There's a hellmouth under us, isn't there?

The new Benjamin?

Rhode Island, are you a high school? Are you a great big high school in a crappy neighborhood where some kid was elected student body president after promising to put a soda machine in the cafeteria, but then when his term began, he discovered that the school couldn’t afford a soda machine because it had a bazillion dollars in debt and no way to pay it? Seriously, Ocean State: what the hell? First, our Dickensian orphanage overseer of an ex-governor cuts social programs all to hell while maintaining tax breaks for the wealthy, who flee anyway. Then the outgoing mayor of Providence wins a seat in Congress and leaves his successor the delightful office-warming present of absolutely no money in the city cash box. Surprise! So now the new mayor is firing all the city’s public school teachers and looking for other creative ways to keep Providence from descending into all-out, every-man-for-himself-Lord-of-the-Flies-type chaos. Meanwhile, the state’s smallest, poorest town is in receivership and cultivating its distinction of being That Place You Avoid Driving Through. Of course, according to some, statewide failure of everything is preferable to even the tiniest tax hike, even if your tax bills are being delivered to your car, because that is where you live after you lose your house, and it’s like a little house anyway because your wheels were ripped off by gaping, years-old potholes so the car doesn’t really function as a car anymore.

Anyhoo, the real question is this: when Rhode Island’s situation becomes so dire that we’re burning our ripped-apart tires for heat and even Connecticut won’t annex us, what will be the currency of this new world order? Clams? Silly mobster nicknames? Cumberlandite? (That’s our state rock, don’t you know.) Or will it be something less tangible, like despair? Or cynicism? Ooh, please let it be the latter. I will own everything.