Black Monday

If you’re anything like me (you are), Monday the 29^th of September must’ve sent your knickers into a full 1080˚. I refer, of course, to the U.S. Congress roundly refusing to let Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson shoot gobs of hot, steaming money into the waiting mouths of Wall Street’s horniest. ‘Stop right there, doc’, you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘you’ve lost me in all of this technical winkery-jink’. Well, you know what? Shut up. If every Till, Dieter and Heinrich had interrupted Hitler during his star-studded 1933 Gala at Nuremberg, how would Leni Riefenstahl have ever been able to capture his mustachioed-charisma in her debut film, Der Sieg des Glaubens, which convinced the world that old Adolf was just a regular chap like you or I? Think of me as your personal Leni Riefenstahl: I’m here to show you the truth, as long as you understand that the role of truth is not going to be played by the truth per se, but by a scraggly-haired and cockney-accented homunculus named Chipperscock who sells sausage casings as condoms to the merchant marine.

So, what, you’re no doubt asking, is the deal with these stock markets, and how is it that they control, and have controlled, the fates of as diverse an array of peoples as the Dutch, the British, Japanese housewives, and most recently, coke-snuffling twenty-somethings from New Jersey who shit $500,000 no-questions-asked mortgages? There is no real short answer to that question, but a short answer to a question is magic, so I’m going to go ahead with that. The workings of stock markets rely on the famous “Black Box Principle”; that is, if you put something into a box, close the lid, and then plant a truck bomb inside the headquarters of the Securities and Exchange Commission, you will find 1500% more of the thing in the box when you return to it. The phrase ‘stock market’ itself is derived from the Anglo-Saxon stoc, meaning a tree trunk, and the Latin mercatum, meaning a place at which commerce occurs. In ancient times a stock market was a place where trees were bought and sold, and if a thick-chested woodsman was lured away by the bouncing breasts and loose morals of a buxom country lass halfway through cutting down an oak, the market was said to ‘fall.’ Similarly, if markets ‘fall’ today, scientists agree that the most likely culprit is a pattern of behaviour known as ‘chase the secretary with the fat ass,’ an obvious descendant of the lusty wanderings of the ancestral lumberjack.

Now, you’re probably wondering just what kind of a boner it took to cause this year’s catastrophic shake-up, and who it was, exactly, that popped that mother-lover of a Stiff Steven. The answer isn’t really magic, but let’s all agree to keep this simple and say that it is. The story goes that an evil lich with a sallow face and drooping claws named Greenspan placed a chest of cursed Spanish doubloons in the middle of the NYSE’s trading floor. Drawn by their natural affinity for gains both free and ill-gotten, the traders flocked in helpless wonder around the unexpected bounty. When they all had stuck their hands in, however, they gasped in fear and outrage as their boners exploded forth from their trousers like so many tricky moles braving a whacking. In the grip of the foul wizard’s spell, they could little more than stick their jammin’ jimmies into ever more profitable and less secure real estate gambles, for it was only in the cooling nether regions of mortgage instruments that they found some relief, if only temporary, from the unquenchable fire which gripped their forsaken loins. Additionally, they became skeletons at night, and lived on a skeleton pirate ship that submerged and then appeared at inopportune times to menace Captain Jack Sparrow and his motley crew of attractive but utterly loathsome screen whores (incidentally, look out for the audiobook version with Patrick Stewart as the gang accursed brokers and Morgan Freeman as their boners). As one can well imagine, such a frenzied and skeletal pisser-poking could only end in tears.

My point is that it’s time to get out, to run for your lives; batten down the hatches; pray to whatever god you prefer not to listen to you. If you have stocks, get bonds; if you have hedge fund shares, get money market shares; if you’re an immigrant, get another mattress to put over your money. It’s a bumpy road to hell, even in a hand-basket. But I’d like to end this piece on a cheerier note, with a little something to get us through the tough times ahead. As Sylvester Stallone once said, musing on the ineluctable hardships of the human condition: “Rambo isn’t violent. I see Rambo as a philanthropist”. Such extreme, shit-headed resistance to the terrifyingly obvious facts of real, actual, verifiable reality should be an inspiration to us all: nothing is too difficult that we can’t blow up all of Southeast Asia to spite it. Amen.

                                                                                                                                                                                                ~ Lion Summerbell