You people can watch while I’m scrubbing these floors

And I’m scrubbin’ the floors while you’re gawking

Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell

In this crummy Southern town, in this crummy old hotel

But you’ll never guess to who you’re talkin’.

No. You couldn’t ever guess to who you’re talkin’.

Then one night there’s a scream in the night

And you’ll wonder who could that have been

And you see me kinda grinnin’ while I’m scrubbin’

And you say, “What’s she got to grin?”

I’ll tell you.

There’s a ship, the black freighter

with a skull on its masthead

will be coming in.

Or, as Spain Rodriguez’s Vietnam era underground cartoon character Trashman snarled as his automatic weapons went brakka brakka at the agents of the established order, “eat leaden death!”

We haven’t quite gotten to that rather dire level of backlash against the rich in general and, in particular, the high rolling execs of AIG who got the world into this mess. But there is plenty of dock space in Manhattan and the black freighter just chugged under the string-‘em-up strands of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

The cultural backlash to the current financial crisis has barely begun, most notably in the Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart’s unloading on Wall Street cheerleader Jim Cramer. The reaction of popular music is in its infancy, if it is occurring at all.

The greed, gluttony and venality of the American rich was precursed in 2006 by experimental, performance art, alternative rock band the Flaming Lips:

If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch, would you do it?

If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich, would you do it?

If you could watch everybody work while you just lay on your back, would you do it?

If you could take all the love without giving any back, would you do it?

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.”

The band may have known something. But it also knew what was good for it, and shortly thereafter sold a snippet of its “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” to enliven a commercial for Kraft salad dressing.

Rock and folk has always been a staple of anti-rich sentiment, but not this time, at least not so far. This is not just me saying it. I polled my Facebook friends, most of who are in the media, and came up with nothing worth mentioning. I also asked a couple very close to me, both former record company executives. They also hit zilch. (By the way, both were recently laid off. She went to work for a human rights organization, which also laid her off a few months later. He’s trying to open a bicycle shop with two friends.)

During the Great Depression, the reaction took a few years to set in, but set in it did. Just talking about music, “Pirate Jenny” was followed in 1931 by the Harburg and Gorney classic:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it’s done.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;

Once I built a tower, now it’s done.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

A few years after that, escapism set in, marked by goofy comedy and wishful thinking. Such as in another classic, that by Dubin and Warren:

We’re in the money, we’re in the money;

We’ve got a lot of what it takes to get along!

We’re in the money, that sky is sunny,

Old Man Depression you are through, you done us wrong.

We never see a headline about breadlines today.

And when we see the landlord we can look that guy right in the eye.

The wishful thinking set in synch with some hard-edged leftist politics, but that’s not what’s on my mind today. I’m just doing pop culture today, and skipping around at that.

What’s clear is that populist protest as well as popular protest song rose most ardently when people’s daily lives were seriously threatened. That occurred during the Great Depression in the fear of breadlines and homelessness. It occurred during Vietnam in fear of the draft and being sent to die in a swamp. I was waiting for it to occur under Reagan and the Bush dynasty but it didn’t. And that was because the threat to the individual, to you and me, was minimal.

That has changed. There is a tangible threat now, and it’s much the same as during the Great Depression: the fear of loss of job, loss of house, and having to move back in with Mom, if in fact Mom hasn’t been evicted and moved onto the welfare rolls and into a Motel 6.

So where is the popular anger now? Where are the guys and dolls (speaking of revivals) with the guitars? Doubtless the reliably pissed off Springsteen and Bono are at this moment scribbling lyrics. I would be surprised if populist rocker John Mellencamp didn’t weigh in. I suppose it’s unavoidable that Billy Joel will take time out from mowing down Hamptons telephone polls to strike a few chords for justice. And I’m told that singer/songwriters Ani DiFranco and Steve Earle are likely to summon the requisite fury. But when?

As for the rappers, they’re mad enough but rarely against wealth. One out-of-left-field exception: reformed convict T.I. late last year slammed his gold-seeking confreres in “Live Your Life,” a duet with recently victimized singer Rihanna. All in all, though, rap has given up all right to populist rage. Maybe that will change when the price of gold, that classic depression safe haven, goes up. And the wearing of the bling goes down.

As for all those nascent populist stars optimistically seeking contracts from record companies that were in financial trouble before the crash of 08, keep strumming, keep seething, and keep your fury.

You’ll need it.

In that blog last week a handful of twenty-somethings found an excuse to trash the 60s in general and the boomers in particular. The fact that the boomers are their fathers is not without significance. They called my generation smug, noisy, and entirely without achievements.

I snapped. This is what I blogged back at them:

”Here’s another note on the 60s. Let’s see if you new commenters for whom the words ‘fuck you’ count as profundity can understand it.

“In the 60s we showed that popular action can stop a war. We kick started the healthy living movement, especially organic farming. We popularized concern for the health of the planet. And … this will be too subtle for many of you, but ask your daddies to explain if you have trouble … we advocated for the sort of global community and lateral thinking that created the intellectual environment that allowed the development of hyperlinks and the Web.

“What have you brought to the table? YouTube and Twitter?”

Notes: I just added a few words without changing the meaning. And I am not a boomer, whose members were born beginning in 1946. I’m three years too old, having been born during the Campaign in the Solomons, another accomplishment that the current generation can’t match.

By the way, both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are boomers. Born toward the end of the accepted range, they are late boomers. (Yes, I’m ashamed of myself.)

So, the 60s. What did we do? The revival of Hair and the release of the Alive Mind DVD celebrating it, Hair: Let the Sun Shine In” seem a good reason for discussion. My thoughts are just that, my own experience and what I take from it. I’m not a historian nor, as several editors have reminded me, a hard news reporter.

When I arrived in Manhattan in 1966 the city was pretty much as it had been for years. Young peoples’ concerns were education, career advancement, marriage, getting into the Playboy Club and, to an increasing extent, staying out of Southeast Asia. There were stirring of dissent regarding Vietnam, but nothing that overwhelmed the national agenda. Then came the Tet Offensive, the King and RFK assassinations, and who remembers what else transpired during 1968, the year that hell burned down.

There were two major reactions: protest and political action, and that wrought by the hippies. While the former group set about showing that popular action could stop a war, the latter set about making fools of themselves by advocating for weed (no alcohol, only growables and acid), flower power, be-ins (which, it should be recalled, were pioneered by NYC radio raconteur Jean Shepherd at least half a decade earlier), colorful dress, an unhealthy obsession with Indians (both those from that country and the Native American kind) and a form of music which, 40 years down the road, was often really embarrassing. Have you listened to Country Joe and the Fish lately?

Those of us suave sophisticate New York writers were 24 or 25 and hated the hippies, who were generally 18 and 19, for being an embarrassment and for making it easy to ridicule the antiwar movement. The pro-war crowd had thoroughly confused the two. The comfortably upbrung adults who stuck out among the hippies were the worst. I refer of course to the truly humiliating Timothy Leary, who kept at it for the rest of his life until his ashes were shot into space, or something like that. I recall a 1967 conversation with Richie Havens in his East Village apartment where he lamented oldsters like Leary. He took acid … sorry, dropped acid … and at age 40 “old guys like him have never felt before and can’t handle it.”

Oh well. That was back when 40 was the old 40.

Hair. It crystallized and celebrated a hippie gestalt that existed less in New York than in San Francisco, but existed here and various other places around the planet. (calling Earth “the planet” was a hippie thing.) As the song goes, it was “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Looking back from the Age of Obama, it really was. Those of my generation and those a few years younger changed awareness and the world. We embraced other cultures. We learned to play sitars and smoked Thai stick and Bolivian Mind Fuck. Nodding to the political kids and with the guidance of another middle ager, Allen Ginsberg, we tried to levitate the Pentagon. We danced in Golden Gate Park and on the Sheep Meadow. We wore … maybe let’s not discuss what we wore. We figured out that if you played your guitar really loud and walked backwards toward your amplifiers, you could make a sound like that of the rocket that eventually took Leary’s ashes to Pluto. Or didn’t. I’m not a hard news reporter. I’m Todd Gitlin with a sense of humor.

After a few years some of us moved to the country and began growing organic rutabagas. We began getting healthy and raised children who disdained violence. In Woodstock we created the third most populous city in New York State and there was no crime. (There also were no cops to arrest anyone, but let’s keep that as a fine point.) It’s the 40th anniversary of three days of peace, love, and rock and roll, and we’ll spend a lot of words on it.

Finally, the late boomers (obviously I’m over being ashamed of myself) wondered what would happen if you tried hooking up a computer in California with a computer in Bangalore. They read the Whole Earth Catalog, an immense book offering “access to tools” from all over the planet. Counterculture guru Steward Brand created in 1968 what Steve Jobs later called the forerunner of the Web. The first time I saw the Web, I instantly thought “oh, the Whole Earth Catalog on a computer.

What did the 60s accomplish? Twenty-somethings are advised to treat their bodies to organic food while surfing the Web and watching as our troops come home from Iraq.

Spread the news as only you can, children. Put it on Twitter.

It recalled for me a true story, one in keeping with my claim to be the fourth prince of Serendip. It’s eerie, and the message that some will take home from it gives me hives. And that is because I do not believe in astrology, the special power of crystals, or that the U.S. government blew up the World Trade Center. If Washington was that efficient we wouldn’t be fighting with the Shar-Pei over table scraps.

And sorry, conspiracy theorists — vaccination does not cause autism. Don’t force me to embarrass you with facts.

Let’s go back to August of 2006. I had to go to L.A. on business totally unrelated to my writing. There was a big convention in town that made the woman who does my travel arrangements unable to book a hotel room for under $350 a night. And that was at the Chateau Marmont, my fave L.A. hostelry back in the 60s when it was kind of the Chelsea Hotel West and I could get a room for $15 a night. Its legendary resident in those times was Boris Karloff. It was said to be an exquisite treat to get into the elevator after midnight and encounter Karloff, who would in that famous voice intone “good evening.”

Since then it has suffered the inevitable gentrification. Now it looks like any other renovated historic hotel and the only longhair who can afford it is Neil Young, who probably wouldn’t be caught dead there.

Just as my travel person went white with exasperation, my thoughts slid downscale and I thought, “what about the place where Morrison lived?”

The Doors and I are inextricably linked because I wrote the first book about them, just 40 years ago. It sold for $1 then and the last time I looked it was a collector’s item at $100 and over. I’ll save details for another day. Salient here is that the book made me the target of stalking by several Morrison loonies, one of whom made my life miserable a decade later when I was stupid enough to list my phone number. He thought that I had some sort of cosmic connection to Morrison. I got so sick of the Doors that when the Oliver Stone movie came out I didn’t go see it. The 10 minutes worth I stumbled over on one of the cable channels last year convinced me of the wisdom of that decision.

During his most productive period, Morrison lived at a hotel on La Cienega just off Santa Monica Boulevard. That’s all of two blocks down the hill from Sunset in West Hollywood. Now that’s prime real estate. But then, Morrison probably paid what I was paying up the hill and down a bit at the Chateau.

The name of the place is the Alta Cienega. It’s still there and costs—tell your wallet that there is a God—a staggering $65 a night. If you want the “Jim Morrison Room,” where he lived, you will have to pay the premium rate, $69. But you get decades of graffiti from Morrison loonies who passed through in hot pursuit of the old, cold ghost of the Lizard King.

A mild codicil on Morrison’s residence: Danny Fields, a Warhol-camp survivor who became a 60s music boulevardier and, later, co-discoverer and manager of the Ramones, told me a month or two ago that Morrison “only left his clothes there. He lived in his car.”

Regarding the Alta Cienega, its quaintness includes the fact that you will not get a telephone in your room. There is only high speed Internet. This is either astonishingly old-fashioned or amazingly prescient. If you want a voice communication, a member of the Asian family that owns the hotel will take a message and slip it under your door.

It’s possible that the Morrison Room receives astral messages from wherever Jim went when he broke on through to the other side. This is unknown. If true, the capitalistically clueless owners of the hotel are unlikely to charge for them.

Let us turn now to the matter of the David Walley, a seminal rock journalist like me. We were friends
and companions in the New York rock scene. I worked for the Times. He worked for the East Village Other, then the nation’s prime underground paper. the Times ran pictures of presidents and prime ministers on its front page. The East Village Other once famously decorated page one with a photo of real shit hitting a real fan. David and I pretty much defined the range of possibilities for rock journalism. He was the most political of the rock journalists of that or any other time, which made him a joy to talk to. How many conversations can you have about the Doobie Brothers?

I lost touch with him in the early 70s, but was aware of him writing No Commercial Potential, a biography of Frank Zappa, and Teenage Nervous Breakdown, a study of pop music and society. In 2004 or 2005 we reconnected via the Internet and resumed our political rants, nearly always about the now-departed regime in Washington. Typically David and I got into a email rant every three weeks or so and then didn’t chat for another three or so weeks, having exhausted the possible ways to beat the Bushies. We had one of these chats around the start of the month of August, 2006. In the course of it, I told him I was going to LA. He lived there for several years in the 60s, part of that time with the woman who later became Mrs. Jim Morrison. He asked me to go down Sunset to see if Duke’s Coffee Shop, one of his old hangouts, was still there. A week later I did.

Duke’s is an unremarkable bean wagon that has achieved a certain place in the history of rock hangouts because it abuts the Whisky a Go Go. I had a chicken salad sandwich and a chocolate egg cream and read one of the local underground newspapers. Then I went back to the Alta Cienega and emailed David this: “In your memory I had an egg cream at Duke’s.”

Whoa. That was a creepy error. I quickly changed the word “memory” to the word “honor.”

You see where this is going, don’t you, especially those of you pilots flying reconnaissance missions aboard the astral plane. Three days after I got home I ran into a mutual friend, who asked, solemnly, “Did you know that David Walley died last week?”

Well, okay. The word “coincidence” exists for a reason. David was a heavy smoker, and smoking is very closely associated with cardiac issues (he died of a heart attack). But I didn’t know about his smoking when my typing error sent him an egg cream in the beyond. He seemed perfectly vital on the phone, never mentioned health problems, and was proud that he had nearly completed a biography of Herbert Feis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning economist and diplomatic historian of the Cold War.

I don’t think his heart chose that moment to give up because it would especially freak me out. I think it was a coincidence. Maybe there is a mathematician like the guy on Numb3rs who can explain it logically. Or you never know, aw hell I might have felt a tremor in the Force. Maybe David and Jim had been out there beyond the doors of perception fighting over a woman. And they decided to bury the hatchet over an egg cream from Duke’s.

Whatever. David is gone nearly three years now. I wish he had lived to finish the biography of Feis. I wish he had lived to know of President Obama.

Or perhaps he does. I’m gonna go send him a blintz, this time in his memory.

At about the same time, in the wasteland where rednecks ride their Hummers to the unemployment office, were other cultural milestones:

A promoter of monster truck rallies was killed by one of his monster trucks after failing to realize that, if you shouldn’t step in front of a Toyota, it’s unwise to tangle footprints with something that makes a Hummer look like a Tonka Toy. The Monster Truck Rally Association blamed the victim, natch, saying that he “stepped in front of a moving vehicle in a fashion that did not provide the vehicle’s driver adequate time to react.” The week before, a six-year-old fan was killed by shrapnel from another monster truck mishap. Word has yet to be received if it was his fault too.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship, said by its owners to be the fastest growing sports organization in the world, announced plans to open a global network of gyms. A horde of YouTube Rambos doubtless will result. Senator John McCain, familiar with both real and preening faux bloodshed, called the sport “human cockfighting.”

Sarah Palin, America’s foremost human cockfight promoter, announced the formation of a political action committee, which among other things is key to exploring options for a 2012 presidential run.

You say, isn’t Sarah Palin 2008 news, like national treasure Britney Spears and the Montauk Monster? You ask, why go to Sarah Palin again? The answer is simple, just like … oh wait, let’s not be discourteous. We’re not going to her, she keeps coming to us, now with the possibility that she will grace the national discourse yet again in four … oops, three … years. Three years is not that long. An African elephant can only have two calves in that time - assuming a helicopter-borne governor doesn’t blast it and grind it up for chili. Among other image sanitizations, to erase any doubt about her academic creds she told this month’s Esquire that “Everything I’ve ever needed to know I learned through sports.” Doubtless the “the fastest growing sport in America” is lending punch, gristle and gore to the fastest rising politician in America.

Despite the serious doubters and the merely terrified, Palin is rapidly becoming Auntie Meme, the subject of viral emails, Flickrs, Twitters, Tumblrs, YouTubes and whatever is spat from the new media du jour. This will go on for a year or two, until she wears everyone out like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan did and no one cares anymore. And then her logical next move is an afternoon talk show. Hell, if Elizabeth Hasselbeck can have a forum, anyone can have a forum.

If Palin still wants to make a run at the presidency she needs a likeminded running mate with a track record among urban voters. The obvious candidate is Rod Blagojevich. He has comparable gubernatorial experience (he too didn’t build a bridge). He shares her oratorical skills, her mystifying appeal, and her talent for self delusion. There also is the shared skill of denial. She was not censored for abuse of power. He did not try to sell Obama’s senate seat. Finally, both are slick and have hair piled atop their heads. Really, the 2012 ticket of Palin and Blagojevich is a comer. Only they can stop the inevitable Bloomberg campaign, which will say “I can fix the economy better than the black guy.”

(Let’s not even think about Giuliani/Palin; that’s scarier than the notion of our Biblical ancestors having roamed the planet with Godzilla.)

A personal note. I recently found that there are three of my books in the Wasilla library system. I’ve long known that my books are popular with librarians, but this is ridiculous. Of the three, one celebrates some things that Palin might be freaked by - voodoo, homicide, drunkenness, interracial sex, New York City, cussing, and having children out of wedlock. Okay, so she wouldn’t be freaked by all of those. My point is that I would like my books gone, out, torched. Palin is interested in banning books that have “inappropriate language” in them?

Take mine first. Better dead than read in Wasilla. I’ll send matches.

I was walking down Bleecker Street in 1970, I guess it was, to review some guitar slinger or other at the Bitter End. That was how I made my living those days – as the folk and rock journalist of The New York Times. I was the first one to do this full time, and the first full-time rock journalist for any major paper. Here’s how the Times described me, in an anecdote that appears to have become boilerplate. So far it has appeared in my old editor Dick Shepard’s “The Paper’s Papers: A Journey Through the Archives of the New York Times”; Arthur Gelb’s “City Room;” and the obituary of its late managing editor Clifton Daniel.

“Mr. Daniel relished his role in expanding The Times’s coverage of arts news. ‘Any newspaper that didn’t cover a major industry in its community would be judged derelict,’ he said. ‘I thought the coverage should be conscientious, thoughtful, and thorough’ … In 1968, when The Times retained a long-haired culture writer as a rock critic, Mr. Daniel enjoyed breaking the news gently to the well-groomed former marine who was then the paper’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. ‘His name is Mike Jahn,’ Mr. Daniel wrote in a note to Mr. Sulzberger, ‘and he is going to write pieces on folk/rock music.’

“Mr. Daniel went on to report that another editor had reassured him: ‘Mr. Jahn wears his hair in a somewhat bizarre style–in fact he looks like a werewolf. But since his work will not require him to be in the office very much, I don’t think he’ll bite any of us.’”

Thus began my contribution to the debasement of American culture – introducing the New York Times to the coverage of popular culture, specifically rock and roll. I am proud of my seminal role in putting our fair and sun-kissed land on the slippery slope to Paris Hilton. Anyway, a werewolf who gets three paragraphs in the middle of Clifton Daniels’ obit is entitled to have a beer with Jimi Hendrix in a roach hole Chinese restaurant.

That night he was lonely and wanted someone to talk to. We knew each other from around, running into one another in clubs in the wee hours. One time he called to ask me to meet him someplace and thoroughly baffled my non-rocker wife of the time, who said, memorably, “It’s Jimmy something.” When he saw me loping down Bleecker he banged on the window and yelled until he got my attention. I went up and we had a beer together. We talked about old blues records and young women, two of his obsessions. I think that one of the reasons he liked me is that, thanks to the attitude the Times teaches young writers, I was oblivious to celebrity and treated him pretty much like another guy who likes the blues and young women. We talked mostly about a Howlin’ Wolf 78 he found in a classic records shop in Chicago. But he also showed me a silver ring that one of his young women – he had an army of them – gave him, also in Chicago. It included a tiny sculpture of a woman going down on a man.

He blushed. He did that. And spoke so softly you had to learn forward to hear him properly. In person he was not the person you saw onstage. But he did blindside me on Bleecker Street, adding yet another chapter in the tale of my family’s gift of serendipity. I am, in fact, the fourth prince of Serendip. So were several generations of ancestors. You will hear about that from time to time.

Which brings me to the subject of my father and Harry Truman, who incidentally was Clifton Daniels’ father-in-law. My father was a newspaperman too, with the Brooklyn Eagle, later a stringer for the Times, editor of a well-respected weekly, and, finally, editorial page editor of the Long Island Press, a Newhouse PM daily that cashed in under pressure from Newsday in 1977.

In 1956, working for the weekly, he was on a train rolling along on its way from Chicago (Chicago again) to St. Louis, which was on Harry’s trail home. It was early evening and he was sitting in his sleeping compartment with the door open reading the Times. There was a commotion in the hall. He looked out to see the Pullman porter carrying bags belonging to Harry and Bess, who had booked the compartment across the hall.

In those days when a president left office he was Citizen Truman. No special protection. Also unfazed by celebrity, my father said “Good evening, Mr. President,” and was rewarded with a nice reply that I have of course forgotten. After a while my father acquired bourbon and closed the door.

Before too long there’s a knock on the door. It’s Harry. He’s bored. He said, “the missus has gone to sleep. Would you like company?”

My father did. They drank bourbon and talked for I don’t know long, I seem to recall my father saying hours. That was long enough for my father to get some quotes about the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and for Harry to get a promise that nothing would be printed until after his death.

Harry went back to bed, and my father retired as well. Comes seven in the morning. Knock on the door. It’s Harry again. “It’s time for my constitutional,” he said. “Want to come with me?”

Back and forth they walked the length of the train until Harry got his fill of morning exercise. I don’t know what happened after that, except that Harry’s kid married Clifton Daniel, who my father also came to know. Make of that what you will. The connection only recently occurred to me. Maybe Daniel recognized the last name when he hired me. At any rate, my father was blind-sided when he saw my byline. I don’t think that his fleeting knowledge of Daniel had anything to do with it. I’m pretty sure I got the Times gig after hearing about it from a rewrite man at four in the morning during the 1968 building takeovers at Columbia. I believe I mentioned being the fourth prince of Serendip.

Shit happens to me.

My father sat on the Harry story until the former president died in 1972. The story went out over the Newhouse wire and is mentioned online, though finding the mention is not without difficulty.

It was a few years ago I was thinking about my having drunk beer with Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend – forgot to mention him – and congratulating myself on how many famous people I had known and famous events I covered.

I covered Woodstock and the coming out of retirement of Elvis Presley and a few other things relating to the counterculture. I suppose that getting stoned with Abbie Hoffman and sitting in a WBAI studio speculating on how to politicize the hippies is one. Not too shabby a career to ponder as I await my first Social Security check.

But then I thought of my father, who covered the Lindberg baby kidnapping trial, the Hindenburg disaster, the rise of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, was an activist in the famously radicalized Brooklyn Eagle strike of 1937, and throughout the 1950s got death threats from the John Birchers for his editorials on McCarthy. And there was the train thing.

Suddenly I realized, jeez, you can have a prominent byline in the New York Times – you can be the werewolf of the New York Times — and still not do better than your newspaperman father, who hung out with the guy who test drove the nuclear terror that so informed the rest of that century.

Sometimes in this Internet, everyone-is-famous (or can pretend to be so) age, we celebrate the inevitability of children doing better than their parents. But how inevitable is it really?

What do you think, George?

She granted me an audience that lasted maybe an hour, which was time enough to count the ways in which she was a contrivance as finely wrought as one of Emily Dickinson’s love lyrics or her own extravagantly blond wig. The curtains had been drawn against the bright, blue California afternoon, but the dim light softened with the scent of roses couldn’t conceal the lines around her eyes and wrists, the wrinkles at her throat, the strain on the corsets that held her figure as rigidly in place as a pagan idol carved in ivory. After ten minutes the imperfections in her appearance were no longer visible. Whether it was art or biology, her letting slip the sleeve of her negligee or the gene sequence encoded in her elbow, so distinct was the sensual inducement that had she directed me to climb the stairway to paradise, I would have gone as willingly as Tristan to Isolde, or Napoleon to Joséphine. Miss West didn’t entertain questions. She spoke as if from an altar or a throne, revealing what she deemed to be within reach of a masculine—and, therefore, limited—intelligence. One took what one was given and was grateful, and it wasn’t until several hours later, reading through my notes in the bar of the Beverly Hills Hotel, that I understood what it was that Miss West had allowed me to see. If she was a force of nature, she was also a work of the imagination, her own as well as that of the company of the elect admitted to her dressing room or her anatomy. Her face never could have been thought beautiful, even at the age of seven in 1900, when she made her debut on the Brooklyn vaudeville stage. Her voice was as rough as sandpaper, her terms of endearment as blunt as stone. How, then, did she float the veil of seduction, and of what was it composed?

My notes suggested an answer having more to do with the spirit than the flesh, not with the bird in the hand but with the seventeen in the bush. “Sex,” she had said, “is like a small business; you gotta protect it, watch over it,” manage the market in desire as a midsummer night’s dream in the forest of Arden, somewhere just over Dorothy’s rainbow or around the next bend in the Missouri River. Forget that what is afoot is a chasing of butterflies never to be caught and you lose sight of the bluebirds, miss the point of the joke—mistakes, Miss West said, that she had been careful to avoid. Over the course of a life that she construed as a transit of Venus, she hadn’t bothered to count the number of lovers who had come and gone with the leaves of autumn and the flowers of spring. “!e score never interested me,” she said, “only the game.” !e constellation of Eros as seen in the Hollywood sky after 1950 she thought sadly lacking in glamour. “!e women just walk around on a stage lookin’ dirty,” she said. “Where’s the humor? Where’s the laugh in back of it?”

In 1964 America’s snow-white homecoming queens hadn’t yet drifted downstream on their parade floats into the saturnalian whirlpool of 1968, but the country’s moral fabric was said to be showing signs of wear and tear—Bob Dylan and the Beatles singing on the radio; the birth control pill in the hands of cocktail waitresses, nymphs, and satyrs hanging out around the birdbaths on suburban lawns. Concerns bearing on the lure of sex were headline news, which was why !e Saturday Evening Post, in those days still a national voice of bourgeois stability, was sending its scouts in all directions to look for signs of the great god Pan slouching toward Nashville to cut a record with Circe and the three sirens.

I didn’t count myself particularly well-qualified for the task at hand. Having come of age in the late forties, I’d been reliably informed, on the authority of Rudyard Kipling and in accordance with the wisdom of the Anglican church, that body and soul didn’t go to the same dancing classes. What I could see of the American way of life at the time confirmed the ruling. At the movies husbands and wives couldn’t be seen occupying the same bed, and children were brought into the world by storks. Booksellers banned the sale of novels depicting either the hero or the heroine in a state of wanton undress; to publish a picture of a pubic hair was a criminal offense; a woman’s place was in the home; and sex was something that happened in France.

At a New England boarding school and college in the mid-fifties it was disclosed that sex had also been known to occur in eighteenth-century England and in imperial Rome. Students interested in more recent source material were referred to pinups of Marilyn Monroe, the novels of James Joyce (on the understanding that Molly Bloom wasn’t the kind of girl one invited to the prom) and to the dimea-dance ballrooms in the shadow of Times Square. Although my postgraduate work had included courses of study in Greenwich Village and its extension in San Francisco’s North Beach—in the red-light districts of Paris, London, and Hamburg and their adjuncts in the confessions of !omas de Quincey and Henry Miller—by the summer of 1964 I hadn’t solved the riddle situated in the story of Héloïse and Peter Abélard (Nogent-sur-Seine, p. 141), and I was no more at ease with the questions posed by my editors in New York—what is sex, and where is love—than was the blonde under the broad-brimmed straw hat seated next to me at the bar in the Beverly Hills Hotel curious to know whether I was looking for company. She was easily fifty years younger than Miss West, a high-end daughter of joy deserving the adjectives that greengrocers assign to the grapefruit and the plums, but there was no laughter in the back of her voice or her eyes, and if I’d learned anything from the goddess in her temple on the beach at Malibu, it was that if there’s no play of the mind, there’s no game in Master John !ursday (Lyon, p. 156).

The observation is in line with those of Dante Alighieri (Florence, p. 36), by !omas Mann (Venice, p. 54), and by David Foster Wallace (Las Vegas, p. 135), but it stands at odds with the transformations of Eros into a consumer produc tthat followed from the excitements of the sixties sexual revolution. !e opening of Pandora’s box had let loose too many freedoms of the spirit—believed to be pagan and seen to be dangerous—threatening to reconfigure the society’s Christian seating arrangements. As a solution to the problem of redeploying the country’s overabundant supply of sexual energy, it was thought best to classify it as a commodity somehow akin to breakfast cereal or unleaded gasoline. !e policy tabled the questions stored in the hope chest of America’s family values (what is moral and where is virtue?) and by so doing opened the market in desire to development well beyond the powers of Miss West to watch over and protect. Eros borne aloft on the wings of commerce licensed any and all uses of the brand name that could be turned to a profit—as romance, lust, neurosis, courtly love, gay and lesbian alliance, adultery, alternative marriage, forbidden apple and low-hanging fruit. In the gardens of tabloid delight the vendors of freshly picked gossip offer the sweetmeats of both prudery and prurience, the front-page political reporting replicates the classified advertising placed by men
seeking women and women seeking men, the editorial pages sing their songs of spring with lyrics supplied by a congressional committee or the police. From every orifice of the media (movie and television screen, newsstand, cosmetic counter, roadside billboard), the sales promotions pour forth at all hours of the day and night, enfolding their multiple target audiences in a haze of pornographic and quasipornographic images intended to move the merchandise instead of the head or the heart—the Song of Solomon (Jerusalem, p. 34) scored for violin and lawn mower, for evening gown and aluminum roof.

It not always being understood that one is expected to look but not touch, to give way to one’s passion not in the automobile but in the automobile showroom, the packaging of Eros as both a liquid and a powder (freeze-dried and chocolate-flavored, as a Valentine’s Day card and a pedophile website) has been good for business but apparently not so good for the emotional health and happiness of the dreambuying public. !e commercial applications beat the life out of the enterprise, and with it Ovid’s merry sensuality (Rome, p. 22) as well as Plato’s hope of meaning (Athens, p. 71). !e reports published in both the literary and scientific press read like the filings of a customer complaint. Having bought what was sold on the guarantee of a safe and quick passage to the islands of bliss, the purchasers of the product find themselves occupying a luxury suite in hell, and they wish to return the experience for store credit. Similarly with the assurances of enhanced performance, both highway and off-road, that come with the cosmetic surgeries and the rejuvenating chemicals—the warranty doesn’t cover the losses of self-esteem induced by the thrilling heart attack supplied at no extra cost with the penile implant.

!e disappointments follow from the belief that sex and money trade in the same market and that between them it’s possible to set some sort of reliable exchange rate. Fortunately for the future of the human race, the notion is ridiculous. Eros is more nearly matched to his description in ancient Greek myth—offspring of the wind and black-winged night, the double-sexed progenitor of the universe—than with a tabulation of the receipts from the Christmas sales on Madison Avenue and Rodeo Drive. In the same way that bad money chases good money into exile or hiding, the erotic additives and synthetics depress the market in midsummer night dreams. !is issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is intended to put Miss West’s bluebirds back in the sky. !e contributors sing the old song as first written in the language of laughter or tears, speak to the unions of body and soul dancing to the music of time.

Idon’t know what country Friedman
thinks he’s been living in for
the past thirty years, or in which
New England gift shops he searches
out the treasures of the American
past. I can understand why he might
wish for a happy return to an imaginary
state of grace, but to explain
last fall’s melee in the world’s financial
markets as a falling away from
the Puritan work ethic is to misread
America’s economic and political
history and to mistake the message
encoded in the DNA of the American
dream. Given any kind of
choice in the matter, who among
the faithful ever has preferred hard
work to the fast shuffle and the artful
dodge, the bird in the hand to
the five in the bush? When has the
thinking about the how ever been
preferred to the projecting of the
how much? Ask any American what
money means, and the respondent is
an odds-on favorite to say that it’s
the soul of freedom and the proof of
wisdom, that if only he or she had
more of it the upgraded combination
of numbers must open the vault
of Paradise. Add to the account the
long-standing American romance
with crime—the outlaw and the
confidence man forever shining like
the fixed stars in the Hollywood
sky—and although the desire for
wealth might be seen as a character
trait that doesn’t get along well with
others, the statement “Yes, but I did
it for the money” serves to explain,
if not always to justify, any and all
forms of conduct (tax evasion, mail
fraud, a second marriage or a third
divorce, the war in Iraq) that otherwise
might be regarded as insensitive,
stupid, self-defeating, or unjust.

The looting of the U.S. Treasury is
never an easy trick, but to carry off
more than $1 trillion in broad daylight
while the members of Congress
stand around applauding the exit
strategy as one certain to guarantee
the health and happiness of the
American people is a wonder of entrepreneurial
enterprise that surely
deserves some sort of tip of the hat.
When the James gang robbed the
Kansas City Fair in the fall of 1872,
the local paper acknowledged the
achievement as “so diabolically daring
and so utterly in contempt of fear
that we are bound to admire it and
revere its perpetrators,” and I would
have thought that our own easily
awestruck news media might have
found a few words of respect and esteem
for the perps who knocked over
the Wall Street fairgrounds last year.
How not at least revere the scale of
the undertaking—nine banks emptied
of more than $500 billion in
capital, as much as $8 trillion withdrawn
from the Dow Jones Industrial
Average, $2 trillion from the country’s
pension and retirement accounts.
How not admire the “collaborating
the old-fashioned way,”
stock-market touts working together
with the Federal Reserve, investment
bankers with credit-rating agencies,
hedge-fund managers with committees
of Congress, all doing their part
to gin up the numbers and shear the
sheep? For the financial operatives
booming the sale of worthless paper,
the bonus money last year came up
to the sum of $39 billion. How not
at least commend so vivid a revival
of the frontier American spirit and
so eloquent a testimony to the
powers of the unfettered
free market?

Why then the sermons and no
joy in Deadwood? Friedman and his
associate clergy in the pulpits at
Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal
apparently require more edifying
precedents than those to be found
in Mark Twain’s Nevada mining
camps or in Charles and Henry
Adams’s Chapters of Erie. If they
worry about straying too far from
the sacred Massachusetts shore, they
might wish to consult Robert Patton’s
Patriot Pirates, a history of the
Revolutionary War at sea published
in a timely fashion last spring soon
after the prize crew from JPMorgan
Chase swarmed aboard the wreck of
Bear Stearns. Patton suggests, and
offers a good deal of evidence to
demonstrate, that our war of independence
was won by the stout-hearted greed of
New England ship captains licensed by the
Continental Congress in the autumn of 1775
to plunder, burn, or sell at auction
British vessels bringing munitions
and military stores to the king’s regiments
quartered on the merchants
of Boston. The colonists at the time
had few other means of acquiring
weapons with which to give voice to
their rebellion, and General George
Washington understood that his illequipped
and untried troops were
not likely “to do much in a land
way” against the superior force of
the British Army. It occurred to the
general to admit the servants of
Mammon to the kingdom of Heaven
with the thought that a squadron
of privateers steered on the compass
bearings of murderous self-interest
might inflict enough damage on
Britain’s overseas trade to persuade
the British Parliament that war with
its North American colonies was a
losing proposition.

Opponents of the policy thought
it unworthy of Christian gentlemen,
one likely to encourage practices
both vicious and depraved, tending
to “the destruction of the morals of
the people.” Friedman not being
present, the objections were overruled
by the advocates of piracy as
public service, among them John
Adams, who informed his fellow representatives
in Philadelphia that the
innovative investment strategy securitized
the criminal collateral. “It is
prudent,” he said, “not to put virtue
to too serious a test. I would use
American virtue as sparingly as possible
lest we wear it out.”

The voyages were rigged as
venture-capital deals, the richest
share of the spoils reserved to the
managing partners who advanced
the money to build and provision
the ships, lesser amounts distributed
to the officers, the subcontractors,
the accomplice politicians, and the
crews. The work was not without its
difficulties. Great Britain in the
1770s was the world’s superpower,
its navy equivalent to America’s
twenty-first-century Air Force, and
for any privateer coming within
range of the broadside from a British
frigate the end was as certain as foreclosure
on a California mortgage
armed with a subprime loan from
Countrywide Financial. But for captains
able to avoid unlucky shifts in
the wind, the rewards were of a
match with those achieved in the
Civil War gold rooms, the 1920s
Wall Street rise, and the Internet
boom of the late 1990s—many times
the cost of setting sail from Plymouth
or Newburyport—and during
the course of the Revolutionary War
the winnowing of what came to be
known as “the golden harvest” at sea
developed into a big business. If in
the autumn of 1775 as few as ten or
twenty small schooners were cruising
the Atlantic coast, by 1783 as many
as 4,000 investment vehicles had
been licensed to practice the art of
piracy as far offshore as the West Indies
and the Mediterranean.

Better yet, the costs often were defrayed
by the semblance of a government
in Philadelphia, the profits taken
by the speculators in Boston,
Providence, and Marblehead. The
contracts specified a transfer of the
proceeds to the Colonial war effort,
but the agreements tended to go
AWOL when it came time to offload
the boodle, preferably gunpowder
but also African slaves, tobacco,
sugar, table linen, Spanish wine, and
anything else the traffic happened to
be bearing.

Which isn’t to say that the sparing
use of virtue didn’t prove to be “the
pivot,” as Adams had foreseen and
Washington had said, “on which
everything else turned.” The putting
of country second instead of first
brought with it change believed in
by electorates both domestic and foreign.
By 1776 the British were losing
cargoes valued in the millions of dollars;
by 1782 the destructive presence
of American privateers in the
English Channel had dismasted the
British public’s enthusiasm for what
was no longer a splendid little war.
More importantly for the American
love of liberty and pursuit of happiness,
the lessons learned in the
oceangoing counting houses of
the Revolutionary War furnished the
new republic with risk-management
models that over the course of the
next century settled the trans-
Mississippi American West, built
the steel mills and the railroads, financed
numerous richly rewarding
stock-market schemes, and by 1899,
the year that Thorstein Veblen
published his Theory of the Leisure
Class, advanced the country’s market
society to a stage in which
vendible capital had replaced
vendible labor as the product that
turned the wheels of fortune. The
pirates no longer went down to the
sea in ships, but neither did they go
about the getting of an honest living.
Reconfigured as predatory financiers
embodying the ethic of
what Veblen called “the higher barbarian
culture,” they lived off the
work of the lower industrial orders,
concerning themselves only with
the pleasantries of how much, never,
God forbid, with the
indignity of how.

Even more touching than
Thomas Friedman’s laying of a
wreath on the grave of Cotton
Mather was the sight of Alan
Greenspan sitting down by the
rivers of Babylon, his harp hung
upon the willows, silent in a strange
land. During his tenure as chairman
of the Federal Reserve (1987–2006)
Greenspan had believed it his duty
to irrigate the fruited plain of the
American economy with the flow of
easy money, his policy to supply the
banks with the abundant credit, at
low cost and presumably risk-free,
that enabled the floating of both the
Internet bubble (1995–2000) and
the housing bubble (2003–2006).
For his efforts he was accorded the
title of “maestro,” his word on the
country’s finances trading at parity
with the word of God. When it was
suggested (as long ago as 1994) that
the newborn market in derivatives
demanded some sort of government
supervision, Greenspan discounted
the suggestion as insulting to the integrity
of the public-spirited Wall
Street gentlemen laboring on behalf
of the common good; when on October
23 of last year he appeared before
the House Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform to
explain what had gone wrong with
the making of something out of
nothing, his tongue cleaved to the
roof of his mouth. “Those of us who
have looked to the self-interest of
lending institutions to protect shareholder’s
equity, myself included, are
in a state of shocked disbelief.”

To think that the Wall Street financial
institutions seek to protect
the equity of their customers in preference
to their own is to think that at
the Las Vegas poker tables the dealers
seek to protect the chips stacked in
front of the sweet old lady in the blue
baseball cap playing a system drawn
from the book of Revelation. But if
Chairman Greenspan put virtue to
too serious a test, so do the cupbearers
of civic conscience who complain of
the lack of “leadership” on the part of
the government in Washington.
Throughout the months of September
and October the Dow was gaining
or losing as many as 700 points a day
(thereby enriching the speculators
taking a cut of the action on both the
black and the red), and from the
choir lofts of the national media the
news went forth that what had gone
missing from both the Congress and
the Bush Administration was the prudence
and the clarity of communication.
Avarice and incompetence at
both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue,
“nihilists” in the House of Representatives,
corporate bagmen in the Senate,
everywhere a falling away of
sober business practice and the habit
of self-denial—where, O Lord, was
the wisdom in the shining city on the
hill, where the watchers on the ramparts
of freedom looking out for the
safety and well-being of
the American taxpayer?

As with the misreadings of the
spirit of American commercial enterprise,
the misinterpretings of the purpose
of American government substitute
the theory for the practice. Just
as the stock-market speculations do
what they’re intended to do, which is
to reward the promoters and fleece
the marks, the government does
what it’s supposed to do, which is to
enrich the creditors and plunder the
debtors. The eighteenth-century
New England privateers flew the
American flag as a flag of convenience,
not as a declaration of their
allegiance to a cause but as a license
to seize the wealth stored in the
hulls of wooden ships. Their twentyfirst-
century heirs and assigns employ
the semblance of a government in
Washington as an investment vehicle
permitting them to seize the
wealth stored in the labor of the
American people. The Republican
and Democratic parties compete
for the brokerage business, between
them putting up $2.4 billion for
last year’s presidential campaigns—
i.e., for the speculative ventures
that bundle junk slogans into
collateralized-debt obligations,
which, when it comes time to offload
the boodle, transform the upside
into private property, the downside
into the good news that poverty
replenishes the soul.

When Treasury Secretary Henry
M. Paulson distributes more than $1
trillion to the country’s financial
overlords ($700 billion to the commercial
and investment banks; $150
billion to AIG, $100 billion each to
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, etc.),
he proceeds in the time-honored
manner of the governments in Washington
that during the four decades
after the Civil War presented the railroads
with 183 million acres of subprime
desert on which to set up the
derivatives market in pioneer homesteads
that were sold as gardens of
Eden on fertile prairies “ready for the
plow and spade.” When the land
holdings turned into fairy-tale castles
of debt rising from the mists of
boundless credulity, it was the farmers
wondering where was the rain in
western Nebraska, not the silk-hatted
gentlemen rounding up the oysters in
William K. Vanderbilt’s palm court,
who paid for the burials of the mules
and the American dream. Bait-andswitch
is the name of the national
pastime. President Grover Cleveland
confirmed the principle in 1887, explaining
his veto of a bill passed by
Congress to provide financial aid to
the poor. “The lesson should be constantly
enforced,” he said, “that
though the people support the government,
the government should not
support the people.” Such has been
the policy of the Bush Administration
for the past eight years; so also is
it the policy “alive today in China,”
Thomas Friedman’s far-off happy
land where the cheap labor relies on
the Puritan work ethic to lay up its
treasure in Heaven.

At 3:39 P.M. on Friday, June 13,
Tom Brokaw interrupted NBC’s regular
programming with the latebreaking
news that Tim Russert had
died—of a heart attack earlier that
afternoon while preparing his Sunday
broadcast of Meet the Press—and
by the top of the next hour the story
was being wrapped up in the ribbons
of a national tragedy. Maybe not as
tragic as the falling of John F.
Kennedy Jr.’s plane into the Atlantic
Ocean but undoubtedly an
historic moment, up there in lights
with the death of President Ronald
Reagan and the loss of Lieutenant
Colonel George A. Custer on the
field at the Little Bighorn.

On the off chance that a bereaved
citizenry might be slow to recover
from the shock and reprocess the
awe, MSNBC throughout the rest of
the weekend projected an electionnight
air of developing crisis. Brokaw
and Keith Olbermann took turns
reading statements incoming from
the leaders of the free world—“Tim
was a tough and hard-working newsman”
(President George W. Bush);
“He was the standardbearer for serious
journalism” (Senator Barack
Obama); “The Explainer-in-Chief of
our political life” (Senator Joe
Leiberman); “Always true to his
proud Buffalo roots” (joint communiqué,
Bill and Hillary Clinton); “A
gentleman and a giant” (Senator Edward
Kennedy); “He was hard. He
was fair . . . . He loved the Buffalo
Bills” (Senator John McCain).

During the delays between bulletins,
Brokaw and Olbermann introduced
a procession of Washington
media celebrities arriving with rush
deliveries of op-ed–page solemnity
and camera-ready grief. For two days
and three nights, they paid tribute to
the glory that was Tim and the
grandeur that is themselves. Before
the red carpet was rolled up on Monday
morning, America had been
comforted in its sorrow by, among
others—Andrea Mitchell, David
Broder, Mike Barnicle, Al Hunt, Bob
Woodward, Gwen Ifill, Sally Quinn,
Howard Fineman, Jon Meacham,
Maria Shriver, Pat Buchanan, Ben
Bradlee, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Brokaw found Russert’s death so hard
to imagine that his only word for it
was “surreal”; Olbermann borrowed
his parting word from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, “Now cracks a noble heart.
Good night, sweet prince; and flights
of angels sing thee to thy rest.” The
choir standing by in the studio supplied
the doo-wop vocals.

“This is a blow to America” (Peggy
Noonan)
“An unfathomable loss” (Brian
Williams, from Afghanistan)
“The gold standard in everything
he did” (Chris Matthews, from Paris)
“The ideal American journalist”
(Dan Rather)
“He was a friend to millions of
people” (Barbara Walters)

By Friday evening the rending of
garments had spread, like a bloom of
algae on an endangered Florida pond,
to all the other news organizations in
town, many hours of sweet remembrance
on ABC and Fox News as well
as on CBS and CNN, more of it on
Saturday and Sunday, Tim’s friends
and fellow on-air personalities thickening
the sentiment, strengthening
the highlight reels, bringing the perspective.
I’m pretty sure that I didn’t
miss any of the major talking
points—Russert a “devoted father”
and “a reverential son”; Russert, “Hail
Mary and full of grace,” certain to
have been enthroned as the Pope had
he chosen a career in the Catholic
Church; Russert a “basic old American
patriot” and a true friend of the
common man; Russert likened both
to Tom Sawyer and to Huck Finn, to
Teddy as well as to Franklin Roosevelt;
Russert born poor and humble
in Buffalo, “Irish, ethnic, workingclass,”
gone forth to become rich and
famous in the capitol of the universe
but never losing sight of the Buffalo
River; above all, Russert the toughminded
journalist, hard-hitting and
relentless, unafraid to speak truth to
power, so fierce in his interrogations
that for a trembling public servant
seated across the table from him on
Meet the Press “it was like going up
against an All-Star pitcher
in Yankee Stadium.”

On Monday I thought I’d
heard the end of the sales promotion.
Tim presumably had ascended
to the great studio camera in the sky
to ask Thomas Jefferson if he intended
to run for president in 1800,
and I assumed that the Washington
news media would allow his soul to
rest in peace. I was mistaken. For
live broadcast on Wednesday, June
18, MSNBC staged a memorial service
in the Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts, and if I’d thought
that the bathos couldn’t reach new
force levels, it was because I’d failed
to account for either the cynicism or
the vanity of a fourth estate that regards
itself as the light in the window
of Western civilization. Several
wire services in town shut down
their operations during the ninetyminute
special as a mark of respect
for the departed hero, his last rites
not to be disturbed with disquieting
reports from Afghanistan or ugly rumors
about the national economy
sinking further into the quicksand
of recession.

The performance attracted an
opening-night crowd of the Washington
carriage trade, 1,500 notables
come to see themselves in the
mirrors. Tom Brokaw lifted a bottle
of Rolling Rock beer (the workingman’s
beer, Tim’s favorite) to say
that “there will be some tears, some
laughs, and the occasional truth.”
Speeches from Maria Shriver,
Mario Cuomo, and Mike Barnicle,
who was moved to blow “a kiss
goodbye” to the “boy of summer,”
who “always, always left us smiling.”
An Irish tenor sang “Ave Maria”;
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick presented
the homily, “Pray that the
beloved anchor of Meet the Press is
now sitting at the large Table of the
Lord to begin a conversation which
will last forever.” Via satellite from
Cologne, Germany, on a large
screen descending from somewhere
up in the chandeliers, Bruce Springsteen
appeared with his guitar to
sing “Thunder Road.”

The program signed off with an
orchestra playing “Over the Rainbow”
while the guests made their
way out to the limousines to be
blessed with a sign from Heaven. Lo
and behold, right there in the gray
twilight, swinging low over the
White House and the Washington
Monument, right there in plain
sight, there was a real rainbow in
the sky. Later that night on
MSNBC’s rebroadcast of the proceedings,
Olbermann reported the
rainbow as no coincidence. “I know
that was Russert,” he said. “I’d recognize
him anywhere.”

With Olbermann it’s sometimes
hard to know when or if he’s attempting
a joke, but if he was joking,
at whom or at what was the
joke directed? Certainly not at rainbows;
probably not at God. Conceivably
at the thought of MSNBC
hunting high and low for the Easter
eggs of truth, or at the idea of Tim
as a knife-wielding journalist. Olbermann
is an intelligent man, and
how else could an intelligent man
interpret the glorification of Russert
if not as a joke, or as a ninety-sixhour
public-service announcement
paid for by General Electric, the
company that owns the NBC networks
but depends for its patriotic
profit margins on its dealings as one
of the nation’s primary weapons
manufacturers. Jack Welch, the company’s
former chairman and CEO,
was among the mourners making a
cameo appearance in the weekend
film clips. “We all felt he was
our friend. He represented us.
We were proud of him.
We loved him.”

Many people loved Russert,
and I don’t doubt that they had reason
to do so. I’m sure that most of
what was said about him on camera
was true: that he was a devoted father,
a devout Catholic, and a faithful
friend, generous in spirit and a
joyful noise unto the Lord. I mean no
disrespect to his widow or to his son,
but if I have no reason to doubt his
virtues as a man, neither do I have
any reason to credit the miracle of
Russert as a journalist eager to speak
truth to power. In his professional as
opposed to his personal character, his
on-air persona was that of an attentive
and accommodating head waiter,
as helpless as Charlie Rose in his
infatuation with A-list celebrity, his
modus operandi the same one that
pointed Rameau’s obliging nephew
to the roast pheasant and the coupe
aux marrons in eighteenth-century
Paris: “Butter people up, good God,
butter them up.”

With the butter Russert was a
master craftsman, his specialty the
mixing of it with just the right drizzle
of salt. The weekend videotapes,
presumably intended to display
Russert at the top of his game, deconstructed
the recipe. To an important
personage Russert asked one
or two faintly impertinent questions,
usually about a subject of little or
no concern to anybody outside the
rope lines around official Washington;
sometimes he discovers a contradiction
between a recently issued
press release and one that was distributed
by the same politician
some months or years previously.
No matter with which spoon
Russert stirred the butter, the reply
was of no interest to him, not worth
his notice or further comment. He
had sprinkled his trademark salt, his
work was done. The important personage
was free to choose from a
menu offering three forms of response—
silence, spin, rancid lie. If
silence, Russert moved on to another
topic; if spin, he nodded wisely; if
rancid lie, he swallowed it. The
highlight reels for the most part
show him in the act of swallowing.

November 7, 1993: Question for
President Bill Clinton, “Will you allow
North Korea to build a nuclear
bomb?”
A: “North Korea cannot be allowed
to build a nuclear bomb.”

February 25, 2001: Question for
John Kerry, “John Kerry, you going
to run for President in 2004?
A. I’m running for reelection in
2002.
Q. How about ’04?
A. I’m not making any decisions
beyond ’02.

April 13, 1997: Question for Louis
Farrakhan, Supreme Minister of the
Nation of Islam, “Would you be willing
to retract or apologize for some
of the things you said?”
A: “If I can defend every word
that I speak and every word that I
speak is truth, then I have nothing
to apologize for.”

February 8, 2004: Question for
President George W. Bush, “In light
of not finding the weapons of mass
destruction, do you believe the war
in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of
necessity?”
A. “That’s an interesting question.
Please elaborate on that a little bit.
A war of choice or a war of necessity?
It’s a war of necessity.”

Having seen the original broadcast
of the interview with President
Bush, I remember Russert taking
great care not to embarrass his exalted
guest. The President couldn’t
help making a fool of himself
(“When the United States says
there will be serious consequences,
and if there isn’t serious consequences,
it creates adverse consequences”;
“I make decisions here in
the Oval Office in foreign-policy
matters with war on my mind”;
“The American people need to
know they got a President who sees
the world the way it is,” etc.), but
Russert didn’t subject the fatuous
statements to the indignity of
a clarification.

The attitude doesn’t lead to the
digging up of much news that might
be of interest to the American
people, but it endeared Russert to
his patrons and clients. Madeleine
Albright, secretary of state in the
Clinton Administration, expressed
her gratitude to Olbermann: “Tim
was amazing because I can tell you
that, as a public official, it was really,
first of all, a treat to get on the
show.” Two days later, over at
NBC, Mary Matalin (former CBS
and CNN talk-show host, former
counselor to Vice President Dick
Cheney) seconded the motion, attributing
Russert’s profound knowledge
of national politics to his superb
qualities as a rubber stamp.
“He respected politicians,” Matalin
said. “He knew that they got
blamed for everything, got credit for
nothing. He knew how much they
meant. He never treated them with
the cynicism that attends some of
these interviews. So they had a
place to be loved.” Remembering
Russert on ABC, Sam Donaldson
explained why too much salt in the
butter makes it harder to spread.
“He” [Russert] “understood as well
as anyone, maybe better than almost
anyone, that the reason political
reporters are there is not
to speak truth to power . . . but to
make those who say we have the
truth—politicians—explain
it.”

Speaking truth to power doesn’t
make pious Sunday-morning television,
leads to “jealousy, upsets, persecution,”
doesn’t draw a salary of $5
million a year. The notion that journalists
were once in the habit of doing
so we borrow from the medium of
print, from writers in the tradition of
Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, H. L.
Mencken, I. F. Stone, Hunter
Thompson, and Walter Karp, who assumed
that what was once known as
“the press” received its accreditation
as a fourth estate on the theory that it
represented the interests of the citizenry
as opposed to those of the government.
Long ago in the days before
journalists became celebrities, their
enterprise was reviled and poorly
paid, and it was understood by working
newspapermen that the presence
of more than two people at their funeral
could be taken as a sign that
they had disgraced the profession.

On television the voices of dissent
can’t be counted upon to match the
studio drapes or serve as tasteful leadins
to the advertisements for Oil of
Olay and the U.S. Marine Corps.
What we now know as the “news
media” serve at the pleasure of the
corporate sponsor, their purpose not
to tell truth to the powerful but to
transmit lies to the powerless. Like
Russert, who served his apprenticeship
as an aide-de-camp to the late
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
most of the prominent figures in the
Washington press corps (among
them George Stephanopoulos, Bob
Woodward, and Karl Rove) began
their careers as bagmen in the employ
of a dissembling politician or a
corrupt legislature. Regarding themselves
as de facto members of government,
enabling and co-dependent,
their point of view is that of the
country’s landlords, their practice
equivalent to what is known among
Wall Street stock market touts as “securitizing
the junk.” When requesting
explanations from secretaries of
defense or congressional committee
chairmen, they do so with the understanding
that any explanation will
do. Explain to us, my captain, why
the United States must go to war in
Iraq, and we will relay the message to
the American people in words of one
or two syllables. Instruct us, Mr.
Chairman, in the reasons why KStreet
lobbyists produce the paper
that Congress passes into law, and we
will show that the reasons are
healthy, wealthy, and wise. Do not
be frightened by our pretending to be
suspicious or scornful. Together with
the television camera that sees but
doesn’t think, we’re here to watch, to
fall in with your whims and approve
your injustices. Give us this day our
daily bread, and we will hide your
vices in the rosebushes of salacious
gossip and clothe your crimes in the
aura of inspirational anecdote.

I don’t doubt that Russert was as
good at the game as anybody in
Washington, but why the five-star
goodbye? Why the scattering of incense
for a journalist who so prided
himself on being in the loop that
off-camera he assured his informed
sources that nothing they said was
on the record? Why a requiem mass
for a pet canary?

The production values were so far
out of line with the object of their affections
that the memorial services
collapsed into absurdity. Unless, of
course, the mistake was to think of
the proceedings as somehow Christian
in character and intent, a variation
on the singing of a Te Deum in
the National Cathedral instead of as
something more along the lines of
Homer’s Greek heroes sacrificing a
milk-white bull to Apollo. Seen as
pagan ritual, even the highlight reels
made sense. The Washington news
media worship at the altars of divine
celebrity, and maybe they begin to
suspect that despite the promise of
their ceaseless self-promotions they
are not immortal, their market share
hitting new lows, their audiences drifting
away to Comedy Central and the
blogs. How then to regain the favor of
the god in whose image they believe
themselves created? With the offering
of a precious gift, and what could be
more precious than “the ideal American
journalist,” a “basic old American
patriot,” and the “friend to millions
of people”? Before leading the
animal to slaughter, the old Greeks
dusted its horns with gold.

When the questions about the
killing of Sean Bell came due for an answer
last April 25 in New York State
Supreme Court, Justice Arthur J.
Cooperman produced as fine a piece of
the soyl’d and slubber’d art as can be
seen anywhere in the halls of Congress
or redacted from a Justice Department
directive prescribing torture
for our Muslim guests in the prison at
Guantánamo Bay. The judge’s way
with words was the more admirable
because he obviously was afraid that his
adjudication of the case conceivably
could lead to trouble in the streets.

The killing under review had occurred
seventeen months previously,
on November 25, 2006, outside a strip
club in Jamaica, Queens, where five
police officers fired a broadside of fifty
bullets at the car in which Bell, age
twenty-three and unarmed, was sitting
with two companions on the morning
of his wedding day. The city’s tabloid
press presented its reports of the shooting
as a terror alert, the fifty bullets
seen as far too many, the show of force
thought to be excessive and gratuitous.
The predictable storm of outrage in
the city’s black community prompted
the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse
Jackson to issue statements implying
that Bell had been summarily executed
by a firing squad for the offense of
having been born black. To a hastily
summoned press conference Mayor
Bloomberg offered his sympathies and
an apology, “It is to me unacceptable or
inexplicable how you can have fiftyodd
shots fired.” The New York Times
editorial page thought it “hard to explain”
the sequence of events as “anything
but panic.”

Sensitive to the emotions aroused by
the incident, the Queens County District
Attorney’s Office conducted a
well-publicized investigation resulting
in a trial without a jury of three police
detectives charged with various counts
of assault, manslaughter, and reckless
endangerment. The court heard eight
weeks of testimony from fifty-six witnesses,
among them Bell’s two companions,
severely wounded in the
broadside. The evidence established
the lack of criminal purpose or intent
in the mind of the deceased (no gun
in his possession, for instance), but
in the minds of the detectives firing at
the car the record showed toxic levels
of hysteria. Camouflaged in plainclothes,
they belonged to an undercover
unit mounting surveillance of
the strip club’s presumed locus as a
point of sale for prostitutes and drugs;
the young men in the club with Bell
were members of his bachelor party.
Outside in the street at 4:00 A.M. the
police mistook the bachelor party for
criminals, the bachelor party was unaware
that the police were police.
One of the detectives thought he’d
heard somebody say something about
a concealed gun. Nobody at the scene
subsequently could say for certain why
or when the shooting started.

Which didn’t mean that Bell wasn’t
dead, or that most of the people who
showed up at the courthouse on April
25—Bell’s relatives and intended bride,
prominent figures in the black community,
citizens of all races and religious
denominations interested in the
equitable distributions of civil liberty—
didn’t think that Bell had been
murdered, if not in cold blood then at
least in a moment of panic or a fit of
passion. They had come to see enacted
what they construed as justice, and
what they expected of the court was a
verdict fitting a punishment
to a crime.

Justice Cooperman found no evidence
of the latter, no reason for the
former. In place of both he provided
aphorisming pedantry, prefacing his
acquittal of the three defendants on
all counts with the inference that it
wasn’t detectives Michael Oliver,
Gescard Isnora, and Marc Cooper who
killed Sean Bell; it was Section 35.30
of New York State’s penal code. The
young man’s death was tragic (as young
men’s deaths always are, in Queens as
in Shakespeare’s plays and the deserts
of Iraq), but if any crime had been
committed, the perp was the policy
governing the use of deadly force by
police officers who find themselves in
circumstances they deem threatening
to their lives and to the performance
of their civic duty. What was at issue
was not what happened in the street
outside Club Kalua at 4:00 A.M. on
November 25, 2006, but what was happening
“at the time and place of occurrence,”
in the “mind-set of each
defendant”—the character, quality,
and cause of the defendant’s alarm, its
compliance or non-compliance with
one or another of the penal code’s various
states of perception that justify
the application of deadly force.

The “mind-set of the victims” Justice
Cooperman pronounced irrelevant.
Bell and his companions were wandering
around in Queens with no policy
other than the one contained in
the Bill of Rights. The words were old
and far away and not prioritized for
quick release in dim light at a distance
of thirty yards.

Finding that much of the trial testimony
“just didn’t make sense,” Justice
Cooperman based his ruling on the
privileged states of fear and confusion
in the minds of the defendants, which,
being licensed as well as invisible, didn’t
rise “to the level of criminal acts.”
Questions bearing on the degree of
their “carelessness and incompetence”
didn’t fall within the judge’s jurisdiction;
technical assessments involved
matters of policy properly addressed
in “other forums” (the Police Department’s
Internal Affairs Bureau, possibly
a small-claims or traffic court) capable
of determining the guilt or
innocence of a piece of paper. Although
greeted with expressions of
shock and disbelief by many of the
people seated in the courtroom, the
judge’s line of reasoning was in compliance
with what has become the law
of the land—another way of saying
that power is as power does, its fears and
confusions excused as a matter of privilege,
its agents free to substitute company
policy for constitutional principle.

A similar state of affairs urged John
Milton to condemn the ways and means
(the Star Chamber, the royal taking
of the forests and the common grazing,
trial by fiat) employed by King
Charles I to suppress the liberties and
seize the property of the English people.
The poet relied for his arguments both
on scripture (the New Testament notion
that every man is as free as any
other man) as well as on the chapters in
the Magna Carta that defend the people
against the savagery of government and
grant them the right of judgment by
their peers. His ideas formed by circumstances
that led to two revolutions
in seventeenth-century England, Milton
understood “canker’d policie” as
the wall separating the people from
their natural rights, protecting the
citadels of money against the
intrusions of the law.

Our own going back to the good
old days of trial by fiat in a king’s star
chamber is what gets presented these
days as late-breaking news from Washington
and New York. We have a foreign
policy that assures the profits of
the defense industry, not the safety of
the American people; we have financial
policies that protect the creditors
but not the debtors; we have healthcare
policies that guarantee the wellbeing
of corporations, tax policies that
shelter the holdings of the rich and
multiply the burdens of the poor.

For five years the United States has
been waging war in Iraq at the pleasure
of President George W. Bush, his
perception of a life-threatening circumstance
(the nonexistent weapons
of mass destruction under the control of
Saddam Hussein) sanctioned by guidelines
that might as well have been written
by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
That the President’s perception
was at odds with what in fact was happening
on the banks of the Tigris River
mattered as little as what was happening
outside a strip club in Queens.
The bombarding of Baghdad with a
show of excessive and gratuitous force
didn’t rise “to the level of criminal acts”
because the fear and confusion in the
President’s mind was a matter of established
policy, the mind-set of the American
electorate (of its representatives
in Congress, of the United Nations Security
Council, of the civilian population
in Iraq) as irrelevant as the mindset
of the three young men in Sean
Bell’s Nissan Altima. Or, as Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the
time, “Stuff happens” for which nobody
can be held accountable, least of all the
Pentagon commanders handling the
maps, plans, force projections, and mission
statements—pieces of paper whose
guilt or innocence could only be determined
in other forums not open to
public discussion or review.

The estimated cost of entertaining
the President with a fireworks display in
the romantic Mesopotamian desert now
stands at $600 billion, a seizure of the
people’s property on a scale undreamed
of even by the splendid Charles I. The
Pentagon’s “stop-loss order” allows for
the seizure not only of property but also
of persons. As revised and rearmed in
2007, the military enlistment contract—
Section 10 (b) of DD Form
4/1—obliges the new recruit to agree
that, “In a time of war, my enlistment
may be extended without my consent
for the duration of the war and for six
months after its end.” Given the Bush
Administration’s policy of never-ending
war on terror, it’s fair to say the
chance of early release from bondage is
slim to none, but as a precaution against
unforeseen outbreaks of peace, Title
10 (E, Part II, Chap. 1209, Section
12305 (a)) of United States Code
makes clear that the debt is owed to the
person of the President, not to the Constitution:
“the President may suspend
any provision of law relating to promotion,
retirement, or separation applicable
to any member of the armed
forces who the President determines is
essential to the national security of the
United States.”

So also, under the aegis of “national
security,” the commander in chief
reserves the right to torture people perceived
as enemy combatants (whether
in Kandahar or New Jersey), to suspend,
as a matter of policy, unauthorized
access to habeas corpus, to order
twenty-four-hour surveillance of any
American household, parking lot, or
place of business that he deems unworthy
of America’s trust—to tap the
phones, sequester the email, examine
the bank records and the toilet bowls.
The citizenry doesn’t enjoy the equal
right to inquire into the mind-set of
the government. Requests for clarification
sent via the Freedom of Information
Act meet with the suspicion
that they constitute reckless endangerment
of privileged states of consciousness.
Invariably the response is
delayed, sometimes for several years;
as often as not, the petition is denied.
Two years ago the New York Times
asked for details of the Pentagon’s deployment
of some of its former generals
to sit and serve as its mouthpieces
on the cable-television news shows.
The impertinence was dismissed with
contempt: “Your request is not for information
on the war on terror. It is
for Department of Defense interactions
with military and security analysts who
discuss the war on terror. Therefore,
you did not establish a compelling need
for the information you requested.”

The same slubbering of policy fends
off requests for further information
submitted to the captains of finance
by people wondering why they lost
their houses, what happened to their
holdings in the stock market or their
savings in a pension fund. The information
is proprietary and not for distribution,
“interactions” between
bankers and securities analysts discussing
the state secrets of money. If
any fault is to be found, it is with whatever
investment policy happened to
be in effect at Countrywide or Bear
Stearns on the day the money went
south. Unless the bankrupted plaintiff
can prove deliberate intent to commit
fraud (all but impossible so long as
the policy was followed) the fear and
confusion in the mind of his friendly
financial planner doesn’t rise to the
level of a criminal act.

The artful dodging behind the
screens of policy has become so standard
an operating procedure nearly
everywhere in American society these
days that it’s a wonder the business
schools don’t teach it as an exercise in
modern dance. Walk into any hospital
or doctor’s office, attempt to correct
a careless or inaccurate telephone bill,
drug prescription, or credit rating, ask
to get off an airplane parked for three
hours on a runway, and invariably the
fault is never with the helpless smile
behind the counter or across the desk.
“Believe me, madam, if it were up to
me, your child would receive the treatment
this afternoon, but it has not
been pre-authorized by your insurance
provider.” “I understand, sir, that your
pension is gone, but reimbursement
is against company policy.
I’m very sorry.”

So apparently was Justice Cooperman.
Aware that his ruling was certain
to disappoint at least some members of
his audience, he began by saying that he
would “like to remind everyone how
important it is to honor the decorum of
the court and remain quiet after the
verdicts are rendered.” In many ways,
he said, “this trial was a hardship. . . . To
overreact to the outcome while you
are in this courtroom, whether you are
satisfied or dissatisfied with the result,
would detract from the great effort that
was expended to assure a fair trial.”

The tone of apprehension in the
judge’s voice suggested his knowing
that what he was about to say was disgraceful.
A judge, after all, is morally
if not legally bound to favor and
prefer the freedoms of the people over
the jury-rigged restraints imposed on
those freedoms. By declaring the
moral principle inoperative, Justice
Cooperman was giving evidence of
the dereliction of his duty.

He needn’t have worried. The
brief flurry of protest staged on the
steps of the courthouse by the family
and friends of the deceased was
shouted down by the editorials in the
next day’s newspapers, the New York
Times respecting the verdict, “as all
New Yorkers should,” the New York
Post happy to see that “politically
charged cases can be judged solely on
the basis of the facts.”

That Justice Cooperman hadn’t
done so became apparent on May 20,
when the NYPD filed “administrative
charges” against seven of its operatives
on location “at the time and place of
occurrence” near the strip club in
Queens. No major crime had been
committed. Detectives Cooper, Oliver,
and Isnora had violated the NYPD’s
policy manual by “discharging their
firearms outside of department guidelines.”
The other officers present also
had failed to observe proper protocol—
taking “enforcement action”
while deployed as undercover agents,
contaminating evidence, careless management
of the crime scene. Proofs of
carelessness and incompetence, but
nothing said about a miscarriage of
justice and no moral lesson appended
to the cautionary tale.

Our leading voices of repsponsible
opinion in Congress and the news
media take a similarly prioritized approach
to the unwarranted killing
in Iraq. Nothing said about the
wrongful waging of an immoral war
or the massacre of innocents both
American and Iraqi. Violations of
the foreign policy manual—contaminations
of the evidence, careless
management of the crime scene, no
mention of christian or constitutional
principle.

If the New York City police commissioner
finds the underperforming
officers delinquent in their duty, they
stand to lose, as did Secretary Rumsfeld,
their jobs and their reputations as
protectors of the people. They remain
free, as Sean Bell does not, to tour the
talk-show circuit with the story of
their fear, confusion, and good intentions.
Unless the question of Bell’s
abridged civil liberties and disappeared
human rights comes to trial in a federal
court, his death, like the war in
Iraq, can be listed by the authorities
under the tombstone of “administrative
error.”

Not being expert at the interpretation
of economic data, I’m never sure
which leading indicators point in what
direction, but when every morning’s
newspaper offers a further proof of the
bankrupt American dream, I’m prepared
to believe that somewhere near
at hand there is a piper waiting to be
paid. The voices of informed financial
opinion in New York and Washington
(bond salesman, stock market analyst,
investment banker, currency trader,
chairman of the Federal Reserve) act
the part of the alarmed chorus in an ancient
Greek play, bearing witness to
the pride that goeth before a fall, generating
the portents of doom—the
American dollar sinking to record lows
against the euro, the capital and credit
markets reduced to a state of paralysis,
hedge funds vanishing into clouds
of blown-back smoke, home mortgages
abandoned in the Arizona desert, banks
drowned in pools of toxic debt, yet another
American corporate sweetheart
(department store, hotel chain, record
label) sold to a syndicate of Chinese
communists or into the seraglio of an
Arab emir.

When the appalled bystanders fin d
themselves momentarily at a loss for
words, they move downstage and run
the numbers. The national debt
pegged at $9.4 trillion (up from $6.4
trillion in 2003), running expenses of
$16 billion a month for the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan (the eventual
cost projected at more than $3 trillion);
$4 trillion borrowed since 2002
using homes as collateral, the value
of American real estate diminished
by $1 trillion in a matter of months;
losses of $600 billion to be incurred
by investors holding debt instruments
backed by specious credit,
American assets in the amount of
$414 billion sold to foreign buyers in
2007, the Federal Reserve on March
11, 2008, cleansing the wounds of
the New York banks with $200 billion
in liquidity and then, a few days
later, allotting $30 billion for the salvage
of Bear Stearns.

The numbers speak to the scale of
the speculative bubble risen to the
height of an Air Force weather balloon,
but I tend to lose track of their sign
i ficance in the long rows of holloweyed
zeros, and so I am at least grateful
for the clarification that appeared on
the front page of the New York Times
on March 1 under the headline “DRUMBEAT
OF GRIM REPORTS SENDS MARKETS
TUMBLING.” The previous day hadn’t
been a happy one on the New York
Stock Exchange (the Dow off 315
points in a spasm of late-afternoon panic),
and the Times rounded up several
of the usual Wall Street suspects known
to have been present at or near the
scene of the accident. Most of the witnesses
couldn’t remember how or when
the tapping on the drum first came to
their attention—the sound jaunty or
solemn, the drum muffled or accompanied
by bagpipes—and so it was left
to Douglas Peta, chief investment
strategist for J. & W. Seligman, to discover
the moral in the tale:

There is not any one news item that I
can point to. We know that there is
paper out there that we can’t trust.
We don’t know exactly who owns it
and how much. And we don’t know
how they are valuing it.

The observation embraced both the
joys and the sorrows of an enterprise
dependent upon the manufacture of
something for nothing. On the summertime
side of the proposition, when
the fish are jumping and the cotton is
high, the paperwork slows down the
momentum, gets in the way of the
oceanfront views. God forbid that any
buyers out there (of Florida sandcastles,
credit-debt obligations from
JPMorgan Chase) should know exactly
what they own—how much or how
little of it, whether it fades in strong
sunlight or washes off in the laundry.
When the autumn leaves begin to fall
the only intelligible paper that anybody
is likely to see is the arrest warrant and
the eviction notice.

Which isn’t to say that the confidence
game is somehow un-American
or wrong. It is a national pastime as
dearly beloved as baseball—appreciated
as an art and enjoyed as a sport—but
the rules are sometimes hard to explain
to Baptist clergymen and bearded foreigners.
Our creditors in Europe, Asia,
and the Persian Gulf (from whom we
currently borrow $2 billion a day to export
the blessing of democracy to Iraq)
begin to suspect that the American
modus operandi doesn’t lend itself to
the trustworthy management of global
empire. With what collateral do we secure
our credit rating as the world’s
AAA hegemon? George Soros ad-
dressed the question at last January’s
meeting of the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland. Speaking
for what was reported as the consensus
of sound judgment circulating among
the assembled finance ministers, Soros
referred to the break in the American
housing market as “basically the end of
a sixty-year period of continuing credit
expansion based on the dollar as the
reserve currency.”

Having had occasion eleven years
ago to attend the Forum’s meeting at
Davos, I could recall the setting—
prominent businessmen, important
politicians, visionary intellectuals,
primetime journalists passing documents
to one another across the
plum tarts and the coffeepots. The
remembrance of time past served to
measure the lifespan of the American
imperium billed by the Bush Administration
as the deserving heir to both
the glory that was Greece and the
grandeur that was Rome. In 1997 the
United States was flush with money
and long on self-congratulation, the
Clinton government fat with the
promise of a budget surplus and an
as-yet-unexploded stock market bubble,
no enemies of consequence on or
below the horizon, the euro five years
away from being established as a legal
tender. Although for the most part
unfamiliar with languages other than
their own, the American participants
in the Forum seldom missed a chance
to preach the doctrine of enlightened
globalism, awakening the representatives
of less fortunate nations to the
need for “transparency” in their financial
dealings, to the sin of “crony
capitalism” (as practiced by the Indonesians
and the Turks), to the
dangers of “bandit oligarchy” (as
practiced by the Russians and the
sub-Saharan Africans), to the subtle
but necessary distinctions between a
“feverish” and a “consumptive” capital
market, between a “palsied” and a
“suppurating” trade balance. To replay
the tape is to appreciate the
worth of the material as
stand-up comedy.

Soros also had been present at
Davos eleven years ago, which maybe
was why the report of his speech
brought to mind the lofty and condescending
height from which, once upon
a time and in a galaxy far, far away,
the liege lords of American finance
looked down upon people whom they
regarded as vassals, bound both by divine
providence and geopolitical circumstance,
to serve the new world order
centered on the navel of the
universe in Washington. Or possibly
it was a matter of coincidence. On February
12, at the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York three weeks after
reading the report from Davos, I
attended a roundtable discussion entitled
“Sovereign Wealth Funds on the
Rise: Should We Worry?” Owned and
operated by foreign governments,
among them Russia and China as well
as Norway, Saudi Arabia, and the United
Arab Emirates, the funds control a
pool of capital (currently $3 trillion,
expected to rise to $12 trillion in another
ten years) that waters the oases
of the world’s credit markets. What
was instructive was the attitude of the
monied interest in the room—the same
kind of crowd that I’d encountered at
Davos, but one that had come to learn
instead of teach. All present were mindful
of the fact that over the past several
months the sovereign wealth funds
had supplied $60 billion of liquidity to
a roster of favored American financial
institutions, among them Citigroup
and Merrill Lynch, that otherwise
might have been exposed to the embarrassment
of having to sell the
furniture, the silver, and the CEO’s
daughter. The money, of course, was
welcome, but was it to be accepted as
an unrestricted gift from Allah, or did
it come with strings attached? Did any
of the attachments mean anything? If
so, why, how, and to whom?

The consiglieri seated on the podium,
among them a representative of
the International Monetary Fund and
a former deputy secretary of the U.S.
Treasury, answered the questions with
the reassuring news that, at least for
the time being, geopolitical terms and
conditions didn’t impede the progress
of the wire transfers. Nobody in Singapore
was looking to acquire Donald
Rumsfeld’s maps or Condoleezza Rice’s
piano. The experienced investors, most
of them Arabs, could be relied upon
to do straightforward business deals unencumbered
by tactical or strategic objectives;
the Russians and the Chinese
were learning how to behave like gen-
tlemen. Although it was true that the
international funds weren’t subject to
regulatory oversight, which meant that
one still had to contend with the problems
of both opacity and corruption, at
the end of the day and all things considered,
sovereign wealth money was
better than private equity money—not
as volatile, less eager for a quick profit,
not subject to redemption. Nor was
there much reason to worry about undermining
the national security. Except
for a few fragments of homeland
defense (weapons-grade uranium, the
runways at Ronald Reagan National
Airport) nearly everything in the
American estate sale (shopping malls,
universities, telephone companies,
movie studios) could be sold to almost
any buyer whose name the lawyers
knew how to spell. The discussion attracted
the Council’s equivalent of a
sellout crowd—sixty or seventy highend
Wall Street lawyers and merchant
bankers imbued with the wisdom of
the country’s ruling oligarchy—and an
executive summary of both what was
said and what wasn’t said could have
been abstracted under the headings of
two PowerPoints:

1. Goodbye to the sovereignty of
nation-states. The world dances to
the music of money, and the only
frontier that matters is the one that
separates the gardens of the rich from
the deserts of the poor. The Upper
East Side of Manhattan belongs to
the same polity as the 8th Arrondissement
in Paris and the
Odintsovo district in Moscow. The
yachts moored in the Bay of Naples
and the lagoon at Bora Bora sail under
the flags of the same admiralty
that posts squadrons off the shore of
Nantucket and the Costa Brava.
2. Geoeconomics trumps geopolitics.
It is the value of the American
dollar that imparts meaning to the
principles of the American democracy;
loss of confidence in the former
depreciates the character of
the latter. Democracy works toward
an idea of equality, capitalism
moves in the direction of inequality,
which is the preferred
travel destination.

At the end of the discussion the expressions
on the faces of at least some
of the gentlemen in the room registered
trace elements of regret. The departing
company clearly was glad to know
that the foreign shills were still in the
game, but there was also the humiliation
of America having to cut back on the
royal elephants and the pretensions to
empire. One gentleman in particular
looked so dispirited as he was putting on
his topcoat that had I known his name
or where to find his hat, I would have
pointed him to the light at the end
of the tunnel, assured him that the redeployment
of the world’s wealth
wouldn’t entail the giving up of his customary
table at Le Cirque. Even if
America were to be reclassified as a
Third World country, he would discover
that Third World countries are by
no means as unpleasant or as dangerous
as they can be made to seem by the editorial
writers at the New York Times.
The girls are good-looking, the golf
courses up to the standard of those in
Palm Springs, the nightclubs trendy,
the secret police efficient and courteous,
the income spread between the haves
and have-nots in line with the one to
which he was accustomed here at home.

The United States has been ridding
itself of its First World status for as
long as it has been privatizing its critical
infrastructure (a.k.a. the common
good), at the same time despoiling the
natural resource embodied in the
health, welfare, courage, and intelligence
of its citizenry. Over the past
eight years, under the absentee landlord
economic policies of the Bush
Administration, the stepped-up rate of
disinvestment has resulted in the
Third World confusion and mismanagement
for which the American guidance
counselors eleven years ago at
Davos rebuked their economic inferiors—
bandit oligarchy, gangster capitalism,
nontransparent finance, palsied
capital markets, and a suppurating
trade balance.

Although not touched upon at the
Council on Foreign Relations, the
question that remains to be discussed
is the one about putting the preferred
spin on the story. The going gracefully
into the imperial twilight with
Britain and France wouldn’t sit well
with the parties of the nationalist
right. We do better with the production
of Super Bowl halftime shows
than with the staging of historical
ceremony; our cathedrals don’t come
furnished with the tombs of museumquality
kings. As an advanced industrial
nation along the lines of Holland
or Germany we would run into
trouble with the paperwork. From advanced
industrial nations the bankers
in Hong Kong and Mumbai expect
sincere proofs of “accountability” as
well as earnest attempts to strengthen
the currency and occasional repayments
of outstanding debt. The requirements
aren’t configured to
match the irrational exuberance of
the freebooting American spirit. Accountability
is a concept poorly understood
both in Washington and
Wall Street, our economy is a faithbased
initiative, we’re not in the
habit of honoring our debts, and
we’re low on creditors willing to believe
that our word is as good as
Barack Obama’s can-do smile.

Our liabilities become assets if we
can recast the United States as a developing
nation that contains within
its borders the excitements of an
emerging market. On first looking
into an emergent market for fabulous
risk-free wealth, the foreign investors
don’t yet know what anything
is really worth—how much oil
is under the sand in Utah, if the chinook
salmon will return to the
Sacramento River, who holds the
mortgage on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The circumstances favor the sunny
side of the American street, allow for
the freedom of entrepreneurial maneuver,
and encourage imaginative
interpretations of what constitutes
an exploitable natural resource. Together
with its expressions of interest
in such things as the Lincoln Memorial
and the Marine Corps Band, the
foreign money can be counted upon
to assign value to commodities that
the natives believe to be worthless.
The seventeenth-century princes of
Europe maintained private menageries
stocked with Spanish and Italian
dwarves; it’s conceivable that
the Arab sovereign wealth funds
might wish to collect, as rare specimens
of an exotic breed, ornamental
American CEOs prized for their capacity
to turn gold into lead. Priceless
objects unavailable for purchase
with MasterCard, capitalist action
figures embodying the treasure of
the Christian West, to be as proudly
displayed as the peacocks in the gardens
of Doha and Riyadh.