The Body of Truth

I am going to send this here piece of drivel to Dmitri Orlov and see what he thinks about it. I have a sneaking hunch it is just a rehash of his and other peoples existing body of work.

When you stand back and look at it, the USSR collapsed under the weight of the untruths that it had accumulated around itself for the brief seventy some odd years of its existence. The workers lied to the managers (we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us), the managers lied to the apparachniks, who lied to the leaders. There was a house of cards built and the aging, intellectually moribund leadership of the Soviet Union took the counterfeit idea of their status as a true power onto the world stage.

Then along came old Ronnie Reagan. Now don't get me wrong, I liked the guy quite a bit. I even penned a get well letter when he got shot and told him he was doing a fine job. But....lets face it here folks, Ronnie wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. What he was was a good poker player. When he recognized that the Rooskis were betting on a busted flush, he started raising. Star Wars, Nicaragua, the stingers to Obama Bin Laden and his ilk in Afghanistan, six-hundred ship navy, the list goes on.

The Russians folded.

Fast forward twenty years. Here in the USA we have rapidly built a similar edifice of lies. The ownership society, CDO's, CDS's, liar loans and livin' large. In a very real sense, the lies that we have told ourselves and structured our society around are probably even more pervasive than those told by the Soviets. To this day, I would like to find Francis Fukayama in a biker bar and give him the slapping around he so richly deserves.

So now we are at the endgame of our bluff. We are going to lose the bulk of the bets that we made, hoping that everyone else would drop out of the game. But we misjudged the game we are playing. We thought that we were playing poker, but perhaps all the while we were playing 21. You know, the game where you play against the house. At the end of the game you show your cards and you either win or lose.

I doubt if we will win when the cards are placed face up.