Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street!

[bellatrys]

--Would you trust this proposal?Here is an older homeowner, living in (let us say) a large, once-regal Victorian with significant acreage, who due to increasing years can no longer get around it so well, nor maintain the estate in the style formerly accustomed, and so has hired someone to look after the building and yard for which this individual

Comments

[wordweaverlynn]

Sorry about your relative, but the allegory is great. I'm linking to it.

The relationship is complicated...

[bellatrys]

and if it weren't so small a town I'd go into greater detail, because some of it's just incredibly hilarious, once well out of it/in retrospect. But no, I'm not so surprised at the stuff that goes on on the large scale, having seen some of the nonsensical things being done by moderately-affluent, college-educated professionals up close...

[voxwoman]

I was going to suggest "get a really big tarp and get a bunch of contractors to bid on it" but I don't know how that translates into allegory-land.

I had part of my roof blow off during hurricane Hugo in the 80's. I got a lot of water in the house, and I had to replace a kitchen ceiling, but my insurance covered most of it. It was an "inconvenience" rather than a "disaster".

The particular building I'm drawing on

[bellatrys]

got wood rot down into structural beams, uprights through the whole building, due to years of leaks from bad roofs. So the damage started getting towards "condemned" territory, in places that would have been unsalvagable eventually like the three-story Victorian building down river from me that *melted* due to years of neglect, and required some extremely expensive restoration work to save it.

The irony was that the second and worse leaks, causing the worst water damage and rot, were from the job done by the Dewey Cheatem & Howe crew recced by a crony, who were like a pocket-size Halliburton for delays and general incompetence.

But hey, it HAD to be done RIGHT THEN, So-and-so said so, and said they were the best for the job (and so what if So-and-so's previous recommendations for contractors had likewise been crews of incompetent and dishonest clowns? What's 2 previous incidents got to do with anything?)

[nancylebov]

Thanks-- I'll be linking to this.

And is the general public being so disgusted with the bailout that it got voted down like something out of GK Chesterton (in the best sense) or what?

Ayup!

[bellatrys]

And likewise the fact that the disgruntled pols are saying "See, Public, this shows that you're just STOOOPIT!!! Why don't you trust us when we tell you you're DOOOMED if you don't give us the keys and no supervision yet again?" and don't understand why this is unlikely to be a winning PR move, too...

[fledgist]

This is an excellent allegory. Not on the banks of the Nile either.