Restating the Obvious

I went to the animal fair . . .

Business journalists like to populate Wall Street with animals, but their menagerie is limited mostly to bulls, bears and wolves. If you go to Wall Street, the only actual animals you are likely to see will be pigeons, both the feathered and the unfeathered kind, although the last time I was there I think I saw the hindquarters of a horse going into 200 Liberty St. (that's a newspaperman's joke, don't worry if you didn't get it).

I think, though, that the characteristic animal of Wall Street is really the rat, the plain ol' white lab rat.

In college, we were shown a film strip of a rat dropped into a narrow, deep jar of water. He couldn't get out, but he swam hopefully for a while, until finally giving up, he sank and drowned.

Then a second rat was dropped in, and he repeated the performance, except that just as he was giving up his little rat ghost, a godlike hand (actually, it belonged to a psychology professor, but in the '60s most of them thought they were gods) reached in and held the rat's nose up in the air for a few seconds.

That rat went on swimming. I forget how long, but the figure of 28 hours sticks in my mind. A long, long time, anyhow.

Presumably his little rat brain was still sending down signals, Swim, Swim!, even at the end, but the supply of ATP ran out and the flesh proved weaker.

I once worked for an editor named Mike Gartner, and Mike once edited a book called “The Wall Street Journal Book of Animal Stories,” but that one wasn't in it.