This Week for Happy Hour: Last Ever Half-Price Happy Hour?

Stay calm.  It’s very likely not the last Half-Price Happy Hour at Rhino, at least not in terms of the discount on drinks.  There will be half-price Happy Hour forever and ever.  Happy Hour, like a nest of fire ants or the Black Eyed Peas, cannot be annihilated by the will of man, nor by a match to kerosene.  It’s resilient, bulletproof and flame retardant in its undeniable breadth, and far reaching through its many compartmentalized tentacles.  So shake it off, relax your posture there and unpucker your sphincter.

And, release.  There, that’s better.  But wait!...

This Friday could be your last opportunity to pay half price for your drinks – in U.S. dollars.  Stay with me.  [Warning: substantive policy issues challenge the attention span, oh the woes of information-based soft science and the blunt black-hole brutality of its innumerable counterparts.]

My concern is this: if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling and we default on our financial obligations, the value of the US Dollar plunges.  I know, I know, Happy Hour is usually the time when you get to relax and forget about the crap storm outside, but it’s relevant here, I promise.

So when the value of the Dollar declines, goods (say, beer or whiskey) and services (say, carpentry or hand jobs), on the other hand (ha!), retain their value relative to the dollar.  All of a sudden your drinks regularly cost twice as many US dollars, and the beloved Half-Price Happy Hour is reduced to the intangible memory of yester-month’s weekday normalcy.  Oh, the horror!

Think the concept is a bit hyperbolic?  Try this one on like OJ’s black gloves: say the hypothetical default and the devaluing of the American currency triggers a domino-effect collapse not unlike the aftermath of the 2008 clustermug, when the unregulated investment banking industry leveraged itself to the hilt for short term profits, found itself – imagine – insolvent upon the inevitable first hiccup, and the economy-at-large took it on the proverbial chin on down the line.  Well, if something like that happens after the potential default on August 2nd, and the value of the dollar relative to goods and services declines further, we could all find ourselves in a make-shift barter economy when it comes to Happy Hour. 

Let’s think about that for a moment.

Unless you’re a sadist, spending $100 on a vodka tonic seems a little inappropriate.  The dollar alternative and practical currency would be the trade of goods and services.  You’d have to bring a bag of flour to Happy Hour – or a half bag, during Half-Price Happy Hour.  A hand job (not for me; I’m just pointing this out) would get you two-for-one drinks, or a single drink for a half a hand job.  Put that on a table tent: “Friday, 5-9pm: Rail Drinks Only a Half a Handy!”  With a thumbs-up decal and an Aquafresh smile.  I think we just found a loop hole to the DC ban on Ladies’ Nights.

Ultimately, none of this is relevant for the foreseeable future.  Because there is absolutely no way in holy hell – and you can quote me on this, and please do – that Congress will not raise the debt ceiling.  Anyone with the slightest understanding of the intersection between the economy and the political system understands that the Tea Partiers and the far Right are putting on a show, whether they realize it or not.  Because it’s not up to them.  And it’s not complicated: as things get closer to August 2^nd, corporate interests will turn the screws on anyone opposing the hike, because those with the most money and earning potential are those with the most to lose.  And the lobbied-for tax cuts would have to be pretty, pretty, pretty hefty to offset the losses from flogging the Dollar.

The Republican Party is the business party in this country – or at least the businessier party – and at the end of the day they will do what they’re told in order to help big business and the wealthy elites – on that, you can always count, and there are no exceptions, if incidentals.  The only question is whether Obama, the coward, can win the game of chicken that’s going on without sacrificing public interest programs and forfeiting debt-reducing tax revenue in the bluff’s wake.  I’m not so confident.  But even if he does, those stretching the debate out like this to maybe get some more short-term profits for the tiniest of minorities, again, will produce significant though less pronounced detrimental effects on the Dollar’s rating.  Which is why I find my sphincter’s all goddam puckered up again!  Am I alone?

I’ll say this: if I’m wrong, and the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised and our country defaults, I’ll buy everyone who calls me on it a whole round of free drinks.  Because if I am wrong, everybody’s gonna need the discount.  And we’re all going to want to take the edge off.

So this week’s call to Happy Hour won’t be so much a celebration of some wonderful-in-its-pithy-triviality event or D-list celeb’s birthday.  Much more, it should be the execution of financially desperate action, the coming together to enjoy a thing which might not last forever inasmuch as it exists within the confines of our own latent anticipations, the prospective cultivation of a perverse nomos at the precipice being as frightening and bleak an interactive theater as one can hope to endure without a nice, cool, refreshing cocktail.

I need a drink already. 

See you there!

Finn

P.S. Scroners are still free and will be forever.

P.P.S.  Saturday, in a normalcy retrospective, we will be celebrating David Spade’s birthday with some of the great comedies of all time: Tommy Boy, PCU, Black Sheep, and Joe Dirt(e) are all on the table.  Holler if you need one to be on.