....but also very funny.

Well done

Painfully spot-on, Mr. Bolling.

A friend was telling me this morning about her neighbor's kid, basically a well-adjusted girl with thoughtful and disciplined parents, who nonetheless is now six years old and rebelling about the things she wants but does not have. She doesn't have a cell phone. She doesn't have a dog. She doesn't have pierced ears. And in the world of her peers, these things signal the End of the World.

I'm pretty sure that kids of her generation in the US will get to know more about real privation than we ever thought they would . . .

Kinda lame if you ask me.

"Boy people are such jerks now a days not like the men of iron our forebears were."

Humans in times of oppulance enjoy their oppulance (as we did in the 1920's and the 1990's) and in times of depression embrace facism, communism, and racism (as we did in the 1930's and we'll have to see how the 00's end to know for sure).

I'm sure some comical cartoonist of the last generation made many a snide comment about flappers and jazzboys blowing their last few dollars on bathtube gin and record disks too.

The greatest generation (fascist sons of bitches that they were) were only great because they made a point to tell us how great they were after the fact.

These self important Americans made sure that every kid in america got a long story about tough things were, and how they survived, and how they fought wars, and saved money, and crushed tin cans and all sorts of nonesenes.

Just like the hippies they spawned, everything they touched had to be the greatest things ever.

And of course, just as they looked down on the generation they spawened, so to do our forebears look down on the men and women of today.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I agree. We're the same species. And we're an adaptive species. And, as you noted, those who survive get to write their histories.

However, I don't think Mr. Bolling's wit is lame. There will be adaptive challenges and that's what he's poking. Are you, Clockwork Smurf, a creative person? Do you write or paint or sing and are your efforts publicly assayed? I might be misinterpreting, but you strike me as a comfy critic, swaddled by anonymity.

The new Sonic game isn't that bad.

...maybe Ruben will have to give up buying color inks.

Oh, he already has. Well, at least going black and white will let him whip off the comics before deadline more easily. :)

I found this cartoon cute but it missed the true irony of today's potential "Great Depression." In the 1920s it was tenant farmers being dislocated by technologies based on the internal combustion engine. In the 1990s it's brokers being displaced by technologies based on the transistor, primarily computer communications and the internet. (Look at the costs associated with trading stocks dropping by an order of magnitude with the introduction of these technologies.) So the Wall St. financiers, realizing they either had to either get "real" jobs and "real" skills, or find a way to game the system, our system. They choose the latter and in 1995 created credit default swaps (same time as the netscape and the internet began to hit the world.) Over the next 13 years they printed $62T worth of CDS financial products based on mortgages. Compared to consumer debt, this pool of derivative wealth is is much, much larger.

Now, the world is seeing the financiers for being this hollowed out shell they are, and their intangible, derivative products are going to zero, wiping out all the "world's savings glut" that Greenspan complained about whenever he could. So it's sorta the Great Depression being applied to the banks, which no men seem to be able to control and as learned by the Oakies, though maybe they figured out how to shoot them from their graves?

"And Pa was born here, and he killed weeds and snakes. Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money. An' we was born here. There in the door — our children born here. And Pa had to borrow money. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised.

We know that — all that. It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster.

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours — being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there — quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

The tenants cried: Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land. Maybe we can kill banks — they're worse than Indians and snakes. Maybe we got to fight to keep our land, like Pa and Grampa did.

And now the owner men grew angry. You'll have to go."

Great cartoon.

It would have captured even more of today's stubborn, wasteful attitude if the father had said, "We'll load up the SUV and go there on our last $500."

tapping away furiously on their Macbooks.

That's how.

I know, laugh. But all great powers rise and fall. This is the last straw. We all knew it was coming, and now it's here, just faster than we thought it would.

This will mean several things including adjusting our living standard.

It sounds upsurd but it's here.

George W. Bush has managed to do what no other president in over 200 years has ever done. Presided over the fall of America as we know it.

In 1939 Britain was the predominant power in the world. By 1945 it was all over. 6 years later it was ravaged, in the midst of a deep depression and a third-rate power at best. Slowly it climbed back, but to nowhere near the levels it was before.

This is what's happening to us right now. People don't want to believe it, but it's happening.

When the GOP and the powers that be finish disenfranchising people, kicking voters off the rolls (please note TWICE as many registered voters have been removed from the ballot as registered) and rigging this election John McCain will win.

We will then have, at the very least a war with Russia and Iran, which will catapult us into something very near World War III all while in a deep depression. At that point, the people who think they're sending some type of shallow, selfish message by not voting for Barack Obama will be VERY sorry.

And the rest of us will be trying to adjust to the new reality. Much like the author I agree The Grapes of Wrath would be good preparatory reading for what we're going to be looking at. Add in a dose of the Thin Red Line for those under 40 and you should get an idea of what condition we'll be in circa 2010.