Depression 2.0

[BO]

Let's mark this day as the start of this century's great depression.

The bank bailout bill -- aka 'the septic bank bill -- has failed and the DOW dropped 778 points today. Undoubtably, not the big crash yet to happen. The credit markets are frozen. As Paul Krugman states...the gears on wallstreet are full of sand.

You might not have been affected yet. You will. Let's hear some personal stories on what folks are doing to prepare. Have you stocked the pantry yet? Do you have a contingency plan should you lose your job? Supposedly the run on banks has started. Have you moved your savings out of the bank? What are doing about about your investments--your 401k, pension, etc.

Maybe you'll say, 'I ain't got nothing, so I got nothing to lose'. Truth is, unless you're homeless, with everything you own in the shopping cart you're pushing, well, that ain't exactly true. Maybe the reality of the situation hasn't hit yet. It will soon.

Welcome to the next great depression. So, what's your contingency plan?

[pan]

the point and utility of a phd? Makes me laugh. Hopefully you have some interesting classes/professors and your dissertation committee will let you actually write what you want to.

The "terminal degree" is aptly named. They usually are trying to kill your soul so you will fit right in with the rank, tenure and promotion clones. Read Page Smith Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America to get a reality check on the b.s. you are having to wade through.

[BO]

I feel a song coming on...

You all know this one.

[Mouse]

Very nice, had me in tears. Listening over headphones, speakers don't work, music machine broken down. Frost very early down south this year.

Lost faint connections I thought I had. People invited for dinner, phoned on Saturday nearly an hour after they were due, to say weren't coming, and there you are. Almost lost the power of speech here. Can barely paint. In the last two weeks three invitations have ended without a visit, the invitations being in themselves rare and difficult things, my hermit inclinations are folding over me. Indeed, friends are rare and strange things these days.

This whole community lark doesn't have wheels round here. This is one of the richest areas in the country. There are little children with no shoes playing in my street at night, eating the takeaway chips (French fries) from polystyrene containers.

Huge bank bailout here agreed five this morning. They said it was £50 billion with additional components of £250 billion and £200 billion there. So, at least £500 billion. Put it in dollars and it's even bigger than your's, chaps.

I run out of the house calling out cries of slavery. And there is no reply.


Nightjack-An English Detective-The Evil Poor It’s a political problem though. While normal people took their eye off the ball thanks to the post war prosperity the 1968 generation burrowed their way into politics, the media and education. They’re the root of the problem. They need to be got rid of somehow.

Warning- Spread - Massive Amount of Accounts Down - Warning!!

[Cal]

Gosh Mouse ... those people sound like they were very rude. I often shy away from social engagements, but not an hour after I was due to arrive. Take heart - I would come to tea & nosh some bean sprouts if I could. Actually I was wondering the other day how long any of us could actually stand each others company if we were to meet face to face .... something very distancing but somewhat protective about this cyberspace shield we are separated by.

[Mouse]

They were having a good time somewhere else. It would not surprise me if they didn't fancy listening to whatever it was I wanted to tell them about. Now they will have to wait to find out just like everybody else with their head in the sand.
Laughing now I must confess.

Yes, I have a suspicion that we might tend to be rather forceful personalities, possibly best kept in separate cages.
We wouldn't be able to stop talking.
I'm hungry again, it must be bedtime. A small piece of Emmental cheese perhaps.

[Mouse]

Oh I forgot again.. The other night, it was day there in America and Monday if I'm not mistaken, couldn't get online at all, things were looking very nasty and the failure to connect message wasn't the same as usual. I thought the whole thing had collapsed, that the plug had been pulled and we wouldn't be able to talk again.
And I was so regretful that I hadn't said Happy Birthday to Waldo, and congratulations upon achieving 60 glorious years as a human being.

Then I went out in the dark and the rain and hurtled downhill on my bicycle, laughing like a drain.

Do you think that's why no-one will come to tea?

[waldopaper]

Ol Johnathon Bing thanks ye, EM... the long and short of it from Chycho gotta lotta links. I wonder who's "in charge?" It sure as hell aint us... but at least we can see it comin.

[BO]

Dueling Puppets. I wonder how those fuckers feel now? OK, don't answer.

How long before it's obvious to people that we should have invaded Wash DC instead of Iraq?

[waldopaper]

well... o course i cant speak for ALL boomers. but ms. waldo sez im pretty a-typical. and boy Zeke sez, dad ya oughta write a book about this... an i tell him i started one... a few weeks before we took our ill-fated motorcycle trip to the wall. i aint finished it yet. i keep losing heart. and brain. so here ye go... a few excerpts from:

The Russian Time Machine
...
The “Folk Revival” retold the stories of the Great Depression and the struggles of working people. The “…we regret to inform you” announcement that came out of our classroom loudspeakers in 1963 awakened us to the possibility that terrible things can happen, even to Hollywood celebrity presidents. In 1965, we were told “advisors” were being sent to Vietnam to help “them” stop the “Communists.”

Drugs had not come on the scene yet in my little town. “Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll” was still just a twinkle in the eye of your Saturday night date, flirting over the pizza and root beer. It took a high-school kid a Saturday afternoon at the library to learn that the “Global Communist Conspiracy” was mostly a myth. Soviet missiles were real, but “Communism” was only an idea. Elvis was now the Beatles… with transistor radios.

Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming

It was a 441cc BSA… my first “real” motorcycle. It was a British “one-lunger,” a “thumper” with all that displacement in a single cylinder. You had to kick it like a mule to start it, and it was capable of kicking you back just as hard. By now, 650cc was “big iron,” and the British bikes held their place between the Japanese ring-dings and the Harley antiques. The BSA would shake your teeth out… and the girls loved it.

The whole world for young people in the North America and Europe turned inside-out in the five years between 1965 and 1970. Vietnam escalated to a meat-grinder, drugs appeared everywhere, the girls got “the pill,” and Jimi Hendrix played guitar like nothing human. He was to our generation what Glenn Miller was to our parents’. “Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll” was a catch-all that contained a greater idealism for some of us.

I will never apologize for being a “draft dodger,” and besides, I was a “war resistor.” A draft-dodger got out of the war. A war-resistor helped other guys get out. I dropped out of college and went to Canada to avoid the war, never intending to return. But I did return, and after a sad and unsuccessful marriage to my high-school girlfriend, joined what I thought was the “revolution,” going full-tilt boogie by 1968.

It was a horrible year that began with the Tet Offensive and ended with Nixon’s election. The year before was the “Summer of Love,” and I was returning from Canada in time to see the 12th Street Riots in Detroit. You could hear gunfire, see soldiers in full battle-gear driving in armored personnel carriers, see the smoke and the flames, and we had to drive carefully through the broken glass and angry black mobs who let us pass.

We were hippies… the mob must have decided we were harmless. We held our fists upright and shouted encouragement, “burn baby burn” and they let us through. On the long way home, our VW microbus was pulled over several times, where the police looked in the back, expecting a van-load of armed negroes, I suppose. It did seem like some kind of revolution was beginning, but for what, and against what?

It seemed clear to us, the cause for revolution. The government was becoming oppressive, and aggressive wars for no purpose seemed unstoppable. Drugs went from being a nuisance to a serious crime. But to many of us, what seemed a “revolution” to the politicians was simply a change in attitude. Fewer people, especially young people, were buying into the “Kommunist threat,” but the politicians were disconnected.

For years, elections had been won by successfully tarring the opposition as “soft on Communism.” If there was any kind of “revolution,” it was playful street theatre. There were love-ins and be-ins… you could smell sandalwood incense and whiffs of pot-smoke, dazzled with granny-dresses and chanting, pools of drumming and acoustic music. The “peace and love” of hippiedom was seen as a threat.

We lost Robert Kennedy and Martin King in 1968 to senseless violence. I saw the senseless violence myself in Chicago that year. Peaceful protest turned angry… and there was nowhere for that anger to go. I stood next to a reporter from the London Times as we watched the cops beat a network camera crew, smash the camera, and throw the film into the street. The crowd chanted “the whole word’s watching.” I was there.

I saw a cop lay his stick across a girl’s back… it sounded like a pumpkin dropped from a building. She went down like a little rag doll. Those were the “days of rage,” and the rage was real. It was May 68 in France, it was Prague Spring, it was the Rote Armee Fraktion in the making. Sticks turned to bullets in May of 1970 at Kent State in Ohio. I was about to leave my small community college to transfer to a larger state school.

Suddenly the Professors seemed willing to talk about “the war,” whereas before it wasn’t “subject appropriate.” I was a “student activist,” and I met my new roommates, not six months out of combat in Vietnam. That’s when I heard the stories, an ongoing nightmare, and I was not there. When the girls left “the movement” because we were “male chauvinist pigs,” I had to look up the c-word in a dictionary. It was over for me.

Drugs, Rock n’ Roll

There was too much posturing, too much political nonsense. Everybody wanted to be a “leader” of some kind of “movement.” The blacks were angry at the hippies, the girls were angry with the boys, the young were angry with the old, the “hardhats” wanted to beat the crap out of anybody with long hair. The only thing that seemed to make sense was music, so I dropped out of school and went to Florida to play it.

The music scene and the drug scene (they were linked somehow) in south Florida was changing too. Merry pranksters smuggling weed on boats from the Caribbean gave way to serious business people carrying serious pistols and smuggling serious cocaine for serious money. It was common knowledge on the street that most of the coke came from Palm Beach International… brought in by government airplanes.

Rock stars between hits came on the scene and lifted the talent they liked from local bands, setting them up to eat each other to get another shot at the mega-bucks recording industry. Music wasn’t fun any more. Drugs weren’t fun any more. They were starting to build Disney World in Orlando. “Development” was going crazy, and that was only the beginning. The streets were getting mean and dangerous.

You could still hitchhike back in 1967. If you had a car, you could go to any middle-sized city and look for the longhairs. You could get a place to stay and food in exchange for transportation. If you were a longhair hitchhiking, other longhairs would pick you up… and offer a place to stay. If you picked up any hippies, you could feel safe giving them a place to sleep wherever you lived. All that had changed by 1970.

Hippie getup became a shallow fashion statement. Out on the highway, there were dangerous muggers either hitching or picking up hitchers. Drugs were starting to get dangerous; not just the awful chemicals, but the culture surrounding them that involved cops with guns or drug-dealers with guns. Maybe the “revolution” in 1967 wasn’t serious, but it started a counter-revolution that continued for the next 40 years.

There has to be a “threat” in order for the government to “protect” us, and garner support for all the “wars” that were to follow: war on crime, war on drugs, even a war on poverty. Then the politicians can tar each other with whoever is “soft” on whatever the threat is… although nobody was accused of being soft-on-poverty. Hippies were the same as “Kommunists,” and it was perfectly fine to beat the crap out of them.

I cut my hair and tried to find a job. All I wanted was to be left alone, to get as far away as possible from the dopers and the cops and the hardhat rednecks and the schemers in the music business. When I left Florida, it was opening day at Disney World. Traffic was backed up on the exit and extended westward all the way to the horizon, bumper-to-bumper. It seemed my little town in Indiana was the best place to escape.

I swapped the BSA for a car. I started working in the family business in 1974, when it seemed the whole madness was over. Nixon resigned. The Vietnam “war” ended. I was 26 years old, and ready to leave the whole “hippie thing” behind. Only a decade and some change since Kennedy and the Beatles, it seemed like my little town was a good place to settle down and “bake a good cookie.”

I still believed that if you did a good job, provided something somebody wanted, worked hard and gave it your best, you could take care of yourself and others. I followed that paradigm for the next 20 years. It took much longer to shatter that illusion than “all you need is love,” and I still believe that. What people call the “60s,” meaning the “hippie-time” would change into something fake. But I was there. I remember.

For so many of us, the hippie-time wasn’t fake, it wasn’t a way you could get laid or find a “meaningful relationship” (husband). We really thought we could change the world. Sex was a part of all that… but only part, same as music and drugs. Maybe the biggest part was questioning (no answers- just questions) who was making out on “feeling good.” All the money in the world’s spent on feeling good.

Feeling Good and “Reality”

When you’re cold and hungry, philosophy doesn’t matter much. The hippie-time was the first time many of us coddled baby-boomers encountered being cold and hungry. Our parents, who grew up during the Great Depression and a World War shielded us from all of that, as all parents wish to do. We ran into cold and hunger voluntarily, and assumed the “solutions” were voluntary as well.

“Feeling Good” seems to be an option when all you want to do is stop feeling bad. We never considered that not being cold and hungry was enough. Feeling-nothing-bad, or feeling nothing… was never even considered. We were never taught that being warm and fed was all we should expect… all we ever deserved to expect. For most of the people in the world today, staying warm and fed is enough.

We learned that it was not that difficult to stay fed and sheltered… especially if you cooperated. You could easily get a $5 an hour job in 1970. It’s a bit harder in 2007. The difference is: those were 1970 dollars. You could make a living. Many resourceful people worked during the winter and took the summer off.

>

The mental patient sat in his room, stark naked, except for a hat. An attendant was curious.

“Why don’t you put your clothes on? You might have a visitor.”

“Nobody’s going to visit. Nobody cares that I’m here. Nobody wants to see me. I’ve been here for years, and nobody ever comes.”

“So, why are you wearing the hat?”

“Well… somebody might come.”

Nobody is ever going to read this. Since you’re reading this right now, maybe I’m wrong. Nobody is going to buy this. I don’t care. Nobody is interested in the memories of an American “Baby Boomer,” so many of us who were born right after World War II. There are so many of us, and that has been both our blessing and our curse. There is no “typical Boomer experience,” I just wanted to write it all down before… the end.

Right now, what seemed like a beautiful dream has turned into a nightmare. It’s hard to say what “right now” is, because I began this project in 2001. It is now 2007. I don’t know when this will be “finished.” Not this writing. I mean this nightmare. Forty years after the “Summer of Love” (which began with a war in the Middle East), it’s happening all over again. I started writing about a motorcycle trip with two little kids.

I call it “The Russian Time Machine” because what later became the Bolshevik Revolution sprouted from the ideas of “The Communist Manifesto,” published in 1848, one hundred years before I was born. For over a century the basic idea was both co-opted by those who supported it and distorted it. Had “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” been as brutally suppressed and distorted, “biotechnology” would not exist as it does now.

The United States went into a time-warp trying to suppress “Marxism,” although never has an idea understood by so few distorted the reality of so many, and it’s not over yet. When the “Soviet Union” imploded in 1991, everybody thought “The Cold War” was over. We still use the term “Third World,” although nobody seems to remember what the first two “worlds” were. I began writing while still in the corporate “velvet prison.”

That’s gone now. It’s difficult to tell the story of a past you remember without involving the present. No “job” prospects now, none. All I want to say is this: I’m sick of war. It’s all I’ve ever known… and I’ve never seen a real one, live and in person. I’ve seen plenty of the wreckage it leaves behind. From the “war on Communism” to the “war on terror” and all the other “wars” on substances and abstract nouns, I’m sick of it.

Give peace a chance? It hasn’t happened in my lifetime, so far. I thought I could leave it all behind at that long, black wall. Every year since I can remember, there have been the flags, the parades, the chest-thumping and the sports-team war-snorting spectators. I’m sick of it. I’ll tell you some stories… but they’re only stories… and I’ll flag them with “Just a story.” “Any relation to any real people…” and all that disclaimer stuff applies.

First disclaimer… I have never known “war” first-hand, nor do I ever intend to if I can help it. Second: “war” is not all I’ve “ever” known… far from it. I have encountered love and beauty and life and wonder and friendship and a whole lot of other good things that are far more than bullet-headed simplistic “war.” So have you, I hope. This is simply a reflection of a life in the 60 years 1948-2008 in the USA.

We will probably be remembered as the spoiled me-generation that messed up everything. We are neither victims nor perpetrators, simply witnesses to a notch in time. I would say I am “typical,” neither rich nor poor, nobody famous nor “important.” Like all typical little people who witness history, we try in our own way to make sense of it all. We are given memes to help us explain it. Some reject the memes, others do not.

Welcome to a Baby Boomer’s memories.

yadda yadda blah blah blah. here's the last entry- on the cutting-room floor'>>

Oh who cares… this that chicken fat. I would say the hexayrut design is a combination of geometry, reality, heat, light and everything in-between. Nobody likes the hexayurt structures because the windows are the wrong shape or there’s not enough room for books yadda yadda blah blah. I’m going to be dead in 5 years. Fuck it.

yeah yeah i know. boo-fucking-hoo-hoo. that part is scrap. when i get fired up and keep gnawing on this thing, i try to imagine a reader after ALL of us have been dead at least 100 years. Lara and Domi's great-great grandchildren maybe. If the creek don't rise, young lasses... mebbe you'll get to see them through dim addled eyes like the one I got on the left side o me skull right now. Ask yer Aunt Donna about Aunt Ella. Her dad (grandad?) was in the US Civil War. Through her (Aunt Ella), those times touch me to this day. Because of her, I can hear the voices of those old-timers... and I try me best to translate and pass it on to the junge Volk. I got lotsa German baggage from me own pap's side o the gene-pool... and I took a great and expensive journey through time and space to get some rude understanding of the Nazi-time... a great and terrible thing... and this day trying to pass it on to me wee spiders the best I can. What can I say? When yer old... History is yer X to bear. G'nite, kids. Yer ALL assholes. God love ye. '>>

[BO]

I knew we were fucked when the hippies started turning into Jesus freaks.

I think the sixties have over-romanticized boomer ideology. In truth, a small percentage were actually active revolutionaries. The rest were groupies, and the other half were signed up for ROTC and the young republicans club. Same as it's always been. 20% leading opinion while the rest remained anchors to progress.

If you could carve out that 20% (100% here) and start a new society, it'd be an awesome place. But, as a whole, we're regressing, as we have been since the mid sixties when our economy--not our ideology--started to go downhill. At that time, our education system was at its peak in quality. The sixties really started as a campus revolution. Ohio State marked the end of it.

The revolution died because that level of energy is impossible to sustain. And economics became a much more powerful (and corrupting) force than politics. Few were able to resist the temptation of easy money, and their ideology became compromised. At some point, most forgot what their ideology was.

That said, some people seem to be born with a ingrained compassion for humanity/life that stays with them their entire lives. The creatives. The monks protecting the ancient scripts of man's discovery and artistry. Humans born without the seemingly common gene for making money whilst destroying everything in their path -- devoid of ethics or conscience. Those people are still around. Although certainly less popular than they were in the sixties.

I guess we become who we revel as our heroes. In '68, it was Abbey Hoffman and Jimi Hendrix. In 2008, it's Warren Buffet and Britney Spears. In 40 years, we've become what we hated most.

[Cal]

Nice writing Waldo ... you reminded me of much ... and reminded me of a kind of lost 'disappointment' I've had for the past 10 years or so that I haven't quite known what to do with except learn to live with it ...

[pan]

First thing: Waldo you should keep that hat on. Your stuff is good and people will read it. As a 51 year old dance artist with arthritis, who never needed to be famous, who now realizes that most people will never see your work or respect what you have done unless you have been stamped with the famous or associated with famous stamp of approval, I have many times wondered if the sum total of my adult work is greater than zero. I'm am now the spouse of the Director of Dance. I have more talent, passion, and relevant experience than the two current wastes of space on faculty but I can't get hired because they, fearing their job security, have invoked nepotism. So right now my employment level is accompanying two classes a week. I see the wee spiders yearning for someone to teach them while I play my djembes and keep my mouth shut and keep myself from shouting at their "teachers" to stop staring at their own reflection in the mirror and do something for their students. But I'm keeping my hat on because I do know that being there is required - that you have to play the game if you want any pay out. I don't play the lottery, my life and my art are big enough risks.

I was ten in '67. My older brother had parties at home when the parents were away. I grew up watching, idolizing these hippies who hid their drug use from me so I thought that was the way things are. The "revolution" may have petered out but I never got over what I experienced as a child. It is a major reason why I am who I am.

I really appreciate this little village of ours - it gives me a chance to remember what "normal" should be.