Is my bankriff showing?

Dear diary,

OK so all people need money now that it’s extinct, so all people are on the verge of failure, hanging on by a thread – all people, that is, but a chosen few, who have more riches than anyone can imagine. And these chosen few are chosen by who? The gods, we’re told. Fortune. Luck. The adorable Furies. A billboard displaying the word doom printed in white letters on a black background, in full caps with three ohs. We’re living in the best of all possible hades.

But people are tired of money (I say to myself), so don’t talk about that. People are tired of hearing about how the biggest criminals get rewarded instead of punished, while their victims get evicted. So don’t talk about that either.

I used the word “evicted” just now, cuz I was thinking of the big banks’ bailout here in the U.S., which led to many non-bankers being yanked from their homes. (I used the term “non-bankers” just now, cuz I assume that bankers did not evict themselves.) There are at least a couple sides to each loaded die. On one, I consider the teachings of sages like my earthly father, who proudly called himself a conservative republican and never let a day pass without singing the praises of the “free enterprise system”; he would tell me that this system is ingenious because it works out all problems naturally, inherently: it needs no human intervention; for instance, if a firm is mismanaged by its owners, then its competitors will swoop in and triumph: the best man always wins (and one vast obscene gesture goes to all you losers, from The Invisible Hand). Then, on the other side, we have the crash of the financial institutions; instead of saying to them: “You veered off the road; therefore you suck at driving, now your corporate personhood must kiss itself goodbye,” the gods decreed: “These banks are too big to fail; let us mollycoddle them.” But this is another far-too-familiar story; I will not tell it.

I’ve seen whales die. Whales in the ocean. They’re very big creatures, but not too big to fail. Except Moby Dick: he’s impervious to failure; but he only exists in the truth of fiction; we’re trying to focus on our lying reality here; so let’s set Moby Dick aside and say falsely that no whale can ever be too big to fail. Alright, so now that the rules of our game are established, I can ask my favorite question:

How much zooplankton must a corporation eat before the ocean will bar it from giving up the ghost? In other words, How many copepods must a small business strain into its baleen before it acquires enough mass to be un·bankrupt·able? How much krill must you or I digest to become the Jesus Christ of whales (because death can’t keep us: we sink back after just three days abovewater)? How many shrimplike crustaceans must an aquatic businessperson inhale in order to claim King of the Jungle and Lord of All Oceans on his or her résumé?

Say you’re a poor little bank, lost and starving in the desert. You’re a mom-&-pop bank; you haven’t eaten a coin in weeks—we can see your ribcage thru your green paper-thin skin. All you’re wearing is a loincloth. You’re crawling thru the desert; the sun in heaven beats on your head mercilessly. Then you chance upon a mirage: an oasis of funds, right in the middle of this wilderness. So you drink it all up: you line your belly’s pockets with the cold hard cash. Now you’ve earned a lot of money. You’re big, fat: healthy.

It’s like when a hunting-gathering tribe cooperates perfectly on a girls-night-out in the woods, and, instead of killing just ten rabbits, which would feed about thirty individuals a single evening meal, you all manage to take down the Great White Stag, which allows your whole tribe to feast for three days consecutively. That’s three full days abovewater. But instead of your all-female cohort devouring the stag, which, by the way, is the same stag that you made a golden image of last week for the people to pray to (which is certainly why you were able to slay it so easily); I say: instead of all the members of your tribe enjoying heaps of hell-fried stag from this present freeze-frame until Friday; you, the Smallest Bank in the Sahara, consume the entire cadaver yourself. Now you’re too big to fail.

I’m getting webbed up in the fun of all the details – the gold; the worship of idols; the harpoon-wielding nudes – and I’m marring the point that I’m wanting to make. (What’s a diary for if not to argue with someone who can’t talk back?) I’m trying to prove that for a financial institution to be “too big to fail”, there’s got to be a savior, a rescuer, someone from the heavens who’s willing to descend and help re-place the banks back onto their pedestals. Cuz when you’re that rotund, you fall over and just keep rolling.

So, in the desert, your food supply dwindles, and then you starve, unless someone comes and brings you aid, like a canteen of water or a packet of nourishment or multiple courses of haute cuisine, like the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). For instance, when you were the mom-&-pop bank, in my last analogy, I myself Bryan Ray came and brought you the corpse of that stag which I hired a harem to hunt, and I cooked it golden white, and served it to you, bit by bit, with a spork made of plastic. Also a bib, to dab your chin. And an eyedropper, to administer liquid morphine. (I assumed you were dying.) But if it weren’t for me—that is, if I didn’t exist (I, even I, this weblog’s author)—you’d be out of a job. You’d be dead meat. You’d have closed your doors. For your customers would’ve made a run on you: and those lines would’ve stretched around the block (rather, around the perimeter of the wilderness), as they all demand their deposits back this instant. The decision about whether you fail would be non-negotiable; for Mother Nature’s a gangster, a common street mobster – she says: If there ain’t money pumping thru your veins, you’re finished. She sends the grim reaper to mow you down. Now you’re thrown in a pile of refuse & burned at the city dump, in the valley of Hinnom, with all the scapegoats. The only salable items allowed to live are sheep, garbagemen, and close-cropped grass.

Again, a desert death is a political decision. It’s not something that just happens inexplicably. The angels assemble to discuss the pros and cons of fattening you up. Shall we fatten up the calf and guide it to the slaughter, or simply slaughter it now while it is emaciated? Contrariwise, banks, when they’re big enough, collapse on the sand and die of thirst: there’s no committee, no crooked politicians, no boardroom full of suited executives that can meet and pull levers and tweak knobs that will halt the pace of doom: no, you (the poor bank) just start to breathe funny (it’s called the death rattle) and then you tremble violently for a couple of seconds and finally snap—or coil up—into the fetal position (it’s called the death spaz and the death pose A.K.A. bankruptcy); signifying that you’ll be born again, by and by.

So I think there oughta be someone who can come along and say “I am not a thing but a person, which is why I have a humanlike form and am speaking the Queen’s English, & I do hereby decree that this poor bank should be given more money: at least enough to satisfy the long line of customers that are trying to make withdrawals.” Then the money could be given unto the bank, and the bank could live another eon. But we should maybe make it wait for a minor amount of time, before we bring it back to life, so that it doesn’t grow spoiled and just assume that we’ll always resurrect it. Say we wait three days, just enough time for it to begin to stink; then we’ll go resuscitate the corpse: we can blow into its nostrils, just like our first-aid training instructor Yahweh did when he saved our hide, in the good ol’ days of Genesis, during the most recent full-world restart. Or that time when Ahab stabbed us to death in the sea. But then we got to drag him for a spell behind our bulk, like Hector from the chariot in the Iliad, until we started to pity him. That’s where we differ from Yahweh God and the Big Banks of the U.S.A. – God never feels sorry for Satan: he just lets him fry in hell forever. And the banks don’t ever repeat the prayer with Jesus: “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”; for, once they’ve been saved by the grace of his precious blood, they jack up the interest rates on all student loans, and make it impossible for We the People to declare bankruptcy. For what’s good for the goose is NEVER good for the gander: our financial sector (the goose) has lobbied for legislation to prevent that type of fair play. If a damsel is evicted from her house, she simply shivers to death on the street. Like I explained above, it’s called the rattle-spaz dance. But if a bank is prevented from evicting that damsel, the damsel lives to suffer another day; HOWEVER, the bank then suffers much worse that any deceased tenant (all tenants are sinners, let me remind you): for the figures on the bank’s financial reports may change from seven to six, or from nine-nine-nine to nine-nine-eight.

Think about that for a second: How would you like to awake in the morn & be greeted with the sight of a number on a balance sheet that is lower than you expected it to be? That’s like telling an imprisoned war criminal that his punishment has been changed from thirty consecutive life sentences to just ten. This might not mean much to a big U.S. bank, because banks have only nine lives, so they’ll be dead for a full year before they can pay off their debt to society; whereas a mom-&-pop outfit, like the one above, which has managed to suck enough eucharist to become vampirical, will most likely faint when it hears this news, because of the nature of the beast. For that which makes its living by sucking the life out of fellow beings is prone to faint at half-whelming news. And any duration, even a seemingly interminable span like twenty lifetimes, is but a drop in the ocean of eternity; thus the report of our former C.E.O.’s reduced punishment was, to him, an anticlimax. And if sleep is the cousin of death, then what is fainting? It’s spiritual murder. That’s why we clerks of heaven have deemed it an unredeemable crime to let big banks expire. And, for the very same reason, we prohibited the imprisonment of war criminals. Only people should die, and only animals should be caged. But each private (for-profit) prison should merge with the local zoo, so that we may simply refer to jail as “the human exhibit”. Now you can buy a ticket and go people-watching, after preaching to the tygers:

For God did not inflict banking on the world to condemn the world; but that the world through these money-lending organizations might receive beatitude; as it is written: Blessed are the poor. When banks are healthy, people are healthy, for righteousness trickles down from heaven incrementally. Thus, anyone who has faith in global banking shall not fail but be saved along with the rest of the financial sectors. And the proof of belief is this: that you keep up with your payments. For he that falls behind even a month on his mortgage is condemned already, because he has not demonstrated faith in the name of the only God-approved system of judgment. You’re too small to succeed. And this is your fate: that robots have invaded the economy bearing gifts of leisure, in the form of fully automated luxury communism, yet men loved debt rather than moneylessness, because their evils were cheap. And by cheap I mean inexpensive, but I also mean kinda-fun-yet-boring, like gum that quickly loses its flavor.

What I’m trying to say is this: TV sitcoms are easy to understand; they’re obviously amusing and entertaining; but they leave the mind hungering for something more substantial. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. [John 3:20] That’s why we’re scared to forgive all debts and proclaim a year of jubilee. Tho I wanna make clear that I’m not saying that anything is the answer; I’m only saying that Capitalism is no better than Christianity, and that DEMOCRACY IS THE ANSWER (if only our representatives would permit us to attempt it); but, to be honest, I wish we could strike upon a NEW system that beats everything that’s currently rotting on the market, and add the word 'democracy' as a prefix to it, like democratic socialism or bottom-up fill-in-the-blank, so that the emphasis remains on We the People. (This is what I was thinking when, above, I wrote the dreaded 'C'-word communism: I want the opposite of totalitarianism or authoritarianism.)

When did people stop dreaming? Somebody, please, invent a new lightbulb, so that we can have better ideas, and make freer-spinning wheels to roll out the upcoming generations. If you save humankind, I’ll refer to you as “Lord” for a limited time.

P.S.

Sorry this affidavit was so rambly. I shouldn’t set an aim, before I start, of filling ex amount of scroll estate with drivel, & then tell myself that, if I accomplish this goal, I can reward myself with a two-ounce glass of grape juice. That’s like dangling a carrot before the face of a donkey. Always work: we’re lured to trot as we’re lured to write. We slaves will never stop pursuing that never-reached, ever-retreating illusion of an abuse-free existence.