This one wandered out of my mind and onto a piece of paper yesterday, and sat around for a day expecting to be posted:
I grew up wondering
if I’d live to see the Millenium
and here it is almost a decade beyond,
the last of the Noughts.
What should I wonder now?
Kate and Shannon are at the Family Home in Nova Scotia, where the weather can be a bit dramatic:
This makes me feel that Everything will be All Right:
This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.
(via MAKE:Blog)
Starting from the question
name a piece of culture (book, movie, album, TV show, etc.) that “exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush”
Phil Ford notes that
Historical epochs do have deep structures of sensibility…
So we can all see how the torture apologetics of 24 play into the Bush II zeitgeist. I’m not going to argue against that — any future study of American culture in the Bush II era will doubtless (and correctly) point to 24 as Exhibit A of an America scared shitless and consoling itself with the spectacle of tough guys torturing bad guys.
I resolve to keep an eye peeled for others. Not irrelevant: my own posting from January of James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here”
from Mike “Mish” Shedlock, a “registered investment advisor” with what look to me like Libertarian predilections:
In total, the Treasury has now committed to squander $700 billion and that is before Obama squanders anywhere from $750 billion to $1 trillion trying to prop up a dying consumer-based economy that really can’t be propped up.
More or less the same analysis of the overall plight as Jim Kunstler, though I’m not sure on which points the two would disagree. Kunstler (in his Forecast for 2009) is focused on the upshots of what he summarizes as the Happy Motoring fallacy, which is of course not just about cars:
Happy Motoring is at the core of our unsustainability trap. The car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not, and it will fail due to circumstances already underway…
Another voice with some of the same tidings is NYU economist Nouriel Roubini:
But the worst is still ahead of us. In the next few months, the macroeconomic news and earnings/profits reports from around the world will be much worse than expected, putting further downward pressure on prices of risky assets, because equity analysts are still deluding themselves that the economic contraction will be mild and short… The credit crunch will get worse; deleveraging will continue, as hedge funds and other leveraged players are forced to sell assets into illiquid and distressed markets, thus causing more price falls and driving more insolvent financial institutions out of business. A few emerging-market economies will certainly enter a full-blown financial crisis.
Kate Beaton’s work is just PERfect. Look at today’s posting. Man, I want the first 4 panels as a t-shirt.
Here’s what Jim Kunstler said in his Forecast for 2008 (Jan 1 2008):
Has there ever been a society so exquisitely rigged for implosion? The whole listing, creaking, reeking edifice stands like one of those obsolete Las Vegas pleasure palaces awaiting a mere pulse of electrons to ignite a thousand explosive charges perfectly placed to blow away the structural supports.
Sorta makes you curious what he predicts for 2009, dunnit? Look here for that, in this overall context:
I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won’t care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.
You don’t have to believe every word, but here and there are bits of astute observation and palpable truth (palp it yourself, you’ll see):
The tragic part of all this, of course, is that the temporary plunge in oil prices has prompted an incurious American public to assume, once again, that the global oil predicament is some kind of a fraud. Given the flood tide of fraud they have been subject to in banking and investment matters, I suppose you can’t blame them from thinking that everything is some kind of a scam…
The over-arching geopolitical theme of 2009 will be the end of robust globalism as we’ve known it for some time. Reduced trade, competition for energy resources, sore feelings over debts and currencies will drive the nations inward or, at least, direct their energies toward their own regions.
So read it and file it where you can find it next year end…