House of Eratosthenes

Especially now, because what just happened to our country might not be so much a repeat of nineteen ninety-two, as nineteen thirty-two. And the notion that the Great Depression ended because of Roosevelt’s policies, rather than in spite of them, is now moribund. Facts are not kind to it.

It comes down to this: Pouring cream in ditches to rot, while a few hundred miles away, a baby starves and its mother’s body can no longer produce milk. Pigs are slaughtered and left to rot while in other parts of the country, a family sits down to soup made with rotten cabbage because there’s nothing else to eat. Policies like these aren’t part of some urban legend. They really happened. They were really implemented, because those boys in Washington were so smart.

This is the burden of a brain trust. When you’re oh so super duper smart, and you feel the weight of keeping that kind of reputation alive and going strong, you’re forbidden from pointing out the obvious. Every little thing that comes out of your mouth has to have this touch of irony to it, this “you wouldn’t think so, but Bob says it’s true.” You have to contradict common sense, to show how smart you are. Up becomes down, women become men, children become wizened old sages, surrendering your guns becomes an act of responsible self-defense, starvation becomes nourishment.

So in a country filled with starving babies, we pour cream in ditches. In a country where nobody has enough money to spare for the essentials, we create artificial inflation.

There is a phrase that appears repeatedly in Atlas Shrugged that I’m hearing over and over again on the news. I find it alarming that nobody’s taken the time or trouble to re-word it, even slightly. That phrase, just like the ultra-smart people, precedes irony — things antithetical to common sense.

The phrase is “In Times Like These.”

Atlas Shrugged is a story of society’s most intelligent and productive people, being requested to sacrifice themselves, by other people whom the prevailing viewpoint thinks are the most intelligent and productive people. (They’re requested to do this, right before they are forced to.) And so the phrase is repeated over and over again. There’s this mindset that wet has to become dry, in has to become out, and, most of all, self-destruction is by its very nature constructive. Common sense has to be contradicted, because this helps to show how desperate these times really are. Up has become the new down.

It’s a whole different world, one inhabited by people who have the reputation of being super-duper-smart and feel the burden of keeping that reputation alive. So they say dumb things to show how smart they are. Dumb, after all, is the new smart.

Sadly, the Great Depression, just like the economic woes that take place in the here-and-now, occurred on Earth. Right here. A place where up is up, light is light, darkness is darkness, and when a baby is hungry and there’s food around, you feed the baby. This love we have of smart people spouting unnecessarily ironic things, which the rest of us then dutifully follow to demonstrate our commitment to climbing out of this hole that we’re making deeper, will, indeed, make the hole much, much deeper. At least, if our present course is left unchanged.

After all, we’ve shown our capability for following this sad formula before. That’s where this so-called “Bad Economy” can really hurt us. By turning things upside down. Every time I hear that phrase, “In Times Like These,” I become further convinced that this is where we’re headed…because here on Earth, most of the things that make perfect sense in fat times, generally make just as much sense in the lean ones.

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Hooray For InflationSaturday, December 27th, 2008

Hooray For Inflation
Saturday, December 27th, 2008