What We've Become

Back in the day, we used to look at documentaries from socialist countries, like the USSR, and there would be daycare centers where all the children would be lined up and it was implied that they were sort of treated like commodities; the parents had to work on the collective farm or the state factory, and the state was responsible for raising the kids. How awful that was!

Well, I just saw something on daycare in the USA. Guess what?

Then I talked to a young woman in Naples who says that my favorite art gallery shut down ( Shamaly's ), and the busiest stores in town are those that are devoted to knock-off jewelry. I asked whether that was legal-type knock-offs (whatever they might be), and she paused. She did not know. Then we spoke about how openly things like that were shown and sold in Chinatown. So I said, "It's Chinatown, Jake!", referring to the film Chinatown (and I wonder if I can work another "Chinatown" in here).

So I said, it's all Baghdad, honey! We've met the so-called Third World, and it is us. (To top it off, there was a brief energy outage...first of the year here.)