Etch-A-Sketches, And Shaking Them Hard

I always wondered whether or not shaking my Etch-A-Sketch hard had anything to do with the quickness of its ability to erase whatever geometric nightmare I’d twisted onto its grayscale screen. I always went into the affair with visions of Frank Lloyd Wright, but always seemed to end up with a London Underground Map. Magnetics are always interesting at any age, but even more so when confined in single, slender line and given up-down, left-right machinations by two giant white knobs. The rounded red casing grabs the eye and tells you that the science experiment going on beneath your fingertips is not only educational, but quite a diversion as well.

A lot of jobs went down the drain this week. Poof. Like the Statue of Liberty under Copperfield’s watch or tact under O’Reilly’s. The tendency, in moments like these, is to blame a side: Republicans, Democrats, the Senate, the House, the President, etc. Whoever seems most to blame, we’ll turn our bright television lights on them and watch their skin sizzle. We the public (or, “the people” as the Constitution claims) are not nearly as interested in the minutiae, but rather the results. And so help us, if the results aren’t what we prefer, then, well, let’s crucify somebody. No better salve for disappointment than a crucifixion, I always say.

Five hundred, twenty-four thousand jobs. That’s more than seven times the capacity of Raymond James Stadium, site of Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, Florida. Take a moment to consider it when you’re watching the Boss try to convince you that he’s a “Nothing Man” in front of nearly 80,000 people. Multiply the audience by seven and imagine them in your living room, all looking at you, frowning and forlorn, waiting for Monster or Career Builder to offer something just a bit tastier than the saltless fare they offer up on a daily basis.

The job market has been zapped, not unlike the time I electrocuted myself after deciding to sever the wire on my tree lamp during my third year of college. In a misguided attempt to turn it into a bed-mounted bunk-lamp, I forgot to unplug the thing before hacking into it with a stainless steel Leatherman. Zap-zap-ze-bap, I couldn’t feel my left side.

I like to picture God, or something similar, reaching down to the District and picking up the Fed, and with a desperate determination usually reserved for ninth inning relief pitching or fourth quarter post-patterns, shaking the hell out of the thing, right there in front of Congress and everybody. Junior senators and staff assistants stand on the Capitol steps, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, watching the pillars of our financial freedom get shaken to bits right in front of their eyes. Financial wizards tumble out like non-survivors from the Titanic, bellowing and screaming while spinning like propellers towards the grass on Virginia Avenue, wishing they’d taken that job at Merrill Lynch IKEA and praying for a communist Maker on the other side.

To those who’ve gotten canned, laid off, supplanted, relocated, and to the thousands more who now sweat, puckered up tight, while tiptoeing through the daily grind in the cubicle farms of multi-national corporations with fat fingers on the HR trigger:

Welcome, I say, to life. A forest is not a majestic forest until it’s been ravaged a few hundred times by fire and carried on. American security isn’t what we thought, it’s just an illusion, like the Statue of Liberty trick and most of what happens on CNN.

Let’s band together and make something new.