Not What If – What Next (Part I: Morphine)

By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  November 8th at 12:00 PM  | 

It was 2008, and Bill Whittle was an intelligent man deeply confounded. He wondered how in the heck people could consider voting for Junior Senator, Barack Obama as America’s next president. He finally hit on a valid analogy. He saw people in sudden, acute economic desperation and compared them to a patient in acute kidney distress. The white-hot pain gets to be intense; it shuts down your ratiocination. You fall deeply in love with the dude who promises you the shot of pain-killer which was exactly what Candidate Obama then promised. But why continue in 2012?

Well, let’s say the pain gets to be chronic. You’re still hurting forty days later, the doctor can’t fix it and the bills are stacked to your chin so you have to go to work hurting. You’d better take a little something and maybe put a stick between your teeth and suck it up. President Obama was overjoyed to hand out the little blue happy pills. Food Stamp enrollment shot up. Welfare benefits were extended, requirements for welfare reform got waived and disability applications grew faster than job creation. Such is the pharmacological brilliance of the Obama Economy. I’m not seeing any cures out there, but he’s sure got a new pill for whatever puts a gimp in your walk and makes it clear you can only get that little, magical pill from him.

It turned into a societal analog to what Operations Research Analysts describe as an absorbing state. Without getting too technical and boring you to sleep with a rap about Markov Chains, an absorbing state is a place where some object or system lands and then can’t get out. It’s like O’Hare Airport on an evening with mixed precipitation. You can plan whatever you like, but as Bob Dylan once sang “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.” You get there and you’d better love Big Brother. He owns you and your vote lock, stock and barrel.

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