As you well know, email has become a conduit for inspirational choir singing. These emails always begin with a long history of forwarding telltales -- all the send-to address lists of previous baton-handers (hint to all you forwarders: you might as well send your friend's email addresses directly to the Central Spam Address Repository). They inevitably end with an exhortation to pass this important message on to everyone you know. Sometimes the directive is more an order, or even a threat. I received one the other day that is basically an ultra-conservative call to arms. It begins with the picture of a gravestone inscribed with:

People in the fifties were nuts. Americans suffered from mass hysteria, believing that hordes of communists were infiltrating our borders, subverting the susceptible among us, and would soon be hiding in our closets waiting to kidnap our children to brainwash them in kiddie commie camps. Now, granted, the world was still smarting from the ravages of WWII when the whole country had spent five years unsure whether goose-stepping Krouts would storm through our towns executing those who still spoke English and forcing us to wear leather shorts. So, their collective nerves were a bit jittery, but the mania that gripped the nation was over the top --arcing so high over the top, it's hard for us now to imagine what in goodness name they were thinking. In fact, the symptoms were suspiciously consistent: irrational anxiety, delusional suspicion, and, of course, an obsessive desire to form hair into sculptures of duck tails and beehives. Stepping back and applying a critical eye, the causative effect is now obvious. Millions of Americans were suffering from nerve poisoning. And, folks, I've figured out the source of the vile toxin. Think about it; the extensive WWII war factories were starving for products to replace the Sherman Tanks and cool leather bomber flight jackets, and they found it in ... drum roll: plastics. Yes my friends, the fifties saw the blooming of the plastics industry. And guess what? These were SOFT plastics! I remember, because within an hour of getting a plastic toy for my birthday, our dog would get at it and render the little soldier or airplane an unrecognizable blob of goo, not unlike other gooey blobs that she'd produce if not let outside in time.

But now we are finally realizing that not only are our bodies just fine wading through a sea of bacteria, but our systems are designed for it and get confused when not immersed. It's called allergies.

And these are the mild examples. Many lives were ruined by McCarthy and his communist witch hunt, and, more recently, many -- criminally many -- lives were lost, and continue to be lost, because we were so easily convinced that Saddam threatened our world with WMD lions hiding in the bushes.

I have a gripe. I'm not surprised that this doesn't surprise you, but I'm guessing that you're not guessing that this gripe is about a gripe.

Well, you can bet I gave her a piece of my mind. And I would have had I possessed a mind that operates that quickly. We're not talking about a failure of compassion here, that has the smell of condescension, but of simple civility. She may be in a position where, through superior skills, inherited advantage, or plain good luck, she has more wealth that the Starbucks' folks, but that should not be confused with superior class. I have very few ideals left about America, but one that I hold close so it doesn't scamper free and get lost in the confusion of scrabbling after the American Dream is that we are a classless society. There are many restaurants and hotels you and I don't go to, but it is our choice that keeps us away, not our social standing. We just don't have that kind of cash to blow.

In America, money buys you a big house, a cool car, and great vacations (and maybe a politician or two), but it doesn't buy you class. You earn that by being polite and cordial. Class is making other people a little bit happier without regard to how much money they make an hour.

Ten years ago this month, freshly arrived from the east coast, we moved into a rental house. The sun was setting, and I decided that I had just enough time for a quick run to loosen up the joints. The neighborhood was completely unfamiliar, but I had jogged in unfamiliar places many times while traveling with work. My technique is simple: I take off in any random direction until I can't go any farther, then note what street I'm leaving and head off again. I don't even have to remember the name of the street, I just have to recognize it when I come back to it on the return path.

What the hell?

After showering and recovering from my fevered delirium born of mental scrambling, I consulted the detailed book-map we had bought. It turns out that there are in fact three streets named Matinal:     Matinal Road, Matinal Drive, and Matinal Circle. And, here's the thing; Matinal Drive intersects with both the others at some point -- twice with Matinal Circle. The result is that in our neighborhood, there are three different corners of Matinal and Matinal. Worse, just across I-15, there are four different streets named Mirasol:   Drive, Way, Place, and Court, resulting in another three corners of Mirasol and Mirasol.

When a category four hurricane tumbles into your coastal town, you feel in your bones that even though your house may survive, you're in the middle of a whole lot of grief and loss. On the other hand, a ferocious, raging, fifty-foot high wildfire may be devouring entire blocks of a nearby neighborhood in southern California, but from a few miles away, the hell storm is an oddly shaped and strangely entrancing cloud -- menacing, but in an abstract and disassociated way. You go inside and turn on the TV to see what's going on.

This is not the life of the American Dream. This is hell, a hell whose flames flare hotter now that her limited budget is squeezed even tighter by an extra $20/week in gas. Guess where that $9/week tax relief is going for her.

I fear that things are only going to get worse. Indeed, our leaders admit this, and that alone should set us quaking. For the first time in decades, as a nation we're going to find out what family and friends are really for. For many years, they've been someone to recommend a good movie, or remember to send a cute birthday card. The time is now fast approaching when they will be rolling up their sleeves and reaching out strong hands to keep us from taking up residence in our once-shiny SUVs.

It all started with a chair. Once a week I run ten miles, just to prove that I can (although I'm going to give it up if people don't resume raising an eyebrow and nodding with admiration -- it's almost as though they've become complacent after three years). Youthful vigor is a tiny hand waving off on the horizon, though, and the day after the Big Run is spent recovering. This last week, however, I spent hours staring into a computer monitor while sweating over a particularly sticky problem, and the chair I was in was nothing more than two perpendicular plane surfaces. The result two days after the Big Run was a slightly stiff back, so that I walked around looking my age. Thus, while I was trimming some particularly nasty briars in the East Province of the jungle that surrounds our house, my lack of flexibility prevented me from giving the lethal thorns due attention and one managed to breach the stratum corneum epidermis¹ releasing copious quantities of blood². I've been putting contacts in and out of my eyes every day for twenty years, and my hands no longer need instructions from my brain, but the bandage on my finger the morning of the third day after the Big Run forced me to improvise the ancient ritual. The clumsy tussle somehow caused the tear duct in my left eye to become infected, and now my vision is watery and blurred. Because of that unyielding chair, I expect to kill, not only myself, but a family of five in an appalling head-on collision.

You see, this last week President Obama proudly announced that he would halve the deficit in four years. That's fine; a trillion dollar deficit is indeed scary. But I fear that some people may confuse deficits and debts. They may have the idea that the President is orchestrating a reduction of the national debt. Oh dear no. He's simply talking about slowing down the enormous escalation of the debt shifted into high gear by Bush. As you would know if you read last week's piece, the current national burden amounts to $75,000 per working adult. Did you also know that the combined debt carried by the American population equals the entire Gross National Product? The financial fate of the nation operates with the same economic gears as the individuals, only many millions of times bigger. Just as so many American families have learned the hard way that you can't live forever, or even for more than a few years, on borrowed money, so, I fear, will our country. Our mind-boggling national debt has been a non-issue these many years for the same reason that these foreclosed families were able to, at least for a while, acquire free money: somebody has been bankrolling the loan, in this case, other countries -- the oil-rich Mideast and China. But what happens when it dawns on them that the whole USA is "upside down"? Hillary has been touring our Uncle Vitos, reminding them that if they pull out now, their whole investment will totally tank. "We're a house of cards soaked in gasoline," I imagine her telling them, "and if

The thing is, as the economy continues to nosedive, there will reach a point when so many Americans are jobless, and the rest have finally decided to put away their credit cards and attend shoppers anonymous, that even the foreign sugar daddies will not be able to justify throwing good money after bad. And, boy will that be bad. The feds will be forced to shift the money presses into high gear and not only will we have no jobs, but inflation will take off like ... well, like a house of cards soaked in gasoline that has been lit.

I saw the economic meltdown coming. Unfortunately, there were two problems that prevented me from diverting the global crisis: 1) I started predicting it around 1994; so, like the nut who goes around warning that Armageddon is just around the corner,¹ without specifics, you have little hope of getting people excited, and 2) who the hell am I? The word "engineer" sort of sounds like "economist," but nobody ever confused the two, and as far as "novelist," well, that's just elaborate lying (hopefully with a viable story arc and characters who Come Alive).

As we do with every problem that we can't solve using the power tools in our garage, we turn to the federal government (meaning, the President and Congress), and they can do exactly three things: 1) dispatch the Army to blow things up, 2) make laws that the Supreme Court may overturn anyway, and 3) spend money. So, it's spending money. Money it doesn't have. Money it is borrowing.

What if this downturn is not a dip, but a drop? What if it is a correction? The piper must be paid. It may be that, as a nation, we can't afford the lifestyles we've been living. In fact, we couldn't afford them decades ago. Haven't we always been vaguely uneasy about all those over-populated third world countries where the people work for two dollars a day to build all our stuff? Haven't we always had the unspoken suspicion that maybe there was a catch in there somewhere? Were we really all that special that we could make twenty dollars an hour and have all our medical covered, while these poor third-world saps toiled for our benefit?

I finished the first draft of a novel this weekend. Somewhere among the last chapters was a word whose importance looms large for me, but few else. I'm only going by the counts that I post on my manuscripts and an average of the size of these weekly pieces, so I can't point to the specific word. But I am reasonably

I'm tired.

-Blaine