The sudden transformation of the American consumer from drunken sailor to Silas Marner is the talk of the economic meltdown. After barely a year of hard times, we have turned into a nation of newly minted pennypinchers.

Many of the commentators are plainly nonplused in the head-shaking, who’d-a-thunk-it fashion. Other reactions have been more sonorous, like Time’s cover story “The New Frugality,” which muses over what it all says about the direction of the national character. Will we, they ask, revert to our spendthrift ways when the economy improves, telling ourselves as we have in the past that our spending is what keeps it afloat? Or will a new kind of American emerge, less optimistic and more prudent, who, undeterred by the return of good times, keeps right on clipping grocery coupons and eating at home to save money to put into his savings account?

After reminding us that belt-tightening practices tend not to last more than one generation, becoming permanent only among those who actually suffered want first-hand, Time comes to a fork in the road and takes it, explaining in their meticulously balanced way that the American people are learning that a strong economy must be powered by both wise spending and wise saving.

No subject as interesting as this one could possibly lend itself to a balanced analysis. What struck me most about our newly minted pennypinchers was the good mood they were in. The lifestyle sections of newspapers were full of cheerful stories about women shopping for clothes at the Goodwill and Salvation Army thrift stores. They were not poor women, but suburbanites for the most part, and they had no objections to giving their names and being photographed. As the trend went on, we saw TV segments of people bartering, planting their first gardens, laughing hysterically in front of Big Lots as they tried to pick up the first hundred-pound bag of dog food they ever bought, and gloating contentedly as they counted up how much they saved with their grocery coupons. This was no giddy “It’s fun to be poor” interlude but a realistic resolve to make the best of things free of embarrassment or shame, with more good-natured patience on display than we are used to seeing in movie lines, not to mention rush-hour traffic.

In short, they were happy — happy that they were probably going broke; happy that their jobs might be on the block; happy that the country might well be on the verge of collapse; happy that another Great Depression could be just around the corner. How can this be? The answer just might be found in that place that Maupassant called “the underside of things.” Nobody calls it that anymore but his allusion to the dark side of the human psyche is still heard in an updated form whenever someone brushes too close to the truth and catches himself with what has become our national nervous-laugh line: “I don’t want to go there.”

I do. There’s no place I’d rather be. I think the newly minted pennypinchers secretly welcome the economic meltdown because it frees them from the merciless demands of the American Dream.

This is the real waterboarding and we have been torturing ourselves with it for over 60 years. After WWII, G.I. Bills for college tuition and government-backed mortgages came close to upclassing an entire society and changed the social assumptions of centuries. Ordinary people became extraordinary and everything followed suit, starting with credit cards for all and going on to bigger and easier mortgages, two cars (one for each garage), exotic tropical vacations instead of a week at the beach, summer camp, hot tubs, and weekend “getaways” for people who had nothing to get away from. To keep it all going, Americans were encouraged to keep up with the Joneses and find their identity in “You are what you buy,” but now the specter of financial chaos has given them permission to say, “Let me off the striver hook and tell me what class I belong to.”

They might well ask. Political pollsters toss around “middle class,” “lower middle class,” “working class,” “blue-collar class,” “college-educated class,” “some-college class,” “non-college class,” and “high-school-or-less class.” Add a few noms de guerre such as “Six-Pack This” and “Lunch-Box That,” and, lest we forget, the latest distinction: the class of people who shower before work and the class of people who shower after work. Endless self-definition can kill. We are trapped in a class-flu pandemic and the only available vaccine is the fantasy of the happy peasant.

The most merciless demand of the American Dream is sending one’s children to college, but the cost — and I don’t mean tuition — has proved too painful for too many families for too long. Anyone who fits the politician’s boast of being “the first member of my family to go to college” has inadvertently played a part in a drama of weakened family ties. To get the show on the road, the father must put himself down: “Don’t be like me, make something of yourself.” To back him up, the mother must put him down: “Don’t be like him, make something of yourself.” It’s a symbolic parricide that no one will ever acknowledge, but they know it’s there, and it hurts and ultimately enrages.

If the first college graduate becomes a success, all is well. But if he doesn’t, he exposes an ambivalence that was supposed to stay under wraps, because then the parricide is turned on him: “Why can’t you make something of yourself?” The more he fails the worse it gets. “All that education! . . . They said you showed such promise! . . . Didn’t you learn anything?” Actually, he did. One night when the family is watching TV, he is able to tell them that “lugubrious” means sad, whereupon they turn on him and snarl: “Stop showing off your big words! You think you’re better than us just because you went to college!”

Happy peasants don’t have to put up with this.