Headlines across the country are saluting the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which measures . . . the paper value of a group of companies.  As you can tell, once we crossed that magical round number — so beautiful, so perfect, so ten-thousandish — the country really just turned around.  Things just felt different today.  Now of course, there will be thoughtful analysts who will talk about other ways of measuring the country’s real health . . . like the nearly 10% of the population unemployed or the dozens of millions of people without health care.  But the whispered chorus will be the same: watch the Dow, watch the Dow, watch the Dow.

It looks like the Dow is America’s top priority, if you judge by what Washington, D.C.’s hometown newspaper put at the top of its front page today.  But don’t worry — the Dow will go up for a while, then down for a while, then maybe up again, and no matter what, you’ll spend many minutes of your day hearing about it, reading about it, forced to think about it.  Meanwhile, back at the ranch house, well . . . it’s being foreclosed.

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