Monday, October 05, 2009

When hope is not enough

Armando Iannucci summed up the current state of politics very well in a piece about 2009 for The Times Cheltenham Festival.

“Maybe … we all feel that politicians are just not quite powerful enough to deal with the big issues any more … A sense that as the real figures on a real stage bicker & backbite, there is nothing to be done but twitter away in our own world of unreality”

Sales of JK Galbraith’s book about The Crash of 1929 rocketed as the credit crunch took hold. Now another of his books deserves to be re-read. The tale of how the idealistic Kennedy White House struggled to finesse the hawks of the Right over Vietnam – Ambassador’s Journal