It is the cranky Puritan in me, the Calvinist thought-scourge, my vain John Adams over-bookishness and practiced cynicism, yet there it is, and my first, second and third opine of the gate-crashing of the trite Virginia duo, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, is to recall the crisis of the "Grapes of Wrath." Once upon a time, the economy collapsed, and the banks and confidence went cliff-diving, and the nation entered a ten-year long slide. The deprivation was genuine. Through 1933 and into 1934, the world markets staggered. Meanwhile in New York and London and Paris, the well-to-do carried on with some success, because the national deflation phenomenon meant that stockpiles of assets grew in buying power. Steinbeck's Joads were meant to be the everyman -- who were shoved so far outside of civilization it was as if the road back from brutality and want had disappeared around them. At the same time, the swollen swells in New York and London were tipsy, racy snobs who lived in alienation and ignorance even while the nation failed west of Broadway. I have read over the newspaper clips. From the London Times, January 1, 1934: "Restaurant managers agree that that New Year's Eve business was exceptionally good. 'Everyone seems anxious to welcome the New Year which promises greater prosperity,' was the comment."
Thanksgiving at the White House, 2009.
Watching the foolishness in the warm-air-blown, glass-roofed tent raised on the South Lawn of the White House, it came to me that the elite are sure to over interpret their good luck just because they too sense like sly predators that we are headed down, so eat faster. The prancing, the video cameos, the grinning, powdered aimlessness, the prop of the stately India PM Manmohan Singh, and the gregarious male-model POTUS, and then here comes the silly duo to pretend they were invited to a pretense of national worthiness. The dinner plate was forgettable. The crowd was a hodge-podge of Chicago wannabees mixed with Clintonist leftovers -- the predictable, glamorous, prickly Democratic swells. What warns me is that the celebration was out of time. There is nothing to celebrate. The jobless number is climbing. The banks remain unsolved. The GDP is false. Overseas markets are fragile. The dollar is a waif. There is more, but you see it all, and I go over it in many angles all the days. The scenario is remarkably similar to New Year's 1934. The next leg down is ahead of us and it will be a long trough. Within days of the pointless extravaganza on the South Lawn, we hear that the Dubai World default has ripped through markets like a chill. Gordon Brown says that Dubai's now highly suspect $80B shopping mania, using a credit card honored at Euro banks such as the rotten RBS and the rotten HSBC, that this splurge is "containable." We are told that Abu Dhabi has a $.5 Trillion rainy day fund that can bail out little cousin Dubai. Show me the money.
The Pranksters
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The Secret Service continues the investigation of how Michaele and Tareq Salahi knew they could get away with walking in on that particular checkpoint. The photos of the Salahi's greeting POTUS now deepen the game of gotcha. (The Salahis look headed to soft time, the pillory and massive fines; and what about the fact that they are not in custody yet: who is in charge of Homeland Security, a maitre-de?) The White House looks revealed as a victim of a prank. Yet the state dinner celebration itself was part of the prank. There is no checkpoint on the economy, no security for the banks, no pay-off. We are in prankland, with gold rising like helium, showing that inflation is now uncontrolled. There is no recovery. The next twelve months will be a brutal, numbing, inconsistent droning of metrics that point nowhere and expectations that come to no certainty, no spending, no hiring, no bottom. However there will be lots of happy talk, lots of chatter about POTUS leadership and Congress courage and international comity. It is a pattern. We have seen this before: Lieutenant General Sir George Macdonogh, president of the Federation of British Industries, "The improvement in British trade, which has been progressively apparent during the year which lies behind us, justifies the hope that 1934 may..." Dated January 1, 1934. Phony hope sounds. Clinking glasses at a phony state dinner. Camera clicks at a prankish phony reception. Silent dread that Dubai World is our phony world, a cheat.
