The title is from Billy Joel’s It’s All About Soul, and while it has been dark and cold since Billy stopped cranking out the hits, that’s not what we’re talking about. (Achtung,
baby)
The subject is next year, the real crisis of our time, the true gotterdammerung for the conservative movement, the year when the dam breaks and it all goes to hell.
Liberals of a certain age (like Newsweek’s Jon Meachum) well recall their own gotterdammerung. Martin died. Bobby died. Chicago. Nixon. Body bags piling up at the airport, bad trips all around.
All this is coming for the Right now. You better start swimming or you will sink like a stone.
This mess in Pakistan is just the appetizer. Afghanistan is likely to be lost, just as Iraq was. Putey-poot won’t let you bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran. The crisis of global climate change will become more than obvious. There will be no immunity, no statute of limitations.
And that’s not the worst of it.
The worst of it is the possibility of a U.S. economic collapse.
We’re talking about a systemic meltdown in which $2 trillion in assets
disappear — that’s trillion with a t. We’re talking about so-called
"safe" money market funds becoming worthless, about everyone’s
retirement accounts disappearing along with their home values, about
real poverty and attendant crime, and about it all being blamed on
those in power.
In many ways the 1968 crisis
Newsweek obsessed over so blithely was pretty gentle, as these things
go. The Civil War and Great Depression were far more wrenching, and things can go that way.
I don’t expect the Right to give up power gracefully. I strongly
suspect there are some who see what Musharraf is trying in Pakistan —
phony elections controlled by the military — as a dry run for what an
emergency might bring here. They see how easily
the demonstrations of civil society are being put down, and the neocons
think, we can do that. Make the emergency great enough here and they’ll
thank us for it. It will be a cakewalk to destroy American democracy,
why we’ll be greeted as liberators.
Think that can’t happen? What I wrote about in The Chinese Century — a collapse of the dollar leading to an American dictatorship and the country’s general retreat from the world
— that wasn’t just wild paranoid fantasy. It was wild paranoid
fantasy based on what really could happen, with just a little push in
the wrong direction, a push we’re now seeing three years later.
I’m for Edwards, but in the course of all this the Clintons — and
we’re really talking about both of them in power when we talk about
Hillary — may not seem like such a bad outcome to New York and those
in the Washington village. They’ve spent six months now getting sort of
used to it, the Money Wing of the Democratic Party now being seen as no
worse than the Money Wing of the Republican Party (and no
different). They could ease the Bushies out for that, while they might
fight the rise of a true populist.
The point I want to make is that 2008 will be hard for everyone,
not just the neocons. It will be worse for them, much worse. Many will wind up exiled or jailed as a result of the coming events.
We, on the other hand, will be left to pick up the pieces, and how many
will be left on the board?
I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
Today’s Albuquerque Journal’s headline was about “the possibility of a recession.” I have made sure that my house is paid off (courtesy of hard-saving GI kindred without children), my car is paid off (it’s 10 years old), and I pay off my credit card every month.
I would also suggest people get any necessary repairs or replacements – to themselves, their homes, and their equipment – done now. Necessary, not vanity upgrades. Do it while you can. Because Dana’s right, folks, we’re in for a long, hard winter, and I don’t just mean November ’07 to March ’08. I mean the one we were sliding into in October ’29.
“The tumult and the shouting dies; the captains and the kings depart….” Kipling.
Today’s Albuquerque Journal’s headline was about “the possibility of a recession.” I have made sure that my house is paid off (courtesy of hard-saving GI kindred without children), my car is paid off (it’s 10 years old), and I pay off my credit card every month.
I would also suggest people get any necessary repairs or replacements – to themselves, their homes, and their equipment – done now. Necessary, not vanity upgrades. Do it while you can. Because Dana’s right, folks, we’re in for a long, hard winter, and I don’t just mean November ’07 to March ’08. I mean the one we were sliding into in October ’29.
“The tumult and the shouting dies; the captains and the kings depart….” Kipling.