The populace is, as a whole, divided into two sorts: math types and language types. Unfortunately, the economists are all the former and, therefore, do not know what to call the present unpleasantness.  In a pathetic attempt to seem cool, the August Society of Notable Accountants has dubbed it the Tsunami of Aught Eight.  This appellation fails, of course, because the Tsunami of Aught Four was a more literal—and littoral—disaster; and the arbiters of good taste—language types, to be sure—agree it’s a little too soon.

Unfazed, the Society has, in an obvious nod to the language types, chosen the alliterative term Mortgage Meltdown.  This, too, has its difficulties in that some of us, the same ones looking at our disappearing pensions and 401ks, recall a certain meltdown at a place called Chernobyl in 1986.  Moreover money, unless it’s bullion, doesn’t really melt.  It’s not just that the August Society needs a word; it needs an appropriate metaphor.

Our Royal Person is understandably nervous in this chilly financial climate and not merely because the August Society of Notable Accountants doesn’t have a name for it.  Uneasy rests the head that wears a crown and all that.  It is such an unnamed disquietude that, as Lady Bracknell observed, might lead to acts of violence on Grosvenor Square.  As a student of history and a distant relative of the Romanovs, we decided to delve further into the matter. 

We ventured into the neighbourhood bookshop and perused a coffee-table edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  The proprietor, noticing the royal enthusiasm, hovered like a moth the whole time, interrupting our concentration with anecdotes about James Agee and Walker Evans that were, we later learnt, to be found at the back of said coffee-table book.  We returned the book to its proper place on the shelf—we are astutely trained in the Dewey Decimal System—and turned to leave. 

The proprietor imposed himself between us and the nearest egress, commenting on the book’s virtues and how such a volume might be expected to increase in value and that he had children and a consumptive mother-in-law.  He was sweating, and we feared he would become violent.  “Have you a copy in paperback?” we inquired in an attempt to defuse the situation.  He did.  A used one.  Quickly purchasing that and allowing the sweating proprietor to keep the pennies, we pushed our way out of the shop and into the mean streets of an America we no longer knew.  There were fewer SUVs on those streets.  There were more people on the sidewalks.  Many of them were sweating.  Here was a situation that needed a word.

We remembered, over the summer, asking our dear mater, whilst she was canning, what, when she was a child, she called the Great Depression.  “Thursday,” she responded, without looking up from the steaming vat.  Despite that she was recovering from surgery, mater found it necessary to go out, at the hottest part of the day, to harvest vegetables and then stand over vessels of boiling water. 

Pater, likewise an intrepid canner of vegetables, likewise a child of the Great Depression, merely refers to that fiscal calamity as childhood. He has always grown tomatoes.  Even when we lived in the city, where he constructed an elaborate rock garden on our front lawn, he still grew tomatoes in it.  And, no, they were not an ornamental variety.

In 1929 the August Society of Notable Accountants also struggled with nomenclature.  Technically one cannot have a depression until one is already in it. Even a recession can only be seen in the rear-view mirror.  The Notable Accountants cannot say anything; we believe they take an oath to this effect.  This is not because the necessary financial indicators are not in evidence but because, if they did reveal that we were in a depression or a recession or a slightly receding blue funk, there might be a run on the bank and an end to civilisation as we know it.  The Notable Accountants must choose their words carefully and, since words are not their bailiwick, they find themselves in a sticky pickle indeed. 

To be sure the Society feels it ought to have naming rights for the cataclysm, but, to be perfectly candid, its members are just not up to the challenge.  Given their considerable language deficits, they might call it The Serious Cash Flow Problem.  While history is always written by the winners, economics may be the one subject the losers compose. Weary bean-counters, rest your abaci and your pocket protectors; the linguists of the world are as close as your nearest reference librarian.  Also in close proximity are perky coffee baristas, empathetic bartenders, spunky waitresses, erudite salespersons at Bloomingdale’s, and the people who call every other month about opera subscriptions.  Any one of these, the product of a sound, if not particularly lucrative, education in the humanities, could denominate this circumstance.  Such a weighty task must not be left to amateurs, must not be left to those who have no passion for words.

Mathematics, the scientists argue, is so important that we will only be able to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence by means of it.  Just our luck, when the Phat-E acidi of the Omega-3 star cluster have their death-ray aimed at downtown Topeka, we learn that these amorphous aliens really want a nicely-crafted Elizabethan sonnet to take back to the home planet.  Economists may scoff, but there is historical precedent. 

We recall it foggily and, to be sure, confuse it with the musical The King and I, but the essential elements persist and are instructive.  It seems there is this missionary who is having such trouble converting some Subsaharan heathens that she actually takes pains to learn their language.  Much to her surprise she discovers their native tongue contains no natural rhyme.  Therefore she begins entertaining her young charges with nonsensical verses, no doubt set to some catchy tune.  Every day the children entreat their governess to “Speak again, speak like falling rain.”  Naturally the heathens’ old chief resists this new falling rain speech and yells at the village children, even as he is attracted carnally to the rhyming missionary.  Happily, at the end of Act III, he dies of syphilis, which the missionaries have introduced along with their snappy rhymes.  Thereupon the new chief, under his beloved schoolmistress’ tutelage, ushers in a golden age of literature and letters, which sadly vanishes into the jungle when the banks fail.

We cannot, then, stress enough the importance of injecting linguistic acumen into the present crisis.  It needs a name.  Therefore let us borrow a dramatic term from Aristotle to describe the situation: catastasis, the prelude to the catastrophe.  The term is delightfully noncommittal.  While a catastrophe is sure to follow a catastasis, just what kind of disaster remains unsaid.  It is a device to build tension.  The networks will have a field day, and the Notable Accountants may volley the words ‘depression’ and ‘recession’ around like shuttlecocks in badminton.

The Catastasis of Aught Eight is the edge of the abyss, the theatrical tip of the iceberg: something much worse lurks below the surface.  And who knows what economic Armageddons lie before us?  Whereas the Great Depression lasted ten years, it was only a hiccup compared to the aptly-named Long Depression of 1873, of twenty-three years’ duration.  The Catastasis of Aught Eight could portend an age of falling hemlines and a surge in austere earth tones (note to self:  invest in companies that produce olive drab and burnt ochre dyes, also in tweed mills). 

There will be margarine and powdered eggs and John-Boy Walton all over again.  Potterville will replace Bedford Falls, becoming a sink of corruption in which even a librarian cannot walk down the street unmolested.  Grifters and gangsters and g-men will grapple in the dirty alleys of America’s cities.  Masses of uninsured children will take up their shoeshine kits and shell games to eke out a miserable existence on the cold, hard streets.  From this ooze will crawl the proponents of fascism, of socialism, of economic Darwinism, and of isms as yet uncatalogued.  A wind age, a wolf age, an apocalypse.  Everywhere the banners will read, “The Catastasis of Aught Eight: The End Is Near.” 

Or not.

When she is not sewing dollar bills into her mattress and canning ornamental rock-garden-grown tomatoes, the Dread Sovereign James responds to e-mail sent to her at HRMQueenJames@aol.com.