It it starting to appear that, if the Senate can’t first head it off at the pass, President Obama will not allow Congress to vent its anger through the tax code and pick the pockets of the weasels at AIG who accepted huge bonuses from the company they helped destroy.

I don’t know this for sure, its just my take on his 60 Minutes interview aired tonight, coupled with the perception that cooler heads are prevailing, and that in the rear view mirror the last week is looking more like a collective hissy fit than responsible government or intelligent public policy.

In today’s NYT, Thomas Friedman likens our actions to a those of children home alone.  I don’t totally agree with his solutions, but he certainly gets props for bravery. Even the appearance of standing up for the AIG bandits paints a bullseye on your back.

The problem: this is a world crisis of confidence, and we are beholden to a lot of people who made this mess to help us get out of it. We knew or should have known they were greedy pigs when we let them build this house of cards, but nobody in power wanted to stop them because on paper the rich were getting richer.

Now all of a sudden we’re surprised that they’re greedy and we’re angry that they know where all the bodies are buried. Like Bernie Madoff and tens of thousands of other criminals who have information that will solve quandries, they have us beholden to them. At least for the short term.

When our country was attacked, we took great pride in a president who turned that into political capital, standing on the wreckage of our biggest financial edifice and vowing to exact a pound of flesh. But we now realize we  took our anger out on the wrong people, and in the end we only made things worse.

Now a new president is standing on a financial wreckage while politicians around him demagogue the American people into demanding a pound of flesh yet again. This time it appears we have a president smart enough to realize that immediate visceral reactions may feel good today, but in the end they just make things worse.

One of the most inspiring facets of our economic downturn is the extent the public has embraced the concept of immediate personal charity as salve for our problems.

Publix, a regional supermarket in Florida and the Southeast, recently sent its store managers a memo with a great suggestion. Result: there’s a table near the entrance at my local store with what appear to be several filled paper grocery bags. Each bag has a price ranging from $7 to $20, and a list of items it will contain; items that pretty easily translate into everything you need to prepare an inexpensive but nourishing meal.

Publix's Instant Foodbank

The local stores each get to identify a local charity to forward their customer’s donations; my Publix chose Lake Park Elementary School and followed up by not only providing the food to families in need through counselors at the school, but also arranged field trips to show how supermarkets work behind the scenes.

Publix is one of the biggest United Way sponsors in our county, so this is no isolated instance of giving. The company could easily say that alone satisfies its community commitment; the fact it chooses not to brag about its United Way work and finds additional ways to encourage us to help each other says a lot about the company, its employees and its customers. When I was buying one of the bags the manager shared that they’re doing very well with donations in a neighborhood that is a good mix of income. This is not just rich helping poor.

I don’t wish this economy on anyone, and I’m encouraged that while it may get worse first, we may be seeing some signs that show we can at least see the bottom. But there have been some silver linings to these economic stormclouds. One of the biggest is the immediate personal charity that is reflected in people “paying forward” cash in toll lines and supermarket checkout queues and buying a symbolic bag of food to prepare a second meal for hungry neighbors when you shop for your own.

These are tough times. Paying firemen and police, fixing roads and water mains and bridges are becoming onerous burdens for municipalities, and its time we considered the free lunch we’ve been handing to churches and nonprofits. For instance:

When Target decided to build a big fancy new Super Target on Okeechobee Boulevard in Palm Beach County, Florida, it meant the smaller Target a couple miles south on Southern would close. When it did, the $6.8 million retail facility on a $5 million corner lot was granted to Christ Fellowship, and as if by magic, $12,485,118 of taxable real property was suddenly given an exemption for every dime.

A Target Born Again

What hasn’t been exempted is the fire protection. the police protection, the cost of maintaining the county offices that ensure that the parishioners in the church are safe should the Fire Department have to make a free call. The church isn’t exempt from any of those regulations, or from the benefits of the municipal services, its just exempt from having to pay for them.

In the early 1970s, as an undergrad journalism student at USC, I spent several days with the folks at Faith Center in Glendale, California. That was before the infamous W. Eugene Scott turned its license into a cause celebre. It was when the early megachurch, which already had an FM license, petitioned the FCC for a television license. Until then, television was too pricey and most churches too poor for a church to ever be a licensee. Pastor Tim Schoch, a good man with some then-innovate ideas, always thought the commission granted them the license in the belief that one church would never get a television station on the air.

But Faith Center did, and Rev. Schoch had a chance to try his marketing theories in the Los Angeles television market. “You take General Motors and these big car companies,” he told me, “and they’re not building auditoriums saying come down here and see my Chevy. They’re using television because they know that way they can get that Chevy into everybody’s living room.” So why, he argued, shouldn’t the Lord have what GM does? (Of course, that was when GM was a big profitable company)

Schoch died not too many years after getting his station on the air, inventing the “praise-a-thon,” and creating a monthly fundraising nut that required real talent to raise every month. He was a charismatic man who raised a fine son, but one who lacked his charisma and abilities and the money dried up. Enter Gene Scott and his horses, hot tub babes and FCC monkey band, but that’s another story.

I’ve told this story to show how churches have changed. They’ve changed in a way that they gives them the resources to pay taxes, and in a way that demands far more public support that creates a serious tax burden for the rest of us. Its time that non-profits and churches pay real property taxes just like the rest of us, and the best way for that to happen is for churches to do it volutarily with the understanding that it sets no precedent beyond that they are caring members of their communities willing to step forward when their government is in trouble.

And if they don’t, then its time they not expect the rest of us to pay for the fire engine to show up when their national television outreach broadcast uplink center catches on fire.

I viisted my piano today. A 1930 Mason & Hamlin grand that has been rebuilt over the last four years, ending today when it again played by itself. The piano is a child of the depression, and there is a strange parallelism to its journey that I can’t help myself but share.

It was made at the Mason & Hamlin factory in Boston in early 1930, just months after the Wall Street crash of October 1929. Pianos had been a feature of nearly every parlor in America, first because someone in a family usually played it, and then because pneumatic player actions could turn them into music machines.

Master technician Jerry at Danny's Piano

But the radio the Victrola and then the amplified phonograph started to change the way Americans and music interfaced. We first stopped playing it ourselves, and then we stopped creating it in the home, deciding to import it. By the time the market crashed, pianos were already in decline, and the crash finished off many manufactures.

Mason & Hamlin (because it was a quality name–Serge Rachmaninov insisted on them for concerts) was bought by the Aeolian Piano company, makers of the Ampico pneumatic player system, for $450,000. My piano was probably in that inventory. Aeolian put a player action in it.

I don’t know much about where it traveled until my grandparents bought it for me in the late 1960s. It had been rebuilt and refinished in Downey, California. But by then, pneumatic player actions were popular only with a few collectors and tinkerers, so it was removed and a piece of wood added to cover where the mechanism linked to the hammers.

Since then, my piano has been across the country three times. To Florida from California, back to Las Vegas (where it was baked when a thermostat malfunctioned, breaking the soundboard) and back to Florida, where again it was the victim of the economy. At one point it was discovered abandoned at the back door of a piano dealer in distress.

But somehow it persevered to be rebuilt and to have a new mechanism installed that uses solenoids and microprocessors, not compressed air and rolls of punched paper. No doubt on its way to its first delivery in 1930, it passed newsboys crying of a worsening economy. Today, on our way to inspect it, we got an automated text message from the NYT: “Stock fall sharply on fears of deepening recession…”

In a few weeks, when the special place for it is ready at the house, it will come home again. Maybe the first thing I should play on it, is “Buddy, can you spare a dime.” Its a tune that it probably knows very well.