Skydiving

But now, the world of Wall Street has become our world; there is no outside to it, there is no other option than to pay and play. Our fortunes rise and fall together to a degree like never before, and our values are enmeshed like never before. The language of Wall Street — of cost-cutting and efficiency, self-interest, using each situation to maximize profit, is the language of everyday life and social interaction.

We’re all losers now. There’s no pleasure to it.

-Judith Warner

Seriously? Seriously? You know, the world is full of terrible, terrible things, and while the declining value of urban professionals' retirement portfolios, my own included, is all dommage and shit, it doesn't really amount to the misery of one single refugee. Economic declines are no fun, but they aren't the Russian advance of East Prussia, either. And, beg pardon, there is plenty outside "the world of Wall Street." Just the other weekend I was at Ohiopyle State Park, and the water was still flowing in the streams. You know what I'm saying?

Back in the quaint old 18th century, as mercantilism evolved toward a more modern capitalism, guys like Smith and Mill understood that trade is cyclical, and for a couple of hundred years, people understood that there would be good times and bad, ups and downs, booms and busts. Then along came the late twentieth century and we tethered ourselves to the innumeracy of optimism and presumed that industrial, technological, and financial progress guaranteed somehow the forever-expansion of good fortune. They do not. It is altogether regrettable that Judith Warner's middle-class comforts, luxuries, and privileges will contract somewhat, and it's lamentable that many very wealthy people will escape relatively unscathed, perhaps even further enriched, while the bulk of us endure certain relative hardships, but it's hardly the end of the world. The sheer volume of hysterical overreaction to a hyperinflated market at last shedding some of the most egregious excesses of the last decades is entirely disproportionate to the reality of the situation. One day, Peter, you must grow up.

Reality: the "bailout" isn't going to "save" anything, or put the market "back on track." If there is hope for a more rational, functional economy, it lies not in artificially maintaining the value of valueless investments, but in the cleansing of all the junk in the system and the establishment of a more coherent baseline where the valuation stocks is related to a company's actual performance, where debts are accounted as debts and obligations aren't treated as assets. Or we can all go apeshit about our IRAs, and consign ourselves to a much harder landing not very much later on.

An Epistle from Lady Sarah Palin, Baroness in Juneau, to His Lordship John McCain, upon Having Completed Her Discourse

My Lord, I hope this letter finds you well
and in good health. I write you to report
gosh darn!—last night’s débat was awful swell,
though judged by standards of my favorite winter sport
it lacked that certain bright Alaskan flare
of fire and scent of ash and howl of pain
from lupine quarry snipered from the air.
You said, in any case, “Sarah! Abstain
from fucking up, or else by God I’ll start
to shoot the hostages.” Dear John, thank God
it worked! By golly don’t ya know you’re smart!
They say to spare the Gov’s to spoil the rod,
or something. Anyway, fudge to ol’ whatsisname;
this lady beat the expectations game.

State of Play

From a forensic standpoint, Joe Biden won the debate. He seems to have triumphed in popular perception as well, with pluralities in post-debate polls finding him to be the clear winner. Palin reassured American punditry, however--what a fickle gang they are, really! I suppose that makes it a wash, all things considered.

I watched most of the thing on PBS and was struck afterward by how pudgy the otherwise insubstantial David Brooks has become in the last eight years, which seems like some sort of metaphor, but I'm not certain what for. This is no new observation, but the attempts of wealthy television personalities to intuit their way into the middling mind of middle America are exceptionally vapid and remarkably wrong. In my professed cultural attitudes, obviously, I'm a viciously disdainful elitist; a smug, pompous snob. And yet I did grow up in a small Pennsylvania town (actually, this one), and the elaborate metastructure of expectation and image that pundits construct around candidates and candidates around themselves in order to explicate the behavior of the portion of the population that still votes becomes clear for what it is (this should shock exactly no one)--justification for the continued existence of their jobs. "Regular people," such as they exist, remain motivated by fairly straightforward prejudices and affinities, not questions of whether or not so-and-so "beat expectations," or whatever.

That's a digression. Look. To me the most despairing moment of the whole debate was the discussion of when it is appropriate to use military force, and Joe Biden laid out two points, the first of which was is it feasible, which sounds reasonable after the last eight years until you pause and consider just how monstrous it is. It is, in fact, one of the most explicit rejections I've heard of the quaint and never-practiced doctrine of war as an instrument of the utmost last resort, a point at which feasibility becomes a meaningless rubric because the only other choices are death and subjugation. It affirms violence as a basic tool of statecraft--of course, we all know this to be historically and almost universally the case, but it still rankles to hear it spoken without even the Cold-War-current nods to "the peace-loving American people." In the question just prior, asked if Americans had "the stomach" for Biden's expansive view of acceptable foreign military intervention, Biden was even plainer: "The American people have a stomach for success." This too is a basic truth--that people love peace only until promised triumph--rarely publicly expressed. In a sense, I suppose we owe Senator Joe thanks for his honesty.

Palin coasted through the whole thing on winks and smiles, enunciating a series of pious non sequiturs tangentially related to John McCain's promise to transubstantiate America with the touch of his quaking hands. Even as they hew to know-nothing informality as a signifier of their own authenticity, the McCain/Palin ticket has moved in an increasingly lofty and abstract direction, promising an end to greed and a win for victory and a triumph of the, uh, will. Wrapping such glittering golden turds in heckuvas and dontchaknows makes them no more palatable to people who want someone to blame for their troubles. McCain tried to give them Obama but got wrapped up in his own goofball mythology. Obama meanwhile shed his myth and plated up some fat-cat CEOs. The latter, I suspect, is the better as far as electioneering goes.

Department of Unusual Convergences

Holy shit. I actually basically agree with Chucky Krauthammer.

Rebate

Biden sounded the standard Democratic goo-gah about the middle class and Regulation and blah blah blah on the economy, then pivoted to avow eternal defense of Israel, escalation in Afghanistan, and something or other over the next year-and-half in Iraq. Palin was merely incoherent. I suppose that counts as a win for her. I was hoping they would eat each other, and after thirty minutes, realizing that it wasn't in the offing, I switched to liquor. My life, Oh Lord, for a cheeseburger.

CBGB heebee jeebee

Shorter Ronald S. Lauder: If we don't change the rules for Bloomberg, New York could suffer the horror of becoming cool again.

Debate!

Apparently the format for tonight's veep debate is as follows: There will be a tip-off a center court, followed by three minutes of loud screaming allocated to each candidate on the basis of who wins the coin toss. A panel of judges from 13 participating nations will award scores on a 16-point scale, including a new essay section worth an additional 800 points, but the referee will call illegal participation on the judge from Romania and penalize Gwen Ifill 15 yards. This is followed by a two-minute rebuttal from either side. Following this, the chairman will reveal the Theme Ingredient, and the candidates will have one hour to prepare a menu with each dish reflecting the ingredient as a central theme. After tasting and judgement, each candidate will have three seconds to discuss his or her public service, followed by a closed-course time trial on bike or horse. The debate will conclude with a round of target shooting, a game of Go, a poetry slam, and a low-heat timed dry. First one out of the auditorium is a rotten egg.

Signalling

On the other hand, it can be reasonably argued that Palin represents something uniquely awful insofar as she is quite simply one of the most desperately vacuous people in politics. Biden's history of and tendency toward confabulation are made possible by a certain knowledge of iconic moments and figures in American history. When he needs, for instance, to haul out a tall tale about troubled economic times, he reaches for Roosevelt. If he needed a fable about Democrats standing tall against nukes and terror, he'd pull out Jack Kennedy. This is hardly a claim for the moral superiority of Joe B. to Sarah P. It's to say that he's less a liar than a bullshitter, which our buddy Prof. Frankfurt so memorably identified as a person totally uninterested in the truth, and therefore a greater danger to it, than a mere liar, which better defines Mrs. Palin. As a cosmpolitan smartass dilettante, of course, I prefer literate bullshit to illiterate lying, and so on a social and emotional level, I am predisposed to prefer listening to a guy like Biden. Dumb shit like the FDR on TV moment doesn't make me cringe like watching Sarah Palin get rolled by Katie Couric, the Anchoress from Roker. Thing is, that's no different from folks preferring ol' Gee-Dub 'cus they're rather sling back a few Buds with him.

At the Track to See the Crashes

Like my man Mister Smiff, I find myself applauding the Congrefs, for once, for having managed by slim margins to Do the Right Thing. Hail Satan. The fact that the failure brought John Boenher damn near tears is just the sweat on the virgin's skin sweet icing on the cake. Pelosi and Barney Frank raising their peacock tails and squawking in the general direction of the GOP for its failures of whippery was the cake. John McCain simultaneously blaming the failure on Obama (because the bill was so fucking urgent and necessary) and calling for something new and better built from scratch (because the bill wasn't really a good one, uh, natch) was the long, post-dessert bong-rip. Obama, as usual, hedged and planted himself in the procedural middle, neither for nor against, making him, I suppose, the post-prandial nap.

One day later, so far as I can tell, the shelves are still stocked in the grocery stores. The great and catastrophic disruptions to the life of the country may yet materialize, but somehow the presto-poof-its-gonery of $1 trillion in electronic "wealth" seems to have affected me not one whit. My fellow libarts alums who saw a terrifying, blasted terrain of non-tenure-track jobs and rushed off to Harvard Business or the Wharton School now appeal in terrified little squeaks, like the poor creature at the end of The Fly, to their old career services offices: "Heeelp me." Meanwhile, those of us who kept smoking pot and slid, as I did, into depression-proof non-profit sinecures are giggling and munching popcorn. Fifty grand a year isn't rich, but it's like infinity times more than nuthin.

As it slowly dawns on the solons of late-great-State Capital that "Main Street" frankly doesn't give a shit about saving investment banks, and wisely fails to perceive them as generators of value (as opposed to this fictitious "wealth"), their panic becomes deliciously visceral. Although unlikely that the ruling class will suffer too much as a class, there is at least the consolation of a few really huge, beautiful, high-definition, cinematic, individual smash-ups along the way.

Napoleon on the Radio

Well, what Prof. Sartwell obviously doesn't understand is that Joe Biden isn't a prattling, self-aggrandizing ignoramus; he's an author of high-literary alternate histories. No, seriously. Dude's actually a bullshit artist. Crispy has a few other notes on the liberal problem of Biden-Palin moral non-equivalence, of which this is just about right in substance and tone.

In almost every way, the capitulation of the Democrats' supposed Progressive base to the Necessity of Biden is even more alarming and shameful than the early Republican enthusiasm for their own dumb VP-aspirant. Palin was selected precisely because she reassured an important, realtively more ideological faction within the conservative coalition. She's a small-town, religious conservative, and her moral hypocrisies, which liberals take such pleasure in pointing out, are the moral hypocrisies of small-town and rural life in America. Having to reconcile filial sexuality and pregnancy with public piousness only endears her more to her core supports, as these are precisely the moral dilemmas they face in their own lives. I have news, too, for liberals: we very rarely, any of us, reach solutions to such dilemmas through our own moral consistency.

Progressives, meanwhile, weren't appeased by Biden. On the contrary, they should have been appalled. If Obama's pitiful and weak-willed shuffle toward foreign-policy hawkishness could be painfully explained away by necessity (it couldn't really, but still), then the selection of a war-supporter as running mate should surely have broken the camel's back. In the midst of two disastrous foreign wars and a great unraveling of the American economy, you have the man who perhaps most represents the Democrats' investment in the war and connections to the finance-and-credit industries as the number two man on the ticket--this, apparently, because he is "experienced," a steady hand, a man with knowledge of the issues.

Despite this, he was embraced and is now defended. "Well, what he meant to say was . . ." The difference between Palin and Biden, such as it is, is that Biden is better and more practiced at dishonesty. Sarah Palin stumbles because she hasn't yet developed the skills, and perhaps lacks the intellect, to extemporize fluent false statements and has to resort to the more difficult task of putting discrete, pre-memorized lies into some semblance of order. Biden is smart enough to make the shit up as he goes along. That hardly makes him preferable, ethically or politically. It just makes him an asshole, and his newfound supporters the biggest hypocrites of all.

Misplaced Modifiers

As the financial crisis grew, even Jim Cramer found it hard to explain.

-The Times

In the absence of that even, it would be a perfectly reasonable sentence. With it in there, the implication seems to be that Jim Cramer, a performance artist on CNBC, is generally in the business of explication. I mean, here's a guy whose job it is to get boneheaded "day traders and market buffs" to throw more of their money into the various schemes that populated Wall Street and its satellites right up to the big kablooey in which we currently reside. He pimped get-rich-quick con games to inadequate white dudes who could just as profitably spent their time with black folk and old people playing their numbers at the convenience store. He represented the glib post-industrial, debtor-economy assurance that something would always come from nothing. The ability to deploy jargon is not the same as understanding, let alone expertise, and since I, a refugee from the Humanities, schooled in useless effluvia like the poetry of Donne and the cultcrit nonsense of a lot of grand Europeans, am perfectly able to explain the roots and progression of the current state of affairs in terms almost any moron can understand, we are left with three possible conclusions: a.) that Jim Cramer is no ordinary moron; b.) that Jim Cramer, and financial media in general, are still carrying water for their masters; and c.) both of the above.