Birds on the Brain

Is the “jump” in unemployment claims really a “surprise”? To whom? It feels to me like the classic Doonesbury cartoon about the “secret” bombing of Cambodia, in which two peasant farmers are being interviewed, and both of them explain that the bombing wasn’t secret to them. “I stood right here,” one of them says, “and I said, ‘Look, here come the bombers.’” Out in the country, there is no surprise anymore that more people are out of work. Chronically high unemployment is part of daily life now. We see it on the local news, hear about it on the radio, talk about it at the corner joint. We develop elaborate coping strategies — one of which, unfortunately, seems to be blaming our unemployed neighbors for their plight. There is a sullen ugliness building in the land, and professorial explanations about “the long-term” aren’t cutting it any more. And, no matter how correct the president is about the destructively goofy ideas coming from the other side, it doesn’t hide the fact that, for too many people, many of his policies seem to be happening somewhere else to somebody else.