Ennui


The news of the Chinook crash in Afghanistan is depressing. 25 Americans- SEALS, apparently- and a half-dozen Afghan soldiers perished in the single most deadly event of a long war filled with them.

Crap.

That was unexpected. The other crap, well, I don’t think this is surprising. IN fact, it fills me with a certain ennui- you know, the term that is derived from the Old French enui (annoyance) and thence through enuier(to vex) to the Late Latin inodiare (or, to make loathsome).

I can’t think of a better way to describe it. I mean, Standard and Poors missed the trillion-dollar weakness in the derivative market that nearly melted down the financial system of The West.

They said at the time that if the people that worked there were very bright, they would have been over at Bear Stearns of Lehman Bros making the real long green. I won’t belabor you with commentary about the downgrade of Treasury Bills from AAA to AA+, since I am bored with the whole thing.

The spin is that S&P miscounted two trillion bucks and so their analysis is flawed and everything is really OK. It is not.

The Market collapsed at the end of the week, down around four percent, and goodness knows if the Street got the willies in advance of the announcement or whether we will go back into free-fall on Monday.

I am burned out with the Fall of the West, and there is so much more of it to come. Who would have thought it would be like this?

I suppose we just need to get used to it, and the chirping of our Chinese Mother-in-law bitching about how we are squandering our cash. It is going to be irritating.

I wonder if that is how the citizens of Rome felt, near the end of their millennium in the center of all things? Irritated? Filled with ennui?

It did not have to be like this. It just didn’t. But it is, and someone needs to get their asses kicked. Instead, we seem to have the sort of national ennui that comes from having too much time on our hands and too little will to find something productive to do about it.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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