MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over)

Okay, got my coffee, my laptop's working. It's Saturday morning in mid-September, and the weather is cooling down here in piedmont NC. It was in the low 50s this morning and will be around 75 today, so that's about perfect. MB and I will be taking the new bikes and going up to Winston-Salem to ride a trail on Salem Lake, a little off the beaten track. (I've also got to mow the lawn and finish my sermon.)

Last evening I was home, but my mind was whipsawed from trying to follow the week's economic news, and I had nothing to say here that sounded right. I wonder if others are turning away from the financial market turmoil, not only because it's just too abstract and theoretical still, and therefore hard to get your mind around, but because it seems like a movie or something, without any personal pain. With 9/11, you had those collapsed buildings staring you in the face. Here and now, all we have are talking heads on TV, saying how bad things are. Blah, blah, blah. Doesn't connect.

That's part of the reason it's happening in the first place, so much has gone on 'behind the screen', with the average person not knowing anything about it. It's just too opaque. That doesn't give me much hope for a real solution, just another attempt to eliminate the symptoms. I think what's happening now in the government is just another attempt to shove the whole thing back underground when it's threatening to pop up its ugly head. Can the goverment just buy all of this bad debt, just like that? That sounds too simple, like the Soviet Bolshevik's thinking they could create a modern industrial economy by fiat and government decree. All it ends up doing is creating a big monster that can't work and only making things worse in the long run.

I saw an interview on Bill Moyer's Journal last evening with writer and social critic Kevin Phillips, who has one of the most honest and accurate views of our situation that I know of. You can watch it here. He's a conservative (worked for Nixon) who's grown increasingly jaded by the wars and financial shenanigans of the last 25 years. I'm not sure what he'd label himself now politically, but he's a wise observer of the nation and world.