Quote of the day - Spengler

Paulson's dreadful scheme will become law, because Americans love their bankers. The bankers enable their collective gambling habit. Think of America as a town with one casino, in which the only economic activity is gambling. Most people lose, but the casino keeps lending them more money to play. Eventually, of course, the casino must go bankrupt. At this point, the townspeople people vote to tax themselves in order to bail out the casino. Collectively, the gamblers cannot help but lose; individually they nonetheless hope to win their way out of the hole.

Spengler - 9-23-2008

Spengler; Asia Times; Kung Fu Panda; the end of slacker culture

"Spengler's" column in Asia Times should be regular required reading for all of you. This week, Spengler writes of the slacker culture in America end predicts said culture's demise. He ties in everything from the Kung Fu Panda movie to current trends in unemployment and the banking collapse:

Two events on June 6 might denote the death of the "slacker" as an American cultural archetype. . . .

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America might be the first country in recorded history whose culture celebrates not only indolence but also the sheer absence of ability. Byronic loafing is the birthright of genius, but slacking has become the entitlement of every young American.

Kung Fu Panda - symbol of a dying culture?



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It is hard to think of a comparable case in social history: a country borrows from foreigners to lend money to its young people to spend four years binge-drinking at a university that pretends to prepare them for the world.

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So-called home equity loans, or second mortgages on homes, are the cause of the crash of US bank stock prices during the past few weeks. The well is dry. That leaves the youngsters in the lurch, which is precisely where most of them deserve to be.

A profound sense of panic appears to have gripped American youth, which might explain why so many of them are seeking a messiah in Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barak Obama. But there isn't much that Obama or anyone else, for that matter, can do to help the slackers.

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While Spengler's outlook is grim, I would be relieved if the only consequences for the western world are those outlined in Spengler's article. Read it all.

Obama's anthropologist background; Ann Dunham; Anthropology; Spengler

B. Hussein Obama's comments on Pennsylvania small towns were predictable. Even though you have seen them many times, I repeat them here so that I can find them later:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

h/t Politico

But these comments should come as no surprise. Obama's background provided fertile soil for the contempt that he has displayed. Obama was raised partially by an anthropologist mother who made a career of studying primitive subjects and marrying extreme leftist husbands.

"Spengler" at Asia Times provided insight nearly two months ago into B. Hussein Obama's anthropoligist mentality:

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Read it all.