A President That Talks

Wow. I don't know if you caught the news conference last night with Obama, but it was really something we haven't seen for a long time. A President that talks. Amazing. Someone would ask a question and he would give an intelligent answer. There were no soundbites. No evasion. The President responded to questions with cogent, well thought out arguments on why he was pursuing his policies. The Press wasn't quite sure what to do. They were used to a man who evaded, obfuscated, mumbled, shrugged, grimaced, then just walked off. We haven't had a President like this since...since...I don't know, maybe Kennedy? We are in new territory. This man is smart and he stays at a level that demands everyone else be smart also. What did the right wing pundits have to say last night. He was acting confident. He's not really confident. He is hiding behind a mask of confidence. Very good acting then. Best line..."Everyone thinks I was all ginned up to spend eight hundred billion when I came in....I wasn't." True. We cant' even blame him for our troubles. A President who doesn't communicate in a clear forthright manner lets us off the hook. We can say it is the President's fault. Not this time. If we are going to blame this man for our troubles we better study up, because there is a new sheriff in town and he is not a dumb man. The pundits may call him the anointed one or disparage him for being arrogant or falsely confident, but the truth is the era of moron is over and the idiots know it better than anyone else.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

The Coal

The problem with the stimulus bill is there is nothing in there for coal. Steam engines need coal. Big sleek ships and trains and even cars once upon a time ran on steam. You didn't really care about the men in the bowels of the ship shoveling all that coal into the boilers because you couldn't see them. You were far above eating your dinner or enjoying a cigar in the bar or lounging topside while the men sweated down below. So when the ship pulled into dock they loaded it up with food, champagne, caviar, fruit, cigars, wine, all the necessities for life and then tons and tons of coal. Because the ship's captain and everyone else knew that without coal the rest of the food, booze and cigars didn't matter much. Seems like there is one thing missing on the good ship's Obama's manifest for the stimulus plan--COAL. Middle class people are the coal of the economy lest you forget this go into Home Depot or Menards of Best Buy. There are no people. The employees outnumber the customers two to one. There are mountains of inventory and one cannot help wonder who is carrying the cost of all that inventory. So the steam engine has stopped. We know from our oligarchy who has taken all the coal. They are still in Washington and on Wall Street laughing their asses off that the American public bought into Tarp. See the one page article in the New York Times by Wells Fargo explaining why employee junkets are still necessary for the great work their employees do. The masters of the ship are tweaked someone would mess with their cigars and fine champagne. But even as the gilded glide far above us top deck, they too our a little worried that maybe the reluctance to order in coal might bring the good ship Lollipop to a halt. So how do we get our coal bins replenished? Bite the bullet and bypass the banks and make a national bank and start lending. Or...shock..shock...give money directly to the people. Not six hundred dollars, thousands. Prime the pump directly. It is interesting that the great populist nation is quite willing to take thousands of dollars in tax money, but recoils at the thought of giving it back. If income tax was never intended to be a permanent institution, let's make good now and give back some of the money. Nebulous promises of jobs will not replace the directness of giving credit to the middle class. Infrastructure jobs will put people back to work, but how many, how soon, remains to be seen. Our bins have been empty a while now and a bold President needs to take bold steps. Throw out the play book. Don't even look for precedent. Do the bold thing and put coal into the boiler now. The hard fact is you cannot operate a ship without coal, providing only for first class passengers. You really need some fuel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

A Grande Venti Double Shot Extra Dry Skim Whipped

So Starbucks is laying off people. The sky is truly falling. Maybe all our trouble began when we couldn't' even order a cup of coffee without tuning up our windpipes and speaking French. I have to admit I have been a holdout. Oh, I go to Starbucks, but I still use words like small or large. Women pucker their brows and men mutter heathen when they hear me go, "yeah I'll take a small cup of coffee." Cretin. And of course then I paid my ten bucks like everyone else for my coffee and roll and went happily on my way. Americans have always prided ourselves on cutting through the BS and getting down to the grit of things. Let the Europeans take on aires, we are a people who speak plainly without pretension. Then came Starbucks. Shuffling into Dunkin Donuts or 7/11 for a cup of coffee became strutting into Starbucks and declaring, "Yes, I want a grandee skim white chocolate peppermint mocha whipped with a double shot and a slice of your nonfat coffee cake..." Phew. That'll be fifty bucks. Probably about here we should have sniffed a sea change. When ordering a cup of coffee becomes a novel that costs as much as a novel then something has gone weird on the good ship middle class. We had a coffee bubble going and now it has burst and the men in the green smocks are going to be joining us on the other side of the counter. Will the ubiquitous image of well shod people walking down the street holding white cups with curved lids leave the diorama of our cultural landscape? Probably not. Lets face it that has become the image of people who are doing well. People who can afford to pay that kind of money for a cup of coffee and illiterate their way thorough the nomenclature of coffeeology surely have their &^%$ together. But maybe in these harder times, there might be another image, some guy walking down the street with a big 7/11 on his cup and a cold donut, sloshing along, muttering the patois of the boom years like a deranged caffeinated moron...ah, grandee...no....latteee, no venti...uh cappacino espresso extra shot blastoh. Somehow that seems more real.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

Titanic and the Economics of Class

Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. When they rescued the fifteen hundred people from the icy Atlantic they found a disproportionate amount of first class people. There were some from second class, further down in the ship, but very few from steerage down in the bowels. It seems the Captain and his crew had concentrated on saving the wealthy over the the middle class and lower class passengers. When a crisis occurs there is a run for the boats and those of privilege usually get in. Recently, there was an interesting quote from a banker in the New York Times. He said they were going to use the bail out money to shore up their accounts and invest in "banks of interest". In other words, the bankers are going to buy other banks with the bail out money and make sure they have enough reserves to weather the storm. They are going to make sure they are in the boats and well away from the ship. The real tragedy of Titanic was the fact that over a thousand people drowned in the frigid waters in range of people sitting in half filled boats. Yet, no one returned to help them. They were afraid, they later said, of being swamped. At the Bankers Association Meeting other bankers reiterated the mantra that they were going to concentrate on opportunities but that they had no real plans to lend the bailout money to consumers. So the American middle class, strangling on a lack of credit and asking for this needed money, will not get it. The boats will not return. When the inquiry into the sinking convened in New York, there were many who cried class warfare. The immigrants in steerage mostly died while the upper crust of the world managed to get into the few lifeboats. The officials of White Star said there was no choosing between classes of passengers, but there were simply not enough boats. The banks are still hemorrhaging. Bank of America just asked for another twenty billion and experts say that still won't be enough. Seems all that speculating in derivatives and mortgage backs was kept off the books. So they will continue to suck up all the bail out money and the middle class will get none of it. The gilded top will sail through for a while but will falter because the coal of any steam engine is the lifeblood and the middle class is the coal of our economy. Even the bankers must know their ship is taking water faster than they can bail now. Like Captain Smith, who asked his ship's architect about Titanics fate with four of her watertight compartments gashed open, the bankers know the words floating up from the depths of our economic distress...she will founder.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Hemingway's Lost Short Story

You may or my not have heard about Hemingway's lost short story. The son of a friend apparently had been holding onto the story for all these years. Seems Hemingway in 1925 wrote this satire on bull fighting and sent it to this friend. Now it has come back into the limelight and the Hemingway estate does not want it published. It will be sold at Christies for about eighteen thousand. Eighteen thousand dollars for a short story at a time when you couldn't' give away a short story. The form is basically dead. The heyday of the short story was in Hemingway's time when "slicks" like the Saturday Evening Post paid as much as four thousand dollars a story. In todays dollars, probably like twenty thousand, maybe more. Hemingway of course made his mark with the short story. In Our Time was a collection of stories that brought him to the attention of Max Perkins at Scribners. You know the rest of the story. So here we are in 2009 where a short story is discovered and people are willing to pay almost twenty thousand dollars for something the Hemingway estate deems unworthy of Ernest. As a writer I can only envy those days when the written word was held in such high esteem that a short story was like a movie today. Those writers were the celebs of their time, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos. Apparently the story spoofs bull fighting, something Hemingway held in high esteem, but others do not want to see the light of day. It is interesting that the Hemingway short story will get about what it would have in 1925 dollars. I guess some writers really are timeless.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

Revolutionary Road

Back about four months ago a reviewer said, "Rocket Man reminds me of Revolutionary Road." I thought, well, interesting title. That was it. Another review came in a few weeks later, same comparison. I still did nothing. Then came another. And another. Then I heard about the movie and I finally went to a bookstore. Richard Yates struggled in 1961 to get readers. His book came out and basically dropped from site. Now why is that? Here is a book that pegs suburban living in the 1950's, nails down the monotony, the feeling that we should be doing something more than just going to work and coming home to a house in a suburb among other people doing exactly the same thing. Maybe the reason Richard Yates novel found a hard audience is because people do not like a mirror put in front of them. Now the novel and the movie are deemed brilliant. Seen through the safety of almost fifty years we can safely relate to this suburban couple. I have had people react violently to Rocket Man. Some had defended the suburbs. The Daily Herald just came out and termed the article "Author's new Novel Takes on Suburbs" http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5The assumption that an author is attacking an institution is implicit in the headline. There have been fears from other people that Rocket Man would be alienating, neighbors would stop talking to us, we would be politely shown the door back to the city. In Revolutionary Road, the couple see themselves apart, some would say in the year 2009 they see themselves as the "cultural elite." People who have reviewed the novel have been dismayed with this view and see their eventual comeuppance as just deserts. We are told from day one to not rock the boat and we don't appreciate our art pointing out our foibles, posing the question that there must be a better way. Yates named his novel, Revolutionary Road, thinking that the placidity of the fifties had to give way to something. It did, the sixties. But here we are in 2009 with another novel questioning the way we live in the year 2009...I wonder what the teens will be like?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0615213073/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1