Watching CNBC
yesterday morning -- seeing the faces and hearing the voices of the
fully employed, highly compensated presenters and guests, including always-wrong economist Mark Zandi, when the US Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the May unemployment numbers -- was sadly revelatory.
When the 69,000 jobs figure (surely to be revised downward in the usual manner thirty days from now, just as the previously announced April and March 2012 figures were corrected yesterday to hell-level accuracy)
and 8.2 % (measured kindly) "upticked" unemployment levels were recited, it seemed like a bomb had exploded CNBC's and the entire news reporting establishment's universe.
Every single media
outlet we surveyed during our morning and afternoon drive north – even zombie, “Yes,
Master,” MSNBC – used the same description over and over: “Disaster.”
Corrupt Labor
Secretary Hilda Solis and feckless Council of Economic Advisers head, Prof. Alan Krueger, alone from
the administration, were made to speak about the horrible milestone to interviewers.
Rehearsing identical talking points, theirs was sad testimony and both
of them looked and sounded as though they were about to cry. Their boss, he who sits in the Big Chair and who (formerly) relentlessly promised to "pivot back to jobs" remained
totally, gutlessly, absent from the scene.
Two days ago,
attending what you might call a hiring hall (the experience reminded me of an attorney version of the longshoremen line-ups in On The
Waterfront), signing up for electronic document review assignments
(for non-attorney readers, litigation
document review is considered to be about the most déclassé thing one might ever find oneself
doing professionally, although I personally have no problem with it; a job's a job, I like to work, and the people seemed very nice), I had an acute pre-vision of yesterday’s debacle.
Then
again, the last three-and-one-half years of executive branch misanthropy,
megalomania, ineptitude, hot air and graft had already provided sufficient evidence of the pre-crime that robbed so much from so many.
I have been practically teetotal recently and happily so, but yesterday's shocking unemployment
numbers made me think a cocktail would be restorative, so I turned
to reference guides and researched appropriate spirit-lifting libations to celebrate
June in any event. These dreadful,
unnecessary, insult-to-us-all, circumstances will pass and we will
find ourselves again on the way to the Delectable Mountains, the Land of Beulah and beyond. Perhaps we already are.
Harry Craddock’s wonderful 1930 drinks bible, The Savoy Cocktail Book, suggests a Corpse
Reviver 2, as the drink of the moment and so do I:
Corpse
Reviver 2
Ingredients
1/4 cup dry gin
1/4 cup Cointreau or other
orange liqueur
1/4 cup Lillet Blanc
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 dashes of absinthe or
pastis
Ice cubes
Preparation
Combine first 5
ingredients in cocktail shaker; fill shaker with
ice and shake vigorously 30 seconds. Strain into 2
chilled cocktail glasses.
To be
perfectly honest with you, something I always try to do, last night my beverage
of choice was a Cusqueña beer from Peru, which I
tried at the very good local Peruvian restaurant Taita in Suffern, New York, before seeing the terrible (except for Charlize Theron and Sam
Spruell) Snow White
and The Huntsman.
I’d never had
Cusqueña before and I’m pleased to report that it was excellent.
As much as possible, I try to avoid making
political comments here. To any reader
who believes that I’ve somehow missed the point (or, possibly, merely overstated the problem), I would simply submit that I haven’t.
