Unlike Peggy Noonan, who wrote poignantly a few days ago about Gate 14 being a small town of Americans who all looked shamed and wouldn't meet each other's eyes and didn't quite understand why their city on a hill. In other words, she mourned the glory days of the Reagan administration -- when both Ronald Reagan and Peggy had good hair -- didn't exist anymore. Never mind that it never did. 

 She said the people in Gate 14 didn't look up. They were all shambling and yearning, for several thousand points of Dow and an encouraging word.

But the guys and dolls in Gate 9B were looking up at the TV and they were asking the fourth-grade question my fourth-grader asked me: "Dad said that the bosses of the companies that lost all their money still got lots of money? Why?"

 And I couldn't answer her. I don't know why. You are the CEO and corporate laird of a too-big-to-fail company. And it goes all to crap. People lose their retirement funds. People lose their college funds. People lose the houses on the hill they dreamed of all their lives -- the threshholds over which they carried their brides. Or grooms.

But as the fellow on TV explained, the parachute for these poor, disgraced honchoes wasn't as golden as it was rumored. It wasn't like .. $150 million. It was only ... like, $65 million. Which is a big difference. He gets this either way because it's only fair for the time and expertise he spent driving the company into the ground.

As Mel Brooks said, you can hardly get that job.

Does this guy (who's a whole lotta guys) have a passport?

Can he go far away where we can't get to him?

Where I grew up, he wouldn't have a plane or a passport or, for that matter, kneecaps. 

The people in Gate 9A weren't all that on about him either. They were yelling at the TV intermittently as though the White Sox were playing the Cubs, except not in a nice way. They were saying, "We blanking blanking our blanks and they drive BMW's?" and "My wife has to blanking work another blanking ten years because I got laid off and these blanks of blanks get to blank off?"

And you know, I blanking got to agree.

As Sara Palin -- whom, by the way, more than one person has remarked that I resemble, except I have a bigger rear end and no specs, and, due to my Northerness, sort of sound like --  might remark,"Darn it, when Joe can't even afford a six pack, things are way out of whack, you know."

Myself, I don't feel all sort of wishful and gee-whiz for the days of Reaganomics. I don't feel downcast. We have our own financial sack of spoiled chicken and it's foul.

I feel really mad here in Gate 9A. I want to kick someone's butt who has even a bigger one than mine. I want to be on the ground when one of the golden parachutes lands -- along with my brother, who got choked up on the telephone as he described the devastation of an 18-year plan to send my beautiful niece to college next year. 

One for my brother. And one for me. And one for you.

Can you explain to my daughter why people who work every day -- one job or two, and in my case three -- have to play CYA every time big idea guys get up to shenanigans and dirty tricks? 

Can you explain why no one noticed for ... eight, nine years that this was going on -- in terms that my daughter Mia will understand? And can someone tell her why it may take so long for this Operation Save The Rich so that they can Save The Rest that it may affect her own chances of going to college, except she's Latina and an under-represented minority?  

The people in Gate 9A weren't grateful that our Congress, in their mighty and infinte wisdom, had decided to approve a plan that would essentially steal from the doing-okay and the not-doing-so-okay so as not to shame and maim the doing-really-great and not-blanking-embarrassed? And make us grateful for it?

Can we explain why these people can still look in the mirror, through the glow of the flames?

It seems even the pundits are stumped, and as for the President, he seems never to have had a clue. He was too busy racking up the debt in multiple zeroes and human hell that has yet to come rolling in.

Yep, at Gate 9, we were yelling at the TV. We were sneering at the TV. 

We were Six-Pack-less and Unable-to-Take-The-Preschoolers-to-Disney and ... as Ann Richards said, we vote.