Okay, I’m tired of bailouts. Everywhere you turn people are discussing bailouts, the merits of bailouts, the idiocy of bailouts, the yahoos who don’t deserve bailouts, and the fact you and I aren’t getting bailouts. Commercials are even using the crummy economy as the hook for their products. Direct TV has bumbling cable company execs asking for a bailout, those annoying commercials which are kind of cartoons but not really, have their people gnashing their teeth about their investments (the advantage of being poor: my 401K consists of hoping one my kids likes me enough when I retire to let me live in his or her basement) and the Dominoes Pizza CEO is being so magnanimous and bailing us out of our economic doldrums by offering us three pizzas for only five dollars a piece. Holy heartburn, Batman, I can’t believe he is doing that just for us and he’s even driving one of the delivery cars. What a swell guy.
Maybe I’m just not very bright but I’m surprised by the depth of the obsession the world has with the fact that, shock, gasp, people are greedy. If Mother Teresa had been offered a $1.7 million bonus (on top of a seven figure salary) to take a job which included such perks as being flown to exotic vacation spots on a private jet fully stocked with gourmet food, the best booze, and hunky flight attendants, driven to her mansion in a car large enough to qualify for its own zip code, and sleep in a bed with mink sheets and pillows stuffed with the clippings from a million babies’ first haircuts and the only expectation was she would turn the company into an empty shell of itself worth roughly the equivalent of a cup of sand offered to a man standing in the middle of the Sahara she would’ve told all her leper buddies, “Catch you on the flip side. I am outta here.”
In an effort to get away from the myopic media’s fixation with AIG bonuses and congressional posturing I went looking for other news.
The first one to catch my eye: French Workers Hold Bosses at Caterpillar Plant. Well, I always heard the French were lovers and not fighters but what a touching moment it must have been when the regular everyday Joe Assembly Line (or in this case Jean Assemblier Linez) stepped up and gave his boss a big old hug. Then I read the first paragraph. The workers were trying to hold the bosses hostage while they demanded further negotiations on their contracts. There went that Sally Field “you really like me” vibe the headline had set up.
The next headline which made me stop was: Pakistan Court Lifts Ban on Politician. My thought was Pakistan had had the right idea to begin with but they just hadn’t taken it far enough. It has nothing to do with the particular story of the Supreme Court in Pakistan allowing the chief minister of Punjab to return to his position. I was thinking Pakistan had simply messed up by making the ban singular instead of plural.
Think about it. Just how much would the world improve if the highest court in every country on the planet were to ban politicians, with an “s”, meaning plural, meaning all of them. There will now be a slight pause as we imagine a world with no partisan bickering, no pandering to lobbyists and rich donors, no worrying more about polling numbers and getting re-elected than about what will actually benefit the people represented, and no more need for Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olberman, Anne Coulter, and Arianna Huffington to tell us how we should feel about things. Deep sigh as we return from Big Rock Candy Mountain to the real world.
This brings us to headlines which made me wonder why someone was paid to type them, much less go out into the world to research and write them. How about this one: Charles Manson Spends Most of His Time Alone. Well, I wonder why. Or this one: Rain, Snow Moisten Soil. It would have been news if the rain and snow hadn’t moistened the soil. (Scientists baffled by soil impervious to rain and snow.)
This headline really got my hopes up only to dash them again. KU Wins National Championship – In Debate. I have to admit my debate bracket didn’t have the Bricker - Johnson Team cutting down the nets, or in the world of debate, cutting off the ties of their opponents? Lost the office pool, again.
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