A Few Alternatives to the Stimulus Plan

DORIS ELFANT, 80 year-old Limousine Liberal

When I was a young girl, it was considered a mark of distinction if a young lady was able to own a pony-- a small horse which she could call her very own. That just isn't the case any more. The years have left many changes here in Bryant Park. The utter worst thing is the decline in equestrian activities. I hope I'm not rude in saying this --- and believe me, I think negroes are thoroughly wonderful --- but I wonder how much of what used to be a young girl's pony budget is now swallowed up with landscaping, housekeeping, cooking, and laundry expenses. These were services that used to be performed by well-mannered negroes at significant discounts from today's prices. I'm not suggesting that our negro president unwind the civil rights movement or move Uncle Tom back to his cabin. That would be outrageous. But he has suggested community service. Why not set up finishing schools for domestic servants? That would probably allow young ladies of polite company to own ponies. I think that would be just darling. As we used to sing at Meadowbrook, "Pony days are happy days."


MEADOW GILLIN, 23 year-old pothead

Today, there is a new energy and a new freedom. All the astrologers are talking about it. These are the days that Natalie Merchant was singing about in that song "These Are the Days." Barack Obama-- you can see it in his eyes. They are like Bambi's eyes, only wiser and more powerful. They make me want to take my clothes off. I'm not ashamed to admit it --- I am spending a lot more time naked since the election.

The economy is not very stimulating. Hence, it is something you must stimulate. Sex, on the other hand, is incredibly stimulating. That is one reason that we do not need a sex stimulus package. Thought of another way, the economy is like business, and love is like sex. The economy is something you deal with, but hope is something you are. And something that Obama is. Peaceful, you know.

That's my stimulus plan: sitting on your futon, wrapped in an afghan, just watching the rain hit the windows. I think if everyone just took a deep breath, enjoyed life, and stopped buying so many things that they don't need, the economy would be fine. Banks are cool, but what about keeping your money in tangible things like food and drugs and clothes and stuff. Things are simpler that way. That's what I do.


LEROY DOBBS, 70 year-old Barber, 130th and Amsterdam
The future of science is tech. Everybody know that. My stimulus plan is simple--- go tech. And if you're gonna go tech, might as well go for the highest tech there is. And that would have to be robots. People need to start building robots. And people need to start learning how to build robots. The bigger, the better. We need to build robots so big that white people don't even know what to do with 'em. They tell me on TV that Chinese people got robots who can eat our babies. Chinese people are crazy. With all that money they got these days for stadiums, high salaries, and bank bailouts, don't tell me Barack Obama doesn't have money to send down here. Get his brothers some robot jobs.


HANK WILSON, 45 year-old ex-convict and cowboy, West Texas

Way I figure it, these Mammon-worshiping barbarian bankers --- they've got us by the balls. They got nothing to do with God. Nothing to do with America neither. Who do you think is behind the drug trade? Why do you think the government has been trying to kill black people for well-nigh fifty years? Because black people is spiritual. And because drugs is the worst devil's poison ever to touch the human heart. I tell no lies, brother. I ain't black, but sometimes I wishes I was. My great-grandfather was a big Klansman rancher dude. A real screwed up dude. Back in the 80s, I stole a lot of cars and did a little drug smuggling. That's when they sent me upstate for 10 years. That's when I found out about the banking industry conspiring to hurt poor folk. My economic stimulus plan is right here in the back of my pickup--- a Remington 870, three cases of Budweiser, and the Holy Bible. The Remington is for the Chinese army, if it ever dares set foot in this part of Texas. The Bible is for the spiritual forces of the Antichrist, wherever he's living these days. And the Budweiser is for the long lonely nights out here on the prairie, when that sweet wind is blowing through the screen window of your trailer and it's just you and the Lord Jesus, praying to keep the devil at bay.

The Generation That Looks for a Sign

--A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.
Matthew 16:14


like certain friends
who tell you what you want to hear
to get you off the phone,

like the speeches of politicians of all ages,

or the easy agreement of the body
with its pleasure,

a wicked and adulterous generation
looks for a happy sign.

My favorite is "Chili's" followed
by "Starbucks" followed by
"Free Lunch" followed by "Open."


And so the catalog of futility
is as endless as the oil
of stupidity
that greases the machines of industry
with our consent
It reads:

when I can think of nothing besides

how I can dream of nothing else

there is no finer way to make a memory

Have we forgotten?
Or is there something wrong
with all our pictures?
Who can fix our minds
when there is no one who
can fix our televisions?

And how short-lived
are the causes of our hearts!
which call us to a heroism
for which nothing in the pages
of television has prepared us.


Come let us celebrate the victory
that hasn't happened yet. We shall drink
strong bright wine to the memory
of tomorrow. Call a fast, assemble
the people, that we may drown our sins
with cakes and alcohol and have spiritual
visions gazing down into the mystery
of our steaks. In which room in all
the chambers of stupidity shall we
take our permanent vacation?
The one with the hot tub of course
and the blonde at the sales conference
from the rival company. The one you met
at the hotel bar three Christmases ago,
the one who reminds you of your wife.


The Ten Commandments which lie
on the floor beside
the hotel bed

will never accuse you before angels
and the twelve tribes

though the headache and lingering anger
will remain long after the flight home
but cease just before

the last panicked flash of remorse
in which we'll learn

the final crashing sum
of the equation
we have all made
between ease and blessing.

Metaphors

Ambition is a dry river-bed in South Texas filled
with green broken bottles of beer and the bootprints
of cocaine smugglers and some household appliances
which are rusting peacefully, season after season,
beneath the warm knowing sunlight. Fame is the deck
your Uncle Jason built by himself in the late 80s
at a house now owned by his ex-wife. Pride is that
he could not comprehend the possibility
that the poured concrete in which the wooden posts rest
would ever sink and crack into the wet earth the way they do now.
Wisdom is your Aunt Tina, his ex-wife,
as she sits on that deck in the late spring
drinking wine spritzer and smoking cigarettes. Folly
is her pink tank top which says "Princess"
but Fortune is the green eye-liner that she wears
all the time. It makes her beautiful.
Triumph is the way her smile causes you to smile
and seems to remind you of the addictions she has beaten back,
one prayer and one near-relapse at a time,
for years and years. Mystery is your Uncle Jason
sipping a cold beer at his apartment complex pool,
his naked beastly stomach frightening all who see it.
Festivity is the 70s rock music that plays all around him
from his boom box like a chorus of angels. Fear
is the generation of human beings who will never
know what a boom box is, who stare at Jason's
Steelers bathing suit and do not want to know him.
Humility is the dirt on the 1972 Buick which your grandmother
still drove to church on Sunday and to the grocery store
right up until the last year of her life.
Sadness is that Buick, which has sat for the last three years,
season after season, growing older and less relevant each day
in the driveway of the old house. But Joy is her memory
and the flowers which grow beside her grave
and your heart
knowing she is gone
far beyond the calm earth which never
will contain us.

Philadelphia Folk Tales IV: A Mayfair Morality Tale

Philadelphia Folk Tales: A Mayfair Morality Tale

Young Grant Brandt, not to be confused with his father Old Grant Brandt (known around certain drinking establishments around town as the Old Colonel), a medical student at Albert Einstein Medical Center, had, like all men of a certain age, a terrible secret.

In these modern times, the second half of the first decade of a new millennium, Young Grant Brandt was still completely, absolutely, undeniably, hopelessly addicted to cigarettes. As a future physician—specializing in cardio-pulmonary illness no less—he knew all the facts, had seen all the damage, witnessed all the suffering first hand. He schooled his patients on Big Tobacco’s dirty tricks, manipulative advertising, and their convincing but empty pseudo-science. Just the other day, he had consulted an elderly couple, the Franks from Elkins Park, on the chronic obstructive lung disorders. Using the parlance of the ward, he explained the difference between pink puffers (emphysema patients) and blue bloaters (chronic bronchitis), and patiently held Mrs. Frank’s hand as she asked about treatments. And yet within five minutes of showing the Franks a model of a diseased lung, a gross looking hunk of plastic with cutaway sections that illustrated the effects of COPD, cancer, and asthma, he was outside the hospital doors lighting a Marlboro Red with a lighter he had filched from one of the nurses.

While illicit smoke breaks certainly hint at double life, it is not his only secret. Grant’s girlfriend of seven years, Adrijana Branislava, a psychiatric resident who had come to Philadelphia from Serbia in the 1990s, to study and build inpatient recovery treatment programs at Belmont Behavioral Health Center thinks of her mate as a stalwart testament to the virtues of monogamy. Which is mostly true most of the time except, of course, when it isn’t. His trysts are mostly meaningless affairs, fleeting afternoons spent in cramped Mayfair apartments or in rented lover’s hotels, or on extremely rare occasions when he can get away or when he is feelingly dangerously daring, at a wooded retreat in the Poconos or a seaside spot at the Jersey shore.

Now, while infidelity in itself is detestable, this is not the secret that weighs most heavily on Grant’s mind late at night. Nor is it the fact that he cheated throughout medical school—it began by borrowing classmates’ notes, then their homework, then paying friends to complete lab assignments, and finally stealing copies of exams. Nor is it is increasingly frequent usage of recreational pharmaceuticals, including but not limited to valium, marijuana, codeine, oxycontin, psilocybin mushrooms, ecstasy, and cocaine. His gambling habit, which is done mostly online, but has also taken the form of sports books, card playing, and spontaneous late night drives to Atlantic City, is problematic but hardly ever bother his conscience. He has lied to friends and family, cheated on his taxes, called out of work by means of false pretenses, failed to pay speeding tickets, urinated in public, welshed on bets, broken promises, faked illness, under-tipped restaurant wait staffs, ignored calls for help, broken the hearts of young girls, insulted the honor of older women, robbed strangers of their dignity, borrowed money that he never paid back, started fight with close friends, and wasted the trust of loyal supporters. But all these things, as objectionable as they may be, are not the problem either.

No, the problem Grant has, the secret he can’t tell anyone, not the Old Colonel during one of his scotch and cigar nights, not the Franks in the safety and privacy of the office, not Adrijana or any of the nameless lovers in the confessional of a ecstatic embrace, is that he is afraid he can do anything he wants and get a way with it. He is deathly afraid there is no punishment.