Lessons to Be Learned -- Again

    Many years ago, Martha Mitchell, the sharp-tongued wife of disgraced U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell observed, “Life is slippery, like a bar of soap. If you think you’ve got a grip on it, you’re wrong.”
    I have been seeing the truth of her observation play itself out in recent weeks.
    I had thought that this time of year would be a good one for enforced idleness. Time to catch up on some reading, watch some sports on television.
    Instead, I’ve sat hypnotized by the train wreck that is the stock market. Even when I have muted the shrill voices talking past each other on CNBC, it has been all too evident that a large hunk of our life savings has been evaporating like rain on hot pavement.
    I am like many Americans who played by the rules, as we understood them: live within your means, save for the future and invest those savings so that you can have a secure retirement. We thought that we were giving up immediate gratification for security.
    Now we wonder whether we have been played for fools.
    We have been let down – by just about everybody.
    The so-called leaders of finance have been too willing to abandon prudence in order rack up huge bonuses and pack golden parachutes.
    Now our so-called political leaders are trying to assess blame. They should look in the mirror. Some of them have been such doctrinaire free marketers that they have believed their own rhetoric that the marketplace could regulate itself.
    Sen. Phil Gramm provided the vehicle for the train wreck. Surely his philosophical blinders shut out skepticism. Even Alan Greenspan, who was regarded as at least a demigod during his reign at the fed, was an apostle of the libertarian gospel.
    Greek mythology is filled with tales of what happens when hubris mixes with avarice. Somehow, though, we have to keep learning that lesson.
    We have to keep re-learning, too, that the essential purpose for establishing government is the police function not just to protect us against violent crime but also against those who steal with a fountain pen.
    Folk singer Woody Guthrie talked about that kind of crime in the last two stanzas of The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd:

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
Lyrics as reprinted in Woody Guthrie, American Folksong, New York, NY, 1961 (reprint of 1947 edition), p. 27. © 1958 Sanga Music Inc., New York, NY.

    My late father-in-law, who funded his own retirement through by saving money (fortunately before avarice overtook judgment on Wall Street), was something of a cynic.
    “If you want a good retirement,” he used to growl, “Work for the government.”
    He was talking about the security of having a check arrive every month regardless of how the economy was doing.
    Just like Social Security checks. We can breathe a sigh of relief that the effort to privatize Social Security went nowhere.
    My father-in-law was part of that generation that was marked by the Great Depression.
    It is difficult at this point to know how deep this meltdown will go, but I think that more than one generation
    But I think more than one generation has developed a deep distrust of our institutions.
    In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner said, "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail."
    At the moment, enduring might be enough.


Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

A Lovely Season on the Lake

    There are few topics more boring to others than one's health, so I will simply report that the bypass surgery was a success and that I am facing a longer period of mending than I would like. Why is patience something that I never quite master?
    On to more interesting matters.
    For those of us who live on the lake, this is a lovely time of year. The weekenders and vacationers have, for the most part, disappeared. With so many schools systems beginning their year in August, activity on the lake begins slowing down well before the traditional Labor Day season end.
    By this time of year, the lake activity is almost nil during the week and limited on weekends. The fact that the water level fell and then came back up contributes to the lack of traffic this autumn. Many people assumed the water was down for the winter and put their boats away.
    Even though I am months away from paddling my kayak or maybe even riding in a boat, I find much to appreciate about the lake.
    I was up before dawn and sat with my morning coffee watching the hummingbirds defy gravity and physics as they did their best to keep their the feeders for themselves, even though there is enough for everyone.
 nbsp;  I stepped out onto the front deck for a few moments. The only man-made sounds I could distinguish were low and far away. The sun was catching beginning to light the trees across the slough. Each morning the trees are showing more color.
    I don't know how colorful the autumn will be. Very often drought makes for more colorful leaves it seems, and I don't know whether that or the moisture we had toward the end of summer will have a greater influence. In either case, we will appreciate what nature offers us.
    Each evening the sun drops over the ridge closer and closer to the Smith Mountain fire tower. We judge the season by the relationship of the sun to the tower, and soon I will be taking sunset photos with the sun silhouetting the tower.
    My wife showed me a photo in the home section of one of the newspapers recently. It showed a fairly extensive yard makeover, and I must say it was very attractive.
    But in the photo, at the back of the garden, was a fence and beyond that roofs of other houses.
    I am content to look from our windows and see the native azaleas and hydrangeas that grow where they want to without much human intervention, and to see beyond them expanses of water.
    Especially now.

Bill Brown can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com.