The Weary Warrior Returns

Never play airsoft with your employees--especially if they are suited up in full camo and sniper ghilli gear. I don't think the camo is really very effective at hiding you, as a shooter, when you are holding a dayglo orange barrel-tip that can be seen from here to Lake Elsinore, but wearing all that gear is a good guard against feeling a "hit." I only played one round of "defend the mine" and I took a hit in the head and one in the trigger finger and one in the donkey cart. The head hit was the most jarring.



"Get down, Dad, Brandon's got a sniper rifle."

"He can't hit me from there. Ouch. Yes, I guess he can. I'm dead. Hear me? Dead! Hold your--ouch--fire."

Earlier in the week, we visited a premium internet airsoft warehouse--Evike.com in Rosemead--and these people were loading up the UPS truck with what looked like four or five cubic yards of gear, to be shipped all over the country. They may talk of nationalizing the banks and bailing out General Motors, but it looks to me as though the airsoft industry is doing very well. (Don't tell anyone; someone will figure out how to tax what works in order to pay for what doesn't.)

Over the course of this nation-wide financial crisis, I have developed a mild addiction to CNBC, and I was one of the first to see Rick Santelli call for a "tea party" on the floor of the Chicago exchange. I was gratified to see that Americans, overwhelmingly, still have the sense to call President Obama's mortgage relief plan what it is: grossly unjust. It rewards people who took unreasonable risks by taking money from people who saved enough to put something down on their homes. As the plan is commonly understood, the only people eligible for relief will be those who helped cause the problem in the first place by over-leveraging themselves. In the same sense, it also rewards the very bankers who made these kinds of loans, and the wall street people who re-packaged and sold them to investors who didn't do their research. In one sense, it is exactly what you would expect from a president who wouldn't even release his transcripts at Columbia and Harvard: a plan to help failures, authored by someone afraid of being accused of failure.

A few folks rightly observe that we bailed out Wall Street CEOs; why not a few of America's under-class, trying to stay in their homes? The answer is that two wrongs don't make a right. We simply don't have the resources to protect every square inch of the status quo. At some point, we have to realize what Davey Crocket realized nearly two centuries ago: you cannot use the public purse to benefit private individuals, just because you have the votes to do so.

This ethical moral lapse--this corruption in the White House itself--is not quite as disturbing as the sense I am getting that an entire generation of Americans could care less about what is right and what is wrong. Cliff Mason, a young, Harvard educated moral dim-wit, who helps Jim Cramer write copy for CNBC, wrote this week that it doesn't matter what is "fair" and what is "unfair." The only thing that matters is shoring up the banks. We've been hearing that a lot lately. Stop worrying about "ideology." Stop worrying about taking the moral high ground. Just do anything to keep the system rolling, no matter what the moral hazard. This is an emergency people: throw out the truth if you can't handle it.

As one of the traders on the exchange put it, "why don't we all just stop paying our mortgages?"

Think about it, Cliffy. It's not the banks that keep America rolling, or Washington, or Wall Street. It's people doing the right thing. The only thing that keeps a bigger man from dashing Cliffy's brains on the sidewalk and emptying his wallet is his sense of what is fair, what is just, what is true--that divine spark called "conscience."

Here's to hoping America rediscovers what Cliff didn't find at Harvard.