Survival

I'm beginning to understand how ordinary Russians survived the meltdown of their Empire: after awhile, so many crises pile on so fast that there's no time to worry about any one of them. You start to realize that all the petty things which used to drive you nuts -- rule-crazy bureaucrats in the USSR, dollar-crazy billing agencies in the US -- are so many mosquitos in the Gloom, to paraphrase Sergei Lukyanenko's "Nightwatch" universe.

Russians lived off their dachas and garden produce for a decade, until Putin and the siloviki launched one of the most stupendous rescue operations of the century. We Americans will have to do something similar, by hunkering down on our foodstamps and government jobs.

Here's a post-Imperial guide to surviving the Great Crumble:

1. It's not you, it's The System. One in eight Americans has no job. One of four American kids isn't getting enough food. Our industrial base doesn't exist anymore. Our housing market is broken. Our media system is broken. Our political system is broken. Our banking system is broken. Our health care system is broken. Do not blame yourself or your unemployed neighbors for any of this stuff: the crash of this system is the crash of an unjust and unsustainable Empire, an Empire of toxic militarism and financial oligarchies. We need to replace it with a fairer, less violent, more democratic and more equitable society.

2. Zombie oligopolies. Right now, about a third of the US economy consists of globally uncompetitive oligopolies, whose main economic skill is buying off US politicians. We have a military-industrial complex (8% of the economy), a pharma-insco complex (8% of the economy), a Wall Street-Treasury complex (6% of the economy), and an automotive-sprawl complex (about 8% of the economy). (And don't get me started on our zombie mass media.) All leech off your tax revenues, some directly ($1 trillion in Federal spending on war) and some indirectly ($14 trillion in credit guarantees for Wall Street, hundreds of billions in tax subsidies for highways and McMansions). Instead of funding dead oligopolies, we should be spending our money on a public school-university complex, a renewable-green energy complex, a local utility-infrastructure complex, and a public media-information complex.

3. Embrace your inner pirate. Don't blow up your TV, use it to surf the web! Can't pay for overpriced, shoddy media? Tired of the lies of the mainstream media? Then don't pay for their lying swill -- download the media and information you want, when you want it, on the device of your choice. Use open source software to create your very own media, and share it with others. With 3 billion people already in the digital commons, and billions more on the way, you can't go wrong!

4. Never underestimate the restorative power of laughter. Being angry at the neoliberals does them too much credit. At this point, I laugh at DMCA take-down notices. I laugh at the mainstream media and its copyright fundamentalism. I laugh when I hear Wall Streeters talk about honesty and good governance. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be angry that neoliberalism completely fleeced us taxpayers. But the first step towards taking back what they stole is preserving our sense of humor -- because humor, as Patrick McGoohan noted all the way back in 1967, is the very essence of a democratic society.

5. Celebrate the joys of the commons. The utopian energies running loose in the traditional forms of the commons, the videogame culture, and the digital commons are simply astounding. More heartening still, these energies are beginning to spill over into the traditional media, loosening the stranglehold of corporate oligopolists and Imperial governments alike.