Low Ceilings Are Intimate, Warm and Good for Americans

High Ceilings are scary.

"We're running out of time," Geithner told reporters after a private lunch meeting with Senate Democrats. Chicago Tribune - I'll just bet that such urgency to raise the national debt ceiling didn't put them off their feed.

It's a cozy little place with subdued lighting and a low ceiling, creating an intimate feel. We were directed to our seats by a pleasant hostess and attended to by a very nice waitress who was attentive and perky. . . ..

Review of a Pub Restaurant

One can not beat a joint that features 'attentive and perky' waitresses. Nor, should one scorn a low ceiling. A lovely woman called my attention to the ceiling phenomenon. As in all things, it takes a woman to address most subjects that do not involve my next meal, episodes of Rawhide on ME-TV, or other less savory instincts. We were passing yet another in the endless and genuinely un-appealing McMansion Developments -homes with very high ceilings - when she lectured me on the psychology of architecture. What follows is what I drew from the lesson.

Too many Americans have fallen into debt by building or re-configuring homes with high ceilings - the boorish and Yup-Scale McMansion -over-priced, over-mortgaged, and over-head ceilings that require more and more adaptors to the wonderful painting idiot-sticks in order to paint the ceilings, or a complete scaffold construction. My son Conor can stand in the living room and apply colonial white to the ceiling with a simple hand-held roller, while Pater Familias Hickey splashes and slathers on egg-shell to the walls in our simple Helot warmth of the Chicago Raised Ranch.

Ever attend a gathering in such a high ceiling-ed home? Guests scatter to cluster in little groups in the primordially human attempt at safety, welcome and warmth. Lessons of the Cave and the Follies of the Temple. I worship at the Catholic Mass of Scared Heart Mission Church where I am tightly packed in with fellow communicants longing to escape the attention of Cantor Terry McEldowney's commentaries. It is old-world worship of intimacy and community rooted in our peasant pasts.

George W. Bush raised the debt ceiling eight times during his two terms and saddled poor President Obama with debt that he feels impelled to excede. President Obama, like that low-brow scoundrel President GW Bush love high ceilings - it keeps the guests at bay.

I say keep the debt ceiling as low as Media Integrity.