World world

A theme park, opening soon along the gulf coast of Arkansas, promises visitors – and investors – more than just memories and a fun time with family.

Luring adventurers to the Land of All Time-themed playground, guests enjoy lily pad accommodations floating throughout the 38-square-mile park, on water and undulating, recycled “terrain.”

“It all started here – everything is from the closed loop, after all. So we just call it all natural,” said Stan Brimmingway, mastermind of the park and keeper of its honorary specimens. Modestly dressed in a smart Tyvex onesie, Stan pets a miniature bull before shepherding the creature back to its keeper. “Back when land was still bought and sold, people were fine with trading money for all of this,” he said and gestured broadly. “So we were glad to just get as much as we could – people thought they were losing land, but look at that view. The water is so much more alluring when its closer to the mountains anyway.”

And it’s unmistakable. A kind of Mediterranean vista, nestled in the Ozark foothills. Whether technology saved this landscape or invented it, it has definitely changed. “And that’s not new – and kinda the point,” Brimmingway said with a glint of enthusiasm not entirely absent of P.T. Barnum. “What is fitness after all other than the result of the effort it takes you to do normal things – otherwise it can be really hard to see this.”

Impossible, he means. Living in a moment most often means being defined by it. Unless you can imagine the Land of All Time, seeing today in context can be simply too much work. But that’s where the park comes in.

“It’s true that we brought ourselves to this place – totally our fault,” he said. “But imagine a glacier sitting on New York, or the invention of writing 3,500 years ago.” His voice trails off, galloping after his ow, quite visible sense of wonder.

“The thing about this is, it’s not only possible. It all happened. Check it out.”

The Rapacious Blur

Green means money, dough, skin, ball, quid, of course. The financial meltdown that hit the news last fall and slowly bled over most of the entire planet is recounted in two new books, which are in turn reviewed by MK in the NYT. Fool’s Gold by Gillian Tett and Dumb Money by Daniel Gross both look like decent post-mortems that gnaw on some of my favorite bones like the corruption of business schools and suburban real estate speculation. Looking at them, both also paint gobs of parallel context onto what has become the Eco Hustle that we know so well.

It was also a disaster, he [Gross] notes, with “plenty of blame to go around,” including “poor regulation, eight years of a failed Republican economic philosophy, Wall Street-friendly Democrats who helped stymie reform, misguided bipartisan efforts to promote home ownership, Wall Street greed, corrupt C.E.O.’s, a botched rescue effort” and poor judgment calls on the part of the Fed, and top bankers who in many cases did not even understand the derivatives their firms were trading in.

In short the current global financial crisis is a story about people who thought they were the smartest guys in the room and who turned out to be remarkably naïve, reckless or, in some cases, downright stupid. It’s a story — novelistic in its narrative and moral arc — about hubris and greed and heedlessness, about people, as Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Sometimes you don’t even have to substitute any words to have the stories turn out so strikingly similar. So maybe we can chalk it up to getting knowing-er about the what when the next when comes. It’s good that competent experts like these can find publishers, and I usually enjoy Kakutani’s slightly-more-than-just-the-facts style.