Quote of the day

Earlier this year, reviewing a bad movie named "Sex Drive," I wrote:

As they motor South, they pass through Amish country. Luckily it's the day of the annual Amish sex orgy, and Ian meets sexy Mary, who falls in love with him, flashes her boobs, etc. The director, Sean Anders, should be ashamed of himself. Lucky the Amish don't go to movies, or he'd be facing a big lawsuit. Better be nice to the Amish. In a year we'll be trading gold bars for their food, haha.

Haha, indeed. The Amish can grow their own food and heat their own homes and feed their own horses, and where does that leave us? Many of my readers right now are living in the middle of vast urban areas, 50 miles from farmland One partner has been laid off, the other fears the same. There are children and mortgage payments. What will they do on the level of survival? I've been reading a memoir by Larry Woiwode, who farms his own land in North Dakota and may not have foreseen disaster but seems prepared to deal with it.

How will my family fare? Yes, we've earned some nice money in our careers. But I have found that nothing cures wealth like illness. Few people in this country can afford to get seriously ill, and many cannot afford to take a single day off from their job--or jobs. Under Bush we doubled our national debt in only eight years. Now the experts say Obama will have no choice but to increase it even further, with "bailouts" of an increasingly leaky ship. That means spending money we do not have--printing it, in the final analysis. That leads to inflation. Inflation leads to legends of fortunes in pre-war Germany reduced to worthless paper, of people trading shopping bags full of banknotes for a loaf of bread. What does money mean when it is backed only by debt?

What if war in the Middle East cuts off oil, even if OPEC wants to sell it? What if the shipping lanes are blocked? What will happen then? Less developed countries may paradoxically be better off. The closer to the land and to subsistence a family lives, the better-equipped it is to survive. The unemployed family in the middle of a city will have savings, unemployment insurance, maybe government and private assistance of various kinds, and may be able to just get by, but how long will that last? Everybody can't move in with the relatives. Some people have to be the relatives.

It does not take any special vision to foresee an immediate future in which the world is hammered by the weather and reeling from an economic meltdown. I hope it is not at war. If the U.S. "steps in" to "police" a war between Pakistan and India, how exactly will that work, when we need both sides as our allies? Their differences are essentially political and territorial, but differences in religion cloud the issues. In this brave modern age, mankind's deep instincts are still tribal, and for some believers religion is the new tribalism.

If you are a member of the U.S. Congress, you should not give a damn if you are a Democrat or a Republican. You should discard ideology and partisanship. You should be searching only for what works, or gives promise of working. You should be listening to the best counsel of the wisest people you can find. This is no time for playing to the crowd. That is all over with. This is the hour to seek what might lead us back from the brink.

-Roger Ebert

I think it's safe to assume that Roger Ebert sees the potential for some sort of odd Mad Max type future apocolypse, eerily similar to a view I stated a few months back but am too lazy to search for to link to right now, but I recall stating that I'm fortunate to have been raised in south Louisiana, for my years on the bayou taught me how to hunt and grow my own food, a potentially valuable skill set in a Mad Max sort of world.

And a friend of mine had a small part in that "Sex Drive" movie. I never saw it out of fear that I'd never be able to respect her again if I did.