Archive for September, 2008
Thomas Jefferson Travels Through Time
This is eerie:
That we are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium, that these have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness, that the wars of the world have swollen our commerce beyond the wholesome limits of exchanging our own productions for our own wants, and that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.
Regarding our current financial crisis, that last bit is especially frustrating: what, exactly, would a coherent remedy look like? I’m afraid that no one has a good answer. The bailout plan, which has now failed to muster the necessary amount of votes, seemed like a deeply flawed solution from the beginning, but the question that remains is whether nothing is a viable option. Even a bad plan seems preferable to a systemic economic catastrophe, but after 8 years of an administration whose power has at times veered toward the dictatorial, setting the stage for even further unprecedented federal powers should give everyone pause.
The Hammer Drops
They marched away enduring a belief Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.**
Browsing through the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, I came across the following words from Anton Chekhov:
There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others.
Besides being a useful admonition for any individual in his or her own life, I found this notion to be an especially timely reflection on something that has plagued our nation: namely, the decadent lack of perspective that permeates much of American culture and politics. It is an affliction that we are only now, belatedly, paying much attention to, something which unfortunately has as much to do with the crushing weight of necessity than it does with any credible foresight. The woeful state of disrepute which America has fallen into abroad and the most recent rapid disintegration of an economy once thought to be invincible, these are but two of the most obvious symptoms of a social ill that has very deep implications for the health of our Republic, and which will require some painful re-alignment in the coming years.
It has become second nature for Americans to assume that they can, to use the belabored expression, have their cake and eat it to. This has largely been the result of a political leadership, especially since the end of the Cold War, that has suggested that sacrifice is a virtue of a bygone era, that material wealth, comfort, and an insurmountable global position are necessary AND sufficient conditions, seen not as transitory privileges, but fundamental rights that define the new American exceptionalism. This has been undergirded by a belief that consumption, at the expense of savings, can sustain such economic and political progress.
All of this has come to a head under a Bush administration whose advice to Americans has been to suggest that we need to increase these tendencies, discounting any trade-offs or sacrifices as unbecoming of our national greatness. The most glaring example of this has been Bush’s concurrent strategy of fighting wars of democracy abroad (Iraq and Afghanistan) whilst entrenching a tax-cutting economic regime at home, soaring the national debt to an unprecedented degree. Regardless of the respective merits of these tracks in their own realm, the combination of these policies in unison has created an incoherence which has only perpetuated the worst of these aforementioned American tendencies: chauvinism, hubris, and greed, all of which make for a debilitating decadence in American life.
In a profound and remarkably prescient article from last December, Tony Judt argued convincingly that we would be wise to impart the lessons of 20th century history, disabusing ourselves of the notion that our era is uniquely privileged, and that its gains are irreversible:
The last time the capitalist world passed through a period of unprecedented expansion and great wealth creation, during the “globalization” avant le mot of the world economy in the imperial decades preceding World War I, there was a widespread assumption in Britain—much as there is in the US and Western Europe today—that this was the threshold of an unprecedented age of indefinite peace and prosperity. Anyone seeking an account of this confidence—and what became of it—can do no better than read Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace: a summary of the illusions of a world on the edge of catastrophe, written in the aftermath of the war that was to put an end to all such irenic fancies for the next fifty years.
I’m afraid that the hammer has (at least partially) dropped, and it will be no unimportant task to prepare for the prospect of an age in which global ears may well be deaf to our own troubles. It may not be comforting to admit of what some have called the ‘The Post-American World‘, but insouciance reaps its own discomfort, and with far less predictability. Success and failure for countries, like individuals, is often separated by only the thinnest of veneers. We would do well to remember that.
Come Again?
Katie Couric says that in their interview, Palin had a tendency towards unresponsiveness, often slipping back into her talking points. Note to the McCain campaign staff: fire whomever is in charge of Palin’s talking points:
COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?
PALIN: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.
Ms. South Carolina take it away…
Quote of the Day
“It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.” –Walter Benjamin
Damn!
Saw Booker T and the MG’s last night at the 9:30 Club.
The show was part of the promotion for the 50th Anniversary of Stax Records and well worth every association with the legendary label. Despite their age, and how absolutely crazy the bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn is, they’re far from the washed-up nostalgia bands that populate the state fair circuit (I’m looking at you, Styx). From the get-go, Booker T had the B-3 rolling along on an impossibly hip groove, and it really didn’t matter what the rest of the band (who ain’t exactly chopped liver) did from there. Legends though they be, the fact that they could credibly produce their unique sound some 4 decades later, and without any appreciable dragging, was pretty spectacular.
The only downside: soul-singing legend Eddie Floyd joined them for a couple of songs, and I quickly remembered the washed-up quality that I had initially feared from the main attraction. Other than the hilarity of him trying to shack up with the ladies in crowd (he memorably exclaimed to the crowd that he’d “take anything I can get” after dancing with and then kissing a plus-sized woman…to be kind), I couldn’t help but wish I was listening to an actual Otis Redding track when he stumbled through, albeit with plenty of energy (soul?), a tribute to the late god.
In any case, the concert was great, and Booker T. proved he and his MG’s still know how to tear the roof of the joint.
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