The Big Rock Candy Theorem

Recent minute blips in the cardiograph of the European markets has the public slowly but surely cocking eyebrows towards economists AS IF they know not what they did, will do, are doing. I must ask the public to be patient. Relax. Have a wheat beer. Take a wide Bertha (or a wide Martha if that's all you got). I learned to take an expansive, patient view of the world during my brief ten-year sojourn in the Swiss Alps.

I was taking the cure at Berghof Schrudrifer Sanatorium for my pathologic gummy addiction (to this day I can't see a swedish berry without salivating like a dog in a jerky factory). Ah, the sweet regulatory life of a patient at the Berghof! Time condensed and expanded in a way you "valley folk" could never understand. Between the five identical and precise meal-times, where we were served everyday with Happy Meals and Fresca, to the long stretches of the "rest cure", where, bundled up in our yak-skin sacks we sat hours on our balconies in all weather, snow or rain, howling at the moon and taking stock of the universe - who among you groundhogs could grasp it?

In short, it was blisteringly boring. But how marvelously so! Still, not all time was solitude. Besides brief conversation at the troughs during meal-times, I also managed to do some Berg steigen, mountainous hiking, although nothing too strenuous for my weakened, gummy-riddled frame. It was during these walks that I met Herr Tortellinni. Clad in a worn but tasteful pea-coat and neon-green neck-kerchief, Herr Tortellinni would harangue me on my mental fructifications and leave with me with plenty of valuable insight to maul over and forget on my own time.

He was a great homo humanus, a passable homo dodgeballicus, and a cringingly greedy homo stealsnapkinicus. He was also a maternal great-grandson of the famed economist Sismondi. His father had been a professional "Connect Four" player who struggled to bring national unity to his home country of Parmesania. Uniting the intellect and fervour of his famed progenitors, Tortellinni served the cause of his country and western civilization as a whole, writing a fifteen volume reference work, The History of Constipation in Literature. "What is all of Greek Tragedy," he would say, "but the mighty constipations of gods and men?"

It was Tortellinni who taught me the true meaning of Economics during one of his humanistic barking sessions -- sine pecunia, of course. I had brought up the subject with reference to the recent universal collapse of markets, sanity, and stability "down below". I went on further to call Economists, bankers, and market-traders alike "greedy sons-of-whores-and-whoremongering donkey eaters." Tortellinni smiled, played with his mustachio in that subtle, Snidely Whiplashesque manner he had, and proceed to correct my peverted opinions with the following lecture:

"Sapperlot, my young Informationist! I do not think you quite grasp the idea of Economics. It was Plato who said Philosophy begins in wonder; he might just as well have said that Economics ends in it. Indeed, one can hardly censure Economists for the unfruitful studies they undertake. At least a Philosopher or a professor of English would have no grounds. Economists are not astrologists. It might very well be that they study the ups and downs of market forces, currencies, and that impenetrable river of numbers and decimals with the same relish that a Classicist laps up from a passage of Homer describing the wine-dark sea. As soon as the critic can tell me the theme of the next great novel before it is yet written, then and only then will I look toward the Economist with regards to the future."

It was a striking thought, I thought, as I struck my thunker on an unseen outcrop of mountain.

"But," I continued, for my sentence was hardly begun, "what then are these Economists good for, Herr Tortellinni?"

He smiled and nodded. "You are playing in dangerous, Bourgeois, urine soaked pool waters, my young Informationist. Asking what a thing is 'good for' is tantamount to intellectual Goonism. However, I will accept your teleological goal-post for the present argument. Let us consider the term from the Poetics that Aristotle uses to define the end of tragedy. The term is katharsis, which might be translated as relief, expulsion, or, in my personal view, the sacred bowel movement of the conscience. It is the feeling that rushes over one after the tragedy, the feeling of joy and release that accompanies the abstracted vision of terror onstage. It affects the whole audience, as if they were figuratively (or in some elderly cases, actually) just waking up from a dyspeptic nap.

"Now you ask me, what are the predictions of Economists good for? I point to Tiresias, to Cassandra, to the prophets of the Old Testament, who underscore the tragic moment by revealing it beforehand. They are our modern capitalistic mystics. It is their place to point at the ghastly, meaningless numbers of the stock ticker, to babble incoherent verses like the Delphic oracle. Above all else they serve to garnish the absolute catastrophe of mankind with a bit of foreshadowed seasoning."

I mentioned casually that as far as the stock ticker on TV goes, I had never learned to discern its meaning. I always read the numbers out like a Bingo man much to the general mirth of the Berghof rumpus room. Some jokes never get old. Tortelinni smiled his wolfish smile. We seperated for lunch, where our Happy Meals and toys were waiting with Swiss precision at our designated seats.