Before y’all get up in my grill, this note is not, per se, a political treatise. Some reference to the current, most prominent pig circus may be unavoidable, but we will seek (like the visit to the proverbial dentist) to render it as brief and painless as possible.
First, though, I want to give a shout out to biological lefties, whose number includes my own departed mama and her brother/my uncle. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also use the opportunity to pay similar tribute to Jimi Hendrix (a poor lad of authentic African and Native American decent, who was forced to restring right-handed guitars and play them upside down), Paul McCartney (who did not suffer this indignity), Sandy Koufax, Albert Einstein, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Neil Armstrong, Beethoven/Mozart, Leonardo Da Vinci, Oprah Winfrey and Larry Bird just to name a few.
To these and other left-handed geniuses: I salute you.
Because we live in a decidedly right-handed world. Everyone knows this, but it came to life for me again this past week when I was attempting to zip up a hoodie of particular personal sentimental value (a hoodie, if you will, for the ages), and realized it had a left handed zipper, with the fat part (called the slider/pull tab) on the left side, as illustrated in the following diagram:
And I’m not gonna lie: as a righty, I have a helluva time connecting it to the bottom stop.
Though I’m not proud of this, I felt outraged at the inconvenience imposed upon me by the hoodie manufacturer. But then I thought again, and I realized that lefties go through this sort of hassle every minute of every day. And not just with zippers. Doors, electronic key boards, standard cutlery, automotive transmission devices, vacuum cleaners, and virtually every product used in daily activity is designed under the assumption that the operator favors his or her right hand. Heck this even applies to combs (which I never use).
OK: maybe not combs. My better half convinced me that combs are dexterity neutral. But hopefully, the point is taken nonetheless.
Expanding upon this particular theme, it occurred to me that pretty much every lefty under the sun has to train themselves to be somewhat ambidextrous, less unspeakable calamities such as getting stuck in elevators, being unable to effectively manipulate the heating coils on their showers, etc., befall them.
It thus becomes axiomatic: if you’re left-handed, the world is out to get you; it hates you. Try not to take this personally. True, you get a head start to first base when seeking to beat out a grounder, and your curve ball tails way from righty batters, but my gosh, the discrimination you face even pervades our lexicon. Have you ever, for instance, been on the receiving end of a left-handed compliment? If not – trust me – it’s not the most pleasant of experiences. Ostentatiously fancy-pants types are referred to by the legit playas as being gauche (the French word for left). Incompetent dancers (among whose numbers, despite the thousands of dollars my late mama spent to eradicate the problem, I count myself), are said to have two left feet.
All of which brings rise to wonderment (cue transition to political treatise) as to the dramatic and unmistakable leftward turn of certain elements of our domestic electorate. No, I didn’t watch The Debate, but I did read about it, and it is clear that the least rive gauche of the presenters is still in favor of huge tax increases, nationalization of key industries, massive entitlement expansion (free education and child care, etc.) and enfranchisement of undocumented immigrants and convicted felons.
And all of the presenters are highly successful Caucasians: disproportionate beneficiaries of a socioeconomic model they now seek to dismantle. They include a Trillionaire (but not his wife), some McKinsey dude, a Harvard Professor and a couple of career pols. Each would re-engineer our whole system, with highly uncertain results, and each is so passionate about this that the contest devolved to determining which among them could outflank the others in terms of left-leaning hysteria.
We can probably now spit, rinse and move out of this political dentist chair, leaving off with one final observation: the assembled debate crew looked more like the 1962/hundred-game-losing New York Mets than their Mickey Mantle/Roger Maris cross-town rivals.
I must disclose for anyone otherwise unaware that I by and large play for the other team. And it is only in the spirit of peace, love and understanding that I urge these lefties, for their own benefit, to induce an element of ambidexterity into the proceedings. Before they lose and lose big.
Certainly, the markets appear to be ignoring the political lurch into the oncoming lanes (which I hardly need to remind you are situated to the left of the right-handed favoring vehicles in which we travel in these realms). It was indeed a down week for the global equity markets, but one that looks to me like nothing so much as a buying opportunity.
And here, I cannot resist the temptation of taking a victory lap around the proverbial prognostication race track (a facility which features a series of perpetual left turns), because, as predicted for many moons in this space, even a modest amount of market/economic carnage has pushed buckets full of liquidity into government debt. As has been widely reported (but bears mention nonetheless), the U.S. Thirty Year Bond closed on Friday at record-low yields:
And again, this against the backdrop of a stable economy, with risk assets hovering at near-record valuations.
My main point here is that if anything really serious happens – in the markets or the broader economy – the pathetic double top at the right side of this graph will extend out to a full collapse. So whichever biological or political side you favor, I’m begging you, yet again, to consider my advice – that a long price/short yield position in Treasuries offers a delectable hedge against the “risk-based” assets you otherwise hold.
Unfortunately, here, we’ve got to get out the salt and lime and crack open yet another Corona (presumably using a Church Key that I will argue to the death discriminates against lefties). I don’t have a great deal of wisdom to lay you respecting this terrifying but increasingly wearying topic. Suffice to say that it looks to me like it is simultaneously the biggest viral threat since the Black Plague and the most over-reported story of at least this young century.
I’ll lean towards optimism here, though. I am happy for the enterprises that are making billions off of updating them masses on this — every microsecond, because I’m a righty and view it as capitalism and free enterprise at its finest. I’ll also go out on a limb and suggest that if, somehow, the monster is contained and dissipates, all other things being equal, were probably looking at a moonshot of >3500 on the Gallant 500 (each constituent of which, I’m happy to report, is, at the point of publication, virus-free).
But I wouldn’t be loading the boat just yet. Because. We. Just. Don’t. Know. I read this morning that they cancelled Carnival in Venice over this, and if so, sh!t may just have gotten serious.
You wouldn’t know it unless you were paying particular attention, but it was actually a quiet week otherwise around these parts. Probably the biggest headline grabber was Morgan Stanley’s bid for e-Trade, and I offer a note of appreciation to the Mother Morgan crew for what I think is a pretty sharp trade on their part. For eons, their Wealth Management Division was an overly exclusive club. In fact, when I sold my last company, I received a call from one of their reps, a very professional sounding lady, who I had to tell that (though it pained me more to inform her than it presumably did for her to receive the information), the proceeds from the transaction failed to place me at their minimum threshold for client acceptance. At which point the conversation ended abruptly. Politely, diplomatically, but abruptly.
And now, with the e-Trade, I think I qualify at long last. Now they want everyone’s money. I’m not gonna rush out to open an account, but it is comforting to know that if I want to, I now can.
And at least they want my cash to invest on my behalf, which is not what the lefties on the Debate Stage have in mind. Those southpaws want to control it for their own agendas, as they always have. If you doubt this, just ask the (albeit) late Chuck Berry – a right handed guitarist who invented rock and roll, but was hounded by the IRS for decades nonetheless. In fact, hounding Chuck Berry may be the government’s strongest suit. They excel at it, and it is my worry that under certain political outcomes, we all may become Chuck Berrys – minus those world changing riffs and signature duck walk.
I am aware, as indicated throughout, that it ain’t easy being a lefty. When you turn on the road in that direction, you must do so against traffic. Maybe you’d be better off with other modes of transportation, say, flying. Though I don’t have first-hand data on this, I’ve no doubt that cockpits also discriminate against this minority group. But that’s their problem; not ours.
If I’m right, though, then even left-handed pilots have to be a bit ambidextrous. And so should we all. It may be that the most urgent need in this regard applies to lefty politicians, but I can find no arguments against the holy notion that everybody should go both ways. At least a little bit.
Just don’t overdo it, OK? I think that each of us should follow the orientation that is dearest to our hearts. On the other hand, a slight move towards the middle, is, I think, the Lord’s Work. But that’s what it is: work. And we need to pace ourselves, because as the great left-handed poet Robert Frost famously reminded us: “we have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep”.
OK; I’ll admit it: I don’t know that Frost was a righty or a lefty, but it hardly matters, right? But either way, we need to pace ourselves, use all of our extremities, and thus work as effectively as we can to reach those dreams that never leave our consciousness, come what may.
TIMSHEL