Been to London to visit the queen

The BritPress has gone postal over the Obamas’ meeting with Queen Elizabeth II. Seems Michelle’s clothes were all wrong, & then she put her arm around HM—terrible breach of protocol, evidently tantamount to a declaration of war.

Blah, blah, blah.

What no one’s ’splained to me is why the Queen is carrying a handbag…in her own palace. I mean, it's not like she's going to be called upon to pay the Domino's delivery guy.

Then we got back to…The Gifts. You'll recall how bent out of shape British newsmen were at the exchange of gifts between Obama & Gordon Brown when the PM came over here a month ago.

Apparently this time Obama gifted HM with an iPod pre-loaded with videos of her recent visit to Williamsburg & Jamestown (celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of the latter). The British press dissed this out of hand as cheesy, & besides, the Queen already has an iPod…

Well, maybe—but does she have an iPod with videos she can replay while sitting through the annual Opening of Parliament? I think not.

She, by the way, gave Obama a silver-framed autographed photo of herself & the Duke of Edinburgh.

British press have termed this the very model of a tasteful diplomatic gift.

Whatever.

After all this fulmination, I give you this column from the National Review to put things into perspective.

Helping hands from Detroit

It’s been widely reported that Ford & GM have announced variants on the “if you lose your job, we’ll make your car payments—so please come buy a car; possibly two” schtick.

Ford’s plan will cover payments up to $700 for up to a year. GM’s will cover payments up to $500 for up to nine months. Dunno what you have to do to prove job loss, but I’ll bet there are scammers out there figuring that out already.

What I find interesting is this statement about the program from newly-minted GM CEO Fritz Henderson: “It’s bold & unprecedented.”

Well, actually it is precedented: Hyundai announced in January that it would allow buyers to return a new car within a year of purchase if they can’t make payments due to job loss or disability. They then expanded the plan in February to make payments for customers for up to three months.

So, once again, Detroit has demonstrated its bold ability to say, “me, too!”

March with a noisy protest

This being the first of April, a traditional time of japes and jokes, I guess it’s fitting that the G-20 economic summit is fixing to kick off in London.

It being London, protestors have already begun demonstrating. Eleven of the japers and jokesters have been arrested after being stopped in an APC, wearing police uniforms. I kind of admire that—shades of Otto Skorzeny’s operations in the Ardennes in 1944.

Still—they got caught.

I’ve been having a look at British coverage of the events. The Beeb (suffering from a severe shortage of punctuation) reports that some City (i.e., the Wall Street of London) workers wore their own camouflage: they dressed in casual clothes to look like, well, the scruffocracy instead of the masters of the universe. Apparently banks and their ilk were warned they might be targeted by the protests.

Well, duh...

The BBC have also helpfully supplied a listing and a map of the “expected protests”, so if you get lost you can join up with your green-anarcho-anti-greed buddies. With these helpful tools you’ll know where to meet up with the Financial Fools’ Day protest for the Bank of England, and not get mixed up with the Stop the War Coalition at the US Embassy or the general-for-the-hell-of-it Protest on Mall outside Bucks House.

The Telegraph (also punctuationally challenged) got some interesting words on the streets. One protester, “an administration worker from Birmingham” spent the night traveling to London with four buds. He explained, “I am not a member of any of the groups represented today but I felt compelled to come down. We are going to march with a noisy protest in the middle of the City to show the people that are benefiting most from this system that we are not going to put up with it.”

Bravely said. I’d like a definition of “not going to put up with it,” though. Long-term, you understand. For after all the rubbish has been picked up on Threadneedle Street.

The Daily Mail squeezed in space for the protest coverage alongside stories the severed head found dumped in a field and a “drink-binge girl, 17, found dead by friends at house party”. They also refer to Obama “gushing” about the US-UK “special ‘affinity and kinship’” And thus “mak[ing] up for Washington snub” of PM Gordon Brown last month.

So, something good has come from this whole megilla.

I looked hard, but still found no mention of “road chaos” in any of the UK coverage. But I’m sure that’s coming. No major event is really fully reported there without chaos entering into it, and these protests are a natural.

One down, hundreds to go

Well, I’ll be a Corvair convertible: our new(ish) President has cut off the flow of bailout funds and told GM and Chrysler to go back and cough up real plans for restructuring to save themselves from imploding on their own excess.

And, by way of showing his degree of seriousness, he’s given GM CEO Rick Wagoner the sack.

Without severance payment.

Aw, gee—CrockTears™!

(Yeah, okay—he still gets retirement benefits of $23M from his decades of service leading the company—at various levels—into the tanker. But at least he won’t get that ultimate insult of the buyout to get him to leave the executive office before you have to point a gun at his head.)

And for the first time we’re hearing the term “bankruptcy” applied with a degree of seriousness to the automakers. No longer that “too big to go bankrupt” nonsense holding them back from the consequences of the past few decades of their boneheadedness.

Finally, we’re calling a spade a spade here: Obama terms this “a failure of leadership—from Washington to Detroit.”

Well, duh…

Word on the street is Wagoner will be followed shortly down the road to former glory by members of GM’s board.

On the one hand I’m surprised it’s taken so long for those with the cash to act upon the blindingly obvious idea that you shouldn’t trust those who got us into this mess to be able to get us out of it. Especially since the only talent they seem to have displayed is that for lining their own pockets.

On the other hand, I’m surprised that someone acted upon the blindingly obvious idea that you should not hire the foxes to guard the henhouse—especially when the foxes went to your university.

Perhaps this is a sign of good things to come.

Michigan’s Governor, Jennifer Granholm, seasonally termed Wagoner “a sacrificial lamb”. As you’d expect. But, really—I could once again quote Oliver Cromwell in dismissing the Long Parliament, “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately…Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Amen.

Blood & booze

The WSJ’s Eric Felten writes this week about whiskey sours, sending me down that old memory lane.

Whiskey sours were one of my first drinks, back in my 20s. I haven’t had one since before I hit 30. From his description, I’m sure I had the drink he heaps scorn upon. I recall it being very sweet & kind of murky.

& I’m sure that I wouldn’t get a “pure” one (by his lights) anywhere in metro Seattle.

However, what’s interesting to me about this story is the connection with Raymond Chandler’s classic noir detective. I love Moose Malloy, but I can't think that any number of whiskey sours would incapicitate him to any degree. Unless he was doing whiskey shots as backs.

Regardless, I swear—some day I’m holding a cocktail party where I serve only drinks from the Philip Marlowe oeuvre. People will have to dress up, & we’ll discuss only high-toned things.

Or murder.

Not in Kansas any more

Everything, apparently, has hidden meaning, including L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

As reported yesterday on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday”, assistant professor of history and political science at Rogers State University, Claremore, Okla., has revisited a 1964 analysis maintaining that Oz is a populist parable. The idea, posited by historian Henry M. Littlefield, is that Baum was reacting to the economic crises of the 1890s that lead to an extended depression and particularly affected farmers throughout the West.

This led to the rise of the Populist movement that for a while pitted rural against urban interests.

The farmers lost.

Anyhow, Littlefield conjectured that the characters and plot of Oz represented America, with the Emerald City standing in for Washington, D.C. Thus, Dorothy (representing Everyfarmer) and her band (Scarecrow being “muddle-headed” farmers, Tin Woodman the eastern industrial workers and the Cowardly Lion William Jennings Bryan, who led the Populist charge on the silver standard).

The Wizard, of course, is the charlatan and fraud of the US president and eastern capitalists.

Taylor has updated Littlefield’s thesis with more detail.

But in his conversation with NPR’s Scott Simon, he also extends the allegory to our current crisis, suggesting who the characters might represent in the post-AIG apocalyptic US:

I’m frankly not seeing Sarah Palin as Dorothy, although I’ll give Taylor the “somewhat provincial” part.

Shrub as the Scarecrow? “Thought to be without a brain, given to stumbling and bumbling.” Okay. “Well-intentioned”? Well…maybe. But a deadly characteristic when combined with world power and no brain.

The Wizard is apparently a toss-up between Dick Cheney and Alan Greenspan, as the men behind the curtain thought to be “great, all-powerful, wise and wonderful ruler, but in the end…exposed as a charlatan and a fraud.” Yeah.

Barney Frank as the Cowardly Lion—’nuff said.

The wicked witches turn out to be the AIG execs, the Bernie Madoffs and everyone else whose combination of personal greed and corporate power got us into this mess.

Al Gore is the Tin Woodman—a little rusty, but truly having a heart.

I think the one I love the most is Nancy Pelosi as the Queen of the Field Mice. (You’ll have to go back to the book to find her; she wasn’t in the 1939 film.) Seeing as to how the Speaker of the House presides over a collection of diminutive, chattering rodents.

Pelosi doesn’t hold a candle to Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Populist crusader who agitated for equality and opportunity. She is well known for advising an audience in rural Kansas audience, “What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell.”



She was right, of course. But the farmers still lost.