Summer mumbled out this year, garbling its usually distinct deflation with an autumn that curled in at the edges like old art deco veneer. An inordinate number of trees on the hill retain their dun leaves. The Fall was neither abrupt nor smooth. Now winter comes hacking at the bodiless skin of the dead seasons, like a child with a toy hatchet in a late garden, smashing weeds and skeletal vegetables, imaginary mayhem in a world past caring.
            May you be born in interesting times, goes the supposed Chinese curse. But the American curse seems to be, may you be born in a time that has lost interest. The high muck pseudo-christians of the righteous right read their apocalyptic fictions, fire and brimstone incantations of surrealist end-times destruction. Meanwhile, the multinational corporations encourage the consumption rapidly turning the earth into desert. Who notices that communism has won? - the corporate communism of the multinationals. But even if we notice . . . who cares? I'm too busy earning a living - right? Or rather, I'm too busy paying off the interest on my loans. Money no longer exists, only credit. But money is credit - right? So, who cares?
            Besides, Jeremy, you seem to think that there is such a thing as value. There is no purpose in the world. It's all just a giant accident in any case. So what difference if we destroy it? And if there's no purpose, why should we bother with education, unless we see some prospect of a better job . . . read: higher pay. There is no such thing as a 'better job'. You think you'd rather be an overpaid CEO. But then your corporation might tank, for no reason of your own - just as your success had little or nothing to do with you personally - and the next thing you know, you go to jail for fraud, because you did what everybody else does in your position. Lovely job. Great power. Limos at the curb. Etc. etc. etc.

            The kids sit in school and recognize that 'value' is no longer part of the curriculum. If the teacher believes in education, he or she runs afoul of the bureaucracy, which now extends from the sub-vice-principle to the White House. Time to get out and start a business - an online business with no employees, since the taxman runs the same bureaucracy that extends from your first piece of subcontracted work to some stratosphere of bureaucratic heaven that cannot even be named. Why should the kids care about knowledge, if nobody believes in value?

            When are we going to start believing in value again? Or maybe we aren't going to. Maybe that's what it's all about. The Great Cat, fate, has played with us until, like the mouse, we are completely stunned and emotionally dead. In that case, it's all over. What difference if our great-grandchildren are fetal skeletons in the endless rock and sands of New York or Pennsylvania.
            Maybe that's what the 'art' is about. 'Point of view'. Soup cans are as profound as Yahweh or Bacchus, if nothing means anything. Even 'point of view' is meaningless, although we apparently keep it around for convenience' sake. The New York Times will keep publishing until paper becomes too expensive or the advertisers head south. Power freaks will continue to run for president as long as the power of the position tends inordinately to outrun the pay. So maybe the art is prophetic after all - prophetic of the final universal cultural death just over the next low ridge, a death of culture inevitable in the death of humanity.

            Only a fool continues to insist on value, when it spells hunger, no rent and bad teeth. Yield to the almighty corporate icon. Cheap toothpaste is more important than integrity or a valid life. Besides, neither is really possible; whereas cheap toothpaste is at the Wal-Mart. Or is the cheapest at the Rite Aid?

            There is value. The fact that you can read this sentence means that there is meaning; signifies significance. Without value, signs themselves could not exist. But tell that to the atheist materialists who write the highly significant tracts denying significance altogether. Because how could significance be an accident?
            This is why we never understand each other.