13.3.08

madness, china, and capitalism

I had a good conversation with a student today. A really fucking good conversation. We were talking about arranged marriages and I asked him why they still existed in Japan. He said 'twas for a few reasons, one of which was to strengthen business alliances. He asked me if anything like that happened in America. I said no, not for a long time. I said the only place you were likely to find something like that would be the mafia or some such underground syndicate. I said that in America, when a business wants to strengthen ties to another business, it buys the other business. I said that American capitalism since the 1950s has been a series of fish being eaten by bigger fish being eaten by things even bigger than fish and there are three monsters in the world and one is a great snake eating its own tail and one is a pale dragon bigger than mountains trying to stand and one is a crowned and engorged whore on a mountain of gold and blood-soaked gems and the world will end when the dragon's knees give out and when it falls it will crush the crowned whore whose spilled blood will coat the earth and color the seas, and when it falls it will startle the snake into letting go of its tail, and when it falls it will turn the earth to dust. And when the crowned whore pops like a grape the world will become like an abattoir and men will kill children for bread, and when the snake lets go of its tail the dreams of mankind will spill out from its coil and for a moment before the dragon turns the earth to dust everything shall be beautiful as if heaven were on earth, for nothing will remain impossible.

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