PINION: Don’t you worry your little head, now

Dearest readers, it’s been a rough couple of weeks for me. It’s tough to walk around this great big campus seeing you lot shambling about, all grumbles and frowns (and didn’t your mothers ever tell you that your face could get stuck that way?). I must ask, what is a self-respecting writer to think of himself when his beloved audience slump their shoulders and sigh through each agonizing day in a despondent miasma?

Of course, it’s obvious what’s got you down. It’s all that rot about tumbling stocks and financial disaster on the TV and Internet, isn’t it? I’m gone one week (and you can address your complaints to the estates of Misters Washington and Lincoln for that little absence) and all these new media blowhards have convinced you that the sky’s falling and that the world’s gone to hell. It’s high time to set the record straight!

Now, the very first thing that you’ve got to realize is that a bunch of so-called ‘journalists’ and ‘economists’ are going to try to scare you out of your wits using a kind of lie known as ‘hard evidence.’ You’ll know that these hucksters are spinning you a tale when you start to see giveaway signs like numbers, charts and timelines appear in their fancy multimedia presentations. But once you take off the glasses of reality they’ve fitted to your mind, pleasant, blurry ignorance will reign free once more!

That fact out of the way, it’s time that we put aside the notion that the current Wall Street tussle is more serious than the minor mix-up with gas prices last year. You remember how glad you were that you didn’t sell your Hummers when the prices went back down, don’t you? So relax, kick back and ignore your laughable job prospects following graduation. This whole thing will clear off in just a few weeks!

Now, some egghead math whizzes will say that it’ll be impossible to buy gas (even at $1.75!) for those Hummers when you’re out of work and struggling to avoid starvation and homelessness. But that would imply that some of the millions of jobs that are going to vanish into thin air in the next year or two will be yours! But we all know that the only jobs that America ever axes are worthless ones like farming, manufacturing and tech support (oh, and maybe fast food order-taking and anything related to so-called ‘small businesses’). Fact is, that in just the past month, literally dozens of massive conglomerates barely limped along, hemorrhaging money and employees like a stabbing victim! Yes sir, those companies shamble on to this very day, mere ghosts of their former, prosperous selves. So sure, some major companies might have gone the way of the dodo, but we’ve got plenty of bankrupt, reeling corporations left to remind us that stupid dodos couldn’t fly anyway!

I’ve heard some nasty mutterings about how this economic recession (talk about a depressing name, eh? Back in the 1930s, we called these things Great!) will be much worse than the last few because broke companies and individuals no longer have a massive easy credit safety net to fall back on when they horribly mangle their finances in an orgy of overspending. But worry not – now that the Obama and Bush administrations have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the few remaining banks in America, they’ve put that money to good use by flying corporate jets and buying each other! Just you wait: once JPMorgan Chase is finished digesting Bear Stearns, they’ll start tossing out credit like glitter on the American financial party again!

Of course, things could be better if people would just listen to our president about the economy. Err, not that nonsense about personal responsibility and transparency on Wall Street – that sort of thing won’t help anyone (except the common man, and who’d want to help out a guy who just hangs around the park all day?). But you see, before signing that $787 billion love letter to fiat currency and deficit spending, he and his advisors heavily critiqued the inclusion of executive pay caps in the bill.

I know, I know: those worthless reporters on the boob tube didn’t even tell you about that atrocity. President Barack Obama’s economic team fears – quite rightly – that capping executive pay could lead to Wall Street head honchos fleeing the banking industry to earn millions of dollars in other high-paying jobs, like playing football or winning Oscars. Those brilliant architects of our meteoric economy could end up abandoning us all to namby-pamby bean counters who want to ‘act responsibly’ and ‘spend frugally.’

But if you, dear readers, open up those near-empty wallets and swipe those battle-scarred credit cards a few more times, I know we’ll be A-OK again. So smile; there’s no way this’ll last!