An Asset

Letter to the Bank #54

Dear Longshot,

It's been so long I've completely forgotten your name. It is possible your bank changed hands since we last spoke, and I use the word spoke loosely considering we have never, in fact, spoken. Are you still you, or have you morphed into someone else? Has your staff turned over? Is it facing the other way? Is the new new team on board with financial regulation or already finding ways around it? I gather all financial regulation is pretty much demolished before it can ever take hold. Sad really. I'd like to get this relationship going again if only to keep you on your toes. You certainly keep me on mine with your continually badgering me for my next interest payment. Like I told the previous gentleman I'd appreciate it if you threw more of my payments at principal in future. Then we might get ourselves on more of an even footing. We'd almost be able to look each other in the eye! A society where the distance between the rich and poor had been substantially eroded would be a thing to see wouldn't it?

Yours sincerely,

K. W.

PS-I'm feeling a little flush! Sold a couple of drawings and have more than enough in my pocket to pay for lunch this week!

Letter to the Bank #53 (Financial Streaking)

Dear Bullrider,

Hello! Your transparently ridiculous friend here, or more precisely ridiculously transparent friend...the one who believes you should/we should all be up front when it comes to the money we do or don’t have. I understand that smoke and mirrors are all part of the game but this game you are all playing is now ruining lives. You are leaving a trail of destruction in your wake—foreclosures and oil spills being just the tip of the ice-burg—not to be rude but the public is beginning to perceive you all as murderous thugs who are indifferent to life as we mostly know it.

So why is it that when I wish to bend an ear it is yours I turn to? I believe if I can bend your steely, sludge filled cochlea there might just yet be hope for us all. As obtuse as I may be when it comes to balancing a check book I may be the one best situated to see this whole shebang of toppling and regenerating stock quotes for the soggy cardboard edifice that it is. To the world of high finance I am the quintessential outsider (no longer victim but wizened observer).


My proposal is this:

We must all engage in a new openness regarding our personal finances and recognize the inarguable fact that, like the Greeks we live beyond our means and perhaps, like the Greeks, are in danger of having assumptions about what we deserve—like retirement at you know...forty, and so forth. These assumptions are based on what? Certainly they are not based on reality. We are all in debt whatever way you choose to look at it. Even you guys are in debt. The bonuses comprise the money you don’t throw at your debt obligations because having (as you all are so sure you do) the money smarts, you don’t want to tie up your money in petty matters like reducing the abstractions and distractions imposed by debt!

I’ve a name for this new plan of mine—Financial Streaking.

Henceforth we shall bare our financial souls.
I’ll be the first.
Just when people are least suspecting it, in the middle of a nationally televised football game for example, I shall rip off my facade and run across the pitch of our shared existence, plow through our collective dreams and so reveal the shallowness of the motivations at their core.

You’ll hear the sound of shock and awe as I determinedly streak, financially butt naked for all the world to see, dropping personal information like PIN numbers and passwords as I go.

Being human and all too frail my gumption and gall will run out quickly and so, if all goes to plan I shall needs must reach the changing rooms (preferably of my favorite team though truth being told I’m indifferent to football and use the analogy only to garner a populist connection to my otherwise whacky theme), having evaded security as I go.

Back on the field there it will lie, throbbing and sad, teetering on the twenty yard line, my dirty laundry, the truth of my financial instability, and in it the masses shall see therein reflected the paucity of their own dreams, based as they too often are on materialistic yearnings.

Yours sincerely,

Kristian Witherkay

Michael Moore on Brian Lehrer

Letter to the Bank #52

Dear Mr. Bullrider (or current BM if not available),

This idea is so insane…it just might work. Why don’t we simply delete all debt? I know it is a simplistic but I believe simplifying is good. We can assume debtholders won’t like the idea too much but visionary ideas must always face and overcome resistance. If we are ever to restore balance to the universe this is the only way. To the Mr. Potters of this world, for those who have never encountered debt the idea will no doubt be seen as dystopian, nightmarish, but for those in the hole—the other 99% —it is not just a utopian dream but one that is within reach! As the majority we can vote to end all debt because we live in a democracy. Of course the debt doesn’t stop at the borders and not every country believes in the democratic process. There are problems we’ll have to overcome. Naturally picking the date for Debt Deletion Day would be tricky. The whole thing would have to happen instantly so people don’t go hiding their assets or knocking down doors to find them. This is more of a headache than I thought. You could help. Give me your thoughts—the thoughtful ones not the reactive kind.

It is funny to think that communist China stood in counterpoint to capitolist America for half a century but now holds the purse strings. They are the greatest debt holder of all! My idea should appeal to capitolists everywhere. Even the banks that are too big to fail owe money to someone, somewhere! The US woud bennefit enormously if China freed it from its fiduciary obligations. At the other end of the spectrum homeowners could keep their homes to salvaging the remaining tattered remnants of this beleagured society. Surely that would be a good thing? Oh I know…legal paperwork would be voided. Ownership would have to be reconceived that sort of thing. These are minor details. The point is to let people be. Leave them alone. Get off their backs. Cease with the threats. Go silent. Be gone. Let people live their lives, their all too brief lives, with some semblance of dignity! This current system is no longer tenable. We need to circumvent, short circuit, the system. Spelunkers in the Matrix can surely find a way.

Perhaps we can find a happy compromise. If we were to be more modest in our goals and merely iron out the wrinkles in debt, even it all out, spread the pain. It would be good for people to feel in control again, self-respect, and bodily hygiene would return and, having learned to iron they’d all be well dressed to boot.  If we all took less and gave back less…for example you keep the art I sent you, keep the books you borrowed, and, for goodness sake, keep all that paperwork you insist on sending me. You know I never read it. And I’ll keep what I already have which means you’ll hardly notice a thing! If you don’t want me to write to you any more I won’t—all the less paperwork for you to deal with!

In short I’ll stop bugging you if you stop bugging me.

Yours sincerely,

Art Witherkay

Letter to the Bank #51

Dear BM,

I’ve been attempting to write haikus of late though not in their strictest form. They are pop haikus, westernized impoverishments of a transcendent form.

In a World That Shoots its own Foot
There’s a hand I often see
That likes to point at me.
Paralyzed from the shin bone up
I gawk at the passers by

My mind feels like a spiral cooked ham these days, hurtling inward to the core, soon to be turned into soup. All I wish to do is turn my protracted whine into an oratorio, convert my confusion into clarity. The desire to share the fruits of my labor with the world is overwhelming but who wants wrinkled skins, and mushy texture, spotting and bruises? It would be nice to share excitement for a change, the thrill of travel, of making new discoveries, the joy of painting.

Why do I keep addressing these letters to you, my friend? Because it seems to me essential that you, more than most, must come to your senses. I’m hoping you will finally grasp the extent of the havoc you have unleashed on this ravaged world.

I’ve always had an angry bent I suppose but mostly have always been regarded as an optimist by nature, not all dark and bent out of shape. That is the awful power of debt—it turns you into gnarly roots and vines. I’ve become an ancient olive tree in the past few years but you wouldn’t want to make oil out of my olives, no siree! Debt crushes the life out of a person. Lack of financial health is more damaging to one’s physical health than lack of exercise! You are positively no help. I can’t trust you any more or any of your ilk. Money experts are expert at making money, but not at helping people manage their own. If people do manage their money well, the experts, I suppose, make less? Is that how it works? I thought if you helped me and I did better then so did you.That is how naive I have been for all these years.

I suppose I keep writing to you out of that optimism I mentioned, that part of me that strains to comprehend, or rather find, the heart in you.

Sincerely,

Art Witherkay

PS_Here is another haiku for you:

We are the bankers’ wet dream
All that we earn they get
For a job poorly done
To maintain good credit
And a debt that will never
Ever diminish

Letter to the Bank #50

Dear BM,

I keep writing in hopes of discovering I am not alone. But you never answer my letters. I persist because I have hope. I’m a hopeful pessimist. Also you not responding allows me to speak my mind. Here is my latest thought:

The institution of banking as we know it has had it’s day. I do wonder what you observe from the inside though— do you see fine marble columns that bolster a sense of security—or do you see decay? Do you notice the gilt work (as it were) or the guilt, that insidious virus, working its way into the fabric of your networks, despite all efforts on the part of your guilty peers to ignore, sideline or deny that any such thing exists, or would even have reason to exist as all that they do is above board and beyond reproach?

So it is that I find myself standing on the pulse of my local branch, the sunlight streaming through that splendid rose window setting my hair aflame. I hold on like some heroic sailor going down with his ship. Then I hesitate. Is this how I want to go? Do I lash myself to your mast and keep making those massive interest payments to your floundering institution, into that leprechaun pot of gold you so cherish? Or do I jump ship, abandon my obligations, and attempt to swim all the way to the shore? The latter feels no less noble these days. This life of indentured servitude in a society so batty it can’t tell its head from its toes doesn’t ring right. I’d like to try something else for a while, somewhere else, somewhere off the grid where it is warm and the life is a simple one. I loved Robinson Crusoe when I was a kid!

Best regards,

Art Witherkay

Admit it. You enjoy my letters. Without them you’d be terribly out of touch with how the other half, rather the other 90%, think.