¶ Matins: One of the saddest things that I’ve read in a long time is also one of the most timely: Paul Reyes’s account, in Harper’s, of clearing foreclosed houses for resale. (“Bleak Houses: Digging Through the Ruins of the Mortgage Crisis“) A big part of the job is hauling left-behind possessions to the landfill.

There, among the whines of reversing garbage trucks, the shriek and hiss of brakes, the groaning of horns, Sue’s possessions slid down into a heap, got fluffed, and were carried over the wall to burn, dissolve, and compress, all traces of what she once prized dragged along the sludge and shoved over the edge into an ash pile so tidal in its proportions as to be barely comprehensible. Foreclosures, in their own way, regenerate: one family’s loss is another’s first home. But this was the colossal deposit left behind, and it was growing by the cubic foot, by the ton. Pulling out of the hangar, driving toward the landfill’s exit, we could see the earth movers perched high up on the trash bluff, where their drivers awaited orders to till another layer, to massage that Kilimanjaro of garbage, and where—if they looked away from the incinerator— they would have had a pretty good view of the city from whose ruin that mountain grew, and into whose streets we now descended to fetch the next load.

¶ Lauds: I didn’t get to the end of this link before I had to go to bed, but I stuck with it a lot longer than I ought to have done. A O Scott showcases films that he finds particularly timely, from Wall Street to State of the Union. And beyond, for all I know!

¶ Tierce: The most curious cog in Sarah Palin’s infernal machinery has been her ability to deflect attention away from the overt racism with which many voters respond to Barack Obama. Democrats and progressives are too busy lambasting the Alaskan’s professional inferiority to attend to boneheads like Ricky Thompson, quoted in today’s Times:

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Instead of Brains-Against-Palin, Democrats ought to be supporting a Scripture-for-Obama movement. Has everybody forgotten the political implications of the Gospels?

¶ Vespers: In his column this morning, Thomas L Friedman quoted a book that ought to be required reading for every high-school student, Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:

Money … has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Oremus…

§ Matins. Also salient is the landscape of substandard housing that people with dodgy finances have been foxed into buying. Some houses are foreclosed before their construction is complete.

The major stock markets all observe what is called “the suitability rule”: brokers are not supposed to sell risky investments to the financially challenged (I remember mopping up a 1985 case in which recent Russian immigrants to Ohio had been wiped out by options trading — an easy way to lose money fast. We asked the rep where he thought the customer had acquired his market expertise; on the Omsk Exchange perhaps?) The subprime mortgage scandal is nothing but a wholesale flouting of this venerable Wall Street principle.

§ Lauds. I’m still not sure that I can bear to watch Rambo (a/k/a First Blood: Part II).

§ Tierce. Perhaps it’s my Roman Catholic upbringing, but I tend to see Protestantism — and the Protestant cultures of Europe’s North and America’s South — as rejecting the New Testament for the Old. The only New Testament work that seems to figure in populist Protestantism is Revelation, the most embarrassing religious text to exercise influence in the modern world.

In other words — has Al Franken ever riffed on this? — Protestants are the real Jews. The folks who nail Jesus to the Cross.

§ Vespers. What Mackay would have made of broadcast television? The problem is, we are still too close to the hopeful early days of the medium, when great things were expected of it.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 4:01 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.