Cheap Thought

The degree to which poetry is about itself is the measure of its irrelevance.

Apply this idea at will and with the necessary substitutions to fit your situation.

Oil and the Art of Speculation

by Special Correspondent TS DeHaviland

So, let me get this straight. US drivers have been driving less. In response, the price of oil hit new record highs. The Saudis have upped production. In response the price of oil hit new record highs. The major oil companies signed agreements to pump Iraqi oil into the global market. In response, the price of oil hit new record highs.

All this and the oil companies, industry analysts, all the mainstream mediacs, still say that the primary reason we’re seeing these prices is “simple supply and demand.” Is there something I’m missing here? How is this not ample evidence that supply and demand have nothing, or little, to do with it, that these prices are almost entirely due to speculation?

If the precious free-market worked the way its adherents say it should, shouldn’t the oil companies have shifted away from the oil pumping business long ago, say starting in 1970 when the largest oil consumer, the US, reached peak production? You don’t see the Fisher company making bodies for horse-drawn carriages anymore; they’ve long since switched to making car bodies for GM. You don’t see IBM making typewriters anymore. Why are oil companies stuck on this single, finite, outdated product? Of course it’s a lot cheaper these days to buy the presidency, and more importantly the vice-presidency, than it is to retool. It’s even better when that presidency comes with its own army, so you can enforce your energy hegemony “for reals.”

Speculation itself is both the highest, most esoteric of the investment arts created by Capitalism and a signal of its dissolution as practical economics. Speculation is investment for its own sake and by means of concept, in the same way that abstract art is no longer practical representation but the conceptualization of the elements of art themselves. The difference is this: if Rothko wants to delve into blocks of color on canvas, no one suffers, nobody loses a job–aside from maybe Rothko. Art, literature, philosophy are about what isn’t there; they absent the world in order to speculate about it within their infinite realms of greater or lesser imaginative abstraction. An economy is about living in a practical sense; it’s how a culture survives within its environment. There is no room for speculation there.

The Obligatory Christmas Post

by Special Correspondent T.S. DeHaviland

As the Christmas spending season draws to a close, I encourage all of you to continue to do your patriotic duty and shop, just like the president told you to back in the latter part of 2001. We can’t have this administration’s otherwise stellar legacy be besmirched by a late-term recession, after all. Even the von Maur store that got all shot up at that mall in Omaha is again open for business. Commerce, the American way, shall not be deterred by such trivialities as a few hundred bullet holes or the mere passing of the seasons. <p>

For it wasn’t what the kid who shot up the von Maur did that was the problem; it was who he did it to. He was, after all, just following the same set of principles our Dear Leader did when he ordered the hit on Baghdad: they both wanted to be famous. And if the same shooter as did the deed in Omaha had done the same thing in a mallful of “our enemies,” whoever they are this week, he would have been posthumously awarded a medal for valor. Never mind that both acts would require an armed person shooting unarmed ones: honor is a measure of body count, not the courage required to enact the combat. Never mind as well that the act of killing the unarmed in the name of one’s cause is exactly what our arch nemesis, Osama bin Laden, did to raise our ire to begin with. Again, such distinctions are trivial, bordering on nuance and therefore suspect because they smack of being French. <p>

And anyway, the consumers at von Maur were merely exercising their democratic liberties which amount to consumer choice. As my students will tell you when I compel them to define “freedom,” it’s shopping at Wal-Mart at 2:00 a.m. and being able to choose from 60 different brands of disposable razors that makes America great. And they write this entirely without irony, with the sort of earnestness of a convert exploring the glories of a new faith, but this One True Religion they have been steeped in their entire lives. <p>

Jesus, of course (remember him?) had hard words for the wealthy, for those who lived for stuff—harder ones, certainly, than for homosexuals, whom he mentions nearly not at all. But one can’t actually expect a nominally Christian nation to live the way that Jesus said. Indeed, that would be bad for business.

Measure

Americans love to get their bobby-soxers in a rumble; we like nostalgia at a penny a pound; we
blush Coke Red and ware Pepsi Blue: America the pre-packaged in sanitary cello fain for your
projection. Freud was a dalliance, but we prefer numbers, have left our black turtlenex in the
trunk of the Lincoln, have rounded forced and are rumbling home. Somebody needs to make a
sport of jumping privacy fences, one of the last defenses of the mythically modest. LBJ taped
himself discussing his nuts with a tailor from Texas: Johnson’s southern-fried ego a
manifestation of privilege, which is to say, in America, of paranoia. It could have been the meds,
though. Everybody was on ‘em: LBJ, Nixon, Elvis too. JFK, Norma Jean. Maybe not Kissinger.
He needed no help to collapse into the universal loathing that comes pre-packaged with power.
Americans absolve themselves, hide behind leadership to forget their roles when black-shrouded
Muslims dance atop boxes, the wires gator-clipped to their fingers–If you fall, you die. That
motto resounds from the Capitol down; it rolls through Wall Street like a cloud of choking dust,
the pulverized bits of glass and wallboard and CRTs pulmonating through, a benediction.

Which we couldn’t hear, wouldn’t because revenge is so much sweeter to the strong who, our
inner myth tells us, deserved it all along. America, home to juice boxes playing pop songs and
Pop Rocks on acid and the wavering from radio north a vague mummery rejiggered to sell jeans.
America, your midriff is bare; your navel dances into view, has forgotten the true and grooves to a new beat, syncopated with the pulses of A/C, modulated by an atom of industrial cesium
beneath a mountain in high Colorado, defensible, Colorado who would lead the souls lost to
secularism toward heaven or its simulacrum by parting the seas of regurgitated Reds or scything
down the weeds of the Fertile Crescent.

America, your thighs thunder.