[Part II] Existential Crisis: Recession Treatment

(Minor edit, late afternoon)

In Part I, I pointed out that while I don't suffer from clinical major depression, I do occasionally feel pretty lousy. That's normal enough; anyone who never has a down day ought rightly to be suspected of being either simple or perhaps out of touch. In any case, I am having a bit of an Existential Crisis. Simply stated, I have worked very hard for a long time on a lot of difficult projects, some of which may prove to be both useful and essential.

Yet despite having invented a better mousetrap, so to speak, the world is hardly beating a path to my door. Indeed, as near as I can tell, the world has decided that it prefers live mice to stored grains.

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Let's see. Millions unemployed, General Motors in bankruptcy, factories closing everywhere, and the Chinese are expressing cautious concern that their investments are perhaps not as safe as we warranted when we borrowed money from them.

But we're not in a Depression, no indeed.

The USA, much like myself, seems to be having an Existential Crisis.

This isn't exactly Existentialism, the philosophy as expressed in such places as the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, though it seems that these waters of the stream of consciousness, and perhaps those waters troubling the economy, all flood from the same source. Perhaps it has more to do with the works of Albert Camus.

While Sartre was one of the first to go into much detail about the spiritual struggle between "falsity" (perhaps in the forms of pomp, disingenuity, or the forms of society) and "authenticity", Camus was one of the first to go into comparable detail on the subject of a perception of "absurdity", in which an individual seeks clarity and meaning within (and from) the world, and society provides neither. Worse, society may seem to be so structured as to intentionally deny individual philosophical clarity, and to stand ready to provide us with meanings which serve primarily to cause us to obey orders or to tithe to the priests.

In much of the Western World, we believed that we had thrown aside the veils of delusion -- which were cast upon us by the Church or other organized religions -- when we Americans first declared the formal division between Church and State and this tradition began to spread elsewhere. Yet, did we not substitute comparable veils of delusion when we allowed moral relativism and Consumerism to make for us a god out of material goods? Well, that false god has failed many of us, leaving us to confront -- as a nation and as a society, the meaning of the world and our life in it, and how to sort the false from the authentic in a way which provides clarity, so that we may understand our place and duty, and how best to move forward.

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I am fortunate in that, generally speaking, I'm quite wealthy in terms of material goods... if you ignore the qualifications of "newness" and "flashiness".

The house is paid for, as are my two cars. All are in fairly good repair; I can probably drive the car another 50,000 miles and the truck is likely to still be running in another 20 years, assuming that gasoline is still being produced.

I have a decent TV, a rather large one and one of the nicest available in standard-definition when I bought it almost ten years ago. My stereo was top-flight 30 years ago, and sometimes when I just want to listen to the AM news, I turn on my perfectly sufficient vacuum-tube radio. It is a "Bradford House" brand radio, sold by the W.T. Grant chain of department stores.

I have an excellent encyclopedia, though the collection was completed in 1954. Some things never wear out, mostly, such as pots and pans, though I did have to spend $20 or so on a new coffeemaker about five years ago. Consumerism, though the more gentle consumerism of the 1970s, has filled the house from top to bottom and we're at the point where we need to build a shed to hold more "stuff". But why do we need more "stuff"?

We've always been told that when we buy "stuff", we're giving manufacturers reason to keep people employed, and that's a fact.

Yet, the vast majority of "stuff" is made in places like China (PRC and Taiwan), Korea, Indonesia, Singapore. One of the few significant manufacturing economies other than those places, which still makes a good set of products, is Germany. Oddly enough, Germans actually seem to like to work, and the German fascination with technology and improvement is well known. And here we enter into a realm of existential absurdity: the largest ethnic group in the US is of Germanic ancestry. We built this nation, and built its factories and turned prairies into the breadbasket of the world, along with our fellows such as the Irish, the Scots, and suchlike. But as a nation, we may be in the same position I am in here in my house: we have everything we could possibly need, and more, but it's all rather old. I like to buy American, to keep my fellow Americans employed -- because after all, they need money to buy more "stuff', don't they? -- but nothing I have bought since perhaps 1998 or so, when Levis stopped being made here, has been made in the USA or even in Canada. Some things used to be made in Mexico, but in the early 2000s, even the jobs of all of the Mexican industrial workers were "offshored".

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And thus I question the absurdity, and seek clarity in meaning, to understand our place in the world here in modern America, where we aren't being treated for major depression. After all, it's just a recession.

We are, so to speak, an old nation living in an old house full of old "stuff"; we have little need to buy, almost no incentive to sell, and for the most part, our local-to-nation economy consists of taking vacations, or trips to the grocery store.

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I tend to deal with these deep and gloomy moments of depression -- um excuse me I mean recession -- by looking into the past, of losing myself in the nostalgia for a brighter and more sunny day, as it were. I "go retro". Then again, for me, "retro" is the 1980s, when I was a young adult waiting for World War Three to start "Real Soon" and wasting my time until that happened in the most hedonistic ways I could. Well, that was pretty depressing, too. And in the end, I wind up looking back at those days with a sigh and the declaration of "If I had known that I'd last this long, I'd have taken better care of myself".

Yet there was a time before that, when we were afraid of the Russians but not on that scale that dominated the Reagan Years.

While the art of the Reagan Years often reminds me of the famous Statue of Diocletian's tetrarchy, in which the four emperors appear to be embracing in filial affection and then are seen to be rather fearfully looking over each others' shoulders, the art -- especially the commercial art -- of the 1950s and 1960s is far less dark and cheerless. Indeed, considering that the 1960s were best characterized as booze-and-benzedrine-driven excesses of gross overproduction by the military-industrial complex, it's hard to see how that art could be other than sunny. Considering that a fairly realistic portrait of a 1960s housewife would show a gleaming new kitchen full of appliances, with the housewife surveying a day's work well done with a pillbottle in one hand and a martini in the other, you betcha the artist represents her with an immense and self-satisfied smile of suburban bliss.

After all, people were at work... building, building.

So I have been doing a bit of research on those times, in the place we call Aspen Hill... with the assistance of the Maryland State Archive's Plats.Net and MD Land Records Net.

I have downloaded most of the subdivision plats and have used them as a window to discover the indices of titles, which themselves provide additional references. It's quite fascinating to discover how many times the ground beneath your home has been sold and subdivided and resold. It's also fascinating to discover the earliest available references to names which are -- in the modern Montgomery -- staples of any political discussion.

This little project should keep me busy -- and if not actually out of depression um I mean recession -- and fairly well distracted from the collapse of consumerism and General Motors and whatnot. I'm far from finished, but people with an interest in this sort of thing are certainly invited to come and visit Neighborhoods in Aspen Hill.

The most complete, thus far, are Aspen Hill Park and Wheaton Woods. There are lots of handy plat maps for those who like that sort of thing.

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More to come, almost certainly...

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