31 January 2008: Has It All Been Said? Happy New Year Anyway
As I skim over the media terrain-the Internet anyway-I find that every category of event related to 2008 has been amply dissected, from sports to entertainment to politics to fashion. Can Baby New Year afford his/her diaper and bib this year? Nothing designer-y anyway.
Baby New Year may wear as an emblem a dollar sign crossed out, or two small bowls, one empty and one overflowing with bullion. The empty one will be labeled "Main St." and the full one will be labeled, of course, "Wall St.," but there will be a hole in the bottom. As bullion runs out, more rains into the bowl from, miraculously, the empty bowl.
But I'm not a cartoonist.
And the old year, 2008, what will it wear? The costume of the Grim Reaper? But am I sure I want to "ring out the old"?What is in store for 2009? Further downward spiraling of the economy? A trillion new dollars printed up? Ten trillion?
Will China, with its tanking economy, stop buying U.S. Savings Bonds?
Will India and Pakistan go to war? Who will fire the first shot? Who the last?
As the Obama administration takes out the broom and dustpan, will it have to order up an industrial-sized vacuum instead? And find that it needs far more? And not find what it needs?
Will Israel obliterate Gaza altogether and still be bombed at its southern border, miraculously?
Will the infrastructure in Iraq be improved, a debt the U.S. has reneged on, now that there's a new government, which it says should take over Halliburton's assignment for now? If that's the case, the Iraqis will accomplish in one day what Cheney's friends couldn't in four years, though draining the treasury by the billion each month.
Will the U.S. catch bin Laden? Not!!!
Will the U.S. spend more billions chasing him and sacrificing hundreds of its military in that process? Maybe.
Will the U.S. defeat the Taliban, navigating, with its instruments, a terrain that only the natives can understand? No, but billions more will be wasted, rest assured.
Will the drug wars on the Mexican borders cease?
Will the stone walls being constructed along the border achieve their purpose?
What is their purpose? The U.S. economy is stabilized (stabilized?) by Mexican money also. Does a country build stone boundaries along the border of an ally? Not!!
