Magical Thinking

"What's good for him is good for us all!"

I finally figured out why the government gave a bajillion dollars to Goldman Sachs instead of doing something sensible to help the economy.* (I'm ignoring the trite observation that the executive and legislative branches of our government do what they do because they've been bought and paid for by the banks they're bailing out.) It's actually a case of magical thinking, which is the confusion of causes and effects.

It's true (and not even totally bad) that every time something huge happens (like war or economic growth) banks and bankers make money. That's because large activities require the movement of money, banks facilitate that movement, and you don't muzzle the oxen while they're out threshing the grain. But, if A (any large economic or social phenomenon) causes B (the enrichment of bankers), it is not the case that B causes A. Our benighted leaders are under the impression that B is the necessary condition of A, when it is only a result. It is not even inevitable that bankers will get in a year more money than a thousand working people would make in a lifetime, only that they will make some money.

The president and congress believe that because the hubristic morons at banks took hundreds of millions of dollars during the good times, giving those same morons hundreds of millions of dollars now will bring the good times back. They are like the gambler who, remembering when he won big on a horse while wearing his pink shirt, wears that same pink shirt every time he goes to the track because he thinks it will help. I presume that most of these politicians were required to take some kind of elementary logic class while they were in law school. It is unfortunate that they figured logic, like geometry, is something that is never actually useful in real life.

*A sensible course of action might be to pay Americans to do something productive and necessary like rebuilding and improving the country's infrastructure– roads, bridges, electrical grid, fiber optic in rural areas, and public education (K-12 and state colleges). Communal infrastructure happens to be the proper responsibility of the government. It would also fix the actual problem in our economy– that nobody is buying anything because nobody has a job or money.

**Image credit: Honoré Daumier, "Gargantua," from www.histoire-image.org.

Waiting For You

This song was laterally inspired by Robert Browning's "The Two Poets of Croisic" and apotropaically aided by the well-timed chewing of Corina.

Your Shoelace Is Untied

While shopping today, I had a minor out-of-body experience. I was looking for blackboard supplies– new chalk and an eraser. The school where I’m an adjunct supplies only jagged little nubs of chalk and a completely ineffective white-board eraser. I now understand the eraser shortcoming, since no store in Hyde Park offers actual chalkboard erasers, the kind made out of felt that remove writing instead of smearing it around. I’m guessing the reason is that chalk is thought to be, like tape-recorders and typewriters, obsolete. Everyone in the modern age is either using powerpoint or– to use my new circumlocution for dry-erase boards– wearing the lady wig:



After finding chalk but no eraser, I walked home along a quiet street and felt that my shoe was untied. I bent down and tied it. When I straightened up, I noticed that I had been standing or squatting in the same place on a slightly unfamiliar sidewalk, where no one else was walking, to the side of a driveway with a one-car garage, in front of someone’s back pantry window, for probably ninety seconds. Anyone who saw me would think I was scoping the place out for a burglary. I realized that my excuse, if someone asked, would sound weird: “I was tying my shoelace.”

When was the last time I ever saw anyone tie their shoelaces in public? It must have been years. Tying your shoelaces is an obsolete activity from the fifties, like repairing a TV or mailing a personal letter. It isn’t done anymore. People wear shoes all the time. Why don’t I see at least one or two a day hunched over, fiddling with their laces? It could be because the urban youths in my neighborhood wear their sneakers as loosely fastened as their pants. It could be that people drive more and walk less, putting less strain on their laces between the times when they tie them leaving the house.

Most likely, my own loose laces were the result of wearing shoes that are almost worn out. It’s not just that I’m a week away from the time when I start to feel the pavement without the mediation of my sole, it’s also that the laces have worn their tracks smooth over the leather of the upper, so that there’s very little to grip and keep them from unravelling. You don’t see too many people in the same situation because old, worn-out shoes are another obsolete remnant from different times. Shoes now are either so top-shelf that they last forever, or they are so cheap that you are supposed to throw them out in a month. (Or– in my experience– they’re both expensive and ephemeral.)

The rarity of shoes that are neither too cheap to last for a day nor everlasting occurred to me when I saw a piece of yellowing paper that I had inserted in a book a year earlier. Old, yellow paper is another obscurity, like vacuum tubes. If a piece of information is only supposed to last a few days, it either goes on the internet or it is printed on a receipt that you throw away when you empty your pockets to change pants. If something is going to last any longer, it gets printed on the most expensive, archival, acid-free, time-proof, boutique paper that retailers can force you to buy. It’s a rare bit of writing that’s supposed to last somewhere between six months and five years, like the notes I scratched on a 3 by 5 card before putting that card into a library book that I had to return today, just as it’s a rare shoe that’s designed to last more than a year for less than a thousand dollars.

Yellow Line