Seeing the crazy way that everything is connected to everything else is one of the best ways to find solutions to environmental problems.  Consider, for example, the connections between the financial crash of 2008, Morgan Stanley (the mega finance corporation that borrowed $107.3 billion from us), “yo momma” jokes, and extraterrestrials – when you put it all together, it points to a possible cause and a solution to global environmental problems like mass extinction, habitat fragmentation, deforestation, and emerging diseases.  I have to admit the chain of logic in this thesis of connections is a bit iffy, but I can explain.  Let’s start at the beginning of the chain.

The Financial Crash of 2008

The boom times running up to the 2008 crash were, in part, attributable to a huge financial house of cards built on a foundation of bad loans.  These loans were mortgages on overpriced homes purchased by people who couldn’t afford them.  I’m simplifying; it’s a complicated story, and I’m no economist, so I’ll leave the full story for others (like Paul Krugman or Daniel Quinn Mills) to tell, but for our purposes here, suffice it to say these “sub-prime” mortgages were purchased by financial institutions that were locked into a complex scheme of largely unregulated risky monetary practices that totaled in the trillions.  When the scheme collapsed Lehman Brothers tumbled, and Morgan Stanley followed quickly along with other major finance institutions like Merrill Lynch, AIG, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Bear Sterns, Goldman Sachs, and many others; all once deemed so powerful and secure they could never fail.

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley fell in part because its hedge fund operations were financed by the purchase of those risky mortgages.  What struck me as ridiculous was Morgan Stanley’s claim that it was a victim like everyone else, not one of the perpetrators.  It claims it never knew the true nature of the risks it was taking.

Seriously?

So when I read Nathaniel Popper’s article in The New York Times (December 29, 2014) that investigations reveal that Morgan Stanley did, indeed, know the risks and, in fact, was instrumental in the growth of bad mortgages, I wasn’t surprised.

What caught my eye, however, was a quote from Morgan Stanley executive Pamela Barrow’s e-mail to her colleague.  Ms. Barrow called the people who bought the houses (with a few added punctuations of mine), “first-payment defaulting, straw buyin’, house-swappin’, first-time wanna-be home buyers.”

Oh snap!

Though not exactly the kind of sharp-tongued repartee of a Comedy Central celebrity roast or the clever verbal sparring of kids ranking or playing the dozens (insult contests) in my school days, Ms. Barrow shows some skill.

But where it really gets interesting is when she continued with a solution that could have saved Morgan Stanley and prevented the 2008 crash if it were implemented.  She said,

“We should call all their mommas.  Betcha that would get some of them good old boys to pay that house bill.”

That’s when it hit me and I had my “aha!” moment.

Yo-momma jokes

Where I grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant, mommas, in the abstract, were serious business – one did not talk about another’s momma unless it was to agitate.  Because of this, “yo momma” jokes were common in ranking or the dozens – the jokes were not actually about mothers, they were just insults meant to test one’s resolve.

Consider, for example, “Yo’ momma’s so ugly, when she threw a boomerang, it didn’t come back!” or

“Yo momma’s house is so small, there isn’t room to change her mind,” or

“Yo momma’s so poor, she does her drive-by shootings by bus,” or

“Yo momma’s so dumb, she stood on a chair to raise her IQ.”

In a moment of honest reflection, when Ms. Barrow considered the risk inherent in Morgan Stanley’s growing acquisitions of sub-prime mortgages to fuel their hedge funds, she must have entertained inserting the clause in the loan agreements that read, “Upon failure to make payments, we’re calling yo’ momma, who, incidentally, is so stupid she thinks a sub-prime is a steak.”

Her solution of threatening homeowners with the possibility of having their mommas drawn into the matter and possibly having to defend their mommas (a cultural obligation rather than a rule of law) if they defaulted on their loans was brilliant.

Extraterrestrials

So here’s my thesis – it is common to consider Earth our mother, and, indeed, the mother of all life on Earth, so Barrow’s momma-based strategy could work, except for one complication – when ranking or playing the dozens, one’s opponent has to be someone outside your family, your friends, or your posse.  When it comes to Earth, who is momma to us all, the yo-momma joke has to be leveled by someone from another planet (their momma being their planet).

So, if the SETI Institute, those folks searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, were to one day receive a staticky, crackling set of communications that that splashed across the news media around the world, and roughly translated as:

“Yo planet is so depauperate, it makes the Tabernacle Choir look speciose!” or

“Yo planet is so fragmented, it makes Humpty Dumpty look good!” or

“Yo planet’s got so many emerging diseases, it makes a zombie apocalypse feel like a Club Med vacation!” or

“Yo planet’s climate is changing so fast, it makes a Kardashian romance look like a long-term relationship!” or

“Yo planet’s so deforested, a Brazillian wax leaves more bush!”,

people would be outraged.  Well, yes, and a bit surprised about the nature of our first contact.  After getting over the shock of discovering we are not alone, however, we would be motivated to respond,  “Oh yeah?  Well yo planet is so f#@!ed up, even James Inhofe thinks your climate is changing!”

OK, since waiting for extraterrestrials to taunt us is a bit farfetched, I do hope the chain of logic behind the idea is at least clear.

One might say that Earth as mom is already a well-known environmental trope, but it doesn’t resonate with everyone.  But maybe yo-momma jokes about our Earth, our mom and mom to all species and mom to our vibrant, living world, might just get even the most apathetic exorcised enough to defend our momma and her honor.