How does this relate to the financial markets and the incoming Obama administration?

The stock market is, alas, but another form of gambling -- hardly different from playing the ponies, the numbers, the slots. Whether the current collapse is an unavoidable cyclical readjustment or was brought to us by a perfect storm wrought by the ignorant, the insensitive, the self-serving, and the malign -- it is what it is.

Mere mortals, the everyday rest of us -- working saps and the retired -- can do little but husband their remaining cash as best they can. A preoccupation with the markets -- with the crap tables -- suggests a motivating preoccupation with the material. And as the song says, "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run."

Isn't that notion itself now a cliche?

Maybe. But it is shared by our greatest living historian, Britisher Paul Johnson, who has written extensively about disintegrating civilizations:

"The financial crisis, detonated by greed and recklessness on Wall Street and in the City of London, is for the West a deep, self-inflicted wound. . . . If we seriously wish to repair the damage, we need to accept that this is fundamentally a moral crisis, not a financial one. It is the product of the self-indulgence and complacency born of our ultraliberal societies, which have substituted such pseudo religions as political correctness and saving the planet for genuine distinctions between right and wrong and the cultivation of real values."

He laments the demise of "industry and thrift," and cautions that "we are traveling along the high road to incompetence and poverty, led by a farcical coalition of fashionably liberal academics on the make, assorted eco-crackpots, and media wiseacres."

Johnson's jeremiad meaning, exactly, what?

Meaning that in the midst of a terrifying financial tsunami, and -- with Obama -- the coming to power of precisely the ideologized panderers Johnson knows too well, hope (certainly not a strategy) is all that is left to us. Diaphanous, gauzy hope and whatever rope we can find to batten down.