You Have to Wonder

We like to pat ourselves on the back when we think of the demise of (most of) the communist world, on how the war was won with better technology and a superior political and economic model, on how we spent them into oblivion.

We spent them into oblivion, we like to recall, and emerged into the sunlight of peace dividends and a brave new world. Our economy blossomed. And our technology, rendered even more potent as the chains of military spending were loosened, our technology brought us into a bright digital world with previously unimagined vistas.

And in our reveries of the boom and the certainties it presented that our social and political and economic model is necessarily paramount, we write off the .com bust as but an anomaly.

But should we see it so?

But where has it all gone? Where is the fruit? What has happened to the flowering of our political and economic systems? Look at the telcos. Look at the airlines. Look at the unemployment lines. Is this the triumph into which we have marched as the victors of the Cold War?

You have to wonder.

Wonder about our own economy now on the skids. Wonder about the overnight transformation of those miraculous surpluses into record deficits once again. Wonder how the blossoming of "free markets" in Uzbekistan (aka, pipelines transporting Caspian Sea oil to western markets) leads to the "blossoming" of political freedom there. Wonder about generally accepted accounting principles. Wonder about PATRIOT II.

You have to wonder.

Wonder if we're about to land -- we the champions of that great struggle of the 20th century -- in the same slag heap as where those miserable communists landed just a few years ago. Wonder if we interpreted the events with just a bit too much self congratulation. Wonder about our sense of importance. Wonder if the down trodden masses in miserable poverty or the seething hoards of religious fanatics kindling their flames of hatred might just have a different view of things.

And you have to wonder if there is a .gov bubble about to burst -- as our economic nose dive has suddenly been rendered insignificant next to the train wreck our government is bringing to the world at the dawn of the 21st century.

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