Dramamine alert!

Here’s a financial tip, which I am able to bring you courtesy of The New York Times. Yes, that’s right folks, although the Times itself is drowning in debt, it may nevertheless prove to be a gold mine for a certain class of investor, chiefly, I suspect, those seeking to capitalize on the wide variety of sentimental emetics that have–now that the Age of Obama is nigh–begun to feature in the pages of our former paper of record.

Consider, to take just one example, the Times‘s recent story on “The New Face of Race Relations” (published, appropriately, in the “Fashion and Style” section of the paper). It turns out that among the many other wonders wrought by Barack Obama has been a lowering of what the Times (quoting unnamed “psychologists”) calls “interracial anxiety.” Obama, you see, is an “omnipresent icebreaker” whose beneficent influence wafts like a healing zephyr through the knotty corridors of race relations–and that’s not all! The Obama Effect has also exercised its magic on other species of prejudice and political incorrectness. Witness this reported exchange:

On the morning after the election, Kristin Rothballer, 36, who lives in San Francisco, kissed her female partner goodbye on the train while commuting to work. A black woman who sat down next to her turned and said she was sorry that Proposition 8, the amendment to ban gay marriage in the state, looked like it was going to pass.

“We grabbed hands,” Ms. Rothballer recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, I really want to congratulate you because we have a black president and that’s amazing.’ ”

“Our conversation then almost became about the fact that we were having the conversation,” she said.

Something moved her to apologize to the black woman for slavery.

“For two strangers riding a train to Oakland to have that conversation about race, it wouldn’t have been possible if Obama hadn’t been elected,” she said. “I always felt open with my colleagues, but to say to a stranger on the train, ‘Hey, I’m sorry about slavery,’ that just doesn’t happen.”

See what I mean? Oscar Wilde said one had to have a heart of stone to read about the death of Little Nell without laughing. But is there a man alive who can digest such tripe without queasiness or worse? The Bank of America may need a bailout. The old-folks managers in Detroit may require billions to pursue their sideline making novelty automobiles. But I reckon that enterprises like Extra Packaging Corp.–“tin-tie and tape-seal bags . . . designed to provide secure sealing and easy disposability”–are positioned to make a killing in the upcoming Orgy of Obama Love.