Summertime Blues

Four out of every five Americans—more, if you just survey the wealthiest—think the country is in a recession. But there's a precise formula for such a thing, and economists say it's not so, although Warren Buffett says it is, and my money's on Buffett (I wish). Of course, it's mainly a semantics game, particularly if you're hard-pressed to afford a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas. The economic classification "recession" was actually invented in 1937 when the economy was back in the toilet but FDR didn't want to call it a depression. And the description "depression" first surfaced during the Hoover administration, a substitute for a more vivid but disconcerting term of art: panic.

Most of us feel the ground trembling beneath our feet, as though the epicenter of an earthquake is somewhere else but still nearby. Some of the growth industries in the country nowadays are built around disaster. There are companies devoted to clearing away debris from flood zones, and contractors who tend houses that have been foreclosed on behalf of the banks that now own them. The Forest Service will be hiring every qualified applicant in California to battle the fires scorching hundreds of acres there.

But at least since the days of the New Deal there has been a national assumption that failure is not an option. Playing by the rules and working hard will lead to prosperity. Prosperity will lead to security, and security is immutable. But little seems immutable this summer, and prosperity has led to credit-card indenture. Having a two-car garage has an entirely different feeling when the cost of filling a car with gas begins to edge toward $100. This is the summer of our discontent, when the equivalent of the ice-cream-truck bells is the music of jingle mail, signaling that our old optimistic notion of America is on increasingly shaky ground.

© 2008