succeeding brilliantly at failure

thanks to a 5 p.m. large mug of starbucks christmas blend, i was up very, very late last night painting and composing balderdash definitions and generally enjoying hanging out with the muses in my cozy little atelier (the building in the garden formerly known as the writing house--doing lots more than writing there, so it needed an expanded name). anyway, i saw this news come in and i laughed and laughed and laughed:



i have to admit that i am quite impressed with bush's reflexes. he dodges that first shoe pretty well, almost as if he's used to having shoes thrown at him. a thought which makes me look upon laura with new eyes...

CNN is saying that from a iraqi cultural standpoint, it's extremely rude to throw your shoes. i wonder if that's true or if your shoes are just the most throwable object you have on you at any given time. i mean, who would want to throw their wallet or keys? and it would be rather difficult to surreptitiously remove your pants and throw them, whereas shoes, no problem.

i find myself feeling a bit sorry for bush here in the waning hours of his presidency. he has brought new meaning to the words "lame duck." i never thought i'd ever feel sorry for him, but he looks old, frazzled and, dare i read it in, a bit sheepish about the whole thing (not to mix my animal metaphors). or perhaps he's just bewildered that it could have all gone so stunningly badly. i hope he realizes that it's largely his fault. although his recent expressions of contrition about the bad intelligence leading to the iraq war (strangely no references to the role of his warmongering VP and cabinet) and how he hadn't gone into the presidency wishing for a challenge like sept. 11 would lead one to believe he has at least a dim awareness of how badly it's gone, i wouldn't mind if he seemed a little more contrite. the one thing that can be said for the man is that he succeeded brilliantly at failure.

it's a debacle

yesterday i consumed two double lattes on an empty stomach and then didn't eat lunch. this was not good. by the time i got home, i was nauseated and shaky. and then, i flipped on the t.v. and the bad news kept pouring in--another bank being taken over, sarah palin's debacle of an interview with katie couric. we watched the house vote on the bail-out package on BBC world and then watched stocks plummet. all of that, coupled with the excess caffeine gave me fitful sleep.

it astounds me how much damage one man can do to the entire world in just eight short years. i remember after the whole debacle (that's my word for this posting, apparently) of the 2000 election with the hanging chads and the banana republic voting practices in florida, thinking, well, dubya seems harmless enough after all. perhaps a bit dumber than a box of rocks, but overall quite harmless. two wars, a couple of hurricanes, an unimaginable financial crisis, a deficit that could make a sane man insane and a melted polar ice cap later, it seems i couldn't have been more wrong.

we listened last night to an in-depth reportage just after our 9 p.m. evening news on DR1. a reporter in the US talked to a lot of ordinary people in chicago who were having mortgage-related troubles. the woman in the studio kept asking him how it could have happened? she, like many, simply couldn't get her head around it. why didn't people see that endlessly remortgaging their house with sub-prime mortgages wasn't sustainable in the long run? why didn't the banks who gave these mortgages see it? was it because they were just selling them on to the next bank, so they didn't really care whether people legitimately qualified or not? it does seem incomprehensible. and yet there are a lot of ordinary people in a whole lot of trouble.

my overwhelming feeling is one of being relieved that when husband and i met, he was tied to his army job and i was a mere graduate student, thus i came to live in his country rather than him coming to live in mine. thankfully we live in a country where the realkredit (appropriate name, now that i think about it) institutions which grant mortgages are sensibly regulated and where their employees are not dependent upon sneaking your loan through for their own livelihood. yes, house prices were a bit inflated (especially apartments in copenhagen), and that market has come down to more sensible levels over the past year or so, but you just don't hear about people sitting in a house that's now worth less than the mortgage they hold on it.

husband has this rather harsh theory that the problems in this world really started when the masses got money. prior to that, decisions were made by an elite that, for the most part, were well-educated and well-read (they being the only ones who could read, for all intents and purposes). but, the masses got money and along with it, they wanted the right to decide things. this has caused an enormous dumbing down of the world to meet a lower common denominator, rather than raising the bar and expecting that with the decision-making power should come responsibility for becoming informed and educating oneself.  case in point: sarah palin, ordinary (and i do mean ordinary) person as potential vice president.

this election is very important. but whoever wins is screwed and frankly, so is the world. i think either way, we're looking at a one-term president, because no one can possibly excel with what they're being handed by bush and his clueless crew. they got us into this mess in eight short years, but who will get us out and how long will it take? meanwhile, the world looks on in shock, as if staring at the smoking remains of a train wreck. unfortunately, it's all too real. and, as paul valéry once said, "the trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."