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In my continuing series of useful, simple, completely obvious and absolutely-without-a-chance ideas, may I suggest:

A free trade zone within the United States.

At this point most readers will be either preparing objections to naive libertarian dogma or, more likely, concluding that I’m drunk again. I assure you, however: I’ve had nothing to drink today stronger than green tea.

So why do I make the absurd suggestion of “a free trade zone within the United States?” Because that seems like the most effective way I can think of to express the idea of eliminating a stupid, regressive, ridiculous maze of what are for practical purposes barriers to either free or fair trade.

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So, did you know that oil prices, which were actually really uncomfortably high a few years ago and only fell back largely as a result of a global recession (to which they most likely contributed), have been rising lately and, especially in conjunction with but perhaps even without the effect of “unrest” in the middle east, may well choke off economic recovery?

Especially here in the United States where, largely as a result of taxes making up a relatively microscopic portion of the price paid for petroleum by consumers, the economy is both highly dependent on oil and thus really staggeringly dangerously vulnerable to high oil prices?

Yeah. Amazing. Who would have imagined…?

Tell you what. Mr. President? I like your “we are not going to keep refighting the same battle over and over” approach to health care reform. Can we start taking a similar “we are not going to keep blithely putting our foot into the same trap over and over” approach to energy policy? Some time? Acknowledging that no it’s not really your fault but that, at the same time, it will at least start to be if you leave office having deferred this problem to the next administration just like your predecessors have been doing for 30 or 40 years? (Also acknowledging that while I like the high speed trains, they aren’t really going to be of adequate scale or timeline as a solution, by themselves.)

What’s that you say? Americans have turned from the oil-industry-friendly party to shift power toward the oil-industry-fanatically-worshipful-I’m-talking-literal-blood-sacrifices party?

Oh. Right.

Christ almighty god. America collectively may well deserve the full consequences of the absolutely determined intentional fucking stupidity which has led us to this pass, but personally I do not. Dear fucking lord.

I suppose we’d probably better just hope that these guys iron out the minor little “technical details” and change history, then. (Not holding my breath for that, either.)

Okay, I’m just going to do this and maybe it will relieve some of this “congestion of the brain.” (I learned yesterday that apparently this was a commonly-cited medical condition in the Victorian Age; along the same lines of Alan Moore’s musings in Voice of the Fire I suspect it may be due for a comeback.)

I’m a little weirded-out, since Christmas. Those days between Christmas and the New Year are always kind of an odd limbo, IMO, mind you; it’s like we’re left with this vexing stub at the end of every year as a result of the historical accidents which see the actual Solstice, our beginning-of-winter festival of light, and the change of the calendar year on three different days.

I still don’t feel quite right, though, even per what usually passes for “normal” with me. Everything just seems awfully depressing. What’s the point, how can anyone really be hopeful for the future?

People can, obviously, and I do marvel at it. Today, The Economist front page had a story from its print edition, from back in November, which I’d not seen before. In which the remarkable Arianna Huffington manages to look around American and note the plentiful evidence of a slide toward “third world” status… and then suggest that “2011 is going to be all about hope 2.0.” Seriously? You’re older and wiser than me, good woman, so I would be happy to believe you’re right, but, wow. I don’t know how one can stare into the abyss and see redemption in the darkness, like that. (more…)