Travels With An Airhead

The Economic Crisis

— by Notch Miyake

As I predicted in my last column, I did not win the election. It was a hard-fought campaign, but I stuck to the issues instead of relying on negative ads as my opponents did. Of course, that's why I lost.

But I am proud to say I got as many electoral votes as Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. And I spent a lot less money than they did. That's one of the great things about this country: Anybody can run for President. But you can't win unless you spend a lot of money. As an airhead rider, you know I'm not going to do that.

Unfortunately, the election did not solve the economic crisis, which is now at the same level as the Great Depression (GD). However, we cannot call it the GD since the name is already taken. So I am proposing that we call the current crisis the GDII (D2 for short) and we rename the 1929 crisis the GDI (D1 for short).

This usage is not without precedent. Before 1941, there was only the World War (WW). They didn't call it WWI, because it was the "War to End All Wars". Hence there was no need to give it a number. That was it. They even created a government body, the League of Nations, to insure we would never have to fight another WW. This was a lot like the creation of the FDIC and Federal Reserve after GDI, to insure we would never have another GD.

So, in 1941, there was an unanticipated problem. It was solved by renaming the WW: WWI and counting from there. My proposal is exactly the same: rename the GD: GDI and start counting.

In 1941 there were no computers and cell phones. People laboriously wrote messages on paper and sent them through the mail. The benefit of this system was the lack of the vast volume of stupid e-mails and text messages that plague our lives today. It must have been very pleasant not to have to spend all that time deleting stuff. Wow. Free time.

But that's not my point. There was no need to save keystrokes back then, so there was no need to abbreviate an abbreviation so it could be entered more readily on a cell phone or Blackberry keypad. Today we rely on electronic communication, so I also propose we use D1 for GDI and D2 for GDII for all text messages and Blackberry e-mail messages.

We need our government to address this critical economic problem immediately. A special session of Congress and a summit meeting of the Group of Seven should be convened. We need to a special investigator from the Justice Department.

Send your Congressman an e-mail or text message immediately. Tell them we have to get this problem resolved before GDII (D2) gets even worse and becomes the Great Disaster (GGDD). Because, if we don't call it GDII, we won't be able to fix it.

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