2000-2009: A Retrospective

The old Butcher of Broadway hit it on the nose in today’s Sunday New York Times.  Frank Rich argued in his most recent column that in more ways than one the recent debacles that have come to characterize the end of 2009 (Tiger Woods’s sex scandal and the financial crisis among others), epitomized the last decade as one of serious deception.  For ten years we were deceived by our leaders, our bankers, our celebrities, and some of the people in the public eye that we trust most have simply failed to come completely clean with their lives.  It has led us to a breaking point.  We’ve had two wars started in the Middle East, lost focus in tracking down Bin Laden, and had a serious decline in the privacy that once was a hallmark of American life all in the last decade.  In exchange we’ve dwindled the health of the economy with carelessness and crass, and we have individuals in positions of accountability talking about being responsible citizens in one breath and regretting their philandering at shiny press conferences in another.  This kind of thinking needs to stop if we are to make it through to the next decade in one piece.

Rich argues presciently that in the coming decade we need to refocus the way that we view leaders in American life. In many senses we need to wonder why we place these icons and relatively arbitrary people in positions of power and ask ourselves why we let them get away with shenanigans.  (Obama you are not immune either, coming off a hoax in Copenhagen and a less than ideal health-care bill that looks like it is going to pass).  For a culture that prizes individualism, why are we so trusting of others, to the point where we continuously ignore the wool that is being pulled over our eyes by those in the public sphere.  Once again, American ignorance and a true lack of skepticism for one’s surroundings seems to have gotten the best of us.  When will we learn our lesson about the responsibility that comes with one’s freedom to explore a life of devoted almost entirely to the self?

Anyways, just found this to be a clever article that caught my attention during finals studying, while I remain holed up in Butler just trying to avoid the snow and hanging on for dear life at the end of the semester.