A Healthy Neurosis

I once sat next to a woman on a plane who told me she had a neurotic fear of Robin Williams. Lurid images of his face materialized in her mind when she tried to go to sleep at night, she told me, visibly shuddering as she described it. Poor woman, I thought. She’s obviously on the verge of some kind of breakdown. Little did I know, I would soon fall prey to a similar neurosis, except the object of my revulsion isn’t Robin Williams, but Newt Gingrich.

Everything about the man fills me with neuralgic horror. If he comes on TV when my nephew and niece are in the room I instinctively shield them. He reminds me of the pushy, aggressive, stinky fat kid who sucked up to the teachers but made faces behind their backs in an effort to win friends; the first one to misbehave but the first one to go tattle on someone else; or the precociously horny perverted kid who rummaged through his own mother’s panty drawer and got caught masturbating in the bathroom in fourth grade. Now he’s like the guy whose eyes dart around your living room when he’s standing at your front door talking to you, and he leaves a slimy film on your hand after he shakes it. He sits just a little too close to your eleven year old daughter, talks to her just a little too much, and looks at her just a little too long than is proper. He’s the kind of sleaze who would not only molest a girl scout, but steal her cookies too. Why is it so easy to imagine him in an oversized army surplus jacket lurking near a playground, jerking and twitching in the bushes, a dog-eared copy of The Third Wave falling out of his pocket? “Psst, little girl, come sit on Uncle Newty’s lap and he’ll tell you why women can’t live in foxholes.” He just seems to be, I think, what the pre-Clarence Thomas Supreme Court would have called prurient.

Just when I’m about to admit I have a problem, head down down to mental health and beg for zoloft or prozac or valium, I tell myself no, it’s okay. I’m not crazy, American political culture is crazy. To prove it, I do a simple web search for some of Newt’s greatest hits, and it quickly yields the following:

If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don't have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they're relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn't matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.

Men are basically little piglets, you drop them in a ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter …

I rest my case.

Then I feel better, and I no longer worry about Newt’s efforts to become the Republican leader again. Any party who nominates that viscuous worm to be their chief can’t possibly succeed, right?

Then I think about Mussolini, and Hitler, and Karl Rove, and all the other ugly little men who fomented even uglier coups and I’m back to square one. It is precisely these kinds of toad-like imps that are forever angling and scheming and plotting to gain power and upset the peace of the world. That’s why he bothers me so much. It’s enough to make we watch re-runs of Mork and Mindy in an effort to replace his face with the goofy but harmless image of Robin Williams in my mind.

Is There Something Wrong With This Picture?

I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Earth Day than spraying several thousand gallons of paint all over the top of the Long Beach Arena. If I knew it was that easy I’d go buy a few cans of Krylon and paint my garage door green.

Atlas Whined

They’re mad as hell, and they’re not gonna take it anymore. Who? Wall Street bankers, of course.

The mighty Atlases upon whose shoulders we sit are getting angry at our ingratitude. They give, we take; they build wealth, and we sponge off it; they motor the world, and all we do is unthinkingly criticize and complain when the invisible hand of the market rewards them. Well, Mr. and Mrs. American whiner, they want you to know they’ve had it, as reported by Gabriel Sherman in this article in New York Magazine:

“No offense to Middle America, but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco out of a huge, shiny truck?” e-mails an irate Citigroup executive to a colleague.

“I’m not giving to charity this year!” one hedge-fund analyst shouts into the phone, when I ask about Obama’s planned tax increases. “When people ask me for money, I tell them, ‘If you want me to give you money, send a letter to my senator asking for my taxes to be lowered.’ I feel so much less generous right now. If I have to adopt twenty poor families, I want a thank-you note and an update on their lives. At least Sally Struthers gives you an update.”

You might think your life is tough, what with losing your job, your home, your retirement, but you just don’t get it. Your perspective is warped by the distorting prism of reality. You should have gone to Columbia or Wharton. Maybe then you’d understand that the rich have special needs. They also face special problems, the likes of which you and I could never hope to understand. For example, cost structures. Cost structures are an invisible web of interlocking expenses that, well, force you to be a greedy snob. A former Goldman Sach’s man explains:

To Wall Street people who have grown up in the bubble, the meaning of the crisis is only slowly sinking in. They can’t yet grasp the idea of a life lived on less. “Without exception, Wall Street guys have gotten accustomed to not being stuck in the city in August. So it becomes a right to have a summer home within an hour or two commute from Manhattan,” says the Goldman vet. “There’s a cost structure of going with your family on summer vacation that’s not optional. There’s a cost structure of spending $40,000 to send your kids to private school that is not optional. There’s a sense of entitlement, that you need that amount of money just to live, that’s not optional.”

Do you get it yet? If you happen to be stuck in the unemployment line this August, just know it could be worse: you could be stuck in a dreary penthouse in Manhattan. But then again, you didn’t go to Columbia or Wharton, so it’s probably not sinking in. It’s all about cost structure, which never enters our beautiful minds, or the beautiful minds of those lucky Sysco delivery drivers who get to idle away their days in huge, shiny trucks.

There’s one more thing. A lot of these beneficient Wall Street people were willing to vote for Obama. You know, because they care about you, me, America in general. But this liberal sense of entitlement he’s been spreading around violates their free market principles, and not even the billions of dollars in TARP money that he’s giving them is enough allay their concerns. Thus, they warn, Wall Street just might do something unheard of in the history of American finance — turn right!

During the campaign, Obama was never shy about his promise to undo the Bush tax policies. But it was easy to ignore his occasional lapses into populist rhetoric and focus on his intense intelligence and Ivy League education. Now, in the wake of the crisis, Wall Street’s politics are shifting rightward. “All the rich people I know took George Bush for granted,” says an analyst at a midtown hedge fund. “I’m a Democrat, but I agree with Rush Limbaugh on a lot of this stuff,” rails the wife of a former AIG executive.

The argument that Obama has in fact done a great deal to help Wall Street—to the tune of trillions of dollars—doesn’t have much truck with these critics. “If you really take a look at what Obama is promising, it’s frightening,” says Nicholas Cacciola, a 44-year-old executive at a financial-services firm. “He’s punishing you for doing better. He doesn’t want to have any wealth creation—it’s wealth distribution. Why are you being punished for making a lot of money?” As a Republican corporate lawyer puts it: “It’s the politics of envy, and that’s very dangerous.”

There you have it. We’re pushing Wall Street right into the arms of Rush Limbaugh. When they deliver us to another Republican regime, we’ll only have ourselves to blame.

I bet you feel really stupid now about complaining over paying their bonuses.

The Time I’ve Lost

The Time I’ve Lost — by Thomas Moore

The time I’ve lost in wooing,
In watching and pursuing
The light that lies In woman’s eyes,
Has been my heart’s undoing.
Tho’ Wisdom oft has sought me,
I scorn’d the lore she brought me,
My only books Were women’s looks,
And folly’s all they taught me.

Her smile when Beauty granted,
I hung with gaze enchanted,
Like him the Sprite Whom maids by night
Oft meet in glen that’s haunted.
Like him, too, Beauty won me;
But when the spell was on me,
If once their ray
Was turn’d away,
O! winds could not outrun me.

And are those follies going?
And is my proud heart growing
Too cold or wise For brillant eyes
Again to set it glowing?
No — vain, alas! th’ endeavour
From bonds so sweet to sever:
Poor Wisdom’s chance
Against a glance
Is now as weak as ever.

Mission Accomplished

What have we learned today? A couple things. First, our politicians are in the tank for Israel/AIPAC. Second, Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was used against Democrats to blackmail them and bring them under heel. What will the likely results of this startling revelation be? If history is any judge, the American people can expect a rigorous, objective investigation into this matter, the abandonment of warrantless wiretapping, and a top-down re-appraisal of U.S. policy towards Israel. … Oh wait. I think I messed up. What I meant to say was, if history is any judge, the American people can expect absolutely nothing.

Oh yeah, we also learned that Bush wasn’t a total failure. His spying program worked exactly as planned. Mission accomplished.

This Speaks For Itself

I can’t think of a more appropriate image for our times.

The Great Dunce Parade

I’ll be performing a patriotic service today by ignoring the tea party morons. I toyed with idea of going to Sacramento to get a first hand glimpse of the stupidity, but I seem to have misplaced my three-cornered hat. Besides, neither my waistline nor my cholesterol level are large enough for me to gain admittance to that hardy band of patriots. I guess I’ll just have to wait to get Neil Cavuto’s autograph. Shucks.

Watching these people is almost enough to make me enjoy paying taxes.

A New Kind Of Atmosphere

I heard the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, interviewed on NPR yesterday. If you thought this recession wasn’t affecting rich investment bankers, guess again. This is from a summary of the interview on NPR’s website:

Because Goldman Sachs is now receiving money from the federal government, Blankfein says, the compensation issue is on the “forefront” of the executives’ minds.

“And since money is fungible, we’re very, very careful how we spend the money and how it appears that we’re spending the money,” Blankfein says. “It certainly affects our behavior, and you know something — it should affect our behavior.”

The notion of bankers playing a round of golf in the afternoon while at a conference has changed, he says.

“There’s kind of a new atmosphere in the world. Things don’t look the same,” Blankfein says. “If we were not in the TARP today, I think the round of golf still feels a little bit different than it would have felt two years ago. And by the way, there’s a business purpose for the round of golf; it’s not as if people within Goldman Sachs are playing with each other when they should be laboring at their desks. We’re engaging with our clients in a context in which people can be more friendly, share more information, become closer — all with a commercial purpose, which is in the best interest of our shareholders. There was nothing wrong with it then, but it does have a different feel in the context of so much distress.”

The poor guy can’t enjoy his golf game anymore. What kind of country our we becoming when a coven of greedy bankers can’t get together at an exclusive golf club to create bigger, better ways to rip everyone else off without it all feeling, you know, different than it used to?

By the way, somebody tell Lloyd Blankfein that we never thought the Lords of Wall Street just went around “playing with each other.” Where would they find the time when they’re so busy screwing us?