The giants of American politics and money, not one of them apparently capable of balancing a checkbook, were going through their 412th explanation of who’s to blame for the collapse of the stock market, and who’s going to suffer the most, when the Baltimore Ravens showed up Monday night.
The economic geniuses were dealing with the day’s historic 778-point stock market drop. The Ravens were there merely to play a football game with the Pittsburgh Steelers. The stock market collapse leaves everybody wondering how we will make our mortgage payments, and finance a new car, and make the threads of our retirement money last us until we breathe our last.
Naturally, we turned as quickly as possible to the football game: our withdrawal from reality, our brief sabbatical from the anxieties of the day.
On CNN’s Larry King program, The New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman was pointing out that the only stock to show a profit this day was Campbell’s Soup.
“Maybe they’re figuring on soup lines,” Krugman deadpanned.
That did it. It chased us over to the Ravens telecast just in time to see Matt Stover kick a 33-yard field goal and tie the score late in the first quarter, 3-3. What stock market collapse? What congressional bailout over the Wall Street bailout?
When the football game broke for commercials, we returned to reality. We flipped the dial here and there. We saw one commercial for the luxury BMW car, another for the “power and room” of a Mazda, another for Toyota. But, when one of the cable news programs returned, we heard one of the economics brains explain that banks “have stopped lending money to individuals and small businesses.”
Oh, yeah? Then, how are we supposed to finance all those swell new cars they keep advertising between the brilliant economic explanations?
Never mind. It was all too painful to hear, so we bailed out again. In the second quarter, we saw the kid quarterback Joe Flacco throwing passes all over the lot, and it felt wonderful for a little while. The Ravens were winning, and the crisis on Wall Street seemed a million miles away.
Stover kicked another field goal, and then Flacco tossed his first professional touchdown pass. At halftime, the Ravens led, 13-3.
This is what we needed. This is why sports matter so much. If we invest real emotions in them, we can believe that touchdowns and field goals actually matter. They take us out of dreary reality for a little while.
During halftime, we made a mistake and turned back to the news stations. We learned that Wall Street lost $1.2 trillion on Monday. Only, we were assured, it wasn’t Wall Street that lost all that money — it was us.
“You, me everybody,” said the financial adviser Suze Orman on CNN. “Just watching our money go down, down, down.”
Luckily, the third quarter arrived before a fourth “down.”
The announcers informed us that the Steelers had only gained 46 yards the entire first half. Now this was arithmetic we could understand. In their last six possessions, we were told, the Steelers had no first downs. What Wall Street calamity? What loss of retirement funds? Gone, for the moment, in the wave of new math.
In the opening minutes of the second half, Flacco raced back and forth with Steelers unable to catch up to him, and then he somehow found Derrick Mason for 26 yards.
“Four months ago,” one of the announcers declared of Flacco, “nobody knew his name.”
The cares of the day were slipping away from us now. The announcers were raving about the kid Flacco and the remarkable veteran Ray Lewis, who was hitting Pittsburgh runners like a small tank. We puffed out our chests. Those were our guys out there, our millionaire warriors, so at least somebody’s money was doing well.
Then the bottom fell out faster than the stock market. In 15 seconds, the Steelers scored twice. During a commercial break, the cable news commentators bemoaned the political gridlock in Washington. They talked about all those people losing their homes. They showed the awful numbers from overseas stock exchanges.
You turned back to the Ravens, because it was the only salvation remaining. With four minutes left, they tied the game, 20-20. They held on for overtime, which was good because it extended everybody’s withdrawal from reality.
When they lost on a Pittsburgh field goal, you turned back to the economics news, and now there was reality everywhere.
