(On a side plug, I highly recommend Chris Hedges book, The Empire of Illusion, from which I pulled the Yeats quote above. Hedges is a stellar columnist for www.truthdig.com, and you can see his stuff here)

We cruised into the Oughts fresh off the roller-coaster ride of Bill Clinton's two-term presidency. Standard liberal boilerplate, especially during Dubya's dog days, was that Clinton's reign was a glorious time for America, especially the economy. Deficits were down, portfolios were up, and sax music danced across the late-night airwaves. Of course, we should now know that this interpretation of Clinton's legacy is false. Sure, things looked good for some. But in reality, the 90s were the heyday of financial deregulation, the continued dismantling of the social safety net, and the ascent of glorious free-trade. The tech-stock bubble inflated and deflated, a precursor to the future housing bubble. And the disparity in wealth between the haves and the have-nots continued its frightening surge. 

This is the inertia we carried into the new decade. Powerful forces were eroding the value of labor, squashing out the middle class, and concentrating power in fewer and fewer corporate hands. But there was little that regular people could do to stem the tide, and we ended up quasi-electing a monumentally underwhelming Good Ol' Boy to high office in 2000. Dubya was really the epitome of what many in the country desperately wanted to be: simple, optimistic, straight-shooting, and swaggering. That pill Gore was a total buzzkill: stiff, boring, effete, intellectual, and wonkish. Plus, he kept pointing out depressing stuff, like the earth cooking in its own juices. Who needed all that bringdownishness? With a major assist from the mainstream media's War Against Gore (see www.dailyhowler.com for the gruesome details), as well as the joke that was the Supreme Court, we had our pretend President. Dubya can be seen a giant wish by middle America that we had not become an utterly compromised plutocracy, despite the obvious fact that Bush had raised hundreds of millions from corporate interests for his campaign (as had Gore). Any hope that we could have a real populist or libertarian, anyone from the right or left who could speak and act against concentrated power, was out the window. Instead, we got the guy who talked like Mayberry RFD but acted like Enron.

And then, of course, the defining moment of the decade: September 11th. You can check out some of my older posts on 9/11 here and here, to get some background on my thoughts on the subject. But suffice it to say, our national response to the attacks, despite some early hopeful signs, was utterly illusory and delusional. Instead of using this profound tragedy as an opportunity to more fully engage a world with which normal Americans were woefully out of touch, we lurched into feel-good tales of national innocence and then Chuck Norris-type rage. We allowed the spectacle of the attack to overwhelm the paltry reality of the perpetrators themselves, and thus embarked on a multi-trillion dollar campaign of revenge. At every turn, we were cajoled, encouraged, and intimidated by the military-industrial-mainstream media cabal into supporting expensive, ineffective, and counterproductive assaults and occupations in Mesopotamia. We acted out a national script qua Steven Seagal movie, taking out the Muslim trash with gusto, albeit with a few hundred thousand innocent civilians as well (nobody's perfect). Of course, the legacy of these self-indulgent fantasy wars is still with us, and the American public is growing increasingly uneasy, choking down the acidic vomit of occupation and nation-building as the domestic economy melts into air. 

Skip ahead to the rear-bracket tragic bookend of the Oughts, the massive recession/depression that began in earnest last fall, and in which we are obviously still embroiled. The standard interpretation of events holds that our current woes are really an aberration, an unfortunate (albeit huge) blip on an otherwise positive national trajectory of economic growth. In this other feel-good story, we would have been fine if there had just been better financial regulation (liberal take), or if do-gooding socialist-types had not forced mortgages on unworthy borrowers (conservative take). But if the system can be cleansed of these malfeasances, we can get back to the business of "recovery," whatever that might mean. 

Of course, this is again a complete fantasy, a profound misreading of the current landscape as just a real estate bubble problem. The forces that have brought us to this place are long and powerful, stretching back to the mid-70s when labor-productivity began to diverge from wages. We have seen wealth and power slowly and inexorably concentrate into a ruling elite over the last few decades, and that class has taken control of the government and the corporate media, obscuring the slow-motion coup d'etat. Again, inertia rules the day, because the levers that move events are so deep and potent that regular people on the ground have very little ground from which to mount any meaningful challenge. So we tell ourselves that our problems are temporary, and we flail around for as many scapegoats as we can find: terrorists, socialists, immigrants, social deviants, bankers, Tiger Woods -- whatever. In place of real thought and action, angry self-righteousness rules the day.

Finally, let's look at the most important emerging reality of the last decade, one that paradoxically gets a lot of attention, but really not enough: the accelerating decline of every major natural system on the planet. Global warming gets the lion's share of the focus here, but climate change is just one piece of a distressing and terrifying whole. The list is nauseatingly familiar: collapse of world fisheries, massive deforestation, depletion of fresh water, build-up of toxic chemicals, wholesale erosion of global topsoils, breakneck species extinctions, etc. Most life and earth scientists believe that there are no significant systems or processes that are actually improving. Virtually everything is coming apart at the seams. 

So sure, reducing greenhouse gases is important, and recycling more stuff is good. But the overriding illusion is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with consumer capitalism itself. We just need greener and smarter jobs and products; and in fact, there is enormous opportunity for sustainable economic growth, if we can just get the right kinds of cutting-edge technologies researched, funded, and financed. Why, just weatherizing our homes and workplaces will save billions and billions, which we can then plow into wind turbine research and solar panel manufacturing.

The reality is much harsher. The trembling of the earth's systems is a sign that the basic algorithms of our civilization are askew. We are simply too large a presence on the planet, and we need to make massive reductions in our numbers and our technologies. We cannot have endless growth, economic or otherwise, within a finite system like the earth. All countries, rich and poor alike, will need to make enormous adjustments in their social forms to avoid the looming famines and dislocations on the horizon. 

Cruising along in the background is Peak Oil. All of industrial civilization can be seen as the briefly-flowering portion of petro-depletion. We built all of our systems on the upslope of oil extraction, resulting in unsustainable ratios of energy to economic output and human well-being. As we continue on the downslope of Peak Oil, long-term trends in pricing and availability will render most centralized systems inoperable, so most grand plans on national and international levels will forever be out of reach. 

Here's hoping that we can cast off the illusions and inertia of the Oughts, before the planet starts casting us off as the cancerous species we seemed determined to become.