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One of the pleasures of the WSJ is the arts section. Critical eyes share insights about just about everything having to do with Life & Arts, on subjects ranging from stately estates to hot rods. One of the recent gems was a short article by Jason Zweig, whose normal beat is The Intelligent Investor published each Saturday. His August 31 column, Born of Boom and Bust made me think of the frenzied circumstances of our current situation with the election, policing, disease, and in general a stew pot of nasty bits and pieces of societal disfunction and upheaval. Though it is in human nature to think the time we live in as absolutely unique, it isn’t. Humanity regularly creates messes and among the messiest of the messes was the South Sea Bubble of 1720 which was satirized by William Hogarth in an engraving of 1722. Zweig surgically unravels the allegories and allusions in his article as if before a circle of aspiring students clustered around a corpse. The engraving presents nearly all the foibles and vanities capable of man, and it's well worth reading in light of our own.