I’ve written a lot about the alleged financial crisis afflicting the country, by which is meant Wall Street and investors, but I don’t really care about it beyond the very considerable entertainment value. Some real pain attaches to it, but by the time we hear about that the revolution will be here and the authors of the debacle will be away in Myanmar showing the ropes to a whole race of new capitalists.

My concerns lie elsewhere. When one’s mind is in a delicate condition, it constantly seizes on things that threaten to split one’s heart. These are things, it doesn’t matter what, from which the crash is a welcome distraction.

These are things that could be anything; a fragment of song made meaningful by association or circumstance; one among the mountains of perfectly turned phrases one threads through daily; a beautiful woman; a beautiful cloud; a beautiful bird, a beautiful rock, a beautiful child.

Beauty can be a fucking death trap, clinically speaking. Less thrillingly, so can the most random and puerile sentimentality.

So one catches a glimpse of perfection, or beauty or grace, or an especially plump regret, and one’s heart splits and threatens to spill out whatever’s in there if one is too slow to slap on a patch. And it is the heart, that’s not a poet’s conceit; these things are all about blood and breath, and they hit one in the chest no matter where they’re conceived.

It’s quite likely that some of the people who engineered the current alleged crisis are experiencing some of the things I’m describing, and I’d be disposed toward sympathy for them if they didn’t represent the perennial worst of our national character, or the worst except for the part that insists on blowing up others for fun and profit; I’m speaking of the childlike inability to stop, which can be scary in a child but is unforgiveable in an adult.

Probably lots of Nazis, the ones who weren’t sociopaths, Hannah Arendt’s brood, got pretty down there toward the end, about what they’d done and, more immediately, what was happening to them now, and one has to view the capacity to do so with some astonishment, possibly some empathy, but no sympathy. No amount of sympathy would help, anyway, and no amount of repentance, in a situation where redemption is, as they say, off the table. Is it a stretch to imagine a connection between those downcast killers and our greedhead titans of finance?

Of course it is: the Nazis were disgraced, mostly, the ones we and the Russians didn’t hire; many of them were imprisoned or even executed, while the people who led our financial meltdown are getting a trillion dollar bonanza. Get it? Death or disgrace on the one hand; three trillion dollar payoff on the other. Despite the five trillion dollars, though, some of these people will summon every ounce of grace they own and spend some hours or days with their hearts split open. We hear a lot about how this is the worst financial horror since the Great Depression, and if you’ve read me then you know I think it’ll probably be worse in some respects, although not bad enough for our own good, but what I don’t expect to see, no matter how richly warranted, are bankers and brokers hitting the pavement like radio turkeys on Thanksgiving Day.

They’re just lucky. They’re lucky that the frenzy of their time was mostly financial and not the one of blood and breath and bone that the Germans got caught up in. They’re lucky too that the shock of dishonorable behavior, probably including Nazi-like behavior, has been silently devalued; it’s been taken off the gold standard and it’s pegged to nothing, and maybe it doesn’t much matter what anyone of a certain pedigree breaks.

I don’t know. I do know that, as mentioned elsewhere, I’m prepared to vote for any candidate who refers favorably to Gerrard Winstanley, who was a communist before there were Communists (mid-1600′s) and a Christian while there were still some of them in fairly high places.

I had heard of Winstanley in connection with the Diggers, a communistic splinter group eventually pulled from Oliver Cromwell’s finger and whose name was appropriated by some like minded individuals in northern California a bit more than three centuries later, which is how I made the man’s acquaintance. But I didn’t really appreciate what Winstanley had done, and the lethal circumstances in which he had done it, until I saw his name dropped in the London Review of Books by Ellen Meiksins Wood, in, strangely, a review of a book by historian and political theorist Quentin Skinner. (I say “strangely” because I can’t remember the last time I read a LRB essay that insisted so strongly on behaving like a book review.)

The reference struck a chord; what Winstanley tried to do in the heart of Cromwell’s revolution is akin to what I say will come from the McCain apocalypse. All we lack is a Winstanley. What particularly distinguishes him is that even though he was a political extremist in an age of zealots, he seems to have been curiously tolerant. Certainly he was both more radical and more tolerant than Cromwell, who so inflamed his royalist foes that when they finally regained power, almost the first thing they did was dig him up and cut off his head.

Winstanley, in contrast, outlived Cromwell by some 20 years and died mostly at peace; so far as anyone knows, no one bothered to dig him up and violate his corpse. That maybe doesn’t speak well of Winstanley’s ability to perservere in a cause; still, he did what he did, when he did it, even if it ended when the local sheriff came and beat up him and the other hippies.

The movie about Winstanley’s life, the scenes of his attempt to create Utopia in the middle of Roundhead hell, would have my heart splitting. I’m waiting for a heart-splitting candidate of my own. Save me, Gerrard …

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