Mixed signals

So, as noted, I was at SXSW Interactive this weekend. Since getting back I’ve slowly been catching up on my reading. I’m struck by the tone of two recent columns, one by David Brooks, and the other by Peggy Noonan. Most notably, I’m struck by how different they are in tone from the general mood (as I was reading it, at least) at the Austin Convention Center.

First here’s some of Brooks:

There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around. There are no new how-to-get-rich enthusiasms. There are few magazine covers breathlessly telling readers that some new possibility — biotechnology, nanotechnology — is about to change everything. That part of American culture that stokes ambition and encourages risk has gone silent.

We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment. Risk is out of favor. The financial world is abashed. Enterprise is suspended. The public culture is dominated by one downbeat story after another as members of the educated class explore and enjoy the humiliation of the capitalist vulgarians.

Peggy Noonan’s column is even more downbeat than that — way more downbeat. It’s more like a J.G. Ballard story. Citing sources such as “a Wall Street titan,” “a Manhattan-based psychiatrist,” a “perceptive writer,” and “a friend in Florida,” she spins a portrait of the country in anxiety and fear and dystopia: Americans are apparently hoarding guns and gold coins, pulling money from the bank and preparing to grow their own food in the backyard.

Now I was only at SXSW a couple of days, but the last day it came up in one conversation that nobody seemed to be talking about the economy at all. The only panel it came up in was one that I was on (and was actually brought up by me — though I wasn’t making any points about end times being nigh). People were unveiling business ideas, lining up for movie openings, crowding panel talks to here more about what’s the next Twitter or how to be me more awesome, or whatever — and figuring where the next party was.

Maybe others had a different experience, but I truly felt like I was in some kind of recession-free zone. Certainly one didn’t sense that “enterprise is suspended” — let alone that we live in “a pandemic of fear,” as Noonan’s psychiatrist source puts it.

I should also mention that I traveled on full planes, through crowded airports. Yesterday Savannah’s St. Patrick’s Day hoedown was reportedly robust.

On the other hand … today, on On Point, callers angry about the AIG thing dropped references to “treason,” or simply declared, “I want blood.”

Oh. And the markets closed up again today.

So: What’s the deal? Are Brooks and Noonan out of touch? Are the SXSWers out of touch? Or is Hugo Lindgren correct that the anxiety is simply amplified in NYC (and perhaps by extension DC, where Brooks is based)? What about those incendiary NPR listeners? What about the markets?

Is it all just more proof that overgeneralizing is always a bad idea? More evidence/another variation on the idea that there are multiple Americas?