Cars

I don't get "Cars."

My Silent mother-in-law likes it, and it made enough money that clearly the young Millennials and Homelanders like it too. The landscape around Radiator Springs is wonderfully imagined, and the characters...well, they're characters. That may be its weakness.

Well, that and a weak story: Lightning McQueen is a hotshot who thinks he doesn't need others and by the end he learns that he does. "Top Gun" has a similar goal but does a better job with it - and is still pretty weak itself. Maverick at least has to learn the hard way about the relative importance of his job and aspirations, compared to the people around him. Lightning just gets beaten in a race or two and gives up a sponsorship deal. The way in which he re-learns his priorities doesn't have an emotional impact. The Interstate 40 dashed-dream montage is poignant, but it's not Lightning's story. It's not even clear why it should matter to us, or him, except for the townfolk being decent enough.

Which doesn't explain the Generational appeal or lack of same. It might just be that the oldsters remember when Route 66 was a big deal, and the kids enjoy seeing the sights.

(And yes, Tom Cruise started race car driving after meeting Paul Newman while filming "The Color of Money" and that led to"Days of Thunder" - referred to at the time as "Top Gun with cars" - which appears to have influenced this ...)

Systems

George Carlin used to ask people (during his act) how the water tasted in their town. Invariably, someone would say it wasn't good, which he would say was proof that "The system was starting to break down."

I mention this because I just arrived at the subway station to see a crowded landing - a sign of a missing or late train. When it did arrive, it was packed not quite like one of those Japanese trains...but close enough to it for me.

I let the other people get on. Another train was about two minutes after it. Although we had to wait for the first train to move forward, there was room to breathe on it.

While I know we're in the Crisis, that's not the same as believing It is the source of every obstacle in our way. Trains run late, people lose jobs, airplanes crash. Some of these happen in their own cycles, some because of intentional acts, some just randomly. Lose sight of that and you might zig when you should have, well, done nothing different at all.

I heard Mr. Carlin ask that question when I last saw him in concert...just over 20 years ago. (Solidly in the 3T, the Unraveling, for those keeping track.) I think the water in my town tastes fine, still.

Housing

The economy is struggling because, among other reasons, the housing market is still depressed?

The housing market SHOULD be depressed. Is you bought ten years ago, your house is still worth probably 25-75% more than what you paid. This for an asset that has a simple purpose, no earnings, and for which gains - absent a bubble - should be modest. Want an improved economy? Don't put your faith in a housing market like we had.

In fact let's consider the situations where real estate gives better than standard returns:

• Network effects: In a place like Silicon Valley, having a lot of engineers in one spot means companies can build up, so new engineers come in, so more companies build... A rare and possibly unsustainable occurrence.
• Exploitable resources: Find gold on your land - or oil or old-growth mahogany - and the value will quickly increase. May yield above average returns if you don't count the effort of finding / identifying the resources, the costs of extraction, and any decrease in land value after it's all gone
  


• A straight out bubble - Been there done that. See also Japan, South Seas, Florida. Note that fraud is often involved.

Certainly people can and do make in real estate, if they spend their lives doing it. Purchase land, build homes or offices, charge rent, sell improved property, and the money will roll in. That's not the same - not even close - to purchasing a house with the expectation that in three years you'll be able to buy a bigger one. And if there's no similar excessive demand, the increase in housing can only be proportional to increases in population. If that's your growth engine, or even a significant portion of your economy, where are these new people going to get money to pay for the housing? Because THAT would be your actual economic engine.

I do wonder how people can consider housing and construction,still, as a primary driver of the economy. (As opposed to a significant indicator, dependent on a true driver.) In the 30s, was there a lot of discussion on how to reinflate the stock market?

(Actually, if true, that wouldn't surprise me at all. )

Zombies

Friends on Facebook are talking a lot about The Walking Dead. One in particular laments her lack of preparedness for a Zombie Apocalypse.  With Zombieland and 28 Days/Weeks Later and the CDC's Zombie Preparedness site it feels like a very Fourth Turning attitude. Something is coming our way, we can't stop it, we'll be lucky to understand it by the time it gets here, if we make the wrong choices the whole world is hosed.

And yes, I know that zombies are not exclusive to the 4T. Night of the Living Dead was solidly in the Awakening. Mr. Niven did a short story (Night on Mispec Moor) that managed to have a single person taking on zombie hordes without any hope of rescue while not being apocalyptic. While not literal zombies, the adversely affected neighbors in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and It Conquered the World (both 1956, First Turning) show a different aspect of the same fear: What if everyone around you became an enemy that could appear out of nowhere, couldn't be reasoned with, and had no clear vulnerabilities?

But back here in the Crisis...I think it's no coincidence that the first (or at least first well-known) classic literature/horror mashup was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . Written and presumably set in the late 1790s, the original Jane Austen novel is Crisis literature. Mr Wickham and his fellow redcoats aren't just some random militias wandering the English countryside: They're being called up to fight in the French Revolutionary and/or Napoleonic Wars.( Mrs. Bennet mentions that she had an eye for soldiers before she was married,  about 25 years earlier - presumably they were preparing to fight in the American colonies.)  The story itself is a survival story. Coming up quickly on their mid-20s, Elizabeth and Jane have literally a handful of years to find husbands. If they don't, they'll be on their own when their father's estate passes to Mr. Collins. And not only do they have to deal with the ticking clock of their advancing age, acts outside of their control - their sisters' foolishness being a big one - could eliminate any chance for success. Adding zombies probably has only the slightest impact on the story's tone.

Bears

I was walking through Hollywood and Highland and discovered that the Build-a-Bear had been closed. Must have been pretty recent: They had a promotion in September's Hollywood and Highland newsletter.

Build-a-Bear! In a place that gets foot traffic like....like Hollywood and Highland!

I am, like Scrooge, starting to doubt my senses: there is no mention anywhere of them closing stores, having significant trouble, or anything about this particular location. And considering the customization done for this particular store - including Marilyn Monroe and James Dean bear statues overlooking Hollywood Boulevard - there must have been some pressure to keep it going. Maybe it just moved.

Not that it ever had any business. The store was completely empty almost any time I walked by. Only rarely did I ever see tourists carrying the oversized boxes containing bears or beagles or whatever.

And what do you expect: Cool as customization and proper names and little hearts are, teddy bears need to be furry and should be cute and...that's about it. It's very much a top-of-the-pyramid business, and will naturally be the first to disappear if less money is flowing through a particular area.

"Horrible"

Consumer Confidence Tops Expectations by Being Merely Horrible, Partially Explaining Black Friday Bloodlust

This seemed like a real Welcome to the Crisis article: The reporting of bad news in a manner halfway between cynical and bemused; the Thoreau quote for dramatic emphasis; the photograph that might have been people running from a mad gunman as easily as the shopping frenzy it actually was.

In the Crisis, any potential advantage is exploited as fully as possible. Not that people will be less moral - some may be, of course - but that the smallest savings or the most meager bonus becomes more important than it was a few years before. Or, if that isn't always the case, our vigilance for such activity and action makes any visible evidence of it of interest - a funhouse mirror held up to our own souls.

Occupy

They're supposed to be clearing out the Occupy L.A. folks today. It has always felt like our Bonus Army moment. I don't recall any lasting impact that the Bonus Army had, except perhaps for a stronger Veteran's Administration after WWII. If so, perhaps here we can expect a more comprehensive regulatory regime to come about in the First Turning, maybe including Too Big To Fail laws and changes in corporate personhood. Perhaps even sooner than that.

Although the resilience of the American economy as the Eurozone goes through convulsions is surprising. I've been keeping track of mortgage rates which continue to go down and stay down. That's largely because U.S. government securities keep dropping in yield, because THEY are a safe haven!

If everyone's bond rating drops, does it matter whether I'm AAA if nobody else is better than AA?

Welcome!

Let's start with the easy stuff first: "The Crisis" is the one predicted by William Strauss and Neil Howe, originally in their 1991 book "Generations." Looking at the last 400 years or so of American and English history, they noted (as others had before them) that periods of upheaval occurred roughly every 90 years. The theory of history they put together also gave a mechanism explaining this recurrence as being one of a cycle of four "turnings," each of which lasts just over 20 years. They expected the next upheaval to begin soon after the turn of the century, and gave 2005 as a likely starting point.

As the new century began, there was no lack of possible starting points for the Crisis. The fears of Y2K bugs causing a meltdown of civilization didn't materialize, but within a few months there was the popping of the dot-com bubble followed by the acrimonious 2000 presidential election. The September 11 attacks gave all indications of being just the sort of catalyst Strauss and Howe predicted....but the authors' internet postings soon after indicated that they thought the timing was not in line with their theory. In the year 2005, Hurricane Katrina fit both the predicted timing and the expected public impact, although it seemed more of a local event than one affecting the entire country. With the financial crisis of fall 2008, though, that it became clear that something had definitely changed. People who discuss this theory on the Fourth Turning website stopped asking IF the Crisis had begun, and instead started asking WHEN.

And that's where I am, here. I wanted a place to post my thoughts on where we are, where we're going, and what's next. Having accepted that the Crisis has started, I'll mention my thoughts on the WHEN, and what they imply for the future.   I may look forward to the period following the Crisis (the "High" or "First Turning") or even later than that.  Most of the time, though, I expect that I'll post a few sentences  observing what is going on in the world within this Strauss & Howe context. Since their theory is cyclical, there will probably be some comparisons with past turnings ("High School Musical" is Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland Let's-Put-On-a-Show redux!) and some predictions about what's next.

Maybe it'll be interesting....