'Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew...'

You reap what you sow.

And It Was Written, Our Blame

By Rod Dreher
Real Clear Politics

Novelist David Foster Wallace, who recently committed suicide at age 46, once told an interviewer that his generation had been morally "gutted" by a pseudo-sophistication that sneered at boring everyday truths. He explained that privilege had caused so many of his contemporaries to forget that plain-spoken wisdom — the sort of truisms that supposedly only children and suckers believe — is actually, you know, valid.

"The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting — which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff — can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important," he said. "That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel."

Mr. Wallace had his epiphany attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as research for his groundbreaking 1996 novel Infinite Jest.

The novelist saw that drunks who had hit rock bottom came to see self-help aphorisms as ladders out of hell. This was a new thing for him. In the light of suffering and intense human need, principles that many of us have come to disdain as sentimental clichés appeared as saving truths.

Mr. Wallace's observation came to mind the other day as I watched a beleaguered Wall Street executive on MSNBC try to obfuscate his company's key role in helping cause the crisis, the near-apocalypse that has delivered the U.S. financial system to the far end of the valley of the shadow of debt, to the edge of Armageddon. The poor man gassed on for 10 minutes, using every possible verbal maneuver to avoid answering direct questions put to him by journalists.

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