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Today I read:[I]t seems to me that antiquity's religion is a far better proxy for reality as we know it than many of the other religious fictions I've encountered. To be sure, I don't believe in the Greek gods, but it seems to me that belief in the Greek gods and all they entailed would be far more conducive to happiness than the alternatives.
Today I read (xii):Buddhist cosmology anticipated what contemporary science has recently discovered. The parallels are impressive. Astronomical time and space, which irrevocably smashed the West's previous worldview, slip into the folds of Buddhist cosmology without a ripple. If we turn from macrocosm to microcosm, from the infinite to the infinitesimal, we find the same uncanny prescience. While the Greeks were positing atoms that were eternal because not composite (a-tomas--indivisible, that which cannot be cut), Buddhists were teaching that everything corporeal is impermanent (anicca) because constituted of dharmas as minuscule in duration as they are in space--remarkably like the fleeting blips that particles register on the scientists' oscilloscopes.
(And, just before that, somebody named Lynn White was quoted, saying: "It may well be that the publication of D. T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem in future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.")
Hans Magnus Enzensberger:In most democratic countries the campaign season is the time when the gray routine of party politics is transformed into public theater. An election is an exhibition bout, a carnival, a purification rite--a kind of football championship of rhetoric in which pent-up aggressions and suppressed emotions surface. It's an outlet for the frustrations, defeats, and disappointments of everyday politics. And especially when nations feel that their future might be at stake, the election is like a destructive potlach, a national brawl in which what normally is forbidden is briefly permissible: open rivalry, ruthless polarization, the eruption of hatred, dissatisfaction, and ill will.
That's from "Swedish Autumn," in Europe, Europe (p. 4).
Except in the United States of the first decade of our shiny new millennium, "open rivalry, ruthless polarization, the eruption of hatred, dissatisfaction, and ill will" never seems to dissipate. Perhaps it's a function of the permanent campaign. I moved to this country in 2004, so I've lived here now through two elections and the whole space in between, and that's all there ever is, it seems. It was different on my first visit after 9/11, in November of that year. When did things change?
I know enough about Obama not to be particularly hopeful about the conduct of his administration over the next 4 or 8 years, though a McCain administration would almost certainly turn out worse. But at least one can still hope that, with an Obama victory, one's friends and neighbors from the metroprovincial "urban archipelago" and the university towns will recover their sanity, at least for a little while. Even if, up top, the "open rivalry" and "ruthless polarization" continue unabated among the competing factions of the American power elite.
Gideon Rachman on last night's debate:I also very much enjoyed Obama’s prissy euphemism for teenage sex - “cavalier behaviour”. I think it could make a good chat-up line: “Darling, could I interest you in a little cavalier behaviour?”
One of the commenters (Lisa-Helene Lawson, on October 16th, 2008 at 3:38 pm), however, finds no amusement in the spectacle. She says that the campaign is like being stuck in the audience in a tent forced to watch a 3 ring circus, all the while there is a killer torn[a]do whipping up and you and everyone else stuck in the tent are in its path…but the circus performers keep performing their dog and pony tricks even though no one in the audience is laughing.
Which sounds rather like Gideon's response to the first debate:Anyone who was hoping for some reassurance at this time of financial crisis, will not have got much from tonight’s presidential election debate. I thought the McCain-Obama exchanges on the Wall Street meltdown and the bail-out plan were feeble in the extreme.
We concur on all points.
Yves Smith's blog naked capitalism has become my new first stop of the day.The two most recent posts there are awfully reassuring about the next couple-few years. Dr. Doom is talking about a "Severe Global Recession," while one of Yves' informants, "a well connected international investor not prone to alarm or (normally) the use of capital letters," is saying that "the banking crisis is star[t]ing to bring international shipping to a halt."The first reader comment on the Roubini post:I find the contrast between the indubitably terrible condition of the markets, particularly in the credit markets and the shadow banking system, and the seemingly blase reaction of people in the street and ordinary businesses, to be really striking. I've read anecdotes of small businesses failing to get loans, but so far I haven't seen a single picture of an ashen-faced ordinary person that can match the despair of floor traders or the gloomy faces of Paulson and Bush.
All in all, the memorable images of this crisis so far are of foreclosure signs and of people who inhabit that science-fiction like world that we call Wall Street.
And the first reader comment on the shipping shudders post:Holy Shit
When the folks described by the "contrast" commenter get the holy shits, I wonder what the Onion can do to rise to the level of their best work (the image is here)?
