I come to bury 2009, not to praise it.

I fear that the animals see man as a being like them who in a most dangerous manner has lost his animal common sense — as the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s been an interesting year. Just last March, as the Dow free-fell toward 5,000, it seemed everyone was hording dried goods, buying gold, and passing the ammo. In April, the spirituous elixir of “hope and change” left one massive hangover as it became obvious that, despite a new occupant the White House, real yet power resided at 85 Broad Street, home of Goldman Sachs.

Then May came. The air was thick with portents of seething, simmering unrest ready to spill forth. We waited for the summer of rage. But then Hollywood disgorged its many feel-good blockbusters. Promises of unemployment benefits extended in perpetuity wafted in on early summer breezes. The majority of people suddenly seemed strangely anesthetized. The banners of revolution remained unfurled.

As autumn rolled around, and the leaves began to fall, stocks began to rise. The rancor characterizing town-hall meeting during the dog days of August seemed like they could be assuaged by the promise of health care reform and a viable public option. But then that failed too.

The harvest revels commenced with a darkly humorous travesty penned by Goldman Sachs’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein, in which he cast himself as in the central role of misunderstood missionary performing “God’s work” — a bit of theater, we learned in November, that won handsome box-office returns; Blankfein and his merry band’s year-end bonuses were going to be bigger than ever. This work of the Lord, which had become Blankfein’s sacred trust, took a decidedly apocalyptic cast. Pestilence in the form of  H1N1 influenza threatened to decimate the sheep still smarting from their latest fleecing. War set itself galloping with duly acknowledged peace angel Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan. And now Famine, and Time (the latter in the guise of Compound Interest)  set about in the saturnine days of winter to unweave the nation’s rich tapestry: unemployment figures remain at an all-time high; the dollar hurtles toward peso-fication; income inequalities grow so extreme as to make the Gilded Age look downright socialistic in comparison. Only Death remains offstage, pacing near the coulisse, eager to strut and fret his hour. . . .

So where do we go from here? How do we prepare for the year to come?

In an attempt at answering those questions, I’ve taken to reading memoirs and diaries written during the Second World War, mostly by Germans in their early twenties and thirties, and works by Soviet intellectuals imprisoned in the gulags during Stalin’s purge of the 1930s. In the anonymously authored A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, the woman in the title speaks of her generation as a lost generation, one thrown on the fire of war by a corrupt and evil administration. Though she confesses to giving up on her life for the most part (even after the war, she remained single and childless), she still tries to find joy in immediate pleasures — a cup of cocoa made from chocolate purchased on the black market, a quiet night without the sound of air raid alarms, her writing. But it’s hard to find happiness in a world that is nothing short of hellish, where ideals have been quashed and hope for the future dimmed. Despite all the brutality of mechanized war, the Berlin woman cannot shake the feeling that she’s traveling back in time, forever cut off from civilized means of conducting a happy life: “At the moment we’re marching backwards in time,” she writes: “Cave dwellers.”

I’m lucky enough not to have bombs raining over my head (yet), and I have a warm place to call home (at the moment) and food (albeit genetically altered) in my belly, but I can relate to the Berlin woman’s sense of absolute bleakness. It’s been a bad year. What’s worse,  it sometimes seems like we too are moving back in time, not to that of cave dwellers, but to the heyday of capitalism run amok — the late nineteenth century.

Time recently designated the past nine years “The Decade from Hell.” “Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end,” the article states,

the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We’re still weeks away from the end of ’09, but it’s not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over.

But does simply turning a calendrical page really promise change or welcome relief? Do the folks at Time invest a new year with some sort of numerological significance? Nothing has really changed. We’re stuck with an administration hog-tied by Wall Street fat cats, an administration that repudiates the very change it promised. Case in point: According to the Time article, incomes continue to fall:

For the average working stiff, it was a pretty lousy 10 years. The median household income in 2000 was $52,500. Last year (the most recent year available) it was $50,303. And given that the unemployment rate has climbed to 10.2%, income will almost certainly drop again this year. Low-income Americans fared even worse. In 2000, 11.3% of Americans were living below the poverty line. By 2008, that number had risen to 13.2%. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans without health insurance increased from 13.7% to 15.4%.

Icecaps continue to melt. The dollar continues to decline. The beat goes drearily, dispiritingly on.

All tomorrow's parties: finance the real "unacknowledged legislator."

I’d like to think things will get better with the new decade, but I can’t be that intellectually dishonest. Where are the reforms? Where are the third-party candidates to challenge the nation’s current political power configuration? Where are the strikes, the saboteurs, the sit-ins and the stoppages? They’re not there because what’s happened has followed on the heels of a systematic demoralization that’s spanned the last four decades (at least). We don’t do anything because we can’t; we’re too atomized, too sick, too fearful, too indebted to the very people who got us into this mess in the first place. We’re brimming over with anger, but we have no idea how to channel that anger into action.

So how do we deal with in a situation in which we seem (for the moment at least) absolutely impotent? How do we deal with the all the corruption and rot and still remain future-oriented, especially when the decades preceding the current one have been filled with more glitz and excess than the stuff that builds souls? MTV videographically valorizes the sexual lubricity and brain-damaged egoism of East-Coast “Gui-tards” with its latest reality-show sensation, Jersey Shore, and, meanwhile, a nation perishes, choking on its accumulated debt. But, fuggeddabowd it!

The American people found outsourcing solutions for their imaginations, and in so doing surrendered the only thing that distinguished them from the beasts.

How do we develop necessary fortitude in the face of casual immorality and greed whose taproot President Ronald Reagan planted, and which drew sustenance from the very glue that bound families and institutions? The seven-year itch gave way to the such prodigies as key parties and the “zipperless f*ck,” the midlife crisis, which in turn engendered the marvels we see today — “sexting,” “booty calls,” “cougars,” “MILFs,” “friends with benefits” — the wreckage of population whipped into depressingly predictable ecstasy by thousands of hours of advertising and television programming. The American people found outsourcing solutions for their imaginations, and in so doing surrendered the only thing that distinguished them from the beasts. Then, as the tide of real production went slack, these hapless sybarites were seduced into taking on thousands of dollars of debt by money-hungry universities only to be excreted four or so years later into the postindustrial dung heap the United States has been since the 1980s. I’m afraid Nietzsche was correct far more than he realized. Humans (at least those residing in the U.S.) from the point of view of other creatures had lost their “animal common sense” in a very fundamental way. They had lost the instinct of self-preservation.

How do we begin to develop a philosophy that will get us through the next thirty years without lapsing into nihilism and despair? Reading memoirs from the Second World War and Soviet gulags provides comfort inasmuch that misery loves company, especially when that company had it far worse, but those memoirs only begin to flesh out a philosophy one can use to cope with current circumstances. Should we read Albert Camus? Albert Schweitzer? Or perhaps we’d best eschew intellectualizing the situation altogether and focus on so-called “first things”: community, neighbors, civics — you know, the stuff public school once conditioned us to internalize. There’s a great decoupling currently going on between Wall Street and Main Street, and it’s hard to know when it’s time just to accept the absolute evil of the former and focus on strengthening and protecting the last remnants of the latter.

I’m not sure myself. According to a recent poll by NBC and The Wall Street Journal, 58 percent of Americans said the past decade was awful. If the next decade promises to be just as bad, it’s time to begin to figure out how to live under the mantle of a political and economic situation that seems just too big and too dependent on its own malignancy to improve.

Ylajali would love to hear from you. Drop her a line at hansengenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

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