Some Things Don’t Change in Grover’s Corners [Our Town]

New York Times ^ | March 7, 2009 | Frank Rich

[Lorianne]

“WHEREVER you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” says the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Those words were first heard by New York audiences in February 1938, as America continued to reel from hard times. The Times’s front page told of 100,000 auto workers protesting layoffs in Detroit and of a Republican official attacking the New Deal as “fascist.” Though no one was buying cars, F.D.R. had the gall to endorse a mammoth transcontinental highway construction program to put men back to work.

You can see why there’s a spike in the “Our Town” market. Once again its astringent distillation of life and death in the fictional early-20th-century town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., is desperately needed to help strip away “layers and layers of nonsense” so Americans can remember who we are — and how lost we got in the boom before our bust.

At the director David Cromer’s shattering rendition of the play now running in Greenwich Village, it’s impossible not to be moved by that Act III passage where the Stage Manager comes upon the graves of Civil War veterans in the town cemetery. “New Hampshire boys,” he says, “had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends — the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”

[Lorianne]

KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS ARTICLE IS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, AND THEREFORE IT IS TOTAL CRAP AND SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ON THIS WEBSITE.

IF YOU DON'T READ IT, IT'S THE VERY SAME AS IF HADN'T EVER BEEN WRITTEN AND NO ONE ELSE HAD READ IT EITHER ... SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT AT ALL!

:) Just enjoining the FR Ostrich Brigade before they arrive

[Arthur McGowan]

I did just read it.

It is total crap.

Rich rehearses some of the excesses in the private sector. He has not a word to say about government’s role in creating a politically-motivated bubble.

Fiat money. Inflation. Encouraging bad loans. Lies.

[Darkwolf377]

and how lost we got in the boom before our bust.

The writer is yet another person engaging in the lazy "EVERYONE thinks this way" view of life.

It's so much easier than accepting that "we" never think in unison, and "we" don't need to be punished for having good lives in this system.

The situation we're in is so complicated it would take a hundred years to figure it all out, and it still would only apply to a segment of the population, not this imaginary "we" that includes all of us.

[kralcmot]

“This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains.”

Rich said the above

you said this:

“He has not a word to say about government’s role in creating a politically-motivated bubble.”

[Arthur McGowan]

He says nothing about how government CAUSED the mess: fiat money, inflation, pressuring lenders to make bad loans.

Rich refers only to private-sector malefactors and government enabling after the fact.

Oh—and WHAT Bush tax policy CAUSED the bubble?

Bubbles are caused by monetary policy, not tax policy.