A Great place to weather a great depression

March 7, 2009

What a time it is to be alive and both unsettled and liberated in the difference a few months can make in Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica, the cradle of western civilization, and the world at large.

When dark perils and foreboding shadows pop out of the morass of economic discomfiture like corpses slipping concrete slippers from the foul waters of the past administration nothing can reasonably have a silver lining nor a veneer of hope.  Yet through all the sticky, sweaty, greasy bad news vomited daily from my television set, I cannot escape the paradigm of a new order making sudden sense again of sensible things, a wave of logic settling into a fretful society teeming with nervous tics and jerky starts, jaundiced eyes jumping between the stock ticker and the power bill, between the mortgage payment and monthly expansion of the piles of credit card bills.  Even large things that I disagree with like trillion-dollar stimulus packages, a recurrent bailout payment plan for AIG, General Motors calling hat in hand, rumors of deals between prosecutors and Bernard Madoff, anything to do with doping in sports, these things try but fail to get my dander up these days.  The renunciation of torture, the plan to close Guantanamo, reversal of silly edicts concerning stem cell research, abortion, abstention programs, medical marijuana persecution, and the secreting of legal memos each propel the America I believe in back into the stratum of decent society.  General Motors must sadly but by the law of the jungle of which it is a leading icon must be cannibalized and dismembered in bankruptcy.  And as venerated icons of capitalism, like Citigroup, are nationalized instead of frog-marched through the bankruptcy that warrant equally with GM, AIG, Lehman, and Bear-Stearns, the paradigm of self-sufficiency, objectivist mastery, of the ascendancy and vitality of greed, market supremacy, and the enshrinement of the super-ego is savaged, the landscape tilled for the next great philosophical shunt.  And as fearsome and bad as everything is supposed to going, it feels good all over again to be an American, and somewhere I am conflicted over all this.

Either something has happened to me, or something has happened to the nation's politics, or both, but I can no longer read www.realclearpolitics.com.  The conservative columnists read like the annoying buzz of blue-bottle flies.  And the liberal columnists, still pinching themselves less than two months into an improbable ascendancy write from an insulated vacuum incapable yet of critical thought, unwilling yet of getting down to the hard work.  My political identification as an independent in this change of helm and affection for our new president appears to remain safe.  I briefly tried on the mantle of the "opposition" party, but I am too pleased yet with our new President to have anything contentious to say about him yet.  .

Others think differently.  Today, I heard a second American give voice this week to what must be a new and emergent urban legend and conspiracy theory, that the American government is either building detention facilities, or recruiting and training a national police force for riot control in advance of the probable imposition of martial law as social order falls apart under the collapsing economy.  It is going to get so bad, I am told, that marauding bands of the zombie-like poor will roam through wealthy neighborhoods eating the rich.  What was going to happen to Costa Rica, I was asked, when the dollar's value went to $0, when the streets churned with revolt and the sewers ran red? 

I had to think about that one for a bit and finally owned up that I was not qualified to answer, having not studied the eventuality much.  In the end I got a verbal go-ahead on the job, but the future's promise remains as fickle as that of a project for which no money has changed hands.  A married couple, two veterinarians, sought me out from their Iguana Lodge stay for beachfront real estate, and we went and viewed a number of properties.  After an uptick in clients approaching me to list properties, it was refreshing to finally be able to welcome to the table that at least represented themselves as interested in buying. 

Real estate has been off since late 2007, when the golden age of Costa Rican real estate folded under its own weight.  After a brisk Christmas season and solid numbers throughout January of this year, tourism is way down in early March after a February in lugubrious decline.  At this time of year I should be able to stand on the Crow's Nest landing at any time and see oddly-garbed foreigners of all stripes tramping up and down main street, bee-lining for that technological oasis in a dusty cow-town, CafeNet El Sol, getting into and out of cars in front of Juanita's Mexican Bar and Grille and CoopeAlianza.  Today's afternoon view from the landing takes in more town drunks than tourists, and the hustle and bustle on the streets, as lively as ever, is mostly pedestrian.   February's falloff and the relatively low number of reservation inquiries that I am getting in the mail would suggest that the recession is keeping its famous chickens home to roost, leaving us foxes without a henhouse to guard. 

What is wrong with me that I do not feel guilty for not feeling bad for the collapse of entire industries and the hardships of all those depending on those industries?  Is it morally acceptable to shrug at the notion of good riddance to bad rubbish?  I was certainly startled when Bear Stearns was drawn and quartered in a harbinger of what has only dribbled and must now release itself through flood-gates.  Since I am not an economist, it is not possible for me to cringe with appropriate verisimilitude at the theoretical consequences of not sustaining such bad actors as AIG and other beneficiaries of lawmakers' largesse.  I understand it would be very bad and could make bad things so much worse that it is not worth the hundreds of billions in savings not to throw in the kitchen sink.  In for a penny--the saying goes--in for a pound.  

Here is paradise, food hangs from trees and swims by the shores.  It never gets dangerously cold nor dangerously hot.  It is a forgiving and lush environment.   The people are progressive and mutually respectful.  If it comes to a full blown depression, I can't imagine much of a better place to weather it.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.  If you wish to add your own two cents to this debate, you may mail me here.

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