R.E.M. had it right

Dear Editor,

I hope Congress doesn't bail us out of this mess. I hope we stew. I'd like to see what would happen. I'd like to be reduced to a diet of TV dinners, watermelon and hose water. I'd like to drive the same car, wear the same clothes, live in the same house and sit on the same furniture, while watching the same television set for the next 15 years.

It would be a bit of a relief, actually. I can say this with complete honesty because I've lived this way before, and to tell you the truth, it wasn't all that bad.

It was a slower and simpler life with fewer modern conveniences, but we were closer and happier, too. And maybe with some economic suffering, some long-lost values would return to America.

So, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the rest of those prophets of doom can't scare me with their ominous visions of a dark future. As R.E.M. once sang, "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine."

Sincerely,

Thomas Kope,

Baldwin Park, Calif.