Here is an article which accurately outlines the complete disarray and bewilderment of the Republicans.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Dark Days Ahead: Why Republicans Need Xmas Vacation
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It's bad. Never mind that for two elections in a row Republicans have lost political independents by wide margins. Never mind that their reputation for competence is approaching Bernie Madoff-like levels, or that the nation's demographic shift, particularly the growth in Latino voters, imperils their electoral future. Never mind that party leaders will return to Washington next year with less actual power than at any point since 1995. The real Republican concern is this: The deteriorating economy now threatens to undermine the political value of the GOP's fundamental identity as the party of private markets and limited government.
The terrifying credit crisis is, as I write, morphing into a "liquidity trap," a term from the bygone era of men's hats and ladies' girdles, or at least Japanese kimonos, when the monetary master's of the universe risk losing control over the financial system, when regular people hoard their money, and when the economy looks to cycle ever downward. It's not yet the Great Depression Redux, but it can be talked about in the same sentence. And in that lies the potential for great calamity for the party of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. Liquidity traps are fought with government interventions. They are fought successfully with big ones. Republicans now face the real possibility of a generation of American voters who will see government not as the problem, but as the solution.
The last time America faced such a major economic retrenchment, Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded with a massive expansion of government spending and regulation, new programs like Social Security and new protections for unions and workers, which were controversial at the time, but which proved to be popular over the long haul. It took leaders like Goldwater more than two decades to gain some significant popular traction in opposition to Roosevelt's vision. Conservative economic ideas did not really impose themselves on the White House until 1981, more than 40 years after the bulk of the New Deal era had been established.
In the face of this peril, conservatives find themselves without leadership, direction, or even a cogent ideological response to the crisis. Conservative lodestars, like Dick Cheney, are warning of Herbert Hoover times if Republicans don't open up the federal pocketbooks. Even President Bush has admitted that he "abandoned free market principles to save the free market system."
And he did not succeed, clearing the way for much more abandoning to come.
Following widely accepted Keynesian theories, Barack Obama has proposed an economic stimulus next year of perhaps $1 trillion over two years, money that will take time to filter into an ever-worsening economy. Whether or not it succeeds, all the voters who get jobs because of this new spending will know its source: For a time, Obamadollars will pay their mortgage or rent. Obamadollars will feed their children. As such, the Democratic president has the ability to build a vast new political coalition of support, much like the one that FDR built during the 1930s. Ask Republican political strategists to honestly tell you why they hate government spending and they all offer the same answer: It creates Democratic voters.
So where does that leave the Republican Party? Totally confused. Lines like "redistributing wealth" makes less sense when the wealth is running scared and your husband just got laid off. The "ownership society" becomes a joke when homes and stocks, the things we aspire to own, are consistently losing value. If government is the only bank willing to lend, it is not hard to understand that voters will support government lending. To make matters worse, Republicans in the House are not a unified bunch. Through the credit and auto bailout debates, Congressional Republicans behaved less like statesmen than stray cats on a sinking ship. According to his own strategists, John McCain only had a slim chance to win the White House this year, but once the House GOP voted down the first version of the bank bailout, his fate was sealed. Then after sinking their own electoral hopes, Republicans reversed course, clearing the way for a slightly-altered bailout a few days later. That's not leadership you can believe in. As a strictly political matter, it was malpractice, or, more sympathetically, a lack of self-control and vision.
As it stands, Republican thinkers appear to be casting about wildly. With his own Rolodex under strain, House Majority Leader John Boehner has put out a public call for any economist who can give some rationale for opposing the Obama stimulus package. The response is so far less than impressive. At best, conservatives have retrenched to argue that the stimulus should focus more on tax cuts then spending. There is a highly technical debate going on between economists about why spending on public works should provide more stimulation than tax cuts for business and the wealthy. (In the classic textbooks, at least, the spending argument beats the tax cut argument.) It does not help the conservatives that their principal academic reference point to argue for tax cuts is a controversial interpretation of a paper written by Christina Romer, the expert on depression economics who is helping to draft Obama's spend-heavy stimulus plan.
So what will Republicans do? In the short term, the answer is clear. They will retrench to a guerrilla war, a tactical battle much like the one adopted by McCain at the end of the general election. Next year will bring Republicans a great unifying gift in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill Democrats plan to push over the objections of many small- and middle-sized businesses that would allow the unionization of workplaces without a so-called "secret ballot." Combined with the Blagojevich scandal, which does not appear to do the labor movement any favors, this could be a short-term political winner for Republicans, especially if it passes. They can cast Democrats as the party of big labor in much the same way that Democrats cast Republicans as the party of big oil. In the near term, Republicans also have the ability to recast themselves as reformers, as the loyal opposition to the waste, fraud and abuse that is endemic to government, and certain to pop up in any massive new spending program. But winning those battles will not win them the war.
What Republicans need is a new ideological message for a new economic era. One of the smartest Republican strategists I know suggested to me that the frame should not be about whether government is good or bad, but whether the solutions to our woes are classic Democrat--industrial age, centralized and top-down--or whether they are new Republican--Internet-age, market-based and bottom-up. Republicans, he recommends, should claim the mantle of innovative government, not just small government. The challenge here is that Obama will try to fill that space as well.
All that said, we also know that the Republican dilemma is not permanent. Karl Rove's predictions of a generation of Republican rule seem ridiculous in retrospect. Democrats succumb to comfort or hubris at their own peril. But as the cups of eggnog clink and the yule log burns, Republican households across the country would do well to realize the grim future that now faces them in the short term. Christmas is a time for rest and self-reflection. Republicans have little time to rest, and much to reflect upon. Next year begins a new political era for America.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
A Krugman Comment on the Crazy Right
December 22, 2008, 8:32 pm — Updated: 8:32 pm -->
Crazy conspiracy theorists
So Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Karl Rove all claim that the financial crisis was a liberal conspiracy, generated either by evil mastermind Chuck Schumer or by wily journalists.
Why does such stuff flourish? Probably because there is no punishment for it — as long as you’re on the right, and I mean right, side. Let Michael Moore point out, entirely correctly, the close ties between the Saudis and the Bush family, and he’s blasted as a crazy conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, let Donald Luskin suggest, in 2004, that George Soros is planning to engineer a financial crisis to defeat Bush, and he gets to publish front-page articles in the Washington Post Outlook section declaring that there isn’t a recession.
Crazy conspiracy theorists
So Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Karl Rove all claim that the financial crisis was a liberal conspiracy, generated either by evil mastermind Chuck Schumer or by wily journalists.
Why does such stuff flourish? Probably because there is no punishment for it — as long as you’re on the right, and I mean right, side. Let Michael Moore point out, entirely correctly, the close ties between the Saudis and the Bush family, and he’s blasted as a crazy conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, let Donald Luskin suggest, in 2004, that George Soros is planning to engineer a financial crisis to defeat Bush, and he gets to publish front-page articles in the Washington Post Outlook section declaring that there isn’t a recession.
Monday, December 22, 2008
A Review of Revolutionary Road
The New RepublicBlaming the 'Burbs by Adelle Waldman'Revolutionary Road,' Considered The Original Anti-Suburban Novel, Isn't Actually Anti-Suburbs--But Something Far More Devastating Than ThatPost Date Monday, December 22, 2008
The New RepublicBlaming the 'Burbs by Adelle Waldman'Revolutionary Road,' Considered The Original Anti-Suburban Novel, Isn't Actually Anti-Suburbs--But Something Far More Devastating Than ThatPost Date Monday, December 22, 2008
The novel of suburban malaise has been in fashion for as long as people have been commuting from leafy pastures just beyond the city limits. Never mind that the majority of Americans actually live in suburbs (and have therefore voted with their feet in favor of suburbia), American readers are apparently hungry for books that seek to reveal how stultifying that life really is. Rick Moody made his career with The Ice Storm, an account of a Connecticut family's expensively appointed but empty lives. Similarly, Tom Perrotta's Little Children depicts a seemingly pleasant Massachusetts town in which rage and depravity lurk behind flower boxes and picture windows, and the banality of child-rearing naturally gives rise to adultery.
Now, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates's brilliant 1961 novel, stands poised for a comeback. Often considered the original anti-suburban novel, the book--long a staple on bookstore shelves labeled "our favorites" and "staff picks"--tells the story of an unhappy young Connecticut couple; it has just been reissued in tandem with a Hollywood adaptation, due to hit theaters the day after Christmas. The film is directed by none other than Sam Mendes, the man behind American Beauty, perhaps the apotheosis of suburban exposé.
But if Mendes's new film is to do Revolutionary Road justice, it will transcend the easy anti-suburban categorization. While Yates's depiction of suburban life is nightmarish enough to exceed the worst fears of Jane Jacobs's devotees, Revolutionary Road is far more than a complacent takedown of the 'burbs. It is in fact less an anti-suburban novel than a novel about people who blame their unhappiness on the suburbs.
Once upon a time, Frank and April Wheeler were bohemians in Greenwich Village, but one thing led to another--well, sex led to pregnancy--and Frank, who'd graduated from Columbia on the GI Bill and worked odd jobs while trying to "find" himself, finally took a "real" job at Knox Business Machines, the dullest of dull corporations, quintessential Organization Man territory.
But Frank doesn't see himself as a victim of 1950s-style pressure to conform. Taking the job was an ironic gesture. "The thing I'm most anxious to avoid," he said to a friend, "is any kind of work that can be considered 'interesting' in its own right. I want something that can't possibly touch me." Moreover, Knox was the very same corporation for which Frank's own father had toiled his whole sad, Willy Loman-like career. How rich! What better way to thumb his nose at his father and his outmoded bourgeois values than to breeze right into a higher position than his dad had ever achieved--and then treat the whole thing as a joke?
Indeed, Frank's trouble is that he doesn't do much of anything sincerely. When we first meet him, he is sitting through a disastrous amateur theater performance, in which April stars. Afterwards, he approaches her backstage:
He ... started toward her with the corners of his mouth stretched tight in a look that he hoped would be full of love and humor and compassion; what he planned to do was bend down and kiss her and say "Listen: you were wonderful." But an almost imperceptible recoil of her shoulders told him she didn't want to be touched, which left him uncertain what to with his hands, and that was when it occurred to him that "You were wonderful" might be exactly the wrong thing to say--condescending, or at the very least naïve and sentimental, and much too serious.
What he said instead was, "Well, I guess it wasn't exactly a triumph or anything, was it?" Ouch.
The remark wasn't hurtful the way it might have been if April were another woman or this, another marriage. In fact, Frank was probably not wrong to have suspected that "you were wonderful" would have grated on April's nerves. The problem is ... well, it's complicated.
Frank's love for April is real, the only thing in his life that is wholly authentic. That doesn't, however, mean it's good; it is in fact utterly poisonous both for him and for April. From the early days of their affair, April, in spite of moments of feeling something that may be, could be love--she thought he was smart, she liked the countercultural thrill of living together in a cheap, cigarette smoke-filled West Village apartment--has "held herself poised for immediate flight."
And that really galls Frank. It's not the morality of the times or the unavailability of abortion that caused the newly married couple to have their first child--and take their first tentative steps towards conventional middle-class life--but Frank's frustration with April's aloofness. She intended to induce an abortion, which enraged Frank even though "the idea [of ending the pregnancy], God knew, was more than a little attractive." But April's unwillingness to bear his child seemed to bespeak an intolerable lack of love. He just wanted her not to be so indifferent--to him:
"You do this--you do this and I swear to god I'll--"
"Oh, you'll what? You'll leave me. What's that supposed to be, a threat or a promise?"
Feeling threatened, Frank did what was easy, natural--and despicable--he took up the "moral position," as if that were the true reason for his objection. And it worked. Frank convinced April to have a baby she didn't want, without having ever considered her feelings in any light other than how they reflected on him.
What is so unique here is that Yates isn't seduced by his characters' emotions, no matter how earnestly experienced; he lays bare the roiling pools of vanity and narcissism that underlie them. While Frank is the nicer of the two--by conventional standards, at least--it's no wonder that April feels revulsion at his "precious moral maxims" and his "'love' and ... mealy-mouthed little--." It's hard for her to articulate, but the reader has no trouble understanding what she means. Meanwhile, Frank, fearful of her flaring temper yet resentful of her power over him, catalogs her flaws--the widening hips, how certain facial expressions make her look old--but to no avail. No matter how much he wants to, Frank can't talk himself out of the absolute stranglehold April has on his sense of self--that is, his great and abiding love for her.
The New RepublicBlaming the 'Burbs by Adelle Waldman'Revolutionary Road,' Considered The Original Anti-Suburban Novel, Isn't Actually Anti-Suburbs--But Something Far More Devastating Than ThatPost Date Monday, December 22, 2008
The novel of suburban malaise has been in fashion for as long as people have been commuting from leafy pastures just beyond the city limits. Never mind that the majority of Americans actually live in suburbs (and have therefore voted with their feet in favor of suburbia), American readers are apparently hungry for books that seek to reveal how stultifying that life really is. Rick Moody made his career with The Ice Storm, an account of a Connecticut family's expensively appointed but empty lives. Similarly, Tom Perrotta's Little Children depicts a seemingly pleasant Massachusetts town in which rage and depravity lurk behind flower boxes and picture windows, and the banality of child-rearing naturally gives rise to adultery.
Now, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates's brilliant 1961 novel, stands poised for a comeback. Often considered the original anti-suburban novel, the book--long a staple on bookstore shelves labeled "our favorites" and "staff picks"--tells the story of an unhappy young Connecticut couple; it has just been reissued in tandem with a Hollywood adaptation, due to hit theaters the day after Christmas. The film is directed by none other than Sam Mendes, the man behind American Beauty, perhaps the apotheosis of suburban exposé.
But if Mendes's new film is to do Revolutionary Road justice, it will transcend the easy anti-suburban categorization. While Yates's depiction of suburban life is nightmarish enough to exceed the worst fears of Jane Jacobs's devotees, Revolutionary Road is far more than a complacent takedown of the 'burbs. It is in fact less an anti-suburban novel than a novel about people who blame their unhappiness on the suburbs.
Once upon a time, Frank and April Wheeler were bohemians in Greenwich Village, but one thing led to another--well, sex led to pregnancy--and Frank, who'd graduated from Columbia on the GI Bill and worked odd jobs while trying to "find" himself, finally took a "real" job at Knox Business Machines, the dullest of dull corporations, quintessential Organization Man territory.
But Frank doesn't see himself as a victim of 1950s-style pressure to conform. Taking the job was an ironic gesture. "The thing I'm most anxious to avoid," he said to a friend, "is any kind of work that can be considered 'interesting' in its own right. I want something that can't possibly touch me." Moreover, Knox was the very same corporation for which Frank's own father had toiled his whole sad, Willy Loman-like career. How rich! What better way to thumb his nose at his father and his outmoded bourgeois values than to breeze right into a higher position than his dad had ever achieved--and then treat the whole thing as a joke?
Indeed, Frank's trouble is that he doesn't do much of anything sincerely. When we first meet him, he is sitting through a disastrous amateur theater performance, in which April stars. Afterwards, he approaches her backstage:
He ... started toward her with the corners of his mouth stretched tight in a look that he hoped would be full of love and humor and compassion; what he planned to do was bend down and kiss her and say "Listen: you were wonderful." But an almost imperceptible recoil of her shoulders told him she didn't want to be touched, which left him uncertain what to with his hands, and that was when it occurred to him that "You were wonderful" might be exactly the wrong thing to say--condescending, or at the very least naïve and sentimental, and much too serious.
What he said instead was, "Well, I guess it wasn't exactly a triumph or anything, was it?" Ouch.
The remark wasn't hurtful the way it might have been if April were another woman or this, another marriage. In fact, Frank was probably not wrong to have suspected that "you were wonderful" would have grated on April's nerves. The problem is ... well, it's complicated.
Frank's love for April is real, the only thing in his life that is wholly authentic. That doesn't, however, mean it's good; it is in fact utterly poisonous both for him and for April. From the early days of their affair, April, in spite of moments of feeling something that may be, could be love--she thought he was smart, she liked the countercultural thrill of living together in a cheap, cigarette smoke-filled West Village apartment--has "held herself poised for immediate flight."
And that really galls Frank. It's not the morality of the times or the unavailability of abortion that caused the newly married couple to have their first child--and take their first tentative steps towards conventional middle-class life--but Frank's frustration with April's aloofness. She intended to induce an abortion, which enraged Frank even though "the idea [of ending the pregnancy], God knew, was more than a little attractive." But April's unwillingness to bear his child seemed to bespeak an intolerable lack of love. He just wanted her not to be so indifferent--to him:
"You do this--you do this and I swear to god I'll--"
"Oh, you'll what? You'll leave me. What's that supposed to be, a threat or a promise?"
Feeling threatened, Frank did what was easy, natural--and despicable--he took up the "moral position," as if that were the true reason for his objection. And it worked. Frank convinced April to have a baby she didn't want, without having ever considered her feelings in any light other than how they reflected on him.
What is so unique here is that Yates isn't seduced by his characters' emotions, no matter how earnestly experienced; he lays bare the roiling pools of vanity and narcissism that underlie them. While Frank is the nicer of the two--by conventional standards, at least--it's no wonder that April feels revulsion at his "precious moral maxims" and his "'love' and ... mealy-mouthed little--." It's hard for her to articulate, but the reader has no trouble understanding what she means. Meanwhile, Frank, fearful of her flaring temper yet resentful of her power over him, catalogs her flaws--the widening hips, how certain facial expressions make her look old--but to no avail. No matter how much he wants to, Frank can't talk himself out of the absolute stranglehold April has on his sense of self--that is, his great and abiding love for her.
Continuation of Revolutionary Road Review
At least, that's the state of Frank and April's marriage at the beginning of the book, when things are going comparatively well.
Then April does something that really terrifies Frank, even more than the threat of her temper.
She takes his denunciations of "these damn little suburban types" and his diatribes about "Conformity, or the Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today" at face value. She decides that they should move to France, where she will get a secretarial job and Frank can find himself. They'll finally be free from the banal routine that just has to be the source of their unhappiness.
It has to be, hasn't it? The picture Yates paints of suburbia is unremittingly bleak. Frank and April's world, with its houses that look "as foolishly misplaced as a great many bright new toys that have been left outside overnight," is bad, but even more depressing are the Wheelers' attempts to make their existence congenial: the amateur theater endeavor, for example, so paltry, so chintzy--and so small in light of all that is wrong. Even less likely to yield real relief are their only friends, the fawning, insipid Campbells, who offer little but meaningless distraction and the ignoble pleasure of being looked up to. It's a hellish life, or it should be. It certainly is for April, anyway. While Frank drones on with stock talk about Conformity and other clichéd generalities, April's acidic observations have Dorothy Parker-like precision. "I know these damn artsy-crafty things," she said of the theater group initially, before she got talked into participating. "There'll be of a woman with blue hair and wooden beads who met Max Reinhardt once ... and seven girls with bad complexions."
April's unhappiness is real, but Yates, unlike a more sentimental author, doesn't applaud her daring--her willingness to buck convention and propose escape. Instead, he exposes the foolishness and the self-delusion behind her Paris plan. In a moment of particularly abject misery, April decides that "it"--the whole dreary shebang of suburban family life--is her fault. "I put the whole burden ...on you," she says to Frank. "It was like saying if you want this baby, it's going to be All Your Responsibility. You're going to have to turn yourself inside out to provide for us. You'll have to give up any idea of being anything in the world but a father." It sounds plausible enough, even if it has little bearing on the messier, more complicated truth. But Yates portrays the glee with which April latched onto her new analysis as part and parcel of the human tendency to self-dramatize: "Her whole day had been a heroic build up for this moment of self-abasement."
Nor does Yates let us forget that April's plan is riddled with holes, something even the affable drunkard who shares a cubicle with Frank can see. (As he says to Frank over lunch, "Assuming there is a true vocation lurking in wait for you, don't you think you'd be as apt to discover it here as there?") It also rests on the assumption that Frank really is cut out for a different kind of life. But whatever it may have been when she met him, Frank's anti-suburban talk has by this time become a mere gesture, a way of making himself feel sophisticated and being once more in April's eyes "the most interesting person [she's] ever met." Frank is not so much lying as he is being insincere. It's as Lionel Trilling observed about Mansfield Park's vivacious Mary Crawford: She is "impersonat[ing] the woman she thinks she ought to be." Likewise, Frank is pretending to be the nonconformist he--and April--want him to be.
The truth is Frank is relatively content in Connecticut. He likes the idea of family life; he likes prattling on to the Campbells; there are aspects of his job that he finds pleasant and even gratifying. Besides he's not sure he has it in him to do much else other than work at Knox. The vision that comes to mind as April waxes about the virtues of her European plan:
[April] coming from a day a the office--wearing a Parisian tailored suit, briskly pulling off her gloves--coming home and finding him hunched in an egg-stained bathrobe, on an unmade bed, picking his nose.
This, not the supposedly "hopeless emptiness" of middle-class American life, is what really terrifies Frank Wheeler.
But April, having convinced herself that her misery is merely a function of geography, is rapturous about France. And Frank gives in. After all, how much more tantalizing is it to join in April's euphoric excitement and her breathy account of him as the stifled genius than it is to feel like the dreary mediocrity whose touch she recoils from.
Rarely in literature has there been a second honeymoon quite so chillingly portrayed as the one the Wheelers embark upon after they decide to move to France--that is, decide that they will both embrace the same flattering fantasy of themselves. As unromantic as Emma Bovary's affairs, it's a sort of mutually masturbatory arrangement that, underneath all the murmured "darlings" and doors held open and nights of passion, is as unstable and as devoid of real tenderness as any described in Game Theory. Because as we know, and Frank only half-suspects, he is more interested in enjoying April's newly reinstated tenderness and admiration than in going to France.
How this all plays out makes for a deeply disquieting account of modern dysfunction. Not that Revolutionary Road is perfect: It poises uneasily on the brink of satire, wanting to its detriment to have it both ways--the psychological sophistication of realism and the mercilessness of satire, granting nothing to its characters that isn't either corrosive or affect. It is, undoubtedly, a brutal book.
Still, it's a great deal bigger and more ambitious than most of the anti-suburban novels it's so often lumped with. In the vein of many a great 20th century novel, Revolutionary Road turns the towering Victorian novels on their heads. Without itself being morally obtuse, it sets up a scenario in which the moral questions that preoccupied those authors are largely beside the point. How much of life, Revolutionary Road reminds us, defies the kind of analysis that parcels out responsibility and blame--and how terrible the realization of that is, because if goodness, or at least its attempt, has so little bearing on happiness, then what can any of us do?
Adelle Waldman is working on a novel called The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
© The New Republic 2008
Then April does something that really terrifies Frank, even more than the threat of her temper.
She takes his denunciations of "these damn little suburban types" and his diatribes about "Conformity, or the Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today" at face value. She decides that they should move to France, where she will get a secretarial job and Frank can find himself. They'll finally be free from the banal routine that just has to be the source of their unhappiness.
It has to be, hasn't it? The picture Yates paints of suburbia is unremittingly bleak. Frank and April's world, with its houses that look "as foolishly misplaced as a great many bright new toys that have been left outside overnight," is bad, but even more depressing are the Wheelers' attempts to make their existence congenial: the amateur theater endeavor, for example, so paltry, so chintzy--and so small in light of all that is wrong. Even less likely to yield real relief are their only friends, the fawning, insipid Campbells, who offer little but meaningless distraction and the ignoble pleasure of being looked up to. It's a hellish life, or it should be. It certainly is for April, anyway. While Frank drones on with stock talk about Conformity and other clichéd generalities, April's acidic observations have Dorothy Parker-like precision. "I know these damn artsy-crafty things," she said of the theater group initially, before she got talked into participating. "There'll be of a woman with blue hair and wooden beads who met Max Reinhardt once ... and seven girls with bad complexions."
April's unhappiness is real, but Yates, unlike a more sentimental author, doesn't applaud her daring--her willingness to buck convention and propose escape. Instead, he exposes the foolishness and the self-delusion behind her Paris plan. In a moment of particularly abject misery, April decides that "it"--the whole dreary shebang of suburban family life--is her fault. "I put the whole burden ...on you," she says to Frank. "It was like saying if you want this baby, it's going to be All Your Responsibility. You're going to have to turn yourself inside out to provide for us. You'll have to give up any idea of being anything in the world but a father." It sounds plausible enough, even if it has little bearing on the messier, more complicated truth. But Yates portrays the glee with which April latched onto her new analysis as part and parcel of the human tendency to self-dramatize: "Her whole day had been a heroic build up for this moment of self-abasement."
Nor does Yates let us forget that April's plan is riddled with holes, something even the affable drunkard who shares a cubicle with Frank can see. (As he says to Frank over lunch, "Assuming there is a true vocation lurking in wait for you, don't you think you'd be as apt to discover it here as there?") It also rests on the assumption that Frank really is cut out for a different kind of life. But whatever it may have been when she met him, Frank's anti-suburban talk has by this time become a mere gesture, a way of making himself feel sophisticated and being once more in April's eyes "the most interesting person [she's] ever met." Frank is not so much lying as he is being insincere. It's as Lionel Trilling observed about Mansfield Park's vivacious Mary Crawford: She is "impersonat[ing] the woman she thinks she ought to be." Likewise, Frank is pretending to be the nonconformist he--and April--want him to be.
The truth is Frank is relatively content in Connecticut. He likes the idea of family life; he likes prattling on to the Campbells; there are aspects of his job that he finds pleasant and even gratifying. Besides he's not sure he has it in him to do much else other than work at Knox. The vision that comes to mind as April waxes about the virtues of her European plan:
[April] coming from a day a the office--wearing a Parisian tailored suit, briskly pulling off her gloves--coming home and finding him hunched in an egg-stained bathrobe, on an unmade bed, picking his nose.
This, not the supposedly "hopeless emptiness" of middle-class American life, is what really terrifies Frank Wheeler.
But April, having convinced herself that her misery is merely a function of geography, is rapturous about France. And Frank gives in. After all, how much more tantalizing is it to join in April's euphoric excitement and her breathy account of him as the stifled genius than it is to feel like the dreary mediocrity whose touch she recoils from.
Rarely in literature has there been a second honeymoon quite so chillingly portrayed as the one the Wheelers embark upon after they decide to move to France--that is, decide that they will both embrace the same flattering fantasy of themselves. As unromantic as Emma Bovary's affairs, it's a sort of mutually masturbatory arrangement that, underneath all the murmured "darlings" and doors held open and nights of passion, is as unstable and as devoid of real tenderness as any described in Game Theory. Because as we know, and Frank only half-suspects, he is more interested in enjoying April's newly reinstated tenderness and admiration than in going to France.
How this all plays out makes for a deeply disquieting account of modern dysfunction. Not that Revolutionary Road is perfect: It poises uneasily on the brink of satire, wanting to its detriment to have it both ways--the psychological sophistication of realism and the mercilessness of satire, granting nothing to its characters that isn't either corrosive or affect. It is, undoubtedly, a brutal book.
Still, it's a great deal bigger and more ambitious than most of the anti-suburban novels it's so often lumped with. In the vein of many a great 20th century novel, Revolutionary Road turns the towering Victorian novels on their heads. Without itself being morally obtuse, it sets up a scenario in which the moral questions that preoccupied those authors are largely beside the point. How much of life, Revolutionary Road reminds us, defies the kind of analysis that parcels out responsibility and blame--and how terrible the realization of that is, because if goodness, or at least its attempt, has so little bearing on happiness, then what can any of us do?
Adelle Waldman is working on a novel called The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
© The New Republic 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Paul Krugman - The Return of Depression Economics
When it comes to economics, I take an intellectual pass. Which is to say: Economics does not greatly interest me. I am only interested in the big picture. The nitty-gritty particulars of economics are boring to me. So when it comes to trying to understand the world's current economic tribulations, I look for someone to trust, and for me, that person is the most recent Nobel winner in econ, Paul Krugman, professor of economics at Princeton.
Krugman is proudly progressive, as I am. I check his blog---http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
daily.
This book is a revision of the same book Krugman published in the 90's. The original issue dealt with then current economic crises in Asia and Mexico. Krugman warned that the troubles affecting those areas of the world come visit this counry one day. One day has come.
Krugman is proudly progressive, as I am. I check his blog---http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
daily.
This book is a revision of the same book Krugman published in the 90's. The original issue dealt with then current economic crises in Asia and Mexico. Krugman warned that the troubles affecting those areas of the world come visit this counry one day. One day has come.
We are in a situation of what Krugman calls depression economics. The conventional answer to a recession is a lowering of interest rates by the Fed. The Fed seeks to keep interest rates low enough to promote economic growth but not so low as to bring on inflation. It's a delicate balancing act.
But now the Fed discount rate is practically zero, and this will not be enough. What to do?
According to Professor Krugman, two things. One is to properly regulate what he calls shadow banking. The problem is not unregulated coventional banks; the problem is shadow banking, which was unleashed in 1999 by a Republican sponsored act of Congress that allowed insurance companies to act like banks. The failure of these type of companies---Lehman Brothers, AGI, etc.--- is what has dried up the credit system. We need to do whatever is necessary to properly loosen up credit, while at the same time, implementing proper regulation of shadow banking.
And we need massive federal spending on infrastructure to get the economy moving again. Fiscal responsibility needs to take a temporary backseat to governmental stimulation of the economy. Not rebates like Bush put in earlier this year, but direct governmental spending.
This is what Krugman says, and I go along with his views.
We should combine direct governmental stimulation with individual responsibility. The days of cheap and artificial prosperity in the US based on credit are over. We will return to economic basics, which means consuming less and living within our means. It's about time.
And it's about time for a New Deal a la FDR for 2009.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Cheney's Delusions
While Bush seems commonly described as just plain dumb, Cheney seems commonly described as pure evil. The following editorial says just that about our lame duck VP. Who can disagree?
FROM Los Angeles Times
20 December 2008
We probably shouldn't have been surprised at Vice President Dick Cheney's blustering, obstinate insistence on ABC News on Monday that he's been right all along about virtually everything. But that doesn't mean we have to agree.
In the interview, Cheney not only acknowledged that he was involved in approving the harsh interrogation methods used by the CIA on suspected terrorists, but said he still thinks that waterboarding was an appropriate way to extract information. He said -- contradicting even President Bush -- that he believes the notorious American prison at Guantanamo Bay should remain open for the foreseeable future, and he reiterated that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was justified by, believe it or not, Saddam Hussein's weapons programs.
Maybe this was just a desperate, last-minute effort to rescue what appears to be a legacy in deep trouble, but it came across asnothing less than self-delusion. Despite public opinion polls showing that only about a third of the country believes the U.S. should have invaded Iraq, undaunted by the irrefutable fact that America's prestige has plummeted around the world, notwithstanding the outcry by human rights advocates against torture and the fact that there is no meaningful peace in sight in Iraq or Afghanistan, Cheney soldiers on with the same cocky, we know what we're doing and laws be damned attitude that has come to define him. Even though the American electorate rose up last month to sweep out the GOP in an extraordinary rejection of Bush administration policy, he persists in defending eight years of morally and legally disastrous decisions.
Cheney, of course, was a hawkish, self-righteous and, ultimately, malevolent figure in the Bush inner circle from day one. In "Angler," Barton Gellman's excellent analysis of his tenure, he emerges as a man willing to bend virtually any rule, a true believer with "a sense of mission so acute it drove him to seek power without limit." In Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side," he's portrayed as pushing his colleagues into ever more morally questionable situations. "The most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history" is how Vice President-elect Joe Biden accurately described him during the campaign.
Cheney likes to joke about himself that when he told his wife, Lynne, that he had been nicknamed "Darth Vader," she didn't get angry. Instead, she responded: "It humanizes you."
With that, we agree.
FROM Los Angeles Times
20 December 2008
We probably shouldn't have been surprised at Vice President Dick Cheney's blustering, obstinate insistence on ABC News on Monday that he's been right all along about virtually everything. But that doesn't mean we have to agree.
In the interview, Cheney not only acknowledged that he was involved in approving the harsh interrogation methods used by the CIA on suspected terrorists, but said he still thinks that waterboarding was an appropriate way to extract information. He said -- contradicting even President Bush -- that he believes the notorious American prison at Guantanamo Bay should remain open for the foreseeable future, and he reiterated that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was justified by, believe it or not, Saddam Hussein's weapons programs.
Maybe this was just a desperate, last-minute effort to rescue what appears to be a legacy in deep trouble, but it came across asnothing less than self-delusion. Despite public opinion polls showing that only about a third of the country believes the U.S. should have invaded Iraq, undaunted by the irrefutable fact that America's prestige has plummeted around the world, notwithstanding the outcry by human rights advocates against torture and the fact that there is no meaningful peace in sight in Iraq or Afghanistan, Cheney soldiers on with the same cocky, we know what we're doing and laws be damned attitude that has come to define him. Even though the American electorate rose up last month to sweep out the GOP in an extraordinary rejection of Bush administration policy, he persists in defending eight years of morally and legally disastrous decisions.
Cheney, of course, was a hawkish, self-righteous and, ultimately, malevolent figure in the Bush inner circle from day one. In "Angler," Barton Gellman's excellent analysis of his tenure, he emerges as a man willing to bend virtually any rule, a true believer with "a sense of mission so acute it drove him to seek power without limit." In Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side," he's portrayed as pushing his colleagues into ever more morally questionable situations. "The most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history" is how Vice President-elect Joe Biden accurately described him during the campaign.
Cheney likes to joke about himself that when he told his wife, Lynne, that he had been nicknamed "Darth Vader," she didn't get angry. Instead, she responded: "It humanizes you."
With that, we agree.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke
I read this book at the behest of Jamie.
The story sounded enthralling, but it was disappointingly not so. It is about Sam Pulsifer, who is convicted of burning the Emily Dickinson house, killing a couple. After leaving prison, he finds his relationship with his parents strained. He goes to university, marries, and returns to the Amherst area. Soon, other writers' homes begin to be burned. While the immediate suspect, he investigates these burnings himself, only to be confronted with issues of truth, love, and family.
The book is entirely too verbose. It has too many didactic ruminations about life and too many rhetorical questions. I think the story is intriguing, but consequently I felt I were trekking through sludge to reach the engaging parts.
The story sounded enthralling, but it was disappointingly not so. It is about Sam Pulsifer, who is convicted of burning the Emily Dickinson house, killing a couple. After leaving prison, he finds his relationship with his parents strained. He goes to university, marries, and returns to the Amherst area. Soon, other writers' homes begin to be burned. While the immediate suspect, he investigates these burnings himself, only to be confronted with issues of truth, love, and family.
The book is entirely too verbose. It has too many didactic ruminations about life and too many rhetorical questions. I think the story is intriguing, but consequently I felt I were trekking through sludge to reach the engaging parts.
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