CORPSE REVIVER (NO. 2)

   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.