In Reset, I range pretty widely over politics, economics, pop culture and more. And as I finish my blogging for Time.com this week (thanks, Time.com!), I'm struck by the hopeful reset signs I continue to see all over the place.
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TIME Managing Editor Richard Stengel talks with Kurt Andersen about resetting America.
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How the meltdown is an opportunity to get ourselves back on track.
You can say Florida is a vivid example of the last quarter-century's go-go all-American magical thinking, a good life based on endless sun, no state income tax, and wild real estate speculation. Or you can say that modern Florida has always been this way, and during the last quarter century the rest of Americans started thinking and acting like Floridians.
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Reset is in part about the unsustainable and unsatisfying profligacy we're leaving behind, and in part -- more interestingly and hopefully -- about new MOs we're discovering and inventing. The last couple of days I came across interesting stories illustrating both sides of the case.
In The New York Observer there is this amusing article about the cutbacks at Condé Nast, which publishes, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair. (Excessively full disclosure: the Observer is the new majority owner of Very Short List, which I co-founded, and I contribute to Vanity Fair.) And in the new Economist is this hopeful piece about how seriously the states of the old midwest are cultivating green-industrial businesses.
As I say in the book, it's the end of the world as we know it, but it isn't the end of the world.
In Reset, I recount the stories of people who were laid off or had their businesses go belly up -- and who have responded by making career turns of 90 or 180 degrees in order to pursue their abiding passions
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The financial writer Joe Nocera, always smart and lucid and often provocative, has a terrific piece in today's New York Times about the U.S. postal service -- about how it is outmoded and unsustainable in the email age, and about how Congress, currently the greatest structural impediment to making the resets this country requires, lacks the vision and the courage to rethink the whole operation.
See, the reset isn't necessarily about moving "left" or creating more government-run enterprises: it's about becoming clear-eyed and ballsy enough to figure out what works best and then doing it, regardless of whose ox is gored or ideological predispositions are offended.
Although the famous Chinese curse May you live in interesting times is not, in fact, a Chinese curse, given China's enabling role in our present situation it ought to be. Since the fall of 2007, 35% of the value of publicly traded companies has evaporated, along with $3 trillion worth of home equity — $10,000 per American man, woman and child — and five million jobs. Iconic businesses and whole industries are variously dead and dying.
But these times are not just accursed, not simply an awful episode to be endured — they really are interesting times, because of the new and possibly improved America that might be created out of the wreckage.
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We all know that American media businesses are, like the American auto industry -- and, as I argue more hopefully in Reset, America at large -- at an historic inflection point.
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In the two hours of radio call-in shows I did yesterday talking about Reset with listeners in Illinois, Missouri and Texas, I was interested in the callers who volunteered that yes, absolutely, even though they still had jobs they really had ratcheted back their acquisitive lifestyles since the meltdown last year, trying to worry less about keeping up with Joneses, cutting down on spending at the inessential end of the shopping spectrum.
And those anecdotal stories of steady-as-she-goes recalibration of needs and wants are borne out by today's better-than-expected employment numbers and the not-so-good new retail sales numbers for July.
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This afternoon I was a guest on a terrific public radio talk show, KWMU's St. Louis on the Air, talking about my book Reset. A very un-public-radio-ish listener called in to say that he wasn't a fan of immigrants, and didn't want America filled up with the huddled and the poor from "the Third World." I told him I understood, kind of, his visceral reaction, but that if we let his view drive national immigration policy we'll pretty much be guaranteeing America's decline sooner rather than later.
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Every day in Washington and in the media echo chambers (hello, MSNBC! hi, Fox News), we're seeing the professional partisans and ideologues resisting any reset in political thinking -- that is, they're defaulting to the easy old party-line positions, as if solving today's enormous problems and the new facts on the ground doesn't require a serious commitment to intellectual honesty and fresh thinking.
And the guys running the big, federally bailed-out Wall Street firms don't get it either.
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