Capitalism in Crisis [But The Wet Dreams Continue]
The ad cuts from the speedy car and its
middle-aged driver to quick shots of a laughing
and smiling young girl, maybe about 18 years old
But the girl doesn't look like the kind you would see
on college campuses today. More like a "hippie chick"
Shorter & Louder
Crisis? What Crisis?
It was in 1992 that Bruce Springsteen sang his song of lamentation over the fact that, when he sat down to watch some TV, what he found was "57 channels and nothing on".
[By the way, Bruce has just endorsed Obama, giving Ba-Ba 'street credibility.' How ironic is that?]
Well, I've got a whole lot more than 57 channels to watch these days; my cable system just picked up Fox Business (and I'm pleasantly surprised to be able to say that it's far less disagreeable than Fox News ).
All horse racing channels (for that fearsome interregnum between the close of trading on the New York markets and the opening of the Nikkei), and I also frequently scan through my hundreds of channels to still seek out the offerings wanting.
But there's one video presentation I try never to miss [above]. This is somewhat challenging, for my favorite viewing on TV these days is not a regularly scheduled program, but a 30-second commercial.
The ad is for Jaguar Motors' new XF sedan car, being introduced to the market in North America this spring. The spot is instantly recognizable.
It features violent camera movements and quick jump cuts, like a music video from the early 1980s. The rock and roll soundtrack is Deep Purple's 1968 hit "Hush".
I thought I heard her calling my name now Hush, hush
She broke my heart but I love her just the same now
Hush, hush
Thought I heard her calling my name now
Hush, hush
I need her loving and I'm not to blame now
The "plot" of the ad is a middle-aged man driving his Jaguar very, very fast. Sometimes he seems to be driving through the countryside; other times he is taking turns on a high, banked racetrack.
All of the video is filmed with a light blue tint, bleaching out a lot of the colors - just like a decades-old memory.
Every so often, the spot cuts from the speedy car and its determined driver for quick (well under one-second shots) of a laughing and smiling young girl, maybe about 18 years old. But the girl does not look like the kind you would see as one of today's college freshmen.
Her hair is long, blond and billowing; to me, she has the classic looks of what young men of Deep Purple's era used to call a "hippie chick".
A young woman who, since she was in proclaimed open rebellion of all of society's mores, obviously had little use of those hidebound traditions proscribing sex before marriage.
Putting the three sets of images together, and you don't need a doctorate in deconstruction to figure out what is being suggested here.
The man, with the young woman's image burning hot at the front of his mind, is obviously traveling to meet her.
With the speeds attainable with his new Jaguar, he is doing this very fast. He probably is not moving this rapidly because he expects on his arrival a stirring game of Pinochle or a rousing discussion of municipal bonds; a romantic assignation is obviously upcoming here.
Perhaps the appeal of the ad is that I remember, when I was the young girl's age, speeding off for encounters with young women who looked a lot like the girl in the ad.
No, I didn't have a Jaguar for this purpose (the guys who did in those days of nationalized and disinterested British industry probably had more encounters with their mechanics than with girls).
I had the use of my employer's huge, (almost 2,500 kg) 12-cylinder 455 cubic inch (that's about 7.45 liters!), pre-gas crisis Oldsmobile Toronado.
That got me to the girl very quickly, provided, of course, there were no turns in the road between me and her.
At first, I thought that was the ad's purpose, to spur the memories and loins of guys old enough to remember "Hush" when it first came out.
Then I thought again about the ad's rationale. The girl was unquestionably the hippie chick, but the man, the driver, presumably, the car's owner, is definitely not a hippie guy.
He a rather bland looking, conservatively attired, middle-aged man.
She's a trophy, not a memory
Then it hit me, this was not happening 40 years ago; it is happening today. The girl was not a memory, she was either a mistress, or a second (or third or fourth ) trophy wife.
If you're rich enough to afford this new, $60,000 car, you're rich enough to enjoy girls like the hippie chick as current-day experiences rather than just faded memories.
Maybe we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, maybe a quarter of a million Americans are losing their homes through foreclosure every month.
Still, if you're in that class of wealthy Americans that only experience the subprime crisis as mindless chatter overheard in the servants' quarters, you can buy this car and, little blue pill willing, have romantic liaisons with girls young enough to be your daughter.
Even as the job layoffs accumulate and the price dials on gas pumps spin upward like slot machines, apparently, rich American men are still speeding through the night, their minds red with lust.
In Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar, Pontius Pilate remarks, "You Jews produce messiahs by the sackful."
Today, what the general financial media, especially US business and investment-themed cable station CNBC, produce by the sackful is proclamations that the entire subprime/financial crisis is over.
Beware these incessant calls from grossly self-interested parties that the credit crunch is over. Someday, maybe this year, or the next or the next after that, the bottom in this credit cycle will occur.
I can't tell you when that will happen, but I can tell you that, when it does, it will not be accompanied by laughter and gaiety from those who make money selling stock.
The bottom will come in the midst of the darkest gloom and crisis, when the general, unchallenged consensus is that you have to be mad as a hatter to want to buy financial stocks.
This was the case during the August 1982 bottom, with prospective loan defaults by Latin American governments threatening the solvency of America's big money center banks.
It was the case in the summer of 1990 stock market bottom, as the US economy, already reeling from the Savings and Loans crisis, the subprime fiasco of its day, then had to cope with the oil price rises and geopolitical implications of Saddam Hussein's march on Kuwait.
It was also the case in the fall of 2002, as US stocks, already weak from the repercussions of the corporate earnings' meltdown of that summer, came to realize that, yes, America was going to invade Iraq.
Five years later, last October, some informed observers, most notably Nobel Prize in Economics winner Joseph Stiglitz, contended that at the actual root of today's credit crisis and resultant economic recession is the $12 billion a month the US is spending in Iraq. He may have a point there.
But as night falls here in the US Pacific northwest, once again I think of all those Jaguars and other luxury roadsters speeding away from the suburban office parks for encounters with the hippie chick.
"I need her loving and I'm not to blame now"
No, he's not. All Americans are, for allowing the greed of the few to blind a nation to the pain that will be visited on the many.