The Crisis Rant
Hieronymus Bosch
Madrid, Museo del Prado
Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist has written a very fine column called, "Generation L and its fearful future". In Rachman's lexicon "L" stands for "lucky". He writes:
Those of us born in western Europe or the US have never really experienced hard times. Our parents and grandparents lived through world wars and the Great Depression. We have had decades of peace and prosperity.I think Rachman has hit the zeitgeist nail on the head here. I think my generation is probably the luckiest group of individuals in the history of humanity, even sinister things like the atom bomb worked in our favor.
Could that change? Perhaps Generation L has just had the luxury of an extended "holiday from history", which is now coming to an end.
I for one having been born an American at the end of WWII have always had a deep affection for the atom bomb.
Without the restraining terror the atom bomb, the USA and the USSR would have surely fought WWIII with highly developed "conventional weapons" and judging what the contending armies were able to achieve with much more primitive stuff in World Wars One and Two, most of us of military age, in both countries probably including me, would have been killed or maimed. So I am all for nuclear proliferation: the more the merrier. I get the feeling that those, like the USA and Israel, who are afraid of others having the bomb are precisely those that would like to go to war. The great lesson of my youth is that mutual nuclear terror means peace.
If I were to pick a nit with Gideon Rachman, I would say that "Generation Ls" golden age really ends not now, but with the oil embargo and stagflation of the 70s and 80s. That was really the end of the genuine good times. That is when the economy lost its balance.
Intense smoke and mirrors have been applied since then to maintain the patient's healthy appearance... What we have now reminds me of the last scenes of Visconti's "Death in Venice", where the aging Dirk Bogarde goes into a barber shop and gets his hair and eyebrows dyed and his face powdered and rouged in order to enamor the teasing Tadzio; then he goes off to the beach and with the heat melting the hair dye and mixing with his sweat and the rouge, he has a heart attack in his beach chair and dies.
Dirk Bogarde would be the economy, the barber would be Alan Greenspan and Tadzio would be "the pursuit of happiness".
Now
a new team of former Clintonites join with the providential Barack
Obama to pump up the corpse with massive dose of economic Viagra to see
if the old thing (the economy) will stand up just one more time.
Tadzio will probably turn out to be the destruction of the dollar, triple digit inflation and and a Wiemar America.
But I am not dismayed or depressed by all of this. Like Rachman, I believe that:
Long periods of peace and prosperity, however, are not always terribly interesting. Amid all the economic gloom, I do not think I am alone in feeling an odd excitement at the sense of living in uncertain and historic times.Frankly I think we need a good crisis... we need to tear out our hair in clumps and beat our chests and rend our garments and cover ourselves with ashes and scrape at our sores with a pot shard.
After the years of this bloated and fictitious, credit financed "prosperity", crawling with neo cons and plenty of vieux cons, we need the mental and cultural equivalent of a high colonic enema.
Who knows, maybe somebody will finally write a truly great book again.
"...we need the mental and cultural equivalent of a high colonic enema."
If for no other reason, I recommended this just for that bit of prose. Too true, but Obama is saying no to the enema. He believes "IT" has already passed and it's time to move forward.
January 13, 2009 6:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
"We need to tear out our hair in clumps and beat our chests and rend our garments and cover ourselves with ashes and scrape at our sores with a pot shard... the mental and cultural equivalent of a high colonic enema."
You first.
January 13, 2009 6:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm wiht you. I've read better stuff than this written in the ingredient areas fo soup cans.
January 14, 2009 10:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think generation L might have been the WWII generation. They got the "good" war, the decades of prosperity after it and the boomer generation funding their social security and medicare.
January 13, 2009 6:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I love when somebody challenges Brokaw's "greatest generation" meme.
January 14, 2009 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Indeed, Cat. Perhaps the most egregious example of the Greatest Generation and even my baby-boomer generation looking out sorely for themselves can be found in the tiered contracts such as UAW negotiated. In these, the present worker maintains his living wage, but the ones to follow are compelled to start at bare subsistence wages @$15/hr.
It's a crass example of "I've got mine, so screw you!" And it amazes me that any good Union Brother or Sister would ever allow it.
January 14, 2009 3:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
David, it must be very nice to be you, in your ivory ex-pat tower, gazing across the sea and thinking "Oh what fun it will be" to watch an economy and a society fall on hard times, thinking maybe it will even catastrophically fail so you can get good literature again.
I appreciate that you've branched out from your mind-numbingly boring diatribes against Obama as candidate and then as P-E. But if you want a good book, why don't you write one? There's always a market for dystopian tragedy.
January 13, 2009 7:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Things are going to be very tough here too, Orlando. The Spanish economy, which I depend on, is deflating a huge bubble and there is going to be massive unemployment. I personally have have had to scramble hard to make up for lost customers and many paper journalists I know are in desperate straits.
The Spanish extended family, which I don't have, and the welfare state will make it a little easier to bear.
January 14, 2009 2:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Which, of course, explains why people keep coming back to the TPM boards.
January 14, 2009 3:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's the most accurate thing that's been said here today.
January 15, 2009 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Some Americans in this generation were lucky, most were not terribly so, unless you count being alive lucky. That's not silly, since one biologist said there are uncountable ways of being dead and only a few of being alive.
If nukes helped us, they may also help India and Pakistan, or for that matter, Iran and Israel. I think it is safe to assume Israel would be rather more cautious in Gaza if Iran could concentrate its parliamentary mind.
So maybe the most recent generation is luckier than ours, since there are more nukes out there. Or maybe they're lucky to be disabused of the notion of achieving a retirement they can afford.
Are we lucky to have seen two Kennedys killed, and to have lost Martin Luther King? (Not to mention Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison.) Are we lucky to have seen our once dominant position in high technology rendered quaint history, with NASA expected to hire dumb but workable Russian boosters?
Can we get past all this meta stuff of trying to decide how significant we are? How about just doing the job of living, raising children, and preserving knowledge for the future?
January 13, 2009 8:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
January 14, 2009 2:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
You call that group on your little list a 'loss'? Maybe a loss of losers, but there's something redundant in that, isn't there?
January 14, 2009 9:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
You can always tell the age of a person when they leave off Kurt Cobain.
By the way, Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison -- and Cobain -- were not killed by a 3rd party. Why not throw Hemingway on that list? Or Glenn Miller? -- he died for a real "cause".
Sorry, Tom, every so often this Boomer-centric perspective really frustrates me. For a lot of us, the world didn't end in 1968 -- or 1974 either. (In fact, it may not have even begun!)
January 14, 2009 3:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
The point I was trying to make is that all generations have their good and bad angles. Lots of people died in WWII but the survivors had some advantages therefore. The Depression was both damaging and ennobling. Tired of this thread, bye.
January 14, 2009 10:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
BTW, why don't I get the point of St. Anthony? Maybe if I was Catholic? All I know about him is people bury a statue in the backyard.
Can you try making your point directly instead of hoping visual aids do it for you? I note that all major newspaper opinion writers do not use evocative pictures. Nor does Josh here, except for actual news items. He makes his points with words, as one would expect a writer to do.
January 13, 2009 8:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I thought the dentist was telling me to flog myself.
He had a speaking impediment. I did not find out until later he was advising me to floss myself.
Flossing does not hurt as much.
January 14, 2009 12:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
tate two hespereen han cod me tammago.
January 14, 2009 2:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Congratulations, David!
You win the First Annual TPM Archie Bunker Channeling Award.
January 14, 2009 3:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good fun.What do you actually think?
January 14, 2009 6:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm perfectly serious when I say that all the American men (and Russians too) who came of military age during the Cold War owe our very lives to atomic terror and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). As I believe that "do unto others etc" is the guiding principal of human peace and happiness, how then can I deny to others what has proved so beneficial to me and all who grew up with me?
Is this a terrible and sinister paradox of hellish implications? You betcha!
January 14, 2009 8:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with that. Not with much of the rest of your post. Perhaps you should use a rifle rather than a shot gun.
January 14, 2009 8:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Flavs,
Did you ever see "Death in Venice"?
January 14, 2009 8:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes. Dirk Bogarde in a white suit crossing the Adriatic on a smokey steamer.
More importantly I read the long short story several times struck by the contrast with Buddenbrooks .
January 14, 2009 9:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
The important thing here is the image of Dirk Bogarde with the hair dye running down his face through the rice powder and rouge.
January 14, 2009 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, and the contrast with our initial glimpse of him, in his immaculate white suit.
On balance the Novella had more impact on me than the (very good)film.
January 14, 2009 2:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I thought every generation of Americans was supposed to leave a better world for their children, and has done for a long while.
What's the matter with your generation, David? Why are you leaving the rest of us holding the bag?
January 14, 2009 10:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
January 14, 2009 12:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seaton is, of course, basically correct.
Americans (of any generation mentioned) have been incredibly lucky. More than that, they still are. Barely making ends meet in America is still lots nicer than a middle class lifestyle in China. And China's doing pretty well lately.
That doesn't mean we don't have real problems, although Seaton's attempt to treat the crisis of 2007-8 as a world-changing event on par with the Depression or the Second World War is a bit beyond the pale.
Part of the problem is we've stopped being willing to take our medicine. In 1965 people expected bad times and good times; the entire Bush Administration has been a period of avoiding the inevitable.
Delaying it, more like.
If people don't sometimes get thrown out of work, they don't start businesses, go find new and more productive work, and change things. Fear of change is an expensive luxury in any society, and resistance to that vice (in particular, resistance to using Government to buy palliatives to that vice) has been a great strength for the United States since the Second World War.
January 14, 2009 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
I will take Shangri-la over Stalingrad.
January 14, 2009 11:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
"The great lesson of my youth is that mutual nuclear terror means peace."
You learned nothing, David. We ran the mutually-assured-destruction experiment to a conclusion only once (as far as I know).
The U.S. military was urging Kennedy to bomb the Cuban missile sites, unaware the nuclear warheads were armed and local Russian commanders had the go-ahead to launch if attacked.
Kennedy overruled his military advisers, so our generation -- and subsequent ones -- were indeed lucky.
We were lucky ONCE, David. I for one don't want to bet the next chamber will also come up empty.
That's the lesson I hope Israel-Iran and India-Pakistan will also take to heart.
January 14, 2009 2:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Without the bomb, for sure we would have gone to WWIII and most of us young men would have been killed, nuclear terror prevented that... it might not always do that, but what would in its place?
January 14, 2009 3:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
If the Cuban tripwire had been tripped, the nuclear "exchange" that followed would have killed hundreds of millions, David. HUNDREDS.
I don't even accept your assertion that a conventional-weapons World War III was necessarily inevitable. However, WW I and II both left civilization battered but intact.
Millions died in those wars, but not hundreds of millions. That's the chance we took (and still are taking, to a lesser extent) with MAD.
January 14, 2009 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink