> While grumbling about this last night, I was thinking about an
> interesting but rarely noted feature about bad times. In bad times,
> time itself seems to accelerate. Events seem to occur at a faster pace
> as if being pushed along their aberrant paths by multiplying forces.
I've also noticed that the collapse in the U.S. Iraq position is happening much faster than, for example, it did in the Vietnam case. I remember that, a few weeks ago, the NY Times published a comparison of the time line of the first year of Johnson's Vietnam escalation and the time line of the year since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in order to argue that the two could not be compared. But the true comparison is between the whole Vietnam thing and the one year of Bush's Iraq adventure, which went from inception to quagmire 4 or 5 times faster than Johnson's, or even faster than that.
The strange thing, though, is that, even though things are happening much faster, I find myself somehow bored with the whole process this time, compared with Vietnam. Perhaps it is because I was younger then, and it was all new to me, or it may be that, with the Internet, etc., the amount of information and chatter about the process is so much more of an overwhelming flood now. But I keep finding myself thinking, "OK, OK, already -- we know how it's going to end; let's get it over with."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax