More Hope

And so ends the week of a billion emails. Tell me you haven’t been drowning in them – pre-, during, and post-election.

But it was a very, very good week, from my point of view.

As bleak as things are – bleaker, I think, than many realize (‘The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it,’ writes the Guardian, paraphrasing the Comptroller General of the United States) – the tide may be turning.

This is still America – America – and as much tragic damage as has been done these last six years to our standing abroad, and by the erosion of our finances at home, we are still the nation that self-corrects better than any other, and that, for all its missteps, lurches generation after generation toward an ever more perfect union.

If those sentiments sounds familiar, give yourself a gold star – they’re lifted from Tuesday’s column.

If you read the whole thing, let alone its links like the one above, from the Economist, give yourself three gold stars – it was only a few words shorter than Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Take the weekend off. See ‘Borat’ (a friend of mine was in it – I hope to have his inside story for you next week). See ‘Man of the Year’ (the comedy about voting machine technology). See ‘Stranger than Fiction’ or ‘Babel’ (I hope to be close to the front, on the aisle).

(Better still, read Paul Krugman’s column today. He completely nails it, as usual. And I’m pretty sure you can get to it free – I think Times Select has been running a free trial promotion thru Sunday this week.)

If you didn’t read Tuesday’s column – perhaps you decided to vote instead, or have a life – I commend it to you now. Not because it’s in Pynchon’s league (reading 20 pages an hour, I never even attempted Pynchon) – or Paul Krugman’s, for that matter – but because (a) I’m too lazy to write something new. And because (b) hope is underrated – it deserves a second look.