T-17

I read today that there have been flare-ups in the water conflict. I mean shooting kind of flare-ups, especially around Phoenix and Las Vegas. You know, if I was a separatist, one of the things that I would make sure of before I separated was that I had enough in the way of resources to support me in the event my separation was successful. Put another way: what the fuck are you thinking, fighting a guerrilla war to stay in the desert? Only in America, man. Only here would we have a sense of entitlement massive enough to make us willing to die for the right to stay in the kind of place that people everywhere else in the world would die to get out of. Wonder if we should call this a civil war. Is it big enough? Is it a threat to the Republic? Is there even a Republic anymore? In my darker moments—and I refer not to my melanin but my serotonin—I believe that the Republic died at the hands of the virtual society. Which of course I have turned to my advantage by becoming Walt Dangerfield, but I’m still grieving. Do I sound sad to you? In another time, I might have been a columnist for the august New York Times, or a respected scholarly journal. But I was born too late, I was born after we’d all been tangled in what we used to call the World Wide Web. As soon as that happened, anyone could say anything and everyone might listen. Nothing was better than anything else. The hierarchies that we depended on to organize our intake of information disintegrated. I’m not sure how I should feel about this. I like doing what I do, and you like me doing what I do, but when there are nutcases fighting an urban insurgency in the remains of a city where I once went to play blackjack, it feels like something ought to be different than it is.