"It's the crash! It's the crash!" (a fictionalized reality story)

Johnny Wilkins woke up shouting: “it’s the crash! It’s the crash!” Mary-Jane caressed his sweaty forehead and said: “Don’t worry. Everything will be alright. God helps those who help themselves.” But her sweet words were of no avail. Johnny rushed down the curvy stairs as naked as Adam and headed bird’s eye for his uncle’s office on the 50th floor skyscraper on 45^th street.

The pretty green eyes of Martha James, the secretary, bulged like a pair of Mexican piñatas when she saw Johnny burst into the office; her attempts to ward him off were all to no avail. "What’s come over you? Graham Nottingham is not in today..." but he was and Johnny was in no mood for white lies.

“Your pretty little world of dollars and bonds and stocks and financial packages is going down the drain along with your marketing gurus and stock market freaks,” he stammered as he slumped into a plush black leather seat in front of Nottingham’s desk, his naked body boldly standing out amidst the folds of soft leather. The frightened look on Graham’s face quickly gave way to an ironic smile as he recognized Johnny.

“My dear fellow, you seem to have forgotten something!"

"No, not in the least. We’ve got to talk man to man."

 "Being a relative of mine by no means entitles you to enter my office like an unannounced Neanderthal,” blurted Nottingham in a stern tone of voice.

“But it’s a crash! Don’t you understand? It’s the capitalist system,it’s the beginning of the end,” Johnny blurted out.

“Calm down young man! It’s just a matter of adjusting accounts,” Nottingham ventured, “you’ve got to go through a crisis now and then. It’s perfectly normal, considering the fact that growth is by definition an uneven process. We need a crisis now and then to help us grow.” The voice of the President of the Goddard Financial Investment Corporation was self-assuring yet Johnny was not in the least taken in.

“It’s the system. Don´t you understand? The corporations and financial speculators play with people’s money as if they were in a Las Vegas gambling house and then make us foot the bill.”

“Oh come off your Marxist illusions!”

“Marx died a long time ago. But the government has taken the money we pay in taxes to bail out those corrupt bankrupt enterprises. And now as if we were mere pawns the government is going to slash salaries, cut budgets for schools, take away medical care for the retired, send workers to Hell...”

“Well, well. Didn’t you vote for that guy who promised the pie and the sky, that pin-headed populist? Like the rest of those self proclaimed reformers, he ends up doing what he has to do, what we want him to do. The rest is just hot air. He knows If we don’t whittle the State down to size we’ll end up in the dark ages, or face a soviet dictatorship.”

“Come off it! You and your marketeers! All you guys care about is making profit at people’s expense. You don’t care about what people think, you don’t give a damn about freedom and democracy. All that matters is the profit margen. Millions are going to lose their jobs so you can boost your profits, maybe even lose their homes just so the big cheeses and go on doing what they have always done.”

“That’s nonsense! No economic system can operate without the profit motive. Why would people work if they couldn’t rake in a bit on the side? You criticize the capitalist system, but it has brought us technology, the computer, pain-killers, electronic mail, internet,movies, electronic voting machines and thousands upon endless amenities which in thousands of years humanity never even dreamed of.”

“And unheard of contamination. Destruction of nature, plastic bottles cluttering virgen forests, pesticides obliterating the course of nature, the streets filled with objects of planned obsolescence. Good God! They tell us that to solve the recession we have to consume, but they shrink our salaries; they think the purpose of human existence is to buy and buy, and buy on credit, on time, but to buy, as if buying were like making love, as if buying were the purpose of life and not to live and love and enjoy the beauty of nature...

"You leftists get poetic in your madness, but reality is not fiction..."

"Well then why do you always ask the common people to pay for the errors of the rich? Why don’t you cut down the billions and billions of dollars the Pentagon spends on wars against who knows what country or group abroad? Why don’t you get the corporations to foot the bill for the economic debacles they invent to increase their profitability?”

“It’s a globalized world. Can’t you understand that?"

"I thought you were against increasing the power of the State?"

"The military operations are needed to keep law and order. That’s the function of the State: to keep order. But not to intervene in the free market. Only if you leave business alone will there be prosperity. If you populists insist on asking the rich to pay more taxes, who is going to invest? Who is going to give jobs to people like you?”

“No! No! No!” shouted Johnny, as the nightmare faded away into the pale light of dawn. Mary-Jane was still washing the beads of sweat from his forehead with a damp cloth. When Johnny opened his eyes she whispered into his ear: "It was only a nightmare" and then sang softly into his ear:

“Blue moon, I gotcha under my skin,

Blue moon, to love ain’t no sin,

Blue moon, how I love your tender voice,

No crash can alter my choice,

No market can slit my heart apart

‘Cause I gotcha deep under my skin,

Loving you blue moon just ain’t no sin,

just ain’t no sin, no, no, just ain’t no sin.”