I somewhat remember the austerity of the nineteen-seventies: washing in a thimble of hot water; three rooms illuminated by a single light bulb; long-distance telephone calls regulated by a stopwatch; Coca Cola rationing; the cookie jar patrolled by guard dogs; and grandmother merrily knitting a draft excluder like one of those French crones at the foot of a guillotine. She'd survived the war, you know, and knew everything there was to know about deprivation. But on the whole my memory is hazy. The world back then was engulfed in a cloud of spray-on deodorant, after all, so perhaps I only saw through a veil of polyester, darkly.
Inflation, stagflation, conflagration of money. Here comes Herr Bankrupt with his Weimar wheelbarrow full of worthless Deutschmarks. This bodes well for nobody but the steel barons. They not only manufacture the wheelbarrow but the bombs and guns that load themselves in its wake also. Then again, who knows what the weapons of modern armageddon will be? I imagine heat-seeking missiles are the equivalent of blunderbusses and muskets now. The last President mumbled something about 'Space Force.' Maybe we will destroy Moscow with lasers fired from the moon. Or will it be a ferocious struggle for control of our minds? There is already a large scale skirmish underway for our attention. Yes, it's battleground brain these days with a no man's land of the heart.
As always, it is the best of times and the worst of times. While we improve at one life skill our aptitude for another declines. I blame the tale of having only two political parties. The perpetual 'who's on first' double act that's more Vladimir and Estragon than Abbot and Costello. At least there were happy endings with Bud and Lou, no matter how badly they screwed things up. We, on the other hand, are heading for a flooded planet, wracked by earthquakes and withered by chemical poisons. It's like one of those disaster movies I remember watching in the nineteen-seventies, except humanity is waiting for Godot to post another distracting video on TikTok instead of teaming up with The Professor and Jacqueline Bisset to stop the rot.
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