Jokehustlers

Peons, supplicant.

What bloody horseshit.

"May your chains rest lightly upon you," every goddamned one of you.

Why Bother?

I swear the truth: I cannot imagine why, in the prevailing socio-political climate of this rotten country, anyone gets out of bed in the morning to stack so much as one single brick on top of another.

I will never understand it.

"I Hear The Streets Are Paved With Coal!"

Where to start on the Destiny USA story?

When you're done laughing at the platitudes blaring out of The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny...

"Destiny USA is powerful, it's personal, it's progressive."

"Destiny USA is about savoring what is good. It's about enhancing the lives we live today."

"Destiny USA is about creating a future for ourselves, our families, and our country."

...then you might want to get down to some business -- you should indulge the term -- faithfully transcribed from the joint's flashy-assed website:

"Destiny USA, designed to be the worlds largest enclosed and integrated structure, will provide a unique blend of experience and experiment. Located in Syracuse, New York, and easily accessible to 130 million residents in the northeast United States and Canada, it is projected to be the single most visited leisure destination on earth. Operating with a unique single-owner model, all of Destiny USA's dining, shopping, entertainment, hospitality, and recreation venues are physically and virtually integrated, providing guests with a matchless combination of experiences and convenience.

Destiny's committment to operating 100% free of fossil fuels will demonstrate practical ways to break the world's addiction to oil. Destiny USA will be a showcase for the world's most advanced technologies and services and a showroom for the latest and best products and brands.

• From the design of the hotels, to the staff who work in them
  
• From the food in the restaurants... to the energy that powers them
  
• From a new paradigm in shopping... to the regeneration of an entire region
  
• From a perpetual spring climate... to technology designed to make the experience effortless"
  

I have a friend in Los Angeles who calls the city "Siberacuse". I laughed and laughed after the first time I ever heard that, understanding that mere reference to the weather isn't the whole sick joke, by a long shot. What you have in the case of the whole of upstate New York is a functional depression that's been grinding along for nearly the entire thirty-two years that I've been aware of it since my family settled here after Dad got out of the Air Force in 1974. If you sat down and drafted a plan to destroy production in "an entire region", I don't know how you could possibly do a better job than what is darkly alluded to by observers of reality as "The Vampire State". No scheme to do serious business here can qualify as a "concept". Any scheme to achieve "the single most visited leisure destination on earth" in Syracuse, must call to question whether its promoters have ever once gotten out of the barn for a look around. To attempt doing it with a shopping mall is something that easily tops the entire scale of fantasy. This is cartoon land: complete suspense of reality.

One of the saddest things about all of this is that this climate of desperation is a regular hot-house for blooming these sorts of straw-grasping delusion. Among people long beaten into submission to the general idea that the state is where everything begins and there is no end, it's all quite natural -- if not entirely palatable -- that attempts at what they see as production of values should necessarily include the long-running fur-ball of lawsuits and press conferences with attendant pols and their grease. This, to them, is the only way anything serious can happen, and so it must be dragged out for the greater good, until the greater good eventually demands recrimination in the news. That's where the little people get forgotten, standing around in their project T-shirts while the rhetorical fire arches overhead between the fiscal carnivores. Their -- the little peoples' -- salaries will only run now until January 20. Where a high-school dropout with a couple of days of jackhammer training will find another sixty thousand dollar per year position in what laughingly passes for a "market" in upstate New York is quite beyond me, and I'm not the only one: one of those very specimens was equally mystified, at least, during his brief appearance before the news cameras last evening.

However, Pyramid Companies, the mall purveyor grasping beyond its reach, is still angling on two hundred million dollars to be issued as bonds by a "corporate non-profit corporation created in 1979 to enhance the City's economic development capabilities", in order to continue attempted levitation of this elephant. So, everybody's got that going for them. Wisely, I believe, The Salina 29 are restraining themselves on news of the latest setback: their fight against eminent domain seizure pre-dates the Kelo decision by a good bit, and I think they know how hard they could still go down. The Syracuse Teachers Association was less timid in a television news report last night: wagging the schools' twenty-four million dollar deficit this year, the STA is anxious to get its fangs into back taxes that Pyramid Companies will have to cough up if no angle can be found to keep the Destiny show on the road.

And everybody keeps trying to live at the cost of everyone else, for the value of "community".

Which wouldn't be quite so bad, I suppose, if only all the communards weren't such bloody shit-heels.