The Future ****s You, Tony

The most inopportune statement of the early aughts?  This album cover by The Coup.

Second worst?  This passage of Krugman’s (via The Atlantic blog) from 2002.

The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. [E.A.]

The seeds of tomorrow’s problems are planted by today’s solutions.  My friends, I’m an idealist too.  I can see myself supporting land reform in turn-of-century Russia, or the Korean Armistice, or the Louisiana Purchase.  But disasters lie in wait like genies in the lamp eager for us to rub the world the wrong way.  Cowards die a thousand deaths, but a nation must be circumspect in being brave on behalf of others because courage is often costly in ways unforseen.  I console myself with the thought that whatever calamity is next to befall us likely is one which no one is worrying about.  ”Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

You Can’t Go Back

Sometimes there’s an obituary that makes me think, “I thought he was dead already.”  Kodak is about to stop making film, it seems.  On the other hand, Tropicana has sensibly reverted to their old packaging for orange juice.

Athwart History

As one of those jerks who reads the Forward and Afterward of books before rushing them back to the library, I had chance to quibble with Jack Womack’s contribution to a late edition of Neuromancer.  It’s a curious habit of Science Fiction writers to claim that theirs is the first generation to embrace sexual themes or pessimism, as though no one read Huxley or Capek [unforgivible] or did not consider them Science Fiction [curious].  Credit goes to Gibbon for adding cyberspace to the language, just as Asimov added robotics.  But his book, like Asimov’s, is still of a future not yet realized.  Except in film, that is: The Matrix is surely an unauthorized production of Neuromancer, and while I was willing to forgive the film for poaching big chunks of Plato in the expository scenes, Gibbon’s book isn’t yet in the public domain, and he seems actually to have been deprived of something by this film’s intrusion.  [In fairness, his own Johnny Mnemonic (also starring Reeves) was a deserving flop--was Ice T talking to a dolphin in that one?  That can't be right.]

I don’t mind having the legs knocked from under The Matrix; I never went ga-ga for the first film and actually enjoyed more the second, which was more earnestly ridiculous and ridiculously earnest (and I never saw the third).  But I fear reading Neuromancer also spoiled Shadowrun for me, which I have enjoyed on rare occasions, but now see only as a way of getting inside Gibbon’s book.

Well, no thank you.  To the degree that Gibbon’s future is already upon us, I’m a’ginnit.  I’m not trading my tuna for krill.  I’m not spending my days watching glowing rectangles.  And I’m not limiting my philippics to 140 characters. I’ll make my stand with Ol’ Freebee.