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.   

  

Bristol Round-Trip (Human Capital)

Driving to Bristol, PA this morning, hopefully for a meeting, I heard a “guest host” on CNBC  adding His two cents to the Falling (then Crashed) soufflé of opinions regarding the US and world economies’ future direction.

As you might expect, the conversation/gaggle was basically Worthless.  


It was  like watching a Chorus of compasses loosed and swinging crazily in a magnetic storm.

However, this fellow did say One interesting thing.

When I graduated college and initially visited corporations’ hiring halls in New York City looking for work, the sign on the door always Read: “Personnel.”

I thought that was a Perfectly good description of the job the people behind the desks there performed.  I was an unaffiliated “person” who wanted to become one of their affiliated “personnel.” 

Quasi-Match.   I was in the Right place.

Then, some years later, “Personnel” was supplanted and replaced by “Human Resources.” 

Horrible, despicable switch That, conveying the Unmistakeable view that those beings formerly considered "persons" had been transformed into Food for Night Of The Living Dead corporate feeders.

Worse followed, i.e., the recent shift to “Human Capital” – people now  described as simple Corporate Currency.

 

Then finally this morning, the aforesaid guest host made a clear, articulated distinction between a company's “Intellectual Capital” staff vs. the other Human Detritus wandering the premises. 

 

What hath God wrought?

On the drive home, I listened for a while to the moronic Alex Wagner on her NOW show on MSNBC.

Ms. Wagner was discussing the crazy, excessive remarks of Rep. Maxine 

Waters yesterday, who said about her congressional colleagues, Rep. John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor:

“I saw pictures of Boehner and Cantor on our screens. Don't ever let me see again, in life, those Republicans in our hall, on our screens, talking about anything. These are demons.”

Dumb awful Alex remarked that while she “disagreed” with the “semiotics” of Rep. Waters’ statement and could not endorse the “descriptors” used, she was basically ok with the conclusion.

Dopey is as dopey speaks.  I extend my heartfelt apology as an American to Roland Barthes, who really does deserve better.   

It had already gotten bad enough.  Now This.

NOTE:   I had never been to Bristol, Pennsylvania before this morning.  I didn’t see much of it, except for the impressive Canal Works building, a repurposed 19^th century former mill where my client’s production studio and offices were located.  The building pictured on the postcard showing the Lehigh Canal is located at the other end of town.  The postcard paints a much more bucolic picture than the one currently on view in Bristol.  I love the way the boat on the river seems to float in mid-air, far above the pedestrian-strollers on the right-hand bank.  Naturalism dictates that it shouldn’t, obviously, but I guess the artist had other things in mind.  If you'd ever like to visit, take the easternmost off-ramp on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a road that it's always a distinct pleasure to EXIT.