I'm living on my Social Security check

Joe,

Your essay "Dispatch from the Chinese Landfill" is the best thing I've read in some time. I live in the land of the Trophy Wife (eastern outskirts of Sacramento, California). Twenty years ago this was a nice farming community with fruit trees, a packing shed, and quiet streets. Now it's bisected by Highway 80 to Reno and points east. The school kids used to like school now they bitch and complain about testing oriented homework and put up with teachers who can't spell or correct the homework papers.

I've got to get my 74-year-old body to somewhere else. Thinking about going to the Philippines, or some other place where the garbage is at least turned over once in a while. I live on my Social Security check and I hope to hell I don't die next door to a McMansion constructed out of shitty materials.

Thanks and best regards,

Dean
California

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Dean,

Here's the worst news for us old geezers. The fucking Social Security check is becoming worthless with the decline of the dollar everywhere. I could live like a king on one in many places I know in this world, because I can live like the locals (after all, whose home it really is). But damned few spoiled Americans would be willing to do it.

Also, Americans have some notion the Third World is just dying to become their personal retirement slaves for pennies. That is a rapidly dying sentiment with many young Third Worlders now, and most of the Thrid World is under 20.

So I suspect it is best they stay here and rot within the empire.

In art and labor,

Joe