Meals From The Marketplace

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

-Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”

            In America, Thanksgiving is believed to have originated either in Massachusetts in 1621 or in Florida in 1565.  It has been celebrated annually since 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln officially recognized it at the height of the Civil War.  It was celebrated on either the third, fourth or fifth Thursday of November until 1942, when Congress passed a law that fixed the day of celebration as the fourth Thursday of the month.

            In the years that followed, it became an American tradition, largely secular but with decidedly religious overtones.  And, since 9/11 especially, it has become almost a second Fourth of July in many iterations, the combination of spiritual reverence and flag-waving patriotism none-too-subtly suggesting a tilt towards theocracy that would have been anathema to both the seventeenth century pilgrims and the Civil War president.

            It also marks the beginning of a holiday season in the United States that leads to Christmas and, a week later, New Year’s, and, about a month after that, Super Sunday.  Thus the holidays, all of them, are at once patriotic, religious and commercial, the perfect amalgam that represents the schizophrenic state of the American ethos in the new millennium.

            And nothing captures that thought better than the Macy’s Parade in New York City. 

            The parade, the second oldest such event (trailing only the one in Philadelphia that is now dubbed “the 6abc IKEA Thanksgiving Parade”) in the country, is a veritable cornucopia of patriotic fervor, heavily spiced with commercialism and sprinkled none-too-lightly with religious sentiments.  And, of course, being wholly American and emanating from the country’s cultural and commercial center, it is done BIG.

            Thus, the parade has, in recent years, featured massive balloons depicting such legendary characters as the Pillsbury Doughboy, Ronald McDonald, Kung Fu Panda, Buzz Lightyear, Shrek, and SpongeBob SquarePants.  And the bands, from high schools and colleges across the country, play a mix of patriotic tunes from the John Philip Souza collection and semi-religious ones like “God Bless America.” 

            Floats this year included these impressive titles: Mount Rushmore’s American Pride, Morton Salt Home Baked Goodness, Homewood Suites On the Roll Again, and Office Max Elves Raise the Roof.

            This year’s performers, some of whom sang while others just waved, included Kanye West, Jessica Simpson, “America’s Got Talent” winner Michael Grimm, Miss USA Rima Fakih, the Power Rangers Samurai, the cast of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” the Muppets, and the Big Apple Circus.  At least four Broadway shows were in the parade this year: “Memphis,” “American Idiot,” “Elf,” and “Million Dollar Quartet.”

            The television coverage of the parade is another staple of America’s celebration of the holiday.  NBC and CBS both get into the act, with the former network owning the license rights, thereby limiting CBS to coverage of “New York’s Thanksgiving Day Parade” (no mention of the corporate sponsor allowed).  But both networks cover all three hours of the extravaganza, with NBC’s “Today” hosts, Matt Lauer and company, doing their thing.  Both networks load up on commercials, of course.  HBO has not, as of yet, seen the value of providing commercial-free coverage.

            The highlight of the parade comes at the end of the long line of floats and balloons and bands and singers and dancers, when none other than Santa Claus himself, regaled in all his glory on a giant sleigh, with elves and children frolicking all around him and with his reindeer leading the way, cruises by the excited children and their happy parents who line the parade route.  Santa doesn’t do much in this appearance, other than to wave cheerily and utter an occasional “Ho, Ho, Ho.”  But it’s enough to establish the point of the whole production.

            And that point, perhaps this year more important than in many of its predecessors, is to shop ‘til you drop.  For if Thanksgiving represents nothing else, it surely signifies the start of the biggest retail sales period of the year, epitomized by the now-traditional super sales day that is called Black Friday, when some 135 million Americans are believed to participate in the mad dash for all manner of things commercial. 

            This was surely the impetus behind the inauguration of the parade, back in 1924, when old Mr. Macy determined that his store needed a boost in holiday sales and devised the parade as a way to accomplish just such a result.

            Macy’s hasn’t done badly for itself in the 86 years since that first parade, but it is probably hurting along with the successors to Gimbels (at the time, Macy’s principal competitor) and all the other retail stores and their on-line varieties in this prolonged economic slump that is now into its third year and counting.

            By classic economic theory, the recession officially ended in FY ’09, but don’t tell that to Ma and Pa Consumer.  They are still struggling to make ends meet, some of their kin hoping Congress will extend their unemployment benefits, others, more fortunate for the moment, hoping they will still have a job as the year turns in little more than a month.

            Of course, it’s all relative.  Those first celebrants, some four hundred or more years ago, were just happy to be alive.  They knew nothing of parades or Broadway shows or Black Fridays.  What they did know was that another cruel winter was imminent, that not all of them would survive it, and that, even so, they were glad to be in the new land that they were only beginning to settle and utilize.

            Now, that same land is over-settled and under-utilized.  Factories that once flourished have shut down, homes that once were lived in are now empty and in disrepair, and the people who populate the country are more restive and less thankful than their forebears, despite having much more in every respect.

            But, yes, it is all relative.  And so, while the parades and the shopping sprees and the holidays are full upon us, it may well be said: It is, truly, the best and worst of times.

            With respect to American politics, you have to keep your eyes wide open and your ears close to the ground to stay ahead of the constant evolution that the system undergoes from generation to generation, and, not infrequently, from election to election.

            Kevin Phillips was exactly on target when he predicted a Republican takeover of the Deep South in the late 1960s.  At the time, the Democrats (Dixiecrats, as they were dubbed) had a monopoly on the South.  Republicans had been non-viable in local and state elections (and had hardly fared much better in national races) since the Civil War.

            But Phillips saw the future far more clearly than anyone other than perhaps Richard Nixon, whose presidential campaign Phillips was working on when he penned “The Emerging Republican Majority.”  In that book, he predicted a conservative realignment in national politics that took hold in the 1970s and became an undeniable fact in the 1980s.

            Now, over forty years after the publication of his book, no presidential candidate who is running on the Democratic ticket can count on any Electoral College votes from the states of the old confederacy.  Indeed, Barack Obama’s wins in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida may well prove to be flukes of political nature as soon as two years from now.

            What did Phillips see that so few others saw?  More importantly, what might one with his prescience see in the current political scene? 

            One thought that might soon become reality is the demise of the two-party system in national politics.  That possibility has certainly been considered at any number of junctures in America’s history.  In fact, it was a fairly popular one at the same time that Phillips was developing his thesis.  In 1968, George Wallace, then Governor of Alabama, created a third-party that he dubbed the American Independent Party.

            Wallace, a staunch segregationist who had attempted to block school integration in his state just five years earlier, ran for president on his newly formed party label that very year, and he won five states in his attempt to roll back the clock on the civil rights movement.  The party is still officially listed as one of California’s registered political parties, attracting old John Birch Society members and their ilk.

            Ross Perot initiated another third-party movement with his national campaign for the presidency in 1992.  The Reform Party, intended as a slightly right-of-center alternative somewhere between the left-of-center Democrats and the farther right Republicans, flourished briefly but had essentially disappeared by the 2000 election.

            The Tea Party movement is the latest “threat” to the two-party system, and it would certainly appear to have legs after the mid-term election of no fewer than five senatorial candidates who profess to have Tea Party affiliation. 

            Of course, the Tea Party is, as yet, not really a political party, not in the official sense of that word.  Instead, it has aligned itself with the Republican Party, for the moment at least.  And with any number of potential titular heads (Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, to mention a few with national recognition), a national campaign under the new party banner in 2012 would not be all that far-fetched, especially if Glenn Beck (the real father of the movement) anointed the candidate who carried the banner.

            So much can happen so quickly in this new millennium.  Could anyone have conceived just ten years ago that the country would be engaged in three separate (albeit inter-related wars) by the end of the decade?  (Iraq, Afghanistan and terror, for those who may have lost track.)  Or that a previously unheard of governor of a state with fewer residents than Brooklyn, New York would be the second most headline-grabbing politician in the country?  (Or is she now just a TV personality?)

            The Republicans could easily bifurcate into two separate parties in the next two years.  The Tea Party movement could grow disenchanted with the politics-as-usual approach of Speaker-to-be Boehner and still-to-be Minority Leader McConnell.  With little real action on the deficit and continued unemployment levels around 9 or 10 percent and with the rejection of a Palin presidential bid (all far from impossible), the movement could easily shake free of its Republican shackles and run Ms. Palin (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) in 2012, thereby decimating the GOP.

            And the Democrats could face a similar fate.  Barack Obama is already tarnished badly, having “led” his party to a devastating defeat earlier this month, and, in the aftermath of that debacle, continuing to sound more like a mediation lawyer than the shining knight many of his followers expected him to be.

            If unemployment continues to linger at present levels for another year, if the administration has caved to Republican “pressure” to extend the Bush tax cuts to the highest income-earning millionaires in the country, if the war in Afghanistan continues unabated, and if “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is still in effect, it would not be inconceivable for a liberal alternative to Obama to appear on the scene, a la Gene McCarthy in 1968.

            True, McCarthy didn’t form a third party, but this Democratic Party is not nearly as united as even that fractured group was in that revolutionary year of national trauma.

            These Democrats are very much at odds with themselves, with some seeking the smallest of victories (watered-down health care reform, exceedingly modest financial reform, “only” a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts) while others cry out for a return of true liberalism and fear even greater electoral losses with a weak and weakened presidential candidate leading the way to ruin.  The fight that might emerge if a strong liberal were to emerge to contest the re-nomination of Obama would make the Carter-Kennedy battle of 1980 look like kids’ stuff.

            And if this scenario seems inconceivable now, consider how much more inconceivable it was just a month ago, before Obama suffered his “shellacking.” 

            Will either of our nation’s current parties survive the next two years?  Will our very two-party system begin to self-destruct? 

            Was the Democratic Party doomed to minority status in the Deep South forty years ago?

            The victory balloons still had air in them at many Republican campaign celebrations last week when Ben Bernanke and his colleagues on the Federal Reserve Board let loose with a heavy spray of cold water on all those candidates who have vowed to keep government spending under control.

            In one fell swoop, the Fed released a chunk of new money into the economy by way of a $600 billion purchase of treasury bonds.  While this action doesn’t result in immediate cash flowing into the economy, as the Obama stimulus act of 2008 did, the Fed hopes it will have the same positive effect, to wit: an increase in economic activity.

            Okay, I know that any time mention of the Federal Reserve gets into a conversation (or a blog post) most people look for someone else to talk to (or something else to read).  But hang with me on this one, because I’m going to make it easy to understand. 

            Let’s talk a little unadulterated Econ 101.  You know, that course that you never took because it included too much math.  Here’s the pared down version, without all those troublesome numbers.

            And today’s lesson, since we are still suffering from the throes of it, is recession.

            Recessions occur when the flow of money in an economic system is too slow (or the demand for it is too weak). 

            Think of the economy of a community as measured by the amount of money in circulation.  Assume there is a fixed amount, that is, there is only so much, and everyone in the community has to get by on what there is. 

            Assume that in this community, as in all modern communities, certain members of the community (we’ll call them merchants) set up shops in which they sell goods that they believe other members of the community want and/or need.  As goods are produced by these merchants’ shops, they are offered for sale to other members of the community who pay for those goods with some of the money they have.

            The merchants then give some of the money they receive for the sale of those goods to their employees, the folks who actually got their hands dirty making the goods.  Those folks, of course, then go and buy other goods from other merchants who also employ folks who make their goods.

            Of course, the merchants keep some of the money they receive for themselves.  They use some of it to buy goods for themselves and their families (just like all the other members of the community), but they also use some of the money to expand their own businesses.  For example, they increase the production of their original goods so they can sell more of them or they expand the line of goods they produce so they can increase the market of potential buyers of their goods in the community.

            In the meantime, the workers (employees) seek more money from the merchants so they can buy some of the goods they haven’t been able to afford before.  The merchants want to keep their employees happy, because without them they won’t have anyone to make the goods their shops sell, but they don’t want to give them too much money, because if they do, they won’t have as much for themselves and for the expansions they want for their shops.

            So the merchants work out agreements with their employees who then use the additional money they receive from those agreements to buy more goods from more merchants.

            Now eventually, as more goods are produced that more members of the community want to buy, that fixed amount of money that the community has to pass around from merchants to employees to other merchants and to other employees and so on is just not going to be enough to keep everyone happy.

            At that point more money is needed to keep everyone happy.  So, the community creates a central banking system that is responsible for keeping enough money in the flow to keep everyone happy.  And that, essentially, is the Fed’s job.  (It’s also the government’s job, but in our story, we’re assuming the government of our community is impotent for reasons that we’ll call “gridlock”).

            In a smoothly running economic system, the flow of the money in the community is at a pace that is just fast enough to keep everyone happy (and by happy, we mean that everyone has just enough money to buy the goods they need and want and that the merchants have enough money to pay their employees and to expand their own shops).

            But sometimes things happen in the community that mess up that all-important flow of money.  Sometimes, for example, natural or human created calamities occur that require everyone to give up lots of money to save a segment of the community.  (For real examples of this phenomenon, see Hurricane Katrina, TARP and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.)  Then, after that calamity has passed the members of the community may feel (perhaps correctly) that they have less money to do the things they used to do.

            Suddenly that all-important flow of money slows appreciably.  Now the merchants aren’t selling as many goods because the employees of the other shops aren’t buying them.  Now merchants are getting less money to pay their employees, and so they are laying off some of them. 

            Now with fewer people working, the flow of money slows even more, and before long a vicious cycle of less money being circulated in the community becomes an economic slowdown that is called a recession.

            The government, if it weren’t in gridlock, could resolve the crisis by pumping more money into the community, perhaps by passing a stimulus bill, thereby increasing the flow of money.  But with the government in gridlock, the Fed has to step in.

            It can create more money, because the community has given it that power.  And so the Fed creates more money in the hope the increase will stimulate the merchants to use more of it, which will then lead to more employees spending more and more merchants hiring more employees.

            Eventually, the economy of the community will revive if enough money is pumped into it, because having money, as we all know, creates an inherent instinct to spend it (in one way or another).  Individuals look for new things to buy/own; merchants look for new ways to grow their companies.  That part of our story is called the human condition (greed might be another word for it) .

            Recessions are part of the economic cycle.  In time, they end, whether because of naturally evolving market conditions or because of Fed/government intervention.  Doing nothing can work, but it can take a whole lot longer and be a whole lot more painful for just about everyone in the community.

            Ben Bernanke understands this little lesson in economics, even if his Republican friends in government don’t.

            “And they’re going crazy; they’re going crazy!”                                               -New York Giants’ announcer Russ Hodges, calling the 1951 “shot heard ‘round the world.”

            By beating the Texas Rangers convincingly in five games, the San Francisco Giants put an exclamation mark on a baseball season that can best be described as the year the underdogs came through.

            From start to finish, the season was marked by the success of teams that were not supposed to succeed.  Individual loyalties notwithstanding (as I’ve made clear in the past, I live and die with the Dodgers), the result can only be good for the sport.

            The season began with almost everyone predicting a re-match of last year’s Fall Classic between the Phillies and the Yankees.  Both teams were loaded with great players and were possessed of the financial ability to add to their rosters if and when they needed to.  And both did get to the playoffs, albeit the Yankees had to do it as the American League’s wild card entry, as they stumbled through the last six weeks of the season, no better than a .500 team.

            That fact alone might qualify as something of an upset, since the Yankees have (on paper, at least) a starting lineup that is loaded with stars (A-Rod, Jeter, Teixeira, Posada, Cano) and a pitching staff that starts with CC Sabathia and ends with Mariano Rivera (‘nuff said).  But more than a few of those players showed their age as the season wound down, and though they swept through the Minnesota Twins in the first round of the playoffs, they looked completely overmatched in losing four of six games to the Rangers.

            The Rangers started the season as a predicted also-ran.  They had some talent, but the pitching, as always, looked suspect, and the hitting was going to rely on Josh Hamilton (a recovering alcoholic) and Vladimir Guerrero (who had stumbled on bad legs in his last year with the Angels).  Hamilton then went on to have an MVP-like year (32 home runs-100 runs batted in-.359 batting average), and if he doesn’t get it, it will only be because Guerrero (29-115-.300) does.

            Texas started strong and then, in mid-season pulled a real coup when GM Nolan Ryan traded for Cliff Lee, who dominated in three straight post-season games (two wins against Tampa Bay and one against the Yankees) before running into those giant-killing Giants.

            But the guys from the Bay Area were the real story of the year, and few, if any, pre-season prognosticators predicted it.  In fact, even fewer of those scribes thought the Giants would get to the World Series after they squeaked into the playoffs by beating San Diego for the National League West title on the last day of the season.

            But this being the year of the underdog, they did prevail, beating that mighty Texas lineup in five games (and beating the mighty Mr. Lee twice in doing so). 

            This was a Giants team that had lost as many as 90 games just two years ago (its first without Barry Bonds) and 91 the year before that (its last with him).  But even though General Manager Brian Sabean had almost been booed out of town in 2007 after signing another Barry (Zito, the ex-Oakland A’s Cy Young winner, who had two miserable seasons before regaining some of his former magic), he continued throughout the season to make roster moves.

            Thus he picked up Pat Burrell, who had been released by Tampa Bay after barely hitting .200 early in the season.  Burrell went to the minors, got some semblance of his swing back, and came up to the big club in mid-season to become a power hitter the team desperately needed.   (In 96 games, he hit 18 home runs and knocked in 51.) 

            And, in mid-August, when the Florida Marlins waived an outfielder named Cody Ross, Sabean grabbed him, too (primarily so the Padres, who were waiting to nab Ross, couldn’t get him).  Ross won a starting spot in the outfield and socked five post-season home runs, while winning MVP honors for the team’s six-game rout of the Phillies.

            Sabean also bolstered a sometimes-shaky bullpen by adding a tough left-hander, Javier Lopez, from Pittsburgh at the trading deadline, and by trading for right-hander Ramon Ramirez (from the Red Sox) on the same day.  Both pitchers played key roles in the Giants’ playoff run.

            That run began with a tough, four-game series against the Atlanta Braves in which all four games were decided by one run.  And except for the game the Giants lost, they were all low scoring, which is to say, the Giants pitching was dominant. 

            If it’s true that good pitching stops good hitting, then the Giants have just proved that great pitching stops all hitting.  Their hitting was sporadic during the regular season (actually it was anemic until Burrell and rookie sensation Buster Posey, their catcher, came on board), but the pitching was very strong, and it only got stronger when the post-season began.  That’s when Sabean and field manager Bruce Bochy made a tough, but critical, decision.  They left Zito off the playoff roster, knowing that they had four better (read that much better) starters and that the lefty was unlikely to be a fit for the bullpen. 

            So, instead, the Giants went with a four-man rotation headed by two-time Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum, hard-throwing right hander Matt Cain, and a pair of young lefties, Jonathan Sanchez (who already had a no-hitter to his credit) and Madison Bumgarner (who, at 21, had only been on the big league roster for half the season).

            Say what you will about the suddenly hot bats of Ross, Aubrey Huff, Freddy Sanchez, Juan Uribe and Edgar Renteria (whose home run iced the final win over the Rangers, thereby winning him the World Series MVP award), it was the pitching of those four, and the lockdown performance of closer Brian Wilson (he of the heavy-duty black beard), that propelled this team to its first championship in 56 years and its first-ever in San Francisco. 

            And finally, in the city by the Bay, the happiest form of hysteria reigns.  

            They’re going crazy; they are, indeed, going crazy!