Meet the Hollows

Sometimes I think T.S. Eliot knew what he was talking about.  Sometimes I wonder.  All of us know the concluding lines of "The Hollow Men", but it is probably a good time to read the whole poem.

The opening stanza is less frequently quoted but possibly even more appropriate to our times:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Those like my parents who watched Roosevelt deepen the Depression but be re-elected in 1940 would know how we feel today.  It seems hopeless.  Mark Steyn suggests that we have seen the end of the American Era.

I disagree with Steyn on one point.  I don't think Washington is willing to increase taxes enough to cover or even seriously mitigate the deficit.  I think they are so utterly insane that they believe they can legislate reality, just as the voters believe they can change reality with a majority vote.  We are a nation of fools governed by the most foolish and corrupt among us. 

The market is booming today.  The dollar is up against the euro, though it's still over 1.31.  Crude is also running at over $93 a barrel.  Copper is back up about 7 or 8 percent the last couple of weeks.  Nothing has changed except the calendar.  It makes no sense.

My guess is that we will see double-digit unemployment officially before the end of 2013, or an admission by the Fed that inflation is becoming a problem.  Both these things are already true but are being swept under the rug.  We have an exacerbating factor in that minimum wage hikes kicked in across the country yesterday.  Since union scale is often tied to the minimum wage directly or indirectly through prevailing wage calculations, we might start to see wage inflation. 

I did not think we would get this far, but "not a bang but a whimper" -- that seems to be the way it is going. 

Take this opportunity to rotate and replenish, and enhance, if possible, your food stocks.  New firearms and ammunition are unlikely purchases at this point for a lot of us just because so little is available.  As someone said elsewhere, this looks like a people preparing for war. 

And, by the way, I don't plan on burying any of my guns.