Walking Is Transportation

DISTRACTING THE NEWS

Signature image,
 "The Water's Edge,
Photographs by
William Meyers"
  Alice Austen House Museum
March 1-May 3, 2009
Info: www.AliceAusten.org
E-mail: [email protected]
Telephone: 718-816-4506

WHEAT, A RARITY;
CHAFF, ABUNDANT

Industry observers report Hollywood box office and kindred receipts are booming in these days of downturn, just as they did in the Thirties, when Americans distracted themselves from economic misery with Busby Berkeley musicals, madcap comedies and the occasional socially redeeming melodrama.

Though I don’t deny the aptness of comparisons between those days and these, the last thing I yearn for is distraction. Especially not with the mushrooming number of internet, print, cable, radio and broadcast TV news outlets competing for my attention, all with an inflaming urgency I’m learning to ignore.

It seems at times that scouring the media to find out what’s really going on––separating the Superficially Interesting But Ultimately Pointless from the Not So Fascinating But Really Important––has become my real job.

What The Administration Has Said,
And What It Hasn’t

Through its rapid-fire introduction of multiple programs to solve a series of inherited crises, the Obama administration has shown it understands the interrelated nature of the problems; the fact that to solve only one is to solve none.

Less clearly articulated by the administration is the possibility, even the likelihood, that these solutions, whatever they turn out to be, may not return us to life as we knew it before. Until very recently, only futurists and environmentalists were looking past the recent past and asking,

•In a very different global economic environment, what sorts of changes will be required of us in our daily lives?

•What kinds of institutions––formal/informal, local/nationwide––will we have to develop, to help people cope with change?

•What do the changes imply for local communities?

Our ‘Flight from Reality’

But in the past week or two, there have been signs of a change in the dialogue. There’s less “When will we get back to normal?” and more “Maybe what ‘normal’ is needs to be rethought.” The recent comments of three writers on politics and culture are hopeful signs:

Thomas Friedman, NY Times, March 7, 2009:  “We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese . . .  We can’t do this anymore.”

Frank Rich, NY Times, March 8, 2009: “America hasn’t seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.  . . .  Our culture painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.’s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country’s wholesale flight from reality.”

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, March 9, 2009: “The mandate of clarity requires me to ask: to what state of affairs do we expect to recover? If the answer is a return to an economy based on building ever more suburban sprawl, on credit card over-spending, on routine securitized debt shenanigans in banking, and on consistently lying to ourselves about what reality demands of us, then we are a mortally deluded nation.”

A TOMORROW UNLIKE YESTERDAY

GETTING OVER OURSELVES

Only a few members of what’s called the commentariat—NY Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, among them––are doing the vital work of preparing the populace for what’s likely to follow the current economic crisis.

Not that Krugman or any other credible observer would risk predicting specific outcomes during a period unprecedented in our history. All he can say with reasonable certainty is that, even when the global economy regains some sort of equilibrium, we will not simply go back to things as they were.

The economy will almost certainly be reduced in size.  A substantial portion of the nation’s productive resources will be devoted to paying down the punishing level of debt that 30 years of devotion to free market capitalism have cost us. The Federal Government’s fiduciary role as economic stabilizer and guarantor of last resort will give it unprecedented influence over national, state and local affairs.

These developments accelerate significantly a process of global market realignment already underway well before the U.S. recession was officially declared. It is not disloyal to acknowledge that the 21st is not America’s century; it is Asia’s.

'STILL'?

Uncomfortable as many Americans may be about this realignment, there are signs we are coming to accept it. One sign is a modifier that has surfaced more and more in recent years in America’s dialogue about the national enterprise—a word that wouldn’t have seemed necessary a generation ago.

The word is ‘still.’ As in, Still the world’s biggest economy. Still the pre-eminent global military power. Still the leader in [choose one from a dwindling number of businesses, sciences and professions] worldwide.

What’s not answered by that defensive posture is the question, Yes, but for how long? Part of an answer, at least, can be found in those recent stories about educated first generation Americans—East Indians––resettling in their parents’ country of origin because of the expanding opportunities there. A generation ago, the expanding opportunities were here.

NO GUARANTEES

Increasing use of the qualifier ‘still’ suggests that America’s hold on top-dog status isn’t almost guaranteed, the way it once was. Through aggressive trade, investment and currency policies, a growing number of challengers could snatch it away abruptly or cause it to erode over time.

Though the signs have been there for a while now, a globeful of crises have made it possible—I say, necessary––to begin to imagine the United States as one of several, rather than as #1.

An administration open to multilateralism, as Obama’s appears to be, could make the transition to ‘one of several’ a matter of policy and practice. Among the many achievements I’m hoping for from an Obama administration, this could be one of its most significant and forward-looking.