h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Foulest Gift that the British ever gave to the world was deference. If something offends you, concerns you, infuriates or terrifies you, then keep it to yourself. Bottle it up; there's a good chap.

A bit like British-invented sport, the colonials now practise this far better than ever we did.

I listened to Obama and McCain's first "debate". Depending on which of these guys takes charge, a different strategy for staving off global economic collapse will be attempted. Different people will thrive, and different people will sink into despair. Different people will die, indeed. Millions of people in each case.

Rather important stuff, then.

And yet the pair of themy didn't even come out of their corners. They sort of half-got-going on just how nasty far-away places like Russia and Iran can be, but they were still oh-so-careful not to have excessively forthright opinions in case some elector somewhere takes offence, and they were icily nice to each other because being rude is political death in a straight-laced, emotionally-frigid America.

The world was spared this a little over a century earlier because of the absence of telecommunications in late 1900s Europe. Even with latitude for pragmatism in the politics of those days, though, we managed to subside into 50 years of depression and war.

First-past-the-post electoral democracy has a major weakness in its marginal win-lose aspect. As a result, it's inadequate, disastrous even, in times where decisive action is needed. There should have been passion and anger in that debate, and instead there was cowardice on both sides.

America has a peculiar combination of social attributes. It has moral indignance taken to the point of mission and yet it has freedom-notions that simultaneously dispense the right of individual permissiveness. I used to admire this dichotomy. I thought it was high-minded to be sure of your own responsibilities while conferring the right of choice to your peers. Now I think that the real system is a travesty of that idea, and that American conservatives are selfish and domineering while their liberals are feckless and anarchic. The social code as a whole is just a symptom of extraordinary gullibility. The Gotham thing.

We live in bizarre times of anti-banking, where financiers turn into the corrupt antithesis of their sole legitimate function. They're deadlier than any Al Qaeda. If the Twin Towers still stood, their offices would be emptying rapidly today. After the panic comes stagnation. America is withdrawing into its shell, even as the world it built caves in around it.

Markets are founded in confidence, pure and simple. Maybe the United States is the richest nation, because it's also the most trusting? But that's too precarious for these times, and yet there is no expectation and no thirst for leadership either, after enduring so long under the governance of hapless imbeciles.

I think we need to change the Front Page, guys. Do Panic. It would actually be good for us, in times like these.