The Sh*t L*st

Last Thursday, my friend Jackson and I went to the Cedros District for gallery night. The first Thursday of every month, the galleries along the strip there stay open late and serve wine and cheese. It's like trick-or-treating for musicians and consultants. We arrived early so that we could roam the nursery and marvel over the beauty and rising costs of nature. The nursery started closing up around a quarter to five, so we headed for the galleries. We began at the Ordover Gallery. I guess the festivities aren't supposed to start until 5:30pm, and when we arrived, the gallery was empty. Jackson and I walked around contemplating the blurried canvases with a silence equal parts religious and pretentious. After about 5 minutes, the gallery manager walked in and retrieved some wine and nibblies for us. By 5:30, we were on our second cup of chardonnay and in good spirits. By 6:30, we had been up and down the street and found ourselves at Solo, on our seventh cup of wine, looking at overpriced soaps shaped like pigs.

I said to my friend Jackson, "See, this is the tragedy of it. If Clinton was still in office, I'd be buying this pig soap and this beaded napkin ring and these photos of a truck stop and this-- this-- I'm not sure what it is, but I'd be buying it. Not because I'd have any more money, but because I wouldn't be worrying about money. None of us would. We know there would just be more of it in the future for all of us. And because we believed that, it would happen.

"But now we got Rumsfeld and Cheney and Ashcroft, and a born-again glue-sniffer who can barely read his lines. And you know what, no one wants to buy pig soap. Because Bush spent his first six months in office telling us how bad the economy was to justify his voodoo tax breaks for the rich. And then he sold middle America a bill of goods on the war. And so he fulfilled his own prophecy. And now I can't even buy a fucking bar of pig soap because I'm too busy trying to scrounge up enough money to order cable from the one cable provider in town."

I'm more loquacious than usual after six or seven cups of wine, and I continued:

"See, if Clinton was in office, well, first off, he probably would have done a much better job managing the various economic stimulators at his disposal -- to the extent that the hayseed-dominated congress would let him. He wouldn't be taking money from the rest of America to feed the rich. As Joe Klein said, he'd be taking from the rich to give to the middle class. But more importantly, he'd have been telling us everything was going to be all right. And we'd believe him because even if we didn't believe him, we know everybody else would. And I'd be buying this pig soap. We'd all be buying pig soap and ceramic armchairs and jelly-fish baubles. But now we got Bush lying to our face and we don't believe him. Not for a second. And even those who support him and say he's a strong leader and a fine man don't believe him. They'll vote for him and they'll praise his vapid speeches, but they don't believe him. They just don't have the neocortical structures to formulate a more exact understanding of their hopeless situation."

We had dinner at the Wild Note Cafe -- salad and seared Ahi. By the time we got back on the street, things had picked up a little, and it really did feel like NPR Halloween.

On Bush's economic mismanagement, Robert Reich made a point on the radio the other day which, though somewhat obvious, had never occurred to me.

He was discussing public schools and the serious budget crises they are facing because of economic woes on the state and local level. The problem is exacerbated by the new federal mandates (which, of course, the Bush administration is underfunding.) Reich points out a fallacy in the supply-side rationale offered to justify Bush's huge top-heavy tax-cuts: the economic problems we face are national and local, but we live in a global economy and members of the investing class with surplus wealth to invest will send their money abroad if it promises a better return there than here. I hadn't even considered this -- I had always figured supply-side economics bad policy because it redistributes wealth from the underprivileged to the overprivileged (mostly indirectly as states lose income and sales tax revenue and start cutting programs and imposing user fees that disproportionately burden the bottom). In redistributing the wealth to the top, and taking purchasing power away for the bottom, it creates bottlenecks in the economy that may help a few sectors and industries that cater to the top, but will hurt the broader economy whose engine is oiled by activity at middle and bottom. But that assumes a closed system which, as Reich points out, isn't even the case. And so part of our resources go toward helping develop third-world economies in which the lopsided distribution of wealth is even more pronounced (and, increasingly perhaps, Europe, where a better educated workforce promises to offset our unparalleled capacity to go without vacation.) And pig-shaped soap just sits there collecting dust on shelves.