Creating facts

out of thin air

One of the oddball characters in Neil Gaiman’s novel “American Gods”pulls gold coins out of thin air. According to a recent Associated Press article (Jan. 9) the federal bank does something similar (“When the Fed lends money to banks, it creates the money out of thin air”).

As athletic and clean-cut-looking as Superman, some of the current cast of presidential candidates are in thin air themselves. They must think the rest of us are dumb and need to be rescued by them, although every day brings further proof of how far removed they are from the reality of this troubled nation of ours. They twist facts around shamelessly and seem bent on creating, in their thin air, a reality that will suit them and their friends just fine. All the rest of us will have to do is reach up and pull it down to us, and we’ll be fine, too.

They’re not the only illusionists, though. As James Haslam pointed out in his op-ed, “It’s time to put people first” (Rutland Herald and Times Argus, Jan. 8), the 1 percent that represents government and corporations “has done an impressive job getting people to focus their dissatisfaction with the current system on ‘the government.’”

Perhaps it all started with the Europeans before there ever was a United States of America. According to Mark Bushnell’s “Life in the Past Lane” of Jan. 8, the Native Americans who were prospering back then in what is now Vermont were done in by the “beliefs, technologies and diseases” brought in by those Europeans. It’s interesting that he put beliefs first.

Perhaps the Occupy movement is waking us up to all the wool that’s been pulled over our eyes for so long. Money — the economy — is endlessly talked and written about these days. The financier Woody Tasch sheds this light on it: So far this century “the dizzying speed of money transfers has ripped finance away from its moorings in reality.” Among his remedies: “Watch money do things in the real world.”

As more and more of us have come to realize, that “real world” is local. Unless there’s an angel in thin air who could become a man or a woman and be elected in November, we can’t hope for a president who will be in a position to do what needs doing to get our ship of state in safe waters. It’s up to us to shed the illusions and get real, for when illusions only benefit the illusionists, they’re downright destructive.

LOUISE SANDBERG

Corinth