Crystal ball gazing

Kerry victory, upside:

• The most incompetent presidential administration in recent history will be out of office.
• The budget will start getting back on track, or at least stop hemorrhaging quite so quickly, at least if Congress cooperates.
• We’ll have a president with actual working experience in fighting amorphous international terrorist networks.
• We’ll have a president who isn’t a coward, and how actually cares about the soldiers under his command.
• Kerry’ll probably release the Reagan-era papers that Dubya’s been sitting on.

Kerry victory, downside:

• Most of his first four years will be devoted to undoing the damage caused by Bush. We’re not going to get a return to late-’90s economic strength, and if the GOP keeps Congress, they might not even let him fix things. That means Kerry’ll get the blame for every rotten egg Bush laid that breaks open and stinks up the joint over the next four years, and is unlikely to get a second term.
• Iraq will be a disaster.
• Civil liberties in the US are not likely to get any less abused. Kerry used to be a prosecuting attorney, and prosecutors aren’t generally disposed to look favorably on civil liberties.

Bush victory, upside:

• If the GOP keeps both houses and Congress as well as the White House, they’ll have nobody else to blame as things continue to get worse and worse. This could lead to the destruction of the Republican party, or at least a revolt as the decent moderate Republicans try to seize control back from the right-wing lunatics.

Bush victory, downside:

• Iraq will be a disaster.
• If the GOP keeps both houses and Congress as well as the White House, things will continue to get worse and worse.
• Oh, wait, they still can blame the media.
• And liberals.
• The traditional recipe for German-style fascism goes:
  • Take a powerful country.
  • Subject it to economic collapse.
  • Have it lose a major war.
  • Give it a leader who appeals to a desire for national greatness, but asks people to invest their desire for leadership in him as a person, rather than in the institutions of the nation.
  • In fact, have him disdain those institutions.
  • And have him blame all the nation’s problems on a wealthy, educated, cosmopolitan elite who caused the nation to lose that major war by doubting its own ability to win.
  Sound familiar?

We could play this one by accident

Spicklefoot!

The Confusion

I’m about a hundred pages into The Confusion, the middle book of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which means I’ve committed to schlepping around massive hardcovers for the next several weeks.

They’re good, entertaining books, with lots of humor and a dollop of derring-do mixed in with the discourse about alchemy and 17th-century economics and science and politics. I’m a bit put off by the anachronisms, though.

Some of them are clearly intentional, and jokes, like when a character in 1689 (more than three decades before the birth of Adam Smith) refers to an Invisible Hand of the Market grabbing his group by the testicles. Some are humorous, but possibly accidental, such as when a crew of 17th-century crypto-Jewish galley slaves use the “Havah Nagilah” (written in the early 20th century) as a rowing song. Some I just don’t know, like when a 17th-century Brit uses terms like “homosexual” (coined in 1869) and “cluster-fuck” (American military slang).

Thomas Pynchon used anachronisms in Mason & Dixon too, but generally more artfully and clearly knowing that he was doing so. Pynchon seems generally more in control of style than Stephenson is. While Mason & Dixon featured long, complex, 18th-century sentence structures, the Baroque Cycle books generally read like modern SF with the some old-fashioned spelling sprinkled on top. Stephenson’s got a better handle on story, though.