Beavis, Butt-Head, Bailout

Confession time: I am a fan of the nineties cartoon series Beavis and Butt-Head, which spotlights the attitudes and antics of two thoroughly clueless young adolescent boys living in suburban America. Not only is it a hilarious parody of society and its taboos: it also reminds me of some kids I went to school with (one kid actually sounded and even looked like Butt-Head). My only objection to this great series was that MTV, which was the channel that originally aired it, targeted it at minors. And Beavis and Butt-Head is definitely an “adult” series!

Recent events in the news have brought to my mind one of Beavis and Butt-Head’s funniest episodes: Candy Sale. In it, our two “heroes” unwittingly find themselves dragged into participating in one of those obnoxious school sales drives; in this case, it’s selling candy bars at two dollars apiece. So Beavis and Butt-Head go around the neighborhood unsuccessfully trying to sell people candy bars. Finally, tired and hungry, Butt-Head asks Beavis for one of his candy bars. “No way”, replies Beavis. But Butt-Head forks out two dollars, and Beavis gives him a candy bar. Then, a little later, Beavis buys a candy bar from Butt-Head, handing him back the two dollars that Butt-Head had originally given him. They then go back and forth with these two dollars until they’ve eaten all of the candy bars that they were going to sell. I’ll leave the ending of this hilarious episode a mystery for you to find out on your own.

And now we come to the financial market crisis. Financial lending companies are going under and credit is too tight for them to lend money out to the debt-greedy public. In other words, they’re strapped for money. Let’s call this party “Beavis”. Now take our federal government, which is trillions of dollars in debt with no end in sight. In other words, broke. We can call them “Butt-Head”. And now, the $700 billion bailout: that’s the “dollar” that gets passed around to stimulate credit ("consume candy bars").

Or look at it this way: Americans, strapped for money because their financial institutions won’t lend it to them, get their government (implicitly through their elected representatives) to guarantee money (that they don’t have) for those institutions to give them the money that they don’t have, either. So that they can chomp on their “candy bars” (pursue their 21st century materialistic lifestyle without having to make hard choices).

Beavis, Butt-Head, Bailout.