Saturday, August 22, 2009

“It just keeps getting piled higher and deeper”

I was impressed by the news of the day yesterday, particularly in regard to the current state of the economy.

It was reported that the Dow Jones was going through the roof, the housing market had rebounded, and consumer spending had increased. Wow! What great news. Makes one as happy as a pig in shit.

Then we were told the unemployment figures continued to go up, with California topping the eleven percent mark, foreclosures were still rising and consumer confidence was down.

How could that be? Now I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I find those bits of information rather incongruous. Do you suppose the Dow Jones is going through the roof because all those unemployed folks are rushing to their brokers with their unemployment checks to invest in the market? Or, is it because those with the money are hoping to make another killing? Nah, that would be downright obscene, wouldn’t it?

Why is the housing market rebounding when people are still losing their homes. Perhaps all those unemployed, and about to be unemployed, are taking all that money they have stuffed under the mattress and buying a cheap house while the market is down. Or, could it be that the opportunists would stoop to capitalizing on other people’s misfortunes in order to reap handsome profits when the economy rebounds? That seems so un-American, don’t you think?

And why would consumer confidence be down? Looks like all those hucksters on Madison Avenue and Hollywood have been asleep at the wheel. After all, they are the ones who create and sustain consumer demand. That could be the only rational explanation for all those folks not flocking to Wal-Mart Mart to buy a bunch of cheap crap from China they don’t need, and paying for it with money they don’t have. That can’t be. There must be something more to it than that. I just might be they have to scrape enough together to feed the kids and keep the bill collectors at bay. I wonder how that would play in The Hamptons?

In trying to make some sense out of all this by applying a rudimentary grasp of Aristotelian logic to these contradictions, it occurred to me that perhaps the mainstream news media has become so calloused as to forego any attempt at subtlety in peddling the corporate and political line of bovine scatology to a nation of suckers. Surely, when people are down on the rims, you would think they might have a modicum of conscience, and revisit notions such as hard news and investigative journalism. But, that is probably asking too much from those who have become fat cats by rubbing elbows with the residents of Georgetown, rather than watchdogs on the establishment that historical traditions of journalism dictate. That would be too much to ask.

Perhaps it is because it is inherent in the nature of a good whore to live in the moment and focus on the next trick.


Cowboy Bob
August 22, 2009
 

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