“The popular culture tried to warn us. For 20 years, we’ve had Homer Simpson’s spot-on caricature of the quintessential American: childish, irresponsible, willfully oblivious, fat and happy. And more recently we winced at the ultra-Homerized former earthlings of WALL•E.” " Remember when each decade, not long after it finished, assumed a distinct character? We all knew and know what ‘the ’50s’ mean, and they definitively ended with the Pill, J.F.K.‘s assassination and the Beatles — just as ’he ’60s’ ended when Americans got tired of being alarmed and hectored, and “the ’70s” ended when stimulants became more popular than depressants and AIDS appeared. But in all salient respects, ‘the ’80s’ — Reaganism’s reshaping of the political economy, the thrall of the PC, the vertiginous rise in the stock market — did not end. “The ’80s spirit endured through the ’90s and the 2000s, all the way until the fall of 2008, like an awesome winning streak in Vegas that went on and on and on. American-style capitalism triumphed, and thanks to FedEx and the Web, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint and unnecessary. So what if every year since the turn of the century the U.S. economy grew more slowly than the global economy? Stuff at Wal-Mart and Costco and money itself stayed supercheap! Even 9/11, which supposedly "changed everything,” and the resulting Iraqi debacle came to seem like mere bumps in the road. " "But now everything really has changed. More than a year into the Great Recession, we still aren’t sure if there’s a bottom in sight, and six months after the financial system began imploding, it’s still iffy. The party is finally, definitely over. And the present decade,…has acquired its permanent character as a historical pivot defined by the nightmares of 9/11 and the Panic of 2008-09. " “It’s time to ratchet back our wild and crazy grasshopper side and get in touch with our inner ant…” "[H]ere is a streamlined, secularized Three-Step Program for America — Bubbleholics Anonymous? — to start getting back on track: • Admit that we are powerless over addiction to easy money and cheap fossil fuel and living large — that our lives had become unmanageable. • Believe that we can, individually and collectively, restore ourselves to sanity and normal living. • Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and be entirely ready to remove our defects of character." “Only six months ago, we thought we might be on the verge of a remarkable new era — thanks to the possible election of Obama. It is bizarre how secondary that epochal change now seems. It’s as if Jesus had returned — but just afterward extraterrestrials landed, and as a result everybody stopped paying much attention to the holy dude. But it’s also a perfectly apt and gratifying turn of events: candidate Obama positioned himself as a smart, steady character who happened to be black, and the economic emergency that helped ensure his election has pushed the fact of his race and its heavy symbolic freight into the shadows of public consciousness. Once the crises have passed, however, I think we’ll rediscover the ramifications, small and large, of the enlightened national turn we made last Nov. 4 and start enjoying the dawn of a new era of racial reconciliation.” “We are in a state of shock….Now that we’re accustomed to the unthinkable suddenly becoming not just thinkable but actual, we ought to be able to think the unthinkable on the upside, as America plots its reconstruction and reinvention.”