Me, I just want to have fun. . . .

It’s hard to know what to make of our country’s ongoing financial crisis. I believe the federal government should have one overarching priority: to protect Mary and me from any loss and ensure our modest retirement exactly as we’ve planned it. Everything else comes second.

It seemed we had mostly achieved that last week when Treasury Secretary Paulson announced that we, the American taxpaying public, were buying out AIG so it wouldn’t collapse and destroy all life on earth as we know it. Since our modest little retirement savings are in AIG, we heartily approved of this transaction. The stock market was up.

Then, the stock market was down again, and it turned out we taxpayers have to buy out pretty much all of the market’s bad investments or face the Great Depression II. I was still on board with this plan because it might add the extra margin of stability I need to be sure our savings are safe.

By Monday, however, it was clear that there was little support for this idea on “Main Street,” since people rightly want to know why they should be held accountable for losses on Wall Street, brought on by the brokers and executives themselves and their Wall Street culture of greed, which has pretty much been the Republican economic policy since Ronald Reagan. The tab is now up to $700 billion—that’s “billion” with a B—or roughly the cost of another war in Iraq, which, as we all know, turned out badly despite our massive and ongoing infusion of capital.

A review of a few of today’s papers makes clear how complicated this whole mess is. One the one hand, I read stories of people like me—retired or soon to be retired—whose savings disappeared in collapsed institutions and nervous markets. The papers state quite flatly that even if the market recovers over time, these folks will never recover with it. Tough beans. Let them eat cake.

Additionally, Congressional Democrats raise important questions about just handing over that kind of money to Paulson, himself a Wall Street insider, without conditions and oversight. And economists of both the left and right seem to question the wisdom of any large-scale bailout at all. Something about throwing good money after bad.

Still, it looks like most of the important players are mostly on board with some version of Uncle Sam playing the part of The Lone Ranger. Whether or not the town stays fixed after the Lone Ranger rides off remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Mary and I meet later today with a “financial advisor,” who himself might be teetering on the brink of disaster, to ask if it’s safe to move our money to a different kind of account, maybe a credit union that has federal insurance and pays two or three percent interest. We’re looking to move in for the big kill. Or is it better to leave it in AIG, which may be one of the safer places to be right now? Do we risk the dreaded “penalty for early withdrawal” if we just transfer money from one institution to another? Not at all clear.

Personally, I already don’t trust anything this advisor might tell us. At risk is our lifetime personal savings of thousands of dollars—that’s “thousands” with a T—and our hopes for Mary joining me in early retirement. We’ve been lucky so far, but as for everybody, our only real security remains false security, and all might be lost in the next morning’s headlines.