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By Bill Morelock '77
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting for this all my
life. Growing up with parents born in the crash year of ’29, and
with grandparents marked and ennobled by sacrifice and ingenuity in
living well with nothing, I’ve amounted to nothing but a Baby
Boomer: first coddled and spoiled, and soon to bring down,
single-handedly, the world’s climate stability and Social
Security.
But now I have a chance to redeem myself. Pretty soon I’m gonna
experience some real honest-to-goodness privation, my own little
corner of a general decline in living standards in the U.S. of
A.
I’m psyched. A Depression of my own!
I’m not talking about those piddly little personal glooms that
have made Pfizer and Lilly a few quadrillion dollars in the last 20
years. No, sir. I’m talking about the kind of depression that
swallows quadrillions of dollars like they were swallows, in a
black hole of economic collapse from which no light and no equity
(if you got any) emerge.
We won’t need Prozac and Zoloft, because, friends, with
something actually, really, objectively bad on the horizon, we’re
immunized against such boomer whining. There’s no depression in the
Depression! As the uncanny sage Walker Percy (born 1920, a teenager
in the Depression) put it, “People feel good when bad things
happen.”
Amen, brother Percy. I’m already feeling friskier myself just
thinking about the catastrophes, the breadlines, the rusting Jags
in front of the mansions from LA to the Florida intercoastal.
The nation needs 70 billion dollars in foreign investment every
month just to service our debts. The Chinese provide much of this,
and though they don’t want to let us down, the dollar’s looking a
little low-rent. They’re thinking, we’d like to diversify into
something more solid, like the Euro, or maybe the zloty.
The sub-prime meltdown is affecting markets worldwide.
Investments tied to billions in adjustable-rate mortgages due to
reset this year—these are as stable as a unicycle on the beach. An
epidemic of foreclosures follows for people who were persuaded to
buy too much house with too little means.
If you’re in debt, you’re in real trouble. If you have money in
the bank, you’re in real trouble. Soon your thousand will be worth
five hundred. Extrapolate to determine your personal doom.
And with oil production peaking around the world, an increasing
demand will coincide with a falling supply. This means, quite
simply, no more mangoes in January. Or July, for that matter. Yes,
the Edvard Munch mask on your face is extremely life-like, and
understandable.
But you’ll have to get over it, and plumb the charms of root
vegetables. Shortages, disruptions in the economy, desperate
grasping for what’s left. Resource wars replacing football as the
number one American spectator sport. Oh, the late-harvest
schadenfreude will be flowing! Except it’s not someone
else’s troubles we’re toasting. Drink, for tomorrow we…?
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Illustration by David Wheeler
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