Flirting With The Abyss No More: Good Riddance & Good Night...

"Let’s be honest—this new millennium, so far it’s been a huge disappointment. It was preceded by a false alarm (the Y2K rollover), was cursed by hanging chads (the Florida recount), and has been held hostage ever since by the ministry of fear, with Americans meekly removing their shoes for the privilege of flying in airplanes charging fees for pillows and blankets. It’s been seven years since 9/11, no follow-up attack has stabbed our shores, and yet the front pages of so many papers resemble the end is near signs toted by bearded prophets that were once a staple of New Yorker cartoons. The decade has traveled from bin Laden’s cave to the Dark Knight’s Batcave in a jagged thrust of clenched force and unleashed chaos. Even an unforeseen blossom of good news, such as the declining death toll in Iraq, seems almost incidental in the log stream of general lousiness.

Journalism used to perform a higher civic function than it does today, so spanked up is it with gaffes, gotchas, spin-doctoring, celebrity pimping,crisis-mongering, minnow-brained punditry, drama criticism practiced from under the troll bridge (usually at the expense of Democrats—Al Gore’s sighings during the debate with George Bush, Hillary Clinton’s “cackle”), and instant amnesia.

To watch archive footage of TV reporters from the black-and-white era with their measured intonations and ashen visages—before everybody burst into Michael Kors orange—is to crack open the crypt on a more responsible, somber, and, yes, duller era, when journalists still conducted themselves as a priestly caste serving the needs of an informed citizenry, as opposed to catering to cud-chewing dolts. Those days are gone and there’s no point in mourning them, the Walter Lippmanns and similar wise men (and women) having proved worse than useless when the Vietnam War sawed the country into two with its lies and delusions. But the intelligent drone of old-school journalism served to extend a support bridge through national trauma, the term “anchorman” symbolic of the media’s role in securing coverage of the news with weight and authority, a fixed point in a sea of raging foam. Now it’s all raging foam, a steady, indiscriminate diet of excitation to keep us permanently on edge.

To pick up The New York Times each morning and brave the headlines—at conference on the risks to earth, few are optimistic, August 24, 2008—is to understand why generalized anxiety disorder is the world’s No. 1 psychological condition. Even more anxiety-inducing are the paper’s science pages, which make you want to roll out of bed in a fetal ball, especially the medical coverage, the happy hunting grounds for hypochondriacs, with Jane E. Brody digging up the latest rare disease about to hit it big, and bummer case studies such as that of the elderly patient with spontaneous gas gangrene left to deal with her own mortal fright: “She never made it to the operating room, and as far as I know, none of her doctors discussed her imminent death, then simply sat with her.”

I blame Bush. I blame Bush for everything and will continue to blame him (and Vice President Dick Cheney) for everything long after we’re all dead...The two terms of George W. Bush’s presidency have been not simply a psychological bringdown but a steady beatdown. The malaise that President Jimmy Carter supposedly diagnosed as our national condition in 1979—though Carter never used the actual word—is nothing compared with the slough of despond Cheney seems to have dug with his shovel jaw in service of the National Security State and to the detriment of everything else. Even as the Decider eyes the exits, his administration pulls stunts such as attempting to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act and to lift the ban on offshore drilling, as if to get in one last twist of the knife before Bush waves buh-bye as he boards the helicopter into the azure, unless it’s raining. It will be one of the un-nicer ironies of modern American history that a president who prided himself on his crispy optimism should depart office having dyed the electorate a pervasive shade of blue. Not Democratic blue (though maybe that too), but the blue of futility, frustration, and worry, as reflected in the right-track/wrong-track numbers. (In a USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted between August 21 and 23, 81 percent of those participating described themselves as “dissatisfied” with the direction in which the country was lurching. Not only is Bush the Decider—he’s also the Dissatisfier.)

“The centre cannot hold,” to quote the oft quoted line from W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” and when the center cannot hold, the chickens run around in circles. everything seemingly is spinning out of control, bemoaned the headline of a June 21 Associated Press article by Alan Fram and Eileen Putman, which proposed that the American can-do spirit was being flattened by chunks of falling sky. “Horatio Alger, twist in your grave,” Fram and Putman wrote. “The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.”

Our true grit has succumbed to dry rot and tofu. Once a virile nation capable of building the Panama Canal and landing on the moon, now look at us: pathetic.

The world’s flirting with the abyss isn’t going to produce a picnic for anybody, should such a consummation occur, but I reckon mankind is responsible for its own ruination. Al Gore tried to warn us about the polar ice caps, but the Rush Limbaughs of this world chose to maintain a carbon footprint bigger than King Kong’s. If humanity remains hell-bent on despoiling its mother planet and rendering it unlivable through our insatiable demand for more of everything (israel’s demand for water is draining the sea of galilee —Financial Times, August 23–24, 2008), bringing down the curtain on a civilization that gave us Socrates, Shakespeare, and Shakira’s vibrating hips, so be it. It’s been a good run—shame it had to end so shabbily. Maybe our Martian colony will survive. We must stay stoic in the stark face of our collective demise, even as we’re blubbering.

I find insupportable the prospect that the animal kingdom will precede us into extinction, the innocent victims of our selfish stupidity and vicious folly—an endless parade of drowning polar bears, slaughtered wolves, slain gorillas, vanishing tigers, and diminishing songbirds joining the fate of the last great auk. It is particularly unforgivable given the research showing that monkeys, for example, are capable of charity and empathy, which is more than can be said of Bill O’Reilly between feedings. We will pamper our pets, spending billions on their comfort and welfare, while witnessing a slow, irrevocable die-off of wild animals as their remaining habitat is destroyed through deforestation, poaching, global warming, and one last mad shotgun spree by Dick Cheney in deer-hunter camo before his bionic heart gives (with vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin ready to step into his boots and fell any caribou suspected of treason).

More and more, telecast news reminds me of the constant cycle of pharmaceutical ads on cable TV for prescription drugs to address bladder control, herpes outbreaks, depression, erectile dysfunction, anxiety disorder, allergies, high cholesterol, fibroneuralgia, and Alzheimer’s, planting nervous seeds in your head until you start patting yourself down for symptoms, unable to pee with the usual carefree abandon. Part of the genius of Barack Obama’s campaign logo is that it englobes the sun, blue sky, the flag, and the O of his name (a circle within a circle) into what resembles a happy pill. Pop it in your mouth and feel the radiance expand within, the windows of your mind opening onto a wonderland. Anyone can preach hope, but to pictorialize it in capsule form—that was the coup. His campaign understood what its political rivals didn’t: the antidote to bad news isn’t good news, but a good feeling that turns bad news into background noise.

Forget the 2004 election, a protracted hangover from 2000. This is the first real millennial ballot, the first real chance to put this bad dream behind us, or keep the bad dream going, under new management."

-James Wolcott,("The News Blues," Vanity Fair Magazine, 12.2008. Image: -BrokenStairway, "Enjoying Life", deviantart.com, 3. 3.07).

VIOLETPLANET SAYS: "Here's to a better future beginning in 2009... Earth. Thanks for putting up with all the abuse. Those who perpetrated these crimes await your punishment. No mercy required."

History Repeating: The 40-Year Cycle Of Change...Is Here...

Written in 2005:

"First, I want to take notice of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the battle which set the stage for the defeat of fascism in Europe. (Interestingly, the battle which turned the tide in the Pacific War occurred at roughly the same date, June 3 - 7, off Midway Island, in 1942. U.S. planes destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers and even more importantly, the cream of Japanese naval aviation. But that's another story).

As we consider a day 61 years ago, it calls to mind the broad sweep of history, and various cyclical patterns of history--those posited by Nicolai Kondratieff and Ralph Nelson Elliott. For starters, let's consider 1893, 1932 and 1974. Interestingly enough, those bottoms of financial panics or depressions seem to operate on about 40-year cycles. If there is indeed a pattern there, we should get a humdinger of a depression around 2012.

Kondratieff posited that an economic cycle of debt buildup and repudiation repeats every 50-60 years. Given the enormous borrowing binge the world has gleefully embarked on during the past five years (M-3 expansion of around $2 trillion by some estimates, American homeowners tapping their equity to the tune of $1.6 trillion in new debt, Federal budget deficits on the order of $400 billion annually, etc.), it's difficult to dismiss Kondratieff's fundamental insight as entirely wrongheaded.

Many in his camp believe we are entering the "winter" phase which will culminate in a collapse or repudiation of all that debt. It's something to consider, given one irrefutable fact: no economy runs up forever in a straight line of unending growth.

"The low-interest-rate-fueled growth in the U.S. economy, says Robert Brusca, president of Fact and Opinion Research, has played out principally through reckless spending from refinanced real estate. I'm convinced that people have taken this money and blown it on gewgaws and junk," he says. "We're basically borrowing money to support our consumption, and we are living well beyond our means."

These "long waves" seem to suggest a severe and long-lasting downturn in the world economy is close at hand, based on the fundamental insight that the enormous mountains of debt which have been accumulated must now be repudiated in order to set up the next cycle of growth.

There is another eerily repetitive pattern of change which has occurred on 40-year cycles in the past century: one of social tumult and change. Consider the explosion of artistic freedoms in film and music of the 1920s, and the concurrent lifting of social constraints, and then note the similarity to the 1960s (ending either with the disasterous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, or Watergate in 1974,depending on your taste in history). If the 40-year pattern holds, we are in the midst of, or at least entering, a similar decade of social turmoil.

We could posit that the cycle began on Septemebr 11, 2001, ushering in a period not of artistic expression but of new constraints and paranoia. The rise of the religious right as a political force could be seen as the penumbra of the 1960s, just as the rise of a radically reactionary Islam could be seen as a reverse analog of the big-power Communist threat the U.S. faced in the 60s.

Where the 60s were all about questioning the conformity which had dominated social and political life in the 1950s, this decade seems to be about reining in the chaos, both outside the national borders and within. A new "ownership" ethic has replaced the paternalistic state ideal of the 1960s, and each new excess in the popular culture (hideously violent Playstation games, crudely misogynist hip-hop music is matched by a shrill new constraint (banning medical marijuana, stem cells, etc.).

Even more troubling, the divide between the wealthy elites and the middle class is widening; as the economy stumbles toward breakdown, the wealth of the nation has flowed to the top 5% of citizenry. As the average Schmoe relentlessly taps his home equity to support a lavishly foolish "upper-middle class lifestyle" filled with the spiritual rot of gimcrack distractions and useless toys, (Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2005, "Lagging Behind the Wealthy, Many Use Debt to Catch Up") the real wealth of the nation aggregates in the elites' hands. As tax rates for the wealthiest plummet to all-time lows, medical insurance becomes a luxury for everyone not independently wealthy or employed by a government agency.

The nation careens down the path of a fiscal policy of endless deficit, transferring whatever wealth remains in the hands on the young to the elderly via unsustainably expensive Medicare benefits, and yet the citizenry are strangely complacent, as if their internal compasses have been scrambled. The events of the decade ahead may provide a lodestone for the dazed American citizenry; as things fall apart, they may find their internal compasses re-set, and the distractions of consumerism less mesmerizing. Can it happen too soon? I think not.

-Charles Hugh Smith ("Are We Poised on the Precipice of Another Age of Turmoil?" 6.2005. Image: - Martin Luther King Jr.'s Mug Shot, thesmokinggun.com, 4.16.1963).

"King was arrested and jailed in Birmingham Alabama after a peaceful protest of segregation. It is here that King wrote "The Letter from Birmingham Jail." The open letter was a response to a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen entitled "A Call For Unity" which agreed that social injustices were taking place but believed that the battles should be taken solely to the court not to the streets in order to better the city of Birmingham. King responded that without forceful, direct actions such as his, true civil rights could never be achieved. As he put it, "This wait has almost always meant 'never.'" He held that Civil Disobedience is justified in the face of unjust laws."-NationMaster Encyclopedia, 2005).