Bittersweet Example of Expert Turned Victim of Economy

What do we make of the story of Donald Lake? A CIA economic analyst who became director of an international bank, Lake switched banks recently and was volunteering at a food bank. He’s got time. He’s another of the multitudes of Americans who lost his job--and his hopes for finding another like it, probably forever.

So, do we regard Lake as an in-the-flesh metaphor for America’s eerie, helpless slide into second-ratedness?

Or is he, sitting here on his screened porch in Topsiders without socks sipping a frosty beer, evidence of America’s vitality?

Lake doesn’t know. We can only guess.

First, though, “lost” may not be the proper word when it comes to the context of one’s career. Lost is what happens to your credit card or to towels in hotels. But a person’s pursuit, one’s metier, is something else. You don’t just lose it. Finance is what this man did, for Pete’s sake. The point of his 48 years. It determined where he lived, what he read and studied, with whom he associated, how his family grew up, what clothes he wore and how he should behave in public.

If we can utilize the worn-out wheeze of the election season without choking, banking was the foundation of Lake’s values. Until last October when the weight of the recession and the deregulated whirligig of international capitalism caught him low at the knees and brought him down.

Save your sympathy, Lake is not asking for any. And how much could he expect anyway, a CIA man, a banker, an economist, a fellow with college degrees, an athlete’s slim waistline and a home in two acres of trees on the dimpled green hillsides outside Baltimore?

No, we brood on the story of Don Lake because he is an expert on economies and a victim of them. The CIA trusted his opinions. A bank trusted him abroad, in Luxembourg, with lots of its money and its important deals.

“I’m very pessimistic about America,” Lake begins.

To wit:

--We Americans have our heads comfortably inserted in sand. “Since World War II we’ve been living in an unreal situation. We’ve come to regard America’s world dominance as the norm. In fact, it’s not the norm. We just enjoyed a brief period when there was no one to challenge our hegemony. It’s not going to be that way anymore, regardless of what politicians promise. If we believe we can go back to 4%-5% growth in the economy, it’s not going to happen.”

--We’re entitled to it all and right now. “We’ve grown up with our whole society believing something is owed them. . . . This is something our society cannot sustain. . . . Reagan, more than anybody, convinced people they can have programs for nothing. And now there’s tangible proof that’s bull, if anybody cares to look.”

--Don’t send us the bill. “The federal budget deficit boggles the mind. It’s more than doubled since the Gulf War, from $200 billion a year to (approximately) $400 billion, and nobody even blinked. . . . And 60% of the spending is for entitlements. How do we stand up to that?”

--Planning for tomorrow? Ha! “We invest six times as much of our national resources on old people as on our children. . . . Our cities are a mess; we have created a subculture of poor who are murdering each other.”

--Even history is against us. “If you believe the Kondratieff wave of economics, bad times come in 60-year cycles: 1870s, 1930s . . . “

--And they’re laughing at us across the oceans. “Bush goes to Japan and tries to present America as determined to be competitive. And he takes the three biggest business Bozos he could: The heads of the auto companies, who simply have not been able to figure anything out for years.”

--So what is the point? “The corporate world, the financial world, it’s all about the deal. Two guys sitting across a table, putting deals together. Here’s how much he’s going to get; here’s how much I’m going to get. One guy trying to gyp the other guy as much as he can. The point is to win the deal.”

The thought comes to mind: Is the CIA giving George Bush such an unsettling analysis of his mighty country? Has Bush read it?

“I’m almost certainly going to vote for Clinton,” says Lake. “He’s clearly more cognizant of the nature of the problems. Bush, I don’t know what he stands for. He’s been on both sides of just about every issue as far as I can tell.”

Wait a second, vote?

Excuse me, but after listening to Lake I’m looking around to see if his suitcases aren’t packed by the door, if his wife isn’t warming up the Volvo wagon, two first-class international airline tickets in her pocket and what’s left of the family nest egg melted into ingots. Why vote, what future could there be in the United States? We have survived the dark clouds of nuclear annihilation only to find ourselves covered with skin cancers in the sudden burst of sunshine. Captain of the Titanic to crew: Please rearrange the deck chairs. Isn’t that the cartoon, Mr. Lake?

Wouldn’t you know, Don is not pulling out of America. And not that he couldn’t.

Gloom and Angst and 60-degree slides in trend lines may satisfy the banker’s worried mind. But the heart? Even a banker has a heart, and Don Lake’s irrigates the buds of new hopes--not some dreamy mystical yearnings, but deliberate, concrete hopes, supported by an All-American assumption of their ultimate realization.

Lake and his wife are moving to Colorado, as soon as the house sells. The two kids are in college and there is enough money salted away to keep them there. In the year that he has been an unemployed bank director, he has found new work. He has taken up free-lance economic writing and is bringing in money. He liked helping out at the food bank. There’s something to this idea of giving back to your community, even if his wife had to push him a little at the start. There’ll be time for more of that in the Rockies.

I leaf through pages in the notebook. For awhile it seemed we were onto something quite telling about 1992. But the more we look, the more we are uncertain. This tale may be 350 years old. Times are tough. Gotta go West. A new start, there. Things are better. New land, new friends, a fresh new smell to the air. Giddyup.

Don explains, “I’ve got the second half of my life ahead of me.”