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Nick Paumgarten and Lillian Ross

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Back to Normal?

By Nick Paumgarten
Posted Monday, Sept. 17, 2001, at 5:57 PM ET

Lillian,

Well, if that is what they mean by getting back to normal, then maybe we're better off not getting back to normal. Aspects of our way of life were perhaps worth attacking, apparently. If there's any upside to the World Trade Center disaster, it's that we will all be spared, for a few weeks anyway, all of this nonsense; the PR mill is quiet, or muted, at least.

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So, today is getting-back-to-normal day here in New York. The stock market is open (and getting killed), the Yankees are playing (in Tampa), thousands are hard at work in borrowed offices. But things are not normal. According to the Times today, the federal government is asking the big securities firms (and, apparently, threatening reprisal should they not obey) to help buoy the stock market--to act not in their own interest, but in the country's. Odd, eh? I always kind of thought the pursuit of self-interest was what made this country great. Where are the free-market high priests on this one? It's as though to protect our way of life we need to abandon it. What if the feds had ordered the commissioner of Major League Baseball to make sure the Yankees won tonight in order to restore confidence? Well, anyway, it isn't working. The markets aren't listening. But what am I talking about? Who cares, at this hour, about a momentary perversion of this or that principle? We're just trying to get back to normal here.

Yours,
Nick