'Twas Not In Vain.

With time to kill (7 hours to be precise) at Twister by Monsoon, a backdated copy of Vanity Fair whetted my appetite for worthy eyeball fodder in its erudite best.

By no means is Vanity Fair an overpriced fashion wannabe mogul as I'd come to believe assume. ( Hear ye, the judgemental Singaporean within!) It was bursting with candied syllables and tingled Mich's literary (not literally) tastebuds.

The Editor had me stifling giggles with his brand of sardonic wit......Meanwhile, Barack Obama, once the cool, unflappable Bugs Bunny of the tale, is re-drawn by the Republicans and the media as Wile E. Coyote—rattled, frustrated, and off his game. His running mate, Joe Biden, as popular, informed, and experienced as he is, is consigned to playing the Looney Tunes role that could have been written for him: Foghorn Leghorn. “Ah say, son … !”

......She (Sarah Palin) would, after all, be a skin cell away from the presidency. Her running mate is a 72-year-old hothead with high blood pressure, and one who has also suffered four instances of the most serious form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma. Not to get overly morbid here, but it bears mentioning that McCain’s father died at 70, and his grandfather at 61—both of heart attacks.Rather happily, I plundered through James Walcott's stash of finesse.
.....I am a pessimist by temperament and trade, prey to intermittent clouds. Left to its own devices, my mind magnifies everything it glues on to, no matter how far off or unlikely.

....In retrospect, my earth-moon crash scenario was probably an offshoot of the atomic anxiety hanging over all our heads back then, “then” being the grainy days of the Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Khrushchev’s “We will bury you,” Fail-Safe, On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and the grim parables of The Twilight Zone, where host Rod Serling, biting off each phrase along the dotted line, would perform a wry eulogy to mankind’s folly in messing with creation.

....Let’s be honest—this new millennium, so far it’s been a huge disappointment. It was preceded by a false alarm (the Y2K rollover), was cursed by hanging chads (the Florida recount), and has been held hostage ever since by the ministry of fear, with Americans meekly removing their shoes for the privilege of flying in airplanes charging fees for pillows and blankets.

It’s been seven years since 9/11, no follow-up attack has stabbed our shores, and yet the front pages of so many papers resemble the end is near signs toted by bearded prophets that were once a staple of New Yorker cartoons. The decade has traveled from bin Laden’s cave to the Dark Knight’s Batcave in a jagged thrust of clenched force and unleashed chaos.

.....Journalism used to perform a higher civic function than it does today, so spanked up is it with gaffes, gotchas, spin-doctoring, celebrity pimping, crisis-mongering, minnow-brained punditry, drama criticism practiced from under the troll bridge (usually at the expense of Democrats—Al Gore’s sighings during the debate with George Bush, Hillary Clinton’s “cackle”), and instant amnesia. To watch archive footage of TV reporters from the black-and-white era with their measured intonations and ashen visages—before everybody burst into Michael Kors orange—is to crack open the crypt on a more responsible, somber, and, yes, duller era, when journalists still conducted themselves as a priestly caste serving the needs of an informed citizenry, as opposed to catering to cud-chewing dolts.Nobel-laureate economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz, primed beyond statistical discourse......President Bush inherited a $128 billion budget surplus from Bill Clinton; this year the federal government announced the second-largest budget deficit ever reported. During the eight years of the Bush administration, the national debt has increased by more than 65 percent, to nearly $10 trillion (to which the debts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should now be added, according to the Congressional Budget Office).

.....Market economies work only when there is a system of accountability, but C.E.O.’s, investors, and creditors are walking away with billions, while American taxpayers are being asked to pick up the tab. (Freddie Mac’s chairman, Richard Syron, earned $14.5 million in 2007. Fannie Mae’s C.E.O., Daniel Mudd, earned $14.2 million that same year.) We’re looking at a new form of public-private partnership, one in which the public shoulders all the risk, and the private sector gets all the profit. While the Bush administration preaches responsibility, the words are addressed only to the less well-off. The administration talks about the impact of “moral hazard” on the poor “speculator” who borrowed money and bought a house beyond his ability to pay. But moral hazard somehow isn’t an issue when it comes to the high-stakes speculators in corporate boardrooms.

.....Never mind that the few times “free banking” has been tried—most recently in Pinochet’s Chile, under the influence of the doctrinaire free-market theorist Milton Friedman—the experiment has ended in disaster. Chile is still paying back the debts from its misadventure. With massive problems in 1987 (remember Black Friday, when stock markets plunged almost 25 percent), 1989 (the savings-and-loan debacle), 1997 (the East Asia financial crisis), 1998 (the bailout of Long Term Capital Management), and 2001–02 (the collapses of Enron and WorldCom), one might think there would be more skepticism about the wisdom of leaving markets to themselves.

.....We can have a financial system that is more stable—and even more dynamic—with stronger regulation. Self-regulation is an oxymoron. Financial markets produced loans and other products that were so complex and insidious that even their creators did not fully understand them; these products were so irresponsible that analysts called them “toxic.” Yet financial markets failed to create products that would enable ordinary households to face the risks they confront and stay in their homes. We need a financial-products safety commission and a financial-systems stability commission. And they can’t be run by Wall Street.Alas, there exists a limit of excitation online - Cherie Blair, caricatures by the New York Review of Books illustrator David Levine, Henry Nicholas of the Broadcom infamy and the Columbian political hostage crisis with FARC guerillas - to command one's attention. You'll have to read the rest in print.

Oh, yes.

Did I mention that I was at the h-a-i-r salon for rebonding (read : a $300 pounding on the wallet)?

Who'd have expected the lettered enchantment which charmed me most?

Now, excuse me while I reach for the subscription form of Vanity Fair. =)