Scams, Cubicles and Golden Parchutes

Dear George,

What’s happening, Big Guy? It looks as if your scam is unraveling. In your speech Wednesday night you called for a showcase bipartisan meeting of congressional leaders and the two presidential candidates to hammer out the final details of your bailout. The next thing you know, you’ve got a shouting match on your hands and your conservative Republican brethren have put forth an alternative plan to simply insure the toxic assets as opposed to buying them.

This could be a classic case of trying to go one scam too far.

Rep. Barney Frank put an unusual spin on it when he said, “I can’t believe that House Republicans are going to continue to defy George Bush or that John McCain isn’t going to try to help. There is optimism.”

It’s a strange day, indeed, when a liberal badmouths our Constitutional separation of powers. How dare Congress disobey you! That’s what the unitary power of the nation’s commander-in-chief is all about, which raises an interesting possibility…

An economic meltdown could easily threaten your Eternal War of the Empty Policy, thus undermining our national security and flooding the streets of our cities with rabid Islamofacists throwing bombs as fast as they could produce them.

Naturally as our unitarily powerful commander-in-chief, you couldn’t allow this to happen. So, it might be time to trot out NSPD-51, which allows you to declare martial law and dissolve Congress (not it would have much of an impact given that body’s dismal record.) This would allow Wall Street to move in and loot the Treasury with impunity until the foreign capital stopped flowing into the country.

Don’t forget that the bailout scheme had nothing to do with saving the economy and everything to do with saving your base It is imperative that Wall Street fat cats be provided with golden parachutes before the whole system goes into total collapse.

Now, George, let me pause , take another pull on the pipe and meditate on how far we have progressed as a nation.

How wonderful it all is! How beautifully we have streamlined oppression and made of it a work of minimalist abstraction. Eighty years ago, Franz Kafka would have looked up from his desk and have been appalled by the sea of desks spread out before him and the clattering racket of typewriters out of sync, with desks and shelves groaning beneath stacks of paper, yellowed and brittle; stacked, banded, tied and foldered, a chaotic mass, static and unmovable, filling the air with the stale mustiness of its decay

Now, what is there to appall? The drone looks up from his desk and sees only the blank wall of his cubicle and hears only the deathly silence of words and figures flickering across screens and sees only the barren straight lines of monitors and fluorescent lights that cast no shadow. There is nothing that can shock or disturb. There is only the sterile vacuum that neither soothes nor upsets.

Evil once needed the sword and the torch to flourish. Now, it needs only blandness.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones