The Long, Long Recession

In 1953, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, thriving in the midst of their success with the I Love Lucy radio and television shows, decided to make a movie called, “The Long, Long Trailer.”  Essentially, they reincarnated their popular characters into the movie, with slightly altered names – Tracy and Nicky.  The movie was directed by Vincente Minelli.

They played a newly-married couple who decide to buy a trailer instead of house.  Nicky wants to do the prudent thing and save their money to buy house.  The addle-headed, live-for-the-moment Tracy wants to buy a house trailer and tour the country on their honeymoon.  The result is a very funny movie about their adventures in the movie.

Tracy is a rock-hound.  She collects rocks from every place they visit, so that when they settle down someplace, she can create a stone path out of her souvenir rocks.  Nicky tells her to get rid of them.  They’re about to cross the Continental Divide and their car, big as it is, can’t pull a trailer full of rocks over the high pass.

However, she can’t bear to part with any of her precious stones.  She unloads whatever other items she can and hides the rocks within the trailer where Nicky can’t find them.  As the car continues upward – like our debt – all they see past the hood of the car is sky.  Meanwhile, the car is obviously struggling.

Finally, they get caught on a switchback turn.  After burning a lot of rubber to get the car going, Nicky grows suspicious.  He opens the trailer and an avalanche of rocks comes tumbling out.  Furious, he tosses the rocks over the cliff edge.  They continue on their way, not speaking to one another.

If Nicky thought the uphill ride was a dilly, the downhill ride would have been a disaster.  His brakes would soon have given out and they’d have gone careening down the other side of the mountain, out of control.  Just like our economy.

That is essentially the state of our national economy at the moment.  At the end of the movie, Tracy demands a divorce because of Nicky’s “insensitivity”.  Speaking to the buyer of the trailer, he asks the older man if he and his wife have ever had an argument.  The man replies, “Nope.”  To which Nicky says, [paraphrase] “Don’t worry; you will now.”

Arguments like these have ended more marriages than anyone can count.  Writ large, it’s about to end our country as we know it.  The Liberal Democrats are the hare-brained housewife, with no clue about how to economize.  Imbued with the nesting instinct, they only know how to spend.  The Conservative Republicans (and there are precious few of them) are the more sensible husband, not wanting divorce, but not wanting bankruptcy, either.

In our feminist culture, with a sympathetic, feminist court, the woman always wins.  After all, it’s another way of “redistributing the wealth.”  The Liberals are casting aside the more necessary items and loading up our trailer with rocks.  They think it’s getting us up the mountain, but it’s breaking our economic engine – capitalism – and eventually when we go down the other side – and we will – our brakes will fail.  We’ve already been warned about our national credit rating.

Most people think that Obama is just some sort of funky Lucy Ricardo, dim-witted and clueless.  However, he and his Progressive Proselytes know exactly what they’re doing.  They know how the Capitalist engine works and they know what kind of stress it takes to burn out the engine and the brakes.  They know they’ve overloaded our economy with unsustainable entitlement programs and have borrowed recklessly.  They’re like teenagers on a rollercoaster ride, knowing that they’re approaching the peak and the car will soon be racing down the other side, out of control.

We need to elect a responsible Congress and President who’ll toss these useless rocks out of the car before we descend down the other side.  This is not a movie where the Progressives and the Conservatives can kiss and make up.  If you believe in fairy tales, you can think that the two sides will come to some sort of consensus.

If you believe in reality, you know the people behind the wheel right now have rocks in their heads and we need to toss them over the side.