Wasn't It Great?

There you have a protracted example of something we are never, ever supposed to do. Our parents and grandparents would throttle us for fetishizing or re-imagining any of the Great Depression, except to admire the strength and character of those who faced it. It's the forbidden fantasy of utter upheaval, whenever the economy gets wobbly and moves to the top of our worry list.

And here you have a confession: It felt exciting to write it.

It is loosely based on the somewhat disputed back story of Florence Owens Thompson, who, in 1936 at the age of 32, was stranded with her children at a muddy fieldworker's encampment near San Luis Obispo, Calif., waiting for her male companion and son to return with parts for their broken car. She was photographed by Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange. She became "Migrant Mother," forever famous for her suffering, a permanent image of the 20th century.

(What's disputed is whether Lange promised Florence that the picture would never be published. Florence's grandson keeps a Web site -- http://migrantgrandson.com-- in honor of the photograph. According to the site, he will come explain the impact and legacy of "Migrant Mother" to your class or social group, for a $200 fee. The Web site also sells T-shirts for $19.36 each, tax included. Florence died in 1983.)

To skip over the concept of "recession" and conceive of a new Depression is illogical, irresponsible and ignorant of key facts. Just enough of our grandparents are around, however, to reach out and touch that irresistibly literary, romantic, tragically forlorn era. It is one thing for Cormac McCarthy to win a Pulitzer last year for a deeply depressing novel ("The Road") about nuclear winter. It's another thing entirely -- bad juju -- to envision or talk about the ruin of our economy.

Yet isn't that the point of fretting -- imagining the worst?

Here's a secret about loving the past too much: A longing to know what it felt like gives way to a slight sense of envy. In any exploration of the Great Depression -- whether taught by the history or humanities department, or across campus at the biz school, or thoughtfully curated at a museum -- the take-away is that it can never happen again, that there are federal safeguards in place, however flawed, that keep things from getting that bad.

We don't envy the suffering. What we marvel at is the togetherness. The idea (propaganda or otherwise) that people cooperated, persevered and figured out a way to cope. The business news in the last month has been about the hesitation of the consumer. It's about an economic pause, holding still, listening for trouble. In this century, when people have bought houses for no money, where the answer to any economic stumble is to buy more retail merchandise to put into those houses, wouldn't a little bit of Great Depression be just the medicine we need?

Wasn't it always?

Isn't that the voice of your own grandfather, in Heaven now and with full access to your credit report, clucking in disapproval?

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There was that exhibit a few years ago of Great Depression photos taken with color film, near the end of the 1930s. The filling station billboards suddenly became yellow and red. Little girls stood in pink and yellow dresses on green farms under blue skies.