Reflection: "The Pit"--the novel by Frank Norris and the movie by D.W. Griffith

Last night at the Town of Union Planning Meeting, the first item of agenda was "The Pit"-----and as the discussion roamed along, having brought my trusty tripod with me, I could allow my mind to wander as the film rolled. It bought back memories of novels of old, and of the "naturalists", Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and the scenes of the trading pits in New York and Chicago. If you ever visited a trading pit you know what I mean----the options are the ones that always seemed the wildest for me.

One of the most noticable things about the "pit" is the character of the traders---independent to the last. Trading on their own capital or maybe their companies capital....they are intense and colorful. They have a rumpled down to earth appearance---no french fashion here. Just functional attire please. At the end of the day, there is always the picture of the empty trading floor---with the little white pieces of paper. After all the ups and downs, I always wondered who really won and lost----my theory, and the one that led me to become a broker, was that in the end, only the banks and brokers won.

Last night, at the Union Planning Commission meeting, after all the discussion of conditional use permits and the irregular nature of them that necessitates that we never follow any set rules about anthing so that total chaos can envelop the discussion and which allows the suits to charge large fees to describe to the partipants what the chaos might portend in the inner sanctum of the courtroom, and then imagine the additional fees if one could not make the proper legal moves.......
I was just intensely determined to pick up that novel "The Pit" and give it one more quick read---to see if there might be a new ending for the case where the world wheat market was cornered by a crazy greedy maniac.

In the end, after all the room was empty and only the books remained last night, I remembered that even in the middle ages, in King Arthur's Court, after all the sword play was over, it was mostly the horses, the large white and black horses that were the real winners. Mostly everyone else was dead. That's great if you are a horse.