Thursday, July 16, 2009

Peter Pan and the recession

In the Asia Times the always interesting Spengler (David Goldman) connects Michael Jackson and the current economic downturn:
They forgave Jackson his dysmorphia and even his alleged pedophilia, for Jackson only expressed in extreme form his generation's refusal to age. In his self-disfigurement and eventual self-destruction, this fey child-man fought madly against maturity with a reckless abandon that his fans secretly admired. They loved him, not in spite of his personality failures, but because of them.
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Something astonishing had happened, compared to which the tulip bulb craze and the South Sea bubble seem like models of sobriety. The eternal adolescence that Michael Jackson so ably represented in fantasy turned into the foundation for the great investing wave of the 1990s
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Youth culture disoriented the entrepreneurs of America so thoroughly that conventional wisdom - including that of the Vatican and the Barack Obama administration - now ignores the entrepreneur as a source of economic growth.
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The hangover from America's obsession with perpetual youth will last for a decade or more. Judging from the rock-star adulation accorded to Obama, Americans haven't yet learned their lesson, which is: after a certain age, no, you can't.

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