TRICKLE UP AND 4000 DOLLAR SUITS

TRICKLE UP AND 4000 DOLLAR SUITS

I think I said a couple of days ago, only in a more charming and entertaining way, what everybody now concedes: giving more money, and it was a gift, to jerks who had just finished proving that they were incapable of handling such vast sums was a mistake. But it seems that there was nobody there who pointed this out. Or something.

What is it about a four-thousand-dollar suit that inspires confidence? Frankly, I'm always a little leary about a guy who paid more for what he's wearing today than I paid for my old Volvo.

Is it like the circular reasoning that says “Why is he the Prince?” “Because he lives in the Castle.” “But why does he live in the Castle?” “Because he's the Prince.” So that we say, “Wow, this guy has a four-thousand-dollar suit. He must be smart to be so wealthy.”

Given that most of us would not think, wow, here's a 4000 dollar suit. We'd just know the guy was well turned-out. We wouldn't actually recognize 4000 dollar suits if they bit us on the ass. Which they do. Every day.

Now, me, I'm lucky and pretty well-off. And of course I mean in the sense that I almost always have pretty much all I need, own my house on which there is no “reverse mortgage”...what a brilliant idea some financial maven had with that one...sometimes I have to take my Telecaster to the pawn shop, but I always get it back. I've done this so often that the broker and I are on first-name terms. But I generally manage to avoid the traps and snares that come up.

I eat well enough that I occasionally have to encourage myself to eat a little differently, a little more shambala, in order to be more attractive, to myself anyway, and I'm not so poor that I am desperate for nourishment and gratification, for some hunger deep inside that has nothing to do with food, that I eat cheaply and become obese. The root cause of obesity, you'll notice if you're paying attention at all, is poverty.  Mostly financial, but some others, too.

But I'm not here to talk about socialism and class warfare. No. That's not true. Those are exactly the things I'm here to talk about. Most of this stuff I write is preaching to the choir anyway, but then who else would listen? So I think we're all all more or less socialists, excepting those couple of beloved and smart libertarians I keep occasional company with, sitting around this fire. I think I mean we're all sociologists.

So on to class warfare. Class warfare exists, and they're waging it. Unless we're talking about Class with a capital “C”. That kind of Class warfare doesn't exist because these guys, these captains of industry (oh, wait! We don't have Industry anymore), these Titans of Finance, then, haven't got Class. All they have is 4000 dollar suits and control of vast amounts of numbers, practically meaningless to them at the levels they talk about, but for most of us they mean food, clothing, shelter, that kind of stuff. Soon enough, though, it's gonna mean clean water.  Jump back.

So why didn't the Government just bail us, the little guys out? I mean the money, as Will Rogers supposedly once said, would be back in the hands of the big guys by nightfall anyway. We would have been happy, they would have been happy, the Government would have been heroes.

I know what's been trickling down on us. And it doesn't smell like money.