Unemployment is now at six percent, a nine-year high. Times are hard, they may get harder. How will people make ends meet? What will they do to get by?

I spent a good part of the 1990s traveling around America, missing most of the tourist spots. My travels took me to the Rust Belt, towns where shuttered factories had taken the heart out of the community, to farm country, where the downtowns imploded as the land was transferred from family farmers to industrial agribusinesses and to fishing communities that were all used up after the fished stocks crashed.
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On August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney said, “Simply stated, there’s no doubt Iraq now has weapons of mass destruction.” There’s a reason Dick Cheney spends most of his time in hiding and it ain’t national security. What Mr. Cheney said was not qualified, it was not tentative, it was not equivocal, but it was – apparently – wrong. Question is: was he lying? Simply stated, yes he was.

Various American intelligence agencies had huge doubts about the existence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. If you carefully read the news all through last autumn and winter, those doubts by the CIA and NSA were duly reported. If you only glanced at the front page or worse, had your television tuned to Fox, you didn’t get the nuances from the intelligence community, all you got was White House and Pentagon spin.
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How polite should one be to a telemarketer? I can always tell when they’re calling. First there’s the long pause, then the tired voice mispronouncing my name. What follows must be my mother’s doing, early years of training in being polite to strangers on the phone, even though I know full well the stranger in question is trying to sell me something I don’t want or need. Every one of my polite demurrals is anticipated and the telemarketer has a scripted response ready, each one pulling me closer to switching my long distance carrier, even though I’m satisfied with the carrier I’ve had for years.
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Mr. Eliot, the poet, predicted the world ends not with a bang, but a whimper. Or perhaps he was referring to the Iraq war. First the president said Saddam was no longer in control, then Don Rumsfeld said the major engagements were over, then George popped in again to say “mission accomplished,” this time wearing a sailor suit and playing with an aircraft carrier as his personal toy. The nominal end of the war has not yet been declared; if it were, the Iraqi prisoners of war would have to be released and the military would have to relinquish some of the sweeping “wartime” authority with which it is vested. It’s a signature Bush administration move – they control the whole country, they’re picking out the puppet government, but they can still behave as if they’re in a free-fire zone because they haven’t sent in the paperwork yet. Ha, ha, ha.
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