The psychological crash to come

A friend who once took drugs compared this moment with taking LSD. "What a high! But then, there's always the crash afterwards."


True of Obama. Most of the country is riding high (as are most foreign countries). Obama did it. It is historical. He is a spectacular person. All of this is true.


But the only way for public opinion to go is down. Obama is a human, a good one, but still human. He won't at once clear up the mess we are in. He may not be able to clear up all of our messes at all. And he will make mistakes as any human will.


Any crack in euphoria makes it all seem hollow; it's like puncturing a balloon. So, the United States will suffer through that and Obama will have to live through it. For once, I agree with President Bush: "Stay the course." If Obama has the will and intelligence, the United States will emerge again as a country we can be proud of. That pride will lie more with accomplishments than with slogans and flag pins.


One thing though, I got an e-mail from a friend in another country. He wrote, "You must protect him. He must not appear without bullet proof glass all round him. Don't forget what happened to the Kennedys and Martin Luther King." That lurks in the minds of most of us. Think of Gandhi and Rabin, too; they were world-changers who angered the rigid. We must take good care of this president. A bunch of people hate him just because he had a father from Africa. We must take the risk of isolating him just a bit more than any other president. If the unmentionable and unforgivable happens, we will again be plunged into something worse than chaos: our rage and the rage of everyone else in the world except for the few cranks. This country is too precious to let that happen.


Final note: Governor Palin seems interested in the Washington scene. Here is a job for her. She can be the official food taster for President Obama.

A major truth and a modest proposal

Don't you ever wonder what really goes on inside the heads of the candidates? Do they really care about America? Are they so fierce in condemning the other guy because they are afraid to be exposed themselves? Do they really believe their programs will work when pundits say that either one will run the country into bankruptcy?


We will never know. Just as we can't really know if our spouses love us. Or if the teacher really cares about kids learning math. Or if the boss wants us to succeed or is waiting for an excuse to fire us.


If we could read those candidates' minds, we probably would run away from both of them in terror and disbelief.


The Praetorian Guards toward the end of the Roman idea had the right idea. They controlled who was to be Imperator. If he didn't work out, they got a new one. And, in order to make sure that the emperor didn't make mistakes, they would dress him in heavy robes, weight him with jewels, and make him just sit. That's right, he would just sit in place without saying a word, a real icon.


We could do that with the next president. Cover him with gold, have him sit immobile in the Oval Office, speechless. People could visit and throw dollar coins at him. The losing candidate could pick them up. The golden president would be the biggest tourist attraction in Washington.


Presidential elections then would be for the best looking candidate: maybe a hunk or a babe. But if the candidate said anything, he or she would be disqualified.


But then who would run the administration? Nobody. And then the United States would enter a new era of prosperity and peace.

Our New Robber Barons

We have always had robber barons in this country. Think back. An early one was Aaron Burr. He wheedled a charter from New York State for a company to deliver water to New York City. Hidden in the charter was permission to start a bank. The company (the Manhattan Company) delivered water to about thirty homes for a few years and then stopped. But the bank prospered and is now the Chase Bank. Burr made money from a scam. [By the way, the logo for the Chase Bank is a cross section of a water pipe, a bad joke.]

OK, the chain of people who fought and lied their way to wealth goes on as a scarlet streak in our history. They made that money on the backs of others, laboring people as well as the financiers they scammed.

The latest ones are those bright people who bundled near-worthless mortgages and sold those bundles to banks. The result: those few made tons of money while the rest of the world slides into Depression.

The big difference is what today's robber barons do with their money. The old ones (perhaps because of guilt) put a lot of their money into ‘good causes': Rockefeller into Colonial Williamsburg and Rockefeller University, Carnegie into hundreds of libraries in small towns, Frick into a lovely museum that was once his house. I exempt Bill Gates because he made his fortune by, mostly, working for it.]

But what about those mortgage bundlers in golden Connecticut? They put their wealth into giant houses, a Testarossa or two, gem- encrusted cell phones, yachts and trips to the newest resorts, paying inflated prices for exotic foods, and general riotous living. Those hip hop guys swilling Crystal Roederer in their limos were pikers by comparison.

Our new robber barons have given little for anything other than themselves. They are our new selfish rich. To an old fashioned moralist, they have not redeemed themselves. To a connoisseur, they are the greedy gulpers of the showy and ephemeral. To you and me, they are objects of disdain.

The damage has been done. We are in for tough times. For the new robber barons, the foods will have been digested and eliminated, the houses will molder in a few years, the vacations are in the past, and the fancy cars and clothes will be so last-year. Maybe they might consider something a little more permanent, soup kitchens or second-hand clothing depots for a start. We might all need them. And, while we won't bless them, at least they won't be hated.

A Prediction

The upcoming presidential election gets increasingly complicated and nasty. People seem to have already forgotten George Bush. They are completely taken with the nastiness of the campaign and with personalities. Here goes with some predictions:

1.It will be a close election.
2.McCain will win. Sarah Palen will help provide the winning margin.
3.McCain will have a relatively quiet administration unless he blows his cool. He will try to pull the nation together.
4.McCain will not last the four years. Palen will be sworn in amidst rumors that she hastened McCaine's demise.
5.She will be an activist president. She will immediately replace members of McCain's cabinet with people from Alaska and social conservatives.
6.Palen will divorce her husband in the second year of her presidency.
7. Her's will be a contentious administration. She will try to cut social expenditures (health insurance, child care, education) while increasing allotments for infrastructure and the military. Congress will try to oppose her but she will push through as much as she can.
8.She will introduce an amendment to the Constitution to ban abortions and to define life as that moment when the egg first divides. The attempt will fail.
9.She will be very strong on anti-terror legislation and will curtail a number of civil rights.
10.Her foreign policy will be tough and unyielding. But she will also make sudden changes, often without warning.
11.She will be known as a tough president as well, rewarding loyalty and severely punishing those against her.
12.Toward the end of her incumbency (after she is elected on her own), the United States will slide even more steeply toward becoming a second-rate nation. President Palen will then act grandly and wildly to overcome this when it looks like an implosion. She will be impeached and a form of mild -appearing dictatorship will take power.

OK, these are predictions and they might be wide of the mark. The first prediction, that McCain will win, is based on a solid surmise. The polls will be wrong. Although it won't be acceptable in public, anti-black bias will appear in the quiet and privacy of the polling booth. The rest (some of it anyway) will follow.

SARAH PALIN AS PRESIDENT

All the polls, including Mediacurves, showed that Sarah Palin helped both her party and herself last night. It's all theater. Americans equate politics with soap operas or sitcoms. We can't seem to differentiate important politics from a jokey, nasty talk or a story that she is really one of us.

Palin gave a fine performance. Of course, she didn't touch the key issues. She swiftboated Obama. But she really uplifted the audience. It takes someone with the assurance and lack of knowledge of a George W. Bush to do that with that kind of tactic.

That leads to: what will she be like as president? It's a serious question; after all, our wounded McCain may not last the four years (if he is elected). Palin will learn fast so she won't be ill prepared. First, she will be a spin master. Look at her current performance on the bridge and other earmarks. She has managed to parlay an unmarried, pregnant daughter and a son with Down's syndrome into assets.

She will be a president who thinks confrontation is the right way to solve problems, perhaps the only way. That means more money poured into the armed forces and less for social programs. Our soldiers will eat well but the rest of may not.

She will be shortsighted. Foreign and domestic policy will go from crisis to crisis without any overall movement.

She will try hard to make abortion illegal; she will succeed if she appoints a new Supreme Court justice. Gun laws? Don't even mention them. Maybe Wayne LaPierre will be Secretary of the Interior.

In other words, she will be another George W. Bush except that she isn't dumb and she didn't go to Yale. She will be just another step in America's slide to unimportance while the populous laughs and applauds another fine performance on their television wristwatches. But they won't know or care if it is by an elected official or an actor or even Bozo the Clown.