I keep getting more cynical
My husband once told me that he knew he needed to get out of his job when he could look at a Dilbert cartoon and wonder where the joke was.
Lily Tomlin once said "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." When that doesn’t sound even vaguely like a joke, you know we’re all in trouble.
Today’s evidence:
- Mr. Orwell goes to Washington.
- Pat Robertson says Dover PA "voted God out of your city."
- Morning after pill decision "unusual."
- NYTimes says Administration is hoping Katrina victims will "simply give up and go away."
Tomlin’s right. I can’t keep up.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:28 am
Yeah, sometimes I think, “it can’t get any worse.”
Then it does.
These are some depressing times we live in.
November 15th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Well, cheer up, history says that as soon as there’s enough bodybags and empty pockets, people are willing to stand up & say “screw this.” I figure at this point we’ve only got another three decades or so. The bad news is that people usually don’t behave so nicely in the 15-20 years they’re saying “screw this.” After that, though, I bet it’ll be pretty nice for a while again.
I was listening to On Point this morning after dropping off my daughter, and the guests were talking about education as a cure for the job loss from globalization. Nobody said anything about the fact that a huge slice of the US population is not going to be bright enough to be zippy managerial symbolic entrepreneurs, no matter what kind of education you try to stuff into them, and it occurred to me that nobody will say it, because it’s career suicide. Instead we’ll spend bazillions over the next few decades in futile attempts to turn everybody into business geniuses and top-flight engineers, while flogging the poor bastards who constitutionally can’t do it to pick up their mechanical pencils and get brilliant, otherwise no public aid for them. So if you want to be cynical and rich, I’d guess the thing to do is to hold your basket out under the education-money faucet for about the next 25 years or so.