Our mountain of debt and the plunge in the market remind me of a story about the Hungarian playwright, Odon von Horvath (1901-1938). While hiking in the Alps, he came across the corpse of a long-dead climber. After rummaging in the man's rucksack he found a postcard. "Having a wonderful time." Asked by his friends what he did next, Horvath replied, "I posted it."
Horvath's own death displayed a similar note of absurdity. An exile from Hitler's Germany, he had settled in Paris just before the outbreak of the war. All his life he had suffered from an inordinate fear of lightning, and one day, while on his way to watch Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, he took shelter from a thunderstorm on the Champs-Elysees and was killed by a falling tree branch.So maybe it's true what FDR said: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Just don't tell that to a mountain climber!
(cartoon by Michael Ramirez)
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