Credit Cards Roasting on an Open Fire

Look, I don't follow the news much anymore. It doesn't help my immediate life much if I do. I got enough going on, trying to position myself at this nutty corporation so I am always perceived as having value, balancing productivity against my innate laziness, coming up with actionable ideas re novel writing, learning to write creativelike (though I'll never touch Raymond Chandler's pure pulp poetry), doing a thing or two around the house so the entire family edifice doesn't come a-crashing down, and being under the constant surveillance of my inner demons, I got enough of all that and more for the news to matter much to me. I especially get cheesed off when I overhear people talking about news that isn't worth a moment's notice anyway, national-scale gossip about some damn TV star or sports anti-hero.

But! What the flip are we doing to our country? I heard driving in that there is a big credit crunch hammering the economy, and that Citigroup Inc., one of the big banking thingies, has been bailed out by a huge investment from Abu Dhabi. Or the way I look at it, our profligate buying on credit has us teetering like a poorly loaded cargo ship and only a big heavy line from the Arabs is keeping us from rolling over and sinking. The Chinese have bought much of us up. The Arabs are continuing to do more and more of the same. The only thing that keeps me from sweating in panic is that the Chinese and the Arabs are not natural allies. I mean, it's not like one of them has a resource the other one wants, giving them both incentive to cooperate. Surely there's no reason to imagine a consortium of next-generation world leaders slavering over the big fat pig that is increasingly on the block and sharpening their knives for a feast. No, no worries about that.

Who's to blame? All of us, I guess. All of us who maintain deep lines of credit, who don't pay off our houses so we can instead buy SUVs, who keep our economy buzzing by enriching the middle men who sell us plastic electronic gizmos manufactured on another continent and that really don't do a lot to enrich our lives in return. What does that shiny new iPhone really do for you? Just more shit to learn how to do, and you know it will break before you adapt to it enough so that it becomes a true enhancement. And if you didn't have a credit card you would never have been able to buy the damn thing in the first place. Would that really be a loss?

All right, so worrying about yet another foreign investment may sound like so much paranoid nativism. Don't we want a truly open global economy and isn't this another step towards reaching it? Maybe, perhaps, I don't know. It just doesn't feel right. And as I not only witness but personally participate in the continuing shift of some of the most productive elements of our economy -- manufacturing -- to factories and business parks in distant countries, and compare the focus and willingness to work over there with the attitude of millions of Americans who collect welfare and live in houses built by underpaid illegal immigrants, I can't help but expect we are setting ourselves up for a fall of historic proportions. Was it Nixon who shifted the dollar from being based on gold to being based on oil? Was it really to prevent Saddam selling oil in euros that we went to war? I doubt that, and I don't know why I should care that oil is sold for a basket of currencies and not just dollars. I don't know anything, in other words. But I don't think my concern is based solely in ignorance.

So here we are starting that special season when we show our love by buying people stuff and waiting until we get our meager income tax returns months later to pay for it. The connection between that and the finer points of the Christian mythology completely escape me. I like Christmas, parts of it. But the decorations and the canned music and the sales and above all the concern of commentators over the importance of "consumer confidence", which is nothing more than an exhortation to treat consumerism as some kind of social or moral or at least patriotic duty, they all make me want to just visit with family, play games, eat a lot and be careful not to buy a damn thing.

I don't know if this post was going somewhere, but this is it. Time to, uh, work now.