Historically speaking...

A few days ago I was thinking about Columbia (it came up in a class I was teaching), and the thought led me back to Turkey. The thought was something like:

'Imagine a _____ [fill in a country] where there had been no US intervention in the 20th century. What paths would the many imaginative and beautiful people there have chosen for themselves? What lives would they be living now? What national obsessions and grass-roots initiatives would they be acting out?'

I don't think people fully realize, that an event like the Iranian revolution, in 1979, doesn't represent merely a serious change in 1980. Rather, it represents frantically dramatic and unpredictable changes for their culture in 2009. We are witnessing that play out now.

Turkey, which saw huge gains for labor and human rights in the 60s and 70s, is instead (almost thirty years after the last coup), now a country of high unemployment and authoritarian management-worker relations, a stifled press, etc. My school, for example, keeps taking parts of my paycheck, and that just doesn't happen in countries with strong unions.

The consequences of these and other historic catastrophes make me uncomfortable. I feel both a sense of powerlessness and accompanying discomfort due to the awareness that, back home in the US in the same thirty-year period, we nurtured a culture of largely playful people, who are highly digital-savvy, and for the most part, pretty cool.

There's a bit of white guilt buried there, I suppose, but more than that, I am merely aghast at how horrifyingly wrong our foreign policy has been... pretty much as long as we've had foreign policy. From where I sit, I feel that the US and Western Europe are, or rather were, securely insulated by their prosperity. A lot of beautiful things resulted from that, along with a lot of waste.

With all this in mind, I found the graphic below, which made my jaw drop...


This image represents the catastrophic failure of free-market capitalism (if not, simply, all capitalism) over the last twelve months. Looking forward, I feel this bodes ill for the United States' future prospects, particularly if we intend to continue with a modified capitalist economy. We were a country that could spend on demonstrably influential projects (even if I don't agree with all/any of them). From here on out, I don't know that we will have money to spend at all.

Here is a link to the article.

I am trying to imagine how distinctly different American culture is now, from say the oil crises of the 1970s (I'm just choosing a random crisis from roughly thirty years ago). The America my kids (God-forbid) grow up in will be distinctly less-influential than that into which I was born. Who knows whether that will be a good thing, but I doubt it.

For real though, the AIG bailout costs the same as the Marshal Plan did!?!

Jumpin' gee wilikers!