Labor Daze
This holiday weekend isn't supposed to be so grim. It's supposed to be about family, friends, the end of summer. There's a pennant race on in the AL East, which is exciting and tense. The weather—in New England, anyway—is glorious. Labor Day is, at is best, a wonderful and relaxing time before the pace of life quickens with the beginning of school and the onset of autumn.
Of course, this year's going to be different; this Labor Day feels like a watershed. There's no good news from Iraq, and the story of the 950 people killed there in a panicky stampede is almost too sad to bear. The situation in New Orleans and Mississippi is horrific. This kind of thing—looting, graverobbing, banditry, corpses floating through the streets—is supposed to happen in the Philippines, or Bali, or some third world nation we don't pay much attention to normally. Meanwhile, on the highways, a different kind of looting is going on: gas stations charging anywhere from $3 to $6 a gallon for fuel they've already bought. (As one Rhode Island gas station attendant put it to me today, shaking his head in frustration, "That gas from the Gulf probably wouldn't have shown up here till January.")
And so far, our president has been disappointing—more the guy who looked dazed and confused in that classroom (tick-tick-tick, went Michael Moore's clock in "Fahrenheit 9-11," as the minutes dragged by and the World Trade Center burned) than the president who stood on top of a heap of rubble and called out inspirationally to the people working to clear the wreckage of the World Trade Center. It didn't help that the president was on vacation until he belatedly realized that this was one crisis he couldn't pedal through.
So this Labor Day weekend feels like a turning point. Towards what, I'm not sure. But I'd say that it caps a summer in which the Bush presidency has effectively come to an end. As soon as someone takes a poll, it will show that Bush's ratings have dropped to new lows...and he's already at record lows.
Of course, presidents can come back from dips in polls. And Bush may yet rebound to save face with the hurricane situation. But the president's real problems are twofold, and they won't go away: Iraq, and oil. We can't get out of Iraq any time soon, and we certainly don't appear to have any plan to win the war. And the huge jump in oil prices—wherever they wind up—is going to gut the economy.
Driving on the highway today, I couldn't help but look at the trucks rolling along and wonder how much more people would be paying to transport goods—costs which will invariably be passed on to consumers. I also couldn't help but smile a little bit as I watched people pull their SUVs up to the pumps. What does it cost now to fill up the tank of a Ford Explorer? $75? $100? I've never liked SUVs, so part of me is happy to see them suddenly become the bane of their owners' existence. The problem is that fatcat yuppies driving BMW and Lexus SUVs can take the hit. For working people driving trucks and vans they need for their jobs, this is going to be rough.
And the more people spend on gas, the less they'll spend on other goods. That's because Americans don't have a big cushion of disposable income; the poverty rate is at 12 percent, our savings rates are the lowest on record, and we're maxed out on credit cards and mortgage payments. It's not as if we can dip into our pockets for gas money until things get back to normal. In any case, "normal" may never be the same again. The era of cheap gas is almost surely over. And while in the long run that may not be such a bad thing, as a nation, we haven't prepared for that transition...which is kind of like building levees that can only withstand a Class III hurricane.
I don't mean to be gloomy, but we could be seeing the toughest times in this country in seventy years. Too bad our president's initials are GWB and not FDR.
