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captainsblogFor all his awesome powerfulness, I can't say I'd ever paid much attention before to what our Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke actually looked like. But now, our fiscal collapse of the past few years makes perfect sense.
Separated at birth?
Somehow, I think our national finances would be in much better health if George Carlin had been running the Fed for the last three years of his life. For one thing, he did a far better job of regulating his icebox than Bernanke ever did regulating the contents of Wall Street:
Perhaps the worst thing that can happen is to reach into the refrigerator and come out with something that you cannot identify at all. You literally do not know what it is. Could be meat, could be cake. Usually, at a time like that, I'll bluff. "Honey, is this good?" "Well, what is it?" "I don't know. I've never seen anything like it. It looks like...meatcake!" "Well, smell it." (snort, sniff) "It has absolutely no smell whatsoever!" "It's good! Put it back! Somebody is saving it. It'll turn up in something." Thats what frightens me. That someone will consider it a challenge and use it just because it's in there.
Substitute "financial sector" for "refrigerator" and "mortgage-backed security" for "meatcake" and you pretty much have the story of 2008.
George also had a healthy disrespect for the most untouchable of institutions, even though he grew up under the wings of the Catholic Church, and even as it turned into one of his most reliable targets for his satire and criticism. Early in his just-released memoirs (which I was reading even before ol' Ben's picture suddenly turned up), he describes the conflict between the sacred and profane that he made a very healthy living off of for most of his career. The nuns back at his old school on 121st Street ("White Harlem," he once famously called it) heard about all the references to their church and school in his standup; even when it got into "shit-piss-cocksucker-tits and God-has-no-power" language, the sisters still ate it all up, even over his own mother's protests. Now, he says, those words "have just received the imprimatur of Holy Mother Church. Now they're nice words." If Bernanke had spent a little more time yelling "fuck" and "cocksucker" at those derivative traders, we'd all be in much better shape.
There's also a description in the book of his work on Shining Time Station, which was a unique acting gig in that all the other characters were CGI or otherwise not present on the set, so the whole thing was green-screen. That's kinda how the Fed chairmanship works, too, modelled on The Man Behind the Curtain in The Wizard of Oz more than anything else.
And so, in George's memory, I hereby nominate Al Sleet as the first-ever Hippy Dippy Fed Chairman. I can hear his acceptance speech already: "If you don't like the economy, MOVE!"
Separated at birth?
Somehow, I think our national finances would be in much better health if George Carlin had been running the Fed for the last three years of his life. For one thing, he did a far better job of regulating his icebox than Bernanke ever did regulating the contents of Wall Street:
Perhaps the worst thing that can happen is to reach into the refrigerator and come out with something that you cannot identify at all. You literally do not know what it is. Could be meat, could be cake. Usually, at a time like that, I'll bluff. "Honey, is this good?" "Well, what is it?" "I don't know. I've never seen anything like it. It looks like...meatcake!" "Well, smell it." (snort, sniff) "It has absolutely no smell whatsoever!" "It's good! Put it back! Somebody is saving it. It'll turn up in something." Thats what frightens me. That someone will consider it a challenge and use it just because it's in there.
Substitute "financial sector" for "refrigerator" and "mortgage-backed security" for "meatcake" and you pretty much have the story of 2008.
George also had a healthy disrespect for the most untouchable of institutions, even though he grew up under the wings of the Catholic Church, and even as it turned into one of his most reliable targets for his satire and criticism. Early in his just-released memoirs (which I was reading even before ol' Ben's picture suddenly turned up), he describes the conflict between the sacred and profane that he made a very healthy living off of for most of his career. The nuns back at his old school on 121st Street ("White Harlem," he once famously called it) heard about all the references to their church and school in his standup; even when it got into "shit-piss-cocksucker-tits and God-has-no-power" language, the sisters still ate it all up, even over his own mother's protests. Now, he says, those words "have just received the imprimatur of Holy Mother Church. Now they're nice words." If Bernanke had spent a little more time yelling "fuck" and "cocksucker" at those derivative traders, we'd all be in much better shape.
There's also a description in the book of his work on Shining Time Station, which was a unique acting gig in that all the other characters were CGI or otherwise not present on the set, so the whole thing was green-screen. That's kinda how the Fed chairmanship works, too, modelled on The Man Behind the Curtain in The Wizard of Oz more than anything else.
And so, in George's memory, I hereby nominate Al Sleet as the first-ever Hippy Dippy Fed Chairman. I can hear his acceptance speech already: "If you don't like the economy, MOVE!"