The world is spinning faster. The tsunami quake caused an ever-so-slight increase in the speed of Earth’s rotation. So our day is milliseconds shorter – just when we have so little time.
That’s not an April Fools’ joke. And it’s not the only fundamental shift. Something else has shifted. Maybe it began with Election 2000, the Florida fiasco, not knowing for weeks who’d be president. Then 9/11 catalyzed so much craziness that, from that day to this, I daily read stuff that should be bad-taste black humor, not real-life news. It’s as though we’re enacting a vast tragi-comedy co-written by Ionesco and Artaud – the Theatre of the Absurd meets the Theatre of Cruelty. These bits ought to be April Fools’ jokes, but they’re not:
• “About one in five Americans now suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than 13% of Americans – over 19 million people between the ages of 18 and 54 – suffer from anxiety disorders, 9.5% from depressive disorders and millions of others from conditions ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.” “In 2001, 5.5 million more Americans were taking prescription drugs for mental health problems, or problems of substance abuse, than was the case only five years earlier” [The Economist, March 5]. So if you’ve had the feeling that America’s a lot crazier than it used to be, you’re right.
• Homeland security meets homophobia: “20 of the Arabic speakers so vitally needed … have been thrown out of the military since 1998 because they were found to be gay … [yet] three years after the towers were destroyed, the FBI, rife with translation problems, admitted it had an untranslated backlog of 120,000 hours of intercepts with potential value about looming threats [my italics]. At the State Department, a study showed that only one in five of the 279 Arabic translators were fluent enough to handle the subtleties of the language” [The New York Times, Jan. 20].
• Homeland security meets the NRA: “The good news for Americans concerned about post-9/11 preparedness is that 58 potential gun buyers were flagged in a nine-month period last year as positive matches on a federal watch list of terrorism suspects. The bad news is that 47 of them were cleared to go ahead anyway and buy assault rifles, ammunition or whatever else was on their firearms shopping list.” In addition, “[gun-]purchase records must be destroyed within 24 hours” [NYT, March 9]. Whose side is the NRA on?
• One reason 9/11 happened is that FBI computers couldn’t search more than one word at a time; a two-word search – two words like “flight” and “schools” – was beyond FBI technology. Since then they’ve spent $170 million on a retooling effort that has just been declared a failure. “I am tremendously disappointed,” FBI Director Robert Mueller told the House Appropriations Committee. Mueller promised that “in the next few months” they’ll try to figure what went wrong, after which they’ll embark on a new retool project that will take another three and a half years [NYT, March 9]. Three and a half more years of a computer-blind FBI.
• But is terrorism humanity’s biggest threat? Time, March 14: “Abject poverty kills 20,000 people very day.” That’s nearly seven times the number who died on 9/11. “Eight million people die each year because they are too poor to stay alive.” That’s the human equivalent of nuking New York City one year; Chicago and L.A. the next; Albuquerque, San Diego, San Antonio, and Atlanta the next … and so on. “The nearly $500 billion that the U.S. will spend this year on the military will never buy lasting peace if the U.S. continues to spend only one-thirtieth of that, around $16 billion, to address the plight of the poorest of the poor, whose societies are destabilized by extreme poverty. The $16 billion represents 0.15% of U.S. income, just 15 cents on every $100 of our national income. The share devoted to helping the poor has declined for decades and is a tiny fraction of what the U.S. has repeatedly promised, and failed, to give.”
• But some folks are doing fine. Publicly owned U.S. companies “devoted about 10% of their profits to compensating their top five executives” [NYT, Nicholas D. Kristof’s column, March 19]. Read that twice. You buy an item – a gallon of gas, a roll of toilet paper – and a hefty chunk of what you pay goes to five people. While 20,000 die of starvation that day. It’s possible that something may be wrong with our free-trade capitalist market system, you think?
• Not to worry. We are being guided by great minds. When Bush won his massive tax cuts in the spring of 2001 (for the benefit of the rich), he and Alan Greenspan predicted years of bounteous government surpluses. We now have the hugest deficits in history. Greenspan recently admitted his mistake: “It turns out all of us were wrong. We were confronted at the time with an almost universal expectation that we were dealing with a very large surplus for which there seemed to be no end” [NYT, March 16]. That, by the way, is a lie; many reputable economists predicted exactly what would happen. Yet Greenspan & Co. are still the experts Congress and Wall Street listen to. Greenspan burps, and it’s a headline. Honorable public servants, having been so wrong, to such disastrous effect, would resign. But the very same people are still dispensing advice and wisdom that this government heeds. Which would be funny if it did not ultimately mean financial destruction for so many trusting souls.
• Sometimes you have to go a long way to find the truth. All the way to page 10 of The New York Times Business section [March 16]. The headline is a little risqué for the Times: “Foreign Capital Inflows Rise (But Read the Small Print).” The small print is, to put it mildly, alarming. Given the deficits that Greenspan didn’t foresee, our government must borrow $2 billion a day to remain solvent. This January, 41% of that money came from Caribbean hedge funds, while “Asian banks … have slowed their purchases [of our bonds] or have been sellers of American securities.” If you investigate what a Caribbean hedge fund is, and if you contemplate that in January (February figures aren’t yet available) 41% of our government’s solvency was dependent upon Caribbean hedge funds, while the grown-ups in Asia are quietly bailing on us … you’d be scared. With good reason. When 41% of our debt depends on hedge funds, it’s a shell game, it’s a house of cards, it’s going down the toilet any minute.
• You’d think this would be a good time to staff an active, competent Treasury Department. But everyone – conservatives, liberals, mainstreamers – want Treasury Secretary John Snow to go. He’d be gone by now if only the White House could find someone knowledgeable to take his job. No one wants it because no one competent would rubber-stamp Bush’s policies. In addition, “the No. 2 job has been vacant for nearly two months, and the first-choice candidate has recently removed his name from consideration. The post of undersecretary for domestic finance, the Treasury’s main liaison with Wall Street … has been vacant all year. The job of assistant secretary for tax policy has also gone unfilled this year … [and] the under secretary for international affairs, the person who coordinates with the World Bank and International Monetary fund” just resigned [NYT, editorial, March 23]. In a sane administration, Treasury is equal in importance to the State Department and the Pentagon. In this administration, no one’s home.
• Three months into the Iraq invasion, 50,000 U.S. troops didn’t have bulletproof vests. In May, they were ordered – from a company that had never mass-produced anything and that failed to deliver. “The Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq. … For thousands of soldiers … it took weeks and even months more. … By contrast, when the United States allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days” [NYT, p.1, March 7]. Which means that many of our killed and wounded in the first five months of the war were hit not by enemy fire so much as by Pentagon foul-ups. And, as usual in the Bush administration, the people responsible either still have their jobs or, like Paul Wolfowitz, have been promoted.
In World War II our GIs had a word for this sort of thing: FUBAR. It means: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. 
This article appears in “The AC” Gen Y Magazine Debuts.