Last night's episode of 30 Rock featured Tracy Morgan's character obliviously fanning the flames of a financial meltdown in Asia as a guest on Larry King Live. As he warns that the ensuing financial crisis will remake the cushy, urban paradise New York of the 2000s into the crime-ridden urban hellhole of the 1970s (think The Warriors), Kenneth the Page is tagged and Liz Lemon blackmailed by a loathsome cabbie. New York City seems to collapse as banks fail, the Asian markets crash, and Jack Donaghue forsakes his buxom love, played by Selma Hayek, to save his collapsing media network.
The episode reminded me, interestingly enough, of a segment, which Josh Marshall recently flagged, on Glenn Beck's aptly titled War Room, a show which carefully warns its viewers that:
In other words, Beck and his guests (temporarily) remove their soothsayer hats and traffic in the simple hypotheses of mere mortals. (We would learn nothing more of a North American Union between the Southwest and Mexico on this day!) After all, one of Beck's guests, Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute, really does fancy himself a clairvoyant, having predicted the 2001 recession, the real estate fizz, and, of course, the increase in Halloween retailing in 1989. The New York Post likens him to Nostradamus and, at least according to his website, lots of MSM sources dig his work (though the NYT promotional quote on the Trends Institute website seems a bit lackluster compared to the Post's: "Mr. Celente tracks the world's social, economic and business trends for corporate clients.").
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment