Game of Riddles No. 9

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

In chapter five of J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Hobbit, and in the first of the three part film series based on the book, “An Unexpected Journey (2012),” Bilbo Baggins solves the riddle from Gollum. The answer was “Time.”

It’s a truism that time devours all things, including the careers of columnists. Our time will be up soon, but Paul Krugman is giving up the ghost now, before Donald Trump can be sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2025.

“This is my final column for The New York Times,” he says.

He began publishing his opinion column in January 2000. In reflecting on what changed over these past 25 years, he is struck by how the optimism at the end of the 20th century has given way to the “anger and resentment” of now.

“And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.”

It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000, he says.

“Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.”

His sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, “so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out (and have a beer) with.”

And of course that was the beginning of the end of the world as we knew it, when the Supreme Court handed defeat to Vice President Al Gore and installed George W. Bush in the White House.

NYT: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment

People discarded the “Peace Dividend” and the end of the deficit for tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of government watchdogging the environment, and a war in Iraq based on bad intel. By the end of his second term, the global economy nearly collapsed.

Will we never learn?

It’s easy for me to remember those times myself, since we were having a blast in Knoxville, Tennessee in those days. While I was working toward a Ph.D. and teaching journalism at the University of Tennessee, I obtained communications department approval to take a year off working on the doctoral dissertation to create one of the first magazines online, The Southerner. I was also writing cover stories for MetroPulse, the alternative weekly there, and sitting in playing the drums every Wednesday night at the Sassy Anne’s bar blues jam.

The turn of the century into the new millennium was a blast. We all had such high hopes for the democratizing power of the internet. We did party like it was 1999, because it was.

I was already in touch with editors at the Times then, when I caught errors in the newspaper of record’s obituary of George C. Wallace.

George Wallace, Symbol of the Fight to Maintain Segregation, Dies at 79, By Howell Raines, Sept. 15, 1998

We had such hope then, even in Alabama, as the election of Democrat Don Siegelman was heralded as the state’s first “New South” governor.

The New South Rises, Again: Alabama Gets Its First ‘New South’ Governor

By August of 2000, I had moved to New Orleans to teach at Loyola University. On Jan. 30, 2001, I had a letter to the editor published in the Times.

Opinion – New Day in the South

I remember when Krugman’s column started running, since by then I was reading the NYTimes online every day. I also remember when purple milk toast David Brooks started writing his column when he was picked to replace William Safire, who stepped down with his last column on Jan. 24, 2005, right after Bush was sworn in to a second term.

‘Never Retire’ By William Safire

We had another chance at hope in 2008 with the election of Obama, and his reelection in 2012. But we abandoned all hope in 2016 when Trump slipped in. We got it back in 2020, and now all hope seems lost as Trump screeched back in in 2024.

At least Saturday Night Live has brought back the “Church Lady.” Maybe we can somehow find a way to laugh, at least for another month or so.

When Trump’s second term starts in January, I don’t think anyone is going to be laughing for long, at least not in this country. Of course they will be laughing at us all over the world, as the dumbest people on the planet. How did we go from being the smartest people in the world to the dumbest?

As Professor Carlo Maria Cipolla wrote back in 1976, the year I was to graduate from high school, the first law of human stupidity is that everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation.

“No matter how many idiots you suspect you are surrounded by, you are invariably underestimating the total.”

Ignorance is Bliss: The Word of the Year is Brain Rot

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