December 13

Well, it is half past December and less than two weeks from our yearly exercise in mass gluttony: Christmas. And just more than two weeks from the end of another miserable year--one not quite as bad as last year but certainly not a good one. I wish I could say I look forward to 2022 and expect better--but I don't.

Why not? Because all of the economic, social, political and legal trends so strong this year are still in play and have much further to go before they hit bottom. David Kaiser has a good post this morning that reflects my own thoughts and illustrates our current condition through his commentary on a classic film: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. We both here remember the film. Mom saw it when it first came out and I from its re-runs on TV. It is indeed a good metaphor for the last 90 years.

The news just announced that COVID has claimed a little over 800k Americans. That is within the range the heads of the health agencies were predicting at the beginning of the pandemic and a far cry from the optimistic predictions (50-100k) if we, in the words of Dr. Debra Berx, "we do everything right." I doubted that we could get enough of our fractious population to agree on anything to manage to get "everything right."