There have been many, many annoying things about the recent hysterical reactions to the global financial shenanigans. There's the regular abuse of information design. The pointlessly bleak pronouncements. The over-dramatic talk of hunkering down. But the one that's drawn me into actually writing a post is the regular and appalling lack of perspective. Every time some number somewhere moves it's compared, with serious sonorousness, to the last time it was that low, and it's almost always startlingly recent. The lowest GASP for five years, WOW, since the 1990s, COR! since 1981. The other night some pundit announced that Mr Mandelson was the first senior cabinet member since (and here he had the air that he was going to evoke the age of Gladstone or even Bonar Law)...wait for it..Thatcher. For heaven's sake. That's not that long ago. Some of us even remember it.
That's why, for all their occasional, West Coast looniness, I'm such a fan of the Long Now folk. Hopefully if they help us take a long view forward we'll also learn how to take a long look back.