Oil

Exxon Mobil Corp. recorded its biggest-ever first-quarter net profit Thursday of $8.4 billion, as record-high crude prices brought in sales of $89 billion for the company, nearly a billion dollars a day for the year's first three months.

Gas

Five thoughts for a Monday:

1. Exxon chairman Lee Raymond's $400 million retirement...
2. Dick Cheney's $8.82 million adjusted gross income and $1.9 million tax refund...
3. Gas...
4. Pipe...
5. Bushwhacked, again.

Blimbo

a : a place or state of restraint or confinement b : a place or state of neglect or oblivion c : an intermediate or transitional place or state d : a state of uncertainty

As the White House plays musical chairs, all that seems clear is they ’re all just suspended in a parallel universe, confined by an acquired deficiency syndrome of self-image, self-interest, PR flacks, and pecuniary lobbyists—not to mention decluded journalists. If all four of the estates have been refracted, then this must be an altered state we’re all in now, and it seems to have little or no relevance to the realities of everyday life for the citizens of any nation, least of all ours.

An alternate school of thought, more sympathetic, would simply point out that all this is simply symptomatic of “the human condition,” which has always been at best fallible and subject to fatigue. Of course this begs the question of whether or not we invest our leadership, our elected representatives, with some weird trust in their infallibility, or at least in their judgment, to do the right thing, follow the rules, and keep us duly informed. After all, their mandate is to serve the people. If so, we all remain aloft, up in the air, so to speak, high and dry, unable to fly, or land. In reality, that trust is just hope, the hope that our trust will be validated by their actions—not their ambition, greed, or avarice.

But of course they believe they’re normal and upright—right, not altered—and their critics are not. The ultimate irony, of course, is while many of them actually practice basic precepts of natural selection, survival of the fittest, in short, evolution (God forbid) in its most naked form of economic and social control through political power, they may even invoke the Lord as their shepherd, who made us all holy through “intelligent design,” as their moral compass and divine justification.

Some might call this hiding behind smoke and mirrors or not allowing the left hand to see what the right hand is doing.

Where does this hubris come from? Where do these miscreants incubate? What fertilizes their profligacy? They make an omelet or a quiche by breaking eggs, like everybody else, yet the yoke’s all over us. The question is do they really believe they’re trying to do the right thing, or are they slippery serpents on a grassy knoll? In God’s name was the beginning, many of them will say. For God’s sake, then, in whose name will it all end?

Or are we doomed to be in this suspended animation forever because it will not end? And that altered state we’re in is not just out there; it’s in here, in our heads, our altered states of consciousness.

Yet another view would reveal that we’re all just trying to get along, to survive, with the limitations of the equipment we have at our disposal—hereditary, genetic, educational, and economic; skills, goals, desires, and ambitions. And while all this propels us forward (or not), it also often confuses the issues, and us, leading to rationalization and the need for justification, both for the sake of others and ourselves.

Throughout history, elaborate frameworks of thought and action have evolved (there’s that word again), revolved, and devolved, and that process keeps rocking the boat and altering our states—national, natural, corporeal, emotional, and intellectual—not to mention our estates. Nothing stays the same, some say, while to others, the more things change the more they stay the same. History does seem to repeat itself. One thing seems clear though: there are no absolutes, really, except that we all just keep hurtling through space and time, little molecules that we are. Or, as the president might say, whatever.

Easter

Resurrection Day. Easter dinners. Chocolate bunnies. And in the news today, Slate talks about our new war on fat, also known and visually recognized as obesity. Did this crisis begin back in the fifties, right around the time McDonald's first opened? And to take a little leap here, since then how many other wars has the United States waged?

1. The Cold War
2. The Korean War
3. The Vietnam War
4. The War on Poverty
5. The War on Drugs
6. The War on Smoking
7. The Gulf War
   
8. The War on Terrorism
9. The War in Iraq

How many of these wars have we won? And what has been the cost? Outasight. Will we ever learn? It’s enough to make just about any dead savior get up out of his grave and cry, “Enough already!”

RANT

Random access neurological tremor (RANT)

1. as in rant and rave;
2. Dutch (obsolete) ranten, randen;
3. a noisy, excited, or declamatory manner;
4. usually occurs after something “strikes a nerve, ” really;
5. associated with seismic, shaking, vibrating, and finally uncertainty and insecurity.

Richorice

As the rich get richer what happens to the rest of us? The following excerpts are from a front-page news report in Thursday’s Washington Post [April 13, 2006] by Staff Writer Blaine Harden:

JACKSON, Wyo. -- In an era when the rich are the only income group getting richer, ever-larger waves of wealth are spilling in from the coasts and swamping the resort valleys of the Rocky Mountain West.

The rich have collectively inflated real estate to prices that are far beyond the means of those who serve them supper, take their blood pressure or police their gated subdivisions. The service workers -- professionals and blue-collar alike -- tend to live in adjacent valleys and commute.

A household making $500,000 a year would have paid $53,921 in local taxes in 2004 in the District of Columbia but just $6,809 in Wyoming, according to Wealth Manager.

"Your accountant will tell you that if you move to Wyoming, the house will build itself," said Angus MacLean Thuermer Jr., co-editor of the Jackson Hole News & Guide.

"The future is locked in -- it can only get richer," said Brian Grubb, planning director for Jackson.

Federal, state and local governments own 97 percent of Teton County. Large tracts of undeveloped private land have been locked up by land trusts in conservation easements. Much of the money for these trusts came from wealthy homeowners.

There are only about 2,500 lots available for construction in rural Teton County, Grubb said, adding that houses are likely to be built on large tracts and would cost several million dollars for the land and structure.

Grubb, who makes $75,000 a year, lives in a subsidized apartment owned by the town.

Perception (Again)

APRIL 14, 2006—William Sloan Coffin passed away Wednesday, and today WETA in Washington, D.C., rebroadcast a conversation he'd had with Terry Gross. He recounted how, when he was chaplain at Yale and young men were turning in their draft cards to him, he was told that New York's Riverside Church was considering him as their next pastor. He admitted to a moment’s pause as he realized he would have to curtail his “radical” activities for causes he believed in if the church was going to take him seriously as a candidate. But he chose not to, and, in his words, Rivrside passed on him for another nine years. During the 1960s, Coffin was known for objecting to the war in Vietnam, marching for civil rights, and in general championing the powerless in the face of power, both at Yale and abroad.

Roughly forty years later, in a short story published by The New Yorker exactly five months ago [“The Best Year of My Life,” November 14, 2005], Paul Theroux recalls a year he spent in Puerto Rico with a young woman hiding out from both their parents while she had his baby. They were both students at UMass in Amherst at the time and didn’t have much money, so they rented a room in Old San Juan while young Paul worked as a waiter. “One day,” writes Theroux, “I saw a man I recognized from a provocative political lecture he had given in Amherst, at the time when Mona and I were living together there. He was William Sloane Coffin, a well-known radical, walking with two other men. They pushed past us, talking, and entered La Zaragozana, and, because that was a restaurant we couldn’t afford, I stopped viewing him as a radical. He was a privileged man from the other world.”

Again, perception versus reality versus perception, but which is real? One's perception of another's reality can become an entirely different reality altogether simply as it is perceived by yet another. And the worm is always turning.

Perception

You're lounging by the beach on a beautiful sunny day. That grand ship gracefully sailing by near the horizon heralds highborn affluence, luxury, success, and festive recognition. But inside that ship, below deck, what is really going on? What does it really take to keep that ship cruising? What are its inner workings, and what is life below deck really like?

By the same measure, a man's life can appear on the surface, from the outside, as a beacon of success; but in reality the actual living of it could be fierce and brutal, void of an underlying sense of direction, achievement, or any nobility—scrambling, insecure, and fraught with peril at every turn. Certainly it can bely any real comfort or ultimate satisfaction, surrounded as it may be by intrigue, deception, or even downright incompetence. The bottom line may even waver with a vague absence of purpose, justification, or, perhaps worse, enlightenment.

Reality? Maybe. But whose?

Suitable

That suit just suits you
So suitable a suit
You’re suited to it
To rule suits as power
Suits you too just as
The suits we bring in court
Or the suits who try them
Now everyone wants
A Cesur suit
Just like your zoot
Bringing your own suit
Somehow so unsuitably suitable
But nothing’s so unsuitable
As a flashy counter suit
Unless you’re wearing it
Or winning it