Now You See It…

As I write this, another Valentine’s Day has come and gone and I am about to cuddle up with an Acai Bowl and pretentious latte, ready to reflect on the only good type of Valentine’s Day:  an uneventful one.  Ironically, I believe this “holiday for lovers” is only enjoyed properly by singles.  Maybe that’s because I see so many desperate, lonely singles flock to “anti-Vday” parties and have the time of their lives once a year, or maybe it’s because 90% of the Valentine’s Days I’ve experienced with girlfriends in my life have ended in apocalyptic fashion.  I’m talking hellfire and brimstone and looking into the sky hoping to see the Four Horsemen galloping on their way to ravage the Earth.  In any case, it’s just a ridiculous, fabricated, useless holiday.  Which got me thinking….

It occurs to me that we always get in the most trouble as a society when we try to fabricate value where it doesn’t exist.  Whether it’s a new investment opportunity, a real estate scam, or a bogus hallmark holiday, the pattern is always the same.  Some visionary has an idea for a way to create or spin a new movement.  The marketers get a hold of it and draw up bunch of sexy ads that they bombard consumers with on the radio, TV and internet.  If the fad catches on and starts to spread virally, it is only a matter of time before the inevitable mob mentality and homesteading atmosphere kicks in to exacerbate the problem, and often exponentially.  The best architects of these movements and schemes invoke powerful human emotions and hangups to kick off trends  that, if launched properly, can endure for decades.  This is the point where conspiracy theorists would start blaming the government, or skull and bones, or the masons, or, for you So I Married an Axe Murderer fans out there, “the pentaverate“.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide who is actually the guy behind the guy while I get to the point of this bloviation.

Let me guess.  You have no idea what I’m talking about?  Right now you’re mumbling that I’m a no-talent hack who couldn’t write his way out of a remedial English class?  Fair enough, but read on for a couple of more paragraphs and I’ll try to give you some examples so you can form whatever opinion you may.  Let’s start with the aforementioned Saint Valentine’s Day, February 14th, a day like any other on the calendar.  Let’s say you were alone on the Island from Lost with only a volleyball to keep you company.   “Valentine’s Day” would unceremoniously come and go in the same manner as the day that preceded it and the one that follows.  While people worlds away are frantically trying to find reservations and make sure they have bought the right color roses, you would be happily foraging for coconuts and trying to remember what bacon smells like.  Now let’s say a flash of light sends you back to the island 5,000 years in the past (sorry to the writers of Lost if I just stole Season 7′s storyline, but your show is so stupid and meandering I can’t be blamed if an inane hypothetical accidentally hit the mark), and imagine trying to explain to an island tribesman from the distant past that February 14th is any different from February 13th or February 15th!  Seriously, like, for real, try to imagine what you would say to convince a group of native people who at this point in their history believe that monsoons are the wrath of the gods, in trying to convince them that they need to treat the 14th as a “special” day.  I don’t know if you could actually get through an explanation with a straight face, but what I do know is that it would be your sorry ass being thrown into a live volcano as a sacrifice to some god you’ve never heard of.

***Uncle Steve’s Random Tips:  Guys, Valentine’s Day isn’t all bad, because it does have one use: it’s the perfect litmus test for that girl you’re dating and thinking of getting serious with.  There are three types of girls and none can hide their true colors on the 14th of February.  Valentine’s Day is like Kryptonite to them, so grab a hunk of the stuff and use it wisely…

The first type are girls who make a big deal out of Valentine’s Day.  You know the drill, they want a certain kind of flowers (e.g. PINK roses, not red), expect a really fancy dinner ON the 14th (heaven forbid you celebrate it early or late), want everything to be perfect, and if you mess up even one bit they have a plethora of stored up tantrums they can choose from and launch into, acting like a kid who got an Xbox for Christmas and wanted a Wii instead.  These girls should be avoided at all costs.  I repeat, these girls should be avoided at all costs.  If you don’t understand why, just trust your Uncle Steve for now and you will thank your Uncle Steve later.  The second type of girl is the one who doesn’t make a big deal about the day at all.  She is probably not bitter or cynical, just doesn’t see what the big deal is and would rather just have a nice night with you and is simply happy that you get to spend a Saturday night together.  If you find a girl like this, hold on to her like an inmate holds on to soap in the shower.  Give her a ring if you have to, but don’t let her go.  The third type of girl is the type that disguises herself as the second type of girl when in reality she is a raging type one.  She’s the kind of girl who tells you not to worry about Valentine’s Day and that it’s just a stupid Hallmark holiday, but in reality she’s just testing you to see if you’ll come through.  It’s only a matter of time before the veil is pulled back and the tantrum begins.  These are the absolute worst types of girls, and if you are with one of them at this exact moment and realizing it while you are reading this, follow these simple steps and trust your Uncle Steve:  Collect yourself.  Now smile at her.  OK, now kindly excuse yourself from the table, walk to the bathroom, escape through the window, call a locksmith to change your locks, throw your cell phone in the river and get a new number, and have your name legally changed.  C’mon, you know you’ve always wanted to have Ruddiger P. Bullworth on your license.  You know you have. ***

The fact is, some really smart businesses realized they could fabricate a holiday as a way to sell cards and gifts and flowers and drum up restaurant business, and put all the resources of corporate America behind making their vision a reality.  And make it a reality they have, with staggering revenue peaks each year in the ides of February.  All this success does have its price, however.  I’d guess 33% (at least!) of couples have fights on Valentine’s Day (due to the variety of personalities described in Uncle Steve’s Tips), some break up, and the holiday serves as a stark reminder to singles everywhere that they have no one special in their lives.  Many girls retreat into dark rooms so they can wallow in sorrow over the fear they are going to die alone.  Isn’t that great?  Huge sums of money for some, clinical depression for others.  All because some D-bag decided to create a bogus holiday on a random pin-the-tail-on-the-calendar donkey whim…..

Let me stop picking on Valentine’s Day (there’s a lady scowling at me in this coffee shop and I think she must be reading over my shoulder) and shift to another ridiculous fabrication of our recent past:  the dot-com boom.  Remember in the late 90s when every week there would be some IPO with a couple of 25-year old kids running a website out of their mom’s garage and they’d be made millionaires overnight?  It was like the perfect financial storm, where regular investors didn’t know what the internet was but were caught up in mob-inspired financial homesteading, each person wanting to stake her claim on a piece of this new digital frontier.  I remember the first time I realized the dot-com craze was a bubble and that it would eventually burst, and believe it or not, it was Howard Stern that publicized it.  At the time, he was offered a pile of priceline.com stock when it was somewhere around $975/share.  Yes, $975/share (it’s now in the $70s)!  He said he didn’t want to partake because the company had nothing.  No assets like buildings and property, no truly unique business model, nothing.  He was buying shares in NBC instead, knowing it was a large and stable company that had tangible assets to back it up.  In a nutshell, this was the issue behind dot-coms: an industry was fabricated over night (some did persist, to be fair) but mob mentality and prospecting drove the market to an unsustanable high, and the resulting POP! of the bubble would be felt for some time, until all that money moved from the stock market to…

…real estate!  If the stock market was too volatile for people to sink their money into, then surely real estate was the next great frontier.  As my Uncle Cliff likes to say, “Land doesn’t rust”, and only goes up in value over time, right?  Well, maybe.  What really aggravates me about real estate are the tricks employed by the realtor community to try to drive values up and fabricate value where it doesn’t exist.  Employing the tactic of giving micro neighborhoods their own chic names, the realtors push prices up and up well beyond their true market value and, like the directionless drones that we are, consumers fall for it hook, line, and sinker.  When I lived in Buenos Aires, it made learning the neighborhoods more than annoying.  “So this is Palermo?  Well, sort of.  This is Palermo Viejo.  On Calle Uruguay you are in Palermo Chico, and if you go a few more blocks you are in Palermo Hollywood, and then if you go three blocks East….” You get the picture.  I see it here in San Diego as well, where I learned that I live not in Gas Lamp, and not even in “Ballpark”, I live in “Ballpark East”.  What a crock of crap.  Couple these tactics in this decade this with the global phenomenon of prospector-driven market demand and, just seven years after the dot-com bubble burst, we the people created and burst another massive bubble in the real estate sector.  Foreclosures are at an all-time high, new home sales and resales are at all-time lows, and the federal government is literally printing money to get us out of it.  Again, smart people fabricating something out of nothing, coupled with herd mentality among the masses, have led to this disaster, and….

…yet another even bigger disaster that was spawned by this mess.  It shows that there is a scale to my “fabrication” theory and that the smarter the people are who fabricate it and the more people that join in from the herd, the more exponentially worse the aftermath will be.  As the money shifted from the dot-com explosion to the real estate sector, some really, really smart people on Wall Street fabricated a new way to make money by taking all of these mortgages and bundling them into a new class of investments.  As long as property values kept rising, we’d all keep making money hand-over-fist.  I won’t go into the specifics here because we’ve all heard enough about it on the news lately, suffice it to say this one is so bad it’s led to close to $2 trillion in printed government money being approved to try to bail us out of this mess.  I stress try, because even after $2 trillion of investment, the smartest economists in the country aren’t sure we are going to get out of this one any time soon.  I will, however, point out again that this mess started when smart people tried to fabricate something from nothing, and we all jumped on board and couldn’t get off until it was too late.

I guess that’s the moral of this blog rant: if someone pressures you with something new, take a step back and compare it to the dot-com era, the real-estate boom, and the mortgage-backed security schemes.  If it was invented by somebody smart, and everyone is jumping on board, you might just consider saying “no thanks”, hiding your money under your bed, and sitting back with a cocktail as the madness eventually unfolds for your amusement.  Or, if you are the entrepreneurial type, give your Uncle Steve a call and you can help me create a new holiday I’m kicking around to get rich quickly.  I’m still playing with the details, but if you see advertising on TV soon for a “One Night Stand Day”, you’ll know you missed your chance….