An English Lesson for Birdbrains

In the English language, appending an "s" at the end of a common noun renders the word plural, as in:

Birds eat.

Example:

The other side of the story in English is this: appending an "s" at the end of a verb designates the present tense:

Bird eats.

Example:

In the Faith language, appending a statement of faith to an event renders it more meaningful.

Example:

"Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them."

In Economics language, appending a bird pic and a statement of faith to an unemployed birdbrain's idle musings renders the event an experience of faith instead of foolishness.

That's today's lesson.

Go in peace.

Glass half-Full

Doing the Limbo at 64

I remember back in the 1950s when I was growing up and attending Catholic school. They taught us that there's a place called Limbo, where you go after death if you had never received baptism while living in the world. Although I am a mere Christian now, having been baptized in 1978 by own choice choice at the age of 27, it has been revealed to this protestant that there is indeed a place called Limbo.

But it is not actually a place; rather, it is a time, a time of life.

How do I know this?

I am in Limbo now. I am learning that it is a stage of life through which you pass, before--not after-- death, a kind of a nether time through which the maturing American sojourns, somewhere between ages 64 and 66.

When you turn 64, there are multiple signs that indicate you have arrived in Limbo. The first is, of course, remembering back to 1968 when the Beatles raised the profound question "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x158z5_beatles-when-i-m-sixty-four_music

On one level, the song is profound for the aging adult, insofar as it raises the question of one's life-status or love-condition in relation to one's spouse, or, as they say nowadays, one's "significant other" or lack thereof.

On another level, the question itself--about being needed and fed--is critical for the aging adult, insofar as it raises the question of one's life-status in relation to "the System."

You know the System I'm talking about, the one that--as we thought back in the day--would relegate us all to little ticky-tacky houses where we'd all look just the same.

And once you start seeing the signs that you are approaching--or perhaps have already arrived in-- Limbo, suddenly the omens are all over the place, and very plain to see.

For example, as I happened to tune in, a couple of days ago, to Diane Rehm's show, in which the Grand mistress of inside-the-beltway grapevine NPR confab discussed the big "R" word with Teresa Ghilarducci,

http://thedianerehmshow.org/audio/#/shows/2016-01-07/teresa-ghilarducci-how-to-retire-with-enough-money/111702/@00:00

I learned that the assets so far accumulated by myself and my wife (six years younger than me) are, of course, not nearly enough to "make it through" the Retirement years, which is a special golden or rose-colored-glasses period sometimes called the "rest of our life."

Theoretically, our assets are not enough, especially with, you know, zero interest rates etcetera etcetera.

On the other hand, who the hell knows how much is enough?

Furthermore, this unstable scenario has been further destabilized by myself, yours truly, who recently, and oh-so-irresponsibly, decided to quit my job seven months before reaching the big SIX-FIVE road marker, because it was--as my body was daily communicating to me--wearing me out, after the past 45 years of uninterrupted work, the lion's share of which was spent in construction and maintenance jobs.

There's a reason (as I am discovering) that 65 is the big mile marker, the fork in the road where two paths diverge, as Robert Frost might have called it many and many a year ago.

In my case, I just didn't quite make it that far, stopped short of the finish line with only seven months to go.

In one moment of time I morphed from one Bureau of Labor Statistical category to another. Whereas, I formerly was perhaps categorized as employed but underemployed (being a college grad in a maintenance job), this statistical territory I now inhabit is a never-neverland somewhere between "unemployed" and "dropped-out of the labor force altogether--having given up on looking for another job! "

Limbo!

The real hell of it is I'm still looking for a job, still striving to redeem myself from the stigma of being a labor-force dropout, still busting gut to add another few thousand bucks into that magic pot of IRA and/or 401K gold at the end of the Social Security rainbow.

Did I mention "gold"? Don't even think about it, except all the online doomsayers are saying I need to buy it. But I wouldn't know where to start. I mean, I've lived in the System all my life.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, where I'm filling blanks and checking boxes in online applications, the question becomes: who is going to hire a 64-year-old who just may be one of those off-the-chart non-entitities who has "given up" on gainful employment, when there are multitudes of unemployed or underemployed 22-year-olds out there pounding the keyboard and the pavement looking for work?

Who? I ask you who?

Don't think too hard. That's been my problem all my life--thinking too much, and maybe writing too much too. (And if you believe that, I've got three novels, poised in cyberspace on the website linked below; they're hanging there, suspended in electrons waiting to enhance your historical reading experience.)

So here I leave you with a closing anecdote. It is a dilemma wrapped in an enigma.

6:30 this morning, still dark. I just delivered my wife to her nursing job. I'm at the gas pump of a convenience store. I'm thinking. . .maybe I should go in there and ask for a job. Then I'm looking blankly at the gas pump as the digitals flash, and my eye wanders up to a sign on the gas pump. It says:

"Polar pop any size 69 cents"

And above that message is another little sign, with pictures of "Crown" cigarette packs, and an offer that smokers cannot refuse:

"$3.18 if you buy two."

Do I really want to spend the last six months of my working life. . .

Fuhgedaboudit.



Smoke

The Invisible Hand of Capitalism, 21st-century version

I'm a regular guy who is trying to learn a thing or two about how things work and what makes the world go around and so forth and so on.

Back in the day, early 1970s, I was a clueless college student trying to figure things out. My draft # was 349, so I didn't have to go to Nam. I know some who did have to go, and I appreciate their service to our nation.

So there I was at LSU in 1970, an English major, clueless about the world and everything in it. (I thank the Lord that my children have made better decisions than I did in their early life choices.) One good thing about being an English major is that you do learn how to read and write well, and that helps a lot as we go through life. To this day, I do not regret learning to read and write copiously.

Well, the years rolled by and I got along all right, with much help from God and my wife, and some dear friends with whom we raised our young'uns. I did sales for awhile, then drifted into construction and stayed on that path for most of the working life. We managed to get the three youn'uns through college and out on their own and that was a great blessing.

Fortunately, I never had to lean heavily on that classic phrase of underemployed English majors, Would you like fries with that?

Long about 2004 or so I decided to ease out of construction work; my wife was doing well in her nursing career. The kids were pretty much on their own. I took a few education classes at the nearby hometown university, and was moving toward some new destiny which we knew not what it would be.

By 'n by, along came the fall of 2008, and the Crash of 2008 on wall street and so forth and so on. You know the story.

And since I had been, back in the good ole carefree college days, an English major, I was still in the habit of reading and writing. Therefore and henceforth I started reading copiously about the financial developments that were so profoundly altering everybody's life, even still yet today, as we speak.

And it seemed to me that the whole economy had kind of gone crazy there for a while, for a few weeks or a few months, as we're seeing in the Big Short. But then things sort of evened out a bit, but they never got back to what they were before and furthermore they still haven't, even though the unemployment rate has dropped down from ~10% in 2009 to the ~5% it is today, according to the BLS or the BS, or some such number-crunchin agency in Washington maybe next to the Brookings or over on K Street or some important think-tank place like that.

Long about that time, early '09 or somewhere in there, all the doomsayers showed up online and everybody and their brother was saying the whole dam world would come apart at the seams again and u better buy gold and it seemed to me like this Crash might do a replay but it never did. Instead, things just kind of got on a long, slightly upward slope to what we have today, whatever it is, somewhere between recession and high cotton, with chronic destagulation and perpetual consternation but no real catastrophe like those fringy preppers (not preppies) had said back in '09 or '10 or whenever that was.

In my clueless English major kind of way, I was keeping an eye on the stock market, just for fun of course because I didn't know much about it, but I must say I was amazed that we never really had another big crash like we had had in '08.

Every time the numbers would take a big turn down, and you'd hear about the market being down a hundred or two hundred, especially in September or October, you' d think this could be the Big one again.

But it never was the big one again. It's been pretty much steady-state destagulation with a few ups and downs here and there-- no inverted hockey-stick graphs.

By 'n by, as the weeks rolled by and as I was wondering about all this, I began to wondering if there wasn't some force or entity that was acting in a big, manipulative and perhaps surreptitious way on behalf of ?whoever ?whatever, the good of mankind, to make the market stay steady instead of taking another dive. It kind of seemed like it. Whoever or whatever it was or is must be pretty daggone powerful or influential. Maybe some Julius Pierpoint Morgan (the original WallStreet bailout artist financier) who was just intervening, out of some sacred duty that had been laid upon him as a knight of the financial garter, on behalf of the whole Western world to keep everything on a relatively even keel so we wouldn't have another Panic of '07 or '29 or 2008.

T'was then I thought about that famous phrase: the Invisible Hand, as applied to economics. There's got to be an Invisible Hand in there somewhere stopping that WallStreet slide every time one starts.

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_ hand explained to me that Adam Smith had introduced the concept in economics in the year 1759. The Invisible Hand the idea that the multiple economic actions of individuals who are acting independently of each other manage to, by luck or Providence or some unseen beneficent force of the Universe, produce a composite outcome that is beneficial to the whole Market, and maybe the whole world.

So as I became more and more astute in these financial matters, I began to feel, somewhat intuitively or through keen powers of in cumulatively clueless observation that this invisible hand was not some ethereal beneficent presence, but rather, a definite entity in the real world. Something very real. Somebody's doing this! Come on now, who is it?

And now, thanks to Ben Bernanke and his memoir, Courage to Act,

http://www.amazon.com/The-Courage-Act-Memoir-Aftermath-ebook/dp/B00TIZFP0I

I have been duly informed. My days of financial naiveté are over, and I see the world for what it really is.

It was the Fed all along!

If you read the epilogue of Ben's book, you'll see what I mean. Here are just a few favorable developments during that period, the last seven years, that he mentions:

~ Unemployment rate, from Aug 2012 at 8.15 down to 5.7 in Oct 2014, during QE3

~ 3 million jobs added in 2014, the largest annual increase since 1999

~ 10.7 million jobs added from 2010-2014

~ "The Fed's securities purchases and lending programs turned a large profit for the government. . .sent almost $100 billion to the Treasury in 2014"

~ "Households had reduced their debt, their interest payments were low, and the value of their homes was higher, as was the value of most retirement accounts."

~ "Consumer confidence, as measured by surveys, had rebounded."

~ "At the end of 2014, U.S. output was more than 8 percent higher than at the end of 2007, the pre-crisis peak."

So it's plain to see that the Invisible Hand has been absolutely vigilant and effective. But this previously mysterious entity is no longer simply the composite whole enchilada of Capitalism. It is . . .

The Federal Reserve!

Thank you, Uncle Ben and Aunt Janet.

Times have changed, and so. . . has Capitalism. The old days are gone forever. We are now living in a bored new world of managed economy.



Glass Chimera

Shovel-ready? Hammer down

In the early 1980s, I worked with a large crew of men to construct the Linn Cove Viaduct. This massively intricate bridge project was a missing link to connect the two halves of the formerly uncompleted Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a long roadway which had begun during the Roosevelt New Deal jobs program in the 1930s; we finally finished the job in the 1980s during the Reagan years. The parkway wound through the Appalachians in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia.

This is funny, in an ironic way. The bridge's construction had been initiated by the granddaddy of American Democratic Keynesian Liberal Make-work Jobs programs, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; but its completion almost fifty years later was achieved during the administration of that great uncle of American Conservative Republican Trickle-down FreeMarket productivity, Ronald Reagan. I see some common ground there.

It must have been the presence of a rugged mile-high mountain (called Grandfather) in North Carolina, and a world war, that had prevented completion of the Parkway under the New Deal. But that was ok with me and the several hundred other guys who finished the job back in '85 or so. We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to do the work, and thus provide meat and bread, homes, paid light bills and so forth for our families during those years.

After that job, boy, was I in for a long string of years learning lessons in the school of had knocks. But Pat and I, managed, by God's grace and all that sweat equity, along with her embarkation on a nursing career, to get the three young'uns raised and off to Duke and Carolina. 'T'weren't easy, though.

But I was thinking, this morning, August 6, 2011, about that great public works project in which I played a part back in the day. Although I had been a student of English Literature, Political Science, and cannabis at LSU about a decade earlier, and although I had spent a few years after that selling debit insurance, newspaper classified advertising, and printing, I had drifted into the construction trades because--long story short--I was tired of using my mind instead of my hands. But of course I was yet to learn what "tired" is really all about.

All the current discussion about JobsJobsJobs! got me thinking about this. After hearing Democrats theorize these last few months about the FedFix making jobs, and shovel-ready jobs and infrastructure and why-cant-we-do-it-in-the-road projects like the WPA and like Interstate Highway constructions beginning with Eisenhower and so forth, and after hearing the Republicans wax eloquent about Main Street and balanced budgets and job-creators and free markets and efficiency and productivity and so forth, I woke up this morning thinking about that amazing work we did on Grandfather Mountain to finish the Blue Ridge Parkway, back in the day.

Believe me, it was no "shovel-ready" project. In fact, I'm wondering about this whole idea of shovel-ready, and make-work for the sake of keeping unemployment levels down.

The Linn Cove Viaduct on Grandfather Mountain, about twenty miles from where I live, was an astounding feat of engineering expertise. The design and calculations for that bridge had required, I am quite sure, years of preparation. As a novice steel worker--what they call a "rodbuster" who ties rebars together with steel wire--I had nothing to do with the brains part of the work. And I had nothing to do with the "shovel" part of the work either. I just did my job tieing steel, 40 hours a week, until all 53 segments of the 1/4 mile structure had been assembled and passed along to the concrete crew.

After each of those multi-ton segments had been intricately constructed in steel and concrete, with varying specifications in each segment determined according to each segment's unique position in the 1/4 mile S-curve--after all that--the huge pieces were taken on even huger trucks out to the bridge site on the side of the rocky mountain. And since there were, in the 1/4-mile length of the bridge, only seven direct-support points, an elaborate system of high-tension cables was strewn through the entire structure as it was being built to keep the thing up in the air.

And a multi-ton crane was driven out onto the cantilevered, epoxy-glued, cable-held roadway-in-mid-air with support at only one end, until seven segments had been erected and the next support structure was reached.

Maybe you didn't follow all that, but perhaps you will believe me when I say this: what men and women have figured out how to do on the face of this God's green earth--and what they subsequently do--is amazing, and seems miraculous. Furthermore, as this bridge project was an example of what humans can do in massively intricate works of concrete and steel, consider this:

The nano-projects we undertake beneath the world of electron microscopes and DNA and gene-snipping, and laboring viruses, amino acids, and polymers among the electrons with quarks and neutrinos and so forth is perhaps even more amazing. But I'll not go there, as if I could.

For general improvement of the human condition, we have a lot of work out there that needs to be done. Its good work, if you can get it. But so much of it, especially these days, is for smart people, skilled people, in this age of pioneering technology. If we can find ways--whether by FedFix make-work infrastructure projects or by MainStreet SmallBusiness, or by some combination thereof, I know not--we can make the employment happen. Perhaps we can make connections between the work that truly needs to be done and those skilled workers who are properly trained to design the work, engineer it, and then do the work, and thus keep unemployment numbers down to reasonable levels.

As for the unskilled folks, I'm not so sure how we'll keep so many of them busy. We make wisecracks about MickeyD's and the everybody's-favorite-store-to-hate-even-as-we-shop-there. But I do know this. Everybody has to eat. And I'm not convinced that it is FedFix's constitutionally-mandated responsibility to feed all these people, and pay their mortgages and light bills and flat-screen tvs and cellphones and whatnot. Such a massive undertaking is, as they say, unsustainable. Not only that, but its downright socialistic, and counterproductive in terms of inspiring the much-needed innovation and creative systemic improvements.

I suggest its time for unskilled folks to get back to the land. Grow food for yourself, your family, your community, instead of buying it all from bigbox stores that have been supplied by fleets of petroleum-spewing trucks that may be carrying suspect salmonella in their highly-processed payloads. This is advisable for skilled workers and educated people as well, if you have time. You might need to cut down on the tv time.

And while you're tending the garden, take some time out of the hot sun to do courses at your local community college or university. Therby, you may learn how to make this nation, and this world, a better place.

Glass Chimera

4000 Holes in Blackburn, Lancashire

I was a high school student when the Beatles mystified the pop music world with their very unusual Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The collaborative musical opus therein was an exquisitely woven fabric of bizarre imagery and lyrical enigmas, along with some groundbreaking rock n' roll.

Since those late 1960s days, I have often wondered about the meanings of so many of the band's odd vocal references. One phrase in particular, sung by the master of modern musical mystery himself, John Lennon, hollowed out a little question mark in my mind that has been unfilled all these years.

Until yesterday. Yesterday I picked up a clue about the possible meaning of the "four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" about which John Lennon sang in the ablbum's finale song, A Day In The Life.

While reading English Journey, a travel journal published in 1934 by J.B. Priestley, I was quite moved by his reported impression of Blackburn, Lancashire, UK. The city had been for many years the very heart of British textile industry, most especially the enormous output of cotton fabrics and clothing. But in the 1920s and thirties, as new producers of cotton goods in India began to supply their own markets, the volume of exports from England's textile belt (Lancashire) slipped into a period of serious decline, from which they never truly recovered. By the early 1930s, employmnet in Blackburn and other cities had decreased to "depression" levels.

Sound familiar? This economic scenario is quite similar to what has happened here in North Carolina about a half-century later, and in New England USA shortly before that.

Mr. Priestley's poignant account of the Lancashire situation in 1934 includes his describing (page 214) a visit to a place called "Community House," which was set up by local volunteers as a resource for unemployed folks to occupy themselves with productive projects. The volunteers had recovered a condemned school building, where people were cobbling--repairing and making shoes--and doing other helpful works. Most notable among the activities, as far as Mr. Priestley wrote, were woodworks being cranked out by the men there.

It was a great work happening in the decrepit old schoolhouse, built upon a good idea and the willingness of local folks to get busy and make good things happen in spite of the hard times that had shut down their factories and their prosperity.

Priestley described the goings-on at Community House:

"This instructor, paid by the volunteer society, was busy all day giving out wood and tools and showing his men what to do. The wood is supplied without charge to the men, and one of the instructor's duties is to find quantities of it at the lowest possible price or at no price at all....He said that the men were not very good craftsmen, and tended to be imitative and careless, but that many of them were very keen and did their best."

And Priestley wrote: "In the next and largest room of all, a public assistance class in woodwork was being held. The young men came here instead of breaking stones in the workhouse. At first, the instructor told me, they resented any attempt at discipline and tuition. They felt they had been dragooned into messing about with bits of wood in this ex-schoolroom. They would not do what they were told...and they were not going to be treated like kids by any bloody instructor. That was their attitude during the first weeks. But after that, almost in spite of themselves, they gradually acquired an interest in their jobs at the benches; they began asking one another the best way to do this and that; and finally were glad of advice from the qualified instructor. There was something rather touching in this, the emergence of the natural craftsman that is buried somewhere in every man."

These men were gradually filling "holes" in their unemployed days and times, with constructive projects--something to do instead of nothing to do.

But J.B. Priestley's initial impression of the condemned schoolhouse, before witnessing the activity inside, had been this: "It was a dismall hole in a dark back street."

One dismal "hole", perhaps, among four thousand others in Blackburn, Lancashire? But the good folks of Blackburn had undertaken projects to fix the holes.

Now, moving right along...maybe you can help me understand the second part of Lennon's mysterious lyric:

"They had to count them all. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall."

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Jobless slap rap

You,
yes you,
who are standing in line
for a Roosevelt dime
waiting for something to happen--
come hear my rappin'.
You,
yes you--Who
absolved your responsibility
to contribute to GDP?
Who gave you permission
to cease your rendition
of providing some good
for your ones in the 'hood?
Who gave you permission?
who assumed your submission--Who
let you off the hook?

Go read a book,
at the very least--
since your employment has ceased.
Who
pushed you off the mandela?
some paper-pushin- fella?
Just because times are hard,
go plant crops in your yard!
Was it the local unemployment cadre?
It warn't your madre
and I know it warn't your padre!
Was it the hard-hearted capitalists,
or statisticizing mapitalists?
--stacking up their productivity,
rationalizing insensitivity
drivin' up their stocks
with their class-war locks
to keep you off the clocks
and away from the docks?
Was it them?
--must 've been him!

Have you now joined those ranks,
(be glad you ain't in the tanks!)
job-seekers forever spurned
--as Wessel termed,
the "permanent cadre of unemployed?"
perpetual evidence of the null and void?

Yes, you can do that
said the rat in the hat.
We'll give ya permission
along with remission.

Hey! what you gon' do?
asks 353732
Denial, delay and willful delusion
have now become your dismal conclusion?
Did you fall in this hole,
just to get on the dole?

Naw, man.

Step up; hold out your cup.
Keep your place in line
for your Roosevelt dime.
Your situation is surely a sign
of our worst and best time.

But you,
you hoo!
Maybe now's the time for you!
Just do what you've needed to do--
its a blessing in disguise,
as you may surmise,
an unplanned prize,
just you realize.