Smile.(The Week)(cheering up despite economic crisis)(Essay)

NO sane person enjoys a global recession, particularly one that flirts with being a depression. But in the spirit of the man who asked Mrs. Lincoln, "How was the theater, beyond the obvious unpleasantness?" I join with Eric Idle of Monty Python, who proclaimed from his perch on a cross, "Always look on the bright side of life":

 
   If life seems jolly rotten 
   There's something you've forgotten 
   And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing. 
   When you're feeling in the dumps 
   Don't be silly chumps 
   Just purse your lips and whistle--that's 
   the thing. 
   And ... always look on the bright side 
   of life ... 

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I don't think it's true that there are no atheists in foxholes (never mind on crosses). But it is almost certainly true that there are fewer atheists in foxholes than there are in faculty lounges. In other words, hardship concentrates the mind on important things. One pleasant side effect of watching Barack Obama "rescue" us from an unstable and inegalitarian 21st-century prosperity and deliver us to a sustainable and renewable 13th-century model is that Americans will focus on the important things, like family and faith, and the smaller pleasures of life, such as meals around the table and the joy of hunting and killing squirrels and other local, hitherto overlooked, comestibles.

Conservatives defend free markets with gusto, but no conservative has to defend everything the market produces. While this is obvious when it comes to, say, violent hard-core pornography or Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance, it is less obvious with the more mundane effluvia of commerce. For instance, it strikes me as no tragedy that Starbucks will have to ...