Vic Socotra

27 January 2008

Living in the Past

(Rabbit Ears Antenna)

The snow-flakes are gigantic this morning, floating down past the tall windows at Big Pink like parachutes. The ground is cold, and the white stuff is sticking immediately. The roads are going to be awful, and this is one of those days I have to be out in the County early, and then across the District in the late afternoon.

I would love to go back to yesterday, live again in the past with dry roads, or jump forward to Thursday, when this will all be melted and gone. There is nothing to do about it, though, except to fire up the Bluesmobile and roar out there and take what the Mother Nature is going to do to us like a man.

Once it took me eight hours to drive home from the Pentagon. I am going to assume that will not be the case today, but you never know. Nature controls the sky, but the Government controls the plows and salt.

And the rabbit ears, as it turns out. The analog antennas have been saved for a few months- thank God. The Senate Commerce Committee, headed by Blue-Stater Jay Rockefeller who owns West Virginia, struck a deal with Red-Stater Kay Bailey Hutchison to push the effective date of the transition to all-digital television broadcasting until June 12, well after the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament and Masters coverage is over, and before anyone can get very interested in baseball.

The House is supposed to rubber stamp the measure today. Boink!

Seems the Government program to fund the digital conversion boxes is a little short on cash, and there is waiting list for subsidized conversion boxes of about a million and a half anxious viewers. Times are tough, and they can neither:

A: Buy a television that works (Circuit City is getting rid of a bunch);
B: Subscribe to cable or satellite;
C: Buy their own damn conversion boxes;
D: Give up and watch on the Internet.

It is a compassion thing, and I have to salute the gesture, even though I am still getting used to the idea that Great Crunch is chewing people up right now. Corporate America announced 75,000 layoffs yesterday, and every one of them must be freaked out, living in the here-and-now.

By the way, what are we really going to call this mess? Crunch sounds like a breakfast cereal.

Not me. I’m having eggs for breakfast in my fool’s paradise, having the luxury of living at the beginning of 2008. I’ll get to that works in a minute, since you would probably like to live there too. It is sort of confusing, this juxtaposition, since our fellow citizens are living, for the most part, in 2009, and that is where the confusion comes in.

I’m surprised that no one has thought about the logical solution to the digital divide. Circuit City is going out of business, and is in the process of liquidating $1.8 Billion in inventory. Why wouldn’t the Feds just authorize the transfer of all the bankruptcy television sets to the technically challenged citizens and be done with it?

It would be faster than having Uncle Sugar to go to the back room and print up the extra money. Not that he hasn’t been back there already. You can hear the presses whining with urgency.

I used to be in the money machine, as a participant in the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System in the Department of Defense, which is a certified big-ass enterprise. I have joked before about how strange it is to spend your working day on the Program Year, two years ahead of real life, while defending the existing budget submission- next year- against the predations of the Congress. Living in two future years simultaneously- three, if you count the one the paycheck comes in- made everyone a little psycho, and never mind about the five-year Future Years plan.

Now, outside of government and in the business world, I am fighting about the Year of Execution, which is what we call what the government is spending now- Fiscal ’09 for short. That is actually money that was appropriated last year, before the full dimensions of the crisis became apparent, and conceived in 2007, a year of dangerous delusions.

So, it is safe to say that I have gone from living dangerously in the future to living foolishly in the past. Things are pretty good back there, by the way, and I don’t expect a gigantic change in next year’s money, when that too becomes the past and I can get at it.

The year after that is the first year the new Administration will really be able to call the budget their own, free from the input of the old regime. That is not to say that they will not be dumping big front end-loaders of cash on things right now, but FY-2011 is the year that things will change, big time, and I have to do some hard thinking about what is likely to happen in the future when it is past.

The tax structure will be part of the big swing, and it will take a while to re-tool things to reflect more compassion with other people’s money. But I digress. I figure I have about eighteen months to figure out what to do, since that is how long it will take for the cold reality most people are facing to get to me.

Laissez les bon temps, you know? Let it roll. But living in the past, while hanging my hat here in the present, means I know exactly what is going to come.

We’ll have to talk about that later in this week- in the future- because the snow is coming down in the now. The consequences are just as plain and stark as the noses on our faces, and it does not take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

Tomorrow: Common Cents

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