Wobegon Boy To Hopester: Get Mad As Hell & Don't Take It Any More!

A poor blogger, slaving over a hot keyboard, only thinks his day is done when along comes Wobegon Boy with a priceless riff on The Geezer. Elsewhere, someone has encouraged The Hopester to have a Joseph Welch moment. In 1954 Joseph Welch said: "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Welch, a Boston attorney, was speaking to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), but The Hopester should repeat those words to Senator John McCain (R-AZ). If this is a (fair & balanced) accusation of monstrous evil, so be it.

[x Salon]
Where Is The Outrage?
By Garrison Keillor

It's just human nature that some calamities register in the brain and others don't. The train engineer texting at the throttle ("HOW R U? C U L8R") and missing the red light and 25 people die in the crash — oh God, that is way too real. Everyone has had a moment of supreme stupidity that came close to killing somebody. Even atheists say a little prayer now and then: Dear God, I am an idiot, thank you for protecting my children.

On the other hand, the federal bailout of the financial market (YAWN) is a calamity that people accept as if it were just one more hurricane. An air of crisis, the secretary of the Treasury striding down a hall at the Capitol with minions in his wake, solemn-faced congressmen at the microphones. Something must be done, harrumph harrumph. The Current Occupant pops out of the cuckoo clock and reads a few lines off a piece of paper, pronouncing all the words correctly. And the newscaster looks into the camera and says, "Etaoin shrdlu qwertyuiop." Where is the outrage?

Poor Larry Craig got a truckload of moral condemnation for tapping his wingtips in the men's john, but his party proposes to spend 5 percent of the GDP to buy up bad loans made by men who walk away with their fortunes intact while retirees see their 401K go pffffffff like a defunct air mattress, and it's business as usual. Mr. McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please — remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators on behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush, the brother of the C.O., who, as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends and who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things? Mr. McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.

Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn't their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that's why you need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, "This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon."

The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand we trust them because they're packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.

Some say the tab might come to a trillion dollars. Nobody knows. And Mr. McCain has not one moment of doubt or regret. He switches from First Deregulation Church to Our Lady of Strict Vigilance like you might go from decaf to latte. Where is the straight talk? Does the man have no conscience?

It wasn't their money they were playing with. It was yours. Where were the cops?

What we are seeing is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero. It is painful. First, there was his exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth that it isn't funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how Mr. McCain has made a fool of her. Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.

Mr. McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in Macy's window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer. Obviously you can fool a lot of people for awhile and maybe he can stretch it out until mid-November. But the truth is marching on. A few true conservatives are leading a charge against the bailout. Good for them. But how about admitting that their cowboy economic philosophy was at fault here?

[[Garrison Keillor is an author, storyteller, humorist, and creator of the weekly radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." The show began in 1974 as a live variety show on Minnesota Public Radio. In the 1980s "A Prairie Home Companion" became a pop culture phenomenon, with millions of Americans listening to Keillor's folksy tales of life in the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon, where (in Keillor's words) "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average." Keillor ended the show in 1987, and 1989 began a similar new radio show titled "American Radio Company of the Air." In 1993 he returned the show to its original name. Keillor also created the syndicated daily radio feature "A Writer's Almanac" in 1993. He has written for The New Yorker and is the author of several books, including Happy to Be Here (1990), Leaving Home (1992), Lake Wobegon Days (1995), and Good Poems for Hard Times (2005). Keillor's most recent book is a new Lake Wobegon novel, Liberty. His radio show inspired a 2006 movie, "A Prairie Home Companion," written by and starring Keillor and directed by Robert Altman. Keillor graduated (B.A., English) from the University of Minneosta in 1966. His signature sign-off on "The Writer's Almanac" is "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."]

Copyright © 2008 Garrison Keillor and Salon Media Group, Inc.

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The Mighty Q: Not Quite Miss Teen South Carolina, But Damn Close

It's astounding to consider the Dumbos' ability to appoint dolts and fools to positions of power. Forget The Dubster's appointments. St. Dutch, in his infinite (and failing wisdom), appointed James B. Edwards as Secretary of Energy in 1981. Secretary Edwards was a Reaganite True Believer who was the first Dumbo governor of South Carolina since Reconstruction. There is an eerie echo here.The Palmetto State produced Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, Lauren Caitlin Upton. Her gross ignorance during the pageant's Q&A session was painful to behold. Governor Edwards was supposedly an expert on energy. The Geezer has proclaimed that Governor Mighty Q of Alaska is an expert on energy. The stunner here is that Secretary Edwards knew drilling all right. He was a dentist in Charleston! Alaska's beauty-queen "expert" on energy is another Dumbo dolt. If this is (fair & balanced) historic incompetence repeating itself, so be it.

[x Salon]
The Fungible Candidate
By Joseph Romm

If this election is about judgment, then John McCain should lose in a landslide. He said of his V.P. pick, "She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America."

We can judge knowledge by both breadth and depth. Palin lacks both. She said in the ABC interview with Charlie Gibson:

Let me speak specifically about a credential that I do bring to this table, Charlie, and that's with the energy independence that I've been working on for these years as the governor of this state that produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy.

FactCheck.org notes that this is "simply untrue." Instead of "nearly 20 percent," try "under 3 percent." On Sept. 14, Palin corrected that to: "My job has been to oversee nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of oil and gas." In fact, as the Washington Post notes, "according to authoritative EIA [Energy Information Administration] data, Alaska accounted for just 7.4 percent of total U.S. oil and gas production in 2005." The Post gives her its highest (which is to say lowest) rating of "Four Pinocchios" for "continuing to peddle bogus statistics three days after the original error was pointed out by independent fact-checkers."

Just for the record, the statement is not true even if you replace the word "energy" with "oil." Alaska accounts for only about 13 percent of U.S. oil production. But the point is, you can't replace all energy with oil, as much as the "Drill, Baby, Drill" Republicans would like to. Palin made the same exact same overgeneralization in her convention speech, when she said, "To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of the world's energy supplies ..." Oil, maybe; energy, definitely not.

OK, so clearly Palin has no breadth of knowledge on energy matters beyond oil. Does she have any depth of knowledge on oil? Nope.

Her lack of depth was painfully on display last week when she was asked at a Michigan town meeting, "I'd like to know that all that oil we're going to drill here is going to stay here domestically and it's not going to be exported by the oil companies." Her answer?

Oil of coal, of course, is a fungible commodity and they don't flag, ya know, the molecules where, where it's going to, where it's not, but and in the, in the sense of the Congress today they know our very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So I believe that what Congress is going to do also is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here; it's gotta flow into our domestic markets first.

Not quite Miss Teen South Carolina territory, but borderline gibberish, self-contradictory, and kind of pointless.

Let's forget that she starts by saying "of coal" instead of "of course." Could happen to anyone who is nervous. She is correct that oil is a fungible (i.e. completely interchangeable) commodity -- the world market doesn't care or have any way of knowing where the original oil comes from. But why add the "flag the molecules" line? Obviously nobody would flag molecules. If she thought "fungible" might not be understood by her audience, how could "flag the molecules" add either simplicity or clarity?

But it's the rest of the quote where her logic runs aground like the Exxon Valdez tanker. Palin was asked about the possibility that oil companies might export any newly drilled crude oil. She said that would be a bad idea (twice) because "domestic markets" should get that oil "first." She says Congress knows that, but that what Congress will do "is not allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here." That would be mostly coherent if she dropped the word "bans." But as it reads now, she seems to be contradicting herself.

But here's the real question: Just how much of the crude oil that America drills today is exported? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2007, America exported 27,000 barrels of crude oil a day. That's compared with 13,500,000 barrels of crude oil a day that we imported. So crude oil exports are about as consequential a national energy problem as my 18-month-old daughter insisting I turn the fan on whenever we enter a new room.

Just for the record, all of the crude oil we exported in 2007 went to ... wait for it ... Canada. But we imported 2,455,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada -- nearly 100 times what we exported to our neighbor. So, yeah, it'd be really shrewd energy policy to ban crude oil exports.

Now you'll be relieved to know that the Christian Science Monitor reported last week:

At a rally in Vienna, Ohio, Tuesday, Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said that, if elected, she would lead the nation's energy efforts.

"John and I, we've discussed some new responsibilities that I'm going to have as vice president," Reuters reports Palin saying at the rally. "First, I'll help to lead the mission of energy security."

Problem solved! Hey, Ronald Reagan's first energy secretary was a dentist. Well, he was an expert on drilling.

The point is that conservatives like McCain don't believe in using the tools of government to promote alternative energy, fuel-efficient vehicles or energy security. They don't believe in a serious energy policy at all, unless "Drill, Baby, Drill" counts. So they don't need people with either breadth or depth of knowledge. In that sense, Sarah Palin is just another fungible conservative energy expert.

[Joseph Romm is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he oversees ClimateProgress.org. He is the author of Hell and High Water: Global Warming -- The Solution and the Politics. Romm served as acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Why I Dislike The Slickster

The Cobra closes her piece about The Mighty Q getting schooled as a world leader with a report of the disgusting behavior of The Slickster. At the so-called MSNBC anchor desk during the Donkey National Convention, one of the token Dumbo analysts — a former McCain strategist in 2000, Mike Murphy — drew boos. Murphy predicted that when The Slickster and The Hillster stepped into the voting booth in November, the former First Couple would vote for The Geezer. That prediction was made, pre-Palin. Now, The Slickster is wrapped up in his libidinous fantasy about scoring with a hockey mom. If The Hopester loses this election and The Hillster crawls out from under a rock to make a run in 2012, the Clintons can count on one blogger who will slave over a hot keyboard to send them to the political Hot Place. If this is a (fair & balanced) curse on The Clintons, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Park Avenue Diplomacy
By Maureen Dowd

I don’t agree with those muttering darkly that the picture of Gov. Sarah Palin with a perky smile and shapely gams posing with a pleased Henry Kissinger, famous for calling power the ultimate aphrodisiac, is a sign of the apocalypse.

It isn’t even a sign of the apocalipstick.

How the mighty 85-year-old Henry the K has fallen from his days chasing Jill St. John and running the world to his hour briefing of a 44-year-old Wasilla hockey mom who may end up running the world.

Governor Palin knows a lot about the End of Days from her years at the Pentecostal Wasilla Assembly of God, which had preached (after a war in the Middle East about light vanquishing darkness) that Alaska would be a shelter for Rapturous “saved” Christians at the end of times when they ascend to heaven.

Sarah was motorcading around Manhattan even as a “greed is good” Wall Street experienced an End of Days vibe while a world gone sour on America descended on the United Nations.

After losing its moral superiority abroad with phony evidence for attacking Iraq, the U.S. has now lost its moral superiority in the financial arena. Once more, W. took the ball, carried it off the cliff and went biking.

It’s hard to imagine that John McCain and Sarah Palin still want advice from the Unwise Man Kissinger. It’s sort of like villagers in those old movies who bring in the wizened witch doctor to shake a stick over them.

Doctor K prolonged the war in Vietnam to help Nixon get re-elected and then advised W. on Iraq that the only way to beat an insurgency and save face is to stick it out, no matter how many American kids and foreign civilians die.

Sarah speed-dated diplomacy on Tuesday. She had her very first national security briefing from the director of national intelligence and then went to a meeting with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. He thanked her for the help of the Alaskan National Guard in Afghanistan and told her about his young son, Mirwais, which means “the Light of the House.” Then she met with President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia.

Finally, Sarah huddled with Henry in his Park Avenue office, next to pictures of Ford and Reagan. The two made an odd couple: the last impure Rockefeller Republican and the first pure Rovian Republican, grown totally in the petri dish of cultural crusaderism.

Summoning his old Harvard teaching days, Kissinger surely looked for a common didactic starting point: She has seen Russia. “Goot. I haff seen it, too.”

(A senior Palin campaign aide told CBS News’s Scott Conroy that the governor’s foreign-policy experience was atmospheric, akin to the way someone from Miami might obtain a feel for Latin America. “It is very much being able to look off the tip of Alaska,” the aide said. “Metaphorically, I’m talking about.”)

Kissinger probably explained détente and Metternich to Palin, while she explained the Iditarod and moose carving to him.

They talked Russia, which is relevant.

Republicans, who have won so many elections painting Democrats as socialists and pinkos, have now done so much irresponsible deregulating and deficit spending that they have to avoid fiscal Armageddon by turning America into a socialist, pinko society with nationalized financial institutions and a financial czar accountable to no one and no law.

And Governor Palin spends so much time ostracizing reporters who might quiz her on NATO or the liquidity crunch that her press strategy is beginning to smack of Putin’s — but less lethal.

Even if she blows off the First Amendment — and lets McCain’s Rove, Steve Schmidt, demonize the press even though she disdains women politicians who whine — Bill Clinton is still a fan.

Besides talking about what a great man John McCain is on “The View” and “David Letterman,” Bill praised Palin at his Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York and will receive her there on Thursday.

“I come from Arkansas. I get why she is hot out there,” he said authoritatively, adding: “People look at her, and they say, ‘All those kids. Something that happens in everybody’s family. I’m glad she loves her daughter and she’s not ashamed of her. Glad that girl’s going around with her boyfriend. Glad they’re going to get married.’ ” He said voters would think: “I like that little Down syndrome kid. One of them lives down the street. They’re wonderful. ... And I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races. Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy.”

On “The View,” he said he understood that some women might vote for Palin on the basis of gender, even if it was against their economic interest.

“You can’t tell someone else that the ground on which they make their voting decision is irrational,” he said primly.

Well, actually you could, if you weren’t still sulking and plotting for 2012.

[Maureen Dowd is a Washington D.C.-based op-ed columnist for The New York Times. She has worked for the Times since 1983, when she joined as a metropolitan reporter. In 1999, Dowd was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Dowd received a B.A. in English from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Keep The Faith, All Others Pay In Gold

May the Lord (of your choice) have mercy upon The Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave. The ghost of The Trickster has come back to haunt us. Nixon proclaimed in 1971 that he was a Keynesian as the United States adopted a new monetary policy, based not on gold, but on our paper. Ask The Geezer if he is a Keynesian and he won't know what the Hell you're talking about. Ask The Hopester if he is a Keynesian and he will reply that there is no simple, one-word solution to this great monetary crisis. If this is (fair & balanced) fiscal despair, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Buck Stopped Then
By James Grant

Critics of the administration’s Wall Street bailout condemn the waste of taxpayer dollars. But the taxpayers aren’t the weightiest American financial constituency, even in this election year. The dollar is the world’s currency. And it is on the world’s opinion of the dollar that the Treasury’s plan ultimately hangs.

It hangs by a thread, if Monday’s steep drop of the greenback against the euro is any indication. We Americans, constitutionally inattentive to developments in the foreign exchange markets, should be grateful for what we have. That a piece of paper of no intrinsic value should pass for good money the world over is nothing less than a secular miracle. We pay our bills with it. And our creditors not only accept it, they also obligingly invest it in American securities, including our slightly shop-soiled mortgage-backed securities. Every year but one since 1982, this country has consumed much more than it has produced, and it has managed to discharge its debts with the money that it alone can lawfully print.

No other nation ever had it quite so good. Before the dollar, the pound sterling was the pre-eminent monetary brand. But when Britannia ruled the waves, the pound was backed by gold. You could exchange pound notes for gold coin, and vice versa, at the fixed statutory rate.

Today’s dollar, in contrast, is faith-based. Since 1971, nothing has stood behind it except the world’s good opinion of the United States. And now, watching the largest American financial institutions quake, and the administration fly from one emergency stopgap to the next, the world is changing its mind.

“Not since the Great Depression,” news reports keep repeating, has America’s banking machinery been quite so jammed up. The comparison is hardly flattering to this generation of financiers. From 1929 to 1933, the American economy shrank by 46 percent. The wonder is that any bank, any corporate borrower, any mortgagor could have remained solvent, not that so many defaulted. There is not the faintest shadow of that kind of hardship today. Even on the question of whether the nation has entered a recession, the cyclical jury is still out. Yet Wall Street shudders.

The remote cause of its troubles is the paper dollar itself — the dollar and the growth in the immense piles of debt it has facilitated. The age of paper money brought with it an increasingly uninhibited style of doing business.

The dollar emerged at the center of the monetary system that took its name from the 1944 convention in Bretton Woods, N.H. The American currency alone was made exchangeable into gold. The other currencies, when they got their peacetime legs back under them, were made exchangeable into the dollar.

All was well for a time — indeed, for one of the most prosperous times in modern history. Under the system of fixed exchange rates and a gold-anchored dollar, world trade boomed (albeit from a low, war-ravaged base). Employment was strong and inflation dormant. The early 1960s were a kind of macroeconomic heaven on earth.

However, by the middle of that decade it had come to the attention of America’s creditors that this country, fighting the war in Vietnam, was emitting a worryingly high volume of dollars into the world’s payment channels. Foreign central banks, nervously eyeing the ratio of dollars outstanding to gold in the Treasury’s vaults, began prudently exchanging greenbacks for bullion at the posted rate of $35 per ounce. In 1965, William McChesney Martin, chairman of the Federal Reserve, sought to reassure the quavering dollar holders. He lectured the House Banking Committee on the importance of maintaining the dollar’s credibility “down to the last bar of gold, if that be necessary.”

Necessary, it might have been, but expedient, it was not, and the Nixon administration, on Aug. 15, 1971, decreed that the dollar would henceforth be convertible into nothing except small change. The age of the pure paper dollar was fairly launched.

In the absence of a golden anchor, the United States produced as many dollars as the world cared to absorb. And the world’s appetite was prodigious. “Balance of payments” crises were now, for this country, things of the past. “Liquidity,” that bubbly speculative elixir, gurgled from the founts of the world’s central banks.

It was the very lack of gold-standard inhibition that permitted the buildup of titanic dollar balances overseas. At the end of 2007, no less than $9.4 trillion in dollar-denominated securities were sitting in the vaults of foreign investors. Not a few of these trillions were the property of Asian central banks. So, although the United States has run heavy and persistent current account deficits — $6.7 trillion in total since 1982 — they have been “deficits without tears,” to quote the French economist Jacques Rueff. The dollars American debtors sent abroad America’s creditors sent right back in the shape of investments in American stocks, bonds and factories.

Under the Bretton Woods system, worried foreign creditors would long ago have cleaned out Fort Knox. But, conveniently, the dollar is uncollateralized and unconvertible. America’s overseas creditors hold it for many reasons. Some — notably Asian central banks — acquire dollars simply to help make their exports grow. But even the governments that scoop up dollars for no better reason than to manipulate their own currency’s value presumably put some store in the integrity of American finance.

As never before, that trust is being put to the test. In the best of times, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve pretended as if the dollar were America’s currency alone. Now, in some of the worst of times, Washington is treating its vital overseas dollar constituency as if it weren’t even there.

Which failing financial institution will the administration pluck from the flames of crisis? Which will it let roast? Which market, or investment technique, will the regulators bless? Which — in a capricious change of the rules — will it condemn or outlaw? Just how shall the Treasury secretary spend the $700 billion he’s begging for? Viewed from Wall Street, the administration’s recent actions appear erratic enough. Seen from the perch of a foreign investor, they must look very much like “political risk,” a phrase we Americans usually associate with so-called emerging markets, not with our own very developed one.

Where all this might end, nobody can say. But it is unlikely that either the dollar, or the post-Bretton Woods system of which it is the beating heart, will emerge whole. It behooves Barack Obama and John McCain to do a little monetary planning. In the absence of faith, what stands behind a faith-based currency?

[James Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, is the author of the forthcoming Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond. Grant is the author of four other books on finance and financial history: Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend (1983), Money of the Mind (1992), Minding Mr. Market (1993) and The Trouble with Prosperity (1996). A fifth book—John Adams: Party of One, a biography of the second president of the United States-was published in 2005.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Roll Over, Norman Vincent Peale: The Power Of Rational Thinking

The Three(?) Horsemen of Our Apocalypse are Greed, Speculation, and Mindless Optimism. Tough-minded Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the positive thinkers and makes a case for realistic thinking. Through the magic of the Internet, YouTube provides Bobby McFerrin's take on positive thinking as background music for your ruminating pleasure. If this is (fair & balanced) lucubration, so be it.

[x YouTube/Max1509 Channel]
Bobby McFerrin — "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (1988)

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Power of Negative Thinking
By Barbara Ehrenreich

Greed — and its crafty sibling, speculation — are the designated culprits for the financial crisis. But another, much admired, habit of mind should get its share of the blame: the delusional optimism of mainstream, all-American, positive thinking.

As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits if only you believe that you can.

Positive thinking is endemic to American culture — from weight loss programs to cancer support groups — and in the last two decades it has put down deep roots in the corporate world as well. Everyone knows that you won’t get a job paying more than $15 an hour unless you’re a “positive person,” and no one becomes a chief executive by issuing warnings of possible disaster.

The tomes in airport bookstores’ business sections warn against “negativity” and advise the reader to be at all times upbeat, optimistic, brimming with confidence. It’s a message companies relentlessly reinforced — treating their white-collar employees to manic motivational speakers and revival-like motivational events, while sending the top guys off to exotic locales to get pumped by the likes of Tony Robbins and other success gurus. Those who failed to get with the program would be subjected to personal “coaching” or shown the door.

The once-sober finance industry was not immune. On their Web sites, motivational speakers proudly list companies like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch among their clients. What’s more, for those at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, all this positive thinking must not have seemed delusional at all. With the rise in executive compensation, bosses could have almost anything they wanted, just by expressing the desire. No one was psychologically prepared for hard times when they hit, because, according to the tenets of positive thinking, even to think of trouble is to bring it on.

Americans did not start out as deluded optimists. The original ethos, at least of white Protestant settlers and their descendants, was a grim Calvinism that offered wealth only through hard work and savings, and even then made no promises at all. You might work hard and still fail; you certainly wouldn’t get anywhere by adjusting your attitude or dreamily “visualizing” success.

Calvinists thought “negatively,” as we would say today, carrying a weight of guilt and foreboding that sometimes broke their spirits. It was in response to this harsh attitude that positive thinking arose — among mystics, lay healers and transcendentalists — in the 19th century, with its crowd-pleasing message that God, or the universe, is really on your side, that you can actually have whatever you want, if the wanting is focused enough.

When it comes to how we think, “negative” is not the only alternative to “positive.” As the case histories of depressives show, consistent pessimism can be just as baseless and deluded as its opposite. The alternative to both is realism — seeing the risks, having the courage to bear bad news and being prepared for famine as well as plenty. We ought to give it a try.

[Barbara Ehrenreich is a feminist, socialist and political activist. She is a widely read columnist and essayist, and the author of nearly 20 books, most recently, This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation (2008). Some of her best-known books include: Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989), The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1990), Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), The Snarling Citizen: Essays (1995), Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America (2001), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (ed., with Arlie Hochschild, 2003), and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005). Ehrenreich studied physics at Reed College, graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis was entitled "Electrochemical Oscillations of the Silicon Anode." In 1968, she received a Ph.D in Cell Biology from Rockefeller University.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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