I'm writing this because I know people will look back sometime and wonder, 'What were they thinking? What was it like?'
I don't pretend to be H. L. Mencken, but I want to make sure I knew. The beauty of the Internet is that whenever I'm wrong, someone will happily tell me. (Although sometimes too, people will say this even when I'm right. Either way, this document is incomplete without your comments, so for-god's-sake write some. Please don't leave me falling alone through cyberspace.)
Here, at the end of the Bush years, the bottom has suddenly dropped out of the world just like this summer's bad remake of 'Journey to the Center of the Earth'.
The Presidential election brought no resolution. Americans are still in mid-fall, struggling to stay upright and wondering when it will end.
No one wants to say this financial crisis may last for years, but that's our deepest fear. As we tumble down the elongated shaft of the global economy like astronauts falling through space, our stunned faces ask: 'where's the ground?' Nothing below us is visible.
It began with the greed of our financial institutions, but irresponsibility, not greed, is this moment's main theme: inflated greed bred catastrophically irresponsible corruption more widespread than anyone imagined possible.
This week's flavors -- Blago and Madoff -- are only symptoms of our irresponsibility to ourselves. No one was willing to admit that something too good to be true wasn't. And now, in a time of need more extreme than any since the Great Depression, we wait again not wanting to say that if the fall doesn't kill us, we may encounter monsters worse than anything Jules Verne could imagine.
I say this because -- together -- climate change and national poverty will bring drought, mega-fires, famine, and disease: all of the horsemen.
How did it happen?
Well -- irresponsibly -- our politicians accepted money from lobbyists and then removed the safeguards that restrained lending institutions. Suddenly there were higher revenues born of easy credit and this spurred decades of growth...
But then, widespread bad debts created shortages of money which in turn created steeply declining consumption.
Manufacturers' supplies backed up from the lack of demand and this restrained production. Jobs were lost and less production meant less demand for energy so oil prices fell.
Hell bells, the price of everything fell.
Retail outlets this December are desperate to sell goods. Weeks before Christmas-Hanukkah you can get 25% off anything at most outlets. If you had the money and wanted to risk committing yourself to payments, you could get $1000 back for buying a new car with 0% financing over the next three years.
A dealership in Belgium is giving a free compact to anyone who buys a sedan. But there are few takers.
Not many people want to assume the personal responsibility of a large, bad debt in a bad time. They have loved ones, families, mortgages. They need to hold onto their shelter and put food on the table, if they can: (a big if these days).
For politicians and financiers though, responsibility is a less tangible thing. In our world, a professional entrenched in a faceless system of other professionals is rarely accountable.
For instance, power brokers at the top of a political food chain can line their pockets with impunity while weakening their temporary administration with bad appointments who are willing to pay. Everyone involved will cover for the dishonest bribe-taker rather than risk exposing himself, and -- of course -- law enforcement is usually reluctant to turn on its own masters.
Last week, a dishonest pol was caught stuffing his pockets with payola. Blagojevich's lack of responsibility is Rabelaisian: there's no sense of shame at being caught. He's decided his own best interest means hanging onto office until he can bargain for a reduced sentence. Dynamite won't get him out of there.
Similarly, if you make money by encouraging people to assume bad debts, the debts are then packaged and spread across a faceless financial network. This doesn't make you less culpable, but it does remove personal consequences.
The size and complexity of our society, therefore, removes commitment, and engagement, the human forces that inhibit greed. And since size and complexity also remove the possibility of punishment, people become free to act irresponsibly.
-- And now everybody within clicking distance knows what a cheerful son-of-a-bitch I really am. So Merry Christmas-Hanukkah to you all and...
Humbug to 2008!
I don't care if we are starving ourselves to death and the economy totally collapses - we must not let cannabis become legalized again or taxed as it will be the worst monster ever to choke our great christian society - look what it did to our grandparents - let's be intelligent about things now -and respectful to our roots and the three magicians from the east with their sacred in-cense
all hail the wise and all powerful government and it's ownership of our bodie$
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_oil
You think that movie about us eating our dead was a joke. Think again.
It is this force fed model of consumption that relies on perpetual growth that has brought the world to the environmental and financial crises we now face.
Perpetual industrial growth is unsustainable because resources run out and waste and pollution overwhelm us. But this year we're learning that perpetual force-fed financial growth is unsustainable also.
We have pursued both irregardless of the consequences. We have become addicted to growth and now we're going cold turkey and being forced to clean up. There were warnings, and although some of us listened, we didn't change course. Now we have to tough it out.
You couldn't say or write 'screwed the pooch' in Canada. Girls' noses would wrinkle and people would cross to the other side of the room.
Doesn't matter that it's true, you just can't say it. America though is vastly more poetic and colorful and that's why I like it so much. Canada never had a Whitman or Ginsberg.
The question is whether new leadership can dig us out of the hole the GOP has put us in. If so, unfortunately, we shall forget all about our habit of living beyond our means because now we can afford it again.
People know there's more to life than that. But under capitalism, unrestrained, going along to get along works most of the time, so it takes exceptional leadership to resist the lure of feeding our greed. It's not as if this is a new problem. It's that no one wants to take the lead in addressing it. So long as the electorate is willing to sell its vote to the highest bidder, we will stumble along, hoping to be able to recover from collapses...until the collapse comes to show us our limitless appetites face and world of limits.
I prefer to think of us as clever and ravenous Ravens. But then I live on the Northwestern (Southwestern, actually, where I am) coast.
Bill Reid the Haida artist has a story about the Raven-trickster who sneaks into a village of men nightly and eats the right eyeball of each villager over a long winter until all of them can only see in a one dimensional and biased way.
This is what happened. Our world is out of balance.
BUT - I do not wish for our wickedness to be spread throughout the "cosmos." And I suspect that whatever supreme being or universal force exists would feel likewise.
So... and this is just a hypothetical musing hypothesis based on philosophical reasoning:
Maybe we as a species will not be "allowed" to break the bounds of our planetary host UNLESS AND UNTIL we learn to treat it with care and respect. Once we pass that test, we may acquire the necessary lessons for life beyond the Orb called Earth.
Until then, we are destined to existence as we currently know it. What a great reason to overcome our pettiness. There is a universe of possibilities, and we are stuck cannibalizing one another for the sake of worthless material greed.