Thursday, March 26, 2009

"Life is a state of mind"



Do you remember the classic existential movie Being There? Peter Sellers plays a simpleton named Chauncy Gardner who fails to recognize any difference between television broadcasts and reality. Recall his dispute with the muggers who mistake him for a mob kingpin due to his lack of fear. Chauncy patiently tries to use his television remote in order to make the robbers go away as though they were just a bad TV show. Recall also the "I like to watch" episode.

Eventually, Chauncy becomes a powerful and famous political and economic advisor with his comments about gardening work. His gardening advice is taken as metaphoric genius about the state of the economy.

Yesterday, I was reading plans to pile more horseshit onto our national situation, and I thought of old Chauncy. Sure, fertilizer is necessary. A little added fertilizer may be fine at times. However, when the problem is too much fertilizer, you don't pile more horseshit on top of the horseshit you just finished dumping. All that will grow is fungus and flies.

I'm sure this garden will recover eventually, but why not clean it up now and start over. It would be better and healthier sooner. Why are we trying to resuscitate plants which have rotten roots and dead flowers? How long could it possibly take the Wall Street geniuses to create a new banking system if the existing banks were liquidated?

Chauncy was dumb, but he was honest and frank, and he could tend a garden.

8 comments:

litzi said...
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Doc Bok said...

One, YOU voted for him. I bet you didn't know he would hire ONO as his secretary of financial guruery!!

Why is the plan horseshit, i.e., other than sticking in your craw because the Democrats have access to 100 billion reserve dollars in the FDIC and only want to burn up 75 billion (as opposed to their usual 150% of available money because they really can't keep track of basic arithmetic), why do you say it won't work?

Sounds pretty stupid to me, but other than referring to Peter Sellers's fictitious movies, what's your rationale? I mean, I would not advocate taking 75% of a patient's blood out, and then spraying it around the room in the hopes that it will create more blood somehow to help the ICU-bound one-eared patient, but that's just me.

litzi said...
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OneEar said...

Litzi, thank you for cultivating the metaphor.

DokBok, you were one of those who claimed, "We must do something, and this is something." Here, succinctly stated, is my objection to wasting 10-15 trillion US$. It is 10-15 trillion US$.

litzi said...
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Doc Bok said...

Sorry, One, sorry, sorry. Sorry. I'm just trying as hard as I can to get you say that Democratic Party spending behavior is something only stupid, irresponsible people would buy into. Could you just say that and be done with it?

Doc Bok said...

Since we've all been blessed with the Second Coming?

litzi said...
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