June 29, 2010

In case you haven’t pulled yourself away from ye olde Xbox long enough to notice, I feel compelled to inform you that the American economy is in the proverbial toilet.

Recent numbers show that the recovery is still just crawling along instead of getting up and running, and the crawling has continued way past the recession’s infancy. There was a little bit of hope a couple weeks ago, when the Obama administration released figures showing a slight uptick in hiring. What they forgot to mention, though - it just sort of slipped everyone’s mind - is that a great deal of that increase could be attributed to the government hiring people to conduct the census.

At this point, I wouldn’t blame a liberal think tank for coming up with more things for us to count, just so we can keep moving in the right direction. We won’t be able to count the unemployed, however, because somebody’s already done that— at the moment, 15,000,000 Americans are officially out of work. But the real number is considerably higher than that, since the stats don’t include people who have finally used up all their unemployment benefits.

I don’t really blame Obama for this particular car wreck, for what should be obvious reasons, but I’m not beyond blaming him for too often promising the world to desperate people and spinning copious amounts of smooth-guy bullshit to cover his ineffectiveness...and I never thought he was the Second Coming straight out of Chicago, so I’m not holding him to a higher standard than I would a "regular" politician.

Don’t even get me started on the administration’s alarmingly Bushian attitude toward our now-systemic human rights violations, many of which have been aimed at people who have been proven innocent but are still jailed indefinitely by the U.S. government, beyond the reach of their families, with no charges filed and no hope of release. In that area, Obama has just about used up the good will I felt toward him when he was first elected, and it’ll likely be enough to keep me from voting for him again.

I’m not the least bit happy about that; in fact, it breaks my heart. But I won’t abide by sheer brutality toward other people, regardless of the charisma of the guy who signed off on it. Check your history books and you’ll note that surreptitiously brutal charismatic leaders tend to generate problems rather than solving them. If God really has been on our side in this apparently infinite war we’re fighting, He may well have opted not to root for anybody by now, and I’m inclined to follow His lead.

In Obama’s defense, though, this president is the Crown Prince of being handed a sack full of shit that he’s expected to somehow transform into a rose, and as quickly as possible. The two wars and the bank-screwed economy are his most obvious inheritances from the genuinely malevolent Bush-Cheney regime. But now Obama gets to take a smack-down because he happened to be in the Oval Office when that oil rig blew up in the Gulf, as if he was supposed to have somehow stopped it from happening.

Although his languid response to the situation is unnerving, Obama is just the next in a long line of chief executives, both liberal and conservative, who have let big business have its way with our planet for the past 50 or so years. He's participated, to be sure, but he was literally in a crib when this foolishness started to take root in our government’s now wholly corrupted soil.

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Anyway, it’s Obama’s economy now, and it’s exceptionally ugly. If you live in a money-centric metropolis like New York, it’s fast becoming obvious that even a lot of white collar workers, who surely must have had some money saved up, are now in dire straits. And I don’t mean they play drums behind Mark Knopfler.

A few weeks ago, I was in line at a midtown McDonald’s when I noticed a guy working behind the counter who obviously hadn’t seen the employee-side of a cash register in quite some time. It wasn’t entertaining, either. Here was a grown man, roughly 55 years-old, running around with a silly hat on his head at a fast food joint, trying to keep up with a bunch of co-workers who were probably 35 years his junior. From the strained look on his face, I could see he was trapped in a personal “Twilight Zone” episode, one that could conceivably never end.

I don’t know who he was, of course. Maybe he was part of the Wall Street shell game that caused the economy to fail in the first place, in which case he was receiving his comeuppance. Or maybe he was an honest person who was getting nailed by factors beyond his control, at an age when you can’t just start all over again and build a better life. Now was supposed to be the time when he eased into that better life, but it disappeared in a puff of smoke and cost-cutting paperwork.

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So, in an attempt to draw some rueful levity out of a dark situation - if it weren’t for rueful levity, I’d have no levity at all - I’m offering this clip from the brilliant 1985 Albert Brooks comedy, “Lost in America.”

In the movie, a successful Manhattan couple named David and Linda Howard (Brooks and Julie Hagerty, who you know as the flakey flight attendant in “Airplane!”) decide to sell their property, cash in their stocks, and spend the rest of their lives cruising the country - David is inexplicably inspired by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in “Easy Rider” - searching for America. But things don’t go as planned.

During a quick stopover in Las Vegas, where they want to have one last taste of luxury before embarking on their journey, Linda sneaks down to the casino in the middle of the night and promptly gambles away their money. All of it, including, as David calls it, “the core of the nest egg.” That leaves them stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a giant motor home and a thousand bucks to their name. Panic, as you can imagine, quickly sets in.

In the clip, they’ve finally run out of fuel for the Winnebago, and are trying to secure jobs in the sleepy Arizona town where they’ve parked. David visits an employment office where he learns a hard lesson in the new economy that other Americans wouldn’t be learning en masse until the past couple of years— namely, that you can’t go home again simply because you used to be a big shot.

I don’t think this is just Brooks’ best movie, by the way. I think it’s one of the sharpest comedies of the 1980s, and you should check it out as soon as you can if you’ve never seen it. The deadpan dialogue is a scream.

Remember when you could laugh for reasons other than staving off despair?

Paul Tatara