Week 24 of the Quarantine
SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – Here’s Dear Reader Blake R. with a teasing remark:
“…it’s a shame that you don’t know enough about livestock to know how to keep a cow from bloating. Growing up, we had a term for people that had some money and thought they could buy a ranch and miraculously become ranchers. ‘Drugstore Cowboys.’ Probably where you bought your boots…”
Is he kidding? We bought the whole drugstore!
But we’ll come back to that in a minute.
Wrong Thing
But first, a note about an important Federal Reserve meeting from CNBC:
“Heading into Jackson Hole we are confident Chair Powell will use his speech Thursday to tee up a profoundly consequential and risk-friendly move to soft inflation averaging at the Fed’s upcoming September meeting,” wrote Krishna Guha, head of global policy and central bank strategy at Evercore ISI. Guha and his team expect the Fed to “seek a moderate inflation overshoot during the recovery phase of this cycle” as a way to avert “Japanification,” or an extended period [of] low growth marked by weak inflation.
Along with the inflation move, the Fed also, as indicated by the minutes from its July meeting, appears likely to reinforce its commitment to full employment. The unemployment rate currently sits at 10.2%, down from the 14.7% peak in April but well above the 3.5% pre-pandemic level in February.
What do these clowns think? That they have an inflation valve somewhere in the Eccles building? That they can open it up just a teensy weensy bit… and get just a little more consumer price inflation?
And if the Federal Reserve really could control the unemployment rate, we wouldn’t have one in 10 Americans jobless right now.
The only thing the Fed can do is either “print” more money or “print” less money. It cannot fine tune the economy with just the right amount of inflation.
Instead, it will inflate the money supply… and keep inflating the money supply… until, finally, consumer price increases are out of control.
And then, with the economy on the edge of disaster… everyone needing more money… and the whole country on the edge of chaos… we are confident that a desperate Fed will do exactly the wrong thing – print even more money in an attempt to keep a lid on things… until the whole system blows up.
Embarrassing Moment
But let’s turn back to our dear reader.
Life offers you plenty of opportunities to make a fool of yourself. The more money you have, the bigger fool of yourself you can make.
A poor man builds himself a small house. Architectural snobs tut and sniff. “The man knows nothing about classical proportions,” they say.
The rich man builds a mansion… and they roll on the ground, clutching their stomachs, laughing to burst a gut. “What a monstrosity,” they gasp to one another.
This weekend, we planted a fruit orchard, aided by two of our field hands – Franco and Fernando. Neither of them knew how to operate our backhoe, a large JCB machine. It was up to us… even though we hadn’t done it in 20 years. This was going to be embarrassing.
We climbed up into the cab and turned it on. Fortunately, it all looked familiar. Like an old habit, we turned around and pulled the lever to raise the digger in back… and then the bucket in front. There was some awkward clanking and jerking when we started out… but within a few minutes, we remembered how it worked.
|
Does Don Bill know what he’s doing?
It was all going so smoothly, so easily… we could hardly believe it when we heard the cracking sound of wood breaking overhead. The tall backhoe arm… sticking straight up behind us… had knocked a limb off one of our favorite trees.
We turned around to see if Franco and Fernando were watching. They had seen everything. But they kept straight faces.
Things We Don’t Know
As for not knowing how to keep a cow from bloating… that’s about the least of what we don’t know. Heck… Ask us almost anything… Go ahead. The odds are very good we won’t know the answer.
What happened to the Hottentots? No idea. How to butcher a cow? It would be a bloody mess. How to make a damned Zoom call on our computer – we must be the only American who can’t do it…
There are millions of things we don’t know. Until recently, how to keep a cow from bloating was at the bottom of a long, long list.
But Blake has hit a hot button. “Identity harm” – like “microaggressions” and “white privilege” – is as popular as pinot grigio in leftist intellectual circles and on college campuses.
And just to keep our readers from straying from the straight and narrow path of political correctness, here’s what it is all about.
People experience “identity harm” if you say anything to them… or don’t say anything to them… that might – or might not – make them feel uncomfortable about who they are, what they are, where they came from, or what they look like.
“Hey, Fatso…” is, therefore, not a recommended way to address a co-worker.
As you may have guessed, “identity harm” joins “microaggressions” and “intersectionality” in the lexicon of the racism industry. And as with the coronavirus, Americans have gotten a little carried away.
It may be time for another presidential “Fireside Chat” to calm them down. Stay tuned…
Making Fun
In the meantime, we’re letting our dear reader off the hook here because he probably didn’t realize what a grave offense he was committing.
Besides, one of our few virtues here at the Diary is that we don’t embarrass easily. Even our neighbor here makes fun of us. Not only do we not know much about cattle ranching… half the time, we don’t know what he’s talking about; we can’t understand his local “coya” dialect of Spanish.
But making fun of one another is what we humans do. Real cowboys make fun of the city slickers, calling them “greenhorns” and “drugstore cowboys.” But bring the cowboy to New York, and the locals snicker – “yokel,” “bumpkin,” “hayseed,” “cowpie”…
Sometimes, the teasing gets a little intense and hurtful. We had a cousin who was a little slow; his brothers called him “Lightning.” Another wore glasses; they called him “Four Eyes.”
Go overseas… Waiters in Paris, for example, amuse themselves by making fun of tourists, ridiculing their accents and grammatical mistakes. You’re almost better off not knowing the language at all, so you won’t notice how they are mocking you.
Upper-class Brits still look down on Americans as uncouth and uneducated colonials… Among the lower orders, in rhyming Cockney slang, for example, Americans are called “sceptic yanks,” rhyming with septic tanks, both of which they think are full of the same thing.
And in Ireland, Americans who’ve come back to the homeland are called “plastic paddies” by their Irish cousins.
Whenever you step outside of your “comfort zone,” someone is going to laugh at you. But it is only there – in the unsettling territory of the unfamiliar… new ideas or new places – where you can learn something new.
More to come…
Regards,
 |
Bill
Like what you’re reading? Send your thoughts to [email protected].