On my computer screen Chen

Rong’s dragon pearl of wisdom

in claw drifting live daring

come and get it Chumster.

This Christmas I took two of our grandchildren to see the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.  I had seen the 1951 original when I was a kid and loved it.  To this day I remember part of the phrase that the human mother had to say to stop Gort from exterminating an entire American army battalion, “Klaatu barada nikto.”  Every time my grade school had an atomic bomb drill, and I crawled under my desk and dutifully hid my face to avoid the glass that would shatter inward and not to be blinded by the sudden light from the bomb detonation, I remembered the message of the movie: Atomic weapons were dangerous.  (I was glad helpful space aliens had come to explain that to Washington, DC.) 

I did like the giant robot, Gort, in the remake better than the old Gort.  This time Gort fragments into millions of tiny, self replicating, locust-like destructors that simply devour all humans and human-made objects.  Much tougher for any one human being to shut down the entire ravaging swarm with a simple cease and desist order.

Which brings me to talk about President Obama and the stock market crash.  I suppose maybe first I should mention that all of the NINA ARM’s (no income, no assets adjustable rate mortgages) and the CDS’s (credit default swaps) reminded me of the ravaging Gort hoards the way that they destroyed the stock market and were chewing away at the value of my retirement savings.  When Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter began declaring Obama to be the Messiah, I really hoped that a god-like alien (i.e. anyone with more smarts than the Bush administration and greater personal ethics than the Wall Street bankers) had in fact given the incoming president some magic words, words that would instantly cause the stock markets to cease and desist from their free fall.  I think it would have been great to see President Obama step to the podium a few weeks ago – you know, just after it was made public that AIG Financial Products executives would be receiving retention bonuses despite the fact that they had created the voracious little CDS critters.  I hoped he would hold up his hands and in loud clear voice would speak into the roiling stock market destruction saying, “Klaatu barada nikto.”  Instead my sister sat me down and told me to pull my vanishing money out of stock funds and put it into CD’s.

It turned out for me that the 21^st century translation of Klaatu barada nikto is in fact “Get out of the market now.” 

I think there must be some sort of space alien sentence that the 1951 heroine did not tell us movie goers.  It would have told us to get back into the market when the global economy begins to reestablish itself.  I’m pretty sure about that because in both the original and the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu, the wise space alien, does come back to life and earth does continue happily to pursue a wiser course of action.