9.  The Coming of The Apocalypse

	Amerika, land of many useless things, most of which float about
like those plastic statuette of liberty tokens that people bought in
flocks some years ago.  Amerika's future remains uncertain, but with a
new president, there's at least some false optimism floating around and
influencing the rest of us to idiotic levels; hope can be a dreadful
thing, especially when used as a pair of blinders, much as Amerikans use
it.
	But there's something to be said for Amerikans as survivors in
an empty way of life; the meaning, whatever could once have been gleaned
from this existence, has been totally excluded, and we now survive with
brave hearts & faces in a land of opportunity squandered.
Relationships, shattered -- we're left objectivizing each other, chasing
after poon or penis, or, in the case of some suppressed minorities such
as the gay community, fucking in fear & dodging the nigh-impossible
longterm relationship.  Too much permissiveness on one end, too much
reluctance on another.  Jobs are things we swap when bosses rage or
companies fail, searching in almost total futility for a comfortable
place to work, shifting ourselves into functional yet unenlightening
careers -- what is there in our personal spaces, what we call our lives,
beyond the illusory?
	Some fill this void with religion, others drugs, others causes
with the intellectual nutrition of white bread but the conviction of
desperation.  We see the abortion issue going from the fundamentalist
podium to the streets in anger; is it really worth this much to these
people, or is this the desolation of loneliness & emptiness at work,
driving them toward something -- even a something hollow like a desert
bone -- to hold on to and defend more than life?  Is this what we seek
when life becomes an echo, the something worth more at least temporally
to us?  Moscow's celebrated problem with the collection of frozen
corpses of passed-out vodka escapees mirrors only our own.  Reality in
the sixties was something to be obliterated to reach out from, but in
the eighties (and continuing into the nineties) reality is something to
be obliterated so that we may survive in it.
	So we can blame it all on Nietzsche, and strive for what's next.
If solutions are to be found it is doubtful they will be within the
pages of this essay.  Like the rest of life, this is essentially a
useless activity: lamenting the givens of our existence.  Or perhaps it
is just procrastination on the part of the author, something to keep him
from falling into the same pit he describes.  More likely this is just
another futile & dangerous attempt on the part of SDI, Inc. to foster
thought, no matter how depressing, dangerous or seductive it may be.
	Or maybe Nietzsche is correct, and this is just another step
toward the time of silence, that dubiously mythical time of the last
human being.
			- S.R. Prozak