Will the Air Man Deliver Door to Door?

[from 2/10/10]

I can't help but think that I'm not explaining homelessness well. I've been trying to do so for over 14 years now, and I just don't seem to be getting the main points across. Truly, I haven't been very good at explaining the major, major, drawbacks of pre-emptive warfare either, but we don't have readers seeing pre-emptive warfare on their own streets everyday, so it's very hard to make that real. But homelessness? I mean, there it is, here's why, here's why it's bad, here's what needs to be done, and that's what gets done, right? Problem seen is a problem solved? Right?

OK, not right. So I'm going to try again by using what we may call a fictitious parallel. I will present a scenario that might happen in the future that would be similar to homelessness, and hopefully everyone will see that the imagined situation would be wrong, and how to make it right again, and see that something like that might work for the problem at hand.

Forget global warming. Let's pretend that the US economy collapses first because the Chinese want their investment back. Suppose this results in the Chinafication of America. Don't worry, it doesn't mean we'll all be speaking Chinese. Not right away. It just means that we'll be running our businesses like they do, or we won't have any. So our cities will end up like Beijing, and you won't be able to breathe the air anymore.

Suppose that happens all over the world. As LA goes, so goes Paris, London, Johannesburg, and Papeete. I know it's a stretch. Buy the premise.

There is already, in this city, with no real shortage of tap water, a hoarding of water resources. There are almost no working water fountains left on Seattle streets. Homeless people who want water are expected to pay for it at coffee shops and fast food joints. No outside cups are allowed. Only the establishment's cups, which cost.

If there were a real clean air shortage, there would be clean air hoarding. Clean air can be made at slight cost, but it would be sold at a markup. "We have to make a profit or we can't stay in business," the producers would say. Only as much clean air would be produced as could be sold at "optimal" profit margins. If it's free no one makes a profit. If even Bill Gates can't afford it, then, likewise, no one makes money. In between those extremes, the total net profit rises from zero and falls back to zero. The price is set at the peak.

Everybody who can't afford the optimal price doesn't get clean air. Everybody whose income allows them to afford the optimal price, pays through the nose for clean air, but they at least get to breathe while doing so. The clean-air-less are the ones who can't afford it.

The air gets worse. The clean-air-less become a social problem. They start costing society money! They show up at emergency rooms with expensive respiratory illnesses.

While in the hospital they get air as part of their treatment, but as soon as they're well enough they get put out into the bad air as before.

As the clean-air-less become desperate, some panhandle, in the hopes of either making enough change to buy some air for an hour or so, or at least a bottle of wine, so they can forget about the problem. Others beg for a hit of clean air directly, just for a half minute of relief. Others just walk around coughing. The general public gets tired of this behavior. Why do they cough so much? How rude. Why don't these people earn more money so they can pay for their own air?

Well, if you were paying attention above, you'd know all that would do is move the optimal peak price up. So every effort to get people to solve their own breathing problems, by getting their own lives together, would fail.

The Democrats’ Gift Horse

The games congressmen play. These days it’s High Horse (AKA High Horse, High Horse, Now Who’s On Their High Horse?)

I have long enjoyed games myself. Growing up as an only child in a sick, sick, sick, (pretend I wrote it 13 times), family, often living in isolation, I became adept at what you could call the Meta-Game Game, also known as Now What Might I Want to Do? The idea of this game is to invent a game, then another game, then another game, until a death in the family occurs, hopefully not your own. At no time is it necessary to play the games invented. In fact, if you play one of them, you automatically lose at the meta level, and have to start all over.

Some of the best games I came up with had no rules or instructions. For example, Figure Out How To Walk On Air pretty much says it all in the name. The game consists in spending hour after hour trying to figure out how to walk on air. One day I made the mistake of actually playing a spinoff game called Figure Out How To Bounce A Ball Off Air, and broke a window.

Having become so good at entertaining myself in isolation, I tend to take that skill for granted. So I’m always a little surprised when I discover people who are incapable of ever playing quietly by themselves. People like ex-Congressman Mark Foley, for instance. This is a guy who will never be satisfied with an imaginary friend.

Foley was playing a fantastic game of High Horse. High Horse isn’t as sophisticated a game as the Meta-Game Game, but that doesn’t mean that great play isn’t possible. Foley’s move of chairing the congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, in between exploiting underaged former pages for minor real-time titillations and jollies on the internet, was extraordinary, and will surely go down in High Horse history. For anything even close you have to go back to Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown in 1992.

Of course we’ve all been watching the entire Republican Party consistently win at High Horse for the past quarter century, ever since Reagan got even for that time Nixon fell off his. Their capture and ownership of the phrase “Family Values” continues to impress all of us, all the more so as their economic policies crush poor families.

Now the party that tried to force Clinton out of office for having extra-marital sex in the Oval Office and trying to keep it a secret is faced with charges of having a pedophile in their midst and trying to keep it a secret.

Now, I don’t know if you can necessarily say that Mark Foley is a pedophile. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis married a thirteen-year-old girl. That was certainly something, wasn’t it? Did anyone call him a pedophile? Well, OK. But still, sixteen is practically ‘round the bend, when it comes to boys.

Anyway, for Hastert and Company to be aware that Foley was sending inappropriate emails to former pages and not call for an investigation, all the while trumpeting Family Values, that should earn them big points, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for staying on their game.

But the Republicans aren’t the only ones playing. We also have Democrats jumping onto their own Horses, pretending that if you vote Democrat next month it will be a vote for decency.

The Democrats are missing an opportunity to raise the game of High Horse to a whole new higher level. What they need to do is come right out and tell the truth, that the behavior of the Republican leadership was typical of all political leaderships in the face of such scandal, and that they, the Democrats, would have probably reacted the same way, because it isn’t the Republicans that are broke, it’s the whole system.

Then they could say, “Ha, ha, we told the truth and you didn’t.” And they’d be the new winners.