Voiture de luxe: China as a Repainted Audi

When Voiture de luxe opens we find a middle-aged teacher, Li Qiming, disembarking from a ferry, having left his countryside home in search of his son in the city of Wuhan. Both Qiming's son and daughter have left home to start new lives in the city, joining the wave of young people following a similar course in the new China. What drives Qiming to search for his son is the fact that he has not heard from him in a long time, and his wife, dying of cancer, wishes to see her son again before she dies. Qiming is met by his daughter, Yanhong, who takes him to her apartment in the city. Yanhong shares her flat with another young woman, A Li. Upon entering the flat, we can see in Qiming's face an immediate recognition of the circumstances that both of the young women live in. Qiming is stoic, yet the worn, slender, once handsome intellectual clearly takes in all the significance of what he sees in the flat. On the other hand, as a loving father, denial seems also to be at work, and he does not immediately come to any conclusion about how his daughter is earning her living.

Yanhong is a beautiful young woman, and we soon see how she earns her living when she goes off to her job. Her workplace, ostensibly a karaoke club, is in fact a well-appointed brothel. Any visitor to China over the last decade will be familiar with the club's decor. As clients leave their luxury automobiles to enter the club, they are greeted by rows of attractive young women who bow, smile and utter a demure ni hao. Inside, marble floors are polished to a dizzingly high shine, curved staircases and state-of-the art lighting abound. Trade the dominant red of the karaoke club for more subtle hues and the setting is one which has become ubiquitous in China's burgeoning multi-star hotels. The contrast between Yanhong's workplace, her living quarters and the meaner streets of much of the city behind its Potemkin village facade of luxury is jarring.

The preferred companion of a brutish customer who is clearly a gang leader, Yanhong is nevertheless called from his side by the club's reckless owner, Da Ge, with whom she is in a relationship of sorts. This is clearly a mistake on Da Ge's part, a mistake which drives the plot of the film. Da Ge's relationship to Yanhong is somewhat nebulous. An older man who is not Yanhong's physical match, he is part lover, part boss, part pimp, and, as we later discover, soon to be the father of her child. While this subplot simmers in the background, we watch Qiming begin the search for his son. In the course of doing so, he encounters a police officer, a man of his own generation with whom he has an immediate affinity. Like Qiming, the police officer is about to retire, but out of sympathy, exerts a special effort to find the boy. After the detective obtains a lead to the boy's wherabouts, Qiming decides to celebrate by inviting him, as well as his daughter and her boyfriend, to dinner at a restaurant.

By the time the dinner takes place, we have learned through a flashback that Qiming's son had been in a gang with Da Ge, and it was their ill-conceived plan to hijack a luxury car that brings all of these characters together. By drawing the odd, losing playing card, it is Qiming's son who must stand in the middle of a dark road and get the driver of a luxury car to stop. The plan is only half successful since Da Ge gets his car, but, in the process, Qiming's son is killed. It is only when Yanhong is hospitalized after an assault engineered by the mobster who resented her being taken off to Da Ge in the club, that Da Ge, remorseful and guilt-ridden over the assault on his pregnant girlfriend, confesses that it is he who is responsible for the death of her brother.

The dinner party at which the protagonists meet might well be a scene directed by Hitchcock. It is clear early on that the detective recognizes Da Ge, and for the persistent police officer, who accepts a ride home from Da Ge and then asks to see the automobile's registration, the ride is his last. Shortly after, with the detective's dead body at his side, Da Ge is intercepted by his mobster nemesis and is himself assassinated. The film ends with Yanhong leaving the city to return to her rural village. She there tells her father of her brother's real fate, and in the closing sequence, we see Yanhong delivering hers and Da Ge's child as Qiming sits outside of the delivery room resignedly listening to his daughter's labor pains.

Ordinarily, the cinematic cliche of trading the death of one character for the birth of another is used to represent hope. And although the expression on Qiming's face as he awaits the birth of his grandchild may be somewhat ambiguous, there is nothing ambiguous about what that birth represents in the overall context of this tale. Director Wang Chou's view of where China's present course is taking the nation is deeply pessimistic. In the newborn child, the blood of victim and victimizer is inextricably mingled. Yanhong may be back in her village, but she brings with her the seed of corruption she may have hoped to leave behind. When first she returns home, she goes to see her father in the school where he teaches. The landscape is a clear departure from that of booming Wuhan. What we see is a wide shot of the school, a wide sand-colored brick building bearing a red flag, an expanse of sand-colored playground in the foreground. Though true to what schools look like all over Asia, it is here an image of innocence that poignantly hearkens to traditional hopes for the future. Yanhong goes to a child's swing that she recalls from her childhood, and it is while seated on the swing that she tells her father what happened to her brother.

Yanhong's double migration, her return to the countryside, of course suggests that one can't go home again. In an early conversation between Qiming and the detective, we learn that the drama of the urban-rural divide had already played out in the life of her father. When a lead on the boy's whereabouts leads the two men to a kitchen on the campus of Wuhan Universty, Qiming announces that he had been a student there forty years before, during the Cultural Revolution, and that, because he had "said something wrong," he was "sent down," that is, sent to the countryside to do penance for his crime. With the Cultural Revolution long over, Qiming might well have returned to the city, but he makes a choice to stay and teach in the rural village. "I miss my students," he confesses shortly after arriving in Wuhan. He, too, cannot go home again. This writer has had more than one experience in China with Chinese old enough to have experienced the Cultural Revolution to know that, for many who lived through the period--Western characterizations aside--it was a period of hope and even expanded horizons. For many who were sent down, life long attachments were made, and those who participated came to look back at their lives among rural peoples not merely with nostalgia, their heads filled with propaganda songs, but with great emotion.

What is incontestable in this film is what has happened to Qiming's children as a result of jumping in Wuhan's turbulent waters--one has died, the other become a prostitute. Even Da Ge, who at times actually seems sympathetic, is a victim, perhaps of his greed or even his lapses into humanity, but also as a consequence of his ineptitude for a life of crime. He is simply not ruthless enough to compete. There is a scene (which at first may seem gratuitous) in which we see the stolen Audi, the luxury car that has cost the life of Qiming's son, being repainted. Great care is taken to cover glass and chrome with newspaper and masking tape and we watch the car, originally a silver gray, morph to a glossy black vehicle and watch it imperiously cruise out of the garage where the work was done. The car is a symbol of the new China, a mere reworking of capitalist fantasies of lives drenched in luxury. When Yanhong's dad and his detective/friend travel about, they travel on bicycles, not in luxury cars. Da Ge's stolen Audi had its parallel in the collapsed Soviet Union, where in the early nineties, rows of black Mercedes limousines driven by what were presumed to be members of the Georgian mafia could be seen parked outside of Moscow's and St. Petersburg's new luxury hotels.

For its view of the environmental and social costs of China's new path, Luxury Car is an invaluable work of art.

Wang Chao's "Luxury Car": A Rare Look at the Reality of Post-Mao China

Chinese director Wang Chou's Luxury Car, (Voiture de luxe), is a deeply moving and a shocking film, deeply moving for the craft with which Chou tells his story, shocking because the film ends up not merely being an allegory of a failed revolution, (which really wouldn't be much of a surprise), but because it is so deeply critical of what China has become that it strongly suggests that China's failure to hold onto its communist ideology represents a profound loss for its people. Viewers of Eastern European cinema have become accustomed to what has been labelled "soviet nostalgia." Chou's indictment goes further than most of the work in that genre. This is a film noir whose darkness grows out of the garish, almost obscent neon glitter that Chou allows to stand for the new China.

The shock a Western viewer experiences after viewing such a work seems, on reflection, somewhat ingenuous. Among China's enormous population, it should probably come as no surprise that there are more than a few citizens who would agree with Chou's vision. One can only speculate on how many Chinese are sympathetic to Chou's point of view. Nevertheless, we here in the West do not often gain exposure to such work and it does make one wonder about the present Chinese government's letting this film be shown at all, either domestically or abroad. (The film was given a Prix un certain regard at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.) The admittedly small American audience who might wish to see this film have CUNY TV's City Cinematheque to thank for the opportunity.

City Cinematheque, presided over by City College Professor Jerry Carlson, is a jewel in the programming crown of the City University of New York's public television outlet, known here in New York as CUNY TV 75. The show and its host deserve enormous praise for delivering to its following (which one can only hope is growing) films that are outstanding either because they are of great importance in the history of film, or because they give us rare insight into the cinemas of other nations. As Professor Carlson would no doubt himself admit, the show serves the valuable function the many art theaters that once graced the city used to fulfill. Most of those little art theaters, along with their free espresso and cookies, are long gone and with them the opportunity for both young and old, but particularly the young to catch up on the great works of the past and to see what is considered cutting edge here in the U.S. and around the world.

Since CUNY TV's focus is understandably on education, an additional feature of City Cinematheque is a thirty-minute discussion between Professor Carlson and, usually, some appropriate member of CUNY's staff following each film. Guest discussants are often colleagues in the school's Film Department, but they may be men and women from other disciplines and venues as well, including, on occasion, the film makers themselves. Given the debt we owe Professor Carlson for his efforts, given the obvious scholarship that he possesses, given his equally obvious love of the art form, it seems less than gracious to carp with him over the content of those discussions. Yet, I probably share with at least a few others among his viewers, the occasional experience of listening to what Professor Carlson has chosen to discuss about a particular film and wanting to jump into the television set, grab him by his tweedy lapels and scream. The discussion period following the showing of Wang Chou's Luxury Car was such a time.

Now, before I launch into what I consider to be my justifiable criticisms of the discussion following the film, let me pause a moment to reprise my gratitude to the show's host. Where else on television could one currently get access to some of the great silent classics as well as avant-garde work coming out of South America, Eastern Europe or even North Africa? Where else on television can one gain the invaluable insights into the current state of film-making around the world that are obviously the fruit of Professor Carlson's deep and vast knowledge of film, film makers, film history and breaking news from within the industry? To cite just one small example from the very discussion that caused me so much consternation: not only did we learn that China now has over 100 cities with populations in excess of one million, we also learned that the Chinese are currently building vast film houses with large screens and sterophonic sound in those cities in an effort to satisfy the Chinese appetite for what Americans used to call "going to the movies." A bit of film history and a bit of social history as well. In a sense, Professor Carlson may be seen as having earned immunity from the quibbles of his less than forgiving viewers for his occasional lapses. What compels me to risk being called an ingrate or a crank in the case of Luxury Car is what I see as the film's urgent message, a message that would have profited from the kind of explication that Professors Carlson and his guest responder for the film, Cindy Wong, (also of CUNY), seemed almost studiously to avoid.

Since my discussion of Luxury Car will be political in nature, I feel one other aspect of Professor Carlson's television persona needs to be mentioned, namely his political bent. Actually, here again, I think our host's performance has been laudable. Carlson seems to call them as he sees them: cinematic fascist gangsters, communist apparatchiks, Southern racists all meet with the same opprobrium. He is eminently fair, and thus, appearing to have do ideological axes to grind, he no doubt often makes ideologues both of the left and the right unhappy. There are occasions, perhaps, when our host has determined that it might be best to allow a film to speak for itself. As I suggest above, just making certain films available may be considered service enough. Viewers can draw their own conclusions. Interpretations will inevitably differ. Yet, I will confess, on this night, Professor Carlson had me screaming at my television set, "When are you going to talk about the film? Talk about the film, for crying out loud!"

I would argue that Luxury Car, (the title Voiture de luxe is due to French collaboration in its production), is no less than an allegory for contemporary China, an allegory which has as its narrative the descent from the relative virtue of the communist years into a nightmare of whorehouse capitalism. Little wonder then that the film has been essentially ignored in China as well as abroad. For many years we were accustomed to Chinese films being censored for being anti-communist. Now, in the post-Mao era, for reasons that should be obvious to all, it appears that it is a pro-communist work that can get a Chinese artist in trouble. Some may be tempted to conclude that China surely has its own version of European-style "soviet nostalgia," that this is what is on view in Luxury Car. I would argue, to the contrary, that this is a film that not only presents a view of contemporary, capitalist China in the darkest moral terms, but that boldly asserts that the communist period, including the period of the cultural revolution, (an historical episode inevitably depicted here in the West an intrinsically evil), was morally superior to the horrors that are now unfolding in China.

Mao’s body was still warm when the latent forces of capitalism rather brutally took the helm and started to redirect the course of the Chinese ship of state. The group labeled “the Gang of Four” included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. She was eventually condemned to life imprisonment and committed suicide in 1991. The "Gang," (which also included Lin Biao, erstwhile hero of the revolution), fought a short-lived and vain struggle against the new tide and was brought down in a coup d’etat in 1976, just a month after Mao’s death. The group was unsurprisingly indicted as counter-revolutionary by a regime soon led by the born-again entrepreneur Deng Xiaoping (appropriately, a near homonym for "shopping"). Deng led the transition to capitalism. Now, some thirty-five years later, Mao’s portrait may still hang at the entrance to the Forbidden City, but China is no longer Maoist or even, I would argue, communist in any real sense of the term. That the regime currently in power has Mao spinning in his Tiananmen sepulcher seems little in doubt. On the other hand, few would dispute the extent to which millions of Chinese were champing at the bit, waiting for the demise of the great leader so that they could give expression to their ancient passion for building family treasure. They were always there, biding their time. Although often used to describe the people of Great Britain, the phrase “a nation of shopkeepers” * seems more accurately to describe the Chinese character.

The vaunted economic miracle may have factories turning out enormous quantities of goods--from flimsy cotton t-shirts to high-tech appliances--and exporting their wares all over the world, but every political regime, every political philosophy has its icons, and, in China, whether the government admits to it or not, the icon of its new world order is a young girl from the countryside working in a factory for pennies an hour. In exchange for the opportunity to get rich, the Chinese must now pay for everything. The state factories are mostly all gone and, with them, the guarantee of employment. The Chinese worker must now "jump in the ocean" of private enterprise if she hopes to survive at all. While the factory girl may symbolize the new economic order, for the artist, the perennial and universal view of how such young women are used has her sellling not her manual labor, but her body. Like crocuses erupting out of the ashes of a volcanic eruption, the first flowers of capitalism in failed socialist states are the young prostitutes. In Shanghai, where once the Peace Hotel housed guests of the Communist Party, it now houses young girls whose charms are advertised by their pimps on the hotel's front steps. And so it is with Li Yanhong, the heroine of Luxury Car.

Having now spent too much time providing background, I will invite the reader to look at the follow-up blog to this one in which I will attempt an analysis of the film.










* A phrase ascribed to Napoleon, but, originally found in Adam Smith, appropriately enough: "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers." After the 2008 crisis, China is seen as more than ever compelled to raise up “a people of customers” and abandon its large dependence upon exports. Smith’s insight also provides a clue to the present nature of governance in China.

The End of Public Education?

The death bed regret of Milton Friedman was that he could not list among his many accomplishments the total destruction of teachers’ unions in this country. Little did we expect to discover that one of the candle-bearing acolytes at his theoretical bedside was no less than Barack Obama, a future Democratic president brought into office with considerable assistance from those very unions. Yet, what we are currently witnessing in the calls for charter schools and the attacks on teachers, first, as stubborn adherents of unionism, and, second, as a bunch of incompetents is fast becoming a hallmark of the Obama administration. We have now reached a crossroads where it is difficult to determine whether public schools are under attack in order to destroy teachers’ unions or teachers’ unions are under attack in order to destroy public education. A fine distinction, no doubt, for the privatization movement which has amazingly—and irrationally—survived its having given birth to the greatest economic crisis since 1929.
Friedman did not see in American public schools a hallowed democratic institution that guaranteed free schooling for our children; rather he saw in the public schools a last remnant of socialism. This may seem bizarre, given that the idea that children should be educated at the expense of their communities goes back not to some New Deal innovation or Marxist agenda but is a centuries’ old icon—from the urban school teeming with immigrants to the one-room little red school house ringing its bell on the open prairie. For Friedman, however, any institution or enterprise which bore the adjective “public” was a lingering cancer in the body politic. Even more frustrating for the Chicago guru, however, was that the teachers’ unions (and their defined benefits pensions) maintained their viability in spite of thirty years of union busting inaugurated with Ronald Reagan’s crass destruction of the air traffic controllers’ union.
When one reflects upon the complex history that propelled this country into a thirty-year period of frenzied privatization and deregulation, leading it to tear up much of the progressive legislation it had taken a good part of the twentieth century to achieve—issues of race, of social malaise, of stubborn sectionalism, of declining empire—one cannot leave out the fact that even prior to the Reagan counter-revolution, it has been as American as apple pie for policy makers of both parties to wage a thinly veiled campaign against the notion that anything good can come from government sponsored or subsidized institutions.
Public schools, health facilities, libraries, transportation have been intentionally under-funded lest the average American fall prey to the notion that publicly provided services can be as good, or, heaven forbid, even better than profit-driven services. “You get what you pay for.” Unless you put out cold cash, you can’t expect very much. (Of course, it might occur to the more sophisticated citizen that he does pay for public services through taxation, and thus the unrelenting campaign by the right wing to lower or eliminate the tax “burden”—unless those tax dollars are earmarked for “defense,” which, through some magical transubstantiation, government manages to give us the largest cornucopia of state-of-the-art, shiny, futuristic weapons of death the world has ever seen.) It is a not so subtle education process, and the lessons become more severe as one goes down the class ladder and crosses what, in our still highly segregated nation, are the clear lines of demarcation separating white from black and brown citizens. White, suburban schools are clearly better funded than inner-city schools. Mass transit, which suffers generally from under-funding, the premium being on automobile and gasoline sales, particularly suffers when its mission is to transport the poor and working classes to their low-paying jobs.
There is considerable irony in the threats teachers’ unions are now confronted with from practically every quarter. They, after all, have paid their dues. Before looking back to how we came to this pass, however, it might be worth while to point out that, fat as they are portrayed, a remnant aristocracy of labor, they have already made considerable concessions. The United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 of the American Federation of Labor, long the largest local in the A.F.L-C.I.O., and long led by the infamous Albert Shanker, is command central for teacher unionism. It long ago began to come to terms with pressure to soften its demands. Following the tumultuous 1968 school strike over community control, the New York State legislature enacted (classically, by one vote, cast by a teacher) the Taylor Law which outlawed strikes by teachers and other municipal employees, with a stroke of the pen depriving the unions of their most powerful weapon. By now, there are five “tiers” in the union’s pension plans. With each succeeding tier, the terms under which a teacher can retire have become less generous. A new teacher will have to work longer for fewer benefits than a teacher who began her career in the 1960s. Almost all of the “Tier One” teachers are gone from the system. And, although in the relatively affluent 1990s a mayor who was committed to improving the city’s schools finally brought teacher salaries more in keeping with the salaries being earned in the white suburbs, those wage scales only came after a period of decades through which most teachers were forced to work two and sometimes three jobs in order to maintain their families. It would be difficult to caricature teachers as leaning on their shovels when they were so underpaid that (the once taboo) “moonlighting” was draining energies from such tasks as lesson planning, grading papers and the high-energy requirements of creativity in the classroom. Nevertheless, the prospect of paying a senior teacher with longevity and the equivalent of a Ph.D. a wage of around $100,000 a year and the promise of a defined benefit pension (and a potential annuity) elicits the full range of dark emotions, particularly during a time characterized as the Great Recession. For the spiritual descendants of Milton Friedman, certainly, it is irksome, to put it mildly, that an essentially moribund union movement can still throw up a barrier to its complete eradication from the American labor landscape in the form of the stubbornly viable teachers’ unions.
For those who carefully followed the career of Al Shanker, all of this is heavily weighted with irony. Over the course of his career as leader of the UFT, Shanker’s main mission was to keep in check the left wing within his rank-and-file. The UFT was itself born in response to the threat posed by the left-leaning old Teachers Union (TU). The newborn UFT had hardly had enough time to organize before the onset of the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam saw thousands of radicalized young teachers enter its ranks. When with a deep collective roar, the amassed delegates to the union’s Delegate Assembly voted to condemn the war in Vietnam over Shanker’s opposition, he acted quickly to reduce the number of delegates each school could send to the Assembly and lengthened the term of shop stewards, called “Chapter Chairmen” (sic) in the UFT, making future such demonstrations far less likely. When the ‘60s bred young teachers entered ghetto schools and found conditions deplorable both within the schools and in the communities they served, particularly in a school system which had come to serve a population that had a majority of “minority” children, when there was even talk of allying the teachers’ union with the Welfare Workers Union and calling a general strike to improve both working conditions and the conditions in which Black and Hispanics lived, Shanker serendipitously found in the Ford Foundation’s Community Control pilot program in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, (shepherded by JFK national security advisor and Vietnam architect, McGeorge Bundy), the perfect means by which to forever purge or immobilize the left within his ranks. The 1968 School Strike drove a wedge between schools and communities, white and black teachers, Blacks and Jews that is still with us. The three-month long strike had been so strident and potentially catastrophic that it came as no surprise that the New York State legislature would bar the union from ever striking again.
Over the forty years since the strike, the UFT, under Shanker and then his protégé, Sandra Feldman and her successors has more or less functioned as a powerful professional organization. Teachers are, after all, basically a conservative lot, and, after 1968 certainly, the radicals, always a minority, were relegated to the sidelines. A constant embarrassment to the union is that in its zealousness to protect teachers’ jobs and tenure, only one or two teachers—out of a total work force of over 55,000—is ever invited to leave the profession, that is, fired. That there are men and women currently standing in front of classrooms who might better be otherwise employed is glaringly obvious. Yet, tenure is almost iron-clad. The union has tried to deal with this through peer mediation and retraining, but such efforts are often ineffectual. Calls for merit pay, which would reward the most successful teachers, are similarly resisted. For the most part, the union insists that all tenured teachers be treated equally. There is some rationale for this, in spite of the layman’s inability to see why poor performers should be treated any differently than they would in the private sector. In theory, at least, a tenured teacher is an individual who has at least a satisfactory higher education, has passed a licensing exam and, typically, a three year long probationary period during which she needs to prove her competence. The rationale further argues (oddly, yet in effect) that teaching is not rocket science and that should anyone pass through the initial hurdles and be found to be less than competent, the blame likely lies not with the individual but with working conditions or lack of professional support. Stiffening this position is, to some extent, the memory, once again, of the ’68 strike, which, on paper at least, had been fought for “due process.”
Teachers’ unions are not easy to love. There is undoubtedly an overdue need for certain reforms and more than a grain of truth in the critiques made by both those inside of the unions and outside observers. Yet none of this is really behind the current movement for charter schools, privatization and the elimination of the unions. Over a forty year career, this writer’s experience in the New York City public schools was that, with rare exceptions, teachers are hard-working, dedicated individuals who love learning and care deeply about their students. Those who work in inner-city schools have special challenges in the form of overcrowding, under-staffing, poor physical plants and lack of adequate teaching tools. One investigator of the charter school movement tellingly found that in a school that housed a charter school, a glaring contrast could be found between the conditions that prevailed among the regular population and those that were found in the charter school it housed where fresh paint, renovated classrooms and lavatories, computers, smaller class size, ample materials and greater guidance made all the difference. If teachers’ unions can justly be criticized for anything, it is for not drawing even greater attention to the need for such accommodations for all students. No, the charter school movement and the attack on public education and public employees’ unions are not motivated by concern for children, rather they are yet another mean-spirited attack designed to place private profit above all else in yet another key sector of American life.

On Being a New York City Driver

I have driven mountain roads in Vermont that are less treacherous than driving down any of hundreds of miles of supposedly paved streets and highways in the city of New York. Having had recent occasion to travel to the U.S. mainland, that is to say, to New Jersey, I got a lesson in just how corrupt, arrogant, blithely dismissive, elitist and, yes, as far as I am concerned, literally criminal the caretakers of our city, "the greatest city in the world," are. In our neighbor to the west, roads are silken, the lane markings clear in daylight, sparkling at night, bedecked with lovely embedded sapphire reflectors, potholes rare. On a typical rainy night in New York, on the other hand, (and, yes, an older driver I--apparently unlike the city's DOT--am perfectly aware that older drivers have diminished night vision), my hands tense on the steering wheel as I squint through my windshield trying to determine where there is a lane to take. The lane markings have faded to near invisibility. There are no reflectors. Mine is not the only vehicle proceeding tentatively trying to find the right arc, or near careening, trying to stay within lanes that do not exist. But, then I remind myself, I live in a city whose mayor is having a blood feud with the driving public. Fresh paint for traffic lanes is not on his to-do list.



As I thought back to my voyage to East Brunswick, New Jersey, I calculated the initial cost of my journey before I had even left the city. Eleven dollars in EZPass tolls, two charges of $5.50 to go through the Midtown and Lincoln Tunnels. Where does that money go? Aren't the funds raised by tolls supposed to be dedicated to the upkeep of roads? (When I asked my mechanic if he could tell me, his response was, "Don't ask that question. They'll kill you. Besides, I sell lots of tie-rods this way.") The evidence of my senses tells me that not a penny has been spent on our roads, and I'm not talking about seasonal potholes, the alleged ravages of a hard winter. Our roads are in a near-permanent state of (benign?) neglect. To cite just one example among dozens that come to mind, going into Queens from Manhattan, the approach ramp to the Triborough Bridge (Unlike others, I will not dishonor Bobby's memory by attaching his name to an urban ruin.) has been--how to describe this accurately--rutted, caverned, rubbled, cragged?--for years, for as long as I can remember. My Nissan doesn't just stutter, tremble and shake; it is wracked to its core, its shock absorbers tested beyond their limit. One of the richest cities in the world. America's first city.

The various "Authorities" collect millions of dollars and apparently just pocket the money. Talk of opening their books is met with the kind of dark laughter you might imagine would come from the owner of one of the city's carting services if you asked to opt out. There is no outcry except for the sad seasonal plea from New Yorkers to fill those potholes that are destroying their vehicles, sending their hubcaps frisby-ing off to curbside, endangering their own lives and the lives of nearby pedestrians. The answer, when there is one, is a tarpot and a thin skim fated to fail within days.

With the nation, state and city hovering near bankruptcy, we will, of course, be told that there just isn't enough money in the budget to repair our roads. This always raises the question of why repairs weren't made when we were rolling in tax dollars. And, yes, the wearisome rhetoric about stimulus money being devoted to our infrastructure needs certainly comes to mind. We're all holding our breath waiting for that to happen, perhaps concurrent with rubber wheels on elevated trains and bullet trains to East Brunswick?

Nope. I want to see the books. I will risk my life and humbly request that I see where my toll expenditures, gasoline taxes, registration fees, etc., go.

And then there's our mayor, a man who considers himself presidential timber. We have now long been treated to the prospect of one of the nation's richest billionaires having a major snit because he could not get his way on a commuter tax. Even more outrageous, however, is the man's implementation of a series of obvious mandates to his obedient commissioners designed to make driving in Manhattan a hellish experience. Again, there is a sad, vast richness of examples to cite. He has essentially set up virtual roadblocks in Manhattan reminiscent of the barriers separating Gazans and West Jordanians from Israelis. In part, these take the form of the lovely plazas he has designed. Not quite the open plazas of Italy and Spain, these are cement triangles planted in the middle of major thoroughfares such as the one in Times Square where feckless New Yorkers are invited to sit on cheap folding chairs and breathe in the automobile exhaust being expelled from long lines of vehicles stuck in the traffic jams that the squares themselves have caused. Major avenues that once allowed three or four lanes of traffic now accomodate only a single lane. Unbelievably, traffic islands replete with new plantings have now cropped up on these avenues, and, as if the islands themselves do not take up enough space, they are lined with parking spaces so that the one lane through which one is forced to navigate is reminiscent of nothing so much as a the chutes that lead cattle to slaughter. Might as well fill the coffers with parking fees and violations as well; just add them to the nightmarish mix.

Another device recently implemented to cripple traffic is the imposition of bus lanes forbidden to ordinary vehicular traffic. The notion that 34th Street, for example, is still a cross-town throughfare is silly. Like many of the nearby avenues, most of 34th Street now accomodates only a single lane of vehicles. Like Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, the mayor must frolic in his City Hall office, giggling at the world he has created, the pain he has caused his hated outer-borough drivers, basking in the afterglow of virtue he has demonstrated by commuting to work on the IRT for five minutes rather than using his one of his Rolls-Royces. In spite of feeble attempts to pose as a man of the people, just folks, the truth is that everything this mayor does is designed to lubricate the wheels of government for the profit and gain of his cohorts--from planting trees to abolishing smoking in public places to banning transfats and imposing taxes on soft drinks. These are all good things, but to believe that these are mayoral fiats from a self-envisioned benevolent dictator is naive. He has paved over the city with high-rise luxury apartment buildings, fantasizes filling them with his true constituents, and then doing whatever he can to make their lives even more comfortable. A social program for the rich.

No one is more anti-automobile than this writer. I am sure that before our century is out, privately owned automobiles will have become as quaint as typewriters. They are an economic, environmental and social scourge. Just give us a way to get to our destinations that is fast, clean and efficient: trolleys, jitneys, light rail, bullet trains, you name it. Give me a way to get there and I will await the amnesty on illegal possession of the private automobile. What we are in fact being treated to are outrageously regressive taxes on the poorest New Yorkers in the form of higher bus and subway fares, cutbacks in the very forms of transportation they are being exhorted to utilize. The poorest, lowest paid New Yorkers face ever greater chunks of their paychecks going to subsidize a transportation system that exhausts them even before they open the doors to their workplaces. But don't think about switching to a car. It's a battlefield out there.

Not the PBS Version of the Civil War

One of the few good things about those PBS March fund raisers is that they give us the opportunity to revisit Ken Burns’ epic documentary on the Civil War. Viewed through the lens afforded us by the constitutional crisis facing the country in the post-cold war, post industrial age it is now in raises serious questions about that war’s still unresolved issues. And just in case listening to Shelby Foote once again drawl that the war forever shaped what this country would become—for better or worse—was not chilling enough for you given the political arc the nation is currently on, one could turn to Susan Dunn’s review of Gordon Wood’s latest work, Empire of Liberty, in the current New York Review of Books and read:

“The South, Wood recognizes, stood apart, as many Southerners disdained not only work, which they deemed fit only for slaves, but also commerce and industry. While the North plunged into the future, nostalgic southerners turned to the past, clinging to the agrarian myth of yeoman farmers leading independent, virtuous lives on the soil as well as to the aristocratic idyll of a leisurely, gracious life of family, hospitality, books and slaves on a lovely plantation.”

It took almost one hundred years for this country to begin to dig itself out from the reign of terror against Black Americans initiated after a rigged presidential election ended Reconstruction and withdrew Federal troops from the South. In fact, it was only with the re-introduction of U.S. Army troops and Federal marshals in the 1950s and ‘60s that desegregation and voting rights would be restored. The South, however, has proved itself still unprepared to give up its version of Camelot, a neo-feudal domain in which the teeming masses—both white and black—toil to keep the deserving few in their aristocratic enclaves. The reaction to Reconstruction was terrifying, and the reaction to the New Deal social contract, the counter-revolution initiated during the Reagan administration, is proving to be almost as horrific.
In some ways, what we are now experiencing as a nation is even worse in that the present counter-revolution is no longer restricted to the terrain of the old Confederacy. The Great Migration that took place after WWII made race a national problem. By the late 1960s, the shocking newsreels of delicate white Southern women hysterically shouting obscenities at a handful of black children attempting to enter previously all-white schools were replaced—or joined—by white Northern women no less committed to the task of protecting their school age children from the prospect of rubbing shoulders with their darker brothers and sisters.
The aftermath of those cataclysmic years, euphemistically called the Civil Rights Era, was the destruction of just about every American city of any size. Few Americans can go home again. Where once there was an urban culture shared by average Americans of all classes, there is now the prospect of endless malls, suburban sprawl, enclaves of privilege, some tiny pockets of re-“gentrified” (read white) neighborhoods within the old city walls. Schools in the North are now more segregated than many in the South.
In an age of euphemism, we no longer have ghettos, we have “inner-cities.” The rust belt, large expanses of the old industrialism, are now as much a symbol of a lost golden age for Northern whites as the decaying old plantation houses once were for Southerners. The suburbs created by the baby boomers now have their own problems and have lost their original purpose as bedroom communities for middle class workers who commuted to their jobs back in cities that no longer exist. (New York City even has a billionaire mayor that does all he can to keep the “poor” out of his rose zone, silk-stocking district, literally throwing up road blocks to automobile traffic on Manhattan streets.)
When segregationist Dixiecrats finally switched parties and created the new Republican Party in the South and the white ethnic working class in the North underwent a similar transformation, abandoning their traditional affiliation with the Democratic Party to become so-called Reagan Democrats, it created the impression that, in this country, it is all about race. That impression is, of course, an illusion. Far more deeply embedded in the genome of the nation’s character and its charter documents is fear of the mob.
The founding fathers who finally had their way with their version of a blueprint for a republic and a democracy never imagined a polis that granted universal suffrage or even majority rule. A recurring image in Burns’ Civil War documentary is Richmond, Virginia under siege. Always hovering in the background is the Virginia State House planted on a hill overlooking the city, a reborn Parthenon atop a New World Olympus. Slaveholding aristocrats like Washington and Jefferson took their classical antecedents very, very seriously. Athens, too, had been a slave state. Freedom and liberty were never intended for the illiterate or barely educated masses. They would either not know what to do with freedom, or worse, actually begin to exercise it. For those who preferred to take guidance from the Christian Bible rather than Plato and Aristotle, there was ample evidence that only the mad or the quixotic would attempt to create a world in which all men were truly created equal. “The poor shall always be with us.” History was replete with examples of what occurred when zealots agitated slaves, serfs or workers to take up arms and demand true equality.
And it is never the truly poor who represent a danger. It is the newly well fed, the newly literate, healthy and learned enough to begin to understand the dimensions of the disparity between the washed and the unwashed. Fuelled by the flames of injustice ignited by their new understanding, such men and women are dangerous indeed. Mansions are invaded, destroyed. Privileges are torn away, “the aristocratic idyll of a leisurely, gracious life of family, hospitality, books and slaves on a lovely plantation,” gone. This insight, this immutable truth about what really drives so-called conservative Americans must finally be confronted, namely, the core belief that universal prosperity and a life free of fear—even if so elusive an outcome could be realized—is dangerous and, yes, evil. It is this fundamental belief that explains the outright antipathy to universal health care, to a proper education for all, to adequately funded hospitals, libraries, cultural institutions, to, dare we say it, socialism, or worse, Europeanization.
In such a world view, prosperity itself poses dangers. During boom periods, periods of enormous wealth accumulation, there seems to be little excuse not to address the needs of a society that years of benign neglect have allowed to grow. One obvious way of dealing with an embarrassment of riches, of course, is merely to redistribute wealth to our latter-day plantation aristocrats. (The Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest are a recent example.) This leaves little wealth in the hands of the vast majority or even in federal, state or local coffers to address growing needs. In the closing days of the apparently golden Clinton administration, when an actual surplus had been allowed to accumulate, Bill Clinton looked ahead, (pre-Monica Lewinsky), to a simple agenda, namely the dedication of the nation’s resources to three specific areas—race, education and a modern rail transit system. After a decade of Republican rule, a three trillion dollar surplus had been converted into a thirteen trillion dollar deficit, thereby guaranteeing that there would be no funds for misguided social programs, no Europeanization of our exceptional Homeland.
Even regressive tax structures and foreign wars, however, could not so disastrously impact the common wealth as a financial crisis that was the inevitable byproduct of years of giving prerogatives to the richest Americans to accumulate wealth unbound by any regulation. All of the organs of government—not merely the SEC, but all government watchdogs from the FCC to the FDA to the EPA and the entire alphabet of gatekeepers that had provided some safety from outright profiteering and know-nothingism—had been gutted. This was accomplished by a form of neglect that few could characterize as “benign.” It was an era more accurately called an era of malign neglect in which government regulators seemed at best incompetent, but more accurately devoted to sabotaging the very missions of the institutions they were employed to oversee. This cancer within government came to extend beyond the economic and social health of the nation to its very constitutional framework. It is one thing to appoint an OSHA administrator who will choose to overlook exploited migrant workers losing their fingers on chicken farms, another to appoint an Attorney General of the United States who will look the other way while prisoners of war are being tortured in their cells or “rendered” to clandestine sites to be tortured by foreign governments.
Once upon a time, patrician scions of families of old wealth could be seen pacing the corridors of power in Washington or in the state houses and city halls. No longer do the children of the most affluent now seek positions in government, preferring to stay on the plantation and influence events behind the scene. Government has become too vulgar, too messy. The ground has been ceded to less delicate types and the result has been rampant corruption and decay pretending to be a more populist form of government in which women and minorities have come into the ascendancy. Once upon a time, those who had accumulated great wealth, embarrassed by their riches (or perhaps fretting over putting them at risk at the hands of mobs with pitch forks) built libraries and concert halls and shelters for the poor.


Still the richest nation in the world, even the Great Recession has not stripped us of certain of the trappings of our wealth. There may be calls to close school libraries as extravagances, but while the bookshelves may be emptied, the long shelves of supermarkets, the true icons of American wealth, continue (so far) to be burdened with more varieties of sugar-laden breakfast cereals than anyone can count. Mall parking lots are still full of new cars (though there may be a form of creeping socialism emerging in their homogeneity, four-door Cadillacs being almost indistinguishable from their KIA cousins). It seems that so long as Americans can reassure themselves via HD color TVs and fully stocked stores from which they still have the luxury of selecting some other needless item, they will continue to pretend to be unaware that a new Civil War has been going on right under their noses, as if in a parallel dimension. (That the battle rages while a Black American occupies the Oval Office is a nice irony.) There has not been one Fort Sumter, but many, and ground continues to be lost. The great question facing this country is what will happen when the vast majority of Americans who were raised to believe in the wholesome values they see symbolized in the nation’s flag, and who try to live by them, come to realize that what we are experiencing in this country is truly nothing less than a second Civil War.

So

Listen to a young scholar being interviewed on a talk show nowadays, and you will more than likely hear at the beginning of almost every response a seemingly mandatory,“So..” At first, this was only an occasional event. Now, just about all those of a certain generation are taken with the mannerism. The prefatory “So” is no doubt an homage to some luminary or luminaries in a particular field of endeavor. It has caught on with a vengeance. Have these kids no shame?

Among all of the other symptoms of conformity one might expect our paradise of individualism to discourage—if not preclude—is a lockstep on vernacular clichés and speech mannerisms. This phenomenon is expected among the young whose hopefully temporary insecurities are somewhat assuaged by speaking the jargon of their set—whether that is the unique speech of the valley girl, the hip-hopper, the geek, the nerd, et al. Something new seems to have surfaced within the last decade or so, however, and the phenomenon seems almost entirely restricted to the class of individuals who once prided themselves on their mastery of the language. Such mastery was a hallmark of having received a superior education.

Although most of the educated avoid “irregardless” in their speech since some English teacher along the way pointed it out as a barbarism, the use of “preventative”—even among young physicians—is widespread. The formerly nice distinction between “further” and “farther,” not a difficult distinction to master, has been found troublesome enough for a whole generation to take the step of just eliminating the word “farther” from its vocabulary. Although I am assuming that most colleges still have speech classes in addition to English classes, many users of “So” are from the same group that finds the (truly painful to the ear) rising cadences of “upspeak” so fetching.

The ease with which certain linguistic fads take root is a phenomenon worth studying. In the aftermath of 9/11, for example, hardly a commentator could be found who had not adopted the truly annoying “At the end of the day…” for frequent use. Did a cataclysmic event invite or even subconsciously impel so gloomy a usage? More important to me, however, is the fact that many show no resistance to these supposed “fads.” We know why politicians twist the language. Orwell made it quite clear, and we have been drowning in double-speak during the Bush years. Conservatives like to mess with people’s minds. But the same individual who would not ever think of his country as “the homeland” or the death of innocents as “collateral damage” seems to have no trouble at all beginning any response that requires a bit of explanation with, “So.”

You know what I’m saying?

HDTV is Highly Dubious

Why has U.S. television gone digital? Have you ever gotten a satisfactory answer to that question? The vista of homes festooned with rooftop antennas that became an icon of modern culture in the 1950s is about to become a thing of the past. It should not have surprised anyone that the transition to digital has not been smooth, and there has already been one postponement. My own somewhat bumpy journey with digital began when a roofer told me that I would have to remove my rooftop antenna because the bolts attaching the antenna to the roof’s parapet were compromising the building’s waterproof envelope. That was disappointing. I have stubbornly refused to subscribe to a cable outlet, and my television reception using the antenna on the roof was perfect. I have always been content to limit my viewing to what was available over the airwaves. Now what to do? I decided that it would be worth a try to just put a splitter on the cable that feeds my broadband internet connection. I am not sure this is entirely legal, but it works just fine, and I found that I was getting NY1 and C-Span as a bonus, two stations that are not typically accessible via a rooftop antenna.

The next phase in this saga came about as a result of my deciding to buy an HDTV, a High Definition television set. At first, I was dazzled by the incredible resolution and deep color that the new set provided. In addition, the tuner in the HD set brought in many more channels than the tuner in my old Sony. In fact, I got a little nervous when I found that I was getting movie channels and documentary channels that only cable provides. My splitter arrangement looked more like theft of services. Within a very short time, however, those premium channels began to disappear. I could only conclude that they had some way of filtering out stuff you had to pay for when they discovered that deadbeats were getting a free ride. Actually, I felt a little better each time one of the so-called premium channels went black. A movie buff, I could not resist watching free junk that I would never have laid down hard cash for in a movie house. The cable company’s vigilance saved me from my darker self.

The longer I live with my new HDTV, the more questions it raises. Let’s start with the technology. You will find, if you haven’t already, that when you auto-program an HDTV, your new TV set has become the receptacle for numerous shopping channels, infomercial channels, evangelical Christian channels and a vast additional array of what can only be called junk television. In addition, the HD tuner brings in a high definition broadcast of many of the major channels as well as what is called a normal cable broadcast. This apparent redundancy acknowledges the fact that not all television stations have the capacity—or the budget—to broadcast in high definition, thus not all cable transmissions are high definition transmissions. The large corporate networks, namely CBS, NBC and ABC, (as well as PBS), have obviously taken pains to showcase HD at its best. Look at a news broadcast or a flagship late night talk show or, God knows, a sporting event, and the quality of the picture is nothing short of dazzling. Resolution and focus are perfect. The picture virtually shines. Cranky types who still play LP records and could never adjust to the alleged “coldness” of CDs will no doubt complain that this new digital technology is too perfect. Most of the rest of us will probably ooh and aah.

On the other hand, if you are watching a digital broadcast in anything other than the HD mode, you will find that the picture quality is absolutely terrible. In fact, it is far worse than the quality of the picture I was enjoying with my rooftop antenna. Even on the big networks, proudly broadcasting their most popular shows in glitzy HD, picture quality is more often than not inferior to transmissions sent out via the airwaves.

Yet another “new and improved” product that is clearly inferior to the original? Obviously, there is digital and then there is digital. Much of what one squints at on a new HDTV has about as much production value as a picture taken on your cell phone or a low level Youtube transmission. Now, I am sure that government and the corporations will assure us that things will get better as more and more HD cameras are used and more stations begin to broadcast in HD, that this is a still developing technology. Maybe. But, for me, there is a far more important issue than picture quality that the move to exclusively digital broadcasting raises—thought control.

This was brought home to me during one of PBS’s ever more frequent fund raisers. A spokesman for PBS stated that one of the reasons they were short of money this year—in addition (of course) to congressional cuts—was that they felt a need to continue to broadcast over the airwaves for a while so that they could reach their whole audience through the transition period. It would cost Public Television an additional 21 million dollars to continue to use their analog transmitters. At this juncture, I recalled images from my childhood in the days of radio when I looked at pictures of antennas with fret lines emanating from them to represent their transmissions, when boys on home-made short-wave radios could put an antenna on the roof and communicate with the whole world. The airwaves. What a wonderful ring that word has! The people own the airwaves. That has a wonderful ring, too. I wonder…just who has the capacity to make digital transmissions? How long will it be before all those remaining rooftop antennas disappear? And when they do disappear, what will that mean for the free flow of information?

If you would like a lesson in the transparency of our democracy, just try finding out what the rationale was for the digital transition. Of course, the stated rationale—put out there for children—is that we will all get better quality pictures on our TV sets. Try to penetrate the deeper arguments, however, and issues of national security begin to appear with great frequency. Even if digital transmission did allow for better picture quality, when did the Reagan era governments of the last thirty years show similar enthusiasm for issuing mandates to private enterprise? The bottom line question raised by all of this is: why did broadcasters need to cease their analog, over the airwaves transmissions?

One Shining Light

Evening skyline along the Grand Central

This deal has been criticized in light of the economic crisis of 2008-2009 and the $45 billion of taxpayer funds allocated to Citigroup by the US Government in two separate rescue packages, prompting New York City Council members Vincent Ignizio and James Oddo to suggest that the new ballpark be called "Citi/Taxpayer Field."

--Wikipedia

“Today we’re introducing the greener, greater buildings plan, a far-reaching package of new local laws that will dramatically improve New York’s energy efficiency and reduce energy costs by some three-quarters of a billion dollars a year,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “This will significantly improve our economic competitiveness, put thousands of New Yorkers to work in green jobs, and do more to shrink our own direct impact on global warming than any other actions imaginable.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announcing the “MAJOR PACKAGE OF LEGISLATION TO CREATE GREENER, GREATER BUILDINGS PLAN FOR NEW YORK CITY” on April 22, 2009.

Name: Citi Field

Site: Next to old stadium in Queens

Cost: $800 million. Mets are investing about $600 million, including $528 million in tax-exempt bonds. The city is spending about $165 million in infrastructure improvements around the stadium. Citigroup will pay $20 million per year for naming rights.

--SunSentinel.com

I don’t usually spend much time thinking about sports, and when it comes to building arenas and stadiums, I just kind of assume the politicians and the monied owners of sports teams are in bed with one another, and will do what they have always done, namely, concoct sweetheart contracts that make the taxpayers—sports fans or no—pay for the bread and circuses while they rake in profits from ticket sales, cable contracts and food concessionaires. But the arrival on the city’s real estate of both a new Yankee Stadium and a new Shea (excuse me, Citi Field or Citi Bank Field) Stadium couldn’t have had worse timing. With all that this city needs, the obscenity of spending a single taxpayer dollar to subsidize arenas in which wildly overpaid (not as much as corporate types, but still) hulks on steroids vie with one another in the sun is difficult to swallow.

The owners of the old Shea Stadium had the decency to reduce it to rubble before the new stadium opened. In the case of Yankee Stadium, however, if you hurry, a ride along the Harlem River Drive will reward you with a view of the old stadium and the new, side by side, cheek to jowl, looking almost indistinguishable from one another. The construction of both new stadiums was completely unnecessary, and in light of the global events surrounding their opening, both edifices will probably forever stand as monuments to an irrational financial exuberance (to coin a phrase) we are not likely ever to see again. In the bad old days, robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller built museums and libraries; the acolytes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan gave me and my fellow Queens residents this to remember them by:

My first real recognition of the pure insanity of this venture came at night, driving down Grand Central Parkway on my way to Flushing. As I approached the area around LaGuardia Airport, I became aware of a halo of garish light on the distant horizon. “My God, what is that?” I uttered aloud. Squinting through the glare on my windshield, I made out the new light display that will (unless some follower of Ayn Rand is available) forever blemish the night sky of Queens. Two thoughts came to mind immediately. First was the Mayor’s exhortation to his followers that they take out all of those wasteful incandescent light bulbs in their homes and replace them with those curlicue jobs that give off such a terrible light. I wearied at the prospect of attempting to calculate how many 40 Watt bulbs it would take to equal the blazing white light of Citi Field’s horrific signage and field lights. Certainly, our Mayor should be informed of the electric changes taking place across the East River in Queens. Certainly, he will want to do something about this:

The halo of light that emanates from Citifield can be seen from far off, and this prompted my second thought—I’ve seen this before, and I can vividly recall when and where. There was a time I was making frequent trips to South Jersey. I would get on the Garden State Parkway and cruise for an hour or so through the pastoral bliss of starry skies, pinelands, grazing deer, busy woodchucks, and then make the turn onto the Atlantic City Expressway whereupon my eyes had to make an immediate adjustment to the OZ-like glare coming from the row of casinos that adorn the shoreline at that location. One turn—from pastoral bliss to whorehouse capitalism.

It was at this point that I had a sinking feeling, a hunch verging on a conviction, that it would only be a matter of time before this first manifestation of the Willets Point “renaissance” would be followed by a proposal to build casinos in Flushing. I promised myself that I would return with a camera and attempt to document this brave new world. My first series of photographs would be taken in daylight, and I would later retrace my path on Grand Central Parkway at night. For the daylight shots, I decided to take the 7 train to the new field, and and begin to tour the new facility. It wasn’t long before I was rewarded with yet another harbinger of a possible incursion by the gambling industry that seemed to affirm my hunch, a large Caesars Atlantic City billboard:

A daytime tour of the grounds soon makes it evident that, with the exception of its main entrance, oddly reminiscent of both the old Ebbets Field and the Coliseum in Rome, the other vistas that the new stadium presents are unrelentingly devoted to the crassest commercialism. Where once the old Shea delicately adorned its circumference with delicate neon line-drawings of players in motion, we now have an explosion of billboard advertising. Across 126th Street, opposite the stadium's Bullpen Gate, are still located the many chop shops and auto parts stores slated for removal as part of the Willets Point renaissance. Protest signs adorn several of the cyclone fences in the area, and indeed this complex--the owners of which have viewed with dark humor the complaints of a city that has redlined the district of all essential city services for years--doesn't look like it is going anywhere soon.

Enemies of the People

When the good Dr. Stockman in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People tries to warn the people of his town that their river is dangerously polluted, he becomes, of course, the eponymous enemy of the very people he is trying to protect. Ibsen, like many other early observers of the devastation brought about by industrialization and the exploitation of the natural environment for profit, understood that an inevitable adjunct of this planet-wide revolution was a “silent majority”. The phrase, (in spite of its having been co-opted by a Nixon administration under siege in the 1970s), is invaluable for its insight into the most profound psychological underpinning of the profit system—denial.

What, after all, do all of the plagues of our time have in common? The automobile, indoor and outdoor air pollution, water pollution, famine, epidemic disease, deforestation, over-fishing of the oceans and rivers, the rapid extinction of species, skyscrapers, jet travel, casual waste of natural resources, even electric light all pose a threat to our very existence on the planet. While on the one hand, we are “treated” to endless jeremiads about where we are headed, there seems to be no plausible solution to the insidious trend. Windmills, nuclear power plants, recycling old newspapers, electric cars and zoos for near-extinct species all seem laughably (or tragically) incapable of making a significant difference. Those who study and understand the full scope of the problems we now face will confess that it is probably already too late to avoid some cataclysmic event that will forever alter our lives on Earth.

Yet, in spite of the gravity of what we are all now facing, there is a conspiracy of silence on its root cause. What is almost never mentioned in the midst of the constant hand-wringing and hair-pulling exhortations in the media and the scholarly journals is the underlying problem—there are just too many people on the planet.[1]

The subject of population growth has a long political as well as scientific history. There was a time when Malthusians, that is, adherents of Thomas Malthus’ ideas about population, were looked upon as reactionary. Left wingers of just about every shade were distinguished by their faith in scientific solutions to all of mankind’s problems. Technology would save us. Population grows geometrically Malthus pointed out, while resources grow mathematically. The technocrats made claim to having defied Malthus’ gloomy forecasts when they devised methods to not only feed existing populations but, as a result of the new regimens they put in place, allow global population to grow by a third. In the process, the ammonium nitrates so liberally applied to the soil have created a huge additional hazard to life on the planet. All indications are that we have not yet seen the end of population growth, that by 2050, we will have three billion more human beings to feed.

What should now be obvious is that Earth simply cannot accommodate such large numbers. Where once—in spite of the usual opposition from the Catholic Church and other institutions that thrive on teeming surpluses of poor people—population control and family planning were corollaries to any program aimed at improving the lot of our species, the subject has become taboo. In fact, declining population is now seen as an economic threat in many advanced nations faced with the prospect of fewer workers to fund social programs for aging citizens. In a global context, the notable exception of China’s so-called one birth policy can be seen as an anomaly. Moreover, the country’s recent surge of affluence has rendered the policy somewhat irrelevant since, as has long been obvious, one effective cure for excess population is affluence. Rich peoples (barring some perceived threat to their group’s existence) don’t have time for babies.

The era in which we were treated to programs for poor nations which included everything from condoms to IUDs to voluntary sterilization ended for a variety of reasons. Reagan era opposition to essentially all family planning regimens led the way, and most of what was then done to remove governmental support from family planning efforts is still in place. The so-called right to life faction, ostensibly opposed to abortion, turned out, not surprisingly, to be disingenuously opposed to all forms of birth control as well. Family planning was portrayed as an insidious cover for advocacy of abortion. In some minority communities here in the United States but in other areas of the world as well family planning was portrayed as a veiled form of genocide for the poor. Population control groups not only lost government funding, they were deemed out of touch with technological changes such as improved fertilizers and genetically modified organisms that would supposedly allow for almost unlimited population growth. In their institutional literature and mission statements, great care is now taken by organizations like the United Nations and other groups with global outreach to emphasize free choice. It has become politically incorrect, even misogynistic, to present a public face that would openly advocate for anything resembling a rigorous program of population control.

The doomsayers of the 1960s who predicted world-wide famine within just a few decades were obviously proven wrong; the population time-bomb never exploded; Malthus was proven wrong once again. Fertilizers and scientifically modified seed could and did feed larger and larger populations. Not included in the calculation, however, was the environmental cost of the new agricultural regimen. It is a cost not measured alone in direct harm to land and water. The parallel phenomena of extinction and chemically induced mutations of still extant species offer a clear warning that, like other species that have been artificially induced to rapidly expand their populations, humans are in danger of becoming dangerous pests, the most dangerous the planet has ever seen.

[1] There are no doubt some on both the right and the left who will argue that we must acknowledge an even deeper underlying problem such as the inequities of capitalism or a lack of spiritual enlightenment. I would argue here that unless the problem of overpopulation is addressed soon, its devastating impact on the health of the planet will render political and religious concerns moot.

Gang Raping the American Working Class

First, they destroyed the unions, they then tore up all the regulations and safeguards designed to protect the citizenry from reckless financial speculation while at the same time instituting the most regressive tax system the country had ever seen. This led to its inevitable outcome: the house of cards came tumbling down, leaving a handful of individuals running for cover with the unbelievable wealth they had been allowed to accumulate while, in the rubble, lay jobless workers and tens of millions of working people with seriously diminished savings accounts and pensions. Most Americans’ homes, their single largest asset, the focus of the bubble (why don’t we call these phenomena boils rather than bubbles?) alleged to have been the core problem, were worth a lot less. But this would be only the first time we were to be ravaged. Within just a few weeks, they would gang on and do it to us again.

For many years, American high school students were taught in their history classes that the one lesson the Great Depression taught us was that capitalism needed regulation. We learned that buying on margin was a thing of the past. You just couldn’t have another depression. There would be no runs on the banks. The Baileys had reined in the Potters. The country had learned its lesson in 1929. We now had an FDIC to insure our savings up to $100,000 per account. The only problem was that by 2008, the savings accounts were empty. The country had a 0% savings rate. After all, only a fool would keep his money in a savings account. Why settle for 0.1% interest at the local savings and loan when you could cash in with a tax-deferred annuity or an IRA or a good mutual fund and make an average of 8%?

Although it would be nice to be able to blame the evil Republicans for this disaster, this proves to be difficult, since both parties were clearly complicit. That the producers of such colorful platitudes as the evil empire and the axis of evil were themselves evil was fairly clear. Should any evidence of Ronald Reagan’s essential mean-spiritedness be called for, one only had to look at his performance while governor of California. The reason that Democrats came to be as likely as Republicans to find in him a miracle worker was that he took an economy which, by the time he took office in 1980, was clearly in crisis and managed—in a fashion that gave him the right to claim full status as a Wizard of Oz—to create an illusion of affluence. If buying time for the system was the goal, he more than achieved it. It was undeniably a miracle of sorts—if one could forgive him for his attack on unions, for his tearing up regulations governing just about every aspect of American life and for his having a philosophy on the environment best summed up in his quip that “A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?” (He does, of course, get credit for bringing down the USSR, a distinction he must rightly share with Pope John Paul II, the Virgin Mary and a moribund Moscow bureaucracy.)

Credit swaps. Hedge funds. Derivatives. Private equity. Collateralized securities. The average American struggling to figure out why our economy now seems on the verge of a depression has by now had the opportunity to obtain at least some superficial familiarity with the heretofore arcane jargon of finance. Of course, most of us still can’t follow what Hank (“Ace”) Greenberg, the former CEO of A.I.G. is talking about during his appearances on the Charlie Rose Show. The sleight of hand that passes for high finance is necessarily couched in enough jargon and enough actual complexity to form a protective shield around the self-styled Masters of the Universe. Most of us are still reeling from the events of those September weeks when Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were teetering and Lehman brothers was allowed to go under, when we were told that others of the most revered names in investment banking were on the verge of collapse. Why was this happening? How could it happen? And, then, we were told that Hank Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke, head of “the Fed,” had determined that only trillions of dollars of taxpayer money could “save the system,” that certain companies were “too big to fail.” They needed the money—and they needed it fast. There was talk of a “complete meltdown of the banking system,” and of “a complete freeze on credit,” that money could no longer flow through arteries that had essentially sclerosed with panic calls on paper that was leveraged as much as 30%. The patient was at death’s door. We had to do something, and we had to do it fast. We could worry about where that trillion (and more like it) were coming from after the patient had stabilized. Most of the people I know started flipping through their dog-eared pages of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. What had once been the regimen applied by (the now reborn) Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to the crippled former Soviet Union was being administered right here at home. Domestic shock therapy.

Oddly enough, looking back on those events, which took place as the presidential campaign was nearing its conclusion, it is John McCain who seems to have gotten it right. McCain was much ridiculed for stating that the American economy was strong and at least making noises that would indicate his opposition to what we now call the “bailouts.” McCain was simply being a good Republican, a good capitalist and an honest broker for a philosophy long identified with the now apparently quaint notion that failed businesses should go bankrupt and that government intervention in the vagaries of enterprise is to be avoided at all cost. It would take a lot of time listening to the endless parade of economic analysts that we have been treated to in the media for the fact to emerge that, as a result of the Reaganite, Milton Friedmanite, laissez faire regimen that the U.S. economy had evolved into, about thirty percent of the U.S. GDP came to grow out of the financial sector. In other words, 30% of our “economy” was devoted to paper pushing rather than creating anything vaguely resembling durable goods. When McCain talked about a healthy economy, he no doubt meant the other seventy percent. Of course, the productive sector now looks gravely ill, in no small measure the by-product of what some diagnose as a “loss of confidence.” The loss of confidence becomes far more profound, of course, when the populace—both here and around the world—must daily confront the floundering of secretaries of the Treasury and Fed Chairman Bernanke as each attempt at “saving the system” falls short, while jobs are lost, wages fall, pensions and savings disappear, and a volatile stock market which we were all being advised to hitch our wagons to loses half of its value.

It is now clear that the system should have been allowed to fail. The trillions of dollars in bailouts and the recent decision by the Fed to just print another trillion dollars is only serving to impoverish the average American wage earner as well as his children and grandchildren. What did they mean when they talked about saving the system? What system were they talking about? Most importantly, whose system did they want to save? When estimates of outstanding derivative debt published in respectable journals were between 500 trillion and a quadrillion dollars, (That’s a one followed by fifteen zeros. Or, viewed another way, the GDP of the entire world for about twenty years.), who was responsible? Hundreds of billionaires were created through the new financial “products” that an unregulated financial sector “miraculously” produced while the richest country in the world watched its standard of living and quality of life decline, watched its infrastructure collapse, its people go without health insurance, its public schools decline to almost third world status, and its redlined masses more and more turn to every drug from cocaine to an inexhaustible array of junk entertainment. Bread and circuses while Rome burned. The U.S. had become its own economic back yard while factories sprouted in China and the other Asian tigers. All of this took place against a backdrop of a decline in the substance and trappings of a viable democracy. An election that many Americans viewed as a coup d’etat resulted in illegal wars and a Homeland Security ethos that borrowed its name and spirit from Weimar Germany. Pages were torn out of the Bill of Rights, newspapers closed, whistleblowers became voices in the wilderness.

Nevertheless, the opposition party, when it was not itself engineering economic programs that ill served the average American, proved to show little real opposition to the “new” economic order in which the World Bank and the IMF would tweak the dials of the planet’s economies. Of course, many Republicans made the disingenuous argument that the whole disaster could be laid at the door of the Democrat Party. It is a convenient argument, but it is also an argument that has some real merit when one considers the nature of the straw that broke this camel’s back. Democrats stood by while being perfectly aware that their ostensibly noble goal of providing housing for the poor declined into the marketplace savagery of “no doc” or outright fraudulent mortgages. It was during the Clinton administration, after all, that some of the significant regulatory checks on the market were allowed to be dissolved. A leading indicator of the “it’s the Democrats fault” line of argument appeared in a Village Voice article titled, “Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie: How the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history gave birth to the mortgage crisis.” The article appeared on August 5, 2008, one month before the meltdown. The Clinton administration may have been reckless (a hallmark trait of the man at the helm) but merely writing bad mortgages would not have resulted in the ensuing nightmare. Criminal as the behavior of many banks had been, their behavior was not a heavy enough straw. For that, we needed to live in an unregulated market of “collateralized securities,” securities leveraged to previously unheard of levels, securities “guaranteed” by good Republican credit houses as solid
gold, AAA level investment vehicles.

There have been few expressions of remorse or regret; there have been no indictments for the greatest rape of the world’s treasure in economic history. Ever the victims of weapons of mass distraction, we are allowed a collective tsk tsk over con artist Bernie Madoff and the luxury of righteous indignation over the multi-million dollar bonuses awarded by A.I.G to its staff. While we are distracted by headline stories chronicling outrages that total millions or billions, we seem blissfully complacent at the prospect of having to cough up many trillions of dollars to “save the system.” And, by now, it is clear what system it is we are saving and who the beneficiaries of this salvation will be—the very same folks who squandered our resources in the first place. So, if a rape took place when the financial sector allowed our wealth to disappear through their recklessness and blind greed, now a second rape is in progress—in the full light of day—as the perpetrators of the crime are made whole courtesy of the men and women on Main Street.

“But we had to do something,” the chorus keens. People need access to credit, need to borrow to keep business moving. Yes. The answer is obvious. Many economists found a prescription in nationalizing the banks. Socialism! In fact, banks are nationalized or taken over by government regulators all the time without any outcry. And for good reason, a nationalized bank is seen as merely a temporary expedient awaiting re-privatization. No, the obvious solution is not nationalized banks; it is a national bank. John McCain was right all along. Let the evildoers suffer the consequences of their deeds; let them go down as the system to which they all nominally subscribe says they should. Instead of all those trillion dollars being handed over—no strings attached—allowing the financial wizards to pay themselves those much publicized bonuses among other things, let those who need to make loans and have the appropriate collateral to qualify line up at the windows of the Bank of the United States. The clogged arteries of enterprise will be opened and the governance of the people’s bank handed over to honest civil servants making wages more in keeping with their actual service rather than making the wages of steroid-injected super athletes. We’ll even make a profit.

As this is being written, the Times announces that the government is going to buy up bad debt and the Dow is up 300 points for the day. The wizard technocrats are doing their magic again. Yet, in my neck of the woods, hospitals are closing, library services are being cut, the New York State legislature is struggling with a 13 billion dollar deficit and most folks not only feel poorer and are poorer, they are fretfully waiting for the next shoes to drop. Or the next pile on.