“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.”  —Assyrian Clay Tablet, ca. 2800 BC

“The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.”  —Dr. Kevin Barrett, “Twilight of the Psychopaths”

“It’s over—we’re officially, royally fucked….” So begins Matt Taibbi’s essay on the crazed power-grabs by Wall Street insiders and other psychopathic personalities that are behind our continuing global economic crisis (see “The Big Takeover” in the March 19, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone).

I tend to agree with Taibbi’s assessment, and I think he’s borderline heroic for writing so lucidly about such a complex topic. Trying to explain collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, and the shady machinations of the London branch of AIG usually results in coma-inducing prose—but not this time. Instead, we get direct, no-bullshit sentences like the following:

“So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.”

Meanwhile, over at Clusterfuck Nation, Jim Kunstler is tackling fun topics like:

“…the desperate efforts to prevent the sane re-pricing of real estate, the cannibalizing of treasuries by the Federal Reserve, the now-notorious hijacking of public ‘liquidity’ injections by third parties like Goldman Sachs, and most generally the perceived sacrifice of everybody else’s greater good for the sake of maintaining Lloyd Blankfein’s cappuccino machine.”

Kunstler has some truly dire predictions about where we’re headed, but his writing, like Taibbi’s, is lucid and engaging. His central thesis—in case you couldn’t guess from his blog’s title—is also quite similar to Taibbi’s:

We’re all (cluster)fucked.

My hope is that writers like Taibbi and Kunstler find a wider audience and prosper during these perilous times—or at least survive (not always a given for investigative journalists; witness Gary Webb, James Hatfield, Anna Politkovskaya, etc…). If we have any chance at all of getting ourselves somewhat un-fucked in the future, we’ll need people like them—people who aren’t afraid to publicly confront the collusive crimes of transnational corporations, the Fed, and officials in our own government.

We’ll also need thousands of honest, ethical, and absolutely fearless lawmen, special prosecutors, and Congressional committees to bust that shit up.

My guess is that it won’t be happening anytime soon.

We live in a fallen world. That should be obvious to just about everyone by now. It became obvious to me while I was doing the research for Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg. The starting point for that research was a line from Aldous Huxley that I used to open the book: “Maybe this world is some other planet’s hell.”

Or wait… back up. That’s not entirely true. If I’m going to be perfectly honest, the real starting point was 9/11, that pivotal date in our country’s history when it was being “taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.”

I was living in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on the day the planes struck the World Trade Center. I tore myself away from the television that awful morning long enough to go walk my big, affable Irish Wolfhound, Clara, who seemed unperturbed by any notion of terrorists attacking her beloved city. We went down to one of the piers jutting out into the Hudson River where we had a clear view—along with a few hundred other people—of the towers burning downtown, unmediated by television cameras and their accompanying terror-propaganda narratives. If Clara and I had stayed out there a little while longer, we would have seen the first tower collapse with our own eyes. Instead, when we got back to our apartment building, the uniformed Polish doorman, Mireck, told us about it. My first, half-stunned thought was, “This is just like ‘The War of the Worlds.’”

I should clarify that thought: I wasn’t thinking that a hostile Martian invasion was in any way responsible for what was going down. What I was thinking was that there was something off, something fake, about the whole scenario as it was occurring—similar to how Orson Welles’ fabulous radio dramatization of “The War of the Worlds” had created so many instances of panic in the more credulous, faked-out members of its listening audience when it was first broadcast in 1938.

When I was seven years old, I had an old LP recording of “The War of the Worlds” that I used to play over and over. “How could anyone not know this was fake?” I used to wonder, secretly delighted that a bunch of dumb adults had been fooled, a long time ago, but not seven-year-old, worldly-wise me.

Future generations will probably wonder the same thing about us in regard to 9/11: “How could they not know it was a false flag terror event?” they’ll think.

(Was there nano-thermite in the WTC dust? You’re unlikely to hear anything about it from the big media conglomerates in America, but Copenhagen University scientist Niels Harrit was allowed to discuss his findings HERE, on April 6th, 2009, in that most humanitarian of countries, Denmark….)

And now, instead of jet-hijacking terrorists, we have a cabal of international bankers and psycho financiers who have swindled the world’s semi-trusting taxpayers on a scale so vast that it’s almost incomprehensible. And those crimes are going unpunished, undermining the entire global economic system and putting social safety nets everywhere at risk. It’s financial terrorism, and it should be dealt with as such—but that’s just not happening.

(William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, recently said to Bill Moyers on PBS: “I don’t know whether we’ve lost our capability of outrage. Or whether the cover-up has been so successful that people just don’t have the facts to react to it.”)

Maybe Aldous Huxley was onto something…. Given the ever-mounting evidence at hand—from the Kennedy assassinations to 9/11 and beyond in both directions—the idea that this world is some other planet’s hell seems entirely plausible to me. Or plausible enough, at any rate, that I made it my book’s premise. I wrote the first page of Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg a few weeks after 9/11.

It took me five years to finish writing Crash Gordon—and another year to get it published. During that time, I learned more than I ever thought I’d want to know about assassinations and their cover-ups, MK-ULTRA and its mind control programming offshoots, CIA drug-running and illegal arms trafficking, economic hit teams, money-laundering and terrorist-funding, heinous corporate fuckery, and other assorted ills and evils propagated by the world’s psychopaths-in-charge. During that time, I also became a father. Suddenly, my initial intellectual interest in elite deviance was transformed into a kind of moral outrage. It’s bad enough that we’ve all had to live in a world where a mere one-percent of the population—the “intraspecies predators” known as psychopathic personalities—repeatedly gets away with fucking over the rest of us; I want a much better world for my daughters.

So I published a book, put up this blog… big fuckin’ whoop, right? But that was all I could think to do at the start. You can’t fix a problem with first knowing that it exists. Or as Gurdjieff was so fond of saying:

“If a man in prison has any chance of escaping, the first thing he has to do is realize he’s in prison.”

So now that we know it’s us against “the whole sick crew of certifiable psychopaths running our so-called civilization,” what are we going to do about it? Anyone?