11-26-2021, 12:28 AM
The 2008 financial crisis
![[Image: saupload_4-bad-bears_thumb1.png]](https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2011/10/11/saupload_4-bad-bears_thumb1.png)
may not have been as horrible as the economic meltdown that began in 1929 -- and then only because the government responded effectively to mitigate it before it became truly dangerous. After a year and a half the fall of securities prices was as severe as in the same time beginning in September 1929. At the same time in analogous meltdowns, Hoover was completely in the dark about how to deal with the economic calamity -- and Obama was backing the banks. It was the devastation from the bank runs that destroyed such stores of wealth as people still had before the corrupt phase of the bubble of the middle-to-late 1920's.
i deliberately selected this graph to go only to 2011. America was clearly in Crisis mode then.
The panic of 1857 (not shown here) destroyed the complacent mood of most Americans about slavery and as such made the Civil War possible. The Crash of 1929 led to FDR in America and Satan Incarnate in Germany. It may be an unconventional description, but the Second World War was arguably the Civil War of technological civilization, and emancipation of slaves was a clear objective of both the Union side in the American Civil War and the Second World War (the civil war of technological civilization). The lag time between the Crash of 1929 and the Pearl Harbor attack (and the full characterization of the Second World War as a world war) was longer than between the Panic of 1857 and the American Civil War.
This time everyone dreads nuclear weapons, which may have made people more chary of going to war over some real or imagined slight to national dignity. Add to this, I can think of some leaders -- Barack Obama or Angela Merkel -- who do not stir up trouble but would have what it takes how to finish it off. See also Lincoln, Juarez, FDR, Churchill, and Mannerheim -- the ability to frame a great struggle as a moral crusade, a willingness to give credit where it is due, decisive command, a firm understanding of history, and the sort of genius for making relentless use of underhanded techniques to look like mere luck. The approach to war "We wanted peace, you gave us war, and we will defeat you and win the peace" is Crisis leadership at its best. Take a look at Donald Trump and see whether he would have measured up.
Two of the most recent pictures that I have seen in a cinema were biopics (I see few movies on the Big Screen) were Lincoln and
The Darkest Hour. Lincoln is not about the second-largest city of Nebraska, and The Darkest Hour is about the bleak prospect of Western Civilization as the British were getting driven out of Calais, Dunkirk, and Oostende and its solution (Churchill). Trump is not Lincoln and he
is not Churchill, to put it tamely.
This time the culmination of the Crisis in America could be two events that coincide: the COVID-19 plague and the sequels of the 2020 election. We Americans may see COVID-19 peter out as people get inoculated or get interred. As important we need as a nation to fully reject the idea that a President is so much above the law that he can establish a secret police whose loyalty is to the President and can nullify an election whose results he dislikes. Crisis eras fundamentally change attitudes, labor-management relations, and institutions (recharging or creating them). It is arguable that the Black Death was a Crisis era in its own right even if it was not a time of war. (Persecution of the Jews did intensify, but Jews are usually targets for such).
OK -- GI's could remember not only the Depression itself but also the speculative frenzy that led to the Crash. The Silent could never contemplate the speculative bubble (almost all big market crashes follow speculative booms that devour and destroy capital), so 2003/2004 makes a reasonable divide between Millennial and Homeland generations. 2001/2002, however, recognizes that kids born in 2001 were likely to have left the usual collective experience of high school with time-predictable events. The Homeland Generation missed one or more of the predictable shared events of growing up that seemingly everyone does in certain communities: attending school, first communion, scouting or similar groups, bar mitzvah or quinceanera celebrations, cotillions, proms, high-school athletics and other such events, and high-school graduations that are usually done predictably as ceremonies that have specific times for happening. Delays and alterations of such events change much. COVID-19 will scar the psyches of the Homeland generation, but not the following generation. Sure, COVID-19 may have disrupted some post-secondary activities. but those are not quite as collective as the usual K-12 activities of kids whose communities of consciousness (neighborhoods and towns) are much smaller and more cohesive. Being delayed a year in going to college is not the same as missing out of Little League baseball or Pop Warner football.
may not have been as horrible as the economic meltdown that began in 1929 -- and then only because the government responded effectively to mitigate it before it became truly dangerous. After a year and a half the fall of securities prices was as severe as in the same time beginning in September 1929. At the same time in analogous meltdowns, Hoover was completely in the dark about how to deal with the economic calamity -- and Obama was backing the banks. It was the devastation from the bank runs that destroyed such stores of wealth as people still had before the corrupt phase of the bubble of the middle-to-late 1920's.
i deliberately selected this graph to go only to 2011. America was clearly in Crisis mode then.
The panic of 1857 (not shown here) destroyed the complacent mood of most Americans about slavery and as such made the Civil War possible. The Crash of 1929 led to FDR in America and Satan Incarnate in Germany. It may be an unconventional description, but the Second World War was arguably the Civil War of technological civilization, and emancipation of slaves was a clear objective of both the Union side in the American Civil War and the Second World War (the civil war of technological civilization). The lag time between the Crash of 1929 and the Pearl Harbor attack (and the full characterization of the Second World War as a world war) was longer than between the Panic of 1857 and the American Civil War.
This time everyone dreads nuclear weapons, which may have made people more chary of going to war over some real or imagined slight to national dignity. Add to this, I can think of some leaders -- Barack Obama or Angela Merkel -- who do not stir up trouble but would have what it takes how to finish it off. See also Lincoln, Juarez, FDR, Churchill, and Mannerheim -- the ability to frame a great struggle as a moral crusade, a willingness to give credit where it is due, decisive command, a firm understanding of history, and the sort of genius for making relentless use of underhanded techniques to look like mere luck. The approach to war "We wanted peace, you gave us war, and we will defeat you and win the peace" is Crisis leadership at its best. Take a look at Donald Trump and see whether he would have measured up.
Two of the most recent pictures that I have seen in a cinema were biopics (I see few movies on the Big Screen) were Lincoln and
The Darkest Hour. Lincoln is not about the second-largest city of Nebraska, and The Darkest Hour is about the bleak prospect of Western Civilization as the British were getting driven out of Calais, Dunkirk, and Oostende and its solution (Churchill). Trump is not Lincoln and he
is not Churchill, to put it tamely.
This time the culmination of the Crisis in America could be two events that coincide: the COVID-19 plague and the sequels of the 2020 election. We Americans may see COVID-19 peter out as people get inoculated or get interred. As important we need as a nation to fully reject the idea that a President is so much above the law that he can establish a secret police whose loyalty is to the President and can nullify an election whose results he dislikes. Crisis eras fundamentally change attitudes, labor-management relations, and institutions (recharging or creating them). It is arguable that the Black Death was a Crisis era in its own right even if it was not a time of war. (Persecution of the Jews did intensify, but Jews are usually targets for such).
OK -- GI's could remember not only the Depression itself but also the speculative frenzy that led to the Crash. The Silent could never contemplate the speculative bubble (almost all big market crashes follow speculative booms that devour and destroy capital), so 2003/2004 makes a reasonable divide between Millennial and Homeland generations. 2001/2002, however, recognizes that kids born in 2001 were likely to have left the usual collective experience of high school with time-predictable events. The Homeland Generation missed one or more of the predictable shared events of growing up that seemingly everyone does in certain communities: attending school, first communion, scouting or similar groups, bar mitzvah or quinceanera celebrations, cotillions, proms, high-school athletics and other such events, and high-school graduations that are usually done predictably as ceremonies that have specific times for happening. Delays and alterations of such events change much. COVID-19 will scar the psyches of the Homeland generation, but not the following generation. Sure, COVID-19 may have disrupted some post-secondary activities. but those are not quite as collective as the usual K-12 activities of kids whose communities of consciousness (neighborhoods and towns) are much smaller and more cohesive. Being delayed a year in going to college is not the same as missing out of Little League baseball or Pop Warner football.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
