Allen Ginsberg began his 1956 poem "Howl" with those words. James Carroll uses them in his Boston Globe op ed today, a piece entitled Making some sense of $700b, a piece inspired not only by the original cost of the "bailout" (remember, the Senate expanded the cost of the legislation), but also the coincidence of the cost to operate the Pentagon for the next fiscal year. And the use of Ginsberg seems appropriate, considering the warnings we were given about military spending by Eisenhower, during whose administration Ginsberg created his famous poem.
I find Carroll's words useful. For once I find that he has not gone far enough. But then, he wrote yesterday, and did not have the advantage I have of looking at the action in the foreign markets.
And thus I will expand the use of the words of Ginsberg about the destruction of the best minds of my generation to a broader application than merely the spending on the military.
Let me begin with the paragraph in which Carroll refers to Ginsberg's words:
The genius of this nation's most brilliant minds has been yoked for more than half a century to the invention of ways to kill and destroy. ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." - Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," 1956) What if those minds had been put to work imagining alternative futures - the rescue of the environment, the ending of disease and poverty, the artistic fulfillment of new media, the teaching of children? It's a question as old as Eisenhower ("The cost of one modern heavy bomber," he said in 1953, "is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities." Leaving office, he said, "We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage." That's us.)
Carroll offers those words immediately after telling us that our exhorbitant spending on military matters "creates far less social capital than spending on education, bridges, mass transit, new forms of energy - even the arts." Of course, it is always difficult for a candidate for high office to take the position we spend too much on our military, even absent our current Iraqi debacle. Carroll notes how little discussion there was about the budget for the Pentagon, a bit more than $700 billion, as compared to the handwringing on the equivalent amount for the "bailout."
Carroll notes that part of the concern in approving the bailout is that we also help rescue the world economy. He notes that we spend twice as much for military exports in 2007 - $40 billion - as we did in foreign economic aid, and concludes that paragraph by telling us "Unneeded weapons spark unnecessary wars."
True, and yet insufficient. Carroll concludes his piece with a short and powerful statement
That the majority of humans are in dire straits and that the planet itself is groaning are issues treated like givens of nature, yet they are results of the ways creativity is channeled and resources are shared. $700 billion for rescue. $700 billion for war. Something is wrong with this picture, and last week that coincidence of numbers told us what.
While I agree with those words, as I do with much of Carroll's piece, I find myself realizing how it does not go far enough.
The madness of our generation has included exporting our way of doing business, including for sub prime mortgages: Britain faces a subprime crisis that is almost entirely domestic. We have exported our use of derivatives, which given the interconnectedness of world financial markets means that whatever happens here will also have huge impact overseas. It is not just the amount of US commercial paper of various sorts held by foreign entities, including sovereign wealth funds such as those in China; it is also the holdings of more traditional US assets whose worth is being devalued as our market descends from what was a high artificially sustained by the financial legerdemain that is in large part responsibility for the crisis in which we now find ourselves.
And I remind readers of this: when the House failed at its first attempt to do the "bailout" the market went up, and the end result of Friday's more "successful" effort was that the US market closed down.
But that was AFTER overseas markets were closed for the week. And it is in looking at those, courtesy of Yahoo Financial, that I write that Carroll's application of the line from Howl does not go far enough.
Consider this, shortly after 6 AM EDT:
Nikkei 225 -4.25%
Hang Seng -4.97%
Sraits Times -5.61%
FTSE 100 -3.99%
DAX -5.83%
CAC 40 -6.31%
Most of these are somewhat better than when I first looked at them, before I began writing this diary.
The American disease of excessive and exuberant greed is something we have also exported around the world, corrupting the minds and morals not only of our own but of people of many nations.
I have no idea if American markets will act in a similar fashion when the open in less than 4 hours. From a political standpoint, if they do, then further discussion of our economic crisis will be an inevitable part of our political discourse, including tomorrow's Presidential debate, despite the attempts of the McCain campaign to shift the focus to what it considers the failing of character of their opponent.
That is, however, far less important than this: the actions we took last week in an attempt to resolve our financial crisis exhausted or ability to respond with money - if that approach is insufficient or - or more likely - inappropriately directed, what is left before we see serious damage, not only to the credit flow necessary for the economic life of this nation, but to the financial well-being of average Americans.
In 2006 the then Big Five financial organizations on Wall Street advocated strenuously for greater flexibility from the SEC in how they did their business. One of the most important spokesmen for the Big Five was the head of Goldman Sachs. It is unfortunate the same man, Hank Paulson, has been empowered to attempt to address the problems he helped to create. The madness that helped create the mess in which we now found ourselves - and the entire world - is a product of a mindset that still does not grasp that their entire approach is beyond redemption.
I hope I am wrong in what I anticipate may well happen today. For all of our sakes. And in reality, my concern goes far beyond what may happen to indices like the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or its overseas equivalents which I have been watching.
If we do not change how we think about the economy, and how we think about government, we will wake up to discover that we have spent what little wealth we still had available and only created a situation more dire than the one we sought to address.
Perhaps we will be lucky. Perhaps the actions we have taken will provide sufficient breathing room that we can rectify the worst of what we confront. I would argue that even if we are so fortunate, that is insufficient, because we will not have changed the basic structure of our thinking, about economics, national security, government, and politics, and thus at best we will have only postponed, not averted, the disaster we currently face.
I HOPE I am wrong. I fear that I am not. A quick look at European markets gives a snapshot of DAX and CAC 40 now both trading more than 6% down. And that is only a window into a far more serious problem of what confronts us.
Even absent the coincidence of numbers to which he refers, Carroll writes something essential, which I will repeat:
That the majority of humans are in dire straits and that the planet itself is groaning are issues treated like givens of nature, yet they are results of the ways creativity is channeled and resources are shared.
It is that which is the underlying crisis, which is moral, which is essential to address lest we wind up in a world that will destroy itself. we are destroying our world, and there are those who seek to use our current financial situation to justify further destroying our world. War is only part of it. Now it is war over energy. Soon it will be over food, and over potable water.
And as always, it will war over the inequity of distribution - both between and within nations - of things essential to life and sustenance.
I was alive when Ginsberg wrote his poem. I am of an age of the grandchildren of whom Eisenhower spoke. I have seen the madness continue.
And I end with a question, derived from a song sung by Pete Seeger, the words themselves from a writer from the Soviet Union. In the original the words are about the third person plural - they. I chose to include us all- we.
When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
Peace? Or is it already too late for us all?