A Red-Letter Day

10/03/2008

Today has been one of those rare, red-letter days, but not like Christmas, or my personal favorite; “kick an asshole in the balls” day. It's not a day that is officially scheduled per se, but is intended to be celebrated on a purely “as needed” basis. It was first declared by Pope Boniface VI in a.d. 896, and will forever be remembered, mostly by historians, scholars, and Catholics with too much time on their hands, as the sole meaningful decree of his 16 day reign as Pope.

The House of Representatives has chosen to ignore the angry demands of it’s constituency and voted to overwhelmingly pass the Senate’s version of the 700 billion dollar bailout package at the urgent, threatening behest of those they consider their real bosses; the cryptocracy of elite bankers and corporations. On top of that, I was summarily fired from my job for reasons which remain unknown.

Screw 'em all. My unbridled fury knows no bounds.

The memories of that god-awful place are already so “two hours ago.” I’ve up and quit much better jobs on a drunken whim. Misery, the forlorn bitch that she is, does love company. My former co-workers, a sullen corps of uber-nihilistic, thread-bare lumpen-proletariat, can have the shit-hole to themselves. They can continue wallowing in the ebb and flow of feces and urine, set amidst the brume of palpable fear and senseless death that defines dog pounds everywhere. Truth be told, it was seriously beginning to harsh on my positive vibes.

But today, it's not the Maricopa County Animal Shelter I’m worried about: it’s the bailout, and on multiple levels at that.

”Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

– Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri.

In a possibly related story, a seismometer at USGS headquarters in Reston, VA has detected a small area of seismic activity, the type of which has never before been recorded, in nearby Mount Vernon. Specifically, the activity appears to be emanating from below the earth near George Washington’s estate on the Potomac.

Seismologists at the Advanced National Seismic System are baffled, and the rabid debate over the origin of the waves somehow devolved into a pallid, flailing-armed donnybrook among the scientists, a bloodied USGS spokesman told a handful of reporters as he spat out a shard of broken bicuspid. The spokesman, who repeatedly refused to state his name, said that one camp asserts that seismic activity is not at all uncommon along the eastern seaboard, while the other camp has suggested that there is overwhelming evidence that the first President of the United States is "spinning in his grave like a laboratory centrifuge."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I just had a great idea. In fact, it’s a crackerjack.

Why don’t we just say to hell with it, and create a national day of celebration over the bailout. We could take a tiny portion of the 700 billion dollars, and buy up all known copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. We could then mix them in with some old currency to be shredded by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and have the shredded funds and documents dropped over the moist-eyed crowd during a ticker-tape parade down Wall St.

The parade would be to honor the President, the Vice President, the Treasury Secretary, the Fed Chairman, and every member of the bicameral Congress who voted for the passage of the bailout. It would be a powerful statement to the world; to show how powerful we remain, and to prove that we aren’t just a paper tiger or a cheap knock-off of our former selves.

We could also use the occasion to demonstrate that we remain the "bread basket of the world", and the “land of plenty”, by hurling eggs, tomatoes, chunks of rock salt, and other foodstuffs from the building tops along the parade route, in a uniquely American display of heart-felt appreciation and affection. It would be a wonderful and grand spectacle to be sure.

In the words of Willie Dixon, and immortalized by Howlin’ Wolf; it would be a real “Wang Dang Doodle.”

That would show them; that would show them all.