There is an op-ed in today’s NY Times by Slavoj Zizek on the anniversary of the Berlin Wall entitled “20 Years of Collapse”. Zizek’s choice of Victor Kravchenko as emblem for our current cultural-political stasis is quiet bleak but his life story does seem to embody a certain zeitgeist. To crudely summarize a life: sickened by the horrors of communism, disillusioned with capitalism, and disappointed by all the other possibilities, Kravchenko ended up shooting himself in his New York home. Gearing up to see 2012 on Friday, Fredric Jameson’s claim that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than capitalism feels as apt as ever.