As usual, I was remodeling their house, and one of them asked me why I called everything from tile mortar, which is sludgy and gray, to drywall compound, which is smooth and white, “mud.” Having been in the construction business for more than ten years at the time, I’d never really thought about it, and it had never occurred to me how weird that term would sound to the uninitiated.

Q: Why do you call that stuff mud, when it”s totally different from those other things you call mud, and none of them are really mud?

A: Well, for people who build things, mud is just mud, and you use different types for different jobs.

Q: But why do you call it mud?

At this point, I decided that I ought to think for a second, and not just say, like I usually would, “because I said so.”  It seemed like a Teachable Moment.

A:  Well, since humans first started building things, if they didn’t have lumber they built with mud.  The first bricks were mud, and they still are, but baked.  Concrete is mud, but with sand, rocks, and lime to make it harden naturally.   I think the word is so old that it just stuck.  Humans like to play in the mud.  (They seemed vaguely satisfied with this explanation.)

But today, the implications of the interchangeability of mud maybe need more thorough explication, to the vast majority of us who think mud is just that brown stuff you stepped in that thankfully isn’t shit, and don’t understand that we have more types of mud in the world than Eskimos have snow.  The fact that BP got its muds mixed up, repeatedly, is the crux of the situation we have where the Gulf of Mexico is rapidly becoming the Cuyahoga River of the new century, and while journalists and the general public are as naive about mud as my nephews were as children, no one seems capable of plainly explaining these distinctions.

You see, drilling mud isn’t really mud at all; it’s more of a lubricant, and lacks the structural permanence any respectable mud ought to have, so is really only for use in firm materials, not to plug intractable holes.  Pumping a bunch of it into a rapidly fissuring seabed is like running a lot of potato peelings down the garbage disposal; it works for a bit, but soon the drain is running again, albeit more slowly.  The other mud, the cementitious type which was somehow supposed to harden into a tappable valve for a gigantic geyser in super cold water and thousands of pounds of pressure, wasn’t even tested as to which sort of mud it was, and whether it would do the job.  (The building inspectors test every load of such mud that is poured into a skyscraper, for chemical composition and dried strength…)  Worse, the suspect mud was poured into forms that were out of whack due to inaccurate placement, and no inspector was there to check this prior to pouring, as they would be if you or I wanted to put in, say, steps to our back porch.  So, “big government,” as currently constituted, makes a construction company leap through numerous hurdles to avoid the potentially detrimental effects from a collapsing building or bridge due to the improper or promiscuous defining of the term, “mud,” but lets huge foreign oil companies just shrug and say, “mud is mud,” and be done with it.

I think the BP board, as well as the US government, could use some 6-year olds to ask, “what do you mean, mud?”

To anyone with a passing acquaintance with the bankrupt Tribune Company that came from reading its newspapers, it would seem counterintuitive that the charlatans responsible for the current crummy simulacra of those once-respectable, if not great, papers that now land with barely a sound on long-suffering porches from coast to coast would be getting bonuses this year, if ever.  The organ with which I’m most familiar (well, the other organ…), the Los Angeles Times, has, under the Tribune Company’s “stewardship,” gone from being the Paper of Record of the West into being a shoddy, disreputable advertiser whose current claim to fame, aside from selling its editorial content to advertisers, stems from having “discovered” Jonah Goldberg. ( That’s something the Pulitzer Committee is sure to notice….)

Beside the fact that ordinary people tend to think of bankruptcy as a time of suffering and humbling austerity, the Tribune Company is, remember, in bankruptcy for a reason; they shat all over their product and now no one wants to buy it.  But like all worthless, unaccountable monopolies, they have a lot of hungry executive mouths to feed, and unlike their many creditors, (not to mention their cheated employees and customers…) the big boys will be fed.  Lots.

By Michael Oneal | Tribune Co. plans to pay 35 of its top executives $14.9 million in additional 2009 bonuses, a court filing revealed late Monday, despite pointed opposition to the proposal from several key constituents in its 17-month-old Chapter 11 bankruptcy case.

The company describes the bonuses, devised as two plans, as rewards for steering the company through bankruptcy court while generating total operating cash flow of $494 million in 2009.

Ah, that “reward” must be like the “retention bonuses” of which Wall Street is so fond, except for the niggling fact that it comes from a dying industry with no jobs available, and goes to people who disgraced their company, financially and strategically, and will continue to do so.

The payments would supplement $42.1 million in management incentive bonuses the court allowed Tribune Co. to pay in February to approximately 670 managers, including most of the executives included in the most senior group.

See, it turns out that the $14 million is really more like $60 million, (since February, that is…) which is money being directly stolen from creditors, readers, and employees, for the feat of having ripped off the same three stakeholders so successfully.  Just like the bank bonuses, and just like all the rest of them. it’s  money for nothing, and perks for free.  Naturally, Tribune resorted to a “government” bankruptcy court to expensively bless all this theft, since thanks to the magic of the “market,” corporate thieves cash in while less well-dressed criminals serve hard time.  Innocence is, as the Free Market would dictate, most typically determined by the price of one’s lawyer’s suit. (see Simpson, O.J.)

The Tribune Company’s outrageous cashing in on utter failure merely lands atop the massive pile of other fraudulent, freeloading enterprises gone Galt like BP, Massey Energy, Goldman Sachs, Enron, Blackwater, Halliburton, and on and on.  Not a one would last a day in the Free Market without the tender mercies of their supposedly overbearing sugar daddies, the American Taxpayer, and it’s our job to just pay up, because a lot of influential folks with a lot of money decided that this would be so.  We must Look Forward once again, but with lighter wallets, something we seem to be getting used to by now.

Please, bring back the welfare queens… at least they weren’t so expensive.

Would that the rest of us had such forgiving performances reviews as George Bush did in 2004.  ”Well, as a country we went financially quite a way from the black to the red already, with no end in sight , but your two other big initiatives, the wars, will at least provide us loss carryovers so we won’t have to pay taxes until 2125….  Great job!”   Or the bankster, “Well, you did crash the world economy and cheat your own best customers for personal gain in the process, but the way you got us all that free Fed money shows that you’re a real team player….  Here’s another billion, and a bigger plane!”  Sadly, those poor guys in the oil industry, who actually do something, or are at least supposed to, always get the short end of the stick.  Unlike Presidents or Wall Streeters, who ruin lives so subtly and at such a discreet distance that it almost seems genteel, and certainly tolerable, the oil boys do have to produce something to get paid, and unfortunately that thing is messy.

Years of playing “Battleship” with the American military, however, and being lavished with tax breaks and lax oversight by fawning politicians and compromised regulators started to make Big Oil think that they, too, had stepped out of the dreary and dangerous basement of heavy industry into the rarified, risk-free penthouses of magic money, but they’re finding out to their considerable chagrin that this isn’t so….   George W. Bush, never much of a believer in Murphy’s Law, nonetheless wisely chose politics when he found out that oil was too hard.  Then, in office, he set about making oil easier, with horrific results for all concerned.  Watch what you wish for, and all that.

There’s something intuitive, really, about the idea that poking holes 20,000 feet beneath the surface of the earth, in rough seas, to bring up flammable gases and liquids is a little tricky, and no matter how widely liability were spread, one good hit with Murphy’s Law and your company, industry, and reputation, not to mention vast swaths of aquatic life, are completely shot to hell for multiple generations.  It takes a particularly blind arrogance and an astonishing sense of personal infallibility utterly foreign to most of the real world to simply not bother to dot every “I” and cross every “t” before proceeding with something so risky.  What does, say, an engineer, or for that matter a waitress, think of people who show up for such highly paid work so dismally unprepared?  Not much, I’m guessing.

For this reason, I hold some hope that Americans will finally get some admittedly petroleum-scented oxygen to their brains from this incident and start to call a halt to the relentless abandonment of accountability at the top that has plunged so many of us into debt, destitution, or despair, while the perpetrators are complete strangers to the harsh and unforgiving retribution we would receive for such shockingly incompetent performance.  Apologists like Mary Landrieu (the Republicans have been uncharacteristically quiet…) only drive the point home further…   She talks endlessly about the importance of “jobs,” when everyone listening knows that had they done their “jobs” like BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, or for that matter George Bush or Citibank, did, they would no longer have them, and they would have a tough time finding another.  For real Americans,  Murphy’s Law has not been repealed, and sympathy for its deniers is pretty hard to come by.

The overlords who have elbowed aside democracy with their money are quite aware that the thing they have going is too good to be true in a nominal Democracy, and although the US is kind of big compared to what they’re used to overthrowing, it’s not unmanageable if you take your time at it.   Which they have.  At least in the media, what few interests with coins to rub together who might actually challenge corporate power on behalf of the vast majority, mainly lawyers and unions, are routinely chastised for upsetting the natural order of things, where Goliath is, you know, supposed to beat David.  And, now that they’ve managed to recast the Tea Party of yore into a made-for TV event generously sponsored by the modern equivalent of the British East India Company, I’d say that the years were well spent.

In this way, the Beckian attacks on “progressivism” are as transparent as they are politically necessary; the last time the American Government was as wholly owned by a plutocratic elite as it is today, with the widespread poverty and suffering that entailed, a lot of screwed-over people realized that at least they still could vote and spent several decades putting a stop to it.  As a result, from the end of WWII to the early seventies, Americans enjoyed the most widespread prosperity of any nation in history, and the very notion of an astronomically wealthy ruling class in a country like ours became an anachronistic aberration, as Americans perhaps descended from servants could afford to travel and tour the abandoned palaces of the Astors and Vanderbilts without shedding too many tears of sympathy about the income tax and the Servant Problem.

In the end, and this concept is not exactly new, a democratically elected and more importantly, directed,  government is our only bulwark against  corporations so wealthy that they can buy governments, and people so wealthy that they can at least rent them.  FreedomWorks, Fox News, and the Koch and WalMart heirs know this, but the followers they must dupe don’t, at least so far, so a more than usually desperate mop-up operation has ensued.  But really…  even the Astorbilts only had three or so houses, and they were a lot more tasteful than, say the best of John McCain’s seven.  (Or was it eight?)  They may also have had their private cars, but they did still take the same railroads, in some cases having actually built them, which would today be considered both vulgar and vaguely socialistic.  But even if you’re a regular Fox watcher, wouldn’t you still notice the unflattering differences and equally unflattering similarities between the superrrich of then and those of today, a realization which might prove inconvenient to the People Who Matter?

Well, yes, and that’s what everyone from Chief  Justice (!) John Roberts to simian nincompoop Sean Hannity has figured out, and damned if these worthies are going to let such socialist rigamarole get a toehold in our discourse.  Once that evil “government” has been well and truly drowned in the bathtub, the “malefactors of great wealth,” as that commie “progressive” Teddy Roosevelt called them, won’t have to waste their money anymore putting on tawdry and divisive shows each election year, and you can bet they have great ideas about what to spend it on.  It ain’t charity.

If not government, what do we realistically have, against such overwhelming odds and money?  Cole Porter may offer a clue.

After you, why, should I take the time to try?

That’s what they’re counting on.

The mountain looks so pretty when it's 12 degrees...

UPDATED BELOW:

A few years ago, I noticed that actually selling something that could be quantified, like a shoe or a car wash, had become hopelessly anachronistic in the “new” economy; we were told to pay good money for something far less tangible, “solutions.”   To what, pray tell?  Everything, as it turned out.

Any plugged-in business from housecleaning to accountancy just stopped selling what they once sold, which in the old days were something straightforward that could be easily measured in dust bunnies or IRS audits, and the preferable absence thereof, to something else entirely.  The advertising industry finally and unexpectedly just came out of the closet about its time-honored formula:  This product you never suspected you needed will solve a “problem” we just invented to sell it.  You’re not buying, say, that deodorant, mouthwash, sports car, and unusually expensive booze, you’re buying a “solution” to the not getting laid “problem.”  That problem and the “solutions” sold in its honor probably accounted for a large percentage of our fabled national wealth during the “American Century.”  The only trouble was, the “solutions” sold never solved the problem, even as Arpege and Aqua Velva sailed off the shelves, for most people the not getting laid problem, among others, was never adequately solved.  Better yet, the disappointed customers, probably rightly, blamed themselves for this unfortunate coincidence, rather than the shills that sold them whichever bill of goods.

Naturally, when any respectable Madison Avenue type spots a trend like that, you can bet it’ll be off to the races for the whole lot of them.  I mean, once it has clearly been scientifically proven that people will not only spend more than they can afford on products which offer “solutions” that never seem to materialize, but that their invariable response to each predictable failure is to seek out another potentially profitable, for its creator, anyway, “solution,” the sky is the limit.  Kind of makes shooting fish in a barrel look hard.    Given all that, there was something of a an almost unseemly pile-on.  When it became apparent that virtually every part of our “service” economy that had replaced what lay before, back in the “thing” days, was pure air, why should anyone sell anything that couldn’t creatively be described as a “solution?”  Once copier repairmen, loan sharks, and real estate agents stopped doing what they were supposed to do, and marketed themselves selling solutions instead, could hookers and drug dealers be far behind?  They, after all, sell solutions, too. The main difference is that their clients almost always get their problem, at least temporarily, “solved,” a contrast that might be unflattering to, say, mortgage brokers.

Fearing such degrading of the “solutions” brand, and the dire results it could have for such formerly trusted names as, say Blackwater or Halliburton, I am proud to report the first international conglomerate that decided to try to beat the competition by daringly selling something more obviously more substantive than tired old airy-fairy “solutions.” Siemens, the German conglomerate, must have a better ad agency than most; in addition to blanketing liberal talk with commercials about its “50,000 Americans” making America a better place and laying in a striking and controversial background ad that eclipses Daily Kos, it has blanketed the blogosphere, and probably elsewhere, with big, big news.

Wait for it….  It’s selling “answers.”  You know, those totally new things which are a lot more valuable than those crappy old solutions…..

Hookers take note.

UPDATE: A bank in Overland Park, Kansas folded yesterday.  Its name?  SolutionsBank.

Clearly, the Cheneys did the world a great disservice by giving us these dreadful daughters, who make their parents’ astonishing venality, dishonesty, and hypocrisy a tame caricature of their own, and are sure to plague us much longer than is either desirable or reasonable.  What’s good for Halliburton is good enough for General Electric and is therefore good for America, and vice-versa.  Just get a load of MSNBC lately.  After Mary’s bilious venom splattered Kerry but mostly landed on her, her book sold 143 copies, and she was tossed out by the “free market” to some A-frame in the woods where she could make turkey-baster babies with her Park Ranger, they rolled out Liz.

It would be difficult to call this one an improvement.  With ever more telegenic hair and increasingly upholstery-grade Republican attire, Liz has simply shown us something that has become depressingly familiar; with the right hair, and no other evident authority, you can say the dumbest and most false things all day long on television, as long as you’re a Republican.  The Cheneys are simply taking advantage of the Bambi-like credulity of the media, a strategy which hasn’t exactly disappointed them in the past.

The trouble is, the Cheneys have their flaws, but stupidity is not among them, and they are only magnifying their repulsiveness and maniacal sense of infallibility every time they open their mouths.  Even they must know this is unseemly.  As another famous chiseler said, and I paraphrase, “I saw my opportunities and I took ‘em.”  And I’m sure he had the decency and good sense to shut up about it afterward, too.  Why then, with an enormous, multi-generational offshore legacy of stolen taxpayer money and all the free Military-Industrial treats that go with it, basically forever, would the next generation of Cheneys want to make asses of themselves lying about everything, up to and including the weather, on national TV every day, attracting further disgusted attention to their deservedly loathed selves?  

I guess it’s the way they were raised.

You see, the ACLU is even slightly less influential in the UAE than it is here, and so over there they can just let their freak flags fly.  Imagine the small but insistent tent in Yoo’s pants as he sweatily marveled at sand-boarding, (water is just so 2003) beating with nail-studded boards, and full-on cattle prods not just here and there, but eventually right where the sun doesn’t shine.  That DVD would never leave the player, which would be especially handy if any Supreme Court justices he knows ever drop by, and they’re tired of “24″ reruns and Saving Private Ryan.  This is real blood, dudes.   And, if Bybee thought bugs were inventive, lighter fluid on the ol’ teabag is about a hundred times more awesome, especially at night, and the salt in the wounds, though kind of shopworn, still produces great screams and stuff.

But the finale, a ritual squishing of what’s left of the victim by being driven over repeatedly with a tasteful Mercedes SUV, complete with boffo bone-break sound effects, is the kind of torture-palooza that might even warm the cockles of Dick Cheney’s partially electronic heart.  And you can bet that the flattened, pulpy mess that remains is pretty unlikely to “hit” us, or much else, after that.  Just think how safe we could be.  Those guys really know how to say Dubai-bye, and aren’t so chickenhearted as we stubbornly can be about showing it.  It’s easy to see why Cheney just picked Halliburton up, paying homage in equal parts to Torquemada and Jed Clampett, and left.  What does that say about America?

Sadly, not unlike when the wife finds the secret porno, this once-treasured videotape has irritatingly fallen into the wrong hands.  Despite the vigorous efforts of Sheikh Issa’s lawyers, who were pretty successful with other righteous causes like Bush’s 2000 recount efforts, somehow the wily commies at ABC news got a hold of it, and now you just know a bunch of spoilsport hippies are going to get all in a snit.  Like Peggy Noonan says, this stuff is supposed to be (hic) m-mysterious, and now the magic’s all spoiled.  Worse, the obvious inferiority and clinically boring lameness of our own relatively half-ass torture program will be vividly on display; outdone as we were by a bunch of treacherous Ay-rabs, yet again.

Even when it comes to torture, America can’t compete.  Too bad we try.