True story. This was the message I found in a fortune cookie this week: “You are tasting the sweets of success.”

I should have known better than eating at a place called Irony Chinese Buffet.

Success seems a shifting standard right now. When Wall Street analysts use descriptions like “financial abyss,” any measure of getting ahead comes with a certain stink of wariness.

Rumor has it that brokerage houses are putting “buy” orders on yeast stocks. Bread lines appear a sure bet.

People awoke Friday to news of another mammoth bank’s collapse. “Liquidity pressure” came as a reason. Sounds like something a better showerhead would fix, but instead a less leveraged institution came through with a pennies-on-the-dollar purchase.

In the semantic scale of panic, I still think “abyss” trumps “collapse.”

Oddly, I slept well last week. Maybe that says something about the comfort of a well-crafted cookie fortune.

Or maybe panic is an unreasonable human gesture during a time when even experts seem to be guessing.

Poll results concerning the Wall Street bailout plan showed 44 percent of Americans opposed to it, except for the poll that showed 75 percent favoring it. And that excludes the one that showed 55 percent opposed to it.

In short, nobody knows nothing. And that goes for the guys putting together the plan. They admit walking on unmapped ground.

Sometimes, all those zeroes — precisely 11 in $700 billion — confound even the big boys.

Since talk swirls about the Great Depression and government reassurance, I researched a bit of President Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the financial crisis of his time.

Within minutes of taking the oath of office in 1933, five sentences into his first inaugural address, Mr. Roosevelt uttered the now-famous phrase “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Fear, he said, paralyzed the nation and made it impossible to convert retreat into advance.

With values decreased, unemployment increased, industrial enterprise stalled and savings gone, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment,” the president said to the nation.

Then, Mr. Roosevelt told Americans to buck up … the forefathers faced a few obstacles, too.

In the years that followed, the FDR-led government provided a bailout of expensive programs and extensive reforms. And citizens toughed out the crisis.

History proves useful in these cases without providing comfort. We watch stock tickers and imagine sad portfolios.

Then, we turn to Washington and witness the overseers of the current turmoil asking for more authority and taxpayer money to make it better.

Consider this: At a time when nearly every candidate with an audience and a voice decries the horrors of congressional earmarks, the federal legislative body put $6.6 billion in earmarks in an omnibus spending bill.

And one of the lawmakers, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, currently on trial for federal corruption charges, wrangled $2 million for the study of hibernation patterns of ground squirrels and black bears.

You can’t make this stuff up. Everyday Americans have earned the right to believe that, despite all the promises, nothing really changes in Washington.

What people feel might not be fear.

What people feel is anger.

Ken Newton’s column runs

on Sunday and Tuesday.