I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...

Comments

[Ben]

My biggest fear at the moment is total financial meltdown, despression-style. But these are all tied together - a dollar sinking in large part because of reckless deficits related to this war, all enabled by a media obsessed with image and culture war to the detriment of underying reality.

The chickens for Bush's willful denial of reality, financial and military, are about to come how to roost. And I'm afraid it's going to be very, very bad. Like F8, minimum.

Speaking of the F scale, my house narrrowly dodged the Atlanta tornado. So that's good news, at least ...