POLIS

John Perry Barlow renews his case for naming our nameless decades the "Uh-Oh's" in a post about a close call for his daughter. I hope she recovers alright; in the meantime, I second his motion:

At the dawn of this psychotic decade, I proposed, on instinct, that we should call it the Uh-Oh's. Decades need names. How else are we map their unique zeitgeists in our subsequent reflections on them? Imagine, for example, how awkward our historical recollections would become if we could not refer to "the 60's," a decade which needed no adjective, unlike, say, "the Roaring 20's?" The name is the frame, and the frame says it all.

But despite my efforts at that time, and occasional subsequent stabs, no one followed my suggestion. Furthermore, despite all the obvious historical hints, you have refused to see the appropriateness of my proposed name. Now, as we reach the mid-point of this critical passage, it remains nameless to everyone but me. You still have no verbal short-hand to refer to the decade that gave us 911, Bush the Younger, the Iraqi Tragedy, the comeuppance of the formerly Almighty Dollar, and now, one of the the most calamitous shit-kickings we've ever taken from Mutha Nature. (70,000 dead and barely counting anymore...) I cannot count the times over the last five years when when various tidings of the epoch made me mutter an involuntary "uh-oh" upon receiving them. And still, you resist my suggestion. What's it going to take, folks? Oh, never mind. You'll either see my point or you won't.