He wanted to study neo-liberalism not to profess its ills, or to destroy it from within, but at first he wanted to use it as a accepted “Oh I gotcha” buzzword among a group of academics who had been tinkering with globalization, contexutalized it into something to be monitored, measured, and meticulously modified to fit their 10 am to 5 pm discourse of worldiness. The “Oh I gotcha” part didn’t really get them as much as he thought. He contemplated this fact while he stared distantly into the window which returned a nonchalant reflection of casual discontent, as four months of pointless scholastic exercises had already frayed his ability to fall into complete panic. Panic not for what remained unfinished of his explorations into the varieties of desperation in which scholars had twisted each others arguments, or scavenged daily through online databases, old manuscripts and .pdf files looking for the sacred “hole” in the literature, but of the possibility that this was all it amounted to. The reflection smirked back.

The crisis that had every pseudo-scholar around him enthusiastically intellectualized in a temporary fashion bored him increasingly. Rich white and pseudo-white bankers, multi-colored politicians bailing them out, and the globalized nature of its impact was not something he wanted to attempt to explain. Conceptualized folly and discrete analysis of corruption and its spread on hapless pensioners, breadwinners, employees, employers were futile accounts of repeated institutionalized human greed: why bother? As the buzz of the overhead lamp became increasingly irritating, Ed Williamson folded his arms and reclined his back to the cushions of the living room couch. This was not it was supposed to be, he thought. Where were the temporary, yet self-correcting episodes of prescribed anarchy? The wars that would teach the lessons to one generation just for the next one to forget? Ed wanted to know and he wanted half-heartedly to see it realized.