Of Golden Parachutes and Green mail

To start: the only legitimate excuse a registered voter can offer the rest of us tomorrow morning for NOT watching the first Presidential debate between Senators Obama and John McCain tonight might be 'I was kidnapped by aliens.' Be prepared to show all of us the probe if that's what you're gonna try. Stepping off my soapbox.

I'm not allowed to do very much in my household with our checkbook since I have a history of hopefulness that my bank cannot stand (I write checks that I hope there's money to cover). I mention that because there's been a huge amount of churn in the world's financial markets in the last weeks that, fiscal fool that I am, I think of as mostly self-inflicted wounds.

I may be (and probably am) very much over simplifying all of the chaos and confusion but it looks like if we took all the money in the world and tried to pay back all the money everyone owes everyone else, we'd run out of money. Or world. See? I told you I was a simpleton. I keep reading that we're heading towards, are already in and/or narrowly averting the Great Depression that started in the USA on Black Tuesday, 29 October of 1929.

I keep reading this comparison, written by folks like me, who weren't alive for the original reference. My mom was, as a young girl barely of school age. When I was a small child she told stories of Grampy, her father, selling apples to try to keep a roof over his family's head as the vortex of collapse spread from Wall Street to Main Street. The desolation and destitution, as she described it, and as I read about in college, was overwhelmingly absolute. I think of how much I love my family, and imagine how much you love yours and the lengths to which we would each go to keep them safe. I often marvel at the bravery my Grampy and Grandma had in holding on in an era before there were federally insured bank deposits, Social Security and almost any of the safety nets we have in place now and which we take for granted but hold in such little regard.

For a lot of us who slept through American History (what's it called now, civics? Yeah that bells the cat) we have a fuzzy black and white clip of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, leaning into a huge radio microphone, telling our grandparents and many of our parents "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." He used that new-fangled technology, radio, to create a community of solidarity through his Fireside Chats and enough of his fellow citizens kept the faith that we look back at that point in our history as a reference and touchstone.

Seventy-years on we still have a lot of fear--and now, we have a system to color code the external threats. Has there ever been a day in the history of this country where the advisory system, as it's called, would have registered "low"? General "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne's army heading south from Canada steamrolled Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Edward until meeting his Waterloo, so to speak (sorry, Benny and Bjorn), at Saratoga trying to subdue those uppity Colonials? Red for "Severe" or Mauve? Today, it's "yellow" unless you're on commercial air and then it's "orange" as in "orange you happy to pay five dollars for a bag of peanuts?"

Meanwhile, in Bedford Falls and elsewhere, the 'creative accounting' wizards who'd perfected and elevated commerce to a religion seem to have come a cropper and it now it looks a lot like Closing Time (or as they used to say in Olde Queens Tavern in New Brunswick when the lights came on at 1 AM, 'you don't have to go home, but you do have to go'). What color should Clarence and George use for the peril we find ourselves in now?

And to whom should we turn, if not one another, not to buy apples or pencils but to reassure ourselves that this remarkable proposition of a nation we inadvertently created over two hundred and thirty years ago, and which survived a suicidal Civil War that certainly wasn't very much of the former, countless conflicts large and small and low fidelity assaults that are unceasing and unyielding and which has been the beacon to so many around the world for decades?

There is no color nor room for doubt or for self-doubt, nor should there be. As Abe Lincoln asked a century and a half ago, "Did we brave all ... to falter now?....The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail-if we stand firm, we shall not fail. " See you tonight, in front of the Electric Fire, but fearing all we'll get is smoke when what we need is light.
-bill kenny