Vic Socotra

17 October 2009

Stormy Weather

(Progress)

Friday is when you want to announce these sorts of things. No one is paying attention, since they are more interested in getting to the weekend or squishing around on the completely soaked carpet in an office facility in Fairfax next to the third-floor women’s rest room.

I don’t mean to say that everyone was in Fairfax. That would be crazy. The other stuff was happening downtown.

The Treasury spokesman at the podium cleared his throat, said that the deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion and then said if there was no other business he wanted to get home and turn on the gas fireplace and kinda snuggle up in front of it with a nice hot cup of tea.

Everyone else felt the same way. It is now on the fourth day of rain, chill water from the slate skies, and it is positively depressing. In the context of the weather, a deficit nearly a trillion dollars greater than 2008 and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945 makes you want to sit down and have a nice bowl of hot soup- you ought to think about that recipe I sent you last month.

It was good enough for Jinny’s Mom, and it would be good enough for you this chilly weekend. Nice savory beef and vegetable broth, and nice soft noodles. Yum.

But as to the squishing around part, I got the call from the woman who manages the rent-a-vault during the annual Fall luncheon of the Spooks Benevolent Society. It was a good meeting, and the chicken was not rubbery at all.

Apparently a pipe burst, and behind the OX-8 special security lock the water spewed into the space, over the silent dark cubicles, and no one noticed until the alarm company called to say that they were showing an outage on the line.

By the time the Treasury guy announced that we were like totally screwed as a global economy, and the awards had been presented, and a senior official outlined the road ahead for Spookdom, the water had spread into the reception area under the tile-carpet squares and was soaking up into the drywall from below like a sponge.

The thing to do was survey the damage in person, so I drove over there in the rain, parked the car, and noticed that the water had managed to follow gravity’s imperative all the way down to the first floor.

The elevators were still working, which was a blessing, and the flood remediation people arrived while I ensured that the computers were all powered down and of the floor.

There was a slick of water over spots in the carpet. In a cold snap, if it all froze, the office would have made a good skating rink.

Once I was confident that my personal intervention in dress shoes and dapper pinstripe suit were not going to help matters, I drove back into town to change into some clothing and shoes more suitable for sloshing. I took a status call on the phone and drafted a report on the minor disaster to distribute on the internet, which is when I heard about the larger disaster that we have all known about for a while.

The commentators said that things have been worse. Back in 1945, the deficit was over 20% of gross domestic product. It seemed to be their way of saying that it was perfectly reasonable to forge ahead with restructuring the 20% of the economy that is the health care sector, imposing a cap-and-trade carbon exchange system and some other assorted tax schemes.

In 1945, we had just crushed global fascism, developed the ultimate weapon, and our armies stood triumphant on every field on the globe. A deficit then seems now to be a pretty good investment.

But the one we are running now is to pay for a binge the like of which the world has never seen. What were we thinking? Did we have to spend everything that our parent’s generation sacrificed for?

What are we thinking now?

I was chilled and decided to cook some soup. I was braising the beef in one pot and slicing the veggies on the cutting board on the sink. Now we are going to have to be nice to those Chinese and Indians. Not because it is the right thing to do, and not because we are swell people.

It is because they own our house, and we are going to have to.

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