Black Monday - Raising the Stakes

I see your mired foreign entanglements, and raise you one tattered economy.  

Well, maybe the economic roof hasn't completely fallen through yet (it's creaking), but when the neoconservative administration that extols the virtues of unregulated free market capitalism directly intervenes in the private sphere through an $85 billion taxpayer-funded buy-in (oh yes, we will all pay for their ineptitude), you know that even the most ideologically committed right wing economists are losing their composure and reexamining their Manichean faith in the invisible hand.

On the one hand, it's probably fortunate that the vast majority of Americans can't explain what takes place on Wall Street in any given week, let alone the implications of what's been taking place in the wake of the mortgage crisis. At the end of the day, as long as the vast majority of consumers remain confident that their dollar is still worth a dollar, and trust that their capital is still safer in the bank than the basement, America can probably weather through this thing without a nationwide reenactment of The Grapes of Wrath. That's little comfort to the hundreds of thousands who lost their jobs in the past year, or the tens of thousands more that will lose their jobs and homes in the coming months as the market continues to bottom out. And it's certainly not a bulletproof assumption by which our leaders should be basing their decisions.  

If any benefit has come out of the past week, it's that electoral attention was finally (if maybe only briefly) redirected towards substantive issues, and away from inane personality politics. As most economic observers are noting, the ongoing Wall Street crisis is unprecedented in its magnitude and implications. Of course, this just adds one more to the catalog of events over the past eight years unprecedented in magnitude and implications. When Americans flock to the poles in six weeks, one would hope that their voting decisions reflect the laundry list. 

It's not that the current election differs that significantly from previous ones in its focus on the mundane and inattention to the gravity of the situation at hand. It's just that gravity is pulling us all down that much faster. When the economic foundation is crumbling faster than it can be pieced back together; when billions of dollars and countless lives are being expended on tenuous and indefinitely bounded combatant efforts in multiple theaters; when the strategic balance vis-a-vis Russia is very dangerously tilting back towards outright military confrontation (can someone please remind Sarah Palin that the Russians are fully capable of matching our capacity for thermonuclear annihilation?); when the strategic balance elsewhere (particularly in East Asia) is realigning in ways, that although not necessarily threatening, nonetheless merit a reevaluation of diplomatic and economic priorities; when the globe is facing profoundly destabilizing environmental changes (regardless of source); when foreign opinion of and confidence in the United States is at an all time low; and when American confidence in the institutions of their government is at a similar low, one would hope that the impending vote would reflect the context of these troubled times.

Unfortunately, I seriously fear (I hope unfairly) that come November 4th, the majority will once again cast their votes based on the same tired fundamentalist priorities – race, religion, guns, and sexual morality – thus allowing the next generation of officeholders to continue steering the ship of state towards the rocks.

And finally, because I like to set my worry to music, a soundtrack for uncertain times:   

1. Bob Dylan – “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”

2. The Oktober People – “The Sky is Falling”

3. The National – “Fake Empire”

4. The Jimi Hendrix Experience – “All Along the Watchtower”

5. Modest Mouse – “Parting of the Sensory”

6. Arcade Fire – “Antichrist Television Blues”/“Windowsill”

7. Explosions in the Sky – “Have You Passed through this Night?”

8. Bruce Springsteen – “Atlantic City”

9. Bob Marley – “Redemption Song”

10. Son House – “John the Revelator”

Peace.