A Trophy for the Tea Party
Dolors & Sense
by Sanford Rose
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—8/8/11—Not the kind that one puts on the mantel. No, the trophy I’m talking about is from the Greek word trophe, meaning nourishment.
The Tea Party needs neuronal nourishment or, more precisely, neurogenesis.
About a decade ago, it was discovered that central nervous tissue can regenerate and proliferate. The amount that we have at birth is not necessarily the amount (or less than the amount) we’re stuck with throughout life (the antiquated belief).
In fact, at every moment of our life, the forces of apoptosis (cell death) and genesis are locked in deadly combat within our central nervous systems.
Excess cortisol, produced by a dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, is the agent of death. It brings atrophy.
Something called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), secreted in the endoplasmic reticulum, is the agent of life. It brings the trophy (or trophe).
Subjected to the intolerable stress of a struggling, becalmed economy, the Tea Partiers may have succumbed to a kind of collective over-expression of cortisol, which has savaged the memory-forming and learning neurons of their hippocampi.
How else can one explain their apparent imperviousness to logical thought?
How else can one justify their rigidity of attitudes that culminates in a fixation with, almost a hypostatization of, the notion of balanced macroeconomic budgets?
Is it possible that they cannot see that the 50 states have been subtracting from economic growth in the last few calendar quarters precisely because all but one of them is required to balance their fiscal budgets each year?
Is it possible that they also fail to see that the only feeble contribution to economic growth during most of the same period has come from a Federal government that is not similarly constrained?
But it isn’t just the Tea Partiers that are suffering from neuronal deficits. Obviously, many of those who elected them share in their malady.
As a nation, we seem to be emulating the late Peter Finch who, in the film “Network,” played a news anchor who told people to scream from their open windows: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going take it anymore.”
The country is uttering an anguished, inchoate howl for help.
But help will not come from Tea Partiers. It will come only when we kick-start our own neurogenesis by rethinking the economic predicament via a painstaking examination of the facts.
Forget the Tea Party. We need the trophy/trophe, ourselves..
P.S.: Prozac is a start. Yes, so is vigorous exercise. Both stimulate the BDNF we’ll need for enhanced focus.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)