It doesn’t get any better than this! You look back over 2011 and say to yourself ‘obvious Leibniz quote’. I myself enjoyed a cornucopia of death, taxes and medical bills with the occasional meaningless workplace drudgery to salt the meal. But let’s not linger on the past when a glorious future awaits!
In 2011, many people protested about their shitty government and in some cases like Egypt managed to replace them with an identical shitty government wearing different epaulettes. The American media slow clapped along like a fuckwit, wanking on about Arab Springs and Tweets until their own young middle class intellectuals started shitting on their lawn. Hey! No Fair!
Time Magazine’s solution to the doublethink is an astounding piece of nationalistic bullshit – for the period 1990 – 2010 for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy and rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters. Although Kurt Andersen, author of this very special piece of pleading allows that there were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Millions of oppressed black South Africans say thanks for caring Kurt!
“Massive and effective street protest” was a global oxymoron – pardon me while I go tell the people mourning their dead over the last 20 years – hey! Stop that! You guys aren’t Protest 2.0.
PROTEST 2.0.
If you’re a venture capitalist by now you’ve stopped reading and whipped out your white iPhone 4.0. Everybody get back to the office pronto we’re ON A NEW ROLL! The protests of the last 20 years were scruffy disagreeable things, brought on by the dregs – this time we are live on Twitter and Facebook – the revolution will be narrowcasted – the executives at PepsiCo are dusting off their old ‘Pepsi Generation‘ campaign. There are Guy Fawkes masks to sell, camping equipment, black turtle neck sweaters and WiFi by the hour. Protest 2.0. is OK with the system because there is money to be made. In 2012, protesting becomes a solid career choice:
What Do We Want? We want to emulate the baby boomers by honing our media skills in faux rebellion before founding media and advertising companies that strangle the world for the next 50 years. When Do We Want It? Can we skip the 70′s and get straight to the comfortable bit?
We’re all expressing our anti-statism by these masks we bought on Amazon © Warner Brothers.
In 2012 the election process will incorporate angry street demonstrations by individuals such as General Motors, Blackwater and Boeing, ‘sticking it to the man’. This piece of theatre isn’t necessarily a bad thing – Revolution nearly always is rewarded by Bonapartes, Stalins, Pol Pots and Lukashenkos, which makes all the spilled blood a sorry waste. North Korea’s succession planning looks pretty smooth compared to these ‘springs’. As do ‘elections’ in which one wealthy tinkerer hands over to another.
Worldwide: Putin isn’t going anywhere in 2012; the Tzar is the Country to the last drop of (your) blood. China on the other hand is safe only so long as they keep the money rolling, something that looks a bit dicey. China is like a huge mall with not quite enough shoppers – stockpiles of unsold goods, entire empty cities built for real estate investment, piles of useless US cash… and the Chinese government will be quietly changing hands in 2012.
USA ELECTION
I’m stoked to hear that Ron Paul is in the running for United States president. The USA is like an old friend on life support in a hospice, waiting to die but taking time to do it. President Paul is the sweet release the country needs.
Imagine the scene on Paul’s entry to the White House – the first day his supporters totally sparking up a fat doobie because hey it’s 4:20 all the time with the TOKUS POTUS. Weed smoked they are surprised to find their local bank closed as going back 50 years to the gold standard wiped out the liquidity of the US economy, destroying inter-bank loans and consequently banks. So maybe Pizza Hut can pay their wages in bottle caps – problem is with no loans, there’s no credit, no buying and so no business to conduct. Sorry dude, closed down.
OK so it’s barter system – I’ll swap you for your bacon. Thing is, most pig farmers don’t want skull candles, bitcoins and paintings of Sonic the Hedgehog in Karma Sutra positions. By the time they figure out that with no cops you can just go take the damn pig, it’s too late, the unemployed cops have already formed a gang running the city. That lasts for as long as it takes for US troops to arrive back from their closed postings, hungry and in pitched battle with the cops, pig farmers and cons sprung from jails. Let Liberty ring!
This is the moment that musicians have waited for. Years have gone by where they’ve been told they can live off T Shirt sales. Some bands have entire warehouses full of unsold tour T shirts. In Ron Paul’s America, a black XXL Tshirt with AC/DC Ball Breaker is worth a day’s weed. Pretty soon there’s a new economy you can wear.
In the 2016 Elections the top candidates are all self made via tour merchandise and it’s a close call between Democrat Spears and Republican Simmons. What no one expected is that China now wants their money back – all of it. As the paper amount owed is more than the entire gold reserves of the nation the Chinese declare the USA a special economic zone with their own appointed President David Bowie.
CULTURE
The plebs were encouraged to horde for most of the 20th century and filled their huts with LPs, CDs, DVDs, cartridges,VHS tapes, in some cases even books. In the 21st century a new money making idea spun up – to have plebs copy all this media onto hard drives for consumption on newly purchased e-books and tablets. The ripping and scanning took a while, but by 2012 the effort had nearly paid off – threatening the lucrative money making. In February a new fashion is struck – conspicuous dubbing. The very wealthy start to copy their ripped VHS and vinyl back onto VHS and vinyl, breathlessly reported in Tapedecks of the Rich and Famous, Cassette Idol, Hissy Missy and New Bounce causing a wave of copycat copying back and forth from disc to drive to tape back to disc. It’s a sorry teen that doesn’t have at least 50 copies of each title clogging every inch of their intimate space. For this reason the children born 2000-2005 become known as generation loss.
In 2011 wealthy photogenic people married, selling photographs for large sums of money to women’s magazines. Then promptly divorced. The battle for GLBTQ people to carry on the same crap is won over the following years, extending hence to pets, the deceased and animes allowing a glut of stars, marriages, editorials, lawyers and divorces that reaches a crescendo with the infamous Twenty Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Seven Sisters, Two Corpses, A Chinese Dinner et al. fiasco where the cost of the cake greatly exceeds the take.
GAMING
Most popular game for 2012 – Bioshock Angry Birds. You are the lone stranger thrust into a forgotten valley – the decaying masterwork of Chinese ultra libertarian 恭喜發財紅包拿來 who planned to fill it with the entire Yangtze before being overcome by rebel forces. You arrive in the fifth year of the endless war between the objectivist Pig and communist Bird forces. And there’s a young psychic girl or girls that have to be rescued or something because the Bioshock franchise ran out of ideas in 2007.
AUSTRALIA
The Prime Minister describes the Leader of the Opposition as ‘something nasty shat out a pole cat’s exhaust pipe’. The Leader of the Opposition replies that the Prime Minster is ‘the film that forms over a bucket of cold goat’s sick’. The Australian People join in mass whining about how poor they are, conducted by wealthy radio announcers. Miners dig stuff out the ground. 500 more branches of Pie Face open in Sydney, bringing certainty to a diagnosis of epicurean cancer. By the end of 2012 hostilities between Pie Face and Flight Centre escalate to pie throwing and pilot stomping before Nibiru wipes out the whole lot and good riddance.
(Edit: repairing some of the weird tenses and other effects of Gin.)