Today I was making french toast in the kitchen and Roby hollered so I looked out the window and saw the biggest bird I’ve ever seen circling the graveyard across 41st street.
This week it finally clicked for me: the stock market isn’t tanking because of some arcane financial details that we don’t understand, it’s tanking because we finally DO understand.
We understand that debt is as toxic to the collective as it is to the individual. We understand that the bailout is useless to us if it doesn’t increase confidence in high finance and their status quo. We understand that there’s no reason to be confident in clever rats who make billions for themselves by poisoning their own business— indeed, their own economy. We understand how money is conjured up in a fractional reserve system. We understand what the mounting debt means to our future earnings. We understand that hanging a few fallguys out to dry doesn’t even begin to address the culture that is so smugly assured that it’s in everyone’s best interest for the richest, hoardingest, most money-obsessed segment of our society to get richer and richer and never stop getting richer. We understand how much energy has been spent on inventing complicated new ways to manipulate theoretical money and projected earnings, and how generously these people have rewarded themselves for it. We understand that no one was expected to use their personal bonuses or ludicrous salaries to help these businesses survive. We understand who mails us these credit card offers and the effect they expected the cards to have on our lives. We understand what kind of person demands that perpetual, limitless growth is not only possible, but imperative. We understand exactly what will happen if we stop beleiving in the mysterious power of their paper assets and refuse to let them gamble with our earnings any longer.
We have stories, stories thousands of years old, some of which have persevered through upheaval and migration and collapse and revolution. Stories about Midas, about Croesus, about Scrooge, about Gordon Gekko. We don’t fool ourselves into thinking that times are so different now, not like we grew up doing. It’s not so easy to pretend now that internet and HDTV and cellphone and eyepod are proof that modern Americans have outgrown the old caveats, have outfoxed the old rules like “what goes up, must come down” and “don’t be a greedy shithead.”
The upper class might fear the crash, but I think the sharper ones amongst them have known for a minute it was coming: they’ve obviously taken steps to insulate themselves, to shake as much money from the tree before winter really hits and it gets chopped up for firewood. These people, I’m sure, are already brainstorming ways to bring even more wealth into their possesion during the chaos to come. The middle class is maybe scared, but they’re always scared of something, always convinced they’re just one wrong move away from losing it all…
The working class—you know, the secret people that neither presidential candidate has to mention?— well we can’t hardly wait. There’s a shitload of us, too. More than there are aspiring CEOs, more than there are office hacks surfing the web, more than there are hung-over college students. More than there are cops, I’d wager, if I was interested in making wagers at this hour.
Short of rolling a guillotine through Manhattan and offfering us a grand pyramid made entirely of rich men’s heads, there will not be any more confidence in our present financial arrangement. Ever. This crash is inevitable, and necessary, and welcomed.
My advice to the anxious is to follow Roby’s lead and learn how to make wine, beer, mead, spirits, etc. You’ll be flush with friends and good stuff to barter. In the land of Joe Sixpack, the distiller can’t help but do fine through tough times.