The What Citizens Councils?

This really belongs in a comment over at TPM, but they don't take comments* so I'll go on record here.  They are going on about God Ol' Haley Barbour and the Good Ol' White Citizens Councils.  Good Ol' Haley says there was nothing sinister about them and--why, here's a racist, now fancy that!

Haley--Baby--I lived through the Golden Age of the CCs and I can attest--I never, ever, not once, heard them referred to as just "Citizens Councils" before--the adjective was always there, like gum on the bottom of a bus seat.  I suppose at some point, somebody in PR told them they had to buff up their image, the same way Jubal Early sanitized the Civil War.

But I have a gold-plated rebel yell ready for anybody who can point to just thing that those WCC's ever did that with a purpose other than the squelching,bullying, intimidation or outright eradication of blacks.
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*Okay I guess they do  but I wasn't finding the link.

Eleanor and Gypsy's Ass--Diid She Say That?

Go to Google.  Type in (using quotes): "May your bare ass always be shining."  As of 9:06 pst this morning, you would have gotten 99 hits, all (well--I didn't actually read them all) assuring you that this was the text of a message (telegram?) from Eleanor Roosevelt to Gypsy Rose Lee.

Did she say it?  Boy, you'd sure hope so, wouldn't you?  Restore your faith in humanity.  My own guess is that it's about as authentic as Richard Holbrooke's last words--something to be filed under "too good to check."   Again as with Holbrooke, I can believe in a kind of quasi-truth: maybe somebody on the press team scratched it impudently across a telegraph blank for the edification and entertainment of his buddies.  Than as inevitably happens with impudent jokes in the newspaper copy, it made its way into print.  I'd say maybe a 30 percent chance that she never knew she said it.

Heaven knows I am not an Eleanor scholar--or a Gypsy scholar either.  Maybe this is all in the footnotes of the best biographies.  I'd probably be just as happy if I never found out.

Oh, and my source: Janet Maslin. 


Afterthought:  My friend Clyde says that what she really said was just "shake your moneymaker."

Mistry Updated

Just after finishing a readaloud of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, I ran across The Economist's what it identifies as "India's Languishing Countryside," and found myself wondering whether the author understood--he must--how much he was providing a backgrounder/update on Mistry's grim but grimly satisfying novel of life under "The Emergency"--Indira Gandhi's lawless power grab that kept her illegitimately in office in the late 70s.  Readers of the novel and the update will recognize the home turf of Ishvar and Om, the two benighted tailors who carry Mistry's story.  The E does provide some extra background: the importance of post-independence land reform in shaping the structure of the Gangetic economy, for  instance, and the ironic dilemma created by the fact that the land is simply too productive for its own good, leading to a kind of overpopulation and land prices that nobody can pay.  The also adds just a bit about India's economic "renaissance," if it is that, which remains offstage but still sets the background for village life.   Christmas (!) special on


There are, perhaps surprisingly, some tiny notes of solace in this hard story--particularly, the insight that Hindus and Muslims here in the villages actually get on quite well, somehow immune or at least indifferent to the clashes that drive their brethren in the cities.  But perhaps the central point is how little seems to have changed at least since Mistry's time and perhaps in ages beyond memory.  Forget about the "abolition" of the caste system: leatherworkers are still leatherworkers, midwives are still midwives.  The E quotes B. R. Ambedkar, the architet of the India's constitution, himself from the bottom of the caste hierarchy:  "What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communialism?"

What indeed?   If the reporter got it right, the answer would have to be:  not much.

Afterthought:  I hope to say more about the Mistry novel tonight or tomorrow morning.

Anybody Can Play!

 Keynes and Friedman in a dead-ish heat.


Adding Friedrich Hayek makes surprisingly little difference.   Would I be right to infer that Glen Beck has hurt more than helped?


 But throw in Karl Marx and he sweeps the field--for now.


Law extra: guess who swamps Benjamin Cardozo.

Andrew Sullivan says Obama is Smarter Than You Think He Is

On repeal of DADT:

Like 2009's removal of the HIV ban, which was as painstakingly slow but thereby much more entrenched, this process took time. Without the Pentagon study, it wouldn't have passed. Without Obama keeping Lieberman inside the tent, it wouldn't have passed. Without the critical relationship between Bob Gates and Obama, it wouldn't have passed. It worked our last nerve; we faced at one point a true nightmare of nothing ... for years. And then we pulled behind this president, making it his victory and the country's victory, as well as ours.

A Payment of How Much?

Yves Smith raises the question whether banks are afraid to foreclose on the rich?  Her piece speaks for itself and I won't attempt to add to it, except--a payment of $20,000 a month?   And "He knows of 20 people personally in his community who have mortgages of over $20,000 a month"--?

Of course I don't know the terms, but a payment of $20,000 a month on a 20-year fixed at five percent annual pencils out to a liability somewhere north of $3 million.


Her source also says that he knows a guy with such a mortgage who "has not made a single payment in over 18 months."  At the same five percent rate, $20,000 a month for a year and a half gives a present value of $346k.   Per the U.S. Census Bureau, the median sales price of a new home in the United States is somewhere a bit  shy of $200k.  So the arrearage alone here would be enough to pay for nearly two of them.


He lives in a fancier neighborhood than I do.

Not in Front of the Children

Thomas Gradgrind, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle tht two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir--peremptorily Thomas--Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.

That's Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Chapter II.


Now this.

More on Karajan: It's All in the Optics

Busy with other stuff today so no for deep thought, though I can offer up one other insight drawn from  Norman Lebrecht's Maestro Myth.  The subject again is dictator and unholy terror Herbert von Karajan.  And in particular, the question of his Naziness--not whether, but how much.  Lebrecht's answer: plenty, and he worked hard to conceal or minimize it.

But reading Lebrecht, one draws the inference that "plenty" does not necessarily mean "more than others." Apparently a lot of serious musicians had a lot to apologize for after the war.  von Karajan's problem may have been that he acted like a fuhrer and seemed to enjoy his role as a bully-in-chief.  And perhaps worse, that he looked like a Nazi with his chiseled brow and imperious frown,  Ironic, seeing as how his father was apparently Slavic and his mother Greek.

Neckties: There Had to be a Reason

As one who believes that neckties cut off the blood flow to the brain, I am intrigued to hear Jonathan Roth explain that neckties evolved from military neck-scarfs: evidently soldiers in an earlier time wore them to keep their armor from chafing the skin.  So informed, I engage never again to wear a necktie unless I am also wearing armor.

The Grand Old Man of Elevator Music

Stuff I wouldn't have known if I hadn't picked up a copy of Norman Lebrecht's saucy-but-informative The Maestro Myth, specifically about the late Maestro di tutti Maestri Herbert von Karajan: he was not only the kingpin/dictator of the podium and the recording industry; he still rules us from the grave.  That is: Karajan is surely one of, maybe the, most recorded classical artist (a search for "Karajan" in Amazon music yields 9,000-plus hits).  He achieved his dominance partly through an artful and masterful collaboration with the top brass at Sony: they worked together to devise and market the digital music which swept the field away from the old LPs (recall--the secret of success in the music biz is to make sure we all have to repurchase our favorites every four-five years).
A corollary: Karajan understood for the mass market, classical music had to be boring.  Or at least "unsurprising," in the sense of "elevator music."  Technically proficient, of course--nobody can fault Karajan for technique.  But reassuring, anodyne.  This flattening of technique seems to have suited Karajan's temperament.  Lebrecht says:

Where lte performances  by Klemperer, Walter, Stokowski and other elder statesmen accquired dimensions of wisdom and grandeur, Karajan's recordings become shallow and insipid as he pursued continual refinement of the quality he perceived as breuty.  'Would you prefer them to be ugly?' he demanded when his interpretations were challenged.

And right there, I think, you have the dirty little secret of too much modern classical, including opera: technically proficient, but with the rough edges or the eccentricities all knocked off.   Like the cider you'd get if you cut out all the wormholes before you threw the apples in the press.  No, not elevator music: banker music:  Can't be too upsetting here.


I shouldn't complain: I listen to a lot of this stuff, and enjoy it.  But I remember Jim  Svejda, the public-radio classical music guru, years ago choosing his favorite recording (LP, no doubt) of Beethoven's Fifth. His choice: the CBS Orchestra.  Not because they were the best, but precisely because they weren't.  He argued that you could hear them thinking, "hey, we're playing Beethoven"--and practically falling off their stools. Gave the performance an energy and urgency that you just wouldn't have found with a more experienced crew.    Energy and urgency, can't have that.  Blame Karajan.

Uh, Legislative Purposes?

Ivan keeps us up to date on the news from Alabama (channeling the Washington Free Paper):

Alabama is the only state to ban the sale of sex toys in most cases; nevertheless the Huntsville shop Pleasures recently expanded, moving into a former bank building and using the three drive-though windows to sell dildos, lubricants, and the like.  Since state law prohibits the sale of these items unless they're used for 'bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial, or law enforcement purposes,' customers must provide a brief written description of the reason for their purchase.

Legislative purposes.  I am so tryin' not to go there.

We All Suck at Law

 The good folks at Above the Law find astonishment and entertainment in the story of the former biglaw associate who tells the world that he just wasn't very good (="I suck") at law.  That would be Will Meyerhofer, "The People's Therapist," who, I suspect, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, can probably still tell you to three decimal places his grade average at  NYU.

As Meyerhofer obviously understands, he's not alone: lots of people suck at law, which shouldn't be too surprising in the sense that lots of people suck at lots of things, even the ones they have trained for, and even when they are sitting on 200k in student loan debt. One item of evidence that this proposition is true: the number of people who want to  escape law practice into law teaching.  I don't have exact numbers, but best I can tell, the number of applicants for teaching positions is rising even faster than the numbers of those trying to claw their way into law school in the first place.  And the quality, at least on paper--if you're not top ten percent at a top five law school, with a prestige clerkship to boot, you'd probably start making other plans.

Hah, you will say, those who can't do, teach!  But that's really not the point, at least not in the sense that you mean it.  The fact is a lot of these new professors are not mere refugee/mediocrities--as I say, look at the paper.  They're extraordinarily talented and hard working people who just can't stomach the life they thought they were (or pretended to be) training for.

Flipside: they may gag on law practice; they often are pretty good at the enterprise of being a law professor.  But being a law professor has little to do with being a lawyer: it's a whole different skill set, a whole different temperament.  And a core of it is the dirty little sotto voce that says: I am purporting to train you for a profession I do not have the stomach to do myself (exception: Yale, where don't have to pretend--they are not training lawyers, they are truly training others to be professors, just like them).

In terms of campus politics, there is a certain irony here.  The folks across the quad in Hom/SocSci, they mock us as a trade school, a barber college, teaching mere practitioners, not advancing the life of the mind.  Yet on closer scrutiny, it is they who are teaching by apprenticeship, they who are replicating themselves.  In that perspective, our life is much more abstract.
 
I don't mean to offer solace to the apprentice-masters over there in the culture factory.  As a serious student of polisci (say),  you may learn by apprenticeship, but the only thing you learn to be is another polisci professor, thus joining the great pyramid club of professors training professors to train professors.  And  I don't mean to pick on polisci: they same could be said about classics, or philosophy, or any of a dozen of those engines in self-replication.  Ponzi was a piker; if he'd come to us, he could have lived out his career full of years and honor with a festschrift and a pension at the end.

I'm not complaining, of course.  It's been a great life, this career-long avoidance of law practice.  It's given me endless opportunities to to think, to write, to follow my intellectual fancy anywhere it led.  I'm just lucky I had the chance.  For as they say, those who can't teach, do, and who wants that?

The Blogger has Questions

  They say the Devil has nine questions. Barry Ritholtz has ten; he poses them to the four guys who didn't finish their term paper:

1. From 2001 to 2003, Alan Greenspan took rates down to levels not seen in almost half a century, then kept them there for an unprecedentedly long period. What was the impact of ultra low interest rates on Housing, credit, the bond markets, and derivatives?

2. How significant were the Ratings Agencies (S&P, Moodys and Fitch) to the collapse? What did their AAA ratings on junk derivatives affect? What about their being paid directly by underwriters for these ratings?

3. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 removed all Derivatives from all oversight, including reserve requirements, exchange listings, and disclosures. What effect did the CFMA have on firms such as AIG, Bear, Lehman, Citi, Bank of America?

4. Prior to 2004, Investment Houses were limited to 12-to-1 leverage by the SEC’s net capitalization rule. In 2004, the 5 largest investment banks asked for, and received, a full exemption from leverage restrictions (known as the Bear Stearns exemption) These five firms all jacked up their leverage. What impact did this increased leverage have on the crisis?

5. For seven decades, Glass Steagall separated FDIC insured depository banks from riskier investment houses. Prior to the repeal of Glass Steagall in 1998, the market had regular crashes that did not spill over into the real economy: 1966, 1970, 1974, and most telling of all, 1987. What impact did the repeal of Glass Steagall have on the banking system during the 2008-09 crash?

6. NonBank Lenders: Most of the sub-prime mortgages were made by unregulated non-bank lenders. They had a ”Lend to securitize” business model, and they sold enormous amounts of subprime loans to Wall Street for this purpose. Primarily located in California, they were also unregulated by both the Federal Reserve and the California State legislator. What was the impact of these firms?

7. These firms abdicated traditional  lending standards. They pushed option arms, interest only loans, and negative amortization mortgages, all of which defaulted in huge numbers. Was non-bank sub prime lending a major factor in the crisis?

8. The entire world had a simultaneous global housing boom and bust. US legislation such as the CRA or Fannie & Freddie only covered US housing and lenders.  How did this cause a worldwide boom and bust — even bigger than that in the US ?

9. Prior to the 2004, many States had Anti-Predatory Lending (APL) laws on their books (and lower defaults and foreclosure rates). In 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) Federally Preempted state laws regulating mortgage credit and national banks. What was the impact of this OCC Federal Preemption ?

10. Corporate Structure: None of the Wall Street partnerships got into trouble, only the publicly traded iBanks. Partnerships have full personal liability for their losses. What was the impact of this lack of personal liability of senior management on Wall Street risk management?

Comment:  Some of these come close to being purely rhetorical in the sense that (I suspect) Barry feels he knows the answer, and that the answer is damning to the culprits.  For every one of them, I suspect somebody over at the American Enterprise Institute will be ready with a memo showing that it was a total non-issue and oh look!  There's Barney Frank!  Even given AEIs risible record of "research," still a number of these do represent real issues on which I'd love to have a better sense of who is right.  Example: repeal of Glass Steagall is part of the standard mantra.  Yet wouldn't I be right that the worst afflicted banks (Bear Stearns, Lehman) are the ones least diversified, the ones that took least advantage of Glass Steagall repeal?  Can we document that Federal preemption really changed anything?

I know, that's not really his point--his point being to try to shame four guys who seem to have no sense of shame, and who pass on, as an "investigation report," a set of AEI talking points that they could have drafted before the commission was ever appointed.

Today's Quote

If the four of them brought this to my office hours I’d advise them to take an incomplete for the class and turn in the paper next semester in January.

That's Michael Konczal on the four-man "minority report" of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.  He means it in the strict sense:

The paper is 9 pages, and about 5,000 words. There are almost no hard numbers. There are only three citations. Everything here was in the popular narrative a year and a half ago.  This was supposed to be original research.... They had the power of subpoena, staff and a budget, and, random bloggers covering it have done a much better job. 

"Random bloggers" is unfair; it fails to identify the central contribution of some very skilled and experienced bloggers including, of course, Konczal himself.  He also includes references to a more serious effort to analyze -the crisis from a point of view with which he is not specially in sympathy-  The Squam Lake Report, out as a book last summer.

Should I be Embarassed by This?

Must be lower than "My Pet Goat."


[A complication: two hours ago on a different computer, I got an intermediate reading of 54 percent.]

Vlad the Impaler by any Other Name...

  Vanessa  Jackson, the Texas diva judge, offers a provocative insight into the forecasting of criminal behavior:

[S]he noticed that a large number of the defendants in capital cases in her court had Wayne or Lee for their middle names. After doing some informal research, Gilmore says she determined that an “oddly high number” of defendants in Texas death penalty cases have those middle names. After doing more online research, she’s determined that others have noticed the same strange propensity for people with Wayne or Lee for a middle name to have trouble with the law.

Mock on, but she may have something here.  Our names define us: Moynihan and Glazer pointed out years ago that you are more likely to be defined (and to define yourself) as "Irish" if your father is a "Hogan," than if your mother is.  And if you name the baby "Vlad the Impaler," the chances of his avoiding a schoolyard brawl are slim.

Yes, but what would it be with "Wayne" and "Lee."  Well, I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of the "Waynes" are "Anthony Wayne," after "Mad"  Anthony Wayne, celebrated badboy of the American Revolution.   Right, I know his parents never actually heard of the general, but the bad-boy aura survives (statement of interest: the second-most-feared bully of my youth was an Anthony Wayne; he claimed direct descent from the badboy, and took great pride in it).

"Lee" is even easier.  Surely a fair number of those parents are claiming fealty to "Marse Robert," Robert E. Lee, Confederate Civil War general-in-chief and patron saint of lost-cause rebellions everywhere.  As a definer of behavior, I'd say it is almost as good as having "born to lose" tattoed on your forearm.

It Means "Trust is Number One!"

Thirteenth most hacked Gawker password:

trustno1

The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name

From the annals of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission:

[A]ll four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases "Wall Street" and "shadow banking" and the words "interconnection" and "deregulation" from the panel's final report ...

Link, with sourcing, here.  For valuable prizes, readers are invited to suggest other words that the party of W*ll Str**t should exclude from its vocaabulary.  Like "integrity" and "responsible government."

You Can Take This One to the Bank

  "Think Yiddish," they used to say, "dress British."  These days, you should dress Swiss.  We learn that USB, the Swiss banking behemoth, is circulating a 43-page appearance/dress code to employees in its retail branches.  As in:

[D]esigner stubble is out of the question for men, as is excessive facial hair.UBS's advice for men even extends to underwear, which should be of good quality and easily washable, but still remain undetectable

Link.  I told my friend Lee once that I think I missed my calling, and  that I should have been a banker,.  "You can't," she said, "you're not tall enough."  She neglected to mention the excessive facial hair.

Joel Kotkin is Not Impressed

As they used to say, put him down as "doubtful:"

[Arnold] Schwarzenegger’s soon-to-be-ended seven-year reign as California’s governor can be best described in just that one simple world: failure.  It has been so bad that one even looks forward to having a pro, the eccentric Machiavellian master, Jerry Brown, replace him.
Schwarzenegger never grew beyond the role of a clueless political narcissist. As the state sunk into an ever deeper fiscal crisis, he continued to expend his energy on the grandiose and beyond the point: establishing a Californian policy for combating climate change, boosting an unaffordable High-Speed Rail system, and even eliminating plastic bags. These may be great issues of import, but they are far less pressing than a state’s descent into insolvency.

The Terminator came into office ostensibly to reform California politics, reduce taxation and “blow up the boxes” of the state’s bureaucracy. He failed on all three counts.

You think that's bitter?  Go and read the whole of it.  There's actually not a whole lot to disagree with here, although I think Kotkin's rage is driven by one important offstage factor: disappointment.  I can't say I have followed Kotkin closely, but he sounds like a guy who expected better.

That's a charge on which I think I can plead not guilty.  I certainly wasn't impressed by Grey Davis, but I don't think I expected tht-all much from Arnold to begin with, so I suppose you could say my expectations were gratified.  And quick as I am to brandish the charge of "narcissism," in the case of Arnold, I'm more inclined to write it off as simple laziness: the first couple of years, he pretty much faxed it in, trusting (as it seemed) that he could coast on his reputation without ever having to leave Malibu.  He blew a lot of opportunities them; I don't know what would have happened if he had tried to use them, but then, none of us ever will now, will we?

I've actually been more charitably disposed to Arnie lately but mainly for the enemies he has made.  He's said a lot of good things; shame he didn't say them years ago

And while Kotkin sees us as more captive than ever to the bloated unions and such, my guess is that weird old Jerry Brown might be the one guy with enough independence and savvy actually to elude their grip.  At least in part.  At least for a while.  Just let's not expect to much of him, okay?
 

Department of Self Congratulation

  Looks like I pretty much nailed it on Richard Holbrooke's last words:

"At one point, the medical team said, You've got to relax," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters on Tuesday, relaying what he said he had heard from people who were in the room with Holbrooke at George Washington University Hospital. "And Richard said, I can't relax, I'm worried about Afghanistan and Pakistan. After some additional exchanges, the medical team finally said, Tell you what, we'll try to fix this challenge while you're undergoing surgery. And [Holbrooke] said, Yeah, see if you can take care of that, including ending the war."

So Huffpost. making the point that the White House was trying to defuse any suggestion that Holbrooke had wanted to, well, like end the war in Afghanistan.

The IRS Doesn't Want me to Pay my Taxes

I don't know about you, but I've always found quarterly estimated tax payments to be a bleeping nuisance.  It's not really the money: I'm a fairy docile taxpayer.  I've always shared the view of the crusty New England libertarian that "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society;"* hell, I have been known to err on the side of overpayment.

But those quarterlies--I have never yet invented a system that guarantees I will remember (a) the due date; (b) the amount due; (c) where I  stowed the paperwork; and, yes, (d) whether I have already paid them.  Huff, puff.  Grump.  Grrr.

Just lately I went in quest of the universal solvent--online payment.  Dealing with my State taxes, I found, to my pleasant surprise, that the State of California was ready, willing and able.  I glommed onto a user name and password just about the same way as I would at any commercial site; I logged on and made a payment, and I said yes, I would be most pleased if they would henceforth send me reminders (if I am conscientious, I will log on at my bank today to make sure it is posted).  I don't know whether this is "secure" or not--I suppose not--but if anyone wants to hack my account for the purpose of helping me to stump up, they should feel free.

But the Feds.  Ah, the Feds.  First, they don't want just a user name and password; they want user name and PIN and password.  More: they mail you the PIN, then you have to phone for the password.  When you finally get around to signing you find yourself being warned that you are  now being transferred to some other arm of the Federal government which may have different policies and that if I want that okay but it's my funeral.   Like virtually every other internet user, I ignore the warning text, then check the box saying that I have not ignored it, and then proceed to ground zero--the site for online payment.

But wait--quarterlies aren't there.  Or I can't find 'em.  Some taxes are listed--some I've never heard of and am delighted I do not have to pay.  But after doodling around for a few (more) minutes, I chucked it all, pulled out my paper checkboook (I still have one), found the tax paperwork (glory be!), went and stole a stamp and envelope from Mrs. B, and posted the payment.  Notice to the boys in the mailroom: those bad vibes have nothing to do with the tax itself; they are all about the nuisance of payment.

I suppose I might be missing something here--I am an old guy, I am not supposed to understand computers.  But my friend Taxmom, who lives with this every day, seems to believe I am on the right track:

Yes, the State has done a great job of streamlining things.  Fed is driving us up a wall b/c they require online payment for certain things, yet make it prohibitively difficult to arrange that payment.  We've seen the FTB (CA) be proactive in other respects as well....for instance they like most correspondence / forms submitted by fax these days, instead of reg email, also greatly streamlined the corporate revivor process (FTB handles finances of this even though it is a Sec of State issue) which used to be a nightmare.

Go California!

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*He also said "get down, you fool!" 

w/ o comment

 When he understood it, he called for his friends, and told them of it. Then said he, I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I have got hither, yet now I do not regret me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness before me that I have fought His battle who will now be my rewarder. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ And as he went down deeper, he said, ‘Grave, where is thy victory?’ So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side. 

--John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

 

Last Words

Seems like everybody in my Google Reader this morning is citing "Richard Holbrooke's last words:"

"You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

"Patient zero" seems to be this Twitter feed.

I'm a great admirer of Richard Holbrooke and I share the widely held view that we've lost a giant.  But were these his "last words?"  I doubt it.  I think it is pretty clear by now that "last words" are a cultural construct, especially popular in Victorian times though I bet they go back to the stoics (cf. "see how a Christian dies!").   The reality is virtually always less theatrical.

But here's a guess: it wouldn't knock me over to find out that Holbrooke, hospitalized, in extremis and with his loved ones, indulged in a moment of black humor to say "yeh, if I go, tell them my last words were..."  This guy was as dedicated, determined--and savvy--as any diplomat whose services we ever enjoyed.   And he understood that part of the job was playing the media. 

OBTW, whether or not I am right, let's agree that he was right.

Can He Do That?

I'm still trying to get my mind round the idea that the Virginia judge who decided the Obamacare  case also owns a chunk of a Republican advisory firm.  My first thought was--can he do that?  On slightly closer scrutiny I suspect the answer is--maybe, just barely, yes.  The governing rule seems to be the one that says the judge must recuse himself in a case where his impartiality might be reasonably questioned.  I've never much liked the squishiness of that rule--I used to speak out against it  back when I did continuing legal education programs.  But if ever there were a reason for questioning, this would seem to be it.

But as my friend Richard suggests, a threshold question is--where were the government lawyer on all  this?  I assume it's the kind of question that only arises if somebody makes an issue of it.  Did they object?  What kind of ruling did they get, and from whom?   Did they even consider it?

There is a devil's bargain here, of course: if you question the judge's impartiality and lose, then you are stuck from the get-go with a judge who thinks don't think he is up to the job.  But if you don't make the objection and lose the case, then you've pretty much screwed the pooch.

St. Lucy's Day

Were you awakened this morning by a girl with candles in her hair?   If so, you may have been enjoying the celebration of St. Lucy's Day, conventionally the beginning of the Christmas season.

At the first cock-crow, between 1 and 4 a.m., the prettiest girl in the house used to go among the sleeping folk, dressed in a white robe, a red sash, and a wire crown covered with whortleberry-twigs and having nine lighted candles fastened in it. She awakened the sleepers and regaled them with a sweet drink or with coffee ...

 So  Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), recorded in Hymns and Carols of Christmas channeled through the aptly named Making Light.  Apparently under the old calendar, December 13 was the shortest day of the year, but what is this with the first cock-crow between 1 and 4 a.m.?  Wouldn't this be New Zealand, or July?

I recall that I was so fêted once, back in the Pleistocene. I did my best to accept it with the generosity and good grace that it deserved although I admit that fussbudget I spent the whole time fearing the poor girl's hair would catch fire.  Won't be happening around here, though, we are plumb out of whortleberries.

My Argument in Favor of the Efficient Capital Market Hypothesis

Graphically summarized:

Link.

The Best New Finance Commentator You've Never Heard Of

  ... is a certain EWC who has taken to reviewing (mostly) finance books at Amazon.   I have no idea who s/he is and his Amazon profile is entirely unforthcoming.  He's not an easy man to impress: of his 15 reviews, I find only one five-star, and that for his very first review, his only novel, which he denies (wrongly) is chick-lit.

Even within his rather austere limits, I can't say my enthusiasm is driven by the mere confirmation of ready-made prejudices.  He's down on All the Devils are Here which I liked a lot, lukewarm on Fault Lines, Crisis Economics, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and Fool's Gold, all of which I liked though in varying degrees.  The nearest he gets to warm praise is for  Slapped by the Invisible Hand ("A five star insight wrapped in a 3 star book"), which I also liked. We are happily in tune at least on Thomas Sowell's typically overpraised Economic Facts and Fallacies, which he eviscerates with far more courtesy and respect than I would have mustered.  And it's not just those whose conclusions he opposes: on Sowell, for example, he says he likes Sowell's conclusions but faults him for (as he says) knowingly torturing his data.

I don't think I can fairly summarize EWC's whole point of view: extracted form miscellaneous reviews, his thoughts are necessarily presented as fragmentary.   His principal concern seems to be rooted in the problem of short-term hot money and the prevalence thereof in a long-term system.  At its first mention, I wondered if he was one of those fractional banking nutcakes, but no: he seems to be an industry insider with a good handle, inter alia, on a fair number of insights about the operation of the banking system to which neither I nor any of commentators appear competent to respond.  One giveaway, though: of Nocera/McLean's Devils, supra, which I liked and he did not like, he says:

[I]t never dawns on the authors to wonder why these lenders predominately put themselves at risk by holding the risky tranches of these loans rather than selling them (acknowledged in Chapter 14), by agreeing to buybacks loans that defaulted (acknowledged in Chapter 15), and overall by holding 40% of all these loans on their balance sheet rather than securitizing them. If they were intentionally making loans to homeowners that they knew could not be repaid and defrauding investors with fraudulent credit ratings and loan documentation, it would have made no sense for them to do this.

No: the insight that bankers made seemingly suicidal choices is important and worth noting, and there is a perfectly good reason why they did so. That is: the individual players were engaged in a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game where they simply figured they could get their own off the table before the police (or reality) kicked in the door. Which, to all appearances, they have pretty well succeeded in doing.  ECM continues:

[McLean and Nocera] repeatedly swipe all this away with the dubious but often-repeated claim that everyone thought home prices would rise forever. Honestly, did you believe the price of your home would rise forever?

 I'm not persuaded that M&N "claim that everyone thought home prices would rise forever."  If they did, they were foolishly wrong.  But the real point is that the bankers  surely did not think that home prices  would rise forever.  Yet they acted as if they did, to all of our cost.

So there is a lot about ECM's presentation that makes me uncomfortable, even though I can't always respond as well as I'd like.  But he's too interesting to dismiss out of hand; I'd love to see him do a book--and to see it reviewed by a true industry insider--Yves Smith, say, or her great buddy The Epicurean Dealmaker, both of whom have the kind of chops necessary to cope with his banker expertise.

Weekend Reading

  Not a long list, but  some really good stuff:

• Your one-stop shop for understanding tax deal.
• And why you might still be mad.
• Will Wilkinson reads Larry Bartels' Unequal Democracy, and Bartels responds.  For related links go here.

Opera Note: The Met's HD Don Carlo

Okay, so back to Verdi's Don Carlo, specifically the Met's HD transmission of same today. The short point is that it was superb, a splendid response to a score that needs no less.

Though it has competitors, I suspect that among serious Verdi fans this might be the all-time favorite.  Among more casual opera goers, perhaps less so: it is probably less vivid in mind than half a dozen others, from Rigoletto to Falstaff.  The same evidence supports both points of view: Don Carlo is massive--running a bit shy of five hours portal to portal in today's version, which is about par.  And there are three versions in two languages; while they are largely similar, there's enough difference in detail to make you wonder whether you've really seen it before.  And it takes six strong voices which means it will be a lucky day before you see an all-round strong performance.

The plot, too, is a bit of an oddity.  It seems simple enough on the surface: young love seeks to outwit the elders in the quest for freedom.  Well, yes, but in this case, the desired one is also papa's wife, which adds a touch of incest, not to say confusion.  And papa--specifically, King Philip II of Spain: Verdi dismissed him as a "savage monarch," and at times,  he does play the villain of the piece.  But in fact, he is not his own man: we quickly learn that he is a mere pawn of the dread Inquisition and that his own terrors and disappointments are as great as those of anyone else in the cast (Don Carlo surely is, bye the bye, the most anti-Catholic of operas, although I'm not sure anybody pays that point much mind).

Six roles, but fact it is the young lover and freedom fighter, Don Carlos himself, who bears the brunt of the work: he is on stage in almost every scene and interacts with virtually every other character.  Carrying the weight today was Roberto Alagna, and you might have been surprised to see (hear) how good he was.  It's easy to underestimate Alagna: he came to the major league in the baggage of his former wife, Angela Georghiu, and he offers so relaxed and laid-back a manner that you might well mistake him for the boy who cleans the swimming pool. (and it wasn't that long ago that he walked off a major stage in a pout).

In fact, Alagna has a steady and dependable voice, coupled with a capacity to connect with almost anyone with whom he share the stge.  Don Carlo is very much a duet opera--as Alagna says, "a duet, not  duel," with lots of intense, breath-to-breath voice-to-voice encounters.  So while he might not be the most brilliant Carlo in terms of technique, he's got just the mix of stamina and emotional availability you need to make this work.

Simon Keenlyside as his best buddy and sometimes collaborator, seems to offer more by way of suavity and nuance.  But--Mrs. B would kill me for this--but I wonder if his situation isn't the revere of Alagna's: he's pretty good at expressing himself, but perhaps not quite as good as you, if you are not paying attention, might think. 

For me, however, the real star of the show was Ferruccio Furlanetto as the king. He has three big moments: one with Keenlyside, one with Eric Halfvarson as the Grand Inquisitor, and a nine-minute display of isolated anguish on his own. He nailed them all: here is a guy who can sing but also, clearly, has given a lot of thought to what he wants to do and why he wants to do it: he is the glue that holds a pretty good production together.

The women were a bit more problematic.  Marina Poplavskaya as the bride/beloved has a luscious voice although I'd say her emotional range was narrow. Part of the problem may be her relationship with Anna Smirnova as Princess Eboli. I gather she Smirnova has taken some flac elsewhere and I feel no need to pile on. But she seemed to me to be miscast: her first song was supposed to be light and sexy which apparently she can't do at all. The rest of the afternoon she sang more convincingly but she seemed to be looking for, and never quite finding, a fixed center for her character.

I don't want to forget Yannick Nezet-Seguin, who looks like me must be all of 13 years old as conductor. Poplavskaya called him "Mozartian" which is extravagent but not entirely off point: he gets a kind of clarity and ease out of the orchestra while making it look like he's just having a grand time. He debuted at the Met a while back in Carmen; he did  fine job there, but I suspect that maybe Don Carlo was a better showcase for his talents.

Staging was restrained, which I thought a relief.  There is so much else going on, you don't want to have to worry about sets too.  Anyway, thank heavens they didn't bring Zeferelli; he would have given us a real auto de fé.

Too True...

Took five hours out for the opera, so now catching up with other.  I leave you with:

Point d'argent, point de Suisse

That is: "no money, no Swiss," as in the tall guys who came down out of the Alps to make a nuisance of themselves iin the 15-16C.  Link.  Sometimes associated with Charles the Rash of Burgundy:

[I]t was the closure of the brief period when the dynastic rivalries of Europe permitted the Swiss as a nation to play a significant role in the affairs of the continent. As to the careless use of the term ‘mercenary’ as an epithet, to deny a soldier his pay is to refuse the honour due to him and implicit in the contract under which he takes service. The Swiss did not believe in promises and if pay day came around and it was not duly counted out, they would simply leave, no matter what the situation their patron might find himself in. Thus to this day the phrase point d'argent, point des Suisses (no money, no Swiss) persists in French usage.  

Link. Reformed as "point d'argent, point de buste."  Link.  I suppose in the 20C we might have said "no Swiss, no money," though whether that holds is perhaps an open question.

Oh Rare

Costco has white truffles at $84.99.  No, wait, that is $849.99.

Reading Note: Zombie Ecnoomics

  John Quiggin's Zombie Economics has achieved a respectful reception.  It does have its virtues but on the whole I found it a bit of a disappointment.

Virtues: Quiggin does have a knack for explaining complicated economic ideas in a straightforward and intelligible manner. He has the makings of a good teacher though I certainly hope he is prepared to say it all more than once if expects to get adequate comprehension from ordinary undergraduates.  In any event, he's a pretty good cheat sheet on some of the structural issues that define or beset modern macro.

Defects: one defect is that the book bears all the earmarks of a rush job.  I can only guess--he wanted to respond to the moment, on is own or at the urging of others; or he simply wanted to move on to other things. Still, you can' escape the feeling that this is the product of months when it could have profited from the gestation of years.

Two: I do think Quiggin rigs the game in his favor at more than one point.  Example: his treatment of the Efficient Capital Market Hypothesis.  He does a creditable job of demonstrating just how intellectually bankrupt ECMH is in dealing bub bles and the bursting thereof.  So far so good.  But he glides over the core of good sense at the heart of ECMH which underlies its role (or non-role) in understanding the late meltdown.  That is: prices impound information.  Not always, and not as quickly or completely as its proponents pretend.  But faster than most investors can move.  The practical fact  is that investing remains a savagely competitive game at which amateurs will achieve an upper hand over professionals only with an extraordinary mix of luck, skill, and hard work.  Anybody who doubts tht the market was and remains broadly "efficient" in that sense--any such investor will soon part with his portfolio.

Another example:  privatization.  I think Quiggin states the case in favor of privatization in  manner that makes his own job too easy.  He says "the central teneet of the ideology of privatization is simple."  That is:

It is the claim that an economy in which all  major decisions on investment, employment and production are left to private firms will outperform a mixed economy where governments play a significant role in such decisions.  Provided private firms are free to compete on a "level playing field," this means they will always have a higher value than they would have under public ownership.

The italics are mine but the exaggeration is his. I wonder who has thought that all major decisions must be left in private hands and that properly guided they will always have a higher value.  Perhaps Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand.  I doubt that Milton Friedman believed it, or Friedrich Hayek--certainly not on their good days. What they did believe--what I believe--is that there are sound practical and moral reasons to favor decentralized decision-making, and good experiential reasons to suspect that governments may impede more often enhance the likelihood of achieving the desired goals.  This doesn't justify selling government capital assets to cover cyclical budget shortfalls, nor the transfer of public monopolies into the hands of unregulated private monopolies.

I don't know of anyone who has tried to do a comprehensive assessment of the effect of privatization over, say, the period since World War II: probably way too ambitious.  Still, I suppose we could all agree that the pell-mell privatization of post-Soviet Russia was a horrendous botch which greatly enhanced the suffering of masses of ordinary Russians (and bye the bye, led to a spectacular increase of the death rate).  We could go further and say that at least part of the blame lies on meddling Western economists with ideological blinders.  But do we really pine for state-run Soviet industry--bloated and senescent, draining the lifeblood out of a society and putting wealth into the pockets of only a selected few?

And it is hardly Russia alone: rail as one will against Maggie Thatcher and her ism, was Britain a better, stronger, happier country when the sovereign owned coal and steel?  Actually, Quiggin may think so; I do not.

I could go on but let me segue instead to my other major complaint which follows naturally from what has gone before.  That is: however shrewd and sophisticated Quiggin may be in seeing  intellectual bankruptcy of modern economics in the markerplace, he is utterly slack-jawed when it comes to his evaluation of the state.  A few fragmentary passages aside, you'd think he'd learned nothing from all the good work that has been done over the past couple of generations by way of critique of state as an institution.  Granted that the critics may have gone overboard; granted that they may harbor the unworthy purpose of destroying the state by fair means or foul.  There are tangential bibliographic references to James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock; also to Anthony Downs, on what Quiggin calls "the 'market for votes' model of [politics."  But then he says:? "In one of my own earliest papers ... I pointed out numerous problems with the public choice approach."  Well, I guess that settles that.   But readers who think that the critiques of the state cannot be dismissed with the flic of a self-citation--those readers will find themselves disappointed that his critique of the state is so flaccid as contrasted with his critique of the market.

Not from The Onion

Obama Has Had It Up to Here With Pretty Much Everybody

 Link.

I So Don't Want to Know...

Guy at front of me in the hardware store buying (a) votive candles and (b) Lady Mini Monkey Butt Glue.

The Brits Understand "Snug"

   On Julian Assange's British hidey hole:

The Frontline Club in London is the kind of place where war correspondents and investigative reporters mingle with admirers and wannabes, fired by a shared passion for exposing government spin, revealing the truth — and fine dining.

So when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange found himself at the center of an international firestorm over the website's publication of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, he knew where he would be well-fed and, more importantly, safe.

Link.   Apparently it worked, in the sense that no one outed him; by what I read, he outed himself.  Not the same for his famous predecessor:

A thump, and a murmur of voices—
    (”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
   And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:
“Mr. Woilde, we ‘ave come for tew take yew
   Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
   For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

Link. That would be "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel," by John Betjeman.

RIP Heda Kovaly

One of the great survivors died this week: Heda Margolius Kovaly, at 91. Clive James said: “Given 30 seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the 20th century, I would choose this one.” He's probably right; for wartime memoirs alone, I think she has to take second place to Primo Levi. But Heda had to survive not only the war and the camps but also the cruel betrayal and murder of her first husband ("Margolius") by the contemptible weasels who dominated Communist Czechoslovakia.

Kovaly has a curious distinction here at Underbelly. My review of her memoir seems to have generated more hits than anything else I wrote here. Apparently I seem to be listed at somebody's source-site for quick off-the-rack book reviews. To a thousand overstrained English teachers, my sincerest apologies.

Obama Explained

Bruce says:

He brought the Harvard Law Review to a knife fight.

Not Sure I Can Handle This...

A cop who just ambled into the coffee shop is a ringer for Madeleine Albright.

Update:  Oh bite your tongue. Yes, a woman.

Update II: Uh, I think.

Myers on Vonnegut

   The ever-dependable D. G. Myers connects for--well, if not a home run, then at least a solid double--with his pointed and crusty display of (some) reasons why Kurt Vonnegut does not belong in the Library of America.  Myers brackets Vonnegut with Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck for their "career-long critique of America," and  adds: "A midcultist whose psychological reaction to this country was healthier—Herman Wouk, for example, or John P. Marquand—would never be considered for the Library of America."  I wouldn't bet on that.  My instinct is that Marquand still has a fan base among the Connected, and may have his day.   A more interesting comparison might be James Gould Cozzens (whom Myers claims to have read in the sixth grade).

Longevity Notes

I was telling Mrs. B at breakfast about Hugues-Adhémar Cuénod, the tenor who debuted at the Met at 85 and died this week at 108--and specifically, how he entered into a civil union at the age of 104 with his 64-year-old companion.

The instant response: "Property rights. Inheritance. He took care of the old man all these years. He deserved it."

Could very well be right.

..and speaking of longevity, just last night in a different context we were talking about Roy Neuberger, broker and art collector, still going strong (the last I knew) at 107. Herb Caen once said: it used to be that if a man was famous for having lived to 100, he had never been famous for anything else. As I recall he was speaking of songwriter Irving Berlin at Berlin's death in 1989, aged 101. Not any more.

Slavery v. Serfdom

I've long been curious about identifying the differences between (American) slavery and (Russian) serfdom.  Peter J. Parish, channeling Peter Kolchin, provides an economical summary:

In round figures, there were two whites to every black in the antebellum South; in Russia in 1858, there was one male nobleman to every fifty-two male peasants.  In the South, there were just over two slaves for every member of a slaveholding family; in Russia, there were more thn twenty-four male serfs for every male nobleman.  Russian serfs were generally held in very much larger units than Southern slaves.   To take the extreme case, the U.S. census of 1860 listed only one owner of more than one thousand slaves; the 1858 census in Russia listed 3,858 owners of over one thousand serfs.  One Russian family owned more than 37,000 serfs, scattered over numerous estates.

The consequences of the enormous differences were profound.  Because many Russian owners were absentees, the relationship between owner and owned was inevitably more distant, geographically as well as personally.  Serfs were probably punished less often, but more brutally, than slaves.  Many of them rarely saw their owners, and dealt mainly with minor officials and bureaucrats. ... They grew their own food, had a voice in local government, and were able to engage in organized rather than individual resistance.  Moreover, unlike slaves, they were required to devote only a part of their labor to the service of their owners.

That's from Peter J. Parish, Slavery (1990). Note to self, find a copy of Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor (1990).

Ingrid Rowland Gets the Point about Ariosto

I count myself a big-time Ariosto fan; he seems to have an almost limitless capacity for ease and good nature, a kind of insouciant brio--all while banging his head against the wall of what must have been a thankless day job.

Nice to see that Ingrid Rowland gets it.  Appraising (in the current New York Review of Books) a new translation, she remarks on how all epics bear an aura of remembernce: Homer tells us of how there were giants in those days.  Tolkien, she says, tells of  harkens back to an age when "the crags, plants, and creatures in wild places were magical because the whole earth was magical."   Of Ariosto's great Orlando Furioso, she says:

[D]espite its monumental length, its heroic subjects, and its atmosphere of changing times, Orlando Furioso is anything but elegiac in its tone; it is the sixteenth-century version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a send-up with biting social commentary, outrageous adventures, over-the-top violence, a sexual merry-go-round, and humor at every level from the most refined to the most sophomoric. Most Renaissance jokes are as lame after five centuries as their modern equivalents will prove to be, but Ariosto can still make anyone laugh.

 Veering close to the too-easy grasp at relevance, this sounds to me pretty much right.  The word that always comes to my mind is "jaunty."  The only thing close to it I know of in English is Byron, specifically the Byron of Don Juan.  I'm sure there are great libraries of commentary on the point but I can still remember my own flash of recognition when, on first reading Ariosto, I thought "Oh!--I've been here before!"

They say that tragedy is comedy seen at  distance--if it happens to me it is tragic, if to you, it is merely funny.   And that comedy is the way of coming to terms with the past, of letting go.  And if one must let go, I can't think of a better way to do it

Maier on Narrative and History (but not Narrative History)

I just heard the Pauline Maier on C-Span flogging her new book; she said: "Historians don't write narratives, they make arguments."

This will, of course, come as a surprise to readers of Doris Kearns Goodwin or Shelby Foote, or David McCullough and their ilk. But I think it is true and, perhaps more important, true in two rather different senses.

Well: the threshold point is, of course, that history is what historians do and historians are people who occupy positions in departments of history on university faculties. Those other people aren't historians; they are, well, they are merchants of narrative.

But go on to the broader question of why historians don't do narrative. As I say, I think there are two reasons.  One: history, like any other academic discipline, is an intense in-group conversation limited to those who understand the nature and limits, and, more important, the "history" (oops) of the conversation.  I think it is Stanley Fish who offers the telling example: id I write an article called "what I think about Milton" and hurl it in through the transome, no one will read it.  If I write "what  Fensterwald thinks about what Gooch thinks about what Millington thinks about Milton," then after due anonymous vetting by the allies of Fensterwld, Gooch and Millington, I may have half a chance of getting into print.  Or as someone else said, it's like coming late to a Friday night happy hour and trying to catch the conversation in the middle.  Anyway, this structure impels argument and disfavors narrative.

But so far, what I say might be true of any academic discipline, which brings me to my second point: with history it is not just the incidental irrelevance of narrative; it is their positive aversion to anything linear.

On reflection, it is possible to trace the history of this phobia: life isn't narrative, life is one damn thing after another, and any enterprise that tries to put narrative on it is bound to falsify.

I suspect the critical figure in this, ahem, narrative, is Fernand Braudel: not the first but probably the best known of the French Annales school, half a dozen or more of whose works appear to persist in print in English.  In his first major work--The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, you can watch him struggling to free himself from histoire événementielle, in favor of--well, he called it the longue durée but the fact is there isn't much duration of any sort.  You do get a feel for physical structure, for geography, and perhaps for patterns of interchange but it certainly is a style of history that has never been done on this grand a scale before.

His other famous work, published in the United States as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, is even more diffuse, as if he had unshackled himself completely from the narrative form.

It's a major intellectual achievement, driven by a powerful insight, but as happens with powerful insights, a great many sins have been credited in its name.  It is in this light that Maier is correct when she says that "historians don't write narratives."  Whether "they make arguments" is a different question. In their guise as participants in a shred academic enterprise, perhaps they do; as I say, that is what shared academic enterprises are all about.  But as children or grandchildren of Braudel sometimes they (but not Maier) simply tip over the box of three-by-five cards.

Glenn Greenwald is a National (and International) Treasure

But you knew that.  Link.

Plate o' Shrimp

Miller: Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.

   

 
Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
 
Link.

Lowenstein Loses It

    "Over the past few months," fawns reports Roger Lowenstein, "[J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie] Dimon allowed me into his inner sanctum, giving me an insider’s view of how he thinks about banking and how he runs the bank." And guess what: the soft lights, the incense and the Johnny Mathis CD just fuddled Lowenstein's judgment:

Instead of reviewing brief summaries of the bank’s operations, as his predecessor had, Dimon demanded to see the raw data — hundreds of pages detailing J. P. Morgan’s businesses every month. Instead of simply trusting his traders, Dimon put himself through a tutorial, so that he would understand the complex trades the bank was exposed to. And rather than run its mortgage machine at full throttle for as long as possible, Dimon reined in lending earlier than did others and warned his shareholders of looming trouble.

You got that, Roger, raw data? It must have been toxic raw data because it apparently blinded Dimon from the oncoming train wreck of $51 billion in losses over the last couple of years--saying nothing of the "cutting corners" (aka "grand theft notary fraud") "in processing home foreclosures."   And forget how it was "embarrassed by" its piratical overdraft fees--"embarrassed by," as if the fees plopped out of the sky onto Dimon's well-coiffed pate.  For all those of you assembling a thesaurus entry on "gush," we offer the following compendium:

The popular animus has come as a shock to Dimon. ... Dimon sees himself as a patriotic citizen. ... At home, Jamie absorbed a first-generation reverence for America ... Like the mechanic who grew up in a body shop, Dimon today is intimately familiar with the details of his trade.... DIMON’S LIFE IS WORK and family (he has three 20-something daughters). On weekends, he consumes a mountain of printed material; he arrives on Monday with a penned list of questions for subordinates (he carries the list in his breast pocket, crossing off items as he grabs people in the hallways). ...

Oh, you get the drift. Yes, yes I know. Lowenstein does slip in a bit of useful background here and there among the spasms. But here is a  guy who made his bones in a biography of Warren Buffett, iconic as our most successful investor, in which Lowenstein positioned himself as informed, inquisitive, dogged and sympathetic, yet ultimately undazzled. Somewhere between Buffett and Dimon, some Friday night in a bar in Soho, he seems to have dropped his crap detector. Read the piece if you want: it is not a 100 percent waste of time.  But keep reminding yourself: this is a guy who lost $51 in two years. I hate to think what Lowenstein would have written had he lost just $50 billion.

Looky Looky

WikiLeaks

LikiWeaks

WeakyLicks

LeakyWicks

WookyLox

WookyWooky

LookyLooky

Lubitsch and Wilder bring you the Revolutionary as Dweeb

Il Teatro Buce enjoyed a screening last night of Ernst Lubitsch's classic Ninotchka with Greta Garbo.  It's good fun, perhaps not least because the dialogue has Billy Wilder's thumbprints all over it.  It does tend to drag after the first half or so and I suspect it wouldn't have its status as a semi-classic were it not so closely woven into the legend of Garbo herself.

But what impressed me most was not its Garbohood buts place in the narrative of the Soviet Union and our perception thereof.  This is 1939: of course we had long since demonized the Soviets for their violence and corruption.  No surprise there; but the movie offers us much more--not just violence and brutality but also meanness, cowardice and bureaucratic time-serving.  Especially in the early scenes we focus not on Garbo herself (she isn't there yet) but on three petty strivers who remind you of nothing so much as the Marx brothers cross-bred with the three little bats out of Pogo--figures of contempt or ridicule, not remotely of fear except insofar as we fear for them.

I've commented with admiration before on Victor Serge's  great Case of Comrade Tulayev, in which he demolishes any possible illusions about the intentions of the Soviet elite.  When I first came to political awareness in the 50s, there were still people who tended to mist over at the thought of Soviet crimes and malefactions.  I've often wished they could have studied Serge.  Silly me; all they needed to do was to go to the movies.

For extra credit, what were the names of the three bats in Pogo?  Go here.

So Sorry

--Did you hear about the guy who was cutting pennies?--The who?

--Cutting pennies. He and his buds. In the Marines. They were cutting pennies to make them the size of dimes so they could put them in vending machines. He got brought up on charges. Obama pardoned him.

--Pardon? Did he got to prison?

--No, no, he went on and served in Vietnam. Then he went home and worked in a factory.

--So this all happened a long time ago?

--The coin-cutting, 42 years ago. The pardon, just this week.

--Why did it take so long?

--He didn't ask for a pardon until just 18 months ago.

--Why did he wait so long to ask?

--He didn't know he was convicted until he went to buy a gun. The background check turned up this old felony conviction.

--So Obama pardoned him?

--Yes.

--So now he's free to get a gun?

--I guess so.

--So the effect of the pardon is to put one more gun on the streets?

--I guess so.

Ivan on the Corruption of Language

Ivan, on the ranch in north Alabama, has a carcass to pick with the Huntsville Times:

Hi John -- this is a small deal but shouldn't the outdoors writer be asked not to BS the readers and stop talking about "harvesting" deer when he means "killing" them. I've got nothing against deer hunting so long as hunters stay out of my fields --I've found deer stands in trees in my woods. I've found deer carcasses in my fields with just the haunches removed. nothing much you can do about it so I clean up as necessary. but the thing that gets me is the essential phoniness of the word "harvesting" when it comes to deer hunting. Rabbit hunters don't "harvest" bunnies. quail hunters don't "harvest" birds. corn growers harvest. soybean growers harvest. deer hunters kill.

Uh Sarah...

Does this count as a Palinism?  Sarah Palin faults John F. Kennedy for not

Telling the country how his faith had enriched him.

Think about it.

Why Do We Tax Public Employees?

A while back I had a borderline-civil exchange with another blogger over the voting rights of public employees--should they be allowed to vote or do they just have too much at stake?  I can understand the argument that they should not be able to vote but it proves too much: every government contractor, every lobbyist, every beneficiary of a public program, has some kind of stake in government decisions and if we deny them all, then nobody is left.

But it occurs to me that you can turn the point around.  Forget about voting, why do government employees pay taxes?   It's certainly not an impossible idea; we already forgive taxes for soldiers in the combat zone.  No quarrel in principle here, but why not extend it?  Understand, I don't mean to offer them a break here: just net out their salary against their potential tax bill.  If they would have the right to $100 in income with s 30 percent tax rate, then just pay them $70.


I admit that there is something creepily unsettling about the proposition, yet for the life of me I can't think why.  What am I missing?

Afterthought:  It occurs to me that the proposal comes tantalizingly close to a system of corvée.  Maybe that's the point of  the tax exemption for people on active duty: active duty also looks like corvée.

LA Security: Near Meltdown?

   Coming out of LAX on United this morning, I endured a security system that seemed to  me very near collapse.  You  had to line up on the street to get ID'd before you got into the building.  You checked your bags and then you hit a queue that extended out of the TSA area halfway into the terminal.  Time spent in the security line: just about exactly the same as time spent in the air on the flight to SFO.  Security people kept waving customers out of the queue for impending flights (Any passengers for 8:23?  This way!).  The lucky (?) few would tumble out of line and dog-trot down the corridor: I assume they were getting screened somewhere but I couldn't see it and I couldn't help but wonder if they were just waving some of them all the way to the gate.

I have to admit it seemed oddly orderly withal.  An argument that I'm exaggerating is that TSA personnel didn't seem particularly stressed, as if this is their life every day.  Maybe it is their life every day.

LA: the Other New York

In LA for a couple of days of this and that, I notice a couple of remarkable points of convergence with New York. 


One: the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, where we saw a somewhat perfunctory Rigoletto. It's pleasant enough as a performanced space though it feels oddly cramped for so spacious a city.  And the chandeliers: they are huge: they more or less fill the open space outside the auditorium.  And then I thought: no, they are not huge; they are just too big for the space,  Looks to me like somebody decided they had to have chandeliers on the same order as the Met, and failed to take account ofd the fact that the Met has so much more room for display.


Another: Canter's, the deli on Fairfax.    I don't think I've been in here for 15 years, and I am surprised at how little has changed since I was first here  35 years ago.  This must not be an acccident: somebody must have decided that retro sells, and that it is good to keep lox and blintzes and latkes on the menu even if the waitresses no longer wear polyester uniforms with nylons and bobbie sox (I wonder when they started selling ham?).  I suppose it is in part a tourist destination although I don't see anything like the tourist crowds you see at Katz's in lower Manhattan--where they come hoping to see Meg Ryan and Bily Crystal.  So: Katz's without Harry and Sally.  So, Katz's west, just like with the chandeliers.


Update: Lunch with my friend John who tells me I am all wrong about the chandeliers.  He says the designer found two great chandeliers on a studio backlot and liked them so much he had a third built to match.  Says they don't look quite so crowded from below.

NYRB: Ten Favorites

Others have tried their hand; I will try mine--ten favorites from the formidable catalog of NYRB Classics:

• Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.  Oddly sympathetic account of a man who made it his life plan to be an assassin.

• Alexander Wat, My Century   A triumph of endurance and preserved humanity under unimaginable stress.  Like so many who lived through the worst the Century had to offer, he died a suicide.

• Nirad Caudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.  Another hymn to civility and good order under another kind of stress.

• Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere.  The most straightforwardly refreshing of NYRB's "we'll always have Paris" line.

• Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk. Said to be hugely popular at home in Turkey.,  Though nominally a  novel, it is clearly intended to convey the reality of peasant life in the rural Anatolia.  I wonder how far it succeeds, how far it is a romantic delusion

• Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties.   In the 50s at Antioch, people used to scoot down to the libraries on Thursday so they could catch Kermpton's pyrotechnical wisdom in the radical/liberal New York Post.  The memories are not quite mine but they form the substrate out of (or into) which mine emerged.

• Andrei Platonov, Soul.  Here's one I had never heard of until NYRB came along.  Billed as a Russian writer, I think he might almost be better understood as Central Asian, or at the very least one who writes about the encounter between the two.

•  Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev.  We never knew, the old lefties used to say, what a miserable tyrant Stalin really was.  Serge knew, and told the truth movingly and directly while lots of people were still in denial.

• Rebecca West. The Fountain Overflows.  An unexpected delight. I've long been a great fan of her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but I really wasn't prepared for the energy and vivacity of this loosely-jointed ramble through women's lives on the edge.

• J. F. Powers, The Stories of J. F. Powers.  An old favorite, rediscovered.  Powers wrote novels with NYRB also reprints, but he is one of those for whom the (longish) short story is the perfect form.  "Lions, Harts, Leaping Doves," ranks right up there alongside "That Evening Sun" or "Lady with Lapdog" or "My Dovecote."

Review:  I see that I favor nonfiction over fiction, Europe over America, the implications of World War II over all else.  I'm already startled and chagrined and what I have left out.  Where is Mavis Gallant, Rose Tremaine, Janet Hobhouse, Gregor von Rezzori Olivia Manning, J.A. Baker (I notice that the A-list is mostly men, the B-list,  mostly women; and my point is--??)?  Where are a dozen others (I think I've read about 100)?  Which is not to say that their list is unerring: I persist in my conviction that Curzio Malaparte is a narcissistic fraud; that there is a bit more Leonardo Sciasscia and George Simenon than they really need; and that Gershom Scholem really didn't get the point of his own story.  Oh, and way too many former consorts of Robinson Jeffers.  But it's a noble venture, executed with great skill and mostly good judgment.  I want them to keep at it for years to come though I suppose this kind of publishing venture either runs out of good material or just starts jumping the shark.  Before that, they should quit.

Riffing on Edna

Riffing with Larry the other day about something or other, I recalled:

I once knew a man from Khartoum
Who kept a live sheep in his room.
It reminds me, he said,
Of a lover long dead.
But I never can quite recall whom.

...which I have always thought the saddest poem in the English language. But it does remind me of

What my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten...

...which just naturally prompted Larry to remember one of the lost verses of Abdul the Bulbul Amir

She could make love all night like a Sultan's delight
Then sit writing sonnets all day
And that's why the pet of the old Boho set
Was Edna St. Vincent Millay.

 ...and I could only respond with

The old, oaken Edna,
The ironclad Edna,
the moss-covered Edna
St. Vincent Millay

Which left Larry to observe that with the closing of his neighborhood hospital, she will henceforth have to be known as Edna Beth Israel Millay.

Some guys have too much time on their hands.