The Times They Are A-Changing… for the Worse

I do not want to turn this blog into a Conrad Black fan site, but he had another excellent column this week. While the column was about Republican presidential candidates, this paragraph leaped off the page:

The entire world is gape-mouthed at how, as a sorbet after its brilliant and almost bloodless victory in the Cold War, the United States has run over and off the cliff of debt, been swindled by the Chinese, been played for an idiot by OPEC, carried the European and Japanese luxury-goods industries on its back like a bipartisan donkey, outsourced 40 million jobs while admitting 15 million illegal and vocationally unskilled immigrants, created the greatest financial bonfire in history by papering itself in trillions of dollars of worthless real-estate-backed debt (certified as investment grade by Wall Street and by the rating agencies that have now put the U.S. on credit watch), and immolated itself like a disgruntled Burmese monk or Tunisian dissident.

When you have gangrene, some form of surgery is needed. So the presidential race next year is important. But if neither party realizes that surgery is needed, the patient will die. Right now, no candidate but Ron Paul or maybe Gary Johnson realizes this, and neither will be the nominee. This whole situation reminds me of the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song: 

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

...

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'