Published: September 30, 2008 10:55 pm            

STEPHANIE SALTER: Help! We’ve fallen and we can’t get up!

If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master.

— Francis Bacon

TERRE HAUTE — Hey, great. Something new to divide us:

Something besides abortion, gay marriage and the Second Amendment. Something different for pollsters to call us up, ask us about and then report that we are 45 percent for, 43 percent against and 12 percent undecided.

Something we haven’t actually argued over before — at least not with this kind of passion and news coverage. Another reason to call millions of our fellow citizens “stupid,” even though most of us doing the name calling are about as educated on the particulars of this issue as some primitive lost tribe in the Amazon is educated on this issue.

But wait. This money thing is different. We’re not divided into the usual camps.

Snotty speech or not, we’ve got Nancy Pelosi begging her Congressional Democratic colleagues to please vote for what George Bush wants. We’ve got her minority counterpart, John Boehner, begging renegade Republicans to stop rebelling and fall in line.

We’ve got conservative Republicans in bed with liberal Democrats — even in Texas. Out on the far edges of their respective warring parties, they have looked across the Bering Strait of politics and realized how close they really are. They say the $700-billion bailout package is poison Kool-Aid and they will not drink it.

The darkest hour in any man’s life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it.

— Horace Greeley

Two things upon which almost everyone agrees:

The bailout that was rejected Monday is a terrible piece of legislation, and “we” have got to do something. Fast.

Yesterday, in fact, would have been better, but it was Rosh Hashana. So, today it must be, or tomorrow, at the latest. Really.

The 228 House members who voted against the bailout package say it sucks eggs. The 205 members of the House who voted for it also say it sucks eggs.

Wisconsin GOP Rep. Paul Ryan spoke volumes (and echoed the cognitive burnout of many), when he said, “This bill offends my principles, but I’m going to vote for this bill to preserve my principles.”

For his part, the pro-bailout Boehner called it a “mud sandwich.”

But the best metaphor for how bad the bill sucks eggs came from among the nay voters. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., told his Congressional comrades, “This is a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle. I’m not going to eat that cow patty.”

The president of the United States, his Treasury secretary and his chairman of the Federal Reserve keep scratching for metaphors or analogies, any new way of saying the same thing.

But the Bush-Paulson-Bernanke pleas fall on deaf ears. Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are like rowdy siblings upstairs in their bunk beds, wrasslin’ around in their PJs, too lost in the moment to really believe Dad’s repeated warnings from below: “Don’t you kids make me come up there! Don’t make me take off my belt!”

Money often costs too much.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unaccustomed as we are to being united in the United States, almost everybody gets it:

This time, we really are all in this together.

Homeowner or renter, with portfolio or without, pensioner or 401(k) contributor, most of us see that Wall Street repeatedly runs into Main Street — and into Interstate 70 and Shady Lane and Skid Row. Whatever bad happens to Washington Mutual and Wachovia is going to trickle down to Walmart’s parking lot and Wendy’s drive-thru. (Only in zero-gravity environments does anything trickle up, but tell that to supply-side true believers.)

The problem is, the problem is … what’s to be done?

We did not get here, to the brink, the edge, the precipice over a couple of eight-hour shifts. Why would we think we could undo such a mess in a week? We, our myriad economists and our elected representatives can’t even agree on where “here” is.

Is it the worst place since the Great Depression? Is it a lot like Oct. 19, 1987, when the Dow dropped 508 points — only Monday was 278 points worse?

Is it more like the bursting of the Tech Bubble on March 10, 2000? Or does it best resemble April 14, 1912, when a gigantic iceberg off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland collided with the RMS Titanic?

Disorientation. Dread. Fear. Those are the very emotions that wake individuals at 3 a.m. and keep them tossing ’til the sun comes up. Multiply that nasty state by about 230 million — the number of adult Americans — and you have an up-to-date anxiety accounting of a nation that is too big to fail, but just might do so.

I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves.

— Joe Louis

A plan recently floated in the creative thinkers’ ether net:

Congress votes to hold lotteries in every state and the District of Columbia with the goal of giving 700,000 Americans $1 million apiece. Allocations for each state would be based on population, and only people who are registered to vote would be eligible.

After all, it’s our money to begin with. Compared to $700 billion in corporate socialism for Wall Street, it seems only fair.

Free-marketers get what they want — no new government rules, regulations or oversight of the financial industry — and Main Street gets what nearly all its residents want — a shot at more money.

Money to get out of debt, to pay off good and bad mortgages, to invest in the stock market or to buy Treasury bonds or gold. Money to send kids to college, to create trust funds and savings accounts, to give to charities, to gamble at casinos and in state lotteries or — that patriotic economic stimulator of them all — to go shopping for big-ticket items and more cheap useless crap.

Our money to spend or sit on as we please. One million bucks to 700,000 of us, not according to our need or ability, but according to our accident of birth, our name on the voter rolls and help from Lady Luck.

That sounds a little better than a cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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