Morons - tasty eatin'!

LI would advise readers to go to this superfinereview (heh heh) of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort. Who is that reviewer, anyway? Give him a raise!

At the moment, I am using Bishop as my template for political prognostication.

Which gets us to the moron tax.

The moron tax is the increase in the price of commodities, particularly oil, which have reliably fever charted its way across the Great Fly’s America. One statistic that truly struck Bishop, and should strike any politically astute observer, is the correlation between party affiliation and population density. The lower the density, the more likely the area will be GOP leaning, and vice versa.

Now, it is easy to deduce from this handy factoid a few things: those exurbs were, in the naughties, some of the hottest construction sites around. Maricopa, Arizona is an exemplary GOP exurb: it is economically dependent on a larger metropole, it was constructed wholly on spec by drive by land speculators, it is an environmental horror, soaking up water at an astonishing rate in a desert environment, and it is built with total disregard for public investment – no parks, libraries, high schools, crappy roads, the whole nine yards. Paradise, in other words, for the GOP inclined. But ignorance, it turns out, isn’t bliss as the policies one advocates, all at a satisfying long distance, start biting your ass. Thus, this is the kind of patriotic population that could be led by the nose into supporting the war in Iraq, could easily be snookered by the fake war against Al Qaeda, and is no doubt twitching to get going on the bombing of Iran. All, of course, are actions laid down in the Bible, as the exurbanites would find out from the televangelically friendly churches they attend.

Well, of course, the housing speculation bubble collapsed; the crappy roads produce giant traffic jams; and the Bible Based foreign policy has produced the kind of meaty, beaty security action speculators just love. Every time Bush rattles his dick at Iran, the price of a barrel of oil goes up. Sweet – the moron leader has finally started taking huge, tasteful bites out of the moron ass. If you are going to milk the morons, though, you have to do more than sell them junk minimansions and crappy paradisial living conditions – you have to get that last drop of milk. Helpfully, the Fed has been loaning money at zero down and give me your junk for collateral rates to the financial community. 450 billion dollars, this quarter. Hey, that’s some nice money. Now, if you were an investment bank, where would you put that money? In fucking mortgages? No thank you. The moron gang bang is over. So you load up on equities – one bubble – and you look around to see what is hot. What is hot is commodities – it is as exciting as 2006 mortgage securities, and up is the only direction anybody knows. So, take another bite out of the moron ass and see how good it tastes! Like ham hocks!

Exciting times. One thing about the morons, though. After their own personal ass is chewed on for a while, they start screaming. Usually it is for war, but – who knows, given an argument that will have to break through the pressjam – even for peace if they find out that they can benefit from it.