On  Friday, November 30, after driving himself from Connecticut to Wyoming, Christopher Krumm used a bow and arrow to kill his professor father at the front of a classroom filled with community college students, and then stabbed himself to death. But before he did that, he stabbed his father’s 42 year-old girlfriend at home two miles away.

On Friday, December 14, Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed twenty children and six adults. But before he did that, he shot and killed his mother at home.

On Christmas Eve, William Spengler lured first responders to his neighborhood by setting a fire and then shooting four firemen, killing two of them, then committing suicide. Before he did that, he likely caused the death of his sister, whose remains were later found in the ashes. Way before that, in 1980, he killed his grandmother with a hammer.

I was busy feeling unimpressed by Mt. Rushmore when I noticed the people around me. Four busts over a medium-sized ridge stared deadpan into the clouds as a collective image reproduced so often the original was an inevitable and sorry letdown.

The visitors, though, were something to behold. Among well-dressed Germans, Boy Scouts, sweaty fathers setting up the tripod, earnest tourists listening to the Lakota version of the audio tour as an act of solidarity and even a few Minnesotans, I also noticed bikers.

Every other person at Mt. Rushmore, after I started counting, was clad in bandanas, leather and jeans. Of vehicles in the overflow parking garage, a full two levels teemed with Harleys.

There was a one-word explanation: Sturgis.

Last weekend, The New York Times ran an article in the Magazine encouraging people to default on their mortgages because, essentially, this is what big business does all the time under the rubric of “strategic defaults.”

Basically, the argument goes, when big business does it, it’s strategic. When individuals do it, it’s unethical. So why not adopt the morality of big business? After all, they were the ones who duped us into taking the mortgages in the first place. Right?

The author gives two reasons such defaults are frowned upon. The first is that defaulted mortgages depress neighboring property values. The second is that “default (supposedly) debases the character of the borrower.” Gotta love that parenthetical word. It’s as if “keeping one’s word” were something that we’ve all just been kind of force-fed by a society which wants nothing more than to exploit our good, trusting natures.

Well, so maybe that’s so. What then? Do we return to the Wild West? Obviously, one op-ed piece isn’t going to change anyone’s mind (well, maybe a few), but it just strikes me as another symptom of our deepening sense of ambivalence about what, after things we believed in begin to fall way, we should keep of the “old ways.”

Aren’t things like “character” worth keeping? Do we want to relive the Wild West? I don’t know. Anyway, who am I—a novelist—to complain? It may have been hard living, but it sure made for some good storytelling.