There are many avenues President Obama could have traversed with his first State of the Union speech, and I suppose that he can be forgiven for wanting to stick with whatever it is his teleprompter told him to say Wednesday night. I probably would have paid attention if he were wearing a T-shirt with three wolves on it.
With his unilateral health care hopes dashed by his own capitulation to Congress and the shameless way Democrats sold their souls to the health insurance lobby, Obama now faces stiff opposition from emboldened Republicans led by a spirited, young male stripper.
Most Americans want to hear what our leader has to say regarding his plans to move the country forward — provided, of course, that President Obama leans heavily on General Larry Platt for advice and counsel when he puts together his second big push for health care legislation.
Great leaders are inspirational in times of crisis, and no man has captured the ennui of 2010 better than the singer of “Pants on the Ground.”
Even though the song has not aged well in the two weeks it has spent racing across cyberspace, the simple ode to waist-level knickers can tell us a lot about how baby boomers are preparing for their impending retirement.
They are hustling.
General Platt came of age in Atlanta during the 1960s, a prominent figure from that celebrated era that birthed the social rights of Medicaid and Medicare. At the beginning of the last decade, his generation stood poised to retire and create the inverse pyramid that was supposed to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare. They looked to the younger generations to hold them up as they sprawled out on a bed of shrinking entitlements, but we couldn’t support them because we had our pants on the ground and needed an extra hand to hold up our britches.
Even with pants at the acceptable level, we’d probably need two hands to text with and couldn’t really help that much right now.
So boomers like General Platt remained grinding away at work while new equity in the inflated value of their homes made their bank accounts look rosy. The decade looked like it would end with baby boomers easing gently into retirement.
All of a sudden, boom — pants on the ground again. This time, though, it’s the bankers with their pants on the ground, pockets weighed down with gold bullion and hats on sideways as they take off in a custom speedboat.
General Platt and his boomer ilk fought bravely to secure social rights for a wider swath of America, but now some of those social rights have been erased by the reality of our economic collapse. Nothing could have more effectively alleviated the impending pinch of baby boomers on our wheezing social system than making them work until they keel over.
Don’t blame Platt, though. All the blame falls on Obama for completely ignoring my repeated e-mails and letters urging him to wear the ultra-powerful wolf T-shirt and let the alien technology it contains fix our country.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears on Thursdays.
