Charles.

This is what wonderful is.

It's a Good Day to Die.

Sarah Palin and the Language of TV.

Even well into the digital age, TV still dictates the popular cultural in our country. For all the CBS's growth on the internet, its website only attracts a million visitors a day. Enough to put it in the top 50 sites out there, but far fewer than the 23 million viewers CSI attracts each week.

This is a relatively mundane point, because for most of our lives TV dictated each of our roles in society through generalities and drab dictations of the national zeitgeist. Each and every sitcom is engineered and group-tested into oblivion so it will grab hold of the largest audience. These facts are hardly hidden, because this is how TV shines. TV's orders from the mount are to present us with the most overarching view of America possible in 21 minutes or less. Which is quite amazing, see, because in effect TV shows us not only how America sees itself, but also what we are as a nation.

To those who prefer to find this in books, TV's endless rehashing of common plots, characters, and themes seems to only lead to a dulling of the senses and a life of McDonald's Pies and Big Gulps. Books rely on far more investment in original, cohesive thought to be successful, but by definition originality and cohesion cannot be found in the blue haze's formulaic seas.

Television's appeal lies in its lack of rhetoric, in its insistence on feelings and its control of them. I'll say that again: TV disdains rhetoric, it speaks in pure emotion. Why else would Fonzi be a common household name today if not for his patterned nostalgia? Or, why on hulu.com is the Family Guy consistently in the top five, if not for its rapidfire demands for laughter? Each and every sitcom, drama, or comedy on TV succeeds to some extent by capitalizing on our feelings, and the more successful each becomes in the weekly ratings, the harder it is to quantify or atomize into distinct parts. Which in turn leads to a national feeling of déjà vu, for we've all felt these feelings before, so TV becomes roundly criticized as nonsensical, repetitive dreck.

These criticisms turn out empty though, precisely because they are searching for gerunds in an idiom that TV cannot speak. We may not know TV's precise point at any given time, but hot damn, we sure as hell can feel it.

Which brings us to Gov. Palin, specifically to her shining moment in the debates, and her feckless and inconsiderate use of the English language:

Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration.

Unless Gov. Palin meant to attack Biden with the securities trading term "preference," a sting to obtuse for basically anyone to pick up on, these sentences might as well be gibberish. But, see, what they convey or feel, is a hope for the future, "forgive those who trespass." And she continues:

Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I'm glad that you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?

Palin's jump to that last sentence exposes a way of thinking that rarely pauses for clarity (wait did she just threaten Biden's wife?), but instead barrels through points for effect (she's a fan of teachers!). TV's basic formula plays well under these conditions; if a scene doesn't work it is cut with little to no concern for narrative cohesion. What matters in both instances is the impact of what's felt (God exists, He's on our side, He wants us to win), what's said is hardly the point. Tally ho:

I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he's a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

And so, her painful paragraph ends with the most heartfelt bunch of feeling a politician can hope for, a family with kids, under God. Palin goes ones step further and emotes into existence a room full of concentrating young Americans, real Americans. Ones she can feel for, the nation follows along, and that's terrifying.

What is Kansas For?

Anyone?

Have a Looksy: the Fed Rate.

A head scratcher at the time, but ponder this:

"While there are many policy considerations that arise as a consequence of the rapidly expanding global financial system, the most important is the necessity of maintaining stability in the prices of goods and services and confidence in domestic financial markets," he said. "Failure to do so is apt to exact far greater consequences as a result of cross-border capital movements than those which might have prevailed a generation ago."(1995-Doubts Voiced By Greenspan On a Rate Cut)

While you stare at this (click to enlarge):

See that blip between 1985 and 1990 that's the S&L crisis, which caused 700 of those shops to close. But you can see the point I'm trying to make here, starting in 1995 the slope of the Down Jones industrial average starts accelerating. That is the change between 2 points on that graph is less than the next 2 points, until about 2005, but then the slope starts accelerating again.

That's what a bubble looks like, but how does Greenspan factor in here? First a word about what his job was. The fed controls the federal funds rate which sets the interest rate for funds banks can lend to each other. The fed sets this rate by requiring banks to have a certain amount of cash reserves at the fed in the form of Government securities -- which are basically numbers on a balances sheet that the government says are worth what it says. If, after the closing bell, Bank A doesn't have enough reserves it must find another Bank willing to lend money to it so it can bolster its government securities holdings. By controlling the supply of these securities, the Government effectively controls the target rate of these loans. Keynes dictated that when times are tough and economic activity is low the Fed buys a whole bunch of these securities from banks and the banks can then throw that money around. This raises inflation a bit but also opens the sphincters on Wall Street and releases a flow of trading, which, hopefully busies up the economy. When times are chill the fed is supposed to start selling these securities to banks which raises the fed funds rate.¹

All of which can make you a bit batty to think about: rather than just saying the rate is x and holding banks to it, the Fed pilots the boat by effectively locking the tiller and trying to control the wind. Greenspan and Milton Friedman's Neo-Classical nabobs at the fed in 1995, though, were all like "fucks to that, we care about inflation first and foremost, not controlling growth in a cyclical way," and set the federal funds rate at a stable level. Now, pause for a second, Keynesian economics offers a pretty straightforward way to predict what the rate's going to be at any point in time. If the economy's bad (and inflation's under control) it's safe to say it will be pretty low, and if the economy's alright it's safe to say that the rate will be relatively high. Ideally, in this system the rate is predictable, and banks like predictability, because it gives them a base income, and therefore a base to plan all their other bets around. This is called hedging, and for us nerds gives a root for "Hedging your bets".

If the fed funds rate is stable, however, and there is no way of knowing whether or not it will change, banks will lose their collective shit and start looking for safer bets to bolster their base. And out of Greenspan's backwards diction:

"While there are many policy considerations that arise as a consequence of the rapidly expanding global financial system, the most important is the necessity of maintaining stability in the prices of goods and services and confidence in domestic financial markets"

We start to see what he was thinking. Basically he removed a stable bet and forced banks to invest outside of Government -- on top of it all, the dude absolutely hated economic models and formulae -- by inserting a healthy goddamn dose of randomness and whimsy into a historically predictable vehicle. Here we go:

See 1994 to about 2001? Flat. So where do banks look? What has been, historically a pretty solid bet? What changes rates basically inline with the economy, the way the fed funds rate is supposed to? Ummm:

And, goodbye empire.

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1. I may be wrong about all this. I received a C+ in economics 101 in college. Not bad for the librul arts! Return.

For more reading about further economic fantods see:

• Cityphilia
• As Credit Crisis Spiraled, Alarm Led to Action
• What's in a Number?