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Volume2 NQl As BafJ1er 18 went to press they were setting out the Christmas book display at the Kansas City Costco, a retail bazaar whose parking lot occupies the site of the city's last jazz club. We never enter this particular Costco without thoughts about mortality, about what had to disappear in order to make its amazing bargains possible, and this time its Christmas book display ~ with its shiny piles of mass-market wisdom, vampires, and comely vice-presidential candidates served to heighten the somber mood. Outside, the world of letters was dying from the bottom up, as newspapers, magazines, bookstores, and perhaps, not too long from now, even book publishing itself discover that there is no conceivable business model that will support the production of quality prose.

But inside, the Glenn Beck books were selling briskly. Shoppers were giving the gift of wholesome paranoia this year. Here was Glenn dressed up like one of the commies who have supposedly infiltrated our government. Glenn bearing messages from the heartland. Even a Glenn Beck Christmas book, a new tradition for your family.

Here it was, the second holiday season of the recession, and all across the decaying, dying Midwest, families would soon be gathering round the hearth and swapping theories about how those scheming liberals have done us in.

And maybe Glenn Beck is right about the impending end of the republic. Maybe it is just a matter of time until Beckiana and its allied genres are the only sort of material that our system finds it can publish profitably. Maybe all the work we have done to revive The Baffler~all the weeks of editing and copy-editing and proofreading~ has been for naught. Maybe publishing is as practical a way of sharing ideas as dumping print - outs from the cargo door of a DC-3. We headed home for a glass of Old Charter to mull it over.

Copyright 2010, The Baffler Literary Magazine, Inc. [ISBN 0-56698-56859-9] No part of this magazine may be republished in print or electronically without the express written permission of the publisher.

This issue of The Baft1er was assembled in December 2009 in Chicago, Washington and New York after having been painstakingly ghostwritten by Bill Ayers. The magazine was designed by The Map Office, New York City, and printed by Shapco Printing Inc, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Thomas Geoghegan, we are proud to report, is the first Baft1er politburo member ever to run for u.s. Congress.

Sadly, the Democrats of Illinois' Fifth Congressional District chose to anoint someone else. The nation's loss is our gain, however, as Tom will now have more time to toil in our very own editorial salt mine.

The list of people that we have to thank for helping us revive The Baffier is so long this time that we can't possibly hope to remember everyone. But here goes: The Baffier wishes to thank Debi Bergerson and her cohort at Shapco; Phoebe Connelly; Ben Edwards; Charlotte Fairlie; Josh Glenn; "Uptown" Mark Greif and Ali Heifetz; Hunter Kennedy; Brad Kotler and the team at Latham & Watkins; Lewis Lapham; Shana Lutker; Rick MacArthur; Jeremy McCarter; Ben Metcalf; Robert Nedelkoff; James Njus; Jennifer Norback; Eddie Opara and Salvador Orara at The Map Office; Dan Peterman and Connie Spreen; Melanie Raucci at Disticor; Rich Schaefer; Joe Spieler; Rick Wojcik; Lastly, Brankica Kovrlija deserves a special mention.

The doughnuts are on us.

The essay by Henry Fairlie was first published by The Washington Post on July 27, 1980, under the title, "Mencken's Booboisie In Control of GOP." It is reprinted here by kind permission of the estate of Henry Fairlie.

A different version of the essay by Walter Benn Michaels was published in Bookforum in 2009 under the title, "Going Boom."

Thanks to Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian for permitting us to print "Exercise" and "untitled," by the late, great Jack Spicer.

The Baffier invites submissions of essays, reviews, fiction. found documents and other interesting writing. Sorry, no poetry submissions will be considered. Send submissions or proposals to: submissions@thebaffler.com, and write your surname and "essay" or "fiction" or "review," as the case may be, in the subject line of the e-mail. Those who submit longish nonfiction pieces would do well to include a precis of a paragraph or so in the e-mail.

Contents Totentanz Thomas Frank, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O'Neil

4

01 I Essays

02 I Columns Poetry Slam Dan Kel!y

140

Let Them Eat Dogma

144

Chris Lehmann

What Does the Internet Look Like?

Christine Smallwood

8

Lost on Nelson Algren Avenue Mike Newirth

152

Blood Drive Matt Taibbi

160

Serfing the Net Astra Taylor

20

No Logo Update Naomi Klein

30

TheO-Word Michael Lind

46

A Cottage for Sale A. S. Hamrah

54

Indispensable Men Yves Smith

66

The Un-usable Past Walter Benn Michaels

74

Journals of the Crisis Year Moe Tkacik

84

Motor City Elegy Will Boisvert

96

This Is Rae Armantrout

24

Zones Devin Johnston

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Michael R. Bloomberg Ryan Ruby

110

Exercise Jack Spicer

65 65

King's Row Jim McNeill

116

[If I had invented homosexuality ... ] Jack Spicer

Race Inauguration Thomas Sayers Ellis

The Mix -Tape and the Auteur Will Schmenner

120

The People, No Henry Fairlie

125

03 I Fiction The Failed Plot to Assassinate Our Leader

by Three Men, All Subsequently Deceased Paul Maliszewski

166

Jimmy Carter's Rabbit Lydia Millet

174

Poetry 79 100

Art Simon Norfolk Joel Sternfeld Jules Spinatsch

13 John Miller 27 James Griffioen 40 Angie Waller

81 103 127

4

the Baffler Volume 2 NOl

Totentanz TIwmas Frank, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O'Neil

When we launched this magazine back in 1988, our beef with the world was simple and singular.

We objected to the deliberately obscure academic style that was then applauded as political engagement of the most advanced sort. We thought it would be fun to heave some dead cats into the sanctuary of high theory. The priestly class was not amused.

One battle led to another, and over the years we took on the culture industry's clamoring for "alternative," its adoration of middleness, its cult of youth. Through it all, what remained constant was a sense of the poverty of profit, the absurdity of the market, and the sheer, thundering cluelessness of mainstream cultural commentary.

It all came together for us in the late Nineties, with all the new varieties of libertarianism that arose to sing the coming of the millennial technogasm. The media were gulled as usual: The freemarket New Jerusalem was at hand, they agreed; the information utopia had arrived.

We disagreed, of course. This was the beginning of a high-tech "dark age," we insisted, not a renaissance. It was a political triumph for particular interests masquerading as an age of enlightenment.

If anything, the great Nineties info-glut marked the termination of certain forms of economic reasoning' the replacement of traditional democratic forms with the populism of the focus group. Oh, for a day of reckoning, some historical earthquake in which all the misconceptions were corrected and all the charlatans exposed!

In retrospect, the catastrophes that have befallen our friends in the "mainstream media" seem to have been almost inevitable. The industry was contemptuous of doubters like us. Its solons were dedicated utterly to the superstitions of the market, convinced in the face of all that is obvious that the formula for success was to drain the last bit of personality out of their product.

Although it's hard to remember nowadays, the chieftains of monopoly journalism had arrogance to burn. Their product was tepid, even banal, but their attitude was Olympian. No sooner had their "golden age" commenced in the Seventies than they were celebrating themselves as "The Powers That Be," as chuffed with their influence and as enamored with the customs and rituals of authority as have been any bunch of professional courtiers since the dawn of time.

And now. In the space of a few short years, they have gone from lofty lordliness to whimpering irrelevance. The wipe-out has been awesome in its sweep, and it grows more devastating by the day. In the legendary newspaper town of Chicago, both surviving papers are in bankruptcy. Labor reporters are gone; book review sections are just about extinct; newsroom staffs are being decimated; investigative units are disappearing. Towns go from two papers to one paper to no paper, and it generates not even a ripple of surprise.

We take no joy in watching this danse macabre.

Newspapers may have done their job poorly, but the answer is hardly to renounce the job itself.

With their eclipse is coming a parallel collapse of public knowledge, a catastrophic shutdown of scrutiny whose costs we will never be able to calculate. Places such as New York and Washington, of course, will always be over-described territory, abundant plains where the dwindling tribe of the pundits can hunt their game in perpetuity. But in the lesser metropolises of the republic, the lights are already going out. Already the people of those places don't know much more about those who rule them than their rulers choose to divulge. We fear that TV producer David Simon has it right when he warns, "The next 10 to 15 years will be halcyon days for local corruption. It's going to be a great time to be a corrupt politician. " What has precipitated the great journalism die-off, ironically, is a massive overproduction

The Raffler TOlenlazlThomas Frank, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O'Neil

of content. The abundance of information and connectivity we were promised in the early days of the World Wide Web has duly arrived, trailing its clouds of glory. But it is the consumer, not the producer, who sings hosanna. The voracious news reader- and there are more of us than ever- has countless newspapers at his disposal, proffering their contents for free. But it seems free is not a very good price for publishers.

And so we read, we comment, we blog voluminously. But what we can't do on our own is the kind of literary work that requires reporters, editors, organizations.

It is doubly ironic that we are losing our faculties of inquiry at precisely the moment when public-minded scrutiny of our institutions is most needed. The economic collapse oi 2008 was a direct consequence of scrutiny's demise, in his case as a result of the great political project of regulatory rollback. with bankers and brokers and mortgage entrepreneurs freed from the intrusive gaze of the public. Financial journalists, too, played their appointed role in the disaster, transforming themselves over the years into cheerleaders for the market and fans of this or that hero CEO. The coming collapse of journalism will merely finish the job of deregulation that the market's allies began.

And surely it can only be described as a bonus triple-irony hat-trick that what the nation is doing to fend off the coming reign of ignorancei.e., nothing - is already being described in the happy, reassuring terms of the very order that has brought us to these straits: "The marketplace will sort this out," says Chris Anderson of good old Wired magazine, an institution that will apparently stand forever beyond the sobering influences of shame or bankruptcy.

And as we stand before the market's judgment seat awaiting that great sort -out- which will undoubtedly cause all surviving journalistic organisms to evolve ever closer to the libertarian views of the foundations that will fund them we can't help but ponder the perversity of it all.

The great, long-running contest between art and commerce is coming to an end, and com-

merce is preparing to declare unconditional victory. From experimental novelists right down to journalistiC legmen, those who work with words are to become society's interns. We will all work for free, the market is telling us, or we won't work at all.

But those who provide the useful social function of crafting derivatives and corporate mergerswhy, nothing is too good for them. They can even crash the global economy, and society will reach out a helping hand to get them on their feet again.

Art is short, but Wall Street is forever.

And so the culture war fmally comes home.

Not only is our criticism debatable; the very existence of journals like this one is a standing affront, a condition of which society will soon be cured.

For us, of course, that means it's the perfect time to re -launch The Baffler magazine. As the world careens one way we faithfully steer the other. Print is dead, they say; we double down in our commitment to the printed word. Brevity is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality.

We look out at this upside-down landscape and are convinced that what it requires is not silence but a strong dose of our particular brand of scoffing: Strong ideas, elegantly expressed. And so, once more into the breach. ~

What Does the Internet Look Like?

Christine Smallwood

Serfing the Net Astra Taylor

No Logo at Ten Naomi Klein

TheO-Word Michael Lind

A Cottage for Sale A. S. Hamrah

Indispensable Men Yves Smith

The Un-usable Past Walter Benn Michaels

Crisis Lit Moe Tkacik

Motor City Elegy Will Boisvert

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Michael R. Bloomberg Ryan Ruby

King's Row Jim McNeill

The Mix - Tape and the Auteur Will Schmenner

The People, No Henry Fairlie

8

'Ihe Baffler Volume2NQI

What Does the Internet Look Like?

Christine Smallwood

Last summer, Popular Science broke important ground in Internet visualization theory-an ongoing effort to describe what happens behind our computer screens, or, more accurately, beyond them, inside Ethernet cables and satellites t1ying around in the upper atmosphere. What does all this activity look like? The answer, according to PopSci, is "an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop." The task your data faces is to lick its way to the center, where all the magic happens.

The history of the Internet is a history of metaphors about the Internet, all stumbling around this dilemma: How do we talk to each other about an invisible god? How does it appear, this mess of data and bytes and information and code, transforming itself into alphabet and image?

We can rule certain images out right at the start.

We know, contra former Senator Ted Stevens, that the Internet is not a "series of tubes." We know that "the Wild West" doesn't fit, not for a landscape that's been so nicely parceled, policed and manicured. We also know that it's not that other Nineties favorite, an "information superhighway"the point of a highway is to get somewhere, after all, somewhere that is not a highway, while the point of the Internet is to stay there, forever and ever, like a hot tub. A hot tub, after all, is shared with friends and strangers, whose warm water swirls around you, lulling you into complacency while silently transmitting disease. Yes: The Internet is definitely more like a hot tub than a highway.

You might be willing to call it a day with the image of a Tootsie Pop, but Popular Science isn't stopping there. It also suggests that the Internet looks like a plane that stops at O'Hare en route from JFK to LAX - in other words, like an "inefficient" t1ight plan. Which, come to think of it, isn't anything at all like a Tootsie Pop. A Tootsie Pop is among the most efficient of all human creations.

Its purpose is to maximize taste pleasure. It does so simply, elegantly, cheaply and sweetly.

No: The Internet is not like a Tootsie Pop at all.

I'm not quite ready to give up on the hot tub idea, though. More on this in a minute.

The Internet is not merely a matter of mind; our bodies are positioned by it, conditioned by it, contorted by it. Maybe you get whiplash from sneaking peeks while your boss isn't looking, or you slouch in front of it, slack-jawed, glassyeyed, t1uorescent -lit, all day long. Maybe you perch on the edge of your swivel chair to check your stocks and the headlines before the kids get up in the morning, and then creep back again at night for a little Amazon.com. Maybe you, a grandchild of people who "hunt and peck" with two forefingers, only write with your thumbs.

Maybe you wear two wrist braces and tote around a special keyboard for ergonomic support. The way we address the god dictates how we sit and slump and bend and the height at which we hold our wrists and when we stand up and when we run back to the desk, just to check one more thing, before skipping out the door. Its magnetic pull yanks your head away from human interlocutors and redirects your gaze, a modern spring of Narcissus. Looking down at its tiny face on "smart phones" is surely the leading cause of non -lethal pedestrian crashes.

We also spend an awful lot of time gazing at other people using the Internet, on television shows, in commercials, on billboards, in print ads, in movies. On the fake-looking screens of CSI and 24 we get impossibly detailed online databases, rotating three-dimensional password prompts, and helpful scans of state secrets. We watch actors do Google searches, sort through YouTube clips, answer MySpace messages, upload photos, click "send" and participate in high-quality livevideo chats. Sometimes these things look just like they do in real life. But more often, they look different. More technicolor. More volume.

Es.~\路s

Wh~l Does the Internet Look Like?/ Christine SmaJlwood

More official seals. More like .. . Important Business.

And yet, using the Internet - even the high speed Internet -never feels like Important Business. Awkwardly jutting my face to the screen as I puzzle over the comments and ratings the anonymous denizens of Internet - ville have left behind never feels like the civilized tete -a- tete with a knowledgeable gentleman featured in those ads for YellowBook.com. It feels slightly more like the cacophonous ad for the "Optimum Triple Play," a cable-phone- Internet package that features pirates, sea monsters and mermaids having a beach party, streaming video and rapping about calling Puerto Rico. And yet ... on the couch, with my overheated laptop burning my legs, one eye on the pirates and one on Wikipedia, I'm all alone, far from the sea, and jealous of the flexible mermaids, able to shimmy with ease despite the hours they pass hunched in front of their computers.

My hunch about that hot tub thing must be right, though, because Optimum isn't the only

one peddling a water party. Hayden Panettiere, shilling for LG, uses her phone as an online "hobby-finder" before she summons her friends and favorite band to her backyard pool for a big blowout. Liquid in general connotes "fast." Cox sells its high-speed Internet as a "Power Boost"a foul-tasting sports energy drink that athletes spit out in disgust but that the Cox pod people, little marshmallow men in Hazmat suits, guzzle down the way the kids suckle cans of Monster Energy drink or Mountain Dew. The Internet, you see, is not only fast; it is also playful. Our most futuristic and, frankly, adult technology- a zillion hours of human creativity and brilliance have built a system whose primary use is to ogle pornography - is sold with youth and innocence.

The young, knowing as they are, must be protected. Even when one would prefer to smack them in the mouth. For worried parents, Optimum has a special line of security commercials. Two beefy men in suits, sunglasses and earpieces stand guard over the living room while "Billy" researches Abraham Lincoln. His mother tries

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CIVILIZATION

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10

The Baffler

Volume 2 NOl

to sail in with a glass of milk and a snack, but little Billy, that joker, pretends not to recognize her: "I don't know this woman." She's confused, then exasperated in the way of a TV mom. Where a real mother might grow something like wrathful if her child were to turn the security apparatus against her, this commercial mom just rolls her eyes.

She should be less sanguine. People worse than pedophiles lurk outside the living room wallspeople like the Eighties metal band Dokken, who represent, in an ad for Norton AntiVirus software, the terrible havoc that can befall your hard drive, imagined as a tender raw chicken. When Dokken does a synchronized pelvic thrust-i.e., when the virus fucks your computer-the chicken spon~ taneously combusts in the special kind of irony endemic to modern advertising.

Sometimes the viruses don't announce them~ selves with scowls, leather jackets and torn blue jeans. Sometimes, they're hidden. In Microsoft's commercials for its search engine Bing, one human being asks another human being a softball ques~ tion -such as, Did you book our tickets to Hawaii? or, Do pregnant ladies have special dietary needs?-only to discover that the yoga buddy, spouse or parent is not a human at all but has turned unexpectedly into an Internet zombie, monotonously rattling off useless facts. It's a brain ~ harvest nightmare with a Freudian twist: an alien virus that colonizes minds and forces mouths to spew out random associations. It com ~ bines the technological (a robotic voice, access to infinite information) with the peculiarly human (an associative way of thinking). A search engine, after all, ranks information based on popularity over time in large sample sizes; free association is an individual tic whose meaning is private and unrepeatable. The terror at first seems to be that humans have become machines, but in fact the malfunction is the reverse-the machine has become human, has acquired a human pattern of thought.

Hence the need for a technological solution, a superior search engine that will "cut through the clutter" for us feeble, Freudian~minded beings.

Modern humans: still able hunter~gatherers, but lousy weeders.

Most Internet service companies sell something very simple: togetherness. In the living room, at poolside, in bed, on a train, you are always connected. You are never alone. The relentless parties they offer, though, only emphasize the Internet's tragic flaw: It can't tuck you in at night.

It can't make out with you. You love it, but it doesn't love you back.

Two hypotheses: 1. We believe that the Internet has banished

solitude.

2. The actual experience of using the Internet is inherently solitary.

Commercial pantomimes shore up the first hypothesis while denying the second.

We are born alone, we die alone, and we use the Internet alone. You may gather round the screen with friends to watch a video clip (turning the Internet into a television), or hang out while you play music on Pandora (turning the Internet into a radio), or post to your blog, or "comment" on someone else's blog (turning the Internet into a roundtable, or a bathroom wall, depending).

But these are subsidiary Internet uses. The essence of the Internet, the thing it does that nothing else can do, its Internet~ness, is the search. Comedian Dave Chappelle captured this with the skit" If the Internet Were a Real Place," in which he loitered in a seedy mall like a modern Odysseus, ransack ~ ing CD stores, ducking into curtained rooms to indulge various temptations, and running away from spammers. Wandering around the Internet, the thing we are always searching for is the doorthe exit ramp off the superhighway, the way home.

But it's hard to find. How do you know when you're done doing nothing?

Searching can be defined as the simple action of typing language into a browser for the purpose of calling up more language, or images, or video, or sounds. Point, click, double~click, hunch over, type, scratch your nose, backspace. (Calling this "surfing" requires a level of irony, or cognitive dissonance, or wish~projection, that can only be labeled a pathological denial of bodily experience.)

n

f~sa\'S

Wh~t Does the Internet Look Like?!Christine Smallwood

The search is not a group activity. Only one set of fIngers can type, only one hand can guide a mouse to click on a link. Daily life presents few frustra tions more profound than sharing a keyboard.

We are beholden to countless Internet fantasies: It's quicker than the speed of light; it appears and dissolves at whim; it's guarded by big strapping men friendly to our own interests and hostile to the interests of others; it's magical. evanescent, as portable as our own bodies and imaginations; it looks like a sWirling hypercolor tie-dyed video game. These are, of course, also common fantasies about capitalism. But the ultimate fantasy of being online, echoed in much writing about the Internet, is existential: that it's a place where you are never alone. And yet, by definition, the experience of the Internet is an isolated one. The search demands solitude while promising to eradicate it.

It turns out that the old metaphor- the Net. or the World Wide Web-was a pretty good one: webs and nets are traps. Like a fIshing trip, or like being a cop or a drug dealer, searching online involves hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror or pleasure. And more often than you'd like, you wind up ensnaring yourself, like a hunter lying bleeding in a bear trap.

We seek on the Internet because that's where we find. In the tween movie Twilight, heroine Bella discovers that her boyfriend Edward is a vampire by consulting a website with a conve nient link to supernatural occurrences in her very own tiny town. The Internet is here collectively written, but perfectly tailored to exactly her individual needs. It is not the wizened woman in the house down the road that holds the truth to Edward's identity, but an anonymous and multiply sourced repository of lore.

A silent film would have cut to an intertitle to explain a secret; a Thirties noir would have spun newspaper headlines in circles to leap forward in time ; aSeventies sci-fi flick would have introduced a wacky professor or scientist to deliver a piece of arcana. Today a quick cut to Google delivers the missing link. It advances the plot.

The cinematic look of the computer screen is arranged to convey maximum information at a minimum strain on the viewer's resources. Favored: Bright, readable colors; large, legible type; and unmistakably clear language. FILE NOT FOUND, with a big red X like a cherry on top. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. SPRINKLER TEST: NEW TIME ACCEPTED.

In Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, a renegade stock trader played by John Travolta jerry -rigs a Wi -Fi signal in a subway tunnel so that he can log on and learn if his diabolical scheme to crash the market is working. Luckily for him, the generic fmance sites he visits feature thick, helpful arrows indicating which commodities are "up" and which are" down."

Internet visualization is not merely a matter of the appearance of screens-it's a matter of Internet ideals, the divine tenets of the day. Film editing makes connectedness look like rapid crosscutting and mobility like swooping, sudden zooms in and out; speed sounds like techno, or synthesizers, or, if you're Miami Vice director Michael Mann, like Audioslave. And it's a plot device, too: American movies since the dawn of the Internet Age have been about connectedness.

Ensemble-driven stories - everything from Traffic to Babel to Crash to You and Me and Everyone We Know-are dazzled by the unremarkable fact that individual Iives are interdependent and interpenetrating. A flap of a butterly's wings triggers a monsoon, SARS spreads across the

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'(heB.fIIer Volume 2 NOl

oceans, a virus originating in Bangladesh brings down Wall Street, and so forth.

There are three key cinematic moments in the annals of Internet Visualization: The Net (1995), The Matrix (1999) and Minority Report (2002).

In The Net, Sandra Bullock's life is turned upsidedown by an evil hacker conspiracy chasing down the MacGuffm of a missing floppy disk. (As far as I'm concerned, a woman who enters her credit card information into "Pizza.Net," which looks like it was designed by the makers of the original Donkey Kong, deserves to have her identity stolen.) When she brings them down, the Internet actually dissolves-"It's eating through the mainframe!" someone cries, and pixels drip down, data reduced to a pulverized, bloody pulp.

As for a "series of tubes," it's just possible that Ted Stevens was a few years late to The Matrix, which imagines that the natural energy of bodies submerged in watery pods and connected via a complex of wires and, yes, tubes, is harvested in order to power a god-like machine civilization of sentient servers. Sort of like Microsoft's Redmond campus.

In the Nineties, the look of the Internetcomic-book web sites that changed to illegible green lines of code-corresponded to traditional fears about technocracy. Characters worked to rescue their identities from the machine. Since Minority Report, the focus has been on a more inner-directed search, described with a new search aesthetic: elegant touchscreens, grand postures, classical music. Tom Cruise, playing a future policeman, searches with sweeping gestures of his arms and hands, summoning images up and then casting them decisively aside, rifling, rotating, sweeping, zooming in and out. As in The Matri.x, the Internet forms an architecture that frames human life; he's actually surrounded by data. It's still a solo flight -only one person can search the screen at a time-but it's a full-body experience. Cruise doesn't bend his neck before his laptop or have to do forearm stretches when he comes home at night to relieve his aching joints; he throws his back into it, hands and arms flying around like he's conducting the New York Philharmonic.

The search used to be practical-In The Net, Sandra Bullock knew she was Sandra Bullock, her job was to convince everyone else. Our newer search anxieties are amnesiac. In The Bourne Identity, the assassin on a self-quest played by Matt Damon personifies the search. With nothing but a handscan (read: a few keystrokes) and a bank account number (an IP address), he accesses the multiple identities that he has strewn around the globe like the little pieces of ourselves that we leave littered around cyberspace. In The Matrix, Neo is "plugged in" via a series of Ethernet wires.

In Minority Report, the "pre-cogs," the human psychics, contain information that is downloaded to disks. In the Bourne trilogy, Matt Damon is the Internet. He is mobility; he is the point of connection; he is search-optimization. He's a Bing zombie, without the zombie part.

The problem isn't really that we don't know what the Internet looks like. It's that what it looks like is so horribly ugly: not a glistening Tootsie Roll pop, not an open freeway, not a shimmering clear pool of chlorinated water nor a siren -littered sea, not even a chiseled movie star, but giant, hulking factories dotting the landscape of the Paciftc Northwest and the Eastern Seaboard, covering old landfills, sprawling, like dozens of Costcos smashed together, stacked with metal and diesel generators and powerful cooling systems, crossed by power lines that deliver 2 percent of the world's energy to the so-called cloud, where your tax returns and credit card statements cross paths with Medicare files and corporate budgets and your old love letters and the photos of Jennifer Aniston's newest boyfriend.

I wish the Internet looked like Matt Damon, or like lines of light written by an invisible hand in the night sky. I wish it sounded like tinkling bells and xylophones. I would be sad if it sounded like techno, but I'd get used to it. It turns out, though, that it looks like a warehouse of space junk, and it sounds like an industrial-strength air-conditioning system. Beyond the screen, the Internet looks like everything else. It looks like money. ~

I'"

PIEIII. IIlTDI Will lIlT II•• COIPmllOal

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'Ihe IIafflcr Volume 2 NQ 1

Serfing the Net Astra Taylor We are living in an age of unprecedented creativity, they tell us. But there was a dark time not long ago, the story goes, when authors exercised dictatorial control over passive readers, movie studios foisted films on captive audiences, listeners were held hostage in their own homes by longplaying records, prime-time television only came on once a day, and professional journalists were gatekeepers to world events.

One version of this tale cites the remote control as the first significant tool of human liberation, enabling viewers to change channels at will without leaving the comfort of their sofas. The next great advance in the forward march of emancipation, I've heard people claim, was the joystick, which took the relationship between observer and screen to the next level. And then, unleashing a torrent of interactivity, came the personal computer and its descendants: cell phones, digital cameras, iPods, TiVo, etc. Hook these magical gadgets up to a broadband connection, and innovation abounds: We can copy and paste, comment and link, download and share. The network revolution, the story goes, has finally made culture a two-way street, liberating the masses from the grip of greedy entertainment industries and quaint notions of authorial control and originality. We are all "content generators" now, free to produce, consume, exchange and remix as we like, free of charge in every instance.

This stirring tale of empowerment is told both by big business evangelists and smash - the-state anarchists, an unlikely alliance that is brought together by a shared fascination with the word "free." But, as software guru Richard Stallman has asked, are they talking "free" as in speech or "free" as in beer? "Free" as in liberty or "free" as in markets? Free-spirited creators or freeloading CEOs? For some, the two meanings coalesce in a strange consumerist vision of a communitarian future: Freedom is a world where all the things

you could ever want are free-as in gratis- which means you can share them without fear of having less for yourself.

Both versions of "free" were on view at the Open Video Conference in Manhattan last summer, a quasi-academic event focusing, to use the current jargon, on "dispersed creativity": "[W]ill technology and public policy support a more participatory culture-one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement?" the meeting's website pondered. "Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture?"

The phrase "permissions-based culture" signaled that I was among people who likely saw themselves as progressives: The conference was more about "free" as in speech than "free" in beer (it cost 75 bucks to attend). Presenters spoke passionately about the dangers of media consolidation, the dire implications of excessive copyright for the cultural commons, the de facto corporate stranglehold over the public domain, and the drawbacks of applying outdated conceptions of intellectual property in a digital context.

What's exciting about the Web, I was told, is that people are doing stuff without asking for permission, even though permission is technically required for what they do. People are pasting news articles on their blogs, they're uploading clips from network TV to YouTube, they're downloading movies and songs, and each time they do these things, they're breaking the law. Whether you like it or not, the Internet is a copy-making machine, a place where replicating and sharing feels natural: Every time you send an e-mail to a friend or refresh your web browser a facsimile is made. This capacity, which makes it so easy to pass along the latest cultural diversion to anyone who may care, has some old school media moguls shaking their tight, money-filled fists in rage-a rage so blinding

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Serftng the Net / Astra Taylor

that most of their moves to maintain control and profits have been grotesque missteps: the Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuits against file-sharing children and even a deceased grandmother, for example.

For independent makers of books, films and records, on the other hand, the Web's capacity to produce instant, pristine copies for free is both a source of enthusiasm and anxiety, empowerment and dispossession. The Internet revolution promised to help creators cultivate massive new audiences without interference from middlemen; social networking would substitute for expensive advertising campaigns and digital dissemination would make hard copies, plastic jewel cases and bubble mailers obsolete. But will people pay for art untethered to tangible things, when it can be replicated and transmitted with the push of a button? How are creative types supposed to sustain themselves and their efforts? After all, despite the plummeting cost of online distribution, art still requires an artist, a t1esh-and-blood person who does the work and must be paid.

These and related questions were up for debate at the Open Video Conference. Could copyright be reformed to better encourage innovation? the event's organizers wondered. Is defending intellectual property worth being spied on? How can we protect the right to remix TV shows and amuse our friends with the results? Is the notion of originality obsolete? Is stealing actually a form of sharing, and vice versa? Is everything on the Web mine to use, and if it is, has the world become more democratic? There was little consensus among the 700 or so attendees on these and other matters' serving, as we did, various masters. There were freeware designers, techie entrepreneurs, political mash - up artists, an abundance of lawyers and legal scholars, documentary filmmakers like myself-and, of course, pirates.

The most famous pirate was surprise guest Peter Sunde, whose image beamed in from Sweden

via webcam so he could discuss The Pirate Bay, a hugely popular website that serves as the point of contact for peer-to-peer sharing of large files via a protocol called BitTorrent. The Pirate Bay's notoriety, and the network's efficiency in permitting users from around the world to trawl the Web for the latest in Hollywood twaddle, had raised the ire of the Motion Picture Association of America, which instigated a number of lawsuits against them on behalf of various movie studios.

Sunde and three co-defendants were found guilty of copyright infringement in the spring of 2009.

The four were sentenced to one year in prison and the equivalent of $3.5 million in damages. When a sympathetic moderator asked Sunde if he was "stressed-out" at the prospect of such punishment, Sunde shrugged, "not really." Since tracking sites don't actually host the files in question, but merely link to available material, it's hard to claim that they're providing a service different from other search engines. Sunde assured the audience that his case was far from settled and that the appeals would go on for at least five more years: There are many peer-to-peer file-sharing websites, but The Pirate Bay, organized by the arts collective Piratbyran (Piracy Bureau), is the most loudly subversive and the most conscientious about connecting freedom to share with freedom of speech. The swashbuckling swagger of the site's impresarios and the high-profile lawsuit had made them an international cause celebre, spawning officially registered Pirate parties in eight countries. In Sweden, where Piratpartiet is the third-largest political party, the group's platform emphasizes three core issues: online and offline privacy, the abolition of patents and copyright reform; it took more than 7 percent of the Swedish vote in the 2009 European parliamentary elections. The party takes pride in being politically unaligned, neither traditionally left nor right. It's unfettered free content that's paramount, trumping all other social concerns: downloaders of the WWW, unite!

â&#x20AC;˘ Less then two weeks after Sunde's Open Video webcast. it was announced that The Pirate Bay would be sold to a gaming company for around $8 million.

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Vo!ume2NO\

This is why it sometimes seems as though the pirates are digital Zapatistas, with Sunde as their Subcommandante Marcos. Last April an activist "gallery and convergence stage" in Brooklyn hosted a discussion with another founding member of The Pirate Bay, Sara Sajjad. "As Piratbyran says, multiplication can produce powerful numbers.

And great music collections," enthused the Facebook invitation. Attendees were advised to "bring your laptop, USB stick or hard drive, and share, swap and propagate like the pirate you arrrrrrr!"

The "Guerilla Music Swap" was imagined as an anti -capitalist statement, a way of sticking it to the money-grubbing, crap-making, public-domaindenying RlAA and MPAA. But if the business author Matt Mason is to be believed, these well- intentioned rebels weren't really challenging the business establishment - they were its unwitting vanguard.

Given the booty to be plundered on the corporate consulting circuit, Mason was probably the richest buccaneer at the Open Video Conference, and the confident optimism of his presentation eclipsed Sunde's insouciance. Mason gave a succinct and breezy talk based on his successful book, The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism; according to his website, his speaking performances have left Procter and Gamble "Delighted" and struck the executives of Miller Genuine Draft as "Amazing." Pepsi just "loved it" and Disney, only slightly more restrained, found Mason "very stimulating!"

And why shouldn't they love him? Remember what pirates like: Parrots. Eye Patches. And gold, best of all. Mason's argument was sensible enough: Pirates aren't anti-capitalists, they're punk capitalists. "D.I.Y encourages us to reject authority and hierarchy, advocating that we can and should produce as much as we consume," Mason writes in the opening chapter of his homage to piracy.

"Since punk, this idea has been quietly changing the fabric of our economic system, replacing outdated ideas with twenty-fIrst-century upgrades of Punk Capitalism."

"Pirates are taking over the good ship capitalism, but they're not here to sink it," he continues, reassuringly. "Instead they will plug the holes, keep it afloat, and propel it forward. " Dressed to play the one hip guy at the business luncheon, Mason acknowledged that piracy can sometimes cut into profits; but in crisis, as they say, lies opportunity. He gave the example of drug companies distributing widely pirated patent medicines without charge. "They started winning corporate social responsibility awards," Mason rhapsodized. "And all the advertising money in the world couldn't help them do that; pirates managed to reach the place that other advertisers and advertising couldn't reach." Or take shoes; instead of suing a Japanese bootlegger for selling altered versions of their sneakers, Nike made a fortune appropriating the redesigns.

As Mason suggested, piracy isn't just another business model; it is the greatest business model of them all. Its secret, as we shall see, is getting people to work for you, for free.

That's not "free" as in beer, that's "free" as in serfdom.

So everyone agrees these days: Hooray for pirates!

Art and culture (or, more discouragingly, "content") should be free. Techno-utopians of the left and right envision a future in which everything ever made is accessible, at no cost, with a click of a button. Those who think "free" as in speech envision a new digital order offering an inclusive cultural commons and mass enlightenment through access to information; those who think

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"free" as in beer merely see a cheaper way to get rich. "Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money." Chris Anderson gushed in the Wired essay that would secure him a hefty advanceto write last summer's blockbuster business hardback, Free!: The Future of a Radical Price.

And creative types should be grateful to him.

They won't be the ones making those "huge gobs of money," but at least they will have been liberated from the tyranny of making a living from their art. Finally their souls will be unsullied!

Such are the insights, anyway, of a well- received academic monograph published last year under the romantic title "Money Ruins Everything."

Its authors, a team of respectable social scientists, were stunned by what they found online: throngs of people who, instead of engaging in cost -benefit analysis, "produce content for the love of it, for the joy of expressing themselves, because it is fun, to demonstrate that they are better at it than others, or for a host of other non -commercial motivations."

Another recent research paper, this one published under the auspices of Harvard Business School, allays any suspicion you might have that lack of income could inhibit the world's creative output. A decline in "industry prohtability" won't hurt production, its authors assure readers, because artists' unique motivations will keep them churning out content even without pay. "The remuneration of artistic talent differs from other types of labor in at least two important respects. On the one hand, artists often enjoy what they do, suggesting they might continue being creative even when the monetary incentives to do so become weaker. In addition. artists receive a significant portion of their remuneration not in monetary form. " To quote the experts, "many of them enjoy fame, admiration, social status, and free beer in bars."

Some, like open-source activist and author Cory Doctorow, still believe "there's a pretty strong case to be made that 'free' has some inherent antipathy to capitalism." That hope is also reflected in a documentary about the virtues of remix

culture, Steal This Film II, which illustrates the rampant abuse of intellectual property by big business while making the case that enforcement of copyright would require a massive invasion of privacy. The movie then veers off course in a burst of willful naivete. "This is the question that faces us today," the voiceover coos: "If the battle against sharing is already lost, and media is no longer a commodity, how will society change?"

Here we come to the core, misguided assumption shared by many copyright reformists: if something is free, as in gratis, it has been decommodifled.

Of course if you want to see it that way, you will hear no disagreements from those masters of commodifIcation, the CEOs of Silicon Valley. Here the democratic impulse of liberal social scientists and anarchist hlmmakers finds its cynical echo. Kevin Kelly, "senior maverick" at Wired magazine, has also discovered uncompensated creativity and he just can't believe how awesome it is. "The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism," Kelly gushes, pointing to sites like Wikipedia, Digg and StumbleUpon. "We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism": Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories. we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks and shovels, we share apps, scripts and APIs . . . . Instead of government rations andsubsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

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This Is Rae Armantrout

1

"If you can read this, you're too close."

This has been specially hand-crafted in Mexico.

2

This is a five star trance.

To have this vantage from the cliff's edge, to get drunk on indifference,

"Hi, you'll do" on a tee-shirt

to stare

made by young girls in Thailand?

at a bright succession of crests

America poses in whose mirror?

raised from nothing and flattened

Irascible.

Insouciant.

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Behold the majesty of digital communitarianism: It's socialism without the state, without ideology, and, best of all, without the working class.

Where free is concerned, we're typically told that "the kids," impatient and entitled, want their culture this instant and will not pay a dime, so they've embraced piracy. But the young pirates aren't really leading a mass insurrection; they're a symbol or a scapegoat employed to obscure a larger struggle about culture and value-and in whose pocket that value accumulates. The owners of social networking sites may be forbidden from selling individual songs posted by members, but the companies themselves, including user content. can be turned over for a hefty sum: almost $900 million for Bebo and far more for YouTube. Google doesn't see the mammoth archive of books it currently hopes to digitize as a priceless treasure to be preserved; it's a trove of content to sprinkle with banner ads. Google, as Chris Anderson points out many times, succeeds because of an almost unfathomable economy of scale; each free search brings revenue from targeted advertising and fodder for the data miners: each mouse click is a trickle in the flood. Technology writer Nicholas Carr and others call this "digital sharecropping": It's not that the production or distribution of culture has been concentrated in the hands of the few-it's the culture's economic value. Somebody's got a massive financial interest in free, and it's not the people uploading footage of kittens to Vimeo.

And so we have our conversation about the enormous cultural restructuring that is going on, but we are having it in a senseless vocabulary where "content" takes the place of "art" and "information" substitutes for "culture," "knowledge," "literature," "music," "cinema" and "meaning."

All the mysteries of the creative process are flattened: the fickle nature of the muse, the idiosyncrasies of scholarship, and the tenacity required to compose a novel. All are reduced to nothing by analogies derived from the logic of computer code, data processing and high-tech business models.

But a deeper problem arises when the idiom of technology supplants traditional social criticism.

The "freedom" promoted by the software community always turns out to be the libertarian version. It's about freedom of information: the desire to see how something is made, to tinker, and to pass those insights and innovations along.

Copyleft, as the advocates of this all-purpose transparency call it, is not "left" in any traditional sense; it has nothing to say about entrenched systems of economic privilege or limits on profitability. Likewise, the open-source movement does not provide the blueprint for a fairer social order.

Techno-utopians, wonderstruck by the latest in programming geekery, project insights about software development onto the broader social sphere, and the rest of us mistake technology'S gee-whiz factor for theoretical sophistication.

Meanwhile, the most hyped solutions for survival in a free economy always turn out to be anathema to those who care about art. Make a video that goes viral and lands you a gig directing commercials, we're advised. Check out a cool app that embeds advertising in your film or song or book.

For artists who have spent years resisting corporate values, it is galling to constantly hear that advertising is to be the only viable source of sustenance in the emerging order of total freedom.

Maybe "free" will soon become just another way of saying "service economy." People won't pay for music, books or film any longer? The trick, we are told, is to find the "fee" in "free." Perhaps people will part with their money for the privilege of getting things quickly and with less hassle, kind of like how we buy bottled water when there's a tap down the hall. Or maybe artists can "add value" to their creations by making themselves into desirable products their audiences can "connect" with.

There was a time when the work took the spotlight and the artist receded into the background-no longer: In a world of digital super- abundance, the makers themselves are auto-generating precious scarcity. After all, when you're working for reputational currency, to use one of Anderson's stock phrases, you are your most valuable commodity.

Celebrity will become even more essential to creative survival, and the cultivation of friends, fans and followers will be a full-time job.

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The Baffler VoJume2NOI

spread among more than a few people, Free can't yet compare to Paid." Unless artists and their allies organize themselves, it never will. Until then, those who have dreamed up a way to cheat an entire category of workers and call it democracy will get to pose as political radicals, happily cashing their paychecks while telling others to work for nothing.

For now, however, the vast majority of artists struggle for sustainability, not proht-and in our rush to "free" we make them canaries in the coalmine of virtual capitalism. There are many self-reliant creators who, even though they appear successful enough, subsist humbly off the proceeds of their work. There are people who spend years toiling to produce something significant before persuading their audience to give them- for an album, a book or a hlm perhaps $10 or $20 dollars in return . Why not have those who are so eager to sever this meager source of sustenance make the first foray into the land of free? Imagine the savings to society if computer programmers or venture capitalists were paid in beer.

Obviously we must balance our desire for free stuff with a concern for work. But the opensource software tradition, our final authority on all social questions these days, has little to say about labor. oppression, compensation or collective bargaining. The supposed liberation heralded by those who promote free culture is winnertake-all; exploit or be exploited, as long as you share your code. Anderson concedes this point, acknowledging that if we "measure success in terms of the creation of vast sums of wealth

In the United States, direct government support of the arts peaked during the Cold War, when fear of a Soviet planet prompted a variety of cultural outreach programs at the behest of the State Department; since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the venture capital model has ruled supreme. Reduced to propaganda or product, art suffers. How relieved I am to be in possession of a Canadian passport. My fellow citizens enjoy access to resources, support and financing that are virtually inconceivable to our independent American counterparts. It's an altogether different form of "free," one based on an investment in creative work that doesn't prioritize profitability, thus liberating artists to explore non commercial avenues.

Meanwhile, here in America, pirates do the work of mass marketers, while industry pretends to defend the very artists they have exploited for so long. It is a cruel parody of the traditional distinction between art and commerce. As the critic Lewis Hyde observes, "When the song of one's self is coming all of a piece, page after page, an attic room and a chamber pot do not insult the soul." But the same message reduced to an economic truism - decline in industry profitability won't hurt artistic production because artists will work for beer-rings not just hollow, but obscene. There's a dignity, a right livelihood if you will, that comes from supporting oneself though creative work undertaken with integrity. Yes, artists will work for love, not money. There are many occupations where that is the case. But the idea of building a massively profitable industry on the uncompensated labor of, say, teachers, would strike most as loathsome, not daring and innovative. And definitely not progressive. ~

Joel Sternfeld Ruins of Drop Cittj, Trinidad, Colorado, August1995

Three of the original founders of Drop City met as art students in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1961. lhey referred to their practice of painting rocks and dropping them from a loft window onto the busy street below as "Drop Art." By 1965 the founders' desire to live rent free and create art without the distraction of employment led them to a six acre goat pasture outside Trinidad, Colorado, which they purchased for $450. Naming their community after their gravitydriven art was the easy part; building it a little harder. But having recently attended a lecture by Buckminster Fuller and now joined by a would路 be dome builder from Albuquerque, they began with scrap materials and visionary optimism. Sheet metal was stripped off car roofs (for which they paid a nickel or a dime) and attached to the grid of a dome. lhese building materials not only pro vided shelter, but they also emblemized the group's refusal to participate in consumerist society.

Money, clothing and cars were shared, and they lived as qu<lsi -dumpster divers.

Initially the community flourished. With a core group of twelve, it functioned as the founders had intended, <l hotbed of art- making. But a steady flow of publicity in underground and mainstream media, encouraged by resident Peter Rabbit, led to a torrent of guests. It has been reported that Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary and Jim Morrison visited, but the historian's chestnut, the primary account, may be less than reliable when it comes to the 1960s. By the time the community decided to abandon its open路 door policy, it was too late: the founding members had left, and conditions had taken hold that would bring <lbout a tina! dissolution in 1973. In 1978 the site was sold; proceeds helped rent space in New York City for exhibitions of the group's work and to publish it in Crisscross magazine.

The domes sat on the land oi A. Bhlsi and Sons Trucking Company until recently, when they succumbed to gravity.

Ruins of Drop City.

Trinidad. Colorado.

August 1995

Negative: 1995; Print: 2005 C-print Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine. New York

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No Logo at 10 Naomi Klein

As I write this, thinking about how much branding has changed in 10 years, a couple developments seem worth mentioning off the top. Absolut Vodka has recently launched a limited edition line called "Absolut No Label." The company's global travel-retail director, Anders Olsson, explains that the bottles-with "no label or logo" -are a way of expressing that "[i]n an Absolut world there are no labels. No one is judged on the basis of prejudice, and everybody is encouraged to be who they really are." That was in May 2009.

A few months later, Starbucks tried to avoid being judged by its own label by opening its first unbranded coffee shop. The "stealth Starbucks," as the distinct Seattle outlet immediately became known, is decorated with "one-of-a-kind" fixtures and, unlike at regular Starbucks shops, customers are invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system and their own pet social causes for the message board. The only hint of branding is the fine print on the backs of menus: "inspired by Starbucks." After spending two decades trying to blast its logo onto every conceivable surface, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.

Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I published No Logo.

But in the past 10 years I have written very little about developments like these. I realized why while reading William Gibson's 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition. The book's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin Man. So strong is this "morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace" that she has the buttons on her Levi's jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When I read those words, I immediately realized that I had a similar affliction. It was not one of those allergies that you are

born with but one that develops over time, due to prolonged overexposure. I wasn't always allergic to brands. As I confess in the pages of No Logo, as a child and teenager I was almost obsessively drawn to them. But writing the book required four years of total immersion in ad culture-four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, attending corporate seminars on brand management, making excursions to Nike Towns, to monster malls, to branded towns. And watching some of the worst movies ever made while taking notes in the dark on product placement.

Some of it was fun. But by the end, it was as if I had passed some kind of threshold and, like Cayce, I developed something close to a brand allergy.

Brands lost most of their charm for me, which was handy because once No Logo became a bestseller, even drinking a Diet Coke in public could land me in the gossip column of my hometown newspaper.

The aversion extended even to the brand that I had accidentally created: No Logo. From studying brands like Nike and Starbucks, I was well acquainted with the basic tenet of brand management: Find your message, trademark and protect it, and repeat yourself ad nauseam through as many synergized platforms as possible. I set out to break these rules whenever the opportunity arose. The offers for No Logo spin-off projects (feature film, TV series, clothing line ... ) were rejected. So were the ones from the megabrands and cutting-edge advertising agencies that wanted me to give seminars on why they were so hated.

(There was a career to be made, I was learning, in being a kind of anti-corporate dominatrix, making overpaid executives feel good by telling them what bad, bad brands they were.) And

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LA80J\ â&#x20AC;˘

KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY

against all sensible advice, I stuck by the decision not to trademark the title (that means no royalties from a line of Italian No Logo food products, though they did send me some lovely olive oil).

Most important to my marketing detox program, I changed the subject. Less than a year after No Logo came out I put a personal ban on all talk of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and Prada's new superstore and toward the growing resistance movement against corporate rule, the one that had captured world attention with the militant protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. "But aren't you your own brand?" clever interviewers would ask me endlessly. "Probably," I responded. "But I try to be a really crap one."

Changing the subject from branding to politics was no great sacrifice for me because politics was what brought me to marketing in the first place.

The first articles I published as a journalist were about the limited job options available to me and my peers-the rise of short-term contracts and McJobs, as well as the ubiquitous use of sweatshop labor to produce the branded gear sold to us.

As a token "youth columnist," I also covered how an increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching into previously protected spacesschools, museums, parks-while ideas that my friends and I had considered radical were absorbed almost instantly into the latest marketing campaigns for Nike, Benetton and Apple.

I decided to write No Logo when I realized that there was a connection among these seemingly disparate trends, and that connection was the idea that corporations should produce brands, not products. This was the era when corporate epiphanies were striking CEOs like lightning bolts from the heavens: Nike isn't a running shoe company, it is about the idea of transcendence through sports;

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The Baffler Volume 2 NOl

Starbucks isn't a coffee shop chain, it's about the idea of community. Down on earth, these epiphanies meant that many companies that had manufactured their products in their own factories, and had maintained large, stable workforces, embraced the now ubiquitous Nike model: Close your factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors, and pour your resources into the design and marketing required to fully project your big idea. Or they went for the Microsoft model: Maintain a tight control center of shareholder-employees who perform the company's "core competency" and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing code. Some called these restructured companies "hollow corporations," because their goal seemed to be to transcend the corporeal world of things so they could be an utterly unencumbered brand. As corporate guru Tom Peters put it: "You are a damn fool if you own it!"

The frantic corporate quest to get out of the product business and into the ideas business explained several trends at once. Companies were constantly on the lookout for new meaningful ideas, as well as pristine spaces on which to project them, because creating meaning was their new act of production. And of course jobs were getting crummier: These companies no longer saw produCing things as their "core" business.

For me, the appeal of dissecting brands like Nike or Starbucks was that pretty soon you were talking about everything except marketing-you were talking about how products are made in the deregulated global supply chain. You were talking about industrial agriculture and commodity prices. And pretty soon you were also talking about the nexus of politics and money that locked in these Wild West rules through free-trade deals and at the World Trade Organization, and made following them a precondition of receiving much - needed loans from the International Monetary Fund. In short, you were talking about how the world works; the t1ashy brands were merely our gateways.

By the time No Logo came out, the movement the book documents in its nascent form was already at the gates of the powerful institutions spreading

corporatism around the world. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were making their case outside trade summits and GS meetings in cities around the world, and in several cases stopping new agreements in their tracks. What the corporate media insisted on calling the" antiglobalization movement" was nothing of the sort.

At the reformist end it was anti-corporate; at the radical end it was anti -capitalist. But what made it unique was its insistent internationalism. All of these developments meant that when I was on a book tour, there were many more interesting things to talk about than logos -like where this movement came from, what it wanted and whether there were viable alternatives to the ruthless strain of corporatism that went under the innocuous pseudonym of "globalization." It was a thrilling period and on a personal level, I was deeply relieved not to have to read Advertising Age anymore.

In recent years, however, I have found myself doing something I swore I had hnished with: rereading the branding gurus quoted in No Logo.

Guys like Peters ("Brands, not products!") and Scott Bedbury ("A great brand raises the bar-it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience. ") This time, however, it wasn't to try to understand what was happening at the mall but rather at the White House-hrst under the presidency of George W Bush and now under Barack Obama, the hrst U.S. president who is also a superbrand.

There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled - the illegal invasions, the dehant defenses of torture, the tanking of the global economy. But the administration's most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the U.S. government what brandingmad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: It hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government' from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence. This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years; it was a central mission, reaching into every held of governance. And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process

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of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a shell~or a brand~was approached with tremendous focus and precision. They were good at this.

Explaining his administration's mission, budget director Mitch Daniels said, "The general idea~ that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided ~ seems self-evident to me."

One company that took over many of those services was Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor. "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States," observed a 2004 New York Times expose. "But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it. ... It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census.

It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft."

No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush's muchmaligned defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Having spent almost three decades in the private sector, heading tech companies and sitting on the boards of such blue-chip firms as Sears and Kellogg, Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. He entered the Defense Department not with the posture of a public servant but, rather, as a change agent channeling a celebrity CEO~ the guy with the guts to downsize and offshore and, most of all, to rebrand. For Rumsfeld, his department's brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said, sounding very much like Bill Gates, "we should seek suppliers who can provide these non -core activities efficiently and effectively. " And, channeling Tom Peters, he argued that it was time "to stop thinking about things, numbers of things, and mass." Addressing the Department of Defense in September 2001, Rumsfeld asked, "Why is 000 one of the last organizations around that still cuts its own checks? When an entire industry exists to run warehouses efficiently, why do we own and operate so many of our own?

At bases around the world, why do we pick up

our own garbage and mop our own floors, rather than contracting services out, as many businesses do?" Rumsfeld even went after the sacred cow of the military establishment: health care for soldiers. Why were there so many doctors? Rumsfeld wanted to know. "Some of those needs, especially where they may involve general practice or specialties unrelated to combat, might be more efficiently delivered by the private sector."

The laboratory for this radical vision was Iraq under U.S. occupation. From the start, Rumsfeld planned the troop deployment like a Wal- Mart vice president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. The generals wanted 500,000 troops; he would give them 200,000, with contractors and reservists filling the gaps as needed ~ a just -in -time invasion. In practice, this strategy meant that as Iraq spiraled out of control, an ever more elaborate privatized war industry took shape to prop up the bare-bones army. Blackwater, whose original contract was to provide bodyguards for U.S. envoy Paul Bremer, soon took on other functions, including engaging in combat with the Mahdi Army in 2004. And as the war moved into the jails, with tens of thousands of Iraqis rounded up by U.S. soldiers, private contractors even performed prisoner interrogations, with some later facing accusations of torture.

The sprawling Green Zone, meanwhile, was run as a corporate city-state, with everything from food to entertainment to pest control handled

by Halliburton. Just as companies like Nike and Microsoft had pioneered the hollow corporation, this was, in many ways, a hollow war. And when one of the contractors screwed up ~ Blackwater operatives opening fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007, for instance, killing 17 people, or Halliburton allegedly supplying contaminated water to soldiers~the Bush administration, like so many hollow brands before, was free to deny responsibility: These were independent contractors, they could argue, and there was nothing the government could do but review the contract.

Blackwater, which had prided itself on being the Disney of mercenary companies, complete with a line of branded clothing and Blackwater teddy

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bears, responded to the scandals by-what else? rebranding. Its new name is Xe. The dream of a hollow state was realized in its purest form at the Department of Homeland Security, abranch of government that , because it was brand new, could be built as an empty shell from the outset. As Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of the DHS, explained: "We don't make things . If it doesn't come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it."

She sounded like Nike CEO Phil Knight back in the Nineties when he declared "there is no value in making things anymore." Unlike Nike, however, which tells its contractors what kinds of products to make, the Department of Homeland Security didn't even do that. When it decided it needed to build "virtual fences" on the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, for instance, DHS deputy secretary Michael P. Jackson sent the word out to contractors: "This is an unusual invitation .... We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

The department's inspector general explained that Homeland Security "does not have the capacity needed to effectively plan, oversee and execute the [Secure Border Initiative 1program."

That same kind of can't-do attitude also applied when the financial system imploded in the fall of 2008 and the U.S. Treasury stepped in with a $700 billion bank bailout. Not only did it fail to attach meaningful strings to the money, but it

J. P. MORGAN

announced that it did not have the capacity to administer the program. It needed to outsource the saving of the banks to the very banks that created the disaster and were receiving the bailout funds. A case in point was the Bank of New York Mellon, which received $3 billion. The bank was also awarded the juiciest "master custodian" contract to administer the bailout. As Bank of New York Mellon President Gerald Hassell pointed out, "It's the ultimate outsourcing-because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury do not have the mechanics to run the entire program, and we're essentially the general contractor across the entire program. " It was a striking admission. By the end of eight years of self-immolation under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a governmentthe impressive buildings, presidential press briefings , policy battles-but it no more did the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike's Beaverton campus actually stitched running shoes. Governing, it seemed, was not its core competency.

The Bush administration's determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand" America in an increasingly hostile world. First came Charlotte Beers, hired as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan. Beers had no previous diplomatic experience; she had, however, held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, where she built brands for everything from dog food to power drills. When Secretary of State Colin Powell came under criticism for the appointment, he shrugged it off: "There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product.

We need someone who can rebrand American for eign policy, rebrand diplomacy." Besides , he said, "she got me to buy Uncle Ben's rice ."

Only a few months in, the experiment was in disarray. Beers's propaganda materials were greeted

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with derision. And when she went on a mission to Egypt to improve the perception of the US. among Arab "opinion makers," Beers ended up getting lectured on US. military bases, blanket support for Israel, and wars with unacceptably high levels of civilian casualties. After Beers quietly returned to Madison Avenue, the same thing happened to her successor, Karen Hughes, when she went on several "listening tours, " focusing in particular on forging a bond as a "working mother" with Muslim women. In Ankara, she was informed by a group of Turkish women's rights activists that the idea that the United States was an advocate for women's freedoms would remain laughable so long as the occupation of Iraq continued. "This war is really, really bringing your positive efforts to the level of zero," Hidayet Sefkatli Tuksal, an activist with the Capital City Women's Forum, told Hughes. Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Kurdish feminist, added that "war makes the rights of women completely erased, and poverty comes after war~and women pay the price." Hughes kept a low profile for the remainder of her tenure.

Watching these cringe-worthy attempts to "rebrand" America during the Bush years, I was convinced that Price Floyd, former director of media relations at the State Department, had it right.

After resigning in frustration, he said that the US. was facing mounting anger not because of the failure of its messaging but because of the failure of its policies. ''I'd be in meetings with other publicaffairs officials at State and the White House," Floyd told Slate magazine. "They'd say, 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say, 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.'" Exactly. A powerful imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe. You can't get the whole world to change its opinion of it just by getting "out there [to] tell our story," as Charlotte Beers put it.

America didn't have a branding problem; surely it had a product problem.

I used to think that, but I have since reconsidered.

When Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the American brand could scarcely have been

more battered ~ Bush was to his country what New Coke was to Coca-Cola, what cyanide in the bottles had been to Tylenol. Yet Obama, in what was perhaps the most successful rebranding campaign of all time, managed to turn things around. "The election and nomination process is the brand relaunch of the year," declared David Brain, CEO of Edelman Europe, Middle East and Africa, a global public relations giant. Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set out to depict visually what the new president represented. In a fullpage graphic in the stylish Paper MagaZine, he showed the Statue of Liberty with her legs spread, giving birth to Barack Obama. America, reborn.

It turned out that the US. government could solve its reputation problems with branding~ it's just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today's tough market.

The nation found that opportunity in Obama, who clearly has a natural feel for branding and has surrounded himself with a team of top- flight marketers. His social networking guru, for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook. His social secretary is Desiree Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama's top adviser, was formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm that, according to Business Week, "has quarterbacked campaigns" for everyone from Cablevision to AT&T. Together, the team has marshaled every tool in the modern marketing arsenal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral marketing (Obama Girl?

Genius!); a 3D-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but was universally heralded as "authentic"); and the choice of strategic brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for gravitas, and no end of hip- hop stars for street cred).

The first time I saw the "Yes We Can" video, the one produced by Black Eyed Peas trontman WilLi.am and featuring celebrities speaking and singing over a Martin Luther King-esque Obama speech, I thought~finally, a politician with ads

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as cool as Nike. The ad industry agreed. A few weeks before he won the presidential election, Obama beat out Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers' top annual award, Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the Nineties, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were rushing to piggyback on Obama's cachet (to wit: Pepsi-Cola's "Choose Change" campaign, Ikea's "Embrace Change '09," and Southwest Airlines' offer of "Yes You Can" tickets.)

Indeed, everything Obama and his family touch turns to branding gold. 1. Crew saw its stock price increase 200 percent in Obama's first five months in office, thanks in part to Michelle's well-known fondness for the brand. Obama's much-discussed attachment to his BlackBerry has been similarly good news for Research in Motion. The surest way to sell magazines and newspapers in these difficult times is to have an Obama on the cover, and all you need to do is call three ounces of vodka and some fruit juice an Obamapolitan or a Barackatini and you can get $15 for it, easy. In February 2009, Portfolio magazine put the size of "the Obama economy" ~ the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires~at $2.5 billion. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Desiree Rogers got into trouble with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with the Wall Street Journal. "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand, " she said. "Our possibilities are endless."

The exploration of those possibilities did not end, or even slow, with the election victory. Bush had used his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as a backdrop to perform his best impersonation of the Marlboro Man, forever clearing brush, having cookouts and wearing cowboy boots. Obama has gone much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. This too can be traced to the mid-Nineties branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional "experiences" ~branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the personality of their favorite brands. Rogers sounds just like those

branding gurus when she speaks about the White House as the "crown jewel" of the Obama brand, a physical space where the administration can embody the values of transparency, change and diversity that drew so many voters out on Election Day. Calibrating the White House megabrand means much talk of the importance of healthy eating ("Let's hear it for vegetables!" Michelle and a gaggle of schoolchildren cheered at the unveiling of the South Lawn garden}~but also field trips to Five Guys Burgers so no one thinks they're too preachy. It means corralling A-list celebrities to perform random acts of mentorship~ but also staying down-to-earth enough to redecorate the girls' bedrooms at Pottery Barn. And most of all it has meant, in addition to the usual state dinners, an endless procession of multicultural celebrations: the fountain dyed green on Saint Patrick's Day, a seder on Passover, a special gathering for the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo. As a brand, the Obama White House's identity is probably closest to Starbucks: hip, progressive, approachable~a small luxury you can feel good about even during tough economic times.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with this.

Why shouldn't a president who wants to change the country benefit from marketing as good as Starbucks and Nike? Every trans formative movement in history has used strong graphic design, catchy slogans and, yes, fashion to build its base.

Fifteen years ago, Nike appropriated the imagery of the civil rights movement and the icons of Sixties counterculture to inspire cult -like devotion to running shoes. Obama has used our faded memories of those same movements to revive interest in actual politics; surely that's a step up. So the problem is not that Obama is using the same tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to move the culture these days pretty much has to do that.

The problem is that, as with so many other lifestyle brands before him, his actions do not come close to living up to the hopes he has raised.

Though it's too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: He favors the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural

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change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison - while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing efforts to hold Bush officials who authorized torture accountable. He will boldly nominate the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions. the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Similarly. he will slam the unacceptable greed of banking executives. even as he hands the reins of the econ0my to consummate Wall Street insiders Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, who have predictably rewarded the speculators and failed to break up the banks. And most importantly. he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the oafish "War on Terror" phrase-even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In his preference for symbols over substance, and his unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, Obama decisively parts ways with the trans formative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (his Pop Art posters from Che. his cadence from King, his Yes We Can! slogan from the migrant farmworkers' Si, Se PuedeJ). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages. ambitious social programs. Because of those high-cost demands. these movements had not only committed followers but also serious enemies. Obama. in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to trans formative presidents like FDR. follows the logic of marketing: Create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires. but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wingnuts (who. granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the U.S.). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand was "big enough to be anything to anyone yet

had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy."

And then their highest compliment: "Mr. Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea. both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark -horse. upstart niche player. " Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti -war. anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party monopoly through dogged organization and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic Party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued "bipartisanship" with crazed Republicans once in the White House.

Has Obama's failure to live up to his lofty brand cost him? So far, not really. An international study

by Pew's Global Attitudes Project, released five months after he took office, asked people whether they were confident Obama would "do the right thing in world affairs." Even though there was already plenty of evidence that Obama was continuing many of Bush's core international policies (albeit with a far less arrogant style), the vast majority said they approved of Obama-in Jordan and Egypt, a fourfold increase from the Bush era.

In Europe the change in attitude could give you whiplash: Obama had the confidence of 91 percent of French respondents and 86 percent of Britonscompared with 13 percent and 16 percent, respectively, under Bush. The poll was proof that "Obama's presidency essentially erased the battering the USA's image took during eight years of the Bush administration." according to USA Today. David Axelrod puts it like this: "What has happened is that anti-Americanism isn't cool anymore."

That's certainly true, and has very real consequences. Obama's election and the world's corresponding love affair with his rebranded America came at a crucial time. In the two months before the election, the financial crisis rocking world markets was being rightly blamed not just on the

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contagion of Wall Street's bad bets but on the entire economic model of deregulation and privatizationcalled neoliberalism in most parts of the worldthat had been preached from U.S.-dominated institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. If the United States were led by someone who didn't happen to be a global superstar, its prestige would have continued to plummet and the rage at the economic model at the heart of the global meltdown would likely have turned into sustained demands for new rules to rein in (and seriously tax) speculative finance.

Those rules were supposed to have been on the agenda when G20 leaders met at the height of the economic crisis in London in April 2009 .

Instead, the press focused on excited sightings of the fashionable Obama clan, while world leaders agreed to revive the ailing International Monetary Fund with up to a trillion dollars in new financing.

In short, Obama didn't just rebrand America, he resuscitated the neoliberal economic project when it was at death's door. No one but Obama, wrongly perceived as a new FDR, could have pulled it off.

Yet rereading No Logo after 10 years provides many reminders that success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting than the quality of being cool. Many of the superb rands and branded celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or are in deep crisis today. Some overstretched. For others, their actual products began to feel rather disappointing next to the thrill of their marketing. (A black woman breastfeeding a white child to sell ... Benetton sweater-sets? Really?) And sometimes it was precisely their claims of political enlightenment that led activists to contrast their marketing image with their labor practices, with disastrous results for the brands.

The Obama brand could well suffer a similar fate.

Of course, many people supported Obama for straightforward strategic reasons: They rightly wanted the Republicans out, and he was the best candidate. But what will happen when the throngs of Obama faithful realize they gave their hearts not to a movement that shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political party,

one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for affordable health care, and Wall Street's addiction to financial bubbles before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have been saved with a better bailout?

The risk-and it is real-is that the response will result in waves of bitter cynicism, particularly among the young people for whom the Obama campaign was their first taste of politics.

Most won't switch parties; they'll just do what young people used to do during elections: stay home, tune out. Another, more hopeful possibility is that Obamamania will end up being what the president'S advisers like to call "a teachable moment." Obama is a gifted politician with a deep intelligence and a greater inclination toward social justice than any leader of his party in recent memory. If he cannot change the system in order to keep his election promises, it's because the system itself is utterly broken.

That was the conversation many of us were having in that brief period between the WIO protests in Seattle in November 1999 and the beginning of the so-called War on Terror. Perhaps it was a limitation, but for the movement the media insisted on calling "anti-globalization," it mattered little which political party happened to be in power in our respective countries. We were focused squarely on the rules of game, and how they had been distorted to serve the narrow interests of corporations at every level of governance-from international free trade agreements to local water privatization deals.

Looking back on this period, what I liked most was the unapologetic wonkery of it all. In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach -ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), which were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I had never

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witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were fmally looking at systems, not just symbols.

In some parts of the world, particularly Latin America, that wave of resistance only spread and strengthened. In some countries, social movements grew strong enough to join with political parties, winning national elections and beginning to forge a new regional fair trade regime. But elsewhere, September 11 pretty much blasted the movement out of existence. In the United States, progressive politics rallied around a single cause: "taking back" the White House (as if "we" ever had it in the first place), while outside America, the coalitions that had been focused on a global economic model now trained their attention on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on a resurgent "U.S. empire" and on resisting increasingly aggressive attacks on immigrants. What we knew about the sophistication of global corporatism - that all the world's injustice could not be blamed on one right-wing political party, or on one nation, no matter how powerful-seemed to disappear.

If there was ever a time to remember the lessons we learned at the turn of the millennium, it is now. One benefit of the international failure to regulate the financial sector even after its catastrophic collapse is that the economic model that dominates around the world has revealed itself not as "free market" but as crony capitalistpoliticians handing over public wealth to private players in exchange for political support. What used to be politely hidden is all out in the open now. Correspondingly, public rage at corporate greed is at its highest point in decades. Many of the points that supposedly marginal activists were making in the streets 10 years ago are now the accepted wisdom of cable news talk shows and mainstream op-ed pages.

And yet missing from this populist moment is what was beginning to emerge a decade ago: a movement that did not just respond to individual outrages but had a set of concrete demands for a

more just and sustainable economic model. Thus in the United States and many parts of Europe, far-right parties are now giving the loudest voice to anti-corporatist rage.

Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed

by Barack Obama. Rather, I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. Sure it was annoying, but after the apolitical Eighties, when there was, according to Margaret Thatcher, "no such thing as society," it also seemed like a good sign that these brands believed otherwise.

All of their high -priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping-for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to selliattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: Our ideas weren't as passe as we had been told. And since the brands couldn't fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.

Perhaps Obama should be viewed in much the same way. Once again, the market research has been done for us. What the election and the global embrace of Obama's brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous appetite for progressive change-that many, many people do not want markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe passionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part of a political project larger than themselves.

Those kinds of transformative goals are only achieved when independent social movements build the numbers and the organizational power to make muscular demands of their elites. Obama won office by capitalizing on our profound nostalgia for those kinds of social movements. But it was only an echo, a memory. The task ahead is to build movements that are-to borrow an old Coke slogan - the real thing. As Studs Terkel used to say: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up." ~

Antilogo No.1

Antilogo No.4

Antilogo NO.5

Antilogo No.3

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TheO-Word Michael Lind

The collapse of the world economy has rehabilitated a taboo phrase long banished to the fringes of political discourse in America: oligarchy. For generations the 0 -word has been used only by firebrands of the left or conspiratorial populists on the far right. So it came as a shock when the former Chief Economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, published an essay in The Atlantic last April arguing that the United States was in the grip of a financial-political oligarchy that closely resembled the ones that lorded over dysfunctional developing countries. The title of the piece aptly conveyed Johnson's sense of how dire this state of affairs is: "The Quiet Coup."

Of course, for many in the mainstream of respectable political opinion, this seemed like rhetorical excess. The U.S. might have an establishment-although even this term still bears connotations of disreputable populism. But an oligarchy?

If the term" oligarch" is to be more than a slur, like "plutocrat," then we should be clear about its meaning. An oligarchy is more than one of a number of interest groups or factions that fight and bargain in a system of Madisonian pluralism or take part in the cluster of elite battles over power that political scientist Robert Dahl calls "polyocracy." In an oligarchy, a kaleidoscopic pattern of interest -group competition breaks down because of a central, swollen interest group that dominates politics and the media as well as the economy.

But if it is bigger than an interest group, an oligarchy is also smaller than an aristocracy. The members of an oligarchy may be nepotistic, but their parentage doesn't dispose of their place in the hierarchy of power; that, instead, arises out of their positions in particular industries or organizations. An oligarchy, like the Mafia, can be simultaneously nepotistic and meritocratic.

Unlike the Mafia, though, an oligarchy is not a conspiracy. Indeed, quite the opposite: The members of the oligarchic elite do not need to operate in the shadows. They dominate all social institutionsso much so that they couldn't effectively conceal themselves even if they wanted to. In an oligarchy, be it Russia or Mexico, the relatively small group of people who appear to be in charge actually are.

In this common, not-at-all conspiratorial set of definitions, "oligarchy" is merely a descriptive term, denoting an exchange of elites across specialized sectors-such as the financial and political classesthat in some cases amounts to their fusion in a single elite. Indeed, the signal defining feature of an oligarchic system is lateral mobility at the top.

The flow of elites moves not just through one but a number of revolving doors, permitting ready entry into the spheres of politics, commerce and culture. This circular motion averts any notion of checks and balances or the work of elites being contained within separate spheres of activity and bound by a single code of professional ethics.

Defined in this way, oligarchy is more common in developing countries than in developed nations, since those societies suffer from a much smaller pool of talent. Since so few people in such social orders are educated or affluent, it's all but inevitable that members of a small number of families will dominate all social institutions-even if both politics and the economy are perfectly open and competitive. The elite professor is the sibling of the minister and the novelist and banker-and indeed could well be a minister and novelist and banker himself at different stages in life. By contrast, developed societies with broad middle classes and high levels of education can create a large enough pool of talent to permit the formation of distinct, specialized elites in government, finance, industry, the media and the academy.

Scale, too, is important. "The iron law of

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oligarchy" -the term that German sociologist Robert Michels adopted to characterize the upward consolidation of elite power-takes hold more readily in a city than in a state or province; while state and provincial institutions are more apt, comparatively speaking, to breed oligarchies than a large and diverse nation-state would be. lt is much easier for a cabal to take over a county than a country; and this explains why, although US. history has seen an abundance of local oligarchies, establishments and courthouse gangs, it's rarely witnessed the formation of a truly national oligarchy.

Only a few economic sectors are in a position to capture or fuse with the state. They tend to be basic industries furnishing a critical component of the infrastructure for the economy and the public sector-a good like land, credit or energy. Energybased oligarchies are common in petrostates like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Nigeria, as well as in some parts of the United States like Texas or Alaska. But it's more common for oligarchies to gravitate toward their traditional foundation in landed and financial wealth. At critical points in American history, land, commodities and finance have supplied resources for the elites that were able to ratchet their way upward into oligarchy: the Southern planters before the Civil War were one such land -based group, and the finance capitalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries established an oligarchic hold over the paper economy of the Gilded Age. Over time, the Southern plantocracy ripened into a national oligarchy. If modern Russia is a petrostate, the antebellum US. was arguably a cotton state, with cotton counting for half of American exports during much of the first half of the nineteenth century. Southerners dominated the federal government from the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 until the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. During much of this period the Southern planters were able to impose their will on the parties they did not control- the National Republicans, the Whigs, the short -lived American party - as well as the parties they dominated-Jefferson's Republicans, the Democratic Republicans and the

Democrats. Not only were they able to force the rest of the country to acquiesce in a balance of free and slave states in the Senate that gave their outnumbered section a veto on federal policy, but between 1836 and 1844 they were even able to impose a "gag rule" on the discussion of slavery in Congress.

They were able to do all this for a simple reason: They threatened to break up the union if they did not prevail. Here we see the chief source of informal oligarchic power-a credible threat to destroy the system unless the oligarchs get their way.

When Americans outside of the North called their bluff, the Southern oligarchy carried through with its threat to destroy the United States-and, if not for the refusal of Britain to intervene in the Civil War, it might have succeeded.

The second major American oligarchy, that of the Gilded Age robberbarons, likewise drew much of its influence from its power to shut down the system if necessary. Consider the financial trust at the heart of the numerous cartels of the erathe House of Morgan. By the early twentieth century, this ultra -elite group of financiers possessed a far greater capacity to mobilize resources and act effectively than did the underdeveloped, archaic federal government. When lP. Morgan organized his fellow capitalists to rescue the US. economy during the crisis of 1907, the lesson wasn't merely the need for a US. central bank, a need eventually met by the creation of the Federal Reserve. Morgan's show of strength dramatically demonstrated that the state was utterly dependent on the private sector-not a competitive private sector made up of many different elites, but a small and dominant group: an oligarchy, in other words. Just as it took a Second American Revolution to crush the power of the Southern planters, so it took the New Deal-a less violent but equally epochal Third American Revolution-to shatter the power of America's financial oligarchy.

Or should we say America's first financial oligarchy? A century after the House of Morgan dominated the American scene, is the United States now in the grip of a successor oligarchy? Simon

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Department to Wall Street and back again. After all, most federal agencies have used the same kind of portal to join the regulated to the regulators.

To be sure, the incestuous relationship between Goldman Sachs in particular and the Treasury Department is well documented; countless articles and exposes have pointed out that Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs while George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson had been its CEO. Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appointed an aide, Mark Patterson, who was a Johnson thinks so: "The great wealth that the former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. Paulson appointed Neel Kashkari, a former Goldman vice financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight-a weight president, to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). If ever there was a case of "regunot seen in the u.s. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man) .... But that first age of banking oli1atory capture" of a government agency by the garchs came to an end with the passage of signif- industry it is supposed to regulate, it is found in icant banking regulation in response to the Great the near-fusion between the Treasury Department Depression; the reemergence of an American and "Government Sachs."

Even so, viewed only in terms of these overlapfinancial oligarchy is quite recent. " Johnson was not the first to draw a parallel ping directorships and agency ~ppointments, the between the Morgan era and our own. A year prior Goldman case only shows that the financial sector to the 2008 collapse, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of is an extremely powerful interest group. But if Goldman Sachs, boasting about the success of the one plows on further, the evidence from campaign financial industry in eliminating New Deal-era finance records considerably strengthens the barriers to the consolidation of financial services case for oligarchy. During the 2008 election cycle, in a small number of universal banks, confidently Barack Obama's first, fourth and fifth largest pritold the New York Times that "if you take an vate sector donors, when universities are excluded, historical perspective, we've come full circle, were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan because that is exactly what the Rothschilds or Chase (Morgan Stanley was thirteenth). Goldman lP. Morgan were doing in their heyday."

Sachs, Obama's largest private contributor, was The metaphor of the octopus has been abused also John McCain's fourth largest. by conspiracy theorists, for whom this or that Between January and September 2009, the social institution are mere tentacles of an octopus financial services industry spent $10.6 million in identified with the Jews, or the Freemasons, or the contributions to politicians. The lion's share, more Bilderbergers, or the Council on Foreign Relations. than $7.7 million, went to Democrats. Among As invertebrates go, however, the octopus-or, to individual politicians, Democratic Senator Chuck use Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi's descripSchumer of New York got the most -$1.65 million, tion of Goldman Sachs, a "great vampire squid"- nearly twice what any other senator received from is as good a metaphor for an oligarchy as the leech the industry. "In addition to collecting money is for the run-of-the-mill interest group. A group for himself," Politico notes, "Schumer has helped is an oligarchy only if its tentacles reach into most [Kristen] Gillibrand, the state's junior senator, elite sectors, not just one or two. get her share of industry dollars" - in the amount For that reason, it is not enough to demonstrate of $886,000. Wall Street also showered campaign a revolving door leading from the U.S. Treasury contributions on Senate Majority Leader Harry

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Reid ($814,000) and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd of Connecticut ($603,000). Each of the parties is funded by its own traditional interest groups-plaintiffs attorneys and unions in the case of the Democrats, and small business and extractive industries in the case of Republicans. But with Wall Street dominating the fundraising for both parties, the financial sector is clearly acting in the manner of an oligarchy.

The case is a bit more muddy, though, when we descend a bit from the commanding heights of politics and the economy and look at the media and nonprofit sectors. There's not yet a strong media tentacle of the financial services octopus.

The mainstream media have always had concentrated ownership-GE and Murdoch today, the three networks in the past-but a Goldman or J. P. Morgan network has yet to be founded.

Nevertheless, the business press in both the electronic and print media are deeply compromised-and indeed co-opted-by uncritical coverage of the finance sector's interests. This is not necessarily evidence of corruption or control. Reporters generally "go native" to maintain access to their sources-be they in the White House, the military or Wall Street.

After Taibbi published a slashing attack on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone, it wasn't hard to see just how thoroughly financial reporters had adopted the protective coloration of their beatto the point of turning on a member of their own professional caste. Columnists for Slate's "Big Money" were particularly sycophantic. One "Big Money" columnist, Heidi N. Moore, devoted two columns to attacking Taibbi. The first: "Will Everyone Please Shut Up About Goldman Sachs?

The bank has a culture that works. So what?"

(July 29,2009). The second: "Matt Taibbi is Just Plain Wrong: Goldman Sachs may be bad, but it's far from the worst." (August 6, 2009).

On July 16,2009, "Big Money" columnist Mark Gimein weighed in with "Yes, We Do Need Goldman Sachs: Trying to ban 'obscene' profIts is a bad idea." He denounced Taibbi for "a comprehensive exercise in conspiracy mongering":

Goldman haters like to weave a narrative that connects the dots between Goldmanites and former Goldmanites who are supposed to rule the world in a one-degree-of -Goldman-Sachs fashion. The list expands until, as Taibbi himself says, it becomes a list of everything, like those lists of members of the Trilateral Commission and the members of the Council on Foreign Relations so beloved by an earlier generation of conspiracy theorists. The guiltby-association parlor game is always a fun game to play and invariably yields terrifIc results- Matt Taibbi's Goldman Sachs investi gation appears in Rolling Stone, the magazine that started the bogus vaccine-autism scare!

The very same magazine responsible for dozens of young children needlessly dying of measles! The anti-Goldman lobby associates with child killers!

Of course, for such histrionics to be remotely applicable in analogizing the Goldman - Treasury link to magazine journalism, Gimein would have to show that Rolling Stone was in a position to exploit policy blinds pots in the Centers for Disease Control to create astronomical profits-and that numerous former Rolling Stone editors were either appointed surgeon general or were key gatekeepers for federal research grants earmarked for the study of the alleged connection between autism and the flu vaccine. But of course, that is to reject the game of asserting clever, fake contrarian sweeping judgments where the evidence to support them is nonexistent.

Still, the United States is not yet Vladimir Putin's Russia: Journalists are not being knee-capped for criticizing Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase.

It's only when we turn to the nonprofit worldand particularly the think tank sector - that we can apprehend just how fully the financial sector operates as an intellectual oligarchy.

Robert Rubin, the central figure of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party, is the founder of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institutionnamed for Rubin's long-ago predecessor as Treasury secretary. Alexander Hamilton, who,

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ironically, favored the kind of economic nationalism that neoliberal Democrats like Rubin repudiate.

While housing former Clinton and future Obama appointees like Larry Summers, Jason Furman and Peter Orszag, the Hamilton Project has aggressively promoted the ideology of neoliberalism that has shaped both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Neoliberalism is really a form of moderate conservatism. In the words of Larry Summers, who began his career working happily for Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, "any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all [Milton] Friedmanites," a canny post-Reagan inversion of Richard Nixon's renowned declaration that "We are all Keynesians now." The only "liberal" aspect of neoliberalism is the chastened Democratic support for a slightly stronger safety net with the political goal of reconciling workers to the disruption caused by deregulated markets.

Otherwise, neoliberalism is a variant of free- market fundamentalism, combining the "Washington Consensus" policies of trade and financial liberalization in global economic policy with deregulation of industry in general and the financial industry in particular.

As is well known, during the Clinton administration, Rubin and Summers blocked attempts by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to regulate derivatives, arguing that regulation might spook the markets.

And along with a broad constituency of industry leaders and lobbyists, Clinton-era financial regulators enthusiastically supported the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal-era law that separated investment banking from commercial banking' enabling a few "financial supermarkets" not only to swell to immense dimensions, but also to gamble with the money of ordinary depositors.

The collapse of the world economy might have discredited the markets- first worldview of neoliberalism and its boosters; instead, it has, if anything, prompted the neoliberal consensus to close ranks and fortify its federal backing. Unlike the Roosevelt administration and its Democratic allies in Congress in the 1930s, the Obama administration and today's Democratic leaders view Wall

Street as their major constituency, rather than as a threat to the public interest. Led by Summers and Geithner, the Obama administration dismissed proposals early on in the crisis to nationalize insolvent financial institutions, electing instead to bail them out at taxpayer expense. The administration's proposals for "reform" of the financial markets are so feeble-a macroprudential or "super-duper" regulator, higher capital requirements-that they have drawn widespread scorn.

Reform ideas that would challenge the wealth and political power of Wealth Street's major surviving players-a new GlaSS-Steagall that would separate commercial from investment banking, the application of antitrust to financial institutions-are limited to the Democratic Party's marginalized progressive wing. The sole champion of a new GlassSteagall act, for instance, within the Obama White House is former Fed chair Paul Volcker, who now heads the largely honorific Economic Recovery Advisory Board -and is so far out of the reigning Washington debate over economic policy that he rarely even bothers showing up in his own office, according to a recent report in the New York Times.

Barack Obama, who owed his primary victory over Hillary Clinton and his general election victory over McCain in large part to the Wall Street money that he mobilized, appears to view the world from the perspective of his major donors and advisers.

In an interview with Bloomberg News in September' Obama protested: "Why is it that we're going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?" As Paul Krugman responded, "Tech firms don't crash the whole world's operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don't have to be rescued with hundred -billion -dollar bailouts." On the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Obama gave a speech on Wall Street calling for reform. Not a single CEO from a leading bank attended. If they feared being given offense, they were mistaken -Obama blamed the victims and the victimizers equally. "It was a failure of responsibility that led homebuyers and derivative traders alike to take reckless risks

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they couldn't afford to take. It was a collective failure of responsibility in Washington, on Wall Street, and across America that led to the nearcollapse of our financial system one year ago."

The Uses of Adversity Such anodyne talk of financial crimes without perpetrators is reassuring indeed to the big-donor base of today' s Democratic party. But it points up a much broader distemper in our public discourse.

Where Theodore Roosevelt spoke plainly about "malefactors of great wealth" and his cousin later decried the obstructionist reflexes of "economic royalists" during the height of the New Deal, the present generation of Democratic leaders appears constitutionally unable to call economic predation by its true name.

This suggests a factor that marks the ultimate measure of oligarchic domination: The process known as "cognitive regulatory capture" has moved out of the narrower orbit of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve and has quietly overtaken most of the American political and intellectual elite. During the Bush years, libertarian conservatives mounted a failed crusade to supplant "the welfare state" with "the ownership society" in public discourse, and their allied push to partly privatize Social Security proved politically disastrous. But in the broader scheme of things, the ideologues of the market have succeeded as arbiters of usage and semantics, transposing many of their foundational assumptions into what German sociologists (who else?) call the Lebenswelt or "life-world." For example, what used to be called "developing countries" are now commonly referred to by a term that originated among investors"emerging markets." Something has changed profoundly when Mexico and China are no longer nations but "markets."

And increasingly, that usage has drifted upward in the global economic order, with developed nations such as the United States forfeiting their standing as republics or nations in official discourse for the more clinical and bloodless conception of them as markets-more fully emerged and fear-

somely scaled than their counterparts in the erstwhile developing world, but markets nonetheless.

This seemingly small shift in terminology stands out in especially stark relief when compared to the twentieth century's ideological rivalries among nations: During the world wars and the Cold War, the United States and its major democratic allies defined themselves by contrast with "totalitarianism" as "the democracies." Especially during the Cold War, the global battle between political freedom and political unfreedom gained far more currency than the more technocratic characterization of the conflict as a mere struggle between two rival economic systems, capitalism and communism or socialism.

Following the Cold War, the Clinton adminis tration, as part of its evangelism on behalf of "globalization," defined the foreign policy strategy of the United States as the mission to "enlarge the circle of market democracies." This curious formulation implied that the rival model was not the authoritarian or totalitarian state, but "non-market democracies."

What is a non-market democracy? For that matter, what is a market democracy? At the height of the New Deal, during the Thirties and the Forties, it was fairly standard practice to refer to the United States and similar advanced industrial nations as "mixed economies," combining to varying degrees socialism. competitive capitalism, and state

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capitalism or utility capitalism. Even though the United States never nationalized major industries or banks, as Western European democracies did at times, it combined capitalism with socialism, via social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare. To define the United States not only as a democracy but as a "market democracy," as the Clinton administration did, was to imply that America's home-grown version of social democracy was as illegitimate in the New World as the brand of social democracy incubated in Europe.

Indeed, the Clinton administration applied the Washington Consensus-which then, as in the present Democratic era, favored privatization and liberalization of market regulation for the United States as well as for the inhabitants of what are now called "emerging markets." Declaring that "the era of big government is over," Clinton collaborated with the Republican Congress in destroying one New Deal era federal entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDc), and came close to proposing partial privatization of Social Security. Rejecting the single-payer approach to social insurance of New Deal Democrats from Roosevelt to Truman to Johnson, Clinton proposed a health care reform that, like Obama's later plan, was so deferential to the private sector that it was strangled by its own contortions. And Vice-President Al Gore was identified with the fad of "reinventing government," which for the most part meant the privatization and outsourcing of government functions-a trend that culminated under George W Bush with the costly and often lawless privatiza-

tion and outsourcing of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In short, from the Seventies to the present, a sort of New Deal in reverse took place, with the blessing of Democrats like Carter, Clinton and now Obama. Deregulation, combined with deliberately lax oversight, reduced the effectiveness of government in the realm of finance, even as it liberated the financial industry to revive practices known only from the history books during the middle of the twentieth century.

And as we gaze out further on the Washington Consensus that drives the conceptualization of domestic policy, we find a still more insidious adaptation of financial thought in the notion of "human capital." Just as "market democracy" replaced "democratic republic" as our dominant national self-image, so has the formation of "human capital" replaced "education" as one of our chief prescriptive social aims. Since the eighteenth century, most Americans had viewed the purpose of education as political-to inculcate the critical thinking and the knowledge necessary for citizens to play their parts in preserving a democratic republic from the machinations of demagogues and tyrants. But in the late twentieth century, the language of the corporate boardroom and the consulting firm replaced the language of Lockean republicanism. The individual was a firm, and the child was a start-up. Teachers were venture capitalists tasked with the mission of how best to invest "human capital" in a classroom full of fledgling enterprises competing with billions of other human firms in the new, borderless global marketplace.

Never mind that in reality, four-fifths of the U.S. workforce toils in the domestic service sector, engaged in activities that can only be performed in the United States and are immune to foreign competition. Never mind that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the jobs to be created within our borders require only a high school education plus brief on-the-job training. To continue in the vein of our age's overmastering market rhetoric, policymakers regard such data as lagging indicators. In the financialized discourse of post-Cold War America, the human capitalist

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has supplanted the citizen, to be equipped with tools by the investor-state and then sent out to flourish or fail in competition with legions of unseen rivals in the new global economy.

Just as banks and other financial institutions are stuffed with toxic financial products like subprime mortgages and credit default swaps, so are the minds of educated people in the United States and around the world now filled with toxic intellectual products: "emerging markets," "market democracies" and "human capital." We have witnessed the financialization not only of the American economy but also of the American mind.

Toxic Avengers If this gradual financial takeover of the Lebenswelt is not the sign of a full- fledged American oligarchy' it is, at the least, a deeper oligarchic drift within American society. It no longer would be sufficient to liberate politics and the real economy from the domination of the crippled but still bloated and abusive financial sector; the challenge ahead is to discard theories and vocabularies that make financialization seem natural-and therefore effectively invisible.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the planters and the finance capitalists issued their ultimatums in their plays for greater power, the American people responded by strengthening the central government to render it less vulnerable to intimidation. The Southern slaveowners could credibly threaten an antebellum federal government with a tiny, incompetent army and no national banking system. The national government that emerged between 1861 and 1865 was a far stronger, sturdier institution. As a result, we haven't heard much from secessionists since General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox.

A century ago, the incompetence of the federal government in dealing with a modem economy was revealed in the most humiliating way by J. P. Morgan's rescue of the financial system.

Once again, the response to oligarchy in the first half of the twentieth century was to expand federal authority-and to cut finance down to size,

to the point that it was more or less a boring utility during the post -war Golden Age of American capitalism that lasted until the Seventies.

Today, as in previous eras, a too-feeble government faces an economic oligarchy that can threaten to shut the whole system down if it does not get its way. What else does "too big to fail" mean? The Obama administration has argued that the federal government lacked the manpower and resources to supervise the bankruptcy of major Wall Street funds and other financial institutions.

If the problem is a lack of government capacity and not merely political will, then the solution should be obvious: Create that capacity. The crash of 2008 provided an opportunity to rightsize America's financial regulatory regime, while downsizing and trimming an out-of-control financial industry.

Unfortunately, the capture of the Obama administration and both parties by Wall Street already may have ensured that the political system has missed that opportunity. It is increasingly likely that there will be insufficient reform, followed in time by another debacle-and, perhaps, another opportunity for reform. If the next opportunity is not to be missed as well, then reforms that go to the root of the problem -such as a new Glass-Steagall-style division of retail banking from investment banking and speculation, along with the replacement of revolving doors with firewalls between the financial industry and its regulators-must be at the center of the debate and not on the sidelines.

But reform will fail unless it is accompanied by the liberation of thought and language themselves from the semantic hegemony of market fundamentalism. We must insist that we live in a country, not an economy; that while our economic system is and should be predominantly capitalist our society is liberal and our form of government is democratic; and that maintaining a republican community depends on the health of a broad and independent middle class, not on the wealth of a tiny investor elite. Most of all, we must think as well as act as though we belonged to the nemesis of an oligarchy: a citizenry. ~

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A Cottage for Sale The High Price of Sentimentality A.S.Hamrah A little dream castle With every dream gone . ...

The Christmas Cottage, a biopic about the artist Thomas Kinkade, famous for the quaint -scary -ugly paintings he sells in shopping malls, is a cinematic portrait of the multimillionaire artist as a young man. Kinkade co-produced the movie, which went straight to DVD when it came out in 2008. In a pivotal scene, the budding "Painter of Light," home from college, gathers with his mother and younger brother on Christmas morning.

It's the mid-Seventies in Placerville, California, a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

The Kinkades are a poor family living in a rundown house. Kinkade's mother, divorced from his father, has lost her job, and because she is generous to other people in the town- "she loaned people money, she gave people things" -and because she refuses assistance from anyone else, the Kinkades are about to lose what they call "the cottage." The bank is foreclosing; they've only got a few days left to pay.

Young Thom-the grown-up artist spells the short version of his name that way-and his brother have been working hard to raise money for their mother's overdue mortgage payment, but they haven't put together enough cash. They can't save the house, so understandably they don't have store-bought Christmas gifts to exchange.

Instead, Thom (J ared Padalecki, from Gilmore Girls) presents his mother (Marcia Gay Harden) with a picture of their house he's drawn himself, so she'll always have something by which to remember what they're about to lose.

At that moment, in bursts the rest of the film's cast, made up of character actors from old TV shows-Charlotte Rae from The Facts of Life, the guy who played Bull on Night Court. Are they there to save the day and end the film the way

It's a Wonderful Life ends? Not exactly. They don't come bearing money to make things right with the bank the way the townspeople do in Capra's film. They arrive carrying tools and cans of paint. If the Kinkade cottage can't be saved for the Kinkades, they figure they can at least fix it up so it can be sold for more money than it would have if it remained broken down and leaky.

They arrive in the nick of time not to save Maryanne Kinkade but to help her flip her house, and possibly to make sure its appearance doesn't drive down their own property values. They quickly get to work, and in a jiffy the cottage looks brand new.

But Maryanne is still stuck in the same sinking boat-it just looks nicer. That afternoon, true economic salvation arrives in the form of Peter O'Toole, decrepit but still more powerful than a troupe of yesterday's sitcom stars. The former Lawrence of Arabia, playing an old, dying painter who inhabits the barn next door, drags himself across the snowy wastes of the Kinkades' yard carrying an unknown masterpiece. At Christmas dinner, the painter, a renowned artist who has retired to Placerville, unveils what will be his last work on canvas. "You will sell it!" he thunders. "It should bring you enough to keep this cottage forever!"

And it does. The Kinkades save their house.

The painting, the film's narration tells us, "is now owned by a museum in New York." Never mind that that isn't true-on the DVD commentary track Kinkade says he doesn't know the whereabouts of the painting that saved his childhood home. What's important is that in Thomas Kinkade's originating myth, two things happen. First, he substitutes a picture he's drawn of a house for the thing itself, giving the representation to his mother to replace the real thing; second, it is not community that

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Previous page and top: Installation view, Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth, curated by Jeffrey Vallance, Grand Central

Art Center, California State University Fullerton, Santa Ana, Ca1ifornia, 3 April-27 May 2004.

Photo: Mark Chamberlain

Bottom: Thomas Kinkade and Jeffrey Vallance in Kinkade's studio, 2004.

Photo: Greg Escalante

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saves the house, but the sale of a painting, which is worth much more. Young Thom learns a lesson the film pretends it isn't teaching. Community only goes so far; art is money in the bank.

Whoever has no house now, will never build one.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Autumn Day"

Others recoil. Joan Didion mentions Kinkade in Where I Was From, her memoir of California.

A Kinkade painting, she writes, was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

The day before I saw The Christmas Cottage, I saw Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York, which begins with that line of Rilke's heard over a radio. The two films have a lot in common. Both It's a passage that has become permanently are about painting, theater, old age and death; both associated with Kinkade; it's included in his Wikipedia write-up. On The Christmas Cottage's are about real estate. In The Christmas Cottage, young Thom paints a mural of Placerville in the commentary track, the artist tells a story he'd town square while his mother rehearses a Christ- probably rather have people recall when they look at his work. He says that as the son of a single mas pageant at her church; in Synecdoche, New York, a theater director rehearses a play after mother who worked late, he often came home his wife, a painter of miniatures, deserts him. to a house that was dark and cold, especially in The Christmas Cottage is a meta-movie like Syn- winter. The "Kinkade glow" represents what he wished was there instead. He tells the story more ecdoche, New York-its alternate title could be than once, which raises a question or two: Didn't Being Thomas Kinkade-but it's a meta-movie for God -fearing grandparents. It ends with Kinkade he maybe just want to burn the place down? Is his himself daubing a fleck of yellow on a painting art really a form of arson? of the cottage whose story we have just seen, The way Kinkade sells his paintings certainly the kind of painting Kinkade sells to old people bespeaks a desire to make people pay. At a time when massive numbers of homes are going into in his mall stores. foreclosure all over the country, Kinkade's sales Of the themes the two films share, it's real method seems designed to drive buyers further into estate that seals the Kinkade- Kaufman connecdebt. A big sign in the Kinkade gallery in Placerville tion. In fact, real estate links Synecdoche, New York to Thomas Kinkade's work in general, not promises Wells Fargo Financing-I2 months just to The Christmas Cottage. In Kaufman's film, interest-free-$O down-IS-minute approval.

Kinkade's sales system is confusing. It includes one character buys and lives out her life in a house that is always on fire. It's even on fire the first time licensed gallery stores, their websites, his own a real estate agent shows it to her. The fire isn't website, and other venues as well. As I write this, Kinkade's main website is offering Sizzling explained; it's just part of the package. We have to accept it, just as we have to accept that the Summer Deals- Up to 70 Percent Off! Does that violent orange glow that emanates from the inte- indicate a new understanding of the plight of the rior of nearly every house in a Kinkade painting people he calls "my collectors," or is it a Kinkamerely indicates that the house is warm and dian fire sale intended to unload stock that isn't inviting, not burning to the ground. moving in a bad economy?

The appearance Kinkade houses have of being When I visit the Placerville showroom, exalted on fire is something that glares from his paintings. in the system because it's his "Hometown Gallery," It's unsettling, but it's something people who like I notice a painting called "Sunday Outing" selling Kinkade paintings don't notice or don't mind. for $150,000. Kinkade's cottage paintings don't

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usually have people in them but this one does .

The family in it looks like they're fleeing a burning house. The price was written on the wall-tag in ballpoint pen over another price that had been covered with Wite-Out. I ask the saleslady working in the gallery if they'd lowered the price of "Sunday Outing, " which was not one of the touched -up reproductions Kinkade is known for but an original signedwith "John 3:16" next to Kinkade's Norman Rockwell-like signature. "Uh, no," she replies, with just a hint of the scorn you expect in an art gallery. "We actually raised it."

Why not? Kinkade can afford to dream. The one uncheckable factoid everything written on him can't fail to include is that supposedly one in 20 American homes has a Kinkade hanging in it.

"What the heck, I'm a romantic," he says on the Christmas Cottage commentary track, explaining that he paints "an art that comforts your heart and reminds you of foundational things, a very sentimental kind of art." When Oscar Wilde wrote that "a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it," he didn't know that someday an American painter would find a way to make sentimentalists pay for it in monthly installments.

The plate-glass display window of the Kinkade gallery on Main Street in Placerville features a big painting called "Nascar Thunder." The painting is detailed and complicated, featuring a termite-like mound of Nascar fans filling stands that recede into the horizon as jets and a blimp fly in formation overhead and fireworks explode in the sky. This painting is in Kinkade's lucrative-commission style, not in the gemutlich -unheimlich style of his cottage paintings. It's a vast fictional panorama that uses items from reality to gauze up a location of idealized American spectacle that never was and won't ever be. Kinkade moves further into the realm of Hansel and Gretel fantasy with his series of Disney commissions, one of which is called "Snow White Discovers the Cottage."

What do these paintings mean in Placerville, a town that has seen better days as recently as 1852, the year the California Gold Rush ended? Outside the gallery, stores sell funny postcards of shacks

,

4L:'..... .

reading For Sale: California Home Bargain-Only $999,950.00. Postcards like that predate the mortgage crisis; out-of-whack real estate prices have long been a subject for humor at the funny-postcard level of American culture, and so have postcards of dilapidated shacks; you can find them in every state. They keep disaster and unaffordability at arm's length. In Placerville these postcards remind me that the houses Kinkade paints were inspired by ones he saw in this town growing up, and that in a 16 -point manifesto Kinkade wrote for the crew of The Christmas Cottage that was leaked to Vanity Fair's website, he advised the filmmakers to "favor shots that feature older buildings, ramshackle, careworn structures," to avoid filming "shopping centers and contemporary storefronts" like the kind in which his paintings are sold, and to "avoid anything that is shiny." In the windows of a nearby real estate agency, half the fliers note the houses for sale are "Bank Owned!!" Half the storefronts on Main Street are for rent. None of them is shiny.

The Christmas Cottage was not shot in Placerville (because of "logistics," says Kinkade on the DVD commentary track). According to the film's credits, it was shot in British Columbia, Canada, "in the Historical City of Fort Langley."

A thorough search of Placerville's walls and hoardings turns up no mural of the town like the one young Kinkade paints in The Christmas Cottage.

The woman who runs the Placerville Historical Museum tells me the mural does not exist and

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never existed. The closest thing, she says, is the painting he gave to the town's library. She hands me a xeroxed copy of a skeptical article about Kinkade from a 2002 issue of Newsweek she saves for tourists who inquire about the artist. "Given that art's value is predicated on scarcity, how can anyone create an appreciating market for massproduced 'limited editions'?" the article asks, before letting readers know that Kinkade's factory "churns out 10,000 pieces a month, each signed by a 'DNA pen' containing drops of Kinkade's blood."

The closest things to outdoor murals in Placerville are the crude mountain -snow and duck -pond scenes painted on the boarded -up windows of a Main Street building that once housed a bar and a tae kwon do school. Both are out of business, and the building is falling down. Across the street an Original Mel's Diner, filled with blown-up photos from American Graffiti printed with George Lucas' autograph, offers a competing, more specific nostalgia to the nebulous kind that informs Kinkade's cottage paintings. I have lunch there, wondering if I should order cottage cheese.

at Hiddenbrooke, a gated community within a gated community in Vallejo, California.

When you look at Hiddenbrooke on a map, it hovers to the northeast of Vallejo like a stray kidney, an errant jellyfish, or a comic strip thought bubble. The day I drove to the Kinkade Village the gates were stuck open: The roads were being repaved and the pavers had broken the gate. When the Village at Hiddenbrooke opened in 2001 and the houses there were selling for about $400,000, it got a lot of press, much of it sarcastic and disappointed because the development wasn't sufficiently Kinkadian and horrible.

While the houses superficially resemble those in Kinkade's paintings, they are not the fantasias you would expect. They are on small lots, each lot about a tenth of an acre. They stand close to each other, huddled under brown hills, not nestled alone in forests or by the seashore. The skies in Vallejo are blue and hot, not dramatic and variable like the skies in Kinkade's paintings. The houses feature details taken from Kinkade's work ~ turrets and dormers and exposed stonework~but they don't differ substantially from the other houses And the people lived in marvels of art ~and in Hiddenbrooke, except that many of those are ate and drank out of masterpieces~ for there bigger, built in a faux-Craftsman style on bigger was nothing else to eat and to drink out of, lots, and set in the hills to give them a bird's-eye and no bad building to live in; no article of view of the development's golf course and the daily life, of luxury, or of necessity, that had Kinkade village below. not been handed down from the design of the In the early afternoon on the summer weekmaster, and made by his workmen. day I chose to visit, the Village at Hiddenbrooke ~James McNeill Whistler, "The Ten O'Clock" has a deserted, eerie feel, like the set of a David Lynch film. It is quiet as I walk past the gate, save The Thomas Kinkade Company has licensing for the yapping of a small dog coming from inside agreements with more than so companies to one of the houses on one of the Village's seven produce various Kinkade-branded items. These little streets. I walk down the middle of these include everything from books, clocks, night streets; no cars come by. None is parked by the lights, calendars and candle holders to more curb or in a driveway, either. Being there is like elaborate-sounding artifacts: live flower arrange- being in a Children's Fairyland version of Omega ments, glow-in-the-dark puzzles, fuzzy posters, Man. The place is as depopulated as one of and "coasters made out of natural sandstone Kinkade's cottage paintings. and/ or dolomite/ gypsum." You can get a KinkadeAfter wandering around for a while, I come branded checkbook cover and a book of Kinkade- to a cul-de-sac and meet a lone man standing branded personal bank checks and use them to in front of his house with a poodle. He identifies pay for his paintings, or maybe for the mortgage himself as Mr. Jensen. He moved to the Village on your house in the Kinkade-inspired Village at Hiddenbrooke with his wife when the devel-

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Exercise Jack Spicer

Is it the word "dream" that causes so much trouble?

Dreams are there like clouds floating endlessly in an except for them blue sky Over the rim Is it the word, dream, that causes trouble?

The clouds move in such unsignificance The winds blowing there That Flag.

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opment opened, he says, because she's a Kinkade fan. They have some Kinkades they've put on their walls. He tells me most of the people here decorate with Kinkades.

There were two foreclosures in the Village and two short sales that Mr. Jensen knew of. One Village short sale I investigated was for a 4-bedroom, 31h -bath model the owners bought in 2005 for $675,000 and were selling at the insistence of the bank for $333,000. I ask Mr. Jensen about the school featured on the map of Hiddenbrooke that I hadn't been able to find as I drove around.

The school was never built, he tells me, because the residents were afraid the city would force it to take local children from Vallejo. Hiddenbrooke residents do not want locals "coming over the hill," Mr. Jensen explains. "Ninety -five percent of the kids here go to private school, anyway ," he says. "We don't need a school." What's wrong with locals coming over the hill? I ask. The explanation Mr. Jensen offered didn't exactly answer the question, but he made his meaning clear: "Vallejo is a dump."

Some sympathy was wasted on the house, A good old -timer dating back along; But a house isn' t sentient; the house Didn ' t feel anything. And if it did, Why not regard it as a sacrifice, And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire, Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

-Robert Frost, "The Star-Splitter" Every weekday the city of Vallejo holds three auctions of foreclosed houses on the steps of the city hall. For as little $40,000, investors and developers buy up houses that sold for as much as $400,000 four years ago. They often pay in cash.

Whatever doesn't sell goes back to the bank. One morning while I watched the auctions, a twitchy, skinny teenager in denim board shorts and a goatee tried to sell me "smoke."

The City of Vallejo is bankrupt. It went bankrupt in May 2008, the nrst city in California to declare bankruptcy since the economic downturn and only the second in the state's history. Inside

City Hall, an out-of-work contractor tells me "there's nothing. There's no new houses starting." He comes to the Planning Division once a week to check anyway. When he asks me what I'm doing there, another out-of-work contractor overhears me tell him I'm looking into foreclosed houses in the area. Without saying much he hands me the card of a loss- mitigation and loan-modincation specialist named Vienna Train Bertolano.

I give her a call and we meet the next day.

We meet in a Mexican restaurant Bertolano co owns. In addition to her work as a loan specialist and restaurateur, she also works as a legal assistant for a bankruptcy lawyer. Bertolano, who tells me to call her Vienna, is a petite Filipina in her mid-50s with a slight accent. "Vallejo," she tells me, "was going to be the new Silicon Valley. It was a thriving market. People could buy investment homes here and see them go up 30 percent right away. When the bubble burst in late '06, middleand lower-income buyers who could barely afford $1,500 a month in rent were stuck with $350,000 homes they'd bought with no money down. In 2005 there were never houses here for less than $300,000. Now there are over 2,000 houses selling in Solano County for less than $100,000 , many of them for around $35,000. The only people buying them are investors. And it's going to get a lot worse. It's going to be bleak."

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I ask her about Hiddenbrooke. "Thirty to 40 percent of homes in Hiddenbrooke have been foreclosed or short-sold," she says. "People were buying those places three or four years ago for around $750,000. Those people are out of those houses. Agents are trying to sell them for $350,000.

Maybe they can get $250,000."

In Vienna's office we prepare to visit foreclosed properties in Hiddenbrooke by looking them up in a local real estate database. "Homes in Hiddenbrooke have lost 50 percent of their value or more!" Vienna exclaims in surprise as she scrolls through the listings. The first one we visited, a four -bedroom Kinkade house that had been on the market for six months, was going for $350,000.

The house has a short patch of grass out front that refers to yard more than being one, like a display bed in a department store. A tiny patio out back overlooks the golf course parking lot.

When we get inside Bertolano looks around.

"This is all standard stuff, no upgrades. This is a first-time homebuyer house. The previous owners didn't do anything. It doesn't look like anyone ever lived here. These are the cheap cabinets and countertops the place came with. There are a lot of houses in Hiddenbrooke better than this," she concludes.

We went to one, a giant pile right on the golf course with five bedrooms that sold for $1.3 million in 2007. It's now going for $500,000.

There is a golfball-shaped hole in one of the garage windows and I glimpse the white of stray balls through the shrubs out front. Although the house has been on the market for more than two years, inside it looks like whoever lived there left an hour ago, and in a hurry.

The house is filled with stuff. Dozens of kids' toys are strewn about. There are Spider - Man bedclothes balled up in a corner of the living room and a Superman standee lying flat in the family room. Each bedroom has a DVD player in it, with video game boxes nearby. The case for a DVD called Ghetto Brawls II sits on the kitchen counter. A bookshelf in the foyer holds a passenger safety card from Alaska Airlines.

Dozens and dozens of real estate agents' cards

are scattered on the kitchen counter and in the entranceway, each one with the smiling face of an agent printed on it.

The two-car garage is filled with dead houseplants, abandoned strollers and baby seats. "Only a two-car garage?" asks Vienna. "These people lived lavishly," she points out. "You can tell they overextended themselves. I call them over-livers."

On the drive back to her restaurant, Vienna tells me a story about her neighborhood in Vallejo, which she describes as a nice place where mostly older people live. There was a bank-owned property across the street from her house, and a few weeks ago she'd noticed a white, middle-class family had moved in. "I was surprised to find out the house had sold or rented," she says. "But it hadn't." Her new neighbors were a family of squatters. "It takes two weeks to evict them," Vienna explains. "Last week they were fined for throwing beer cans into the street. Police came and gave them a ticket but couldn't tell them to leave."

Without this fatal spiritual flaw, he was capable of becoming one of the greatest of our artists; but instead he only became one of the strangest of our madmen.

- Theophile Gautier, "The Painter" In The Christmas Cottage we learned that Thomas Kinkade is no stranger to economic hardship. Nor is the Painter of Light a stranger to lawsuits. In 2001, when Kinkade's then-publicly traded company, Media Arts Group, began liquidating Kinkade product at deep discount prices, owners of Kinkade gallery franchises began to wonder if they'd made wise investments. As the value of the company's stock plummeted, some speculated that the artist was deliberately driving down the price so he could buy back the company. In early 2004 he did just that, taking the business private for $32.7 million. Investors lost a lot of money, but now the business is owned solely by the Thomas Kinkade Company, an entity that has turned "light," according to its company profile, into an acronym for "Loyalty -Integrity -Growth -Honoring God -Trust." Like the acronym, it almost worked.

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The FBI has reportedly been investigating Kinkade since 2006. According to news reports, the bureau's probe began after "at least" six former Kinkade Signature Gallery owners sued the Kinkade Company for fraud. They claimed the company persuaded them to invest in galleries and then undercut them by selling Kinkade reproductions direct to consumers for less than the galleries charged.

After years of appeals, Kinkade gallery owners have lately started to win their lawsuits. A galleryowning couple from Virginia claims Kinkade executives rooked them by creating "a certain religious environment designed to instill a special relationship of trust" between them and the Kinkade Company; a judge recently awarded them $2.1 million. Another couple in Michigan was awarded $1.4 million.

It is hard to feel sorry for these people. After all, they put their life savings into the work of man whose best - known public utterance came when he got drunk at a Siegfried and Roy show in Las Vegas and repeatedly yelled the word "codpiece" at the magicians until he was calmed by his mother.

New owners of Kinkade galleries also have reason not to be thrilled. Last March, several months before a couple in Prescott, Arizona, bought a Kinkade gallery there, the Painter of Light himself made an appearance before 500 fans to give a motivational talk and raise money for charity by drawing a sketch, maybe one not that different than the one he gave his mother that Christmas back in the Seventies. The drawing was auctioned for $12,000. According to the Prescott Daily Courier, the audience believed the $12,000 would be split between two charities. They didn't know that Kinkade had arranged to keep 80 percent of the sales price himself, with the charities receiving only about $2,000.

Why was a wealthy painter like Kinkade using these charities' good names to collect a measly $lO,OOO? The new gallery owners don't know.

What they do know is that since the news of Kinkade's 80/20 split leaked out in late August, disgruntled Prescottians have been phoning their

gallery and threatening to throw bricks through the window.

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace from which we have been dispossessed by a greedy swindler. ~Eugene O'Neill, "More Stately Mansions" The house that was to be the playwright Eugene O'Neill's final harbor, the Tao House, sits in the hills above Danville, California, about 120 miles southwest of Placerville and 35 miles southeast of Vallejo. O'Neill and his wife purchased the Tao House and the ranchland around it in 1937 and the couple lived there until 1944, when O'Neill became too sick to write. While he was living there, he wrote many of his best plays, including The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night. The house is now a National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service.

Visitors can tour the Tao House Wednesdays through Saturdays. To get there, you wait for a bus in front of a supermarket and a park ranger drives you up the hill. In O'Neill's time the land was clear. Now there's a gated housing development there. After the housing development was built, the National Park Service had to ask permission to drive through it to get to the O'Neill site.

On the ride to see the study in which O'Neill wrote More Stately Mansions, the park ranger driving the bus points out some of the sights of the gated community. "Have you ever seen a house worth $1.85 million?" he asks. "That house on the left was valued at $1.85 million!" He doesn't say what it's worth now. We travel further into the gated community and the driver points out another place. "You see that house on the right?" he asks. "That house has an infinity pool. Have you ever gone swimming in one of those? That's a pool that looks like it just falls off into space, like off the side of a cliff."

The tourists I'm with seem a little let down when we arrive at O'Neill's Tao House. It's just a two-story house. It's not even that big. Looking at O'Neill's Bessie Smith records and his book

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collection is a disappointment to them after almost seeing an infinity pool. Studying his tiny handwriting through a magnifying glass the Park Service provides doesn't excite them, either. Even the grave of O'Neill's dog Blemie doesn't move them very much, and they barely stop to look at themselves in the strange black mirror in the master bedroom.

Weep for what little things could make them glad.

Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.

- Robert Frost, "Directive" O'Neill's contemporary Robert Frost is a counterbalance to Kinkade more than any other American artist. In poem after poem, Frost writes about abandoned houses, arson and fire, debt and loss.

When he writes about a cottage, he writes about it because there's no one there anymore. His cottages are haunted by memories of the people who lived and died in them, or built them and lost them.

They aren't glowy; they're cold, and they speak of a time in the life of this country when people earned their houses instead of getting them with no money down. The word "subprime" does not appear in his work.

Frost is associated with New England, but he was born out here, in San Francisco. As I write this, California's seasonal wildfires are turning the sky over Oakland black. "The best way is to come uphill with me," Frost wrote, "and have our fire and laugh and be afraid. " While the fires rage in California this August, that strikes me as the best way to look at Kinkade, too. Whatever his value as an artist, he has used his own experience to create a business that predicted and in some ways replicates the current mortgage crisis. His paintings of quaint houses with burning interiors substitute nostalgia for values and hope for community. The idea that these reproductions, gobbed with points of light, are a good investment isn't any different than the idea that flipping gated, golfcoursed mansions is the way to get rich. Kincade is a living testament to how the triumph of kitsch

values has repercussions in the marketplace, outside the world of taste.

Meanwhile, in a safer part of California, Kinkade is still sitting on his gold mine, at least until the FBI and the courts decide to take it away.

When I was getting ready to leave California, a news story broke in a town close to Placerville that made people forget about the fires. Philip Garrido, who ran a printing and graphic design business out of his home, was arrested for abducting a girl in 1991, when she was 11. He held her hostage for 18 years in a makeshift compound in his backyard, and while she was his captive he fathered two children with her. Garrido, a religious fanatic, gave interviews after his arrest.

"Wait till you hear the story of this house," he told a reporter. "You're going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, the victim - you wait. If you take this a step at a time you're going to fall over backwards, and in the end, you're going to find the most powerful heart -warming story."

There are a lot of houses in this country with Thomas Kinkade paintings in them, so when you tell people you're writing about Thomas Kinkade, you often find out their lives have been touched by his work; "highlighted" by it, you might say.

I spoke with a young woman named Katie who works as a waitress at a California Pizza Kitchen in San Francisco. She told me her grandparents are Kinkade collectors who have left her and her siblings one Kinkade painting each from their collection. The paintings are reproductions they had highlighted at a Kinkade gallery, and they bought the proper gallery lighting equipment so they could display them the way Kinkade meant for them to be seen.

Katie says that if her grandmother were to die today (her grandfather has passed on), she wouldn't display her Kinkade where she lives, which is in a one-bedroom apartment in the Mission she shares with her girlfriend. The painting doesn't fit into her lifestyle right now, she tells me. It's too fancy and valuable. Maybe if she had a big house she would, but she doesn't, and she doesn't expect to anytime soon. ~

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[If I had invented homosexuality . .. ] Jack Spicer

If I had invented homosexuality It would be entirely different

Would be incredibly archaic like an Egyptian statue Or two boys that are pals with each other Would be I beg you pardon, Mr. Freud, Immovably fixed at the crazy level of adolescence.

The sexual ruling classes Always Make our bodies posture in their image.

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Indefensible Men Yves Smith

Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from. and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

- Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society

A year on from its brush with Armageddon, the financial services industry has resumed its reckless, self-serving ways. It isn't hard to see why this has aroused simmering rage in normally complacent, pro-capitalist Main Street America.

The budget commitments to salvaging the financial sector come to nearly $3 trillion. equivalent to more than $20.000 per federal income tax payer. To add insult to injury, the moneyed miscreants have also availed themselves of more welfare programs in the form of lending facilities and guarantees, totaling nearly $12 trillion, not all of which will prove to be money well spent.

Wall Street just looted the public on a massive scale. Having found this to be a wondrously lucrative exercise, it looks set to do it all over again.

These people above all were supposed to understand money, the value of it, the risks attendant upon it. The industry broadly defined - including once lowly commercial bank employees-profited handsomely as the debt bubble grew. Compensation per worker in the early 1980s was similar to that of all non -government employees. It started accelerating in 1983, and hit 181 percent of the level of private sector pay by 2007. The rewards at the top were rich indeed. The average employee at Goldman Sachs made $630,000 in 2007. That includes everyone, the receptionists. the guys in the mailroom, the back office staff. Eight -figure bonuses for big producers became standard in the

last cycle. And if the fourth quarter of 2009 proves as lucrative as the first three, Goldman's bonuses for the year will exceed bubble-peak levels.

The rationale for the eye-popping rewards was simple. We lived in a Brave New World of finance, where the ability to slice, dice, repackage and sell risk led to better outcomes for all, via cheaper credit and better diversification. We have since learned that this flattering picture was a convenient cover for massive risk -taking and fraud.

The industry regularly bundled complicated exposures into products and dumped them onto investors who didn't understand them. Indeed, it has since become evident that the industry itself didn't understand them. The supposedly sophisticated risk management techniques didn't work so well for even the advanced practitioners, as both elite investment banks and quant hedge funds hemorrhaged losses. And outside the finance arena, the wreckage is obvious: housing market plunges in the United States, UK, Ireland, Spain, the Baltics and Australia; a steep decline in trade; a global recession with unemployment in the U.S. and elsewhere hitting highs not seen in more than 2S years, with the most accurate forecasters of the calamity intoning that the downturn will be protracted and the recovery anemic.

With economic casualties all about, thanks to baneful financial "innovations" and reckless trading bets, the tone-deafness of the former Masters of the Universe is striking. Their firms would have been reduced to sheer rubble were it not for the munificence of the taxpayer-or perhaps, more accurately, the haplessness of the official rescuers, who threw money at these players directly and indirectly, through a myriad a programs plus the brute force measure of super -low interest rates, with perilously few strings attached.

Yet, remarkably, the widespread denunciations of excessive banking industry pay are met with

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incredulity and outright hostility. It's one thing to be angry over a reversal in fortune; it's one ofthe five stages of grief. But the petulance, the narcissism, the lack of any sense of proportion reveals a deep-seated pathology at work.

Exhibit A is the resignation letter of one Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president in AIG's Financial Products unit, tendered in March 2009 as outcry over bonuses paid to executives of his firm reached a fever pitch. The New York Times ran it as an op-ed. "I am proud of everything I have done," DeSantis wrote.

terms as doing a tour of duty in the armed forces, and the hyperventilating: "proud," "betrayed," "unfairly persecuted," "clearly supported."

And to confirm the yawning perception gap, the letter was uniformly vilified in the Times' comment section, but DeSantis's colleagues gave him a standing ovation when he returned to the office (turns out he wasn't quitting just yet).

I was in no way involved in or responsible for the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful ofthe 400 current employees of A.I.G.F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage ....

[W]e in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials ....

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G .... The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.- F.P. because ofthose losses.

[I]f someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco .... ?

I'm attached to my BlackBerry .... I get calls at two in the morning .... That costs money. If they keep compensation capped, I don't know how the deals get done.

Anyone with an operating brain cell could shred the logic on display here. AIG had imploded, but unlike a normal failed business, it left a Chernobylscale steaming hulk that needed to be hermetically sealed at considerable cost to taxpayers. Employees of bankrupt enterprises seldom go about chestbeating that they did a good job, it was the guys down the hall who screwed up, so they therefore still deserve a fat bonus check. That line of reasoning is delusional, yet DeSantis had no perspective on it. And there is the self-righteous "honorable service," which casts a well-paid job in the same

The New York press has served as an occasional outlet for this type of self-righteous venting.

Some sightings from New York Magazine:

It never seems to occur to them, as de Gaulle once

said, that the graveyards are full of indispensable men. So if the cohort with glittering resumes no longer deems the pay on offer sufficiently motivating for them to get out of bed, guess what?

People with less illustrious pedigrees will gladly take their places.

And the New York Times has itemized how the math of a successful banker lifestyle (kids in private school, Upper East Side co-op, summer house in Hamptons) simply doesn't work on $500,000 a year. Of course, it failed to point out that outsized securities industry pay was precisely what escalated the costs of what was once a mere upper-middleclass New York City lifestyle to a level most would deem stratospheric.

Although the word "entitlement" fits, it's been used so frequently as to have become inadequate to capture the preening self-regard, the obliviousness to the damage that high-flying finance has inflicted on the real economy, the willful blindness to vital considerations in the pay equation.

Getting an education, or even hard work, does

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not guarantee outcomes. One of the basic precepts of finance is that of a risk - return tradeoff: high potential payoff investments come with greater downside.

But how did that model evolve into the current belief system among the incumbents, that Wall Street was a sure ride, a guaranteed "heads I win, tails you lose" bet? The industry has seen substantial setbacks-the end of fixed commissions in 1975, which led to business failures and industry consolidation, followed by years of stagflation punitive to financial assets and securities industry earnings; the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis, which saw employment in mergers and acquisitions contract by 75 percent; the dot -com bust, which saw headhunters inundated with resumes of former high fliers. Those who still had jobs were grateful to be employed, even if simultaneously unhappy to find themselves diligently tilling soil in a drought year, certain to reap a meager harvest.

But you never heard any caviling about how awful it was to have gone, say, from making $2 or $3 million to a mere $400,000 (notice how much lower the prevailing peak numbers were in recent cycles). And if you were having trouble paying your expenses, that was clearly bad planning. Everyone knew the business was volatile. Indeed, the skimpy salaries once served as a reminder that nothing was guaranteed.

So why the unseemly whining? It's a symptom of longstanding pathologies in the industry that were once narrowly useful but which have gotten wildly out of hand.

It wasn't always that way. I worked for a few years in the early 1980s in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and later in the decade starting up the M&A business for a Japanese bank, then the second largest in the world, in that brief window when the island nation seemed to be buying up America.

I have continued to consult to the industry.

Unfortunately, it isn't hard to see how those on the investment banking meal ticket come to have an unduly high opinion of their worth.

Wall Street jobs have long been the prime objective at the top of the MBA food chain, and that

has always been a function of the money. Aside from looking for people who are well groomed, articulate and reasonably numerate (image is important, given the fees charged to corporate clients), firms screen job candidates for money orientation and what is politely called "drive."

At Goldman, the word "aggressive" was used frequently as a term of approbation.

But the firms are white-collar sweatshops with glamorous trappings. You do not know how hard you can work, short of slavery, unless you have been an investment banking analyst or associate.

It is not merely the hours, but the extreme and unrelenting time pressure. Priorities are revised every day, numerous times during the day, as markets move. You have many bosses, each with independent demands and deadlines, and none cares what the others want done when. You are not allowed to say no to unreasonable demands.

The sense of urgency is so great that waiting for an elevator is typically agonizing. If you can get your bills paid and your laundry done, you are managing your personal life well. Exhaustion is normal. On a quick run home en route to the airport after an all-nighter, a co-worker tried to shower fully clothed.

A setting that would seem to reward, nay require, cutting corners has another striking feature: intolerance for error. A computation mistake or a typo in a client document is a career -limiting event. Minor miscues undercut the notion that your firm can execute the more complex and risky deals correctly.

And the dynamic doesn't change much over the course of one's career. A medical residency (or pre- Iraq, a military tour of duty) has a known endpoint. But investment bankers have signed a Faustian contract: You never have a right to personal boundaries. The business says how high to jump, and you are expected to keep leaping skyward. Yes, more senior people have more dignity, but the idea that your needs are second to those of the business never changes.

In my day, it wasn't uncommon for the firm to ask associates to reschedule weddings if they conflicted with a deal. It wasn't that firms were

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opposed to marriage; indeed, the partners knew a young man was theirs once he procured a wife and, better yet, kids. He was tied hopelessly into a personal overhead structure that would keep him in the business.

Not that there was any real risk that someone would leave voluntarily. Exhaustion and loss of personal boundaries are an ideal setting for brainwashing, which is why people who have spent much of their career in finance have such difficulty understanding why their firm and their worldview might not be the center of the universe, why they might not be deserving of their outsized pay.

The finance community has other elements in common with cults. One is the implicit and explicit reinforcement of bankers' "specialness," their elite status. In how many lines of work do you get to meet with CEOs at a tender age, much less work on matters routinely involving hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, are routine? Senior people in the investment banks are political fundraising heavyweights and sit on high-prestige nonprofit boards. Anyone of a Calvinist persuasion would be impressed.

Another parallel to cult indoctrination is that the demands of the job remove new hires from established friends and family and plunge them into a new environment. Most people who come to Wall Street are not New York natives, and the extreme and erratic hours make it difficult to maintain old ties. Vacations (save for the week before Labor Day and the Christmas- New Year's period) are frequently rescheduled.

Class-consciousness is felt nowhere more keenly than in the world of high finance. Wall Street denizens earn more money than most peoplethat's the point, after all. And that means they become accustomed to the perks, such as eating at restaurants that might strain the budget of those less well situated. And, frankly, with their lives revolving around finance and business, other interests wither. In most cases, it's more fun for them to talk shop than to relate to people outside their cloistered world. The incestuousness often extends to one's personal life. When I was at Goldman, the only married women professionals

who were not married to men at Goldman had come to the firm hitched.

These values become deeply internalized. One buddy, a vice president in hard-charging, testosterone-filled M&A, spent the better part of a weekend lying on her side on the floor of her office, reading documents for a deal. She kept reassuring concerned colleagues that she was fine, until the pain got so bad that she relented and called her boyfriend. He came and took her straight to the hospital. The doctors operated immediately, assuming she had appendicitis. They found instead diverticulitis, which usually afflicts the elderly, and she was so close to a colon rupture that they had to remove half of it.

The partners at her firm instructed her not to return until she had recovered fully. But this was September. Bonuses were paid at year end, and understanding the unwritten code, she knew that staying away too long would be seen as a sign of weakness. She was back at the office three weeks later, looking wan.

She later became the first woman investment banking partner at her prestigious firm. Her instincts served her well. Or maybe not. She later lost 90 percent of the vision in one eye to glaucoma, an easily treated disease, because her overloaded schedule made eye exams seem like a luxury.

Trading, the other side of the business, is stereotyped as the antipode of investment banking; traders and dealmakers like my friend typically view each other with disdain. While there are other subcultures within large firms, the bankers and the traders are the alphas and set the tone.

In the old days, traders were almost without exception order flow traders who served the socially useful function of making markets in instruments that weren't listed on exchanges.

It's an adrenaline-filled game, with quick highs and gut-wrenching lows. Unlike bankers, who can never truly take personal credit for the profits on a deal (even if they brought it in, the firm's franchise usually played a role), traders see their profits and losses as their own output, even though they use the firm's infrastructure, research and capital.

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Historically, traders often came from modest backgrounds. Indeed, some scrappy firms such as the former bond market king Salomon Brothers didn't care if traders had two heads as long as they produced.

But as Wall Street became bigger and more profitable, in part by eating commercial banks' lunch, trading-related jobs became more sought after. Even Tom Wolfe took note in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities, portraying Sherman McCoy as inordinately proud of the Ivy Leaguers reporting to him.

As markets became more liquid, and more complex instruments were created, firms began creating specialist trading groups to make bets with house funds. Unlike the traditional market makers, they did not deal with customer orders but were strictly out to make money into more money. The pattern for the so-called proprietary traders was set nearly 20 years ago. Securities industry denizens were taken aback to learn that Larry Hilibrand, a member of Salomon Brothers' bond arbitrage group, made $23 million in 1990, then an unseemly sum. But even that wasn't enough for Hilibrand; he and his colleagues decamped to form the now infamous Long- Term Capital Management (LTCM), which did spectacularly well before nearly bringing down the entire financial system in 1998.

Trading is an autistic activity. Markets are impersonal. And despite the shows of bravura, there's an ever - present undercurrent of terror. Even if things look to be working out well, they could turn swiftly into monstrous losses. And, as LTCM illustrated, it's all too easy for successful traders to lose that sense of fear, to start believing in their own genius and take risk recklessly.

The picture of traders, both in the media and too often in their own eyes, reveals more than a bit of a John Galt fantasy, casting them as brilliant, productive people, with others piggybacking on their earnings. That's hogwash. Traders conveniently forget that they have managed to get themselves in a hugely advantageous position: They get a slice of their profits if they win, but don't disgorge them when they screw up. The

worst that happens is they lose their job. And a remarkable number fail upwards, or at least sideways. Witness how John Meriwether is now raising his third fund after heading two firms (LTCM and JWM Partners) that failed.

Moreover, traders benefit from massive subsidies, such as artificially low interest rates (not just now, but certainly since 2001 and, some argue, even earlier), plus industry-serving policies that produced a highly concentrated structure, with a small number of firms sitting at the nexus of massive capital and information flows. The big Wall Street firm trader's claim that he is an independent operator fully deserving his earnings is a wonderful bit of mythology. It's like claiming prowess in hunting based on the results achieved at a well-stocked game reserve, with some of the prey drugged to boot.

Many psychological disorders are otherwise healthy tendencies carried too far, unchecked by other personal attributes. Single-mindedness, drive to succeed, aggressiveness and lack of remorse are useful traits in business, but when do they tip into the psychopathic? In the case of Wall Street, the collective psyche has suffered as important checks on ego and behavior have eroded.

One no-longer-operative constraint is the partnership form of ownership. In the days when partnerships prevailed, senior management had good reason to keep pay demands in line. The partners had most of their wealth tied up in the business; they lived poor and died rich. If the firm suffered a loss, the consequences were disruptive to catastrophic. You couldn't replenish capital easily; mortgaging the house will only go so far.

And the partners were personally liable. They were on the hook for any shortfall. Many once famous Wall Street names lost their independence due to weak performance or losses: Kuhn Loeb, First Boston (over a series of years), Bache & Company, A.G. Becker, Drexel Burnham Lambert.

Despite the peril it posed to the owners, the partnership form had some compelling advantages: Compensation levels were confidential, so as not to annoy less well remunerated clients, and the firms were not exposed to double taxation.

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And the partnerships had a cachet that the public firms, mainly retail brokers, sorely lacked.

That mode of operation in turn produced a great deal of vigilance, at least in the firms that proved to be survivors. The management committees needed to set pay levels so that the business was also retaining sufficient capital to remain competitive. These owners also had narrow spans of control, acting as players in as well as managers of businesses they had grown up in. In the market-making businesses, they were usually the senior traders on the desks and knew the foibles of their subordinates.

And so performance-inducing levels of compensation and the long -term health of the business were held in balance. Moreover, the leadership had reason to rein in big egos, since they might feel emboldened to take risks that would jeopardize the firms.

In the early 1990s, Sallie Krawcheck, then an equity analyst covering publicly owned investment banks for the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, remarked, "It's better to be an employee of a Wall Street firm than a shareholder. " Being public changed all the incentives. Management had less reason to be cautious. Indeed, that also showed up in her analysis. The most profitable business was fixed income, meaning the debttrading business, and even then the firms were on a trajectory of taking on more risk.

Meanwhile, taking on more risk changes the meaning of trader profits. The private partnerships had managed against the fact that the non-partner market-makers didn't share in the downside, and a key device was making sure that joining the partnership was the richest reward. That alone encouraged underlings to be more judicious.

To illustrate how much values have shifted in a money-minded business, John Whitehead, the former co-chairman of Goldman who presided through 1984, blasted the current CEO Lloyd Blankfein over the "shocking" pay levels.

"They're the leaders in this outrageous increase," Whitehead remarked in 2007. He urged the firm to be "courageous" enough to lower bonuses and re-instill a sense of propriety.

But Whitehead, like most seasoned hands trying to persuade a younger generation of the error of its ways, was ignored.

In the "other people's money" world, there was less reason for restraint. Indeed, an expression has become common that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s: "IBG, YBG" ~ "I'll be gone, you'll be gone." In other words, long-term consequences (likely damage) don't matter; all that counts is this year's kill. And if it's big enough, you will never need to work again.

This attitude is predatory. And it has become widespread. A former Deutsche Bank employee, Deepak Moorjani, wrote: When speaking about the banking sector, many people mention a "subprime crisis" or a "financial crisis" as if recent write-downs and losses are caused by external events. Where some see coincidence, I see consequence. At Deutsche Bank, I consider our poor results to be a "management debacle," a natural outcome of unfettered risk -taking, poor incentive structures and the lack of a system of checks and balances.

In my opinion, we took too much risk, failed to manage this risk and broke too many laws and regulations .... [r]he system of incentives encourages people to take risks. I have seen honest, high- integrity people lose themselves in this cowboy culture, because more risk -taking generally means better pay.

Bizarrely, this risk comes with virtually no liability, and this system of O.P.M. (Other People's Money) insures that the firm absorbs any losses from bad trades.

And remember, in the brave new world of OPM, management has every reason to be in on the game. Their bonuses are a function of the profitability of the businesses that report to them.

And now that the consequences are evident, it is easy to rationalize the behavior: Everyone else was operating the same way, there was money to be made, you were just providing what the market wanted.

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securities and dodgy collateralized debt obligations sold to hapless investors as far away as Norway and Australia, the sellers were sometimes less than forthcoming about the quality of the wares they were peddling.

Nevertheless, one sees bankers and brokers, who concede that much of the anger directed at fancy finance is "very well deserved," take DeSantis-like exception to their specialty being spattered in the mud -slinging. From the blogger Epicurean DealMaker: A second change has been in how members of the industry see themselves. Most I ran across were proud to be members of respected firms (the reaction when offering your card was quick confirmation), but no one labored under the delusion that finance was an elevated calling. It was a necessary function, the plumbing of a capitalist economy. If there was anything to congratulate yourself for, it was having discovered and gotten into a field that offered outsized rewards, thanks to regulatory and scale-based barriers to entry.

The same M&A banker who jeopardized her health in her successful pursuit of partnership once commented dismissively, "It's indoor work." A suc cessful institutional salesman said he had never run into more mediocre overpaid people than on Wall Street.

Thirty years of conservative extolling of the virtues of free markets seems to have contributed to the banking sector's inflated ego. Even though the securities markets are far from "free" (they are regulated to varying degrees) , the mythology has taken hold that players in finance allocate capital to its best uses~a role of vital importance to society ~ and therefore deserve to be more richly compensated than everyone else. Such rationales became necessary as growth in capital markets meant that the pay they offered greatly outstripped that of other forms of indoor work.

But this flattering self-image is inaccurate.

It's the end investors who are making the capital allocation decisions; the brokers and bankers are facilitators and an information hub. And, unfortunately, as we've seen with auction rate

And, in twenty years of offering M&A and financial advice to corporate clients, I have yet to meet someone who has intentionally pushed a "bad" M&A idea to a client, either. Sure, I've been in pitches where a banker has proposed silly, ill-thought-out, or downright stupid M&A ideas to a client, but those instances are either uninte ntional ~ in which case the client throws the banker out of his office and said banker usually gets fired in the next round of layoffs~ or intentionally designed to provoke a deeper and more productive dialogue with the client.

One wonders, has the Epicure ever actually worked on the sell side? There, the banker's role is to elicit the best possible price. And, trust me, plenty of crappy businesses get peddled. That's precisely when a broker adds most value, in monetizing a garbage barge, and I saw tons of them when representing one of the preferred dumping grounds, the hapless Japanese. Ah, but of course!

They aren't your client; it's perfectly OK if the guy on the other side of the table is a stuffee.

Yet to prove his point that the critics have gone overboard, the Epicure wraps himself and his col leagues in a familiar Wall Street refrain: "We're good guys in our sector." What's more, his black -and-white portrait doesn't appear to be a rhetorical device; he seems to believe it.

Later he writes: Would the esteemed economist from The New York Times care to explain to me exactly how the finance industry was able to unilaterally increase

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demand for its services while drastically expand ing its operating margins? Maybe I don't remember my entry -level Economics so good, but that strikes me as a somewhat dubious proposition.

And yet, that is exactly the conclusion an inattentive or ill- informed reader would draw from Mr. Krugman's tendentious screed: regulate those nasty bankers, before they force our country to lever up and make them filthy rich again!

The anger is as telling as the logic, or lack thereof.

The Epicure never addresses the inconvenient truth that lay at the heart of all those arguments for stricter regulation: that the rising asset values that fueled the securities industry boom in turn were the result of ever-increasing borrowings.

Private sector debt to GDP rose gradually in the 1980s, more steeply in the 1990s, and went into galactic overdrive from 1999 onward.

In modern economies, we don't let banking systems that lend money on a reckless scale go bust, as much as that would be a useful cautionary practice. We socialize the losses. Those who weren't perps fail to acknowledge that they benefitted from the wanton risk-taking nevertheless. In the case of the Epicurean DealMaker, how can he not recognize that transaction prices were pushed up enormously by the easy access to cheap deal funding? And that his fees, set as a percentage of the deal price, were higher as a result? Many of the cheap loans that funded transactions and pushed M&A prices into the stratosphere were in collateralized loan obligations. The big lenders and investment banks hadn't unloaded them when the crisis hit, so they are part of the losses that taxpayers are now eating.

That's why the great unwashed public is furious. They may lack the sophistication to grasp the arcana of the financial crisis, but they sense that the explanations for the costs they are bearing are insufficient; they see that a lot more people were feeding at the trough, directly or indirectly, than the poster children served up for public ridicule. And they're right.

So the whining, the petulance, the defensiveness, the distorted reasoning, signifies something

much deeper and more troubling: Finance has lost sight of its role.

Banking and capital markets have become important to advanced economies, but also they represent a charge on the productive economy, just like lawyers and national defense. The Japanese understood this well, and were still unable to prevent a turbocharged borrowing binge that left their economy a mess. They recognized that letting banks be very profitable comes at the expense of industry. And indeed, until the global financial crisis, while Japan's domestic economy remained mired in deflation, its export sector was still robust. When our crisis broke out, Japanese policymakers were uncharacteristically blunt and warned the U.S. that the mistake they had made was not cleaning up their banking sector quickly.

We are repeating their error for the very same reason: Financial firms have great political clout.

Or, as John Maynard Keynes put it, "When the capital development of a country becomes a by - product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done."

Yet the people at the heart of this system, even with the wreckage they created all around them, still fail to acknowledge that the rich pay of recent years was the product of a debt binge.

It wasn't just the makers of the pernicious securities who benefited; all boats in the finance industry rose with the surge of borrowing. Trying to defend the status quo ante shows a willful, selfserving blindness to the proper place of financial markets in a healthy economy.

Worse, it bespeaks a bankrupt ideology that has somehow managed to live on, zombie-like, through the crisis. The idea that the needs of the financial sector trump those of the productive sector isn't just specious; it's pernicious.

But its strange persistence as an article of faith among our leadership class, both in government and the media, has yielded inertia and fecklessness where there should be energy and resolve.

Before we can confront the challenge of mending our broken financial system, a battle of ideology must be waged and won. And the hour is getting late. ~

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The Un-usable Past Walter Benn Michaels

Let's go shopping, let's go chill, Let's go buy them new Louboutin heels.

Ass in the Perla, ears full of pearls, Damn dirty money know how to treat the girls.

-Clipse, "Dirty Money"

of American fiction over the period by the New York Times or that prominent also-rans included Blood Meridian, Underworld and The Plot Against America. Even younger writers like Michael Chabon and Colson Whitehead have rushed to take up the burden of the past.

When Francis Fukuyama declared the end of Of course, Fukuyama thought that we'd enjoy history back in 1989, he did so with mixed feelflattering ourselves by hearing about the great triings. The good news, he thought, was the ideolog- umphs of our history. And the extraordinary (and ical triumph of free markets and of the political otherwise inexplicable) popularity of admiring arrangement most suited to them. Even commubiographies of the Founding Fathers suggests he nists were talking about the importance of being wasn't entirely wrong. But what our novelists competitive in the marketplace. The bad news was have realized is that accounts of the truly horrible that without "the worldwide ideological struggle" things done by and to our ancestors are even more between capitalism and socialism to inspire us, flattering-what we readers really like is to disapwe were in for "a very sad time." "In the postprove of other people's bad behavior. In other historical period, " he wrote, "there will be neither words, the denunciation of crimes we haven't art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking committed is even more gratifying than the celeof the museum of human history." The end of hisbration of virtues we don't have. tory would be good for markets, bad for art.

Thus, even though books about slavery and These days, it's not so clear how the good-for- the Middle Passage, the Holocaust and the extermarkets thing is working out. It's still true that we mination of Native Americans are sad almost by don't have any socialists, the ravings ofbirthers definition, it's also true that the logic that produces and death panelists notwithstanding. The current them and makes them so attractive is profoundly administration wants to rescue market competi- optimistic. Why? Because trying to overcome, say, tion, not restrain it. And, led by the kind of liber- the lingering inequities of slave labor (a characteristic injustice of the past) doesn't involve trying als even bankers love, it may well succeed.

But what if it doesn't? What if we're seeing to overcome the burgeoning inequities of free not just the end of a boom but the beginning of a labor (a characteristic injustice of the present). new period of "ideological struggle"? If good-for- It doesn't involve criticizing the primacy of marmarkets was bad for art, will bad-for-markets kets; it just involves making sure that everyone has equal access to them. So when Beloved reminds be good for art?

With respect to at least one art form, market us that we are a nation divided by race and racism (and when A Mercy reminds us again), we're being triumphalism has been something of a disaster. told that what ails us is lingering racism-not outThe past 2S years have been a sad time for the of-control capitalism. And when Morrison wins the American novel, and a lot of the best ones have Nobel Prize and Obama becomes president, we're indeed been committed to nothing more than historical caretaking. It's no accident that Toni being reassured that we are headed in the right Morrison's Beloved was proclaimed the best work direction, even if we're not quite there yet.

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Indeed, Toni Morrison has become such an icon of liberal culture that her very presence is used to signify the moral superiority of those for whom the boom was good. When, for example, Drew Faust was sworn in as the new president of Harvard (endowment in 1987, the year Beloved was published, $3.85 billion; endowment in 2007, the year Faust was inaugurated, $34.9 billion), Morrison was on hand to read from the not -yet -published A Mercy and to help bear witness to this happy confluence of wealth and virtue. "Even a few short years ago," the new university president declared, people like Morrison and Faust herself could not have been on that platform. Their presence now was a tribute to the way universities over the last half -century have served as "engines of the expansion of citizenship, equality and opportunity-to blacks, women, Jews, immigrants and others who would have been subjected to quotas or excluded altogether in an earlier era."

"Ours," she continued, "is a different and far better world. " Maybe so. But if you look at the economic data for the "few short years" Faust has in mind, what you see is not a society with greater equality but a society in which there is less. In 1987, the top tenth of the American population made about 38 percent of the nation's income. (The bottom fIfth made about 3.8 percent.) That top figure was substantially up from the relatively egalitarian numbers that prevailed from the end of World War II until the emergence of neoliberalism in the late Seventies, but the really big jump has taken place since. In 2006, according to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the top tenth earned about half of all the money made in America, a higher percentage than in 1928, till then the highest figure of the century.

While universities like Harvard have welcomed representatives of racial minorities, they've withheld that welcome from the vast economic majority. "Seventy-four percent of students at the nation's top 146 colleges come from the richest socioeconomic quartile," the Pew Foundation tells us, "and just 3 percent come from the poorest quartile." Neoliberal economies are structured to

reward the rich at the expense of the poor; neoliberal universities-turning the entitled children of the upper middle class into the credentialed children of the upper middle class-are structured to pass those rewards on to the next generation.

The account of Faust's inauguration in the Harvard Crimson includes an interview with an enthusiastic undergraduate who claimed (and who would doubt her?) to have read Beloved 12 times. But you only have to read it once to understand the ways in which the world is better; reading it 12 times will tell you nothing about the ways in which the world has grown worse.

Increasing inequality is simply not something that American culture, even liberal culture, has had much to say about. Instead, the more unjust and unequal American society has become, the more we have heard about how bad, say, the Holocaust was. And as our cultural and economic elites have separated themselves from everyone else, and as the Holocaust has begun to show signs of brand fatigue, enterprising writers like Philip Roth (in The Plot Against America) and Michael Chabon (in The Yiddish Policemen's Union) have boldly moved beyond condemning bad things that happened in the past to condemning bad things that didn't happen in the past: a Nazi takeover of the United States and the exile of a whole society of Eastern European Jews to Alaska.

In the real world, meanwhile, things have finally gotten so bad that even the relatively rich have begun to feel the pain. Harvard's endowment is now only about six times what it was in 1987, not 10 times as much. And disapproval of Holocausts is getting some serious competition from fear of poverty. Which is what the vast majority-the victims of the boom - have been worrying about all along. So maybe it's time for us to forget about Nazi bad guys and focus on the free market instead; to stop congratulating ourselves for being against genocide and start asking what it means to be for free trade.

Although it doesn't appear anywhere on the Times' best American fiction list, Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991) is a much better

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the Chloes weren't so great for "dancing madly to U2," but they, along with the Vera Wang and a cocktail dress by Lanvin and a dinner catered by Daniel Boulud, nonetheless managed to convey the same message as the Women for Obama T. That message is the exact opposite of that conveyed by Chelsea's Michael Kors or, for that matter, by the suede Yves Saint Laurents the Psycho's girlfriend wears, also to a U2 concert (maybe a proper depression will get us better rock 'n' roll; novel than most of the ones that do, and the Psycho's self-consoling reminder- "I am richTitus Andronicus is a good start). The meaning of millions are not" - has the merit of problematiz- the Saint Laurents is that the wealth of the rich ing the upper middle class's sense of virtue rather comes at the expense of the poor, and American than, like Roth and Morrison, pandering to it.

Psycho's political power consists in its recogniUnlike all our popular meditations on the badtion of their fundamentally opposed interests: As ness of racism, American Psycho understands the Psycho says to a bum he's about to murder: that the wealth of the rich is extracted from the ''I'm sorry. It's just that I don't have anything in common with you. " poor and therefore that there is a structuralnot merely a sentimental-antagonism between The fantasy of Waldman's Chloe boots, on the other hand, is that the things dividing us have noththem. That's the meaning of all its descriptions of what rich people wear - "a suit by Lubiam, a ing to do with money, and therefore we needn't be great-looking striped spread-collar cotton shirt divided at all. When Waldman describes "White people and black people, Latinos and Asians," all from Burberry, a silk tie by Resikeio and a belt "chanting 'Race Doesn't Matter, Race Doesn't from Ralph Lauren": You can't afford these, the Psycho is telling us, because I can.

Matter,' " she is describing a liberalism that Or, to take a more recent example, that's also replaces the antagonism between the rich and the the meaning of the notes the call girl Chelsea poor with the alliance of the black and the white: "United. Not divided." After all, black women keeps on what she wears to each job (" a Michael Kors dress and shoes and La Perla lingerie under- (Oprah wore Louboutins) can have hot shoes too.

"Race Doesn't Matter" is an alternative to someneath") in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend thing that can't be chanted at rallies but is noneExperience. The movie is set in November 2008 theless what's always being said: "Wealth Doesn't as Obama is about to win the election. And you Matter." We don't chant it at rallies because, once can see the political point of Chelsea's clothes by fast -forwarding two months and comparing you put the point in those terms, it would occur to them to the clothes worn to the inauguration someone that wealth actually does matter. But it's by the novelist, essayist, and passionate Obama being said anyway, because the great vision of our supporter Ayelet Waldman. Back when Obama liberalism is the poor helping the rich to make a better America rather than, say, the poor making a won the South Carolina primary, Waldman predicted on her blog she'd see her readers "on the better America by taking away the rich's money.

Waldman's autobiographical essays about being Mall in January." ''I'll be the one in the Women for Obama T-shirt," she promised. By the time and having a mom essentially do the same politiJanuary came around, however, a "fabulous Vera cal work as her Chloe boots and (her husband!)

Wang gown" (a "loaner" from a friend) had Michael Chabon's alternative Holocaust history. replaced the T-shirt, supplemented by "five-inch For if historical novels have been one literary way Chloe boots" (also "fabulous," but her own) to be to make the reality of our social arrangements worn to the concert on the Mall. Unfortunately, invisible, they haven't been the only one. It was

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also in 1987 that Margaret Thatcher, as canny a cultural critic as Toni Morrison, pronounced herself tired of hearing about society's problems and, in the wake of her triumph over the National Union of Mineworkers, took a stand against the idea of society itself, proclaiming: "There is no such thing!

There are individual men and women, and there are families .... " Anybody looking to explain the appeal of the memoir in contemporary writing need look no further. Every sentence in everyone of them, true or false, literary or non -, tells us that there are only individuals and their families. Thus, for example, the proper way for workers to see themselves is not as workers or union members, but as entrepreneurs or husbands and fathers.

For some sense of the contemporary relevance of Thatcher's analysis, look to the extraordinary success of the Broadway musical Billy Elliot (10 Tony Awards). It is, as they say, "set against the backdrop" of the strike Thatcher broke, but what it's really about is Billy's grizzled old miner dad learning to respect his son's desire to become a ballet dancer, and about Billy learning to respect his best friend's desire to cross-dress and about all the miners learning that the union is irrelevant and, most upliftingly, about everyone learning that, as the song says, "What we need is individuality":

easier for workers to unionize). Card check, despite its euphemistic name, is not about the need for individual choice. Just the opposite; it's about escaping your individuality, and about the power of collective bargaining. Same-sex marriage, on the other hand, is all about the rights of individuals, and especially their right to form families.

The exemplary attraction of same-sex marriage emerges even more vividly when, as in California, it's an alternative to domestic partnership-in other words, when the legal and economic issues have largely been factored out. Here, as the complaint recently filed in federal court by the Republican Ted Olson and the Democrat David Boies (opposing attorneys in Bush v. Gore but united in Perry, Stier et al v. Schwarzenegger) asserts, the harm in not being allowed to marry is "severe humiliation, emotional distress, pain, suffering, psychological harm and stigma." Of course, once you've identified our problems as having nothing to do with the redistribution of wealth, you've also identified the solution as one that has nothing to do with the redistribution of wealth. It's these problems, described in this way, that American liberalism loves to solve. Hence the popularity of the memoir, always committed, like the lawyers in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, to the primacy of emotional distress and psychological harm.

And hence the opportunity to finally get rid of it.

If you wanna be a dancer, dance, When people's jobs and investments begin to If you wanna be a miner, mine, disappear, the idea that we'll be better off if we If you want to dress like somebody else, just stop stigmatizing each other and start making Fine! better life choices looks a little less plaUSible.

Maybe, at that moment, capitalism starts to look My point is not that memoir writers or the makers of like a problem for which human capital is not a Billy Elliot think of themselves as cheerleaders for solution, and the economic arrangements of the the free market. It's that in the memoir and in society you live in begin to seem more important the musical, society is merely the "backdrop" against than how your parents felt about you, how you which we either make or fail to make good choices. feel about your kids or even how you feel about If you wanna be a miner, mine-but when it doesn't yourself. So maybe another upside of the collapse work out, it's because you made a bad choice. And of a Thatcherite economy will be the disappearif you wanna dress like somebody else, fine. ance of this entirely Thatcherite genre. Maybe It's no accident that same-sex marriage has people will lose all interest in the moving stories of emerged as a centerpiece of American cultural the struggles of other people to overcome destrucliberalism, rather than, say, card check (the tive parents and seductive addictions, and no one Employee Free Choice Act, designed to make it will want to read memoirs. Maybe people will even

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lose interest in their own struggles, thus conceived, and no one will want to write them either.

where liberals and conservatives both are as unanimous in their enthusiasm for the one as book reviewers are in their enthusiasm for the other.

Thus when Michiko Kakutani (also writing for So-no memoirs, no historical novels. What else?

A lot of non -historical novels will have to go too. the Times) attacks Jonathan Littell's recent novel, For sure, no more dysfunctional family books like The Kindly Ones, because its central character, the Nazi Dr. Aue, is a "cartoonish" "monster" we The Corrections or Light in August, or any of Oprah's other choices. And no more stories about can neither "sympathize" with nor "understand," and when she applauds the "appealing" central the children of immigrants, trying to figure out character in Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union, where they fit in American culture. Ethnic idenin whose "plight" the reader becomes completely tity is the family writ large, and no move is more characteristic of the neoliberal novel than the sub- "absorbed," we should understand that she is stitution of cultural difference for class difference. invoking political as well as literary criteria of evaluation: Good novels are defined by their What the neoliberal novel likes about cultural difference is that it sentimentalizes social cont1ict, interest in character; neoliberal politics by their presenting us with an imagined world where peo- respect for individuality. And we can go on to get some sense of what's at stake here for ambitious ple care more about respect for otherness than fiction just by sketching out some of the similariabout money for their mortgages. But you get a ties and differences between the novels thembetter sense of the actual structure of American society from Ayelet Waldman's boots than you selves. They both, for example, come equipped with glossaries: Chabon's explains the meaning of do from all our novels about people reclaiming, Yiddish terms like luftmensh (dreamer); Littell's refusing or repurposing their cultural identities.

Just think of what it means for Toure (in the New provides helpful explanations of the bureaucratic responsibilities of organizations like the Hauptamt York Times) to hail Colson Whitehead's novel about upper-middle-class black kids, Sag Harbor, Ordnungspolizei or "Main Office of the Order Police." If the point of Littell's glossary is to for "reshaping the iconography of blackness" -as familiarize you with the institutional structure if the crucial thing about rich black people is the new way they perform race rather than the old of the militarized society the book depicts, the point of Chabon's is to replace a society with an way they embody class. ethnicity; the novel's world is that of Detective It's not just particular kinds of novels that misrepresent life under neoliberalism; it's some Landsman "and his people." The novel's major of the things that we take to be central to the very stylistic achievement is emblematized by the way it uses the ordinarily pejorative term "yid" in the idea of the novel. In How Fiction Works, James Wood approvingly quotes Osip Mandelstam's same tone and with the same inside pleasure that claim that "the novel was perfected and strength- hip- hop culture uses the term "nigga." You don't exactly get "Whussup, my yidz" but you do get ened over an extremely long period of time as lots of sentences like, "Seems like I've known a the art form to interest the reader in the fate of lot of chess-playing yids who used smack." If the individual," and he goes on to emphasize the importance of "psychological motivation" the Yiddish word that is Landsman's name had appeared in the glossary, the most plausible curin producing this interest. Thus Wood himself rent translation would be "homie." Individuals, understands "character" -the novel's primary technology of individuality-as crucial; "to deny their families and their "people"; this is the way character," he writes, "is essentially to deny the Chabon does neoliberalism.

By contrast, Dr. Aue's family is literally the novel." It's one thing, however, to insist on the importance of character and individuality in Russia House of Atreus; The Kindly Ones is what the in the 1920s and quite another in the U.S. in 2009, Eumenides become at the end of Aeschylus' tril-

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Zones Devin Johnston

The hours spent on transpacific flights pass like a sandstorm through the Kazakh steppes, lodging a single grain-an irritant to memory-within the furrowed cortex.

Nacred by revolving doubt, it grows a pearl as black as the ocean depths and lustrous as the moon through sublimated ice.

This pearl outlives its host - and can be bought in Shanghai, from an unassuming shop on the French Concession's western edge.

The jeweler plucks it from a velvet box and cups the pearl like a Dramamine in the hollow of her outstretched palm.

She stands like that, expectantly, revolving shapes to come.

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ogy, and Aue's domestic life, to the extent that he has one, is all incest and matricide, without the slightest effort to achieve "psychological plausibility." The attraction of ethnicity-of "a people" -is reduced to nothing but the utility of racism; anti-Semites need Jews. Kakutani is right, of course: Aue himself is not at all sympathetic and there's a certain sense in which he is indeed a monster-not so much an unappealing character as not really a character at all. Indeed, in one of the few smart American reviews of The Kindly Ones, Daniel Mendelsohn describes him instead as "ideology in action," and it's this that makes him seem monstrous-to a literary culture that wants characters instead of ideologies and to a political culture that wants the same thing.

Thus, while Littell's book belongs formally to the genre of neoliberal historicism, it doesn't quite deliver the desired dose of flattery. Alternately a figure from Greek tragedy and a scrupulous Nazi bureaucrat, Aue images a society where individual character-good or bad-is largely beside the point, and his opening words to the reader, "Oh my human brothers" (from Villon's Ballade des pendus), suggest that we might better understand ourselves as creatures like himentirely structured by ideology - than as the psychologically complex and morally autonomous individuals our literature exists to tell us we are.

Or, to put the point more preCisely, we might understand our attachment to our psychological complexity and moral autonomy as itself a kind of ideological commitment, our way of imagining our world as nothing but individuals and families, markets and identities.

From this standpoint, The Kindly Ones, like American Psycho, would count as a kind of resistance to the "sad" time for art announced by Fukuyama-a return to ideology. And it would not be alone. The completely homegrown version of Littell (an American who lives in Spain and writes in French) would be the Baltimore-based writer/producer David Simon, whose TV series, The Wire, is the most serious and ambitious American fiction of the 21st century so far. Unlike The Sopranos (which really was about what

David Chase always said it was about- "family"), The Wire is about institutions-unions, schools, political parties, gangs. It's about the world neoliberalism has actually produced rather than the world our literature pretends it's produced.

If a book like American Psycho looks back to the great novels of Edith Wharton-novels of manners in which what's always at stake are the hierarchies of the social order- The Wire is a way of reinventing Emile Zola or Theodore Dreiser for a world in which the deification of the market may be going out rather than coming in.

Then again, the deification of the market may not really be on the way out. Unemployment may have reached 9.8 percent in October but year-todate returns were also the highest for hedge funds in 10 years. Besides, the goal of the Obama administration is not so much to oppose neoliberalism as to perfect it, to get us back to the days of the booming economy but without the pointless and expensive foreign wars, the waterboarding, the anti-immigration racism, the gay-bashing and the straight white men on the Supreme Court.

None of these things is good for business; some of them (the anti -immigration stuff) may even be bad for business. And American liberalism likes things that are bad for business even less than American conservatism does. So when it comes, say, to reforming health care, the idea of actually socializing it - not just bad but fatal for businessisn't even on the agenda.

But that's OK. My point here has not been to imagine ways we could get a better society but ways we could get better fiction. Which we could still do even if inequality goes back to increasing. For while it's more or less inevitably true that aesthetically ambitious books and TV shows are made by relatively rich people for an audience of other relatively rich people, it's not inevitable that these books and TV shows must be tributes to how virtuous (how anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-gay marriage, etc.) rich people are. And it's not required that they accept the terms of literary virtue-the interest in character, the search for your own "voice," etc. -either. Writers of the world, experiment!

How much worse can you do? ~

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[H]emp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products. Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa.

Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term. The original American flag was made of hemp fiber and our Constitution was printed on paper made of hemp. It was used as recently as World War II by the u.s.

Government, and then promptly made illegal after the war was won. At a time when rhetoric is t1ying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? Ah, the female. The evil female plant - marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover.

Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive [sic] drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers.

The above paragraph is excerpted from one of the most widely read texts to emerge from the financial crisis: the October 2008 farewell letter of a hedge fund manager named Andrew Lahde.

The letter opens, "Dear Investor," and closes with the words "goodbye and good luck"; in the fifteen months prior to authoring it Lahde had amassed a 1000 percent profit for his clients and increased his own net worth nearly a hundredfold by anticipating the foreclosure crisis.

The letter depicts Lahde's success as a victory over a class of people variously termed the "Aristocracy," "the low hanging fruit," the "idiots

whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA," who "were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received)" but rose to the commanding heights anyway because they "had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not." Condemning politicians for repeatedly rejecting legislation that "would have reigned [sic] in the predatory lending practices" and bemoaning "a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country," the letter challenged George Soros and other great minds to convene a meeting to devise a new form of government devoted to fostering a genuine meritocracy. "Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt," Lahde wrote. Before long he had earned his own Facebook fan page featuring a link to a site at which admirers could purchase black T-shirts that read "Andrew Lahde ~ Pure Awesome."

Crisis profiteers like Andrew Lahde are often described as having "shorted" subprime mortgages, but what Lahde did involved far less risk than a classic short sale. He simply accumulated a large supply of credit default swaps, a once-obscure derivative that provided a form of "default insurance" on bonds backed by subprime mortgages.

Credit default swaps were such unpopular investments in those days that $20 million bought a year's protection on a billion dollars worth of the most odious bonds. Curiously, the lack of risk seemed to do little to ease Lahde's mind as the crisis loomed-and as he prospered. He had lined up only a handful of small- time investors to back his experiment, and most brokers refused to sell credit default swaps to such a minor player. Long hours and chronic stress "destroyed" his health, he wrote, and after packing up his plunder he urged contemporaries who might aim to "amass nine, ten, or eleven figure net worths" to con-

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sider doing as he did: "Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life."

It has been more than a year since Lahde repaired to Salingeresque hermitage, a decision inspired by his "hero" Timothy Leary, according to Gregory Zuckerman's book, The Greatest Trade Ever.

In the interim, countless gigabytes of prose have been produced explicating the origins and the corrupt ideologies that enabled the multi-trillion dollar disaster. It is perhaps another failure of the market that all this activity has yet to produce a crisis chronicle so urgent or memorable as the investor letters composed by capitalists like Lahde, a literary genre that generally assigns words the status of wrapping paper around numerals and pie charts. To be sure, there were a few crucial distinctions with Lahde: For one thing, he seemed utterly indifferent to the chance to add more

zeroes to his net worth. He had nothing more to prove. Besides, and even for a man so addled by his own exceptionalism, the size of the fortune he had amassed was simply too great to rationalize as the homage of a rational market. The conclusion he drew from his own success was that capitalism had become irretrievably corrupt.

More erudite free marketeers reached much the same conclusion in the aftermath of the Panic of '08, but none so distinguished as the conservative legal scholar, federal judge and cultural critic Richard Posner. While not a trained economist, Posner has long been an exponent of the University of Chicago school of economics, famous for insisting that markets are most efficient when they are left alone to self-regulate. In 2009 this acolyte of the invisible hand published a compact treatise declaring the crisis to be nothing less

Books Discussed Edmund Andrews, Busted: Life Inside The Great Mortgage Meltdown (WW Norton, $25.95) David Faber, And Then the Roof Caved In: How Wall Street's Greed and Stupidity Brought Capitalism to Its Knees (Wiley, $26.95) Charles Gasparino, The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System (HarperBusiness, $27.99) Jill Kargman, The Ex Mrs. Hedgefund (Dutton Adult, $25.95) Duff McDonald, Last Man Standing: The Ascent Of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase (Simon & Schuster, $28.00) Lawrence G. McDonald with Patrick Robinson, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside

Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers (Crown Business, $27.00) Richard Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (Harvard University Press, $23.95)

Barry Ritholtz with Aaron Task, Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy (Wiley, $24.95) Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought To Save The Financial System~ and Themselves (Viking, $32.95) Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, $28.00) Gillian Tett, Fool's Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed And Unleashed a Catastrophe (Free Press, $26.00) David Wessel, In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Crown Business, $26.99) Gregory Zuckerman, The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind- The-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defted Wall Street and Made Financial History (Broadway, $26.00)

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than A Failure of Capitalism. Like Lahde, Posner is pessimistic about the nation's financial future, and he blames the coming full-scale "depression" upon a neglectful regulatory structure and an academy that had been "asleep at the switch."

The chief difference between the two seems to be their esteem for other capitalists. Where Lahde saw a financial industry peopled with mediocre trust fund kids who had traded their souls for Crackberries and Wellbutrin, Posner defends bankers "whose IQs exceed my own" as "brilliant."

He expends much text chastising the media as "ignorant" for indicting the bankers' "failures of rationality or intellectual deficiencies" and finds the media naIve for harping on "greed (whatever that means)"; he wonders rhetorically what anyone thought "businessmen were like."

The character of capitalists is not a matter to which A Failure of Capitalism devotes many more words, but the rationally self-interested John Galt clones who seem to inform Judge Posner's views are decidedly less believable characters than the rich -kid conformists Lahde indicts. And in a way, Lahde's mixture of sympathy and contempt for his fellow financiers bodes better for the future of the American economy than does Posner's soft bigotry of subprime moral standards. This is not an ancillary concern. If capitalism has failed, and socialism has failed, and the only remaining option is some improved version of the drab "mixed economy" that currently exists, then we are living in a perilous ideological vacuum.

To find our way out of the void, a stemwinding survey of the cultures and personalities that produced the catastrophe is required. And so despite Posner's insistence that what we really need is "a concise, constructive, jargon and acronym-free, nontechnical, unsensational, light -on -anecdote,

analytical examination of the major facts of the biggest u.s. economic disaster in my lifetime," a survey of what the men who created the current crisis are actually like might be a useful first step.

Posner never identifies his intended audiencethose readers who crave an account of the financial crisis stripped of any actual stories for fear of inflaming their allergies to sensation. But for less sensitive types, I have good news: the economic crisis was not only a sensational disaster story replete with edifying anecdotes, but it was also a story first pieced together in the name of profit by a small group of freelance capitalists who were in many cases just as astonished as the rest of us to discover the depths of systemic depravity that enabled their massive returns. And while Posner urges the Obama Administration to establish a "financial counterpart to the CIA" charged with collecting information so as to "assemble an intelligible mosaic from the scattered pieces, " he might have acknowledged that this sort of financial analysis has a name: "mosaic theory," the very approach which Andrew Lahde credited for his success."

The trouble with mosaic theory is that it lacks a sophisticated theoretical pedigree, and thus had been largely abandoned before the financial system came to be dominated by institutions that were Too Big To Comprehend. So while it was generally understood by the middle of the decade that bonds backed by pools of mortgages were probably due for a fall thanks to speculative bubbles in certain real estate markets and the rise of subprime mortgages, almost no one understood the magnitude of the disaster that was coming.

This was not so much because of a dearth of data. but rather an almost willful refusal to see what decades of overcompensated executives forcing overleveraged companies to squeeze ever-fatter

â&#x20AC;˘ Mosaic theory was also cited in the first paragraph of "The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is A Fraud." the famous 19-page memo a freelance fraud investigator named Harry Markopoulos sent the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2005 suggesting that Bernard Madoff was operating a gargantuan Ponzi scheme. The memo was ignored, but in 2009 Markopoulos was called to testify before Congress about the failings of the SEC. Markopoulos painted a stark picture, one that veered far outside the frame of the Madoff scandal: Government has coddled, accepted, and ignored white collar crime for too long. It is time the nation woke up and realized that it's not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it's the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most. They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives.

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profits from an ever-more indebted consumer base had wrought. It is difficult enough, for example, to fathom that Dick Fuld survived comfortab y in the Seventies as a L ehman Brothers bond trader on a salary of $6,000 a year, a sum the book Too Big To Fail offhandedly calculates as one ten -thousandth of the annual pay he took home later as the firm's CEO; but now try to wrap your head around the impact that such a man's actions had on an economy that had fatefully entrusted him with a balance sheet more than 10,000 times the size of that later salary.

Before the present catastrophe, the average financial journalist would have resisted evaluating Fuld's pay package on such absolutist grounds for fear of coming off as a socialist or a spoilsport; the media contrasted the compensation packages of CEOs as the CEOs did themselves: with those of other CEOs. Neither would a journalist have been likely to question the unbelievable bigness of Wall Street's financial footprint, though for a more innocent reason: it was just too overwhelming. This symbiosis of the immoral and the incomprehensible is what enabled the current destruction, and the latter has yet to change: "too big to fail " istreated in the current crop of crisis chronicles more as a catchphrase than as the massive inscrutable menace it remains. The story, alas , is too big to tell.

Perhaps the one truly enlightening treatise on "too big to fail" appeared just before the big fail in the eccentric 2007 manifesto The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, in which the options trader and amateur philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued that high finance had become dangerously vulnerable to cataclysmic panics and crises. After surveying the many flaws in the way humans perceive reality, Taleb turned his sights on the fatal flaw in the mathematical models that dictate the operations of the financial systemthe idea that wealth flows in accordance with the statistical formulas Wall Street had adopted from the world of academic physics.

Physics, Taleb objected, has nothing to do with wealth, citing as evidence the absurd, gravity defying growth of certain individuals' portfolios during the age of George W Bush. Wealth accu-

mulated so quickly in some pockets it created wild disparities even within the (wildly competitive) ranks of the superrich. While this random distribution of wealth blessed many on Wall Street, it simultaneously undermined the models of the Street's own financial engineers, producing in turn an ever -accelerating flood of financial crises. Taleb explained his unique perspective as a function of growing up in a locale less historically blessed by randomness , Beirut, Lebanon, during that country' s civil war.

As it happens, another bit player in the finan cial crisis grew up not far from Taleb during the Lebanese civil war. But while Taleb spent the war reading philosophy in his basement, Daniel Sadek, the founder of Quick Loan Funding, played outside. He quit school after third grade, sustained two bullet wounds by the age of twelve, and spoke no English when he moved at eighteen to Orange County. After spending most of his twen ties working at gas stations, he was selling cars when he decided to go into the subprime business in 2001, inspired by the number of luxury rides he'd begun selling to mortgage brokers. The firm he started, Quick Loan Funding, catered to the most subpar of subprime borrowers; in 2004, a Wall Street auditor reviewed a sample of Quick Loan' s applications and flagged 40 out of 40 as fraudulent. But Sadek's outfit never made a loan Wall Street was not happy to securitize.

The Texas hedge fund manager Kyle Bass first noticed Quick Loan because its logo kept popping up when he screened mortgage securities for higher-

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than-average delinquency rates. Like Lahde, Bass was a relatively anonymous regional finance guy who quit his job in 2006 after learning about the then-obscure business of credit default swaps, which he wanted to use to bet against the housing bubble. At the time, delinquencies were rare because lenders like Quick Loan were falling over one another to offer refinancings.

Bass, a t1eshy former college athlete with a remarkably hideous painting of dollar signs hanging in his office, appeared to harbor few political or philosophical convictions-indeed, he had never so much as registered to vote. But by 2006 he was increasingly certain the economy was on the brink of a cataclysmic collapse, a rare bit of prescience made possible by a valuable insight he had gleaned from ... his car. Bass was a longtime participant in the Gumba1l3000 Rally, an annual spectacle in which wealthy men with rare and expensive cars drive at high speeds on public roads around the world, stopping to attend extravagant parties featuring bikini-clad models but zooming blithely past the wrecks their colleagues invariably cause. Many journalists and politicians owe their understanding of credit default swaps to Bass, whose apocalyptic letters to investors quickly earned a following on financial blogs, but only David Faber, author of And Then the Roof Caved In, learned what it felt like to reach 190 miles per hour on a public highway in Bass's car.

Bass' first and only glimpses of Sadek came via YouTube, which in April 2006 posted local news coverage of a stunt car wreck Sadek had engineered to build "buzz" for Redline, a movie he was producing about the bacchanalian Gumball circuit that starred his then-girlfriend and the comedian Eddie Griffin. The stunt required Griffin to purposely crash and destroy Sadek's $575,000 Porsche Carrera. This was, Bass felt, "just a senseless destruction of capital, " but Sadek told reporters his aim was to give audiences bored by Hollywood's outsourcing of destruction to computergenerated imagery the "real deal." People "will know we're destroying a real Porsche-not a model, but a real one, " he explained. It was to be quality waste.

To Sadek's credit, all $4 billion in loans he originated during his short career in the mortgage business were taken out by real people living in real houses. But for each Quick Loan Wall Street pooled into a mortgage bond, there could be as many as ten "synthetic" mortgages trading in the esoteric derivatives market. Securities both synthetic and real were pooled into collateralized debt obligations or COOs, then sliced into "tranches" paying out a range of interest rates, with riskier tranches paying higher yields in exchange for agreements to shoulder the first wave of defaults, and safer tranches paying barely more than Treasury bonds because they lost value only after the riskier tranches had been completely wiped out.

Bass figured the incessant pooling and slicing to be a fertile environment for fraud, but he was stunned to learn what happened to lousy mortgage bonds and their synthetic clones upon entering the securitization process. The riskier tranche were being re-pooled and tranched again into "mezzanine" COOs, and by some imaginative leap the credit rating agencies were grading the top 80 percent of those Triple-A. Who was buying these things?

Bass learned the answer at a wedding in Spain, when he found himself seated at the reception next to a man who sold precisely that subpar subset of subprime mortgage dreck for a top-tier investment bank. Calmly, the banker explained that "mezzanine" was essentially a marketing gimmick the banks had concocted to sell off the lowest classes of sub prime mortgages back in 2003, when American pension funds and insurance companies had stopped buying them. By repooling those dregs, marking up their values and labeling the result "mezzanine," the salesman explained, the banks had found a way to "EXPORT THE NEWLY PACKAGED RISK TO UNWITTING BUYERS IN ASIA AND CENTRAL EUROPE!!!!" It was, Bass wrote his investors, nothing less than the "Greatest Bait and Switch of ALL TIME." It was also, of course, an epochal opportunity to bet against the house and win. But the era of easy money was quickly ending. Bass failed to secure backing from his old firm Bear Stearns,

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even though his presentation prompted a risk manager there to privately tell him, "God, I hope you're wrong." Sadek's day job was disappearing by the time Redline premiered in March 2007, by which point Griffin had also totaled his rare $1.2 million Ferrari Enzo, this time in an apparent accident when he botched a tight turn and crashed into a concrete barrier. The $33 million movie was universally panned, but the spectacular crash sequences prompted more than one critic to note that the cars had more "personality" than the characters driving them. "I lost my dream car," Sadek mused over his Ferrari. "But I went into my trailer and thought to myself, there's people dying every day. A lot of worse things are happening in the world."

Indeed there were. As it turned out, Wall Street hadn't dumped all its foreclosure cases on Europe and Asia; hedge funds and "shadow banks" had stockpiled hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage bonds as well using largely borrowed money in an almost criminally simple investment strategy known as the "carry trade." By that summer all the hedge funds that had fueled the boom had wiped out their investors. The banks that lent them money would be next. A great symbol of the era, one mort gage investor's yacht, Positive Carry, was for sale.

Kyle Bass, meanwhile, decided to tour some of the homes that comprised the collateral beneath the many layers of fraud and obfuscation to determine what else of value might remain. A road trip through central California proved the prognosis "MUCH WORSE than even I thought it would be," he wrote investors, estimating that 90 percent of loans contained some form of fraud, thanks to a "wanton disassociation of risk inherent in the machine that churns out Subprime loans." Daniel Sadek's destruction of capital was significant not because it was an aberration; it was a perfect symbol of the age. By wrecking perfectly awesome cars, Sadek was simply the first guy in the business who had documented the senselessness of the era in a medium Bass could appreciate.

Bass imagined how an epidemic of foreclosures would feed upon itself, subjecting sunny exurbs and retirement communities to the blight

of the grimy urban centers their cash -strapped inhabitants had fled. Even more disturbing was the baffling inaction of government at any level.

"Is there a TRILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY that you can name," he challenged investors in January 2007, "that DIRECTLY touches the consumer and is COMPLETELY UNREGULATED???" And this was before he discovered the magnitude of the other completely unregulated industry in this story: the manufacture of derivatives, a market some thirty to sixty times greater than the trillion dollar mortgage industry on which it was based.

The one entity with enough authority to regulate subprime mortgage brokers was the Federal Reserve Board. Controlled by one politically appointed chairman and twelve regional presidents, the Fed is a perversely undemocratic agency, but it was by no means oblivious to sub prime mortgage problems. In 1999, the GlaSS-Steagall Act was repealed, and the floodgates were opened for the nation's investment banks to pour funds into the once-boring world of mortgage origination.

By 2002 a longtime member of the Fed's Consumer Advisory Committee named Agnes Bundy Scanlan, an executive at Fleet Bank in Boston, was publicly warning the Fed that the "seven, eight, nine, ten years of [Community Reinvestment Act enforcement] work that I've been doing has probably all been undone" by the predatory practices of the new generation of mortgage lenders. "We have lost everything we've gained."

But the Fed did not operate as a "we." The crisis narratives by both David Faber and David Wessel depict then -chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan repeatedly dismissing statistics that detailed the rapid growth of the unregulated subprime mortgage business. Greenspan also routinely silenced dissent among members of the Board's small voting body (he had once sneeringly called it the "Federal Open Mouth Committee"), insisting that investors were too "sophisticated" to gain anything from the clumsy oversight of the babbling bureaucrats who staffed his own organization. Many times this most ardent foe of government told how he bonded with IP. Morgan's team of loan officers

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during a meeting in the Eighties, a story that somehow proved the market policed itself better than any bureaucracy ever could. Why Greenspan failed to bond with the loan officer from Fleet is anybody's guess.

Then again, perhaps Greenspan's doubts about the "sophistication" of his own colleagues were warranted. Wessel explains the philosophical factions within the Fed in adolescent terms: There were the cool guys, the jocks and the geeks. Bernanke, Don Kohn, Tim Geithner, and Kevin Warsh fell into the first category, the cool ones. The jocks were regional Fed bank presidents determined to show their manhood by talking tough about inflation and economic rectitude: economists Jeffrey Lacker in Richmond and Charles Plosser in Philadelphia, investor -turned -policy -maker Richard Fisher in Dallas. The geeks included monetary policy scholars who shared Bernanke's view of the world: Rick Mishkin in Washington, Janet Yellen in San Francisco, Eric Rosengren in Boston. And then there were the wannabes: among them Randy Kroszner, the book-smart University of Chicago professor who managed to rub much of the Fed staff the wrong way, and newcomers James Bullard of St. Louis and Dennis Lockhart of Atlanta.

impersonating Tim Geithner and SEC chairman Chris Cox and then competing against each other in an impromptu BrickBreaker tournament.

And if even a "cool kid" like Geithner felt he had "little available leverage" (in the words of an Inspector General report on the bailout) to negotiate a "haircut" with the Wall Street chiefs who had purchased hundreds of billions of dollars worth of "insurance" on their toxic mortgages, how could we expect the Fed to stand up to the Xtreme mortgage peddlers themselves, guys like Daniel Sadek and the "bodybuilders" former Lehman Brothers trader Lawrence McDonald describes after relating his own efforts to short the subprime mortgage market in A Colossal

Failure of Common Sense.

Back at Lehman, McDonald relates, distressed debt traders like himself were the "sharks," but an encounter with the "bodybuilders" on a "reconaissance mission" to Irvine, California, leaves him feeling a little less ferocious. Pulling into the Ferrari -filled parking lot at subprime giant New Century Financial, McDonald and a trader buddy panic that their rented Buick will give their spy mission away; they repair to a nearby steakhouse, where they soothe themselves with afternoon martinis served by glamorous waitresses. Here they encounter "the bodybuilders," McDonald's term for the brash young men who took home massive bonuses during the boom years by manThe Fed's undemocratic and insular structure has ning the front lines of the mortgage biz. Muscled been attacked relentlessly since the birth of Bail- and tanned, clad in tight suits and talking "with a out Nation, but this characterization is perhaps brashness common among people who are paid even more damning. Where are the stoners and huge amounts of money for tasks that require no goth kids, the hoodlums and skateboarders, and real brilliance, " they are the physical embodiment the "street smart" entrepreneurs who procure of a market McDonald fears has been fatally "roided fake IDs and give teen movies their plots? Well, up" on derivatives. The louts actually recite comthere's disgraced Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne, pany mottos~"New Century for a new century" who may be down to his last $600 million but and "new shade of blue chip"~and share debauched still enjoys access to "the best weed in New York," tales from the luxury booze cruise the company as he boasts in The Sellout. And some of the kids chartered for its top salesmen, wherein they know how to have fun even in the moment of sailed under the banner, "Best Damn Mortgage ultimate crisis: on the eve of the Lehman Brothers Company. Period." bankruptcy, according to Too Big To Fail, the Delicately, McDonald raises his concern: a combankers assembled in the basement of the New peting lender has been advertising a program to York Fed spent that ultimate moment of crisis first help its existing homeowners find jobs, suggesting

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with the magnet-school crew of the Fed of 2008.

Where Ben Bernanke's brainstorming sessions were called "Blue Sky meetings," the JP Morgan derivatives team leader Peter Hancock had "Come to Planet Pluto moments," spontaneous creative outbursts intended to inspire his team to think outside the proverbial box. Although Hancock wasn't a PhD-he had been promoted to head of derivatives mainly because he had captained a company sailing team that beat Golda number of borrowers had been caught off-guard man Sachs- he had studied physics at Oxford when their "teaser fee" period was over and their and is described as "exceedingly cerebral. " What Hancock's team invented was the credit monthly payments mushroomed. Responses from default swap, a massive watershed in global finanthe bodybuilders range from "not our concern" to "someone else's problem" to "otherwise it's back cial history that dates to a corporate retreat at to the ghetto, right?" And of the double commisa Boca Raton resort in the summer of 1994, an sions they are rumored to earn on the most preda- employee field trip that would bankroll corporate tory loans, they explain that it "takes a tough man risk disassociation parties long into the future.

Tett attempts to recreate the magic moment when to sell this stuff, and New Century is prepared to someone first concocted the CDS, but no one pay for the best." Incidentally, New Century was also, according to allegations published in Business recalls much from the trip beyond an abundance of drinking games, prank room service orders Week in 2008, one of numerous institutions to staff its mortgage-pooling divisions with attracand a poolside dunking contest in which a senior tive, flirtatious and often unqualified women; banker broke his nose, a tropical excursion the "mortgage sluts" hired, shall we say, to "incentiv- bankers recall with the fond nostalgia of aging ize" the bodybuilder types to bring home a steady celebrities reminiscing about the halcyon days supply of loans. * of Woodstock and Studio 54.

But if the geeks at the Fed were oblivious to "We had this sense of being special, of being the indifference-to-consequences that would detached from everyone else," one says. "There soon yank us all into a depressionary spiral, they was a sense of mission," said the sustainer of the at least shared the distinguished company of the broken nose, a "sense that we had found this fanPhD quants whose sophisticated models so effitastic technology that we really believed in and ciently converted one person's fraud into somewe wanted to take to every part of the market we one else's problem. The pioneering Nineties geek could." Not content with her own seventy-odd squad at J.P. Morgan that forms the cast of charuses of the word "innovation" and its variations acters of Financial Times reporter Gillian Tett's over the course of 253 pages, Tett herself likens Fool's Gold would probably get along great the team's invention to "splitting the atom," * "Mortgage sluts" and Ferraris: again and again the teenage obsessions of sex and cars saturate the story of the financial crisis.

The one regulator David Wessel commends for understanding in 2007 that the mortgage market would require a massive taxpayer bailout was yet another automobile enthusiast. Former deputy Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari, when in high school. filled most of his senior yearbook page with a large photo of a Ferrari. superimposing a picture of himself and assorted heavy metal lyrics. Recognition of the disaster's potential magnitude did not convert to concern, however; according to David Wessel's book, In Fed We Trust, in early 2008 Kashkari jestingly likened it to the Iran hostage crisis that consumed the 1980 election year, advising colleagues that mortgages, like hostages, were a problem for the "next president." (A slightly different account in Too Big To Fail has Kashkari reversing this stance, urging Paulson to start lobbying to use federal funds to bail out the mortgage market lest the history books accord Obama all the credit for "bringing home the hostages." I'm not sure which story makes Kashkari look like a bigger douchebag.)

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"cracking the DNA code", "the banking equivalent of space travel" and the "financial equivalent of the Holy Grail." Blythe Masters, a posh 25-yearold who would over the next few months take credit for inventing the credit default swap, would rave later that the concoction of sophisticated new "products" appealed to her not only because of her quantitative background, "but they are also so creative." And finally: ''I've known people who worked for the Manhattan Project, and for those of us on that trip there was that same kind of feeling at being present at the creation. " For anyone who forgot what we were fighting for back in the Summer of '94, a bit of historical context: "From time immemorial," Tett explains, "the worlds of business and finance have been beset with the problem of default risk, the danger that a borrower will not repay a loan or bond."

This is frustrating to read if you think of this lingering "problem" as a bank's fundamental reason for being. But Hancock's real innovation was not so much getting rid of risk that it was rendering risk less risky.

Here's how it worked: When J.P. Morgan made a loan, it would sell off the risk of the loan to another institution, which would get a portion of the interest payments in exchange for signing a contract agreeing to make good on the loan in the (highly improbable) event that J.P. Morgan's borrower defaulted. This arrangement supposedly made for a "win-win" situation because banks were bound by law to keep a certain percentage of their total borrowing and lending activities in cash, while the institutions to which they were contracting out their risk were not. By end of the nineties, J.P. Morgan had convinced the government that any bank that had outsourced its risk in such a clever way ought to be allowed to risk more of its funds trading than the capital requirements allowed.

The bank also perfected the art of selling off risk at extremely low prices, by pooling together thousands of separate loans from different regions and industries, then dividing the pooled risk into layers of riskiness and selling off the layers for a range of interest rates. The riskiest risk paid higher interest rates and was in greater demand; the bland,

virtually risk-free risk was offloaded to AIG at less than a tenth of a penny on the dollar. To keep a handle on all this newly tradeable risk, J.P. Morgan invented a model called "Value at Risk" or VaR, which the bank used at the close of every trading day to calculate, using historical data, the biggest possible loss it could expect to face.

It was a big success. Within years J.P. Morgan's so-called "noninterest income" - income that came from activities other than lending-comprised four-fifths of the bank's revenues, and the other big investment banks were following suit. VaR soon became the industry standard, as did the sale of socialized risk pools the team had invented.

But J.P. Morgan itself soon fell behind. Peter Hancock had been sacked in a dotcom-era dustup, and his team couldn't figure out how to compete in the fast-growing mortgage-backed sub-sector of the risk business. As Tett tells the story, this was because the bank's geeks didn't have enough historical data on mortgage defaults. There was a simple reason for this: housing prices in the United States had risen steadily since the Great Depression, and very few defaults had ever occurred. There simply didn't appear to be enough risk for the geeks to make money mitigating.

Years later, Tett tells us, when competing banks began churning out mortgage-backed CDOs, J.P. Morgan's derivatives team assumed their competitors had somehow found more reliable data. They could not know for sure because they were not regulated. They were not regulated in large part because of the lobbying efforts of J.P. Morgan. And because they were not regulated, the credit derivatives market soon grew to more than $66 trillion, a number almost no one would know until the next depression was on its way. Tett describes the "perversion" of the team's innovations variously as a "bitter, bitter irony," a "cruel irony" and a "terrible, horrible irony."

Even in our Age of Imprecise Irony, this is something of a perversion of the term's meaning.

Of course, meaning itself didn't enjoy much status in a banking industry convinced it could profitably lend money without ever shouldering the risk that it wouldn't be paid back.

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Taleb, for his part, accuses lP. Morgan in The Black Swan of putting "the entire world at risk" not by inventing the CDS but by popularizing VaR, which elevated sophisticated, mathematically - minded geeks he termed "Dr. Johns" over his preferred Wall Street archetype, "skeptical Fat Tony." (The difference between Fat Tony and Dr. John is revealed by their response to a question about the probability a coin will toss heads after tossing tails 99 times in a row: Dr. John answers "one in two" and Fat Tony answers "bullshit.")

Wall Street's Dr. Johns had committed a grave error in their risk models, Taleb tells us, having to do with the "Gaussian" function statisticians use to calculate probability, in which data clusters around means and averages. A Gaussian bell curve is the shape taken by a graph plotting the heights of adult males in America, or the proximity of fallen leaves to their trees, or any other realm somehow bound by gravity.

Taleb's contention was that while normal distribution patterns may govern most of the world's activities, they were irrelevant to the workings of modern finance. Most of us lead predictable financial lives, earning and spending money as we might consume and excrete food, and the probability of encountering a fellow adult who runs twice as fast or who consumes four times our own caloric intake is incredibly low.

On the other hand, it would be virtually impossible for me to board a Manhattan subway at rush hour without encountering someone making ten times my salary. Although our ages, cholesterol levels, SAT scores and rankings on HotOrNot.com could and probably would cluster around a mean, if you compared my cash flow to that of the hedge fund guy and forecasted our net worths at retirement, the difference would be exponential, a barely noticeable tremor next to the San Francisco earthquake.

Fool's Gold chronicles, if somewhat inadvertently, how Wall Street convinced itself -along

with the regulators who agreed that IP. Morgan's innovations had effectively reduced risk by a factor of five- that it had conceived its own disruptive megatrend with all its new tools and models.

Converting those innovations into the eight-and ten -figure bonuses that expanded the American centimillionaire population so dramatically was a slightly more elaborate matter, however. This required the wagering of ever-larger pools of capital on an ever -more arcane array of risky bets, plus the acceptance of both irrational expectations' and ubiquitous fraud. And of course, the abdication by public officials of any sense of responsibility that might otherwise prompt them to intervene Taleb's gravest fear about the spread of analytical systems like VaR is that they bring a cognitive blindness he calls the "ludic fallacy," the misinterpretation of real life for ludus, Latin for "school" or "game." But Wall Street's blindness was general by the end of the Bush years. The reason the Treasury, the Fed, the geeks and the mortgage brokers repeatedly invite comparisons to teen movies is because they seem to have operated under the assumption that the real world was an extension of high school.

Surely some degree of "ludic fallacy" is embedded in consciousness itself. But financial markets are supposed to be so vitally connected to all the tangible activities of humanity that Wall Street historically nurtured an unsentimental intimacy with real life, rewarding those who understood how trends and movements translated into dayto-day price fluctuations and who appreciated the real-world consequences of those fluctuations. This was where Fat Tony once thrived, and it is difficult to overstate the degree to which the Fat Tony types that dominated earlier Wall Street narratives like Liar's Poker have been marginalized in our day. When Kyle Bass goes back to tour his old company, Bear Stearns, he finds the mortgage- pooling desk staffed by twentysomethings.

"Capital is ubiquitous and free- flowing," one of

â&#x20AC;˘ For instance, the book Busted: Life Inside The Mortgage Meltdown excerpts a September 2008 "open letter" to Hank Paulson written by former Merrill Lynch CDO "guru" Christopher Ricciardi, who advised the Treasury Secretary to address the credit crisis by using taxpayer dollars to essentially guarantee all money managers willing to invest in mortgage bonds an "acceptable" annual return-"15% to 25% typically."

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them tells him with spooky conviction, "and it will never stop." At Lehman Brothers, McDonald's distressed debt department was populated by Fat Tony types, but they controlled nowhere near the sums allotted to the mortgage desk for a simple reason: the overlords in risk management were "guided, advised, regulated, trapped, imprisoned, and threatened on pain of torture and death" by VaR, a "tyrant" and a "bonehead" and "goddamned machine" that endorsed the firm's accumulation of tens of billions of dollars in subprime mortgage CD Os because it was programmed to prioritize historical volatility-and the mortgage CDO market was until 2006 a "calm, tranquil place."

Fat Tony manifests himself to a degree in the form of JPMorgan Chase's straight-talking CEO Jamie Dimon, who (supposedly) reined in his band of "innovators" by taking the trouble to educate himself about derivatives, and whose firm was the only major Wall Street player that did not need a massive bailout. But Dimon is described in most of these first drafts of financial history as a kind of mutant. As McDonald writes, "you could have tied Jamie Dimon to the bow of a patrolling nuclear submarine, so sensitive was his sonar." Fat Tony is totally absent from the list of stereotypes cited by the narrator of The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund, a fund manager's wife who frets about her husband's association with a "quintessential rowdy-jock-cum-date-rapist type" and delineates the various investment strategies of hedge funds in terms of the marital fidelity of their practitioners.

Not all hedge fund guys were like that. 1'd studied the scene up close, and Kiki and I had decided there was a link between the style of the guy and the type of hedge fund he worked in. For example, at the quantitative style funds, where mathematical formulas and computer software helped determine investments, at the helm was a nice power-nerd type, who loved his wife and kids and didn't care about "the scene." Contrastingly, both the "global macro" type firms (who put their wedding rings in their pockets on Boondoggles) and the equity hedge funds (preppy white-shoe types, including scattered "Tiger cubs" from the once allpowerful Tiger Management) were way more life-in-the-fast-Iane: jets, cars, wine, women, and song-the works.

In other words: there were jocks, and there were nerds. There were preppy jocks and power nerds and geeky prankster preps and date rapists, but in the end the distinctions between them were so superficial and meaningless as to be discernible only to the grown -up fratboys who perpetuated them. The flow of capital had come under the control of ISO-pound children who still viewed life as a game they could win the way they'd won their way into the Ivy League. The Fat Tonys retired, and the world of finance had no adults left.

Washington wasn't much different, the former jock Hank Paulson would learn as he pleaded with his ideological frat buddies in Congress to help him fend off the cataclysm that had resulted from their old project of dismantling the financial regulatory structure. Paulson, a former offensive lineman and Dartmouth alum, was accustomed to "two-facedness" among Congressional Republicans, but he was aghast when they privately agreed that he needed to act to save the system but refused to support him publicly with their votes. Before acting, others in the capital demanded some simple way to visualize and understand the panic in the credit markets, the sort of thing that comes from publicly available information, the collection and dissemination of which is the

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barest, most basic role of government oversight.

Alas, almost no such oversight existed in the bond and derivatives markets, and thus there was no easy way to convey the magnitude of the panic even as it was happening, much less in the years before and even a year afterward. Perhaps Hank Paulson should have sponsored a viewing of the movie Redline.

What was easy to convey was that something about the past ten years had been unsustainable.

But the truth-that an entire ideology had been unsustainable-is one that we have not yet grasped. And that is why so many journalists, economists, intellectuals and financiers now scramble to churn out books that for the most part read like the memoirs of people trying to make themselves feel less stupid. The current financial system was constructed to make us all feel stupid, and in the process of building it the architects allowed themselves to become stupid as well. That ignorance begat infantilization, which bred cowardice and systemic moral decay.

The only sustainable way out is to reacquaint ourselves and our fellow citizens with the wisdom of asking stupid questions.

In defense of Hank Paulson and the shrinking Republican congressional caucus, we should remember that they weren't alone in inventing the fable of an economy that could shutter all its factories and find a more innovative use for capital in the business of finding innovative uses for capital. The Party of Bob Rubin and Bill Clinton did such a good job preaching the gospel of accelerating profits that not one of the three bondrating agencies thought to question the Triple -A grade inflation with which we laid the groundwork for catastrophe. With both parties converted to this new Gospel of Wealth, who was left to point out the frightening taste of the superrich for such gratuitously hazardous sports as the Gumball 3000, or the cavalier way its organizer shrugged off the hit -and - run death of a Macedonian coupie who wandered onto a stretch of the Gumball route in Bratislava, and then returned in 2008 with a new route boasting a celebrity-studded party in ... Pyongyang?

Besides, no proper broker nowadays feels anything other than indifference about the wider world, as McDonald writes of the bodybuilders: They acted as if neither the fortunes of the company nor the borrowers had anything to do with them. They were like hired guns, oblivious to the fate of the victims or the company that had hired them. Professional salesmen who rode the waves, and when one wave petered out they would find the next one.

They were utterly remote from the reality of what they were doing. They moved in a flock, migrating from one sales scam to another, probably about every five years. And they were good at it.

Perhaps full-scale economic devastation was the only way to restore the sense of "intimate and inextricable relation to the society" around us that Tom Wolfe famously hoped to instill in readers of his 1987 crash -lit classic Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the last memorable explorations of the morally hazardous culture of the Master of the Universe class.

Sadly, it was not to be. The cool kids in residence at Treasury and the Fed, following Tim Geithner's curious motto, "Act fast, deal with the unintended consequences later" bailed out the jocks and geeks and bodybuilders and speed junkies, pledging a sum that by Barry Ritholtz's estimate exceeds the combined inflation -adjusted costs of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Space program, the Savings & Loan Crisis, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, both Iraq Wars and the New Deal. Ritholtz doesn't really fault their decisions, conceding later in a "naughty child index" that AIG was akin to "the kid who accidentally stumbles into a biotech warfare lab" and jams his pockets full of unlabeled vials before heading back to the playground. "History will judge" is the chorus reverberating through the rest. And maybe it will, if enough Andrew Lahdes and Fat Tonys can be lured out of retirement to impress upon this generation of entitled overachievers what vacuous, cowardly and parasitic twerps they all are. ~

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Motor City Elegy Will Boisvert My father came to Detroit when he was 12 because his parents couldn't feed him. It was the middle of the Depression, but there were jobs in Detroitmore than in rural Quebec, anyway-so he lived with an uncle who had one. When the war came he was drafted and made an intelligence officer: Since he spoke French, the Army reasoned, he could learn German as well.

Detroit had a good war, too, churning out B-24 bombers and Sherman tanks and hundreds of thousands of the trucks that ferried Allied soldiers into Germany. When it was over, my father came home to a city that was strong and prosperous.

Migrants poured in, houses went up, and the auto plants were always hiring at good union wages.

People who remember those days say that, back then, if you couldn't get a job in Detroit, you couldn't get one anywhere.

Times have changed. Germany and Japan rebuilt the cities that Detroit's war industries demolished; today it's Detroit that lies in ruins. Among major American cities, only New Orleans presents a tableau of devastation to rival the Motor City.

Its empty, crumbling buildings have made it an emblem of urban apocalypse. Its population today numbers barely 900,000, down from a 1950 peak of 1.85 million, and its mighty industrial economy has shriveled. Once toasted by everyone from Lenin to Noel Coward as a symbol of dynamic modernity, the city is now a byword for decrepitude and obsolescence.

The current recession has added lurid new statistics to the long saga of Detroit's decline. Last May, when I visited the city, the unemployment rate was 23 percent and the average home price had fallen below $12,000, less than the price of a decent used Chevy. Starved of tax revenue, the city government was running a $300 million deficit it couldn't close and flirting with receivership. A dip in the city's notorious crime rate proved a mirage when, in June, the press accused the undermanned

and demoralized police department of fudging homicide statistics and, in many cases, simply not responding when victims called. (That was not entirely the fault of the police, the Free Press noted: Some 911 calls don't go through because copper thieves have stolen the telephone lines.)

The recession has deflated a modest downtown building boom, and with it hopes for the city's revival. Projects have stalled, with idled backhoes frozen in mid -scoop. Rather than revitalizing the anemic economy, the three enormous new casinos that were to be the capstone of downtown redevelopment have had a hard time just vampirizing it profitably. The Greektown Casino, glitzy anchor of downtown's tiny nightlife enclave, sought Chapter 11 protection in 2008, and my tour of its halfempty acres of slots made it all too plausible that the house could actually lose in Detroit. The most popular attraction was a Chick -Tac- Dough promotion in which contestants played tic-tac-toe against a chicken to win $100 worth of gambling credit. When I came by, the line was 50 deep because the chicken, its operant conditioning having mysteriously lapsed, had stopped pecking at its video screen and was sitting huddled in a corner of its cage.

Downtown's signature abandoned skyscrapers show that the recent prosperity was more veneer than substance. Many of them are distinguished landmarks, their exteriors spruced up for the 2006 Super Bowl makeover: the elegant Lafayette tower, its boarded windows painted with happy sunbeam motifs; the massive Whitney Building, empty behind a Potemkin fa<;ade of faux storefront displays designed by students. ("Ever since I was little, I have dreamed of helping revitalize Detroit," Katie B. wrote on the signature card for her window treatment, a cardboard skyline beneath gauze clouds.) Over-engineered with strong steel skeletons, these buildings aren't crumblingwhich makes their abandonment more unsettling,

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majority. Decades of low-intensity race war ensued a testament to the strange valuelessness, despite as black families moving into white neighborhoods an obvious use-value, of the city as a whole.

Out past the ring of freeways encircling down- were besieged for weeks on end by rock -hurling town, ruination proceeds without disguise or mobs. The 1967 riot accelerated a general white prettification. This is where Detroit's celebrated flight. The apartheid lines stabilized around the cityurban prairie begins. The city bulldozes thousands suburb boundary, and Greater Detroit became the of empty structures every year, but it can't afford most segregated metropolitan area in America.

Meanwhile, Detroit's prodigious manufacturing to bulldoze them all; the resulting landscape, in many places, is one of wide vistas of grassland dot- base eroded as auto companies shifted production to the suburbs, the rural Midwest, the anti - union ted with looming hulks. A Web community of South, and eventually overseas. A major producer photographers and video essayists has sprung up of aircraft, cement, electronics, machine tools, to document these picturesque ruins: the debrispharmaceuticals and beer, Detroit was never a strewn factories, icons of modernist design; the half -demolished carcass of old Tiger Stadium; the company town; there were few useful things it 18-story slab of the Michigan Central train station, could not make. But its diverse industries were scene of a climactic battle between monstrous alike in their hostility to the city's powerful unions, mutating automobiles in the movie Transformers, and they all followed the Big Three in seeking rearing up like a Monument Valley mesa. The first cheaper land and labor elsewhere. Factories were shutting down en masse by the end of the 1950s, city of working -class homeownership, Detroit is full of sturdy, spacious houses whose decay offers taking with them the jobs black workers depended on, and a notorious culture of permanent paupera cornucopia of haunting images-burnt -out wrecks; stone mansions staring vacantly through ism set in. Today, even good times are hard times busted-in window holes; wood-frames sagging in in Detroit: the unemployment rate exceeded 13 percent every year from 2003 through 2008, with on themselves, right angles gone oblique. There's a third ofthe city's population living in poverty. even a subgenre that specializes in photographic studies of suburban ruins: shuttered Seventies Suburban refugees saw this polarized landscape in racial and moral terms, contrasting their own strip malls and derelict office parks in the struggling inner -ring suburbs north of Eight Mile Road. decency and work ethic with the shiftlessness and criminality they perceived in Detroit proper. But Nowadays Detroit's ruins may be its biggest de industrialization and the collapse of organized claim to fame, even a potential tourist draw. But the fascination they exert goes beyond their lugu- labor have confounded Greater Detroit's effort to distance itself from the inner city it despises and brious aesthetics. They are a panorama of indusfears. Greater Detroit's unemployment rate is now trial civilization's collapse-one that inspires, depending on your worldview, either mourning the highest of any large metro area in the country, and people throughout the region feel desperate: or a grim satisfaction.

The cab driver who picked me up at the airport had Detroit was not wrecked by any particular finan- just been laid off from a suburban parts factory cial crisis, act of God or Republican administraand was thinking of going back to India, where prospects seemed brighter. The culture at large, tion, but by forces so banal and pervasive in American life-racism, corporate profit-seeking, meanwhile, is no longer able to distinguish between suburbanization - that they can seem as inelucta- Detroit proper, the lair of the urban underclass, ble as time. Its decline dates to its heyday-to the and Greater Detroit. home of the doomed bluecollar aristocracy, a class of social parasites bound 1943 riot, sparked when blacks' efforts to win promotions on the factory 1100r and move out of for globalization's guillotine.

Detroit's overcrowded ghetto were resisted furiThe city was the site of labor's greatest victoously by whites, then the city's overwhelming ries, climaxing in the Treaty of Detroit, the 1950

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United Auto Workers contract that won cost -ofliving adjustments along with lavish health and unemployment benefits, pensions and vacations.

The settlement gave autoworkers a reliable middleclass standard of living and a secure retirement, with money to send the kids to college; it was a privatized, corporate version of the national social-insurance system that the UAW fought for unsuccessfully in Washington. Naturally, it made Detroit a leading target when the conservative counterattack against organized labor finally came. When oil shocks and Japanese competition crippled the auto industry in the Seventies, management theorists blamed its union workforce for the nation's economic malaise. Autoworkers, they insisted, were unproductive, careless and hungover. They cranked out defective cars and clung to petty work rules that stymied innovation. Their sky -high wages and costly benefits imposed a huge price disadvantage on the Big Three. Worst of all, they were uncooperative, self-willed and indifferent to the common good; unlike Japanese workers, they couldn't see that the interests of management and labor were the same.

The latest auto-industry collapse has turned this managerial critique of the UAW into populist folklore about $75-an -hour goldbrickers. ("Assbite UNIONS have bancrupted GM and the American auto industry for 75 years, but is that enough for the greedy bastards?? NO! They still want to fester and suck blookd from GM/ America and block GM reorganization out of self/greed," ran a typical posting to an AOL article on the auto bailouts.)

Like the inner-city underclass, suburban bluecollar workers and retirees now find themselves pilloried as selfish loafers dependent on welfare handouts that sap the nation's vitality. The auto industry's federal overseers have therefore decreed that the non-union Japanese-owned plants will set the bargaining pattern, and Detroit, Labor's Bastille, has now become its Waterloo.

A final dimension of classical tragedy: Detroit was undone by the very car culture it created.

Henry Ford, modern Detroit's founding father, embodied the irony. Echoing a familiar strain of American anti-urbanism, Ford decried

the industrial city as a "pestiferous growth" that rendered life artificial and made men strangers to each other. But unlike Jeffersonians past, he believed that technology would eradicate the disease. By conferring unlimited mobility, his cars would let people abandon the urban hellhole and live a wholesome rural life while participating in the industrial economy: "We shall solve the City Problem," he wrote, "by eliminating the City."

His prophecy came true, catastrophically, for the city he built.

Detroit has a reputation for low-density sprawl, but at its 1950 zenith it was a real city. At 13,249 people per square mile, its population density was nearly twice that of present -day Seattle, and extensive trolley and bus lines made it surprisingly auto-independent. All that changed with the breakneck suburbanization of the Fifties. Leading the onslaught were the interstate highways whose construction, shortly after the trolleys shut down, obliterated whole neighborhoods. City planners turned a jaundiced Fordian eye on any remaining pockets of density and bustle. Much of the docks district was t1attened to make way for a windswept riverfront civic center, and the city's historic black ghetto and other ethnic neighborhoods were demolished for redevelopment schemes that often skipped the redevelopment. Long before the fires of '67, urban prairie took root in the guise of urban renewal. But these holes in the city's fabric did less harm than did gradual dissipation, as the city's substance bled out over the interstates. The auto industry thrived on government subsidies for road -building and home construction in the new auto-dependent suburbs, but Detroit languished because of them. This was the infrastructure that let the city's inhabitants and industry disperse into the exurban hinterland. Without it, Detroit's population, economy and tax base might not have slipped its orbit, and whites, lacking easy escape routes, might have accommodated blacks' demands for integration instead of sentencing them to a municipal quarantine zone.

Detroit fulfilled my father's hopes for a while: He got his law degree at the University of Detroit, made partner at a top accounting firm and moved

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fixated on the false security of making stuff, would remain a backwater.

The current recession has shattered the financial sector, laid world-class cities low, and even moved government officials to extol manufacturing. And yet proponents of this critique only grow louder. Pondering "How the Crash Will Reshape America" in the March Atlantic, the influential urbanist Richard Florida again rings the death knell for Detroit -style industrial cities. The postmodern economy, he contends, "no longer revolves around simply making and moving things, " but around "generating and transporting ideas." The future therefore belongs to "creative cities"those that generate "the highest velOCity of ideas" by luring the" creative class" of bankers and law yers' scientists and engineers, fashion designers, film directors, artists and just plain "highly educated people." Florida's showcase is Pittsburgh, which ditched steel -making and re -oriented its economy around its universities, health-care In the Seventies Detroit adopted the motto "Ren- industry and technology sector; he salutes it for aissance City," and became a laboratory - and "redeveloping its core to attract young professionals and creative types." By this standard, Detroit, graveyard- for urban renewal fads . The Renais with a measly four Starbucks, is out of the runsance Center, a pharaoniC hotel -office complex of banal glass-and -steel towers, hunkering behind ning, and Florida expects it to become a "ghost fortress -like concrete berms that made it Virtually town." This is a matter of indifference to him. unapproachable, didn't spark a revival. The People While he declares the fostering of "idea- driven Mover, athree-mile elevated light-rail loop, built creative industries" to be "one of the governas the downtown anchor for a commuter line that ment's biggest challenges," the evaporation of the never materialized, shuttled its empty cars "tangible sector" is just nature taking its course, between vacant lots. an inevitable outgrowth of "long- term trends ...

As remedies failed and failed again, Detroit that look unlikely to abate" until we reach "The became a case study in urban theory, one that Last Crisis of the Factory Towns. " dovetailed nicely with the anti-industrial thrust Florida's brand of urbanism yields few policy prescriptions, other than that "t1exibility and of New Economy propaganda. The city failed, urban theorists began to believe, because it never ascended from manufacturing to the financecentered economy that rallied New York and London from their post-industrial slumps. These were "world-class cities" -a designation avidly sought by urban development officials, implying dematerialized wealth adorned by cultural prestige, celebrity architecture and the Olympicsand "world- class cities" were the only ones that would flourish in the global economy. Detroit,

our family into one of the city's best neighborhoods. But the upheavals that climaxed in the '67 riots made the city a far less promising place than it had been in his youth. The crime was especially shocking, and did much to justify people's decisions to flee. Poor blacks suffered more from it than did middle-class whites like us, but it touched everyone. A kid I knew well was set upon by a gang while he was riding his bike and beaten into a coma, and my family and I were robbed in our house by a gunman and his jittery girlfriend. By that time, Dad had left the city. His firm moved from downtown to the suburban business district springing up in the edge city of Southfield, and after he and my mother divorced he lived in nearby Bloomfield Township. He ended his days in a subdivision hewn from a cornfield, full of low ranch houses, wide lawns and spindly trees that gave no shade. It was safe, but it felt more desolate to me than any place in Detroit.

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Race Inauguration Day Thomas Sayers Ellis

Parades, but not-a-one in the meter of a march.

There were parties.

No apology. Then there were more parties.

Still many of our former owners spat at progress, at celebration, at transparency, our fought -for step up from nothingness.

Masked, we forgave them.

Civil Wrongs, overcome.

Statehood!

No one wants to make the hood a state.

So we skinned ourselves, zipper down the body middle, right there on the National Mall, the moment the poet, cold as her tone, enjambed America with "Love."

Without complexion, though, we looked exactly like what we had become: a clear people, equal to blur.

Sores.

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mobility" should be prodded along by encouraging of "the transnational webs of corporations and renting over homeownership. Worse, by disdain- petroleum" and into "the future, at least the susing all things industrial as stolid, stupid and stuck tainable one, the one in which we will survive," in the mud, his theory of urban economic succes- she writes, skating around the massive die-off that would have to occur before the city's land area sion gets the lesson of Detroit flat wrong. Making good cars requires plenty of innovation and, yes, could feed its population. creativity; rejecting the fallacy that it doesn't Solnit's dream may be coming true, but only is precisely what enabled Toyota to eat Detroit's with the thoroughly corporate help of the Hantz lunch. Nor is it obvious that the idea industries Group, a Southfield -based financial-services Florida touts are any more robust than manufaccompany that announced plans last April for a turing; indeed, what's brilliant about Pittsburgh's huge commercial farm in Detroit. Starting with strategy is its targeting of sectors that receive a 70-acre tract on the East Side, Hantz Farms LLC massive and uncontroversial government subsihoped to buy up 10,000 acres of allegedly underdies. The real point of the Creative Cities model is utilized land-a tenth of the city-for vegetable, the nifty way it rationalizes the privileges of what fruit and Christmas tree farms, a cider mill, maybe used to be called the upper class. Florida envisions a wind farm. The company vowed to "clear away an archipelago of world -class cities catering to the garbage, the blight, the debris," produce "local well-heeled elites who are always ready to flock and natural food" along with hundreds of jobs, and to more amusing perches; meanwhile, the making "reintroduce Detroiters to the beauty of nature."

City officials promised CEO John Hantz swift of things can be relegated to far-off sweatshops where workers make no demands on their creative action on the proposal, which was applauded by betters. Detroit, the city where the working class the Detroit News and urban farming advocates. once stood up to claim its slice of the pie, would It's hard to see Hantz's folly competing with be glaringly out of place. the factory farms of the real prairie; one imagines Another influential school of thought insists its main harvest will be tax write-offs and agrithat, instead of advancing into the post-industrial business subsidies. That Hantz could propose future, Detroit should regress into the pre-indus- leveling a sizeable stretch of a major American trial past. The city's prairies have made it a center city and turning it into a Christmas tree plantation, and then be hailed as a green visionary instead of the urban farming movement, with hundreds of plots ranging from community vegetable garof being run out of town on a rail, shows how dens to a multi -acre spread that raises alfalfa, desperately Detroit needs straws to grasp at. His chickens and cattle. Movement leaders extol the is actually one of the sunnier versions of the city's fertile soil, the fresh produce they supply "shrink Detroit" proposals now floating around, to local food deserts (there isn't a single majorwhich call for sacrificing blighted neighborhoods chain grocery store in the whole city), and the in order to concentrate city resources on healthspiritual "healing and regeneration" that comes ier ones. One downsizing scheme showcased in from working the land. To a certain green-anarthe Free Press would bulldoze neighborhoods and relocate their inhabitants to a patchwork of chist mindset that abhors Detroit's industrial leg"urban villages" separated by belts of woodland acy, this is thrilling Progress. Surveying "Detroit Arcadia" in the July 2007 Harper's, urban ruinist and pasture where houses once stood. Harder-eyed Rebecca Solnit trumpets the city's "tender, hope- approaches would simply withdraw city services ful and green" farmlet economy, illustrated with from the sacrifice zones and leave hangers-on in a Hobbesian state of nature. a photo of a shovel-wielding peasant, as "the shining example ... the post -industrial green city These plans draw on the trendy doctrines of the that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist international Shrinking Cities movement. Shrinkage manufacturing. " Detroit now points the way out theory holds that a dwindling population cannot

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are razed and emptied, development is shunted, as usual, to cornfields on the exurb an frontier, where people drive everywhere and nowherethat's the green part of the equation.

The most ass- backward renewal gimmicks yet, shrinkage and farming simply restate the formula for racially driven sprawl that wrecked Detroit, only this time in the jargon of environmentalism and, God help us , urbanism. Meanwhile, the Chinese, with their curious notion that development means moving up from peasant agriculture to manufacturing, are building a dozen Detroits, which will make all the products Hantz's employees can afford on their field -hands' wages.

Like many Detroiters, my friend Scott, a labor lawyer who lives downtown, considers the Death of Detroit an annoying cliche, so he insists that our ruins tour also be a signs-of-life tour. We drive afford the municipal services necessary to sustain through the East Side, past the enormous Briggs works, now home to a flea market, and the rama city built for a larger population; they should bling shell of the Packard factory, vacant except therefore contract into a smaller footprint that's cheaper to maintain. The result is compact settle- for a man sitting in an easy chair by its cavernous ment surrounded by parks or farms-a denser urb entrance. The once busy commercial artery of Mack Avenue is now flanked mainly by small that's greener, to boot. But as rational as all this sounds, it hangs on a grotesque misunderstanding fields; every block on the side streets has at least a handful of derelict houses. But there's also Indian of Detroit's predicament. Despite its ghost- town image, Detroit's population density is still actually Village, still a gorgeous district of well-tended rather high by American standards. The city is half mansions, and Mexican Town, a growing neighborhood with the lively street life all Detroit used again as dense as Portland, Oregon, substantially denser than the booming Sunbelt cities of Phoenix, to have. Brush Park, the city's posh district after Houston and Dallas, denser even than Pittsburgh- the Civil War, is a lurid standoff pitting new townhouses and spiffily rehabbed Victorian manall of them places that adequately fund city servsions against charred ruins and prairie; I can't ices. Detroit's problem is not underpopulation, tell whether it's dying or being reborn. but brute poverty, something that the grossly North past the Highland Park Model T factory, overstated efficiencies of shrinkage won't alleviate. (Flint, Michigan, a shrinkage poster-city held the decay deepens . On Robinwood between John R and Woodward, reputedly the city's worst up as a role model for Detroit, anticipates saving blocks, every house is empty except for the brightly all of $100, 000 on garbage pickup in the neighborhoods slated for destruction.) And for all its colored heaps of trash vomited through their doorways into the weeds. Even Scott's optimism anti -spraWl rhetoric, shrinkism is extravagantly wasteful from the larger perspective of metropoli- flags; the street feels sinister and slightly deranged, tan land use. It hollows out the dense core of metro- and it seems like there is nothing to do except to raze it and let the prairie in. Just a few blocks area settlement under the assumption - the ugly, unstated postulate of shrinkage-that decent peo- away , across the moat of Woodward Avenue, we cruise through the unbelievably luxurious neighple can't be enticed to live there. As city districts

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borhood of Palmer Woods. Built during the auto boom when Detroit was probably the richest place in the world, it has winding streets with Tudor palaces and French chateaux set on rolling lawns.

But even here we find a derelict property, said by neighbors to be Mitt Romney's boyhood home.

Finally we head south across Seven Mile to our old neighborhood. Not quite as grand as Palmer Woods, it has solid four-bedroom houses set near each other on quarter-acre lots. It's a close- knit neighborhood; when I was very young, in the pressure wave of the baby boom, just about every family had four or five kids, and as we ranged through our leafy backyards we merged into an autonomous republic of children that our mothers were powerless to police. I was last here when my mother moved out in 2002, when it had transitioned into a community of black professionals and was doing fine. As we pull up, myoid house looks better than ever: newly landscaped, with a couple of kids playing basketball by the garage like my brothers and I used to. But the stately brick colonial next door is half burned and boarded up, hung with a banner painted with staring eyes that warn scavengers and drug dealers that the house is being watched. The family that had lived there wanted to rebuild, but the house was uninsured; the neighborhood association was taking up a collection.

A Martian developer landing in the metro area would immediately peg inner-city Detroit as the place to build. Unlike a cornfield, it's ready to support housing and businesses with a transportation grid, utilities, and municipal services. The prairie is not actually a prairie, just vacant lots ready to be built upon. With peak oil coming, bus transit on the broad avenues could be whistled up on the cheap. Detroit has architecture and atmosphere and a lovely riverfront, and people ought to flock there. No law of nature prevents it from recovering its lost million, and making the little battery-operated cars we should be driving, or something else, and being the great city it once was. That this potential seems unrealizable, that hard -headed analysts dismiss it as nostalgic

fantasy, that our leaders can think of nothing better to do with the Renaissance City than to plow it under, is a crime.

Centuries ago, humanists in Europe's Renaissance cities also pondered a legacy of ruins from the distant past, but they did not gaze on them with romantic melancholy or shake their heads at the Ozymandian hubris of it all. They saw in the ruins of antiquity an inspiration and a challenge, great feats of human ingenuity to be emulated and surpassed. Detroit's ruins attest to its failures, to an industrial democracy fatally undermined by its refusal to include everyone, and a heedless material culture that, unless drastically reformed, imperils the planet. But they also speak of titanic achievements by whose standard we might usefully judge the present: prosperity widely shared; a working class that acted as master of its fate rather than as a dullwitted tool of production; a readiness to remake the world for the benefit of ordinary people, rather than bowing to the pseudo-natural order of the market economy. Instead of accepting the city's challenge, we have abandoned it, imagining that we can thereby leave behind poverty and decay-and even materiality itself, with all its defects-and so escape the burden of remediation and repair these things impose on us.

But it's not so easy to leave Detroit behind. I went to Chicago for college, and eventually to New York to be a writer-to join the creative economy in the pre-eminent world-class city. I succeeded, sort of; I'm a hack book reviewer, paid a pittance in an industry that's collapsing faster than GM. My situation is precarious, and every day I am reminded that, to live, I need things, not just ideas. The ads for writing jobs on Craigslist are all looking for bloggers to post about trendy nightlife spots, which I can't do because I have nothing to say about nightlife, and because I'm too old to even be allowed into anyplace trendy, but mostly because blogging pays nothing at all unless you are world -class, and I am not world -class.

Working in an auto factory for union wages doesn't sound half bad right now, but jobs are hard to come by in Detroit these days. ~

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The Eighteenth Brumaire of Michael R. Bloomberg Ryan Ruby

If you were a New Yorker, you probably went to sleep on the night of September 10, 2001, thinking that the most important thing you would do the next day would be to head to your local polling place and cast your vote in a mayoral primary.

Your task was to choose the Democrat who would face off against political newcomer Michael Bloom berg, the billionaire financial services executive, in the general election.

But, like the City itself, History doesn't sleephe stays up and listens to records. And that night, he wanted to hear the Queen of the Blues do her rendition of "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes."

Within the next 24 hours, with the help of 19 terrorists, he would hijack four planes, two of which he would plow into the tallest buildings in the Manhattan skyline, killing almost 3,000 people and upending politics at every level: local, national and global.

In terms of public opinion, no one benefited more from the attacks than the standing mayor Rudy Giuliani. After September nth, Giuliani's approval rating shot up more than 2S points; he was made Time's Man of the Year; he was awarded an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth; and perhaps most important of all, he was christened "America's Mayor" by Oprah Winfrey.

Giuliani would ultimately parlay his newfound popularity into lucrative book contracts, lecture tours and consulting gigs, as well as a run for the presidency in the 2008 Republican primaries, but at the time his sights were set closer to his home at City Hall. He considered attempting to change the city's term limits laws, which had been upheld twice by referenda in the past decade, to allow him to seek a third term. But the usually megalomaniacal mayor concluded, after reviewing the situation, that his almost universally admired handling of the worst terrorist attack in history didn't furnish him with the political capital to do so.

Instead, Giuliani settled for the privilege of playing kingmaker. Two months later, Michael Bloomberg would ride his crucial endorsement to a narrow victory over Democratic nominee Mark Green, who, by virtue of his party affiliation and his government expertise, would-ceteris paribus-have probably won that November.

Naturally, Bloomberg praised Giuliani's decision to abide by the referenda. And, when it came time to lose his veto virginity the following year, he unscrewed his executive pen to nix a bill that would extend term limits for city council members.

"At a time of excessive cynicism about so many of our institutions," he said, "this bill would send an unfortunate message about the impact and importance of their votes and set a perilous precedent for future leaders of this city."

As it turns out, he was talking about himself.

In October 2008, capitalizing on the widespread panic over the global financial crisis, Bloomberg announced that he would run for a third term.

Citing his business expertise and executive experience as his qualifications to lead the city through the economic state of emergency, Bloomberg proposed a revision of term limit laws that would allow him, the five borough presidents, and the Sl city council members to seek third terms.

New York's three major newspapers tripped over each other in their rush to voice support for the mayor and his bill after Bloomberg met privately with their owners to discuss the idea.

Rupert Murdoch's Post and Mort Zuckerman's Daily News hit upon the same hackneyed headline, "Run, Mike, Run." A.O. "Pinch" Sulzberger's Times featured an op-ed by Ronald Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir who had helped bankroll the two earlier referenda, in which he raised the specter of the Seventies-an associative cluster that includes serial killers, blackouts, racial tension' punk rock and the World Series champion

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Yankees~ in his

about - face on term limits. "Times Square was not the sort of place you wanted to bring your children in 1975," he wrote. "I never want to see that happen again."

Unsurprisingly, the city's business community was also excited by the prospect of four more years of their billionaire-in -chief. Speaking on its behalf, Kathryn Wylde, the president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, echoed Lauder's sentiments: "New York City and the country face a serious economic crisis and continuity in leadership is crucial at this time."

The only thing that stood in Bloomberg's way was the law. Instead of once again putting the issue to voters, the mayor's bill was backdoored through the Committee on Governmental Operations, chaired by his longtime ally Councilman Simcha Felder. It was then passed 29- 22 by the Council, two-thirds of whom were themselves nearing the end of their second term and therefore stood to benefit from the new legislation. An attempt to overturn the law ~ led by Randy Mastro, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, who made the obvious point that if 9/11 wasn't a good enough reason for Giuliani, then neither was the Wall Street crisis a valid excuse for Bloomberg ~ was rejected by a federal judge.

Bloomberg's political maneuvering angered many, but it didn't end up costing him re-re-election. During the campaign, he used every ounce of the vast political and financial power at his disposal to ensure victory. He would go on to spend 14 times as much as the Democratic nominee, City Comptroller Bill Thompson, laying out $90 million of his own money, most of which was spent on dispersing his competition with a whiff of advertising grapeshot. On the eve of the election, Bloomberg enjoyed a healthy 54 percent approval rating and an almost insurmountable 15 point lead over Thompson. Whatever else they thought of it, New Yorkers seemed to view Bloomberg's electoral coup as a fait accompli. In the end, their satisfaction with the incumbent and their electoral fatalism got the better of their anger over term lim its; they proved unwilling ~or unable~ to redress the damage to democracy done by City Council

at the ballot box. Thompson made the election closer than anyone had predicted, finishing only four points behind the mayor; but only a million people showed up to vote, resulting in one of the lowest turnouts in city history. On November 3, the man once known as "Mayor Mike" happily acceded to the title bestowed upon him by his critics, "Emperor Bloomberg."

Bloomberg's political mythology rests on the kinds of contradictions only a fortune of his size can engender. A self-made plutocrat from Medford, Massachusetts, his personal wealth has quadrupled since becoming mayor ~ from $4 to $16 billion, and this after the losses he sustained during the financial crisis~making him the 17th richest person in the world. Yet, with publicity stunts such as his $1 annual salary or his daily subway commute, he is sometimes viewed as a man ofthe people, winning himself the label "Billionaire Populist" in a glowing profile in Rolling Stone, that erstwhile organ of the counterculture. In their endorsements, local newspapers in former working -class districts in the outer boroughs never failed to praise the incorruptibility of a politician who's just too rich to bribe.

Beholden to no political machine, he changes party affiliation when it suits him: from Democrat to Republican to escape primary competition in his first mayoral election, from Republican to Independent in 2007. For this election, he ran on both the Independence and Republican Party ballot lines. Bloomberg's ability to finance his electoral campaigns frees him to float above the ideological morass in which contemporary American politics is stuck, allowing him to maintain his reputation as a fiscal conservative while running a nanny state whose public health policies (draconian taxes on cigarettes, a proposed tax on soft drinks, bans on indoor smoking and trans fats) and public safety policies (gun control, surveillance cameras and shows of force such as the preemptive arrest of nearly 2,000 protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention) must make his libertarian fellow travelers cringe in the privacy of their penthouses.

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As a result of his amplification of Giuliani-era policing practices, crime rates have remained low.

Unwarranted police stop- and-search operations have increased by several hundred percent under Bloomberg, and an ever -higher proportion of those stopped are black or Latino. The result of this egregious racial profiling, according to the Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals, is that New York City 's seven poorest neighborhoods produce more than 80 percent of the state's prison population. Miraculously, such iron -fisted tactics haven't exacerbated racial hostility, as those of Giuliani's NYPD once did , nor, outside the black community, have they tarnished the public's perception of Bloomberg, asthey once did of Giuliani. One need only compare how Giuliani, ever the pugnacious ex -prosecutor, mishandled the police shooting of Amadou Diallo to how his savvy media- mogul successor dodged public out cry after the police shooting of Sean Bell. As with so many aspects of his mayoralty, Bloomberg represents a change in his predecessor's style rather than in his substance, what you might call Giulianism with a Human Face.

Finally, when it comes to the culture wars , Bloomberg has the good fortune to be a Big Apple exceptionalist. Since he already shares the majority of his constituents' "enlightened" positions on gay marriage, abortion rights, health and allthings -green, he is regarded as post -ideological.

His primary economic tasks- balancing budgets, minimizing bureaucratic inefficiency, juggling tax rates with government spending-are considered value-neutral; and, insofar as he does well by his constituents, he is deemed a pragmatist. From

the beginning, Bloomberg has branded himself as the man who can "run the city like a business," and New Yorkers have always thought of him not as a p olitician but as a technocrat, not as City Hall's executive but as its chief executive officer.

These, however, are pernicious illusions. Democratic societies have always had to negotiate the often porous boundary between the rights of wealth and those of commonwealth. But, wherever this particular combination of illusions has persisted in the mind of their electorates, the result has always been the same: a massive trans fer of public resources into private pockets.

Nowhere is this transfer process more in evidence than the Bloomberg administration's land use and development practices. In the past eight years, more than one-fifth of New York's total area has been rezoned for new development, more land than under the previous six mayors combined.

Much of this rezoning has been spearheaded by Amanda Burden, the director of the Department of City Planning, and Dan Doctoroff, the mayor's Baron Haussmann, who retired from his position as deputy mayor for economic development to become president of Bloomberg L.P. in 2007. For its part, the developer-pliant City Council has never met a rezoning proposal it didn't like.

Literally. It has approved every single one of the more than 100 such proposals that have come up for review since 2002.

The areas slated for redevelopment are often old industrial zones that have fallen into disuse and disrepair as the city has transformed from a manufacturing- to a service-based economy. Development in many of these areas is necessary if the city is to adapt to changing economic conditions, but just as Hemingway warned that we shouldn't mis take movement for action, we shouldn't confuse development with progress. The problem is not development tout court, but rather the way in which, under Bloomberg, it has been used to further the interests of the private few rather than the larger public.

Take the case of the Atlantic Yards. Though a private development, Bloomberg and Doctoroff

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have been involved with the project from its inception and remain its steadfast cheerleaders.

Currently being developed by Bruce Ratner, CEO of Forrest City Ratner (FCR) , Atlantic Yards began as a massive 22-acre development in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn (to put its size in perspective, the new World Trade Center will rest on only 16 acres). The project was to include a Frank Gehry-designed arena to house Ratner's acquisition, the New Jersey Nets, and 17 high- rise office buildings and residences, but has only resulted in a string of broken promises' sweetheart deals, waste and corruption.

FCR promised that the project would create 15,000 construction jobs and 10,000 office jobs; it also promised to create 2,250 units of afford able housing by 2016. In its Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) with a coalition of community organizations, FCR stipulated that at least 35 per cent of its construction jobs would go to minorities and 20 percent would be completed by minority-owned firms. The CBA went a long way to win low-income and minority support for the project. However, the CBA is not a legally binding document, and six of the coalition's commu nity organizations were brought into existence with the CBA itself. One of these organizations, Brooklyn United for Innovative Development, owes its entire budget to FCR; others have received money from the company, including the liberal nonprofit community organization ACORN, which received a $1.5 million loan. With this kind of accountability to the community, it is not surprising that 15,000 construction jobs turned out to mean 1,500 over 10 years; that the estimate for the office jobs was cut by 75 percent; that only 200 units of affordable housing will be available by 2012, and even those units are not guaranteed; and that none of the housing will be aifordable to the local residents it will displace.

Meanwhile, the cost of the project has skyrocketed from $2.5 to $4.9 billion. City funding for the arena alone has doubled to $205 million over the past four years, Which, according to the Independent Budget Office, means that its cost to the city will vastly outweigh the tax revenue

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it was projected to generate. Still desperate for additional funds, Ratner has recently attempted to alley-oop the Nets to Russia's richest man, Mikhail Prokhorov, who, as a beneficiary ofYeltsin 's 1995 "loans-for-shares " scheme, knows a little something about reaping private benefits from public resources . In order to cut expenses, Ratner cut Gehry and turned over the design of the arena to the stadium- building firm Ellerbe Becket , whose initial renderings for the Barclays Center resemble the barns where other clients such as the Pacers and the Celtics play. The renderings are of a piece with nearby Ratner properties like the Atlantic Center Mall and the MetroTech Center, which, with their fortress-like design and chain -store retail offerings, reek of suburbia.

Public outcry, led by Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, forced Ratner to hire SHoP Architects to spruce up Ellerbe- Becket's design.

The stadium is now slated to look like a George Forman grill.

FCR bought the development rights to the eight and a half acres above the currently defunct Vanderbilt Rail Yards for $100 million from the Metropolitan Transit Authority-less than half of its market value and $50 million less than another offer on the table. In a subsequent deal, the MTA demanded only $20 million upfront, the rest of which it would allow Ratner to pay over 22 years. The MTA passed on the cost of these unfathomably moronic business decisions to strap hangers. in the form of a fare hike and service cutsbut Bloomberg took care toconceal this awkward arrangement in one blast of his campaign's directmail deluge blaming higher fares and decreased services on "MTA bureaucracy."

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If it is completed, Atlantic Yards will be one of the largest building projects in the city- and it represents the whole of Bloomberg-era development in miniature. (If it's not completed, it will be due to the efforts of Daniel Goldstein, a property owner turned activist, who found himself within the project's footprint, and is currently fighting Ratner's use of eminent domain in court, arguing, quite logically, that his expropriation is unconstitutional because the Atlantic Yards project doesn't amount to public use). The project combines the same practice of public financing for sports stadiurns that saw $500 million in taxpayer dollars flow to the Yankees and Mets to subsidize their new ballparks, with the same abuse of eminent domain that has characterized the Columbia University expansion, with the same disregard for the needs of the community in the Kingsbridge Armorywhose developer, Related Companies, is headed by a former business partner of Doctoroff. FCR, like its fellow development corporations, pays lip service to Jane Jacobs' call for "mixed-use" development, as it whips up Robert Moses-sized plans for prefabricated neighborhoods, whose essential elements-shopping malls , offIce towers , condos, hotels-are duplicated ad nauseam in sites throughout the city.

Now, with tax revenues from Wall Street down, a budget crisis looms and the political classes have begun to deploy the standard rhetoric of making sacrifices and tightening belts. But it is not wasteful private developers whose subsidies are on the chopping block; it is 1,400 teachers, 1,000 police offIcers and 500 social workers, as well as the health care and pensions of city employees. Adding injury to insult, along with these service cuts, Bloomberg has proposed a fare hike of his own in the form of an increase in the sales tax to fill budget gaps , which will disproportionately affect poorer New Yorkers.

Projects like the Atlantic Yards give the lie to the mayor's pragmatist reputation. They show that if Bloomberg is too wealthy to bribe, this hasn't eliminated business influence in his governmentit has merely obviated the necessity for it. They show that ineffIciency isn't the sole prerogative of

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public bureaucracies, and that the claim itself is only made to obscure the wastefulness of the private sector. Finally they show that balancing budgets is not a value-neutral matter, that it forces elected offIcials to choose between those services that will be kept and those that will be cut, and that the choices they end up making reflect distinct political priorities.

But the effects of the Bloomberg administration's Neo- Haussmannization aren't only economic; they are also aesthetic, and perhaps most impor-

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York's real estate moguls, who have lucratively tantly, existential. Development has changed the character of the city, which in many respects followed their trail from Greenwich Village to SoHo to the Lower East Side, but in the last eight has become more homogeneous.

Homogenization is a somewhat misleading term: years, the process has gone into overdrive, with It suggests a natural process of equilibrium rather artists moving in and getting priced out of "it neighborhoods" in Brooklyn and Queens every than what it really is, namely, the colonization of the culture of one place by another, more power- other year. Now they are leaving the city altogether, decamping for cheaper cities like Philaful one. Under Bloomberg, the ethos of Giuliani's delphia, New Orleans and Portland.

Times Square redevelopment strategy has metasChelsea, the city's center for new art galleries, tasized, so that huge swaths of Manhattan are now provinces of Midtown; the largest mall in the has devolved into a combination highbrow stock world, the island's once unique districts now offer exchange and up-market dating scene. CBGB's, the little more than varieties of consumer experience. legendary home of punk, was iconic enough to be featured in a promotional video for the city's bid With the construction of large~and now largely for the 2012 Olympics (run by Doctoroff), but was empty~luxury condominiums, Long Island City and downtown Brooklyn are now indistinguishnot deemed worthy of preservation with historic landmark status; 315 Bowery is now one of John able from the Financial District. Small, local institutions are in retreat across the city. Working-class Varvatos' eight boutiques. A few blocks away, the corpse of the avant -garde music club Tonic rots in dives have been replaced by glitzy cookie- cutter cocktail lounges, a fate that poet Andrei Codrescu the shadow of a hideous blue luxury condominium.

Writers still have a home here, but as the publishrightly blames on the smoking ban. Regressive ing industry contracts, their future is uncertain taxation, along with rising rent and food prices, too. There may soon come a time when the New is leading to the slow death of the neighborhood York novel is considered to be nothing more than bodega, whose role in providing food and supplies, especially in lower-income communities, a quaint species of regional fiction.

Cynics will argue that the spirit of a place is is being supplanted by national chain grocery always in flux and that therefore preservation is and drug stores.

The city has also become more ethnically homog- a conservative, quixotic enterprise. New York, which embodies the "all that is solid melts into enous during the Bloomberg era. According to air" spirit better than any city in the country, is the most recent census, the African-American population of the largest black city in America, and no stranger to such logic, but the changes to its one of its primary centers of black culture, has character during the Bloomberg era have been gone into decline for the first time since the Civil regressive rather than progressive; it has followed national trends rather than set them.

War. The city's high cost of living has prompted Frank Sinatra famously said of New York, if you many blacks to move back to the South, but can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. But dwindling Afro-Caribbean immigration, high as big-box chain stores drive out local businesses, incarceration rates and gentrification are also responsible for this stunning demographic change. as advertising devours every inch of public space, Meanwhile, the number of Asians in New York as high rents force artists to look elsewhere for studios, and as the high cost of living radically has increased, followed by an increase in the alters New York's racial demographics, its citiwhite population of the city.

New York has also lost its claim to being the art zens and admirers have watched in horror as the reverse has become true. At the rate things are capital of the world. "For the first time in Mangoing, it is worth wondering whether, after four hattan's history," observes commentator Adam more years of Bloomberg's stewardship, New York ~ Gopnik, "it has no bohemian fringe." Artists The City ~ will even deserve the name. ~ have always been the unwitting scouts of New

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King's Row lim McNeill

People tell me the housing bubble has burst, but you wouldn't know it in my neighborhood. I live in Washington in Mt. Pleasant, about two miles up from the White House. Known for its hippies and their group houses in the Sixties, Mt. Pleasant is dominated by yuppies and their granite countertops today. Real estate agents here still send out postcards boasting about our escalating home prices. One agent recently touted a row house not much bigger than mine that listed for $959,000 and "Sold for $965,000!"

Sadly, I don't own my home. I rent a room in one of those Sixties remnants, a tumbledown group house on the 1800 block of Kilbourne Place. I used to live on the 1700 block in a home that had been hacked into three small apartments, but the landlord sold out in 2002 for half a million dollars and the only place I could afford nearby was the basement bedroom in this group house. It's a dry basement, except when it rains.

Still, I feel lucky to live in Mt. Pleasant. Despite the influx of yuppies, we like to consider our neighborhood diverse. And according to the latest census it really is. Washington is one of the most segregated cities in America, but Mt. Pleasant has a fairly even mix of black, white and Latino, with each group hovering around 30 percent of the neighborhood's population.

But those numbers are misleading. If you live here long enough, you begin to sense there's not a lot of interaction among us. On my block, the black homeowners are almost all seniors, many of them elderly women who seem to live alone.

Almost all the new homeowners-like the ones who paid $732,000 for the house four doors down from me-are white couples of childbearing age. They don't seem to spend much time in one another's homes.

The best I can say for myself is that I'm an equal-opportunity hermit. I don't know the elderly black women on my block, but I don't

know the white yuppies or their kids either. I have my excuses. I'm a writer, or try to be, so I spend all my time holed up at home, not finishing articles like this one.

Well, I do leave the house on occasion. Just the other day, I trudged up to my local cafe- Dos Gringos, it's called-to buy a cup of coffee. The route took me by myoId house, and I noticed a white hipster standing on the sidewalk, staring across the street and smirking. I assumed he was staring at myoId place, whose plain bricks are painted a garish yellow now. But as I got closer, I saw he was looking at the house a few doors down. I never knew those neighbors, of course, but they're African-American, an extended family, I think, who've been living there for years.

Ever since I moved to Mt. Pleasant, they've had a picture on their porch, a framed portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., hanging right by the front door. I've always thought of it as a sort of loud and proud mezuzah.

But that's not what the white hipster was smirking at. A few days earlier, Michael Jackson had died, and there on the columns of the family's front porch they had hung two large portraits of him. Hand-painted, it seemed, in a style somewhere between a velvet Elvis and folk art. Both were given an even more defiant pride of place than King. I hope I didn't smirk like the hipster, but my jaw went slack. I saw Jackson as a tragic figure, one to be mourned not celebrated. And even if someone gave him the benefit of the doubt in his molestation cases, how could anyone put the King of Pop up there on a porch with King?

In 1950, Dr. Robert Deane became the first African -American to buy a home in Mt. Pleasant.

Two years earlier, it would have been illegal for him to do so.

Like so many American neighborhoods at the time, Mt. Pleasant had an all-white citizens asso-

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ciation that organized local homeowners to adopt racial covenants banning the sale of homes to black buyers. In the mid-Forties, James M. Hurd challenged those covenants in the u.s. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Hurd, an African -American, had tried to buy a home from Frederic and Lena Hodge in D.C. 's LeDroit Park neighborhood, but the Hodges had a racial covenant in their deed and refused to sell. Mrs. Hodge said she'd rather have a white criminal in her neighborhood "because he is white and I am white" than a black family, "no matter how educated or cultivated. " In 1947, the appeals court ruled in the Hodges' favor and upheld the legality of racial covenants.

But the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hurd's appeal and made it a companion case to Shelley v. Kraemer, arguably the most important civil rights decision in America before Brown v. Board of Education. Two of the justices had to recuse themselves because they owned property with racial covenants. In May 1948, the slimmed down court ruled unanimously in Shelley that racial covenants could not be legally enforced.

But one Supreme Court case wasn't enough to win a full measure of justice for the black citizens of Washington. In the middle of 1947, the same year the D. C. appeals court handed down its infamous decision in Hurd v. Hodge, the National Capital Park and Planning Commission released a proposal to revitalize the city. Washington had grown horribly overcrowded during the war

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years and the city's public facilities badly needed an upgrade. The chair of the commission, Major General U.S. Grant III, grandson of the Civil War hero, promised a root-and-branch reconstruction of Washington that would leave it teeming with new "playgrounds, public buildings, parks and schools."

Grant's plan would have done to black Washington what Sherman's march did for Atlanta.

Grant frankly admitted that several AfricanAmerican neighborhoods would be gutted and said "the colored population dispossessed" by his efforts would be relocated to distant sites "in the rear of Anacostia," a section cut off from the rest of D.C. by a river. Defending the plan, an official with the local housing authority explained that "segregation is the accepted pattern of the community." Although Grant had to shelve some of his more extreme plans, his vision of a dispossessed black population pushed to Anacostia largely came to pass.

While black homeowners like Deane got a foot hold in Mt. Pleasant and some other all-white neighborhoods, African -Americans lost ground in other areas. Postwar highway projects in Southwest D.C. devastated the black community there.

In Foggy Bottom, just north of the Lincoln Memorial, the expansion of George Washington University and other development projects nearly wiped out its African -American population. And the historic black enclave in Georgetown all but disappeared when its residents were priced out of the market.

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When I moved into my Mt. Pleasant basement in 2002, the descendants of one of the neighborhood's old African-American families lived next door. I say descendants, but I don't know how many of the people who cycled in and out of that house were blood relations. There was an elderly aunt or maybe great aunt who sat on the porch in all but the coldest weather, and in one of our rare conversations she said one of the youngish women in the house had inherited it.

Many small children lived there as well-or did for a few months at a time. The kids would arrive with young women who'd leave them with the elderly aunt and disappear. Before long, the kids would disappear too. One of the longest -standing residents in the house was a surprisingly square man in his late 20s or early 30s . Whether a boyfriend or brother of the owner, I never knew.

Weirdly, he was a sucker for classic rock. I'd be under my back porch digging yet another moat to block the rainwater from my room and I'd hear the Steve Miller Band blaring from his window . When he'd spring down the steps to meet friends, 1'd hear him singing Eagles songs.

We were friendly in a formal way, and when I'd see him in the bar up the street, we'd nod politely across the room. He seemed to spend even more time at the bar than me. You could see his features thickening, his body a little more bloated by the day. And then, maybe in 2005 or 2006, he was gone, replaced by men who didn't like the Eagles at all.

Menacing cars with Maryland plates would show up outside the house late at night and someone would start pounding on the front door.

Sometimes they'd disappear inside. Other times, the police would show up to quiet them down or take them away. The police visits seemed to grow more and more frequent until suddenly, in the summer of 2008, the contents of the house were emptied out onto the street.

I learned a little while ago that the house was sold to one of D.C. 's most notorious slumlords way back in 2003. The descendants of those old owners must have been desperate for cash, because they

sold it to him for just $206,000, an obscenely low price for Mt. Pleasant. Apparently, the slumlord let them live there as tenants and evicted them when their money ran out. The house is still empty, and I have to admit the tomb-like silence is easier to take than the thumps and shouts at 3 a.m.

Fortunately, the whole world is not The Wire.

Despite sad stories like that of my neighbors, the black middle class has grown dramatically since the civil rights movement pricked America's con science. In 1960, just 13 percent of black workers held middle-class jobs. By 2002, 51 percent did.

Say what you will about the Clinton years, but median income for African-American households jumped almost 30 percent while he was in office.

The Clinton administration also crusaded successfully to increase minority home ownership.

The problem with that crusade, however, is that it overlooked the needs of people who didn't or couldn't or shouldn't own their homes. As Alyssa Katz points out in Our Lot, her revealing study of the housing bubble and the policies that led to it, the Clinton administration lost focus on the third of Americans-and the roughly half of Latinos and black Americans-who are renters. Between 1995 and 2003, America lost 300,000 units of subsidized rental hOUSing. Even as we built a glut of McMansions over the last decade, we destroyed a tenth of the nation's public housing apartments.

In 2001,13.8 million American families spent more than half their income on housing, a crippling cost for shelter. By 2007, more than 18 mil-

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lion families did. Cuts in housing aid hit the poorest fifth of Americans especially hard. In 2007,53 percent of them spent more than half their income on housing. A 2008 Zogby poll found that 43 percent of all Americans paid more than the governmeni's recommended maximum of 30 percent of their income for housing.

Just as rivers run where the landscape allows, so commerce flows where rules and regulations let it. Because we spent the last three decades lifting restraints on the banking industry, the real estate market ran wild. Minority borrowers were most badly hurt.

Katz notes that as early as 1993 the Senate Banking Committee took testimony from elderly black borrowers who were pressured to take out subprime mortgages they couldn't possibly repay. Congress responded by passing a law that affected just 1 percent of those sub prime loans.

In 1996, the Justice Department sued Long Beach Mortgage for charging black and Hispanic borrowers much higher loan fees than other equally qualified borrowers. And yet the firms that Long Beach spawned would go on to issue one-third of all subprime mortgages in 2005, the height of the housing bubble. A former Wells Fargo loan officer in Baltimore testified in a 2008 lawsuit that the bank had targeted African -American churchgoers and pushed them to take out subprime mortgages even when they qualified for less expensive prime loans.

There are reasons why black and white Americans see the world differently. We sometimes forget that Martin Luther King Jr. 's last crusade was the Poor People's Campaign, his doomed struggle to address the scourges of "racism, poverty, militarism and materialism," as he put it. In his final months, King challenged America to recognize that the "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced." It remains as daunting a challenge as ever. Who wouldn't prefer to argue about the content of Michael Jackson's character?

On AprilS, 1968, the day after King was assassinated, soldiers from the 6th Cavalry at Fort Meade, Maryland, entered Washington and drove to

Fourteenth Street, which runs two blocks east of Mt. Pleasant. The soldiers jumped from their trucks just before sunset and converged on Fourteenth and U, the historic heart of black Washington and the epicenter of the riots that engulfed the city after King's shooting. By the time they arrived, at least half of the 300 businesses along the Fourteenth Street strip had been looted or burned. Soon, two full battalions-more than a thousand men - were patrolling Fourteenth Street and 13,600 federal troops and D.C. Guardsmen had fanned out across Washington. It was the largest occupation of an American city by U.S. soldiers since the Civil War. Not much got built around Fourteenth Street over the next 30 years. Mt. Pleasant suffered its own setback in May 1991, when the largest riot in D. C. since 1968 broke out on the neighborhood's main drag. The police shot a Salvadoran man during a routine arrest and for three days rioters rampaged on Mt. Pleasant Street, setting fire to stores and cars. Fifty people were injured, 230 were arrested. That year, Washington was dubbed the murder capital of America when a record 482 people were killed in the District.

Over the years, however, the murder rate has steadily declined and development in the city has surged. In Columbia Heights, the neighborhood just east of Mt. Pleasant and just above Fourteenth and U, hundreds of high -end apartments and condos have been built. Even more are being erected down by U Street. And even though Mt. Pleasant may be filling with white couples and their kids, those pricey new developments around U are filled with owners who are young and black and successful.

Four decades after the 1968 riots, on the night Barack Obama was elected president, the people of Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights poured into the streets once again. Again they headed down to Fourteenth and U. This time no army was needed to restrain them. In Washington, as in other cities across this polyglot republic, people gathered in the streets as one. We hugged and we cried. We celebrated what we'd won together. And then we went back to our separate homes. ~

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The Mix -Tape and the Auteur Will Schmenner If the legends are to be believed, those film directors lucky enough to be crowned auteurs hold every element of the success of their movies in their profoundly artistic minds. And now, in our media -addled age of the indie-auteur, artistic creation is not only a function of a director's unassailable vision; it sprouts full- blown out of his or her pre-existing taste preferences, so that movies increasingly seem to double as infomercials for a particular director's consumption patterns.

Nowhere is this trend plainer than in the strange miniaturization of the movie soundtrack, which has quietly turned film directors into d.j. 's, calibrating a given moment on screen to an offthe-rack snatch of commentary from the pop or indie rock canon. Now, strangely enough, directors are as preoccupied with choosing the proper mood-evoking Elton John song as they are with composing a shot in a sequence, or settling on a particular quality of film stock.

A pivotal case in point is Wes Anderson's 1998 film Rushmore, which owes much of its success to its British invasion soundtrack, Bill Murray, and a then-refreshingly funny Owen Wilson, who co-authored the screenplay. Rushmore recounts the unlikely rise and fall of a friendship between Murray'S character, a depressive manufacturing mogul named Mr. Blume, and a 15-year-old prep school student possessed of wild ambitions named Max Fischer (played by Jason Schwartzman)an alliance that unravels into an escalating, and quite funny, revenge battle when both characters come under the spell of a fetching British teacher (0 livia Williams).

The movie is funny, but it curiously outsources most of its pathos, its emotional complexity, onto its soundtrack. Precious few moments in the performances by the movie's quite talented cast approach, for instance, the longing conveyed in director Wes Anderon' s strategic use of the Who's mini-pop operetta, "A Quick One, While He's

Away." There, John Entwistle's falsetto (perfectly echoed by his harmonizing bandmates) in the song's simple, climactic chorus pleads for, and wins, an emotional generosity that the film's action and characters largely deny: "You are forgiven." By contrast, Fischer and Blume-and for that matter Schwartzman and Murray -are nothing more than big kids, desperately in need of Ray Davies (and the obscure Kinks chestnut "Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl") if we are to believe they are capable of romantic love.

Anderson also enjoys an outsize influence on the audioscapes of young filmgoers because Rushmore happened to strike at the cusp of a strange moment, a moment which seems to have occurred coincidentally the year after Rushmore's soundtrack met with wild critical acclaim. In 2000 the Grammys-which it may be hard to recall at this late date, mightily influenced the movement of product in a still robust recording industry -adjusted their format, creating a second soundtrack categoryfor "Best Compilation Soundtrack Album." The floodgates opened. By 2005 emo-dorable Zach Braff, who garnered what might be called the bricoleur Grammy for Garden State's compilation soundtrack, remarked, with all the requisite flourishes of irony, that he won the best mix -tape award.

That uniquely deflating moment marks as good a cultural reference point as any to ponder what's become of the musical side of the cinematic experience. In the era of the Hollywood studio system (roughly the Twenties through the early Sixties) the dominant approach to matching music with the moving image was either via a composed film score or a genre of its own - the musical, which would incorporate (with varying degrees of success) new and old popular songs as elements of the plot. Although it doesn't seem so long ago, it's exceedingly difficult to conjure up the aesthetic impact of the studio system's soundtrack complex -

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a standalone Hollywood industry in its own right.

The closest latter-day approximation comes, perhaps, from the phenomenally successful Dick WolfTV franchise, Law &' Order. When the series theme-quite literally a siren song-hits its establishing opening notes (da-da-da-da-dun), it's an aural synonym for Law &' Order. Regardless of how quickly an episode's script was torn from the headlines or how inhumanly righteous Sam Waterston is, that spare bit of quasi -funk is cognate, in the popular imagination, with the experience of seeing the show. In other words, Mike Post's iconic theme music is something different from a good song. It is music that cannot be separated from whatever Law &' Order is.

The explosion of the rock aesthetic reshaped the logic of using music in the movies, just as it changed so much else in the culture at large.

Since the Sixties, filmmakers have used music less as defining elements of the movies themselves and more to advertise their own set of taste preferences-producing an embarrassingly hamstrung sort of cinematic storytelling and an increasingly insular use of pop music's cultural resonance. At the formal level of things, that has simply meant a sprawling corpus of film scores composed of songs that were not created for the movie-songs that exist, robustly, outside of the movie. There is often a carelessness about this approach, as if a good song were a ketchup-like condiment, which when spread liberally enough would improve whatever accompanies it.

Certain movies of the late Sixties epitomized this trend. Mike Nichols blazed the trail for Rushmore 31 years earlier by incorporating "The Sound of Silence" into The Graduate three times-guaranteeing it would strike a chord of recognition in viewers, since Simon and Garfunkel had had a huge hit with it almost exactly two years before.

And, similar to Wes Anderson's obsession with the British Invasion, all Nichols seems to have cared about was that the music was Simon and Garfunkel-because although he uses it expertly, it has nothing to do with The Graduate or the larger issues of coming of age as a matriculated adult, or (what amounts to the same thing in LA)

having an Emma Bovary-style liaison with the mother of the woman you later realize you love.

Even so, the musical sins of The Graduate are more of omission than commission-as is also the case with another montage- happy example of a film from just a year later with an outsized, nay swelling, music score, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both those films suffer from a certain arrogance and laziness arising from their instinctive trust in their own ostensible power to make the soundtrack music their own-which means, in practical terms, distrusting a composer to do the movie justice with an original score. In Kubrick's case, that reflex produced an absurd conviction that may only have been possible to sustain in the late Sixties: that images of a model spaceship can brand, hold and harness the music of Beethoven. (Indeed they did for a fleeting bitbut the paradox of science fiction is that it ages quickly.)

This laziness and arrogance are the typical bad habits of good directors-but in the wake of the Sixties they bulked into an aesthetic trend unto themselves. Easy Rider, two years after The Graduate, is-cue the Steppenwolf track and the mock horror-not so counterculture after all.

George Lucas's hymn to a populist, conservative rock era, American Graffiti (1973), is a textbook example of a subgenre intent on repurposing pop's past. The movie drips with nostalgia-and of course its soundtrack was a monster bestseller-but instead of wrapping that longing in bold, bracing, performative kitsch, it pretends that George Lucas's vision of rock liberation (the standard set piece of jocks, greasers and cheerleader ingenues battling for social and erotic advantage) was how the pre- New Frontier Fifties actually were. From such wish-fulfillment accounts of pop history, it's a short, but none too lovely, step down into the mystical vision of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983), where we encounter an exotic, unheralded brand of Boomer white suburban college grad who adopted Motown hits, rather than the Beatles or the Beach Boys, as its generational soundtrack.

Still, American Grafttti and The Big Chill

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might have been written off as regrettable sonic monuments of auteur~branded taste, if two skilled directors in the Nineties hadn't elevated the rock~appropriated soundtrack into an art of collage and appropriation. Quentin Tarantino's maiden turn as auteur, Reservoir Dogs (1992), was in all senses a pageant of derivativeness~the video~clerk~turned~director famously cribbed much of its plot from Ringo Lam's 1987 Hong Kong crime opus City on Fire. But when it came to music, Tarantino was a true innovator, even if he was still trafficking in much the same rever~ ently handled schlock nostalgic content that he used to overstuff the movie's action and charac~ ters. As a running motif through the movie's failed capers, Tarantino has the fictional K~ Billy radio show, "Super Sounds of the Seventies," serve as an omnipresent background soundtrack.

The device was, typically, a perfect delivery sys~ tem for Tarantino to advertise his own pop cul~ ture taste~and in turn figures prominently in the movie's most infamous scene, where Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) cuts the ear off a captive police officer in a warehouse while dancing to the soft ~ rock Stealers Wheel tune "Stuck in the Middle with You." Unlike The Graduate or 2001, where the music typically comes out of nowhere, Res~ ervoir Dogs draws attention to its functionality: Mr. Blonde saunters over to the radio to turn it on and pauses to ask his gagged hostage if he's ever listened to K~ Billy. When Mr. Blonde leaves the warehouse to retrieve the gas from his car for some more mayhem, the song fades away until the camera, involved in an elaborate, teasing tracking shot, follows him back inside.

Critics hail the Reservoir Dogs torture scene as a landmark moment in the depiction of vio~

lence on screen in the early Nineties. The legacy of that single scene has, by most measures of such things, been crucial to the expansion of realistic violence into such divergent movies as Saving Private Ryan and City of God. And indeed, Tar~ antino's breakout film was in many ways a wel ~ come alternative to the big ~ budget action film that just blew shit up, but like other flourishes of styl~ ized musical irony on screen, it came at a price.

Today the appropriation of music in Reservoir Dogs is a frustrating example of nothing~or, rather, of nothing other than virtuosity ~ for ~ virtuosity's~sake. It is neither convincing realism nor fulfilling escape. "Stuck in the Middle with You" was the spoonful of sugar to help us stomach the gruesome torture of the bound police officer.

It's now painfully clear, when you consider it from the perspective of the eternally knowing ~ and~winking corpus ofTarantino films, that the creation of K~ Billy's Super Sounds of the Seventies was simply a way for the director to have his cake and eat it, too~ to be entertaining and coy as well as brutal and visceral. Although the song could arguably be part of an otherwise realistically unhinged torture sequence, we know it isn't. It's the cinematic equivalent of an audio~tour, designed to let us fully savor Tarantino's pastiche of dis~ jointed styles. It is there to ease us into a scene that at one time pushed the envelope of Hollywood's approach to realistic violence but now is just a confused, weird artifact of early Nineties movies culture that is devoid of meaning, but seems to need it. Indeed, Tarantino himself has largely ignored the convention~defying precedent he set, retreating more and more into a stylized aesthetic of violence that allows him more room for playful and over~the~top cinematic brutality.

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In addition to the shadow cast by Ringo Lam's Hong Kong cinema, it's hard not to see Martin Scorsese's influence looming over Tarantino's feature debut. Goodfellas, produced two years before Reservoir Dogs, is a masterful example of Scorsese's use of music. The hIm is peppered with popular music from the period in which the action is set, as if Henry Hill, the narrating mobster played by Ray Liotta, were constantly walking through a glamorous, hyper-violent music video, rather than decades of his own life. This is a central narrative choice for Scorsese-some of the attraction of being mobbed up in Goodfellas is plainly the glamour of the mob life. Perhaps the best musical evocation of this Janus- faced appeal is the sequence where a tiny and very angry Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) is shown beating to death a gangster named Billy Batts (Frank Vincent).

As with the Reservoir Dogs torture sequence, the music is allegedly rooted within the scene: The jukebox at the bar is playing "He's Sure the Boy I Love" by The Crystals.

That song choice in the hands of a director like Tarantino would produce an ironic payoff that could be cut with a knife-or beaten to death, as the case may be: Batts, it's brutally clear, is very much not the boy DeVito loves. But Scorcese wisely shuns such literalism. Indeed, the scene as it unfolds suggests that the music is something more than just a song or two emanating from the bar's jukebox. We hear the music hrst (and loud and clear) during an establishing shot of the outside of the bar-and from there, the music proceeds to modulate in rhythm with the melee that takes shape in the bar. During the verbal altercation the sound swells as if the song is evoking the anger between Batts and DeVito. And when DeVito later returns to beat a drunken Vincent to death, the jukebox is playing "Atlantis" by Donovan, another song, like "He's Sure the Boy I Love," that starts with a recitation from the singerperhaps a sly means of underling how the jukebox is narrating the action of the scene. Indeed, "Atlantis" continues to swell and build to its own aural climax, as if Donovan himself is joining the hght-or at least covering for DeVito and mobster

Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro) while Hill rushes to lock the bar. Neither Donovan nor The Crystals adds a layer of comforting pop-culture recognition to the shocking realism of the violence.

Rather, the scene is a convoluted, yet marvelous mixture of realistic violence, glamour and cinematic dexterity.

In these treatments of music, Scorsese and Tarantino managed to transform the slappedtogether soundtrack work of the rock era into something new. To be sure, the Goodfellas and Reservoir Dogs soundtracks aren't as totemic as the Law & Order theme, but they both brought music out from the sonic background of movies and made it something of a character in its own right. And for Tarantino especially, music became a crucial ingredient in the creation of his trademark pastiche visions of pop culture and washedout urban menace.

But the not-at-all- Tarantino-esque irony of all this is that the use of pop music to smuggle in realistic violence faded away in the following years. Within the context of on-screen violence, Scorsese's more deft and nuanced way with music hasn't aged much better than Tarantino's self -distancing irony -infused soundtracks have.

The sequence in Goodfellas still communicates quite strongly on the visual level, but it now looks defensive and almost apologetic for trying to root the music in the scene-and for eliding, via a series of discrete pans, several opportunities to make the audience confront the look of violence. When more novelistic TV fare such as The Wire acquired its own realistic soundtrack aesthetics, producers would strictly tie the music they employed to each and every setting and sequence. The idea was to err on the side of naturalism: Music used in an exterior scene would typically be muffled and in the distance or moving across your television set as if it were actually coming from a nearby car radio or a boom box left out on a stoop.

However, most latter-day directors haven't heeded the arduous work Tarantino and Scorsese did to turn radio and jukebox fare into the stuff of collage and appropriative art. Aspiring directors

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in today's film school instead view Tarantino and Scorsese's virtuosity as nothing more than one ready-made technique among many: the technique of using pop music. But virtuosity isn't a technique itself; it's a practice.

So as a result, just a few years later-which in movie years is pretty much immediately - the musical palette of the virtuosos makes directors who aren't really that good seem good to us.

They're able to use music as a crutch, a substitute for a lack of emotional depth. At best, this aural legacy just gets you Rushmore: a funny movie with a great soundtrack and a confused director who is surprised to find himself at a creative dead end. And yet because Tarantino and Scorsese executed it with such virtuosity-and because the gimmick appears easy to bring off (just add your favorite songs) it continues to influence droves of young, up-and-coming filmmakers.

And that's a loss for movies and music alike. As more indie product continues streaming its way out of film schools, the thin characters and creaky plots suffer badly in comparison with the often standout soundtrack music used in the films. We can expect more of the undigested indie tweeness you find in pseudo-musicals like Juno (which won a Grammy for "Best Compilation Soundtrack") and the laziness-unto-idiocy rehashings of the pop canon like Watchmen's use of "The Sound of Silence."

This isn't to condemn all uses of pop music that fall short of virtuosity. There are still plenty of movies (well, some anyway) that don't just carelessly ransack the pop songbook to create the appearance of high synergistic filmmaking on the cheap. Sometimes, for instance, a pop-savvy film will perform a song in a new context, rather than simply co-opt it. That's why, for instance, the scene near the end of High Fidelity when Jack Black sings "Sexual Healing," is only half badeven though it effectively grinds the movie's plot to a halt as we are encouraged to admire the crooning skills of the schlumpy -but - tuxedoed Black. It isn't a sampling of Marvin Gaye so much as an ode to him. Still, the culture-synergy payoff of the moment was, for all functional purposes, identical to that of Rushmore and other

specimens of sonic hipster bricolage: There the track was, on the successful High Fidelity soundtrack CD, so that Jack Black was doing double duty for the movie's fans as performer and connoisseur of the pop canon.

Similarly, the part in Almost Famous-the 2000 auto-mythologizing rock movie made by rockjournalist -turned director Cameron Crowewhere everyone on a Seventies tour bus starts singing along to "Tiny Dancer" doesn't grate, because, let's face it, there are plenty of other reasons to hate Cameron Crowe that don't involve Elton John sing -a -longs. (For that matter, there are also plenty of other Crowe-abetted soundtrack moments that are far more egregious, such as, well, the entirety of his 1996 effort Jerry Maguire, with a freshly cashiered Tom Cruise pumping his fist to Tom Petty's "Free Falling" and pitching artless woo with Renee Zellweger as Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm" plays didactically in the background.) Recent musicals from Moulin Rouge! (2001) to Dancer in the Dark (2000) are above this type of criticism, since they straightforwardly employ music as an escape from reality and not a technique to create it. Although in Dancer in the Dark, for instance, that opposition is used to emphasize the crushing weight of reality as its blind female protagonist escapes further and further into song as her world is maliciously taken apart by those around her.

Clearly, the Tarantino-and-Scorsese brand of virtuosity for virtuosity's sake has proven good for those directors, but its effect on the long-term health of movies is uncertain. It's especially bad for all the poor directors who have confused mak ing a mix-tape with directing-and therefore displaying their own taste preferences with establishing a cinematic style. I'm just grateful that great television-the closest thing to the old Hollywood studio system we have today-errs on the side of naturalism, mainly relegating pop music to the end of episodes or seasons. The best way to avoid the aesthetic of the mix -tape, it seems, is to craft soundtracks that are made up of music instead of directorial statements. It's easier that way for grown-ups to get on with the movie-making. ~

125

Essays

The People. No / Henry Fairlie

The People, No A British Tory Observes the Dawn of the Reagan Revolution.

Henry Fairlie

To say so is of course a kind of apostasy from the true faith of a journalist in this country, but I am not a great admirer of H.L. Mencken, and will lay no wreath on his grave when his centenary is observed in September.

Here and there his wit is coruscating, but usually it is labored, and too often he writes like a brewer. His denunciations of his victims can be pure savagery, and one cackles at them, like the old women sitting and knitting at the foot of the guillotine, but what else does one gain? The sad truth is he had little to say. For the most part, he is an unholy bore.

His prejudices are as lumpish as those he arraigns. As the young Randolph Bourne, a journalist of 10 times his quality, said of him very early, he went "heavily forth to battle with the Philistines, glorying in pachydermatous vulgarisms," and quickly became a moralist himself, "with the same bigotry and tastelessness" as the enemy. He could in his writing be as much a boor as them.

Yet there I was crying as I watched the Republican convention, "Mencken! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!" Wishing that someone would spatter buckshot into the Joe Louis Arena. Wishing that he would come among us, still the guttersnipe, and scrawl his graffiti on the walls. For there was his Homo Boobus, indeed, elevated to be a sovereign.

We needed someone to break from the yoke of

mere happenings, and say that here was the common man and, yes, the common woman, too, come to take possession of their century at last.

Those who warned the prophets of the common man that they would not like his visage when they saw it had only to point to the floor in Detroit.

There it was, polished now for television, the face of Caliban, come smirking to rule. With their noses wiped, taught some manners for the screen, clean handkerchiefs in their pockets, there were the booboisie. Narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envi0us, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious.

The common man, exactly as Reagan said of himself in his prime time. We have been warned of his coming. Not only Mencken inveighed against him. Sinclair Lewis gave us the half-baked stereotypes. It was Walter Lippmann, commenting on the characters in Lewis' novels, who pinned them down: "They are the creatures of the passing moment who are vaguely unhappy in a boring and senseless existence that is without dignity, without grace, without purpose.

They are driven by they know not what compulsions, they are ungoverned and yet unfree, the sap of life does not reach them, their taproots having been cut." They were there, in their own

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never cut as deep as that of London. Today it is capitulating. What is called "neo-conservativism" is largely a New York phenomenon; its most prominent figures have in common their access to the New York media; and one by one the neo-conservatives are announcing for Reagan. Taking sides with the Reaganites. It is no less than a trahison des clercs.

What has always disturbed the European (and English) conservative is that the American conservative has barely even a whispering of aristocratic sentiment. He will support a Nixon. He will support a Reagan. These men are not evil. They are not even reactionary. They simply are vulgar.

The Norman Rockwell of today is Norman Lear.

They are in person the common man. This does How cleverly he seems to caricature the primetime, soap-opera lives of the characters whom he not seem to worry the American conservative. If portrays. But in fact he celebrates them, is gentle he thinks he needs the masses, as Ortega y Gasset with them, and of course he exploits them. There used the term, he will take them on their terms, in the persons of their nominees. He is then suris no line drawn between his characters and his prised when later he has the devil to pay. viewers. He makes them both acceptable. Their Just as Americans in general do not have the lives are empty; they are trivial, the lives of helhabits of deference, so the conservative in Amerots. He justifies them.

The powers-that-be should pay him a fortune, ica does not have them either. Ultimately he does not defer even to the country's institutions. If one for he takes the lives which they have deformed, and he makes them seem shapely. He makes a joke of these institutions, such as the Supreme Court, out of bigotry, he turns prejudice into a whimsi- makes decisions he detests, he will defame that institution. He is as ready as is the common man cal pleasantry. to bypass the institutions he ought to defend.

Look at almost any of his characters: they The American conservatives may resist the might have sprung to the screen from the cover Equal Rights Amendment. But the overwhelming of the Saturday Evening Post of 30 years ago; not least Mary Hartman with her brainless and majority of proposals for amending the constitution in recent years have been put forward by meaningless efforts at self-expression; her life conservatives. They even wish to control the bounded in the narrowest possible compass; budgetary process, which traditionally is in the her mind in braids. keeping of the representative institutions, by Much of what we today call "nostalgia" is a constitutional amendments to reserve it to the tolerance, justification and celebration of smalltown America. The abandon with which the high popular voice. culture in America today flirts with the popular They may have opposed the initiative and the referendum when these were introduced; but it culture has the same effect. What is common and low is legitimized. The "metropolitan" in America, is they who now use them most indiscriminately as vehicles of popular discontent. Just as it was to use the words of Lippmann in this context, is Goldwater who first captured his party from surrendering to the "provincial." the grassroots, so it is the conservatives who now The metropolitan in America has always been much weaker than in Europe. New York may seem reap the benefits of the primaries and caucuses, as the common man is stirred to subvert the trato extend its sweep over the whole culture. But it has nothing like the hold of Paris; its influence has ditional methods of politics. Those who have sap, on the convention floor. They may deserve our concern, for they are deprived; they do not deserve our approbation.

But how understanding of them we are now asked to be. They are the middle Americans. We must explain them as neutrally as do the sociologists. We must not criticize them. Not so long ago, the drawings of Norman Rockwell were mocked, as they should be, as a false representation of stunted lives. They are a celebration, not of what is good in those lives, but of what is banal and deformed, but today we must cherish them.

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ESsays The People. No/ Henry Fairlie

Oaf-Oaf

carried Reagan to the very threshold of power are exactly the ungoverned but unfree whom Lippmann described half a century ago.

Ungoverned and unfree and so in the end ungovernable; this is exactly what Ortega foretold in the coming of the common man; and it is what the conservative in America seems to have no resource to resist. No traditions to which to appeal; no habit of deference to authority; no patience with the bridle of institutions.

Europe shudders today, not so much at the three men who have emerged this yearas candidates, as at the political illiteracy of the popular voice which has chosen them, the America they most fear. The politicians will come and go, and do less good and harm than is supposed, but what of the people who chose them?

The America which Europe fears is the America of the Reaganites. The America once of the Scopes trial; the America of prohibition; the America of ignorant isolationism. The America then of "better dead than red"; the America of

McCarthyism; the America of the last fundamen talists of the 1950s. The America now of the new evangelicals; the America of the Moral Majority; the America of a now ignorant interventionism; the America which can see homosexuals as a conspiracy; feminists as a conspiracy; perhaps even women as a conspiracy. The America of fear.

For it is in fear that the ungoverned and the unfree are doomed to live. And there was this America in control at Detroit.

It is time that we reminded ourselves, and said aloud and more often, that it is from these people that nastiness comes. It is time that we pointed out to the neo-conservatives that democracy has never been subverted from the left but always from the right. No democracy has fallen to communism, without an army; many democracies have fallen to fascism, from within.

The Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy. If the neo-conservatives cannot sniff danger, surelythe rest of us can be alert. ~

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.. Engage in smen talk about. ~nal matters. DO get directly 10 (he point

" Meeting leogU115 rmnulas maxllTlum

.. Attempt to 8l1swer the "why me?

of Ihe meeting & own the decision

" Provide business rationale (see $lids J) .. Own the employe~ s fl;lalings .. Be clear, OOIlCI5&, and i'I:1;Spectfui • Oiscuss other employees or make comparisons .. Be attentive - Maintain open • Say ttiat you ~i~11I£I with thc!I demion communication by listening; pause before continuing • Get Into the indvidual's Job performance/past issues or make .. Allow the employee to respond comments that suggest he/she might be • Refer to employee packet contents able to retum In the future Including both the Separation and $uplplemenlal Release

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Poetry Slam Dan Kelly

Let Them Eat Dogma Chris Lehmann

Lost on Nelson Algren Avenue Mike Newirth

Blood Drive Mike Taibbi

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Poetry Slam Dan Kelly

Some months ago, Facebook was all atwitter with outraged book lovers. A list of some of the finest works of literature had been posted, along with the following glove slap reportedly handed down from an esteemed British newspaper: "Apparently, The Guardian reckons most people will have only read six of the 100 books here. " Readers were instructed to annotate the list, marking the ones they'd read, the ones they loved and the ones they planned on reading. Miffed readers took up the challenge, damned if they were going to be written off as illiterate rubes. Few noticed the incongruity of the Harry Potter series sharing space with One Hundred Years of Solitude, or that the list asked if they had read the "Complete Works of Shakespeare" and, separately, Hamlet.

But the slapdash quality of the provocation didn't stop thousands of people from taking the bait.

It has since been established that The Guardian had nothing to do with the list, although it bore some similarities to "The Big Read," a tally of Britain's "best -loved novels" the BBC published in April 2003 based on submissions from its viewers.

(That list, it should be noted, did not goad readers with intimations of cultural inadequacy.)

Who compiled the Facebook list? That remains a mystery. Whoever it was, I wish they'd taken the fighting words of the introduction to their logical conclusion. That's what I've done with my own version, excerpted below.

Instructions: 1. Look at the list and put a II after those you have

read.

2. Add a . to the ones you LOVE. 3. Star those you plan on reading.

4. Describe how you'd take down this master of language, specifying the setting of the donnybrook and the techniques employed. Was your hand forced? Did you/he/she fight with honor?

S. Add a t if weapons are involved.

*

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

*

Fight over fairly quickly, I imagine. As a product of her time, Austen would be a woman of slight build and limited strength. She would no doubt seek revenge, either by savaging my character in high society or poisoning my tea with laudanum.

2. The Lord of the Rings, IR.R. Tolkien I knock on Tolkien's front door. It opens and there

he stands, meerschaum pipe clenched between his teeth, crinkly eyes giving him the appearance of a wise, wizened wizard.

"Do I know you? You are aware you're trespassing, yes?" He looks toward the entrance. "Has the gatekeeper been drinking again? Oh, bloody hell!"

A sucker-punch to the gut inspires his last interjection. The meerschaum flies from his lips, shattering on the garden path. The writer / philologist who crafted a world inhabited by vast, powerful armies of mythological beasties turns out to be a soft-bellied panda of a man. There's no game here.

"Oh, I say," he says, dropped to one knee, gurgling and slurring on saliva. He rubs his tummy.

"You bally well gave me a solid blow there, lad.

Be a good man and help me ... ulp!"

Reverting to Greco- Roman wrestling technique' I place Tolkien in the referee's position.

"This ... this ... is highly unorthodox! What is the meaning of this? You ruddy blighter! 1-" Rapidly, I flip the author of The Silmarillion onto his back with a meaty thump in the center of his foyer. He refuses to tap out.

"Outrageous! Outrageous!" Tolkien blubbers as I stand up and rest my foot on his chest. He thrashes around, attempting to throw me off or wriggle away, but like an inverted turtle, he can only flop about helplessly. I beat my chest and howl a victorious war cry.

3. Harry Potter series, IK. Rowling Security too tight.

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Columns Poetry SlamiDan Kelly

street credo Far from being a pacifist, Orwell would be a hungry fighter; an implacable foe of imperialI find Poe approaching his favorite Baltimore pub, ism and fascism, he would no doubt refuse to be head lowered as he ponders his miserable life, subjugated. his deceased wife, Virginia, and which sailor he Upon reflection, it is best not to fuck with should turn into chow in The Narrative of Arthur George Orwell.

Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Ravaged by drink and utterly depressed, Poe puts up no fight as I wrest 9. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka t I . the bottle of amontillado from his grip and smash Kafka attempts to escape through a winding series of stairs and hallways that veer off at oblique and it over his head. I seize and yank his mustache from side to side, disorienting him further. An acute angles. His vegetarian diet leaves him lighter arm bar follows, whereupon I force my knee to and more fleet of foot, but eventually he finds the back of his shoulder and take him down hard. himself trapped in a windowless, doorless room.

Divine Edgar crashes down to the cement. I curb Seemingly resigned to his fate, Kafka slouches and him. The last thing he tastes is amontillado, cob- doesn't turn around. I try to deliver a jump side blestone and blood. In comparison with all that kick to the small of his back. came before, it is the happiest day of his life.

But all is farce! Kafka falls to the floor and snaps back both legs, issuing a seated twin side kick, 5. The Bible, Jehovah planting his soles into my floating ribs. I seethe At last, a worthy opponent. The great I AM immeas the pain radiates through my chest, but work diately incinerates me with a tornado of bloody through it. Kafka flips into a standing posture fire. Come on, it's the Almighty, for Christ's sake. and drops back into a fighting stance. Momentarily, he is magnificent, but then he sizes me up, and something dies behind his eyes. He throws 6. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte t It is a little-known fact, borne out by Internet rea punch a blind man could dodge. I make no search, that Ms. Bronte left for the Far East during allowances for mistakes and, nabbing his wrist, a mysterious "missing" year. There she sought out do a reverse wrist side flying throw. Kafka has ascended masters who instructed her in the ability the wind knocked out of him. I quickly land on to fight and cloud men's minds so they cannot see his chest. Ground and pound, ground and poundher. Her skill with the nunchaku is, of course, leg- I turn the progenitor of the postmodern novel endary. A short fight for her; eternal shame for into my own personal bobblehead. me to be felled by a mere slip of a woman.

Like her sisters, Ms. Bronte died young. Unlike 13. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges tI her sisters, she died not of tuberculosis but Borges will mislead me with his blindness. As is rather from a "death touch" applied to her by a well-known in all pulp literature, in the blind the other senses become more acute. Late in life, rival dojo master.

Borges developed the ability of the Shaolin 8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell t I . t monks to detect slight movements in the air A stint in the Indian Imperial Police likely prostreams about him. In some ways he could see vided Orwell with training in hand -to -hand com- more than the sighted people around him.

Wearing soft -soled kung -fu slippers, I approach bat and firearms. The Spanish Civil War granted the old man as he dictates "The Garden of Forking him an affinity for bayonets and bombs. Quite tall with a long reach. Sickly, but used to pain, priva- Paths" or perhaps "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" to his mother. The accursed t100r tiles of the tion, and suffering after being nettled and tempered during the long winter of 1946. Also, was Biblioteca Nacional shift slightly and betray my shot in the throat once, granting him Tupac-Ievel approach. At once, Borges heaves himself upwards,

4. Collected Works, Edgar Allan Poe t I .

*

t

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somersaults through the air, lands before me, and delivers his famed one~inch punch to my chest. I collapse, gasping for breath as he moves in for the coup de grace. With a sharp twist of my head, he crumbles my neck bones like a sleeve of Saltines.

*

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare Grab prissy collar, pull face down quickly into raised knee. Bard of Avon kisses floor, spit~spot.

17. Prufrock and Other Observations, I.S. Eliot

lit Sitting in his study, Eliot is hard at work on the "Macavity: the Mystery Cat" segment of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. He momentar~ ily looks up, certain he heard one of the hounds barking outside.

What is that noise? The wind under the door?

Intruder!

Ioo late. I drop from the chandelier and put hin'f in a choke hold, my thumb bone forced upwards against his windpipe. With the unreasoning fury of an alleged anti~Sernite, the auteur of "The Waste~ land" and "The Hollow Men" stumbles about his study, roaring like a bear aflame. My grip doesn't slacken, even as his fingers twist into fishhooks, seeking purchase in an eye, a nostril, or any other unguarded orifice. When this fails he resorts to backing up into the furniture. Books and memen ~ tos topple from the shelves; an exquisite, irreplace~ able crystal brandy decanter set smashes to the floor, releasing a heady, raisiny perfume. My grip slackens somewhat and I.S. gasps out, "Kill you!

Eat your children! I will show you fear!"

"England has made you weak, old man," I harshly whisper.

An inhuman growl escapes his throat. He thrusts back once more, heaving me against a stack of barrister bookcases. The glass shatters and trans~ parent cat claws rake and stipple my back. I still cling to him, applying increasing, unforgiving pressure to his trachea. He grasps a cube from the wood block calendar on his desk and smashes it into my forehead. The word April is cruelly imprinted in the flesh, the room spins, and I fall to the ground.

T.S. Eliot whirls about, a feral gleam alight in his yellow eyes. He licks his lips and bares his teeth in a mirthless grin. He lunges ... but I am quick! A stiletto springs from the contrivance beneath my sleeve. I throw it and it sticks square in the center of his chest.

But he lives! Hell's bells, he lives!

Snarling, Eliot dashes to the window and jumps out. I run over and see him skittering up the side of the house before disappearing over the roof's edge.

My heart fills with yellow sickness.

27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

... 路 t

Dostoevsky is a dirty fighter. Like Raskolnikov, a superior man in a cold and impersonal universe, he is unencumbered by notions of morality or fair play. Also, he has picked up a few things about the Jailhouse Rock fighting style in Siberia.

Pretending to shake hands, Dostoevsky suddenly pulls me forward and head butts my nose. Gouts of blood spill forth before the bastard smashes a right cross into my chin, reinforced by a tightly rolled fistful of rubles.

34. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson II t Spar and feint, forcing Stevenson to defend himself in a battle he knows he cannot win. The sickly wretch quickly runs out of breath due to consumption, sarcoidosis, or whatever unknown respiratory disease it was that plagued him his entire life. I push the exceedingly frail author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde down easily and kick him in the side until he stops moving. An unsatisfying win.

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45. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes 11'. t

75. Ulysses, James Joyce 11'. t

Cervantes: trained soldier, good with blades, walked away from two bullets to the chest and one to the arm in the Battle of Lepanto- unfortunately' this led to the permanent maiming of his left hand. Did a little time in stir. Master of Spanish language and possible badass in a ruffed collar and Van Dyck. I must be cautious.

Lulling him into complacency, I buy him glass after glass of sherry at a tavern in Madrid. We shoot the shit about the Knight of the Woeful Countenance. He holds forth, with barely restrained disgust, about Pierre Menard's plagiarism (so he says). We later walk arm in unmaimed arm, singing Spanish folk songs, until I lead him down an alley to "see a guy about something."

Cervantes looks about and sees only a bolted door in the brick wall at the alley'S end. "I see no one, senor," he slurs. Then he turns around.

"Who sent you?" he asks.

I say nothing, letting the manriki gusaria length of chain with heavy weights on either end-slide from my hands. I begin its slow, rotating swing, the iron hammers increasingly widening their gyres. Cervantes smirks and slowly applauds me for getting the drop on him, but I am not fooled. A butterfly knife suddenly flicks out of his palm, shining in the single street lamp illuminating the alley and clicking like an angry cricket. It begins to rain, and the alley appears painted in blood. Not yet it isn't.

The manriki gusari cuts through the night like a dull grey meteorite, dashing the blade from his hand. Before prison 1'd have been no match for Cervantes, but the years of captivity have left me a crucial opening of a scant few seconds. As the blade flies away I swear I see a glimmer of respect and a bit of a smile in the old man's eyes.

"Today is a good day to die," says he. I smile, but the swelling respect I feel for him does not stay my hand. The manriki gusari does its dirty work, and one man, not Cervantes, leaves the alley under his own power.

Strolling the streets of Zurich on a beautiful day, homburg hat set at a rakish angle, tapping along with his walking stick, Joyce is astonished as I walk up and, without warning, snap a right jab into his good eye. He leans forward in pain, and I cup my hands and slap both ears. Howling now, Joyce becomes a man possessed, swinging wildly with his cane. I bob and weave then deliver a quick snap- kick to his groin. He buckles, and I follow it with a backhanded tolchock to the chin and a leg sweep, sending him crashing to the pavement. Unlike reading Finnegans Wake, it is over quickly. I take Joyce's homburg as a trophy, jauntily wearing it as I walk off, his groans receding in the distance.

81. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens 11'. t Notoriously fast walker, Dickens easily evades me.

He reaches a trellis, and monkey-climbs up it to lie in wait behind a gargoyle. As I pass he staves in my skull with a copy of Nicholas Nickleby, delivered in 20 monthly installments between April 1838 and October 1839.

91. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 11'.

Conrad finds the darkness before him as I rappel down into his study in midnight-black ninja garb.

Bonk on head with a bo staff. Vanish into the night. Conrad may have mastered the English in his 30s, but his grasp of the art of ninjutsu was sorely lacking.

95. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

v'

Quick knife- hand strike to the neck and Toole falls forward. Elbow dropped on back of neck, collapsing him into a useless pile of meat and bone. One must fight the suicidally depressed without joy.

100. 0 Pioneers! Willa Cather Only a fool would take on the author of My Antonia.

What was left of the last man who did ... well, it couldn't properly be called a "man" anymore. ~

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Let Them Eat Dogma Chris Lehmann Not so long ago, the lead theorists of America's conservative revolution hymned it as a thing of unparalleled vitality and intellectual rigor. The Republicans ruled the policy world as "the party of ideas," President George W Bush famously pronounced, and all sorts of his erstwhile enthu ~ siasts on the right, from tax~cutting think tank impresario Grover Norquist to Weekly Standard Warmonger ~ in ~ Chief William Kristo!, lustily seconded the notion.

But then a funny thing happened: The conserv~ ative utopia of shrinking government. financial deregulation and upward income distribution became a hulking disaster. Major investment banks teetered on the brink of oblivion in the catastrophic Panic of 2008; pension funds spiraled into free~fall; the auto industry went on federal life support; and home foreclosure after home foreclosure has ren~ dered many onetime boomtowns virtual diorama showcases for the wreckage bequeathed by alchemi ~ cal works of market triumphalism, such as credit default swaps, mortgage~backed securities and the efficient market hypothesis.

And just like that, the idea ~ intoxicated Ameri ~ can right vanished. As the federal government stirred out of its decades~ long regulatory slum ~ ber and started to meet the financial calamity with urgently needed deficit spending, conservatives of the Gingrich vintage, who had long advertised their fealty to the high~tech, low~tax future, morphed seemingly overnight into the intellec~ tual equivalent of historical re~enactors. Much as the Mormon faithful trek annually to the upstate New York festival in Palmyra to see their faith's creation myth in a lavishly produced pageant, so have the conservative faithful repaired en masse back to the musty site of their modern genesis, the 1930s New Deal.

But this pageant of faith is a disorienting spec~ tac1e indeed. Instead of reckoning with a starkly transformed global economy, or the crucial ways

in which their core precepts have been rudely upended, conservative thinkers are reviving 70~odd~year~0Id talking points from the Liberty League-the network of rock~ribbed Roosevelt haters who clustered in corporate boardrooms and Chamber of Commerce lobbies during the Thirties-thereby, one supposes, to finish the job their ancestors started: discrediting the New Deal and its legacy once and for all.

To judge by the rhetorical choler alone, the Liberty League mantle is proving an awkward fit for the right~wing sachems of the Obama era.

With a Democratic White House and Congress seeking, however erratically, to revive broader economic growth and install a regulatory scheme ensuring that markets don't once again threaten to pitch the gross domestic product carelessly into the abyss, the conservative elite routinely rises up to decry it all as a thing of low 20th ~century infamy and deviltry. "Socialism" is now the lib~ eral thought crime du jour, supplanting the ane~ mic Nineties scourges of "political correctness," tree~ hugging and the like.

Consider the case of Jim DeMint, a U.S. senator from South Carolina, who has denounced Presi ~ dent Obama as "the world's greatest salesman of socialism" -and in the promotional rounds for his jeremiad Saving Freedom (subtitled-yes"We Can Stop America's Slide into Socialism"), this free market solon also suggested that counter~ cyclical deficit spending was putting America "about where Germany was before World War II when they became a social democracy."

The liberals are spending again, and all sorts of nightmares of the thirties are assailing the truth tellers of the right. Now that a Democrat occupies the Oval OffIce-a Democrat who has, moreover, explicitly hailed the Roosevelt administration as a precedent for leaders "to try things and experi ~ ment in order to get people working again - " there is a real, despicable move afoot to legitirrtize

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statism. Why, the man has even resuscitated regular folksy press conferences-just like those fauxamiable, statist fireside chats!

And do not get them started on the marketkilling horror of it all! Fox News Managing Editor Brit Hume, for example, has recalled the New Deal as "a jihad against free enterprise," adding that "everyone, I think, agrees on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed." So commonplace has the "New Deal failed" mantra become in Republican circles that, at the height of the February 2009 stimulus debate in Congress, Ohio Representative Steve Austria went ahead and denounced FDR not just for failing to stanch the Depression but for traveling backward in time to start it as well. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression," the congressman told the Columbus Dispatch.

"That's just history."

This, of course, is more than just chronological addlement. New Deal denialism, much like creationism, entails blotting out whole swaths of contradictory evidence-not merely the bulk of FDR's contemporaneous record, but also the decades of growth and comparative stability that succeeded it. To get laissez-faire completely off the hook. however, the true New Deal denialist must go further, must strive to remake Roosevelt's predecessor, Herbert Hoover, into a mad, wage-inflating social planner.

No thesis this woolly can gain much of footing without a semi -respectable parentage, and most of the denialists' big ideas come courtesy of Bloomberg columnist Amity Shlaes' bestselling revisionist chronicle of the New Deal, The Forgotten Man. The 2007 book has launched an entire industry of New Deal denialism on the right -one market that's clearly benefiting greatly from the Obama stimulus. Just this spring alone, Forbes assembled a special "Revisiting the 1930s" package of articles, keynoted by a lead piece from Shlaes on "Roosevelt's glee in prosecuting the business heroes of the' 20s" and an essay by conservative UCLA economist Lee Ohanian insisting that the Depression was needlessly prolonged

by Roosevelt's meddling in labor markets. And should conservatives find such fare insufficiently stout, last May they could have attended a confab on the Depression sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The precis for the event affirmed that "Obama wants to be FDR, and he is, in the worst possible sense" and offered a special lunch dispensing - finally! - with the myth that capitalism is inherently unstable: "Mises Institute Fights Bubble and Bust."

But Shlaes remains the center of the New Deal denialist movement, and The Forgotten Man, for all its overt intellectual folly, bears close investigation, in the same way that None Dare Call It Treason is essential reading for chroniclers of postwar paranoia.

In its main outline, The Forgotten Man tells a very old story, a litany of complaint unaltered since Roosevelt's heyday. It begins with definitions: The New Deal is chiefly identified with command -style, cartel-friendly bodies such as the short -lived National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which were in reality both ruled unconstitutional a few years after their launch. The book then proceeds to a simple verdict: The New Deal was an unmitigated failure. For all his widely touted Keynesian innovations, it is said, Roosevelt presided over sluggish gains in employment, a skittish stock market and, in 1937-38, a "depression within the Depression" that would have finally exposed him as the patrician fraud he was, had not World War II conveniently come along to turn him into a successful war president.

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At the outset of The Forgotten Man, Shlaes poses as a disinterested chronicler. But she soon makes her affinities plain. Roosevelt's experiments in social engineering were "often inspired by socialist and fascist models, " she asserts . And while she allows that "few New Dealers were spies or even communists," they nonetheless cleaved to "Soviet-style or European-style col lectivism" - something that other historians of the era have neglected to note for "fear of being labeled a red-baiter."

Shlaes depicts the New Deal as a titanic exer cise in interest-group politics, aimed solely to secure Roosevelt's 1936 re -election by buying off "labor, senior citizens, farmers" and {redundantly} "union workers." Before those dark days, Shlaes contends, "only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood" for such interests, neatly writing off the nation's entire reform tradition.

In Shlaes' telling, the only legitimate function of government, now and forever, is to shore up the interests of business. Anything other than that is Machiavellian subterfuge.

All this frantic rearranging of intellectual furniture takes place within the first IS pages of The Forgotten Man. The dreary, yet somehow also overheated 380 or so ensuing pages only multiply the confusion. Acentral strain of Shlaes' argumentborrowed from the Hayek school of delusionally classical economics-is that FOR's occasional policy reversals, such as the waffling that preceded the end of the gold standard, created "regime uncertainty," which "made Americans doubt themselves as investors. " There are at least two difficulties with this line of argument. One is that the business community itself-and bankers in particular-lobbied aggressively to retire the gold standard, since retaining it bred no small amount of uncertainty, amid rampant deflation and a credit freeze provoked in part by bank panics.

But more fundamentally, here and throughout The Forgotten Man, FOR's character shifts depending on what narrative use Shlaes wants to make of it: He carries 46 of 48 states in his 1936 landside victory because of his sinister drive to draft policy to serve political ends-so much so, she writes,

that "the country was splitting into those who were Roosevelt favorites and everyone else." But when framing those devilish policies, Roosevelt is both capricious and feckless-Shlaes refers repeatedly, and without evidence, to FOR's alleged view that taxing the wealthy was "amusing," as though he were short-sheeting the beds in his Harvard dorm. It seems unlikely that such a distractible Bertie Wooster sort of chap could engineer four successive preSidential victories, - but in the insular logic of Shlaes-land, Roosevelt's successes at the ballot box can only attest to the supreme cunning of his interest -group-fueled agenda.

The "regime uncertainty" thesis becomes even more awkward when placed beside another cherished Shlaes-myth-that American business leaders are swashbuckling connoisseurs of risk.

She dotes at uncomfortable length, for instance, on how banking titan Andrew Mellon-a longtime Republican Treasury secretary and a bitter foe of the New Deal-would grant starter loans to promising inventors against the advice of his own boards, and then increase his investment as the inventor's project took off. Sure, he could have foreclosed once the project became profitable, but the wondrous fact of the matter, Shlaes coos, was that the "Mellons never did business that way."

This, after all, was the same towering adventurer who founded his eponymous free market institute in Pittsburgh "under the general Mellon rubric 'self-improvement,' though whether that 'self was Mellon or his business or the U.S. economy generally even he left unclear." Well, what difference was there, at the end of the day?

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Ultimately, though, the greater object of The Forgotten Man-and of the armada of hastily assembled right -wing polemics coming in its wake-is to discredit the notion that countercyclical deficit spending can counteract economic downturns in the first place. It's a case that can only be made selectively, and disingenuously, as Shlaes makes abundantly (if inadvertently) clear.

Take the Dow's performance, which Shlaes mistakenly hails as "the most precise measure" of an administration's political success in mastering the transition into power-one of many phony axioms of the commentariat readily disproven by the George W Bush presidency. But Shlaes is so enamored of the Dow's ability to judge this or that moment's political initiative that she speculates that it staged a mini - rally in 1937 "perhaps inspired by the thought" of the excellent Andrew Mellon's famous bequest to the National Gallery.

But the bigger moral is that -surprise, surpriseunprecedented government spending didn't thrill the investor class of the early 20th century, which believed even more firmly than today's Wall Street crowd in the grand verities of classical economics. Shlaes drums this point home with running notations at the head of each new chapter, setting forth the Dow's monthly performance through the first stage of the Roosevelt administration as though it were an instantaneous Olympics-style rating of the New Deal's progress.

Of course, and as the world learned soon after Shlaes' book was published, the Dow tells us little about the underlying health of the economy. You'd think that the lesson of 1929 alone could bear testimony to that elementary point, but then that might suggest something other than a don't -spookthe-investors approach to macroeconomic policy.

That's also why you hear not one peep in any of the right's studies of the 1930s about wealth and income inequality and its role in spurring and prolonging the Depression. Though the verdict is not yet fully in on our present -day calamity, the 1920s still holds the standing record for wealth

wealth and income "was only one among many roots of the Great Depression, " writes historian Robert McElvaine, "but it was the taproot. It led to both underconsumption and oversaving, and it helped fuel stock speculation."

Letting the free market administer its mystic remedies-reallocating capital and labor in more efficient fashion - is the de facto position of all right-wing Thirties revisionists, from the impressionistic Shlaes to the various von Mises hardliners. But nothing like that outcome would ensue in a laissez-faire approach-then or now-for the simple reason that laisseZ-faire conditions are what eroded demand and pumped up speculation in the first place. It's very much like trying to cure pneumonia by standing out in the rain.

Free market shibboleth remains serenely oblivious to such considerations, however. After all, Shlaes counsels, "the market had its own natural laws." And it's the law, evidently, that business interests should never be molested - for they, and they alone, dictate the course of the common good.

Hence the 1937-38 recession-which most students of the era attribute to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau's abrupt call to slash federal spending as demand still faltered - was actually caused, in Shlaes' judgment, by artificially high wages, frightening investors (of course) and driving up unemployment. Which means the FDR-empowered labor movement was a principal culprit.

By this reasoning, the labor movement itself, like the socialist outlook it recklessly foments, is a thing of perversity, which did not, in the case of the more militant Congress of Industrial Organizations "necessarily, represent the average worker." What's more, as unions secured stronger footholds in American workplaces, their success "only seemed to make them more bellicose." As for the Wagner Act, which legalized collective bargaining, thereby triggering these manifold disasters, it "was continuing to hurt profitability" at U.S. corporations. Even as General Motors, for instance, saw its sales rise in the

inequality in these United States-with the top

wake of the historic 1937 sit-down strikes that

32.4 percent of all net wealth. Maldistribution of

marked the founding of the United Auto Workers, its earnings declined: "The new wages and the

o.s percent of the American population owning

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costs of the strikes had made the companies less valuable." Never mind that by any honest reck0ning of the Flint sit -down strikes, GM executives bore at least as much responsibility for their costs as the striking workers-especially since their basic strategy was to starve out the UAW organizers. Never mind, in addition, that those same "new wages" helped make generations of autoworkers- many of them recent AfricanAmerican transplants from the Jim Crow Southrelatively prosperous members of a middle class whose wages stoked broader consumer demand.

No, if companies are made less valuable, then any social movement or incremental progress toward industrial democracy reflects perverse "belligerence" and must be judged a miserable failure.

Of course, as Shlaes has admitted elsewhere, blaming wage increases for chronic unemployment through the Depression requires a critical bit of number -fudging: She uses figures that count WPA and other work-relief employees as unemployed, since, you know, everything the government does is by definition illegitimate. This trick allows Shlaes to omit fully a third of American workers drawing government pay from her talliesand contend that unemployment during the 193738 downturn "was again hitting a full two in ten."

This is amazingly easy to debunk: According to the far less tendentious Historical Statistics of the United States, actual unemployment for the period was somewhere in the 14 percent rangestill woeful, to be sure, but not the 20 percent level that Shlaes uses to suggest that the whole New Deal stimulus effort was basically a wasteful, politically driven wash. And again: The recession in question did not proceed from artificially high wages (the U.S. should have such troubles) but misguided budget slashing amid a fragile recovery-i.e., the very policy that Shlaes and her allies urge as the wisest response to the present downturn.

So much, in other words, for the talking point that now commands such universal assent on the right: "The New Deal didn't work." And yet there it sits, a grand unexamined fallacy that the movement invokes as though, with just enough repetition, it could banish not just the possibility

of emergency government intervention in a failing economy, but invalidate the entire sevendecade legacy of the New Deal.

Then there is the massive contradiction behind the corollary talking point that seeks to deny the New Deal by insisting that only World War II brought the Depression to an end. After all, the Second World War was a mobilization of deficitfunded economic power that made the New Deal look like the work of pikers. One could go further and note that the uneven prosperity of the Reagan and George W Bush eras were likewise textbook studies in deficit stimulus efforts-only without any pretense of finding adequate tax revenues to cover the spending costs. Weighed in the full balance of the historical record, Shlaes' argument is not a brief about the eternally destructive character of government intervention in the economy; it is, rather, an unusually shrill insistence that government intervention is illegitimate when it serves liberal domestic policy interests.

This is a position that today's conservatives endorse at considerable political peril. They are advocating, unwittingly, exactly the same formula that Shlaes' hero Andrew Mellon proposed for handling the Depression: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farms, liquidate real estate."

But instead, the commercial success of Shlaes' fanciful account of the Thirties has cleared the way for more full- throated demolition efforts such as Robert P. Murphy's Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.

An acolyte of the "Austrian" school of purist libertarian economics, Murphy relentlessly sniffs out the evil that attends to every dollar disgorged from the federal treasury. Murphy's Regnerypublished polemic is a treatment of Keynesian economics that, in the persuasiveness of its polemic details, seems to owe more to Lewis Carroll than to Murphy's hero Ludwig von Mises. But it's been baptized a main selection of the Conservative Book Club-and rightly so, one senses, since it effectively codifies the denialist faith, while serving as a salutary reminder of where its logic tends, once consistently applied.

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so on. Alaissez-faire outlook among the Allied powers, in other words, would almost certainly have resulted in a fascist triumph. (Even more inconveniently, the killing blow to Nazi imperialism was delivered by the most hatefully statist command economy of them all, Stalinist Russia.)

If this is the sort of high -octane prevarication that Murphy employs in sizing up the aftermath of the New Deal, you can just imagine the rhetorical restraint he uses in describing the main event. Herbert Hoover's early feints at state intervention in the initial troughs of the Depression, for example, rate this appraisal: "Hoover tried to fight the Depression with policies so destructive that, in retrospect' one almost wonders if he were a Soviet agent sent to undermine the American economy."

And as for Roosevelt, well, he was simply "a fascist"; a charge that Murphy concedes is "loaded and overused" but accords with the term's "strict economic definition. " Murphy apparently has in mind the cartel of corporate leaders that formed under the aegis of the National Recovery Administration-an agency that, whatever its ideological coloration, was outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1935. As to the broader economic definition of fascism, it actually hinges on the privatization of the state- the opposite of the state- orchestrated melding of enterprise the NRA undertook. And every fascist leader ever has made it a first order of economic policy to outlaw unions and strikes, which the New Deal pointedly expanded.

But of course, it gets better-and by "better," I mean "more ludicrous." Murphy seems to dismiss the notion (as any consistent free market purist must) that there was anything seriously awry in 1929 - or at least not anything that a little Mellonstyle liquidating couldn't rectify in short order.

There could be no crisis of overproduction, or demand, or credit, or unemployment, since the market-i.e., nature-has made these things; the crisis only comes when government gets involved.

"The free market, by its very nature, is self -regu1ating' " Murphy patiently explains. "It is government interventions that inevitably distort it, often with unintended consequences."

Of course, to make all market outcomes seem

SENATOR ROBERT M. LAFOLLETTE

like undeviatingly intended consequences requires some acrobatic reasoning, on a whole other plane than mere editorialists like Shlaes can manage.

So rather than reflecting longer-term income and wealth inequities from the Twenties boom, the Depression itself was entirely a government crea tion. After all, our Austrian evangelist confidently declares, "the boom-bust cycle is not a natural feature of capitalism, but rather is caused by the Federal Reserve' s manipulation of interest rates" -specifically in this instance a decision to loosen up credit in 1927 in order to counteract drawdowns in the gold supply from British investors. That original fiscal sin fatally set the stage, Murphy argues, for "the extraordinary meddling with wage rates by Hoover and then FDR" that "prevented workers from moving to more sensible niches in the economy." How Murphy and his fellow Miseans account for the many panics and depressions that preceded the Fed's founding in 1913 is a mystery left largely unplumbed.

Everything else involved in the disaster was like wise just a matter of temporary disequilibriums, Murphy explains. "It wasn't that 'business' was producing too much, but rather that some sectors

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was being molested! After all, Murphy explains, "there are other goods and services that those scarce resources could have produced, but which humans will now never enjoy because they were devoted to government projects." Think of all the miniature golf facilities, nylon stockings and radios senselessly sacrificed just for the liberal vanity project of defeating fascism!

Likewise with the erstwhile layabouts now caught up by the draft-how could anyone count this as a legitimate form of employment? Suppose, for example, "that FDR announced in 1940 that in an effort to fight the Depression, all able -bodied unemployed men would be shipped to African jungles (where they faced lions and disease) . That policy would have brought down the official unemployment rate," Murphy sniffs, "yet it obvi0usly would not have promoted actual economic recovery. Had FDR suggested something this monstrous as a 'cure' for mass unemployment, Not for Murphy, for example, the softheaded notion that the Second World War played any sig- citizens would have rightfully recoiled in horror."

Indeed, one can almost picture Murphy himnificant role in rescuing the Depression -battered self, after typing up such infamies, smiting his American economy. True, Murphy concedes, breast. slumping alongside his laptop, lifting "there were many non-pecuniary reasons for his head heavenward only to convulsively shout, waging war against Nazi Germany and Imperial "Unclean! Unclean!" After all, had the market Japan," which "may very well have justified the approved of the war, it could by itself have immense costs of our entry into the conflict. " instructed wartime production facilities where Phew, well, that's a relief.

But since the mobilization effort mandated such to allocate resources, by the magic of the price measures as price controls, the draft, and rationmechanism. "Precisely because World War II ing of scarce materials such as rubber and steel for was an unprecedented event, there were no war production purposes, the whole thing was the 'experts' on transforming civilian production to foulest of economic abominations. "So the carefully military production on this scale. When it comes constructed measures of 'intlation -adjusted gross to motivating millions of people to brainstorm and quickly come up with better ways to make domestic output' during the 1940s are about as meaningful as the economic statistics reported by a mousetrap (or tank), nothing beats the prohtthe Soviet Union," Murphy notes in disgust. "The driven market economy. " government effectively made it illegal for market Back in consensual reality, however, the Second prices to signal how much inflation the Fed was World War doesn't actually reduce to a perverse pumping into the system."

safari outing. There was a Japanese attack on a u.s.

And so it is with all the economic measures of the grotesquely defiled Forties. Sure, the poor saps drafted into the Army or the female workers who thronged into war production factories might have thought things were turning around. But they were blind to how the pure model of laissez-faire

naval base, and a massive German effort to conquer the West and spread racial genocide. Oh, and the "pecuniary" stakes were far from negligible, as well, with a war-driven Nazi command economy curi0usly indifferent to the domestic production needs of Poland, France, Belgium, the Balkan states, and

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were producing too much, while other sectors were producing too little, in light of the economy's supplies of resources, the skills and desires of its workers, and the tastes of its consumers."

In fighting wage reductions in the Depression's early phase, Hoover-like FDR after him-was defying the mighty truth that all markets dictate: "High wages do not cause prosperity, they are rather an indication of prosperity." Sure, the worker forced to accept wage cuts in downturns would be unable to spark any surge in demandbut hey, his employer still could! Contrary to Hoover's reckonings, "wage cuts give employers the means to increase their spending (either on personal consumption or to invest)."

Besides, why fret about workers in the first place? "The simple formula of paying the workers 'enough to buy back the product' overlooks the fact that there people other than employees who make up the economy." Why, entrepreneurs just for starters! Don't they-and God's other anointed class, the shareholders- "own the businesses that employ 'the workers' "? After all, "the workers at an automobile plant don't crank out thousands of cars with their bare hands," you know. So of course, when workers organize themselves under protections of the Wagner Act and the NLRB, the market deformities simply pile one on another: "artificially high prices, artificially high unemployment, and politically allocated-rather than market allocated -capital and labor." As a result, the stunningly obtuse Murphy lectures, "not only did the New Deal keep workers on the sidelines, but it also ensured that many of those who did have jobs worked in the wrong sectors." Because, really, what could be more artificial inducements to attract someone to a labor market than higher wages, job security, pension protections and collective bargaining rights? Workers should just shut up and be thankful they live in a free market-as they await whatever verdict the free market has in store for their livelihoods and their families.

Surely it can only be a grotesque coincidence that the greatest period of mass prosperity in the modern consumer economy-the 1950s, when even Murphy has to concede that the American economy

was firing on all cylinders-also coincided with the highest concentration of union membership in the U.S. working population.

For Murphy, anything other than "market allocated" capital is an illegitimate player on the economic stage-and this is especially true of efforts to produce higher wages for workers, which can only bespeak "politically allocated" mischief with the sacred market. But of course the last generation of right -wing tax -cutting, labor -soaking and income polarization tells a very different story: Capital is being allocated politically, all rightjust not in the interest of anyone other than its owners. Even before the present recession, income inequality had sharpened to levels approaching the worst of the twenties. From 2002 to 2006, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez report, 75 percent of all income gains in the United States went to the top one percent of earners-those making more than $382,600. And the bulk of those gains, Piketty and Saez note, went to the top 0.01 percent of the population, which controlled 5.46 percent of the nation's income. In 2005 alone, according to the Economic Policy Institute, all income gains went to the top 10 percent of earners, with the other 90 percent showing income declines-again, during conditions of overall economic growth. This was the ftrst economic expansion since World War II, in fact, in which the vast majority of Americans lost economic ground.

Economists remain divided over whether the principal cause of this massive upward income transfer was the steep Reagan-era tax cuts or the wage erosion spurred by globalization-but both policies came straight out of the conservative economic playbook.

Such is the true shape of the present economic fiasco-as workers have realized steady gains in productivity over the past two decades, income and wealth have been deliberately channeled out of their hands. I guess it's no surprise that, in the face of this dismal record, ideologues on the right prefer to talk of the mythical failures of the New Deal. The only real wonder is that at this late stage of their own intellectual bankruptcy anyone still bothers to listen. ~

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Lost on Nelson Algren Avenue Mike Newirth

Any good necrography should begin at the grave.

Fifteen years ago I spent a summer in Sag Harbor, tending bar and snarking at specimens of the Nineties boom who crowded the American Hotel each night. The first rule of gentrification is the gauzing of the past, and so in reaction to the partying traders I dug deeper into the area's history. In Canio's, a ramshackle bookstore where I hunted first editions, I spoke with an archetypal Long Island codger over a hardback of The Man With the Golden Arm, the once-famous 1949 novel about Chicago gamblers and drug addicts.

"Nelson Algren lived out here, at the end," the old-timer averred. "In fact, his apartment was a few blocks from here. He died setting up for a party. He'd just found out he'd been accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters."

He directed me to the cemetery where Algren lies buried. I spent an hour wandering among the pine trees and headstones there, but I never did find Algren's grave.

Nelson Algren is that rare cultural figure who seems both fiercely singular and a tabula rasa: in memory's eye he is alternately a serious novelist, a squandered has-been, a devoted idealist, a cranky misogynist and the original swinger. This last image is what has made him an icon for his hometown of Chicago - particularly these days, as the city gives itself over more and more to a hipster culture that's mannered, loud, and resolutelyasocial. Indeed, if Nelson Algren's grave was recorded, perhaps Mayor Daley's minions could reclaim his corpse in the name of Chicagoland.

Hipster tourism is an industry now in Algren's town, and this city would happily re-inter him in a sarcophagus in the old "Polish Triangle" at Division & Milwaukee, with spotlights and a plaque that the youngsters could ignore as they stumbled out of the Evil Olive nightclub. Algren's postmortem street cred would shine down like a midnight moon upon our hedonism.

On the other hand, there's also a move afoot to appreciate the man's work. His books have actually been returned to print by Seven Stories Press. In April 2009, his spirit was feted at Chicago's SteppenwolfTheatre, with Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, Barry Gifford, and assorted Hollywood types reading Algren's unpublished writing. Said Banks on that occasion, "The people he wrote about were different than those who read his books, which is a divide that's impossible to get around." Even so, the marginalized humanity that Algren fought to memorialize remains absent from our contemporary literature, just as Algren himself now serves his city as a mannequin of hipster rebellion rather than a defeated spokesman for the down and out.

Bettina Drew's 1989 biography of the author tells how, during the Fifties, Algren came to believe that the vibrant, proletarian Chicago, in which he immersed himself while writing The Neon Wilderness and The Man With the Golden Arm, was replaced with something meaner, more corrupt and plasticized: Daley's Chicago.

Now, in the Chicago of Daley Junior, dissent seems positively impossible: our parking meters are sold off like spoils fenced at Maxwell Street, children murder one other with abandon, and ask nearly any neighborhood denizen what he or she really thinks of the city fathers' (unconsummated) Olympics-lust. But even as we wait for Urban Outfitters to offer form-fitting Nelson Algren t-shirts, we'll wait much longer for a young writer who follows Algren's path, because in reality the career Algren chose is the opposite of the white male hipsterism that now rules literary land. For all the sad young men today, for all the transgressive artists and video-makers and DJs, social awareness is but a thin overlay on ironic appearances (last year: corduroy! This year: shaggy beards, mirrored shades!); Algren's would-be descendants don't worry their pretty

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little heads about the 1995 heat wave, for example, which killed hundreds of impoverished Chicagoans. They don't wonder if anyone will ever be called to justice for the city's police torture scandal. Nor did they fret over the massive civic displacement that the Olympics would have entailed. But each of these would have made perfect material for Nelson Algren.

So in this city where sanctioned diversity is venerated, but real culture just gets stepped on in a thousand ways-in neighborhoods adequately policed only when gentrified, in the city's bureaucratic meanness towards grass-roots music (see the proposed "Chicago promoter's ordinance")the deification of Algren makes a certain sense, as ironic a coda to the story of his misadventures here as this summer's hipster-clogged concerts at Pritzker Pavilion are to the tear gas fumes of 1968.

The real story of how Algren lived recedes like cobblestones beneath blacktop.

(which drowned 981 picnicking Western Electric workers in the Chicago River). He was not really an accidental writer: he developed the bug in high school, and read the classics obsessively at the University of Illinois. He planned to become a sociologist, already "traveling among the poorer people, the downtrodden," a childhood friend recalled. He began writing fiction and crime journalism in 1931-not a good time to enter the job market, but a fine time to develop a wry fatalism, The legend of Nelson Algren's life seems digestwandering the ruination of Texas and Louisiana. ible. During the Depression, he rode the rails Following his adventure in typewriter theftwith hoodlums and dodged a two-year Texas which, against the legend, occurred when he was prison term for typewriter theft; he returned to already under contract for his first novel-he imChicago, and became an accidental novelist when mersed himself in Chicago's restive literary scene, an acquaintance suggested re-casting a tragiin locales like the Jewish People's Institute and comic letter he had written as fiction. His first the Communist Party's John Reed Club. Algren's novel, Somebody in Boots, a Candide-like tale of studiousness led to his debut in Story magazine, Thirties vagrants, epitomized the proletarian lit- and friendships with James T. Farrell and Richard erary style; his second, Never Come Morning, a Wright, notable at a time when artistic desegregamelodrama of a North Side Polish thug, appeared tion was rare (Algren actually gave him the title just before his Army service in World War II. Native Son). While Algren would later be perAlgren returned to Chicago fully engaged, proceived as an introverted iconoclast, he was very ducing a singular short story collection and The much part of a literary community at this crucial Man With the Golden Arm, a novel that received moment - the members of which would be pilthe first National Book Award. Yet after that, loried for their artistic activities during the Red Algren would publish just one more novel in his Scare. It's important, when digging up Algren, to lifetime; he scuffled for money, bitter and adrift. take note of the man as he was, not to gauze him He died with his famous books out of print and over into our very own Kerouac, a neutered anteunavailable in the libraries of Chicago. cedent of today' s hipster cool.

The Algren that emerges in Bettina Drew's biDespite editorial help from Farrell, positive reography seems flawed, but as a lifelong artist he views, and Algren's own expectations of making appears profoundly in sync with the city and the a difference through sparking proletarian outperiod. Born in 1909, Algren recalled the Black rage, Somebody in Boots sold 762 copies. Algren Sox scandal of 1919 and the wreck of the Eastland attempted suicide soon after; his deep depression

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culminated in a stay at the University of Chicago Psychiatric Clinic. For years afterward, Algren denigrated his debut, although he essentially re~ told its story with his 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side, which he seemed to regard as an op~ portunity to squeeze something out of the work (in true Chicago scrapper style).

Just as Algren seemed resigned to giving up literature for survival (he was married to his first wife, working in a warehouse, and stealing food off wagons), Wright connected him with the WPA Federal Writers' Project, which "gave new life to people who had thought their lives were over," as Algren later observed. For the WPA Guide to Illinois, he produced the chapter on Galena, "peo~ pled with renegades and hustlers," and remained active in the League of American Writers, flirt ~ ing with the Communist Party. Algren' s political activism grew out of his firsthand observations of the violence of poverty, as did the empathy devel ~ oped in his early literary characterizations, and it was just these two elements of social engagement that would soon cause him endless troubles.

One senses this in Entrapment and Other Writings, edited by Dan Simon and Algren scholar Brooke Horvath, the only one of the new Algren releases that does not replicate earlier publications. It mixes fiction and reportage: unpublished work (includ ~ ing a never~completed novel that would have con~ stituted a substantial follow~up to Golden Arm) alongside pieces that appeared in magazines rang~ ing from Sports Illustrated to Cavalier. Entrap~ ment traces the simultaneous development of Algren's social earnestness and his stylistic daring, which often seem at cross purposes. This explains both why Algren achieved more than his peers in the proletarian movement, as well as his eventual burnout: he gambled his artistic potential in out ~ running a discordant era. As Simon notes in his introduction, Algren "saw writers generally -and himself in particular-as being one with those who don't otherwise have defenders." (Quick! Name one widely read contemporary novelist under 40 about whom you'd assert this. Three ... two ... one ... you owe me a Coke.)

This seems apparent from his earliest stories, written in the Thirties. Algren made difficult artistic choices, often allowing his characters to appear ugly in the interest of vivid portraiture. In "A Lumpen" (published in New Masses in 1935), Algren sketches a down and out transient who is racist and psychopathic: In the morning I walked west down Harrison and that was when I seen this parade. Niggers was walkin' with white men, carrin' banners, so I stood an' watched.

"Them's mighty cocky niggers," I said to a guy.

"We all came out of a hole, didn't we?" the guy said back.

"Maybe you're a nigger yourself," I said.

"Maybe I am and maybe I'm not," he answered.

I thought for a second and then I said, "Say, guy, you want some 0' me?" And I doubled up both fists.

"I got no time for fightin' now, 'cause I'm getting in the parade," said the guy and before I could spit through my teeth he was gone.

The narrator's desolate inner monologue pings from "If I could just get some chippie to marry me, I bet I could get on relief," to "The trouble with the whole works is Jews an' Niggers. That's why I'm down and out." The story's conclusion points towards the rosy~fingered Fascist dawn: the narrator is selling newspapers "for [Huey] Long," a better job than giving out prayer books.

In a few paragraphs, writing while callow and broke, Algren confounds the reader's sympathies while nailing the unvarnished reality of the dec~ ade's collapse and introducing giddy humor via the absurd dialogue. Already in his early work Algren was struggling both to utilize and to shed the strictures of the talky left ~ wing style of the day in favor of something barbed and leaner, a haunting form of proletarian satire.

One thing Chicagoans know for sure about Algren is that he was associated with the neighborhood known as Wicker Park - once rough~edged and

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polyglot, but gentrified during the last twenty years to a grotesque, rococo extreme. Less well- known is how Algren' s attentiveness to the neighborhood's low-income vitality sparked a weird, unsavory controversy that planted the seeds of his decline. In 1940, Algren moved to the "Polish Triangle" of Division Street and Milwaukee and Ashland Avenues, characterized by Drew as "an old-time proving ground for Chicago hoodlums." Algren absorbed the neighborhood's vices: he searched out poker games, tavern eccentrics, and participants in the underground economy of narcotics and crime, while surreptitiously taking notes and studying speech patterns, and following newspaper accounts of the mayhem of the day ~ the apprenticeship of a real "social" writer. (The latter included the trial of Bernard Sawicki, a nineteen-year-old multiple murderer, who seems to have given Algren his crucial line of dialogue, that he "never expected to be twentyone anyway.") From all this came his second novel, Never Come Morning, a tough noirish melodrama about an amateur boxer. Richard Wright contributed a prickly introduction, noting that most writers would take an aloof approach to material that many would deride as illegitimate in the first place: Most of us 20th century Americans are reluctant to admit the tragically low quality of experiences of the broad American masses ...

[TJhere will come a time in our country when the middle class will gasp and say (as they now gasp over the present world situation): "Why weren't we told this before? Why didn't our novelists depict the beginnings of this terrible thing that has come upon us?"

Algren's publisher assured him that the novel was "going to make a stir." This proved accurate.

The novel was immediately vilified by conservative leaders of Chicago's Polish community, who chose, according to Bettina Drew, "to see it as Nazi propaganda." The controversy spiraled out of control, until Mayor Ed Kelly had the book removed from the Chicago Public Library. Worse, the Polish American Council sent a copy of its resolution against Never Come Morning to the

FBI, which was happy to re-open earlier files on Algren's activities.

In this, Algren had good company among creative types, who had generally been radicals in the Thirties and then woke up in an America poised for an emerging surveillance state. Still, Algren again stands alone: Simon asserts that Algren's FBI file is the longest of any American author. Then: a military policy to divert known leftists to front -line infantry was applied to the novelist. "The FBI was in contact with the army about Algren," Drew writes; "his induction form was strangely stamped Special Assignment, and his incoming and outgoing mail was routinely opened. " Despite his credentials as a writer, Algren was assigned to an artillery unit.

He was repulsed by the other soldiers' eagerness, and appears to have been as terrible at soldiering as he was skilled at navigating the urban underground. Desperate to avoid combat, Algren spotted a "rabbi" in a lieutenant who'd been a contributor to New Masses before the war, and eventually secured an improbable transfer to a medical company. Algren sought out the company of gamblers and drinkers, and when he finally departed for Europe, he developed a facility for the black market, which inspired "He Couldn't Boogie-Woogie Worth a Damn," a t1awless story about an AWOL African -American private who understandably decides to stay in Europe.

Once again, it's remarkable how Algren stumbled into representing an oppositional American archetype: the thoughtful nonconformist soldier who is the Army's shame. It's chilling to think how easily Algren could have been tossed into the meat grinder as payback for his progressive politics. Algren's absurd battle with the Polish leaders reminds us how rare such conflicts are today, now that so much of our acclaimed writing arises from cheap irony, pop culture references and solipsism. One begins to understand the fierce love Algren's protectors always had for him~even when readers slipped away, when he became slovenly and bitter.

The early Fifties were the peak of Algren's life, between the flush of literary respectability and

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his complicated affair with the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, whom he called "Frenchy."

This relationship, of course, has provided as much fuel for coffee- house fantasies of the writer,s life as have the antics of Bowles, Burroughs, and Kerouac, but this legendary love was conditional: de Beauvoir would not abandon her "open" commitment to Jean-Paul Sartre, and by the late Fifties the affair had turned sour, probably amplifying Algren's chauvinism.

Algren took on two incongruous freelance assignments in this period. The famous "prose poem" Chicago: City on the Make, originally an essay in Holiday magazine, remains a pungent but sentimental overview of the city (it was butchered by the upscale magazine but then brought out by Doubleday and kept in print by the University of Chicago Press). Easy to miss within it is Algren' s baseline concerns: how can a society nurture literature when that society devotes itself to consumerism and war? "You can't make an arsenal of a nation and yet expect its great cities to produce artists," Algren challenges. Then: another essay on the artist's predicament, this one asserting that a serious writer must be prepared to resist a climate of political fear and the temptations of business interests. Published in the Chicago Daily News book section in 1952, the essay attracted an "outpouring of applause that amazed us ali, " as literary editor Van Allen Bradley recalled. (Where have all the newspaper literary editors gone, anyway, and the avuncular men-about-town with names like Van Allen Bradley?) It was extensively reprinted and Doubleday insisted on bringing the essay out as a book, prompting Algren to overhaul it. The prospect seems tantalizing: a still-youthful writer, his progressive passions fully engaged, given a platform to critique writing and the darkness of Eisenhower's America. Perhaps Algren could have been redefIned as an essayist or critic.

The events that followed instead seem mordantly predictable. In March 1953, as the FBI investigated Algren again, his passport application was denied, based on allegations that he was a Communist. In September, after Algren tussled

with an editor sent from New York to "polish" the essay ("into oblivion," Algren commented), Doubleday refused to publish it, a decision Bradley attributed to creeping fear of McCarthyism. Algren mailed the manuscript to his agent; it was lost. In 1956 Algren delivered the sole remaining carbon to Bradley for safekeeping. This copy wound up in the Algren archive at Ohio State University, untouched during Algren's life time. Nonconformity: Writing on Writing was first published in 1996. In it, Algren offers an important assessment at the start of the Fifties, wagering his (ephemeral) standing as an "important " public fIgure against the creeping stultifIcation he perceived.

As ever, Algren's critique remains rooted in his activist experiences during the Thirties, but his argument that consumer comfort has crippled American writers seems prescient. Algren' s inspirations include Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech of 1950, with its observation that the American "tragedy" had become such "a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now" that even writers and artists were hobbled.

Algren examines the cost such emotional investment carried personally for F. Scott Fitzgerald, while praising Joseph Conrad and Andre Gide and eviscerating the then-popular Frank Yerby, the sort of writer who reduces "the art of writing to a ballroom game of seeing who can serve the heaviest tipper the fastest" -a cute anachronism, until one considers the prominence of precisely

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this sort of literary veneration of the white and the attractive and the moneyed in American writing since the Eighties. Some of Nelson's barbs can still sting.

Perhaps today's hipster / booster fascination with Algren is a consequence of our ongoing passion for the Fifties. That decade is the symbolic home of the beloved kitsch that helps us to understand our youthful preoccupations ever since. And Algren fits right in: the Playboy Club habitue; the American existentialist lost in a cool neon wilderness. A famous Art Shay photograph of the author epitomizes this. It shows Algren sitting in a claustrophobic nightclub watching clarinetist Bill Reinhardt play onstage. Algren appears relaxed and attentive to the musicians six feet away; he is well dressed, smoking. drinking from a rocks glass. Among other things, the photograph suggests commitment, and maybe this is what has been leached out of today's hipster culture, which laminates this Algren like a placemat: jazzbo Nelson, baby!

In reality, the Fifties were the decade when Algren's social engagement cauterized his artistic ambitions. His 1949 novel, The Man with the Golden Arm was greeted with adulation, and became the best-selling book in Chicago upon release. (Algren's money problems only intensified. however.) It's arguably the best novel of its era, and one of the most thematically difficult: its protagonist, card dealer Frankie Machine. is (like its creator) a fatally flawed J1aneur in the juicedup postwar milieu of Division Street - the ultimate insider on the scene, crippled by heroin and abusive love. But the book's sale to Hollywood immediately turned contentious; later, Algren would travel there to write the screenplay, and was tormented and then fired by Otto Preminger, who'd surreptitiously acquired the rights from the first producer. The acrimony and lawsuits dragged on for years, sapping Algren's strength. Back in Chicago. though. Algren's political involvement never wavered. epitomized by his decision to be honorary chairman of the Chicago Committee to Secure Justice in

the Rosenberg Case, a move that probably fueled both his passport problems and the cancellation of his book about nonconformity.

As a result of these setbacks, Algren seemed to turn away from the difficulties of writing novels.

He became preoccupied with money and gambling; in 1956, he fell through a frozen lake near the Indiana Dunes, probably another suicide attempt.

From then, a cascading series of little disasters quashed his determination to write novels. His biographer. Bettina Drew, points out that the aesthetic trends started to turn against Algren and his Thirties peers in the late Fifties; a highbrow backlash" directly attacked the whole idea of the writer as the compassionate social conscience"; lit scholar Leslie Fielder dubbed him "the bard of the stumblebum." Algren fell into the trap and returned fire, eventually becoming preoccupied with his critics and personal enemies.

This sets the tone of the travel book Algren published during the Sixties, Who Lost An American? (now reissued with its sort-of sequel, Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way). In 1959, Algren's passport was finally granted. He journeyed to Europe via first-class ocean liner, and this sequence shows the lesser Algren; humorous, but allusive and dated.

Elsewhere, the book improves, although as Algren moves through Barcelona. London, and Paris, an atmosphere of musty nostalgia makes the reader yearn for the determined plotting of his fiction. The most memorable chapters assess Chicago again, with withering broadsides against the city's corruption and its booster culture.

Algren's complex relationship with Chicago is better articulated than before: he castigates the booster class for applauding the city's rise from "squalor," for sucking up to Machine power, for attacking its writers while competing to be the lapdog to corruption, while deploring prostitutes and ignoring their johns, while beating the drum against delinquency and unwed mothers yet excusing the rampages of a notorious police burglary ring. He calls out esteemed figures for their collusion, like the Sun- Times columnist Irving Kupcinet. pioneer of bold-face celebrity

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journalism, and "saint of architecture" Frank Lloyd Wright: "He liked expensive buildings better than he liked cheap buildings, but if there wasn't any expensive building near at hand to like, Mr. Wright would just go ahead and like any old building .... " All of which tells us "why writers so often take a one-way t1ight from Midway or O'Hare and never come back."

Perhaps Algren should have booked his t1ight sooner. As his troubles mounted -a fmancially difficult divorce; vicious reviews of his work - the author seemed poised for decline. Art Shay's photography book, Nelson Algren 's Chicago, thus conveys a devastating evanescence: here Algren really is, a gliding bespectacled ghost - his doughy face always impassive, except on the cover, where he smiles at an archetypal North Side "party girl." thought to be Margo, an addicted prostitute whom Algren loved and helped get clean. Shay has a remarkable sense of composition, including environmental elements that make Fifties Chicago seem like a wonderland of grimy texture, decaying filigree. and the earnest consumerism of drink, games, cars. sport. Here is Algren, eating dinner with his cat in his "$10 a month apartment on Wabansia," his humble oilcloth-and-canned-food aesthetic a rejoinder to the coiffed quality of contemporary male fashion, all "fixies" and skinny jeans. Here is Algren cruising the Maxwell Street market with Marcel Marceau, picking through cheap toys. Algren at the Wicker Park nexus of Damen and Division in a winter maelstrom, sparks flying off the trolley cables, across the street from the Rainbo bar, that elegant mortuary monument to everlasting hipsterism. The novelist and the photographer crashed autopsies, courts, the police lineup: Far from a souvenir, Shay's book summarizes how a certain demographic really lived in this city in the postwar era; they situate Algren within the lost urban chaos that informs both his fiction and the legend.

The Sixties were hard on Algren, but then, they were hard on Chicago generally. Algren carried a .38, and was vilified in the press when arrested

on marijuana charges. He survived on academic appearances and book reviews; when a Boston newspaper asked him to cover "The Crime of the Century," referring to the 1966 Richard Speck murders in Chicago, Algren replied, "I don't want to go to Vietnam." Algren considered leaving as early as 1968, when City on the Make was reissued with a retitled epilogue, "Ode to Kissassville." In August, he arrived back in town from a gambling junket to watch the city explode during the Democratic convention, assessing the famous police riot as follows: "I don't think the clubbing represents one man. I think it represents a majority of the people of Chicago. If an election were held today, he'd win." Given that Chicago really did become a more callous place on Algren's watch, the bitterness that sapped his productivity seems all too comprehensible.

In 1974, Esquire asked Algren to write an article on Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, since made famous

by Bob Dylan and Denzel Washington; back then, Carter was just another murderer, albeit one railroaded by police misconduct. Algren concluded that Carter and his co-defendant were innocent, and decided to move to Paterson. N.J., to write about them. In order to raise money, he auctioned off his possessions, claiming, for example, that a random table was the site of poker games that inspired scenes in Golden Arm, and charging old friends for small mementos. "Now that I'm leaving, Chicago is finally saying some nice things about me." he observed. "You know, the kind of praise I wouldn't be getting unless I had died."

In 1973, the last book of Algren's lifetime appeared: The Last Carousel, a compendium of stories and essays. Editor Bill Targ recalled, "Algren sent me a huge box of clippings, scraps, junk mini -manuscripts ... I spent a week reading' sifting, sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

Damned little wheat. " Thus, one discovers a weak grudge exercise, "Otto Preminger's Strange Suspenjers," in proximity to a hard -edged gem, an account of gambling in the dissolute copper town of Butte. Montana, where lynched labor ghosts roamed a once majestic downtown: "When fists were still what counted most but

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money counted more." The book's publication was overlooked in Chicago and elsewhere.

Algren's article on Carter was rejected, but Algren had at last found a project he believed in, with its echoes of the race and labor strife that preoccupied him for so long. And he stuck with it as his life continued to fray; he had a heart attack that he concealed from acquaintances, and a landlord in Paterson evicted him. The first draft of his reportage was rejected by Targ at Putnam's (probably reflecting their losses on Last Carousel); following suggestions by Studs Terkel and his agent, he decided to turn the book into a novel. Friends describe a man who enjoyed gambling at the track and fancy dinners he could ill afford; he was overweight, disheveled, lonely.

Algren's move to Long Island in 1980 was the culmination of these dashed hopes. When Donald Barthelme, Malcolm Cowley, and Jacques Barzun nominated Algren for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a flurry of publicity and crowded readings resulted. Perhaps it was simply excitement in this moment, after so much rejection, that led Algren to ignore a doctor's recommendation that he check in to a hospital for observation, following persistent chest pains; after all, he was planning a party, and whatever his flaws, Nelson Algren was not a man to disappoint those he stood with.

Chicago is a gaudy city. We embrace our proletarian roughness and venerate our buffoons, from the Mike Ditkas of yesterday to tomorrow's corrupted politico. Perhaps Algren was our Cassandra: he was right when he argued for the significance of "squalor" and for the literary significance of the vast demographic of the dispossessed. The city was integral to what Algren observed and animated in his best fiction; thanks to Algren and a few others, Chicago framed American conversations about urban reality from the Thirties all the way through the Seventies and Eighties. In Chicago one could easily observe and understand what was really at stake: the lives of the poor and the working class, and the great question of whether these people could surmount

the inequities visited upon them, or disappear into violence and depredation, into the numbing index of lives destroyed and ground under.

These days that subject seems remote. This is not to assert that Chicago is not violent and depraved; to the contrary-every night the killing fields of the South and West Sides provide a whispery tickling of the conscience. But now the gaudiness has taken over; you see it in so many neighborhoods on a Saturday night, where pricey hedonism has become all. This is why the empty veneration of Algren grinds: the progressive city he wished for and worked for is far away. In its place, a segregated wonderland where alcoholic vice is slickly commercialized and literature is just another culture-scent to be consumed.

In the Seventies, Wicker Park was an arsonridden neighborhood of Latin gangs and white folks on drugs, and the building where Algren lived for years was torn down. After the writer's death, according to Drew, a sympathetic alderman had a section of Evergreen Avenue renamed in his honor. Inevitably, the Polish community leaders protested and the deSignation was removed, then qUietly reinstated later. In the late Nineties, a movement to rename the triangular intersection at Division, Ashland, and Milwaukee after Algren was similarly derailed. As Chopin Theatre landlord Zygmunt Dyrkacz observed (with a convoluted sense of entitlement), "It'd be like going to an Indian reservation and naming it for a white author who wrote about the Indians and not naming it for the Indians themselves."

Instead, a small concrete fountain was dedicated to Algren in 1997, inscribed with a passage from City on the Make. It's a sad bit of clutter, commemorating a neighborhood that has been transformed by the booster class and the hedonist economy. It seems an unsatisfying salute to the most perceptive and humane novelist produced

by Chicago in the 20th century. On the other hand, the price Algren paid for a life of literary honesty was high, and maybe this piece of urban detritus is the appropriate way to commemorate his sacrifice-a reminder that art in the service of humanity pays diminishing dividends. ~

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Blood Drive Matt Taibbi Rod Blagojevich, The Governor: The Truth Behind the Political Scandal That Continues To Rock the Nation (Phoenix, $24.95) One of the first rules of book reviewing is that unless murder is involved, you can't slam any book written by a guy who's under indictment and just trying to make a few last bucks for his family before he goes to spend the next 36 months painting road signs. And that goes double, in the genteel reviewing world, if (let's just say) the book was written as part of a defense strategy, as a blatant attempt to poison the federal jury pool with 260 pages of horses hit platitudes about the terrible frame job that's going to destroy the author's life-and presumably send his two prepubescent daughters careening down the path to eventual porn stardom, or similar ju~-in-time celebrity cash-in stratagems.

Your average critic should respect any effort in that direction-again, provided murder isn't involved. After all, who among us might not one day face federal corruption charges for trying to brazenly sell a newly elected president's vacated Senate seat from the governor's chair, through a mountain of expletives, over an FBI wiretap?

That's why it was okay for anyone and everyone to thrash OJ. Simpson's I Want to Tell You as the most revoltingly self -serving, intellectually retarded, villainously narcissistic memoir ever written, but why I personally feel uncomfortable knocking former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's new unofficial pretrial brief, The Governor, Phoenix Books, 2009, which for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with literary quality happens actually to be a very interesting book.

By their very nature, books written by people in Blagojevich's position are untruthful, desperate" and stylistically uninteresting; they are written for the purely pragmatic purpose of helping the author payoff his legal fees and other debts,

stay out of jail, or both. Ripping these efforts for being the dully outrageous claptrap they usually are is as unfair as slagging some ex -NFL player's lethargic performance in a state-mandated "Just Say No" television ad. After all, the truly excellent political jailbird books (like G. Gordon Liddy,s Will) have almost all debuted after the court process is over, the sentence has been handed down, and the author has given up all hope of being politically viable again. In other words, they're able to capitalize on the fleeting moment when the author feels free to tell the complete truth for once in his or her life.

I somehow doubt that will ever happen to Rod Blagojevich-as natural a born liar as this country has seen in decades-but that doesn't mean The Governor doesn't have its moments. Blagojevich's book is at times a truly brilliant piece of crisis politics, designed on the one hand to provide a plaUSible defense scenario to the public (this part of the book is not brilliant but merely ridiculous) and on the other to shoot a giant Saturn V rocket of pure fear straight into Barack Obama's White House (and, by extension, into the upper echelons of his Justice Department; it's this part of the book that is much more interesting).

As far as the latter project goes, the book's powerful and unmistakable between-the-lines message is I know a lot of shit and am not afraid to spill it if you really plan to go through with this. It's a message sent from a psychological state we seldom see a prominent politician reacha rare pitch of public desperation that provokes the disgraced pol to spill his guts while he still holds some viable cards. In order for that message to hit its target, said politician has to show that he's willing to reveal any and all compromising information-and most emphatically, his own role in accelerating the race to the bottom of the public trough-when the time comes.

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Blago achieves this paradoxically civic-minded recounts Ryan approaching him at a dinner at aim by being not only candid but viciously, the governor's mansion just after governor -elect delightedly, destructively candid about the misBlagojevich had beaten him in 2002: deeds of the many minor characters he skewers in this book, in particular his own father -in -law He told me he spoke to my father-in-law and Dick Mell (a once-powerful Chicago alderman) another prominent Chicago alderman about and a host of other ward - heelers who have an idea where he could get the Legislature to worked the Chicago-Springfield axis to their approve a big income tax increase on the peogreat professional advantage. ple immediately before I was sworn in as governor. He told me he would be prepared to Like the wiretap transcripts that got Blagojevich arrested in the first place-for instance the one take the heat for the income tax increase, and where he says a Senate seat is a "fucking valuable I would have all the money I needed to balance the budget ... thing, you just don't give it away for nothing"Blago's book at times offers an HD-quality look at the way politics really operates in this country. In these and other sections where Blago is not The best passages involve Mell, who has repeatindulging his self-regarding view of his own edly feuded with Blagojevich, apparently over (inevitably noble) actions, but rather examining the insufficiently enormous amount of payola the those of the corrupt favor -traders surrounding governor allegedly forked over to his father-inhim on all sides in Illinois politics, he is entertainingly blunt about the corruption of our political law after winning election in 2002. In one hilari0us passage, Blagojevich details his system. In fact, in Blago's graphic descriptions father-in-Iaw's efforts to get into the landfill busi- of how things actually work behind the scenes (even his historical descriptions of Chicago's ness, and his rage at Blago for shit -canning a votes-for-jobs political schemes are weirdly potentially lucrative waste-management deal.

It's impossible to know how much of Blago's compelling), he's more revealing than virtually version of this story is true - his goo -goo account all of our journalists. And there's no doubt whatholds that he opposed Mell's effort to overturn soever that all of these corrosive insights are rulings blocking the project out of a selfless con- aimed at one person: Barack Obama.

Blago makes this clear enough when he chooses cern for the environment. But one detail rings to open The Govern; with a scene from Obama's very amusingly true: inauguration. He mentions Obama just two senSo [Mell] came to our house when I wasn't tences into the book and by the fourth paragraph there and dropped off a colored brochure of a is already plumbing his personal relationship house he wanted to buy in Sanibel Island, with Illinois' favorite son. Blagojevich goes on to Florida. The purpose of his visit was to tell his describe, in a curiously flowery way, the contrast daughter that I killed his deal. And he wanted between Obama's inaugural triumph and his to know what our plans were to help him own misery. "He heard the multitudes roar with afford to purchase that house ... approval ... I'm hearing the sound of a heavy metal iron door unbolting, opening the lockup, Elsewhere, Blago recounts an episode with which and then the sound of it closing ... [Obama is] like he is able to burn both Mell and former Republican Zeus in Greek mythology, on top of Mount OlymGovernor George Ryan at the same time. He claims pus. And I'm Icarus, who flew too close to the that the two of them conspired to surreptitiously sun. " The message is obvious: While poor Blago-a raise taxes by getting the lame-duck Ryan to push through an income tax hike in advance of Blago' s visionary Icarus-goes to jail, Obama gets everyswearing-in for his first term in office. Blago thing. But maybe that can change, our singed

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and chastened hero reasons, if I decide to open my mouth; maybe 1can take a few people down with me-perhaps even overindulged, undeserving Zeus himself.

The specific threat that Blago is trying to deliver to the president in The Governor is never made explicit, but a close reading of the text suggest a number of potential avenues of, urn, persuasion.

One of the few concrete accusations he sends in the direction of Obama's people involves the nowinfamous 2008 exchanges between then-candidate Obama's staff and Blagojevich over Illinois politicos whom the governor might appoint to fill Obama's vacated Senate seat.

The story that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald tells in his indictment of Blagojevichcopiouslyborne out by the wiretap transcriptsis in the grand Chicago tradition of open graft.

Blagojevich is trying frantically to sell the Senate seat to Obama's people, who apparently wanted African -American lawyer Valerie Jarrett, a longtime confidant of the Democratic presidential nominee, to get the spot. "I've got this thing, and it's fucking golden, and uh, uh, r m just not giving it up for fucking nothing," he says, in one such voluble wiretapped call. Later on, Blago deputy John Harris is heard negotiating with then-aide and now-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, saying that if Jarrett were to be Blago's pick,

"all we get is appreciation, right ?" To which Emanuel says, "Right."

That's the Justice Department's-and the FBI's- story, But in Blago's telling, it's Obama's people who come to him first. He claims that a Chicago consultant named Marilyn Katz had lunch with Harris in the fall of 2008; in that confab, Blago claims, Katz tendered an offer alleg edly approved by the Obama team , to help Blago raise money for his re -election bid if he would choose Jarrett. Later, he claims, Katz tried to schedule a lunch with Blago's wife to push Jarrett's candidacy. "I didn't give much thought to it," writes Blago now about the offer of campaign support. "I remember mocking it to John Harris.

1 may even have bemusedly asked the question, isn't that pay to play? " That recollection amounts to the only headlineworthy accusation in Blagojevich's book- together with a little juicy innuendo about Emanuel, who left a Chicago congressional seat to take the Obama chief of staff job. Blago claims that Rahm asked him to nominate a "placeholder" to take Emanuel's seat in Congress, so that Rahm might one day come back and make a run at the Speaker of the House job should the whole White House chief of staff thing fall through. Blago in the book replies that he isnot sure he has the legal authority to do this, which turns out to be the case. This

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may be bullshit - though Blago is certainly clever enough to know that Rahm's hyper-ambitious character makes this story believable. Who knows?

But either way, it achieves its more immediate purpose: letting Those Who Matter know that Blago is going to tell stories if they decide to keep pushing him toward jail.

Meanwhile, the wheels of Chicago-style justice grind ever-slowly on-but as they advance on our hero, we can still hold out hope that Blago as a convicted and released felon-assuming he is convicted and released - may adopt a genuine fuck-it-all outlook on his torched career and produce a brilliant tell-all book about how gubernatorial politics really works. The potential is there, judging from this early effort, even if the rest of the book - the part aimed at "the people" in which Blago casts himself as an innocent hardworking champion of the common man felled by a prolonged and elaborate frame-upis not merely preposterous but unreadable.

Fans of the HBO series The Wire who read this book will undoubtedly recognize in Blago's public appeals for sympathy on the corruption charges-whatever he did, he did because he just loves the people of Illinois so goddamn muchan almost flawless impersonation of Isiah Whitlock, Jr.s' immortal character Clay Davis, a corruptas-fuck Maryland state senator. Indeed, the chief differences between the two are incidental: Davis quoted Aeschylus; Blago quotes Shakespeare.

Of course, if you buckle down and try really hard to appreciate Blago's mawkish pleas for sympathy, they have some appeal as absurdist comedy.

The ex-governor possesses a brand of pure shamelessness that is very nearly off the charts, well beyond that of the occasionally self -examining Marion Barry but falling a little short of OJ. My favorite moment of such world-class unselfawareness comes when Blago relates a story from his childhood about how his father punished him and his brother (beating them with a belt the mean old Serb called Svete Ilija, or Saint Eli) when the brother allegedly drank a shot of whiskey following an uncle's funeral. As Blago tells it, his brother only downed the shot after adult relatives

egged him on. The boys were innocent - but the two got punished anyway for their" crimes" : To this day I have no idea why I got a spanking.

What did I do? I didn't drink the whiskey. I didn't tell my brother to drink the whiskey ...

But whatever the reason, I now joined my brother in getting my ass kicked.

The set piece abounds with themes foreshadowing his later career. Blago and his brother, after all, would both end up getting snared in his federal corruption scandal. What's more, the heavyhanded Freudian symbolism of the scene will also playa central role in Blago's adult drama as (so he imagines) an unfairly maligned criminal suspect. In The Governor, he claims that the public freakout by his father-in-law Mell (his political "father," if you will) after the landfill fiasco was the main precipitating event behind his persecution.

When Mell was venting his rage against his sonin -law, he accused Blago aide Chris Kelly of trading commission appointments for campaign contributions, a charge that Blago now says he's convinced "ultimately led to the federal prosecutor's determination to target me and relentlessly pursue and investigate me for the next three and a half years."

So all these accusations against Rod Blagojevich are the result of a jealous and unreasonable father taking revenge upon his innocent political son. You can believe that, or you can just look up the wiretap transcripts, where Blago says stuff about Obama's inner circle of advisers like, "They're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them." Either way, the Rod Blagojevich story shows us American politics in a light we don't often get to see. Justice mayor may not be served by his conviction and imprisonment, but adverse court proceedings will almost certainly help him flesh out the tantalizingly incomplete accounting of his downfall that he's produced here-if only because it will take a tour behind bars for someone with an ego as outsized as this to realize that civic and literary appreciation will be the best he can hope for. ~

/~

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The Failed Plot to Assassinate Our Leader by Three Men, All Subsequently Deceased Paul Maliszewski

Jimmy Carter's Rabbit Lydia Millet

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Babycakes87: Listen, when I say I like pears, you're supposed to say I like pizza. That's our system, the way it works. Because otherwise how do I know you're you and how do you know I'm me?

BeercanMan: Because I like pizzal I love pizzal Babycakes87: Well, that's great. Thank you so much for your enthusiasm. But it's too late now. Next time though, okay? Next time you get it right, all right?

BeercanMan: I will study the code until I speak it in my dreams.

Babycakes87: The code is for our protection.

BeercanMan: I like pizza!

Babycakes87: You know, I'm getting tired of having to ride you about the code.

BeercanMan: What are you supposed to say after I say how I like pizza?

Babycakes87: Something about the weather, depending on the conditions here. That will tell you what to do next. Whether we're going to go through with this or not.

BeercanMan: We had better go through with this.

I saw our leader on TV last night. He flew his jet around and chopped firewood. I thought, So that's how he intends to play this, is it? Firewood then airplane and then back to firewood?

I'm tired of the symbols, the usual juxtapositions. Tell camp I'm tired of waiting around.

Babycakes87: Listen, I saw today that it's supposed to snow tomorrow.

BeercanMan: Oh, yeah? I like me some snow.

Babycakes87: Yeah, it's supposed to snow a lot.

All day and then all night, too.

BeercanMan: I'm chatting with Jerome later this afternoon. He will be most interested in your weather report.

Babycakes87: Stop calling him Jerome. You need

to use his fake name. You got to use the fake names and you got to use the code.

GoTigersGo: Marvin really said it was going to snow?

BeercanMan: Yeah, he was like it's supposed to snow tomorrow, and then he added, let's see, he added how it would be snowing quoteunquote a lot and that it was going to be snowing quote all day and night un-quote.

GoTigersGo: That seems serious, doesn't it?

BeercanMan: I thought so.

GoTigersGo: This is for real this time, isn't it?

BeercanMan: Very real.

GoTIgersGo: Marvin's never called for snow, has he?

BeercanMan: He tends to be a lot more circumspect.

GoTigersGo: It's been months and months of partly cloudy, slight chance of precipitation.

BeercanMan: Some possibility of evening showers.

GoTigersGo: Just boring old temperatures cooling overnight.

BeercanMan: I'll be glad when this is over. I'm sick of Marvin and his code.

GoTigersGo: He's all, The code is for your protection. Without the code we can and will be easily compromised.

BeercanMan: The code saves lives, he always says.

GoTigersGo: He's like, As the inventor of the code, I do place not a little pride in it, but gentlemen, I tell you that I've also seen how well the code works.

BeercanMan: In Tucson, in 1977, October the 17th, we had ourselves a real devil of a situation, a situation only the code could have solved. I was young then, just like you young men. It was only my second or maybe third operation, but it was my first full-on situation.

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GoTigersGo: He's always going on about Tucson.

BeercanMan: I'm so sick of Tucson. I'm sick of Marvin. I'm sick of the code and I'm sick of Tucson.

GoTigersGo: It's a whole different world now is the thing. There are no more Tucsons. There are only Milans and Calgarys. situations that are so fucked right out of the blocks that the code seems like a thin layer of frosting on a three-layer shit cake and guess what? You're the birthday boy.

BeercanMan: I think Marvin's getting worse.

GoTigersGo: He going to break?

BeercanMan: He's cracking a bit. Gets real pissy about every last little thing.

GoTigersGo: That's Marvin's job. He's professionally pissy.

BeercanMan: He doesn't have to belittle me. We are on the same side.

GoTigersGo: Yeah. well, what are you going to do, take it up with personnel ?

Babycakes87: Listen to me carefully, okay?

BeercanMan: I'm listening.

Babycakes87: I heard that the coach is soon going to be coaching his last game.

BeercanMan: So the old coach is stepping down, is he?

Babycakes87: That's right.

BeercanMan: And no doubt giving his final post game presser.

Babycakes87: Right, so you understand.

BeercanMan: What will his won-loss record be, overall?

Babycakes87: Don't mock the code.

BeercanMan: Nobody's mocking the code.

Babycakes87: What are you doing then?

BeercanMan: I'm just embellishing, to make it like we're making small talk.

Babycakes87: No mockery of the code, all right?

It's one of the first rules. It's in the book.

BeercanMan: All right.

Babycakes87: Are you still listening?

BeercanMan: I am in fact.

Babycakes87: You will be pleased to learn that I got us seats to the coach's last game.

BeercanMan: Good seats these?

Babycakes87: Yeah. these are real good seats.

BeercanMan: Well, then I should wear something real nice, shouldn't I? Babycakes87: You're going as maintenance. I have your uniform and cover.

BeercanMan: Why do I always have to be maintenance?

Babycakes87: Because you install the device. Guy who installs the device is always maintenance.

That's in the book too.

BeercanMan: Well. put me down as officially sick of being maintenance.

Babycakes87: Duly noted, Jorge.

BeercanMan: Why Jorge?

Babycakes87: Your new cover, Jorge.

BeercanMan: I don't look like a Jorge .

Babycakes87: Really? What's a Jorge look like?

BeercanMan: Well, for starters, I suspect most of your Jorges look like they come from a country where the people speak Espanol.

Babycakes87: Nobody's going to be looking at your name. They'll look at your picture if they check your ID. And that's if they check your ID . Big if there.

BeercanMan: So how did my name get to be Jorge?

Babycakes87: I picked it out of my ass.

BeercanMan: I mean, if somebody asks me, then how did my name get to be Jorge?

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Babycakes87: I don't know, maybe you're half and half, okay?

BeercanMan: Perhaps my mother was American and my father came over from Cuba, fleeing Castro, and they lived in Miami. I have three brothers and sisters. Two brothers, one sister.

All older. I always wanted to be the youngest child. I'm married now and my wife Janelle is pregnant with our first baby, a girl, we think, even though we don't want to know until the baby's born.

Babycakes87: Hey, Robert De Niro, can I trust you to figure all this out on your own time?

BeercanMan: Just trying to be thorough.

Babycakes87: I understand, but we have actual business tonight.

BeercanMan: Somebody just asked to come into the room.

Babycakes87: The Tiger?

BeercanMan: No, BratMouth. Tiger's in Berlin tonight doing site select and survey.

Babycakes87: You want to use some code there, Einstein?

BeercanMan: Fine, Tiger is buying popcorn and Cheez-Its at the Wal-Mart.

Babycakes87: So who is this BratMouth?

BeercanMan: Beats me. Just says BratMouth.

Can't tell much about him. Or her. Or whatever. Just joined. Blank profile. No picture.

Babycakes87: We don't know any BratMouth, do we?

BeercanMan: Not so far as I know.

Babycakes87: And there's no BratMouth back at camp, is there?

BeercanMan: Should I let him in or what?

Babycakes87: Yeah, let him enter, but pretend we're having sex.

BratMouth: Hey, thanks for keeping me waiting, losers. I celebrated a birthday out there.

BeercanMan: Hey, BratMouth. What's up?

Babycakes87: How big is your cock now?

BeercanMan: Uh, cock is getting very large now.

BratMouth: Am I interrupting something?

Babycakes87: No, no, you're just in time, my friend. Just in time.

BeercanMan: Yeah, what are you wearing, BratMouth?

Babycakes87: BratMouth, send picture.

BeercanMan: Yeah, send us a picture of your pretty mouth.

Babycakes87: BratMouth, send close-up now.

BratMouth: Look, I was just browsing new groups, okay?

Babycakes87: Oh, my god, my cock is just so huge!

BeercanMan: What sort of new groups you looking for, BratMouth? Maybe I can be of some assistance in that department.

BratMouth: Just, you know, browsing. I wanted to chat.

BeercanMan: Oh, yeah? Chat about what, exactly?

BratMouth: Just, I don't know, stuff, okay?

BeercanMan: I love stuff!

Babycakes87: I love stuffing stuff in my mouth.

Big stuff.

BratMouth: Actually, since you asked, I'm here to talk to good people like you about the upcoming election.

Babycakes87: Seriously?

BratMouth: I'm going group to group, talking to good people about why it's important that they help to re-elect our leader.

BeercanMan: He appears serious, like some stones are said to be serious.

BratMouth: Do you guys have a few minutes to chat?

Babycakes87: Well, we were having sex, but I guess we could take a break, get back to it later.

BratMouth: I first met our leader when I was a boy of six or seven. My father had taken me to an air show, because it was his weekend and because my mother had to wash her hair. After some fanfare with bunting and flags and a big brass band tearing through a patriotic song, our leader landed in one of his planes. It was silver and buffed so clean it shone like a mirror. He shook a bunch of hands, including mine, I must say, and then climbed back into his plane and took off again. Now I'd seen planes, of course, and I'd admired them greatly - I had posters of fighters on my bedroom wall and so forth-but I'd never before seen the men who got in and out of planes. There was something impressive about it, god-like even. Today, when you see

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the leader chopping firewood, if you're like me, you think, That's how a man should chop firewood, And then you think, That's exactly how I chop firewood. Or when you see our leader with a handgun, in his vast underground pistol range, you think, Now here is a man who is comfortable with a gun. Look how casual he appears, how winning, with one hand stuck in the pocket of his finely tailored suit, and how very jaunty, with his protective earmuffs worn not around his head but under his chin, just like the pros do. And when I see our leader flying planes, even though I have never flown a plane, let alone had one hour of even basic flight instruction, I catch myself thinking, That is precisely how I would fly a plane, because that is how one should fly planes. Our leader is just like us, even when we are nothing like him.

Which is why he has made such a profoundly good leader these past dozen or so years, and why I hope you agree that he deserves to be reelected for another term of a dozen or so years.

BeercanMan: You put that very movingly. Thank you.

Babycakes87: My cock is not so huge now.

BratMouth: Hey, thanks for your time. Check you guys later.

Babycakes87: Aw, come on. We were just getting warmed up here.

BeercanMan: BratMouth seemed nice. You came on a bit strong though.

Babycakes87: He gone?

BeercanMan: Indeed.

Babycakes87: I suspect we've been compromised.

BeercanMan: You think BratMouth's knowing?

Babycakes87: I know that he was not wholly naIve, I can tell you that much.

BeercanMan: Seemed to me like just some stupid kid.

Babycakes87: Everybody seems like a kid. You got to look beyond the obvious, for the deeper signs.

BeercanMan: He was just canvassing. Going group to group. Probably something he and his friends do. God knows with the young people.

Babycakes87: Don't be so naIve. I just wanted to, you know, chat? Come off it.

BeercanMan: So we need to change rooms again?

Babycakes87: I don't take chances. I'll be in touch.

GoTIgersGo: So let me get this straight, it was Marvin's idea that you all would be having sex?

BeercanMan: Totally, he was like, I know, let's pretend we're having sex.

GoTigersGo: Like it's the first thing on his mind.

BeercanMan: Like he'd had thoughts about it before.

GoTigersGo: Or had done it.

BeercanMan: God only knows what Marvin does with his free time.

GoTIgersGo: I thought he raised bonsai plants.

That's what I heard anyway, that he's some sort of master bonsai artist person.

BeercanMan: Why do I have no problem picturing Marvin with tweezers and an eye loupe, pruning his tiny trees?

GoTigersGo: The trees probably have names, like pets.

BeercanMan: I bet he talks to them.

GoTigersGo: I bet he whispers to them in the code.

BeercanMan: I like pizza. Well, that's great, I like pears.

GoTigersGo: It's the other way around, you know.

BeercanMan: Sorry. What am I trying to do, get us killed?

GoTigersGo: So the interloper, BratMouth, he was into your sex games?

BeercanMan: No, it was funny. Turned out he was there working for the re-election of our leader, which basically meant he just ran through all the ads-the airplanes, the firewood, the pistol, all the symbols. And then he was gone, but Marvin wouldn't chat anymore. We're supposed to get another room assignment.

GoTIgersGo: Can't hardly wait.

BeercanMan: I hate the waiting. I like better the doing.

GoTigersGo: Too bad BratMouth didn't send you his picture.

BeercanMan: What, did Marvin tell you about that?

GoTigersGo: I work very hard to avoid dealing directly with Marvin.

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most people, if you asked them, and they were being 100 percent honest with you, would give anything to be anybody other than who they are?

BeercanMan: Most as in just more than 50 percent?

Or most as in a whole lot people?

GoTIgersGo: Because when I was a kid, I used to ask myself, If you can really be whatever you want to be when you grow up, if that really is true , then can you be someone else ?

BeercanMan: When you were in Berlin, did you ask yourself if you could be a person who was supposedly working?

GoTigersGo: I finished early and then, you know, I got bored, so I logged on. I always get bored in Berlin.

BeercanMan: Yeah, Berlin blows.

BeercanMan: Well, I don't recall telling you the kid's name was BratMouth.

GoTigersGo: I'll pause now so you can draw an obvious conclusion.

BeercanMan: You were BratMouth?

GoTigersGo: Thanks for making me wait, losers!

BeercanMan: You asshole.

GoTigersGo: I celebrated my birthday out there, etc. etc.

BeercanMan: You totally sounded like those creepy kids with the cute, wide-open faces and the memorized spiels.

GoTIgersGo: I actually forgot who I was for a while.

I was like: type, type, type, I'm this new guy now.

BeercanMan: And that stuff about the air show, about your dad?

GoTIgersGo: Oh, that part was true . That really is how I first met our leader.

BeercanMan: Marvin's pissed, so you know. He's convinced now that we're being watched.

GoTIgersGo: Marvin. I laughed my ass off at Marvin.

BeercanMan: Well, you know how he is about operations, when they get compromised. Even when he just believes they got compromised.

GoTIgersGo: If you had to guess, don't you think

BaseballFan89: Ilike pears.

MisterPenCollector: And I like the pizza pie hot and spicy!

BaseballFan89: What did I tell you about mocking the code?

MisterPenCollector: My new cover is prone to exclamation.

BaseballFan89: Your new cover may turn out to be prone to getting reassigned to documents and files.

MisterPenCollector: For me, every new cover is like a fresh role. I explore it from the inside-out.

I get to know the character's organs. I touch the underside of his skin.

BaseballFan89: I heard today where the coach will be coaching his last game.

MisterPenCollector: Tell me more.

BaseballFan89: Baton Rouge.

MisterPenCollector: Does Baton Rouge mean Baton Rouge ?

BaseballFan89: Yeah, that part's not in the code.

MisterPenCollector: It always struck me as one of the parts that should most definitely be in code.

Insofar as it's sort of important.

BasebalIFan89: Camp discussed it and decided it was too tedious to come up with a code that covered every Single city where, in this case, the coach could be coaching. I mean, he could be anywhere.

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MisterPenCollector: Somebody just asked to come into the room.

BaseballFan89: You have got to be shitting me. Is it The, uh, Leopard?

MisterPenCollector: Actually, no. It's BratMouth again.

BaseballFan89: Jesus, this guy's good.

MisterPenCollector: Should I let him in?

BaseballFan89: I guess.

MisterPenCollector: You guess?

BaseballFan89: Yes, yes. Let him in.

MisterPenCollector: Are we supposed to be having sex again?

BaseballFan89: No sex. Just let the fucker in.

BratMouth: Hey, guys, I'll keep this brief, because I know everybody leads real busy lives these days, but I'm going group to group, talking to good people about the upcoming election and why it's so very crucial that they help reelect our leader for another dozen or so years.

BaseballFan89: Do you get paid to do this, whatever it is you're doing?

BratMouth: No, sir, I don't. I wish I got paid, even if not with money, but I don't, not right now anyway.

MisterPenCollector: We could probably pay you to go away, in money.

BratMouth: Well, like I said, I'll be brief, because my object here is not to annoy or antagonize, but rather to tell you a story. Today, when you see our leader kissing women other than his wife and, as he does in his latest campaign spot, having sex with them, you may think, as I find myself thinking, Now that is how a man should kiss and have sex with women other than his wife. Did you know our leader's latest campaign spot is fast becoming the most frequently downloaded video on the Web? It may already be number one. I once went to a restaurant where the waiter informed our table what the top three most popular appetizers of that day were. Not the best appetizers. Not her personal favorites. The most popular. I learned from this a valuable lesson: People like popular things

many popular videos. Also, he possesses many beautiful girlfriends. Some work as flight attendants' and some are nightclub singers or professors of business administration at several of the country's finest institutions of higher learning. Some are waitresses whom our leader meets while stopping in at one of our country's great greasy spoon establishments. Did you know that every morning, our leader orders two scrambled eggs, a side of turkey bacon, and wheat toast with no butter? Now that's a good breakfast for a good man, don't you agree?

Substantial and wholesome. Recently, I got the chance to see our leader shoot one of his political enemies. Our leader has had so very many political enemies. I'm especially partial to the video where the political enemy is sitting at the dinner table and it looks like a real nice place~ you know, fancy stuff stuck on the walls, antique chairs, and the like. Now the political enemy, he believes he's waiting for dessert to be served, but it doesn't come, so he waits some more. He's quite patient. He looks like he's just pleasantly occupied with whatever his stupid thoughts are. That's when our leader comes up behind him and right there, it's lights-out time.

BaseballFan89: BratMouth, are you with an agency or some organization?

BratMouth: No, why?

BaseballFan89: Come on, are you government or are you corporate? Which is it, up or down?

BratMouth: I don't understand.

BaseballFan89: He doesn't understand. That's rich.

MisterPenCollector: Urn, Baseball, we got another person at the door.

BaseballFan89: That's great.

BratMouth: You guys having some kind of party here?

MisterPenCollector: It's LeopardBoy. BratMouth: LeopardBoy? Is he registered to vote?

MisterPenCollector: Do I let him in?

BaseballFan89: Of course, of course. Let him in.

Anybody who shows up, just let them right in.

and popular people. Our leader is popular, with I don't care anymore. both the ladies and the gents. And he has made LeopardBoy: Hello, hello.

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MisterPenCollector: LeopardBoy, meet BratMouth.

BratMouth, LeopardBoy. BaseballFan89: BratMouth may quite possibly be one of the brightest minds in the lS-to-24 demographic. He came by today to make the case for why we should all be working for the re-election of our leader.

BratMouth: Or you guys can just vote. You don't have to work for his re-election if you all will just get out there and vote.

LeopardBoy: Have you told BratMouth about how, as chance would have it, we're actually kind of working against the re-election of our leader?

BratMouth: Oh, you guys are like with the opposition? That's cool, too. I have a lot of friends who say they are completely and violently opposed to what I believe, but I've already convinced quite a few of them to believe exactly what I believe.

LeopardBoy: We're about as opposed as three people can be without being completely and violently dead.

BratMouth: Hey, LeopardBoy? I think we've maybe met somewhere before.

LeopardBoy: Oh, yeah?

BratMouth: Yeah, it was the other day at Wal-Mart.

LeopardBoy: Well, I do shop from time to time at Wal-Mart, like every good person. They got a great selection, you know, and great every day low prices.

BratMouth: You were buying-what was it again? - Cheez - Its? LeopardBoy: That's right.

BratMouth: And popcorn!

BaseballFan89: All right, enough. I hate to break up this big tear -filled reunion, but can the fake asshole please leave, so I can tear the real asshole a new asshole?

MisterPenCollector: And BratMouth has left the room.

BaseballFan89: That was. It was beyond words, really. Never. In all my years, I've never. I should have both of you hung by your balls at lunch. By which I mean I would like to eat my lunch while watching you both hang. By your balls.

MisterPenCollector: Me? What did I ever do?

LeopardBoy: Sorry, sir. While at the Wal- Mart, I went wandering in the toys and games department.

MisterPenCollector: He means he just got bored in Berlin. And wanted to playa little joke is all.

He wanted to be on both sides at the same time, like a chess master playing white and black.

BaseballFan89: I know what he means. I invented the code for fuck's sake.

MisterPenCollector: In fairness to him, I sometimes get a bit punchy in Berlin.

BaseballFan89: Well, no kidding. Everybody knows Berlin blows.

BaseballFan89: I like pears.

MisterPenCollector: I like pizza.

BaseballFan89: I'm glad to see you made it out.

MisterPenCollector: The coach came with an army.

Many more people than previously indicated.

Many more than we were told to expect.

BaseballFan89: He suffers no shortage of people.

That's how he travels now.

MisterPenCollector: They were like angry ants, just swarming.

BaseballFan89: The coach does not skimp.

MisterPenCollector: The tank was a surprise, I thought.

BaseballFan89: Armored limousine, with a rotating machine gun mounted in the trunk. Pretty routine fare, for the coach.

MisterPenCollector: Might as well have been a tank.

BaseballFan89: I expect you've heard, but Jerome is not with us any longer.

MisterPenCollector: I know.

BaseballFan89: He was a good agent, in the overall sense of the word.

MisterPenCollector: He enjoyed the job. And he liked to laugh.

BaseballFan89: I saw him get hauled away.

MisterPenCollector: I heard shots. Three. I was underground, installing the device. I was almost done. I finished fast and I ran toward the sounds, but it was impossible to figure out which way they were coming from. Too many echoes. Too many corridors with too many doors. It may have been only a single shot, I just don't know.

173

Fiction The Failed Plot to Assassinate Our Leader by Three Men, All Subsequently Deceased/Paul Maliszewski

BaseballFan89: I was close to him. I should have done something. I should have acted. I saw him plain, do you understand?

MisterPenCollector: You couldn't have done anything, Marvin.

BaseballFan89: I have dreams now in which I act.

Vivid dreams, dreams in color. I'm yelling. He's there. He's just standing right there, where he was in Baton Rouge. And the coach is there, too, exactly where he stood. In my dreams I act. I lunge. I am blessed with movement and judgment.

MisterPenCollector: You always told us that, if we see each other out, at an operation, that we don't know you from shit in the bowl quote- unquote.

BaseballFan89: My teacher's teacher used that line in his classes. It goes way back. It's older than the code.

MisterPenCollector: Trying to save him would have compromised you and it would have compromised the operation.

BaseballFan89: Well, but the operation was fucked though.

MisterPenCollector: Still, think of the operation above this operation.

BaseballFan89: That's what they always say. The big operation. Keep in mind the big operation.

Tell me, what if there is no operation above this operation? You ever ask yourself that?

MisterPenCollector: I believe in the operation, I guess.

BaseballFan89: But maybe it's all playas you go.

You know, improvised.

MisterPenCollector: It makes a certain sense though, operation to operation. There is a sort of logic in it, sort of.

BaseballFan89: Jerome's body was discovered in Knoxville. Did you hear? In a parking garage.

On the top deck. They wrapped him around a light pole, like he was a horseshoe in some game they played. There were skid marks from a minimum of five vehicles up there. Some spilled gasoline, medium -grade, less than onetenth of one gallon. Spent matches with no source information yet identified. Cigarettes

of various makes and models, some chewed up gum, candy wrappers, and assorted other material evidence, but mostly tiny shit. Threads, literal threads that may have nothing whatsoever to do with his dying. They ran an effective counter-operation. It was tight.

MisterPenCollector: I didn't know him well-we were a couple of years apart and with different assignments-but there were moments when he felt like a real brother, or how I imagine having a brother would feel. Like you don't talk often, but you still already know what's going on, without all the talking.

BaseballFan89: I flew out to the scene, to view the body myself, and to see if there was anything left undiscovered. There are some things you have to do yourself. Maybe it's guilt, I don't know.

Maybe it's that I don't trust anybody. The whole garage was cleared out. We bought it outright and then shut it down. Made it look like a construction site. Please pardon our mess while we make this parking garage better so as to serve your incredibly petty needs. Some shit like that on a sign. Even days later, the scene was weird and grisly. His blood had soaked into the pavement around the light pole. A ring of it. I bent to touch it. I did it before I even thought about doing it. I was just already bending down, already reaching out my hand, my fingers already tracing the ring of where he lay overnight, alone more than likely, maybe even still alive, we're not sure yet. Can you imagine? You see something like that, like what I saw, and you start to ask yourself questions. That's all I'm saying. You ask yourself questions, and when you find you have only the one dumb answer that people have been repeating to you for years, like trained birds chained to a perch, chirping over and over about how it's the operation above the operation that truly matters, well, you have to go back and ask still more questions, because now you're just not satisfied anymore.

MisterPenCollector: We should change rooms again probably. We'll need brand-new covers.

And income, a clean stream.

BaseballFan89: I'll be in touch.

174

lhe Baffler Volume2NQ[

Jimmy Carter's Rabbit Lydia Millet

He came to see me at my Atlanta office, after his move back to Plains. It was a slow afternoon and the day's sessions were already over when the Secret Service men stepped into my foyer. I wasn't expecting company; my first thought when I opened the door on them-with their clean-cut hair, dark suits and earpieces-was hearingimpaired Witnesses.

Then I caught sight of that broad, down -home grin.

Our families went to the same church when we were boys, and we had Bible Study together.

He was an avid student, hand always shooting straight up with the answers, while I spent most of the class lobbing spitballs at the back of a fat girl's head. Our interests were different: One of us was strong and popular, the other was bookish, but it was a small town, and even though there were some differences between us we were thrown together often enough. We hung out, playing ball in the meadow behind the general store, or ran a Cowboys 'n Injuns racket in a rotting tree house. Typically I was a cowboy and Carter was one of the braves. One time, if I remember right, he was a squaw.

Anyway, after some neighborhood unpleasantness my parents moved the family to North Carolina. That happened when I was twelve, and contact between Jimmy and me ended.

Come 1981 I hadn't seen the guy in nearly 50 years.

He wasn't seeking me out in a professional capacity, he told me up front. Of course, if he hadn't said that, the conversation would be privileged.

No, he just wanted to get reacquainted. Was there someplace we could settle in for a chat?

We sat out on the roof of my building, which had a couple of chairs and a table. This was back before Carter became a hobbyist vintner, but he already liked his vino; I, too, was a bit of a connoisseur. My heart lifted when he handed me

an Echezeaux, and I strode boldly through the glass sliders to my liquor cabinet for a corkscrew and goblets. As I turned from him, I recall a kind of imprint on my visual cortex: a former freeworld leader leaning back in a chair behind me, his legs loosely crossed. President, I thought.

President and waiting. I'd stayed pretty calm till then, but some kind of delayed shock took me.

I got butterfingered and dropped a glass.

Left it there. You don't squat and clean up shards in that situation.

Watching the glittery descent of airplanes in the sky, we cradled our drinks and kicked back. I let the burgundy soak my tongue as Ravi Shankar floated out through an open window; my office was, more's the pity, next to a yoga studio. This was before I moved to my more upscale current location. Meanwhile, in the shared lobby -as I would notice a couple of minutes later on my way to the bathroom - his Secret Service detail was scanning dog -eared copies of New Age and Tantric Frontier.

I needed a second to settle my nerves. I had known Carter before, certainly, but back then he was just a skinny kid with big teeth, your basic Young Baptist Next Door. Myself, I already had a deep voice. I got to second base with Patty Evans while he was still singing like Tweety Bird. But now he wore a mantle of sorts. I had a good career myself, of course, but his credentials were hard to beat. When I looked at his face, media images clicked through my memory like cards in a shuffling machine. The guy had walked the corridors of power like Caesar or Napoleon, for Chrissake.

So I have to admit my legs took on a liquid quality. A great vaulted hallway held them all, these massive, looming figures of men, and here was one of the monoliths in my office. Coming to me for help.

Because no one knocks on a psychologist's door to sell Girl Scout cookies. Carter wanted something.

175

Fiction Jimmy CaTteT's Rabbit/Lydia Millet

There was denial there, of course. There always is.

Carter told me he considered talk therapy to be "for folks with real problems." And he purported to be free of these. For Carter matters of the psyche were matters of the spirit, and matters of the spirit found their resolution in the teachings of Jesus. Even when we were boys, Jimmy took his churchgoing to heart. Back then, of course, Baptists were more easygoing and not overly interested in politics.

He eased into the confab with a casual narration of his life post-commander-in-chief. He'd published two memoirs and was looking forward to starting work on a novel. I waited patiently as he yapped about Rosalynn and the kids; I was fairly sure he hadn't sat in the limousine for three hours to offer up the Carter family cv.

"Why I came to see you, Bobby," he said when the small talk wound down, "was I'm trying to take a deep look at myself these days. Yesterday and tomorrow. I look back at my life so far and I try to make a moral reckoning. Where have I been, Bob? And where do I want to go?"

"Makes sense," I said, encouraging.

I took the liberty of pouring myself another glass of the burgundy. It was an excellent Echezeaux - a '74, if I recall correctly, which carried a price tag in the triple digits.

"I'm not just looking at recent events, Bob. I'm looking into my character all the way back. And when I remember what we put you through, I feel badly. I truly do."

It was then that my bladder put me on notice.

In the cloying bathroom, thick with the sandalwood incense visited upon me by the yoga women, I popped a few codeine-laced Tylenol. My head was aching. Was it the spooks in the waiting room?

Or was it Carter himself? I have an action practice: Clients know that with me the past is a springboard, not a quagmire. We don't dwell on the mommies who didn't love us enough. My clients are strictly proactive. I don't often toot my own horn, but I've molded Fortune 500 executives out of acnepocked office drones.

Important to steer the conversation in a positive direction. Carter wasn't a client, but the same tactics applied.

I left the bathroom with my temples throbbing and was quickly frisked by a Secret Service agent, apparently concerned I might have stowed a firearm in the toilet tank. Outside on the roof I sat down again and had barely picked up my glass when Carter leaned forward earnestly and clasped my arm.

"Keeping quiet and letting the blame fall on your head. Standing by while your family was hounded out of town and your daddy put you away in that place. It was wrong, Bobby. Sinful and wrong."

"I go by Robert these days, Mr. President," I said. I had no use for the rehashing of childhood squabbles; mine is a forward vector. Strength and velocity.

"Robert. Of course. Listen here, Robert. I want to apologize. I've always felt distressed by what happened. I can only imagine what you must feel."

Then it came to me. The end stage of the Carter presidency had been a time of low points, like the hostage crisis and Billygate. Those were the landmarks that showed up in the history books, but there were also the small, linchpin moments that turned the tide and got swept under the rug.

I'm talking about what happened with the swamp rabbit. The newspapers called it a killer.

The killer rabbit plowed through the water toward Carter's boat in the spring of 1979. Carter was fishing alone on a pond at the time. Startled, he threatened the thing with his oar, splashing at the water to shoo it away. The vermin grudgingly changed its course. Not much of a story, but when it was leaked Carter was ridiculed for telling tall tales. People didn't believe rabbits could swim, for one thing. But soon a White House photographer showed up with pictures of the scene that backed Carter up, showing a large, light-brown hare, red -eyed and dog - paddling, and Carter splashing the water's surface a few feet from the animal in what looked like a feeble defensive posture.

The upshot: Carter was no longer a liar, but still a clown. Comic-strip spoofs of the episode appeared, one of them starring "Paws, " a sharklike rabbit menace.

The president had been unmanned.

176

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VoJume 2 NQJ

It was then that I had an inkling of what was going on. The killer rabbit had brought Carter tome. " . .. Never thought of you as the town bully myself," he was saying. "You could be, ah, insis ~ tent, and you didn' t always know your own strength, but heck, Robert, that's par for the- " "The killer rabbit," I interrupted.

"Pardon me?"

"It's about the killer swamp rabbit," I said.

"Isn't it. Why you're here."

Carter shook his head bemusedly, the vaguest hint of a smile playing about his lips. "Robert, I came to talk about you. And the wrong we boys did in letting you take the fall for us. In letting you alone be punished. " A diversion. It's hard for any guy to admit to his impotence.

Well, Ikept at him. For a while , rather than face up to the lop~eared specter, Carter contin~ ued to claim interest in the incident that had led to my parents' leaving Plains. He showed a sin~ gle ~ minded determination to divert the conver~ sation from its true purpose. I could see how, in your high~level talks, he could have been a tiger.

Still, I cycled back to the rabbit. And finally my subtle handling opened the floodgates.

"Oh, all right. Trivial episode, relatively, but I'll give you the story if you really want it."

It wasn't till after the Reagan inauguration, he said, when he went back to South Georgia, that he really thought about the rabbit incident. He had time, in Reagan' s early months, to read the jeering accounts; he had time to reflect that there had been nothing out of the ordinary in his behavior in the fishing boat. He had merely caught sight of an animal in the water and, surprised, jerked an oar in its direction. He'd done it the same way you might swat a fly. His train of thought - moving from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Warren Christopher-had been rudely broken. He realized what the animal was a split second later and lost interest. He had seen swamp rabbits before, mostly in marshes; they took to water readily, to escape from predators.

Two of the four rabbit species in Georgia, he said, swam well; only the cottontails couldn't swim.

For a while, he said, he'd toyed with conspiracy theories. The Reagan strategists, after all, were lean and mean, unlike his own friendly posse of good 01' boys with their antiquated notions of honor and

1n

Fiction

Jimmy Carter's Rabbit/Lydia Millet

"I know what you're thinking," I said. In a straight shooting. He imagined far-fetched scenarios: James Baker creeping through the foliage session I would never say this, of course, but we with a phalanx of hungry coon dogs, scaring rabwere old familiars, after all, and I felt myself bits out of their hollows and chasing them toward homing in. "Maybe Reagan wouldn't have won the pond; Ed Meese, wearing oversize waders and at all. Maybe you'd still be president now. If a filthy baseball cap, pulling up to the waterline you'd hit it. Who knows? Maybe the hostages in a rickety truck with traps full of long-ears woulda come home in time. Maybe you'd be foaming at the mouth. more successful in other areas, too. If you know The thing was, said Carter with lazy good humor, what I mean. " he, unlike the Republicans, had long been a friend The pause lasted a while.

Then: to the meek and the undefended. Heck, he had "Well, Bob," drawled Carter. "Now, you may signed the Alaska Lands Act. And yet the rabbit had swum against him! just be right. But the thing is, I didn't miss. I He laughed awkwardly. Clearly he was mask- wasn't trying to hit that poor critter at all."

And just like that, the rabbit faded. Slowly but ing a wound that still ached. I had no doubt the rabbit had affected his conjugal performance. surely I knew the dark form of the old Mullins 1'd already put back a good part of the bottle; cat, strung up and skinned. Only had two and a Carter had barely sipped. I needed a release half legs to begin with, limped around everyvalve, since my then-wife was attending twelve- where; that was why we hated it. Pitiful. Thing made you want to weep. step meetings that seemed to consist of a gaggle We trapped it in a corner, Al Jr., Travis, me, of hausfraus who had fastened like limpets to the notion that every man jack was a substance and J. C. Whose idea had it been to club it to abuser. To hear them tell it, a lone Miller Lite in death in the first place? the hand of a spousal equivalent - I use the term Not his.

"Listen. It was all of us that did it, Robert, " advisedly, as there were several lesbians in the group-was the equivalent of a guided missile. came Carter's voice faintly. The wine made my Though only dimly aware of the words' definihead heavy; it wanted to loll. "Sure, you did tions' Debbie had armed herself to the teeth with the ... you know, first hit ... but the guys were egging you on. I hope you understand you don't jargon culled from these get-togethers. Terms like codependent and enabling were thickening have to bear the burden alone. There was a mob the air like poison-tipped arrows. mentality. I mean, the hardness of those times "You wish you'd got it, don't you," I said. took a toll on us kids. I don't believe it was your ''I'm sorry?" fault alone. I really don't. I know we were just "The rabbit. Hit your mark, man. Instead of children. But I want you to know that I am missing." deeply sorry we did not all step forward to take Carter stared at me with his mouth agape. In responsibility. I think how you were punished, that moment, the ex-free-world leader looked and I feel for you. I will always be profoundly like a village idiot. repentant for what we boys did."

"Would have read better," I went on. "In the Carter was playing hard at deflection. He'd history books. You're afraid your name will bear brought out the big guns. the stigma of that moment of weakness. Of your "What you may want to do at this point is visualize the rabbit," I said. My mind was wansymbolic impotence." dering. Al Jr. had said we would end its suffering, "Gosh, I ... " He trailed off.

The inability to speak at all is, in my line of put it out of its misery. Strength is the principle, work, highly significant. I had to press home my now as it was then. Don't cave, I told myself. advantage.

Do not fall prey to Carter's feebleness. For a while

178

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Volume2NQJ

he had governed the nation, but weakness toppled him in the end. The rolling gait of the cat came to mind, how quickly it could get where it was going on its less than three legs. Old Mullins had pulled it around on a plywood cart with a string, but it didn't need the cart. Even when it had been broadsided by the bat, it had struggled to get up again.

In quiet times, when memory floated, I imagined that little cat had been brave.

Quiet times brought on sentimentality.

I looked at Carter, the smudged glass globe against my fingers. Behind my hand the nearempty bottle was a column of light. Carter himself stretched sideways and ballooned as though in a funhouse mirror ... it came to me in a wash of smells and color, that scene in the alley.

He hadn't hit it. Not once.

There he was beside me, thin and bulgy-eyed.

He shook his head, tried to stop the whole deal.

Because it was my idea, I was up to bat first. He had put up his hands to grab the bat from me, fell back when I pushed against his chest, and stumbled away as I raised the implement.

Down it went. Down it went.

He had never joined in.

"You need to visualize the rabbit," I said, shoring up my supports. My words were not slurring. I've always held my liquor. "Fix it firmly in your mind.

The rabbit is what defeats us in the end, no matter what we do. " I saw a leaden pinpoint shrinking inward; I saw dry motes of dust, the gray hours.

Then my eyes glanced across Carter. In passing it came to me how sad he looked. My eloquence was moving him. Possibly, just possibly, he would be able to let go.

Back then I was advising clients to use punching bags for aggression, often with images taped to them. But Carter was fairly sophisticated, and I felt instinctively it would be better to keep the self -expression abstract.

"So what are you going to do with the rabbit?

Now that you have it? It's in your sights, Mr. President. What are you going to do?"

For a time there was another pause, Carter seeming to gaze at me.

Before long he stood. "You know, friend," he said in his gentle voice, "all of Creation is under this blue dome of sky. Maybe someone tossed up that bunny's burrow with a plow blade; maybe it had a litter a coyote got into. There are animals that go mad if you kill off their young. Heck, swamp rabbits live maybe two years, if they're lucky.

Reckon that poor fella's bones are somewhere near that pond as we speak, covered up in good old Georgia dirt."

At this point he clapped me on the shoulder.

I noticed his glass was still practically full: a good three fingers of the good Echezeaux. Was it going begging?

Something in his bearing was lighter. I understood that he was leaving. He wouldn't need to lean on me again. He'd gotten what he came for.

And, sure enough, he would go on to a resurrection. He would rise from the ashes of a failed presidency to attain the stature of a well-respected elder statesman. It's the job of men like me, behind the scenes, to shape and position; sometimes only a nudge is needed. Meanwhile, the public faces of our strength-our avatars, so to speak-are held up as heroes.

But we know what we do.

I took the presidential hand and held it.

Finally it was withdrawn.

"I appreciate you seeing me," he said warmly.

"You let me know if you ever need anything. " With that he turned and stepped away. And did I whisper it, or did it only run silently through me? Out of its misery.

As he disappeared through the glass doors I stayed where I was, standing. The afternoon had been intense, and I couldn't risk stumbling. It occurred to me he had a point, partly. I was the fall guy for doing what had to be done. I bore the weight of other men's hesitation.

I saw the fullness of the three fingers then.

Carter had left me with something. ~

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SUPREMACY It resides in the written word, printed in neat columns

on the papery page. You can tweet all you want.

Twenty years from now nobody will give a damn.

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James Griffioen is a writer and photographer.

Yves Smith, creator of the blog Naked Capitalism,

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has worked in and around Wall Street for nearly 30 years. Her book, ECONNED: How Unenlight-

A. S. Hamrah is the film critic for n +1. He lives

ened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism, will be published in

in Brooklyn, New York.

March 2010.

Dan Kelly lives in Chicago with his wife, Michael, and son, Nate . In his Boob Jubilee bio he referred

Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and the author of several books, including The Great Derangement. He won the National

to his sons Henry and Travis. They are, in fact, his cats. Mr. Kelly regrets the error. Goad him on at mrdankelly.com.

Magazine Award for commentary in 2008.

Astra Taylor is the director of two documentaries Chris Lehmann is associate editor of The Baffler. He about philosophy, Zizek! and Examined Life, is also the co-editor of Bookforum and a columnist both distributed by Zeitgeist Films. A companion for the Awl.com. He lives in Washington, D.C. book, Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers, was recently published by Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English The New Press. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book is The Trouble with Diversity; his next will be The Death of a Beautiful Woman:

Form Now. Jennifer Maxley has published five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Clampdown.

She teaches creative writing and poetics at The University of Maine.

Will Schmenner was the film curator and pro grammer at The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University. He is currently a graduate student in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania.

Christine Smallwood's essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, Bookforum and the Los Angeles Times. She was a founding co-editor of The Crier. She is currently working on a Ph.D in English and American literature at Columbia University.

Moe Tkacik has been a staff writer for Time and The Wall Street Journal. From 2004 to 2005 she was a contributing editor at The Philadelphia Independent. Most recently, she was an editor at Gawker Media in New York, where she lives.

Angie Waller is an artist based in New York. Her past publications include Data Mining the Amazon and Home of Tycoons . She is also the founder of the anti-social network myfrienemies.com. More information about her work can be found at couch projects. com.

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Front and back cover art: Ben Edwards. Tower, 2009 bejaminedwards.net Jack Spicer's poems "If I had invented homosexuality" and "Exercise" (from "For Major General Abner Doubleday") appear courtesy of the Literary Estate of Jack Spicer. and with the generous permission of the Bancroft Library.