Unnecessary Pipe Trench Excavation

Posts Tagged ‘mccain’

It’s the mother of all ambivalence.

On the one hand, I readily admit, it’s really cool that we elected someone who is not an old white guy, or even a young white guy, to be president. Not that I have an innate problem with white guys, being one myself. But given all the racism that still pervades my country today, both overt and otherwise, I never would have thought I’d live to see this day, and I’m proud of my country that it proved me wrong. Seriously, up until Tuesday night, I really didn’t think it was possible, and I really am happy that it happened in my lifetime.

I think Tom Toles, the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, put it best, simply and eloquently:

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Ah, I’ve come circle; I’m no longer morose and melancholy over a) the election, b) the financial meltdown, and c) the government’s subsequent bailout. It’s gone beyond mystifying and transcended to the realm of the absurd … the insanely absurd. The Absurd with a capital A. I feel like my brain broke and that intead of witnessing and participating in reality, I’m in a French existential comedy – the world has transcended, or rather descended, into a work by Sartre or Camus. Maybe Beckett.

Dubya comes on the television and says in order to save the free market the government has to use taxpayer money to buy shares in private banks. So … we need socialism to preserve the free market? We have to partially nationalize private banks in order to save them? We had to burn down the village in order to save it?

We got into this mess by people living beyond their means, and people banking – literally – on the fact that people were doing this. So, we have to use taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street so banks will extend credit again – so the same people whose tax money is being used for the bail out can continue to live beyond their means, and investment bankers can continue to get rich off of them. And the best part of it is, the people in charge of implementing this bailout were, up until a few years ago, investment bankers at Goldman Sachs, making money hand over fist from sub-prime mortages – in other words, some of the same folk that got us into this mess have been tasked with getting us out of it.

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Technorati Tags: election, bailout, Absurd, Sartre, Camus, Beckett

Ah, now this is the stuff of blogs: navel gazing and self-righteousness at it’s best. …

I never really stopped to think about this; perhaps that’s the problem — why, that as I close in on age 40, I still feel like Holden Caufield. I reread Catcher in the Rye for the umpteenth time last week. I remember reading it as a youth, and having one of those epiphanies that only someone filled with the self righteousness of youth can experience: here is someone who “understands,” I thought; here is someone who “gets it.” The who being J.D. Salinger, of course. I thought the same thing when I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit that now, but I’m not — I’m also astonished to have found it among my mother’s books shortly after her death, but that’s another topic for another time.

I guess I had some vague notion or expectation that by now I wouldn’t still feel alienated from the world around me. I’m not really surprised that I’m not, I suppose; but I think if anything I’m even more restless and mystified by the world today — even pissed off — then I was as a youth. I guess the upcoming election coupled with the current financial debacle have exacerbated these feelings. Or maybe I’m just not as self absorbed as I was as a youth.

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Technorati Tags: Holden Caufield, Salinger, Ayn Rand