President Obama and the Mann Gulch Fire metaphor ..

[DemoTex]

A week ago Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States. Intead of passing the torch to Obama, his predecessor -- the political pyromaniac George W. Bush -- chose to light the world with fire. The powder-dry kindling that Bush has ignited includes world economies in general and the US economy in particular. The wind-whipped fire – a ”blowup" in forest fire terms -- rages as Obama ends his first week in office.

Almost sixty years ago, on the afternoon of August 5, 1949, fifteen airborne firefighters -- "smoke jumpers" -- stepped into the abyss from the rear jump-door of a Douglas C-47 circling above the lightening-sparked inferno that was brewing on the wooded, southeastern flank of Mann Gulch in western Montana. Twelve of these brave young men and a forest ranger on the ground would die before nightfall.

One of the surviving smoke jumpers -- he was their leader; foreman Wag Dodge -- would save his own life by starting a fire (an "escape" fire) with matches in the cheat grass near the northwest ridge of Mann Gulch and, then, lying down in the ashes of that controversial fire. Dodge tried to get other smoke jumpers to join him in those ashes but his was a vision of survival that the other men could not comprehend as the 300-400 foot firestorm raced towards them, faster than any but the swiftest could run, up the steep, grassy northern slope of Mann Gulch.

Norman MacLean wrote eloquently of the Mann Gulch Fire tragedy -- and MacLean points out that it was indeed a tragedy in the literary sense -- in his bestselling book Young Men and Fire. Like the world now feels, in the wake of the Bush pyromania, MacLean was horrified by the "extraordinary-causes-for-the-extraordinary-effects" at Mann Gulch.

Today may well become the Mann Gulch of the American working class. Our economy stands as stark and desolate and blackened as the ground behind the Mann Gulch smokejumpers as they sprinted uphill ahead of the inferno. Most did not make it.

President Obama must think and act outside the box, as Wag Dodge did by torching the very earth around him when he saw that running for safety would not work. The Bush fires were well set, either accidentally or on purpose. The conflagration now rages like the fires of 1910 and Mann Gulch combined.

President Obama must scorch the earth, like Wag Dodge. It is too late for anything else.

[Warpy]

1. Wag Dodge lived to see his strategy taught to

smoke jumpers. Unfortunately, we lived to see the equivalent fiscal strategy, the New Deal, abandoned by greedy people who thought they'd be allowed to get rich quick instead of putting up with a slow and steady pace that served the majority of us so well for so long.

Obama's lucky in that he's got a solid history to learn from: what worked and what didn't work, and what happened in 1937 when chickenshit conservatives in Congress abandoned what did work too quickly.

Maybe we'll get out of this one without a World War to provide employment, something we no longer have the infrastructure to survive, let alone win.

However, we can always count on one thing: sooner or later, the get rich quick boys will be back to suck gullible people into backing the boom and bust cycle again.

[Suich]

2. K & R! n/t

[Skittles]

3. Demo did you check your inbox

:D