by anna missed
bigger
the wave
by anna missed
oil on wood, 8” x 14”
The picture somewhat rhymes with this recent magazine title.
Back to Main
October 4, 2008
The Wave
bigger
Comments
i wish, i wish we were waving goodbye
🙁
very impressive (as usual) anna missed..
Posted by: annie | Oct 4 2008 17:46 utc | 1
it looks like it’s bleeding, or there is blood built up below the surface. wound like. moving and sad.
Posted by: annie | Oct 4 2008 18:09 utc | 3
Here’s the soundtrack:
The National
Zelda – Song of Storms
When the Spell is Broken
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 4 2008 19:42 utc | 5
But still I dreamed on,
further into the future
than I’d ever dreamed before.
Watchin’ Hank Paulson’s progress from afar,
working for 40 days and 40 nights to pump
$750 billion back into the US economy
takin’ pride in his accomplishments,
as if they were our own,
wonderin’ if he ever thought of US,
and hopin’ that maybe we’d
broadened his horizons a little,
even if he couldn’t remember
just how they got broadened.
But still I hadn’t dreamt
nothin’ about Mom and Pop,
until the end.
And this was cloudier,
because it was years, years
more wage work away.
But I saw an old couple
abandoned by their children
and all their grandchildren too.
The old couple were all screwed up,
and so were their kids and their grandkids.
And I don’t know.
You tell me.
This whole dream.
Was it wishful thinkin’?
Was I just fleein’ reality,
Like I know I’m liable to do?
And it seemed real.
It seemed like US.
And it seemed like,
well… our home.
If not Arizona, then a land not too far away,
where all parents are
strong and wise and capable
and all the children are fed and clothed.
I don’t know.
Maybe it was Utah.
No, that would be waving goodbye.
Posted by: Onkle Oscar | Oct 4 2008 20:43 utc | 7
Since I live in europe, the only interaction I get with US citizens is while I am at work and even then we are a small group of somewhat curious people. Can anyone here who currently lives in the US tell me if there is really this despair that Anna Missed so eloquently portrays among others? what do your republican friends say about this? our resident republican has been pretty quiet lately but blamed the crisis on stupid poor people for taking out loans they could not afford.
I guess slothrop and citizen k are still pretty upbeat.
Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 5 2008 5:10 utc | 8
Here on the East Coast, the bailout and the economy is everyone’s default topic of conversation. The discussion isn’t about blame except in passing. The urgent topic is, “Will it all be okay?”
The capacity of American consumers to thin and act as represented citizens is withered, and atrophied. They know that the real citizens of the nation are the big corporations, and the people who can invest in politicians and policies in Congress. They just cannot quite believe that those people screwed up so very, vary badly.
Suffering — in the form of lost jobs, higher food and gas costs, foreclosures, lack of medicine and healthcare — those things are suffered privately and invisibly, a matter of shame and personal failure.
Citizens, I said Citizens of the sort who peopled this country in its founding years, would pull all their monies out of the banks, entrust them as investments to respected local members of their village or town, and then watch them like a hawk.
Consumers won’t do any such thing, even in their own nation, where they are the government’s bedrock. When consumers find that the machine is out of snacks, they only worry about whether it will be filled again, and how soon, and how.
>O?”All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.” — Eric Hoffer
Posted by: Antifa | Oct 5 2008 7:00 utc | 9
where the street meets the wall they fall by margin calls
where the street sign twitches for Shanghai time, bitches
where seven hundred billion itches demand scratching
while the title switches from bailout to rescue plan
as the shit-pile acquires a few extra ribbons and bows
like derivative threads tie up the emperor’s clothes
Posted by: Lizard | Oct 5 2008 7:42 utc | 10
I would say there is a large amount of people here in NC who think that the Feds fixed this and everything will be okay.
My friends are too smart for that, and they are very angry and very ready to fix blame.
I have a secret hope that the economy will tank totally and this country will stop with its warmongering.
Obama is in town, and 10K are expected at the rally tomorrow in Asheville NC. Those folks think Obama is going to fix all this mess, after he is elected. They are in for a few surprises, I think.
I will be protesting the wars, the torture, and the bailout.
Posted by: Susan | Oct 5 2008 8:44 utc | 11
so, there is not really a general feeling that we have been had by the bankers? people still believe that the government will make it all ok?
I wonder what could cause a “pitchfork” moment for the US populace. Since not even this huge theft of the Social Security Trust, and I believe that is where this money has come from and will never be returned, was enough to rouse people from their seemingly catatonic state I have to believe nothing can ever provoke them.
the news that we now torture people, or that we have secret prisons where we throw people and never tell anyone, or that our government has given itself the right to read our mail, listen to our phone calls, come into our homes without a warrant or any oversight whatsoever didn’t trigger outrage. the last chance for people to push back came when the elites took the last remaining bit of cash in the country and passed with barely a whimper.
is it fear of losing that last bit we have? distrust of others, namely republicans who would happily send jack bootz to crack some skulls of those who would dare raise or in Palinesque rear their heads? I feel the powerlessness, I would like to do something, anything to somehow reverse this trend. I don’t know what that could possibly be, seems like trying to sweep back the tide. We are like livestock being led to slaughter and the silence of the lambs is very eerie.
Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 5 2008 9:10 utc | 12
Sorry, but I have to return to Sarah Palin. Mostly because she is the prime index not only of just how far the post Nixon republican “presidential ready” bogus icon has degenerated into at this point – a literal cartoon character, but more importantly how this plays out on the body politic. Palin was chosen as a the new and improved “genuine” Joe Six-Pack – not an actor playing one, nor a blue blood imitation, but a popular, good looking, and feisty real McCoy. And from an advertising angle it probably looked as sure fire a strategy as the “New Coke” idea must have looked in an nervous boardroom in Atlanta.
What’s changed however, in this particular fall roll out is of course the economy. Over the last year the rubes have watched one bale out after the other on the TV news, and after each particular “adjustment”, they have seen the need for yet a bigger one – to the point that I think they have stopped believing in what they are being told, and what they are being sold. The comfortable faux fear previously sold as an instrument of political posture is now being displaced by real and actual fear. This is evidenced by Bushes’ poll numbers now falling into the middle teens, by the almost universal reaction against the bail out, and the deader than dead cat bounce after Sarah Palins folksy flatulent laden performance.
The rubes have lost their appetite for shit, and McCain not only has an albatross around his neck, but the bird is alive and is gnawing away at his living corpse.
Posted by: anna missed | Oct 5 2008 9:33 utc | 13
so, what I am reading anna missed is that the McCain Palin ticket would most likely be very successful if the economy were rocking instead of tanking. Our resident republican thinks Palin is a very talented woman and expresses absolutely no reservation in supporting her. I don’t know if I am agreeing with you or not but I don’t see the republicans changing their views at all, they would happily vote for a horse or chimp if that was put to them. What might have changed, and I say might because this is still up in the air until after the results are announced the day after the election, is that non republicans are coming to the realization that they will have to get up off their dead asses and vote this band of criminals out of power.
the really sad part about that is that those waiting in the wings are no better.
Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 5 2008 10:08 utc | 14
btw, I really like how you were able to portray the wake of the ship in your work. bet that was hard to do.
Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 5 2008 10:10 utc | 15
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
– Stevie Smith
Posted by: Tantalus | Oct 5 2008 12:15 utc | 16
DOS @ 8,
Here in VT, my mother-in-law, who’s a sort of idiot savant oracle of Middle America, dismissed my mutterings about the economy (I was studying her copy of the local Gannett rag) with There’s no downturn here. She would brook no argument, either. Yesterday in Burlington there were crowds and crowds of people all thronging about, in and out of the shops, buying stuff. whether this was a sort of last dance on the Titanic thing or just total heedlessness I don’t know. People will talk about the economy but there isn’t much anger or even annoyance – people are resentful but on the whole passive, so far. There are a few of us who are foaming with rage, of course, but I’ve noticed we keep our voices down when raging in public.
My three lovely children were denied healthcare coverage last week – state and Federal – after endless go-arounds with various offices. We’re selling our house to avoid foreclosure. There are For Sale signs everywhere, people trying to get rid of their SUVs and thirsty old pickups. Many more yard sales than usual. Things are slipping.
VT has always been a hard place to live, economy-wise, so perhaps people aren’t reacting that much to this latest squeeze because we’re pretty used to scraping by. When it gets worse, though, we’ll see.
Posted by: Tantalus | Oct 5 2008 12:32 utc | 17
Next: The Mother Of All Bank Runs?
t’s plain that the current financial crisis is worsening in spite of–or perhaps because of–the Treasury rescue plan.
The strains in financial markets are becoming more, rather than less, severe in spite of the nuclear option of a $700 billion package: Interbank spreads are widening and are at a level never seen before; credit spreads are widening to new peaks; short-term Treasury yields are going back to near-zero levels as there is flight to safety; credit default swap (CDS) spreads for financial institutions are rising to extreme levels as the ban on shorting of financial stock has moved the pressures on financial firms to the CDS market; and stock markets around the world have reacted very negatively to this rescue package.
…So, this is not just a U.S. financial crisis. It is a global crisis hitting institutions in the U.K., the Euro-zone and other advanced economies (Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc.).
…Thus, the gambit of converting into banks while not being banks yet hasn’t worked, and the run against them has accelerated in the last week: Morgan’s CDS spread went through the roof on Friday to over 1200, and the firm has already lost over a third of its hedge-fund clients together with the highly profitable prime brokering business (this is really a kiss of death for Morgan). And the coming roll-off of the interbank lines to Morgan would seal its collapse. Even Goldman Sachs is under severe stress: Most of its lines of business (including trading) are now losing money.
…Maybe Mitsubishi (other-otc: MSBHY.PK – news – people ) and a bunch of Japanese life insurers can take over Morgan.
…The only institution sound enough to swallow Goldman may be HSBC (nyse: HBC – news – people ). Or maybe Nomura in Japan should make a bid for Goldman. Either way, Mack and Blankfein should sell at a major discount before they end up like Bear and are offered, in a few weeks, only a couple of bucks a share for their faltering operation.And the Fed and Treasury should tell them to hurry up, as they are both much bigger than Bear or Lehman, and their collapse would have severe systemic effects.
…The next step of this panic could be the mother of all bank runs, i.e. a run on the trillion dollar-plus of the cross-border short-term interbank liabilities of the U.S. banking and financial system, as foreign banks start to worry about the safety of their liquid exposures to U.S. financial institutions. A silent cross-border bank run has already started, as foreign banks are worried about the solvency of U.S. banks and are starting to reduce their exposure. And if this run accelerates–as it may now–a total meltdown of the U.S. financial system could occur.
…The U.S. and foreign policy authorities seem to be clueless about what needs to be done next. Maybe they should today start with a coordinated 100 basis points reduction in policy rates in all the major economies in the world to show that they are starting to seriously recognize and address this rapidly worsening financial crisis.
Posted by: vbo | Oct 5 2008 12:44 utc | 18
that habitual horror-in-chief, the gonnoreah-ridden-golem, wolf blitzer – going hammer & tongs on the obama -bill ayers connection
they are filfth from one of the circels of hell
bill ayers i find a little me-me , by & large the members of the weathermen/weather underground were honourable americans in a time of slaughter & disgrace
in their quixotoc way they brought the war home & tasted a little of what it might have been to be vietnamese
but the golem, at every opportunity brings out this hoary old story in service of his master in chief. what a specimen he is – he’ll only be happy when bset pal benyamin benyanhatu is president og both israel & the u s
the likudinisation of politics is that there are no questions, no attempt at answers & like old apartheid racist south africa – only military force & certifiable madmen making public policy
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 5 2008 16:41 utc | 19
I skipped the comments [tomorrow] because I want to say that I’ve been looking for this. Thank you anna missed.
I canvased for Obama today and my feet hurt. Not giving up. Yet.
Posted by: beq | Oct 6 2008 1:09 utc | 20
@dos #8 and #12
Can anyone here who currently lives in the US tell me if there is really this despair that Anna Missed so eloquently portrays among others?
I feel the powerlessness, I would like to do something, anything to somehow reverse this trend. I don’t know what that could possibly be, seems like trying to sweep back the tide. We are like livestock being led to slaughter and the silence of the lambs is very eerie.
I believe these statements are related, and are sentiments shared by a large number of Americans. Yes, the despair is real. Everyone I’ve spoken with (even the republicans) sees disaster on the horizon but doesn’t see any way to avoid it. We’ve lost faith in our ability to effect change in our government or the course of our nation. About the only option left to us is open revolt, and we still have too much to lose to go that route.
I’m not sure how much longer that will last, as I also see people becoming more desperate. The price of food and fuel keeps rising, while income stays the same or disappears due to layoffs.
Unfortunately, every revolt I can think of in our country’s relatively brief history has been forcibly put down by the military and was unsuccessful in effecting change. Sometimes I wonder if the “support our troops” sentiment that’s still so prevalent here is partially motivated by fear…
Posted by: Chemmett | Oct 6 2008 21:25 utc | 21
dan > maybe my response is sort’a iffy; my contacts in the US from far away are middle class with ‘college’ degrees and white or a darker shade of white; many are post ww2 immigrants, their children; they show up in all political colors: McCain is a maverick, the man of the day > Islamo-fascism is BS, we have no Gvmt. left.
All dissociate politics from their personal situation. One thinks he has had a spate of bad luck – another is hopeful Obama will fix his health problems, payment – a third is certain her future profession will bring in great riches – a fourth just built a McMansion – another is struggling in academe heh .. Only minor, personal advantages are contemplated.
For the rest, it is a political circus that burbles on the blue screen, time-out poor entertainment, not worthy of attention if anything else is going on, party, BBQ, prom, a marriage, a birth, a promotion, a bonus…or shootings down the road.
They collectively uphold that turbulence comes and goes but America is strong, valiant, endures.
Two topics are taboo or only to be discussed in MSM terms: 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Btw, Iraq soldiers are ‘hot’ – they come home on leave (in that milieu) to nooky cornucopia, pardon the expression. The glamour of killing and desert sands.. danger and deprivation…living in foreign lands and coming up to terrarists face to face.. defendin’ Amerika…When vets have difficulties faces are turned away.
The economics? Entertainment and news are 100% US. Food (basic) more or less as well. Consumer goods etc. are manufactured by slave labor far off. Energy – a good part ….international policing, manipulations, the threat of nukes, and the co-option of various dictators, war… Menial staff at home is also slave – maids, babysitters, gardeners, builders, etc. Services, for those who earn more than X, are practically free, from laundry to landscaping to take-out.
Econo crisis? Not.
a caricature, sure.
Posted by: Tangerine | Oct 7 2008 18:12 utc | 22
nooky cornucopia? you make that sound like its a bad thing.
thanks for that and to all the others who have shared their experiences with me. As much as I would like to see people take control of this mess, it seems we will simply continue to bumble along. I think it was Churchill who said that Americans can be counted on to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else.
Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 8 2008 21:05 utc | 23
dan
my own vision is apocalyptic – so i’ll pass over this in silence
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 8 2008 21:44 utc | 24