I admit, I have been holding back

steel belted, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

ENOUGH.

Enough with these bluff, arrogant, barrel-chested golf-playing private-school fuckers who broke the economy and now are voting to get paid for it. Because... I mean, it's the same guys, obviously. Young Ted is on the Street, and Uncle Chip is in D.C., and they have a mock tussle at Thanksgiving over who's going to carve the turkey.

Blech!

Whatshisname, Henry Paulson, used to be CEO of Goldman Sachs. That's so great. Get the guys who drove the industry like they were drunk teenagers in a borrowed Maserati on prom night to oversee the rehab program. Don't forget a personal masseuse for each participant!

Nick Harkaway, in The Gone-Away World, ranks bureaucrats thusly:

... Type C pencilneck (chortling lackey of the dehumanising system, ambient golf)
... Type B pencilneck (heartless bureaucratic machine, pro-class tennis)...
... Type A pencilneck... a person so entirely consumed by the mechanism in which he or she is employed that they had ceased to exist as a separate entity... odourless, faceless and undetectable, without ambition or restraint, and would take decisions entirely unfettered by human concerns, make choices for the company, of the company. A type A pencilneck would be the kind of person to sign off on torture and push the nuclear button for no more pressing reason than that is was his job - or hers - and it seemed the next logical step.

I think I'm in love with Nick Harkaway. And he knows this shit, his father is John le Carré, who used to be MI6. Substitute "company" for "class" and that's how I feel about what's going on.

But what I DON'T get is why perfectly ordinary middle-class people support these bastards. Use the words "wealth distribution" like it's a bad thing. Vote Republican. I mean, do they think that they, too, are rich? That any of this shit applies to them? Do people defend the fortunes of the wealthy because they think it will somehow enrich them? That the wealthy will even NOTICE? It makes me very sick, to see middle class people aligning themselves with the rich, like high school losers defending the popular kids in the lunchroom. Feels like England.

In my house, we are training humans. It's hard work, let me tell you. I really believe people are not born human. Watch a two year old as he Baby-zillas through a room, trailing destruction and crumbs. Responsibility, accountability, empathy, self-discipline... all these things are learned behaviors.

And by most accounts, my children are coming along ok. Mao just was elected to be Student Council rep for the 2nd grade. Zhou is so accustomed to civil discourse that he is having trouble with the autocratic environment of the soccer team. (Poor little bugger. He just stands and stares when the coach barks commands.)

So I propose that we let ME be the one to fix this problem. In my house, when you knock the entire condiment rack off the fridge, YOU get a dishtowel and get down and wipe up the shoyu and the hot sauce. And your friends and family help, because the sooner it's cleaned up, the sooner you'll be back outside playing.

I bet you could find 700 billionaires on Wall Street, extract a billion from each of them, and finance the bailout that way. I tell you one thing, there would be oversight THEN!

Forbes lists hundreds of billionaires. Let's cold-call 'em. "Hey you! Don't walk away - clean that up!" I'll start dialling - I don't mind. Who's with me?