“’The bear promptly went inverted, with feet in the air, growling and crying at the same time, flailing with his feet,’ Parker said. ‘He actually rolled off the porch.’ When it was done, the bear sat up, shook his head, seemingly to regain his wits, and then bolted ‘faster than any bear I’ve ever seen,’ he said.”
-Police Lt. Dave Parker describes tasing a “problem bear” which was spotted messing around with a fish fryer on the porch of a home in Anchorage’s Hillside neighborhood. Parker hopes the tasing “will keep the bear out of further mischief.”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Three-yes three!-poems by Gregory Pardlo.

Aquinas: The mover gives what he has to the one who is moved in that it causes him to be in motion.

Jumping often refers to something you’d rather not
get involved in, but when you’ve left the parking
lights on overnight, a jump can mean the difference
between being employed and not. Worse than having
to buy a swipe from a stranger on the bus is having to flag
a neighbor for a jump. People willing to defibrillate
flatlining cars on ice scraper mornings are like organ
donors and subway heroes. For karma like that you need
a Winnebago covered with solar panels sprouting a fountain
of jumper cables so you can spend your day suckling
weary vehicles like an electric wet nurse. By your example,
thugs would soon measure their cred by a tattooed lightning
bolt under the eye to symbolize each battery they have
sprung back to life. Soon gangs will jump-in initiates one
toothy clamp at a time, and civilians will jump all over each
other with reciprocal gifts and hugs, finding power where
power is given, a residual lifting of the spirits in the act.

Occam: Every body has an impetus which allows it to continue to move. Being moved is passing from potential to the act.

You often size up the random demographic holiday
traffic makes hoping to see yourself inside a picture bigger
than the neighborhood you know. But the knots of cars
strung in rows like Incan quipu ordain your destination for
they script your possibilities in the Nielsen lingo, abstracted
from ad copy instead of the tangible planet. So who is really
driving the soapbox you find transporting your thoughts while
you inch the highway like the Pope’s bubble-mobile? Lines at
the toll plaza are a poem where you idle in this way, mindless
as Sonny Corleone. Every procession ends in a funeral. Think
of the chain gang of reindeer and the tiny hands making toys
in Santa’s maquilas. Will you spend the whole poem reading
bumpers and vanity plates, concerned how they distance you?
At the end of this poem full of furtive glances will you count
yourself among the seers or the seen? No one sees you sleeping
but your wife, and for her you thought of nothing. Look how little
you give of yourself. How little of yourself you have been given.

Gassendi: ambulo ergo sum.

We labor to maintain them in the macadam fields around
Pep Boys, where legs dangle from the maw of upraised hoods
like tailfins draping a pelican’s beak. We can say about cars
what Jefferson said about slavery when seeking pity for his
hardships. “Like holding a wolf by the ears.” Talk about
awkward. Yet it’s for domesticating horses that he charges
Europeans with “the degeneracy of the human body.” Perhaps
we are all, like him, exhausted by our compulsion to be free
from carrying our weight, human to heap our load on some other
burdensome body we’ve subordinated to our sloth. Who could go
on schlepping the lanes flanking Eastern Parkway beneath plane
trees as trumpets from dollar vans blow Dixie? Few haven’t caved
to the runagate’s dream of those chariots come to carry us home.
Hasidim fill the streets Saturdays with ambling demonstrations
of civil-resistance. James Meredith trod a shoulder in Mississippi
for freedom. We may all go someday Pan-like marching, transported
by the rapturous clopping of the only two hooves we can own.

Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem (April, 2007). He is recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, the Lotos Club Foundation and Cave Canem. Pardlo is an associate editor of poetry for Callaloo, and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at George Washington University.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to read more? Visit our vast archive of poetry!

by Carl Hegelman

The economy is terrible right now. Almost everybody seems to agree. The business community, as represented by the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and most Republicans, has some ideas as to how to fix it: cut taxes; reduce the deficit (!); rein in Big Government spending (except defense); stop over-regulating business so they can get on with business. The Democrats have their own idea: more stimulus, in the form of, for example, extending unemployment benefits. Who’s right? If anybody?

As a corporate bond analyst, I get some perspective on this. My job is to analyze companies and try to figure out whether they can service their debt (pay interest and return the principal when it comes due), or, perhaps more often, how much of a loss their creditors (banks, bondholders, vendors, pensioners, etc) are going to take in the bankruptcy, and what the company is going to look like when it has screwed them all (except the lawyers and financiers) and emerges in a relatively debt-free state from Chapter 11. I spend a lot of time gazing at spreadsheets (in between ruminating over Solitaire, Hearts, Tetris and Bridge), corporate slide-shows and SEC filings. I listen to a lot of “earnings calls” (the conference calls given by management when their quarterly earnings numbers are released). I read the Financial Times every day. (Gave up the Journal a long time ago, fed up, finally, with the one-sidedness of its editorials).

There’s a thread that runs through most of the calls I listen to: Demand is weak; we are responding by cutting the fat and becoming leaner and meaner; when demand picks up, we’ll be in good shape.

Most of the companies I follow have a line in their income statements: Restructuring charges. When they close a plant and lay people off (“headcount reductions”), they have to pay severance and, for instance, break leases. And that’s what restructuring charges are all about. Granted, I don’t follow upper-class companies like Exxon or IBM or Microsoft; but pretty much every US company I do follow has this line in its income statement. And even most of the blue-chips have probably taken these restructuring charges at some point in the past two or three years. Yes, even Microsoft ($290 million in the March quarter of 2009).

Just as an aside here, there’s a reason for them breaking it out like that as a separate line-item in their expenses: that way, they can present it as a “one-time charge”. Analysts like me are supposed to discount it in looking at their “real” underlying cash flow and in forecasting their financial futures. It’s a one-time charge. Trouble is, it almost never is a one-time charge. That line, Restructuring Charges, appears, for most of my companies, every single quarter. Sometimes you begin to wonder what’s left to restructure.

Most CEOs and CFOs on earnings calls are not taking the big-picture view. They’re focused on the details of their own particular business. Still, I often ask myself if they see the connection that’s staring you right in the face: when is “the consumer” going to start spending again? Well, maybe when you stop firing him.

This really seems to be the root of the problem here in the US, and these earnings calls are like a microcosm of the whole US economy. You’ve probably read a hundred times that consumers are responsible for about two-thirds of GDP. (In the last four quarters up to 3/31/2010 it was close to 71%). So if they don’t have any spendable money because they’ve been fired (or are afraid they’re going to be fired), demand will be weak.

In other words: If I fire everybody, then who is going to buy the stuff I make? You can see how this turns into a vicious circle.

A corollary of this whole phenomenon, incidentally, is this: Private enterprise “surplus” as a percentage of GDP has stayed at a pretty high level-about 25% over the 12 months to 3/31/10. That’s well above the trough in the last really big recession in 1980, when it ran about 20%. At the same time, perhaps not surprisingly, corporate cash is at $1.8 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve, which at 7% of assets is as high as it’s been since the 1960s. There’s probably another reason for that other than all the money they’ve saved by their “reductions in force”: they’re haunted by the ghost of the credit crunch, when cash was very hard to come by and you couldn’t be sure your bank would survive. Still, there’s obviously a connection.

You probably think this is all leading up to a big rant against the evil corporations. Not so. I mean, there’s plenty to rant about, including the extraordinarily high salaries of the corporate managers and, particularly, the egregious parasitism of “financial services” companies whose contribution to our economy is minuscule in comparison to their cost; but staying “lean and mean” is just facing reality: keeping employees hired just for the good of US-kind is a short-term fix with bad long-term consequences.

The stock answer to this quandary is that we must invent new industries and re-train workers in the skills required to drive them; but, frankly, that’s bullshit and I think we secretly all know it. The truth is, there is no good answer to this quandary.

One thing does seem clear, though. The US Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and Republicans generally have the wrong answer. The reason businesses are not hiring is not that their taxes are too high or that they’re over-regulated or that their healthcare costs are too high or that they don’t have enough cash or that they can’t borrow. The reason is that there’s fewer and fewer people left to buy their stuff (except the Chinese, but that’s another story). It’s not even clear, really, that’s there’s anything government can do. But if we have to pick between the Republican solution and the Democrat one, well, the Democrats win by default.

Carl Hegelman (a pen name) is a corporate bond analyst and a connoisseur of leisure.

Legendary journalist Daniel Schorr-he was one of “Murrow’s boys,” he was on Nixon’s “enemies list,” and he spent the last 25 years providing commentary for NPR-has died at the age of 93.

Yes.

PREVIOUSLY: Is The Legendary Chupacabra Hanging Out In Texas? (Spoiler: Yes.)

The Machines run Facebook, and they are willing to make your racist busybody Facebook posts disappear.

Welcome to the future. I wonder how many people are working on functions for this that involve sex right now. Probably MILLIONS. [Via]

The Houma Nation, about 17,000 people who live on the Louisiana coast who are not recognized by the federal government, somehow, are a fishing community! Which, hoo boy. Their principal chief tells NPR: “We are discussing the future of our communities. Our people are not able to go out on their fishing vessels anymore. The season has been closed and that’s the way that they earn their living. Where other people live check to check, we live catch to catch.”

“He’s more of a No 2 or a No 3 person rather than being at the top. Even as a family member, I could not give him even a passing grade for his delivery of a policy speech, or for the question-and-answer sessions after he became Prime Minister.”
-Nobuko Kan, wife of the new Japanese leader Naoto Kan, rates her husband in her new book Now You Are Prime Minister, How On Earth Is Japan Going to Change? It’s good to know that Mrs. Kan is keeping up the Democratic Party of Japan’s tradition of interesting first ladies.

Harvard magazine profiles class of 1969 dropouts from Harvard. It’s awesome! They are great! Here’s one: “She moved off-campus as a sophomore and had a great time ‘hanging out, smoking dope, and having sex with a lot of different guys…. It wasn’t Harvard that made me leave Harvard, it was me. I wanted to be young, alive, and free. Free to hitchhike around the country, check out California, try living in a commune. And I did all that.’” Now she works in a family planning clinic in Maine! Love you, Joanne Ricca!