I'm Just A Poor European

The delusional Wall Street Journal columnist, Joseph C. Sternberg, is worried we don't know how poor we are in Europe.

I'm in shock after digesting that drivel masquerading as a thought-provoking article.

We're in bliss, you see, in Europe.

Blithely ignoring the fact that our per capita output is slightly lower than Connecticut's.

But let's puncture the bliss, shall we? Let's take a scalpel to this comfortable delusion and perform a little transatlantic compare and contrast, the kind that leaves blood on the carpet.

Let's stare straight into the abyss and see exactly how comprehensively, how gloriously, how terminally fucked Europe really is, or is not.

How noble it must feel for the Wall Street Journal, perched atop that $94,400 per head Olympus, peering down at the sad, stagnant Europeans, shuffling about in our $65,000 GDP misery, Ireland's is $130,000, wondering why we haven't yet prostrated ourselves before the altar of hyper-capitalism enlightenment.

The continent's great existential question, according to the latest oracle from the Wall Street Journal, is this.

when will we deluded welfare addicts in europe finally shake off our socialist fever dream and admit how wretchedly poor we are when will we do the decent grown-up thing and start fixing our addiction by which one presumes the article means flinging the doors open to more venture capital slashing away at sick days an annual leave like a puritan with a riding crop and embracing the American sacrament of drowning in medical debt while the bills pile up like funeral wreaths on the steps of our recently repossessed homes.

All this, naturally, while organizing our entire civilization around the rigid worship of some 250-year-old words, those brittle constitutional relics, as though they were handed down on Sinai rather than drafted by a committee of slave-owning Enlightenment gentlemen who never had to worry about waiting lists or insulin prices.

How illuminating of the Wall Street Journal, how infinitely generous of them, these high priests of the Dow Jones and the leveraged buyout, to descend from their ivory towers and offer us their guiding hand on the path to salvation to show us poor, benighted Europeans the way out of our childish welfare garden and into the bright sunlit uplands of proper American adulthood, where venture capital flows like holy water and bankruptcy is just another character-building sacrament.

The true genius of the American capitalist model, that holy place of greed is good in what used to pass for freedom and liberty, something we also have in abundance in Europe, is this.

The delusional Wall Street Journal columnist, Joseph C. Sternberg, is worried we don't know how poor we are in Europe.

I'm in shock after digesting that drivel masquerading as a thought-provoking article.

We're in bliss, you see, in Europe.

Blithely ignoring the fact that our per capita output is slightly lower than Connecticut's.

But let's puncture the bliss, shall we? Let's take a scalpel to this comfortable delusion and perform a little transatlantic compare and contrast, the kind that leaves blood on the carpet.

Let's stare straight into the abyss and see exactly how comprehensively, how gloriously, how terminally fucked Europe really is, or is not.

How noble it must feel for the Wall Street Journal, perched atop that $94,400 per head Olympus, peering down at the sad, stagnant Europeans, shuffling about in our $65,000 GDP misery, Ireland's is $130,000, wondering why we haven't yet prostrated ourselves before the altar of hyper-capitalism enlightenment.

The continent's great existential question, according to the latest oracle from the Wall Street Journal, is this.

when will we deluded welfare addicts in europe finally shake off our socialist fever dream and admit how wretchedly poor we are when will we do the decent grown-up thing and start fixing our addiction by which one presumes the article means flinging the doors open to more venture capital slashing away at sick days an annual leave like a puritan with a riding crop and embracing the American sacrament of drowning in medical debt while the bills pile up like funeral wreaths on the steps of our recently repossessed homes.

All this, naturally, while organizing our entire civilization around the rigid worship of some 250-year-old words, those brittle constitutional relics, as though they were handed down on Sinai rather than drafted by a committee of slave-owning Enlightenment gentlemen who never had to worry about waiting lists or insulin prices.

How illuminating of the Wall Street Journal, how infinitely generous of them, these high priests of the Dow Jones and the leveraged buyout, to descend from their ivory towers and offer us their guiding hand on the path to salvation to show us poor, benighted Europeans the way out of our childish welfare garden and into the bright sunlit uplands of proper American adulthood, where venture capital flows like holy water and bankruptcy is just another character-building sacrament.

The true genius of the American capitalist model, that holy place of greed is good in what used to pass for freedom and liberty, something we also have in abundance in Europe, is this.