The world turned upsidedown

Jacob Anthony Saydeh, the son of two Air Force veterans, was born one week ago on Nov. 11, 2011, at 11:11 a.m..

My sources in the mystical world tell me this entitles him to one extra-powerful wish.
That’s good, because he’ll need it.

This week, a group of Chinese academics selected Vladimir Putin as the winner of the Confucius Peace Prize.

I hope we can all agree that Putin, best known for his brutal suppression of Chechnya and a free press in Russia, was this year’s most effective messenger of peace.

In defense of Putin, his latest campaign ad involves a college-aged guy and girl registering to vote before hooking up in a voting booth. We all know how much more peace (and voting) that would bring.

Back in China, the selection committee said Putin was chosen from a pool of eight, including Bill Gates and Kofi Annan, because of his (failed) efforts to keep NATO from going to war in Libya.

Speaking of inane selection processes, this week Herman Cain, the man who would be president, had some of his own failed efforts concerning Libya.

As he put it to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason — nope, that’s a different one. I gotta go back to, see ... got all this stuff twirling around in my head.”

In the words of Rick Perry, “Oops.”

There’s this great moment in American mythology when the British come out to surrender at Yorktown with the military band playing “The World Turned Upside Down.”
If only that band was here now.

This week, we watched as our understanding of “going the Second Mile” was permanently flipped and scarred.We watched as Bunga-Bunga Berlusconi was finally turned out of his prime minister post. And, of course, we watched Occupy Wall Street members forced out of their tents by a secret, early morning police raid.

You can be forgiven if your head is spinning a little bit now. If all the world’s a stage, the playwright’s going mad and this is the Theater of the Absurd.

I, for one, don’t like it.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that all around us, there’s a consensus developing in our generation that our adversarial system of politics and economics isn’t working.
That’s the idea at the core of the 99 percent movement and an idea actually echoed by the early tea parties.

That, too, is the idea behind college opinion columnists who write about “discourse” or “the two-party system,” a complaint you’re sure to hear about when the supercommittee fails next week.

Once upon a time, there was a generation that had a similar dream. They were called the Baby Boomers, and they were going to save the world. They failed. They failed and here we are today with the world oscillating up and down.

It’s up to us to figure out why they failed so we can put the Baby Boomers out to pasture. Every day we wait, the world gets a little worse and the problems a little more intractable.

And we better hurry, because at some point, not even Jacob’s wish will be powerful enough to repair this world.

­— sidfletc@indiana.edu