Remember, back in the seventies, when geeks of every stripe would rent out a huge warehouse and build their domino fun machines? Start at domino #1 with the Channel 5 news cameras rolling, push it forward, and for the next few minutes millions of dominoes would tumble in succession in a chain that snaked in labyrinthine patterns. The dominoes would climb stairs in elaborate runs, fall upwards on Hot Wheels tracking, ring bells and do everything but feed the baby. And for that minute or five, those pocket protector heroes saw their avocation become spectacle. Andy Warhol was somewhere smiling his Andy Warhol smile. The domino lovers united in a moment of sheer ecstasy.
But for all the work, thousands of hours of laborious placing of one tile in front of the next, there was always the threat of the whole thing coming down with the puff of a careless breath. As a matter of fact, in a notorious moment in the history of domino record setting, the Channel 5 guy actually dropped his notes from the second floor, setting off a chain reaction that ruined a run destined for the Guinness Book of World Records. It was painful to watch on the six o' clock news even if one wasn't vested in the project. For the dominophiles, the moment must have occurred in slow, painful motion. When those papers made contact with the innocent dominoes below, the resulting chain reaction must have felt worse than passing a kidney stone.
It seems an incredibly painstaking process for five minutes of fame, but some among us like to build with the singular purpose of undoing the creations thence wrought. Perhaps it is a part of the DNA coding of humanity: build to destroy - our insatiable appetite for wars and horrific stories on the evening news support a build-to-destroy hypothesis.
We live in a precarious world, each day as uncertain as the last, wondering what tomorrow and all the tomorrows beyond will place on our table.
In 1977, housing prices started to rise. If one were to look at a median price chart, this is the point, or very near to the moment, when the growth curve began to amplify. Suddenly, those ubiquitous ranch homes in ubiquitous subdevelopments were increasing in price faster than hard-to-find Beatles collectibles. The slope of the curve continued to rise throughout the remainder of the century, creating a lazy exponential growth model. Then, in the year 2000, the housing market began a six-year meteoric rise, resembling the Apollo 11's takeoff from Cape Canaveral. By 2006, the price of the typical 3-bedroom, 2-bath had doubled. What was behind this?
Think of the domino hobbyist, but one with greed that exceeds capacity to think. He plies his trade for say eight months, then he sees that he is nearly completed just as his whole creation begins to teeter. He should be placing dams and blocks here and there to make sure the whole thing doesn't come crashing down like a house of cards, but there is more interesting work to do - keep building. So, he goes about nervously working on the last few constructs, the coup de grace as it were. He becomes a Vegas gambler with a fix; the craps tables. If he is lucky, he will not have to start over in ten different places. However, luck is something one is better off not relying on.
But for all the work, thousands of hours of laborious placing of one tile in front of the next, there was always the threat of the whole thing coming down with the puff of a careless breath. As a matter of fact, in a notorious moment in the history of domino record setting, the Channel 5 guy actually dropped his notes from the second floor, setting off a chain reaction that ruined a run destined for the Guinness Book of World Records. It was painful to watch on the six o' clock news even if one wasn't vested in the project. For the dominophiles, the moment must have occurred in slow, painful motion. When those papers made contact with the innocent dominoes below, the resulting chain reaction must have felt worse than passing a kidney stone.
It seems an incredibly painstaking process for five minutes of fame, but some among us like to build with the singular purpose of undoing the creations thence wrought. Perhaps it is a part of the DNA coding of humanity: build to destroy - our insatiable appetite for wars and horrific stories on the evening news support a build-to-destroy hypothesis.
We live in a precarious world, each day as uncertain as the last, wondering what tomorrow and all the tomorrows beyond will place on our table.
In 1977, housing prices started to rise. If one were to look at a median price chart, this is the point, or very near to the moment, when the growth curve began to amplify. Suddenly, those ubiquitous ranch homes in ubiquitous subdevelopments were increasing in price faster than hard-to-find Beatles collectibles. The slope of the curve continued to rise throughout the remainder of the century, creating a lazy exponential growth model. Then, in the year 2000, the housing market began a six-year meteoric rise, resembling the Apollo 11's takeoff from Cape Canaveral. By 2006, the price of the typical 3-bedroom, 2-bath had doubled. What was behind this?
Think of the domino hobbyist, but one with greed that exceeds capacity to think. He plies his trade for say eight months, then he sees that he is nearly completed just as his whole creation begins to teeter. He should be placing dams and blocks here and there to make sure the whole thing doesn't come crashing down like a house of cards, but there is more interesting work to do - keep building. So, he goes about nervously working on the last few constructs, the coup de grace as it were. He becomes a Vegas gambler with a fix; the craps tables. If he is lucky, he will not have to start over in ten different places. However, luck is something one is better off not relying on.
Throughout the new millennium, people were in a home-buying and selling frenzy. Ed, the guy next door, suddenly owned three homes while also owning a credit score south of 500. Janice down the street just sold her home for thrice her buying price while only living in it ten years. It was a speculator's greatest dream come to life. The mortgage industry had seen to this by selling sub-primes to people who also didn't have a downpayment, and sometimes even a job.
But then there was no reason to worry about trifling matters such as FICO scores and whether a potential buyer could hold a job. Things were good in the land of milk and honey; things were so good in fact that the US regulatory arms turned a collective blind eye to the banks, to Wall Street, to any money-making entity that had means to turn a profit from a cheaply disguised Ponzi Scheme. Bernie Madoff, he of the half billion dollar thievery, was by no means anything but a symptom of something far bigger, far more nefarious.
The home foreclosure crisis followed closely, unmooring the little remaining confidence the consumer had as the Administration's spokespeople spoke and said nothing at the same time. Seemingly overnight, the home that was worth 120k was now equivalent to the value of a double-wide with fancy aluminum siding. It became apparent that the foundations upon which the G W Bush and Friends' economy had been poured were fragile and laying on a major fault line. The storm was in full cycle, a funnel cloud siphoning down, and below lay the proverbial trailer court.
That trailer court was laid waste by the winds and the energy cycling inside.
All the while, the George W Bush administration saw fit to start wars on two fronts: one in Afghanistan (ostensibly to bring down al-Queda and Osama bin-Laden) and another in Iraq. The Iraq war's purpose changed with the wind. One moment it was weapons of mass destruction, the next it was the fear of Saddam Hussein and the yoke of tyranny he held over his people, the next that darn yellow cake uranium that the Iraq regime was stockpiling in order to create a nuclear weapon with "USA" stamped on its side. The reasons changed like the mood of a teenager going through puberty, but the desire to go to war for at best dubious reasons never wavered. War with Iraq was as inevitable as the sun setting in the west. And the American people: they went along for the ride like a dog with his head out the window of a Chevy Tahoe, slobbering uncontrollably, a huge doggy grin welcoming passers by. A full 85% of Americans polled supported the ouster of Saddam and his regime regardless of the cost of American lives and dollars. It seems that we can never turn down a good war; our credulity is a fountain without end.
Then the big banks - names like AIG, Bear-Sterns and Morgan-Stanley - began to teeter, their profits disappearing in a puff of smoke. Red ink was pouring out of an open, festering wound faster than infusions of life-giving cash could arrive to stanch the flow. Financial institutions, which were making money faster than the Treasury Department could weave the cotton and stamp it only sixteen months ago, were suddenly on life support, dying the slow death of a smoker now in the oncology ward, rasping for air in the brilliantly rich environs of an oxygen tent.
A second domino had fallen.
Dominoes were falling forward, backward, up and down, but none of this spectacle had been planned - so unlike the domino hobbyists and their meticulous methods. It was as if 500 separate people initiated the tumbling sequence from 500 different places with no idea what the person behind or in front was doing. Our economy had become chaos and the world held its breath. What would come next? Was a second Great Depression on the horizon? It looked at that singular moment like a pretty good bet.
Luck would have it that the presidential election was just around the corner and the Democrats were fielding a breath of fresh air. Then again, Gary, Indiana felt like a breath of fresh air as America staggered like some tomato can fighting against Muhammed Ali. We were suffering from collective punch drunkenness; the financial debauchery had been occurring for years. So we did what Americans do best when the poop hits the fan. We voted for the other party. It didn't hurt that the Republicans foisted up John McCain, a man who never met a war he didn't like, actually love (think, "bomb, bomb, bomb…bomb, bomb Iran" John). His running mate was charismatic when scripted, but seemed to have little more than a reptilian brain when the teleprompter was turned off. Her interview with Katie Couric was a train wreck in slow motion.
And so the election was gift wrapped with adorable bows, by the Republican party, when November rolled around. And Barack Obama was one hell of an orator, no matter your politics.
The fall and winter of late 2008 was as dreary as Seattle in the same period. But instead of a slow, steady drizzle, it was a torrent of dominos falling in a deluge.
The stock market followed the rest of the economy and did its best impression of the tumbling domino, shedding 7,000 points and trillions of dollars of worth in that winter of our discontent. Along the way, there were drops of nearly 1,000 points, followed by gains half again as much. Two steps backward and one forward was a recipe for even more financial stress.
The hits kept coming through the Spring of 2009.
Then we hit rock bottom. All the thousands, perhaps millions, of dominos had crashed aside from a few that were misplaced. We looked around and saw that our perilous work was for naught. Our fragile domino empire was indeed constructed of dominos, and dominos are not the stuff of empires. Foolish that we should have thought different.
Our capacity to delude ourselves is sometimes only exceeded by the evil twins or our nature: avarice and hubris.
It is the late fall of 2014, and I look back from time to time at the house we built, just like one of the three pigs, though replete with dominos instead of straw. There is much to remember and learn, but I'm afraid we are doing little of either. Instead, we have begun the reconstruction of our dream house - and again it's on a fault line on an oft-flooded coastal area, protected from neither. We are builders; we are destroyers. Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds: J Robert Oppenheimer was speaking of himself, but could have been generalizing all the human race.
But then there was no reason to worry about trifling matters such as FICO scores and whether a potential buyer could hold a job. Things were good in the land of milk and honey; things were so good in fact that the US regulatory arms turned a collective blind eye to the banks, to Wall Street, to any money-making entity that had means to turn a profit from a cheaply disguised Ponzi Scheme. Bernie Madoff, he of the half billion dollar thievery, was by no means anything but a symptom of something far bigger, far more nefarious.
The home foreclosure crisis followed closely, unmooring the little remaining confidence the consumer had as the Administration's spokespeople spoke and said nothing at the same time. Seemingly overnight, the home that was worth 120k was now equivalent to the value of a double-wide with fancy aluminum siding. It became apparent that the foundations upon which the G W Bush and Friends' economy had been poured were fragile and laying on a major fault line. The storm was in full cycle, a funnel cloud siphoning down, and below lay the proverbial trailer court.
That trailer court was laid waste by the winds and the energy cycling inside.
All the while, the George W Bush administration saw fit to start wars on two fronts: one in Afghanistan (ostensibly to bring down al-Queda and Osama bin-Laden) and another in Iraq. The Iraq war's purpose changed with the wind. One moment it was weapons of mass destruction, the next it was the fear of Saddam Hussein and the yoke of tyranny he held over his people, the next that darn yellow cake uranium that the Iraq regime was stockpiling in order to create a nuclear weapon with "USA" stamped on its side. The reasons changed like the mood of a teenager going through puberty, but the desire to go to war for at best dubious reasons never wavered. War with Iraq was as inevitable as the sun setting in the west. And the American people: they went along for the ride like a dog with his head out the window of a Chevy Tahoe, slobbering uncontrollably, a huge doggy grin welcoming passers by. A full 85% of Americans polled supported the ouster of Saddam and his regime regardless of the cost of American lives and dollars. It seems that we can never turn down a good war; our credulity is a fountain without end.
Then the big banks - names like AIG, Bear-Sterns and Morgan-Stanley - began to teeter, their profits disappearing in a puff of smoke. Red ink was pouring out of an open, festering wound faster than infusions of life-giving cash could arrive to stanch the flow. Financial institutions, which were making money faster than the Treasury Department could weave the cotton and stamp it only sixteen months ago, were suddenly on life support, dying the slow death of a smoker now in the oncology ward, rasping for air in the brilliantly rich environs of an oxygen tent.
A second domino had fallen.
Dominoes were falling forward, backward, up and down, but none of this spectacle had been planned - so unlike the domino hobbyists and their meticulous methods. It was as if 500 separate people initiated the tumbling sequence from 500 different places with no idea what the person behind or in front was doing. Our economy had become chaos and the world held its breath. What would come next? Was a second Great Depression on the horizon? It looked at that singular moment like a pretty good bet.
Luck would have it that the presidential election was just around the corner and the Democrats were fielding a breath of fresh air. Then again, Gary, Indiana felt like a breath of fresh air as America staggered like some tomato can fighting against Muhammed Ali. We were suffering from collective punch drunkenness; the financial debauchery had been occurring for years. So we did what Americans do best when the poop hits the fan. We voted for the other party. It didn't hurt that the Republicans foisted up John McCain, a man who never met a war he didn't like, actually love (think, "bomb, bomb, bomb…bomb, bomb Iran" John). His running mate was charismatic when scripted, but seemed to have little more than a reptilian brain when the teleprompter was turned off. Her interview with Katie Couric was a train wreck in slow motion.
And so the election was gift wrapped with adorable bows, by the Republican party, when November rolled around. And Barack Obama was one hell of an orator, no matter your politics.
The fall and winter of late 2008 was as dreary as Seattle in the same period. But instead of a slow, steady drizzle, it was a torrent of dominos falling in a deluge.
The stock market followed the rest of the economy and did its best impression of the tumbling domino, shedding 7,000 points and trillions of dollars of worth in that winter of our discontent. Along the way, there were drops of nearly 1,000 points, followed by gains half again as much. Two steps backward and one forward was a recipe for even more financial stress.
The hits kept coming through the Spring of 2009.
Then we hit rock bottom. All the thousands, perhaps millions, of dominos had crashed aside from a few that were misplaced. We looked around and saw that our perilous work was for naught. Our fragile domino empire was indeed constructed of dominos, and dominos are not the stuff of empires. Foolish that we should have thought different.
Our capacity to delude ourselves is sometimes only exceeded by the evil twins or our nature: avarice and hubris.
It is the late fall of 2014, and I look back from time to time at the house we built, just like one of the three pigs, though replete with dominos instead of straw. There is much to remember and learn, but I'm afraid we are doing little of either. Instead, we have begun the reconstruction of our dream house - and again it's on a fault line on an oft-flooded coastal area, protected from neither. We are builders; we are destroyers. Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds: J Robert Oppenheimer was speaking of himself, but could have been generalizing all the human race.
No comments:
Post a Comment