Blue Dress

When I read that LA had suffered a major power outage, my first thought was, What the hell is going on?! Patrick from Yelladog seems to have a good answer, provided in a comments thread on an earlier post:

I was listening to This American Life last night, thinking about what has happened in New Orleans and what has happened to the country and its infrastructure (there are blackouts in LA as we speak and my hosting company appears to have gone down with it) and it occurs to me that the gods of karma are rewarding us with the life we have exported to the people of Iraq: failure of basic services of government, chaos, looting and death.

We're all wearing the blue dress, now.

Yeah. Except, of course, on a much lesser scale than what we delivered.

Tangentially, Shaker Deborah sent me the link to this article in The New Statesman that examines how America’s insistence on maintaining a deluded self-image makes much of this inevitable. Interestingly, the author seems to envision a similar fate for Britain.