As most of my readers will know, I’m not exactly Mr. Patriotism. Still, the following clips are interesting in all kinds of ways. The first is from the East Village in New York City, the second from Portland, Oregon. Both are places that have been told repeatedly over the last 20 years or so that they represent the worst of this country; they are rhetorically excised from the (imaginary) community as a matter of course. So it’s interesting to me, anyway, to see a kind of reclaiming of that imaginary status in this way. I think the deeply discriminatory and unjust results on the LGBT marriage and adoption propositions shows that we have a long way to go indeed. Still (and I hesitate to “but” or “still” it, given how horrendous those propositions actually are), these are remarkable rhetorical artifacts. Multitude?
Here’s this, written on Day 1,000 of this fucking war:
In the heady days of January 1991, we used to cut out of our senior year of high school early and go smoke joints at R.L.’s apartment. We’d often have beer as well. From about 2 pm to 6 pm, a large group of us would chill there, maybe with CNN or MTV or cartoons on the television in the background. It was the line in the sand day, or thereabouts, and CNN was on. The war had not yet started, but we were waiting for it, full of bravado. We were sure that if the war started, it would lead to a general Mideast conflagration, and we would all be called to service. We were all 17 years old, and in good health, if often high.
I left R.L.’s at about 6, heading home to dinner. I walked back to my apartment with Sulli and Steve. We were pretty lit by this time, and the electricity in the air said it all: the war is imminent. Steve started belting out the lines as we walked down the Queens street: All we are say-ing/ Is give war a chance! I remember laughing. When I got home I found my mother standing in front of the television, her hand over her mouth. “What’s going…” but she shushed me, and I looked at the television. The eerie green light, the tracers going up over the minarets, the stentorian intonations of some spokesman or other. War. I went into the bedroom I shared with my brother, my heart filled with joy…
*****
Why doncha come on back to the War. – Leonard Cohen
September 10, 2001. I have dinner with an old friend at an Italian restaurant in the East Village. Then we go to DBA, a bar. Jay-Z’s “Hova” comes on the bar’s sound system: H to the Izzo, V to the Izzay, what else can I say, dude, I gets bizzay. We talk about how great it is. I’m drunk at this point, and I have to get back to Brooklyn. I have to be up early tomorrow to do campaign work in Lower Manhattan before I head to work at my building near the Ferry terminal. I take a cab back over the Manhattan Bridge, with a final glance at the lights flickering in the Manhattan skyline just as we hit the center of the Bridge. Goddamn is it beautiful.
*****
One…we are the people
Two…a little bit louder
Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now
One…
March, 2003. The first Saturday of the War. I am at a conference in New York, but I stay at my brother’s place in Brooklyn rather than in the conference hotel. I don’t live here anymore. On Friday I got food poisoning. My brother, his wife, and my wife went to a French restaurant in Fort Green, but I stayed at his place, sick as a dog, watching the lead-up to the War on television. On Saturday I go to Midtown to see a friend’s panel, but the war is on television there, too, real now, green-lit tracers over the minarets, Shock and Awe booming through the hotel lobby. I leave after the panel, and wander into the anti-war march that is just beginning. The crowds are tremendous. I walk downtown with the march, but on the sidewalk. Hard for me to be a joiner that way, I guess. Earnestness irritates me, but I’m with them. When I get down to 10th street I encounter the drummers – a group of Latinos and Latinas leading the chant: One…we are the people, Two…a little bit louder, Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now. Everyone on the march and on the sidewalks is cheering. On a third floor balcony above the march, a woman comes out with a little boy and a conch shell. She starts blowing it in beat with the drum. Everyone’s eyes seem to move from the drummers to the balcony and back. The drummers acknowledge her, and the little boy dances. There he is dancing on the first Saturday of the War.
*****
And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was. –Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Other Dancing Song”
One Thousand Days. I should have waited another one, and led with One Thousand One Arabian Nights. Too clever by far. And no history or stories will save me, like Scheherazade. It is the one thousandth day of the War. I often wondered when I was a child how people could live normally on the home front when a war was going on. How do they face it everyday, I wondered, knowing what must be happening, knowing that everything is at stake? How do they go out to dinner, play sports, make love, gesture to each other on the street? It bothered me. I’d think of the swing clubs during World War II – everyone dressed up and dancing. A sip from a bottle of beer, or a Tom Collins. How? It is the one thousandth day of the war. No stories will save me. In March, if all goes well, my first child will be born. Perhaps on the first Saturday of the fourth year of the War. I want her to dance to something else. I want some other occasion for her joy and even for her heartbreaks, something other than what Langston Hughes once called “the same old stupid game, of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” I want for her some other dancing song. But it is the one thousandth day of the war and no stories will save me.
*****
Now back to the present, today, election day, 2008. And another one on the way. Another child, another dancing song. For the first one, now our dear babygirl (life is dearer than all that wisdom ever was), and for this second one, whoever he or she will be, and whatever he or she will dance to: VOTE. Vote some other dancing song. Vote OBAMA.
I’m a little too busy right now to deal with this in detail, but I find the rhetoric of McCain/Palin’s “unhinged” crowds to be a very interesting development indeed, and one that deserves a careful tracing. It is, no doubt, more media narrative than “representation” of any change in GOP rallies, but its a curious narrative to deploy at this point. Ever since palin came out with her asinine “pals around with terrorists” jibe we’ve been treated to a LeBonesque contemplation of the crowd mind, all with a special focus on the “rabid” McCain/Palin rallies. Of course, this whole election season has been a study in crowd rhetorics, from the Hillary camp’s desperate insinuation that the Obama supporters were a “cult” to the cringingly stupid and tone deaf “celebrity” ads that McCain’s more retrograde advisors decided to go with in August (like everything else, they boomeranged on the painfully out-of touch McCainites when he picked the ultimate substanceless “celebrity” in Sarah Palin).
I’ll just suggest here, with the (no doubt fruitless) promise of picking the point up later, that we’re seeing the return of the classical 19th century crowd image at precisely the moment that the so-called “wisdom of crowds” – which was always, for James Suroweicki and his various disciples, merely synechdoche for the orderly operation of free markets in the Chicago School style – at precisely the moment when the wisdom of crowds, I say again, is collapsing at 20% a week. So what do we see emerge at once, during the same week?
Panic on the financial markets, the collapse of the “wisdom of crowds” mantra that was always Friedmanite rational choice theory dressed up in a really laughable costume of physics.
Atavistic irrational rage of the McCain/Palin mobs as they froth and sway across the media spectrum.
“You’ve got national governments trying to deal with a global problem.” -Richard Quest, responding to a 9% drop in the Nikkei, 3 minutes before European markets open.
Check your TIAA-CREF if you’ve got one. Not pretty.
From Japan…Information cascade: panic selling. People talking about “underlying economies.” The US consumer buying Toyota: if they can’t get the loan to make that big purchase, etc. “Now analysts are scratching their heads…Analysts trying to figure out what it was in the psychology that made the market go so bad…the ‘real economy’…the nuts and bolts of what makes Japan tick…Bank of Japan has been injecting funds for 16 straight days.”
UK “partially nationalizing the banks.” Hooo boy. I like that somebody is called Chancellor of the Exchequer. $87 billion for British bank bailout, plus $350 billion credit line. Quest wonders who’s going to take out a loan when the job may be gone next week. It strikes me as a not irrelevant question. Relief that Europe opens up “only” 3% down. Banking shares in the UK recovering, but is anybody buying? CNN headline amusing: “Worries deepen over world financial turmoil.” (2:13 CDT). DAX and Paris both down 4%. CNN flashed the 9.38% Nikkei drop when they were talking about the FTSE and the anchors were like “Whoa, don’t be scared…that’s Tokyo, not London.”
Iceland near bankrupt: no money coming out of the ATM’s. What will happen to West Ham, boyos? The Hammers are owned by Icelandic banking interests. Ooops. Maybe not so funny, since now they’re worried about food imports into Iceland. “Fear, dread, concern…but won’t use panic just yet,” says the newsreader…This is fascinating stuff. London, Paris, Germany diving close to 5% now; anchors started worried, now looking concerned.
Quest: “You’re all fixated on the markets! The egg was hatched in Iceland, when somebody tried to take money out of the bank and couldn’t…” Co-anchor: “Fear seems to have gripped everyone now…confidence.” Quest: “This is not a movie where suddenly three quarters of a way through something happens and everything’s fine! Don’t be naive!” Hilarious!!! Quest: “They’re now attacking this with a water pistol…It is not going to end…you won’t be able to spot the turn.” Some German guy up now in a wacky sweater and upturned Eurotrash collar. “Japn is not about the banks or the financial system, but about the exporters…experts afraid world is going to enter a depression.” But why, then, did the banks fall sharply? German dude: “They didn’t. Worry is about the ‘real economy.’” Welcome to the desert of the real…
The spiralling financial crisis hit another benchmark today, as evidenced by the panic of the Lehman Brothers collapse. There’s a very good story in the New York Times detailing the “fear” on Wall Street today – a Sunday. This morning, she showed me a wedding announcement in the Times; the groom’s father was a managing director at Lehman. We hypothesized that perhaps the impending bankruptcy of the fourth largest investment bank may put a damper on the joyous event. Quelle dommage.
Fear and greed are the stuff that Wall Street is made of. But inside the great banking houses, those high temples of capitalism, fear came to the fore this weekend.
As Lehman Brothers, one of oldest names on Wall Street, appeared to unravel on Sunday, anxiety over the bank’s fate — and over what might happen next — gripped the nation’s financial industry. By late afternoon, Merrill Lynch, under mounting pressure, entered into talks to sell itself to Bank of America.
Dinner parties were canceled. Weekend getaways were postponed. All of Wall Street, it seemed, was on high alert.
In skyscrapers across Manhattan, banking executives were holed up inside their headquarters, within cocoons of soft rugs and wood-paneled walls, desperately trying to assess their company’s exposure to the stricken Lehman. It was, by all accounts, a day unlike anything Wall Street had ever seen.
Sounds like a lot of fun. I remember working on election day, 2000. We were closing a deal for Allegheny Power, some selling off of generation assets and releasing of transmission assets under a bond, I don’t really remember the details. It all seemed vaguely pomo to me, that you would get rid of the energy production business and get into the energy movement business. In any case, we were in the conference room and on the phone with the in-house lawyer for Allegheny, and the lawyer I was working with asked “So, who do you like for the election?” The Allegheny guy said “Well, I guess Bush would be good for us in the medium short-term as far as dereg, but…” And then he stopped. The lawyer on our side (a good friend of mine still) just laughed. Yeah, he said. I know. We shook our heads, and could practically hear the Allegheny guy shaking his. And so here you have it. Bear Stearns, vanished. Lehman poised for bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch peddling itself to any taker whatsoever, desperate to fend off the short sellers. What a monumental mess.
But I think back to election day 2000, the World Trade Center still standing less than a quarter mile behind me, doomed the moment later that night when NBC took Florida out of the Gore column, and our view of New York harbor from the conference room, and the lawyer for Allegheny Energy who knew, but couldn’t say, that a Bush-Cheney administration was a deeply, deeply stupid idea. I often say that the American people – whatever that is – got it right that day. Yes, we often forget, but they did get it right, by 500,000 votes. Bush received fewer votes than Gore by a long shot; there’s something striking and fundamentally appropriate about that, something that usually goes unsaid. It kind of hangs in the air with each disaster that has afflicted us since then. People rejected the cruelty and instability of the Bush-Cheney program that day. It’s often forgotten, and bears repeating. But now I also think of all the neo-cons, free marketers, and Friedmanites at Bear and at Lehman who no doubt thought the same: good for us in the medium short-term. Well, the medium short-term is over, and I hope they relished it.
It’s true that schadenfreude is an unattractive posture, especially when the financial services industry is a route to the middle class for many of the people I grew up with, for so many in the Outer Boroughs and the poor neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles. Yes. And as we well know here at Seven Red. It ain’t all fat cats and neo-cons. Like all groups, it is made up mostly of the decent. So schadenfreude is usually unattractive, sure. But only usually. Sometimes, it’s all that’s left.
On edit: The “guy” who was getting married this weekend was not just any guy, but Theodore Roosevelt V (that is, the fifth). His dad, Theodore Roosevelt IV, is the managing director at Lehman.
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