"Y2K, 'W' and the Great Depression - Part Deux"

"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right" - Oprah Winfrey, American media mogul, actress and producer - born 1954.

February 12th 2000 was the official date when I first arrived in San Francisco in what would turn out to be the first of two full relocations from Ireland to the United States in the decade that would follow. I was lucky enough to have been able to spend much of my middle to late '20's travelling the world with my career, but the move to the United States at the dawning of the new century was the first time I was actually planning on living in a new country, absorbing and adapting to a new culture, and attempting to accomplish what hundreds of thousands of my fellow Irish men and women had done in the centuries past. Much of the boom in the technology and software sector in the late 1990's, the industry in which I worked at the time, revolved around the confusion surrounding Y2K. Would information systems, computer programs, and the technhnological infrastructure supporting corporations and businesses of every size, shape and industry vertical, and perhaps even governments, continue functioning after 01/01/2000. Y2K turned out to be a red herring and by February of 2000 it was largely forgotten.

My first project in the United States involved a travel schedule that went something like this: Sunday - fly San Francisco to Memphis, take a connecting flight from Memphis to Nashville and then either hire a car or book a driver and travel across the border from Tennessee to Kentucky to a place called Bowling Green. Friday afternoon around lunch time I would retrace my steps back across 3,000 miles of open country to San Francisco. This was the schedule for nine months. Bowling Green has been, (and is likely only ever to be), famous for two things: a) it is the home of the Corvette car museum and b) at one time it has the largest number of restaurants per head of population in America. You can understand now when I tell you that the folks I was working with on the project looked at me kind of funny for the first couple of weeks whenever I opened my mouth. The natives of Bowling Green were somehow able to get five syllables into word that was only supposed to have three. To them, this fast talking Irishman was quite literally from another time and place.

One memorable trip in one of those car rides from Nashville, Tennessee to Bowling Green, Kentucky stands out. It was March or April of 2000 and the presidential primaries were being waged across the country. John McCain had just defeated George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary by 17 points and Bush was on the ropes. (This was just before Karl Rove stepped in and began circulating flyers in South Carolina (in advance of their primary) saying that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate child, that he was in favor of homosexuality and that his wife Cindy was a drug addict. Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of John McCain, but I had respect for him back in 2000, and any Republican that was running against Bush, any Bush, had my support. The conversation in the car between the can driver and I got around to Bill Clinton. Clinton was at the time trying to rehabilitate his name in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998, while simultaneously seeing out his second term as President. Once I mentioned Clinton's name to the driver in the middle of Kentucky redneck country, he became incensed, telling me that he would gladly shoot that son of a bitch Clinton with his shotgun if he had an opportunity. I tried to draw him out on what his issues were with Clinton and perhaps not surprisingly they ranged from abortion to gun control to so-called "morals" in the White House. This experience was my first introduction to someone who classified themselves as an evangelical Christian, the kind of voter that George W. Bush courted extensively in the 2000 election with Al Gore. The rest, as we know, is history.

As we close out this year of 2009 it is also worth considering that we are also turning the last page on the first decade of the 21st century. There is no doubt that in the decade of the '00's, one man has dominated the political and economic landscape of the world. George W. Bush, as we now know, was the archangel Gabriel in disguise. A man that ran on a plank of "compassionate conservatism" in 2000 turned out to be the worst American president in the history of that office, somehow achieving a level of incompetence worse than that of his predecessors Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and his own daddy, George H.W. Bush. 'W' was an unqualified to be President as his "Skull and Bones", Nazi apologist, Savings and Loans defrauder, CIA hit man, and friend of the Bin Laden family, father was. The man 'W' stole the election from in 2000, Al Gore, went on to completely rehabilitate his career and racked up a Grammy, an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize in quick succession. Today, Gore is the pre-eminent worldwide authority on global warming and climate change, while 'W' has been ostracized to the back waters of Texas and obscurity.

Time magazine recently issued a special publication entitled "The '00's: Goodbye (At Last) to the Decade from Hell". Who could blame them for such a title after a decade that included such catastrophic and world changing events as 9/11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Hurricane Katrina, Guantamano Bay, torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the dismantling of the United States constitution and the plunder of the US economy by a combination of investment banks, mortgage houses, finance companies and the insurance industry. The legacy of the Bush/Cheney years will, unfortunately, be with us for a generation or more.

On a positive note, the outstanding event for me in 2009 was the inauguration of President Barack Obama. The election of America's first black president marked a seminal moment in the history of democracy in the United States. Here is a brave and visionary leader who is committed to making ground breaking legislative changes for the betterment of Americans. There is no doubt that Obama's task is huge and he may well have underestimated the extent to which corporate America owns a large slice of the United States congress, however, I believe strongly that this president will preside over significant reform (and improvement) in areas such as climate change, regulatory control of the marketplace, foreign policy, immigration and civil rights and universal health care. Let us wish President Obama well as he undertakes these awesome endeavors.