Did anyone else notice how much John McCain, who promises a steady hand on the tiller, looked at times like Captain Queeg last night, attacking Obama for his "associations" the way Queeg went on about strawberries? It was sad, really.

Anybody who's heard George Santayana's aphorism is condemned to repeat it, but what good do historical parallels really do us right now?

We know there are uncanny similarities to the beginning of the Great Depression: as in the late 1920s, credit has locked up, for all the reasons we pretty much understand. We know that a pyramid scheme ran out of bottom, only homes, not stocks, were the bubbled assets. We know that some people made fortunes from the scheme, and inequalities in income are now a disgrace and a macro-economic problem: in the short term, not enough buying power is stored up in the middle-class, whose incomes have eroded; whose net worth has taken a hit with the stock market plunge. In the long run, if unemployment rises, there will be a further spiraling down of the consumption that prompts growth.

But we know other things, too. Why forget them, of all times, now?

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