Market Forces and the Frivolty Industry

Spending all your time staring agape at behemoth of stupidity isn't strictly writer's block, but its results are similar enough to make it at least a distant cousin.

So I'm sitting here staring at a blank document which should by all rights be at least half filled by (hopefully) amusing little one-liners about the latest little interactive nothing by now, and I'm completely stuck.  I keep alt-tabbing between the aforementioned Naked Word Doc and a Trusted Source for Dire, Dire News About the Economy, and the more I read of the latter, the less inclined I am to bother with anything as frivolous by comparison as the former.

I'm in total "How can I waste time with X when Y is happening??!?" mode, even though X actually pays the bills* and I have no rational course of action to take as a countermeasure to Y**.  Like every working stiff who through accident of birth and paycheck knew better than to bother with long-term financial planning, I find myself struck dumb at the prospect of having to deal with a Beast upon whose creation I had minimal effect. 

On one hand, I can't help but feel less than enthusiastic about my tax dollars going toward a series of bailouts for a banking system which laughed at me every time I reached too far above my station and, say, tried to buy a car which was built in the last two decades.  I've been beneath their notice since time immemorial, so to Hell with them, right?

On the other hand, I realize that this thing is far too complicated, and the consequences potentially far too severe, for me and mine to simply turn my back on it.  But what can we, the lowest of the middle class, do other than continue our daily struggles and wonder if our day-job bosses would agree to allowing us to quit long enough to collect early on our meager privatized retirement plans, then rehire us? 

Don't ask me - I'm spending my free time trying to figure out a way to switch out from the whole Digital Media thing into an area more focused on Sidearms and Non-Perishable Foods.

It would help if the whole thing didn't smell so rotten.  Maybe I'm just an alarmist***, but when the former head honcho of a group of professional slimeballs asks for $700 billion which we don't have to finance a debuggerification which his own former subordinates helped create, I get a little incredulous****.
 
It's not that I honestly think that this is the beginning of the end, but good God, are they ever going to screw things up trying to fix this one.

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* Well, one or two of them.

** My doctor says that admitting that my big Pile O' Guns is not a rational course of action is a step forward.

*** I am totally the world's biggest alarmist.

***** On the bright side, I now have a clever new name for the Pile O' Guns.