Random Thoughts; Stray Voltage

It’s not Friday or anything, but I saw a couple of interesting articles in the paper this morning.  So here goes…

First up is an opinion piece in the NY Daily News saying something that I’ve said on this blog before: the Baby Boomer generation ruined this country with its me-first attitude and short-term thinking.  In this specific article, the argument is that the nation’s spending has been diverted from education to health care as the Boomers have aged out of a widespread need for education and into a widespread need for extensive health care, with the effect that now young people in this country—and indeed, the country itself—are now permanently in debt.

The second article is an opinion series out of the New York Times that says, if you can believe this, that gas isn’t expensive enough.  And to be honest, though it’s hard to admit it, the truth is that the article’s initial premise is almost certainly correct.  Which is to say that the world is the way it is because of economics.  We made gas cheap and encouraged everyone to buy a car or two, so we shouldn’t now be surprised that they don’t want to walk anywhere or take mass transit.  It therefore follows that changing the world requires changing the economics.  Or, to put it another way, if you want folks to drive less, you should make driving more expensive.

That said, as much as I’d like to see folks forced to use their bicycles more, the simple reality is that today’s suburban commuter culture would struggle with the adjustment.  I mean, I can imagine New York—and to a lesser extent New England—surviving with European-style gas prices, but we have mass transit up here.  It’s hard for me to imagine the same systems being adopted in, say, Tennessee.  The infrastructure isn’t there, and quite honestly, the cost to put it in place is staggering.

But who knows?  Like it or not, gas ain’t getting’ cheaper.  I suppose eventually something will have to change, one way or another.

AvX #1.  I've been digging some of the recent X-Stuff,
but I don't know if it's enough to put any X-Stuff on
my actual Pull List.

Finally, I read through Avengers vs. X-Men #0 and #1, and I liked them.  I’d never heard of Hope Summers before, but I read House of M, and in any event, it’s not overly difficult to figure out who Hope is supposed to be.  I also got a couple of Astonishing X-Men trades from the library—storylines written by Warren Ellis from right after the initial Whedon/Cassady run ended—and I liked those—a lot more than I thought I would, honestly.  So I started wondering if maybe I should’ve been following the X-Men these past few years after all.  It’s always looked like a mess—and God knows that there’s nothing in comics that goes off the rails quite as badly as the X-Men does when it’s written by some clueless no talent hack.  But, I mean, what if I was wrong?  What if I’ve been missing years and years of awesome X-Men stories?  That’d be a tragedy!

So then I went and read the Wikipedia entry on Hope Summers by way of catching up with the story, and…

Uh, no.  Thank you, but ugh. 

I don’t mind following AvX for awhile ‘cause it looks like it might be cool, but all that crap with Cable and Bishop and the X-Force… I mean, isn’t that what killed comics in the first place?  I mean, the 90s are over, man.  They ought to leave that stuff lying where they found it.

Or better yet, bury it where it’ll never be found again.

So anyway, here’s my question, dear readers: beyond AvX, are there any actual X-books that’re actually worth reading?