Nationally, Enron's demise is stirring debate on a huge range of issues, from campaign finance reform to accounting rules to the very ascendancy of the idea of deregulation.

But not here in Houston.

"None of us blame President Bush or free-market capitalism for Enron's collapse," says Raymund Eich, a local patent agent, who believes that liberals are using the Enron bankruptcy as an excuse to smear both. Only Dallas and Washington gave more money to Bush's 2000 campaign than Houston, and Enron is well known to be Bush's single biggest corporate backer, but Eich doesn't think the government owes anything to hard-hit Enron employees or investors, noting that "Houstonians are more self-reliant than people in other places."

Take Houston accountants -- a phrase that in February 2002 sounds like the punchline to a very bad joke waiting to happen. Here's a group who would like very much to remain self-reliant, even as they fear that their days of self-regulation may be numbered, thanks to Andersen's bad behavior. Over lunch -- beef stew on noodles -- the members of the Houston Chapter of the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants at their annual business meeting at the J.K. Marriott dish about Andersen's role in the Enron debacle.

"I think someone should pay," says Ann-Marie Curtin, a CPA at Prime Asset Management, a Houston property company. "There's no way that there wasn't a significant amount of illegal activity going on."

But new rules to help prevent such nefarious activities? They won't hear of it. Patrick L. Durio, president-elect of the local group and the chairman of the -- voluntary! -- ethics committee of the Texas Society of CPAs, says: "Government regulation is not the answer. I don't want to see the government setting accounting standards," noting that the industry has been self-regulating for 100 years. "And I don't think that politicians should be getting involved in it."

In Houston, they probably won't. Because no matter how big Enron's corporate implosion appears on the national scale, such colossal busts are hardly unusual in Houston history. In fact, Enron is a mere blip compared to the city-wide bust that occurred in the mid-'80s. Houston is always trying to shake the perception that it's just an urban pit stop for roughnecks who rip natural resources out of the ground on the way to getting really, really rich. Because many Houstonians remember what happened when those roughnecks and their moneymen ran the town right into the ground.

"Imagine a city where everybody had gone to Las Vegas for the weekend and lost everything they owned," says Jaffe.

In the mid-'80s, the city lost a quarter of a million jobs in the oil and real estate bust. "There were a lot of people who went from owning lots of real estate in West Houston and driving a Porsche to having to take a job selling aluminum siding. Everybody was a kazillionaire," says Jaffe, "and all of a sudden, everybody was bankrupt over the course of, like, three years." Banks just couldn't keep up with all the foreclosures on the suburban houses stocked with '80s amenities -- the backyard swimming pool, the built-in wet bar and the Jacuzzi.

The bust inspired a favorite Houston bumper-sticker, begging God for a second chance, for another oil boom: "God, if you bring it again, we won't screw it up this time."

Things were so depressed circa 1986 that a volunteer civic organization called Houston Proud formed to try to cheer up the beleaguered populace. The Houston Proud theme song was a relentlessly upbeat ditty that tried too hard. Sample lyric: "We're Houston Proud! Proud of the things we've done together!" Commercials aired on local TV pairing the song with chipper images of smiling Houstonians to market Houston to its own people, as if to plead, "Please don't lose faith. Just don't move away."

And maybe that's where the inferiority complex comes from: This is a city that knows what it feels like to fall flat on your face, to go from driving a Porsche to selling aluminum siding. Or maybe a city where the free-market conquers all knows it's inevitably a little rough around the edges.

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