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40 Days In The Desert: Denial & Ephemeral Finance in the Post-American Century (John Grey, October 2, 2007) One cannot help but stand in awe of the stupidity at the ulcerous heart of the American delusion; an arcane engine of unregulated finance, operating far more on sheer psychological whim than margin calls and earnings reports. That is the financial legacy of the Prozac generation, whose whole way of life is predicated on strip-malls, vast suburban sprawls, and investment instruments so exotic they should come with tiny, colorful umbrellas: the insistent yet unfounded belief that positive thinking can override the bottom line. We have seen this on Wall Street which, at the time of this writing on October 1st, has sounded the trump that the worst is over, storming to a new all-time high, and declaring that all will be turned to gold, or 50/50 dividends as the case were. But as it has so completely observed, these individuals that work in the ivory tower, standing on the twilight border of the failed American experiment, do not see the grim realities that steal food from the mouths, coin from the pockets and hope from the hearts of those that live and die in its shadow. They have no wish to see it, and who would? Who wants the good times to end? The party has been going on so long, the returns on investment so staggering and steep, that to see it end seems almost contrary to nature, like the sun going dark in the heavens. But no blood sacrifice and no murmurings or incense offered by the grand poobah of the Fed upon the altar of high finance will bring back the sun. Few times in my life have I ever seen things of such a textbook nature. I look at the inflation numbers, the run-up of speculation, the collapse of the dollar’s value, and I see the dark days of 1929, the shock and privation of those harsh years that followed. I see it in the vinyl-wrapped cookie-cutter development ghost towns in the sun-drenched corners of America, where debt and denial grow more readily than begonias. I see it in the deconstruction of local self-sufficiently, paved in the corporatist good intentions of Wal*Mart Supercenters, where the soul of a nation is prostituted beneath the 24-hour-a-day glare of fluorescent lights. The same lights illuminating the inexorable decline of Western civilization. Mine is but another voice in a vast choir heralding the financial Armageddon, this is true, but for perhaps the first time in our collective history as a nation, it is the doomsayers plugged into the situation. All one requires to understand the depth of our calamity is the ability to add and subtract, and to divorce ourselves from preconceptions of entitlement. If it is true that you reap what you sow, then the current situation is as just as it is ironic. But one cannot help but acknowledge that the current climate is suitably biblical. The devil of greed and easy money offered us all the kingdoms of the world, if we would only bow down and worship it. If we gave leave to our reason and believed the great lie at the heart of the new American dream: that we can get something for nothing. I believe that none shall escape the penalty for dereliction of common sense, and that our land of Nod will be a diseased, oil-strangled tertiary power as the nations of the world slip into the long night of uncontrolled power-down. And nighttime in the desert is so very cold. For more on a wide array of other topics, please visit the oftwominds.com weblog. 
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