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Le ravissement de Psyché (1895)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
oil on canvas / 209 x 120 cm / private collection
image courtesy of the Art Renewal Center
Celestial Cupid, her famed son, advanced,
Holds his dear Psyche sweet entranced,
After her wandering labours long,
Till free consent the gods among
Make her his eternal bride;
And from her fair unspotted side
Two blissful twins are to be born,
Youth and Joy; so Jove hath sworn.
-- John Milton
* * *
The government of Iceland has fallen, car dealers are practically giving new cars away for free, millions around the world have lost jobs and even their homes, there've been some ugly incidents with firearms in places where everybody always wears a suit and tie or an outfit from Talbotts.
Skyscrapers are dark, empty and boarded up with plywood when last year they were gleaming multi-elevatored beehives of globalized financial action, surplus currency and hot derivative paper were leaking out of 50th storey windows.
Planet Earth needs to start spending. A lot. Right now.
If you are reading this blog and Not Shopping, at a mall or on-line, then you are fucking everybody, you're hurting yourself, you're starving your neighbors and forcing them toward the Public Dole.
By your unwillingness to reach for your wallet, you are smashing your Western Wealth Center boots on an entire village in Micronesia. Illness will soon follow the malnutrition you have chosen to impose on them because you're nervous, anxious, worried, cautious and too cheap to buy new Nikes or Adidas. Demand plummetted and the factory closed. You did this.
Buy something. Now. Preferably a Big-Ticket Item, like a refrigerator (your old one is probably an energy-sucking ecological anti-Green vampire fester) or a new washer-dryer. (The Sears/Kenmore machines are actually manufactured by top-line companies you've heard of, but you pay a lot less if you're willing to let visitors read the KENMORE cachet on your appliances.)
It is an odd crisis, with a ghostly, evasive enemy you need a PhD in economics just to perceive.
This enemy can fuck you up every bit as much as a horde of Vandals or Vikings or the Mongol Horde.
It may not immediately ravish your womenfolk like the Vikings did.
But if we can't make this enemy retreat, the womenfolk -- of a startlingly liberal range of ages -- may start renting themselves out for cash. And the menfolk, and the boyfolk, and the childfolk.
(I stayed in a hotel in London whose neighborhood, historically, housed the city's Child Virgin Market. Having sex with a virgin was believed to be a cure for venereal disease.)
But instead of reaching for our firearms and battleaxes and crossbows and scimitars, the only weapons that can defend us and save us and see us through this Sack & Pillage are Discretionary Spending, Retail Buying, our credit cards, our checkbooks.
Fortunately for all of us, the crisis collides with this special calendar moment:
Happy Valentines Day!
This is all about Romantic Love -- and it ain't cheap.
* roses
* chocolate -- not Hershey bars or Three Musketeers, but stuff from Europe, individually wrapped in gold foil
* restaurant meal (not Fast Food Alley, but the place you take your Mom on her birthday)
* movie, concert, theatrical event
* fancy liquor or wine
* 1 - 5 live musicians during dinner
* bling from tasteful jeweler
* whoops, i almost forgot the Greeting Card, I always forget that
If each of us Celebrates Romantic Love tonight as we were supposed to anyway, this will be a major Kick-Start for the ailing financial organs of Planet Earth. February could end up reporting healthier, more prosperous numbers than January and the bleak Christmas shopping season.
Because you cared.
This is no time to explain to your Love Partner that you can't afford to Prove Your Love. That will do Negative Things for your Relationship, and cause nine strangers to lose their health insurance (if they're Americans, the only Western industrialized capitalist nation without national health).
Reach for your MasterCard and head for the Whately Inn, reservations for 2 at 7:30! Oh go ahead, order the duck! And some champagne!
AND I Love You!
* * *
Everyone Says I Love You
from the movie "Horse Feathers" (1932)
by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby
CHICO
Everyone Says I Love You
The great big mosquito when he stings you
The fly when he gets stuck on the fly paper too
says I Love You
Every time the cow says moo
She makes the bull-a very happy too
The rooster when he hollers cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo
says I Love You
Christopher Columbus he write
the Queen of Spain a very nice little note
He write "I Love You, baby"
and then he gets himself a great big boat
He's a wise guy.
What do you think Columbus do
When he come here in 1492
He said to Pocahontas "Acki Vachi Vachi Voo,
"That means "You little son of a gun, I Love You."
GROUCHO
Everyone says I love you
But just what they say it for I never knew
It's just inviting trouble for the poor sucker who
says I love you.
Take a pair of rabbits who
Get stuck on each other and begin to woo
And pretty soon you'll find a million more rabbits who
Say I love you
When the lion gets feeling frisky
And begins to roar
There's another lion who knows just what he's roaring for
Everything that ever grew
The goose and the gander and the gosling too
The duck upon the water when he feels that way too
says QUACK! QUACK! QUACK!
