Limited, Inc.

    I searched my heart, the street, my ex-‘s habits, my family I searched them all for opportune   neuroses That I could jot down for my poetry And calm my nerves and hide the focus   Five fathoms deep in   something posy sounding. For after all, don’t I claim to be Some seashell bard, some grounding Mama, some prophet of the salty sea   Minus the albatross around my neck (come to tell you all)? -           No?   I’m here to sample wreck I’m here to smear the large and small   Until disproportion proposes That we go for a little walk, you and I, A little walk with pretty poses. A little truism, a little lie,   Logos burning a hole   in my pocket “Like her fair eyes, dude,   the day was fair”   I was going up like a rocket A perfect movement in the down and dirty   air   And heard myself gibbering like a bat while the air grew ever more blind and thick with those who   flew, shrieked and shat panting for the breath we’d left beh

  In 2007, Prospect Magazine, always looking for hits, did a survey of big thinkers. Here’s the way they phrased their question: “We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.”   Admittedly, the thinkers they asked seemed somewhat random. David Brooks gets his say, and Joe Boyd, a music producer, gets his, and apparently what qualifies one to have a view of the next one hundred years best is to work for a bank or business or write an opinion column. There were no H.G. Wells, that’s for sure, and few seemed to disagree with the premise of the question. Well 16 years on, the answers seem all too predicably concentrated on what the 00s held to be the most important issue since some peasant invented bread: terrorism. Nobody, oddly, questioned the premise.