The Tempest

Wall Street - Main Street: how many times can you use a synecdoche before you become a cynic dochebag?  Or are these mawkish clichés rather more like  metonyms, if the street is used to stand for something much larger than the establishments found there or the men and women working in the neighborhood?  They sell hot dogs on Wall Street too.

When we use those straw men, for that's what they really are, are we distracting from something much bigger, a trend, a phenomenon like the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution or the deregulation of past years that isn't being noticed as we search for the packaged scapegoats provided by political campaigns?  And we need those scapegoats you know, to focus the public mind the way you ask a kid to look at the birdie and not at the unattractive photographer.

Some of this is so childish as to make us think more of Sesame Street than any other avenue with terrycloth puppets in business suits or is it more a Punch and Judy show: Bernie Sanders hammering on a top hat wearing, hand wringing stereotype?   Is it all there to distract us from the nearly a quarter trillion dollars in fines already paid by "Wall Street" and to prompt us to  clamor for additional punishment which although emotionally satisfying, doesn't pay the bills?

I think we're seeing a bit of a passion play and I have to recall the menacing and grimacing faces common to medieval paintings and street theater, of Jesus being tormented by an angry crowd.  Does "breaking up" large institutions produce salubrious results ?  Are there examples? I'm not hearing any discussion at all.  Is "greed" an apt description for the profit motive or is it a word chosen for emotional complexity?  It conjures up all sorts of historical unpleasantness and far more than the word "ambition" does.

It's cheap politics, but parsimonious America spends little intellectual effort on analyzing major historical movements like the evolution of  economies.  Are we drifting or are we being steered?   Is the captain planning to jump ship as we head toward the rocks, or are we steaming away from the storm?  Is the production of  a large "surplus population" as inevitable as it was in previous revolutionary centuries and now that we don't have colonies to ship them to, will we have a revolution here instead an adjustment?

A tempest in a teapot or a campaign in a piss pot:  it remains to be seen. I'm too old to have expected a contest between reason and  deception, but still it involves holding one's nose when choosing a candidate and it's depressing to be so sure that America the Beautiful would not respond approvingly to anything else.  O brave new world, That has such people in't!