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There's only one reason I remember the last big stock-market dip, back in 1987. A few days before the plunge, Martha and I had shipped a manuscript to New York City. It was a 60,000-word installment of an adult-western series which featured ample sex and gratuitous violence.
These paperbacks, we were told, sold quite well in the American Heartland. This makes me wonder about the validity of all those Bible Belt surveys which claim that wholesome downhome Americans are fed up with sex and violence in popular culture -- if that were true, why do new adult westerns appear in the stores every month?
Back to our manuscript, a thrilling tale of a virile protagonist who encounters several frustrated plural wives in the realm of Deseret. Given the vagaries of delivery and the deadlines specified in contracts, I figured we should call to make sure the manuscript had arrived.
As I talked to the editor on that October morning, I could hear shouts, screams, and moans in the background, so I asked if perhaps an office party was in progress.
No, the Dow just dropped 200 points, and the stock
market is still dropping, and everybody is panicking and
worried,
he said. We're all watching it by the
minute.
This was an editorial sanctum, presumably devoted to fabricating and extending a mythology of the Old West, and they were all astir about the transient fluctuations of the stock market?
That probably explains the nature of the American book industry, more interested in the Dow-Jones than in mere words to publish. The reaction to the 1987 drop -- days of front-page stories and lead status on the network news -- tells us what's important in this country, and it isn't us.
For starters, we live in a time zone that nobody
notices. Program promos proclaim 11 Eastern, 10 Central,
8 Pacific,
as though an arm of the Gulf of Mexico
extended into Canada, the Nowhere Zone.
Then note that the beautiful people we often read about
have bicoastal marriages,
and they jet back and
forth over flyover country.
If we're not in neglected flyover country,
then
we're America's Heartland,
as though we live in a
land of simple virtues were violence and terror have never
been known -- thus erasing Sand Creek, Ludlow, and scores
of other horrors, from lynchings to labor wars.
Apparently this indicates that, to the rest of the country, we Heartlanders are just not sufficiently smart or sophisticated to handle our own history, and so it must be sanitized to protect our delicate sensibilities.
Then recall the extensive coverage of the 1987 stock-market crash when major corporations lost about 25 percent of their paper value. This was bemoaned as a major tragedy.
But about five years earlier, values in the Mountain West plunged a lot more than 25 percent. The Climax Mine near Leadville had employed more than 3,000 people. It closed entirely, and Leadville real estate dropped by a lot more than 25 percent.
Not that anybody important noticed. Half of Salida was on the block at fire-sale prices then, partly on account of Climax and also because CF&I's Monarch limestone quarry had closed -- as had the steel mill in Pueblo it had supplied. Anaconda shut down its smelter in Montana. Many counties in the West, and some whole states, lost population.
And nobody on either coast seemed to notice. Farmers, facing foreclosure because crop prices had dropped, tried to get some attention with tractor cavalcades to the national capital; occasionally they became the day's story, but faded quickly because our food supply isn't nearly as significant as the twitchings of the stock market.
This country sure has some strange priorities. If some speculators run into trouble with a 25 percent drop in the market value of their paper, then it's a national catastrophe, and we're all supposed to care.
But if the real livelihoods of real people disappear, if their life-time investments in their homes plunge by 50 or 75 percent, then it might rate a blip on the nightly news (assuming there are some heart-tugging visuals), but it certainly won't inspire any reassuring speeches from the Secretary of the Treasury or bail-out legislation in the halls of Congress.
This inspires the formulation of a new rule: The
importance of any event to daily life in the Nowhere Zone
is in an inverse proportion to the amount of attention it
receives from the national media.
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