So far, my favorite part of the banking crisis has been watching politicians pitting the poor against the rich.
It’s always fun to see the rich painted as immoral inheritors of ease, and the poor as greasy, powerless wage-slaves who secretly long for socialism if it would mean getting out of working a third shift at Wal-Mart, where they selflessly toil just to make sure that their families never want for cigarettes, McDonald’s, or pickup trucks.
But what about those of us who don’t live on Wall Street or Main Street, but rather on Canyon Creek Court? Why are the suburbs left out when it comes to the great electoral tradition of class warfare?
I think that I, as a responsible member of the suburban class, should hereby step up and prescribe the best medicine for all concerned: another Great Depression.
If we want to be as great in this century as we were in the last, then nothing will serve us better than getting wiped out financially.
Just think of some of the great things that could come of it.
For starters, Generation X needs a kick in the ass. This group, who’s soon to take the economy’s reins, is as soft and uninspired as the director’s edition DVD of “Reality Bites.” Standing in bread lines would do a lot for our character.
Plus, for our entire existence, our Baby Boomer parents have thought that they were special because they burned their bras at Woodstock. Well, now we can say, “Oh, yeah? Well, thanks to an inability to afford vaccinations, our kids were the first since 1955 to contract Polio!”
And this generation has no cool stories with which to annoy their future grandchildren. My older relatives can regale me with the splendor of both the Great Depression and the Holocaust. Talk about an embarrassment of riches! But what can we annoy our grandkids with? Right now all we’ve got is, “When I was your age, there was no Bluetooth, and we actually had to hold phones to our heads.”
A Depression would also help our arts and entertainment. Not one modern comedian or actor has been able to do a movie about boiling and eating his shoe (a’la Charlie Chaplin). I’m ready for the Will Farrell sports spoof where he and his rag-tag bunch of losers are too malnourished to stage a come-from-behind win.
Perhaps the coolest thing would be the inevitable creation of the Great Depression video game. Forget Sim City, think about how much fun people would have pretending to be Harvard Ph.Ds forced to migrate to the Gulf Coast and take jobs filling sandbags.
So fear not financial disaster. All that can happen is that we become better people—and at the very least, all the inevitable New Deal-type spending would mean that we’ll finally get all those damn potholes filled.
eremy Greenberg is a writer, comedian and an Eastside resident. He is the author of Relative Discomfort: The Family Survival Guide (Andrews McMeel). Learn more at www.relativediscomfort.com.
