I suspect that the next few years will record a high-water mark for Gen X snarking. Because ya gotta snark -- it's the only way to keep from crying. Well, snarking combined with consumption of massive quantities of alcohol (if you can afford it after you contribute your share to the $700 billion $1.8 trillion bailout).
And so we have the birth of Buy My Shitpile, Henry!, at which you can request that Hank Paulson -- former Goldman Sachs CEO who now wants a blank check he can write, over and over again, to his crooked Wall Street cronies, with no strings on how they can spend the dough -- buy out your worthless crap, too.
I added old Yankee Stadium, which closed last night, to the shitpile:
True fact: That stadium opened just as the last Great Depression was getting started. So it's kinda fitting that the new one will debut just as Great Depression II is beginning. Not that any of us mere working proles will be able to afford tickets to a game or anything. But it's pretty to look at from the outside: The subway line that gets me into Manhattan -- which is elevated, not underground, at that point -- goes right by both Yankee Stadiums, and I've been watching the construction for months now with the kind of glee typically seen only in four-year-old boys who have little-boy orgasms over dump trucks and hard hats. (Ooo, and suddenly words like dump trucks and hard hats sound naughty.) Construction sites are always cool (excepting the asshole construction workers who think a wolfwhistle is a form of acceptable communication between adults).
In case you're wondering where shitpile comes from, that's what Atrios at Eschaton (which is, incidentally, one of my favorite political blogs, and a daily must-read for me) has been calling the accumulation of bad Wall Street debt for quite some time now.
So, yeah. Some snarking is in order, at the minimum.
Here's the good part: it's probably gonna get worse. My own company (you've heard of it; it's in the Fortune 50) is probably a good example. All the baby boomers are planning to retire in 2-3 years. They're open and honest about the fact that they're gonna retire en masse in 2-3 years. But in the meantime, they're looting the place like crazy, sending tens of thousands of jobs to India and Brazil. Then they'll retire and leave those few Gen Xers with jobs to try to pick up the pieces while they retire with the proceeds of the stock options THEY GAVE THEMSELVES and then caused to skyrocket through massive fiduciary misconduct. By the time the investors realize the place has been looted, they'll be long gone.
Snarking is the bare minimum response, I'd say. I favor taking it a step further: after the last baby boomer dies, we bury him or her vertically head down, salt the earth over the location, and pray over the site such a generation never comes again.
-J