Update – The Power of Art

An anonymous donor, who must have seen Prometheus Unbound or read sweetunrest, has solved the firepit crisis.

 

Can Obama channel Old Hickory?

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves.”

Speaker – Andrew Jackson

Audience – Obvious

 

National Garage Sale – Social Security, Bureaucrats, Other Valuable Merchandise Available

While most people believe that the $700 billion bailout actually represents a move toward the nationalization of banks and financial institutions, it actually is part of the grand privatization scheme of neo-cons and others that’s been in the works for many years.

Our president tried to let us do it the easy way. Remember a couple years ago when he travelled the country trying to sell us on the privatization of Social Security? (If it had worked, by the way, I’m not sure millions of 70-year-olds wouldn’t be storming the White House right now.) Thankfully, he failed, perhaps because he’d squandered too much political capital on the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

This—what we have now, and what’s coming—is the hard way. The government, deeply in debt, will have no choice but to sell the banks it bailed out, as well as other assets. Some private corporation will be perfectly willing to buy the shell-game that is Social Security and refashion its obligations and revenue streams in the capitalist mode. This will have us looking back fondly on the times when Bush was at least making it seem as if we had a choice.

 

Taxpayers Rejoice

The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, signed by none other than rascally leprechaun Bill Clinton himself, provided some curious incentives, as it turned out, that we might do well to remember. Coupled with the Balanced Budget Act, TRA of 1997 arguably helped to create the much heralded—and in many ways miraculous—federal budget surpluses starting in 2000. The surpluses quickly vanished under the leadership of a fiscal conservative.

But one of the provisions of the act was that profits on the sales of primary residences would be tax free up to $250,000 for single persons and $500,000 for couples filing jointly. You’d have to look long and hard for other ways to make half a million taxless dollars.

Surely, the promise of loot encouraged homeowners to take advantage of this. Along with the mortgage income tax credit and cheap money, the pot of gold at the end of every house sale rainbow begot more buying and selling. Which helped beget, well…this, didn’t it?

Interestingly enough, owning a house might not even be that great an investment, and those now waiting for pots of taxless gold will most likely wait some time.

One wonders what the intention was for a tax cut that encouraged people to move out of their houses.  Probably churn.  What a noisy spectacle it was: musical chairs with “cozy” condos, “quaint” Craftsmans, and “darling” Colonials.  Unfortunately, the music has stopped.

 

Link to Technorati

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Poem for Heather’s birthday

This is one of the poems that prompted a classmate of mine at Notre Dame to proclaim that love poetry died with John Keats in 1821.  This desperate vitality reminds me to be grateful you were born and encourages me to love you better:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

 

Pack Up Our Things

Susan Tedeschi’s singing a new song in live concerts lately that supposedly her record company won’t let her put on an album. It’s called “Pack Up Our Things and Go,” and it’s about the US’s Iraq experiment. The lyrics aren’t frighteningly great because they seem to lapse into sentimental pundit-speak without really parodying it:

Bring our young soldiers back home; what are we fighting for?

I know this isn’t our war.

Has our journey just begun? Or are we back where we started from?

Who knows what lies in store?

But the title and sentiment sound just the right note now. This largish foreign policy problem seems as if it has an immediate domestic—and by domestic I mean familial—solution.

Just briefly imagine one side of the conceit: a husband and wife decide that a certain situation isn’t right for the kids or the family. The neighbors sell crystal meth, the jobs have dried up, highrises obscure the mountains that once cast gentle shadows over the town. They resolve to leave. It might be a tough decision, and hardships may lie in wait elsewhere, but they’re too weary to stay. That the decision was undertaken as a family for the general good is cozy and reassuring.

The song grants us more courage to suggest that the debate is over and it’s time to pack our shit and go.

 

Sharing

Parents who bring their toddlers to public places like libraries and beaches tend to make a big show, when their child inevitably purloins another kid’s toy and starts playing with it, of encouraging their own child to share and be nice and let the kid who had been chewing, for example, on the plastic toy horse to continue chewing on it until such time as she tires of it and only then can their kid savor that same horsemeat. But kids aren’t stupid, even if they can’t talk. They see these same parents tuck their own individual wallets into their own pockets and purses and drive their private cars home to houses full of things that are theirs and no one else’s. In other words, they hardly see their parents share, and when the horse is pulled from the offender’s mouth, the lips curve more in confused recognition than anger.

 

Worry = Sanity

Says one wise citizen to another after the death of Edward IV in Richard III:

Truly, the hearts of men are full of fear.

You cannot reason almost with a man

That looks not heavily and full of dread.

 

Slowness

Each time I land at JFK, I’m amazed at what an incredibly ugly hurry everyone seems to be in. Perhaps my always coming from California, a much more dignified place, exacerbates my shock. Nevertheless, a question for New Yorkers: isn’t being in a hurry less attractive than composure and deliberateness? For the answer, one need look no further for help than a long-running US TV series entirely dependent on aesthetic judgment. So, here’s the second question: when a swimmer or surfer or diver is imperiled and a lifeguard must dash down the beach and into the water to make a daring rescue, don’t the directors of Baywatch inevitably cut to the slo-mo shot, because even life-saving action is more beautiful when lentissimo?