Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : The Last Two Cold Beers on Earth: Responding to the Great Credit Repair Bill of 2008

It was a gray and wavy day when the U.S. economy finally fell apart–like cellophane placed unskilled over a pencil eraser. It was October 3rd, 2012–almost four years from the day that the Great Economic Credit Reform of 2008 was passed.

Columbus, Ohio has always been known for its bars and restaurants and today was no exception despite the reality that there were very few functional public establishments left after the credit dried up. Many businesses and institutions floated their immediate future on credit–their payrolls, their current stock, their long term viability–which meant that when the easy credit dried up so did their long term prospects, their option to own their current month’s payroll, and the stock on their floors.

When people stopped buying they also stopped building. The construction industry, from the timbers in the forests to the cranes on the 87th floor–was all predicated on the illusion of an ever-growing future fueled by inexhaustible resources. This was the 13th most ignorant fallacy of reasoning that American citizens had ever deluded themselves over.

An inebriated man shuffles with the scuffle of worn up and worn out tennis shoes that he lifted from the empty racks of a Kohls store that had been abandoned for three years. The shoes didn’t match but they were the same size. The man became the country and had been looking to remove its burden from his shoulders with every drop of whiskey he could beg borrow or steal.

After walking nearly three hours in the brisk windy streets of Columbus, the man finds the bar in which he will take his next drink. Columbus still retained a bit of its former beauty as it lay nestled and forgotten on the banks of the Olentangy river. George Washington’s best friend surveyed this land and found it agreeable and planted a flag and started a war with those who lived around here before them.

The drunk saunters into the bar and sits on the floor next to a man wearing a snipped off tie and a fairly clean but wrinkled dress shirt. The drunk takes a shot of whiskey from the beast of a bar man with his handle bar mustache and balding head. Whiskey is the only drink anyone serves any more because it tastes like the failure now the foundation of everyone’s lives. And everyone drinks for free as long as it lasts.

They had seen it all being lived around them and they worked for their mortgage and their kids education and their two vehicles and the gas that went in them. They bought firearms and took classes for the permits. Many of the towns and villages across the country became self-enclosed and isolated as that was initially the place that the multitude of hopeless and helpless gathered to seek strength in numbers. The problem was that human beings had become so isolated in their worship at the alter of the Cult of Individuality that they had forgotten what it meant to work in a close-knit community. There was much violence and murder in the early days of the collapse, back in ‘10 when they were saying words on the 24-hour news channels like blip on the radar, small setback or the always famous potholes in the road to recovery.

The drunk man who was now the country looked at the drinking man with the clipped tie, gestured a toast and both drank to pissing into the void. The drunk asked the man what was with the tie. The man told him that he was one of the last financiers left trying to save the global exchange market and that when it had finally died and the body had grown cold, he grabbed the scissors on his desk and clipped his tie. He said it felt like the right thing to do.

The man gestures to the bar tender for another shot and doesn’t look at the drunk but talks to him all the same. He says that we live in a world of scarce resources and these scarce resources, based on their price and the other party’s willingness to pay that price, are supposed to be allocated to the most efficient uses. That’s what market pricing does–it puts a value on our limited resources and makes sure they get to the most effective places. It’s the beauty of the free market when it’s unhindered by political regulation.

He pauses and reflects a moment and asks if the drunk ever read that book Atlas Shrugged. The drunk says no and the man goes on. He said that the people leading us were pretty much the scum of the earth. He said that our country just went financially bankrupt, that we didn’t even make it 250 years without suffering an economic collapse of the collective value of our labor.

But then again, he says, leadership all over the world, in business, politics, and even art has been morally bankrupt his entire life. He says that our politicians took our currency (which wasn’t tied to physical assets like gold that can be weighed and measured), and they created a bunch of fake value in the treasury which had no merit, no backing, and inspired no faith in other countries around the world. He said that our currency used to be considered as the world standard of exchange in value and stability and now look at it.

The clipped tie man takes his drink and says the thing he was created to say, possibly to this drunk and possibly in this place. He says a thing so powerful and true that it could have saved the world if the right people had been wise enough to listen to it and act when they had the chance to do something about it.

The man drank the whiskey, gritted his teeth and kept his eyes closed as he talked. He said the standard of our currency is the standard of our character.

The wealth in the vaults of a country’s treasury is supposed to equal a portion of the collective value of its citizens’ labors, dreams and ambitions. Our government sold off on our dreams in 2008 and they didn’t even think twice about it. He says, I wonder what the founding fathers would have thought of that. He says that he told a lot of bad lies in good places in his life and wondered what the founding fathers would have thought of him.

The beast of a bar man walked up with two amber colored bottles. He offered them to the drunk man who was his country and the snipped tie man who was nothing anymore. The drunk reached out and took the bottles and handed one to the man with the slouched head who still sat next to him. The bartender said that those were the last two he had, hell probably the last two in the city or all of existence. He kept them cold in a bag he placed in a secret spot of the Olentangy and that these were the last two cold ones left and the men looked like they would put the best use use to them.

The drunk looked at the bottle and smiled. He said hey do you remember these? The labels on the little mountains turn white when the beer gets warm. The man looked at his bottle and the drunk saw the tremor of a smile threaten the gloom of the man’s mood.

The drunk put his arm around the empty man’s shoulder, clinked his bottle to his and said here’s to pissing into the void. The man straightened up a bit, looked at the drunk, raised the last cold beer he would ever drink that had the little label that turned from blue to white and he said we’ll do it better next time.

The sun slipped away and the banks of the Olentangy settled into the darkness one more time with the people who loved living in the drunken peace of its presence.

photo credit: DerrickT