It’s That Time Again
there's something about the codas to 2008's economic crash and 2020's pandemic that rhymes
Listen to the author perform this piece, recorded live on the This Is Hell radio show/podcast:
Back in February of 2009, before a lot of you young heathens could drink or even drive, I did a piece for the This Is Hell radio show/podcast called “Imbecilical Time.” In it I mused that our current moment, and maybe even all of modernity, suffers unflattering comparison with ancient times, the time even before emperors and peasants, when numinous rishis sang creation into being and spiritual sages constructed the lattice of the law. Today, obese bags of hot air fart forth endless threadbare policies calculated to fail to solve any of civilization’s real problems.
2009, if you keep up on your current history, came exactly one year after 2008. By 2008, the last year of the W Bush administration, the process Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich had spearheaded so aggressively – crippling government’s power to regulate the private sector – had progressed to the point where the financial industry was subject to about the same quality of oversight as a federated group of Somali warlords. Lending institutions, investing institutions, and risk-loving trading institutions had become combined chimerical organisms, like different kinds of tumors growing and feeding on each other. Capital requirements for banks were sickeningly weak. Financial instruments had become insanely complex.
In March of 2008, Bear Stearns was bought out by JP Morgan, and in September, Lehman Brothers bank collapsed. It was the year of the Cratering of the Economy, the biggest global financial crash since 1929.
That was the year Barack Obama was elected the first Black President of the United States. The joke went that global conditions had deteriorated enough and become so messy no white person wanted the job. Even Hillary Clinton was uncharacteristically gracious about it, as I recall. At least, as gracious as she deemed necessary.
Back then, fifteen years ago, if I may do the easy thing of mining myself for a quote, I said:
I don’t believe humanity is devolving. That kind of thinking is just cranky-old-geezer syndrome. If there is the appearance of degeneration, it’s because in the long view human beings are indeed geniuses. And the longer the view, the smarter we are. Like the soaring skyline of a city viewed from the air, the beauty and brilliance we are capable of is breathtaking. Only when we descend into the streets of the city do we smell the garbage and
pee and see the half-eaten hot dogs and drowned rats floating in the gutter...
...Only when the focus closes in on our short-term behavior do we reveal ourselves as clumsy clods. The problem is, we happen to experience our lives in the short term, not the long. This is not to say we cannot escape the limitations of the zeitgeist. The problem is far worse. We inhabit a zone of spacetime perception wherein our klutzy traits are by far dominant, to the near exclusion of anything and everything nobler.
That’s what I meant by “imbecilical time.” As opposed to “genius time” or even “competent time,” the long view where humanity seems to be somewhat clever or at least equal to the many tasks we must undertake to solve large issues we encounter when trying to achieve great things, such as comfortable survival for all.
In coining “imbecilical time” I was thinking of the many ineffectual ways our government addressed the problems revealed by the financial catastrophe. Worthwhile policy changes were proposed, but the most efficacious and structural of them were all nixed. One thing that still sticks in my craw is the advent of the Tea Party. The Tea Party was a juvenile fascist tantrum of folks enraged by the prospect that Obama might consider forgiving the debts of those whose predatory sub-prime mortgages were foreclosed on, mortgages that were arguably at the root of the crash in the first place. The money was going to go to the mortgage lenders and insurers anyway, to make them whole. Why not let it first go through the destroyed borrowers? Why were they not just as deserving as the banks? It was the same goddam money. But CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli famously voiced rightwing conventional wisdom when he stamped his feet and pulled his hair out on television, screaming, “How many of you want to pay your neighbor’s mortgage?”
The Tea Party was the fascist tantrum in the wake of the 2008 crash.
In the aftermath of the Covid-19 emergency something similar happened. It was most fully on display on January 6 at The Capitol.
That riot was the right wing lashing out at all the indignities they’d suffered. It was a tantrum, not just about the election, but was meant to dispute that teachers, nurses, food service workers, and others were more essential than corporate CEOs; that cops routinely killing Black people justified an uprising; that shutting down business-as-usual in the face of a poorly-understood
virus was the right thing to do for public health and even helped ease stress on a rapidly warming planet. The MAGAts weren’t going to take that woke crap anymore! Especially now that they’d discovered the term “woke” by which to derogate it all in aggregate.
And since the petering out of mandates, those to whom we’ve given authority are once again doing too little too late to prevent a repeat of another landmark disaster. And once more, obese bags of hot air fart forth endless threadbare policies calculated to fail to solve any of civilization’s real problems.
So, I’ve revised the phrase “imbecilical time.” No, not because it derives from a term once used to categorize developmentally disabled people under a framing of eugenics and is therefore “unwoke.” I don’t care about that. A lot of you imbeciles didn’t even know about it till I just told you.
I’m changing it because the phenomenon has revealed its reiterative nature. It’s not just that we find ourselves looking at all the trash we live in due to our focus on current mundanities. It’s because our failure to dig ourselves out of our pile of trash repeats itself in bursts, like our boom and bust economy (to give one example).
That’s why I’m calling it “Imbecyclical Time.” Yes, it’s a portmanteau neological pun. An extremely sophisticated literary contortion. Don’t try this at home!
But do try to remember it next time a big Sisyphean ball of dung rolls downhill on top of us. That way you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say, “It’s imbecyclical time again here in the USA.”
Well said.