Friday, March 13, 2009

THE PEASANTS' LIVES LOOK SO SAD FROM MY MANSION ON THE HILL

I set out to write some snark about Peggy Noonan's latest column, which is about the economic crash, but I'm having trouble getting past this in the first paragraph:

...we have arrived at the first fatigue. The heart-pumping drama of last September is gone, replaced by the drip-drip-drip of pink slips, foreclosures and closed stores. We are tired.

Hey, Peggy, you know what? For an ordinary person, last September may have seemed quite ominous, but it was distant. But if one of us gets a pink slip or suffers a house foreclosure, that's not a "drip-drip-drip" -- that feels like a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Maybe your friends with their mid-six- and seven-figure incomes react to pink slips as if they're not gut punches, but the rest of us are either (a) reeling or (b) bracing for the possibility of a blow that's going to send us reeling.

Oh, and about your pal, the "attorney in a Park Avenue firm," the one who says this?

"the dread is chronic.... Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe were supposed to be invincible. The pillars of media were supposed to be there forever. The lawyers were supposed to feed through thick and thin. Not anymore."

That's you. The rest of us? We're thinking: My job was supposed to be there forever -- or, if not my job, then at least a job market for people who do what I do. And the other 60% of my 401(k)? That was supposed to be there forever, too. That was the promise they used to sell us on these damn things -- that they'd be there when we needed them. Did we ever give a crap about the Park Avenue lawyers and the Masters of the Universe? Only to the extent that we thought that, if they're having a banquet, that means we'll be able to get a crumb. Now we don't even have the crumb. And that's what we care about -- not their banquet.

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