“Irresponsible,” spat President Obama of the banking executives awarding themselves humongous bonuses just after the Treasury FedExed a trillion dollars to Wall Street. “Shameful.”

When did we stop adulating the wealthy? Was it when Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain chose the moment his company received its $20 billion handout to dial his decorator and discuss that $1.22-million office renovation? Was it the $35,115 toilet, the $1405 trash can? The total of those executive bonuses, $18 billion?

As a nation, we’d been indulgent. We didn’t begrudge the recipients of Reagan’s and Bush’s greenback-stuffed tax policy billets doux. If we noticed the corporate suites getting spiffier while the streets outside grew shabbier, we defended the executives: They deserved it! They created wealth! We didn’t mind those $35,000 commodes flushing directly onto our faces.

Now, as we trace the line from the mahogany-paneled offices, through the warehouses of toxic paper, and out the other end to the cinderblock unemployment offices . . . well, let’s just say the word lynch takes on new associations.

It’s not the first time our ardor has cooled. In an elegant little book called Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, historian Steve Fraser shows how popular affections for capitalism’s high-end gamblers have waxed and waned. In the years following the Civil War, the financiers who had been regarded a decade earlier as slimy “confidence men” came to be viewed as “Napoleonic.” They remained heroes until the excesses of the Gilded Age — and the resultant crash of 1929 and Great Depression — again brought them condemnation as “immoralists.” Fraser credits early-20th-century labor and socialist movements for turning widespread resentment into politicized resistance, and forcing policy change. He thinks it could happen again, and I hope he is right.

But how? Anger at outsized greed, Fraser notes, is “a righteous emotion,” which can “arouse people to do battle with institutions.” But focusing on individuals can also draw our gaze away from the “systematic reorganization” of capitalism that has concentrated power and wealth in a few hands.

In other words, we need class consciousness. We need to name greed, if not as a characteristic of owning-class people, then as a confederate of their interests. Is it too late?

To retrace the recent history of greed, I rented Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, released in 1987, the year the stock market crashed and the galloping second Gilded Age took a breather. I’d remembered the film delivering a deft yet firm guilty verdict on the era’s values. Instead, it quivers with our perennial ambivalence toward Wall Street — and our reluctance to acknowledge the crimes of a class, rather than condemning individual sin.

The movie tells the story of an ambitious young stock trader, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), who buys the attention of his idol, working-class Jew turned billionaire arbitrageur Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), with an inside tip about the airline where his father, Carl Fox, is the union rep. Gekko takes Bud under his wing; Bud gets rich. But when Gekko’s dirty dealings threaten to sink Carl’s company — and with it, the workers’ jobs — Bud must choose. Rejecting the wicked stepfather, he returns to the arms of his real, good father.

Stone drives the message home with the subtlety of a rivet gun to the skull. “Stop going for the easy buck and start producing something with your life,” Carl admonishes Bud. “Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others!” Gekko, boasting of his power and wealth, delivers an equal and opposite rejoinder: “I create nothing. I own.” Gekko’s famous words, “Greed is good,” of course imply “greed is bad.”

But at 22 years’ remove, the message isn’t so clear. In the last scene, Bud is climbing the steps to the courthouse where he will be convicted of insider trading — nabbed on a tip-off from none other than his tutor in crime, Gekko. But while the apprentice goes to prison, the master goes back to the office to continue gleefully merging and acquiring, slashing and burning jobs and lives, and hauling in the dough.

Hardly an indictment of capitalist morality. Indeed, the prodigal son’s return is only incidentally, and not necessarily, an endorsement of his father’s blue-collar values.

Wall Street is a Rorschach of unresolved class loyalties. Stone made the film as a tribute to his father, a wealthy stockbroker; one of its most sympathetic characters, Lou Mannheim, is based on Lou Stone. Mannheim is always taking Bud aside and advising him to watch the fundamentals; none of this go-go stuff — slow and steady wins the race. The director imagines a kinder, gentler Wall Street — and a kinder, gentler Wall Street broker, suavely negotiating the border between dubious ethics and illegality. The intrusion of the brash arrivistes Gekko and Bud into these patrician precincts reads as an offense of style rather than of substance.

Like Bud, Stone can neither embrace nor renounce his family’s class. So he turns the story into a fable of fathers and sons. Stone loved his father, and if Dad was a successful capitalist, then capitalism can’t be that bad. Carl Fox, meanwhile, is an honest man but also a rigid one, a Marxist dinosaur. In the end, you sense Bud can’t go home again, because that home is an illusion. He can’t return to Wall Street, either, but not because Wall Street itself is corrupt; because he was.

Wall Street reflected a then-growing popular sentiment. Crime may not pay. But greed does. Soon after the film’s release, magazine articles began musing on the question “Is greed good?” Most of the writers, bullish financial advisers and free- market boosters, answered, You bet.

Is Mammon worship over? In 1931, British economist John Maynard Keynes (of all people) predicted it would someday be. “When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues,” he wrote. “The love of money as a possession . . . will be recognized for what it is — a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

While polishing this prose, Keynes was also promoting consumer spending as the road to capitalism’s recovery. So he qualified his definition of that social pathology: “the love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life.”

It was a tough distinction to make then, and it still is. President Obama denounced the bankers’ gluttony, but he wasn’t ready to rule out overeating. “This is America,” he said, announcing a $500,000 cap on the salaries of bailout-receiving bank executives. “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success, and we certainly believe that success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset, and rightfully so,” he went on, “are executives being rewarded for failure — especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, many of whom are having a tough time themselves.”

We don’t want to reward failure, but we’re happy to reward overweening success. We don’t want to reward exorbitant greed, but we’ll rekindle an appropriate amount of consumer desire. A $35,000 taxpayer-funded toilet demonstrates shamefully bad taste. But might we interest you, as a spur to increasing tax revenues, in this $3800 Philippe Starck X European toilet, which, as any shelter magazine will assure you, is in excellent taste?

Greed is a matter of degree, and degrees change with history. In Wall Street, the shareholders gasp when Gekko reveals the salaries of their company’s vice presidents — $200,000. The week Obama proposed that salary cap, the New York Times laid out the annual expenses of a typical Manhattan financier’s family — mortgage payments, $96,000; private school tuition, $32,000 — under the half-ironic headline “You Try to Live on 500K in This Town.” The article induced a kind of moral vertigo. On the one hand, you despised these people. On the other, you almost felt sorry for them — or for yourself, now that such a lifestyle had been declared illegal by executive order.

Yes, many of us, stockholders all, were waiting to become John Thain. Like Joe the Plumber, we imagined passing on a death-tax-free million to our children. It wasn’t greed that motivated us. We just wanted the good life.

Keynes thought that once we achieved that life, greed would become an anachronism that we would “be free, at last, to discard.” But he struggled with the question of when good would feel good enough. How evil does evil have to get before we change the system to reward something else?

We’d better get our politics moving — and our policies changed — while greed is in the slammer. Because Gekko is still at the office, and once capitalism is back on the street, he will rise again.

This piece originally ran in Seven Days.

And then the host, who today is focusing on personal economies during the recession, turns to me: “Isn’t this all a blessing in disguise, Judith? Haven’t we lost our way, and aren’t we now discovering new, and better, values?” I’m getting such questions regularly these days; my 2006 book, “Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping,” has unexpectedly made me an oracle.

Well, yes, sort of, I stammer. But, uh, actually, no. On one hand, who can argue that the grow-grow-growth consumer economy is outgrowing the limits not just of our bank accounts but also our finite Earth? Part of me is ecstatic to wave goodbye to the $20 martini and the 20,000-square-foot house.

And then there is the other hand. The downturn is giving us fresh excuses for moral flagellation, of ourselves and others. If yesterday’s White House proselytized shopping, today’s is shaming bankers for their greed.

The message: We sinned with profligacy, and now we repent in parsimony.

Thrift is the new abstinence.

Type “recession is good” into Google and you get more than 35 million hits. Some of these are from unreconstructed bulls, explaining how the downturn can help entrepreneurs, supermarkets, something called “cloud computing” — and, of course, thrift stores. Marketers are linking bad times with good selling. Trend hound Faith Popcorn — who could find consumers among the residents of a Darfurian refugee camp — identifies the next surefire ploy: empathy. She attributes Burger King’s recent gains to its “we-feel-your-pain” ads rather than to the desperation of laid-off workers driven to subsisting on French fries.

NPR’s Martin Caste notices another theme, “dignified deprivation.” He plays an Allstate insurance ad: “People are getting back to the basics — and the basics are good.”

The basics — unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure — are allegedly good for community (increased donations to soup kitchens, at least from those who aren’t eating at them); for family (playing Scrabble together aids both parent-child communication and spelling); for love (bonking is free; just forgo the platinum dildo); and good for health, thanks to more home cooking and less junk food consumption (except for McDonald’s).

A typical post from a personal-finance blogger at NorthernCheapskate.com sums it up: “There is potential for personal growth, innovation, and kindness that doesn’t always appear when times are good.” Caste calls it “the virtuous recession.”

The religious Web sites are salivating over the soul-saving opportunities opening up. “Our nation has become defined by a total lack of discipline or temperance. That is a spiritual problem, not a financial one,” preaches a Sheworships.com blogger. She happily predicts the return of modest fashion, premarital chastity, parental patience and preferences for G-rated movies. The hellfire and damnation faction is also finding great material, as it always does, in signs of moral, economic and environmental decline. “So what caused this recession?” thunders Kent Brandenburg at a Web site called What Is Truth. “Greed. What caused the Great Depression? Greed.”

“Of course, it’s very deep rooted,” he avers. “Man is depraved and greed is part of it.” There’s just one solution: Jesus Christ.

The cultural critic Ellen Willis called anti-consumerism “the Puritanism of the left.” If she were alive, she’d see that it is now the Puritanism of the right and the middle as well. The operative word, though, is “Puritanism.” Yes, Buddhists and Jews are seeking their own spiritual silver linings in the economy’s black clouds. But thrift is a Christian virtue: Temperance, prudence and self-denial are good for the soul.

Primitive societies didn’t have much use for saving. They hustled to get in food and fuel for the winter, then kicked back. If extra stuff was amassed, it was often for the express purpose of being squandered. Sacrifices, feasts, potlatches, bacchanalia — these rites might inspire the gods to send status, rain or military victory. But there was religious value simply in going over the top. If frugality was practical, excess was sacred.

The religious orgies of their mystics notwithstanding, early Christians got pretty exercised about excess. In 1571 Martin Luther put it in writing: his 95 Theses condemning the Catholic Church for feeding Mammon with the indulgence fees of the faithful. “Money,” he declared, “is the word of the Devil.”

A century later, English and American Puritans were flogging the anti-wealth doctrine. Debt was wicked, as was conspicuous consumption: “‘Tis a Sin … for a man to Spend more than he Gets,” said Cotton Mather. Profit was equally sinful: A Puritan could be jailed for charging the market price for his products. Still, the Puritans exalted labor, God’s punishment of Adam and Eve for seeking knowledge (and sexual pleasure). “Let your Business Engross most of your time,” wrote Mather in a treatise on Diligence. Mather prescribed diligence as a cure for masturbation, but also for something called “economic depression.”

If it was hard to distinguish pious industry from sinful profit-seeking, one thing was clear: Early-Christian thrift fought the need of capitalism to accumulate wealth. By the 17th century, a new Protestant ethic would solve the problem. Now a person could be both godly and rich; indeed the latter was proof of the former. Thrift resumed its Old English meaning: a thriving condition, a means to prosperity. In the mid-18th century, Ben Franklin was recommending thrift as “the way to wealth.”

Franklin was a secularist, prone to poking fun at religiosity, and his Poor Richard was an avatar of practical, if upright, self-interest. That hasn’t stopped anyone from mining the Almanacs for paeans to godly parsimony, however. Now pragmatic, now Dionysian, Americans always retain the Puritan gene.

That gene emerges even in today’s most pragmatic-seeming responses to Americans’ meager personal savings and high debt. A 2005 article in Education Policy Analysis Archives, proposing an “allowance and savings program” for poor students, begins with a moral assumption — the poor stay poor because they “make impulsive choices … driven by a tendency to overweight rewards and costs that are in close temporal or spatial proximity.” This infantile instant gratification seeking, the authors suggest, also explains teen pregnancy among the poor.

The program would teach what wealthier families pass on to their offspring: the value of “delayed gratification through the accumulation, savings, and investment of regular allowances.” And if the students learn thrift? They’ll “move from poverty to middle class status as adults.” With echoes of Victorian “child-saving” crusades, the article is titled “Child Savings Plans: Learning the Value of Self Control.”

“For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture” — a recent report from the politically diverse Commission on Thrift — blames debt not on personal failings but on the influence of “anti-thrift institutions,” such as payday lenders, predatory credit card issuers and state-funded lotteries. The report makes moral judgments only of institutional venality and dishonesty, and recommends policy, not personal, change.

Yet where it focuses on personal motivation, “New Thrift” becomes a Sunday school pamphlet. It proposes, for example, to “repurpose the lottery” to offer not just gambling tickets but also “savings tickets.” The lottery’s public-relations “wizards” could concoct “jazzy new promotions” and slogans like “Every ticket wins!”

Say the authors: “It ought to be an easy sell.”

Right. About as easy as abstinence-only education, and for the same reasons — or rather, the same faulty reasoning. Teens don’t have sex and babies just to gain status, love or welfare, as conservatives contend. They have sex because it feels good. Similarly, people buy lottery tickets not because they need money, even if they do. They enjoy the libidinal thrill of gambling. There is something sadly sober about a “savings ticket,” no matter how jazzy the promo. Couldn’t those wizards come up with a gamble that’s also a way to save? I’ve got it: the stock market!

From the 17th through the early 20th century, capitalism needed greed, and Christianity found ways to underwrite it. Late-20th-century consumer capitalism needed unending desire to keep the profits coming. Enter consumer credit and an ethos of gratification. Although that came mostly from secular sources, market-savvy evangelicals have proved enthusiastic boosters of consumerism, with their “gospels of wealth.” After Sept. 11, shopping became an act of patriotism, another religion. And now we are asked to keep the faith, spending to save the free market from free fall, and us with it.

The injunction to gratify our desires when we’re scared we can’t meet our needs is like telling a woman with advanced breast cancer to enjoy sex because it’s good for her marriage. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes coined an economic term for this recessionary quandary, in which the macro-economy needs consumers to spend confidently, even while self-interest might be better served by putting the pennies in the cookie jar. Keynes called it “the paradox of thrift.”

Add to this a moral paradox: We are damned morally if we don’t save and damned economically if we do.

So is thrift a countercultural message from a chorus of Christians, environmentalists and socialists — and bad for capitalism? Or is thrift, like the Protestant ethic, useful to the economy?

What’s bad for capitalism is surely good for contemporary Jeremiahs seeking evidence of man’s downfall — and thus for the wisdom of thrift. Here is Kent Brandenburg, naming the latest names in a catalog of history’s economic evildoers: “Greedy home ownership painted like Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Greedy mortgage lenders looking for a quick buck. Greedy illegal immigrants who think they’re entitled. And then the greedy politicians who overspent in the time of plenty, instead of creating budget surpluses for the time of leanness.”

But in inveighing against greedy immigrants and wasteful politicians, Brandenburg isn’t dissing the free market. No, he’s singing the hymn of Reaganist Christianity, which figures each man — or each family — an island, and the state, with its handouts of welfare or food stamps, an intruder in the moral justice that rewards the good with prosperity and the wicked with poverty. This is American self-reliance with a punitive face, wielding thrift as its one economic ameliorator: “Young man, work hard while you are Young; you’l Reap the effects of it when you are Old,” proclaimed Cotton Mather. And if you don’t work hard? Then you will reap the effects of that, too.

Thrift is not just a moral antidote to personal profligacy. It is a confederate to collective stinginess. Thrift is good for America’s free-market Puritan state.

I’m thrifty by upbringing and environmentalist principle and, and as a writer, by necessity. For decades I’ve dutifully put money into my IRA. This year, like everyone else, I lost half of it. Did thrift reward me? I cannot say it gave me much spiritually, unless you count a sense of security. And that turns out to have been false.

So I have reflected on what else I might have done with that money. I could have spent six months in Paris drinking wine and perfecting my French, financed a small movie, or bought oceanfront property in Nova Scotia. What effects would I have reaped from my profligacy? Knowledge, adventure, pleasure: riches perhaps exceeding those of a fully funded retirement account.

You can’t take it with you. That’s what St. Paul told Timothy before warning him that the love of money was the root of all evil: “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” What lesson does the recession teach? Live now. Be merry. For tomorrow we — or the stock market bull — may die.

This piece originally ran on Feb. 25, 2009 in Salon.com.

It ain’t all pretty, but 2009 looks a lot better than anything this millennium has witnessed so far. As in all things psychological and political, the signs point every which way. So here are my predictions — some grim, some gleeful, some substantiated and some woven of the holey cloth of dreams. Here’s to a really new New Year.

Class struggle, welcome back
“JUMP, you fuckers!” This placard, carried at a September rally protesting the financial industry bailout, may be too explicit for some of you random-acts-of-kindness practitioners. But its underlying sentiment is probably a healthy one.

Admit it. Unless you’re a hedge-fund investor laying off your gardeners or listing your yacht on Craigs-list, your heart is not flooded with compassion for the Masters of the Universe whose universe has suddenly deflated. You are not moved to tears by the suicide of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the financier ruined by Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The Villehuchets were so rich they lent money to Louis XIV; for such crimes many of them ended up on the wrong edge of the guillotine blade. Yet Rene-Thierry believed that the rich would forever get richer, and never pay.

Sisters and brothers, you are feeling a scintilla of schadenfreude, that slightly guilty pleasure in the misfortune of those who justly deserve it. Savor the emotion. The baby bankers throwing back $20 martinis in SoHo, the private-plane weekend commuters cluttering up Vermont’s woods with their 40,000-square-foot ski chalets, complaining all the while about their property taxes — these people’s needs and values have afflicted the rest of us long enough. Then crank your spite up to anger, a necessary ingredient of class struggle.

Not to worry, post-partisans. The U.S. isn’t on the verge of condemning Bill and Melinda Gates to the fate of the anciens Villehuchets. But when John McCain failed to convince voters that ending the Bush tax cuts would lead directly to Venezuelan-style communism, we may have witnessed Americans waking up to which side they are on. (Note to Joe the Plumber: I didn’t know Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, but I know you’re no Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet).

You’re a Wall Street investor? Me, too. Don’t let that confuse your loyalties. Your retirement fund is probably hovering in the high four figures. Sign a card, comrade. This year, we eat the rich.

Muddied green
If the rich, having faces, are not on your list of comestibles, you are in 2009’s avant-garde. Our food co-op is selling “artisan tofu.” Watch for the Gourmet Magazine feature on root vegetables.

But if designer rutabaga is the rage, its purveyors may be out of luck. Shoppers tell pollsters they are cutting back on organic veggies because of high prices. Magazine editors are deep-sixing their green issues. Hybrid-car sales are sluggish, while lower gas prices are boosting purchases of SUVs. Red (as in the deficit column) is shaping up to be the new green.

The lesson here is not that we should all build saunas, sit back and enjoy the Earth’s rising temperatures. It’s just that we can’t rely on consumer desire to save the oceans from boiling. Want gas-guzzlers off the road? Implement emissions standards that prohibit their manufacture. With climate-change experts and activists heading Obama’s new White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that just might happen.

The White House heats up . . .
It won’t satisfy aficionados of extramarital fellatio and cigar play, but when Michelle puts on that red dress, Mama, somebody’s going dancin’ tonight. The Obamas bring some much-needed mojo back to a household that has gone frumpy and depressed. And for America’s growing girls and boys, the First Woman is living proof that smart, strong and serious can be sassy and sexy, too. Abstinence only, RIP?

. . . and sells out
So Rick Warren, the “purpose-driven,” anti-gay pastor of California’s Saddleback megachurch, has been chosen to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Is this trip to the dark side our new leader’s idea of crossing the cultural aisle? Or is it truly his first political faux pas? We’ll know after January 20, when he either pulls his own don’t-ask-don’t-tell or puts his money where his mouth isn’t and appoints some pro-equality judges. The question is how long queers will lie still and be sacrificial lambs to excessive ecumenicalism — and what we will all do if Obama doesn’t come to his senses.

Racism redux
This Christmas, Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman sent committee members a little gift: a CD featuring “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin of “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” In it, Shanklin regales listeners with an impression of Al Sharpton and ridicules not only Obama but also Snoop Dogg and Louis Farrakhan. Another highlight of the CD: “The Star Spanglish Banner,” an anti-immigration tune that begins, “Jose can you see . . .” And you thought the GOP had loaded neo-fascism, along with its cheerleader Sarah Palin, on a plane back to the permafrost. Dream on. Politico.com makes a good case that the flap over the CD could help, rather than hurt, Saltsman’s chances.

The new neo-atheism
Pastor Rick is giving that invocation. We still have not one but two prayers at the inauguration, not to mention one at the start of every Congressional day. The Washington National Cathedral, though it receives no government funding, is the congressionally designated “national house of prayer.” Conservative Christianity still exerts a deep influence on the politics of this purportedly secular nation. (Read Jeff Sharlet’s brilliant book The Family and shudder to learn how deep it is.) Still, there are signs that God may be taking a back pew in Washington. Obama has promised to nix the global gag rule, which prohibits reproductive-health providers in U.S.-aid-receiving countries from mentioning abortion to their clients. I’ve lost track of the number of times the word science has been spoken around Capitol Hill lately, uncoupled from its longtime companion, creation.

Prozac nation
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-V, won’t be out until 2012. But this year the controversy will keep heating up over whether the bible of psychological disorders (and guidebook for insurance-claim arbiters) should include Apathy Disorder, Caffeine Withdrawal Disorder, Internet Addiction and a host of other dubious diagnoses. These days, new psychological illnesses are almost invariably “discovered” by pharmaceutical companies that just happen to have devised drugs to treat them. The plot thickens when you learn (as the Center for Science in the Public Interest reported last May) that more than half of the new members of the DSM-V writing group have ties to Big Pharma. As the manual gets fatter, and more former human discomforts are enshrined as disorders, there will be fewer of us who are not certifiable — that is, certifiable consumers of psychotropic drugs.

Revenge of the nerds
First, the improbable happened: Republican pundits defected when McCain chose a dimwit as his running mate. Then the unimaginable: A candidate was elected not despite but because of his gift for uttering elegant sentences describing subtle and informed thoughts. Then that glimmer of possibility became reality in a Cabinet composed almost entirely of class valedictorians. Could the intellectual be making a comeback? Book sales are down, it is true, but publishers may be shedding mostly those customers who buy books (especially books by the likes of Tina Fey and Jamie Lee Curtis) and don’t actually read them. Call it the audacity of hope, but I’m putting my money on a brand-new product line that will pull the publishing industry out of the ditch: books for readers, written by authors.

Mission accomplished
Reports from Iraq tell us the courts are travesties of justice and the prisons are torture chambers; freedom of speech and the press are nonexistent (the journalist who threw his shoe at Bush was allegedly beaten brutally and faces seven years in prison); and women are in purdah. In other words, the U.S. “liberation” of Iraq has produced . . . Dick Cheney’s “democracy.” Next year in Afghanistan!

This piece appeared originally in Seven Days.

For a girl who grew up in a communist family, this month’s events should be cause for fireworks. As Marx predicted, the self-sown seeds of capitalism’s own destruction are spreading tendrils under the foundations of Wall Street, opening fissures in the walls of marble. Lenin told his comrades the profit-insatiable capitalist would eventually sell the people the rope to hang him with. Now he’s sold us the rope — and we’ve hanged ourselves. But the salesman, too, is gazing nervously at the gallows.

It’s an infidel’s Rapture, the End Times as foretold by the Prophets Karl and Vladimir.

So why do I feel so blah?

Maybe it’s because the revolution is not even near. “The end of U.S. capitalism? I really doubt it,” U. Mass economist Gerald Friedman told Al Jazeera last week, echoing colleagues across the political spectrum. “A capitalist system — or any social system — can only be brought down by an opposing system supported by a rising economic class. There is no such contender on the horizon right now to challenge capitalism. So we’ll continue to muddle along.”

Maybe it’s because the muddling is certain to be painful. “I don’t know about you, but I planned to retire someday,” a friend told me. I thought of the IRA statements lying unopened on my desk.

But maybe, just maybe, it’s because this enemy of the plutocratic state is grieving for more than my evaporating savings. And, in spite of the recent burst of populist fury against the tycoons and deregulators, I suspect America is feeling similar.

The story of our latest infatuation with Wall Street began with the economic policies and culture of Reaganism. Businesses started replacing guaranteed pensions with individual market-dependent retirement accounts. The government deregulated everything (the process was accelerated, and pretty much finished, by the Clinton administration). Politicians told us government protections like Medicare and Social Security were hanging off a cliff. The media announced the S&P numbers at the end of every five-minute news brief, while cities were festooned with LED tickertapes, constantly reminding us of our fortunes. The schools started teaching personal finance in the third grade.

Before you knew it, half of American households held stocks. Ordinary people were identifying with the high rollers, thinking of Wall Street as Main Street. The other afternoon, I overheard two grizzled guys — they appeared to be just this side of homeless — discussing investment strategies. “Even money markets aren’t safe anymore,” said one. The other nodded sagely.

But our stake in Wall Street’s well-being is not just economic. It is emotional: a kind of codependent love. The markets are our abusive lover.

We love the markets because, increasingly, we depend on them for comfort and security. We also love them because they promise romance: more and more, happily ever after.

Wall Street needs our confidence; the markets are nothing if not a vast confidence game. But, of course, it also requires risk. So, like that abusive lover, the markets keep us off balance. They parcel out their goodies in unpredictable and inscrutable ways, then take them back with equal caprice. This leaves us hungry — and unsatisfied desire always feels like love.

When Wall Street screws up, like an abuser it feigns contrition, mewling and begging. Even while it asks our indulgence, it blames us for its problems and threatens us with abandonment. Market capitalism is the author of our pain, but we are too scared to disbelieve its threats — or refuse its demands.

Master deregulator John McCain has been on a tear against Wall Street’s greed, as if this were an aberration. But economic systems, like people, have personalities, and capitalism is a narcissist. Selfishness is not a dysfunction; it is the central function of a system designed to alchemize individual self-interest into a common good. But a narcissist cannot love, so a folie à deux — or, in this case, à tous — develops. Because the markets’ parsimonious and conditional love leaves us needy, we grasp and hoard, too. Greed is capitalism’s antidote to anxiety, its answer to feelings of powerlessness.

Who among us is not greedy? Who does not buy two for one, even when we know the pennies off that extra pair of sneakers are subtracted from the paycheck of the factory worker? Who, when renting or selling a home, does not ask for “what the market will bear,” even when that price is helping to gentrify the neighborhood and displace the very people who made it a good place to live?

We feel we can’t help it. Capitalism, the controlling spouse, has indoctrinated us with a version of ourselves, and any divergence from that image creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. We doubt ourselves. If we reject the get-mine ethic — choose the greener, politically cleaner (and thus more expensive) product, list the house at less than top dollar — we may get a spiritual buzz, the sense that we are strengthening the community or saving a Chinese child from the factory. But what is this vague feeling compared with the hard evidence of figures ticking up in the dividend column? Are we really saving a child — or depriving a family of needed wages? Did we actually help the neighborhood — or just one lucky new homeowner? Are we ethical actors in an imperfect world — or bleeding-heart schmucks?

When complicity creates self-loathing and resistance self-doubt, we can always resort to a tried-and-true survival mechanism: self-delusion.

How many of us read the mutual fund prospectus to see what corporations our dollars are supporting? How many buy into a socially responsible mutual fund and then pretend the problem is solved?

Me, for one. One day, I casually opened the pamphlet of my fund’s investments. Immediately, I discovered several pharmaceutical companies on the list. All were deemed benign, even exemplary, under the fund’s labor, community and environmental criteria. But what about their routine tactic of inventing or exaggerating medical disorders to get people to buy the snake oil to treat them — a practice I despise? The fund’s vetters can hardly be expected to exclude every company that manipulates or lies to consumers; there would be virtually none left to invest in. Yet I realized at that moment that the fine tooth of my political sensitivities would find almost no corporation free of moral nits.

So what did I do?

I tossed the prospectus in the recycling bin.

Wild swings of elation and depression, confidence and doubt, realism and denial. And after it’s all over — when the other has walked out with your home and your life savings and your self-confidence — you declare that you never trusted the bastard in the first place.

Sounds like love, doesn’t it?

******

A crisis, of love or money or both, elicits many emotions. One is panic, which leads to rash decisions; another is anger; a third, depression. Congress, with its $700 billion no-guarantee-of-working bailout, has acted on the first. I’m feeling the second, but sinking into the third. Paralysis is an effective defense against pain.

If Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine is right, however, these emotions are part of the plan — and must be resisted. Crisis, Klein argues, provides the perfect environment for anti-democratic and wealthy elites to push through politically repressive and economically unjust policies (the Patriot Act; the seizure of peasants’ land to build hotels after the 2004 tsunami) that citizens would fight in calmer times. Massive instability is so propitious to such radical changes that the “reformers” and their beneficiaries are not beyond creating it to move things along. For instance, Klein quotes neoliberal economist John Williamson asking an audience of top-level policymakers in 1993 to consider “deliberately provoking a crisis so as to remove the political logjam to reform.”

Klein predicts that the finance industry bailout, which was written and shoved through by the bank lobbies, is only the first step. Should McCain be elected, she says, his administration will use the Treasury’s overextension to justify cutting a host of existing social programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, housing subsidies — and putting the kibosh on any new ones, just as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have forced debtor nations to do worldwide.

It’s a sign of the success of this strategy that an American presidential candidate— no, both candidates — are running on the backlash, calling for more regulation.

The romance of capitalism may be over, but we’re still in bed with Wall Street. And for the moment we’ve got no place else to sleep. Still, this is no time to be dozing off the blahs. If the bankers’ crisis-response team has had its blueprint for action at the ready for a decade, progressives should not get huffy about right-wing conspiracies. Instead, we need — indeed, have needed, for about 40 years — our own conspiracy, our own plans, and fast.

Depressives, awake. Drink a Red Bull, or five or six. Be alert but not rash, calm but not docile, skeptical but not cynical, hopeful but not naïve. Fix the marriage; stay together for the sake of the kids.

But start depending on our friends. Practice solidarity. Invest in each other.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Marx believed that the edifice of capitalism was built upon misery, and misery would bring the edifice down. To increase productivity and profit, he reasoned, bosses assembled workers in factories. Once there, though, the workers would soon notice that they were all similarly miserable — and that they outnumbered the bosses. The workers would organize and overthrow the bosses. Capital created its own revolutionary proletariat, Marx concluded: The system contained “the seeds of its own destruction.”

What old Karl did not predict was capital’s ability to pay workers enough to buy SUVs and flat-screen TVs — to emulate, albeit in knock-off form, the lives of the bosses. He didn’t predict that economic growth in the richest nations would come to depend not on the production of those cars and TVs, but on their consumption.

It didn’t occur to Marx that capitalism would prosper not on misery but on pleasure, and on the faith in future happiness secured by wages sufficient to buy more cars, more televisions, and more pleasure — consumer “confidence.”

He didn’t imagine that this edifice built not of steel but of gossamer — of optimism — would tremble only when that optimism started to evaporate.

But that’s what is happening now. Pushed by the expectation of misery — by mounting layoffs, stagnant wages and the spreading mortgage crisis — “consumer sentiment” plummeted in April to its lowest level since 1993. Shoppers aren’t shopping. Homeowners who still have mortgages are staying put, forgoing the kitchen renovations and in-ground swimming pools.

Meanwhile, with each bit of marginally good news — a stock price rise for Freddie Mac, a not-too-terrible inflation report from the government — Wall Street and its business-page boosters shout optimism from the rooftops, as if to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that it’s time to get out there and rally.

“The vast bulk of the housing contraction is behind us,” declared a keynote speaker at the National Association of Home Builders in February, forecasting “more vigorous economic growth following tax rebates by mid-year that will set up a recovery beginning in 2009.”

“S&P’s Optimistic Outlook on Financial Crises Sparks Turnaround on Wall Street,” the Associated Press headlined in March.

“Wall Street Shows Optimism That Crisis Is Fading,” reported The New York Times in April.

“Despite a drumbeat of bad economic news, the stock market is up — almost 11 percent in the last few weeks,” read the International Herald Tribune the first week of May. The article noted that, just as “bankers and investors appear ready to look past the crisis to more profitable times . . . consumers find themselves in a more precarious position as the job market weakens and banks make it harder to borrow money.” That’s an ominous bit of reality for Wall Street, which knows that if consumers don’t rally, investors won’t do so for long, either.

The traders resemble a family gathered around Grandma’s death-bed, smiling brightly each time she opens her eyes. But the more the family grins, the surer Grandma gets that her prospects are grim. In fact, she realizes they are counting on her to cheer them up.

We’re all Grandma. While the pink slips flutter around us, we’re exhorted to remain confident. While our credit card balances balloon and our mortgage payments come due, we’re coaxed to borrow more. It’s an impossible proposition, both practically and emotionally: Save the economy (and thus ourselves) by destroying ourselves.

That’s not optimism, it’s harikiri.

Maybe it’s this topsy-turvy emotional atmosphere, but I’ve got a perverse secret to confess: I’m kind of looking forward to the recession.

I’ve got no illusions. It isn’t going to be pretty, as the lines at the food pantries grow. As we slide down the other side of Peak Oil, things will probably get worse before they get better. Before we descend into Road Warrior-esque battle, we’ll feel our furnaces go cold. Before that, our little luxuries will vanish. I’m already starting to miss pineapples.

On the other hand, downturns have their upsides.

The gas crisis of the 1970s launched a movement of organic gardeners and appropriate-technology tinkerers. Today, what no amount of doomsaying from Al Gore or cajoling from Bill McKibben could accomplish, the $80 gas pump tab is getting done. Last month, for the first time ever, one in five vehicles sold in the U.S. was a compact or subcompact car — compared with one in eight 10 years ago, when the SUV was king. What the American Heart Association and an army of health columnists could not change, the $2 bag of corn chips is changing. The Portland, Oregon, Press Herald quotes a woman who is reducing her grocery bills by cutting back on snack foods for herself and her son. Though she “wouldn’t normally call herself a penny-pincher,” she says, “the real thrifty people must be having coronaries right now.” Or not. Another woman photographed for the article allows that she’s saving gas money by walking to the supermarket. Her picture indicates that she can use the exercise.

OK, so America is getting greener and fitter in spite of itself. But can we be happy in a recession?

I can only say I have been.

I lived in New York in the 1970s, when the city was teetering near bankruptcy. The place was weedy, seedy, wild, raunchy, cheap, creative and, in many ways, far easier to live in than its current corporatized, manicured, hyper-policed incarnation. Back then, the landlord might have neglected to send up the heat now and then. But he wasn’t trying to force you out to make room for the next sports-stadium-cum-luxury-condominium mega-development.

Friends who grew up in Vermont or moved here in the 1960s or ’70s admit to similar feelings. Back then, good jobs in the state were few. Land was literally dirt-cheap; 25 years ago, my partner bought his house and 40 acres in Hardwick for $36,000. Vermont was poor. But a limited number of decent-paying jobs and low property values also kept communities stable. Generation after generation could buy homes and take up their fathers’ and mothers’ trades, plant a garden, volunteer at church, and drop the kids off after school at Grandma’s a few houses away. Nobody was renovating the farmhouse down the road, then demanding that the farmer next door clean up that smelly manure.

I don’t want to rewrite history all fuzzy and nostalgic. In the 1970s in New York, I got mugged — several times. The subways stalled and the garbage piled up on Sundays. In Vermont, economic scarcity sent more people migrating out of the state than into it, from the 1850s through the 1960s. If the home-price climb relents now, as it’s showing signs of doing, younger families and lower-income folks may no longer be squeezed out of the housing market — and those wanting to sell, retire, and move will be squeezed in.

All I’m just saying is, there are more ways to gauge economic health than the single measure we’ve got — growth — and other ways to feel about it than “bigger is better and smaller is scary.”

For instance, there’s the “security” of expecting ever-rising wages and ever-multiplying home values. And there’s the security of knowing you and your friends can stay in your community because prices will remain more or less the same. There’s consumer confidence, the feeling that you’ll be able to keep buying stuff forever. And then there’s what I’d call “non-consumer confidence” — knowing you can live happily working less, earning less, and buying less.

As for optimism, we can start from scratch on that, since America’s supply is virtually depleted. A Washington Post /ABC News poll last week found that eight in 10 Americans believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction. In last month’s similar CBS poll, only one in five said the economy was in good shape.

Marx, and the Marxists I grew up with, would look at these figures, see misery — and incipient revolution — and cheer as loudly as stock traders at the end of a record day for the Dow. It’s true that pain, or at least caution, is motivating the new small-car-driving, snack-food-limiting, walking, non-renovating American. And that’s a bummer for the growth economy. In this way, consumer capitalism, the capitalism of confidence, contains the seeds of its own destruction.

But unless the recession goes on endlessly — which no one wants it to — people are going to need more than misery and fear to stick with their Civics and keep off the Fritos. And just as Wall Street can’t persuade the realistically glum to act as if everything is hunky-dory, it is hard to convince those who feel their lives are shrinking that they’re actually living as large as before — just differently.

In the long run, pleasure is a better motivator than pain.

But if the economy is going to depend on the populace feeling good, it needs to give us something better than cars and TVs to feel good about. I’d start with sustainability, which would also reduce a lot of anxiety.

Meanwhile, by miring dreams of building and buying in melted-down credit and $125-a-barrel oil, the recession forces us to take time out, and gives us time to experience some different kinds of happiness, and new reasons for optimism.

It’s already working for me. Each proposed monster ski resort or McMansion village that bites the dust makes me feel a little bit better.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

I don’t want to pay more than my share. But I’m happy to pay my share.

I wasn’t so avid until a year ago. That’s when I undertook a radical experiment in consumption, or rather, its antithesis: I went a year without shopping. For stimulation and meaning, I threw myself onto the offerings of the public sphere. There, I felt gratitude, grief, and finally, ownership.

The idea came to me in late 2003. I was panicked about my maxed-out credit card, depressed by visions of cast-off Christmas toys and electronics mounting up in the landfills. I wondered: what if I tried to duck out of the marketplace? Was it even possible in the 21^st century to maintain a social or political life, or an identity, without purchasing?

Single-handedly, I wasn’t going to save the world’s workers or its ozone layer – or cripple the economy. Overconsumption is a huge problem, requiring national and global policy solutions. But shopping is personal. I wanted to explore the connection between what we do and feel at the “point of purchase” and what happens out there.

Starting January 1, my partner, Paul, and I vowed to buy only necessities. We said yes to grocery ingredients, insulin for our diabetic cat, and Internet access for our businesses. Among the no-nos were clothes, books, CDs, restaurant meals, and movies.

Instead of spending our hours and dollars in the shops and cinemas, we passed Friday evenings at the Brooklyn Public Library and Sundays cycling the Hudson River Park trail. We wandered the streets, alert to New York’s spontaneous street theatre.

The library was ababble with immigrants learning English and English-speakers (including Paul) acquiring new tongues. Our bike rides took us from the buff men sunning on the piers to the Dominicans playing soccer at the north end of Manhattan, surrounded by salsa music, kids, and massive picnics. We whiled away hours mesmerized by the dancing fountain outside the Brooklyn Museum.

But much as we reveled in our city’s free spaces, we also grieved the condition they are in. The librarians couldn’t afford to replace lost books. When the museum fountain broke, it remained dry for months.

In the U.S., politicians of both parties parrot the dogma that private is always better than public – on either the revenue or the expenditure side. So, in 2004, faced with budget shortages, New York’s mayor floated a proposal to peddle corporate sponsorships, along with naming rights, to subway stations, buses, and bridges. Paul came home one day from his Italian class, singing out, “I love our library!” It occurred to me that he might not feel so proprietary if “our library” were the Bertelsmann BookCenter or Burger King’s Read It Your Way.

We Americans also tend to think of the government as a company. We pay our taxes for the product – our nation — and if not 100 percent satisfied, want to call Customer Service and demand our money back. The less we pay in taxes, we’re encouraged to believe, the more we have left for what we really want and need. Happiness is having your own – your own swimming pool, transportation, or healthcare account.

In the rest of the developed world, taxes are higher. So is public investment. The municipal pools are open, the trains go everywhere, and everyone gets basic healthcare. There’s less left for private consumption. Still, people seem to have what they want and need: Europeans consistently report higher levels of wellbeing than Americans do.

During our year, spending less on ourselves meant giving more to others, whether those were political candidates or tsunami victims. At the same time, our expenses, including deductible business expenses, fell. For instance, on my 2003 tax return, I claimed $719 in “professional viewing tickets”; in 2004, I entered a zero on that line. In 2004, therefore, I paid more taxes on similar income. And because my spending has not reverted to pre-2004 levels ($455 for tickets), again in 2005, I’m sending a substantial check to the IRS.

Am I gleeful? Come on. But I no longer feel I am mailing “my” money away to “them,” the less fortunate, or to “it,” a distant government detached from my life. In 2004, the libraries became mine, the parks, mine. If they were broke, it was up to me – us, our government: me – to finance them.

A year without shopping transformed me from consumer to citizen.