ReVisit Redux

I wrote this a really long time ago (I didn't have a computer yet so I had to do it in long-hand and tape the papers on to people's windows) and just rediscovered it. I would have told you at that time I thought I was pretty optimistic about who we are and where we were going, especially when compared to right now, but when I read what I wrote, I'm thinking 'maybe not so much.' So much for what passes as a disclaimer... 

I don't remember what the product is; actually, I do, but when the commercial starts I can never recall the sponsor (it's for an Internet bank)-and a grown-up is sitting at a short table with two little girls of less than (probably) five years of age. He asks the first little girl if she would like a pony, and the child eagerly says 'yes' and the man gives her a small pony replica. Smiles all around. 

The man asks the other little girl if she, too, would like a pony and she responds in the affirmative, at which point he makes a 'chck-chck' sound and out from behind this large dollhouse ambles a real pony, bridle, and saddle. The child is delighted. The first child not so much and we get some close-ups of her face as we hear the squeals of delight from the other little girl. Eventually, she screws up the courage to tell the grown-up very non-judgmentally for a child who just got double-crossed 'you didn't say I could have a real pony.' To which he quickly rejoins, 'you didn't ask.' 

The announcer proceeds to read advertising copy about sneaky is as sneaky does, trust whatever the bank is to do whatever banks are about, grown-ups eat bugs or some such palaver. What I always come back to is the abject hatred on the first girl's face for all things adult. She isn't close to tears or a tantrum; she's close to homicide. Either she is an incredibly gifted actress at such a young age, or the producers of the commercial didn't let her in on the joke and what we are seeing is her actual animus, spontaneous and unrehearsed. 

Sometimes when I follow the news even casually, I expect to see the streets of America littered with plastic pony replicas. We are, I think, the most relentlessly optimistic nation on earth, perhaps unrealistically optimistic. I grew up in a nation that liked Ike, grudgingly extended equal rights to everyone, that went in one generation from a chicken in every pot to two cars in every garage with lots of pot and which now finds itself, for lack of a more elegant term, flat-out broke financially, ethically and morally. 

The part that doesn't have me worried is that we can't fix what doesn't work because two hundred and something years of our history tells me we can. What bothers me is will we choose to repair ourselves? We've conspicuously consumed just about everything this planet has to offer and its riches haven't come close to filling that hole in our hearts. And now the one in our wallet is even larger than that one. 

We've conditioned ourselves to find solutions in fifteen, thirty and sixty-second increments and ideas like universal health care, greenhouse gases, economic reinvestment, equal rights for everyone, don't lend themselves to discussions or explanations that can be jammed in between the blue mountains of a beer can commercial and the soft porn of a shaving cream advertisement. It's not even fair to say we lose interest; we never had any. 

For our whole lives, guys in suits with briefcases fixed everything. We never asked how, because we never wanted to know. We built armies, we went to the moon, we sold each other real estate everyone at the closing knew wasn't worth the money being paid for it, but no one got upset or concerned because the Suits were there and they were fabulous. We, too, were fabulous. Hell, everything was fabulous, unless it was brilliant.

And now the suits are shiny with wear, and in some cases, there are holes at the elbows and the sleeves are ragged. And the property we used in our cities and towns to build the grand list to elevate the bond rating for the twenty-year municipal debentures we sold to finance the construction of the new transportation hub of the city that we could leverage to elevate all of our property values and sell it off before the whole crashed? 

Well, bad news on that front, cupcake, as the subprime mortgage lenders who shouldn't have advanced us the money they didn't have to buy the stuff no one wanted to impress people we don't know who don't like us anyway in the first place are all flopping and twitching on the beach as the tide of prosperity continues to rush out and no one warned us about the undertow.

Except, of course, we were warned, but we chose to believe they were asking if we wanted a pony. And now we get to choose between two seriously scary philosophies on how to govern that appear, at least to me, to be mutually exclusive and not only that but everyone on the other side of the political divide is somehow some kind of sub-human deserving neither sympathy nor pity. And here we are, with our plastic ponies hoping something great is about to happen, and content to leave it at hope, except hope is NOT a plan, and we have no hope of ever having a plan.
-bill kenny