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02/15/2005: "Man on a White Horse"

With Clint Eastwood in the limelight with his latest cinematic success, let’s consider a much earlier work that’s one of my personal favorites: High Plains Drifter. It’s perhaps the classical allegorical western. A charismatic hero rides into a Western town that is paralyzed with fear at the prospect of retribution for past transgressions. I find it remindful of the situation with Social Security, with Bush in his full “great man on the white horse” mode, heralding the danger presented by future social security shortfalls. In the movie, the stranger on the pale steed gets the town busy in preparation for hard times ahead. But these preparations are odd and seemingly unrelated to the nature of the danger. For example, he has the town setting up banquet tables on the main street. This reminds me of Bush’s plans for “fixing” Social Security’s shortfalls, fixes which have no direct relation to the problem. (The problem is not enough money coming in to continue current benefits. His fix is to do something different with the money coming in so this money legally must go to the person who put it in. It does nothing about the fact that there’s not enough going in to guarantee current benefits to both current and future retirees). Getting back to the story, the townspeople have misgivings but go along, because they want to believe there’s a painless solution to their problem, because the tall, handsome stranger is convincing, and because nobody has any other ideas. When the big day arrives (the equivalent of Baby Boomer retirement), the gang comes rampaging through town. Too late the townspeople realize that they were set up – their “preparations” did nothing more than turn them into sitting ducks. And I think that’s exactly what Bush has in mind. It’s clear to me now that he and his extreme Right Wing cronies plan to pile up debt by slashing taxes so far below the level needed to sustain modern governmental services that the only alternative facing future generations is to eliminate these “discretionary” services in favor of mandatory interest and principal on the debt. If you’ve got a better explanation, I’d love to hear from you.