Published: September 24, 2008 01:41 pm            

Spread around blame for economic malaise

WAURIKA — Getting started on fall cleaning, the first thing I found was a stack of sticky notes that serve as my memory. They were beneath a box of old magazines that were supposed to have been tossed during house cleaning last fall:

As we slog our way through a gas crisis, a housing scandal and now a collapse of the lending and investment industries, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Greedy big oil executives, foreign oil producers, speculators, auto manufacturers, politicians and lobbyists, and environmentalists catch most of our wrath, when we fill up with $3.50 a gallon gas.

A lack of ethics is prominently fingered in the housing scandal, while a lack of federal oversight, excessive deregulation and a culture of greed within banking and lending institutions are the main culprits in the unfolding Wall Street crisis.

Certainly all of these factors have been at play — big time — in creating this economic malaise. But consumers can’t act like they’re completely innocent victims.

Back in the ’70s, we seemed to learn nothing from gas lines and warnings to conserve. As soon as OPEC took its foot off our necks, conservation went out the window. We went back to zipping along at 70 to 80 MPH, and buying SUVs and other “prestige” vehicles that sucked up gas like it was water.

Sure, a broker who tantalized you with bedrock financing on a $250,000 home was behaving unethically. But if you were making $10 an hour and still thought you could afford to finance that $250,000 house ... well, as Bill Engvall would say, “Here’s your sign!”

Likewise, if you were already in debt up to your ears (U.S. households have debts totaling $14 trillion) and still snagged another low-interest loan being dangled by a banker or investment mook, then you play a role in the addiction to borrowing that’s bringing Wall Street to its knees.

Consumers may want to hold “The Captains of Industry” solely responsible for crashing into an economic iceberg, but we’re all riding this Titanic together.

• “Stress is when you wake up screaming and you realize you haven’t fallen asleep yet.” So says Woody Allen.

• Why do folks who do the weather on TV and radio continually inject the word “those” so often? You know, the weather guy or guyette giving a forecast says, “Our temperatures will be in those 40s on Thursday, but we’ll be back into those 60s by Friday.”

Those 40s? Those 60s? Are there some other 40s and 60s we don’t know about?

• Contrary to what we might have thought, cable TV news teaches us daily that there’s little difference between a mountain and a molehill.

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the guys who invented Google, say they did so because they wanted a computer as smart as the one on Star Trek.

• Tip from a veteran husband to guys who are new to the marriage game: When your wife says, “I’m not upset,” she really means, “Of course I’m upset, you moron!”

• If men truly ruled the world, garbage would take itself out.

• Here’s the epitome of laziness: I was leaving the parking lot of a well-known retail store and noticed some doofus had left a shopping cart sitting in the middle of a parking space that was ONE SPACE AWAY from a shopping cart corral.

• Whose cruel idea was it to put an “s” in the word “lisp”?

• “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Aldous Huxley said it.

• According to Gourmet magazine, in the USofA these days, there are more Chinese restaurants than Burger King, Wendy’s and McDonald’s locations combined.

• What’s the speed of dark?

• A bachelor knows nothing is forever. You wash the dishes, and two weeks later you have to wash ’em again.

• It’s hard to make a comeback if you’ve never been anywhere.

• The late George Carlin asked: “What was the best thing before sliced bread?”

        

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