Mar 16 2009
“The psychic woe beneath the economic blow” and other nonsense
People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions. …I suspect more than a few see themselves, deep down, as “the designated mourner,” from the title of the Wallace Shawn play. – from ”There’s No Pill for This Kind of Depression”
Peggy Noonan has discovered that people are anxious about the economic crisis. More people are going to church; city folks are looking for farms. Gun sales are up; some deep-pocketed persons are pulling large sums of cash from their banks. (Or perhaps, being of Irish descent, Noonan is merely on a mortality rant.)
She thinks that anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication contributed to the financial crisis. I jest not. She writes: “In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ’00s.”
Perhaps she should do a little informal study of how many users of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication work on Wall Street. Then, to compare, see how many users of anti-depressants, etc. voted for politicians who had their hands in the pot of various bailed-out institutions. It ought to be downright interesting, to say the least.
Instead, she talked to a writer, a psychiatrist, etc. to take the pulse of the nation. And the patient isn’t well.
I know what she means. An aquaintance of mine (I’ll just call him “Max”) ignored the signs of the times: environmental change, the devastating cost of gas, man’s inhumanity to man.
He lived as he pleased, a loner speeding around in his gas-guzzling car and having conflicts with nearly everyone he met. But he reconsidered his ways and really thought what kind of world the younger generation would inherit. And that’s why he’s known far beyond Thunderdome.
