Even though we're facing what Alan Greenspan called a "once in a century" economic cataclysm, the public airwaves are still filled with the familiar Republican boilerplate: cut taxes, cut spending, deregulate, let the market work its magic, and so on.
The impact of the public fear of the Nibiru cataclysm has been especially felt by professional astronomers.
Having seen a misrepresented and mismanaged war, a disastrous disaster relief effort, and more recently an economic cataclysm, the American public knew full well for what and whom they were voting in '06 and '08.
But in the meantime a clear sense of public life seems to exist only in the midst of cataclysm, and a public memorial is now fated to be saturated with private sentiments.
The alternative is too gloomy to countenance; a public, whipped into a frenzy of anger over an environmental cataclysm, responding with a knee-jerk anti-governmentalism that renders it even harder, in the long-run, to rein in Big Oil or to clean up Big Oil's messes when they next occur.
Every day they hold public office is a day in which we accelerate towards a cataclysm of labor and capital management confrontation in the streets.
Millennialism focuses on collective, public salvation and asserts that humanity will endure the great cataclysms of the coming Endtime before fulfilling the age-old dream of dwelling in an earthly paradise.
All the while, he has effectively been Australia's civilian commemorator in chief - preparing Australia's most revered and popular public institution for the four-year festival of commemoration of the global cataclysm that was the first world war but to which Australia refers parochially as Anzac100.
"Don't fuck it up!" he reportedly yelled at Tony Blair during the Monica Lewinsky cataclysm, as the sitting British Prime Minister was preparing to give a public speech in defense of Emanuel's boss, President Bill Clinton.
But the biggest difference, officials say, was that the case for the $700 billion was made to Congress directly by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, two public officials, who testified that urgent Congressional action was needed to prevent a global economy cataclysm.
