Small people indeed.

As an octogenarian, having arrived a year before the Crash of 1929, I’ve observed this great land of the free at close range for a quarter of that time and from a middle distance the other three quarters. I’m constantly amazed at the division, the factionalism the ambidexterous hyberbole that is indulged in daily by everybody from Rush Limbaugh over here to grubby socialist academics over there.

The most recent example is the “Bailout” and the ranters on all sides. Most recently, Cindy Sheehan in your pages, who comes up with the miraculous information that the monsters of Wall Street, in league with Nancy Pelosi and George W. Bush, have shat on the “small people” yet again.

Small people indeed. This is a nation of small people in every respect, who are capable collectively of great things on occasion, and just as frequently subject to the most abject paranoia. I’ve discovered that you can constantly improve extraordinary behavior, but in the words of the immortal Ron White, you can’t fix stupid.

Most of the time, a visiting Gulliver, or a person of normal reasonable stature, is invariably pinned to the ground.

Cindy, guess what? We are ALL to blame for the paralysis that is gripping ALL OF US.  Under the blanket of blame, as Robbie Burns might say, “there’s room for us a’.” Let me enumerate:

Item: The President and the administration are to blame. Of course.  (1) for allowing the unbridled greed of the masters of our financial universe to proceed in a climate of far too little oversight and regulation; but far more elementally (2) for the trillion-dollar adventure of war abroad and total lack of stewardship at home, which has resulted, in the face of a decade of so-so productivity, in the decline of personal income on the part of – you guessed it – small people.

Item: The Congress is to blame. Of course. (Yes, the “Congresspersons” you’re constantly, politically-correctedly, referring to). That is, the House and the Senate are to blame. Don’t single out Pelosi, Cindy. Don’t single out Boehner, or Schumer, or Barnie Frank or the peripatetic Lieberman. They’re all – politicians, and as such must keep one eye on their (mostly uninformed) small-people constituents, and the other eye on the lobbyists who pay their keep. (Creating the recent anomaly of a certain senator who has been in Washington for 35 years and – gasp – is NOT a millionaire.) As politicians, they’re mostly to blame for the divisive factionalism that muddies every problem, that distorts every issue, that gets all of us constantly riled up and at each other’s throats and then – like opposing lawyers in a courtroom – go out to lunch together. They are to blame, because over the last decade they did absolutely nothing about imposing the legal limitations necessary to replace 19th Century legislation with the contemporary imperative to sit on junk-bond stupidity and greed.

Item: The government regulators (Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the SEC) are to blame. Of course. For doing too little, too late, when all of them are skilled economists and in most cases knew months and years in advance that huge imbalances were taking place, domestically and internationally. Now they tell us that a stupid, hoked-up piece of insane legislation, loaded with pork to ensure its passage, is the one alternative to total financial and economic collapse.  The painful truth is that such is probably true, given no realistic alternatives, given the corner into which we’ve all painted ourselves.

Item: “Wall Street,” is to blame. Of course. Meaning investment banks (although many, in the vernacular, are tits up on the table), brokers, analysts, financial commentators, and oh, yes, those second cousins of the Street, those quasi-government Bobbsey Twins, Fannie Mae and . Collectively they all rolled the dice on, for one, the mortgage industry, first by creating an investment “product” known as “the mortgage-backed security,” cobbling together millions of individual mortgages and then sub-dividing and selling this total tranche as imitation bonds or debentures to institutions and individual investors, who, by the way, were equally stupid and therefore, to blame.

The catch? That in doing so, individual credit-worthiness on any or all of those little segment mortgages simply disappeared, and the “product” sold was impossible to determine as to credit worthiness. So, loading their shelves with this small-people credit instrument, they proceeded to lose their shirts once the real estate bubble fizzled out. That’s just one issue, but it was huge in the total evaporation of the nation’s credit climate.

Item: Hey, whom did we forget? The small people, whom you, Cindy, and so many other social apologists have been blubbering over recently., The victims, the losers, to wit, all of us. Boo-hoo.

Guess what, Cindy?  THE SMALL PEOPLE ARE ULTIMATELY TO BLAME.  It worked liked this: Since we are all imbued with that Constitutional 28th Amendment that we are all under God given the right to live better this year than we did last year, and live better next year than we did this year, and that our kids, by definition have the same God-given right to live better than we have, and God knows better than OUR miserable parents,

Therefore, along about 2001 when our income started to slip, the prototype for all of us said: “Who gives a damn? I have this $300,000 house on which there’s a $250,000 mortgage, and therefore I can do a reverse mortgage and use that $50 grand to live in the manner to which I have become accustomed. Moreover, who cares if I run up credit card debt and all the other little debts, because the gawddam house will always increase in value, so it’ll always be like self-perpetuating assets. Go for it, Scooter.”

 And at that point, of course, the housing market and the sky really did fall on Lilliput. 

Because we really do live in Lilliput. And the threat doesn’t come from, nor can we blame it all on, that big oaf we’ve pinned to the ground.

But blame everybody you want, Cindy. Blame Pelosi, blame Bush. Blame the evil bastards on Wall Street. Unfortunately, the buck doesn’t stop. Except for old Robbie Burns, under that blanket of blame, where, lassie, “there’s room for us a’.”