The Bush Depression, My Hair, and the Life of Riley

I hereby dub thee: The Bush Depression. Because there’s no doubt, since certain people are already doing it, that they’re going to try to blame it on Obama. Because somehow, magically, everything is Obama’s fault, even retroactively. Let’s hope it catches on. After all, if we’re not going to send Bush to jail for ordering torture and illegal wiretapping, then he ought to at least get this legacy named after him.

(I have no right to dub it, it seems, say the some 22,000 hits on Google.)

I need to get my hair cut, but I can’t afford it. Not until I get another paycheck. My roots are all dishwater blonde instead of red, and … I really ought to just wear scarves and forget about it for right now. Cutting it myself seems rather desperate. But I’m also afraid not to go to my brilliant but expensive hair stylist. It’s worse since she’s a friend. If she wasn’t I would change up and never look back. (In fact, I once tried to quit, but her talent is like a drug. I use her to keep me from looking too much like the 40-something housewife I feel like I’m becoming. Or am, duh.)

Here are some more quotes from The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel:

From Bruce Bendinger (Terkel calls him an “advertising wunderkind”):

You have the knee-driven underclass, which we continue to market sugar and salt and alcohol and nicotine to. We make a good amount of money off of them. You’ll find black America still drinkin’, still smokin’ a lot of cigarettes, still spending a high percentage of their cash on this. You can understand this in terms of what their options are. Much more concerned with short-term gratification, for reasons that are sad but obvious. Marketing things like potato chips, salty snacks, may seem innocent. If you’re black, chances are you will retain a greater percentage of salt and be more prone to high blood pressure. Take a look at the mortality rates in black America, you’ll find one of the side effects of these consumption patterns. They are fueled by the […] type of marketing, which contributes to—I don’t think you live as long. [….]

Bendinger

There’s a new kind of poverty in America. It’s time. All the people makin’ all this cash, you know what they don’t got? And I’m one of ’em. They don’t got time. The time-poor. Both of ’em are workin’. They’re workin’ hard, makin’ all this money, fifty, sixty hours a week. Mom isn’t home makin’ the tuna casserole. They both come home beat from their jobs. They’re gonna go out, they’re gonna order pizza. They don’t have time to make dinner, to do a lot of things. It’s really changed the way a lot of America lives. My lawyer says every couple in business together needs a wife, because there’s no one who’s cookin’ the dinner, who’s cleanin’ the house.

Another way that’s reshaping America is the move from parenting to child management. You don’t have mom raising the kids. She gets ’em till it’s time for Montessori, then she’s back in the work force to make the money to pay for Montessori and the designer kids’ clothes.

[From The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel, which was published in 1987.]

I guess I get to this point: At least I don’t eat bad food. At least I have plenty of time to live in my house, love my family, and be in the present instead of being stuck looking ever toward a mythical retirement. At least I have time to read books. At least I have time to drink tea and look out the window. At least going for a walk in the woods isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

I live the life of Riley. Not being able to get a haircut is way down on the list of things that ought to cause me any stress.

FDR: Saint or Satan?

Is our New Depression a time to toast the heartening words of FDR?

Or a time to argue about whether FDR prolonged the Depression with his spend-thrift ways? (He didn’t.)

I am overwhelmed by the day-to-day. The practicalities of whether or not we’re going to make enough money in the next eight months to keep a roof over our heads, and whether or not I’ve condemned myself because of living so close to the edge up til now. Staring down the canyon between Personal Ideals and Reality.

So yeah, thank you Star-Tribune, for the pep talk on NYE. It’s nice to get links to a bunch of fireside chats and all, and a lovely quote from our long-ago presidential papa:

“In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

But I don’t know if I have it in me to listen to Fireside Chats from 70 years ago in hopes that it will make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

And here’s the thing–neither you at the Star-Trib nor any politician in Washington is really looking down the barrel of taking a third or fourth job. (And neither was FDR.) It’s hard to know how to take it when people who do not suffer in the slightest—or even profit from your troubles—tell you to “hang in there” or “don’t give up.” It gives me a creeping urge to bake pies and throw them.

David Sirota, thanks for the crack on the knuckles to the Right. However, I’m not so sure that what the government’s been doing right now (like, say, facilitating the theft of what’s left of our treasury down to the draperies) can be something to make me feel all plucky and optimistic.