Recently did my fine and ever-loving and yet slightly overworried parents, still married and flirty and sort of amazing after something like 147 years together -- and no, I have no idea how the hell they did it, so don't even ask -- forward on a terrifying hunk of email to me, full of sound and fury and unchecked socioeconomic gloom, signifying nothing.
It was an email, I quickly surmised, that had bounced around their group of retired, largely Republican friends and then commented on and fretted over a bit too much, all about what the hell is happening to the world, how dramatically things have changed, what can or cannot be done about it and, more than anything else, how they feel fearful for their kids -- which, for the purposes of this column, we'll call, me.
It was an email, simply put, about the end of the world. More specifically, the end of the American empire, of the United States as global economic superpower, primarily due to various and sundry "horrific" factors having to do with the threadbare American workforce, the staggering loss of manufacturing and factory jobs in this country, the spiraling debt, the shocking erosion of our industrial base, and so on.
"Facts About The De-industrialization Of America That Will Blow Your Mind" screamed the email's headline, instantly indicating its mad desire to be not the slightest bit tactful or reasonable. The piece then went on to list all manner of "horrifying" data about America's post-industrial implosion, from the mundane (a single Ford factory closing due to "globalization") to spurious forecasts about China, "rotting war zones" like Detroit, and how America's number one export is now, quite literally, garbage. ...
(Full URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/04/20/notes042011.DTL&nl=fix)
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