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It is six months since Lehman fell and the crash (or the great recession, or the collapse—it’s time it got its name) began. An aspect of the story given less attention than it is due, perhaps because it doesn’t lend itself to statistics, is the psychic woe beneath the economic blow. There are two parts to this. One is that we have arrived at the first fatigue. The heart-pumping drama of last September is gone, replaced by the drip-drip-drip of pink slips, foreclosures and closed stores. We are tired. It doesn’t feel like 1929, but 1930. People are in a kind of suspended alarm, waiting for the future to unspool and not expecting it to unspool happily.

Two, the economy isn’t the only reason for our unease. There’s more to it. People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions. People don’t talk about this much because it’s too big, but I suspect more than a few see themselves, deep down, as “the designated mourner,” from the title of the Wallace Shawn play.

I asked a friend, a perceptive writer, if he is seeing what I’m seeing. Yes, he said, there is “a pervasive sense of anxiety, as though everyone feels they’re on thin ice.” He wonders if it’s “maybe a sense that we’ve had it too easy in the years since 9/11 and that the bad guys are about to appear on the horizon.” An attorney in a Park Avenue firm said, “Things look like they have changed and may not come back.” He contrasted the feeling now on the streets with 2001. “Things are subdued…Nine-eleven was brutal and graphic. Yet because there was real death and loss of life folks could grieve and then move on.” But today, “the dread is chronic…Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe were supposed to be invincible. The pillars of media were supposed to be there forever. The lawyers were supposed to feed through thick and thin. Not anymore.” He quoted Ecclesiastes:  “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” We are worried, he said, “about a way of life, about the loss of upward trajectory.”

The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ’00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn’t notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.

Gun sales continue up. The FBI’s criminal background check system showed a 23% increase in February over the previous year, a 29% increase in January, a 24% increase in December and a 42% increase in November, when a record 1.5 million background checks were performed. Yes, people fear President Obama will take away the guns he thinks they cling to, but a likely equal contributor to what The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch called a “gun-buying binge” is captured in the slogan on one firearms maker’s Web site: “Smith & Wesson stands for protection.” People are scared.

They are taking cash out of the bank in preparation for a long-haul bad time. A friend in Florida told me the local bank was out of hundred-dollar bills on Wednesday because a man had come in the day before and withdrawn $90,000. Five weeks ago, when I asked a Wall Street titan what one should do to be safe in the future, he took me aback with the concreteness of his advice, and its bottom-line nature. Everyone should try to own a house, he said, no matter how big or small, but it has to have some land, on which you should learn how to grow things. He also recommended gold coins, such as American Eagles. I went to the U.S. Mint Web site the next day, but there was a six-week wait due to high demand. (I just went on the Web site again: Production of gold Eagle coins “has been temporarily suspended because of unprecedented demand” for bullion.)

In Manhattan, Catholic church attendance appears to be up. Everyone seems to agree that this is so, though the archdiocese says it won’t have numbers until next fall. But yes, said Joseph Zwilling, the director of communications, “from what I’ve heard anecdotally from various priests,” the pews have been fuller. The rector at St. Patrick’s told him Ash Wednesday was “the busiest yet,” with 60,000 people coming for ashes. At my local church at noon mass one day this week, there were 40 people when normally there are roughly a dozen, and the communion line stretched to the back of the church. Something is happening. Yesterday a friend sent the warning of the Evangelical pastor David Wilkerson, of Times Square Church, that a new catastrophe is imminent. This is causing a small sensation in evangelical circles.

To me, one of the signal signs of the times is the number of people surfing the Internet looking for… something. One friend looks for small farms in distressed rural areas. Another logs on late at night looking for a house to buy in a small town out West, or down South, or in the Deep South. She is moving all around America in her imagination. I asked if she had a picture in her head of what she was looking for, and she joked that she wanted to go where Atticus Finch made his summation to the jury. I don’t think it was really a joke. She’s not looking for a new place, she’s looking for the old days.

I spoke to a Manhattan-based psychiatrist who said there is an uptick in the number of his patients reporting depression and anxiety. He believes part of the reason is that we’re in a new place, that “When people move into a new home they increasingly recognize the importance of their previous environment.” Our new home is postprosperity America; the old one was the abundance; we miss it. But he also detected a political dimension to his patients’ anguish. He felt that many see our leaders as “selfish and dishonest,” that “our institutions have been revealed as incompetent and undependable.” People feel “unled, overwhelmed,” the situation “seemingly unsalvageable.” The net result? He thinks what he is seeing, within and without his practice, is a “psychological pandemic of fear” as to the future of things—of our country, and even of mankind.

So where does that leave us? The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, “We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.” We are actors in a moment of history, taking part in it, moving it this way or that as we move forward or back. The moment we are living now is a strange one, a disquieting one, a time that seems full of endings.

Too bad there’s no pill for that.

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Anxiety over “peace process” following shootings of soldiers, police officer.

The media in the UK and Ireland has been filled with near apocalyptic warnings of the potential breakdown of the Northern Ireland “peace process”, which established power-sharing structures between Republican and Loyalist parties.

They came in response to the shooting of two British soldiers at their barracks in Antrim on Saturday evening. The soldiers were opened fire on by two masked men who used a pizza delivery to the barracks to make the attack. Another four men, including two pizza delivery workers, were injured. Late Monday, a police officer was shot and killed answering an emergency call in Craigavon, 26 miles southwest of Belfast.

The Real IRA claimed responsibility for the first attack and the Continuity IRA the second. Both groups are opposed to the power-sharing agreement. But while denouncing Sinn Fein and the IRA for “selling-out”, they offer nothing but a continuation of the bankrupt and reactionary perspective of trying to re-ignite sectarian hostilities as the basis for opposing Britain’s continued presence in the north.

Thus the RIRA defended the assault on the pizza delivery workers—one a 19-year-old local youth and the other a Polish immigrant—as a legitimate attack on British “collaborators”. CIRA used its killing of the police officer to threaten, “As long as there is British involvement in Ireland, these attacks will continue”.

That the assaults came as a shock is at one level unsurprising. Not only was the attack on the army barracks intended to be as high profile as possible, no British soldier or police officer has been killed in Ireland for more than a decade.

But that cannot account for the degree of nervousness over the fate of the entire Agreement now being expressed. RIRA has been marginalised since it was held responsible for the Omagh bombing in August 1998 that killed 29 people.

Widespread outrage over Omagh intensified support for the British, Irish and US-backed Good Friday Agreement which, it was claimed, would end such atrocities by incorporating Loyalist and Republican parties into the devolved assembly.

Today the various Republican splinter-groups opposed to the deal are said to number a few hundred core activists, and are subject to widespread surveillance and repression. A number of their leaders are imprisoned, and they are more often than not involved in confrontations with one another, rather than British forces.

Since the beginning of 2008, dissident groups have carried out 18 gun and bomb attacks, with varying success. There have also been several attempted attacks on police officers. But the latest report from the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), appointed by the British and Irish governments to report on paramilitary activities, stated that while RIRA had continued efforts to “enhance its organisational capability”, police “on both sides of the border have been successful in disrupting dissident operations and arresting suspects”. Its efforts to recruit had met with “limited success”.

Adding to the isolation of those opposed to the agreement is the partnership established between the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein. The DUP have made clear they will not use the latest attacks to undermine Sinn Fein, while Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams called on the public to help the police track down the perpetrators.

Still Social and Democratic Labour Party representative Dolores Kelly said the attacks had left Ireland “staring into the abyss”, while David Simpson, DUP, described it as a “deliberate and sustained effort…to try and drag Northern Ireland back to the worst days of Ulster’s past”.

The Irish Times opined that the shootings were “as much a danger to the quality of life on this island as the threatened collapse of the global economy. Make no mistake about it, any resumption of violence in Northern Ireland will cause inestimable damage to the peace process, prevent foreign investment and contribute to rising unemployment and falling living standards”.

Even before the shootings, warnings were being made by senior police chiefs of the dangers posed to the “peace process”. Less than 48 hours before the assault on the army barracks, Northern Ireland police chief, Sir Hugh Orde, announced he had requested the deployment of Britain’s undercover Armed Forces Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) against dissident republican groups.

Formed four years ago with the remit of targeting international terrorism, the SRR has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan. It continues the tradition of Britain’s “dirty war” in Ireland, during which it bugged, spied and murdered its way through the north. The unit was also said to be involved in the shooting death of innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, following the 7/7 bombings in London.

The deployment was denounced at the time by Sinn Fein’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. “The history of the north has shown that many of these forces have been as much a danger to the community as any other group”, he said.

British commentators are subsequently crowing that McGuinness has had to eat his words.

At any rate, McGuinness’s complaint that the involvement of the SRR had bypassed the devolved assembly and the Policing Board is disingenuous.

Sinn Fein has fully signed up to the new Police Service of Northern Ireland. More specifically, it is a signatory to the October 2006 St. Andrews Agreement, orchestrated by the British and US governments, Annex E of which allowed for MI5 to take overall charge of national security in the north.

To date, fully 15 percent of MI5′s budget is committed to its activities in Northern Ireland, and in 2007 it opened its largest regional headquarters outside London in Belfast.

Why Orde chose to make such an announcement public is unclear. After all, the idea that British intelligence was not at work in the north until this time is hardly credible. And given that Orde claimed the SRR was made necessary by an increased threat from dissident groups, which had caused the terror threat to be raised from “substantial” to “severe”, why were British soldiers so unwary as to leave their barracks to collect a pizza delivery unarmed?

At the very least, McGuinness’s warning that the announced British crackdown on dissident republicans was “dangerous” has proven correct. Not least because it demonstrated that, 11 years since the Good Friday Agreement, British imperialism remains the real power in the north.

Sections of the British ruling elite are using the killings to demand that Sinn Fein go the extra mile, pledge its support to the British army and promise to fully participate in the type of law and order measures demanded to clamp down on dissent.

But this is bound up with broader concerns over the impact of the developing capitalist crisis on Northern Ireland.

As the World Socialist Web Site has consistently explained, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement had nothing to do with establishing genuine democratic control over the institutions of power in the north. Rather, it represented the drive of British and US imperialism, supported by the Irish government, to create a more stable environment for international capital and the transnational corporations by bringing Sinn Fein into government.

That is why the Irish Times’ first concern was the impact of the killings on international investment. It is also the perspective of all the major loyalist and republican parties, who agree that the north must be transformed into a low-tax investment platform, on a par with that in the south, if it is to be competitive.

It is the fragility of this economic programme under conditions of global recession that has intensified anxieties over the “peace process”.

The Irish Times went on to warn, “These are dangerous times. Public confidence in a better future will have been dented by the economic downturn, while unemployment and lack of opportunity may provide fertile recruiting circumstances for paramilitary elements on both sides”.

The southern Irish economy has been particularly hard hit by the global recession and is widely expected to be forced at some point to follow Iceland in declaring state bankruptcy. The UK economy is not far behind.

No longer able to trade off its “Celtic Tiger” partner, or to rely on its major UK markets, Northern Ireland faces economic meltdown. In December the Belfast Telegraph warned that pledged infrastructure projects are to be abandoned, while the north’s “inordinate dependency on public sector employment”—the UK government accounts for two-thirds of economic output and one-third of employment—made it “particularly vulnerable, when the inevitable cut-backs come”.

The collapse in the property market has seen house prices fall more steeply in the north than elsewhere in the UK, down by more than 34 percent last year. Large numbers of lay-offs have followed in the construction industry, with the north reporting its largest monthly rise in claimants for almost 30 years. Six of the north’s towns are among the top 10 UK district councils reporting the fastest increase in unemployment.

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