Vic Socotra

21 October 2009

Guilt

(Machine Girl Movie Poster)

It is the Fall Pledge Drive on National Public Radio, my preferred source of disinformation. I listen to it most of the day, except for Tuesday evenings, which I reserve for the NetFlix movies that come every month and I have resolved to do something about.

The guilt is good, and I have to stop myself from calling up in order to prolong the agony.

I was listening to the host of Hot Jazz Saturday Night, a Mr. Rob Bamburger, who was asking for money. He was an unwitting companion when I was briefly homeless a few years ago, and the memories forced me to move from the kitchen to the couch.

The movie that beckoned last night- to assuage my guilt about not watching more television- was a Japanese action slasher film called “Machine Girl,” which was about a young woman in a Sailor Moon school outfit who somehow had become attached to a sort of Gatling gun appendage that she wore in lieu of her left arm, which had been lost in an unfortunate encounter with a yakuza sword.

I don’t know why Japanese slasher films should be a sort of comfort entertainment, except that in my formative years watching television on the Kanto Plain, I ceased to need direct translation of a difficult language and the culture began to communicate direct to my brain on a visceral level quit unconnected to words.

In that regard it is sort of like American politics, which in the case of the Old Dominion, will give me a chance to vote against a whole slate of candidates in the general election coming up on the 3rd of November.

There is nothing on the ballot that will actually let me communicate with the Federal government, so I will have to do what I can through inference, much like the actors in the slasher film yelling at me from the speakers in Japanese.

A pal sent me one of those lovely internet notes the other day that summed up the surreal nature of Washington. She smokes, once in a while, and has a weakness for mentholated cigarettes like Ho Chi Minh. She told me the President was committed to getting rid of menthol by next year, right along with closing Guantanamo.

It is surreal. Like the other note that I got informing me that there will be another cash payment to disabled vets and other selected categories of taxpayers who need stimulus.

I don’t recall asking the Federal Government to do much beyond letting me along, but apparently we taxpayers will again $250 cash payment, disbursed, in my case, by the VA. It verges either on the insulting or absurd, since $250 bucks doesn’t go very far these days.

My pal attached a simple-English primer, targeted to the ordinary citizen to help explain:

Q. What is an Economic Stimulus payment?
A. It is money that the federal government will send to taxpayers.

Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.

Q. So the government is giving me back my own money?
A. Only a smidgen.

Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is for you to use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.

Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China ?
A. Shut up.

I had to do some digging in another website to try to understand, but I did find some constructive recommendations, scaled down a bit, since the $250 is fully taxable, and I will have to send about half of it back to Washington. The Internal Revenue Site had some useful information on how to best help the US economy by spending the stimulus check wisely:

  •      If you spend the stimulus money at Wal-Mart, the money will go to China .
  •      If you spend it on gasoline, your money will go to the Arabs.
  •      If you purchase a computer, it will go to India .
  •      If you purchase fruit and vegetables, it will go to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala .
  •      If you buy a car, it will go to Japan or Korea .
  •      If you purchase useless stuff, it will go to Taiwan .
  •      If you pay your credit cards off, or buy stock, it will go to management bonuses and they will hide it offshore.

Instead, in order to actually stimulate the economy and keep the money in America, the recommendation was to:

Spend it at yard sales, or
Go to ball games, or
Spend it in the commercial sex industry, or
Buy more beer ,or
Get a cool tattoo.

The reasoning here is that these are the last core industries still owned and operated in the U.S.
A friend of mine owns a small elevator company, and he is in Massachusetts, so I thought I should add elevator rides to the list. In conclusion, I decided that what they were really telling me to was:

“Go to a ball game with a tattooed hooker you met in the elevator going to the yard sale and drink beer all day.”

I could see no flaws in the logic, and packaged up the Japanese movie to mail back to NetFlix when it was done. I think they are still an American company, so the whole thing was virtually guilt-free.

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