Columbus Day is a federal holiday, and, in my humble opinion, no other day is more suitable. After all, Columbus was dead wrong about the key assumption underlying his endeavours, that being the size of the earth. Every educated person in Columbus’ day knew it was round, of course – that realization went back to the Greeks, one of whom, a fellow named Eratosthenes, calculated the true value to within a couple of percent, in 250 BC. Using Eratosthenes’ figures, however, it was obvious that sailing west from Iberia to the Orient would scarcely be practical given the ships available in late fifteenth century Europe (even without those two huge continents completely blocking the way from pole to pole, which, obviously, nobody knew anything about). That’s why the King of Portugal’s consultants told him to turn Columbus down. So Columbus made up some of his own figures which demonstrated the Earth was considerably smaller, and subsequently managed to bamboozle the more gullible royal couple of Spain into backing his harebrained, vainglorious and megalomaniacal scheme to become Viceroy of the Western Sea. So there we have it – Columbus was a mendacious, self-aggrandizing, egotistical poseur who didn’t know where he was going; nor did he know where he was when he arrived. Furthermore, he didn’t know what he was doing while he was there, he didn’t know where he had been when he returned, and he did it all with other people’s money. Have the annals of human exploit ever provided us with a superior or more appropriate exemplar of the federal bureaucrat? Surely not – and that’s why, if any moment in history is to be celebrated by all the federal bureaucrats staying home where they can do no harm to the rest of us, that occasion should definitely be Columbus Day.
Because of the federal holiday, all of my appointments this morning were with other consultants, and, with one notable exception, all of my visitors this afternoon were foreigners. Around two, though, my nephew Jason arrived, unannounced, requested a visit with me, and politely camped out in the reception room to wait for an opening in my schedule. While doing so, he made himself useful by fetching Gretchen a caramel latte and muffin for her afternoon coffee break. Around three, while there was a lull in the action, she showed him in.
“Hi, Tom,” Jason offered as he sidled across the room and made himself comfortable on the couch. “How’s business?”
“Never better,” I assured him. “What’s up?”
“The economy is stagnated, unemployment is skyrocketing, income inequality is the worst it’s been since the nineteen-twenties, and every American owes forty-seven thousand four hundred dollars on the National Debt,” he replied.
“There’s a new iPhone coming out,” I remarked.
“Right,” Jason sighed, “and Steve Jobs is dead.”
“Look what a beautiful day it is out there,” I observed (it was, by the way, absolutely gorgeous), as I gestured toward the picture window behind the couch and the White House beyond. “Wouldn’t Steve Jobs want you to be outside with your current iPhone, texting to all your young friends about how cool the iPhone 4S is going to be, instead of moping around my office bewailing our society’s misfortunes?”
“I think,” Jason speculated, “that he would want me to be out there tweeting up a demonstration against a broken, dysfunctional system that’s denying six out of ten 2011 college graduates the jobs they expected to get four years ago when they went into hock up to their ears getting a degree.”
“But that’s not your problem,” I chided. “You got a degree in computer science and your father found you an intern job at Whizzonator-YoyoDyne before you even graduated.”
“Maybe,” Jason conceded, “but what about the English majors? They’ve all had to either go to graduate school or come home and live with their parents. You know what it’s like for them, having to live at home with their parents?”
“You live at home with your parents,” I reminded him.
“That’s different,” Jason shrugged. “Rob Roy and Katje are only fifteen years older than me. They have tats and piercings and play video games better than I do. It’s like they’re my big brother and sister or something. That’s not what I’m talking about – I’m talking about living with like… you know… parents – old, grumpy, middle-aged people who thought their kids were going to move out and leave them alone at last. But now their children have moved back down into the basement because there aren’t any jobs, even though all their lives, old, grumpy, middle-aged people have been telling them that if they worked hard, stayed in school, busted their humps getting good SAT scores and then spent four years listening to old, grumpy, middle-aged professors, they’d get a nice job, their own car, their own house, their own cable television and their own vacations, and finally be able to get into a nightclub with their real ID, all while they’re young enough to enjoy it. And what do they get instead? A couple of old, grumpy people sticking their heads down the basement stairs, yelling about turning that crap down, cleaning up that mess, why don’t you get off that damn computer for five minutes once in a while, what’s that smell, you know smoking isn’t allowed in the house – especially not that kind of smoking – and constantly complaining about you sleeping until ten-thirty – as if there was anything else to do!”
“And so?” I inquired.
“And so,” Jason proclaimed, “that’s why they occupied Wall Street!”
“To get out of their parents’ basements?” I asked, incredulous. “Really?”
“Well,” Jason shrugged, “I’ve talked to a lot of them, and yeah, in the beginning, I’m pretty sure that’s what the original motivation was. But there’s more to it than that, now. It caught on, like the Arab Spring or something. Now there’s people who actually have jobs, like unions and civil rights groups, and students who haven’t graduated yet, and even old, grumpy, middle-aged people…”
“Who want to get their unemployed college graduate children out of their basements, perhaps?” I conjectured.
“At lot of them,” Jason corrected, “don’t even have kids! They’re just sick and tired of the rich having all the legal advantages, the big corporations paying lobbyists to get them unfair breaks, the special interests buying politicians and sending them to Washington… all the corruption, greed and evil that are destroying everything!”
“Okay,” I parried, “I get it. Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Atlanta, Occupy Los Angeles, Occupy DC – Occupy Whatever, it’s all a grand, magnificent, grass-roots, progressive, populist movement, which, I dare say, will last about as long as this pleasant October sunshine holds out. When it starts getting chilly, all the fair-weather patriots cease occupation and go home.”
“Not,” Jason objected, “if they have insulated jackets, wool hats, blankets, sleeping bags, winter socks, chemical thermal packs, galoshes, tarpaulins, umbrellas, gloves, canned heat, fifty thousand macaroni pizzas and a hundred thousand gallons of hot chocolate. Which is why I’m here.”
“You want… money?” I carefully asked.
“I’ve already put three hundred bucks of my own into this,” Jason confided proudly. “I was thinking maybe somebody who makes as much money as you could chip in a couple of grand.”
“A couple of grand?” I shot back in my best incredulous tone.
“Fifteen hundred?” Jason retorted.
“Nine,” I told him.
“Okay,” Jason agreed as I took out my check book and began to write. “It’s for a very good cause. You won’t regret it.”
“You’re probably correct,” I smiled as I dated, signed and handed him a check. “I’ll probably get considerably more than nine hundred bucks worth of extra business out of this.”
Now, let’s see what’s in that Quarterly Mailbag.
Was it really only the beginning of July? It seems like much longer than that, since people like my dear brother-in-law Hank and his sister-in-law Shannon could seriously argue about whether Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin were the most viable contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. But there it is – only three short months. Plenty of Bachmann boosters and Palin partisans alike wrote in to upbraid me for expressing doubts about their respective idol’s electability. My reply would be – well, here we are, all of three months later, and it’s more likely that a hummingbird will fly to Mars with the US Capitol tied to its tail than either of them will ever stand on its steps to take the oath of office. Not that plenty of folks on the other side of the political spectrum didn’t express their appreciation for the frank verbatim quotations from Hank and Shannon, which, in their opinions, prove exactly what the TEA Party in general and both Bachmann and Palin in particular are all about – ignorance, prejudice and unreasoning self-righteousness. Yes, but alas, it’s not like those two ladies, the TEA Party or the Republicans have a monopoly on that. Take, for example, the vegans and vegetarians who so vociferously vilified me for all the exotic grilled meats I served at the barbecue where the argument I described in the post occurred.
The July 10 post which related my dear sister Rose’s concerns pertaining to teaching middle school students about the federal debt ceiling drew plenty of fire from the fringes, no doubt about that. I received a flood of ranting e-mails from self-proclaimed experts on free market economics as elucidated by the Chicago School, fiscal policy as explained by H. Ross Perot, monetary policy as preached by Milton Friedman, tax policy as analyzed by Arthur Laffer, the United States Constitution as expressed in Original Intent of the Founders, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, the Masons, the Trilateral Commission, the Bohemian Grove Conclave, the Knights Templar, the prophesies of Edgar Cayce and conspiracy theory in general, all explaining the recent congressional debt ceiling flap in their own lunatic terms from their own charmingly demented points of view. What I’m convinced of now is that if any of Rose’s students could talk to just one of those learned correspondents for ten minutes, even those kids would realize that the federal debt ceiling is the least of our problems.
My July 16 post concerning a consultation with Dr. Nenda Kajitombe, Advisor for Diplomatic Affairs at the newly-opened Washington DC embassy of the just-created Republic of South Sudan drew quite a number of messages commenting on the quality of the advice I provided him. According to many of them, a truly discerning eye – such as theirs, for instance – can readily distinguish the work of Hong Kong tailors from the fine craftsmanship of the several metro Washington area haberdasheries that I also mentioned. Therefore, they contend, I gave Dr. Kajitombe a bum steer and now he, as well as the rest of the Sudanese delegation, run the risk of looking chintzy at posh diplomatic functions. None of them, however, I note, bothered to explain what, short of examining the labels on the inside of the suit jacket, allows them to tell the difference. An analysis of the e-mail headers revealed that almost all of them originated from servers located within fifty miles of Washington, which leads me to believe that most of my correspondents on that subject work for the local establishments in question. My warning to Dr. Kajitombe about the dangers of Prince Georges County, Maryland, particularly the police, drew a Niagara of horror stories about the place, particularly the police. The one most mentioned (and, in addition, my personal favorite PG County anecdote) is the classic story of how the Prince Georges County police mistakenly raided the home of Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, and, among other things, shot their dogs and questioned Mayor Calvo for eighteen hours while he wore nothing but handcuffs and underpants. By contrast, several folks from the Eastern Shore and Piedmont regions wrote in to protest that rural Maryland and Virginia are not at all extremely dangerous places for African diplomats to get lost while driving around with their families in foreign cars. In fact, no less a personage than the Grand Dragon of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, Catoctin Mountain Legion, invited Dr. Kajitombe, as well as the South Sudanese ambassador, His Excellency Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, and, “… all the rest of the spear-chucking jungle bunnies they got down there at the embassy” to march in the Klan’s annual Jefferson Davis Birthday Parade, to be held beginning at noon, Sunday, June third, 2012, in beautiful downtown Thurmont, Maryland. There was, on the other hand, general agreement surrounding my recommendations concerning the best gay hangouts, liquor vendors, escort services and sources of bush meat – all things which, of course, no African diplomat in Washington can do without. And by the way, congratulations to the Republic of South Sudan – with your recent inclusion in Google Maps, you have now truly achieved genuine legitimacy in the family of nations.
I received a flood of e-mails speculating on the identity of the anonymous caller, the conversation with whom I related in my July 23 post. For the record, it was not Jiang Zhi, writer-director of the Chinese film, Our Love. Nor was it Taiwanese actresses Shu Qi, Barbie Hsu or Jacklyn Wu. Furthermore, it was not Fann Wong of Singapore, Ly Huong of Vietnam, Yoon Eun-hye of Korea or Kei Mizutani of Japan. It was not UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Kabuki star Ichikawa Ebizo, TBS Japan news anchor Hiroko Ogura or Korean prophetess SunJa Hwang, either. All very nice tries, people, but no cigar. So who was it? I suggest interested parties e-mail Rupert Murdoch and ask his opinion.
I got flak from Rick Perry supporters twice this quarter. The the first time was about a post that presented a conversation with fellow Texan Austin Houston Crockett Bowie Bonham III about Governor Perry’s staunch religious outlook and his involvement in The Response, a fundamentalist prayer rally with which Perry strongly associated himself. While there was some apparent disagreement about whether I’m going to the Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Pentecostal, Apostolic, Televangelist Mega-Church, Charismatic or Baptist Hell, the general consensus among my correspondents on this issue is that I am definitely going to suffer some sort of eternal damnation for not jumping on the Rick Perry bandwagon with both feet. Well, if subsequent public reaction and opinion polls are any indication, it looks like I’m going to have plenty of company – at the moment, he might not even be popular enough to get re-elected governor of Texas. Not that things haven’t been changing quickly in the Republican presidential race, of course. Maybe Herman Cain will start quoting Robert Mugabe and Mitt Romney will pull down his pants and show us all his magic Mormon underwear, and Rick Perry will suddenly seem like a reasonable choice again. Stranger things have happened, like Michele Bachmann winning the Iowa straw poll, for example.
Initially, my August 11 post, where I relate discussion of the ramifications of Standard and Poor’s downgrade of US debt over lunch with my dear sister Rose, and recommend Treasury bonds as the best investment option, drew opprobrium from nearly every point of the political and economic spectrum. What was I, folks of every stripe and orientation demanded to know, nuts or something? If Standard and Poor says your debt is less worthy, then, they reminded me, as every economics textbook ever written says, lenders will demand higher interest rates and therefore your bond prices will fall. Instead, as we all now know, Tom was right. Maybe you’re not going to make a lot money investing in them, but since the Standard and Poor rating downgrade, the price of US debt instruments has gone up, and as a result, Uncle Sam can now borrow money at record low interest rates. So, here’s a perfect example of why I don’t answer individual e-mails. Because I have the same answer, right here in the Quarterly Mailbag, for one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-three e-mail messages: If markets always actually behaved the way the theories in the textbooks say they should, economics would be a science, suitable for practice by intelligent, honest minds, not a pathetic intellectual farce suitable for practice only by nattering, opportunistic charlatans. And what fun would that be?
At first, I received no e-mails at all in response to my August 20 post wherein I recounted a consultation with a fellow hired by the Michele Bachmann organization to figure out what to do about Rick Perry. But when Perry started to tank, a trickle of missives, which grew to a torrent, began to show up in my Inbox. See, Mr. Smarty Pants, they gloated, how our heroine Michele didn’t need to claim that the Democrats are in favor of implanted mind-control microchips broadcasting subconscious commands from UN headquarters? See how she didn’t have to call for the impeachment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Maria Sotomayor on the grounds of judicial incompetence, or promise to replace Thomas Crawford’s statue of Freedom on top of the US Capitol with a statue of Jesus in order to knock Rick Perry off his perch? To them I say, (a) Rick Perry knocked himself off his perch, your heroine Michele Bachmann had nothing to do with it; (b) Michele Bachmann’s actual comments so far haven’t been any less outrageous, they’ve just been less interesting; and, (c) Michele Bachmann has sunk so far in the polls at this point, she could start giving press conferences in a g-string while hanging from a exotic dancer’s pole and still nobody would pay any attention to her. Look up “Yesterday’s News” in the dictionary, Bachmann fans, and there’s a picture of her.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – a 5.8 earthquake ain’t squat, as so many people in California, Japan, New Zealand, Peru and many other places wrote in to tell me after I mentioned our little quake here in Washington in my August 27 post. Still, it was enough to put such nasty cracks in both the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral that stone masons announced this week it will take years to repair them. And I should also note that, true to the US government’s traditional methodology, the halls of Washington’s federal buildings are all now plastered with posters presenting instructions on what to do during an earthquake – notably, don’t run out into the street, as nearly everybody in Washington did when the quake hit. So great, now when the next earthquake hits – about seventy-five years from now – all the federal government employees in Washington will not do something ignorant and idiotic. Sure – no doubt on that day, there will also be numerous overflights of massive pig flocks. But the post was about Muammmar Gaddafi’s secret crush on Condoleezza Rice, actually, and I received quite a few e-mails concerning the good Colonel’s unrequited love, too. Apparently, Condi’s got plenty of male admirers, none of whom found it the least bit odd that Gaddafi became smitten with her. Many of those e-mails were accompanied with JPEG and GIF file attachments, invariably consisting of Condi’s head Photoshopped onto the nude body of some other shapely woman. Guys gotta do what guys gotta do, I guess, but GZPZ, I really need to tell the fellow who put Condi’s head on the nude Jayne Mansfield – that’s just plain sick and disturbing, dude. Get help.
Aside from a scattered population of raving lunatics, huddled in their cabins with their DSL line modems in the hinterlands, sporting axes to grind about Arabs, Iraq, Washington and Beltway bandits, nearly all of the correspondence I received in response to my September 3 post originated with the corporate communications departments of government contractors. For the record, these firms view with alarm, and take serious issue with, the attitudes and opinions expressed in that post with respect to the role and value of federal government contractors in Iraq. Furthermore, they wish it to be known that it is their firm corporate policy never, ever, to do business with anyone like the Iraqi gentleman with whom I conducted the consultation, a transcript of which appeared in the post. Ahem. Yes. Duly noted. You can tell your lawyers to stop calling my lawyers now.
Several CIO’s wrote in to protest the harsh characterization of Chief Information Officers that appeared in the September 10 post about the fallout from the Microsoft Cloud crash. Being a CIO, they assured me, involves a lot of responsibility, long hours and hard work, not to mention dealing with boatloads of very complicated stuff. So who can blame them for just throwing up their hands and saying, “To hell with this, buy Microsoft” and being done with it? Well, okay, point taken. But in response, I will note that, forty years ago, all a CIO had to do was say, “Buy IBM,” after which it was off for a round of golf with the IBM salesman, who, of course, picked up the fees and bought the drinks at the nineteenth hole. What’s the difference today? Oh, yeah, that’s right – the guy from Microsoft doesn’t pay for the golf and booze like the guy from IBM did. About eighty percent of the remaining e-mails were horror stories about what blithering, bumbling, half-witted morons CIOs are. That’s the problem with employees in the IT sector, where the majority of the work force have IQs above 105 – they see right through pretentious attitudes, two-thousand dollar suits and Little-Bo-Peep diplomas from fancy schools and notice, in exquisite detail, that not only does the Emperor have no clothes on, but he’s also hung like a hamster. Then there were fifty-seven e-mails from folks who, for the most part, insisted that, essentially, since Bill Gates is such a great philanthropist, it doesn’t matter what crimes Microsoft commits, who Microsoft cheats or how Microsoft screws up. I say, if those people aren’t CIOs, I’d like to know why not, because they obviously think like CIOs. Maybe they’re just really ugly or something.
I swear, it looks like my dear brother-in-law Hank is acquiring a fan base. Scads of sympathetic, nay, I dare say, laudatory e-mails arrived after my September 18 post, where I recounted my conversation with him regarding his decision to volunteer for Rick Perry. I also got loads of grief, for the second time this quarter, from Perry supporters, of course. Their hero, they proclaimed, is much better looking than Gomer Pyle, much more charismatic than Huey Long and just as smart as George W. Bush. My comparison of Perry’s integrity to that of Heidi Fleiss came in for a particularly thunderous downpour of vitriol. “Just because he’s a Texas politician,” a fellow from Amarillo scolded, “doesn’t mean Rick Perry is some kind of whore for special interests, not necessarily, anyhow, and even if he is, it’s nothing compared to Chicago ward heelers like Barack Obama!” Okay, so now the world knows you and your buddies disagree with me, Ace, and I hope you’re satisfied. In light of recent developments, however, Hank’s been “re-thinking the parameters,” as he puts it, of his decision to spend a hundred hours a week without pay working for Rick Perry. Since he started, Hank’s been a target of derision for just about everyone in his Fairfax, Virginia social circle, from other Republicans to any Democrat who will still speak to him. Last week, of course, that business about the Perry family’s Texas hunting lodge and its truly unfortunate name came out. Since then, things have been particularly rough for poor Hank. Not that his counter strategies were particularly brilliant – the first thing he did was look up all the other places in the United States with the N-word in their names and recite them to anybody who cracked wise about Rick Perry’s rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ place. That approach required Hank to say the N-word about thirty times in a row, though, and the effect generally proved far from salubrious. His next try was to point out, through example, all the times that African Americans use the N-word themselves. Again, that swayed few to Hank’s side of the argument, and did, in fact, result in an elderly Indian lady slapping him in the face and a little Thai girl from down the block kicking him in the shin. As of today, Hank’s strategy is to say, “The Perry family painted over that name as soon as they started hunting at that lodge.” That, I will concede, might work, if Herman Cain stops bringing the issue up and saying “[expletive]-head” over and over every time somebody mentions Rick Perry. But truth be told, Hank’s hardly a happy camper these days.
I received pretty much what I expected in response to the September 24 post about my conversation with Joe Biden concerning the Solyndra debacle. Obama supporters are so embarrassed by the affair that few of them could bring themselves to write about it. Obama detractors, on the other hand, could scarcely contain themselves, and my Inbox overflowed with smug and condescending expressions of contempt for the administration in general and the Department of Energy in particular. To them I say, the Congressional Budget Office, which is not known for exaggeration, calculated that in 2009 alone, subsidies for corn-based ethanol production exceeded five billion dollars, or roughly ten times the amount of money DOE lost on Solyndra. And that’s when the oil that corn-based ethanol was supposed to replace was selling for prices in excess of a hundred dollars a barrel. Now that the petroleum bubble is collapsing, how many more Solyndras are the US taxpayers going to give the likes of ADM and Cargill? Why, just as many as ADM and Cargill tell the House Republicans to give them, that’s how many. And who cares what that’s going to do to the cost of food for the poor in the midst of the biggest depression since the nineteen thirties? To paraphrase Marie Antoinette, let them eat still bottoms. Right, Representative Issa?