reality is frequently inaccurate

i am a confirmed collector of quotations. i have small notebooks full of them. many from books and a few from films, but mostly from the clever people who surround me. i remember some years ago, a friend complaining that he could never make my quote book. but if you are trying too hard, you'll never make it. and he did eventually do so, with some quote about biology, as i recall (i cannot currently locate that small notebook, as many of my books are still packed away awaiting the renovations of this house).

but i've found myself thinking about quotations recently. because a lot of them seem to be floating around. there are these trendy postcards with pithy comments on them that i think have been brought on by an odd combination of mad men and pinterest. and those "keep calm and ..." variations. and my facebook feed is full of self-help quotes. platitudes really. and i wonder what it is that makes us need platitudes so much at this particular juncture? they're generally quite obvious and a bit vapid and aimed at boosting our self-esteem. but why do we need that?

is it really more prevalent now than in other times? has world economic crisis really shaken our confidence so much that we need empty reassurance that it's all going to be ok if we just believe, don't look back, crush monsanto, eat right, live in the now, stop medicating, eat raw, grow our own, look for the silver lining?

but what if it's not...what if all of the true Idea People are gone and all we're left with is mediocrity? and these platitudes are the logical conclusion. and what we're witnessing is the end of civilization as we knew it? what if it's not going to be ok?

where are the cutesy 50s postcards about that?

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."