Waiting for a Punchline that Never Comes
MN Gordon

“When you masturbate with the hand of fate expect the worst because life is a JOKE!” – Charlie Vurmin

(Artwork by Charlie Vurmin. Source: Institute of Sociometry)

Hard Luck Chuck

Some actions in life are so terrible they’re impossible to reverse. There are no second chances. There are no do overs. The wreckage is lasting.

Charles Twain Clemans, also known as Charlie Vurmin, was a disreputable early ’90s Pacific Beach punk in San Diego, California, and a member of the small-time beach gang, the P.B. Vurmin. Our circles briefly overlapped through the eclectic, and sometimes destructive world of skateboarding.

While sessioning a famous grade-school playground skate spot in suburban San Diego one afternoon, Chuck made a lasting impression on us, and everyone there – a large collection of skaters, punkers, and derelicts – by publicly defecating on the concrete embankment in broad daylight.

Socially deviant behavior. A guy running around with a few loose screws. What could possibly go wrong?

Not long after, on October 2, 1995, Chuck got in a fistfight at a backyard kegger on Felspar Street. He went home. The right thing to do would have been to take a cold shower, sleep it off, and then go to his job the next morning as a silk screener for a prominent skateboard clothing company.

Instead, he went completely mad. Under the pernicious influence of booze and illicit drugs, he returned to the party with his gun and shot four people. Luckily, no one was killed.

Chuck was arrested that night. He was later sentenced to a 28-year California State Prison stint with no possibility of parole.

Over the decades that followed he reformed and served out the last years of his time at the Norconian, a former luxury hotel and current minimum-security state prison, which sits behind twenty-foot-high chain link and concertina wire fences, in Norco, California, in Southern California’s Inland Empire.

Life’s a Joke

We recount the tale of hard luck Chuck with intent and purpose. Not so much to dwell on what he did to get locked up. But what he discovered after several years of confined reflection and contemplation.

Like any troubled soul who’s left to deal with the cold penalties of his insane actions, Chuck constantly slipped into what he called the “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve” syndrome. There, he obsessed on all the things he missed – his daughter growing up, not being there for his wife, day to day freedom he took for granted, and on and on. He even wrote a song about it.

Chuck described this daydreaming like an itchy rash on his leg. He knew he was better off not to touch it. But the feeling was intoxicating when he did.

So, too, this daydreaming was like being consumed by quicksand. The more he thought about what he didn’t have, the more he wasn’t able to appreciate what he did have.

After several years daily contemplation, Chuck developed his “Life’s a Joke” philosophy. He carefully penciled out this diagram in 1998 to show how the arrangement, relationships, and working parts all fit together.

(Diagram by Charlie Vurmin. Source: Institute of Sociometry)

Obviously, this isn’t a philosophy for a constructive life. But we suppose when you’ve wrecked your life by committing deranged acts of violence against others, it offers some relief from what’s otherwise, extreme disappointment.

Having a guiding philosophy that minimizes life down to a joke perhaps makes the day-to-day pain somehow bearable.

Irreversible Wreckage

We don’t know if hard luck Chuck is aware of what central banking is or how it works. But if he is, it’s likely he would consider it to be a sick joke. It certainly falls within the “anything” and “everything” buckets of his life’s a joke philosophy.

The Federal Reserve, after printing upwards of $5 trillion to paper over the self-inflicted destruction of the coronavirus lockdowns, is back at it. After reducing its balance sheetover the last three years, from $8.9 trillion to about $6.6 trillion, the Fed is quitting before the job is even halfway done. By this, the Fed’s balance sheet will never return to its pre-COVID level of $4 trillion.

More than likely, the Fed will resume Quantitative Easing (QE), through balance sheet expansion, before this new easing cycle is over. First, the Fed will continue with rate cuts. Last week, for instance, the Fed cut the benchmark federal funds rate by another 25 basis points, bringing the target range down to 3.75 to 4 percent. This is a reckless act of monetary easing in the face of persistent, elevated rates of consumer price inflation.

The ultimate long-term risk is the permanent loss of purchasing power for the currency. By running massive government deficits, financed by QE and artificially low rates, the Fed encourages runaway government debt and higher and more persistent inflation.

Monetary easing may be intended to provide short-term relief, but its persistence has permanent long-term consequences. American workers, savers, and retirees suffer the consequences through permanently higher prices and the broad debasement of society. That’s the sick joke of the Fed’s money games.

But where’s the punchline?

Waiting for a Punchline that Never Comes

Traditional comedy follows a predictable setup to punchline structure. First a premise is established, and an expectation is created. Then a surprising or funny conclusion delivers the laugh by disrupting the audience’s expectations created by the setup. It is very formulaic.

In contrast, Steve Martin pioneered a non-traditional type of comedy where, by twisting with non-sequiturs, there is no punchline. Martin described the idea behind his comedic approach in a 2008 article in Smithsonian Magazine:

“What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation? 

In one of his final recorded dispatches from the Norconian in 2016, after years of reflection, Charlie Vurmin remarked:

“At the surface, I still do adhere to my theory that ‘life’s a joke.’ I really do. I also pride myself on the acceptance that my opinions are always in flux. My opinions will never be fully refined and ready for shelving. So, currently my opinion is that my life really does seem to be a joke in that it’s a grueling drudgery of mundane routines. We are all balancing on a slippery slope and it seems that most life on Earth is this quick cycle (consume, reproduce, die…) and along the way, you should try to enjoy the show…. Maybe one day I’ll figure out my purpose and then life won’t seem like a joke.”

The joke of Chuck’s life, as far as we can tell, follows the form of Steve Martin’s comedic styling. After all these years he’s still waiting for a punchline that never comes.

Similarly, the Fed’s sick joke of dollar debasement and permanent inflation is without end…and without a punchline. Yet the joke’s on all of us.

We pay the price – through our time, our talents, and our lives – for persistent dollar debasement and the permanent wreckage of financial bubbles and crippling debt.

And that, my friends, is no laughing matter.

[Editor’s note: Join the Economic Prism mailing list and get a free copy of an important special report called, “Utility Payment Wealth – Profit from Henry Ford’s Dream City Business Model.” If you want a special trial deal to check out MN Gordon’s Wealth Prism Letter, you can grab that here.]

Sincerely,

MN Gordon
for Economic Prism

 

MN Gordon is President and Founder of Direct Expressions LLC, an independent publishing company. He is the Editorial Director and Publisher of the Economic Prism – an E-Newsletter that tries to bring clarity to the muddy waters of economic policy and discusses interesting investment opportunities.

 

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