#44 "Attention Span of a Gnat”

Dear Don1001,

Although presently I’m writing my memoirs, there are contemporary things that “bitch slap” you back to the now. For instance, I just saw an Internet TV commercial for a mortgage company that was advertising the advantages of a new low variable rate mortgage over a stodgy old 30 year fixed rate. If you want an allegory or metaphor (I can never remember the difference) for the economic debacle that took place in 2008, the variable rate mortgage (that anyone including children could get) is that poster child. Those “Dream home deals of a lifetime” turned out to be all sizzle and no steak, and in the end for most people, it turned out to be like a long bad weekend in “Vegas” where you get on the plane with a screaming bad hangover with all of your credit cards “maxxed” out and a tooth missing. Since February of "09" American homeowners have suffered a combined net loss of over a trillion dollars. I don’t know about you, but from where I came from that’s money, real money.  The recent monetary “pig-fuck”, my friend, was the result of a combination of avarice, world-class arrogance and stupidity. Now less than three years later some of the financial institutions that the Federal Bank lent money for 0.0% (that’s zero percent) are starting to slowly creep back into the shadow world of variable rate money lending. The sharks on Wall Street have a lot of “cheap” money and they need to find a place for it and what better way get a high rate of return than lending money to people that can’t afford it. Which make me wonder just how long is the attention span of the American people? It can’t be too long, because after the World almost went into an economic Armageddon, one would have thought that in the election of 2010, the people that had lost homes and jobs would elect politicians that would have their best interest in mind, but they didn’t. The American people returned to office at the State and Federal level people (mostly conservative and very rich) with the very same mindset that drove the truck into the ditch in the first place. And what do these Ayn Rand aficionados have to offer as solutions for the pain of the working poor and the middle class? More tax cuts for the Rich. (Personally that’s not the direction I would have taken but nobody asked me.) So I doubt things will change any time soon because the economic elites are still having so much fun that its easy for them to rationalize an America where the majority of people are saddled with a boatload of debt and angst about the present and the future. I know this is a horrible indictment of the truly rich but it certainly does go a long way in substantiating my best worst fears about the future.  A fear that events that have yet to come are going to be as equally fucked up as the last decade, because we, as a people, are still more infatuated with flash than substance.

                                                      Wishing we could rewrite the future, Brother Gregory

You can see videos of these sage observations here: http://www.youtube.com/my_videos?feature=mhum
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