Word: presentism
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...residents say, the preacher at a nearby mosque issued a fiery sermon inciting violence against them. The police visited the Christian community later that night, warning them of possible violence the next day. Some left that very night. But it appears others didn't receive the warning and were present when thousands of Muslim protesters charged through the town...
...implosion of Wall Street is already having this salutary effect, prompting some bankers to start up new financial firms and others to go to work for smaller, no-name companies. Which should, among other things, help reduce the dangerous overconcentration of capital and risk that made the present crisis so dangerous and devastating. "If the risk-taking spreads out to these smaller institutions, it is no longer a systemic threat," according to Matthew Richardson, a finance professor at New York University. "And innovation is spreading out too. This is a good thing...
...well or badly we respond as individuals and a society to those cyclical shifts - such as the big one we're experiencing now - is up to us. Both my middle-aged sense of history and hardwired American hopefulness make me more optimistic than pessimistic - but just barely - about the present reset. I suppose it wouldn't be a catastrophe if my children, when they reach middle age, are living in an America that has become a supersized Britain. But I'd prefer to think of them growing old in a country that's still unequivocally great and grand...
...arcs and patterns of history. Indeed, I became hopelessly addicted to the Long View. Last fall, as Wall Street crashed and a very grim New York City future looked very plausible, my historian's tic kicked in again. In my New York magazine column I compulsively imagined the present from the future as a memory of the recent past...
...there are other, less familiar historical moments that also have unmistakable resonance with the present. We've just finished living through a long Gilded Age, in which rich Americans got richer, and more and more people began consuming conspicuously. The original Gilded Age began a century earlier, in the 1870s, during a laissez-faire boom that lasted - déjà vu! - from the end of one Wall Street and banking meltdown (the Panic of 1873) to the beginning of another (the Panic...