Circling the School. Not that School. Us.

"Hi, folks! I'm Fred Thompson. Like me, you've probably been wondering how to give your house back to the bank."

(Like John Kyl, I did not intend those quote marks to be factual. I intended them to be needles.)

About fifty years ago, when I was a much holier men than I am now, I tried to convince an old couple to sell their adjoining property to our church, at full price, giving them the money immediately, together with the right to live in their house for so long as they pleased. They chose not to sell.

Reverse mortgages are contracts with a bank that calculates how much money the bank will give you, over time, for your equity in your home, while you continue to live in it. There are deductions and fees, of course. Sometimes you live too long. The bank thought of that. Sometimes your kids suggest you are spending their money. Kids think of that. Sometimes--not always--there are horror stories, and fine print.

What offends me is what should not offend me. Fred Thompson projects a likeable personality, and like a lot of other seemingly-likeable people, he accepts a lot of money to sell things. He has a right to do that.

Maybe it is "the sucker be damned" attitude that irritates me. It is hard to believe that the likeable hucksters care that the banks have hearts of gold--real gold--not warm, thumpy heartbeats. Perhaps it is the odor of smart people dealing with old people who might, or might not, realize the trade-offs.

Maybe it is that what used to be good, old-fashioned Republican banks that stored your money, and paid 3% for the privilege of using it, have become cash cows for their chief executives. They hire folksy, believable actors, and use them to bait their hooks.

It isn't Fred Thompson. He is just a well-paid shill making a lamentable living, acting. It is the sharks, circling the school.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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