How You Know What's Coming

I'm just going to avoid the preamble - there is something bad coming down the road, and I know it because all there is on TV are shows about prison and I got solicited at the Home Depot, for the first time in my life, for a job by a middle aged white man who then out-and-out asked me for some money to get back to Texas. Day labor is by far the most recession-responsive industry there is; if a homebuilder cuts a single house, it's the equivalent in man-hours of laying off two men for a year. And he wasn't the only one there.

Now, it's normal to find guys looking for work outside a building supply store - but not two white guys, and not on a SUNDAY morning, when all there is are just the weekend putterers who want to do the stuff themselves (otherwise, they wouldn't be there.) Imagine if NASA engineers were looking for work outside the hobby shop, hitting up the people building model rockets; you'd probably say "Things must be bad at Cape Canaveral; and you'd be right.

Now, if you think that culture responds to society in unconscious ways, then the crime shows one sees on television are the dream state of that culture; when the economy was good, all that was on TruTV and MSNBC and Nancy Grace were cases of rich white girls being abducted - which is perhaps the most perfect analogue for the Freudian castration fantasy of the American bourgeois home. Coming home on JetBlue - remember, I don't own a TV, so I never get that "frog-boil" effect of getting used to the zeitgeist - there was a marathon of "what prison is like" stories; today on TruTV - the same thing. I suspect that this is because, knowing how the crime statistics are going to go, the deep troubled mind of the nation is wondering what exactly the conditions of prison are these days, much in the same way that Sigfried Krakauer discussed the formation of a infantilized man seeking masculinity in group action in the years before the rise of Nazism. Needless to say, I have the full expectation that everything Paulson does will make the economy work - why wouldn't it? he's a Bush selection, and therefore, by proxy, is an extension of the unsurpassed ability of the President to screw up - and it will literally be years before Obama's plan - if it works - has any tangible effects on jobs.

That Is All For Now.