Karl Kraus, thou should'st be living at this hour

Surely some comedian already presented this skit last week on YouTube or someplace comparable:

[The clock reads 3 a.m. On the table, a red telephone is ringing.

A hand reaches for the telephone and we hear a vaguely familiar male voice say "Hello?"

Then we hear the male voice say, "I got it, Hillary. Just go back to sleep now, hear?"]

clouds smaller than a man's hand

I've posted a friends-only commentary that I'll probably delete regarding the relationship between erroneous theory and inadequate self-knowledge on the part of the global financial managers who have gotten us into our present condition (I leave ambiguous the referent of "us").

An NPR story relating the run-up in oil prices to the need for fund managers to find investments to replace the no longer secure ones discredited by the mortgage-market meltdown raises several intriguing questions.

Obviously the creation of a new market bubble has, unlike the housing bubble, devastating consequences on the way up as well as on the way down.

But it is impossible for fund managers to do anything differently, it would seem. I am reminded of the dynamics that the '70s economic writer who used the "Adam Smith" pseudonym said of stock market tops: something to the effect of "The champagne glasses are tinkling, the caviar is being passed by butlers, and even though everyone knows that sometime before dawn the dark horsemen will come crashing through the glass doors and begin lopping off heads, it is a lovely party, and no one can bear to excuse themselves and make their way safely home."

His allegory sticks in the mind as econometric models do not. And it incorporates the element of self-delusion.

Self-delusion operates the other way, too; the chatterati of America are clearly shaping up for an apocalypse of the imagination, as witness Friday's New York Times commentary on the Whitney Biennial (the same work a few years earlier would have been taken as a rebuke to profligate habits rather than evidence of a new downscaling mentality) and the much-noted bleak metaphors of this year's fashion shows. Liz Hand, on the LJ community theinferior4, raised the same issue that occurred to me when I read the quote to the effect of "there will always be that one item that people will go without food in order to be able to buy": what would that item be for various of us?

I was intrigued that nobody who responded to that post said something like "The 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big." The answers included such things as art supplies, which seems unimaginative in a world in which outsider artists have regularly created masterworks with discarded shirt cardboards, pencil stubs, and bottles of nail polish.

I would have expected more answers bouncing between "antique paperweights" (like the glass-encased flower in Orwell's 1984 that serves as the emblem of the prospect that another world is possible) and "new novels by ***************"...assuming that no matter how bad things get, human beings need new visions of imaginative possibility to supplement the ones that have grown worn out with familiarity.

But that's just me. And I have my own delusions and seriously evident limits.