Nonsense With A Pretty Face

Carrie Prejean, Sarah Palin and Lady Gaga are currently exploring the limits of how far one can go on just being pretty. It used to be that these model/Miss America types came with a distinct ‘use by’ date and their achievement expectations were endowed by liberally fixed ceilings. There always were exemptions; a stray product spokesman here, a weather reporter there and the assorted one note actress ala Veronica Lake. Generally speaking, however, when the whole Miss Milkmaid thing was over, it was time to go off and marry someone rich, marry someone famous, marry someone powerful or marry a mix of the theme. Today this is no longer the case. You’ve come a long way, baby!

Maybe too far. The perpetually model walking former Governor of Alaska is now trying to pass herself off as a viable Presidential candidate, stalking the outskirts of secondary markets with her face-painted bus, a book of nonsense and a team of advance people portraying political sharpies. It’s all fun dress up as far as it goes—a live action version of Barbie For President, complete with accessories. Beyond her shiny hiney, Mrs. Palin’s selling points as far as commander in chief are self-professed to be having good values and common sense. Given that our problems--today, tomorrow and perhaps forever--deal with an economic system incapable of modulating production overcapacity, an inability to regulate financial vehicle manipulations, a retrenching and ever more weirdly acting Russia, a gluttonous pretentious amoral China and numerous nut jobs seeking nuclear weapons, what is being offered seems no solution. Best of luck deploying your common sense and good values in dealing with that. Ditto the whole being pretty thing.

These people do not know their place. We do not have simple problems. We cannot afford simple solutions. At its core, our problems have little to do with bad values and a lack of common sense—at least as far as the public at large is concerned. When it comes to the financial crisis, it was caused by fewer people than would fit in your standard movie theater. As common thieves operating in an area above the law, perhaps these people need reeducation, but the masses require no scolding. What is needed is the balls to disarm these fiends or the brains to outwit them. A pretty face need not apply. Similarly, megalomaniac haters of free will do not require a good talking to. Russian thug kleptomaniacs, Chinese thug kleptomaniacs and Iranian religious thug kleptomaniacs must be countered when they can be and contained when they can’t. Or all is lost. Good values and common sense qualifies you for meter maid. Defender of the Free World requires much, much more--and perhaps qualities contrary to plainspoken thought and value-oriented judgment. Ask Jimmy Carter if you need references.

Plying similar forums is the similarly good values conservative Carrie Prejean, who is also similarly hawking a book not written by herself. Prejean is the former Miss California USA who muffed a Miss USA stress test question with some mumbled gay bashing. Whatever you may think of her position (that marriage should be reserved for people of the opposite sex), it is very clear that she is attempting to parley a career out of something she said in a half witted way off the top of her head. She is compounding this mistake by continuing to speak extemporaneously. Thus far, she has demonstrated only a talent for reading words off cards before receptive audiences. When taken off script, whatever has been poured into her ears comes out of her mouth in random order. To put it mildly, she is no picture of grace under pressure, as her recent fleeing of the Larry “Softball” King’s show demonstrates. Allegedly this pandering to fellow gay bashers is done as a stepping stone to a career in sports reporting—in which case the gay bashers are sort of a test market. Or perhaps she is just hawking stuff to an audience she already has. In any case, her end game doesn’t seem too well thought out.

Hawking something simply for the purposes of hawking it seems to be the entirety of Lady Gaga’s act. For those of you who have missed this flash in the pan, Lady Gaga is a singer. Who does not sing. At all. Couldn’t hold a note. Can’t find a note. Doesn’t know what a note is or what it’s for. She is also a dancer. Who does not dance. Not a step. Not a tap. Not a pirouette. Her voice, such as it is, is ‘rapped’ into a harmonizer and dehumanized into disco riffs. In the true product of this artist, her videos, she twitches between freeze frame shots of her doing something lewd, usually with corpses or illuminated pylons. Her lyrics are both incoherent and bawdy. And she says ‘Gaga’ a lot, perhaps as a warning to those who have strayed in from the Learning Channel. It’s like Tangerine Dream cut with Clutch Cargo and sped up.

Having now experienced all of Lady Gaga’s fine electronic offerings, I feel thoroughly qualified to say that there is no there there. The visual is an unedited loop of Cyndi Lauper’s garage sale. Lyrically, it’s parts of Donna Summer’s cast offs. Lady Gaga’s boring theme is fame: not so much her striving for it, but rather her presuming it by proclamation. In short, she’s all hat, no Carmen Miranda. Even as a gimmick, it’s pale.

I’m all for people trying to transcend their station. No one should blame a person for using the talent of being beautiful as a leg up in doing such. But failure is failure. The time has come to boo these hussies off the stage.

Coda:

It doesn’t help that all of these women are largely frauds. What we see in all three is a manifest lack of depth and almost no self-awareness. Palin styles herself as a red neck when she is really Archie Bunker in a dress, only without the bother of a daily readying habit. Prejean has found herself to be an inadvertent sex movie peddler, leading one to wonder when and where these old fashioned conservative values presented themselves. Lady Gaga might be forgiven if you completely discount electronic music as an art-form altogether—something I do not. (I even like disco and trance.) Lady Gaga is not simply not trying, she is not trying and she has no talent.

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Bad Idea Alert:

Our pals in the real estate industry have come up with a solution to the housing values crisis. A really stupid one that they won’t shut up about. Think of the stupidest idea ever. Now write it down.

Did you get: Use Public Funds to Demolish Vacant New Housing? Of course not, because you are sane.

Now let’s get to the fundamentals. The houses aren’t the problem. In fact, the houses are rationally needed. People would buy these houses if they were priced reasonably. By reasonably, I mean a price that people who earn today’s dollars can actually afford. The problem here is that this price is probably much less than what the houses were initially offered for, way back when the market was being flooded with funny money. Many of these houses were put up with that same now vanished funny money.

In any other market this would mean prices come down. Not just for these new houses, but for houses in general. In our market, no lender is willing to get into housing since the bottom has not been felt. (There are other reasons.) Left to the ration of the marketplace, your house and all houses like it settle down to where they are in competition for actual buyers who actually can pay mortgages, perhaps not on the basis of land value but rather ability to pay. This is much the way credit is extended in the car market.

All of this is bad news for people who own houses, of course. Your house is no longer valued as an investment, but rather for its utility as a place to live. There are plenty of people in apartments who would like a house to live in. But that’s it. That’s the market. Eventually this leads to a collapse in rentals. It’s all bad news, especially for property owners. It is also inevitable.

Mortgages are not socially funded so that everyone can get involved in chasing the bubble of increasing values. They are government backed for the purpose of cutting the average person into the thrills of home ownership. The rise in home values was a fake market whose bubble has now completely burst. Prior to this long run up, people used to sell pre-existing housing for less than what they paid for it because it was used, as in a used car.

Just as it makes no sense to destroy the inventory of new cars to support the demand for used cars, it makes no sense to demolish new housing for the purpose of supporting the phony value of old housing. Crushing the new housing just compounds the mistake.