Dear Pete,

Nobody cares about my little electronic friend. Sorry for the interruption, though. I wish I could tell you what happened, but I'm afraid only Google knows. Why they would "SEND" in the middle of my letter and against my will is beyond me. I know I didn’t hit the tab key, but I did get a message - from Daemon, the electronic server. Apparently he's been promoted to Customer Services. The message was pretty good for a machine. "Oops...sorry," it said. I was deeply touched by the personal flavor of the message. Usually when Google bungles, they only say "Oops." The thing is, Pete, how can an electronic device be sorry? Something about all of this bothers me. Imagine what it must be like to be a machine capable of sorrow? The poor little guy, locked up in a computer somewhere in Idaho, why, he might be suicidal. Nobody cares about him or his feelings. I felt so bad for him that I wrote back and gave him the suicide hotline number - it's an 800 number so he won't need any money to make the call.

Can you just see the obit?

So anyway, where I left off before Daemon got confused; I'm on the Times website, on this page called "Letters to the Public Editor," and of course, I can't figure out how to send this letter, and the bunion on my left big toe is killing me as usual. Naturally, I am compelled to write about my grandmother's orthopedic shoes, but I know that won't get far, even if they were bigger than Elliot Spitzer's election. Did I spell that right?

I don't even know what I would write or why I should bother with this anyway. Pete, the sad reality is that nobody cares about Charles Lindbergh's relationship with Hitler. Nobody wants to hear about the imminent disaster that may occur when the Hadron Particle Accelerator finally fires up its neutrons and sends them, and us, into a black hole filled with Disney characters, Google emoticons, and pieces of Al Franken's brain.

Pete, it is so bad that people don't even care about the imminent crash of America's economy. The shopping malls are packed with people on a spending rampage, emptying the shelves of DVD players, TVs, cameras, computers, appliances, accessories and accessories for accessories; throwing down credit cards at the checkouts as if we were in a boom year. I'll tell you, Pete, it's like a bad science fiction movie - "The Visa Card Zombies." They don't understand that they will be sucking on the tailpipe of more than a trillion dollars of illiquid and toxic debt...forever. Pete, do you know what a dollar is really worth today? Nothing. There haven't been any dollars since the big banks privatized money...Wall Street calls it "derivatives trading." I call it stealing.

Now the Obama administration has subsidized these thieves with money we don't have...money that we borrowed from them when they pretended to have money to lend; money that never existed to begin with.

This is old news, though. The British banks tried to scam Lincoln, offering 37% interest loans backed by recycled credit, and Abe told them to get lost. “These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people..." he said in a speech to the Illinois legislature in 1837. He didn't borrow a penny. Instead, he printed new money, known as "greenbacks," and the economy survived despite the drain caused by the Civil War. Thomas Jefferson had it figured out as well. "A government does not need to borrow its national currency from bankers merely pretending to have money.” Isn't that how we got into this mess?

Wow. I must be out of my mind. I'm comparing George Bush and his administration to Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. It's like comparing Sanka to Starbuck's. Two weeks ago, I predicted that the Washington Redskins would win the Super Bowl. Now I'm an economic alarmist, riding a mule through town yelling "The crash is coming...the crash is coming!" Am I really Ralph Nader? My thinking is clearly unsound at any speed.

Okay, I figured it out. Tomorrow, I'm going shopping. I will buy as much as I can...things I don't even need, and I'll charge all of it. I watched those people in the mall, and they were happy. I want to be happy too. So what if I spend money I don't have? Doesn't everybody? §