The semester is steaming along, and steamrolling me. Wonderful discussions yesterday in two of my classes, both part of Poetry Inside/Out, contributed to the steamrollery and also inspired me to further consider the role of social critics and social criticism.
Even though it seems we’ve seen the end of $4 gas, the economy is not quite out of the woods. Demand destruction and a severely constricting economy have driven down the price of oil and its distillates. But the resulting economic bounce has resembled a dead cat tossed off a skyscraper.
I appreciated an article by Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil in 2004, which appeared in the June 2008 issue of National Geographic. But I enjoyed the resulting letters to the editor even more. The six letters published in the magazine’s print version covered a wide range of beliefs, and I print two in their entirety because they represent the end points as I’ve come to see them.
While reading through an earlier post, it occurred to me that it might have relevance to today’s political drama. So I tracked down a few essays and put a contemporary spin on the year-old post.
Dr. Day-Ruiner.
Dr. IHAN (short for I Have A Nightmare, wordplay on Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech).
Dr. Doomsday.
Prophet of Doom.
These are the names given to me by friends. They are the nicest things people call me. You can imagine what others say.
For those of you not paying attention to the news last week, here’s a quick summary: The United States economy nearly collapsed, taking the world economy with it. Only a quick infusion of cash by the Treasury Department prevented full-scale collapse. The problem: peak oil. The solution, such as it is: print money, sensu Weimer Republic. Ben “Helicopter” Bernanke is living up to his nickname, and he’s getting a loan from Henry Paulson.
The blogosphere is ripe with discussion of this country’s unfolding financial collapse. The collapse of the big banks has begun in earnest, and there’s nothing you, me, or the federal government can do about it. Over at Clusterfuck Nation, James Howard Kunstler is asking us to place blame squarely on Republican shoulders, asking us to re-brand the Grand Old Party as “the party that wrecked America.” I’ve got no problem blaming BushCo and his Republican predecessors for putting us in these dire straits. But I think there’s plenty of blame to go around.