1. clipped from: www.nytimes.com
Published: July 1, 2009
The financial meltdown has sent the literary-minded scurrying back to the classics for insight and succor.
I recently dusted off literally one of those classics:
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899.

In the book, Veblen whom C. Wright Mills called the best critic of America that America has ever produced dissected the habits and mores of a privileged group that was exempt from industrial toil and distinguished by lavish expenditures. His famous phrase ‚conspicuous consumption‘ referred to spending that satisfies no need other than to build prestige, a cultural signifier intended to intimidate and impress.

2. clipped from: www.nytimes.com

METHLAND
The Death and Life of an American Small Town
By Nick Reding

255 pp. Bloomsbury. $25

clipped from: www.nytimes.com

Wasted Land

By WALTER KIRN
Published: July 1, 2009

Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of “Methland, Nick Redings unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear. The ravages of meth, or crank, on Oelwein and countless forsaken locales much like it are shown to be merely superficial symptoms of a vaster social dementia caused by, among other things, the iron dominion of corporate agriculture and the slow melting of villages and families into the worldwide financial stew.

The madness stalking tiny, defenseless Oelwein may eventually come for all of us…