Where is (was) Toto? by Hodding Carter III, former journalist and permanent citizen

News item: Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, told a House panel that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves.

It is passing strange, as I have never had the occasion to say. All of us grew up on The Wizard of Oz. All of us know ourselves, at least partially. Thus all of us know that behind all those oracular pronouncements and thundering sound effects, there is a silly little man hiding behind a curtain, bellowing into a megaphone. Often, he is not merely a bad wizard, he is also not really a good man.

But only rarely are we saved by Toto, or at least saved from our credulity before rather than after the fall.

But who or what is Toto anyway?

When I was coming along as a newspaperman, I was sure that was supposed to be our role. I thought I knew that power is inevitably corrupting and that there are no gods walking the earth in human form, Republican or Democratic. Skeptical detachment, that was the ticket. Toto the watchdog of the public interest, barking furiously around the hems of power.

And yet...think how many designer collars my old profession has put on over the years. We can't seem to bear the loneliness of standing outside the magic circle of power and barking, so we become enablers of our officeholders' worst instincts and characteristics,all but guarding them against informed criticism. "A wizard, a veritable wizard," we yelp, as the Kissingers and Greenspans and Clinton the Perpetual Adolescent and (God help us) even George the Incompetent hove into view.

In the midst of the ensuing shambles, we pledge to do better, to look behind the curtain from now on, to piss on the leg of anyone who claims to have invented an economic balloon that only goes up, the only occupying army beloved of its subjects, the only fox that can be trusted to guard the hen house, the only police state expedients that are actually in the best long-term interest of a democratic republic.

Until the next time.

P.S. To what "free markets" do Greenspan and his acolytes refer? The derivatives playpens of the insiders? The computer-designed trick bags manipulated by downtown boodle boys? National Socialism masquerading as free enterprise capitalism? The welfare for the rich we call price supports?