Bad News

You can read bad news in different ways. One way is to think of it as a call to action, things that need fixing, interesting jobs, as it were. And there are lots of those this morning. We live in a pretty good but imperfect nation in a world of hurt. So there is much to do. One simple and easy job is to fix the American electoral system. It is simple and easy because all the solutions are in plain sight, many of them tried and proven elsewhere. I am not the one to do that, but I could lay out the plan for fixing it right here, in under 800 words. I would not be surprised to learn that someone is already at it, that we shall see their plan will be on the Sunday op-ed pages. Let’s hope so.

We could also fix American racism, which does intrigue me. It is not as simple a task, but it is surely do-able. I would start in western Pennsylvania or maybe Idaho, where it lurks in dark corners and moldy wood piles. Flush it out of there, and you can flush it out of anywhere.

The economy, of course, needs fixing, The main reason it has not been fixed, the same as the reason it is broken, is that we assign the task to experts, in this case economists, none of whom, by virtue of educational brain damage, have any sense of it. Perhaps I should explain that. On the farms where I grew up we understood and saw a great deal of that kind of brain damage. We even had a name for it; we called it book learning, which we held in great disdain. We would send a kid off to college, to agricultural school say, and he would come back brain damaged, knowing nothing about how to run a farm but full of stuff we once loaded into manure spreaders. It was a terrible thing we did, taking a perfectly fine kid and making him useless if not dangerous. What we had done, of course, was remove him from any reality having to do with making a living on a farm and instead filled his head with the odd notions of professors who had never come close to a real farm, let alone shoveled manure or pulled teats, cow teats that is, as we used to do.

Now I am going to leave Joe the plumber in the clutches of the media, where the silly fool belongs. I used to be a plumber, and real plumbers know to keep their mouths shut about things they don't understand. But I will turn to real plumbers and real farmers and real motorcycle dealers and real waitresses and real realtors and real doodlebuggers (something to do with finding oil in the ground), people on the cutting edge of our economy, people who feel it when something goes wrong, people whose intellect I know and respect. They saw this thing coming months if not years before it hit. And they told me why it was coming. Unlike economists, they got it right because they were right where it was happening. What they could not do is figure out how to stop it, or if they did, then nobody would listen to them. Instead we listened to people with book learning.

Mind you, I am not licensed to speak with much authority on this. I was one of those kids they sent off to college, which I did with such relish that I became a professor. What license I do have I got from being submerged in all that book learning and professing. I can tell you why the experts have gotten it wrong. I know all about experts. I was one. But I also worked in steel mills and slums and oil fields and logging towns and on farms and trap lines and trot lines and firing lines. And some of that got into me, at least the ability to hear what people in such places have to say. These are the people we should be listening to and listening carefully. These are the people who understand economies; they live in them.

So when we get ready to fix the economy, when someone gets to it, I hope they will look to some of that wisdom out there where it is happening. I trust we will not leave it to the bloody experts who got in this mess.

Let's see. What else needs fixing? Oh, yes, we have to fix the world or at least find our place in it, which is probably not in the sands of Arabia or the guts of Asia or the heart of Africa. Having once been a sort of spook I have long been of the persuasion that a sharp knife and a sharp mind do a far cleaner job of it than a plane load of bombs. So that too can be fixed. But not by the experts, who are much too taken with pyrotechnics. For this I would turn to butchers and farmers. That would also help fix the economy, knives being much less of a drain on it than fireworks.

So many neat things to do. With just one quick read of today's news, and I have not yet gotten to the funnies, where most of the wisdom lies. Such an exciting world we live in with so much fun yet to be had. Thank God I did not pick up the paper this morning to discover that everything was just fine. What a huge bore that would have been.