Let them eat cake
My NYT was a no show this morning, and friends called for breakfast at Cake Cafe, one of my favorite joints in the Marigny, so off we went. I had just been reading quotes in Harper’s of letters sent to Franklin Roosevelt after his radio announcements – some were banal like one who told him the pronunciation of status is with a long a not a short one, but a lot of them were insinuations that FDR was a communist “we all know your Communistic aims.–You old feather duster” or a socialist “…I have a suspicion that you know your Karl Marx pretty well…” much like Obama is referred to. And much like Obama, FDR inherited an economic mess.
Our friend’s mother was visiting from Florida and she said that this conservative trajectory had started back in the days of FDR as a radical reaction to the New Deal and that backlash continued through all of the conservative presidents we’ve had since such as Reagan and the Bushes to unravel the programs FDR created. The subject came up because my friend had asked why is it that there was such an opposition to ending these tax cuts to the wealthy that is on the table right now. What I wondered was when was there ever a liberal agenda? I don’t know of any time except for maybe the 60s when the hippy movement as a nonviolent reaction to the riots and segregation and other conservative agenda was in force.
Later when we were home, the nun rang, she had returned from Ireland and brought some Irish chocolates over (which were American corporation owned Irish chocolates – I knew this from past research on Candy in my work) and ironically she told us how all of her family and friends in Ireland are suffering from the economy, from unemployment and that it all points to corporate greed. The greedy are getting greedier and greedier, she said. We talked about the church and the emptiness of the cathedrals except for those of her vintage and she said that she felt comfort in knowing God Knows and God Has It Together.
Our conclusion at breakfast was much the same, albeit more secular, that this too shall pass as life is a series of pushes and pulls and we live inside the friction of liberals pulling at conservatives and vice versa, and there have always been poor, there has always been war, and there have always been greedy people since man was created, so it is probably best not to think too far in any one direction without losing track of the center. If the center be called God, than she knows and has it together, for sure.
Meanwhile, as a manifestation of the extremes – Tin was a perfect angel today, the flip side of his evil twin Skippy who showed up yesterday.
