A monthly column
by Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net
2008 was a dog of a year. Let’s hope
we all have a better one in 2009, experiencing a little time for peace and
contentment in addition to an increase in economic and personal security.
Wikipedia
Whenever
I look up a concept (such as securitization for this month’s lead essay) Google
tends to steer me to Wikipedia first. A few years ago there was some doubt as
to whether Wikipedia, because user-written, was a fit citation for young people
doing school work, let alone the rest of us.
I
think that question has been settled. Wikipedia is the biggest peer reviewed
journal on earth, and the quality of the expertise seems to me to reach the
highest level as a result. This is due to the unique Wikipedia culture as
implemented in the technology and is really rather remarkable, when you
consider how many other human projects sink to the level of the lowest common
denominator.
When
I have glanced at topics on which I have a little understanding or expertise, I
almost always have the reaction that the anonymous authors were academics or at
least individuals whose knowledge well surpassed my own. Even on low culture matters, such as
forgotten actors or old television shows, Wikipedia articles, though not as
well written, tend to give you what you need in terms of dates, biography, and
links to other sources.
I have edited
Wikipedia twice, once to remove some inane gibberish someone had mischievously
added to an otherwise scholarly piece on Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, the other
time to add an example to a list of pop culture references to a particular folk
tale. For someone relatively
nontechnical, the process was well documented and easy to follow.
I would like to
propose a phrase, “Wikipedia humility” (I couldn’t find it already in use in
the first several screens of a Google search):
The revelation that you don’t know enough about a topic to contribute a
Wikipedia entry about it; more generally, the epiphany that you don’t know
enough about any topic to write a Wikipedia entry.
The ethics of demanding Mormon
resignations
There
was an amusing full page ad in the Times
recently in defense of all the Mormons who got “outed” as having
contributed money to the California initiative against gay marriage. Some of
them have resigned jobs as a result. These individuals, who supported one of
the great modern acts of bigotry, are now decrying the prejudice against them.
The
first case which came to my attention, days after the election, was that of
Scott Eckern, artistic director of the California Musical Theatre, a Mormon who
quietly sent $1000 to the pro-Prop 8 effort, doubtless never expecting he would
be pressured to give up his job as a result.
A
bit over a year ago, I wrote an essay entitled “Persecution”, where I analyzed
two cases of people who lost their jobs as a result of pressure by the
powerful. I noted at the outset that the First Amendment only protects us
against government action, not against private blacklisting and censorship. One
of the cases I discussed was Debbie Almontaser, who resigned under pressure
from a New York City Arabic language school she founded, and the other was
Norman Finkelstein, crushed by the odious Alan Dershowitz for his thesis that
the Holocaust is exploited to advance the Israeli political agenda.
In
my conclusion to that essay, I said:
Almontaser and
Finkelstein are examples of people whose careers have been destroyed by
intemperate, malicious nongovernmental speech. If we tolerate this, don't fight
to defend the marginal and unpopular, then the First Amendment itself becomes
meaningless. There is no comfort for those hounded out of their livelihoods in
thinking, "Well, at least it wasn't the government."
I
have been wrestling a bit with the applicability of my doctrine to Eckern’s
case, where I feel an intuitive satisfaction at his resignation. Am I a
hypocrite? (You decide!)
Here
is my justification. Eckern’s job
required him to deal with many gay people, substantially represented in theatre
and in musicals in particular. (Trite but true.) If Eckern holds any biases
against the community he dealt with every day, he would have been best advised
to keep them to himself. Eckern’s
contribution, a matter of public record, was essentially speech, an assertion
of prejudice, yes, prejudice, against gay people. Once it became known that he
supported Proposition 8, Eckern could not continue dealing with this community
with any credibility. Also, members of this community had a perfect legal and
moral right to decide not to permit Eckern’s theatre to perform their work. Why
collaborate with someone who does not respect you?
I don’t see Eckern as resembling
either Almontaser, who was hounded from her job based on lies about her
beliefs, or Finkelstein, terminated for opposing the politics of Israel. Eckern
is more comparable to Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, who left
his job after stupidly remarking that women are not as good as men at math and
science.
Eckern
and Summers both spoke in favor of the exclusion or inferior status of a group
of people. Neither Almontaser or Finkelstein ever did.
This
reminds me that I wrote back in 1995 that among the few reasons I would ever
reject an article for the Ethical Spectacle is that it “advocates hatred, racism, or violence”.
Is that censorship?
In
your face or in the environment
The foregoing leads to an inchoate
thought, the kind this column was created to express: ragged, not yet well
defined, but intriguing.
Political and ideological debates in
America tend to involve two situations, the kind where the behavior we are
opposing is in our face and the kind where it is merely somewhere in the
environment.
Racism and bigotry is “in your face”
behavior. In the sixties, black people conducted sit ins to desegregate
restaurants where they were personally refused service.
Gay marriage is “in the environment”
behavior. Here is a slogan that is probably already on a bumper sticker
somewhere: “Oppose gay marriage? Then don’t marry one.” But that’s not good
enough for the supporters of Proposition 8. They don’t want any gay person
anywhere to be married, even though they don’t have to be involved or
personally aware of it in any way. They
don’t even want a gay wedding to take place behind closed doors in a distant place
they will never visit.
On the whole, protests against “in
your face” behavior have more moral simplicity to them than protests against
behavior in the environment. In the
first case, society asks the question, should human beings be forced to tolerate
the personal treatment involved, or is it quite logical and understandable they
would feel offended or threatened by it? In the second, we have to analyze the
extent to which the group complaining is appointing themselves the moral
arbiter—more properly the dictator—of everyone else’s behavior.
American society went through a self
examination in the fifties and sixties which led us to a substantial majority
opinion that it shocking and insulting for anyone to be refused service in a
restaurant. We decided that individuals
should be spared the personal harm involved.
But there is no personal harm
to anyone if two gay people marry one
another. Instead of defending their own
persons and minds against an insult directed at them, supporters of Prop 8 are
claiming to defend something much more abstract, “public morality” or the
“institution of marriage”. What it will really boil down to in almost all such
cases is one group attempting to impose their own rule-set on everyone else,
instead of simple working on observing it themselves.
It is an interesting side note how
this rhetoric gets turned around by the oppressors. A lot of pro-proposition 8
ink has been devoted to the proposition that the gay people, angered by being
robbed of the rights granted to them just months ago, are “aggressively” trying
to impose their lifestyle on everyone, when the converse is true.
Bringing this analysis back to the
three cases at hand: Bigots in New York did not want Debbie Almontaser, an Arab
American and devout Muslim, in the
environment. Alan Dershowitz did not want Norman Finkelstein criticizing
Israel, anywhere in the environment.
Neither Almontaser or Finkelstein were in anyone’s face. Anyone who
opposed the creation of an Arabic language charter school in New York didn’t
have to send their child there. Anyone who disagreed with Finkelstein was free
not to read him, or to express their own views in print.
By contrast, once his support for
Proposition 8 was revealed, Eckern was in the faces of the very community he
had to deal with every day, as much as a white retailer in Harlem making racist
comments to the press. None of the people he offended was required after that
to deal with him by bringing him their plays for production.
The announcements of several of the
leading playwrights and composers that they would not submit their work to his
theatre was what led to Eckern’s resignation.
Eckern wanted to discriminate against gay people and do business with them at the same time.
But it doesn’t work that way.
Bigotry
Before changing the subject, I will
defend my comment above that support for Proposition 8 is an act of bigotry,
which dictionary.com defines as “stubborn and complete intolerance
of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own.”
I assert that a
belief that gay marriage degrades the institution of marriage is morally indistinguishable from the
proposition that black people owning real property degrades the institution of
property. Marriage and real property
are two essentially similar cultural norms created through the ages via the
accretion of custom and law. If one can be modified to end injustice, so can
and should the other. And anyone
battling to preserve the status quo, on the theory that the grant of rights to
a minority already enjoyed by the
majority, degrades the fabric of society, is a bigot.
Money in politics
Before I get too visibly cozy with the
idea of an Obama presidency, its
important to me to reiterate my feelings about money in elections.
Campaign finance, as I originally
said in the original issue of the Spectacle
in January 1995, is legalized bribery. Very rich people funnel millions of
dollars to their preferred candidate (or, often enough, to both candidates).
The elected candidate by definition has to give very careful consideration to
the contributor’s desires, even when they contradict the will of the majority
of those who elected her.
In today’s world, the person with
the most money tends to win the election, being able to drown out the other’s
voice with more television and radio advertising. It is a problem the founders
never anticipated, that the ability to raise money has become far more
important than intelligence, knowledge or the ability to solve problems.
Thus we really have a shadow primary,
in which the money votes, before any election in which the people vote.
Obama was elected in a perfect storm
of disgust with Republicans, fear of a great Depression, war exhaustion
etc. And I reiterate my belief that he
appears to be the calmest, most intelligent and decisive person elected
president in many years (since Kennedy and possibly even Roosevelt). But,
because of that perfect storm, he also was able to raise a war chest (declining
public financing) of over 120 million dollars, more than twice the money McCain
deployed.
I believe that the fact that the
right person for the job was able to raise the most money was a wild
coincidence, the opposite of what usually happens.
Ordet
Dreyer’s “Ordet” is an interesting
examination of religious faith which descends into kitsch at the end.
An austere farm family includes a
dour father, a schizophrenic son who believes he is Jesus, a married agnostic son and a young eager son
just starting out in life. The agnostic son’s wife provides the family’s vitality—she
is one of those people who radiates love—and when she dies in childbirth,
everyone’s faith is severely tested.
When a neighbor who refused his
daughter in marriage to the youngest son because of religious differences,
turns up remorsefully at the wake and offers her in replacement for the wife
who was lost, the movie has a first of two endings. This ending was satisfying and moving (overlooking the sexism
involved), delivering a message about the importance of tolerance and
compassion in faith.
Dreyer couldn’t stop there, however,
and delivers a coda in which the schizophrenic son performs a miracle and
brings the dead woman back to life. Up to that moment, this has been a
naturalistic movie, with no hint of the supernatural. Movies in which the rules
of nature will be suspended probably should let us know at the outset which
filmic universe we are in, rather than delivering such an abrupt left turn at
the end. A movie about faith, after all, does not have to put the supernatural
on screen; Dreyer’s own far superior silent film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc”,
puts Joan’s faith front and center but leaves God offstage.
Another infuriating thing about the
miracle in this movie is the unanswered questions it raises. Presumably, somewhere else in the vicinity,
and certainly in many homes around the world, another good person is lying dead
at the same moment. Why don’t these
others get to return to life as well? What is the message of a discriminatory
miracle which singles out one lovely but hardly unique human and disregards all
others?
I think this ending takes an easy
and rather trite choice, calculated to manipulate us into tears, and is
therefore kitsch.
Kitsch
In an ancient anecdote, the prisoners who
tell each other the same jokes year after year eventually assign each joke a
number. After that, when someone calls out “Forty-two!”, everyone laughs.
Kitsch is a similar approach to
doing things by the numbers. When we seek a particular emotional
response—tears, pride, patriotism, sentimentality—we snap together some trite,
well-tested elements that are calculated to produce the desired effect. How
cute that dog is! How brave that blind girl is!
Kitsch involves the imitation of an
imitation of life. People who knowingly use kitsch elements in their work are
cynical. People who use kitsch components because they don’t know any better,
lack originality.
In the distant past, every kitsch
trope originated in someone’s original conception: Liza fleeing from the
wolves, Little Nell dying, big eyed sad
children, dogs playing poker. (Maybe not the dogs. ) Kitsch arises when tropes
are continuously re-used in the absence of an original thought., or with the
sole intention of producing a calculated response. Even passages of Shakespeare have become kitsch (“to be or not to
be”) and some strains of classical music (The William Tell Overture). “Gimme Shelter”, the greatest rock song
ever, has become kitschified through overuse in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and others. Somebody in a helicopter or
with a gun is slowly proceeding to kill someone else; cue the Stones (“rape,
murder, is just a shot away”).
Arguably,
all movie music is kitsch because inserted to produce an emotional response the
director doesn’t trust the movie to cause on its own. “Ordet” has little or no
soundtrack music until the miracle at the end.
Marx’s famous assertion in “The 18th
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” that all
historical events happen twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time
as farce, can be understood as a description of the eventual kitschification of
human actions through repetition.
In May 1970, National Guardsmen in
Ohio shot and killed four students at Kent State University. A decade later,
when the events became the basis for a television miniseries, the
kitschification of the killings was complete.
Because kitsch is the end of an arc which begins with an
upsetting event or a disturbingly original thought, it represents the death of
originality and the total encapsulation of the triggering matter in a
comforting cocoon of predictability.
Kitsch is the art form preferred by
people who don’t like to think too much or feel unexpected emotions, who never
want to be off balance or in despair or provoked into changing their
world-view.
An interesting methodology for a
writer is to continuously evaluate each scene or passage in her writing, indeed
each sentence, to try to ensure it is rigorously free of kitsch. The more your
writing mirrors events you have witnessed, the less kitschy it is likely to be
(though of course life sometimes imitates kitsch). The more the incidents in
your work are based on novels or movies rather than on life, the kitschier they
are likely to be.
Even when you are describing the
world, it is crucial to scrutinize the words you use as it is possible to use
kitsch phrases to describe things which deserve better. Any expression used
commonly in popular speech is likely to be
kitsch, if it more than five years old, dude,
or to become kitsch in between
the time you use it and the time someone reads it, dawg.
Some words used in common and
crucially important moments of life are almost impossible to use in art because
of a heavy overlay of kitsch. Like “I love you”. When it becomes necessary to
use such expressions in your work, look for a less commonly used formulation.
Personally, I prefer novels, plays
and movies where scene B does not follow inexorably from scene A, where the
characters choose the less obvious pathway (as the writer has), and do not talk
about it in the same terms used in every television show or movie this
year.
Medical scans and tests
As medical technology gets more powerful,
doctors are able to detect anomalies and features they couldn’t before. Anyone
raised with an uncritical belief in progress will believe this is a Good Thing.
In reality, it is proving to be a mixed bag.
An article in today’s New York Times Science section
(December 9, 2008) tells the story of a woman who experienced severe knee pain.
The real cause was arthritis, but a super-sensitive MRI showed an anomaly in
her knee. She was close to deciding to
have a knee replacement, when a more experienced and intuitive physician told
her she needed only treatment for arthritis.
Years ago, during a fad for
obtaining full body scans, a man told he had scarring in the lungs opted for
painful and expensive exploratory surgery, only to discover that it was merely
the benign remnant of a childhood condition.
Genetic analysis and counseling,
revealing that we have genes which may
predispose us to cancer, have even caused frightened people to maim themselves
by having “preventive” double mastectomies.
Someone I know was induced after a
mammogram to have a painful breast biopsy, which left a scar which lasted for
years. The biopsy showed a potentially “precancerous” condition. Among the
treatments casually described by the doctor were a preventive mastectomy, and
the use of a drug which caused death, stroke or other cancers in a percentage
of the patients. She opted for no treatment whatever, and about fifteen years
later has not developed cancer.
Screening for colon cancer in older
men frequently reveals tumors which, undiscovered, would not have caused the
slightest health problem in the individual’s lifetime.
All this prediction tends to do
little for us except rob us of serenity and cause us to spend money (or spend
the insurer’s or taxpayer’s money) unnecessarily. The aggressive pushing of
predictive testing verges on a scam (doctors buy the machine and must amortize
it by getting lots of patients to take the tests). And the epidemic levels of
questionable testing raises the cost of health care, contributing to the
breakdown of the system.
Another governor implodes
Illinois
governor Rod Blagojevich is an idiot. Like Elliot Spitzer of New York, he threw
away everything he had, his job, power, status and respect. Spitzer is probably
crazier and Blagojevich stupider, but otherwise they got themselves into
similar messes.
In
the federal indictment which came down this week, the governor is quoted (from
a wiretapped conversation) as saying of
Obama’s vacant Senate seat, that its an "[expletive] valuable thing, you
just don't give it away for nothing".
Apropos
of the discussion of money in politics earlier in this column, Blagojevich’s
debacle is certainly thought-provoking. Blagojevich boasted that candidate
number 5 (Jesse Jackson, Jr., unfortunately, possibly tanking his own career)
had offered to raise a half million dollars for Blagojevich if appointed.
If Blagojevich had appointed Jackson,
and Jackson had returned the favor by raising campaign funds for him without either one ever discussing a quid
pro quo, there would have been no problem.
Under our dishonest and
dysfunctional campaign finance system, the crime is not the sale of high office
but talking about it. Quid pro quos are exchanged every day.
So long as they are left latent, in the air, for intelligent people to
understand, and never said (and certainly never said on tape),
everything—office, influence, votes—can and will continue to be bought and
sold.
Blagojevich’s act of gross stupidity
was not offering the appointment to the highest bidder. It was describing the
sale, in simple unsubtle terms, to anyone who would listen. I imagine the
ghosts of all Blagojevich’s corrupt ward heeler mentors rising up in agitation:
“Have we taught you nothing?”
Ponzi
The Bernard Madoff scandal fascinates me.
The received wisdom is that bull markets engender bold frauds, which remain
unperceived until the markets retreat. At an extreme low tide, all kinds of
things are visible on the ocean floor you wouldn’t normally see.
This former Queens stockbroker
worked himself into a position of trust in which extremely wealthy people
handed him their entire net worth. Normally what you are supposed to do is to
be so clever that you can invest other people’s money in offerings of rare
distinction, unknown to others, master the selection and timing, and pay your
trusting customers a return unknown to the rest of us. Madoff took the easy way
out. If you needed to withdraw any money, he took it from another investor.
This way, he could report to everyone concerned an in retrospect unbelievable
10% return year in and year out, no matter what the market conditions. The
reflex of suspicion that anyone could hit those kinds of numbers every year
without fail were ameliorated by the fact that he had been doing it for some
friend of yours, or someone else at the country club, for twenty years.
Ponzi schemes are good until the
valences reverse and there are more investors asking for money than there is
new money coming in. Someone said in a Times column yesterday that the smaller
frauds tend to come to light first. In Madoff’s case, thirty to fifty billion
dollars are missing.
Just like it is hard or impossible to
draw the line between campaign finance and bribery, the line between legal
investment strategy and Ponzi schemes is also somewhat arbitrary. A bank, an
investment bank and Bernard Madoff all have something in common: if every
investor or depositor asks for her money back at the same moment, it isn’t
there to be produced. The money you hand to someone else exists virtually; it
goes to money heaven, and if you are permitted to withdraw it, you are possibly
being handed someone else’s, who isn’t asking for it at the same time.
Some years ago, I figured out that
social security is also is a massive Ponzi scheme, in which today’s retirees
are being paid with the taxes levied on those who will retire twenty years from
now. The scheme collapses when there aren’t enough people working to support
the retired (not enough new money coming in, exactly as in a collapsing Ponzi).
This is the doom predicted for the social security system in a few decades.
The easy becomes difficult
It seems to be a powerful but puzzling
feature of modern life that things that were easy thirty years ago have become
impossible today: running the government, fighting a war, relieving New Orleans
after Katrina, building a bridge. I am not talking only of political-financial
matters, such as managing oil prices so people can afford gas or keeping enough
money in unemployment insurance reserve funds to cover needs. I am talking
about matters like the technical know-how and will required to keep
infrastructure like roads and bridges from deteriorating, or to be able to
deliver physical rescue, food, medicine, and laws enforcement to the survivors
of a hurricane.
The loss of knowledge is a
fascinating problem which I dealt with in last month’s Rags and Bones column and hope to make the subject of a forthcoming
feature article. You can find some
simple and practical causes for any deficit: political interference, arrogance,
a lack of commitment to education. But when things become so extreme that it
starts to appear that nothing whatever works the way it should, we have entered
a highly irrational world of an almost magical level of incompetence. In
Zimbabwe today, the inflation rate is at trillions of percent, there is a
paucity of clean water, teachers have stopped showing up for work because they
can’t live on their salaries. There are days in America when I feel like we are
at the top of the slippery slope: for the first time I feel I can see Zimbabwe
from here.
Health insurance
Our badly cracked health insurance
system is an example of something which used to be easy which has become
difficult. As malpractice premiums and prices for the most routine services go
through the roof, as hospitals slide into bankruptcy because of their mandate
to perform services for which no-one will ever compensate them, it becomes much
harder even for people like me to find affordable health insurance. And then
when you have it, you start receiving bills for all sorts of things which used
to be covered.
About a year ago, I noticed that
routine visits to the emergency room started to result in bills. All insurance
fully covers ER visits, right? Wrong. Last January, I spiked a high fever and
was coughing so hard I thought I would bring up a lung. I resist doctor’s
visits to the point of irrationality, but I was sufficiently scared by the
uncontrollable hacking that I went to the ER at Southampton Hospital (It was a
weekend and I didn’t believe I could hold out till Monday when I could see my
primary care physician). Eight months later, without explanation, I received a
bill for $260 for the services of the ear, nose and throat specialist who saw
me for five minutes.
The protocol dictates that after age
40 we should have a colonoscopy every five years. I was about a decade overdue
for one, so I finally had the procedure in September. Yesterday, a bill for
$1600 arrived from the anesthesiologist who spent a few moments rendering me
unconscious. I called his billing associate and she explained to me that, as a
routine matter, insurance companies are denying anesthesiologist bills even
when the surgeon is in-network, on the grounds that the anesthesiologist is
not. You then have to appeal and fight the company to establish it is a related
service. She was glad to take a few minutes out of her day to participate in a bitch
session about health insurers. An anesthesiologist gets the call to work with a
particular surgeon on a given day for some number of procedures. There is no
discussion of whether the anesthesiologist takes all the same insurances as the
doctor. Nor would it be practical for the doctor to have a HIP anesthesiologist
for the first colonoscopy, a United Health Care guy for the second, and so on.
From the point of the view of the
patient, we have a right to think that an in network service will be in network
for all purposes. Getting a $1600 bill for a service for which I got a referral
to a HIP physician is rather shocking. In the law and public affairs the way I
understand them, there should be disclosure. Neither the doctor who treated my
cough at Southampton, nor the anesthesiologist who put the mask over my face in
September, told me first that they might not be covered by my insurance. The
insurer denying coverage for a crucial component of a covered service smacks of
gross dishonesty and manipulation.
Though this apparently happens every day, per the billing
associate, it turned out not to be my problem. I called HIP and learned that I
had a $2000 deductible under my new plan for in network services.
Shame on me for not understanding
the fine print. Earlier in the year, I was in the final months of the COBRA
coverage from my last employer, facing the tripling of my already severe
monthly premium when I converted from group to individual coverage. During most
of the spring, I believed I would have to leave New York state for Texas or
Florida to find group coverage I could afford as a retired person. Then I
stumbled upon a poorly publicized plan offered by a nonprofit arts
organization, which I signed up for gratefully.
In my naivete, I have never heard of
or imagined that there could be a deductible for in network services. If I’d
understood this, I would still have had to sign up for what was the only plan
in sight—or leave New York. But its very distressing to have health insurance
and still be getting these kinds of bills. Even when I was working at my last
job, as an emergency medical technician, I couldn’t have afforded to pay a
$1600 medical bill from my salary. Every significant health bill I pay comes
straight from my dwindling capital. People who don’t have capital don’t pay,
and then the prices go up and so do everyone else’s premiums.
In the lead essay this month on
securitization, I speak briefly of “George Bailey world”, the nostalgic if
somewhat fictional world of the past in which there was a personal relationship
between the bank lending officer and the neighbor who took a mortgage to buy
his home. In George Bailey world, when
you get sick you call Doc Swanson and he come over and treats you and gives you
a bill for twenty or forty dollars. If you can’t afford to pay him, he waits
until you have sold your harvest or accepts a couple of chickens. There is
never any question of getting an unexpected $1600 bill for a minute of service.
If I had understood in advance how
much the colonoscopy was going to cost me, I wouldn’t have had it. But we’ve
all been sold that a colonoscopy every five years is not a trivial or elective
procedure, not cosmetic surgery but a dire necessity. So the system is not
delivering the services we most need at a price we can afford. Something is
really broken.
To add insult to injury, an article
in the Times for December 16 reports
a study showing that colonoscopies actually miss about a third or more of
cancers.
The grown-ups
One of my formative experiences as a
teenager was attending a meeting at my high school where the principal defended
to parents his crack-down on teenagers protesting the war. The principal, whom
I had regarded up to then as a highly competent super-villain, called one of
the gym teachers, his notorious flunky, to aid him in a sort of skit. “This is
how the kids behave,” he said, and pushed the teacher, who compliantly
staggered half way across the auditorium stage. At that moment, I had a series
of overlapping perceptions and recognitions: The principal was behaving very
childishly, and the gym teacher, who was wearing a Mickey Mouse watch, was a buffoon.
My perception of the universe
underwent a radical revision that night. I had entered the auditorium believing
that the adults who ran the world, from President Nixon on down, were
competent, pragmatic and evil. I now understood that the grown-ups had no idea what they were doing. They were as lost
and confused as we were, with the additional necessity of behaving as if they
were in control.
I now can add an additional
understanding, that the childishness and incompetence of leaders is much less likely to be exposed in good
times, when public confidence—belief in leaders—buoys the system. Our confidence
is a necessary underpinning of any regime largely based on spin and
illusion. We don’t confront or
criticize people who appear to be getting results, even when their success is
fraudulent (as with Bernard Madoff) or accidental.
I think Ronald Reagan was an example
of an accidental success. The man was an idiot, the first of a dangerous series
of modern Republican figure head presidents. (Here is a joke current in the
1980’s. The Reagans go into a diner and Nancy orders the Blue Plate special and
a Coke. “What about the vegetable?” asks the waitress. “He’ll have the same
thing,” Nancy responds.) His greatest achievement, the collapse of the Soviet
Union, was one he never even saw coming.
Confidence in Reagan, the “Great
Communicator”, ended a recession which brought him to power and gave us two
decades of largely bull markets which enabled Bernard Madoff to thrive. In the
end, such presidents are considered great for enabling irrational exuberance or
at least not getting in the way of the zeitgeist. The history of the Clinton administration
can be perceived as a constant rejiggering of priorities to achieve the kind of
reputation which Reagan fell into so effortlessly.
Anybody can stand at the wheel of a ship which is headed in a safe
direction in clear weather and deep water. It is in the really hard times that
we find out how incapable our leaders really are. In those times we see at least briefly through the cant, and seek
the help of a leader who is really hyper-competent. Barack Obama presents as
such a person—but that’s just the spin so far. I hope he lives up to his
advance notices.
More on Madoff
I
can’t stop thinking about the Madoff scandal, which I find endlessly
fascinating. You almost always hear of Ponzi schemes preying upon the
relatively uneducated, people who have
no investment experience and don’t know any better. In the New York
Times for December 26 is an account of such a scheme that harmed the members of
a Washington Heights church. The newest parishioner claimed to supply large
electronic companies such as Best Buy. If you invested with him, you would
double your money in about ten weeks.
The pastor and his family lost several hundred thousand dollars in the
scheme.
Madoff conned billionaires, Swiss
bankers, Arab money men and other sophisticates. His scaled down version
offered a ten percent per annum return. Over the years, occasional hedge fund
types looking to invest with him deflected away because he wouldn’t answer
questions, or because they were unable to reverse engineer his results. Some
individuals raised an extremely pragmatic issue, so obvious that it is
remarkable it didn’t stop the great
majority of Madoff’s investors from handing over their money: how does anyone
get a ten percent return, year after year, with little fluctuation, regardless of what the market is doing?
Add to this the very prosaic but
telling fact that Madoff’s auditors were an unknown three person firm in a
shopping center in Queens, and all the danger signals were there. Why didn’t it matter?
Fitzgerald famously said, “The rich
are not like us,” to which Hemingway
replied, “Yes, they have more money.” Though we all have a deep if
secret awe for people who can dispose of a billion dollars, those who inherited
the money (or some substantial chunk of it) didn’t have to be any more
knowledgeable or shrewder than the rest of us. Even those who did make it
through strenuous, unique, clever activity don’t necessarily have better fraud
radar than we do; like Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog, they may be good at one thing,
not all things.
The most telling factor may have
been Madoff’s status. The perception
of his power. He had been there a long time—decades—making his ten percent
return, and had reached a degree of wealth, reputation and exclusivity which
awed even the super-rich. You had to know someone who knew him and then, having
reached him, had to plead with him to steal your money. Sometimes he refused.
What Madoff acquired was similar to
the concept of “mana” shared by a
number of South Pacific cultures:
In Hawaiian, mana loa
means "great power". There are two ways to obtain mana: through birth
and through warfare. People or objects that possess mana are accorded
"respect"; because their possession of mana gives them "authority", "power", and "prestige".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana
For someone with such mana, asking
inconvenient questions like, how do you sustain your ten percent return in a
bad market, would be considered very disrespectful. Powerful people according
to a world view shared by most human cultures are to be greeted with a tugging
of the forelock, not with questions. Madoff’s black box approach to investing was considered only natural in this
environment. If you had a secret formula, would you share it? I am sure in more
than one family supported by Madoff these words were said over the years: “Who
cares how he makes it as long as nobody gets arrested.” If you don’t have
consummate mana yourself, you probably want to be aligned with those who do.
People assigned a lot of value to being able to tell other people that they
knew Bernie Madoff, invested with Bernie Madoff. were themselves therefore
members of an ultimate financial elite.
The problem is of course that this
is an essentially medieval structure, where the fact of authority is paramount,
and looking too much into its underpinnings is treason or heresy. In fact, one of the most important questions
in human development is whether to trust
the powerful (including the super-rich)
unquestioningly or not. A major underpinning
of American democracy, as the Framers made clear, is that nobody should be trusted blindly. That
understanding got lost somewhere along the way; Bernie Madoff and George Bush
inhabit the same universe, in which the paramount rule is to trust without
question. Sounds even better in French, as a kind of slogan similar to “honi
soit qui mal y pense”:
Faire confiance et se taire
The
assault on Gaza
The Israeli attack on Gaza is justified.
To put this statement in context: I
think the decision to create Israel was extremely problematic; I think the
state itself is confused, even cursed, by a contradictory identity, seeking at
once to be secular and based on a religion; I think the Israelis have made
horrendous errors over the years in their treatment of Palestinians. The map of
the proposed partition in 1947 doesn’t look fair to me. Israel’s close
friendship with apartheid South Africa, while it lasted, spoke volumes.
But I don’t think the Israelis have
a moral obligation to die, as Islamic fundamentalists believe, nor to leave the
area. I think most Israelis have come to understand, as their government has,
that a two state solution is both moral and practical. All else is just
negotiation about the details, borders and so on.
In order for a Palestinian state to
take its place next door to Israel, there are two preconditions. Someone
representing the Palestinian people must have authority to enter into such a
deal. And he must have the ability to police his people and ensure that the
rockets stop being launched and the suicide bombers stop being deployed.
There has not yet been a Palestinian
“partner” who could satisfy both preconditions, not Arafat and not Abbas in the
West Bank today. Both men led Al Fatah, and yet Fatah always had a terrorist
wing, supposedly not under their control, which continued killing Israelis
while Arafat and Abbas negotiated peace treaties. So, even when the first condition was satisfied, the second never
has been. What use is a peace partner, no
matter how sincere, who is unable to shut down the killers on his own side? (The
US is facing a very similar problem in Pakistan today.)
I believe that Israel has seriously
demonstrated its interest in a solution in a variety of ways, including
withholding violence except when outrageously provoked. Peel away all of the ideology, all of the
history and the emotions, and what you are left with is a country trying to
deal with an enclave within its current borders, from which people are firing
mortars and rockets. If a group in downtown Newark started firing mortars at
New York, they would be met by massive force hours later, and be out of
business the next day. But Israel, under strong pressure from illogical world
opinion, has tolerated these rocket and mortar attacks for years.
Israel’s response in Gaza is not
illegal under the laws of war. At most, it can be scrutinized carefully for its
proportionality. So far, the strikes have been aimed at Hamas targets (though
some civilians have inevitably been killed) and have followed the express goals
of depriving Hamas of its ability to fire rockets and mortars at Israel. Israel
undoubtedly hopes to beat Hamas up until an appropriate peace partner
emerges. The goal is not the complete
destruction of Gaza and its civilian population (who originally voted Hamas
into power, by the way).
The demonstrators coming out in
force in the Arab world are essentially taking the position that the Israelis
should just allow themselves to be attacked without responding—in other words,
that Israel has a responsibility to die.
This is an inane proposition. People are dying today in Gaza because of
Israeli bombs but also Hamas’ intransigence.