From n + 1

“A few months ago a lot of people thought the world was coming to an end. Now they’re dancing in the streets and going out to restaurants.” So a mutual fund strategist told the Times in mid-July 2009, midsummer, mid-crisis. Meanwhile we have a friend who works at a restaurant in Brooklyn—he hasn’t lost his job, but he makes two-thirds of what he did last year, and the restaurant’s owner has taken to gazing distractedly at the empty tables and scooting toward the door when someone reminds him he owes them money. The owner was always an alcoholic, but not like this.

The sense one gets from the news these days is that no one is sure what’s going on. Confusion reigns, the way it never quite did during the Bush era, when the enemies of humanity went out of their way to identify themselves. Partly the confusion results from how poorly, at how many removes, the stock market reflects the actual strength of the economy. And partly it results from the election of Obama (that night there actually was dancing in the streets), and the consequent turn toward policy. Under Bush, a straight neoliberal agenda was shoved at us and we could just say—not that it mattered—No; now we encounter the messy question of how to structure a Keynesian stimulus without bankrupting a nation whose debt is fast approaching its GDP. Under Bush, we had the overt suppression of global warming discourse and total obsequiousness toward the oil majors; now we wonder whether to support the worthy but inadequate Waxman-Markey Act, a plan to cap national CO2 emissions that recently passed the House by the narrowest of margins and is being voted on by the Senate this fall.

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