibits his spinal column, but whose whole skeletal system seems to be exo- like the star of that b movie, The Fly. What a great enterprise it is – a true call to slavery in the name of freedom. Having spent trillions fighting the approximately ten to thirty thousand paramilitaries of al qaeda, with the tremendous result of swelling their ranks and giving them an untold amount of importance in both Pakistan and Iraq, the budget makes a joyful sound to the Lord of Flies by proposing a seven percent increase in the military budget. It is by these increases that President Exoskeleton retains the affections of the media – for the core of the political media, based in D.C., has been bathed in the butter of federal spending like nobody’s business for the past eight years. These fat and sassy eunuchs have never had it better, and though they believe – repressing their inner astonishment – the polls that proclaim how disgusting the mass of Americans find the leader of this country, in their heart of hearts they would follow the President to the gates of hell and back – at least by proxy. That is, they’d sternly teach us that all serious people support sending America’s army, recruited from those clueless masses outside the Gated Community, into whatever fucked up orgy of vanity and peculation the Grand Old Party wants to give. It is a party Party, and the invites long ago went out to our ersatz opposition party to join it. And join it they have, protecting hedgefunders from taxation here, giving the President a chance in Iraq there, and in general enjoying the D.C. butter as they’ve sold out their constituencies at rock bottom prices.

Ah, but let us look at what the Lord of Flies has wrought:

Bush reviewed the budget with his Cabinet. He held aloft a computer tablet that contained the budget details. ''This is a good, solid budget,'' the president said.

''It's not only an innovative budget in that it's coming to Congress over the Internet. It's a budget that's balanced -- gets to balance in 2012 and saves taxpayers money.''

The spending proposal, which shows the government spending $3 trillion in a 12-month period for the first time in history, squeezes most of government outside of national security, and also seeks $196 billion in savings over the next five years in the government's giant health care programs -- Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

Even with those savings, Bush projects that the deficits, which had been declining, will soar to near-record levels, hitting $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009. The all-time high deficit in dollar terms was $413 billion in 2004.

Hazlitt, in his life of Napoleon, wrote:

“Mr. Southey somewhere accounts for the distress of the country in 1817 (and probably at present) by the prhase of “the transition from war to peace”, and emphatically observes, that the war was a customer to the manufacturers of Birmingham and Sheffeld alone, to the amount of twenty millions a year. Be it so: but if this were all, and this were really a benefit and source of riches to the country, why not continue to be a customer to these manufacturers of steel and brass in peace as well as war; and having bought and paid for so many cannon and so much gunpowder, fire the off in the air as well as against the French?”

That was a true moment of prophecy. Except, of course, that we have learned how not to use the accursed share at all – here’s a government proclaiming that we are in WWIV in Iraq, while it spends the major portion of the military budget on non-Iraqi items. It would be as if Roosevelt had proposed a military budget in 1942 in which the major portion of it was not dedicated to the war at hand, but to … well, to futuristic wars that bloody minded peeps envision in their think tanks.

An odious end to a wholly odious administration.

It has been our constant hypothesis over the years at LI that this planet cannot forever support an unlimited number of blue whales, who have weights of up to 300,000 pound. That is, the planet cannot indefinitely support a system that requires of the human beings in it to go about using, on average, use as much energy in a year as a creature more than a thousand times their size. Long ago, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote an essay entitled,On Being the Right Size. Here’s how it begins:

“The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be as large as a hippopotamus, or a whale as small as a herring. For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.

Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider a giant man sixty feet high—about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress of my childhood. These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a graceful little creature with long thin legs, is to become large, it will break its bones unless it does one of two things. It may make its legs short and thick, like the rhinoceros, so that every pound of weight has still about the same area of bone to support it. Or it can compress its body and stretch out its these two beasts because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle, and both are quite successful mechanically, being remarkably fast runners.

Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.”

Now, of course, culture is a great jimmy-er of nature. We’ve found innumerable and ingenious ways to pick Nature’s locks. However, ‘we’ did this while, all unconsciously, developing a system about us, the way an oyster unconsciously extrudes a shell. We know, now, what that system is costing – and we are doing nothing about it that would save it in any way. The scattered ingenuities that created it have now become so much shit for the richest flies to land on, led by President fly, whose minions are too busy jerking off to videos of Iraqis being shot or bombed to know that they are even putting their own pretty white asses in peril. On the contrary, we are wasting money as it has never been wasted before on triviality, murder, and plunder.
What a way to spend eight years!