Another unique feature gone

Writer's block. Usually that's because folks have nothing to write about, but I have so much that I want to write about that I can't. So, I will keep it somewhat short and simple. Maybe.

Back in the early 90s when I first lived in Japan (91-93), the Bubble had collapsed. It actually collapsed in 89, but the effects didn't really hit hard until about 92 as far as I could tell in Toyama and later Tokyo. In 1992, the US presidential campaign between Old Man Bush, Slick Willy, and Crazy Man Ross Pea-rot was in full swing. Willy was running around lying as always and claiming the the US economy was the worst since the Depression. Crazy Ross was saying similar things when he wasn't ranting about Bush and conspiracy theories.

I thought that most Japanese believed the "worst economy" bullpucky. I don't know how many times I heard about or was asked about the end of the "American Dream." I for one could never really define what that was so I could not answer, but most non-US folks seemed to know what it was. Perhaps they read it in the New York Times, which is the newspaper that everyone in the US goes to when they want to know what is really going on. (AHAHAHAHA. That is a joke, of course. The NYT impresses only the NYT and certain gullible foreigners.*)

I was watching PBS and the Jim Lehrer Show when it was mentioned that one of the rather stupid things that went wrong in the financial crisis in the US is that people seemed to assume that real estate values would only go up and never drop. That included folks like Alan Greenspan according to the talking head experts.

That took me back to about 1992 when I was hearing reports on TV and reading in the news that many Japanese had thought the same thing about Japanese real estate prices. I thought "How foolish. Of course real estate prices can drop. How could anyone believe otherwise?"

Now I have found that the foolishness is not limited to any one country, even Japan as uniquely unique as it is supposed to be.

残念ですね。（Zannen desu ne. My chance to throw in an unnecessary Japanese word/phrase to impress the hell out of myself and make reading anything I write even more difficult to understand and follow than it already is. Done since I have read that Latin is said to be making a comeback in the States. Ever tried to read an E.H. Norman book? I did in college. Get out your Latin Dictionary while wondering what the hell the purpose of the Latin was. Did he not know English? But I digress as usual.)

(Added 28 Oct) *Folks who read the Times and believe that from doing so, they understand the US. I meet many people like this. It's hard enough to understand a country when you've lived in it for years, let alone have anything other than a very shallow caricature of it from reading newspaper articles from afar.