An Ominous Year

Summer is nearly done. Officially, it won’t end until September 30, but our collective perception is that the now fast-approaching Labor Day weekend marks the end of the season, and the beginning of the end of the year.

The troubled and sour year 2006 is on the wane; and the ominous figure of 2007 comes into view.

2007 Is a number whose digits add up to nine, the number of endings. We’ll see the end of the hot housing market, as thousands who suckered themselves into the foolish game of interest-only mortgage payments and drew loans against equity find themselves stuck holding property worth less than what they owe. Their cries of self-inflicted pain will echo throughout the land.

The price of crude oil, presently on hold at slightly over $70, will rise again, all the way to 85 or 90 dollars this time, and the price of gasoline will ratchet up another buck, to four. People will chatter about alternative sources of energy – electricity, or hydrogen, or biomass, or unexploited forms of oil such as tar sands and asphalts – subjects upon which the oil monopoly will remain mute and inscrutable as the stone heads on Easter Island. There’s no acceptable way for them to announce that they’re making too much money from things arranged just as they are to tolerate the prospect of any sort of change.

Most ominously, the war will continue lurching along, going nowhere, going in circles and leaving bloody footprints, like a headless monster. Without aim or purpose, objectiveless, meaningless, and lethal, it will eat up lives and fortunes, mostly those of the innocent. Ordinary Iraqis of all persuasions will remain nailed to the cross, while our young “volunteers” are left hanging in the desert wind, to be picked off one by one by roadside bombs, for no reason except that the fighting of the war, the daily carnage and destruction, has become its own purpose.

There may be a change in the country’s political configuration, as the other party wins back one or both houses of Congress. But if people believe the Democratic Party has the spine for real, fundamental confrontation, or would countenance real changes in the order of things, I think they’re leaning on a very frail reed.

Altogether, the year 2007 promises to be a momentous, slow moving, and mind-numbing increment of time. Like the ancient Hebrews in the Book of Ezekiel, who drank water “by measure and with astonishment,” we will pump gasoline and shop for increasingly expensive groceries with dumbfounded looks on our faces.