The boomer order collapses onto Ukraine

Like it did onto My Hometown

Music, like any art, helps bring clarity to things. I find writing a few music cues into Volume 3 of my fiction series certainly helps me tell the story as a writer. Many stories. In November, 1985, fall semester of my freshman year of college, the last top-10 hit off Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA was released. Recorded in 1983, My Hometown held the haunting of years past already.

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closin’ down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are goin’ boys and they ain't comin’ back

to your hometown…your hometown

Bruce is today like a relative I’ve lost to their dementia, and I’m sure he doesn’t know who he was once either. His “in the middle” Super Bowl ad of 2021 morphed former working class hero Bruce into a morbid establishment clown, a cowboy hatted (you’re from New Jersey, dude) sort of ghost, like your aunt on Facebook, oops sorry, Meta. But I sure do still recognize my hometown - still looks like Bruce described in 1983. Worse. Way worse. Forty years worse. So much worse, fellow boomer rocker Neil Young, current deranged mini-Mussolini censor on the warpath against anyone telling him he’s a damn fool for buying a bill of goods from big pharma, recorded a cover of My Hometown…in 2014.

Funereal dirges lamenting the rot of everyone’s hometown were a staple of radio by the early 80’s; the collapse had been underway well long enough for art, great art, to come of it. Some folks prefer the more rockin’ Billy Joel 1982 top 20 hit, Allentown (“where they’re closin’ all the factories down”). The Pretenders’ My City Was Gone came out in 1982. Ay, Oh, Way to go, Ohio. That’s how long things have been collapsing with such devastating generational effect that the Billboard charts sang it out in a plaintive wail of agony, in real time. Today, if you dare complain (let alone in agony) about the 40 years of decline ever since, you’re a racist terrorist whose bank account may be seized by, incredibly, Canadian fascists!?? Neil Young is Canadian, btw.

In Ukraine today, we see boomer world order coming to a close. Now. Finally. Every institution, from local to international, has lost all credibility or reason, NATO chief among them (about to be surpassed by the WHO). Nothing could be more boomer sclerotic than a Red Scare military alliance whose purpose for existence, the USSR, was gone in 1990. In the over three decades since, NATO’s Cold War broken record nostalgia for 1984’s 99 Luftballoons played on. And on, as NATO became little more than an aggressive sharp end of US imperial capitalism. A brain dead policy long ago pointless, NATO today is connected to its origin about as much as Clear Channel piping Neil and Bruce into your ears at the shopping mall that’s been hollowing out year after year your entire life. Thus, today, we enter the long dreamed-of orgasmic Dr. Strangelove End Times boomer fantasy clash in a place so few Americans know the slightest thing about anyone who does still calls it “the” Ukraine. Wave that hat, cowboy, yaaaaahoooooo!

Other than Slim Pickens boomers yahooing to nuclear winter on a missile, no one cares. No doubt designed to get the highest possible support for American boots in Ukraine (cha-ching), an AP poll this week returned the utterly unsurprising yawner that only 26% of Americans want America more heavily involved against Russia in Ukraine. Sad emoji. It’s likely lower. No matter. Clear Channel’s board (through overlapping board seats across the entire defense establishment) will happily tell war profiteers covered in the blood of decades that 26% (or even half that) is a great number. Easily big enough to milk forever with that nostalgic playlist pumping out long dead Cold War cash register ringing cliches. Ask any predatory hedge funder shorting Moderna stock - there’s gold in them thar fraudulent hills.

Vladimir Putin has been warning NATO, and every international institution there is, of clearly red lines in every conceivable way since he rose to power in 1999. The brightest line has always been Ukraine. Might as well have been trying to get Clear Channel to stop playing Neil Young. Come to think of it, might as well have been trying to refuse the covid-19 “vaccine” (pharma board seats overlap in the blob, too). It’s probably no coincidence that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is launched as omicron has proven conclusively to the planet that American pharma, and by extension the entire world health architecture, like everything else, is a gigantic profit seeking vampire squid of fraud. It was only a matter of time before Russia, under Putin or anyone else, tired of indulging these lunatics and their Westphalian “sovereign border” phantoms, for whom it is forever Sudetenland, 1938.

Me (end right) with other trainers, visiting Catherine’s Palace after a weekend of antagonizing Putin with a political party training near St. Petersburg, Russia, 1999

When I worked four months for NDI in Ukraine in 1999, then Russia for four months that summer, training political parties, I thought I was doing God’s work. We knew we were sticking a finger in Putin’s eye, but he wasn’t president yet. Just on his way there, and our job was to leave “democracy” behind to check his power. Hindsight being 20/20 (perhaps 20/22?), Putin chasing my ass out of St. Petersburg should have warned us all. (Long story.)

That it’s the Clintons’ and Bidens’ pet project of Ukraine which at long last pops this bubble…predictably delicious. Weren’t Hunter Biden’s countless board seats (one at NDI even) supposed to prevent all this? Didn’t we at NDI leave behind “democracy”? Or did we leave behind a bunch of oligarchic fascists just like Joe Biden? (In some cases, literally Ukrainian neo-Nazis, like, with swastikas even.) My former existence as a foot soldier for neoliberal Clintonista Blairite Third Way New Democrat horseshit gives me many such sins to repent for. Exile from their world does have a silver lining - I’m not an international man of mystery pied piper for this trash anymore. We all bought someone else’s dream back then.

No country on earth would allow a NATO-like presence on its border in a place where a thousand years of ethnic conflict simmers constantly. A lesson we Americans never, ever learn. Imagine the Warsaw Pact admitted Cuba. Oh wait, that nearly did happen. Did we like that? Imagine Russian sponsored “color revolutions” every few years in Mexico and Canada. Would we like that? All peace needed in Ukraine, for a generation, was a NATO commitment to never admit, nor arm, Ukraine. Of course, that was as unlikely as a big pharma commitment to stop shoving poison into the world’s veins. Authoritarians don’t negotiate, only demand fealty. Ask Canada. Little is more authoritarian than police state Crime Bill Joe Biden, and the security architecture reeking with oligarchic stench upon which Biden is petulantly perched.

Maybe it’s time to put on some Talking Heads; same as it ever was. In irony Bruce couldn’t have known in 1985, the B-side of My Hometown was another unavoidable classic, Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town. Like those jobs that ain’t comin back on the A-side, B-sides vanished long ago, and they ain’t comin’ back either. Once the world finishes flirting with nuclear war just to finally scratch that most insistent of Cold War boomer itches, will Santa Claus still be comin’ to town?