Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Bruce Sterling on the fiscal crisis:

If the straights were not “prone to hostility” before that experience, they might well be so after it, because they’ve got a new host of excellent reasons. The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata. It’s like somebody burned their church.

I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company jets to Washington to beg. I felt sorrow for them. Truly. These guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food chain. Of course they fly corporate jets. Corporate jets were *invented* for guys like the board of General Motors. And now they’re getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can usually buy and sell?

*That’s* the issue at stake, a few jets? General Motors built the aviation industry in World War II. General Motors aircraft pounded Nazi Germany into a flaming ruin. Here they get this off-the-wall, total-hokum act of peanut-gallery gotcha humiliation about the corporate airplanes they’ve used for fifty years. That must have felt surreal, even nauseating.

Also, happy 2009. 2008 ended sadly, with friends of friends killing themselves, everyone worried about money, and most everyone on anti-depressants. The signs are all bad, but I still feel good, and excited about everything coming up. I’ve always liked the feeling of having something to anticipate. I grew up with the idea that heaven waited at the end of my life, so no matter what happened, there was always at least infinite bliss to look forward too. These days I don’t know about heaven, but still think God intends to at some stage, somehow, sort everything (Gaza, the arctic, Sudan, the fish, etc.) out, and hopefully involve me in that, perhaps even postmortem.