LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
“If we weren't all crazy, we would go insane.” Jimmy Buffett
The theme of this issue is disaster. In America there is one permanent, continuing, endless disaster – politics. And, thanks to politics, we just had a disastrous midterm election.
What should we do about it? Maybe we should do what the Dow Jones Industrial Average did the day after the election and go crazy... It closed up 545 points. I know... I know... Markets always go up after every midterm election. Supposedly this is because markets love certainty, even if the certainty is lousy. Which this midterm election certainly was – sending the socialist swineherds to tend the capitalist pigs in Congress. If it’s true that markets love certainty of any kind, no matter what... then this confirms a suspicion I’ve had for a long time... Markets are insane . I mean, personally, I’d rather have a little hopeful uncertainty instead of a hopeless sure thing. I’d rather have my doctor say, “Maybe this is serious” than “You’ll be dead in a week.” Which is how I feel after the campaign season we’ve been through. We have two political parties in America, each worse than the other. One party thinks it’s in favor of business and economic growth. It’s not thinking very hard. The GOP has done nothing about the nation’s burgeoning debt and deficit. If Republicans were financial advisers, they’d take a look at
your huge credit-card bills, delinquent car loan, and outsized mortgage debt and tell you to quit making loan payments and go on a spending spree. You’d say, “But I’ll lose the house!” And Republicans would say, “Heck, we lost the House. So what?” The other party is convinced that everything is free. Health care is free. College tuition is free. Parental leave is free. Not that parents need it, since daycare is also free. Democrats should go into a butcher shop and announce that beef is free... and get clocked on the head by a butcher wielding a frozen rib roast. (Except Democrats will ban meat because animals are free, too.) Meanwhile, Republicans claim that free trade isn’t free and costs too much and this means war. Because... the way to deal with the giant Walmart that is China is to burn it down and get swell bargains afterward at the fire sale. Which makes Democrats scared that real war will break out and, when the world is destroyed by nuclear holocaust, women and minorities will be hardest hit. But, Republicans say, what we really should panic about is thousands of jobless Hondurans and Guatemalans invading our
8 November 2018
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