Not the fat Elvis

Merchants across these states, united, are battening down hatches and rolling back prices even as you read this. Across this great land, racing faster than even the sun from East to West, the Day after Christmas sales have already started.

Some stores, I've read, will have opened at six this morning or even earlier. As unconscionable as I find this to do to the people working in the store (many Macy's stores NEVER closed for the week leading up to Christmas) in light of the economic realities that drive our capitalist society, I guess faced with getting up two hours early to go to work, and the very real possibility that I might not have a job if we don't get close to earnings targets, I'd skip the shut-eye.

I've read a lot all week-being ill has had the advantage of slowing my always in bewegung butt to a crawl in the last few days-about the 'demise of capitalism' because of our current economic condition and the perceptions and realities of hard times that come with it. Gotta tell ya-my evil twin, Skippy, buys in on it, but me, not so much. I guess because I can remember watching the Fall of the Wall, live and in color, after having witnessed the death by a thousand cuts (and defections) across the Iron Curtain, as citizens from East Germany and elsewhere voted with their feet to live in a society where, at least in theory, effort was rewarded.

It's great, a decade and a half on to misremember the triumph of democracy over communism, but it really came down to Levi blue jeans and Sony Walkman crushing three piece suits made of burlap and concrete and soulless, faceless mass housing high rises that trapped their inhabitants in despair and self-loathing for generations.

If democracy, alone, were so wonderful, why is it we, the world's leading practitioner of it, even in an election as exciting and as startling in its contrasts as the one we just had, would have voter turnout, though the highest in forty years, that still didn't top 60%. Holy shortsightedness, Batman! A larger percentage had an opinion on the Yankees signing Mark Teixeira, and that didn't even include Boston (kidding! Though maybe not).

So we like to be rewarded for our efforts--that seems to be the simplest definition of capitalism I can imagine. And when you withhold the rewards, or hand them out like lunch and render them meaningless, the system gets screwy and we cheat one another. Could that be what has happened to us in recent years? Have we patched so many places and so often, that there's no actual original fabric left? Has anyone seen J. Wellington Wimpy, and is it Tuesday already and can I get a slice of cheese for this hamburger, today?

Instead of spending the days between the years mourning what we no longer have, why not concede we are close to having leveled the playing field of wants, needs and desires, and remap our routes, as we may have lost our way (how can one person swindle a system of 50 Billion dollars--and where is this money?) and agree we have the first opportunity since the Great Depression (and before that, the War Between the States, and before that, the War of Independence) to redefine, for ourselves and for all those who reckon by our lights around the world, who we are as a people and a culture?

Oh I used to be disgusted
And now I try to be amused.
But since their wings have got rusted,
You know, the angels wanna wear my red shoes.
-bill kenny