On Dali Time...

“Salvador Dali's clocks aren't wrong or stopped or broken. Their active faces slide like pancake batter over edges of a bureau, bend and hang across branches. Adapted to the shape of every object they meet, these clocks announce that there is no standard time in Dali’s universe - nor, as Dali knew - in Einstein's.”

So says Stephanie Strickland on the website http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/webarts/hypertext

She might have added that there is no standard time in Washington, DC either.

The Bush Administration has had eight years to observe the effects of its decisions on the economy over which it presides. What was that Ms. Strickland said about pancake batter? Yeah, it feels like the most elastic eight years in American history to me, too. And now that Bush is pretending to give a shit about the economy, his corrective plan must be approved by… eight pm tonight?

(I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about how Bill Clinton triggered this mess 12 years ago by encouraging home loans for lower-income Americans. As he pointed out on the Today Show yesterday, that was during a time when there was a budget surplus instead of a trillion-dollar deficit, no war, no recession, and booming job creation.)

But, back to the future, Bush’s legacy to America is an $800 Billion bailout that encases the next president’s feet in concrete and throws him overboard, creating a bleak zeitgeist of loss that will dog taxpayers today, tomorrow, and all the way to end times, immortalizing (and explaining, finally) that smirk he always wears on his face.

Somewhere in freak heaven, Dali is twirling his moustache.

Ms. Strickland continues: “In fact, Dali's clocks are not clocks at all, if we mean bookkeepers that measure unvarying flow. But then the human heart is not that kind of clock either; rather, it …runs concurrently to the beat of several highly variable drummers. When that stops being true, when it runs to no beat… losing some of those long-range correlations that tie it to events thousands of beats into the future, then it is about to die of congestive heart failure.”

Is your heart fibrillating too?

There are no drummers in Washington, unless you count a few bi-partisan bongo players. No one is keeping the beat for millions of American hearts waiting to see what the hell is going to happen to our economy.

Can we have just a little consistency, please? Can we agree to scoop up the sliding clock of this moment in history and set its alarm for tomorrow, or next week, or some other well-reasoned finite point in time by which our bongo-players will have agreed upon the Bailout principles? Can tonight’s debate move forward, giving each candidate an opportunity to beat his own drum, until our national arrhythmia subsides? Dammit, we’re Americans, we INVENTED multi-tasking. If either candidate finds that prospect daunting, let him ask the mother of any three-year-old in America how it’s done.

Tick tick tick…