We Don't Know What Time it Is

Noonan has a good allegory about part of our situation in today's Journal. Telling paragraph:

I think there is an illness called Goldmansachs Head. I think it's in the DSM. When you have Goldmansachs Head, the party's never over. You take private planes to ask for bailout money, you entertain customers at high-end spas while your writers prep your testimony, you take and give huge bonuses as the company tanks. When you take the kids camping, you bring a private chef. Goldmansachs Head is Bernie Madoff complaining he's feeling cooped up in the penthouse. It is the delusion that the old days continue and the old ways prevail and you, Prince of the Abundance, can just keep rolling along. Here is how you know if someone has GSH: He has everything but a watch. He doesn't know what time it is.

What she describes is a modern day Cherry Orchard, an old Russian play by Anton Checkov that takes place inside a manor house on a huge estate where workers are chopping down the old forest that provided the now poverty stricken family their livelihood for more than a century. The now destitute family, dressed in finery as if they were still rich, talks about trivia and argue about next to nothing as they stupidly ignore the sounds of the axes destroying their only means of support. The family in that play didn't know what time it was and in fact had forgotten how to tell time; a character has lost his watch during the first minutes of the play and is looking for it. Checkov's family was stricken by a disease that envelops everyone everywhere when calamity strikes while people just don't want to pay attention. I post this in Los Angeles where the LA Teachers Union is parading around demanding more money for less and less as if they aren't affected by the Recession. Our client population wants what they want as if the cherry orchard isn't being chopped down. Gimme gimme gimme still rules.