
The toy your kid wants is still sitting on a dock in China.
Your Uncle Joe realizes this is a problem. By next election, he knows you’ll have forgotten about Afghanistan. Covid-19 will have been banished, which means the economy will zip back. Gas prices will slip downwards, because they always do.
But if your kid doesn’t get the Magic Mixies Critter Cauldron or the Squishmallow Frog Prince* he or she wants this year because they’re all still stuffed into a container ship off of Long Beach, you’re going to remember that come election time, mostly because your kid will remind you of it every day until next Christmas.
This is a problem and, like a Democrat, Joe Biden is trying to solve it. He’d better, because Fox has already labeled the issue “Joe Biden’s supply chain,” as if Biden had spent his life managing the worldwide network of ships, ports, trucks and trains that gets stuff from the people who make it to the people who want it, before taking a little break from that to be President. Here’s a nice interview with an executive from Walmart, a behemoth corporation that pays minimum wage as often as it possibly can, blaming the “labor shortage” for our supply chain woes and calling for Biden to fix it by finding more people who want to work for $7.50 an hour.
Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, thinks that the supply chain problem exists because the Secretary of Transportation is gay.
Biden’s solution is a disgustingly Democratic one, meaning it addresses the problem and has an outside chance of working. He ordered every port to be open 24/7 and every stevedore and truck driver in the country work overtime so that Christmas can be delivered.
For me this means that the Amazon, UPS and Fed-Ex trucks that already ram ceaselessly around my sleepy suburban neighborhood, endangering my elderly neighbors out for their evening totters, will increase in both speed and number, soon in the dark, so that it won’t be safe to step off a curb until December 26.
But Joe knows what he’s doing. If people can’t go into credit card debt until next November so that their tykes’ faces glow under the Christmas tree, if they can’t throw lefts and rights at each other at Target on Black Friday, if Jeff Bezos can’t make enough extra billions in Christmas cash so he can launch all of us into space, why, it wouldn’t be Christmas at all.
And don’t try that birth-of-Christ, all-men-living-in-peace-and-brotherhood for one day a year, sleep-in-heavenly-peace crap on me. Christmas is about commerce, naked greed and transforming our kids into even bigger bottomless pits of needs and wants than they are the rest of the year. If you could magically remove all of the cash out of Christmas, hardly anybody would pay attention to it. It would be celebrated by a small minority of Americans, while the rest of us would barely be aware of its existence.
Shit, it would be Hanukkah.
*Real toys. Google them if you don't believe me.