3.14

Try as we (and various French protesters) might to stop it, 2009 has come and with it all manner of grim portents of Even More Bad News. Some of it's quite familiar. There's, yet again, fighting in Gaza. Various political dramas involving corruption, recounts, and absurd identity politics. The Men's Basketball team seems to perform based on a random number generator. These things we are used to, however perennially unfortunate they may be.

But what is new and truly terrifying is the economy, stumbling like a great wounded beast, crashing to its knees mid-run and struggling to lift itself from the ground to avoid complete, final collapse. It sounds like something written in hyperbole, but, truth be told, most people seem unsure. Some may think the new administration can find a way to stimulate the thing, but with Obama warning of potential US deficits in the trillions of dollars, even potentially successful measures will come at a stiff price.

Personally, it's a thoroughly weird experience. I've always thought of economics as a mystical area of study, something I do not and often refuse to understand. To me, it's closer to the dark arts, surreal forces manipulated to mysterious and often evil ends. It's sinister and magical, like modern painting, the Student Services building, and Ann Coulter's book sales.

As a result, I tend to regard with unease, ignoring it at best and casting superficial glances at its murky depths when no other option is available. Business news is the chanting of voodoo, the daily stock reports a habitual druidic mantra. The FED chairman is some grim, Norse god, glumly reclining upon his throne of skulls, storm clouds hovering over his furrowed brow as he manipulates systems made to, some day, inevitably overcome us all.

So it is that the current economic downturn seems like the manifestation of collective insanity. Unlike direct, violent tragedies and horrors, it manifests itself, at first, in the corner of your eye. Where once you glimpsed a cloud of darkness, you turn to find everything as it should be, only your cold shudder to tell you all is not well. It haunts you, following you as you read a paper or skim some headlines, a “record low” here, a major bankruptcy.

Soon, it reaches more central prominence. It is named: “Financial Crisis.” Words from previously cloistered dark cabals of monetary manipulation spill forth, profaning our ignorance. “Subprime,” “bailout,” “you're going to have to pay for all those things you bought with, like, cash money.” Monstrosity after monstrosity, but its true nature and the extent of its malevolence are well guarded.

It is positively insidious how the economy's sickness comes not as one concentrated evil, but in shadowy tendrils. That fearful thing you merely glimpsed in passing is not whole, but of disparate terrors. You might not be unemployed, but more and more people are, the numbers easy to ignore if not for your fear of being the “million and one.” You might not lose your retirement savings, but the anxiety and anguish of those who do becomes contagious. You might not sell or buy, but the numbers, always lower, always worrisome to those practitioners and acolytes of this dark phenomenon who ponder grimly, like the doctor seeing a tumor where a patient sees only vague fear.

It is as if, all of sudden, the increasingly loose hold you have upon your reality will shatter and the “Financial Crisis” will appear before you, shrouded in the gray hood of the damned, and beckon you, finally, to the dire fate you always knew would come, but always hoped would not.

Now, I suppose, would be the time I break the tone and provide you some moral that turns this from indulgent hyperbole to didactic fable. But the sad truth is, the above paragraphs are not far off. Admittedly, I, like most of us I think, am in denial, but I do glimpse, out of the corner of my eyes, some dark malaise spreading that I can do little to rationally combat (aside from saving money and avoiding debt, paltry offerings to such demonic forces). I don't understand the ins and outs of the crisis very well, but, even then, to say it is limited to pure business and economics is to say that those things exist in a vacuum, which is definitely not the case. It is a manifestation of social and cultural values, of politics, of personal choices rarely significant, in and of themselves, but eventually combining to create this horrific amalgamation. If anything, it's a lesson of how interconnected we have become and how we cannot ignore it any more. But even that lesson does little to solve the current crisis.

Gross Doomestic Product. There, I said it. Let the healing begin.