> Maybe it's just me. Honestly, things look like shit
> from my perspective, and I have this strange sense of massive,
> unquantifiable, anger among everyone I meet these days.
It's not just you. I noticed the same thing at O'Hare airport recently (major hubs are wonderful social metrics). Things were already dour late last year, then they got worse this spring. This summer, the sullenness has spread to the TSA workers, who just waved us through. On the airport speakers, they were playing the usual horseshit about "Threat Level Orange". Noone paid the slightest attention. Gas prices were all over the Foxopticon.
The entire petro-fundamentalist underpinnings of the US Empire are unraveling. All the cheap plastic crap which made life in the Empire tolerable isn't cheap anymore. People can't afford their homes, can't afford their cars, can't afford seventy years of suburban sprawl. Whenever I fly out of any major Texas city, I see the doom of this Empire writ into real estate: millions of homes, but not a single one with a solar roof.
-- DRR