Two Years Later...

It's been two years since the Rusty Wire Service first posted. In that time, there have been reports from riots and protests; prison life has been chronicled and police station procedure has come under scrutiny and for good measure I have tried -- whenever I could -- to draw a bead on the venality of the dead-eyed consumer society in which we live and to ponder identity and social justice refracted through the often unreliable lenses of race and culture.

At all times,  The Rusty Wire Service has striven to remain to true to its brief manifesto as espoused in our first post back in the early winter of 2010, as Ireland prepared to sell its children into bonded servitude and exile: "We aim to cover a wide range of topics here but underpinning it all, we hope, will be a necessarily deep scepticism about established 'truths' and orthodoxies. First principles like liberty and legitimacy should never be taken for granted."

The Deptford Croppy would hope at least that this publication has stayed within an ass's roar of these (admittedly very open-ended) aspirations. If content has been thin on the ground over the past couple of months, a number of factors have been at play -- some of them pertinent to the current discourse, some not so much.

As the fearful grippe that has wracked the world economy continues, this writer's ability to put bread on the table and broad in the band has proved both onerous and time-consuming. A more regular service is promised and one which will utilise my current area of (paid) working research; with a far greater focus on the macro-economic and geopolitical picture envisaged.

But the fall-off in content production here at Croppy Towers was also the result of rather more existential ruminations; mostly of the 'what the fuck difference does it make?' variety. The answer is of course none and while that might be rather hard for the ego to take, I was genuinely more concerned with whether or not my tired ramblings and pompous prognostications were actually adding anything other than ambient noise to the global clusterfuck we're living through.

Another bank caught laundering money for drug-dealers through its off-shore accounts? Really? A cabal of London bankers meet up to fix the interest rates? You don't say. A leading Tory denies paedophilia? Now there's a turn up for the books....After a while it all gets old...Compassion fatigue? Post righteous indignation trauma? Take your pick, I promise it wasn't writer's block.

So here's to the last two years, we're still all going to hell in a handbasket and most of the world seems happy enough to keep shopping as the end of the road beckons. The road to hell may well be paved with good intentions but most people are too focused on the billboards to notice.