I Wish I Was Smart Like Alan Greenspan

I wish I wish
I wish I was smart like Alan Greenspan
able to see into the future
using math
to calculate the endless lines of cause and effect
like a Hindu lama tracing the twisted consequences
of an economic karma;
like a Gypsy fortune-teller staring into
a crystal ball full of dollar signs.
How I wish I had the smarts of the noble
intellectuals on the Federal Reserve Board
when I look at my neighbors
on the farms around me,
struggling to find their way out of the red ink
when nothing - nothing you can plant -
can pay out more than it'll cost to raise it.
If it costs more to grow a crop
than you can make when you sell it,
I mean, if you know you'll lose money
before you even plant anything…
I wish I could see where it all ends up.
And I look at the stone cold commodities market
and I wonder,
what does it all mean and where is it all taking us?
But I can't figure out the future any more than
an economic equation can calculate
chaotic human hearts.

I wish I was smart enough to understand
how to prepare for a future
where all the auto plants are closed and moved
to other countries, and
where all the manufacturers and the producers
and the growers have packed it in
and left the wealth of nations to the people who
produce nothing more substantial than
a cyberspace or an ethernet.
You can't hold it in your hands and you can't eat it
or wear it or safely sleep under its roof.
Every hour on the a.m. radio news they play the
status of the New York Stock Exchange
but never the Chicago Board of Trade.
Every hour the doctors at the Federal Reserve Board
lean over their S&P 500 patient
with stethoscopes to their ears
as if the economic well-being of America
is based on their own indexed mutual funds,
and they never notice the crippled up
commodities market in the next bed.
I look and I wish I understood how it'll be when
nobody's producing anything anymore.
'Cause if I could really understand, maybe
I could figure out how to make money off it for myself.
I wish…I wish I was smart like Alan Greenspan.