Mark me down for yet another unannounced, unauthorized vacation (in an undisclosed, secure location) from the rigors of chronicling the crash of the industrial age. In the past these respites have been enforced by mental roadblocks — depression, writer’s block, whatever you want to call it — but this one is different.



I’ve always had an unspoken deal with you, Dear Reader (if you’re still there, and if you are not I certainly understand), that I will write here only when I believe I have something valid to say, not to fill a hole or meet a contrived schedule. But with each passing year it has become less possible to know, with any reasonable degree of confidence, what is going on anywhere. The people and publications doing honest reporting are declining rapidly in both number and quality, leaving us observers adrift in a toxic sea of misinformation, propaganda and drivel. Our collapsing empire is increasingly insane, from the emperor on down, and there is no alchemy by which lunacy can be turned into anything useful.



Nothing the president says about anything can be believed. No utterance of any politician or bureaucrat or industrialist can be taken at face value (don’t trust, and verify). The bimbos and bimbettes of the mainstream media are happily gamboling through the woods chasing the pretty little squirrels who are running for president, ignoring the fact that the woods are on fire, a hurricane approaches and a tsunami looms offshore. How can one pretend to think, much less write, sanely in an insane world?



Well, if you’re a member of the orchestra on the Titanic, and your world is going down, you keep playing. Not because you think it will save the ship, or even be of much comfort to the panicked passengers, but because it’s what you do. If you don’t play your instrument, then you just die in silence.



So I shall try to write on, as and when I can do it with some confidence of validity, because writing is what I do, and if I don’t write I’m just sitting here listening to the ship fill with water. As Hamlet asked of Horatio, I shall absent me from my vacation yet a while, and in this harsh world draw breath in pain, to tell its story. Or at least, the next chapter.

