Fixing Us Up

I’ve been thinking about fixing up our goodbye-Bush crisis. He played patty-cake with those bankers doing old-time, laissez-faire, robber-baron, footsie-footsie thinking. Now Prez. Obama has moved on to only 70-year-old ideas by starting up Mr. Keynes’ public money shovel. It worked before—when the shovel was big enough— so I expect it will work again.

The big question for me is where do you shovel all the money—in the same old carbon-cooking, late-age capitalism pork-pots or do you aim the shovel in new green directions.

We need to make jobs and make stuff, but let’s make something that doesn’t use up many resources, doesn’t burn much coal or oil, and helps people out.

Back in the 80’s, in an earlier mess, a bunch of people thought about making new stuff. It’s a good example. Boeing laid off engineers when too many jets just sat around doing nothing (sort of like those foreclosed-on houses, these days). Ever wonder why your baby carriage looks like a 747 landing gear getting ready for touchdown? Those hot shot, laid off engineers looked at the baby buggies like I pushed my son around in, buggies that felt like a boat on a truck chassis, buggies that took the whole trunk to pack them up and weighed more than my wife. Those smart-guy engineers changed everything with new light-weight designs that twisted into a little pile of tubes and cloth and fit anywhere. That’s the way to do it.

A month or so ago, my friend Sue started writing all sorts of politicians about the chance to make buses and passenger trains again in the US. That sounds like a good green direction for the money shovel to point. Where I live, we buy buses from the Dutch and train cars from the French. And have to pay in Euros that cost a bunch. We could change that. American cars look like buses anyway so why not do stretch Hummers and Escalades and give them away to any town that promises to add them to their bus fleet. That’s a lot better than buying whacko loans from defunct banks.

But we need something big. Bigger than buses. To keep millions of people in work. I’m thinking of the great business success of our time: Acrylic Nails. There are way more nail shops than factories in the US—more nail shops than just about anything except espresso stops and porta-potties (more about them later). Nails are green—not a big oil burner, a little oil makes a bunch of nails. And you don’t just do it once. They break, they chip, and sometimes you just want new pictures and glitter to jazz them up. But best of all, nail customers are happy as puppies with their fancy personalized weapons.

OK, there is a problem that keeps the nail industry in check. Most men have pretty short ones. We could come out with macho-themed nail pix, like skulls and daggers and other nasty stuff, or we could work on completely different “looking-good” products, that, like nails, take a while to apply and wear off in a week or two, but are for men too.
If we can get more nail action and some new products going, then ten million hard working people will open shops and we will have an entrepreneur burst that will light up our money supply like hotcakes.

Here’s my idea. I have been watching those crazy fans who paint their faces for games. Why not wear face paint all the time. It’s worth a try. Everyone with face paint for their favorite team, getting it redone once a week in private fan shops on every main street and mall in America.

Or what about those fancy beard trims. Barbers used to do it but now beards are do-it-yourself, like fixing toilets and sinks. Can’t we put barbers back on the map? If Bush can tell us to go shopping, then Obama can tell us to paint our faces, do our nails and get a trim.

Everyone can sneak out for an hour or so of nails, trim and facepaint without any trouble That’s 200 million folks paying 20 bucks each. That’s billions a week. Hundreds of billions a year. About the same as they are giving banks. Instead, they should mail out coupons for all the new shops that will open. Coupons for one treatment a week for the next year or so for every red-blooded, looking great (with their facepaint and trim and nails) American over 5 years old. (Let’s not forget the kids.)

That’s lot’s of jobs, lots of small business and not much oil and waste. Wow!

P.S. Oops, I forgot about the porta-potties and espresso shops. I’ll leave that for you to add on to barber shops and nail emporiums or maybe buses. Send you ideas in right away.

Hot and Scaly

Every morning when I go for a walk all the people living here are bundled up in parkas and heavy jackets with knit wool caps on their heads and scarves over their noses, mouths and chins. Even dogs have big red-plaid, flannel jackets which the Soriana store down the street sells like hot cakes (Hot cakes are big here.) Brrrrrrr, the people say (in Spanish) as they walk to work.

So where am I? In southern Mexico and it is almost 60 degrees at 8AM. Then in the afternoon when it is pushing 85, the schoolgirls are down to wool sweaters, skirts and long knit socks guarding their heat supply.

What’s going on? The people here are plump, so it’s not skin and bones cold (like I saw in India) that they are suffering. I think these folks just learned that comfortable means pretty warm. Maybe sweaty. And anything less means cold.

They like it much above our hallowed 68 degrees that I learned about in grade school for the thermostat in the livingroom. And maybe I learned in my skin and bones that sweat is bad and cool is, well, cool.

But I have been happy a lot warmer. It was pretty hot back in the womb. My little cells learned to sweat just fine in there. And it was damp, actually it was downright wet. But then I chilled out in the northlands for 50 years and forgot how happy hot can be.

I have been trying to reset my inner thermostat to 85. That seems right for this part of Mexico, especially next month when it heats up a lot. But the old thermostat seems stuck. I still love those cool evening breezes and the local people marvel at my ability to wear only a t-shirt and shorts when it is 65 degrees out.

They tell us that hot is coming everywhere. We need to get ready for global warming, not just get ready for hiding out from winter in Mexico when we get old. If our inner thermostats get set when we are a couple years old, maybe we just need to wear snow suits until we start school. That’s what they do down here in Mexico. Maybe we could keep kids hot longer after they are born. Make our nurseries into damp, big wombplaces. I bet if my mama had used more blankets at nite then maybe I would be comfortable down south and even enjoy sweating a bunch, like the people here do.

Or maybe I need to call on our good old genetic engineers to work on the thermostat reset gene. So we all could be really comfortable at 85. Then we would be ready when the polar bears start shaving off all that heavy fur and the penguins lose all their cute, heat-holding, baby fat.

While you are at it, Mr. and Ms. Engineer, can you do something about this skin? Its red and burned every day and I have to grease up my face every night like Doris Day used to do in the 50’s, to keep that handsome womanizer (in the movies that is) Rock Hudson out of her bed. I know I have my gringo skin because my ancestors stayed in the hut all winter and there wasn’t much sun anyway up where they lived with the reindeer and moose. Thanks to their shady lives, my skin looks like those glassfishes who live in dark black caves and watch their stomachs digesting shrimp that glow in the dark.

But when things heat up (it’s that global warming again), this old white skin is about as useful as a bay window with a great big skylight over top for keeping out the sun. I feel more related to a shedding snake than my thermo-hero, a lion who just lays back and naps in the jungle heat.

What I need is something darker and oily. Maybe with more hair. Then when the seas rise and I am on very high ground where the sun really beats down, I can cool it all day long.