MONEY
By John Buckley
IND5EV
The Blow
The Week of the Wind has blessedly passed.
Whew! A Zephyrus sigh escapes my lips that is not
unlike the soft sigh I breathe following Thanksgiving
dinner or the end of the Christmas holidays. The
winds still blow, rest assured of that fact, but the
bluster and hype has abated. Sometimes the storm
created in newsrooms and public agencies across our
nation exceeds that in the earth’s atmosphere itselt.
As Genesis tells us: “the Spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters.’’ On our chunk of the Upper
Left Edge the Breath of Heaven cannot be dispensed
with lightly. The wind has its tricks and magic.
Swirls at the center of supertomadoes have been
estimated to approach speeds of up to 1220
kilometers an hour. Wheat straws are routinely
embedded in the bard of trees In St. Louis, wind
shot a pine plank right through a solid iron girder
supporting the Eads Bridge. In the Midwest, a
whole herd of cattle were lifted aloft and were seen
drifting along together like gigantic birds in the sky.
Nasty winds grind the earth. In Japan the Arashi
“stormwind“ blows. The Kamakaza, or sickle wind,
cuts like a knife into one’s body. The Daibafu or
Giba, the “hang-horsewind” is strong enough to
smash down horse and rider. Roksblow in Iceland.
The Ty Fung of China, the Willy-Willy of Timor and
the Baguio of the Phillipines scourge and tear at sea,
earth, and sky.
Last Monday word went out. A bruising, mauling
wind had started north to beat up the Northwest.
Recommendations for emergency precautions and
school closures held the day. The television news
teams began salivating, hungry tor a feast of storm
carnage and destruction right here on their own turf.
On Tuesday, the barometer slid down badly. The
first gusts Tuesday drove my pals and I indoors for
the duration of the day. At noon a hastily organized
CBS Evening News Team was dispatched and
arrived in Cannon Beach to send a report back to the
East describing the situation here. They interviewed
several local residents, hoping to transmit fear and
cataclysmic foreboding across the country via
television. One Cannon Beach resident interviewed
said his chief concern was that Bill’s Tavern would
be closed during the storm. Several others shrugged
off the wind’s threat. Locals tend to become wind
and storm jaded. They’ve seen it howl in over The
Rock many times before. I spent Tuesday afternoon
lolling in an armchair in my friend’s home watching
television coverage of the storm. I considered their
treatment of the storm and its effects on the state to
be appalling and disturbing. The broadcasters were
not content with simply reporting weather data and
storm activity. Television news seeks to entertain,
and if the actual events occurring don’t fit the script,
then the news commentators editorialize and infuse
on-screen images with the heightened emotional
atmosphere they seek. We spun the TV channels all
afternoon. On every channel over-zealous on-the-
scene reporters, the “talking heads of television
news, whipped themselves into berserkerfrenzies
over fallen trees and power outages. I suspect that
every downed tree in the city of Portland was
televised and scrutinized by two or three
newscasters. Singularly embarrassing performances
by “the Boz’’ and some hypertensive nit-wit in a
snowsuit covering the Jantzen Beach boat moorage
for Channel 6 set the tone for Storm Tuesday ‘95. I
am deeply concerned at what appears to be a trend m
contemporary newscasting. Exaggerating the
severity of storms, earthquakes, floods, and other
disasters in order to sell broadcasting is
irresponsible, unethical, and dangerous. Goading
the general population into an emotional troth,
playing on their fears and uneasiness, is
reprehensible and inexcusable. It was a restless
wind, a wayward wind. It blew through the
willows, cried Mary to some, Louise to others. It
may have been an ill wind, with dreadful rain, but it
wasn’t the wind I saw on TV last Tuesday.
The thing that differentiates man from the
animals is money.
Gertrude Stein
George Washington had to borrow money to
pay for his trip to his first inauguration.
Abraham Lincoln’s regard for money
extended no further than keeping his family
in modestly decent circumstances.
Thomas
Jefferson died broke.
Andrew Carnegie, of all
people, said the mere “amassing of wealth is
one of the worst species of idolatry.”
Most of us have heard the old saw, “What
comes around goes around.
In the US, in
1900, 1% of the population is reported to have
controlled 90% of the wealth. In 1990, 7% to
8% was the figure. For the world at large in
the same year 2% to 3% controlled 90% of the
world’s wealth. So much for old saws as far as
money is concerned.
Money. Mazuma. The long green. Jack.
“The love of money is the root of all evil” (I
Timothy 6:10). It is “the most important thing
in the world” (George Bernard Shaw). It is
“the alienated essence of man’s work and
existence” (Karl Marx). “There is nothing so
habit forming as money” (Don Marquis).
“Money is a kind of poetry” (Wallace
S te v e n s).
Money. It is a medium of exchange, a
measure of some values. It is an index of
power and influence, a social marker like
your address or the number of feathers in
your war bonnet.
Iago counseled, Put money
in thy purse,” and we heed his advice,
keeping the figure to ourselves. It comes in
handy when you want to take a vacation or
get the car fixed. Get pinched, bail is a matter
of money. It is “the final enemy that will
never be subdued” (Samuel Butler). It is
“better than poverty, if only for financial
reasons” (Woody Allen).
Not all that many things occupy as central
a place in our lives as money. The usual reply
to that is, “you’ve got to live.” Note: in that
formulation money equals life.
Try numbering the days lately when no
thought one way or another was given to
money.
Few subjects provoke such intense
and varied responses. When it comes to
dough-re-me, detachment is for the other
guy. You can learn a lot about someone if you
have a feeling for their attitudes about
money. You can learn a lot about yourself.
Money is like sex and the weather. Who is
without opinions about it? Listening to
tirades against money is like listening to
angry soon-to-be-ex-spouses on the eve of
their divorce settlement.
About which are
they more angry?
Marriage or the party
they’d stopped having it with? Francis Bacon
in his essay, “Of Riches” (1597), cautioned we
should not believe people who claimed to
despise money, despise wealth. He called
them pretenders, hypocrites.
Sour grapes is one thing. An informed
understanding of the injustices that can stem
from fortress concentration of wealth is
a n o th e r .
When it comes to money we all put our own
spin on the matter, but consider these three
familiar ways of looking at it:
First, money as something in itself. This is
the point of view that creates, among other
things, misers.
Words like greed, avarice and
covetousness come to mind. Words one
doesn’t hear all that often given the prestige
that attaches to wealth.
The infrequency of
their use in polite conversation suggests
denial of the downside in human and moral
“I know what you mean. Yeah, I think she may
be the only Umquit, at least the only one left around
the Bay. All her people were moved from here a
long time ago, sent to the reservation where they
were mixed up with other people who were sent
there. Mary and her father didn’t like it on the
reservation, she told me, and they returned here.
She says this place is their home, not inland, across
the mountains. And then her father died, and she
In the silence, broken only by the slow slush of
just stayed on. I don’t think she’s unfriendly or
the waves breaking on the beach and the gurgle of
anything like that, but she likes to live alone and had
the stream just beyond the fireplace, fog swirled and
rather live here. She knows where she belongs and
played. Gloom of dusk was setting in, and it was
where she wants to be. And she is determined, I
time for Steve and me to head for home. We washed mean determined. And you were right not to start
up our cups; Mary remained seated and quiet. Steve
asking her questions or about things. If she feels
stoked the fire and we started up the trail: no good­
you’re pumping her, she’s apt to clam up. Until she
byes, no come agains. Yet I knew we would.
decides about you. I’d say you did it right, to remain
quiet. And I think it’s a good sign that she told us
Steve and I had about three miles to go before we
the fog story. It probably means that I don’t have to
reached our houses and we needed to do it before it
ask to bring you back when we want to come.”
got too dark. We walked rapidly and for the most
part silently. I broke the silence to ask, “Where did
“I think I had the advantage of being brought by
Mary get the story about the fog, do you suppose?
you — for sure. I’d never have got there any other
Did she make it up?”
way,” both of which were true, since without Steve I
wouldn’t have gone and certainly not have been
“She may have; she’s good at doing that, and she
likes to talk in tales. Or she may have learned it from invited in, much less accepted, if I had gone alone.
her people. When I asked her about that anemone
“Maybe so,” Steve said. “Old Mary and I get on.”
story which I told you on the beach, she said it was
By now we were crossing Old Bridge over South
an Umquit tale.”
Arm Creek; soon we were making our way through
“Is she the only Umquit around, do you know?
the damp, gathering gloom along Bay Street, moving
That was one of the things I wanted to ask her. But
through the fog from one pool of light cast by the
somehow I found it impossible to ask her anything.
street lamps to the next. We made our way up to
It didn’t seem right. I felt like I had to wait and let
Lower Bench, where we parted.
her tell me things.”
pause, she continued: “Sun has many children, but
fog is the most mischievous. Fog is always running
away from sun’s house. Every night fog escapes
and sun spends the mornings trying to bring fog
home, inside. Some days, it can t be done. Some
days, sun locks fog in all day, all night, all night, all
day. But fog is clever and always finds a way out.”
terms of this domineering value.
Greed is numbered among the Seven Deadly
Sins, a form of idolization and false worship.
Such reverence is commonly known to
deepen one’s talents for suspicion and
dismissive opinions of one’s neighbors.
After
all, when it comes to important things like
money and your good opinion of yourself,
whom can you trust?
Next. Undoubtedly the most common-
attitude, succinctly put, is “no money, no
live.” Salt isn’t the salt of life, money is.
Food, the rent, gas, the kid’s diapers, all cost
money. So we find work, i.e., exchange our
labor for the money to pay for those things.
The class of people we are born into and our
personal and family choices and ambitions
have a lot to do with the kind of work we seek
and how much we think we are worth. What
is achieved is called one's standard of living.
It is not for nothing that when that standard
is graphically portrayed it looks like a
th e rm o m e te r.
With some seasoning many come to realize
that not having a lot of wants, especially of
the vain and impulsive sort, is a kind of
wealth.
Meanwhile, there is the constantly
rising cost of living, work insecurity, health
matters and having enough for your spouse s
and your old age.
Many of us are doing just fine, but
increasingly for many the exchange rate
isn’t keeping up. Enter, “to economize.” A
lonely fearful business when what you have
to sell, your labor, no one wants to buy or if
they do, then at a price telling you you’re not
worth much.
A third way of looking at money is as a
commodity. Just as oil and Coca Cola are
treated as commodities by individuals and
corporations having a proprietary interest in
them, so can money be regarded. The
commodity point of view is one reason to have
retirement accounts, to have savings plans —
if, that is, we can afford them. The notion is a
simple one. Farmers plant wheat to make
money. Money regarded as a commodity is
“planted” to grow more money. Just as wheat
seeds beget wheat, so money can beget
money.
Unlike wheat, however, money is
almost always in season.
Big money. Surplus money. Extra money.
In an uncertain world informed treatment of
it as a commodity is the most productive and
safest way. Of course, there are risks. There
are always risks. Death and taxes are about as
close as we get to sure bets. Stuff the money
in the mattress, hide it underneath the
floorboards, one thing you can be fairly
certain of is that it will be worth less in
purchasing power when you resurrect it.
A good cigar may still be a smoke, but a
dollar hasn’t been worth a dollar since who
knows when. Maybe never. In November I
paid $1.09 for a dozen eggs. In December,
$1.29. Soon enough, if not already, the $50
bill will play the role in the walking-around-
money department that the $10 bill played.
Many who have amassed great fortunes
claim not to have been interested in money as
such. Which is not to say they pooh-poohed
the status and life-style it provided. Look into
their lives and you will discover that neither
Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller or
Henry Ford were spellbound by money. Many
top-notch professional athletes have
expressed surprise at getting rich playing a
game. So has Bill Gates, at forty years of age
reputed to be the richest man in the country.
Rather, these people tend to talk about
putting their talents or better ideas to the test.
They talk not only about their fortune, they
also talk about making their luck. In this
country, as elsewhere, that mostly means in
the marketplace.
Common consent has it
you’ve passed with flying marks when the
money comes cascading in.
The meaning of money? Consider these
sentences by Lewis H. Lapham from his book,
Money and Class in America (1988):
“Money is like fire, an element as little
troubled by moralizing as earth, air and
water. Men can employ it as a tool or they
can dance around it as if it were the
incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or
monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or
translations from the Bible, commissions
Rembrandt and underwrites the technology
of Auschwitz.
It acquires its meaning from
the uses to which it is put.”
We’ve all got our own take on money as a
fact of life, a symbol and a necessity. One
thought I expect most of us would agree upon,
though, is that it takes more money than ever
before to go broke.
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