Bowie In An Elevator

One of my few brushes-with-famous-people was with David Bowie.

It was the second week of September, 1983, and he was playing at the Coliseum in Vancouver. I’d just started at UBC, and was drinking rather a lot, as was my wont. One night there was a mixer at Place Vanier with free booze, and me and a friend of mine who I’d graduated with and who was also a freshman at UBC took great advantage of the freebies (white wine, for some bizarre reason, as I recall, something I’d never really gotten inebriated on before).

It was pouring rain that evening, as usual, and when the mixer shut down, I was, in young wonderchicken style, just getting geared up. But being underage, finding more booze was going to be a challenge, so we decided to make the trek across campus to Gage Towers to find her older brother, the theory being that he could hook us up with some more grog.

As we passed in front of the computer science buildings, I got it into my head to do the Gene Kelly routine from Singing in the Rain, and sing and splash and swoop around the light poles a bit. Predictably, my blood-alcohol content rendered my swooping a little less graceful than it should have been, and I ended up breaking my ankle.

Next morning, I woke up in my dorm room in my clothes with a monumental wine hangover and a somewhat hazy recollection of the night before. Reeking, disoriented, with a throbbing right ankle that felt about the size of my head. My mother, who was visiting Vancouver to see I’d settled in, and her sister, who’d come to visit with my mom, were knocking on the door. I can’t say they were all that surprised. At least Mitzi — yes, my friend’s name was Mitzi — wasn’t there in the bed with me, too.

We went to the campus hospital, I got strapped up and given a pair of crutches, and we went to the Bayshore Hotel, where they were staying, for breakfast. I was feeling about as physically bad as an 18-year-old can.

The elevator stopped on our way up to my mom and aunt’s room. I could smell myself, and it wasn’t pretty. I was staring at the carpet, swaying, sweating, and trying desperately not to throw up, but noticed more or less in my peripheral vision two very large black-suited men and one much smaller blond man get on.

We got off on my mom’s floor, and as we did, I realized that the little fellow was David Bowie. The realization took long enough to percolate through my hungover brain that all I had time for was a double-take, wobbling on my crutches, enough to turn and meet his eyes and smile, and get a smile back.

I believe that he was a nice fellow because of that smile, ’cause man, if I’d had to stand in an elevator with my sodden, reeking self that morning, I’d have been rejoicing the moment I got off.

This first, memorable experience of my university career turned out to be emblematic of the next 5 years. UBC was a lot of fun.

Making Do

I was tightly wound when I was a teenager. I’d been a fat kid, which kind of ruined my self-confidence back in the days when that wasn’t as common as it is these days, and I had a step-dad who had his own problems and wasn’t really a subscriber to the self-image boosting regimen. And I had acne that literally scared people, I think, at least until years later, when the docs put me on accutane and damn near killed me with the stuff.

I was big and strong and well-put-together, smart and funny and creative, sociable and athletic and geeky all at once. I really should have gotten laid a lot more than I did, looking back on it.

But, like most teenagers, I had a crippling case of self-consciousness and a brain that worked overtime, and that self-reinforcing combination conspired at least part of the time to auger me into the dirt. Still, I came through OK, more or less, and look back on that time with much fondness.

One of the ways that being constantly stressed manifested itself, other than the facial irruptions, was nearly-constant low-level stomach pain. I think, though I can’t recall exactly, that the small-town doctors in the small-town hospital in my small town diagnosed me with stress-induced ulcers, at least incipient ones. After flipping a coin, which was the usual way of doing those things, unless there was a freshly killed chicken available. And not taking into account that they’d destroyed my digestive system with tetracycline for something like 4 years straight. This was also back in the stone age before there were any of the preventatives, palliatives, and treatments for proto-ulcers so easily found these days.

I think they sent me home with a hearty, bluff, South African ‘relax, you’ll get over it, son’ or something equally useless. And another scrip for antibiotics. You may get the impression I have some bitterness towards the medical profession. I think that would be a fair assessment.

So I self medicated. What I’d found was that Eno Fruit Salts, the Alka-seltzer-esque powder that people tended to take for indigestion or hangover queasiness, cooled the fires in my belly, at least temporarily. A tablespoonful in a tall glass of cold well water, wait until the fierce bubbling had reached its peak and then down it, breathing deeply through my nose to get that crisp waft of salty CO2, and I had a few hours of sweet surcease.

Of course, this was also back in the day when nobody really knew that salt was bad for you, or worried that each dose of this stuff carried a couple of grams of sodium with it as well.

I inevitably developed a taste for the stuff. Everyone else I knew hated the taste, drank it only in the deepest hungover despair in hopes of relief. I loved it. I started drinking it just because I liked the taste, even once I started to grow out of the awkwardness of my mid-teens, get lean, lose some of the worst of the rococo facial carbuncles, gain confidence, and leave behind the constant stomach pain. And by my late teens, I’d started boozing, and a nice tall glass of delicious Eno in the morning cut the worst of the cobwebs. I’d seen the old-timey ads that called it a ‘liver-tonic’, too, so I figured why not.

But like any addict eventually does, I started amping things up. My version of the speedball was Eno added to Club Soda. That glass would positively erupt with bubbles, and drinking it down was thrilling. Sweet, salty monkey on my back.

In later years, when I started travelling, I stopped drinking it except as a rare treat, wisely I suppose, because all that sodium just can’t be good for you. But in the last 10 years or so here in Korea, I’ve missed it, mostly because like anyone else, I miss most the things that I can’t get. And there ain’t no Eno in Korea.

A year or so ago, though, it was finally possible to buy soda water — sparkling mineral water is what people call it these days, I guess — here in Korea. A domestic brand, the first, I think, and the big Home Plus store they built a few years ago not far from our house stocked it. I was thrilled, because I don’t drink Coke or any of the other sugar waters, but I do love me some bubbles. But something was missing.

Fast forward to a month or two ago, and my wife, along with a bunch of other vitamins and supplements, ordered a container of pure, pharmaceutical grade Ascorbic acid — Vitamin C — because she hates taking pills.

I don’t know what struck me, but entirely by random one Saturday afternoon while feeling a little under the weather from my customary Friday-night-at-home beer adventure, I poured a glass of soda water and mixed in about half a teaspoon of the ascorbic acid.

Holy crap. It was like tasting home again. Thirty years since I drank the stuff daily, and a couple of years since the last of the bottle I’d brought back from my last visit to Canada had run out. It tasted almost exactly as I remembered Eno used to, right down to that certain added fierceness to the effervescence.

And the best part? No sodium, at all, so my borderline blood pressure doesn’t cross into the Old Man Danger Zone.

I am a simple man, and it takes very little to make me giddy with glee. I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you about this one thing that did.

The Ape and The Snake

The men who planned and carried out the bombings in Bali in 2002, the ones that killed one of my oldest and dearest friends (but only after he suffered with burns over most of his body for nearly two weeks) along with 201 other people, were executed last month.
You’d think I’d be happy about that.
Let me tell you a little story that may not seem to have much to do with this, but does, somehow, in a way that’s not entirely clear to me. Maybe in the telling, I can work it out a bit.
It was the mid-70s, I think, another glorious short clean summer in Northern BC, one of the ones that stay with me in my memory, and my aunt, uncle and two cousins were visiting us.
We had taken our river boat ten or fifteen kilometers up the lake, up to one of the rocky beaches under the ridge of Mount Pope, inshore from Battleship Island. We set up our outpost on a long expanse of thumb-size pebbles rattling under a broad unclouded vault of sky, stands of jackpine and spruce at our backs clustered beardlike around yellow stone cliff outcroppings. Clear deep dark green water, hot dogs cooked on whittled birch sticks over a fire pit. It was the kind of day that makes you feel glad to be alive, especially when you’re 8 or 10 years old and all is right with the world.
I remember at one point my cousins and I were ranging up the shingly beach, just exploring, when we came across the biggest snake I’d ever seen. It was glistening and black and in the water, and it took off like a shot as soon as it saw us, undulating frantically as it headed along the rocky verge, trying to escape.
We were curious, or at least I was, and we started throwing driftwood and rocks in its path, trying to get it to turn around, or slow down, so we could get a better look. I’m not sure, of course, what my cousins were thinking, but I don’t think they had any more malicious intent than I did. We were curious. The missiles we hurled at the poor beast got progressively larger and we got more excited, and the inevitable happened. One of the rocks or sticks landed square on the snake, and killed it. It uncoiled and floated, light belly up.
As we’d been hollering and chasing the snake, my uncle, presumable alerted by our excitement, had come up behind us just as the fatal stone did its work. All he saw was hooting boys killing an innocent creature.
He wasn’t furious, he was disgusted, disappointed. I still remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the look on his face. I don’t think anyone had ever looked at me like that before.
Several people have sent me links to news items about the execution of the Bali bombers in the past few weeks, and each time, I’ve had to tell them that I just didn’t know what to feel about it, much less what to think.
I find as I grow older that every year I am certain about less and less.
I’ve said to some folks who asked that although I do not believe that more killing is a good response to killing, if I were handed the gun, or set down in front of the switch behind the one-way glass, or just put into a room with the bastards, I wouldn’t hesitate to exact vengeance for the death of my friend. Pull the trigger, press the button, beat them with my fists. I’ve said to my friends that I am an ape masquerading as a man.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, I really don’t. It sounds good, I suppose, and I’ve always been about the dramatic pronouncement over the measured interpretation.
Is the world a poorer place without my friend Rick Gleason living in it? Yes, it is, and the same is no doubt true for the friends and family members of each and every of the other 201 people killed in the bombings. Is the world a better place without their killers living in it? I think it probably is.
We tell ourselves a lot of stories about ‘the sanctity of human life’. We seem to mean the lives of those we know and love when we talk about it, and that’s not surprising or wrong. We find it hard to care about strangers, and harder to care about strangers whose tribe is different, and even harder to care about those strangers who would do us harm if they could, or leave us to die without compunction. People get all misty about their Jesus and his injunctions to love one’s enemies and turn cheeks.
But we don’t really believe that human life, in the abstract, is sacred, even if we’re willing to go the extra mile and define what we mean by sacred, do we? Not really. We make war, we ignore the roots of violent crime and turn away, we spend millions on blood-fiesta movies and video games and tell ourselves that it’s about catharsis. The best we can reasonably claim to believe is that some human life is sacred.
We’re not bad people, of course, most of us. Actual, personal violence we find shocking, unacceptable, abhorrent. We are traumatized by the headless corpse behind the steering wheel sitting in the puddle of blood and piss in the twisted plastic and metal of the Friday night wreck. We’re dutifully frightened by the TV news items about violent crime that are intended to keep us dutifully frightened and at home watching the sponsor’s messages. But we do love our serial killers and the movies about them, we love our torture porn, we love our Schwarzeneggerian one-liners before the shotgun skullpop, even while we guard our vulnerable citizens against violence domestic and corporal and sexual and even emotional. We righteously and rightfully do our best to end the social conditions that allow such things to happen. And we support our troops. You know, if we have any. We compartmentalize.
I don’t think most of us are all that clear on these things, and I suppose I’m no better than anyone else.
See, if we admit that by executing those bastards, and we accept that violence has its place in our attempts to make the world better, we have accepted that violence has its place. This has consequences.
And if we’re not trying to make the world better, then we’re just acting out another episode of the woeful old Jehovahriffic vengeance.
I’m not against vengeance, though I’d rather be a man than an ape. I have to admit that there are times when I want to bare my yellowed fangs and rip out a throat and feel the hot pulse of blood wash across my cheek.
Thirty years later, having returned to the memory many times over the years, I don’t think I wanted to kill that snake. But I’m not certain that that was actually the truth at the time.

My Home Is Dying

When you grow up in the far north in Canada, if you’re at all curious about the world and the people in it, you can’t wait to get out. As soon as you’re able, you head out to the big city, for work or school or whatever you can get. It isn’t such a different story from kids growing up in the boonies anywhere, where it’s Montana or Gangwon-do in Korea, western New South Wales or the Cyclades.
I grew up, for the years that counted at least, in Fort Saint James, British Columbia. During those years — the early 70′s to the early 80′s — it was the End of The Road. Vanderhoof was the asshole of the world and we were forty miles up it, we said, recycling that old standby. The paved highway ended in the Fort, and to go further north meant logging roads and endless washboard and pothole gravel, dusty in summer, solid ice in winter, and slicker than snot the rest of the time. There were a couple of reservations further up there, and a few scattered fishing lodges and mines and logging camps. Wilderness, though, for the most part. Endless dense forest carpetting mountains, nap worn smooth in spots by crystal-clear cold lakes and rivers. Germanson Landing. Takla Landing. Leo Creek. Deese Lake. I’d like to say I hunted bear in these places wearing nothing but a breechclout and bowie knife, but with parents who were grappling with living on the frontier after moving from southern Ontario and a little shellshocked by family tragedy, the names of these tiny, isolated places were almost as exotic to me as Tokyo or Timbuktu. We didn’t stray too far.
But our own tiny town of 2500 or so was frontier enough for anyone, and, in what feels all these decades later like a deliberate, considered balance to the more bookish side of my nature, but was probably just imposed on me by the environment, I spent a lot of my time outdoors. In the summer especially, I’d spend 5 or 6 hours a day just behind our house swimming in the cold runoff-fed waters of Stuart Lake, or buckling on my first-gen Sony Walkman and riding my bicycle further and further out along the limited network of paved roads that snaked out along it, or to the south towards Vanderhoof, or the 10 or 15 kilometers north to the saw mills, after which the asphalt just stopped. Looking for something.
The trees never ended. The trees were everywhere. There were some things, growing up, that seemed limitless in their supply, overabundant, somehow both comforting and a little obnoxious in their insistence on being a part of every experience you could have: the trees, the water, and the snow. Nobody, or at least no young people that I knew, ever entertained for a moment the possibility that these things weren’t eternal, perpetual, guaranteed. We were ants on a golf course, surrounded by plenty, living the good life, and occasionally cursing the sprinklers.
For my part, I was one of those young people — and by no means was I in the majority — who couldn’t wait to get out, and once out, stayed. But I was also in a minority of the escapees, I think, in that I loved the place, even before I left. I’d read enough science fiction as a preteen to know that the dystopian extrapolations of scorched and dusty futures were based on the lives that people in more populous and less resource-blessed places were living already. I wasn’t all that keen to hunker down or bunker up.
I was afraid in a weirdly longing way of the nukes we assumed would soon be sailing along gravity’s rainbow, even if I was confident that up there in the North we’d be relatively unscathed by the coming armageddon. But I loved the sulphurous mineral rich town water that stained porcelain orange. I loved the thunderstorms that rolled in from the west over the 60 kilometre expanse of the lake, the bloodsplash summer forest fire sunsets, the northern lights you could almost hear, the way the hip-deep powdery snow creaked and puffed when the temperature got down to 40 below zero and your eyelashes began to freeze together. I loved the dusty evergreen smell of the trees and the rocks when we climbed up Mount Pope under flawless blue skies, I loved skindiving out to the drop-off in the lake, where the water, clear as air, grew dark and frightening, and my lungs felt ready to burst as I tried again and again to see what was down there, every minute irrationally terrified remembering the stories of giant sturgeon that had been pulled from those depths in decades past. I loved riding out on the lake in boats, and even riding on the river, even though that’s where my younger brother had died, in that fast dark water, when I was 6 years old. I loved blizzards and whiteouts, and waking up in the morning to see drifts of fresh snow that reached the roof of our house in beautiful mathematical arcs. I loved standing in our cold kitchen in my robe in the winter mornings before school while my mom made me breakfast, over the floor grate as the furnace blew hot air up my legs. I loved when the spring came and the roads and streets shed their dirty ice shells, and I could once again hop on my bicycle and prowl the streets, nose in the air smelling that good spring smell, hoping that maybe I’d see the girl I was in love with, but almost never seeing her. I loved the brief melancholy autumn smell of wet leaves in the freezing rain.
I didn’t fit in very well in many ways, though I tried, and once I began to drink — the official sport of Northern BC — it became much easier, and much as there were many people I loved and still love in that place, in some ways it was the place itself that made the greatest mark on me. I am and always will be someone who loves things green and blue and clean, and a smalltown boy who hauls out his big-city credentials and plays the global nomad urban expat sophisticate with a little reluctance.
I’ve been an expatriate most of the last 20 years and I’ll probably never live there again, but it will always be a huge part of who I am.
The reason our little town has existed and more or less thrived in the last century or so, though it was the first capital of British Columbia back in the fur trading goldrush days of the 19th century, has been the forestry industry. It’s a beautiful place, and tourists do come, but the lumber mills have always, at least in the last few lifetimes, provided something like 80% of the jobs, and powered an even larger component of the overall economy. It has been the same story for most of the small towns in the region. I worked in the mills too, bitching and moaning and drinking away the bruises, during my summer vacations from UBC, back in the 80′s. Taught me the value of hard work, and how much I don’t really care for it.
All that’s coming to an end. The trees are dying, and with them, the towns. It’s the pine beetle, you see. Just tiny little bugs. Nothing so dramatic as bombs or storms or ice caps melting away.
People like to debate the phenomenon of global climate change as if it were an academic issue. People who don’t live in the path of the huang-sa dust storms that sweep in out of China to blanket Korea every spring, and get worse with each passing year, people who aren’t in Central British Columbia watching 85% of the pine trees die off, and with the trees, the futures of their children. People whose health or livelihood isn’t directly affected.
But then again, those British Columbians aren’t entirely blameless, unlike the poor Koreans (and me) who are sucking down heavy metal-laden dust that we had no part in creating. While noting that the pine beetles are a natural part of the ecosystem, Canadian ecosuperhero (at least for my generation) David Suzuki blames forest fire suppression, clearcutting (and subsequent replanting), global warming. The first two can be laid directly at the feet of the folks who live there, whether they like to admit it or not.
The global warming part is textbook: to put it simply, as I understand it, warmer winters means reduced insect die off in the coldest part of the year, which means more of the little buggers the following season, and warmer temperatures the rest of the year means they spread further.
Forest fire suppression breaks the necessary cycle of old growth die off and renewal.
Clearcutting means huge areas are effectively denuded, and replanting with a single species of tree means a lack of biodiversity in the new forest, green as it may appear.
The bugs have rushed in as a result, and whole region is in very big trouble.
In the 6 years leading up to 2007 130,000 square kilometres of pine forest have been destroyed by the beetles. To put that number in perspective, that’s the area of the country of England, or about one and a half times the area of South Korea. It’s an armageddon all right, but not the kind that gave me nightmares when I was a teenager.
The irony to all this is that the massive die off of pines (and the infestation is moving to spruce, apparently) means, according to some researchers, that the forests of BC will no longer act as a carbon sink for the earth’s atmosphere, but by 2020 will become a carbon source, making the problems even worse. It wouldn’t be excesssive to describe this as a calamity. An area the size of a small country will be filled with standing kindling, which means forest fires will rage on a scale never before seen — imagine, again, the entire country of England aflame for a sense of the scale involved.
Imagine that.
And companies that practiced unsustainable clearcutting, and the successive governments that allowed it? A special circle of hell will hopefully be reserved for those bastards. You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Have a look at this, to get an idea what those greedy f–kers have done to my home, and to our collective heritage over the past few decades. First, what the forests around my hometown (it’s at the tip of Stuart Lake, there, center left) looked like in 1973, not long after my family moved there. Unbroken green, punctuated only by the blue of the northern lakes, and some farmland around Vanderhoof, down there at the lower left.

Now have a look at the same area in 1999. See the clearcuts? See what ‘stewardship of the resource’ has meant? See the spots, like some kind of mange, some horrific skin disease? Good job, you scum. You’ve burned your own house down around your ears. Thanks, American owners of Canadian forestry companies! You’ve screwed us again.

I have nothing against forestry. I have nothing against logging. It has been the lifeblood of the community that made me who I am, and supported people I know and love (and some I don’t care for so much, I admit.)
What I can’t and couldn’t ever ignore, yeah, even while I was sweeping up the damp rich sawdust for fifteen bucks an hour, is the ways in which it has been pursued. And now, finally, the bats are coming home to roost, and it will be decades before the province and the industry recovers. Next time, maybe, they’ll do it right. If there is enough fossil fuel left to do it, and any communities left to work there.
So what’s happening on the ground? Two years ago, when I last visited Canada, I drove a rented car from Vancouver the 1100km north to Fort Saint James. There were stretches of a hundred kilometres and more where every tree that lined the highway on either side, once stately and evergreen and immutable, was the dull reddish brown of standing deadwood. It was a terrible thing to see. My mother, who was mayor of Fort Saint James for 14 years and still lives there, painted a pretty gloomy picture when we last talked. Of the 4 lumber mills that have provided most of the economic steam to run the community for decades, two are out of business, and one, run by the native community, is limping along with about 50 employees. Young families are leaving in droves. Real estate prices are plummeting, and houses are standing empty. Last year was one of the best ever for tourism, and that will hopefully never change, but other towns in less beautiful areas are in the process of drying up and blowing away.
Trees take decades to grow in Northern British Columbia. The good times are not going to come back any time soon.
I don’t pay much attention to goings-on in Canada. I don’t know how much attention is being paid to this. I suppose people are too worried about the coming real estate bust in the cities. I suppose the economic boom and environmental nightmare of the oil sands in Alberta offers some distraction. I don’t know. But what I am sure about is that my hometown is dying.
I have mixed feelings.
The forests will come back. The forestry industry and government will, we can only hope, learn some lessons. People will relocate — Canada is a nation of migrants — and towns will shrink and maybe disappear. It’s probably just wishful thinking, but it would be nice to think that things will shift toward a real attitude of sustainability and stewardship.
No matter how it all plays out, a lot of people will be hurt in the process. It takes a lot of good to outweigh the pain that the end of a way of life brings.
It’s happening all over the world. They say change is good. They say a lot of stuff.
Update: The news is that a local (-ish) company has taken over the largest mill in Fort Saint James, the one that closed a year ago. They are aware and resigned to the fact that they will lose money for a good while, but they are focused on the long-term. This is fantastic news for the town — it means hundreds of jobs, and means the town will not dry up and blow away. Other towns may not be so lucky, but I am gratified that my hometown at least seems to be looking at a stay of execution.
Update 2, Fall 2010: My mother’s been mayor again after more than a decade out of the job — Mayor Sandy to the rescue! — and things, in part through good timing and in part through her political skills, have turned around to an almost astonishing degree. The downtown core has been revitalized and renovated, a new gold mine is going in north of town adding hundreds of new jobs and millions in new tax revenue and businesses, there’s not a single rental space available in town, and everything is humming the way it hasn’t since…. well, since the last time my mother was mayor, to be honest. While the rest of the region is undergoing severe economic difficulties stemming from the problems I talked about here, at least FSJ is weathering the storm. Even if I never end up back there — a vanishingly unlikely possibility — that’s still very comforting to know.

Here’s a pretty word cloud, in celebration:

Armageddon Schadenfreude

When I was a teenager, I thought a lot about the end of the world. In particular, the rain of nukes that always seemed just around the corner. I was fascinated and terrified. I suppose that’s not an unusual thing for kids that age, and might even have been the usual for m-m-m-my generation.
I grew up in the 70s, came of age in the early 80s. I was convinced that nuclear war was near-inevitable. I had no doubt that doddering dimwitted Ronald Reagan (read ‘his handlers’) and whichever doddering Soviet supremo was currently being propped up and jerkily animated with electric current (read ‘his handlers’) were going to blow the crap out the world. I dreamed about it. I can remember a grand total of one wet dream from my pubescent years; I can remember literally dozens of atomic holocaust dreams.
I remember Helen Caldicott and her Canadian-made If You Love This Planet. They showed it to us in high school. I remember the TV movies Threads and The Day After. Two and half decades after seeing Threads, I still remember the camera lingering on the puddle of urine at the woman’s feet as the mushroom clouds rose. I watched The Road Warrior when it was first released. I remember reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. I sucked up all the ’50s bomb-shelter paranoiac sci-fi juvenilia I could get my mother to buy for me at the bookstores on our shopping trips to the nearest city. I read what little I could find about the growth of the Cold War arsenals. It was… a hobby of mine.
Not that I was the archetypal Weird Kid or anything, muttering head-down through greasy locks about the ‘end of the world’. I had normal hobbies, too: comics and computers, swimming and biking, booze and friends’ fast cars. Girls. I showered regularly. But I did dream a lot about the end of the world.
And they weren’t all nightmares by any means. See, I grew up in a tiny town more than 1000 kilometers north of Vancouver. I was completely confident that when the bombs fell, we’d be safe and secure. When I was in Grade 5, my gifted-group teacher had had a meteorologist boyfriend who’d lent me (and the other smart kid they’d cut from the herd to study what and how we liked) his weather maps. I’d learned about the prevailing wind currents of north-central British Columbia. We’d be all good when the balloon went up. The nearest mushroom cloud might sprout and rain its deadly ash 500km away, at worst, accidental mistargetings notwithstanding, and leave us basically unscathed
We had moose and squirrel salmon, we had farms and ranches, we had endless forest. Fruit might get a little scarce, but hell, I didn’t much like fruit anyway. My house had a deep well, and the lakes and rivers were sweet and clear. Nuclear winter? No worries. We lived through -45°C spells every damn year. We’d get by. Let the mad bastards down south kill each other off en masse. We’d be the inheritors of the earth, us hardy northern canucks, ululating our diesel-powered ways down out of the arboreal wastes, antlers strapped to the hoods of our Barracudas and pickup trucks, to rebuild things in our own Royal Reserve-powered image. Proud Canadians. There’d finally be some kind of payoff for living 40 miles up the asshole of the earth for so many years.
Armageddon didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Not the best result in a lot of ways, sure, but Ouroboros the world-turd was spinning at the bottom of the bowl, anyway. Time for cleansing holy nuclear fire! It’d be a shame, all those innocent people getting torched, but we kept reading how overpopulation was going to kill the planet even if the nukes didn’t.
So talk these days of a coming economic armageddon with Ground Zero in America’s bubble have actually put me in a nostalgic mood. Headlines like China threatens ‘nuclear option’ of dollar sales take me right back to 1982. Media tidbits like Jim Cramer’s recent howling monkey-boy histrionic meltdown — ‘It’s Armageddon out there!” have fascinated me in the kind of way that (metaphorical) nuke-porn did back in the day.

It’s far from certain, of course, that the blow up is going to happen, or even that things will fall apart. But I’ve been watching the whole thing for years now, after decades of conditioned ignorance about economics, and the New Great Depression feels as likely to me as nuclear tennis did back in the early ’80s.
Then again, that didn’t end up happening, did it? There’s some comfort in that, I guess.
A comment from the perspicacious Malor in a recent Metafilter thread (among many others about the subprime mortgage mess, the yen carry trade, the liquidity dry-up, and all the rest) lays out genesis of the worst case scenario pretty well, I think. Is it a Minsky Moment? Yeah, probably.
Malor said:

We should have gone into a horrific recession after the stock market bubble popped in 2000. The size of that bubble was far bigger than the one in 1929, so the consequences should have been even more severe… something on the order of severity of the Great Depression, although I think a 1970s-style stagflation writ large was the likeliest outcome.
What happened instead is that the Fed panicked and hit the liquidity button, flooding the system with incredibly cheap money. New money chases inflation, and causes more of it, so it went into housing, and then people started leveraging themselves up into massive debt to buy more of it.
Bubbles have been called the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear weapon; the only way to avoid the fallout is by not having one in the first place. The stock market bubble was a huge deal, though probably survivable.
But the Fed, which set off the original bubble with easy money, tried to fix the fallout with more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place. To stop the fallout from one atomic bomb, they set off two fusion weapons instead…. and we didn’t even dodge the fallout from the first bomb, we just delayed it. The explosion of the other two bombs just sent the fallout into orbit, but it’s still up there, and we’re still gonna eat every rad.
At the very least, we’re going to have a full generation of very hard times, tougher than anything in living memory. I think we will be exceptionally fortunate if the United States continues to exist as the same legal entity.
In terms of likely outcome, my operating theory is that we’ll go into a short-term deflationary crunch, but the Fed will open the floodgates and send us into an inflationary death spiral. Not just nasty horrible stagflation for two decades like we would have had from the Y2K pop, but an actual hyperinflationary death spiral for the dollar.
With fiat currency, I just don’t think a true deflationary collapse is possible… although with the unbelievably massive leverage in the derivative positions, I suppose it could happen. Money could be destroyed from debt default faster than the Fed can lend new dollars into circulation.
There’s one name you should remember in the coming crisis: Greenspan. This is all his doing. His refusal to ever allow a recession, ever, led us directly into this mess. He never met a problem he couldn’t cover up with liquid paper.

I think Malor might be overstating the case when he talks about a generation of hard times. On the other hand, if China pulls the economic trigger, he might be understating it.
Anyway, the winds taste the same to me because as the tension builds I’m once again far from the places where the corpses will litter the ground if and when the hammer falls. Two and half decades ago I was in the far north of Canada, confident that we’d be able to sustain ourselves while the rest of the world went to hell. Now I’m in Korea, and if economic armageddon happens, once again I’m not directly in the line of fire. Once again, if it all goes to hell, I’ll feel sorry for all the people (even the stupid ones who went for their two year no-money-down teaser-rate no-declare ARM mortgages for a McMansion they knew they couldn’t afford) who lose it all. The rich will make it through, as they always do, this time with Bushy legislation and offshore accounts rather than hardened bunkers and hidey holes.
Well, I like to say I’ll feel sorry about the end of days. I said to myself when I was 17 that I’d be sorry about all those crispy corpses down in CanadAmerica South. But not entirely sincere the sentiment, I have to admit, then or now. The truth is, of course, in some ways, on some days: I think I’d feel like pumping my fist, taking a deep breath, and shouting ‘That’s what you get for shortsighted greed and systematic stupidity, you bastards!’ Or more succinctly, ’cause my wind is not what it once was, ‘Suck it, dummies!’
I’m a bad man that way. Or part of me is and was, at least.
Bad things are going to happen to the Korean economy, certainly, if and when America’s economy goes tits-up and takes the rest of the world with it. But if I lived in North America, if I was mortgaged to the hilt, if I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I’d be a lot more worried about it than I am here in Korea with my life savings in won and no debt.
Maybe we ought to buy some gold, though.
So I am back where I was when I was young — a cleansing fire might just be what’s needed to clean out the corruption and cauterize the wounds. Part of me almost looks forward to it. I’m not sure if I really believe that, or if it’s just the romantic teen I was surfacing again for a last misanthropic gasp before he goes down into that dark cold water for the last time.
Either way: armageddon schadenfreude. It’s not just a good name for a postmodern superhero.
[Update: more background material and some excellent explanations of the IMPENDING DOOOOOOOM in this MeFi thread.]

I think of Dean Moriarty

…so in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty.

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