Democrats say we're all Americans and we're all in this together. Republicans say no: we're a nation of individuals and we are not in this together. I am a Democrat.
Robert ReichChancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, 'Aftershock'
The Moral Question
Posted: 9/30/11 09:16 AM ET
We dodged another shut-down bullet, but only until November 18. That's when the next temporary bill to keep the government going runs out. House Republicans want more budget cuts as their price for another stopgap spending bill.
Among other items, Republicans are demanding major cuts in a nutrition program for low-income women and children. The appropriation bill the House passed June 16 would deny benefits to more than 700,000 eligible low-income women and young children next year.
What kind of country are we living in?
More than one in three families with young children is now living in poverty (37 percent, to be exact) according to a recent analysis of Census data by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies. That's the highest percent on record. The Agriculture Department says nearly one in four young children (23.6) lives in a family that had difficulty affording sufficient food at some point last year.
We're in the worst economy since the Great Depression -- with lower-income families and kids are bearing the worst of it -- and what are Republicans doing? Cutting programs Americans desperately need to get through it.
Medicaid is also under assault. Congressional Republicans want to reduce the federal contribution to Medicaid by $771 billion over next decade and shift more costs to states and low-income Americans.
It gets worse. Most federal programs to help children and lower-income families are in the so-called "non-defense discretionary" category of the federal budget. The congressional super-committee charged with coming up with $1.5 trillion of cuts eight weeks from now will almost certainly take a big whack at this category because it's the easiest to cut. Unlike entitlements, these programs depend on yearly appropriations.
Even if the super-committee doesn't agree (or even if they do, and Congress doesn't approve of their proposal) an automatic trigger will make huge cuts in domestic discretionary spending.
It gets even worse. Drastic cuts are already underway at the state and local levels. Since the fiscal year began in July, states no longer receive about $150 billion in federal stimulus money -- money that was used to fill gaps in state budgets over the last two years.
The result is a downward cascade of budget cuts -- from the federal government to state governments and then to local governments -- that are hurting most Americans but kids and lower-income families in particular.
So far this year, 23 states have reduced education spending. According to a survey of city finance officers released Tuesday by the National League of Cities, half of all American cities face cuts in state aid for education.
As housing values plummet, local property tax receipts are down. That means even less money for schools and local family services. So kids are getting larger class sizes, reduced school hours, shorter school weeks, cuts in pre-Kindergarten programs (Texas has eliminated pre-Kindergarten for 100,000 children), even charges for textbooks and extra-curricular activities.
Meanwhile the size of America's school-age population keeps growing notwithstanding. Between now and 2015, an additional 2 million kids are expected to show up in our schools.
Local family services are being cut or terminated. Tens of thousands of social workers have been laid off. Cities and counties are reducing or eliminating their contributions to Head Start, which provides early childhood education to the children of low-income parents.
All this would be bad enough if the economy were functioning normally. For these cuts to happen now is morally indefensible.
Yet Republicans won't consider increasing taxes on the rich to pay for what's needed -- even though the wealthiest members of our society are richer than ever, taking home a bigger slice of total income and wealth than in seventy-five years, and paying the lowest tax rates in three decades.
The president's modest proposals to raise taxes on the rich -- limiting their tax deductions, ending the Bush tax cut for incomes over $250,000, and making sure the rich pay at the same rate as average Americans - don't come close to paying for what American families need.
Marginal tax rates should be raised at the top, and more tax brackets should be added for incomes over $500,000, over $1,500,000, over $5 million. The capital gains tax should be as high as that on ordinary income.
Wealth over $7.2 million should be subject to a 2 percent surtax. After all, the top one half of 1 percent now owns over 28 percent of the nation's total wealth. Such a tax on them would yield $70 billion a year. According to an analysis by Yale's Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, that would generate at least half of $1.5 trillion deficit-reduction target over ten years set for the super committee.
Another way to raise money would be through a tiny tax (one-half of one percent) tax on financial transactions. This would generate $200 billion a year, and hardly disturb Wall Street's casino at all. (The European Commission is about to unveil such a tax there.)
All this can be done, but only if Americans understand what's really at stake here.
When Republicans recently charged the president with promoting "class warfare," he answered it was "just math." But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.
Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.
President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.
Friday, September 30, 2011
The Ugliness at Ole Miss
Is the nastiness going on in Oxford partly a racial matter? I don't know, but I do think that if the football team were 4 & 0 this wouldn't be going on. But you do have to wonder given what is going on there.
Race Friday, Sep 30, 2011 14:02 ET
Mississippi's Colonel Reb: Gone but not forgotten
Race, football and Obamacare: Conservative talk radio brings all great things together
By Andrew Leonard
"Colonel Reb," former mascot for the University of Mississippi college football team Like most liberal Berkeley, Calif. residents, I am an avid follower of Southeastern Conference college football, which means I often find myself spending my lunch hour catching up on the latest news about tree poisonings in Auburn or Lane "Lame" Kiffen's cheating escapades at Tennessee. But it's just not every day that my consideration of LSU's awesome defensive line is interrupted by new revelations about the intersection of Deep South college football and the conservative right-wing campaign to demonize Barack Obama as the Socialist Bringer-of-Death.
But hey, everything's connected, right? Race, the Confederacy, conservative talk radio, the rise of the Republican South, health care, Jeremiah Wright, and college football? Of course it is.
The Ole Miss -- University of Mississippi -- college football team is suffering through its second horrible year in a row. At any SEC school, that's a recipe for serious alumni dissatisfaction. But at Ole Miss, the heat is extraordinary. A group calling itself the "Forward Rebels" (Ole Miss's nickname is "Rebels") has been running full-page ads in local newspapers calling for new leadership and "change" at the university. The U. Miss. chancellor is lashing back at "anonymous, malicious and public attacks." It's a mess, but while the Forward Rebel ire is ostensibly aimed at athletic director Pete Boone's responsibility for mismanaging the program, (and he does seems to be something of a buffoon,) it's pretty clear that the bad fortunes of the Rebels aren't the only, or even most important, reason for the disgruntlement. Culture war is alive and well in Mississippi.
Continue reading
According to long time Mississippi sports reporter Rick Cleveland, the breach between the alumni and Pete Boone dates back to the furor a few years back about the Ole Miss mascot "Colonel Reb." Boone was largely responsible for ditching the mascot, and he had a pretty good reason -- the perception that top African-American high school players were not crazy about the prospect of playing for a football team that routinely drenched itself in Confederate nostalgia.
Seriously, if I was a high school All-American 6 foot four 250 pound linebacker being recruited by every top football college in America, I'd probably have second thoughts about going to a school where the fans sing Dixie at the games, wave Confederate flags, and cheer a mascot representing a solider who defended the right to keep slavery legal in America.
But for Colonel Reb's defenders, the theory about competitiveness is just a politically correct smokescreen by liberals who want to trample all over Ole Miss' great traditions. Mississippi's backward economy and also-ran status in the SEC explained the lack of top recruits -- not the Confederacy trappings.
Rick Cleveland brought up the issue of Colonel Reb with the Forward Rebels spokesman, Lee Habeeb.
Said Lee Habeeb, "As far as Colonel Rebel, we don't have a dog in that hunt. Our people aren't driven by that."
Habeeb also said, "At the same time, this is an administration that makes decisions unencumbered by how the public feels."
Make of that statement what you may.
And here's where the story breaks out of the football/race box.
Lee Habeeb is a mogul of conservative talk radio. He was responsible for bringing Laura Ingraham to national prominence, and he is the "Network Director of Strategic Content" for the Salem Radio Network, which boasts a who's who of right wing blowhards on its roster, including Bill Bennett, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt.
According to Habeeb's Wikipedia page, Habeeb has "commissioned several hit YouTube videos," including one on Barack Obama's relationship with Pastor Jeremiah Wright -- titled "Is Obama Wright?" -- that ran during the 2008 election campaign. He's also "produced the video 'Is Nationalized Health Care a Death Snare?' about the effects a government takeover of health care would have on both beginning of life and end of life issues."
If you are a liberal resident of Berkeley, California, you probably think that Lee Habeeb is the definition of bad news. And I'll be perfectly frank: learning that he is the spokesman for a group that feels that the University of Mississippi administration "makes decisions unencumbered by how the people feels" certainly makes it easy for me to decide who to root for in this gridiron showdown. But the larger symbolic meaning of this debacle is a heck of a lot more profound than any SEC won-lost record.
The rise of the Republican-dominated South as a direct consequence of Lyndon Johnson's passage of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights legislation is one of the most important political developments of the past half-century. Southern Republicans are the backbone of a party that has grown ever more conservative and reactionary. Conservative talk radio aids, abets, and enables this right-wing calcification, a process that has utterly crippled the Obama administration's agenda.
Mississippi, a state as stained by slavery's legacy as any in the nation -- is where all the pieces fit together. Don't listen to Habeeb's equivocations -- the squabble over Colonel Reb undoubtedly feeds alumni dissatisfaction, just as Obama's skin color feeds criticism of his legitimacy.
It's a cliche to say the North may have won the Civil War, but we're still fighting it today in 21st century. But when you connect the dots between Southern Republican resistance to Obama and the fight over Colonel Reb in Mississippi, it's hard to come to any other conclusion.
Race Friday, Sep 30, 2011 14:02 ET
Mississippi's Colonel Reb: Gone but not forgotten
Race, football and Obamacare: Conservative talk radio brings all great things together
By Andrew Leonard
"Colonel Reb," former mascot for the University of Mississippi college football team Like most liberal Berkeley, Calif. residents, I am an avid follower of Southeastern Conference college football, which means I often find myself spending my lunch hour catching up on the latest news about tree poisonings in Auburn or Lane "Lame" Kiffen's cheating escapades at Tennessee. But it's just not every day that my consideration of LSU's awesome defensive line is interrupted by new revelations about the intersection of Deep South college football and the conservative right-wing campaign to demonize Barack Obama as the Socialist Bringer-of-Death.
But hey, everything's connected, right? Race, the Confederacy, conservative talk radio, the rise of the Republican South, health care, Jeremiah Wright, and college football? Of course it is.
The Ole Miss -- University of Mississippi -- college football team is suffering through its second horrible year in a row. At any SEC school, that's a recipe for serious alumni dissatisfaction. But at Ole Miss, the heat is extraordinary. A group calling itself the "Forward Rebels" (Ole Miss's nickname is "Rebels") has been running full-page ads in local newspapers calling for new leadership and "change" at the university. The U. Miss. chancellor is lashing back at "anonymous, malicious and public attacks." It's a mess, but while the Forward Rebel ire is ostensibly aimed at athletic director Pete Boone's responsibility for mismanaging the program, (and he does seems to be something of a buffoon,) it's pretty clear that the bad fortunes of the Rebels aren't the only, or even most important, reason for the disgruntlement. Culture war is alive and well in Mississippi.
Continue reading
According to long time Mississippi sports reporter Rick Cleveland, the breach between the alumni and Pete Boone dates back to the furor a few years back about the Ole Miss mascot "Colonel Reb." Boone was largely responsible for ditching the mascot, and he had a pretty good reason -- the perception that top African-American high school players were not crazy about the prospect of playing for a football team that routinely drenched itself in Confederate nostalgia.
Seriously, if I was a high school All-American 6 foot four 250 pound linebacker being recruited by every top football college in America, I'd probably have second thoughts about going to a school where the fans sing Dixie at the games, wave Confederate flags, and cheer a mascot representing a solider who defended the right to keep slavery legal in America.
But for Colonel Reb's defenders, the theory about competitiveness is just a politically correct smokescreen by liberals who want to trample all over Ole Miss' great traditions. Mississippi's backward economy and also-ran status in the SEC explained the lack of top recruits -- not the Confederacy trappings.
Rick Cleveland brought up the issue of Colonel Reb with the Forward Rebels spokesman, Lee Habeeb.
Said Lee Habeeb, "As far as Colonel Rebel, we don't have a dog in that hunt. Our people aren't driven by that."
Habeeb also said, "At the same time, this is an administration that makes decisions unencumbered by how the public feels."
Make of that statement what you may.
And here's where the story breaks out of the football/race box.
Lee Habeeb is a mogul of conservative talk radio. He was responsible for bringing Laura Ingraham to national prominence, and he is the "Network Director of Strategic Content" for the Salem Radio Network, which boasts a who's who of right wing blowhards on its roster, including Bill Bennett, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt.
According to Habeeb's Wikipedia page, Habeeb has "commissioned several hit YouTube videos," including one on Barack Obama's relationship with Pastor Jeremiah Wright -- titled "Is Obama Wright?" -- that ran during the 2008 election campaign. He's also "produced the video 'Is Nationalized Health Care a Death Snare?' about the effects a government takeover of health care would have on both beginning of life and end of life issues."
If you are a liberal resident of Berkeley, California, you probably think that Lee Habeeb is the definition of bad news. And I'll be perfectly frank: learning that he is the spokesman for a group that feels that the University of Mississippi administration "makes decisions unencumbered by how the people feels" certainly makes it easy for me to decide who to root for in this gridiron showdown. But the larger symbolic meaning of this debacle is a heck of a lot more profound than any SEC won-lost record.
The rise of the Republican-dominated South as a direct consequence of Lyndon Johnson's passage of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights legislation is one of the most important political developments of the past half-century. Southern Republicans are the backbone of a party that has grown ever more conservative and reactionary. Conservative talk radio aids, abets, and enables this right-wing calcification, a process that has utterly crippled the Obama administration's agenda.
Mississippi, a state as stained by slavery's legacy as any in the nation -- is where all the pieces fit together. Don't listen to Habeeb's equivocations -- the squabble over Colonel Reb undoubtedly feeds alumni dissatisfaction, just as Obama's skin color feeds criticism of his legitimacy.
It's a cliche to say the North may have won the Civil War, but we're still fighting it today in 21st century. But when you connect the dots between Southern Republican resistance to Obama and the fight over Colonel Reb in Mississippi, it's hard to come to any other conclusion.
President Garfield
Editor: Laura Miller
American History Thursday, Sep 29, 2011 20:01 ET
The truth about Garfield's assassination
A new book explores how politics, science and medicine contributed to the president's death
By Meredith Hindley, Barnes and Noble Review
This article appears courtesy of the Barnes & Noble Review
In November 1881, Charles Guiteau, a charlatan suffering from mental illness, stood trial for the assassination of President James Garfield. As part of his erratic defense, Guiteau argued that he should not be charged with murder, because the bullets he fired from his ivory-handled revolver didn't kill the president. Instead, Garfield died as a result of the care he received from his doctors. "I deny the killing, if your honor please," he said. "We admit the shooting."
Whether they were prompted by insanity or simple desperation in the face of his looming, almost inevitable execution, there was element of truth in Guiteau's ravings. In "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President," Candice Millard reconstructs the events leading up to and following Garfield's assassination. The murder serves as a lens through which to examine Garfield's life, Guiteau's peripatetic existence, the fortunes of the Republican Party, the political spoils system, the role of scientific invention, and the state of the American medical profession. By keeping a tight hold on her narrative strands, Millard crafts a popular history rich with detail and emotion.
One of the pleasures of the book is the chance to learn more about Garfield, who appears as a fully realized historical figure instead of a trivia answer. A child of a poor family, he worked as a canal driver before attending college at Ohio's Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. During the Civil War, Garfield's leadership of Ohio's 42nd Regiment yielded a bloody victory over Confederate forces at the Battle of Middle Creek, securing Kentucky's allegiance to the Union. Elected to Congress as a Republican, Garfield served nine terms in the House, developing a reputation for oratory and a willingness to dig into financial issues. Drafted to stand for president against his wishes, Garfield entered the White House in 1881 with more than a bit of reluctance.
Continue reading
Unlike Garfield, Guiteau never found his calling. An odd little man, he was by turns a lawyer, a swindler, and a traveling evangelist whose constant movement from city to city made it possible for him to escape the consequences of unpaid bills and delusional behavior. As his fortunes declined, so did his mental state. Having delivered a short speech at a "small gathering" in New York endorsing Garfield's candidacy, Guiteau came to believe that he had orchestrated Garfield's victory. Guiteau spent weeks loitering in the waiting rooms of the White House and State Department, intent on securing an ambassadorship to Vienna or Paris. When the appointment didn't materialize, Guiteau was subject to a divine revelation that came "like a flash" while he lay in bed: God commanded him to kill the ungrateful president.
His mind quickly taken over by this obsession, Guiteau borrowed some money, bought a pistol at a sporting goods store, and commenced stalking the president, an activity that Millard shows to have been shockingly easy, even in a city that had witnessed Lincoln's shooting less than two decades prior. After some false starts, the assassin waited for Garfield in a Washington, D.C., train station on July 2, 1881, and shot him twice in the back. Seized by the crowd, Guiteau gave himself up to the police and asked them to deliver a letter to Gen. Sherman. He expected in short order to be proclaimed a hero.
Millard devotes most of the second half of the book to a revealing chronicle of Garfield's treatment after the attack, and its consequences. American medicine in the 1880s had not yet embraced Joseph Lister's ideas about germs and their role in promoting infection -- indeed, many were mounting a furious counterattack against what they considered a nonsensical foreign innovation. Within minutes of Garfield being shot, dirty fingers were inserted into the wounds to feel for the bullets. Millard shows how contemporary ideas about patient care -- diet, pain management, the cause of infections, wound care and sterilization -- led to Garfield's death two and a half months later. An invention by Alexander Graham Bell, which could detect the presence of metal, might have been able to locate where one of the bullets had lodged, but the doctor overseeing Garfield's care restricted its use out of concern for his own ego. The once-robust Garfield would lose 80 pounds as his body became a collection of pus-filled abscesses brought on by septic poisoning.
Millard's sympathetic portrayal of Garfield leaves the reader wondering what might have been had he lived. What kind of president would the bookish man from Ohio have turned out to be? The answers to these counterfactuals are outside the purview of Millard's book, but their seeming inevitability attests to her ability to bring to life the man at the center of her story, and his brief entry into the annals of presidential history.
American History Thursday, Sep 29, 2011 20:01 ET
The truth about Garfield's assassination
A new book explores how politics, science and medicine contributed to the president's death
By Meredith Hindley, Barnes and Noble Review
This article appears courtesy of the Barnes & Noble Review
In November 1881, Charles Guiteau, a charlatan suffering from mental illness, stood trial for the assassination of President James Garfield. As part of his erratic defense, Guiteau argued that he should not be charged with murder, because the bullets he fired from his ivory-handled revolver didn't kill the president. Instead, Garfield died as a result of the care he received from his doctors. "I deny the killing, if your honor please," he said. "We admit the shooting."
Whether they were prompted by insanity or simple desperation in the face of his looming, almost inevitable execution, there was element of truth in Guiteau's ravings. In "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President," Candice Millard reconstructs the events leading up to and following Garfield's assassination. The murder serves as a lens through which to examine Garfield's life, Guiteau's peripatetic existence, the fortunes of the Republican Party, the political spoils system, the role of scientific invention, and the state of the American medical profession. By keeping a tight hold on her narrative strands, Millard crafts a popular history rich with detail and emotion.
One of the pleasures of the book is the chance to learn more about Garfield, who appears as a fully realized historical figure instead of a trivia answer. A child of a poor family, he worked as a canal driver before attending college at Ohio's Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. During the Civil War, Garfield's leadership of Ohio's 42nd Regiment yielded a bloody victory over Confederate forces at the Battle of Middle Creek, securing Kentucky's allegiance to the Union. Elected to Congress as a Republican, Garfield served nine terms in the House, developing a reputation for oratory and a willingness to dig into financial issues. Drafted to stand for president against his wishes, Garfield entered the White House in 1881 with more than a bit of reluctance.
Continue reading
Unlike Garfield, Guiteau never found his calling. An odd little man, he was by turns a lawyer, a swindler, and a traveling evangelist whose constant movement from city to city made it possible for him to escape the consequences of unpaid bills and delusional behavior. As his fortunes declined, so did his mental state. Having delivered a short speech at a "small gathering" in New York endorsing Garfield's candidacy, Guiteau came to believe that he had orchestrated Garfield's victory. Guiteau spent weeks loitering in the waiting rooms of the White House and State Department, intent on securing an ambassadorship to Vienna or Paris. When the appointment didn't materialize, Guiteau was subject to a divine revelation that came "like a flash" while he lay in bed: God commanded him to kill the ungrateful president.
His mind quickly taken over by this obsession, Guiteau borrowed some money, bought a pistol at a sporting goods store, and commenced stalking the president, an activity that Millard shows to have been shockingly easy, even in a city that had witnessed Lincoln's shooting less than two decades prior. After some false starts, the assassin waited for Garfield in a Washington, D.C., train station on July 2, 1881, and shot him twice in the back. Seized by the crowd, Guiteau gave himself up to the police and asked them to deliver a letter to Gen. Sherman. He expected in short order to be proclaimed a hero.
Millard devotes most of the second half of the book to a revealing chronicle of Garfield's treatment after the attack, and its consequences. American medicine in the 1880s had not yet embraced Joseph Lister's ideas about germs and their role in promoting infection -- indeed, many were mounting a furious counterattack against what they considered a nonsensical foreign innovation. Within minutes of Garfield being shot, dirty fingers were inserted into the wounds to feel for the bullets. Millard shows how contemporary ideas about patient care -- diet, pain management, the cause of infections, wound care and sterilization -- led to Garfield's death two and a half months later. An invention by Alexander Graham Bell, which could detect the presence of metal, might have been able to locate where one of the bullets had lodged, but the doctor overseeing Garfield's care restricted its use out of concern for his own ego. The once-robust Garfield would lose 80 pounds as his body became a collection of pus-filled abscesses brought on by septic poisoning.
Millard's sympathetic portrayal of Garfield leaves the reader wondering what might have been had he lived. What kind of president would the bookish man from Ohio have turned out to be? The answers to these counterfactuals are outside the purview of Millard's book, but their seeming inevitability attests to her ability to bring to life the man at the center of her story, and his brief entry into the annals of presidential history.
Phony Fear Factor
Op-Ed Columnist
Phony Fear Factor
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 29, 2011
The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality.
Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy.
The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false.
The starting point for many claims that antibusiness policies are hurting the economy is the assertion that the sluggishness of the economy’s recovery from recession is unprecedented. But, as a new paper by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute documents at length, this is just not true. Extended periods of “jobless recovery” after recessions have been the rule for the past two decades. Indeed, private-sector job growth since the 2007-2009 recession has been better than it was after the 2001 recession.
We might add that major financial crises are almost always followed by a period of slow growth, and U.S. experience is more or less what you should have expected given the severity of the 2008 shock.
Still, isn’t there something odd about the fact that businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment? No.
After all, why should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more. Business investment always responds strongly to the state of the economy, and given how weak our economy remains you shouldn’t be surprised if investment remains low. If anything, business spending has been stronger than one might have predicted given slow growth and high unemployment.
But aren’t business people complaining about the burden of taxes and regulations? Yes, but no more than usual. Mr. Mishel points out that the National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for almost 40 years, asking them to name their most important problem. Taxes and regulations always rank high on the list, but what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back.
So Republican assertions about what ails the economy are pure fantasy, at odds with all the evidence. Should we be surprised?
At one level, of course not. Politicians who always cater to wealthy business interests say that economic recovery requires catering to wealthy business interests. Who could have imagined it?
Yet it seems to me that there is something different about the current state of economic discussion. Political parties have often coalesced around dubious economic ideas — remember the Laffer curve? — but I can’t think of a time when a party’s economic doctrine has been so completely divorced from reality. And I’m also struck by the extent to which Republican-leaning economists — who have to know better — have been willing to lend their credibility to the party’s official delusions.
Partly, no doubt, this reflects the party’s broader slide into its own insular intellectual universe. Large segments of the G.O.P. reject climate science and even the theory of evolution, so why expect evidence to matter for the party’s economic views?
And it also, of course, reflects the political need of the right to make everything bad in America President Obama’s fault. Never mind the fact that the housing bubble, the debt explosion and the financial crisis took place on the watch of a conservative, free-market-praising president; it’s that Democrat in the White House now who gets the blame.
But good politics can be very bad policy. The truth is that we’re in this mess because we had too little regulation, not too much. And now one of our two major parties is determined to double down on the mistakes that caused the disaster.
Phony Fear Factor
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 29, 2011
The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality.
Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy.
The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false.
The starting point for many claims that antibusiness policies are hurting the economy is the assertion that the sluggishness of the economy’s recovery from recession is unprecedented. But, as a new paper by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute documents at length, this is just not true. Extended periods of “jobless recovery” after recessions have been the rule for the past two decades. Indeed, private-sector job growth since the 2007-2009 recession has been better than it was after the 2001 recession.
We might add that major financial crises are almost always followed by a period of slow growth, and U.S. experience is more or less what you should have expected given the severity of the 2008 shock.
Still, isn’t there something odd about the fact that businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment? No.
After all, why should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more. Business investment always responds strongly to the state of the economy, and given how weak our economy remains you shouldn’t be surprised if investment remains low. If anything, business spending has been stronger than one might have predicted given slow growth and high unemployment.
But aren’t business people complaining about the burden of taxes and regulations? Yes, but no more than usual. Mr. Mishel points out that the National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for almost 40 years, asking them to name their most important problem. Taxes and regulations always rank high on the list, but what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back.
So Republican assertions about what ails the economy are pure fantasy, at odds with all the evidence. Should we be surprised?
At one level, of course not. Politicians who always cater to wealthy business interests say that economic recovery requires catering to wealthy business interests. Who could have imagined it?
Yet it seems to me that there is something different about the current state of economic discussion. Political parties have often coalesced around dubious economic ideas — remember the Laffer curve? — but I can’t think of a time when a party’s economic doctrine has been so completely divorced from reality. And I’m also struck by the extent to which Republican-leaning economists — who have to know better — have been willing to lend their credibility to the party’s official delusions.
Partly, no doubt, this reflects the party’s broader slide into its own insular intellectual universe. Large segments of the G.O.P. reject climate science and even the theory of evolution, so why expect evidence to matter for the party’s economic views?
And it also, of course, reflects the political need of the right to make everything bad in America President Obama’s fault. Never mind the fact that the housing bubble, the debt explosion and the financial crisis took place on the watch of a conservative, free-market-praising president; it’s that Democrat in the White House now who gets the blame.
But good politics can be very bad policy. The truth is that we’re in this mess because we had too little regulation, not too much. And now one of our two major parties is determined to double down on the mistakes that caused the disaster.
Class War Hysteria
by Johnthan Chait
Understanding Class Warfare Hysteria
9/27/11
The recent outbreak of hysterics over “class warfare” occasioned by President Obama’s deficit reduction plan from a week ago was a highly revealing event. The super-rich have enjoyed overwhelming prosperity and a rapidly accelerating share of the national income over the last three decades. They also enjoy a position of privilege within the cultural and political elite, which paradoxically rallies around them and has come to see them as a vulnerable minority threatened by populist currents, however faint those may be.
And they are faint, indeed. To understand the hysterical character of the “class warfare” charge, consider the basic lay of the land. Here is a chart showing the share of national income earned by various income groups alongside their share of the tax burden:
Obama’s proposed tax hike would, by limiting deductions, increase the average tax rate paid by households earning between half a million and one million dollars by 2.7 percentage points. Households earning over a million dollars would see their tax rate increase by 5.5 percentage points.
How do you take this state of affairs and portray it as a kind of quasi-Bolshevism? First, you ignore the taxes that burden average Americans most heavily. The income tax is progressive, taxing the rich at higher rates and the poor not at all. On the other hand, payroll taxes, which finance all of Social Security and most of Medicare, levy higher rates on the poor and middle class. And state and local governments tend to employ sales taxes and other levies that are more regressive still. The overall progressive character of the American tax system is quite mild. But if you pretend income taxes are the whole of the tax system, then it can be made to look as if the rich are being oppressed.
Next, you focus on the share of taxes each group pays. Few Americans have a sense of just how large a share of the pie is brought in by the most affluent. For that reason, the share of taxes paid by the rich is likewise surprising.
So put the two together, and you have results like this soundbite:
According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the 1 percent of households with the highest incomes pay 38 percent of federal income taxes. The top 10 percent pay 70 percent of federal income taxes. Meanwhile, 46 percent of households pay no federal income tax at all.
And the president thinks that the wealthy aren't paying the fair share?
That’s Chris Wallace on last weekend’s Fox News Sunday, but versions of this statistic are uttered almost every day.
It’s important to note that the interminable campaign to persuade Americans that the rich are overtaxed has not succeeded one iota. Raising taxes on the rich remains highly popular. Among voters, raising taxes on the rich unites Democrats, independent voters, and even many Republicans, isolating a small, recalcitrant base of committed right-wingers. At the level of political elites, by contrast, it works just the other way around. Higher taxes for the rich is “class warfare,” a left-wing play for the Democratic base, alienating thoughtful centrists. Proposals like Obama’s deficit reduction plan will be met with gasps of horror, not just from conservatives but from moderate Republicans like David Brooks and even moderate Democrats like Mark Penn.
One explanation for this anomaly is that rich people, obviously, hold a pride of place within the culture of the political elite. Mike Allen, who publishes the bulletin board of the political press corps, today endorses the worldview of the CEOs he “constantly” speaks with. The idea that a writer like Allen would endorse the (not crazy, but certainly self-interested) proposals he constantly hears from union leaders is, of course, unimaginable. Unions are an interest group. CEOs are economic leaders. One of the peculiar sentiments held by the rich is a fine-tuned sensitivity to any rhetoric that suggests they ought to have less privilege. Even the mildest advocacy of moderate fine-tuning of the tax code will produce spasms of complaint that, due to their proximity to the political and journalistic elite, reverberate throughout the political discourse.
Consider this representative grievance from Washington sports franchise owner Ted Leonsis, which is all the more noteworthy because Leonsis voted for and donated to Obama in 2008. In a long blog post, Leonsis protests:
I say this as I read all of the rhetoric about Class Warfare, the rift that is being created between economic middle and lower class and as the President said “those millionaires and billionaires.” …
Economic Success has somehow become the new boogie man; some in the Democratic party are now casting about for enemies and business leaders and anyone who has achieved success in terms of rank or fiscal success is being cast as a bad guy in a black hat. …
Pick some business leaders that you work with and make them heroes. Don’t demonize them. …
It blows my mind when I am asked for money as a donation at the same time I am getting blasted as being a bad guy!
Someone needs to talk our President down off of this rhetoric about good vs. evil.
Good and evil? Demonized? What is this man talking about? Obama has not said anything remotely like this. His riff on raising taxes for the rich has always described the Bush tax cuts for the affluent as tax cuts for people “who didn’t ask for them and don’t need them” — which is specifically designed to shield the rich from any blame. His recent “class warfare” speech contains not the slightest hint that the rich are bad, or that taking money from them is a positive thing in and of itself. It simply describes fiscal necessity, and takes pains to reassure the rich with passages like this:
Nobody wants to punish success in America. What’s great about this country is our belief that anyone can make it and everybody should be able to try — the idea that any one of us can open a business or have an idea and make us millionaires or billionaires. This is the land of opportunity. That’s great. All I’m saying is that those who have done well, including me, should pay our fair share in taxes to contribute to the nation that made our success possible.
The hypersensitivity of the super-rich, impervious though it may be to facts, is nonetheless a powerful political force. And so we have an economy driving an increasing share of the national income to the rich counterposed with a political system in which a primary consideration is to safeguard the rich from any hurt feelings resulting from proposals to arrest that trend, even slightly. “Class warfare” is the term we have to signify this bizarre state of affairs.
Understanding Class Warfare Hysteria
9/27/11
The recent outbreak of hysterics over “class warfare” occasioned by President Obama’s deficit reduction plan from a week ago was a highly revealing event. The super-rich have enjoyed overwhelming prosperity and a rapidly accelerating share of the national income over the last three decades. They also enjoy a position of privilege within the cultural and political elite, which paradoxically rallies around them and has come to see them as a vulnerable minority threatened by populist currents, however faint those may be.
And they are faint, indeed. To understand the hysterical character of the “class warfare” charge, consider the basic lay of the land. Here is a chart showing the share of national income earned by various income groups alongside their share of the tax burden:
Obama’s proposed tax hike would, by limiting deductions, increase the average tax rate paid by households earning between half a million and one million dollars by 2.7 percentage points. Households earning over a million dollars would see their tax rate increase by 5.5 percentage points.
How do you take this state of affairs and portray it as a kind of quasi-Bolshevism? First, you ignore the taxes that burden average Americans most heavily. The income tax is progressive, taxing the rich at higher rates and the poor not at all. On the other hand, payroll taxes, which finance all of Social Security and most of Medicare, levy higher rates on the poor and middle class. And state and local governments tend to employ sales taxes and other levies that are more regressive still. The overall progressive character of the American tax system is quite mild. But if you pretend income taxes are the whole of the tax system, then it can be made to look as if the rich are being oppressed.
Next, you focus on the share of taxes each group pays. Few Americans have a sense of just how large a share of the pie is brought in by the most affluent. For that reason, the share of taxes paid by the rich is likewise surprising.
So put the two together, and you have results like this soundbite:
According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the 1 percent of households with the highest incomes pay 38 percent of federal income taxes. The top 10 percent pay 70 percent of federal income taxes. Meanwhile, 46 percent of households pay no federal income tax at all.
And the president thinks that the wealthy aren't paying the fair share?
That’s Chris Wallace on last weekend’s Fox News Sunday, but versions of this statistic are uttered almost every day.
It’s important to note that the interminable campaign to persuade Americans that the rich are overtaxed has not succeeded one iota. Raising taxes on the rich remains highly popular. Among voters, raising taxes on the rich unites Democrats, independent voters, and even many Republicans, isolating a small, recalcitrant base of committed right-wingers. At the level of political elites, by contrast, it works just the other way around. Higher taxes for the rich is “class warfare,” a left-wing play for the Democratic base, alienating thoughtful centrists. Proposals like Obama’s deficit reduction plan will be met with gasps of horror, not just from conservatives but from moderate Republicans like David Brooks and even moderate Democrats like Mark Penn.
One explanation for this anomaly is that rich people, obviously, hold a pride of place within the culture of the political elite. Mike Allen, who publishes the bulletin board of the political press corps, today endorses the worldview of the CEOs he “constantly” speaks with. The idea that a writer like Allen would endorse the (not crazy, but certainly self-interested) proposals he constantly hears from union leaders is, of course, unimaginable. Unions are an interest group. CEOs are economic leaders. One of the peculiar sentiments held by the rich is a fine-tuned sensitivity to any rhetoric that suggests they ought to have less privilege. Even the mildest advocacy of moderate fine-tuning of the tax code will produce spasms of complaint that, due to their proximity to the political and journalistic elite, reverberate throughout the political discourse.
Consider this representative grievance from Washington sports franchise owner Ted Leonsis, which is all the more noteworthy because Leonsis voted for and donated to Obama in 2008. In a long blog post, Leonsis protests:
I say this as I read all of the rhetoric about Class Warfare, the rift that is being created between economic middle and lower class and as the President said “those millionaires and billionaires.” …
Economic Success has somehow become the new boogie man; some in the Democratic party are now casting about for enemies and business leaders and anyone who has achieved success in terms of rank or fiscal success is being cast as a bad guy in a black hat. …
Pick some business leaders that you work with and make them heroes. Don’t demonize them. …
It blows my mind when I am asked for money as a donation at the same time I am getting blasted as being a bad guy!
Someone needs to talk our President down off of this rhetoric about good vs. evil.
Good and evil? Demonized? What is this man talking about? Obama has not said anything remotely like this. His riff on raising taxes for the rich has always described the Bush tax cuts for the affluent as tax cuts for people “who didn’t ask for them and don’t need them” — which is specifically designed to shield the rich from any blame. His recent “class warfare” speech contains not the slightest hint that the rich are bad, or that taking money from them is a positive thing in and of itself. It simply describes fiscal necessity, and takes pains to reassure the rich with passages like this:
Nobody wants to punish success in America. What’s great about this country is our belief that anyone can make it and everybody should be able to try — the idea that any one of us can open a business or have an idea and make us millionaires or billionaires. This is the land of opportunity. That’s great. All I’m saying is that those who have done well, including me, should pay our fair share in taxes to contribute to the nation that made our success possible.
The hypersensitivity of the super-rich, impervious though it may be to facts, is nonetheless a powerful political force. And so we have an economy driving an increasing share of the national income to the rich counterposed with a political system in which a primary consideration is to safeguard the rich from any hurt feelings resulting from proposals to arrest that trend, even slightly. “Class warfare” is the term we have to signify this bizarre state of affairs.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The New Historicism
I wish I had taken a course in literary theories.
DEFINITION OF THE NEW HISTORICISM
The new historicism developed during the 1980s, largely in reaction to the text-only approach pursued by formalist New Critics and the critics who challenged the New Criticism in the 1970s. New historicists, like formalists and their critics, acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with an eye to history. In this respect, the new historicism is not "new"; the majority of critics between 1920 and 1950 focused on a work’s historical content and based their interpretations on the interplay between the text and historical contexts (such as the author’s life or intentions in writing the work).
In other respects, however, the new historicism differs from the historical criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. It is informed by the poststructuralist and reader-response theory of the 1970s, as well as by the thinking of feminist, cultural, and Marxist critics whose work was also "new" in the 1980s. They are less fact- and event-oriented than historical critics used to be, perhaps because they have come to wonder whether the truth about what really happened can ever be purely or objectively known. They are less likely to see history as linear and progressive, as something developing toward the present, and they are also less likely to think of it in terms of specific eras, each with a definite, persistent, and consistent zeitgeist (spirit of the times). Hence they are unlikely to suggest that a literary text has a single or easily identifiable historical context.
New historicist critics also tend to define the discipline of history more broadly than did their predecessors. They view history as a social science like anthropology and sociology, whereas older historicists tended to view history as literature's "background" and the social sciences as being properly historical. They have erased the line dividing historical and literary materials, showing not only that the production of one of William Shakespeare’s historical plays was both a political act and a historical event, but also that the coronation of Elizabeth I was carried out with the same care for staging and symbol lavished on works of dramatic art.
New historicists remind us that it is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really was—rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was. And they know that the job is impossible for those who are unaware of that difficulty, insensitive to the bent or bias of their own historical vantage point. Thus, when new historicist critics describe a historical change, they are highly conscious of (and even likely to discuss) the theory of historical change that informs their account.
Many new historicists have acknowledged a profound indebtedness to the writings of Michel Foucault. A French philosophical historian, Foucault brought together incidents and phenomena from areas normally seen as unconnected, encouraging new historicists and new cultural historicists to redefine the boundaries of historical inquiry. Like the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault refused to see history as an evolutionary process, a continuous development from cause to effect, from past to present toward THE END, a moment of definite closure, a Day of Judgment. No historical event, according to Foucault, has a single cause; rather, each event is tied into a vast web of economic, social, and political factors. Like Karl Marx, Foucault saw history in terms of power, but unlike Marx, he viewed power not simply as a repressive force or a tool of conspiracy but rather as a complex of forces that produces what happens. Not even a tyrannical aristocrat simply wields power, for the aristocrat is himself empowered by discourses and practices that constitute power.
Not all new historicist critics owe their greatest debt to Foucault. Some, like Stephen Greenblatt, have been most nearly influenced by the British cultural critic Raymond Williams, and others, like Brook Thomas, have been more influenced by German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Still others—Jerome McGann, for example—have followed the lead of Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who viewed literary works in terms of polyphonic discourses and dialogues between the official, legitimate voices of society and other, more challenging or critical voices echoing popular culture.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.
H
DEFINITION OF THE NEW HISTORICISM
The new historicism developed during the 1980s, largely in reaction to the text-only approach pursued by formalist New Critics and the critics who challenged the New Criticism in the 1970s. New historicists, like formalists and their critics, acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with an eye to history. In this respect, the new historicism is not "new"; the majority of critics between 1920 and 1950 focused on a work’s historical content and based their interpretations on the interplay between the text and historical contexts (such as the author’s life or intentions in writing the work).
In other respects, however, the new historicism differs from the historical criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. It is informed by the poststructuralist and reader-response theory of the 1970s, as well as by the thinking of feminist, cultural, and Marxist critics whose work was also "new" in the 1980s. They are less fact- and event-oriented than historical critics used to be, perhaps because they have come to wonder whether the truth about what really happened can ever be purely or objectively known. They are less likely to see history as linear and progressive, as something developing toward the present, and they are also less likely to think of it in terms of specific eras, each with a definite, persistent, and consistent zeitgeist (spirit of the times). Hence they are unlikely to suggest that a literary text has a single or easily identifiable historical context.
New historicist critics also tend to define the discipline of history more broadly than did their predecessors. They view history as a social science like anthropology and sociology, whereas older historicists tended to view history as literature's "background" and the social sciences as being properly historical. They have erased the line dividing historical and literary materials, showing not only that the production of one of William Shakespeare’s historical plays was both a political act and a historical event, but also that the coronation of Elizabeth I was carried out with the same care for staging and symbol lavished on works of dramatic art.
New historicists remind us that it is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really was—rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was. And they know that the job is impossible for those who are unaware of that difficulty, insensitive to the bent or bias of their own historical vantage point. Thus, when new historicist critics describe a historical change, they are highly conscious of (and even likely to discuss) the theory of historical change that informs their account.
Many new historicists have acknowledged a profound indebtedness to the writings of Michel Foucault. A French philosophical historian, Foucault brought together incidents and phenomena from areas normally seen as unconnected, encouraging new historicists and new cultural historicists to redefine the boundaries of historical inquiry. Like the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault refused to see history as an evolutionary process, a continuous development from cause to effect, from past to present toward THE END, a moment of definite closure, a Day of Judgment. No historical event, according to Foucault, has a single cause; rather, each event is tied into a vast web of economic, social, and political factors. Like Karl Marx, Foucault saw history in terms of power, but unlike Marx, he viewed power not simply as a repressive force or a tool of conspiracy but rather as a complex of forces that produces what happens. Not even a tyrannical aristocrat simply wields power, for the aristocrat is himself empowered by discourses and practices that constitute power.
Not all new historicist critics owe their greatest debt to Foucault. Some, like Stephen Greenblatt, have been most nearly influenced by the British cultural critic Raymond Williams, and others, like Brook Thomas, have been more influenced by German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Still others—Jerome McGann, for example—have followed the lead of Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who viewed literary works in terms of polyphonic discourses and dialogues between the official, legitimate voices of society and other, more challenging or critical voices echoing popular culture.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.
H
A Review of "Hemingway's Boat"
‘The Finest Life You Ever Saw’October 13, 2011 by James Salter
Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961
by Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 531 pp., $30.00
Ernest Hemingway, the second oldest of six children, was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899 and lived until 1961, thus representing the first half of the twentieth century. He more than represented it, he embodied it. He was a national and international hero, and his life was mythic. Though none of his novels is set in his own country—they take place in France, Spain, Italy, or in the sea between Cuba and Key West—he is a quintessentially American writer and a fiercely moral one. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a highly principled doctor, and his mother Grace was equally high-minded. They were religious, strict—they even forbade dancing.
From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along with a third thing, writing. Almost from the first there is his distinct voice. In his journal of a camping trip he took with a friend when he was sixteen years old, he wrote of trout fishing, “Great fun fighting them in the dark in the deep swift river.” His style was later said to have been influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, journalism, and the forced economy of transatlantic cables, but he had his own poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness. There is a nervy tension in his writing. The words seem to stand almost in defiance of one another. The powerful early stories that were made of simple declaratives seemed somehow to break through into a new language, a genuine American language that had so far been undiscovered, and with it was a distinct view of the world.
He wrote almost always about himself, in the beginning with some detachment and a touch of modesty, as Nick Adams in the Michigan stories with his boyish young sister in love with him, as Jake Barnes with Lady Brett in love with him, as the wounded Frederic Henry with Catherine Barkley in love with him, Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees. In addition to love, he dealt in death and the stoicism that was necessary in this life. He was a romantic but in no way soft. In the story “Indian Camp” where they have rowed across the bay and are in an Indian shanty near the road:
Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.
“This lady is going to have a baby, Nick,” he said.
“I know,” said Nick.
“You don’t know,” said his father. “Listen to me. What she is going through is called being in labor. The baby wants to be born and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to get the baby born. That is what is happening when she screams.”
“I see,” Nick said.
Just then the woman cried out.
“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick.
“No. I don’t have any anaesthetic,” his father said. “But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important.”
The husband in the upper bunk rolled over against the wall.
The birth, the agony, the Caesarean, and the aftermath are all brilliantly described in brief dialogue and a few simple phrases. But every word, every inversion or omission is important. Of such stuff were the first stories made. “My Old Man” was chosen for Edward O’Brien’s Best Short Stories of 1923. “Up in Michigan,” another story, was—for its time—so frank and disturbing that Gertrude Stein called it unpublishable.
Hemingway was a handsome and popular figure in Paris in the early 1920s; there is the image of him walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse in his confident athletic way past cafés where friends call out or gesture for him to join them. He was married to Hadley, his first wife, and they had an infant son, Bumby. He was writing in notebooks, in pencil, lines of exceptional, painstaking firmness. His real reputation commenced in 1926 with The Sun Also Rises, swiftly written in eight weeks, based on his experiences going to Pamplona and his fascination with bullfighting. The characters were based on real people. Brett Ashley, in life, was Lady Duff Twysden:
Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.
It’s written with exuberance—”racing yacht” with its connotation of fast, sporting, gallant, its aura of heedless days. Words of one syllable that hit you all at once. Lady Duff Twysden liked being written about. Harold Loeb, who was Robert Cohen in the book, didn’t. He was portrayed as a Jew who wanted to belong to the crowd and never really understood that he couldn’t. The portrait bothered Loeb all his life. He had been a friend of Hemingway’s. He felt betrayed. Hemingway was generous with affection and money, but he had a mean streak. “I’m tearing those bastards apart,” he told Kitty Cannell. He was fine if he liked you but murder if he didn’t. Michael Arlen was “some little Armenian sucker after London names”; Archibald MacLeish, once his close friend and champion, was a nose-picking poet and a coward. As for Scott Fitzgerald, who was a couple of years older, successful before Hemingway, and had recommended him to Scribner’s, Hemingway said he wrote “Christmas tree novels,” was “a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money.”
Hemingway broke with almost all his literary friends—MacLeish, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson—although he remained loyal to Ezra Pound and never had the chance to break with James Joyce. Almost all of his likes and dislikes, appraisals, opinions, and advice are in his letters. It is estimated that he wrote six or seven thousand in his lifetime to a great variety of people, long letters bursting with description, affection, bitterness, complaint, and great self-regard: it’s hard not to admire the man, whatever his faults, who so boldly wrote them.*
In 1929 came A Farewell to Arms, which marked Hemingway’s complete ascension. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby had been published four years before but had somewhat disappointing sales. Hemingway’s novel burst like a rocket. It had been serialized in Scribner’s magazine and the first printing of 31,000 copies was quickly doubled.
In the 1930s Hemingway wrote two books of nonfiction: Death in the Afternoon, explaining and glorifying bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa, based on a long-anticipated hunting trip to British West Africa in 1933–1934. They are books in which Hemingway as the writer is very present and delivers various opinions and feelings. The books were not particularly well received. The critics, who once praised him and whom Hemingway now detested—lice, eunuchs, swine, and shits, he called them—were scornful. Green Hills of Africa had been a small book for a big man to write, one of them said. Edmund Wilson, initially Hemingway’s champion, astutely wrote:
For reasons which I cannot attempt to explain, something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situations which obsess him, are externalized and objectified; and the result is an art which is severe, intense and deeply serious. But as soon as he talks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin…. In his own character of Ernest Hemingway, the Old Master of Key West, he has a way of sounding silly. Perhaps he is beginning to be imposed on by the American publicity legend which has been created about him.
This was written in 1935.
They were beginning to pic him, to get him to lower his head. The letters of outrage he wrote were childish and violent. He believed in himself and his art. When he began it was fresh and startling. Over time the writing became heavier, almost a parody of itself, but while living in Key West in the 1930s he wrote two of his finest stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” both published in Esquire. And in 1940 his big novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on his experiences as a correspondent in the Spanish civil war, redeemed his reputation and restored him to eminence.
Paul Hendrickson’s rich and enthralling Hemingway’s Boat, which covers the last twenty-seven years of Hemingway’s life, from 1934 to 1961, is not, as is made clear at the beginning, a conventional biography. It is factual but at the same time intensely personal, driven by great admiration but also filled with sentiment, speculation, and what might be called human interest. Hendrickson can write an appreciation of a photograph of Hemingway, his wife Pauline, and a boat hand named Samuelson sitting at a café table in Havana as if it were an altarpiece, and can give Havana itself—its bars, cafés, the Ambos Mundos Hotel, the ease of its life and dedication to its vices—a bygone radiance, a vanished city before its puritan cleansing by Castro.
On returning to America from his African safari in 1934, Hemingway fulfilled a long-held desire to buy a sea-going fishing boat, and at a boatyard in Brooklyn he ordered the thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser that he christened Pilar, his favorite Spanish name and also the secret name for his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, from early in their romance. In May 1934 his boat was delivered.
In Hendrickson’s book there is a great deal about this boat, by whom it was built, what it cost, its many particulars, all supporting the central part it played in the next two decades of Hemingway’s life. He needed physical activity as a relief from the intense effort that went into his writing, and he had always loved fishing. This was fishing for marlin, the great blue marlin, gigantic fish, four or five, even six hundred pounds, “their girth massive,” “their bills like swords.” When hooked they would literally walk on water. They appeared every summer off Bimini and then came down along the Cuban coast, traveling in the Gulf Stream, the great sea-river, deep blue to black, six or more miles wide. The battles with them, sometimes hours long, were savage, almost prehistoric, with the heart-stopping thrill of the strike and line screaming from the big reel. “Yi! Yi! A marlin!” Hemingway cries to his wife, “He’s after you, Mummy! He’ll take it!”
The deep, primal fears, the great fish fighting ferociously against the steel hook in its mouth, hour after hour, sounding, bursting from the water, struggling to be free and being slowly exhausted, the fisherman pumping and reeling in until the fish is gaffed alongside or even in the boat. In his first two years Hemingway caught ninety-one of them. One had jumped three times toward the boat and then thirty-three times against the current. That fish or another, gotten on board alive, had jumped twenty times or more in the cockpit.
In articles for Esquire, Hemingway wrote of all this with tremendous power. He was a heavyweight. Broad-shouldered, mustached, with an outlaw’s white smile, he dominated the marlin. He broke them. In Bimini once he returned to the dock
close to midnight in a jubilant drunk to find his 514-pound giant bluefin tuna that he’d fought for seven hours…and pound[ed] his fists over and over into the strung-up raw meat in moonlight the way prize-fighters in the gym slam at the heavy bag.
He had boxed almost all his life—Morley Callaghan, Mike Strater, and Harold Loeb in Paris. He even taught Ezra Pound to box. In Bimini he’d issued an island-wide challenge, a hundred dollars to anyone who could go three rounds with him. No one, it’s said, managed to.
He enjoyed taking people out on the Pilar to fish or to show them the excitement of it, Dos Passos and MacLeish before he broke with them, and Arnold Gingrich, who was the editor of Esquire and who married a sporty blond woman, Jane Mason, who’d been Hemingway’s mistress and was the model for Mrs. Macomber. The boat was used as well for cruising along the Cuban coast—the island is eight hundred miles long—to secluded bays where they would have lunch, swim, siesta, and sometimes stay for a few days.
Paul Hendrickson, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Sons of Mississippi—a book about the white sheriffs who, in 1962, tried to stop James Meredith from enrolling at the University of Mississippi—is a deeply informed and inspired guide. He often appears in the first person, addressing the reader and exhorting him or her to speculate, imagine, or feel. He has researched exhaustively, been to the places Hemingway frequented, and talked to whoever was part of or had a connection to the Hemingway days. He interviewed all three of Hemingway’s sons in 1987 for a piece about them in The Washington Post. His diligence and spirit are remarkable. It is like traveling with an irrepressible talker who may go off on tangents but never loses the power to amaze. The book not only traces the history of the boat with all its associations but also the longer arc of Hemingway’s life—his childhood, youth, companions, manhood, and achievement—in its full rise, fall, and finally rise again. Not a bell, as Hendrickson writes, but a sine curve.
There exists a general feeling that Hemingway was better earlier; his books were better, he was better as a man. By the time he was fifty, his son Gregory—with whom he had a difficult relationship—said he was “a snob and a phony.” The hotels, the Ambos Mundos and the Compleat Angler, seemed to become the Gritti Palace, Ritz, and Sherry-Netherland, and there was much association with rich or fashionable people. He had worked hard all his life. He had been to three wars, he had always showed up. “When you have loved three things all your life,” he wrote, “from the earliest you can remember; to fish, to shoot and, later, to read; and when all your life the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember.” And in a famous letter to his former wife, now Hadley Mowrer, he wrote:
Now I’ve written good enough books so that I don’t have to worry about that I would be happy to fish and shoot and let somebody else lug the ball for a while. We carried it plenty and if you don’t know how to enjoy life, if it should be the only one life we have, you are a disgrace and don’t deserve to have it. I happen to have worked hard all my life and made a fortune at a time when whatever you make is confiscated by the govt. That’s bad luck. But the good luck is to have had all the wonderful things and times we had. Imagine if we had been born at a time when we could never have had Paris when we were young. Do you remember the races out at Enghien and the first time we went to Pamplona by ourselves and that wonderful boat the Leopoldina and Cortina d’Ampezzo and the Black Forest?… Good bye Miss Katherine Kat. I love you very much.
It is Hemingway at his most gentle, elegiac, and self-pitying. Eight years after writing it he published Across the River and Into the Trees, an autobiographic novel about an aging colonel wildly in love with a young Italian woman in Venice that took his egotism to new heights and was ridiculed mercilessly, made worse by the notorious interview he gave to Lillian Ross that provided an equally devastating portrait. But he followed this with one of his most popular and enduring works, The Old Man and the Sea, about an epic marlin and an aged fisherman’s courage, written in Hemingway’s heroic style, uplifting, open to being mocked.
In 1954 he was given the Nobel Prize. Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, still a journalist, caught sight of Hemingway and his wife in Paris one day in 1957 walking along the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Hemingway was wearing old jeans and a lumberjack’s shirt. He had long been one of GarcÃa Márquez’s great heroes, for his myth as well as his writing. The Old Man and the Sea had hit GarcÃa Márquez “like a stick of dynamite”; he was too timid to approach Hemingway but also too excited not to do something. From the opposite side of the street he called out, “Maestro!” Hemingway raised a hand as he called back “in a slightly puerile voice,” “Adios, amigo!”
His health was deteriorating. There was recurring depression as well as the effects of serious injuries from two successive airplane crashes in Africa in 1954 that resulted in concussion, a fractured skull, a ruptured liver, and a dislocated arm and shoulder. Over the years he’d had many diseases, broken bones, and a number of wounds. There were also diabetes, hypertension, migraine headaches, and the cumulative cost of decades of hard drinking. He had night terrors and thoughts of suicide. His father had committed suicide—shot himself—in 1928. Writing was becoming increasingly difficult, and he had always put into it everything he had. His style became in some respects a kind of imitation of itself, a close imitation although, as Walter Benjamin noted, only the original of anything has authentic power.
Still, toward the end, in 1958, he finished the beautiful remembrance of his youth in Paris, A Moveable Feast, written with a simplicity and modesty that seemed long past. As with much of Hemingway, it fills one with envy and an enlarged sense of life. His Paris is a city you long to have known. Two of his novels never put in final form by him have been published posthumously, The Garden of Eden and Islands in the Stream. Like all his books, they sold well. In 2010 Scribner’s sold more than 350,000 copies of Hemingway’s works in North America alone. By far the most popular is The Old Man and the Sea.
There are lengthy though discerning portraits of minor characters in Hendrickson’s book. They are of interest mainly because they are neglected witnesses. The longer one, affectionately done, is of Walter Houk, who served in the US embassy in Havana at the end of the 1940s and whose girlfriend Nita worked for Hemingway as his secretary. She introduced Houk to Hemingway and they became friends. The Houks were married at Finca VigÃa, Hemingway’s house; he gave the bride away. Houk’s memories are firsthand, meals with the Hemingways, swims in their pool, voyages on the Pilar. A kind of rosy nostalgia seems to be taking over when suddenly, in the final riveting act, there enters a grotesque, almost demonic figure, tortured, mesmerizing, a doctor with the prodigious wreckage of three wives, seven or eight children, alcohol, drugs, and adultery trailing behind him, a transvestite who finally has a sex change operation and ends up dying in jail: the always troubled, gifted youngest son, Gregory Hemingway.
He is last seen sitting on the curb in Key Biscayne one morning after having been arrested the night before trying to get through a security gate. He’s in a hospital gown but otherwise naked with some clothes and black high heels bunched in one hand. He had streaked, almost whitish hair that morning, painted toenails, and as the police approached was trying to put on a flowered thong. Five days later he died of a heart attack while being held in a Women’s Detention Center. He was listed as Gloria Hemingway. This was in 2001; he was sixty-nine years old.
The last, very moving section of Hemingway’s Boat is devoted to Gregory, Gigi as he was always called, rhyming with “biggy,” the wayward son who as a boy was caught trying on his stepmother’s white stockings. “He was a boy born to be quite wicked who was being very good…,” Hemingway wrote in his fictional version, Islands in the Stream. “But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it.” Hendrickson says, “I’ll whoof this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt….” And these were possibly the transsexual fantasies in The Garden of Eden along with all the women in Hemingway with hair cut short like a boy’s.
When Gigi’s oldest child, Lorian, saw him for the first time in years, he took her out in a chartered boat to show her big-game fishing, but then embarrassingly lost the big marlin he’d hooked. He hadn’t slacked, and the line had snapped. He’d made a botch of it. He seemed broken. She reached out and touched his forhead in sympathy. “Sorry, Greg,” she said. “You’re a pretty girl,” he said. “A very pretty girl. Call me ‘Father,’ would you?” She noticed the nail polish on two of his cracked and dirty nails.
Hemingway’s declining health and psychological problems were more serious at the end of the 1950s. He had shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic and believed the FBI was following him. (In fact FBI agents had compiled a large file on him.) He was delusional and slurring his speech. It was kept from the public. He was unable to write as much as a single sentence. In chilling detail Hendrickson gives the almost step-by-step account of his final hour when he rose early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, put on his slippers, and went quietly past the master bedroom where his wife was sleeping. The suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it.
Hemingway’s Boat is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It does not rival the biographies but rather stands brilliantly beside them—the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.
“Forgive him anything,” as George Seldes’s wife said in the early days, “he writes like an angel.”
Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961
by Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 531 pp., $30.00
Ernest Hemingway, the second oldest of six children, was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899 and lived until 1961, thus representing the first half of the twentieth century. He more than represented it, he embodied it. He was a national and international hero, and his life was mythic. Though none of his novels is set in his own country—they take place in France, Spain, Italy, or in the sea between Cuba and Key West—he is a quintessentially American writer and a fiercely moral one. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a highly principled doctor, and his mother Grace was equally high-minded. They were religious, strict—they even forbade dancing.
From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along with a third thing, writing. Almost from the first there is his distinct voice. In his journal of a camping trip he took with a friend when he was sixteen years old, he wrote of trout fishing, “Great fun fighting them in the dark in the deep swift river.” His style was later said to have been influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, journalism, and the forced economy of transatlantic cables, but he had his own poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness. There is a nervy tension in his writing. The words seem to stand almost in defiance of one another. The powerful early stories that were made of simple declaratives seemed somehow to break through into a new language, a genuine American language that had so far been undiscovered, and with it was a distinct view of the world.
He wrote almost always about himself, in the beginning with some detachment and a touch of modesty, as Nick Adams in the Michigan stories with his boyish young sister in love with him, as Jake Barnes with Lady Brett in love with him, as the wounded Frederic Henry with Catherine Barkley in love with him, Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees. In addition to love, he dealt in death and the stoicism that was necessary in this life. He was a romantic but in no way soft. In the story “Indian Camp” where they have rowed across the bay and are in an Indian shanty near the road:
Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.
“This lady is going to have a baby, Nick,” he said.
“I know,” said Nick.
“You don’t know,” said his father. “Listen to me. What she is going through is called being in labor. The baby wants to be born and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to get the baby born. That is what is happening when she screams.”
“I see,” Nick said.
Just then the woman cried out.
“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick.
“No. I don’t have any anaesthetic,” his father said. “But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important.”
The husband in the upper bunk rolled over against the wall.
The birth, the agony, the Caesarean, and the aftermath are all brilliantly described in brief dialogue and a few simple phrases. But every word, every inversion or omission is important. Of such stuff were the first stories made. “My Old Man” was chosen for Edward O’Brien’s Best Short Stories of 1923. “Up in Michigan,” another story, was—for its time—so frank and disturbing that Gertrude Stein called it unpublishable.
Hemingway was a handsome and popular figure in Paris in the early 1920s; there is the image of him walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse in his confident athletic way past cafés where friends call out or gesture for him to join them. He was married to Hadley, his first wife, and they had an infant son, Bumby. He was writing in notebooks, in pencil, lines of exceptional, painstaking firmness. His real reputation commenced in 1926 with The Sun Also Rises, swiftly written in eight weeks, based on his experiences going to Pamplona and his fascination with bullfighting. The characters were based on real people. Brett Ashley, in life, was Lady Duff Twysden:
Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.
It’s written with exuberance—”racing yacht” with its connotation of fast, sporting, gallant, its aura of heedless days. Words of one syllable that hit you all at once. Lady Duff Twysden liked being written about. Harold Loeb, who was Robert Cohen in the book, didn’t. He was portrayed as a Jew who wanted to belong to the crowd and never really understood that he couldn’t. The portrait bothered Loeb all his life. He had been a friend of Hemingway’s. He felt betrayed. Hemingway was generous with affection and money, but he had a mean streak. “I’m tearing those bastards apart,” he told Kitty Cannell. He was fine if he liked you but murder if he didn’t. Michael Arlen was “some little Armenian sucker after London names”; Archibald MacLeish, once his close friend and champion, was a nose-picking poet and a coward. As for Scott Fitzgerald, who was a couple of years older, successful before Hemingway, and had recommended him to Scribner’s, Hemingway said he wrote “Christmas tree novels,” was “a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money.”
Hemingway broke with almost all his literary friends—MacLeish, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson—although he remained loyal to Ezra Pound and never had the chance to break with James Joyce. Almost all of his likes and dislikes, appraisals, opinions, and advice are in his letters. It is estimated that he wrote six or seven thousand in his lifetime to a great variety of people, long letters bursting with description, affection, bitterness, complaint, and great self-regard: it’s hard not to admire the man, whatever his faults, who so boldly wrote them.*
In 1929 came A Farewell to Arms, which marked Hemingway’s complete ascension. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby had been published four years before but had somewhat disappointing sales. Hemingway’s novel burst like a rocket. It had been serialized in Scribner’s magazine and the first printing of 31,000 copies was quickly doubled.
In the 1930s Hemingway wrote two books of nonfiction: Death in the Afternoon, explaining and glorifying bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa, based on a long-anticipated hunting trip to British West Africa in 1933–1934. They are books in which Hemingway as the writer is very present and delivers various opinions and feelings. The books were not particularly well received. The critics, who once praised him and whom Hemingway now detested—lice, eunuchs, swine, and shits, he called them—were scornful. Green Hills of Africa had been a small book for a big man to write, one of them said. Edmund Wilson, initially Hemingway’s champion, astutely wrote:
For reasons which I cannot attempt to explain, something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situations which obsess him, are externalized and objectified; and the result is an art which is severe, intense and deeply serious. But as soon as he talks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin…. In his own character of Ernest Hemingway, the Old Master of Key West, he has a way of sounding silly. Perhaps he is beginning to be imposed on by the American publicity legend which has been created about him.
This was written in 1935.
They were beginning to pic him, to get him to lower his head. The letters of outrage he wrote were childish and violent. He believed in himself and his art. When he began it was fresh and startling. Over time the writing became heavier, almost a parody of itself, but while living in Key West in the 1930s he wrote two of his finest stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” both published in Esquire. And in 1940 his big novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on his experiences as a correspondent in the Spanish civil war, redeemed his reputation and restored him to eminence.
Paul Hendrickson’s rich and enthralling Hemingway’s Boat, which covers the last twenty-seven years of Hemingway’s life, from 1934 to 1961, is not, as is made clear at the beginning, a conventional biography. It is factual but at the same time intensely personal, driven by great admiration but also filled with sentiment, speculation, and what might be called human interest. Hendrickson can write an appreciation of a photograph of Hemingway, his wife Pauline, and a boat hand named Samuelson sitting at a café table in Havana as if it were an altarpiece, and can give Havana itself—its bars, cafés, the Ambos Mundos Hotel, the ease of its life and dedication to its vices—a bygone radiance, a vanished city before its puritan cleansing by Castro.
On returning to America from his African safari in 1934, Hemingway fulfilled a long-held desire to buy a sea-going fishing boat, and at a boatyard in Brooklyn he ordered the thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser that he christened Pilar, his favorite Spanish name and also the secret name for his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, from early in their romance. In May 1934 his boat was delivered.
In Hendrickson’s book there is a great deal about this boat, by whom it was built, what it cost, its many particulars, all supporting the central part it played in the next two decades of Hemingway’s life. He needed physical activity as a relief from the intense effort that went into his writing, and he had always loved fishing. This was fishing for marlin, the great blue marlin, gigantic fish, four or five, even six hundred pounds, “their girth massive,” “their bills like swords.” When hooked they would literally walk on water. They appeared every summer off Bimini and then came down along the Cuban coast, traveling in the Gulf Stream, the great sea-river, deep blue to black, six or more miles wide. The battles with them, sometimes hours long, were savage, almost prehistoric, with the heart-stopping thrill of the strike and line screaming from the big reel. “Yi! Yi! A marlin!” Hemingway cries to his wife, “He’s after you, Mummy! He’ll take it!”
The deep, primal fears, the great fish fighting ferociously against the steel hook in its mouth, hour after hour, sounding, bursting from the water, struggling to be free and being slowly exhausted, the fisherman pumping and reeling in until the fish is gaffed alongside or even in the boat. In his first two years Hemingway caught ninety-one of them. One had jumped three times toward the boat and then thirty-three times against the current. That fish or another, gotten on board alive, had jumped twenty times or more in the cockpit.
In articles for Esquire, Hemingway wrote of all this with tremendous power. He was a heavyweight. Broad-shouldered, mustached, with an outlaw’s white smile, he dominated the marlin. He broke them. In Bimini once he returned to the dock
close to midnight in a jubilant drunk to find his 514-pound giant bluefin tuna that he’d fought for seven hours…and pound[ed] his fists over and over into the strung-up raw meat in moonlight the way prize-fighters in the gym slam at the heavy bag.
He had boxed almost all his life—Morley Callaghan, Mike Strater, and Harold Loeb in Paris. He even taught Ezra Pound to box. In Bimini he’d issued an island-wide challenge, a hundred dollars to anyone who could go three rounds with him. No one, it’s said, managed to.
He enjoyed taking people out on the Pilar to fish or to show them the excitement of it, Dos Passos and MacLeish before he broke with them, and Arnold Gingrich, who was the editor of Esquire and who married a sporty blond woman, Jane Mason, who’d been Hemingway’s mistress and was the model for Mrs. Macomber. The boat was used as well for cruising along the Cuban coast—the island is eight hundred miles long—to secluded bays where they would have lunch, swim, siesta, and sometimes stay for a few days.
Paul Hendrickson, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Sons of Mississippi—a book about the white sheriffs who, in 1962, tried to stop James Meredith from enrolling at the University of Mississippi—is a deeply informed and inspired guide. He often appears in the first person, addressing the reader and exhorting him or her to speculate, imagine, or feel. He has researched exhaustively, been to the places Hemingway frequented, and talked to whoever was part of or had a connection to the Hemingway days. He interviewed all three of Hemingway’s sons in 1987 for a piece about them in The Washington Post. His diligence and spirit are remarkable. It is like traveling with an irrepressible talker who may go off on tangents but never loses the power to amaze. The book not only traces the history of the boat with all its associations but also the longer arc of Hemingway’s life—his childhood, youth, companions, manhood, and achievement—in its full rise, fall, and finally rise again. Not a bell, as Hendrickson writes, but a sine curve.
There exists a general feeling that Hemingway was better earlier; his books were better, he was better as a man. By the time he was fifty, his son Gregory—with whom he had a difficult relationship—said he was “a snob and a phony.” The hotels, the Ambos Mundos and the Compleat Angler, seemed to become the Gritti Palace, Ritz, and Sherry-Netherland, and there was much association with rich or fashionable people. He had worked hard all his life. He had been to three wars, he had always showed up. “When you have loved three things all your life,” he wrote, “from the earliest you can remember; to fish, to shoot and, later, to read; and when all your life the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember.” And in a famous letter to his former wife, now Hadley Mowrer, he wrote:
Now I’ve written good enough books so that I don’t have to worry about that I would be happy to fish and shoot and let somebody else lug the ball for a while. We carried it plenty and if you don’t know how to enjoy life, if it should be the only one life we have, you are a disgrace and don’t deserve to have it. I happen to have worked hard all my life and made a fortune at a time when whatever you make is confiscated by the govt. That’s bad luck. But the good luck is to have had all the wonderful things and times we had. Imagine if we had been born at a time when we could never have had Paris when we were young. Do you remember the races out at Enghien and the first time we went to Pamplona by ourselves and that wonderful boat the Leopoldina and Cortina d’Ampezzo and the Black Forest?… Good bye Miss Katherine Kat. I love you very much.
It is Hemingway at his most gentle, elegiac, and self-pitying. Eight years after writing it he published Across the River and Into the Trees, an autobiographic novel about an aging colonel wildly in love with a young Italian woman in Venice that took his egotism to new heights and was ridiculed mercilessly, made worse by the notorious interview he gave to Lillian Ross that provided an equally devastating portrait. But he followed this with one of his most popular and enduring works, The Old Man and the Sea, about an epic marlin and an aged fisherman’s courage, written in Hemingway’s heroic style, uplifting, open to being mocked.
In 1954 he was given the Nobel Prize. Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, still a journalist, caught sight of Hemingway and his wife in Paris one day in 1957 walking along the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Hemingway was wearing old jeans and a lumberjack’s shirt. He had long been one of GarcÃa Márquez’s great heroes, for his myth as well as his writing. The Old Man and the Sea had hit GarcÃa Márquez “like a stick of dynamite”; he was too timid to approach Hemingway but also too excited not to do something. From the opposite side of the street he called out, “Maestro!” Hemingway raised a hand as he called back “in a slightly puerile voice,” “Adios, amigo!”
His health was deteriorating. There was recurring depression as well as the effects of serious injuries from two successive airplane crashes in Africa in 1954 that resulted in concussion, a fractured skull, a ruptured liver, and a dislocated arm and shoulder. Over the years he’d had many diseases, broken bones, and a number of wounds. There were also diabetes, hypertension, migraine headaches, and the cumulative cost of decades of hard drinking. He had night terrors and thoughts of suicide. His father had committed suicide—shot himself—in 1928. Writing was becoming increasingly difficult, and he had always put into it everything he had. His style became in some respects a kind of imitation of itself, a close imitation although, as Walter Benjamin noted, only the original of anything has authentic power.
Still, toward the end, in 1958, he finished the beautiful remembrance of his youth in Paris, A Moveable Feast, written with a simplicity and modesty that seemed long past. As with much of Hemingway, it fills one with envy and an enlarged sense of life. His Paris is a city you long to have known. Two of his novels never put in final form by him have been published posthumously, The Garden of Eden and Islands in the Stream. Like all his books, they sold well. In 2010 Scribner’s sold more than 350,000 copies of Hemingway’s works in North America alone. By far the most popular is The Old Man and the Sea.
There are lengthy though discerning portraits of minor characters in Hendrickson’s book. They are of interest mainly because they are neglected witnesses. The longer one, affectionately done, is of Walter Houk, who served in the US embassy in Havana at the end of the 1940s and whose girlfriend Nita worked for Hemingway as his secretary. She introduced Houk to Hemingway and they became friends. The Houks were married at Finca VigÃa, Hemingway’s house; he gave the bride away. Houk’s memories are firsthand, meals with the Hemingways, swims in their pool, voyages on the Pilar. A kind of rosy nostalgia seems to be taking over when suddenly, in the final riveting act, there enters a grotesque, almost demonic figure, tortured, mesmerizing, a doctor with the prodigious wreckage of three wives, seven or eight children, alcohol, drugs, and adultery trailing behind him, a transvestite who finally has a sex change operation and ends up dying in jail: the always troubled, gifted youngest son, Gregory Hemingway.
He is last seen sitting on the curb in Key Biscayne one morning after having been arrested the night before trying to get through a security gate. He’s in a hospital gown but otherwise naked with some clothes and black high heels bunched in one hand. He had streaked, almost whitish hair that morning, painted toenails, and as the police approached was trying to put on a flowered thong. Five days later he died of a heart attack while being held in a Women’s Detention Center. He was listed as Gloria Hemingway. This was in 2001; he was sixty-nine years old.
The last, very moving section of Hemingway’s Boat is devoted to Gregory, Gigi as he was always called, rhyming with “biggy,” the wayward son who as a boy was caught trying on his stepmother’s white stockings. “He was a boy born to be quite wicked who was being very good…,” Hemingway wrote in his fictional version, Islands in the Stream. “But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it.” Hendrickson says, “I’ll whoof this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt….” And these were possibly the transsexual fantasies in The Garden of Eden along with all the women in Hemingway with hair cut short like a boy’s.
When Gigi’s oldest child, Lorian, saw him for the first time in years, he took her out in a chartered boat to show her big-game fishing, but then embarrassingly lost the big marlin he’d hooked. He hadn’t slacked, and the line had snapped. He’d made a botch of it. He seemed broken. She reached out and touched his forhead in sympathy. “Sorry, Greg,” she said. “You’re a pretty girl,” he said. “A very pretty girl. Call me ‘Father,’ would you?” She noticed the nail polish on two of his cracked and dirty nails.
Hemingway’s declining health and psychological problems were more serious at the end of the 1950s. He had shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic and believed the FBI was following him. (In fact FBI agents had compiled a large file on him.) He was delusional and slurring his speech. It was kept from the public. He was unable to write as much as a single sentence. In chilling detail Hendrickson gives the almost step-by-step account of his final hour when he rose early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, put on his slippers, and went quietly past the master bedroom where his wife was sleeping. The suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it.
Hemingway’s Boat is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It does not rival the biographies but rather stands brilliantly beside them—the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.
“Forgive him anything,” as George Seldes’s wife said in the early days, “he writes like an angel.”
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
A Review of "The Art of Fielding"
Thursday, Sep 15, 2011 20:30 ET
In defense of the baseball novel
Baseball has a grand literary tradition. Why does the acclaimed book "The Art of Fielding" not want any part of it?
By Mike Doherty
Chad Harbach's debut novel, "The Art of Fielding," arrives with no lack of fanfare. It was sold, famously, for $665,000 (North American rights alone), blurbed by Jonathan Franzen (as "complete and consuming") and optioned for TV by HBO. It has renewed some people's faith that literary fiction, even without Oprah's blessing, can be a commercial proposition.
Oh, and it's about baseball. Not that its publisher is keen to advertise this. Indeed, Vanity Fair's 19,000-word e-book on the novel's "birth" describes how its designer was forbidden from referring to the sport on the book's cover. "The Art of Fielding's" official description tells us it's "about" such things as ambition, family, friendship, love and commitment -- themes common to just about any novel. Though the baseball novel may be in rude health -- according to bibliographer Noel Schraufnagel, some 200 of them were published between 1990 and 2007 alone -- in literary circles, it's still deemed minor-league. Sure, the likes of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway made reference to baseball in some of their best-known works, but most novels about the sport are dismissed as Cracker Jack for the sort of enthusiast that agonizes over his -- and it's always his -- fantasy team, rather than manna for the enlightened, worldly reader.
Yet baseball, with its colorful history and fiercely guarded traditions, is an ideal framework through which to contemplate America's culture and character. Schraufnagel's study, "The Baseball Novel," identifies waves of novels dealing with race (via the sport's integration of African-American and Hispanic players), gender and sexuality, where baseball, as a conservative, immovable object, meets the unstoppable force of societal change. Baseball fiction's predominant concern is with the attempt to safeguard the American dream, and it depicts honest, hardworking capitalists attempting to defeat underhanded villains driven by filthy lucre. Ring Lardner's "You Know Me Al" (1916), the first truly popular baseball novel, captured the uncomfortable relations between players, owners and gamblers, even three years before the notorious Black Sox scandal, when players were banned for throwing the World Series.
Since then, just about every work of adult baseball fiction has dealt in one way or another with the corruption of the sport, including those few that have been welcomed into the literary fold. In Bernard Malamud's myth-laden debut "The Natural," the lead character is bribed; in Philip Roth's darkly farcical "The Great American Novel," a team's money-hungry owners lease its ballpark and force it to play all its games on the road; in W.P. Kinsella's redemptive "Shoeless Joe," a magical baseball "field of dreams" is threatened by its creator's mercenary brother-in-law. Even Robert Coover's mind-warpingly postmodern "The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop." portrays the made-up league in its protagonist's head as being under threat by his job as an accountant.
"The Art of Fielding" goes even deeper into the nature of baseball itself than all these: It's set in a fictional liberal arts college in Wisconsin, whose team plays the sport for its own sake, unsullied by commercial constraints. Harbach exposes an issue that's integral both to the sport and to American democracy: the tension between the individual and the collective, where the pursuit of personal happiness is pitted against the good of the whole.
More than any other team sport, baseball can be broken down to a series of one-on-one confrontations; it rewards solo efforts, from the home run to the no-hitter, and punishes mistakes as errors. And yet, players are sometimes called upon to sacrifice themselves: As one character remarks to "The Art of Fielding's" protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, "You chose to say Laying down a bunt the way a person might say Laying down my life." Baseball heroes uphold the standards set out for great men by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "Self-Reliance" -- they think for themselves and value "the independence of solitude" but accept "the society of [their] contemporaries" and "the connection of events," and come into their own as "guides, redeemers and benefactors." Such prose may seem grandiose in context, but Harbach's collegiate characters are given to quoting Emerson and other American Renaissance authors, who wrote at a time when baseball was becoming "the national pastime." Westish's baseball players are forced to examine how their roles on the team affect their trajectories in life.
As "The Art of Fielding" opens, Henry, a recent high-school grad from South Dakota, is practicing fielding grounders. The setting is symbolic: a "ramshackle ballpark between a junkyard and an adult bookstore on the interstate outside Peoria" -- a scrap of nature surviving the worst of what urban sprawl has to offer. Skrimshander, the farm boy, has a natural talent, and he moves in a way that makes Westish catcher Mike Schwartz paraphrase Robert Lowell: "Expressionless, expresses God."
When Henry enrolls in Westish, his skills inspire the college's mediocre baseball squad just as former farm boy Roy Hobbs' magnificent home runs lift up the lowly New York Knights in "The Natural." But where Hobbs is an imperfect hero who thinks only of his own accomplishments, Skrimshander has the opposite problem: He seeks to lose himself in the game. He constantly pores over a collection of Zen-like aphorisms by his idol, shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez, and takes to heart advice about "dissipating the self, which is the source of all suffering and poor defense." Henry calls his glove Zero, and on and off the field, he seeks to empty out all that is not baseball, focusing only on training and playing; even big-league scouts offering money don't throw him off-course. But when he's on the verge of topping Rodriguez's college errorless streak and becoming a national hero in his own right, he commits his first-ever error. Only then does he realize what he's given up to get to this point, and it frightens him.
His mentor, Mike Schwartz, also gives himself to the team: His single-minded drive to help them win screws up his relationships with women and his career prospects. On the other hand, one of Henry and Mike's teammates embarks on a clandestine relationship with the college's president, and both put their personal lives above their commitment to their institution and the team.
The novel feels intimate, bound up in the details of its characters' everyday lives, which Harbach relates with tenderness and observational humor, and as with any "literary" baseball novel, the players' personal struggles also take on a larger resonance. Baseball, the sport of summer, is best suited to the genre of romance, which is unruly, episodic and given form, or so Northrop Frye tells us, by the quest. As veterans of college English lit classes know, Bernard Malamud made this explicit in "The Natural," where Roy Hobbs seeks to bring the pennant to his manager, a wounded Fisher King figure named, er, Pop Fisher. "Shoeless Joe's" hero, Ray Kinsella, is given a series of increasingly bizarre quests by a voice he hears in his head; one of them involves his kidnapping the author J.D. Salinger and bringing him to a baseball game in order to "ease his pain." In Don DeLillo's "Underworld," a collector quests for 22 years for the Bobby Thomson home run ball from the "shot heard 'round the world," all the while asking himself, "Why do I want this thing? What does it mean?"
Harbach plays with the idea of the quixotic quest: At one point in "The Art of Fielding," Mike Schwartz reflects that he could be seen as "the Ahab of this operation, this tournament the target of his mania." To be fair, this role may have been thrust upon him: Westish's sports teams are called the Harpooners, in reference to "Moby-Dick," whose author is said to have visited the college on a lecture tour late in his life. Having discovered this tenuous connection in 1972, the college administrators, in perhaps "a risible act of desperation," erected a statue to Melville and rebranded themselves, resulting in high-selling "commercial kitsch" in their bookstore and T-shirts that read, "WESTISH COLLEGE: OUR DICK IS BIGGER THAN YOURS."
Westish's appropriation of Melville's Great American Novel attempts to give the college significance, but its sports teams' nickname is quizzical: At the end of his failed quest to kill the white whale, Ahab is killed by his own harpoon. What's more, in "Moby-Dick," Ahab's peg leg is made of sperm-whale jawbone, or what Melville calls skrimshander; Henry's last name suggests that he isn't so much in charge of the team's quest as propping it up and being dragged around.
Though Harbach layers his characters' baseball dreams heavily with postmodern irony, he's not simply making fun of them, or of their goals. Pella Affenlight, Westish's president's daughter, the one significant character who's something of an outsider, cuts through the Harpooners' fraught masculine dramas with her sardonic wit, but even she develops affection for the team members. As readers, we come to feel the same way.
The Harpooners' quest, in the context of college life and bolstered by a literary perspective, is a process through which a baseball player can define himself as a person and as part of a group, and become, as Emerson would say, self-reliant.
As for Harbach himself, the 10 years he spent writing the novel, underemployed and with collection agencies at his heels, obviously paid off -- and not just commercially. Vanity Fair's e-book details how, after his agent helped create a bidding war, Harbach turned down the most lucrative offer in order to work with Little, Brown's Michael Pietsch, who edited David Foster Wallace. Thus, Harbach himself is seen to have heroically fended off the forces of greed and corruption, and safeguarded the integrity of his literary novel.
And maybe for the next edition, they'll even put a baseball on its cover.
More: Mike Doherty
Close
In defense of the baseball novel
Baseball has a grand literary tradition. Why does the acclaimed book "The Art of Fielding" not want any part of it?
By Mike Doherty
Chad Harbach's debut novel, "The Art of Fielding," arrives with no lack of fanfare. It was sold, famously, for $665,000 (North American rights alone), blurbed by Jonathan Franzen (as "complete and consuming") and optioned for TV by HBO. It has renewed some people's faith that literary fiction, even without Oprah's blessing, can be a commercial proposition.
Oh, and it's about baseball. Not that its publisher is keen to advertise this. Indeed, Vanity Fair's 19,000-word e-book on the novel's "birth" describes how its designer was forbidden from referring to the sport on the book's cover. "The Art of Fielding's" official description tells us it's "about" such things as ambition, family, friendship, love and commitment -- themes common to just about any novel. Though the baseball novel may be in rude health -- according to bibliographer Noel Schraufnagel, some 200 of them were published between 1990 and 2007 alone -- in literary circles, it's still deemed minor-league. Sure, the likes of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway made reference to baseball in some of their best-known works, but most novels about the sport are dismissed as Cracker Jack for the sort of enthusiast that agonizes over his -- and it's always his -- fantasy team, rather than manna for the enlightened, worldly reader.
Yet baseball, with its colorful history and fiercely guarded traditions, is an ideal framework through which to contemplate America's culture and character. Schraufnagel's study, "The Baseball Novel," identifies waves of novels dealing with race (via the sport's integration of African-American and Hispanic players), gender and sexuality, where baseball, as a conservative, immovable object, meets the unstoppable force of societal change. Baseball fiction's predominant concern is with the attempt to safeguard the American dream, and it depicts honest, hardworking capitalists attempting to defeat underhanded villains driven by filthy lucre. Ring Lardner's "You Know Me Al" (1916), the first truly popular baseball novel, captured the uncomfortable relations between players, owners and gamblers, even three years before the notorious Black Sox scandal, when players were banned for throwing the World Series.
Since then, just about every work of adult baseball fiction has dealt in one way or another with the corruption of the sport, including those few that have been welcomed into the literary fold. In Bernard Malamud's myth-laden debut "The Natural," the lead character is bribed; in Philip Roth's darkly farcical "The Great American Novel," a team's money-hungry owners lease its ballpark and force it to play all its games on the road; in W.P. Kinsella's redemptive "Shoeless Joe," a magical baseball "field of dreams" is threatened by its creator's mercenary brother-in-law. Even Robert Coover's mind-warpingly postmodern "The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop." portrays the made-up league in its protagonist's head as being under threat by his job as an accountant.
"The Art of Fielding" goes even deeper into the nature of baseball itself than all these: It's set in a fictional liberal arts college in Wisconsin, whose team plays the sport for its own sake, unsullied by commercial constraints. Harbach exposes an issue that's integral both to the sport and to American democracy: the tension between the individual and the collective, where the pursuit of personal happiness is pitted against the good of the whole.
More than any other team sport, baseball can be broken down to a series of one-on-one confrontations; it rewards solo efforts, from the home run to the no-hitter, and punishes mistakes as errors. And yet, players are sometimes called upon to sacrifice themselves: As one character remarks to "The Art of Fielding's" protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, "You chose to say Laying down a bunt the way a person might say Laying down my life." Baseball heroes uphold the standards set out for great men by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "Self-Reliance" -- they think for themselves and value "the independence of solitude" but accept "the society of [their] contemporaries" and "the connection of events," and come into their own as "guides, redeemers and benefactors." Such prose may seem grandiose in context, but Harbach's collegiate characters are given to quoting Emerson and other American Renaissance authors, who wrote at a time when baseball was becoming "the national pastime." Westish's baseball players are forced to examine how their roles on the team affect their trajectories in life.
As "The Art of Fielding" opens, Henry, a recent high-school grad from South Dakota, is practicing fielding grounders. The setting is symbolic: a "ramshackle ballpark between a junkyard and an adult bookstore on the interstate outside Peoria" -- a scrap of nature surviving the worst of what urban sprawl has to offer. Skrimshander, the farm boy, has a natural talent, and he moves in a way that makes Westish catcher Mike Schwartz paraphrase Robert Lowell: "Expressionless, expresses God."
When Henry enrolls in Westish, his skills inspire the college's mediocre baseball squad just as former farm boy Roy Hobbs' magnificent home runs lift up the lowly New York Knights in "The Natural." But where Hobbs is an imperfect hero who thinks only of his own accomplishments, Skrimshander has the opposite problem: He seeks to lose himself in the game. He constantly pores over a collection of Zen-like aphorisms by his idol, shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez, and takes to heart advice about "dissipating the self, which is the source of all suffering and poor defense." Henry calls his glove Zero, and on and off the field, he seeks to empty out all that is not baseball, focusing only on training and playing; even big-league scouts offering money don't throw him off-course. But when he's on the verge of topping Rodriguez's college errorless streak and becoming a national hero in his own right, he commits his first-ever error. Only then does he realize what he's given up to get to this point, and it frightens him.
His mentor, Mike Schwartz, also gives himself to the team: His single-minded drive to help them win screws up his relationships with women and his career prospects. On the other hand, one of Henry and Mike's teammates embarks on a clandestine relationship with the college's president, and both put their personal lives above their commitment to their institution and the team.
The novel feels intimate, bound up in the details of its characters' everyday lives, which Harbach relates with tenderness and observational humor, and as with any "literary" baseball novel, the players' personal struggles also take on a larger resonance. Baseball, the sport of summer, is best suited to the genre of romance, which is unruly, episodic and given form, or so Northrop Frye tells us, by the quest. As veterans of college English lit classes know, Bernard Malamud made this explicit in "The Natural," where Roy Hobbs seeks to bring the pennant to his manager, a wounded Fisher King figure named, er, Pop Fisher. "Shoeless Joe's" hero, Ray Kinsella, is given a series of increasingly bizarre quests by a voice he hears in his head; one of them involves his kidnapping the author J.D. Salinger and bringing him to a baseball game in order to "ease his pain." In Don DeLillo's "Underworld," a collector quests for 22 years for the Bobby Thomson home run ball from the "shot heard 'round the world," all the while asking himself, "Why do I want this thing? What does it mean?"
Harbach plays with the idea of the quixotic quest: At one point in "The Art of Fielding," Mike Schwartz reflects that he could be seen as "the Ahab of this operation, this tournament the target of his mania." To be fair, this role may have been thrust upon him: Westish's sports teams are called the Harpooners, in reference to "Moby-Dick," whose author is said to have visited the college on a lecture tour late in his life. Having discovered this tenuous connection in 1972, the college administrators, in perhaps "a risible act of desperation," erected a statue to Melville and rebranded themselves, resulting in high-selling "commercial kitsch" in their bookstore and T-shirts that read, "WESTISH COLLEGE: OUR DICK IS BIGGER THAN YOURS."
Westish's appropriation of Melville's Great American Novel attempts to give the college significance, but its sports teams' nickname is quizzical: At the end of his failed quest to kill the white whale, Ahab is killed by his own harpoon. What's more, in "Moby-Dick," Ahab's peg leg is made of sperm-whale jawbone, or what Melville calls skrimshander; Henry's last name suggests that he isn't so much in charge of the team's quest as propping it up and being dragged around.
Though Harbach layers his characters' baseball dreams heavily with postmodern irony, he's not simply making fun of them, or of their goals. Pella Affenlight, Westish's president's daughter, the one significant character who's something of an outsider, cuts through the Harpooners' fraught masculine dramas with her sardonic wit, but even she develops affection for the team members. As readers, we come to feel the same way.
The Harpooners' quest, in the context of college life and bolstered by a literary perspective, is a process through which a baseball player can define himself as a person and as part of a group, and become, as Emerson would say, self-reliant.
As for Harbach himself, the 10 years he spent writing the novel, underemployed and with collection agencies at his heels, obviously paid off -- and not just commercially. Vanity Fair's e-book details how, after his agent helped create a bidding war, Harbach turned down the most lucrative offer in order to work with Little, Brown's Michael Pietsch, who edited David Foster Wallace. Thus, Harbach himself is seen to have heroically fended off the forces of greed and corruption, and safeguarded the integrity of his literary novel.
And maybe for the next edition, they'll even put a baseball on its cover.
More: Mike Doherty
Close
Monday, September 26, 2011
Amazon Opens up to Library E-Books
Kindle Connects to Library E-Books
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: September 21, 2011
For years the availability of free e-books from libraries was something of an underground secret.
But Amazon significantly increased the potential visibility of library e-books on Wednesday when it opened up its popular Kindle device to these books for the first time.
“Libraries are a critical part of our communities,” Jay Marine, director of Kindle at Amazon, said in a statement. “And we’re excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country.”
The introduction of the Kindle, the biggest-selling e-reader, opens up library e-books to a wider audience, heightening the fears of publishers that many customers will turn to libraries for reading material. If that happens, e-book buyers could become e-book borrowers, leading to a potentially damaging loss of revenue for an industry grappling with a profound shift in consumer reading habits.
Library e-books are already available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, smartphones, laptops and other devices, but never on the Kindle, whose users had long complained that they were left out.
“We do get asked the question frequently: ‘Can I use my Kindle to download your e-books?’ ” said John F. Szabo, director of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System. “And the answer has been no.”
The move by Amazon “is a big deal and it’s a big step forward in public libraries being much more central in the whole e-book growth,” said Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries and schools. Connecting libraries with the Kindle, the most successful device and the largest e-book bookseller in the business, “is going to bring millions of readers to the public library,” he said.
The publishing industry has been reluctant to criticize libraries and their e-book systems because of the cherished status libraries hold in communities. But some publishing executives said privately that they found the development troubling and were concerned it might lead to a further unraveling of the traditional sales model.
As e-books have taken off with readers, libraries have been building their e-book collections to meet demand, successfully persuading many publishers to sell their titles to libraries in e-book format.
Christopher Platt, the director of collections and circulating operations at the New York Public Library, said that to meet demand from Kindle users, the library has already moved more money into the e-book budget and changed its default lending period for e-books from three weeks to two weeks.
“This is massive for libraries,” Mr. Platt said. “It opens up another avenue of access to the collections that we already have.”
From January to September the number of e-books checked out increased by 75 percent over the same period last year, he added.
About 67 percent of libraries nationally offer access to e-books, up 12 percent from two years ago, according to the American Library Association. Most libraries work through OverDrive, which acts as a middleman between publishers and libraries.
There are usually rules attached to checking out e-books. Publishers have said that libraries must treat digital collections the same way they treat physical collections: if a library buys 10 copies of a certain book, for instance, then only 10 copies can be digitally checked out at one time.
Library patrons appreciate not having to visit a physical library to access e-books, which can be downloaded remotely from home or on the road.
That convenience has publishers worried that e-reader owners who used to buy digital books will begin instead to borrow them. At least two of the six major publishers, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, do not make their e-books available to libraries.
“Our e-books are not currently available in libraries because we haven’t yet found a business model with which we are comfortable and that we feel properly addresses the long-term interests of our authors,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster. “We are in an ongoing dialogue with our library customers, and holding meetings with the different vendors who are offering e-book distribution to libraries, so that we can stay abreast of all the possible options.”
Publishers have also learned that once they have established e-book guidelines, changing them risks incurring the wrath of libraries. In March HarperCollins infuriated some librarians when it began enforcing a new restriction on its e-books, requiring that a book be checked out no more than 26 times before it expired. Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said on Wednesday that there had been no change in the policy.
Demand for library e-books will increase, publishing analysts said. Forrester Research estimated that roughly 15 million e-readers would be purchased in the United States this year.
A recent study by the Codex Group revealed that the idea of downloading e-books from a library was “phenomenally popular” among owners of digital reading devices, said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market-research company.
“The only thing holding digital public library growth back is low book-buyer awareness,” Mr. Hildick-Smith said.
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: September 21, 2011
For years the availability of free e-books from libraries was something of an underground secret.
But Amazon significantly increased the potential visibility of library e-books on Wednesday when it opened up its popular Kindle device to these books for the first time.
“Libraries are a critical part of our communities,” Jay Marine, director of Kindle at Amazon, said in a statement. “And we’re excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country.”
The introduction of the Kindle, the biggest-selling e-reader, opens up library e-books to a wider audience, heightening the fears of publishers that many customers will turn to libraries for reading material. If that happens, e-book buyers could become e-book borrowers, leading to a potentially damaging loss of revenue for an industry grappling with a profound shift in consumer reading habits.
Library e-books are already available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, smartphones, laptops and other devices, but never on the Kindle, whose users had long complained that they were left out.
“We do get asked the question frequently: ‘Can I use my Kindle to download your e-books?’ ” said John F. Szabo, director of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System. “And the answer has been no.”
The move by Amazon “is a big deal and it’s a big step forward in public libraries being much more central in the whole e-book growth,” said Steve Potash, the chief executive of OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries and schools. Connecting libraries with the Kindle, the most successful device and the largest e-book bookseller in the business, “is going to bring millions of readers to the public library,” he said.
The publishing industry has been reluctant to criticize libraries and their e-book systems because of the cherished status libraries hold in communities. But some publishing executives said privately that they found the development troubling and were concerned it might lead to a further unraveling of the traditional sales model.
As e-books have taken off with readers, libraries have been building their e-book collections to meet demand, successfully persuading many publishers to sell their titles to libraries in e-book format.
Christopher Platt, the director of collections and circulating operations at the New York Public Library, said that to meet demand from Kindle users, the library has already moved more money into the e-book budget and changed its default lending period for e-books from three weeks to two weeks.
“This is massive for libraries,” Mr. Platt said. “It opens up another avenue of access to the collections that we already have.”
From January to September the number of e-books checked out increased by 75 percent over the same period last year, he added.
About 67 percent of libraries nationally offer access to e-books, up 12 percent from two years ago, according to the American Library Association. Most libraries work through OverDrive, which acts as a middleman between publishers and libraries.
There are usually rules attached to checking out e-books. Publishers have said that libraries must treat digital collections the same way they treat physical collections: if a library buys 10 copies of a certain book, for instance, then only 10 copies can be digitally checked out at one time.
Library patrons appreciate not having to visit a physical library to access e-books, which can be downloaded remotely from home or on the road.
That convenience has publishers worried that e-reader owners who used to buy digital books will begin instead to borrow them. At least two of the six major publishers, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, do not make their e-books available to libraries.
“Our e-books are not currently available in libraries because we haven’t yet found a business model with which we are comfortable and that we feel properly addresses the long-term interests of our authors,” said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster. “We are in an ongoing dialogue with our library customers, and holding meetings with the different vendors who are offering e-book distribution to libraries, so that we can stay abreast of all the possible options.”
Publishers have also learned that once they have established e-book guidelines, changing them risks incurring the wrath of libraries. In March HarperCollins infuriated some librarians when it began enforcing a new restriction on its e-books, requiring that a book be checked out no more than 26 times before it expired. Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said on Wednesday that there had been no change in the policy.
Demand for library e-books will increase, publishing analysts said. Forrester Research estimated that roughly 15 million e-readers would be purchased in the United States this year.
A recent study by the Codex Group revealed that the idea of downloading e-books from a library was “phenomenally popular” among owners of digital reading devices, said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market-research company.
“The only thing holding digital public library growth back is low book-buyer awareness,” Mr. Hildick-Smith said.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Gene Chizik - All In (5)
So it was a bitter ending for Coach Chizik at Iowa State, but Auburn was his dream job. He thought it would get easier once he got to Auburn, but it certainly took time for it to get better
Chizik kept only 3 of the approximately 25 people in Tuberville's organization. There is Coach Yoxall, Coach Lolley, and chaplain Chette Williams. Sometimes I wonder why he kept Lolley when I see the play of our cornerbacks!
The Coach felt like he to make a clean start and have assistants who did things his way; hence, the letting go of Tuberville's people. He says there were certainly hard feelings on the part of Tubs staff, and some of his former coaches have not spoken to him to this day.
In his first meeting with the Auburn players, he quoted from the Auburn creed:
I believe that this is a practical world and that I count only on what I earn. Therefore, I believe in work, hard work.
You can't go wrong when you quote from the Auburn creed!
Chizik kept only 3 of the approximately 25 people in Tuberville's organization. There is Coach Yoxall, Coach Lolley, and chaplain Chette Williams. Sometimes I wonder why he kept Lolley when I see the play of our cornerbacks!
The Coach felt like he to make a clean start and have assistants who did things his way; hence, the letting go of Tuberville's people. He says there were certainly hard feelings on the part of Tubs staff, and some of his former coaches have not spoken to him to this day.
In his first meeting with the Auburn players, he quoted from the Auburn creed:
I believe that this is a practical world and that I count only on what I earn. Therefore, I believe in work, hard work.
You can't go wrong when you quote from the Auburn creed!
Thursday, September 22, 2011
States Rights is Ridiculous
If Republicans Love States’ Rights So Much, Why Do They Want to Be President?
Michael Kazin
If Republicans Love States’ Rights So Much, Why Do They Want to Be President? September 20, 2011
Whatever their differences, the leading Republican candidates all swear that they love states’ rights. If elected president, Rick Perry vows to “try to make Washington as inconsequential as I can.” Mitt Romney declares his faith in the Constitution, which, he says, declares that the government “that would deal primarily with citizens at the local level would be local and state government, not the federal government.” Michele Bachmann “respect[s] the rights of states to come up with their own answers and their own solutions to compete with one another.” With lots of help from the Tea Party, the Tenth Amendment which, not so long ago was familiar mainly to constitutional lawyers and scholars, may now be as popular as the First or the Second. But, what this resurgence of federalism overlooks is not just the historical consolidation of federal power but also the inanity of attempts to reverse it.
For most of U.S. history, the primacy of federalism was taken for granted. Except during major wars, states exerted far more power over the daily lives of their residents than did any of the three branches of a national government located in a swampy river city on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard that most Americans had never visited. In the nineteenth century, as the historian Gary Gerstle explains, states funded canals, highways, and railroads. They decided which groups could vote and which could not. Some tried to regulate working hours. Others outlawed a variety of private acts—interracial marriage, drinking, and theater-going. In 1837, Illinois even forbade “playing at ball or flying of kites” as public nuisances.
All these policies fell under the legal sanction of “the police power,” which one influential Massachusetts judge in 1851 defined broadly as insuring the “good and welfare of the Commonwealth.” For its part, the Supreme Court, until after World War I, rather consistently ruled that the celebrated protections of the Bill of Rights—from the freedom of speech and the press to the right to a speedy trial—applied only to acts by the federal government and not to those of the states.
But, by the middle of the twentieth century, this arrangement no longer served the needs or desires of most Americans. During the Great Depression, state revenues, based mainly on property taxes, plummeted. The federal government stepped in to provide relief, and citizens everywhere began to count on Washington to keep the economy afloat and their Social Security checks arriving promptly. Then World War II and the cold war bound Americans to a national-security state that financed education for veterans and interstate highways as well as aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. In the 1960s and ’70s, Congress passed laws to safeguard the civil and voting rights of every citizen, regardless of where he or she might live. Policies to protect the environment and regulate hazards at the workplace further diminished the sway of state governments. The Supreme Court, even with a conservative majority, has done little to reverse these changes.
Yet, states’ rights never lost its appeal to that minority of Americans who are ideologically committed to lambasting the federal state as both overweening and ineffective. (It should come as no surprise that these conservatives were so alarmed at the emergency measures taken by the Bush and Obama administrations to address the financial meltdown of 2008: the formation and rapid growth of the Tea Party was the predictable result.)However, any Republican elected to the White House in 2012 will find it impossible to lead a headlong charge back to the past, and not just because of the difficulty of undoing a half-century of tradition and Supreme Court precedent.
Voters unhappy with the inability of the federal government to restore prosperity may like the sound of “states’ rights.” But how many would trust their governors and state legislators to pay their Medicare and Social Security checks on time and at current or higher levels? How many really want 50 separate immigration policies or 50 different standards for what constitutes clean air and clean water? Or the possibility that a state, seeking to lure business away from its neighbors, could cut the minimum wage in half and not requiring employers to pay for overtime?
When you look more broadly at their promises, the GOP hopefuls reveal the emptiness of their own rhetoric. Bachmann, never a paragon of consistency, supports a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, as well as the right of individual states to legalize it. In 2007, before Romney got in trouble for his Massachusetts health care law, he predicted, “that all these states … who follow the path that we pursued will find it’s the best path, and we’ll end up with a nation that’s taken a mandate approach.” Rick Perry favors federal action to stop gay marriage and restrict abortion—and, last month, asked President Obama to speed up aid to stop wildfires from burning up whole sections of his vast state. Like a lot of other Americans, these ambitious conservatives like to rail against Washington in the abstract but cannot imagine how the nation would operate without a strong central government. And the specifics of their smaller hypocrisies are underscored by one giant irony: They’re all running for president.
The U.S. has long ceased to be a country in which most people look to their state instead of to the national government to address and solve their most vital problems. State pride is pretty rare these days, except for residents and alumni who dress in the old-school colors and root hard for a college football or basketball team from a major public university.
Of course, state governments still perform a vital role in education and economic development and can still be “laboratories of democracy,” sites for testing out new policies that aren’t yet ready for national consumption. Progressives who cheered when New York legalized gay marriage and look forward to the day when Vermont begins operating the single-payer health care system it passed this spring can hardly object, at least in principle, when red states pass laws they abhor. But, as an alternative philosophy of governance in a modern nation, states’ rights is very wrong. In fact, it’s ridiculous.
Michael Kazin
If Republicans Love States’ Rights So Much, Why Do They Want to Be President? September 20, 2011
Whatever their differences, the leading Republican candidates all swear that they love states’ rights. If elected president, Rick Perry vows to “try to make Washington as inconsequential as I can.” Mitt Romney declares his faith in the Constitution, which, he says, declares that the government “that would deal primarily with citizens at the local level would be local and state government, not the federal government.” Michele Bachmann “respect[s] the rights of states to come up with their own answers and their own solutions to compete with one another.” With lots of help from the Tea Party, the Tenth Amendment which, not so long ago was familiar mainly to constitutional lawyers and scholars, may now be as popular as the First or the Second. But, what this resurgence of federalism overlooks is not just the historical consolidation of federal power but also the inanity of attempts to reverse it.
For most of U.S. history, the primacy of federalism was taken for granted. Except during major wars, states exerted far more power over the daily lives of their residents than did any of the three branches of a national government located in a swampy river city on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard that most Americans had never visited. In the nineteenth century, as the historian Gary Gerstle explains, states funded canals, highways, and railroads. They decided which groups could vote and which could not. Some tried to regulate working hours. Others outlawed a variety of private acts—interracial marriage, drinking, and theater-going. In 1837, Illinois even forbade “playing at ball or flying of kites” as public nuisances.
All these policies fell under the legal sanction of “the police power,” which one influential Massachusetts judge in 1851 defined broadly as insuring the “good and welfare of the Commonwealth.” For its part, the Supreme Court, until after World War I, rather consistently ruled that the celebrated protections of the Bill of Rights—from the freedom of speech and the press to the right to a speedy trial—applied only to acts by the federal government and not to those of the states.
But, by the middle of the twentieth century, this arrangement no longer served the needs or desires of most Americans. During the Great Depression, state revenues, based mainly on property taxes, plummeted. The federal government stepped in to provide relief, and citizens everywhere began to count on Washington to keep the economy afloat and their Social Security checks arriving promptly. Then World War II and the cold war bound Americans to a national-security state that financed education for veterans and interstate highways as well as aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. In the 1960s and ’70s, Congress passed laws to safeguard the civil and voting rights of every citizen, regardless of where he or she might live. Policies to protect the environment and regulate hazards at the workplace further diminished the sway of state governments. The Supreme Court, even with a conservative majority, has done little to reverse these changes.
Yet, states’ rights never lost its appeal to that minority of Americans who are ideologically committed to lambasting the federal state as both overweening and ineffective. (It should come as no surprise that these conservatives were so alarmed at the emergency measures taken by the Bush and Obama administrations to address the financial meltdown of 2008: the formation and rapid growth of the Tea Party was the predictable result.)However, any Republican elected to the White House in 2012 will find it impossible to lead a headlong charge back to the past, and not just because of the difficulty of undoing a half-century of tradition and Supreme Court precedent.
Voters unhappy with the inability of the federal government to restore prosperity may like the sound of “states’ rights.” But how many would trust their governors and state legislators to pay their Medicare and Social Security checks on time and at current or higher levels? How many really want 50 separate immigration policies or 50 different standards for what constitutes clean air and clean water? Or the possibility that a state, seeking to lure business away from its neighbors, could cut the minimum wage in half and not requiring employers to pay for overtime?
When you look more broadly at their promises, the GOP hopefuls reveal the emptiness of their own rhetoric. Bachmann, never a paragon of consistency, supports a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, as well as the right of individual states to legalize it. In 2007, before Romney got in trouble for his Massachusetts health care law, he predicted, “that all these states … who follow the path that we pursued will find it’s the best path, and we’ll end up with a nation that’s taken a mandate approach.” Rick Perry favors federal action to stop gay marriage and restrict abortion—and, last month, asked President Obama to speed up aid to stop wildfires from burning up whole sections of his vast state. Like a lot of other Americans, these ambitious conservatives like to rail against Washington in the abstract but cannot imagine how the nation would operate without a strong central government. And the specifics of their smaller hypocrisies are underscored by one giant irony: They’re all running for president.
The U.S. has long ceased to be a country in which most people look to their state instead of to the national government to address and solve their most vital problems. State pride is pretty rare these days, except for residents and alumni who dress in the old-school colors and root hard for a college football or basketball team from a major public university.
Of course, state governments still perform a vital role in education and economic development and can still be “laboratories of democracy,” sites for testing out new policies that aren’t yet ready for national consumption. Progressives who cheered when New York legalized gay marriage and look forward to the day when Vermont begins operating the single-payer health care system it passed this spring can hardly object, at least in principle, when red states pass laws they abhor. But, as an alternative philosophy of governance in a modern nation, states’ rights is very wrong. In fact, it’s ridiculous.
Elizabeth Warren-Great Candidate/Great American
by Jonathan Cohn from TNR
One worry about Warren, the Harvard Law School professor challenging incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown, is that she won’t be able to connect with average voters. As you’ll see, that very plainly that is not the case. But pay close attention to what she says about progressive taxation, starting at about 50 seconds into the video:
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
These days, when you hear Democrats defend proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy, usually they argue about the numbers. We need more revenue in order to maintain vital government services, those who can afford to pay more should pay more, etc. And that’s fine as far as it goes.
But there’s also a philosophical rationale for progressive taxation. Two, actually.
One is the role that luck plays in life. As I wrote a few weeks ago:
Almost by definition, people who are successful have benefited from some measure of good fortune. That fortune can take the form of obvious, material advantages--like access to advanced technology and good schools. Or it can take the form of more subtle, but still important, assets for moving forward in life--like good health or loving parents.
Yes, a good work ethic will take you far. And I know many well-educated professionals convinced that nobody works as hard as they do. (I’ve been known to indulge the thought myself.) But I’ve met many people at the bottom of the income ladder who work just as hard, for far less reward. Between 1980 and 2005, the richest 1 percent of Americans got more than four-fifths of the country's income gains. Does anybody seriously believe that the other 99 percent didn't deserve to take home a much larger share?
The other argument is the one Warren makes in this video: Every person’s success is a product, in part, of investments that Americans made, collectively, going back generations. As she says, it was the taxpayers who paid for the schools, the roads, the scientific research, the first-responders, and all sorts of other public goods on which every business – and, indeed, every American – depends. Those who benefit the most from these investments don’t merely have the ability to pay more for them. They have an obligation.
And this argument isn’t simply about taxation. It’s also an argument for making more of these investments going forward. It’s worth spending government money on infrastructure, schools, and other public goods – even if it means paying for them, eventually, with higher taxes – because we all stand to benefit from them.
To echo Steve Benen and Greg Sargent, Warren’s candidacy is one of the most exciting political developments of recent months – and not simply because of what it means for Massachusetts.
One worry about Warren, the Harvard Law School professor challenging incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown, is that she won’t be able to connect with average voters. As you’ll see, that very plainly that is not the case. But pay close attention to what she says about progressive taxation, starting at about 50 seconds into the video:
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
These days, when you hear Democrats defend proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy, usually they argue about the numbers. We need more revenue in order to maintain vital government services, those who can afford to pay more should pay more, etc. And that’s fine as far as it goes.
But there’s also a philosophical rationale for progressive taxation. Two, actually.
One is the role that luck plays in life. As I wrote a few weeks ago:
Almost by definition, people who are successful have benefited from some measure of good fortune. That fortune can take the form of obvious, material advantages--like access to advanced technology and good schools. Or it can take the form of more subtle, but still important, assets for moving forward in life--like good health or loving parents.
Yes, a good work ethic will take you far. And I know many well-educated professionals convinced that nobody works as hard as they do. (I’ve been known to indulge the thought myself.) But I’ve met many people at the bottom of the income ladder who work just as hard, for far less reward. Between 1980 and 2005, the richest 1 percent of Americans got more than four-fifths of the country's income gains. Does anybody seriously believe that the other 99 percent didn't deserve to take home a much larger share?
The other argument is the one Warren makes in this video: Every person’s success is a product, in part, of investments that Americans made, collectively, going back generations. As she says, it was the taxpayers who paid for the schools, the roads, the scientific research, the first-responders, and all sorts of other public goods on which every business – and, indeed, every American – depends. Those who benefit the most from these investments don’t merely have the ability to pay more for them. They have an obligation.
And this argument isn’t simply about taxation. It’s also an argument for making more of these investments going forward. It’s worth spending government money on infrastructure, schools, and other public goods – even if it means paying for them, eventually, with higher taxes – because we all stand to benefit from them.
To echo Steve Benen and Greg Sargent, Warren’s candidacy is one of the most exciting political developments of recent months – and not simply because of what it means for Massachusetts.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
David Brooks is Unwell
David Brooks Is Unwell
Timothy Noah from the TNR
What Class Warfare Looks Like David Brooks Is Unwell Are Corporations People Or Aren't They? September 20, 2011
When Did ‘Trickle-Down’ Become a Respectable Idea?David Brooks has indigestion because President Barack Obama, whom Brooks rather likes, wants to raise taxes on the rich. "He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries." Why is that a half-truth? Because "the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S."
Oh, please. The top 10 percent pays nearly 70 percent of all income taxes because the top 10 percent makes half the income--49.74 percent, including capital gains, before the recession and only slightly less now. (My source is the World Top Incomes Database, a fantastic Web resource put together by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo and Tony Atkinson. Share it with the class warrior in your life.) The relevant statistic isn't what proportion of the nation's taxes comes from the rich. It's what proportion of the rich's income gets paid in taxes. Brooks cites a Congressional Budget Office report that says people in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government. Boo hoo. What he doesn't say is that back in 1979, on the eve of the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent paid 37 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government, even though its share of the nation's income was much lower than it is now (34 percent, including capital gains). Effective tax rates on top earners didn't change as much as many people think during the past 30 years, but they did go down (except for a brief uptick in the early Clinton years). For the very richest Americans, the drop was more precipitous. As recently as 2000 the 400 richest Americans paid 22.3 percent of their adjusted gross income in federal taxes. In 2008 (the last year for which data are available) they paid 18.1 percent. Again, this occurred while their income share was going up, not down.
Obama isn't even talking about making the rich pay a higher proportion of their income than the middle class in taxes. God forbid! He's merely saying (with his proposed "Buffet Rule") that the rich shouldn't get away with paying a smaller proportion. In doing so, he is repeating "the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives," according to Brooks. He is being "mean and intransigent." Have our politics really reached the point where the president must turn a deaf ear to a billionaire (not a "millionaire") who suggests that he shouldn't be paying proportionally less in taxes than his secretary? Jeez, demagoguery ain't what it used to be.
Timothy Noah from the TNR
What Class Warfare Looks Like David Brooks Is Unwell Are Corporations People Or Aren't They? September 20, 2011
When Did ‘Trickle-Down’ Become a Respectable Idea?David Brooks has indigestion because President Barack Obama, whom Brooks rather likes, wants to raise taxes on the rich. "He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries." Why is that a half-truth? Because "the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S."
Oh, please. The top 10 percent pays nearly 70 percent of all income taxes because the top 10 percent makes half the income--49.74 percent, including capital gains, before the recession and only slightly less now. (My source is the World Top Incomes Database, a fantastic Web resource put together by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo and Tony Atkinson. Share it with the class warrior in your life.) The relevant statistic isn't what proportion of the nation's taxes comes from the rich. It's what proportion of the rich's income gets paid in taxes. Brooks cites a Congressional Budget Office report that says people in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government. Boo hoo. What he doesn't say is that back in 1979, on the eve of the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent paid 37 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government, even though its share of the nation's income was much lower than it is now (34 percent, including capital gains). Effective tax rates on top earners didn't change as much as many people think during the past 30 years, but they did go down (except for a brief uptick in the early Clinton years). For the very richest Americans, the drop was more precipitous. As recently as 2000 the 400 richest Americans paid 22.3 percent of their adjusted gross income in federal taxes. In 2008 (the last year for which data are available) they paid 18.1 percent. Again, this occurred while their income share was going up, not down.
Obama isn't even talking about making the rich pay a higher proportion of their income than the middle class in taxes. God forbid! He's merely saying (with his proposed "Buffet Rule") that the rich shouldn't get away with paying a smaller proportion. In doing so, he is repeating "the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives," according to Brooks. He is being "mean and intransigent." Have our politics really reached the point where the president must turn a deaf ear to a billionaire (not a "millionaire") who suggests that he shouldn't be paying proportionally less in taxes than his secretary? Jeez, demagoguery ain't what it used to be.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Labor Lost?
Delving more closely into the nature of learning, we find that learning is more than just the gathering of information. Confucius discusses the relation of learning (hsüeh) and thought (ssu).
"The Master said, 'Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous'" (Analects II:15).
The relation of learning and thought is critical to Confucius. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge. Thought is the capacity to reason, understand, synthesize and ultimately apply the knowledge acquired.
The passage suggests that knowledge for knowledge's sake is "labor lost" and any attempt to understand without adequate knowledge is counterproductive and even dangerous!
Knowledge without thought is perilous indeed. My, my, are we not at the heart of much of today's problem?
From Rodney Taylor, Professor of Religious Studies at the U of Colorado
"The Master said, 'Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous'" (Analects II:15).
The relation of learning and thought is critical to Confucius. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge. Thought is the capacity to reason, understand, synthesize and ultimately apply the knowledge acquired.
The passage suggests that knowledge for knowledge's sake is "labor lost" and any attempt to understand without adequate knowledge is counterproductive and even dangerous!
Knowledge without thought is perilous indeed. My, my, are we not at the heart of much of today's problem?
From Rodney Taylor, Professor of Religious Studies at the U of Colorado
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Why We Don't Let People Die
Why We Don't Let People Die
Jonathan Cohn
Senior Editor
The big drama of this week’s Republican debate was over whether front-runner Rick Perry would stumble. But the most interesting moment turned out to involve a man nobody thinks can win the presidency: Ron Paul.
CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked Paul whether he was prepared to let an uninsured 30-year-old with cancer die, just because that 30-year-old could not afford the treatments. Paul gave a long, convoluted answer about responsibility. But a handful of audience members were less ambivalent. They blurted out “yes”—as in, yes, they would let the 30-year-old die.
The self-selected audience that attends Republican debates isn't exactly representative of the country as a whole. But this also isn’t the first time I’ve heard people attack universal health insurance, in principle, because it supposedly absolves people of individual responsibility—whether it’s the responsibility to stay healthy, the responsibility to seek timely medical care, or the responsibility to make the right choices about health insurance.
Of course, the proper boundaries of responsibility are a frequent subject of debate in American politics. In the 1990s, the argument over welfare reform was all about responsibility—and whether people had an obligation to work if they wanted financial assistance from the government. The consensus was that, yes, those who wanted assistance needed to be more responsible about their own lives.
But attitudes about medical care have always been a little different. As a practical matter, few of us are prepared to allow a somebody die when life-saving treatment is available, just because that person isn't prepared to pay the bills. As Ezra Klein put it the other day, “we do not want to look in people’s pockets for an insurance card when they fall to the floor with chest pains.”
We've actually written this expectation into law: The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) prohibits hospitals that accept Medicare (i.e., virtually all hospitals) from withholding such treatment. But the idea that providers of medical care have this sort of obligation goes back much farther than that, as Howard Markel, a leading historian of medicine from the University of Michigan, explains: “It is part of the standard “social contract” doctors have long had with their patients and society at large… most famously it emerges from the teachings of Hippocrates—and in particular the Oath.”
I happen to agree with this attitude: We shouldn't let people die, just because they can't pay a medical bill. Partly that's because I recognize the role chance and misfortune play in our lives. A child born into a family without health insurance couldn't have done something different to get covered. Yet, as Paul Krugman pointed out on Friday, if that child gets sick, that child is going to suffer. An adult with an inherited conditions, even a relatively mild one, didn't choose to be born that way. But inherited conditions are pre-existing conditions—and can make it impossible for people to get affordable insurance.
To be clear, the people without the means to pay for medical care aren't always, or entirely, victims of circumstance. Years ago, when I started interviewing people about their experiences with the health care system, I always hoped to find that perfect story of somebody who, through no fault of their own, was wronged by the system. But those stories were less common that I'd expected. Frequently the people I met had made at least one mistake. Some didn’t spend enough time looking for charity or public insurance options. Some checked the wrong box on a form. Some stopped paying for insurance when they could have stopped paying for something else. Some ignored medical warning signs.
But you know what? We all make those kinds of mistakes in life. The problem for these people was that they happened to make a particular kind of mistake—a mistake about their health or how to pay for their medical care—that led to unusually severe consequences—like losing their life savings or, in the worst cases, losing their lives. Maybe the people in the audience on Tuesday would shrug and say those consequences are appropriate. I wouldn't. My definition of a decent society is one that protects people not only from bad luck, but also, in some circumstances, from their own bad judgment.
Jonathan Cohn
Senior Editor
The big drama of this week’s Republican debate was over whether front-runner Rick Perry would stumble. But the most interesting moment turned out to involve a man nobody thinks can win the presidency: Ron Paul.
CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked Paul whether he was prepared to let an uninsured 30-year-old with cancer die, just because that 30-year-old could not afford the treatments. Paul gave a long, convoluted answer about responsibility. But a handful of audience members were less ambivalent. They blurted out “yes”—as in, yes, they would let the 30-year-old die.
The self-selected audience that attends Republican debates isn't exactly representative of the country as a whole. But this also isn’t the first time I’ve heard people attack universal health insurance, in principle, because it supposedly absolves people of individual responsibility—whether it’s the responsibility to stay healthy, the responsibility to seek timely medical care, or the responsibility to make the right choices about health insurance.
Of course, the proper boundaries of responsibility are a frequent subject of debate in American politics. In the 1990s, the argument over welfare reform was all about responsibility—and whether people had an obligation to work if they wanted financial assistance from the government. The consensus was that, yes, those who wanted assistance needed to be more responsible about their own lives.
But attitudes about medical care have always been a little different. As a practical matter, few of us are prepared to allow a somebody die when life-saving treatment is available, just because that person isn't prepared to pay the bills. As Ezra Klein put it the other day, “we do not want to look in people’s pockets for an insurance card when they fall to the floor with chest pains.”
We've actually written this expectation into law: The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) prohibits hospitals that accept Medicare (i.e., virtually all hospitals) from withholding such treatment. But the idea that providers of medical care have this sort of obligation goes back much farther than that, as Howard Markel, a leading historian of medicine from the University of Michigan, explains: “It is part of the standard “social contract” doctors have long had with their patients and society at large… most famously it emerges from the teachings of Hippocrates—and in particular the Oath.”
I happen to agree with this attitude: We shouldn't let people die, just because they can't pay a medical bill. Partly that's because I recognize the role chance and misfortune play in our lives. A child born into a family without health insurance couldn't have done something different to get covered. Yet, as Paul Krugman pointed out on Friday, if that child gets sick, that child is going to suffer. An adult with an inherited conditions, even a relatively mild one, didn't choose to be born that way. But inherited conditions are pre-existing conditions—and can make it impossible for people to get affordable insurance.
To be clear, the people without the means to pay for medical care aren't always, or entirely, victims of circumstance. Years ago, when I started interviewing people about their experiences with the health care system, I always hoped to find that perfect story of somebody who, through no fault of their own, was wronged by the system. But those stories were less common that I'd expected. Frequently the people I met had made at least one mistake. Some didn’t spend enough time looking for charity or public insurance options. Some checked the wrong box on a form. Some stopped paying for insurance when they could have stopped paying for something else. Some ignored medical warning signs.
But you know what? We all make those kinds of mistakes in life. The problem for these people was that they happened to make a particular kind of mistake—a mistake about their health or how to pay for their medical care—that led to unusually severe consequences—like losing their life savings or, in the worst cases, losing their lives. Maybe the people in the audience on Tuesday would shrug and say those consequences are appropriate. I wouldn't. My definition of a decent society is one that protects people not only from bad luck, but also, in some circumstances, from their own bad judgment.
Capitalism and Marx
by John Gray (British writer)
Karl Marx may have been wrong about communism but he was right about much of capitalism, John Gray writes.
As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
He viewed capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history, and there can be no doubt that it differs radically from those of previous times.
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.
Negative return
The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended.
Defenders of capitalism argue that it offers to everyone the benefits that in Marx's time were enjoyed only by the bourgeoisie, the settled middle class that owned capital and had a reasonable level of security and freedom in their lives.
Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels In 19th Century capitalism most people had nothing. They lived by selling their labour and when markets turned down they faced hard times. But as capitalism evolves, its defenders say, an increasing number of people will be able to benefit from it.
Fulfilling careers will no longer be the prerogative of a few. No more will people struggle from month to month to live on an insecure wage. Protected by savings, a house they own and a decent pension, they will be able to plan their lives without fear. With the growth of democracy and the spread of wealth, no-one need be shut out from the bourgeois life. Everybody can be middle class.
In fact, in Britain, the US and many other developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been happening. Job security doesn't exist, the trades and professions of the past have largely gone and life-long careers are barely memories.
If people have any wealth it's in their houses, but house prices don't always increase. When credit is tight as it is now, they can be stagnant for years. A dwindling minority can count on a pension on which they could comfortably live, and not many have significant savings.
More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. Middle-class people used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. But it's no longer possible to look at life as a succession of stages in which each is a step up from the last.
In the process of creative destruction the ladder has been kicked away and for increasing numbers of people a middle-class existence is no longer even an aspiration.
Risk takers
As capitalism has advanced it has returned most people to a new version of the precarious existence of Marx's proles. Our incomes are far higher and in some degree we're cushioned against shocks by what remains of the post-war welfare state.
But we have very little effective control over the course of our lives, and the uncertainty in which we must live is being worsened by policies devised to deal with the financial crisis. Zero interest rates alongside rising prices means you're getting a negative return on your money and over time your capital is being eroded.
The situation of many younger people is even worse. In order to acquire the skills you need, you'll have to go into debt. Since at some point you'll have to retrain you should try to save, but if you're indebted from the start that's the last thing you'll be able to do. Whatever their age, the prospect facing most people today is a lifetime of insecurity.
Markets are a volatile business At the same time as it has stripped people of the security of bourgeois life, capitalism has made the type of person that lived the bourgeois life obsolete. In the 1980s there was much talk of Victorian values, and promoters of the free market used to argue that it would bring us back to the wholesome virtues of the past.
For many, women and the poor for example, these Victorian values could be pretty stultifying in their effects. But the larger fact is that the free market works to undermine the virtues that maintain the bourgeois life.
When savings are melting away being thrifty can be the road to ruin. It's the person who borrows heavily and isn't afraid to declare bankruptcy that survives and goes on to prosper.
When the labour market is highly mobile it's not those who stick dutifully to their task that succeed, it's people who are always ready to try something new that looks more promising.
In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces, traditional values are dysfunctional and anyone who tries to live by them risks ending up on the scrapheap.
Vast wealth
Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: "Everything that is solid melts into air". For someone living in early Victorian England - the Manifesto was published in 1848 - it was an astonishingly far-seeing observation.
At the time nothing seemed more solid than the society on the margins of which Marx lived. A century and a half later we find ourselves in the world he anticipated, where everyone's life is experimental and provisional, and sudden ruin can happen at any time.
A tiny few have accumulated vast wealth but even that has an evanescent, almost ghostly quality. In Victorian times the seriously rich could afford to relax provided they were conservative in how they invested their money. When the heroes of Dickens' novels finally come into their inheritance, they do nothing forever after.
Today there is no haven of security. The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead.
Austerity measures to reduce Greece's debt has sparked riots This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism and I think it's going to be with us in any future that's realistically imaginable. We're only part of the way through a financial crisis that will turn many more things upside down.
Currencies and governments are likely to go under, along with parts of the financial system we believed had been made safe. The risks that threatened to freeze the world economy only three years ago haven't been dealt with. They've simply been shifted to states.
Whatever politicians may tell us about the need to curb the deficit, debts on the scale that have been run up can't be repaid. Almost certainly they will be inflated away - a process that is bound to be painful and impoverishing for many.
The result can only be further upheaval, on an even bigger scale. But it won't be the end of the world, or even of capitalism. Whatever happens, we're still going to have to learn to live with the mercurial energy that the market has released.
Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.
But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.
Karl Marx may have been wrong about communism but he was right about much of capitalism, John Gray writes.
As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
He viewed capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history, and there can be no doubt that it differs radically from those of previous times.
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.
Negative return
The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended.
Defenders of capitalism argue that it offers to everyone the benefits that in Marx's time were enjoyed only by the bourgeoisie, the settled middle class that owned capital and had a reasonable level of security and freedom in their lives.
Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels In 19th Century capitalism most people had nothing. They lived by selling their labour and when markets turned down they faced hard times. But as capitalism evolves, its defenders say, an increasing number of people will be able to benefit from it.
Fulfilling careers will no longer be the prerogative of a few. No more will people struggle from month to month to live on an insecure wage. Protected by savings, a house they own and a decent pension, they will be able to plan their lives without fear. With the growth of democracy and the spread of wealth, no-one need be shut out from the bourgeois life. Everybody can be middle class.
In fact, in Britain, the US and many other developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been happening. Job security doesn't exist, the trades and professions of the past have largely gone and life-long careers are barely memories.
If people have any wealth it's in their houses, but house prices don't always increase. When credit is tight as it is now, they can be stagnant for years. A dwindling minority can count on a pension on which they could comfortably live, and not many have significant savings.
More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. Middle-class people used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. But it's no longer possible to look at life as a succession of stages in which each is a step up from the last.
In the process of creative destruction the ladder has been kicked away and for increasing numbers of people a middle-class existence is no longer even an aspiration.
Risk takers
As capitalism has advanced it has returned most people to a new version of the precarious existence of Marx's proles. Our incomes are far higher and in some degree we're cushioned against shocks by what remains of the post-war welfare state.
But we have very little effective control over the course of our lives, and the uncertainty in which we must live is being worsened by policies devised to deal with the financial crisis. Zero interest rates alongside rising prices means you're getting a negative return on your money and over time your capital is being eroded.
The situation of many younger people is even worse. In order to acquire the skills you need, you'll have to go into debt. Since at some point you'll have to retrain you should try to save, but if you're indebted from the start that's the last thing you'll be able to do. Whatever their age, the prospect facing most people today is a lifetime of insecurity.
Markets are a volatile business At the same time as it has stripped people of the security of bourgeois life, capitalism has made the type of person that lived the bourgeois life obsolete. In the 1980s there was much talk of Victorian values, and promoters of the free market used to argue that it would bring us back to the wholesome virtues of the past.
For many, women and the poor for example, these Victorian values could be pretty stultifying in their effects. But the larger fact is that the free market works to undermine the virtues that maintain the bourgeois life.
When savings are melting away being thrifty can be the road to ruin. It's the person who borrows heavily and isn't afraid to declare bankruptcy that survives and goes on to prosper.
When the labour market is highly mobile it's not those who stick dutifully to their task that succeed, it's people who are always ready to try something new that looks more promising.
In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces, traditional values are dysfunctional and anyone who tries to live by them risks ending up on the scrapheap.
Vast wealth
Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: "Everything that is solid melts into air". For someone living in early Victorian England - the Manifesto was published in 1848 - it was an astonishingly far-seeing observation.
At the time nothing seemed more solid than the society on the margins of which Marx lived. A century and a half later we find ourselves in the world he anticipated, where everyone's life is experimental and provisional, and sudden ruin can happen at any time.
A tiny few have accumulated vast wealth but even that has an evanescent, almost ghostly quality. In Victorian times the seriously rich could afford to relax provided they were conservative in how they invested their money. When the heroes of Dickens' novels finally come into their inheritance, they do nothing forever after.
Today there is no haven of security. The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead.
Austerity measures to reduce Greece's debt has sparked riots This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism and I think it's going to be with us in any future that's realistically imaginable. We're only part of the way through a financial crisis that will turn many more things upside down.
Currencies and governments are likely to go under, along with parts of the financial system we believed had been made safe. The risks that threatened to freeze the world economy only three years ago haven't been dealt with. They've simply been shifted to states.
Whatever politicians may tell us about the need to curb the deficit, debts on the scale that have been run up can't be repaid. Almost certainly they will be inflated away - a process that is bound to be painful and impoverishing for many.
The result can only be further upheaval, on an even bigger scale. But it won't be the end of the world, or even of capitalism. Whatever happens, we're still going to have to learn to live with the mercurial energy that the market has released.
Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.
But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.
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