PLUTOCRACY

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As you watch the current Wall Street meltdown unfold you should bear in mind that the crisis doesn't represent a failure of capitalism, it represents a triumph of plutocracy — government by, of and for the wealthy.  This is the way plutocracy is supposed to work.

In a plutocracy like ours, the wealthy instruct the government, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America, to construct a system, a set of rules, under which corporate America can behave like a pack of rabid hyenas in its hysterical pursuit of short-term profits.  When and if the hysteria leads to a breakdown of the system — basically because the suckers get tired of being defrauded, or run out of money to lose — corporate America instructs the government to bail it out with tax dollars from ordinary Americans . . . that is to say, the same suckers it was trying to swindle by other means.

The wealthy never lose.  Dick Fuld (above), the CEO of Lehman Brothers, got a bonus of 22 million dollars last year, as he was in the process of defrauding hundreds of thousands of people with essentially worthless financial instruments and leading his company forward into bankruptcy.  The two top officers of Merrill Lynch, which had to sell itself to the Bank Of America to avoid the fate of Lehman Brothers, will split a parting gift of 47 million dollars.  The financial institutions which tried to make quick bucks by selling bundles of nearly valueless mortgages are now going to sell those bundles to the American taxpayer, in what will surely be the greatest act of corporate welfare in the history of human civilization.

Such moments in history are instructive.  They remind us that corporate America, and conservative apologists for the “free market”, have no real interest in free markets — they are interested in free money for the wealthy.  If they can get it through unregulated fraud, that's fine — if they can get it through corporate socialism, that's fine, too . . . as long as they get it.

This is the sort of racket which used to be called “the old army game”.  Like any sophisticated con, it's a no-lose system for the hucksters who are running it, corporate America's wealthy elite.  Trust me — Dick Fuld is not going to give back the 22 million he got for doing his part to send the world economy into a tailspin, placing the welfare of millions at risk.  And he's not going to jail, either — because he was operating within the laws that he and his fellow hyenas paid to have enacted.

It's plutocracy as usual.

TENDERLOIN

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Cartoonist Winsor McCay never ceases to amaze.  I love this particular image (despite the preposterous ethnic caricature) because its cityscape reminds me of my old neighborhood in Manhattan, which real estate agents called North Chelsea but was in fact the old Garment District and before that, in the days when Teddy Roosevelt was New York's Police Commissioner, the Tenderloin, a precinct largely devoted to sin.  It's made up mostly of late 19th-Century and early 20th-Century commercial buildings like the ones in McCay's panels, with more than a few even older townhouses.  It has become a dreamscape to me now, which McCay's image evokes precisely.

[With thanks to a delightful web site devoted to McCay's work — Meeting McCay.]

WATER

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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet
an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
“Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

This is an excerpt from a commencement speech given a couple of years ago by the writer David Foster Wallace (above), who committed suicide this week at the age of 46.  I don't know Wallace's writing, although it has quite a reputation, but I've been struck by many of the quotes from it that have appeared in various notices of his death.

The quote above is particularly resonant.  It reminds me of Walter Benjamin's notion of the “phantasmagoria” associated with each age in history — those dreams that a whole epoch dreams and can't recognize as dreams, because everyone is having them.  He's referring to cultural assumptions so profound and so unexamined that they're simply experienced as part of the environment, like water, or air — things noticed only when they're absent.  (Curiously, Benjamin, pictured above, also committed suicide, in much different circumstances.)

It seems to me that the principle task of any critic, of art or culture, is to discover the phantasmagoria of his or her time and disenchant people out of it — so it can be seen.  It is, as I've written before, a delicate task — like letting a dreaming person know he's dreaming without waking him, because as soon as he awakens, his defenses, his unexamined assumptions about things, will reassert themselves.

Phantasmagorias exist in the regions of our culture unexamined or devalued by the official, that is to say, the conscious, culture.  In the 20th Century, for example, the official culture dreamed that the Victorian Age had been left behind in Modernism's dust, and thus it could not see how the central art form of the age, movies, was essentially Victorian.  The official culture dreamed that certain kinds of movies, like musicals, were frivolous and escapist, and thus could not see that they represented some of the century's most radical experiments in cinematic form.  The official culture dreamed that Las Vegas was a vulgar cultural aberration, and thus could not see that it was the one place where the 20th Century was anticipating the future of our cities most perceptively (while also, paradoxically, keeping the Victorian tradition of the “universal exposition” alive.)


                                                                                              Image © Paul Kolnik

These observations will seem like clichés a hundred years from now, in retrospect, when we've awakened from our current dreams.  It's the job of a cultural critic to get inside our dreams while we're dreaming them.

So how's the water where you are?

FILM NOIR REVISITED

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It's sometimes noted, quite correctly, that the artists who made what we now think of as the classic films noirs were entirely unfamiliar with the term, and indeed had no conception that they were working in a distinct tradition.  They thought of the movies they were making as crime thrillers.

This is occasionally cited in support of the idea that the term film noir is a category created by cinéastes after the fact, and therefore inauthentic, misleading.  It certainly was created (or at least popularized) by cinéastes after the fact, but that doesn't mean it's inauthentic or misleading.  Such a view fails to take into account how genres and traditions arise, which is a complex process — a combination of historical and cultural trends, influence and imitation among artists, and simple commercial calculation.  All these factors can combine to create distinct new forms, and in the case of film noir I think they did.

Two early films, which I would not call films noirs, nevertheless set the tone for the new form — The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity.  The Maltese Falcon was a fairly standard work of hardboiled detective fiction but it had a twist.  In hardboiled detective fiction, the world might be a dark and messy place, but the detective had a code of honor which made a kind of grim moral sense amidst the darkness and the mess.

Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon had such a code and he stuck by it — but Huston allowed him more than a trace of doubt as to whether the code had any ultimate meaning, any ultimate value.  This was something new in the crime thriller, in hardboiled detective fiction — this hint of existential uncertainty.

In Double Indemnity, essentially a domestic murder melodrama, Billy Wilder offered a portrait of middle-class American life that was unremitting in its bleakness, its moral vacuousness.  I'm not sure that Wilder had any particular message to convey by this — he just sensed that in the midst of the global horror of WWII audiences were looking for sterner stuff in their melodramas, a darker vision of ordinary life that would accord with the experience of civilization as a whole gone suddenly mad.

Both films were commercially successful — proof that audiences were at the very least receptive to darker visions, to stories that raised the most disturbing (and unresolved) questions about morality and society.  Both films were also well-received critically.  This gave other film artists a kind of permission to experiment with similar themes — within the confines of the crime thriller.  They got very creative within those confines after WWII, when a generation of men scarred by war came home, and when the specter of nuclear annihilation became a reality for everyone.

They didn't think, “We're going to create a new kind of existentially challenging crime thriller.”  They just inflected the crime thriller with a new mood.  Audiences responded, and formulas began to solidify.  Film artists imitated each other, got turned on by each other's work.  Elements that worked in one film got incorporated into other films, given new twists.  It was a combination of playing it safe commercially but also pushing things as far as they could go within familiar territory — testing how much darkness the public really wanted.

It turned out to be quite a lot — so much so that that during the Fifties filmmakers began to realize that the darker themes could be incorporated into other genres besides the crime thriller, as they were, for example, in the domestic melodramas of Sirk, in the Westerns of Ford and Mann.  When that happened, the classic film noir more or less played itself out.  Its usefulness as a cultural escape valve had ended.  Any kind of film in the Sixties could deal with existential angst, with moral bewilderment, with political or social criticism, in more direct terms.  America had internalized the darkness of the film noir — the resulting culture wars were just a matter of time.

Film noir had a beginning in the global dislocations and moral derangement of WWII, and an end in the open social and political critiques of the Sixties.  There had never been anything quite like film noir before WWII, and there has never been anything quite like it since the Sixties.  It was, and remains, a distinct tradition.

[With thanks to Tony D'Ambra at films noir for some thoughts that provoked the above meditation . . .]

BIG STACK BLUES

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On the face of it, the total collapse of Barack Obama's momentum in his race for the Presidency seems puzzling — but any poker player will find the phenomenon all too familiar.

Obama doesn't know how to play a big stack in a no-limit tournament.  He ran up an enormous lead in chips early on by taking chances — positioning himself as a new kind of Democrat, one who'd risk it all to live up to his principles.  Then, when he had the Democratic nomination locked up, coffers filled with contributions from millions of small-time donors energized by his boldness and courage, he changed his style of play — cow-towed to the wicked Clintons, picked a safe running mate, started breaking his promises to his Progressive base.

It happens every day at the poker table.  A guy sits down, plays aggressively, builds a big stack — then suddenly gets afraid of losing what he has and tightens up.  Other players realize he's lost his nerve and begin bluffing him, stealing his blinds — and his chips start dribbling away.  When you play poker trying not to lose — you lose.

John McCain, who's holding 7-2 off-suit, just pushed all his chips into the pot with the Sarah Palin stunt — one of the most daring bluffs in the history of American politics.  “Don't call me,” McCain says, “or I'll accuse you of hating motherhood, small-town America and ordinary folks everywhere.”  Obama's holding a pair of Jacks.  If he calls McCain, if he just states the plain truth that Sarah Palin is a religious extremist (when she's talking in church, if not on national television) and a compulsive liar, he wins.  But, as I say, he's lost his nerve.  He thinks that if he lays down his Jacks, he might get an even better hand on the next deal.

He might, but that's not the point.  You can't play poker when you've lost your nerve — when you aren't willing to risk it all, especially against an obvious bluff.  It's a lesson Democrats never seem to learn.

Look for John McCain to win this particular tournament.

[After writing the above I happened to read an old report in The New Yorker from the campaign trail in Mondale's race against Reagan in 1984.  Polls showed that voters agreed with Mondale on the issues, when they were listed one by one, but that they liked Reagan better as a man.  The Mondale camp decided that they had to just keep hammering away at the issues and not attack Reagan, for fear of offending those who liked him so much — and because Mondale wasn't “comfortable” in the attack mode.  In the election, Mondale carried his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.]

FRONTIER FEMINISM

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I've posted some harsh things here about Sarah Palin, but much as I fear — and think everyone should fear — what she might do if she ever got control of America's nuclear arsenal, I must confess that there's a part of me that loves her.  Camille Paglia (pictured above), in the extraordinary article from Salon below, made me realize why I love her:

New Blood For the Vampire

You won't read anything like this article anywhere else in the national media — it's an exhilarating exercise in free thought, a celebration of Sarah Palin by a liberal, atheist, dissident-feminist lesbian who hates John McCain, supports Barack Obama and is a passionate advocate of choice on the abortion issue.

Paglia is dead wrong about many things but she's right about what Palin represents, at least in part — America's frontier past, its real frontier past, in which women hauled their fair share of the freight, and then some.

I especially commend this article to my fellow progressives, who need to understand its profound insights if they're ever going to have a chance of electing politicians who represent their views . . . something I fear is not going to happen this time around.

Sarah Palin may not be a good woman, or an honorable woman — she may even be a very bad and a very dangerous woman . . . but she's the kind of woman who got the crops in before the hailstorm hit while her husband was passed out drunk in the barn, the kind of woman who saved America's sorry ass more times than America cares to remember.  As Paglia argues, she represents a kind of frontier feminism that was getting its hands dirty with the hard work of the nation before feminism was an ideology you could subscribe to — when it was something you had to live.

Credit where credit is due, folks.  This is powerful stuff.  There are, I suspect, millions of women who would be willing to endure four more years of economic catastrophe and international disgrace, indeed to sacrifice this nation's welfare for many decades to come, just to see that kind of feminism honored and respected.  The impulse might be, in the larger context of things, irrational, self-destructive, borderline insane, but it's there and it's not going away.  The chickens are coming home to roost.

HITCHCOCK AND LEWTON

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I've written before about the painting above by Arnold Böcklin, The Isle Of the Dead, which reportedly inspired some of the compositions in Hitchcock's Vertigo.  It was an image that was important to Val Lewton, as well.  A reproduction of it hangs on the wall of one of the interior sets in Lewton's I Walked With A Zombie, and of course Lewton made a film called Isle Of the Dead, which references the image more powerfully, in the film's setting.

Lewton and Hitchcock had crossed paths before they made any of these films.  Lewton was working as a story editor and assistant to David O. Selznick at the time Hitchcock made Rebecca for Selznick.  I think Lewton learned a lot from Hitchcock on that film — specifically how to create a mood of supernatural dread using only lighting and suggestion.

Hitchcock learned from Lewton in return.  Lewton's The 7th Victim has a very creepy scene (below) in which the heroine, home alone, is taking a shower behind a translucent curtain when suddenly the silhouette of an older woman materializes on the other side of the curtain, delivering an ominous warning.



The moment doesn't escalate into violence, as it does in Psycho, but the sense of surprise, of violation, of vulnerability is exactly the same.  The similarity of the two scenes is too great to be coincidental — and I think we can see Lewton's influence on another important Hitchcock film.  The whole tone of Vertigo — quiet, dreamlike, subtly, ambiguously ominous — is far closer to the tone of Lewton's RKO horror films than it is to Rebecca, which is essentially a very classy and delicate rendition of the spooky atmosphere found in old-fashioned Gothic fiction.

The house, with its ghost, haunts the heroine of Rebecca.  In Lewton's films, and in Vertigo, the whole world is haunted, unhinged — it has become a spooky maze with no exits.  Hitchcock's innovation was to create Lewton's deranged dream world in color, in California sunshine — which is ultimately much more unsettling.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: REPORT FROM THE BEACH, 9 AUGUST 1998

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bestplacefields

For almost five years I rented a small studio apartment behind a garage in Ventura, California, half a block from the beach. My principle residence was still New York City, but I needed to spend part of the year in California, for professional reasons. I ended up in Ventura because I wanted to be near the ocean, I wanted to be within striking distance of Los Angeles, for business meetings and visits to friends and to my sister and her family there, and I wanted to be near Ojai, where a few other close friends lived. I triangulated those geographical objectives on a map and Ventura was the only logical choice.

 I sent out irregular reports to friends about Ventura — mostly meditations on place, a record of my exploration of the town and an attempt to create a myth about it for myself, as we always create myths about the places we live.

 Here’s the first of those reports, from 9 August 1998:

The beach at the end of my street isn’t wide. At high tide the waves lap up against the embankment of rocks designed to keep them from the houses lined up like books on a shelf, facing the ocean.

Sitting on one of these rocks at sunset I can look south and see the breakwater and the masts of Ventura Harbor, basically a man-made marina. North I can see the coastline for a few miles, curving inland in front of the city of Ventura then back out again to a headland of tall hills.

There is often a lot of coastal mist at sunset. Sometimes the tops of the hills at the headland are covered in it. Sometimes the whole beach is shrouded and it’s hard to make out a surf-fisher fifty yards away. All the permutations of the mist make for strange and shifting effects of the light when the sun goes down.

The water I look out at is the Santa Barbara Channel, running between the mainland and the Channel Islands, which so far have always been hidden by the mist.

The waves at the beach are not large or long but there are always surfers here. They wait out beyond the breakers, sitting still on their boards, sometimes for twenty minutes at a time, hoping for a good wave. They remind me of ducks then. Usually when a wave comes they are up and down in seconds. I think this must be an amateur or novice surfer’s beach.

Still, for those few seconds, riding upright on their boards, the surfers look bitchin’, tuned into something awesome.

The ocean.

HARD TIMES

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Alaska is a very rich state — its coffers are overflowing . . . to the tune of a five billion-dollar surplus, mostly from oil-related revenues.  It still somehow manages to get more money per capita from the federal government than any other state.  (When Sarah Palin canceled the “bridge to nowhere”, she didn't send the money back to Washington — she just used it for other things in Alaska.)

I doubt if Palin has ever visited the meaner streets of South Chicago, where Barack Obama did the community service she finds so laughable.  It's possible that she's never met any truly, desperately poor people, unemployed, without health care, and no jobs, no hope in sight.

She should take a few moments and listen to Stephen Foster's beautiful song “Hard Times”, wonderfully sung by many people through the years but never better than by Bob Dylan on his album Good As I Been To You.  It might touch her heart, and the hearts of all the soi-disant Christians who laughed along with her at an example of actual Christian charity.

ONE, TWO, THREE . . .

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The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

                                                             — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Honorable behavior in uniform doesn't necessarily translate into honorable (much less competent) behavior in public office.  Look at Ulysses S. Grant, who presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in American history.  It also doesn't translate into honorable behavior in one's personal life.  Look at the way John McCain treated his first wife, the truly honorable American woman who waited for him and raised their children alone during his ordeal of captivity in North Viet Nam.

If he's going to ask us to judge him on the basis of his honorable acts many decades ago, shouldn't we also take into account his dishonorable acts from the same era?  Do we have any way of knowing which John McCain will show up to work at the Oval Office, especially given his record of inconsistency where political expediency is concerned?

McCain opposed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy which he now supports.  He opposed the off-shore drilling he now supports.  He supported immigration reform which he now disowns.  More importantly he once opposed the influence of the nutty wing of the religious right and now asks us to place a right-wing religious nut a heartbeat away from control of America's nuclear arsenal.

Obama doesn't have a lot more political courage than McCain, and has made a disgraceful retreat from his support of the U. S. Constitution, but he also isn't selling himself as paragon of transcendent honor, and he doesn't have a running mate who sees the war in Iraq as “God's task”.  (End of debate for Sarah Palin, folks — you can't argue with God.)

Have you counted your spoons recently?

FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY

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I
loved the way Sarah Palin mocked and derided Obama for his community
service on the streets of Chicago, devoting himself to “the least of these” when he could have been making big
money on Wall Street, or, if he wanted to be really noble, serving as
the mayor of a suburb in the oil-rich state of Alaska.

Palin, a
self-described pit-bull with lipstick, must find Jesus's example of
“community service” to the least of men downright hilarious, compared to the serious
responsibility (and true charity) involved in getting streets paved for
upwardly mobile Alaskans.

In her speech she also said, “Hope is
not a strategy.”  But isn't this the strategy that Jesus asked his
followers explicitly to embrace?  Wasn't it Saint Paul who said, “. . . for we are saved by hope“?  Wasn't it Saint Peter who said, “Be prepared to give witness to the hope that is in you”?  Isn't hope the very condition and ground of life for Christian believers — not just a strategy but the strategy?

It makes you wonder just what it is Sarah Palin likes about the Christianity she professes.  Saint Paul also said, “And now abideth faith, hope,
charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”  Having
mocked hope and charity, what is Palin left with?  Faith, I guess
— pinned like a cheap plastic crucifix to the pit-bull collar.