Now He Tells Us

I have a confession to make. For months now, ever since I first heard our splendid president say that X jobs were to be "created or saved," the last part of the phrase always fairly hurriedly, so much so that the media people to whom he was speaking apparently couldn't hear the "saved" part and thus never asked the obvious question, "How will jobs be 'saved'? And how do you measure that?"

Anyway, I must confess I thought he was lying because I couldn't think how one could know that a job was saved.

Now I know: somewhere, someone, maybe President Obama, maybe someone else, said that "teachers and firepeople" and the like would have their jobs saved. Of course, duh, the purpose of much of the stimulus was to bail out not those that were said to need it, but especially the profligate local and state governments, who don't have the luxury of spending more than they take in. And because local and state political leaders always threaten us with laying off the useful and essential government people, instead of devising other ways of living wthin their means, at least this part of what passes for our representative government now makes sense. I am a slow learner.

By the way, the picture is said to be that of Lenin reading an issue of Pravda—Russian for truth. In the last half of the 20th century ordinary Russians read it backwards, or 180 degrees from what it said. It might be interesting to read the New York Times in that way, just to see what would happen. My grandfather would tell my brother Gerald and me, when he was trying to fix the old tractor, to "start 'er up and we'll see why she don't run."