Where Fun Comes to Die

As most of us likely learned in grade school, the U.S. government is built on a system of checks and balances.  Each of the three branches of government — legislative, executive, and judicial — serves as a check on the others.  It could be said, not unreasonably, that the people have their own “check” on the government: amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  If the people don’t like the laws passed by the legislature, as interpreted by the courts, the people (through their representatives — an imperfect proxy, of course) have the ultimate authority: they can simply change the rules.  The Supreme Court can overturn any law passed by the legislature, but it can’t do a damn thing about what the Constitution says.

Amendments are serious business, which is why they’re also seriously difficult to pass.  First two thirds of Congress must vote in favor of the proposed amendment.  After it passes in Congress, it’s put to the vote of the states, a full THREE QUARTERS of which must vote in favor of the amendment.  Clearly, the Constitution is far more important, and far more powerful, than run-of-the-mill legislation.

Which brings us to the land of fruits and nuts, my strange and beautiful home state of California.  I learned something new this year: to amend the California constitution, you need only a simple majority.  51%.  Or, I suppose, 50.0001%, or whatever is the equivalent of a single vote tipping it over 50%.  Not a two-thirds supermajority or a three-quarters super-duper-majority.  Just a plain old majority.  The exact same majority you need to enact any old law.

So I’m just wondering: if you can change the constitution just as easily as you can make or change any other law, what’s the point of having a constitution?  Seriously, I’m wondering.

Friends, we are less than a month away from the most pivotal election our country has seen in decades, and yet, I’ve heard nary a word from either major party’s presidential candidate about a crucial automotive issue that affects millions of average Americans on a day-to-day basis.

No, I’m not talking about gas prices, or our dependence on foreign oil, or the need for more efficient renewable energy resources, or global warming, or any of that.  I’m talking about something far more sinister: assholes who refuse to properly park their obnoxious cars.

There cannot be a day that goes by that I don’t drive past the “compact” section of a parking lot, only to see that at least 50% of the “compact” spaces are taken up by Humvees, Jeeps, Range Rovers, and minivans.  Look, I’m not gonna tell people what kind of car to buy.  You want to be that dick who can’t feel secure without 5 tons of metal to threaten the safety of everyone else on the road, well, you just go on with your bad self, girlfriend.  Drive that car like it’s never been driven before.  Terrorize old ladies in compact Oldsmobiles.  Take 60 seconds to get yourself up to proper merging speed on the freeway.  Honk your horn like a screeching hyena every time you see a girl under 40 years and 175 pounds.  But LEAVE MY GODDAMN PARKING SPACE ALONE!!

If these space whores actually had the smarts and the skill to maneuver their planet-sized killing machines into a “compact” spot — hell, even if there were no more than an inch of space on either side — No Problem.  Far as I’m concerned, you’re entitled to the entire space allotted you.  You might have to crawl out your back hatch to exit, but what fun is having an SUV if you never play around in all that unnecessary space?

But such thoughtfulness is not the strong suit of the Big Car Drivers.*  In fairness, they are far too important to be bothered with taking the extra 45 seconds it would take to maneuver their cars into a less imposing position.  And so, there she sits, brazenly slumping into an adjacent space, as though her bare existence were reason enough to flout the rules.  Occasionally you’ll see a Smart Car or a compact Hyundai meekly squeezing into the shrunken remains of the adjacent “compact” space, cowering in fear of the sheer towering bulk of the larger neighbor.

The more honest of these offenders don’t bother with even the appearance of attempted compliance.  Instead, they’ll stretch out their heavy tankers across two — sometimes even three! — parking spaces, as though to announce “yes, fair denizens of the Best Buy parking lot — I have arrived, and you may lay your offerings at my hubcaps.”  The arrogant felinity of this gesture communicates to other parkers the sheer superiority of the driver of the larger vehicle.

The problem here lies not in the fact that these vacuous folk are, by and large, an annoying and unsightly blight on the already less-than-sleek face of the American public.  Rather, it lies in the foundational dilemma underlying economic theory: scarcity.  Yes, I’ve often lamented the results of double-space gluttony, only to have my passenger-seat driver interject that it’s no matter, as I wouldn’t have gotten the space anyway; someone else would have.  What these space-hog apologists fail to realize, however, is that the space that would have been occupied by said someone else would now have been vacant, and if it had been taken by another, that other’s would-be space is then freed up in its place, and so on.  See?  It’s the trickle-down theory of parking.  Perfectly usable, valuable space is being wasted like so much leftover Chinese food.  I want to shake these drivers and ask them “what about the parking-spot-starved children in the Sudan??”

I call on Sens. McCain and Obama to tackle this key issue by announcing, for example, their support for legislation providing automatic reprieves for those convicted of vehicular vandalism, where such actions were justified by a parking violation of sufficiently egregious magnitude.  I can see the outpouring of support from previously undecided voters just imagining it.

*The observations in this post, it should be noted, are by no means strictly limited to vehicles of greater bulk.  In fact, just two days ago I was deterred from my first-choice parking spot by a nefariously-deposited Mazzerati (the drivers of which, by the way, are deserving of an entire post devoted to them).

Rest in peace, old friend.

Hey, anyone know where a high-income, low-net worth, deductible-challenged individual can find a decent tax shelter?

I spent far too much of my valuable time yesterday observing various news pundits weighing in on the defeat of the so-called “bailout bill” that would have turned over $700 billion to the Secretary of the Treasury (never thought that’d be a job I’d envy…).  The thing that struck me the most was the general consensus among the pundits that the failure of the bill was a bad thing.  Or rather, I suppose it wasn’t a general consensus so much as a widespread unquestioned assumption.

Perhaps my favorite part of it all was the horrified screaming about the stock market, OH MY GOD LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO THE STOCK MARKET, as though it had much of anything to do with the vote.  You’d think they’d been living in Candyland for the better part of the year.  We’re in a RECESSION, folks.  Stock prices fall during a recession.  That’s just an unfortunate barebones truth of economics.  I mean, come on, what, did you expect that passing the bill was going to magically fix the stock market, solve the mortgage crisis, relax the credit crunch, eliminate cyclical unemployment, dissolve our outstanding national debt, bring about world peace, feed hungry children in the third world, eliminate compatibility problems between Apples and PCs, cure AIDS, and reveal the final Cylon??

I listened to these Chicken Littles sobbing about how this is the worst blow to the stock market since the Great Depression — if not even worse!  All of these people, by the way, were gainfully employed, well-dressed, college-educated or better, and almost certainly went home later in the evening to eat a healthy, hearty dinner with their families, who were almost certainly not wearing the same clothing as they wore the night before.  But let’s not let little details like objective prosperity such as the world has never known get in the way of fearing a relative slowdown to the point that we’re willing to slap our kids and grandkids with a tax bill that will effectively prevent THEM from attending graduate school or owning a house in all but the most sparsely populated areas in the country.

Am I glad the Dow closed almost 800 points down?  Of course not.  But am I worried?  About the stock market?  Hells no.  This is Amurrica, boys and girls.  I thought we had nothing to fear but fear itself.  I thought pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps was what we were good at.  What happened to that tiny little band of idealistic roughians that single-handedly defied the greatest military power the world had ever known — and WON???  Have the colonies been brought so low that we’d rather turn over our souls — and our children’s souls, and our grandchildren’s souls — to the government than live with the risk of not buying a new convertible next year?

If the “Republicans” and Democrats (Dems don’t need scare quotes, as at least their desire to have the government control the economy is consistent) are going to pretend that the only way for the economy to recover is to throw good money after bad, then frankly, I’d rather do nothing and let the market correct itself (as it will eventually, someday, need to do anyway).  Yeah, it’ll be a painful process, but better that, better we LEARN from our mistakes, than that we keep making them, over and over and over, until we reach a point that a collapse of the economy really IS a collapse of our Republic.  As things stand right now, the biggest threat to representative democracy… is precisely what the President is asking for.

Oh, and gee.  Would you look at that.  Dow just closed UP almost 500 points from yesterday — the third-largest single-day gain in the Dow’s history.  Funny how the sky is still in place and all.