The Way We Live Now: Fleeing the police, on foot. Who can afford cars? Let them all go bankrupt. All we need for our ATM robberies are a crowbar and a laid-off blesbok, for distraction.

Chrysler—always trying to stay one step ahead of GM!—is on the verge of a bankruptcy filing. Who cares?

Well shit Chrysler workers and their families do, you monster, but you know who probably doesn't? Various state workers across the country. Because they're already preoccupied by the fact that they're being hit with involuntary furloughs, which amount to a pay cut and a cut in services! You media industry employees are already familiar with this tactic. If you're a state worker, furloughs are at least preferable to outright pay cuts, because at least you get a few extra days off. But if you're a state citizen, and you want to, say, use the courthouse, or go to the DMV, or take advantage of some other government service that your tax money paid for, you're shit outta luck. Come back Monday!

Or, if you are Queens resident Valentin Garcia, you may choose not to wait until Monday. Instead, you may choose a different plan: knock an ATM machine off its foundation with your van at 3 a.m., then flee on foot when witnesses call the police, then jump into the East River and attempt to swim away, then be scooped up by harbor patrol, proclaiming "I was not in the van. I don't know anything about ATM machines" while they pull you out of the river, and then, when you get to the police station, using your one phone call to call your accomplice at home and loudly tell him to remove the money from your mattress, where you were hiding it. Do this well enough and you will make the papers. But not the front page. Valentin, if only you had enlisted the help of a night monkey, a lemur, a guanaco, a caiman, a porcupine, an Arabian oryx, and a blesbok—that is front page material.

You could have done it, too, Valentin. Those animals have all been laid off. They want that ATM just as bad as you do.