Happy New Year

It's been a long time, now I'm coming back home...

As in 2007, I failed to make a very good go of this blogging thing during 2008. I made a better start of it, but in my too characteristic fashion, I failed to maintain the effort for very long. One of my problems is that I get too hung up with grandiose notions of what I want to say or do with the blog, and when I can't carry those plans out to my satisfaction, I give up in frustration.

My resolutions for 2009 are to try to make entries at least three times a week and to not worry too much about the content or any grand schemes. Over time, I will get to the things I want to share my opinions about, and if I want to get better at blogging, the most important thing is to just do it!

Good Riddance to 2008

What a year, eh? Thank whatever powers there be that it is over.

The most positive note is that America did the right thing and elected the most hopeful and inspiring candidate to serve as our 44th President. And our first African-American President, at that. (Our first minority President, as far as that goes.)

Along the way, of course, plenty of Americans got to show how little progress we have made in eliminating bigotry and ignorance. We live in an information-rich age, with news, opinions and research available 24 hours a day at the touch of a button, but many people still cling to their narrow interpretations, refusing to join the rest of us in the world of fact-based reality.

Our own head lame brain, I mean lame duck, good old G.W., has spent most of the last eight years living in his own bubble, in which all sorts of things are true, despite the heavy weight of evidence to the contrary. Saddam Hussein had, or was about to deploy weapons of mass destruction... He was also behind the terrorist attacks of 09/11/2001... The jury is still out on global warming... Brownie did a heck of a job managing FEMA... and so on.

The 2008 elections highlighted how easily fear and prejudice can surface among the electorate, especially during tough economic times. Lunatics showed up at McCain and Palin rallies to chant racial epithets and assassination threats against Obama. Even worse were the campaign pols, who know better, but who tried to manipulate the public by spreading outright lies about Obama and other candidates. Fortunately, this time, these "swift boating" strategies fell short.

Besides the election, the big, bad news of 2008 was the economy. Politicians were shocked! to discover that greedy men left to their own devices (i.e., free market capitalism at its best) would take a blow torch to the public interest, if that's what it took, to amass as much personal wealth as possible. This seems to be a lesson that needs to be relearned every generation or so, from the robber barons of the early industrial age to war profiteers to Michael Milken and the junk bond purveyers of the '80s (remember Michael Douglas in "Wall Street?") to today's mess.

For all its faults, 2008 can hardly be described as the worst year ever in American history. A column by Rich Lowry made this point in the newspaper the other day. Among the other years he suggests were worse are 1862, 1938 and 1968. As Lowry points out, almost any year during the American Civil War was among the worst in our history. Things looked particularly bad for the republic in 1862, with Lee driving Union forces out of Fredericksburg, Virginia and practically to the doorstep of the White House and France on the verge of formally recognizing the Confederacy. In 1938, unemployment reached 19%, despite five years of FDR's New Deal programs. Even the most pessimistic don't expect it to take nearly as long to recover from our current economic woes. And in 1968, we experienced an even more tumultuous political season than last year. It was a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. in May and Bobby Kennedy in July. There was rioting, looting and burning in cities across the country. The Democratic National Convention held in Chicago became a battleground of the generation gap and cultural revolution. In the end, we elected Richard Nixon, who despite some significant accomplishments, was a deeply flawed President.

We came through those and other bad years and ultimately prospered again. So keep that chin up and carry on. Our best days are still ahead of us. Happy New Year!