Modern Civilization: This Sucker Is Going Down

George W. Bush was onto something in the fall of 2008 when he remarked apropos of the Lehman collapse: “…this sucker could go down.”

It’s my serene conviction, by the way, that this sucker actually is going down, right now, even as I clatter away at the keys — perhaps in slow motion, so that not many other bystanders have noticed yet, and the few who have noticed are mostly too crosseyed with nausea to speak.

It’s perhaps useful to define even what we mean when we say “this sucker.” Everybody knows what a sucker is, of course — say, a Midwestern public employees’ union pension fund snookered into buying a fat slice of equity tranche in a Goldman Sachs-engineered CDO. But “this sucker” is something else: a rather large cargo of commercial relations, entailed obligations, hopes, expectations, habits of daily life — indeed millions of whole lives — loaded onto the rather creaky vessel we call modern civilization. “This sucker” was such an apt term coming from someone whose understanding of civilization was like unto that of a boy who found a PlayStation under the Christmas tree. (more)