Roll Out the Barrel. We’ll All Have Barrels of Funds

The Glass-Steagall Law erected barriers between banks, brokerages and insurance companies in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. This New Deal reform cancelled by Clinton (he added NAFTA to the corporate lunch and the Bush Administration went on steroids) reflects a major shuffle with a handful of trump cards disappearing under the table.

Solid business used to be the goal. Today, running the show into the sewer and begging for a handout is the game. With auditing practices complex enough to fool the fox in the hen house, with CEOs who let the dice roll instead of maintaining a safety valve for investors and stock holders, we’re “led” to the alters, the wars, the echoes in the mall and the silence between national drumbeats so thin the music doesn’t even play.

The loan sharks are in the bedroom. Its din din for Jesus and the cash. This Wallow Land of epistemic opacity and eulogistic sound bytes, runs up the tab, bears arms for oil, or sits under the Congressional flagpole waiting for the next job, the next hurricane, the next foreclosure, the next shoe to drop from Uncle Sam’s never ending slog to corporate victory.

What an orgy. Create the crisis. Demand payback for years of economic polymorphic perversion. Streamline the hedge funds with no promise of return. Add Presidential power at the Congressional Dance Hall this week. We’ll hold our breath while the global financiers pant for more. In this flushed out game of drop the soap, perhaps a worldly body condom is in order.

Zippo the Moon Clown

If the western sky held promise that morning, one might have been encouraged. A single great white heron passed under the last half of the moon just before dawn. Another morning in Paradise; the courage to drive on, or at least to the pump. But wait.

Pressing issues held at bay somewhere between all night movies and Paid for Programs, secretly wrapped in drive-through McMuffins and see through napkins, an ageless crush, a thrust, egos and splash. If only we could get it, whatever the hell it was, and it was-to own, steal, lend, bend the market, slip a fid, cash in, move to Dubai, Maine or “whatever”; stuff the affair in a suitcase. One man’s floozy was another’s gift certificate.

America watches the screen for the prize night after night; boinked, mesmerized,, the hooting pundits shone on themselves, berating, amending, frivolous laughter, a chewing unending sound byte staring down their own cameras. The screw that might turn the tide, the real meaning of id and the subservience or intellect, the jokester, the fool, tucked carefully between a Mercedes, cologne, the drama of drugs to keep it up, cool it down, pad the calamity, thin the mind and belly for the price of a gallon, intramuscular please, a song to remember, the, the election up for grabs depending upon whose hand slips up America’s skirt at the moment.

“Good Fences mean good neighbors”. Who said that? That integrity basked in towers and long reflecting pools between Lincoln and Washington. If we just stood on that faithful hill, that braved spaciousness we would own, or at least claim, but alas the Island in Maine had loosed the bad meat in Texas, the crippled, the superlative, the world grabbing hustlers who sold guns, said no, who played the Star Spangled Banner on their heart pumps and waved judiciously . On with the folly in the folds of the cheeks, the grins, to any and everyone. Oh the TVs blinked somewhere between aghast, awe and chest thumping; the children awash in flash, ready or not, in line for the next rocket, the bombed out skulls that cooked them. Tampons ruled, or was it a slow leak in Paradise, the polar bear leaped for a chunk of life, college students stared down dim hallways called gone, geezers rolled eyes of despair and I told ya, a little Viagra in the medicine chest, the gunning down of Kennedys, MLK, but an echo in their hearts.

It ripped on. Real life drama flashed the screen. Who’s real? Who’s not? Step up to the mike. Let’s hear the cracked tenor kid, the soprano squirrel. Beat each other senseless with bamboo sticks on a strange rehearsed island. Click it. Text it, phone it, bleed on the floor, gamble the rest, fall in love with your own particular discontent. We have a cure.

Ask them. They talk about change. Watch the candidates march the stage from Oshkosh to Hawaii, the University of Ding Bunny to the Pre-School of Lulu—they are freedom. You know. Like that. Wasn’t it the famous astronaut Edgar Mitchell who said, that one of the first things you discover when you enter outer space, “God is not up.” Yes, the sun rose in the East. The moon disappears. The rush of traffic thins the day.

America Loses a Few Teeth

According to the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Rachel Fernandez, a pot bellied pig and “full fledged member” of the Fernandez-Fleites family of Miramar, Florida, who died after dental surgery, “lay under her favorite pink Princess blanket…a sweet smile on her lips, is the first swine in the cemetery.”

So who cares about a $400,000.000 orgy at AIG, or a governmental takeover of the banks? This isn’t Venezuela. This is America, a one big hoorah with a cruise to the ATM and beyond. What spiritual revelation when a woman in Edgewater, Florida gets knocked out by a leaping dolphin. Why isn’t the dolphin a friend? He’s on TV. You can swim with dolphins (for a little cash) but as with other wild creatures, don’t feed them.

Unfortunately, the amphibians hulking the governmental shores these days prompt financial cartoons parlayed in flotsam and jetsam while Congress stands at the edge of the aquarium voting for Ahab to harpoon the game.

One can wiggle, froth and blow off simple love, the little pig that died at 15 months in a human dress and sweet embrace. It does bear faith in earlier pleasures like the pet rock, a wig on the bald, and the spirit of America. More so, the pig belies the ease, the mask we have become, not a hurtful creature at birth, our friend; this metaphor is like the talking M and M, the sweet bears selling toilet paper to the tune of the Halleluiah Chorus with a wild hug for more.

No surprise when the “dolphins” turn up at the party, the back door of your local broker, bank or get off course and knock the bottom out of the boat that is you, all in the name of democracy freedom and terror. These gorgeous creatures’ radar spins irregularly these days. But, we can’t stop tinkering with the wiring.

One has to feel sorry for the pig, or maybe the “family” who put the pig in the dental chair for a mere $2000 with little chance of return. The truth is, Rachel Fernandez is not the first swine buried in a cemetery.