Do you know? Do you care?

One of the inmates, Jerry Bradway, quails as he listens to them riff and thinks to himself, “The old life rewrites itself every minute.” “The free future is hard to imagine,” he frets. “I have trouble enough tracing the shape of the knowable past.” Jerry, imprisoned for unspecified white-collar crimes, happens to be the father of the preteen anchors. He suspects his wife, from whom he is legally separated, of writing their scripts. Unperturbed by what they don’t know, the girls rattle on gaily: “The fear continues to grow.” “Even the numbers are panicking.” “What is a credit default swap?” they ask. “What is a sovereign default? What is a special-purpose entity?” “We don’t know. Do you know? Do you care?” “What is Wall Street?” “Who is Wall Street?”

Don De lillo and the American Unease.