The Pecan Grove Memorial Day ceremony will take place at Pecan Grove
Cemetery at 9:30 a.m. U.S. Rep. Sam Johnson, a former prisoner of war
during Vietnam, will be on hand to present a posthumous Prisoner of War
Medal to the family of Lt. Robert B. Fleming, a veteran who served in
World War II and endured captivity as a prisoner of war after his plane
went down in Germany. Fleming's son will accept the medal on his
father's behalf.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
1, 2, 3, Puke
Europe may soon be choking on that plat du jour of government a la Hollandaise
with the side of chopped Greek salad. The whole world, in fact, has got
something like a giant hairball stuck in its craw. The hairball is
composed of filaments of lies wound over a core of supernatural
indebtedness. The lies are promises that the debt will be paid back.
For two months the financial markets have gone sideways on a cushion
of the European Central Bank's Long Term Refinancing Operations and the
hot air of austerity chatter. The illusion of remaining airborne may
dissolve now with the Hollandaise denunciation of Franco-German team
spirit while a centripetal vortex of unpaid obligations sucks notional
wealth through the event horizon of massive deflation.
Things are heating up, in other words. Wake up, sleepyheads! Welcome to the rest of the year 2012.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics and
International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at
the London School of Economics, and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, is so amusing this morning. I, too, almost upchucked my "Paleo" diet breakfast of salmon hash with four eggs (pas de Hollandaise). Krugman writes in his column:
What's wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe's ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn't exist -- that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.
What an excellent misrepresentation of reality by one of the official
molders of public opinion and policy in this exceptional land. I would
attempt to debate his statement above that spending less government
money is proposed to encourage consumers, blah blah. It is proposed
because government doesn't have the money to spend and has run out of
the ability to borrow more money due to the bad odor now wafting off
the world's compost heap of sovereign bond paper. Everyone is going
broke simultaneously, including putative lenders, i.e. buyers of bonds,
who are the same ones selling them.
I like the way
Krugman avers offhandedly to the concept of "depression." I believe
this is a new thing for him to admit a certain absence of "green
shoots" on the spring economic scene. Heretofore his halftime act
between two presidential terms has been sheer cheerleading, but I guess
he forgot to bring his pompoms to the office yesterday. I would refer
to the situation as something more severe than a "depression," which
merely suggests a valley between peaks. I would say that we are instead
out on the arid buzzard flats beside the deep blue sea where modernity
is shortly to drown itself in a fugue of suicidal bad faith.
All of which is to say the pretense that has reigned since 2008 (viz:
"recovery") may not float through the rest of 2012. Surely in the USA,
we are approaching a dark inflection point where the fall elections
collide with the broken promises now gathering into the shitstorm
vulgarly called "Taxmageddon." The event horizon for that extravaganza
of financial lightning strikes is officially January 1, but the effects
will be felt long before that as households, businesses, pension funds,
municipal governments, and various branches of the US military prepare
to roll over and die.
Enjoy the European sideshow for
now because the roustabouts are still setting the props for act in the
center ring. When the clown cars pull into the political conventions
this summer, I would like to see these circus troupes greeted by large
and lively mobs of furious citizens hurling objurgations at the likes
of Barack Obama and Willard "Mitt" Romney. This is probably the least
we can do to register some objection to the two useless parties' way of
running things. Also, by the way, I would wonder what the generals over
in the Pentagon will think (or might do!) as they see their country
fall to tatters.
Friday, May 04, 2012
| |||||
|
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Elegy
A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and
navigated my way on the tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly
former industrial region in the northwest corner of Indiana just off
lowest Lake Michigan between the towns of Whiting and Gary. The
desolation of human endeavor lay across the land like nausea made
visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it all
had been.
Not much more than 150 years ago this was a
region of marshes, dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater
ponds of the huge lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain
made it perfect for running railroad track, and before long much of the
heavy industry that epitomized the modern interval opened for business
there, downwind from the pulsating new organism called Chicago. The
storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the numberless small shops
and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as
ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of
highways.
The one gigantic enterprise still going was
the BP oil refinery, originally the Standard Oil operation, a demonic
jumble of pipes, retorts, and exhaust stacks that sprawled over
hundreds of acres, with flared off plumes of leaping orange flame from
gas too cheap to sell lurid against the Great Lakes sunset in a lower
key of rose and salmon pink. The refinery was there to support the only
other visible activity in region, which was motoring.
In
a place so desolate it was hard to tell where everybody was going in
such numbers on the endless four-laners. Between the ghostly remnants
of factories stood a score of small cities and neighborhoods where the
immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and
shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness
that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaning
denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel.
Judging from the frequency of taquerias in the 1950s-vintage
strip-malls, one inferred that the old Eastern European population had
been lately supplanted by a new wave of Mexicans. They had inherited an
infrastructure for daily life that was utterly devoid of conscious
artistry when it was new, and now had the special patina of
supernatural rot over it that only comes from materials not found in
nature disintegrating in surprising and unexpected ways, sometimes even
sublimely, like the sheen of an oil slick on water at a certain angle
to the sun. There was a Chernobyl-like grandeur to it, as of the
longed-for end of something enormous that hadn't worked out well.
Yet people were coming and going in their cars from the welfare
ruins of East Chicago to the even more spectacular tatters of Gary,
where the old front porches are disappearing into prairie grass and the
20th century retreats into the mists of mythology. For a while, I
suppose, people were interested that the Michael Jackson nativity
occurred there, but that, too, is a shred of history now merging with
the fabled wendigo of the Wyandots and the fate of the North American
mastodon. You might draw the conclusion that driving cars is the only
activity left in certain parts of the USA. Many of the ones I saw in
this forsaken corner of the Midwest were classic beaters occupied by
young men in pairs searching, searching, searching. It takes a certain
special kind of mental bearing to persist in searching such a place for
something that is not there.
I was never so glad to get
out of a place than those hundred-odd square miles of soured American
dreamland. I was driving too, along with everybody else, on the Dan
Ryan Expressway (US I-94), and for about 20 miles or so, from Pullman
to the West Loop, the traffic barely pulsed along, like the contents in
the terminal portion of the human gastrointestinal tract. This is what
remains out in the Heartland of our country: a place so dire that you
want to race shrieking from it and forget what you saw there. I have a
feeling that its agonizing return to nature - or what's left of nature
- will not be mitigated by anything Barack Obama or Mitt Romney might
propose to do. I wouldn't want to be around when the driving stops.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
