That Giant Sucking Sound

February 8, 2009

From the Crow's Nest, well-lighted by the blinding tropical sun penetrating clefts in the white curtains, you can just barely hear it but only when you are busy with something else.  When you actually attune your ears to try to pick it up, it goes away, fades right into the dull hum of biochemical rhythms in their pulse of life, and you think maybe that you were dreaming and go back to the silly things you do to feed yourself to fuel the empty boasts of your prosperity, and right in the middle of some new mild effort at commercial or personal productivity, you hear it again in the distant background, a sound like the fulminating flush of a giant toilet, a huge sucking sound muffled by its transit across a space and time that seem to attenuate its effect, especially for those of us able to sustain our attention on the doll-houses and formations of toy soldiers lining the living room floor as the smells of hamburger casserole and scalloped potatoes rise from Mom's protean and real-economik kitchen like the smell of twice-used coffee and a flopped rabbit scraped from a dusty roadway and roasted hard over a Depression era cook fire beside the great iron highway that conduced America to its place as a global economic powerhouse in the last half of the nineteenth century.

As those recently converted paragons of fiscal responsibility, congressional Republicans, furrow their eyebrows, glare their disapproval, stab the air in moralistic outrage, and appear without saying so literally to relate the smell of the stimulus package to that of a fresh steaming pile of dog shit, America unloads on its newest celebrity mother.  And you can see in Ann Curry's facially typeset contempt the visual manifestation of that sound in the distance of things of value being stripped of their component parts in a gale-force vortex that lives like a monster under the bed of many of America's Norman Rockwell homes, porch swings, lemonade, red wagons and all.  The sounds shift from that of the pure annihilation of a maelstrom of economic entropy as it shreds value from edifices and institutions, tearing investment from physical structures to leave skeletal remains through which the real lives of everyday Americans, so fecklessly vaunted by the reality-television ethic, must now be observed by even those passers-by that subscribe to neither prurient voyeuristic bents nor to the fairyland falsity of America's newest entertainment paradigm.  Back to America's most newly famous mother, for all of Ann Curry's pinched nerves and Anderson Cooper's hyperventilated hypocrisy, they forgot to mention how much they paid her for the interview.  When the woman secured $160,000 for being "injured" on the job in her health care job, maybe she just did the math back in the age when the economic vortex of destruction was pumping and creating cash instead of sucking and destroying it and saw a career in baby-having.  Doesn't she have a book deal now?  Didn't CNN re-affirm her basic business model and isn't it invested in her future, despite their puerile protestations to the contrary?  Isn't she on her way?

The mosh pit in the American living room, before the great communal eye of all-opinion-all-the-time cable news, CNN on the left, Fox on the right, has savaged the dissected debate about executive compensation among those companies in the financial sector that took taxpayer money to stay afloat, however temporary that survival may prove to be.  For all of the boo-hoo-hoo complaints that big percs are required to draw top talent, I would argue that sour grapes make better vinegar than wine.  The world's crass class, the most arrogant and privileged, have found themselves--fancy the delectable irony so rich in the cherished flavors of shadenfraude--in the wrong place at the wrong time.  While they feted themselves in self-congratulatory denial over the past few years, that great sucking sound had to have been an orchestral accompaniment to the dry issuances of corporate mandates and buyout targets in Manhattan high rise board rooms, where the air above the steamy soiled streets is like a Barbra Streisand movie on a clear day, only not quite so after the credits roll and the curtains fall.

The lessons to be learned are so many and of such existential clarity that no single commentator or economic expert can ever approach the composite whole with any semblance of expertise.  As the sucking sound rises and falls in my ears not just as a function of the fortunes of today's financial markets and the tentative motion back and forth of capital across spans of the planet but also to some degree in concert with the variation of my own blood pressure and the synapses that I allow or choose to fire, it takes me right back to that age-old tiger's milk college conundrum between the objective and subjective, between one and two, to be or not to be, and whether God is a necessary tool to help us all control impulses to rape, murder, pillage, and all sorts of other bad nasty things, or simply an inescapable human-nature reflection of our large-brained insistence that there be some greater meaning to the transitory significance of our lives.  How, indeed, can this be all there is?

Yet, how, indeed can there be this much of everything in the first place?  How is it that I can now buy horseradish, wasabi, buttermilk, fattened goose liver paste, and fourteen different brands of sun-dried tomatoes here in this backwater town in Central America, so far from both God and the United States?  Cowboy Bob stopped in to ask me about four westerns on my shelves downstairs.  I gave them to him, and we talked a bit, and he was down on the stimulus package, myself noncommittal, and in our conversation, the great sucking sound raised in volume a bit.  He voiced impressions that might have been direct sound bytes from CNN, how it was all spending and a burden on our children and grandchildren.  True enough, and I withheld judgment, professing to not know enough to make a judgment call but withholding the observation that when it was $800 billion for bankers and wealthy donors on wall street, his political class was all for surrendering unto Caesar.  Now that the package includes assistance for the, ahem, poor, and for national infrastructure, the lawmakers and party arguably most responsible for getting us here are morally outraged at the expansion in government implied.  Some things never change, and hypocrisy is something that you can set your watch by in the political culture of all societies.  It is the mother's milk of representative government, itself arguably the most immemorial of oxymorons. 

Anybody that sits back like a Katrina victim waiting on a FEMA trailer or a flood victim hungering for free peanut butter just because they got canned along with everybody else in their factories is living in denial.  That great sucking sound has transmogrified to them into one not of warning but into a moralistic hunger for vengeance that is neither moral, hungry, nor vindictive.  That great sucking sound has been out there in varying degrees throughout human history.  In the earliest days, it was the silent rush of dazed awareness of the hunter just before getting pounced upon and eaten by the hunted back in a time before we figured out how to define through legislation and government what was right and wrong, good and bad.  In former times, that awful sound like the base note of a tornado building was the distant roar of the hoof beats as the Golden Horde approaching town with drawn swords to burn churches, disembowel brethren, and rape mothers.  Today, it portends a bit of belt-tightening and some introspection and planning.  Before it was the cosseted ruffle of clerical robes tightening down thumbscrews and filing the points on the old iron maiden to assist in the purging of your inner demons and to expose your presumed pacts with the devil.  Today, it is the discovery that your anti-drug and anti-gay mega-church super-deacon is into methamphetamines and gay prostitutes or that the investment of your hard-earned Sunday donations into the advancement of the ministry capitalized instead a larcenous and unrepentant lifestyle replete with private jets and onanistic requiems to obscene self-indulgence to which Imelda Marcos would gasp with outrage.   That great sucking sound in the late thirties was the lockstep clatter of perfectly timed footfalls of fascist foot-soldiers engaged in ethnic cleansing; today the same sound has a high note, that of societal outrage as one of its erstwhile pillars in the public view slips off the pedestal of political correctness to fall to the rocks of perfidy and excoriation below as we shake our heads unsympathetically without fully realizing that but for the grace of god go an awful lot of us.  The low note of that sucking sound is, of course, the permanence of fascist foot-soldiers continuing in their ambitions toward ethnic cleansing, only this time under the guise of different arguments, some new, some old players, all of it a chaotic rumba where outrage and audacity are both required partners in a dance scripted in the earliest of times that boils down in the end likely to nothing less mundane than competition among expanding populations for limited resources.  And to close the analogies closer to home, the great sucking sound used to be that of topsoil lifted off the American breadbasket and the crumbling of banks around emptied vaults, the grey masses of disheveled and hungry waiting in long lines for soup and bread, of unwashed, unshaven, men in dirty clothing with empty pockets jungling up in railroad hobo camps to invoke Lenin and Trotsky while their contemporary overlords paid goons to break legs and necks and enforce the necessary divisions between capital and labor sustained today by the convenience of acquiescent illegal alien workers and government handouts to massive agricultural business interests that do not deserve from the American tax-payer John Nance Gardner's immemorial "bucket of warm spit."  Today, while the great sucking sound rises in tempo and gathers wealth in its vortex and shreds it into the nothingness that it almost certainly must have been all along, the reality is simply that there is less wealth to go around, and having defined the boundaries of the dilemma makes its solution virtually implicit.  Revolution is not going to change that, and the President's proposed stimulus plan is not going to change that.  The bailout funding known as TARP is not going to change that either.  Seething public fury gave way to a round of executions in Revolutionary France, but offing with their heads is not going to fix anything either, and just like America's most famous new mother, some of those most responsible for our present economic morass did not actually break laws.

What our nation learns from this lesson is likely to provide a new standard in our political and economic balance between unrestricted laissez-faire economics and governmental regulation.  And it will take a decade or more for these lessons to evolve into laws and practices that may help us to prevent a future recurrence.  All that is as nothing in terms of me living my life and trying to get wealthy and be fat and happy.  If I am unable to adapt to my new circumstances and to forge a path toward my personal ideas of success and contentment, if I am unable to do that on my own, then no governmental program or level of stimulus spending will be able to do it for me. 

Of course, I am not a single unemployed mother of fourteen children, so I cannot speak for everyone.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.  If you wish to add your own two cents to this debate, you may mail me here.

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