I love the environment, I really do – the grass, the trees, the sky, the swamps, the deserts, the jungles, the caves filled with primal ooze, black widow spiders, rattlesnakes, great white sharks, cobras, tarantulas, lice, the Ebola virus, vancomycin-resistant tuberculosis, flesh-eating bacteria, volcanoes, meteorites, stellar explosions, all of it! I love Mother Earth, even though She spends about 99.8% of her time trying to annihilate me.

Worshiping nature is, of course, a hallmark of civilizational collapse, representing as it does the rejection of rational thought and all considerations of practicality. But I still love “green” technology.

It’s fun!

You know where the term “green” comes from? No, it’s not from the color of chlorophyll, the pigment that makes grass and leaves the color that filters down through the leaves in an aboriginal jungle (God bless evolution) and also makes your mouth smell fresh when it is included in mints. “Green” when applied to technology comes from the color of MONEY! That’s right, money! Green technology costs an arm and a leg. You love “green” if you own a “green technology” company, and have friends among environmentally conscious politicians (ask Al Gore).

Green technology also makes you feel good, because you are so environmentally responsible and are being kind to the bunnies, chipmunks, coyotes, and rats. As long as you don’t use it to heat your house. Because if you try to stay warm using photovoltaic cells, greenhouses, or any other environmentally conscious solar technology, you will freeze your ass off. Nobody who peddles these solar blessings ever mentions that, occasionally, the winter sky is cloudy. Like 95% of the time.

What will we do next for Mother Earth, or Gaia as the real nuts refer to her? You should plan to watch all new construction screech to a halt as more and more species get promoted to “endangered.” Or “threatened.” Or “less happy than we, the powers that be, think they should be.”

And vegetables are next. Remember the furbish lousewort? (I am not making this up) Preserving this pathetic weed stopped an important flood control project dead in its tracks in Maine. On the other hand, who cares about drowning a few moose? But there are weeds we do care about – for example, wheat. And the other vegetables. We must preserve their precious lives. Not one stalk shall be cut. Kumbayah, my Lord, Kumbayah!

And when we finish saving all the other species, we will still have one problem left. There will still be one endangered species.

Us.

No, I’m not talking about the Battle of Hastings. That’s 1066. I am talking about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, not rendering unto William the Conqueror everything you have.  I am talking about Form 1040, the one tool left to us poor mortals to claw back our money from the rapacious government that collected too much of it last year. Why do we overwithhold? Because the hordes of the Internal Revenue Service will descend on us if we are fifteen cents short and turn our lives into a living hell for the next twenty years. So we sit docilely by the mailbox, waiting for our refund check, and when it arrives we say “Oh Goody!”

You think Form 1040 is bad. Try Form 1120. That’s the form for a corporation’s tax return. By the time you finish completing that one, including all the required supplementary schedules, it is about the size of the Manhattan telephone directory. [N.B. For those of you who are young enough not to remember what a telephone directory is, let me explain. In the days BG (before Google), you found a telephone number by consulting a thick book which had the names of the owners of the telephone numbers arranged in alphabetical order. Since you’re reading this, I assume you know what an alphabetical listing is. As a predicate, I also assume that you know what an alphabet is.]

But back to the income tax. What a wonderful word is “tax!” It comes from the Ur-Proto-Ugaritic language spoken by the Australopithecans, and translates literally as “screw the peasants.” So you can see that nothing much has changed over the past several millenia.

But things are about to get even better. Our masters are about to impose a “carbon tax.” Unfortunately, it will not be paid by the carbons. It will be paid by YOU. As you can see by looking out the window and observing the absence of glaciers, the Earth is heating up, which will have all sorts of bad consequences, like increased agricultrual production that will encourage excessive eating, fatness, and an increase in heart attacks. And we all know that this heating is produced by the burning of stuff, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere, exacerbating the greenhouse effect. [For me, the greenhouse effect is my being inundated by hydroponically grown zucchini raised by my neighbor all through the winter.] To alleviate this problem, the gummint is going to charge emitters of CO2, like power companies and airlines, a fee based on how much CO2 they emit. This will result in electricity costs going from $.04 per kilowatt hour to $400.00 per kilowatt hour, and the coach fare from Boston to Miami going from $200 to $20,000. But what the hell.

We have much more fun in store.

What else produces CO2? Why you do, of course, every time you exhale! I’ll bet they tax that next, and if you don’t pay up, they will duct tape your nostrils closed on every second Tuesday.

And there are lots of other greenhouse gases! Say, like methane, produced, as you know from your diligent perusal of the newsfeeds, by cow farts. The methane tax cannot be imposed directly on the cows, because they are unlikely to pay. So the cost will be born by the rancher, and steak will be $1,000 per pound, like it is in Tokyo today. And if you, as a city dweller, don’t want to be assessed a similar tax, lay off the beans.

But do you know what the biggest greenhouse gas is? WATER VAPOR! So you can forget about taking any more hot showers, or washing your dishes in hot water. I’m sure you have a river bank located conveniently near your house.

But back to carbon. Carbon is a chemical element. There are 117 others. We can tax them too!

We’re just getting started.

There is an old joke that Illinois politicians serve two terms: one in the statehouse, and one in the slammer. It’s true everywhere, but Illinois is the poster child for crooked politicans. (But I repeat myself.) (In all honesty,  I have to admit that this construction is due to Mark Twain, only he used “member of Congress” and “idiot.”)

This raises a serious financial question. In a day of collapsing state finances, why should the people of Illinois have to pay for TWO residences for their felonious leaders? I want Illinois to prosper. I once lived in Chicago, and I love the city. It sure beats the hell out of New York. Chicago is clean.  It also has a beautiful lakefront, terrific museums, great restaurants, and pleasant people. In contrast, New York is filthy, has riverfronts that provide a wonderful view of (yuch) New Jersey, and vile people who scurry about in a manner indistinguishable from the gait of a cockroach.

So how is Illinois to regain financial stability. It is said that you can’t save yourself into success, you have to spend money to make money, etcetera, ad nauseum. But you sure can save yourself from bankruptcy and life sleeping on a grate covered with old copies of the Wall Street Journal. So I have a modest suggestion for reducing Illinois state expenditures.

Sell the statehouse to a real estate developer, and send the politicians directly to jail immediately upon their election.

This would be fun, and would clearly raise the quality of governance. Illinois politicians would be able to pass far fewer useless  laws if they had to meet in the prison library, since they would be forced to maintain silence. They couldn’t meet in the prison dining hall because they would also be required to remain silent during meals, just like their fellow felons. The only forum in which they wouild be allowed to speak would be the exercise yard, and if they shot their mouths off there, the  younger and stronger of their associates would, at best, beat them senseless, and at worst, stick them with a shiv.

It would also be impossible for them to extort material amounts of graft from paving contractors. We all know that graft raises the price of road maintenance, thus increasing your taxes. You might argue, of course, that all the paving contractors are also in jail for bid-rigging conspiracies, but new paving contractors spring up to fill the vacuum constantly, financed by organized crime, so roads on which to drive Belchfire Eights at 130 miles per hour will continue to be available.

Politicians would also be in a position to learn useful trades. Not making license plates! License plates, phooey! Their new associates could teach them safecracking, how to hotwire a car, drug distribution logistics, and all the other myriad skills that make a collapsing civilization go.

I love efficiency.

Two feet of snow. Before even one inch fell, our brave media christened this latest snowfall “The Blizzard of 2013.” In the 1800’s, people had the decency to wait until 1889 to christen the March 1888 snowstorm “The Blizzard of ’88.” But now, we need a dramatic label, preferably conjuring up images of hardy pioneers slogging on through fifty foot snowdrifts carrying 200 pound knapsacks and fighting off wolves.

In actuality, we’re weenies.

We sit inside, warm and full of scotch, watching the snowflakes fall. And all the while, we loudly pity ourselves because of the enormous hardship the storm is working on us, for example, by making it impossible for us to go out to buy pizza.

Whatever happened to the concept of the stiff upper lip? Robust civilizations celebrate the hardy and self-controlled. But as the civilization decays, poets waste their minuscule talents celebrating failure, bemoaning the fate of the incompetent, and gnashing their teeth at the injustice of anybody living well by working hard and making a buck. Diseases that used to be considered mild annoyances are promoted to plagues ; “The Hearbreak of Psoriasis;” “The Agony of Ingrown Toenails;” “The Plague of Big Mac Deprivation.”

All of which is really cool!

Whining is inherently fun, and it’s even more fun when other people listen to it uncritically! No matter what it is, we can let it all hang out. My foot hurts! My head hurts! My ass hurts! Gimme sympathy! None of this suffering in silence nonsense. What fun is that? We can damn well suffer at the top of our lungs, in the serene confidence that no one will say “Shut up, you crybaby!” “Crybaby” is a non-PC pejorative. The response you can bet the farm on is “Oh, you poor thing. Let me give you a hug.”

And you can generalize to things other than bodily discomforts. I want a bigger house! I want a cooler car! I  want to jump in the sack with Claudia Schiffer! I want all of your money!

The last one I like.

In 1909, E.M. Forster, author of “A Passage to India” and other joyful classics, wrote a novella entitled “The Machine Stops.” He pictured a world in which face to face communication had died out. People lived underground, and sat at their desks all day communicating with a circle of friends through terminals. HUH? WHAT? Did Mr. Forster borrow a time machine from H. G. Wells and visit 2013, landing in the basement of somebody’s mother’s house to see her hairy, slovenly, unwashed son seated in front of a PC, munching Fritos, slurping 5-Hour Energy, and hacking Fort Knox? NO. Mr. Forster was a smart guy, and cleverly extrapolated what he had observed that the just-invented telephone had done, id est, that it had reduced face to face communication to nonexistence. Forster goes on to describe the consequences when the universal machine that controlled everything from telecommunications to your toilets (Sound familiar, folks? Internet controlled electric toilets, stoves, can openers, right?) began to break down. In the end, everything breaks down: toilets refuse to flush, heat and air-conditioning cease, and everybody croaks except the few brave souls who had rejected the technological civilization and had gone to live above ground, enjoying fresh air and fresh meat which they had hunted down and killed themselves, preferably with their own teeth.

So, the question is: will we suffer the same fate? Have we become so interconnected, gridded, texted. facebooked, twittered that when the Web expires, we will all go down with it?

Probably.

But we will have fun while it happens, won’t we? Look, the original god of texting, Blackberry (almost, but not quite. RIP) has suffered a few world-wide outages, but the only people it really discomfited were lawyers, and that’s a net plus. So what will the upside be when the entire Web goes down permanently, perhaps through an EMP produced by a North Korean or Iranian (or Chinese, or French, or British, or Israeli, or Pakistani, or Indian, or Californian) nuke detonated a few miles above Dubuque?

To begin with, we can stop paying bills … ANY bills! All the accounting data supporting those annoying monthly demands for payment will have been reduced to random bits. WE ALL GET A FRESH START, AND WE KEEP EVERYTHING WE ALREADY HAVE! YAY!

We can stop paying taxes. The IRS databases, the faceless leash that holds us all in thrall, will have been erased. THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO AUDIT YOUR RETURNS, especially the 2010 return on which you claimed Aunt Sally’s pig as a dependent, and deducted the cost of those lap dances in Vegas as a medical expense.

We can create as many identities as we like, since there will be no way to cross-check them. So we can be bigamists, or trigamists, or quatramists, or whatever, with a spouse in every port. And we can aboandon them whenever we want. No child support! Whooppee!

Of course, I must admit, there may be  a downside, too. If you live in a major city, you will starve to death or be slaughtered by crazed, starving mobs, because the system that brings food from flyover country to the sophisticated locales inhabited by the excessively civilized will have collapsed. Unless you follow the storied example of the Donner party, and perfect your skills as a cannibal.

Yum.