Snark Twain

Here’s the scariest thing about the credit crunch. We don’t know whom to credit anymore. In boardrooms and showrooms all over America all you see are incompetence, failure and overpaid losers. Entire industries are about to go away, to China, to Japan, to nowhere, and the best the CEO’s of America can do is beg. Business by the incompetent, of the incompetent and for the incompetent is killing us.

We’ve got the top job covered. I’m pretty sure we hired a competent guy for that. If anybody can pull off the miracle of making Washington work, Obama can.

But the rot in New York and now Detroit is devastating, and we don’t get to fire those idiots, like we did our nation’s First Idiot. It scares me to death.

I don’t know how you take an industry that thrived for a century, whose brands were once beloved, coveted and iconic as a GTO’s split grille, and drive it straight into the ground, just because gas went up for a couple of quarters. I don’t know how you plow through a hundred years worth of profits in two. Call me naïve, but I actually thought it wasn’t possible to screw up that bad.

This isn’t Amalgamated Buggy Whip we’re talking about. Cars haven’t gone away, they’re still as necessary as ever. It’s not even an American crisis, the Toyota plants in the USA will survive just fine. It’s a management crisis of what we still call The Big Three, for no good reason.

General Motors gone? Ford history? Chrysler, Chevy, Caddy disappeared? Who did that? Is it possible to be that stupid by accident? Or were the Big Three killed on purpose? Maybe there was a hostile takeover by the Republican Guard when we weren’t looking.

And, of course I mean the Iranian Republican Guard, not the GOP Republican guard. Not that there’s all that much difference.

Sorry, that was a cheap shot, but I’m feeling real cheap these days. Great Depressions will do that to you. And this one is looking greater every day.

Seriously, where is the competence? Wall Street firms that survived two world wars and the first depression killed dead in six months. Auto companies that put the world on wheels, now reduced to begging for bailouts, threatening to go bust and take the entire American economy with them.

I want to help, but I don’t consider Detroit’s current management credit worthy. It’s not just money they’re fresh out of, it’s ideas, it’s smarts, it’s competence. That’s the real credit crunch.

I’m scared that 25 billion won’t do it. Detroit has blown through several times that much in the past few years. There is no end to their failures. These guys could screw up a wet dream.

Hell, these guys did screw up a wet dream. Most of us had our first taste of sweet, forbidden sex in their products. I mean, they used to call it parking. You didn’t walk to Lover’s Lane, you drove. In daddy’s car. And it wasn’t a Subaru.

So, what’s the solution? I don’t know. If I did I’d be sending off my resume right now. But I have one idea.

From what I hear, Detroit is well-endowed with homeless people. That is a class of folks who have loads of experience in Making Do With Less. Surely there is among them a genius of thrift, an Edison of improvisation, a Rockefeller of the Streets.

Find him. Or her. Job one for the auto companies for the next few years will be begging. Why not hire a professional?

I couldn’t take it anymore, the wait was killing me. Even writing my weekly commentary wasn’t cutting it.  I had to do something to make the next two weeks pass quickly, so I took a job. I figured if I had to wait, I might as well make some money doing it….

“Welcome to Chez Hypocrisy, my name is Snark and I’ll be your waiter tonight.

“Our special appetizers, available for the next four days, seven if necessary, are Tampa Bay Ray ala Irwin, or Olde Tyme Philly Cheesesteak. Whichever you choose I can assure you, it’s World Class.

“No, I’m sorry, we ran out of Boston Chowder last week. It was a big surprise to us, too. The same is true of our Los Angeles Chokeburger.

“Our end-of-the-month dinner specials include a delicious Fillet of dry-aged Johnny Steak, smothered in Alaskan mud, with heirloom bitter herbs and a salad of Green Envy, dressed with Regret. That also comes with your choice of whine, White or Whiter.

“If you’re dieting, I recommend the Russian Bear Claw Palin. It’ll do wonders for your waistline. It’s low carb, low fat, low protein and totally without nourishment. We don’t actually serve it, but we bring it close enough that you can see it from your table.

“Also, we have a Main Street Mixed Grill that is to die for. It’s all the comfort food you ate growing up in middle America, shoved down your throat until you’re ready to explode. If you can swallow ten pounds of it, everyone at your table eats free!

“Our prize-winning roast pig comes both ways, with and without lipstick.

“You might want to choose from our everyday favorites. Tonight we have:

“Savory Chicken Balls fried in Offshore oil.

“Aged Arizona Elephant with cornbread.

“Thrice-cooked Chestnut Crackers with your choice of Sixties smears.

“Medical marijuana brownies, available in our blue state restaurants only.

“GOPher waffles with Chinese Creamery Melanin-Butter, Unfrosted Let-Them-Eat-Cake cake, and Nuclear Mushroom Glacé dusted with Clean Coal pepper on a globally warmed plate.

“Our featured cocktail is the Saturday Night Special. It’s a traditional concoction that’s been around so long it’s gotten terribly stale, but now it’s reborn in a new, lively recipe that’s too, too fey. It will have you giggling all through your meal, I promise!

“Make sure to save some room for dessert. We have Half-baked Alaska drizzled with simpleton syrup, surrounded by sour grapes and crowned with a whipped cream so airy it’s hardly there at all. Our retro dessert is a clearance item that did very well for us the past eight years, but now we’re closing it out. It’s a leftover mélange of silly sorbets and outdated broulettes glazed with new sugary frosting that’s guaranteed to taste just as good coming up as it did going down.

“Are you folks ready for the check? I hope you enjoyed your dinner. I’m sorry, we no longer accept credit cards. Chez Hypocrisy is a happening place and credit is so September! We don’t take dollars, either, but we’ll be happy to exchange them for Euros, three-to-one.

“It was truly a pleasure serving you. Be sure to come back in a couple of weeks. We’re planning a Hawaiian Luau that’ll knock your socks off!”

“Good mornin’ class. It’s sure nice to see so doggone many happy faces smilin’ up at me today, right here in America, the bestest country ever. For those of you whose memory isn’t what it used to be—and whose is, boy-howdy—my name is Sarah Palin. I was John McCain’s runnin’ mate against President Barack Obama in the last election.

“Now, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, I’m gonna give it to you straight, without the media elite twisting my words into pretzels, or that snooty Katie Couric pullin’ ‘gotchya’ stunts tryin’ to make me sound like a bimbo.

“I lost that election. But I’m not a loser and neither are you!

“That’s today’s lesson at the Sarah Palin School of Low Expectations—we are winners if we say so. Nobody but us can set the bar for our success, and the secret of life is to set that bar so low you’ve already crossed it.

“As I look around the room and see the Wall Street executives and CEOs, the religious leaders and educators, the Dancing With The Stars ex-contestants and Republican ex-senators lookin’ back at me, I can see the question in your eyes. ‘Can I take advantage of the same trick that got Sarah Palin, beauty queen and governor of Alaska—which is almost a state—through a disastrous campaign with a twinkle in her eyes and an allurin’ grin on her adorable face? Will the magic of low expectations work for me?

“You betchya!

“If I can do it, anyone can do it. I don’t think it’s a big secret that I had absolutely no business even bein’ considered Vice Presidential material by John McCain or anyone else. The only difference between me and Dan Quayle is that he’s prettier and he went further in the spellin’ bee. He got tripped up when the liberal media asked him to spell potato and I flunked out on moose.

“But Dan Quayle didn’t know my system. He let that potato make him a loser, but I didn’t let no moose do that to this hockey mom! I shot that sucker square between the eyes and served it to my big, main-street, American family for dinner.

“Low expectations works! When I got my tush handed to me by that smart-aleck Joe Biden during our debate, the whole world thought I’d broken even, at worst!

“Why? Because I had carefully set the bar so low I couldn’t have tripped over it in five-inch heels. All I had to do was keep a seductive smile on my lips while stringin’ random English words together not answerin’ the questions until the light told me to stop, and I was a winner!

“Was I nervous? Course I was! One time my stomach got so jumpy durin’ some foreigner policy question or something that I let out a smelly. You can see ‘can I call you Joe’ make the uglyface when it hit him. But nobody knew because I squeaked it out. If the microphones don’t pick it up, it never happened.

“Remember that class. Never let ‘em see you sweat. Or hear you fart.

“So you’ve had a rough time of it lately. Your company went bankrupt, the government had to bail out your golden parachute, Charlie Rose doesn’t answer your phone calls anymore, you can’t get a decent table at TGI Fridays and your kids tell all their friends at Groton that you’re a fireman.

“Big deal. Tell ‘em that’s just what you wanted! That’s your story and you’re sticking to it.

“Well, jeez-o-flip, class, I see we’re almost out of time. Here are your homework assignments.

“I want you Wall Street fellas to write, in your own words—no cheaties—why you’re happy your companies went bust and got bought by Dubai because, unlike Ken Lay, you’re not in jail, or dead.

“Religious leaders, tell me how your wife is totally behind raising the bastard child you had with that call girl, because you’ve both always wanted to help the underprivileged.

“And you Republicans—well, gosh almighty, I know it’s gonna be hard—but I want you to put on your little spin beanies and write an essay about how you’re glad you lost the election because you broke every toy in the store and mommy told you to go home and stay in bed while the Democrats try to clean up your mess.

“Class dismissed, you cute rascals. Next week we’ll practice ‘the wink.”

A crisis that has been brewing for years takes a turn for the worse.  A government that has ignored the problem, acted like it didn’t exist because it conflicted with their ideologically-approved vision of the world, suddenly wakes up—and immediately goes into full, hyperventilating panic.

“Do it now,” they say, “and do it our way, or life as we know it will come to an end.  These are desperate times and they call for desperate measures.  Discuss, deliberate, and dissent all you want, but we need your answer by Monday.  Anyone who opposes our rush to judgment is playing politics, unpatriotic, even traitorous.  We’re not saying it’s our way or the highway, we’re saying it’s our way or nothing and the ship sinks with all hands.  And yours will be dirty while ours will be clean because we tried, and you didn’t listen.”

Sound familiar?  It should.  That’s the way we were bum-rushed into the war in Iraq and that’s the way we’re being frog-marched over a trillion dollar cliff right this minute.  A government that has no foresight, no hindsight, no idea what the hell is going on until all hell breaks loose is at it again.

They’ve been deregulating the economy since Reagan, making billionaires by the bushel and bragging about it, kiting checks until the deficit got so big it didn’t seem to matter anymore, while at the same time shrinking government into hopeless, limp-weenie impotence.  This has been the work of a generation—that’s how long it took to turn the New Deal into a no-limits game of Texas Hold-em—and in a single month it all went bust.

It was bound to happen.  If you keep betting the farm—over and over, with each “free market” bubble and burst—sooner or later you’re going to wind up living in the city in a cheap downtown condo, six months behind on the mortgage, with foreclosure notices hanging off a magnet on the fridge.

Once again our fearless leaders are scared witless.  Once again we are told to act now or die.  Once again we know that the devil is in the details but there are no details.  The details are being worked out by fixers in rooms that used to be smoke-filled, back before the fixers cared more about their health than ours.

This is government by panic.  This is a bunch of guys with their eyes bugging out of their heads and a suitcase full of cash in their arms, running through the streets, screaming “Feets don’t fail me now!”

We’ve seen this cartoon before.  After 9/11 we reacted—went after the bad guys in Afghanistan, tightened up homeland security and made some common sense intelligence reforms—but we didn’t stop there.  We blew right past reacting to overreacting, to hyperreacting, from a small, necessary war in Afghanistan to a tragic, morbidly-irrelevant monster of a war in Iraq.  Common sense intelligence reforms became stupid, constitution-shredding breaches of trust, a sympathetic world was ignored and abused into totally unnecessary opposition, our united country ripped in half, both halves spending more time, energy and bile fighting each other than our enemies.

We’ve been seven years digging out of that hole, and we’re still digging.  That’s what we got for panic dressed up as decisiveness.  And we’re about to do it again.

Here’s what they’re asking.  “Give us another big blank check, sign right here, and don’t ask questions.  Do it for the economy, do it for our people, do it for the children, do it for America, and do it right now.  If you don’t do it, if you don’t panic right along with us, then you must not care about the economy, the people and our children, and you hate America.

Well, as the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me 137 times and China takes over the world.”

This time when they say “Right away,” we need to say “No way.  We’ve got a new government coming in a couple of months, we’re gonna pass.  Muddle through, do some piecemeal, company-by-failed-company bailouts, don’t make plans, just put out fires as best you can and don’t worry, we know you, we don’t expect much.

“Come January we’ll have a new president, a cool president, a president who doesn’t do panic.  We are going to try a new tactic: thoughtful, considered deliberation leading to well-crafted, non-ideological legislation.  It may take a while, Wall Street may have to endure a few more nervous days, but it’s our only chance to Get It Right.”

This isn’t 9/11, it isn’t Pearl Harbor, it’s not even the Great Depression.  And it won’t be, if we don’t panic.  We have nothing to fear but panic itself.  We have nothing to fear but a rush to misjudgment.  Panic is what gets us into depressions—mortgage panics, stock market panics, bank panics, government panics—but you cannot panic your way out of one.

So back on the campaign trail, John McCain, get out of Washington, talk to the people and try listening, too.  Above all, stop spreading panic.  All the fears you stoke about Obama, Iraq and Big Government aren’t half as scary as the crazy moves you keep making trying to CPR your dying campaign back to life.  We have a serious decision to make in six weeks; we intend to make the right one—calmly.  No panicking allowed.

Dear Mr. Obama:

We are writing to express our outrage at your offensive “lipstick on a pig” remark.  In your mad quest for power you have left common decency behind and offended swine and their human companions all across America.  Shame on you.

It may come as a shock to one as comely as yourself, but not all of God’s creatures are born with natural beauty.  Sometimes mother nature needs a little help.  To tease a female—any female—for using the cosmetic arts to improve her looks is just plain cruel and totally uncalled for.

You are being accused of aiming your nasty remark at Governor Sarah Palin.  Would that it were so.  Mrs. Palin has herself offended the entire canine community with her equally gratuitous “lipstick on a pit bull” reference.  A pox on both your houses.

Many sows are plain.  Many pigs are chubby.  But we think they are beautiful.

If a little judiciously applied lipstick, eyeliner, blush and mascara can make a swine feel more attractive, make a pig feel better about herself, then she should feel free to use them, without shame, without ridicule.  If it takes a bit of foundation to put the glow in Petunia’s cheeks, only a cad would deny her that right.

You, sir, are a cad.

We live in a free country, you are free to be as insensitive and boorish as you like.  But we don’t have to like it, or you.

No longer shall we be content to wallow in the mud thrown by haters like yourself, Mr. Obama.  No longer shall we allow our self-esteem to be spiral-sliced by the vicious words of bigots.  Our faces may be painted but our hearts are pure.

We speak for the porkers who have no voice, and we say no more!  Our day has come, our lipsticks, ourselves!  We will march on Washington, hand in hand, hoof in hoof, demanding the respect we deserve.

“Out of the sty and into the streets!”

Sincerely,

Smithfield Hamm:  President, North American Man Pig Love Association.