Subject: Re: Was the Cold War fuel for Gothdom? From: Tiny Human Ferret Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:10:23 -0500 Newsgroups: alt.gothic IHCOYC XPICTOC wrote: > Xandraius wrote: > > >> Funny conversation with an AG reg (going on as I post): With the end >> of the cold war, tensions dropped. This caused a cascade that pulled the >> rug out from under the goth community. During the fear of burning >> nuclear fire, we did not so much laugh at death as we laughed at people >> *about* death. > > > > I remember all that. In 1980, the first presidential election for which I > was eligible, I voted for Ronald Reagan because I believed he would save me > from the bother of having to take a job, and the terrors of my student > loans. Sonafabitch turned out to be a peacenik anyways. > > But frankly, I am more disgusted at the general stupidity, petty venality, > and general evil shittiness of the American people now than I ever was back > then. Total Depravity continues to work its way through their lives. We > continue planning Armageddon through our prideful, oblivious cluelessness. > But unfortunately, the path to the post-apocalyptic world of my dreams seems > to be an awfully long and slow road. Because the American people are easily > frightened by spooks, and will try to vote themselves a free lunch anyway > they think they can, they will continue turning this country into just > another kleptocratic one-party state. They will not die gloriously, in > revolution or in war. They will die like the peasants they are. My theory of the moment is mostly in agreement with you, with some exceptions. My own expectation is that especially in the "civilized" world, notably the DC Metro Area, they'll simply go criminally insane. Not schizophrenic, not bipolar, not multiple-personality, but simply criminally insane. Society will shatter into a collection of persons leading double lives, wearing two hats at once, if you will. They will be primarily defined to themselves and to their associates and neighbors by their education, professions, and income level, but their secondary self-definition will be of affiliation to this or that splinter group. As pressures mount, these splinter-groups will more closely isolate their activities and membership, and as they do, shall assume a more activist, yet conspiratorial nature. Each of these groups will find their activities increasingly becoming more illegal in nature, especially as they begin to decide that the activities of other groups are intolerable, whether or not legal, and move to suppress such activities, be they real or imagined. Rather than have their illegal activities controlled by law-enforcement or civil litigation, they will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure their operations can go undetected; and from this moment they become actively criminal in mindset and operation, and to the degree that their goals or motivations fall outside what might be reasonably explained to their community, they become essentially mad. Imagine tens of thousands of such groups, each essentially a local cult, perhaps with tie-ins to larger related cults, and to the degree each local cult is moving beyond mere insularity and weirdness into criminal conspiracy, their tie-ins to other organizations will assume a cell-based organizational style. In the end, everyone will believe themselves to be the uber-spy and secret agent of their secret societies, and, riddled by ten thousand such little secretive cults, society will be part and parcel at each other's throats and always coming from behind, for no reasons comprehensible to any other than those inculcated into madness by these cults, attacking without warning and with a carefully contrived lack of accountbility or possibility of legal retribution. Society will become entirely unable to function and anarchy of the intolerable sort will result. In the end, western civilization will be nothing but a collection of fruitcakes all driving themselves and everyone else mad, and otherwise stabbing each other in the ass because they can't think of anything else to do. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the inane babbling of the hopelessly deluded, beyond even the reach of surrealism and psychotropics. The rest of the world will force their kids to watch a few hours of television's final broadcasts of the glorification of secret cult attacking secret cult, and say, "you don't want to end up like that, do you?" -and later in the strange years to fallow, missions sent to America to investigate the possibilities of a long-hoped-for return to something like sanity in the States, will themselves return home with secret second lives, spreading the madness, because it's all they have left to them, to drive others as criminally mad as they are, because misery loves company. -- The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance, and produce the effects, of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. --Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"