Seven Red

I want to put in  a plug for the PBS documentary Inside the Meltdown, which will start airing online and on television tonight. More than the war, more than the foreign policy catastrophe, more than 9/11 and Katrina, the financial meltdown is the key event of the Bush years, that era’s intense and perhaps even logical conclusion. It really encapsulates the history of the last thirty years, a full cycle, in the same way the financial restructuring of the late-1960′s and early-1970′s  affect our present far more than, say, the Vietnam War. Whether this particular documentary will be any good, I don’t know. But while my historical sensibility usually prevents me from saying “everything’s changed…it’s all different now!,” I think there are moments, events, that shift configurations so drastically that you have to say that. Clearly, it’s too soon to peg the goings-on in the financial industry – and, more specifically, the week of September 15, 2008 (and your heroic narrator was well on top of that) – as one of those events, there’s already a good argument to be made there. Obviously, she works in the industry, so we’ve had a close tie to it all throughout the Bush era. I also worked in the industry, and even loved it, even loved those years closing asset backed security deals and insurance demutualizations. So we’ve watched this with a not disinterested horror/fascination: the collapse of Lehman and Bear Stearns were just as unbelievable – truly unbelievable – as the collapse of the World Trade Center, so grand and terrible and, yes, oddly beautiful as to be even sublime. So I’ll plug the documentary with these sneak peeks from the Frontline site. You can also check out the Salon review here.

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