There I was, innocently poking around the internet looking for interesting things to read, when I came across this astonishing assertion that we're not really in that much trouble. "Don't believe the economists who say America is in an irreversible decline," writer Daniel Gross orders us. See, it doesn't mean anything, because:
"Economic prognostication is hamstrung by a tendency to extrapolate from recent trends far into the future. It happens at the top of a cycle—the Dow is going to 36,000! Housing prices will never fall!—and it happens when we plunge into a ditch."
Gross cites as evidence a doom-and-gloom book of about twenty years ago which "went into paperback just as the United States was beginning to emerge from the Cold War as the world's only superpower and the hub of a globally integrated trading system."
But...but...but...Where do I even start?
Let's try a tip from the world of screenwriting manuals. If you read the book "Save The Cat," you will discover that, at the midpoint of most contemporary films, there is a false event. It is either a false defeat, or, more commonly (check out your Netflix), a false triumph.
And that's what the late eighties and early nineties were. They were a moment of false triumph. See this article by Tom Englehardt for a reassessment of those years, a reassessment, by the way, which wouldn't be necessary if we had listened to all the people back then who were standing around on the sidelines kicking the tires and saying "Guys? Guys, if you actually look under the awesome shiny tricked-out hood, there are some really worrisome things going on."
The truth is, we are in trouble. And you know what? The sooner and more fully we acknowledge it, the more we can turn it around.
Because we can turn it around. Please. We're Americans. We are the country of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Clara Barton, Crazy Horse, Margaret Sanger, Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, Sacajawea, Carl Djerassi, Rachel Carson, Douglas MacArthur, Steven Spielberg. We can whip a puny little economic implosion.
But first, we have to be fully aware that that's what it is, and that it won't be puny if we don't start singing "We're All In This Together" while inaugurating massive public works and taxing the everliving shit out of the top 1%. Oh, and cleaning up the environment.
Sigh...
