02 March 2011

(Irish Poet William Butler Yeats.)

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– First Stanza of The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939

I am feeling good enough to go to a funeral this morning. I have competing obligations, as does my pal Paul, but he is going to be the one in the uniform, and I am going to don my trench-coat and slouch-brimmed fedora with the press-pass jammed in the grosgrain ribbon.

We are saying goodbye to George, one of the Old Comrade’s of The Organization up in New York. I did not know him well, except by reputation, but he knew Mac and Tom and the other luminaries of the business whom I hold in high regard.

It is a matter of honor.

Accordingly, there are some issues that we will have to defer this morning. They are important ones, and include:

The lyrical design of the Fender Stratocaster guitar;
The astonishing lengths to which we are prepared to level the State of West Virginia in search of Coal;
The price of oil, and the coming commodities bubble;
The next collapse of the Dow.

As to the last of these, we actually know the trigger that will burst the next stock bubble, and I am hereby announcing a little project to keep you posted on how I attempt to follow Peter Lynch’s extraordinary eight principles of investment and attempt to minimize my losses in the fixed game of global finance.

There is something abroad in the land. I saw it at the gun-show down in Dale City, where I had to go while still in the grip of the fever on Sunday to pick up a package. Americans like their guns, always have. But there is something wary in the eyes of the overwhelmingly white middle-and-lower-middle class that prowled the aisles.

The rifles on display are something else. They are not bolt-action scoped hunting rifles; in fact, they are not hunting rifles at all, unless Bambi and her sisters are now traveling in shock brigades.

I think I know part of what is fueling the clear sense of unease and building tension. Clearly part of it is distrust of government, at most of the levels in which it exists. The tension is clear across the spectrum, from the union protestors in Wisconsin to the prowling trucker ballcaps in the in the aisles of the gunshows.

Lest anyone think this is another of those squeals of partisan outrage, it is not. The phenomenon that I am attempting to capture and describe is one that first pricked my attention in the second Bush Administration, though it long predated W.
President Reagan began to append what is called a “Signing statement” to legislation that came to his desk to enacted as law under his signature. It is usually printed along with the bill when it is published in U.S. Code, and released in the Congressional and Administrative News. The Administrations of George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton continued the practice, but in the second Bush Administration the Signing Statement became ubiquitous.

Critics maintain that the statements under him were unusually extensive, and heavily modified the meaning of statutes as ratified by Congress. The practice has been continued by the Obama Administration, and is a handy, if ad hoc, modification to what some of us consider Constitutional process. The American Bar Association agrees with me, and issued a statement in 2006 that held that the use of signing statements to modify the meaning of duly enacted laws serves to “undermine the rule of law, and the separation of powers.

That was reiterated last week, and the event has passed without much negative comment because it was a popular.

The President announced last week, though his attorney general, that he has determined a law duly passed by the Congress is unconstitutional. His Justice Department will henceforth cease to enforce them. This happens to be the “Defense of Marriage Act.” I personally find it an appalling piece of legislation.

I do not think the Federal Government has a role in stipulating who can sleep or marry whom, any more than I think DEA agents should have the right to kick the doors of state-sanctioned medical marijuana boutiques, or that wandering bands of TSA officers should be able to pat down children and their parents EXITING an AMTRAK train in Savanna, Georgia.

You should check out the improvised video captured by a bemused citizen of the event on youtube. It is the queerest thing. It looks just like an internal check-point in some tin-pot banana republic.

My understanding of the Constitution is that there are three co-equal branches of government:

There is Congress to pass laws, raise taxes and dispense money.

There is a Supreme Court to interpret the legality of such laws against the baseline of the Constitution, and,

There is an Executive Branch to direct the operations of the central government, having proposed a budget for Congress to modify in the appropriations process, and to enforce the laws judged constitutional by the Court.

That is close to what I was taught in civics, anyway.

I don’t agree with the Defense of Marriage Act, as I said, but I missed something along the way. When was Eric Holder appointed to the Supreme Court?

Selective enforcement is not new. Federal laws regarding illegal immigration for decades have stipulated all non-citizens in the US have on their person documentation as to their rightful presence. For the legal citation, check the legacy of Senator McCarron of Arizona in the law that still provides the benchmark: McCarran-Walter Public Law No. 82-414, 1952, as amended.

For a variety of reasons, this is now considered controversial. Arizona mad, racist bigoted state law requiring law enforcement to inquire as to legal status caused a firestorm. Attorney General Holder and his Department of Justice in fact have enjoined the state in legal proceedings to have the law nullified.

The interesting thing is that the state statute is patterned directly on the Federal statute on the books that are not being enforced.

I am sure this is all a misunderstanding. I am glad I am not a suspicious person, since were I, it would be possible to be convinced there is something going on. Mr. Yeats must have had a more profound view, shaped by the observation of The Great War, and presaged by the certain knowledge of the second war bearing down upon him. He wrote this before he laid down his pen.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Don’t know. More on some of this tomorrow.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com