Simon Johnson in the New York Times today:
Our leading bankers looted the state, plunged the world into deep recession and cost the United States eight million jobs. Now many of them stand by with sharpened knives and enhanced bonuses – willing to suggest how the salaries and jobs of others can be further cut. Consider the morality of that.
This article is terrific outline of what needs to be done, and how.
If you are not familiar with Simon and Kwak, you should subscribe to The Baseline Scenario.
I got about ten seconds into it. Then the muscles in the back of my throat tightened up, I couldn’t swallow, and I couldn’t see the screen very well, my eyes got misty, I had to turn away.
I’d followed a link to an eight-minute video of the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Couldn’t watch it. I literally couldn’t watch it; if you’d tied me to the chair and forced my eyes toward it, I’d have closed my eyes or, if you’d propped them open with toothpicks, my mind would have blanked, I would not, could not have seen.
We’re nine years past that date, says the calendar; but for many of us, it was just yesterday. And we are not able to live with it, not yet.
“Get over it!” some people say. Worse, “Get over yourself!”
That morning we’d gone back to see the gorgeous glass creations in the Frederick Carder Gallery in Corning, New York. Finished there, we were in the visitors’ shop, and noticed some strange activity. We asked; told there was an accident at the Towers in Manhattan; that we could watch the TV coverage from the auditorium next door.
What we saw was almost impossible to take in, too horrid to believe. The human tragedy was simply too immense.
I knew those towers, lived in Manhattan when they were built (had thought them ugly, a travesty), and then become used to their presence on the skyline. I’d been in them, through them, mingled with the thousands of people who thronged them daily.
Here today, in Corning, were frantic relatives of Tower workers, wildly scrambling with cell phones, trying to reach their family. And on the screen–a giant screen above the stage–behind them, a burning tower, maudlin backdrop.
Then close-ups of the tower. People trapped in top floors. Breaking windows. Falling bodies.
And then the final collapse.
I firmly believe this was, for me, a traumatic event. No other way to explain my reaction even now, nine years later.
From wikipedia: “A traumatic event involves a single experience… that completely overwhelms the individual’s ability to cope or integrate the ideas and emotions involved with that experience”
Sounds right to me. That experience, so intimate and immediate, there on that big screen, shared with so many others, was traumatic for me. So that even now, my inability to “integrate” it all causes an intense emotional reaction when I’m confronted with its images, even in my own mind.
I sob once, choke it down, look away.
It was 1969, and I was invited by the US overnment to observe the explosion of an atomic device in Colorado.
I was invited, because I’d asked to be invited, as a registered journalist. At the time, I was editor of “the Divine Times”, which was an instrument of Divine Light mission, the organization of Guru Maaraj Ji. I was living in an ashram of Divine Light mission, and editing this basically propoganda sheet for the org. We had high hopes for the Divine Times, that it would evolve into legitimate newspaper like Rev. Moon’s Washington Times. But at the time, we were just a propoganda rag.
At any rate, I and my two assistant editors, Judy and Dave, had cajoled our way onto the invitation list for a news conference with the Governor of Colorado, at the time Richard Lamb and viewing of the explosion. A part of the Operation Plowshare (a project conceived under the Eisenhower administration), this was to be a test of nuclear devices put to peaceful use — in this case, an underground detonation of a 40-kiloton device ( four times the size of the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima). The perpose was, it was said, to “fracture” natural gas deposits in the limestone shale, creating a giant, glass-lined bubble full of natural gas.
The event was nominally in Rulison Colorado, which is a small town, just off Interstate 70, on Colorado’s Western Slope. Definitely cow country, high, arid, suitable for ranches and not much else. The place was really in a non-entity called Parachute, Colo., about 40 miles from Rifle, Colo, and 20 miles off the interstate. This was only about a four hour drive from Denver, up the precipitous eastern slope and through the Eisenhower Tunnel along I70. Our little VW bus chugged its way up, though slowly.
We spent the night at a motel in Rifle, in my mind a desolate little town, though it might have been a thriving community in the minds of the ranchers in the hundreds of square miles of which it was the center. I remember having breakfast in a diner there, and feeling way out of things, especially considering that we three were strict vegetarians, and about the only thing on the menu we could eat was toast. No grits out west.
The morning of the Event (I keep trying to find a better name for it than ‘The Event,’ but keep coming back to that.), we drove to the appointed gathering area, and joined a long line of CBS, NBC, ABC and local affiliated stations’ cars and vans, jammed with reporters and cameramen.
Up a long, twisting, dusty road our caravan drove, to end up at a mesa overlooking the explosion site. We all lined up along the edge of the mesa. Before us were an infinity of arroyos, canyons, mesas, cry creek beds, more canyons, stretching to the horizon.
We had heard that there were some anti-nuclear protestors who were occupying the site of the undergraound nuclear test, but we could see none of that. We, representatives of the Free Press, wee shielded from all that.
There was someone “explaining” what we were about to see, but nol one paid any attention to him; we were all just waiting to see what might happen.
There was a count-down of sorts. Then the moment. A jolt, then a few seconds-long trempbling. The stretch of canyons and mesas in front of us blurred for a moment. Then a noise low and rumbling, as if the earth was moaning. When the earth stopped moving, was when we realized it had been doing so.
From every canyon, arroyo, mesa, creek bed for the hundereds of square miles we could see in front of us, arose atomic cloud-shaped puffs of dust, as every poorly balanced rock and stone and boulder in that desert was knocked off balance and tumbled to the ground, rolling down the hillsides, into the rills and valleys of this desert, so that the dky became muted with brown-grey dust that formed a low cloud over us, the slowly lifted and was wafted away by a light westerly breeze.
I think there was some scattered applause from the assembled journalists and dignitaries, but not much. Rather, there was a stunnde silence, a sort of standing-in-awe at the magnitude of what we had just seen. No blinding flash, no booming roar, no towering pillar of ashen atomic mushroom cloud. But that near-silent uplifting of the entire earth, the low moan, the silently spuming rock cascade, was an utterly transmorgrifying experience.
After The Event, there was a press scrimmage around the Governor, whom I asked a question, and was scared to death by all the microphones and cameras trained on me as I did so. He had been talking about his discussions with the President about the creation of a cabinet secretary for Enegy, and I asked him if he was interested in the job: he brushed my question off. The logical follow=-up would have been, “When do you start?” and indeed, he did become the “Energy Czar” shourtly after, but I’m such an intrepid reporter I was completely verklumpt after my first question.
Here’s what it test looked like:
“lol” apparently has lost, or at least changed, its meaning. Used to be “laughing out loud”, but now has come to mean, simply a happy face. E.g.:
I love the roundabout too….however this is America and things have to be designed for the lowest of lowest common denominators–especially to accommodate the very old and very young drivers, lol.
Should be “…very young drivers. 🙂
If I need to communicate with you and you don’t use email, it will cost me half a buck; it won’t cost you anything–it’s delivered by the government at no cost you you. (My postage stamp pays for the delivery.)
If you have email, it costs me nothing more than my regular ISP charge. Costs me nothing to send you as many emails as I want. You, on the other hand, have to have an ISP yourself. This’ll cost you at least $10 per month; plus, you have to buy a computer to hook up to your ISP, plus the phone line (you probably have one of these anyway).
So, while shoud you go to the expense of email? I can’t think of any way that would be to your economic advantage. on the other hand, we could converse a lot more readily.
I had thought that we had avoided the housing bubble in Greenville; this must be because of the high unemployment rate.
I was listening to the radio the other day, to a local (upstate South Carolina) radio station. The talk-show host was discussing the Joe Wilson outburst during President Obama’s recent speech to the joint session of Congress about health insurance reform. This is when Representative Wilson shouted out “You lie!” in a pause in the speech.
The talk show host pointed out the the House later “admonished” Rep. Wilson (did not censure him); but, he insisted, this was after Wilson had called the President to appologize. What happened, he went on, was that everything was settling down, but the “the Black Caucus” “made a race thing” of it, which led to the admonishment.
Heavens. This is projection run rampant. Hasn’t this guy seen that the black caucus in the House is tiny? And that almost every Democrat in the House voted for the admonishment? This is a wholly black thing? This is projection, pure and simple. It is projecting his own prejudices so as to create a non-existent tar man, to which his own prejudices will stick, to his own discredit.
Excuse me, Mr. NY Times, but a message like this is completely unacceptable:
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
At least edit your error message to be somewhat meaningul to your readers!
(the above message was the result from several requests to nytimes.com on 7/11/09 at 7:50 pm.
Today’s headline in the New York Times: “PALIN RESIGNING GOVERNOR’S JOB; FUTURE UNCLEAR”.
Whereas at the New York Times, the future is usually bright, clear and easily explicated on Page One.
This almost ranks right up there with the Times’s 1865 headline: “Lincold Reported Shot; Significant If True”.