Stagflation: n. the act of blowing up male deer by filling them with compressed air ‘til they burst. A subset of inflation, which refers to the blowing full of compressed air a deer of any gender.
I took my one and only freshman course in Economics at the
University of Saskatchewan from a text called Economics: Canadian Edition,
1967. Our prof was a curly-haired, youngish master’s candidate with a
serious lisp so I still hear our text’s author’s name as Thamuelthon Thcott. Had
I been his dean, I would have suggested he choose a text by someone whose name
had fewer S’s in it. Funny how the mind is so easily distracted, how it Velcros
to memories of trivia while discarding essentials one moment after the final
exam is written.
Stagflation, I think, hadn’t
been coined yet and I wouldn’t have known what it was meant to mean except that
I have this bad habit of reading text whenever a block of it passes by. It’s a
combination of stagnation and inflation, obviously, and it refers
to a period of well-above-average inflation that persists for a long time. Like
the 1970s, when the only mortgage I could get was for one year at 17% interest
until Pierre Trudeau instituted wage and price controls and my mortgage
payments dropped to something closely resembling reasonable.
So here it comes again. Luckily we
have another Trudeau on the hill unless he’s accidentally run over by a mile
long convoy of trucks before he can save us. It reminds us that there are
levels of hell: Level one, pandemic leading to Level two, unemployment and
mountains of misdirected rage, leading to labour shortage on top of continuing
pandemic and inflation and even worse and escalating and louder swamps of
misdirected rage. (To what hell is the devil sent when his judgment day comes. It
would have to be worse than the fire and brimstone one he invented. Perhaps
Northern Canada … in winter … with nothing to wear but s shorty nightie and
shoes with holes in the soles and no laces? Brrrr.)
With my background
in Thamuelthon Thcott, my extensive—if unfocused—reading, I can tell you
exactly why stagflation may be descending upon us like a cloud of stand-up,
sadistic comics with misogynist attitudes shouting "Freedumb, NOW!". Could be that our spending habits
dropped during the pandemic (for obvious reasons), we inadvertently saved cash
and now we’re hell bent on spending it on pleasures COVID denied us. Too much
money chasing too many shiny trucks and motorcycles, trips to rotisseries of
heat on sandy places where you can stare at ocean and land at the same time,
gadgets and gimmicks that are obsolete in months, trips to places that are
disappointingly similar to home (possibly because being there means we have to
take ourselves along with all our foibles and feelings.… Maybe it’s all our
fault … or the virus, or the president of the USA, or the Russians, or evangelical
Christians, preservatives, or, or, or.
I’m pretty sure if we figure out
why gophers evolved to live in small, underground colonies, we will also have
figured out pretty much why living well as a colony of 7.5 billion of what are
facetiously called “humans” can be as frightfully complicated and often
devastatingly disappointing as it is.
All of which suggests a massive
broadening of the English vocabulary: stagstration, stagcusations, stagrage,
stagmask, stagstreaming, stagscreaming ….
Think I’ll go out into nature,
blow up a few stags.
You busy?
Wear a mask.
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