The Way We Live Now
© Helena Lind · Filed Under Features · Add your comment
I saw this – the credit and subprime malaise that
is – and thought of Trollope. Anthony Trollope, who wrote a timeless
novel about stupidity and speculation and called it “The Way We Live
Now”, set in the 1870s.
The plot is as crispy and actual today as it was in
Victorian days.
The old saying “if something seems too good to be true it probably isn’t” has nothing to do with it, same goes for intelligence, easily replaced (if ever there to begin with) by vulturous greed and collective blindness.
Only in the novel, the pratts who fall victim to the scheming Melmotte are totally-out-of-their-depth English Aristos who know how to kill lots of pheasants and foxes but besides nothing of the real world, longing for nothing so much as that juicy sounding promise to make money to foot their stupendous lifestyles.
But what about those top university trained pillocks in international banking and other institutions, who fell for the subprime packages and thought it a smashing idea to buy into loans of obviously prospectly disadvantaged people who were never much likely to repay their mortgages in the first place? Common sense should have told them, if one would have used ther brains. But again it had nothing to do with it.
Great stuff eh, to profit from squeezing people who were pushed into make-believe by their son-of-a-gun-style bankers that they could afford a much larger house than they think, or shop ’til they drop? No-one saw the meltdown coming eh? Yeah, the pigs have just reached cruising altitude.
Same thing, read Trollope. Easy money to be made…easy money…make money. You can most certainly make mistakes, but not money.
Because “good money” is not made. Good money has to be earned!
The way we live now, the way we live always should not give such wrong signals as the credit crunch and it’s reasons sadly do.
Money not earned but burnt.
Worse still: there is not a single sign of regret or an uneasy concience found round those who dealt that blow to the economies and millions of real people with real lives and real problems. People who have to earn their keep, mostly not in designer suits but the hard way.
The way we live now – can we really accept to be walked over by such cynicism and contempt for decency?
What say you, Mr Trollope?
This article published by MIZPAH Magazine - ©2010 www.mizpah.tv
© Helena Lind
Some politicians may want to ban boom and bust, the economic cycle, but that isn’t possible!