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NEXT 
Cat Food Generation
If you’ve been reading Paul Krugman’s commentaries in the New York Times for the past decade, the current economic fiasco comes as no surprise. More than anyone in the so-called, mainstream media, he has been warning that the U.S. was headed for a fall. Before Lou Dobbs went through his conversion and figured out that there was a rank odor coming from Washington that likely being emitted by the rotting corpse of the middle class, and was still extolling the virtues of free-market capitalism, Krugman was warning that the end was nigh.
The other voices that echoed these sentiments were given short shrift, or only heard on obscure blogs like Michael Nystrom’s Depression2 or as talking heads on Bill Moyers’ PBS programs. The story that most Americans heard, was that despite funding a war that costs, depending on the source, between $2 and $4 million per day, watching jobs dry up and blow away to third world countries, bearing the increasing costs for fuel, food and medical care, it was all okay. It was okay because the stock market was soaring, credit was cheap and home prices were always going to go up. If things were tight, you could borrow low-interest money until you could flip your house at a shocking profit and then spend your windfall on luxury goods made by Chinese children.
Well folk, that world is gone. The wind has come and it’s blown through the house of cards that functioned as the structure many thought would shelter them into early retirement, and most of us are now part of, what I like to call, the Cat Food Generation.
In truth, none of this is all that surprising. What’s surprising is that it took so long for the rot to wear through. The post WWII boom collapsed decades ago, but almost no one had the nerve to mention it. In fact, when President Jimmy Carter dared to tell Americans, in his much maligned, 1979 “malaise” speech, that oil was running out and our consumer values might be misplaced. Or, as he put it: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”
He was laughed out of office for his honesty in favor of a Hollywood cowboy, who ushered in the “greed is good” era. But Mr. Carter has lived long enough to see that he was right all along, though it probably doesn’t give him much pleasure. Cassandra didn’t feel much pleasure when Troy actually fell either. Still, everyone likes to be right.
So, the party is over, and many will now begin to dissect the remains of this disaster — as they did after Hurricane Katrina. The pontificating classes will deluge the public with words — some of them true. Books will be written. Economists will dominate the airwaves. Politicians will feign a level of shock to rival Claude Rains’ in Casablanca. Some might even finally stop evoking Reagan’s name in the same context as Abraham Lincoln’s.
But, none of this will matter, because Americans will find themselves, if not this year, then very soon, unable to afford the books or to stomach the rhetoric. And maybe, if we’re lucky, when enough Americans get fed up with the lies, and the poverty, this nation will have a chance to rebuild itself on a more solid foundation.
In the meantime, the Christmas shopping season is almost upon us, and Paul Krugman will likely be the first to say that the array under the tree is going to be pretty sparse this year.
©Suzanne Rush, October 3, 2008
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