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something that baffles me, and which i've been hearing in various publick houses and reading here from more conservative folk, is this idea that what's happening economically is somehow really a matter of attitude---so there's no real problems---rather people are just getting bummed out by some bizarre decision on the part of unnamed but somehow pervasive Forces of Opinion Management to focus on bummer information---the flip of that is the "argument" that if we all just put on a happy face, that everything would fix itself.
behind this is what i take to be an illusion: that once everything "fixes itself" the world will return back to the way it was before.
i don't buy it.
i think krugman has been consistently closest to the mark on what's happening, much more than any other figure who operates in any way inside the ideological vacuum of the dominant american press. if that's the case, then this happy-face business is nothing more and nothing less than denial.
i can understand the appeal to some extent, though--after decades of simple-minded happyface capitalism, folk get used to it.
but still, if krugman is anywhere near correct, it seems to me obvious that there'll be hell to pay at the micro-level if geithner's bush administration redux strategy does not work. it seems to me that happyface in this case is an acrostic for paralysis. that can't be good.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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