I’d like you to to read some pieces and then come back here for mine. There are four, and they are in large part repetitive, but I think they’re worth your time. They are:
The Decadence of Election 2010
WWIII ahead: Warfare defining human life by 2020
Hatred is killing your profits; new meltdown ahead
And, finally, America on the brink of a Second Revolution
The first piece is by Peter Morici – “a professor at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission.” The last three are Market Watch op-eds by Paul B. Farrell – “the author of nine books on personal finance, economics and psychology, including The Millionaire Code, The Winning Portfolio, The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing. Farrell was an investment banker with Morgan Stanley; executive vice president of the Financial News Network; executive vice president of Mercury Entertainment Corp; and associate editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He has a Juris Doctor and a Doctorate in Psychology.”
There are a lot of specifics in these three pieces that I disagree with, but the overall conclusions? I’m pessimistic enough to go along with most of those.
Peggy Noonan said it in her 2005 column, A Separate Peace: “tough history is coming.”
Though he explicitly states that the problem is bipartisan, Paul Farrell lays most of the blame for the coming chaos at the feet of the Right. I really don’t give a damn who’s to blame. I’m convinced that it’s the inevitable result of Thomas Sowell’s “Conflict of Visions.” I’m reminded of two quotations – Ambrose Bierce, who said “Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment,” and Arthur Koestler who said “Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.”
Koestler also said “The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.”
We’re a nation of pissed-off people in a world of pissed-off people. The “greatest generation” in Tom Brokaw’s analysis is the last one to have known true hardship. Each successive generation has been progressively (in all meanings of the term) infantilized. We’ve been promised free ice cream all of our lives, but that ice cream is running out. Still, as Farrell says, most of us are in denial, and will continue playing on the railroad tracks until the oncoming freight train runs us down.
As Billy Beck says, the Endarkenment cometh. We’re not voting our way out of this.