What To Call The ’00s
The NYTimes looks at naming the ’00s. I like this guy, science fiction writer David Brin:
“I would recommend the Noughty-aughts,” he said. “ ‘Nought’ as in zero. ‘Aught’ as in nothing. Both words contain essentially nothing, because this was an era when no progress was made.”
Mr. Brin looks at the ’00s as a great lost opportunity, the decade when “the drug high of self-righteousness poisoned our inherent American joy in pragmatic problem solving.” We missed the chance to solve the problem of global warming, to fix our crumbling infrastructure, to find ways for the United States to become a font of new products for the entire world.
Instead, he says, we were sidetracked by our response to 9/11, which he considers stupid and costly. Ever since the decade began, “it’s been whining and crying and moaning, and retreat from ambition,” he says. “On the grand scale of things, our descendants will look at us as a bunch of crybabies.”
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4 Responses to “What To Call The ’00s”
I never knew who David Brin (author of The Postman) was until I saw him giving an interview with the Libertarian Alternative. He's a left-leaning libertarian with some rather unorthodox views on the nature of libertarianism versus socialism and feudalism.
The problem with Brin is that he refuses to understand that the “Culture War” is nothing more than a side show whose sole purpose is to keep the suckers fighting with each other so that the wealthy can take them to the cleaners…
The conservatives had the House, the Senate, the courts and the Presidency for six years, is Abortion illegal, is gay marriage dead, is affirmative action dead. What have any of the Social/Religious conservatives gotten out of six years of conservative rule?
Well no matter what the NYTimes decides to call the decade, providing our nation survives its damage, courtesy of Cheney/Bush, our history books will define it as the decade we almost dissolved as a nation.
Choose words accordingly to describe their siezure, via the Supreme Court and Florida's Jeb Bush coup, of the Whitehouse. The words should reflect the mafioso-style operating procedures leading up to the Iraq war and the financial collapse. History books will tell of how these people siphoned the US Treasury, murdered for oil and tortured in the name of “freedom” and led us to the brink of disaster as a nation.
I'm thinking “the decade of the sheisters” might be appropriate?
If you have trouble visualizing how history will view this decade [which is of course the MO of how and why the NYTimes is trying to name it first], just think back to the 1800s and imagine a group of usurpers who tried to do the same thing. Surely 100-150 years from now, with even more damning facts revealed as to the perpetrators of the near-collapse of our nation, the books most favorable assessment of Cheney/Bush will be “traitors”.
“our history books will define it as the decade we almost dissolved as a nation”
No. Lefties are, and remain, divisive as well as frequently controversial, but there was no crisis, despite the shallow squawking of some after Bush's election about seceding (they couldn't even devise anything resembling a useful contemporary strategy with that, as I described numerous times, such as joining Canada).