Aren’t Hall and Oates gay? I think so though perhaps not with each other. By acclamation Hall is just out of Oates’ league. But whatever the domestic situation these two men’s men have written passionately about women for decades. This one is from ’73 and we all remember many others. Was homophobia so rampant back then that only Freddy Mercury could openly flaunt his glory in denim chaps? Maybe. Maybe Sarah Smile was really Sammy Slim. Or maybe it is that everyone with a serious claim to humanity pretty instinctively imbues all things valuable, fragile, volatile and tragic with a female animating force. Ships get the treatment. Hurricanes did for years until some pansy somewhere decided either women were being insulted or men were being slighted and gave us Hurricanes Andrew and Gustav but it fools none but the  foolish. We have Mother Earth and the naked Muses. Those in the habit of cursing or coaxing their cars almost always see them as female. America, of course, is the Big She; the land of milk and honey to a starving globe. The mother. The teacher. The sister. The whore. And baby, she’s gone.

That’s what a lot of people are saying or intimating lately but don’t look down to see if the Atlantic Ocean is pouring into the continental void. In that sense we are still pretty continent but it seems like nearly every talking head is warning us of America’s imminent departure or telling us that the ship has actually already sunk, dummies. That’s not just the stereotypical patriot community (which does not include me, incidentally). The Left is on that kick, too. Most notably and recently the President informs us that the proposals from Paul Ryan, never mind any more whacky players, threaten what has made America great. And that, according to his anecdotes and homilies, is the culture and provision of these things we call entitlements. We all know though that these programs were only invented in the ’30s, so America has been great for about eighty years now. Before that, not so much. The Revolution? Not so great, really. The Civil War? A nasty bit of inter-office politics. Not worth considering. Other hoary tropes from the history curriculum of yesteryear are best forgotten, splattered as they are with blood, mud, lies and predation.

The snake-flag crowd, we know what you are about. By your accounting America has been dead and gone at least since the Johnson Administration. The cowboy ethos, the pioneering individual whether busting brush across the Rockies or busting competitors on the Exchange; this is what America means, or meant. Greatness lay in kicking German asses (twice) and some injuns, too. The notion of the country as a woman, to be wooed or conquered if she would not be wooed is woven into the fabric of this view. And these guys are more adamant by far that America is not dying but dead.

Let’s not start the autopsy just yet, though. I think I saw those eyelids flutter.

There is no doubt in any circle that we are in serious, serious trouble. Briefly, a couple weeks ago there was a wan campaign to declare otherwise; Howard Dean, Michael Moore and lesser figures were denouncing the whole idea of a debt crisis as a contrivance. We are not broke! Moore screams waving a copy of the Forbes 500. We have plenty of money in the pockets of these people here. All we have to do is go get it! He specifically targets Oprah’s fortune, an unwise over-reach especially as Mr Moore would be on his own hit list if it were the Forbes 520. This spasm didn’t last long though. Now everyone, including the President, says we cannot go on as we have.

But they say this while we do. Cutting has already begun, you say? No need to check the fine print, it is in the regular print. The Continuing Resolution that kept the lights on at the Washington Monument amounts to a shell game with one shell and no pea. Spending continues to increase today as yesterday. And that will speed up mightily. The “cuts” such as they are apply only to “discretionary spending”, a tiny fraction of the national budget which is a tiny fraction of our vested liabilities which are a small fraction of our true liabilities. Indeed, even the wild-eyed and lachrymose Glenn Beck underestimates the problem by half or more. Even the flat acceptance of the allegedly cruel Ryan plan cannot turn this tide as he specifically and pre-emptively declares that no current recipients of Social Security or Medicaid will be affected with this grandfather clause applying retroactively to those 55. Sorry, no one can be spared. No one. It’s too late for that. If you want to keep these programs and even the maddest of madmen on the Right seem to, they must become what they were always sold as; poor relief. This means Means Testing. The greater your net worth/income or whatever measure of wealth you apply, the less benefit you receive and the level needs to hit zero at a pretty modest figure. At the same time eligibility requirements will have to tighten like a hungry python. The retirement age MUST be raised and this must begin immediately. And do you know what else? Yes, taxes will have to be raised. The People’s Budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus shows the way. They want to raise payroll tax rates as well as get rid of the exclusion for higher earners. The Progs will sell their new austerity by EXPANDING benefits radically. Sorry, hippies, that only accelerates the trajectory of debt even before you figure in higher returns on our bonds. If these precious entitlements are to continue in any form every worker paying in will have to pay more while every beneficiary must take less out. The confiscatory plan, even if it works on its own terms, does not bring in nearly enough money even if we ignore the crushing effect of these higher taxes on growth.

And growth you can pretty much forget. The Treasury has produced a mildly convincing simulcrum of pathetic growth but it is a mirage; it blows away with the morning breeze. The stock market is held aloft with a cocktail of printing money, government bailouts and foreign operations. There is no there there, not in greenbacks anyhow. Standard and Poor’s has come from its burrow, seen its shadow and darted back underground. They are conspicuously late to this downer party with their “guidance” that maybe, perhaps in the next year or three they might have to scale back our bond rating. Just a skooch. This while prominent investors who are free to do so abandon Treasuries, quietly, so as not to disturb their other positions. Taking up the slack? This is also Joe Average. The government is buying its own bonds to the point that WE, as the US government are now the largest holder of our own debt. Don’t try this at home, plebs. The SEC would not be amused.

AND we are now paying out more in entitlements than total revenue. AND the entitlements are indexed to inflation, rising along with it. AND much of our debt also is contrived to rise with inflation, even the principle! AND we have smothering restrictions on energy production while we are married to vast, destructive subsidies of ethanol, “green” power and other poisons with no hope of fueling our economy. And above all, we have what appears at times to be a population addicted to the produce of their neighbors’ work.

So she’s gone. Whether you think what makes America great lies in old-timey westerns or in the pseudo-socialist projects of the New Deal and Great Society it is all coming down. There are precious few avenues of escape even mathematically possible. There is essentially NO political possibility of anything beneficial happening.

Is it time then to set our hair on fire and run around in circles, screaming?

Yes, it most certainly is.

But when you are tired of that and have put the Bactine on your head you will notice a crowd gathering around the nation’s voluptuous corpse. She was not so young but boy, was she a looker. The mourners will have their day but life must go on, so it will. The Left and the Right will be equally bereft and stunned but putting food on tables and roofs overhead must continue, just without the dollar. We didn’t always have the dollar, you know. The greenback as we know it was really a product of the Lincoln Administration. How did we get on before that? Currency will always be found. If there can be a complex economy based on cigarettes in prisons do you really think that all of America will be paralyzed simply from a mere currency collapse? Not for long. Not for long. If need be we will trade in the oldest currency there is; trust. Even now, in extremities, we know damn well we can trust our countrymen by and large. This is our great collective asset. Hand shakes and frank talk don’t sound like much to the viziers of the international finance community, but without them all the rest is bullshit anyhow. The learning of this lesson is the great and inescapable necessity of our day. Once it is driven by hard experience into a few of the thicker heads our dead mistress will look a little less pale. The diagnosis will improve from Dead to Mostly Dead. The courageous and industrious, which is nearly all of us, will say, eh, I’ve seen worse. The American revival will make the Berlin Miracle look like a good day at the farmer’s market. Bigger and better things are in our future that, yes, will include the care of those who cannot fend for themselves but will exclude those who will not which is better for them as well. As before we will cut the trail that the rest of the world will follow. America WILL be back and it may well be that it is our sitting President who sees us through. He is also, after all, getting the lesson. Possibly harder than anyone else.

So we aren’t going to start digging any graves just yet. America is as tough as she is hot. She may be gone but not for long.

But yes, we will pay the devil to replace her.

 

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