In the Great Depression, Roosevelt saw a third of a nation ill-housed. Here you are, in an alternate reality, in the Second Great Depression, ill-housed yourself.

Your favorite neighbors will hit the road in search of work or an upbeat sense of spiritual self-determinism. Pretty soon you'll pack up and leave too.

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?

Even in the darkest times, 75 million Americans a week were finding a way to go to the movies. (A 15-cent movie ticket in 1933, adjusted for inflation, should cost only $2.40 now. Tell us again how everything's okay?)

"There's this hunger in this generation for discussing collective purpose," he says. "There's a spiritual hunger for something larger to be a part of. They remember 9/11 and being urged to continue shopping."