Your Third Castling

I

For isn’t, indeed, Stephen Daedalus himself castled by Leopold Bloom? And Bloom then castled by…Molly? And on and on?

A cursory search of the internets leads me to believe the Fritz Cramer who provides the epigram for Lars Gustaffson’s “Stories of Happy People” might not exist. That sentence itself was thrice castled, in terms of its subject, wasn’t it? Here’s what he says:

Fundamentally complex living systems can be defined as systems which can delay the breakdown catastrophe for some time by organizing themselves in a more complex way for as long as possible.

suggesting that when you become complex, further complexity isn’t merely a virtue – it’s a survival tactic.

II

1. If a fence must be constructed to maximize area for grazing sheep, and “there are” 100 meters of fencing, what geometric shape should be employed and what should be the dimension(s)?
2. If the sheep (10) each graze in a random pattern, and eat 10% of their body weight in grass each day, will the area be sufficient for one week of grazing for sheep with a median weight of 10 Newtons?
3. Which sheep dies before the week is out?

III

Mr. F. Cramer escaped from a maximum security prison in 1987 and it is believed he fled toward the west-Texas/New Mexico border. He had been held for 19 years and published a weekly column on knitting in the weekly prison newsletter. It seems he’d knit a crude model of himself and tucked it into the sheets for the subterfuge. It seems, also, that he’d knitted the prison as well, and therefore only needed to tug in this one spot, for it all to disappear. Now he’s working a gas station, and his pants smell of oil and the smoke of a thousand exhaust pipes.

 

Whatever Happens Will Happen: Paling Kings Part II

 

(refresh yourself on part I if appropriate)

April, 2, 2009: FASB grants the loosening of mark-to-market accounting rules

Apparently, Mr. Herz is better able to influence the board than he thought. Sound decision or stay of execution?

 

Week of May 4, 2009: Secretary of Treasury Announces Banks Perform Well on Stress Test

         : Dow on the Rise. Economic Recovery?

Whatever happens will happen. What “happens” after the last page in Infinite Jest? Do Gately, Hal, and John Wayne really dig up Himself’s corpse and find the anti-samizdat and use it to crush the Quebecois separatist/terrorist movement and restore unsubsidized time?

The book works for a thousand pages to get us to ask better questions. What does it feel like to read a book where events of various scales are kaleidoscoped together? A teenager and the world disintegrate; an exceedingly average former addict performs heroically in a challenge so perfectly suited for him it resonates like Attic myth. The fractals are made human; they bleed. And what does this reading have to do with what seems to be this life?

Whatever Happens is Duly Recorded in the Tables

With neither beginning nor end, and therefore terrifying in infinitely large and small ways, paperwork is the mÖbius strip of life. The one sure thing about doing paperwork is that you hope to finish it. But it’s never done. We keep waiting, but it won’t ever be done.

Consider for a second the various cop shows, where the renegade cop is out doing his darndest to protect and serve, sometimes breaking rules, but always for good reasons. Consider his ball-busting lieutenant bitching constantly about all the paperwork he has to fill out if, for example, the renegade cop discharged a few rounds in a shopping mall to kill a rat attempting to lick a dripping air-conditioner*. And the renegade himself is always getting his balls busted to complete the paperwork for said shooting, which we might get a brief glimpse of during the closing credits montage set to a Sarah McLaughlin tune.

(*of course, qua tv, this action served as a bit of unintentional (by the renegade, not the show’s writers) symbolism wherein the renegade symbolized for an “innocent bystander” what might happen to a “rat” and therefore the “innocent” decides to eat so much cheese that he became a sufficiently big rat to warrant police protection. The thoughtless gunshot is therefore exactly the sort of thing this cop does without thinking to show yet again that certain cops have good instincts or “gut feelings” and their bosses typically don’t and that’s why they (the ones with bad instincts) are taken off the street and put behind a desk to do all the paperwork.)

What if the show continued, and we got to climb inside this renegade’s head while he completes the paperwork? And we also granted him a little introspection and helped him realize that the paperwork would not end; it would just stop from time to time, briefly? What if we got him to think about that, right there while he’s doing it? Would that make for exciting tv?

 

Let Go

See right there on page 29 of Ulysses (the 1990 Vintage International Edition) where Stephen Dedalus receives his salary for teaching wee snot-nosed lads history, mathematics, Latin, and etc.? You can tell right away that Mr. Deasy, the distributor of the money, is despicable in all sorts of ways. Stephen sees him “stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet.” Can we agree that undue interest in keeping one’s feet dry is despicable? Deasy then proudly flourishes the money, dispensing it from a special change machine and counting it deliberately—investing the act with all the ceremony of the preparation of the Eucharist.

Stephen, qua man of ideas, is embarrassed by Deasy’s pomp and the necessity of money and quickly shoves it into his pocket, which prompts the schoolmaster to dispense some advice. He recommends that Stephen be more careful with his capital, save more. Deasy quotes Shakespeare: “Put but money in thy purse.”

Of course, Shakespeare wrote this line, but Iago, as Stephen notes, is the one who utters it. Iago, the villain, who’s giving this advice to his pawn Roderigo, and for villainous reasons.

This painful scene worsens, the players perfectly misfit for each other. Deasy selects those historical and literary details which best fit a series of ignorant, racist, or silly claims: that the Irish deserve to be an English colony, that O’Connell was a chump, that Jews are taking over the world, that hoof and mouth disease is easily cured if the government would just take his advice, that a black balance sheet is a man’s noblest virtue.

Stephen’s replies consist of grunts and brief gestures, but his interior monologue lists with poetic allusions the details Deasy omits. Stephen’s knowledge burdens him with history. Deasy’s ignorance liberates him. Deasy is comfortable; Stephen is beyond exasperated.

Why are the Mr. Deasy’s the ones we must genuflect to? Why are they the ones lording “financial arrangements” over our heads? Better yet, what does it feel like to ask these questions, and live in the world? Books that fail to address these items are worthless, and are for Mr. Deasies. The rest of us were left better books, and better words to live by.

When he was fired from the post office for hiding in the back room to read, Faulkner said: I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.

 

Paling Kings

“Most of us are allowed to go through the span of life allotted to us in actuarial tables.” from The Echo newspaper, November 1, 1869

Except the tables don’t tell the whole tale, do they? There are also qualitative burdens—especially when it comes to certain folks, say for example kings, who:

…must bear all. O hard condition,

Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath

Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel

But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease

Must kings neglect that private men enjoy! Henry V, IV.1

Does not late model democracy make all of us Henry’s? Kings and yet also subjects—to the king of collective will. And doubly subjects to that sovereign’s king, the entity that orders and executes that will. I’m referring to the actuarial tables, or the paper on which they are printed. It’s quite a trick to take on all the worries and enjoy so little of the power. Pale kings indeed.

Remember this testimony on March 13, 2009?

Or is this the king David Foster Wallace refers to with the title of his unfinished novel? It’s Robert Herz, chairman of FASB, who got himself “dragged in front of Congress” and subjected to the steam and grunts (–”the breath of every fool”–) of subcommittee members over the loss of constituents’ jobs and the need for immediate action. Mr. Herz twirled his water bottle’s cap and articulated maddeningly reasonable explanations for various accounting practices. He tends to smirk slightly when speaking, but perhaps not consciously.

It’s dreadful to watch elected representatives beg him to modify this or that mark-to-market or discounted cash flow accounting protocol. Not because he’s always ready with a lucid description of the rule’s origins and purpose, but because of his perfectly legitimate refrain that, even if a legislator’s suggestion makes sense, he’s merely one voice on a 5-person board, and, more importantly, accounting standards are now a global concern and unilateral changes to the way US corporations handle their balance sheets would have bespectacled bean counters from Alberta to Zaire shaking their fists at yet another overreach of US hegemony. Actually, Herz didn’t raise the specter of actuarial terrorism as much as indicate that no matter what the US does, everyone else isn’t going to necessarily agree to it, or even if they do, it may cause, instead of prevent, bookkeeping chaos.

Because he’s very smart, Herz didn’t say anything like, “A pile of shit weighs the same in pounds or kilograms.” Good bureaucrats know enough to allow their patrons to deceive themselves, both about facts and the scope of their (the bureaucrats’) power.

A good bureaucrat isn’t particularly human, which seems to me to be what concerned Wallace so much. In his work (and in interviews) there’s an evident desire to palpate those parts of us the world seems determined (and better than ever able) to conceal. Qua American writer of talent, energy, and ambition, he’s obliged to poke his fingers right into the heart of things American. The hearts of the last two centuries have been oil (and whales), and dreams (and Long Island). Certainly the 21^st century’s pièce de résistance will be about taxes (and the suburbs). A book on paying the bills that have been run up is probably the last one our experiment can write and we can stop when it’s done. By then, we’ll have used up the span allotted to us in the tables.

 

Our Only Hope (for H.M.)

Between 1966 and 2001, the median salary in the US increased by 11% after adjusting for inflation. In the 99.99^th percentile (where the 13,000 highest paid US workers fall), annual income increased 617%. It’s gotten worse since then.

Over the past 40 years, while the “debate” raged over democrat vs. republican and government activism vs. free market capitalism and imperialism vs. world policeman, the few robbed the majority blind. Picture a classroom where two boys trying to launch spitballs at the teacher attract the attention of all the students but one. The one clear-eyed pupil steals all the others’ lunch money in plain sight, flips some small amount to the teacher, and watches with chilling calm when the larceny is discovered and the mass of pupils attack the teacher and whichever spitball boy has eyebrows they don’t particularly like the look of. Little did they all know that the one clear-eyed student paid these boys as well.

What can be hoped for? We can raise taxes on the rich, the ones who stole, but it’s probably too late. They’ll know long before us when the dollar and the yen and the price of gold will plummet. They’ll have moved to some country which by design, and according to its constitution, serves as a tax shelter for the most privileged global citizens. The founding documents, by the way, will have been written by a native of that country, who attended Yale and roomed with some of the usual suspects.

Why is there so little anger at those who deserve it? Why is there so much directed at illegal aliens and the poor and blacks? Of course, there are answers to these questions. “The few” control the media, the messaging, and the means of production of ideas. And on and on, as we’ve heard before, nodding gravely and reaching for our latte. But those answers no longer suffice. At some point, for each individual person, hasn’t the bullshitting got to end? Why don’t we understand that this ruling class infringes on our liberty way more than any terrorists could ever hope, since the terrorists simply hastened and catalyzed a process already underway.

Have you seen a supersaturated solution crystallized by a projectile?

The ruling class corroborated with the government to produce the biggest and most effective Ponzi scheme on record. Regular workers contributed to their 401k’s and IRA’s and 457’s and 403b’s in exchange for tax breaks. The financiers used the money to engage in huge over-leveraged risks and have already run away with the wealth generated by this scheme. It’s a game of musical chairs and the guy with his finger on the stereo’s switch is on the take.

So what? Aside from robbing us, what have they really done? Don’t we still have our souls, if not our dignity?

We have digital media, especially the internet, a great resource for pornography and confirming that other peoples’ lives are as frivolous as our own. We have foreclosed houses and entire foreclosed neighborhoods—monuments to our own dead hopes but, more than that, nice covers for what underneath has been erased. We’ve destroyed our open spaces in the name of progress and home ownership and profitable real estate hedge funds. We’ve ruined our landscape and we’ve done the digging ourselves. We’ve poisoned our air and streams as if they had wronged us. We’ve killed off countless species. We can’t see the forest through the trees because there is no forest. We’ve inflicted great pain on the citizens of other countries, raining bombs and nonsense down on them.  We’ve lost our great literature and art to the asking of silly questions. We’ve squandered the education of the masses. We’ve fallen embarrassingly short in being merely helpful.

We’ve allowed our faith and our religion to be subordinated to progress and profit. We’ve apparently lost even the ability to see these things. We’ve become distracted, drunk. We live in a literal and figurative haze. We are lonely, and alone.

And, ultimately: do we like it this way, because it most accurately reflects how we want to feel when we are most in touch with the basic facts of trying to cling to a big rock hurtling round a giant ball of nuclear flame, spinning crazily all the while, with naught but darkness beyond.

Some might say this is a dismal vision. That’s been said. I say much more hopeless are the ones who remain willfully ignorant, who know who stole their lunch money, but attack the spitballers. They are hoping only for disappointment—for if they catch their prize, they’ll be forced to face the facts of their chase. Let’s face the facts of the chase first, and re-direct our efforts.

 

4 Questions for Marianne del Cerriota

Marianne del Cerriota, M.D. is a senior fellow at the Kassel Institute for Bio-Economic Policy, a think-tank in San Diego. del Cerriota is a respected authority on bioeconomics issues at the frontier of medicine and technology, most notably generative medicine and semantic bio-diagnostic research. Author or editor of 14 books as well as a chapbook of “anti-sonnets,” del Cerriota served as an advisor to surgeons general under the Carter, Bush I, and Clinton administrations. Her latest book Not Now (Grove Press), paints a bleak picture of human behaviors in the face of rapid scientific encroachment on intellectual and psychological territory. She responded to these queries Jan. 26-29, 2009; some are edited for length and clarity.

SU: Not Now was published last month, so I’m guessing it was completed by mid-2008 or thereabouts. Has the turmoil in the western financial system in the last six months got you wishing you could make some adjustments to the book?

MdC: You seem to be implying that I might now want to paint a less optimistic picture of the future, which would hardly be possible. I would not change a line in my book, nevertheless. We are headed toward catastrophe, inevitably. Mainstream news outlets are serving the same narcotics, using innocuous terms like “meltdown” and even “disaster” to describe the so-called financial crisis. Disaster is what happened yesterday, while any thinking person understands that recovery is, in the absence of some miracle, literally impossible. I described the unfolding disaster in my book as being like the peeling of an onion where each new layer’s rottenness had been obscured by the last’s. No, I believe my book to be still well ahead of the curve.

Your book’s title refers to emergent scientific breakthroughs which will be thwarted by, to use your phrase, a “bioeconomic catastrophe.” Can you explain the process by which global economic events constrict science at precisely the wrong times?

The first thing to understand, before moving to that induction, is the significance of the extent to which people seem to misunderstand our current problem. Because of my own reluctance to believe in our ability to escape catastrophe, it’s become clear to me that denial is uniquely qualified as a collective survival tactic. Nevertheless, when the world’s wealth falls by 50%, as I believe it will, certain statistical inevitabilities start to trigger. Local governments will be bankrupt and their offices plundered. The capitol will be besieged. Soldiers will desert in the thousands. Every person with a college degree will start to sound like Marx, talking about means of production and natural resources and labor instead of about money. The entire world will essentially seem to consist of unskilled graduate literature students and revolutionary gangs.

In the meantime, anti-natalogists, eugenicists, bioethicists, pre-natal genomic cartographers and the like are threatening to eradicate all institutional (and personal—including at the cellular level) capital systems. The result won’t be that information will replace agriculture or cars or even commodities as capital—it’s not even that meta-information will. Instead, new developments will make it clear that capital exchanges as such have run their course, in favor of a more sublime rendering of the human stamp. However, the 1^st gen technology threatens to prevent the move to 2^nd gen.—which is a classic law of biological order. What is unnatural, in this case, is the extent to which a revolutionary Darwinian leap has been predicted—by myself and others. So few are aware for two reasons: the science is difficult and the science is scary.

This confluence of circumstances brings us to the precipice of a huge bioeconomic chasm that begs for new ideas—it demands that we start jumping off cliffs and then hoping, with no good reason, that we’ll land somewhere. This sort of thinking becomes even more difficult during high-pressure times.

But hasn’t cutting-edge science itself begotten the very problems that threaten it?

For the most part, yes; and this continues to trouble me. It’s frustrating to be so distracted by a 19^th century problem, but Frankenstein still walks the earth. If however, this cutting-edge science leads to…Let me put it this way, there will be a liberating aspect to the eradication of the disposition for the empirical. Engaging in empiricism, of course, is to practice the most basic bio-economic activity, and to do so in the most traditional sense. Rejecting this approach is what will allow us to account for, for example, Zeno’s paradox, or bust through Moore’s law, or accomplish any of our other scientific goals. This demands re-investment in radical ideas, which have for so long suffered under the curse of marginalization. Pressure may bring these ideas forward, or it may not.

I know this is old-thinking, but the average citizen may be investigating a plan to convert all his wealth to cash or even gold. Are such activities outright absurd, in your view?

I wouldn’t criticize or ridicule anyone for attempting to build their ark. The time horizon on bioeconomic shifts is unknowable. At this point, it’s all gambling. I have nothing to hide. In the near term, I’m betting on cash, which is to me not a conservative but a radical strategy. The conservative strategy is to find a way to collect and store potable water.

 

Democratization of Language

Subtitle: Have you ever seen the phrase “piacular recompense” and the word “stuff” (the noun variety) in the same sentence?

After Tuesday there will be no more President Bush press conferences. During these linguistic spectacles, the Harvard- and Yale-educated oil-tycoon scion sometimes dropped the “g’s” off his gerunds and uttered phrases such as “We’re gonna get ‘em.” And then he’d string together a few Latinate words to describe the dangerous situation in Pakistan. Then he’d say something like “We’re deeply committed” or “we’re deeply involved” and he seemed to believe that if he gave that word “deeply” sufficient bodily or facial or gesticulatory gravitas, it could mean more than it does, which is essentially nothing.

Bush’s modulation between high and low language is what allowed him to win the election against Al Gore Jr., I contend. Gore always sounds wonkish, and when he did attempt to employ folksy language, it seemed like a pose. Al Gore must have sounded, to some Americans, like the English teacher who failed them but called them “dude.”

Aside from getting him elected, Bush’s soprano-to-bass grammatical seismograph also, I further contend, accounts for his charm and the fact that he survived 8 years without being impeached.

One might argue that President Bill Clinton shared this skill, but Clinton leaned on his accent to undercut his vocabulary, throwing in a few Goshes and Gollys for effect. (Can you believe Clinton pronounces “program” as pro’-grum? When he says “missle pro’-grum,” its referent sounds about as deadly as some hare-brained Barney Fife-ean plot. Clinton had a genius all his own, of course.) Bush uses words, and no one has ever moved more effectively than he between technical jargon, marketing-speak, sloganese, patriotic bromide, southern cant, and officio-political discourse. I don’t believe Bush necessarily thought this out, it’s more like he’s a perfect linguistic man for his age. Karl Rove recognized this and shaped the whole DC-outsider-simple-Cowboy-Jesus-freak narrative to fit the man’s talents, kind of the way a defensive coordinator might switch to a 3-4 to take advantage of an ox-like nose tackle and a couple of lightning-quick defensive ends.

What is our linguistic moment? The last several decades have witnessed explosive developments in word processing, the capacity of machines, digital communications of all kinds, networking tools such as Facebook and search engine optimization protocols, immigration, the simultaneous formation of media conglomerates and explosion of media alternatives, increasingly absurd differences between the wealth of the rich and the destitution of the poor, the rise in arcane academic writing, the number of scribbling corporate lawyers, and we can’t forget the straws that stir the drink—marketing and spin, those twin augers of sound and fury.

The linguistic effects of these explosions are profound, both politically and personally—and maybe impossible to define. One thing one can say about America is that there is a lot of noise out there, a torrent of it, and we all drown in it every day. Certain types of language are so ubiquitous that they’re starting to wear ruts in the earth, and I believe the result is that anyone speaking a single tongue becomes automatically a parody of himself. The computer nerd, the guy who likes to hit on women, the right-wing talkshow host who tells it like it is, the feminist, the corporate PR person, the black guy CNN brings on to talk about racism, the cantankerous sportswriter, Oprah, the idiotic reality show judge and the angry pompous reality show judge. Though Americans like these people, they’re unelectable, because they are not free. George W. Bush was, if nothing else, linguistically free.

On a related note: Have you noticed that Tina Fey’s lampooning of Sarah Palin is not actually lampoon? It’s just imitation, in my view. There’s nothing to parody! Palin is already parody. But if Palin learns to mix in some 3-syllable words with her references to high school hockey and her stupid winking charm, watch out. If she learns that the language of real Americans is polyglot, we could be in trouble.

What’s changed since Chevy Chase fell off a ladder while decorating a Christmas tree as Gerald Ford? What’s changed since Dan Ackroyd spewed arcane nuclear engineering factoids at a press conference as Jimmy Carter? Everything has changed. We’re in a different age, language-wise, and the ‘70s might as well be Paleolithic. The only thing that generates interest nowadays, for comedy or political glory, is the violent yoking together of signifiers from disparate dialects.

No one I know absorbed and refashioned our compendium of tongues better then David Foster Wallace. His Infinite Jest and other works are our tower of Babel. I’ll end with an explication of two graphs from his essay on tennis star Tracy Austin. Here are the graphs:

Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere – fastest, strongest – and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.

Plus they’re beautiful: Jordan hanging in midair like a Chagall bride, Sampras laying down a touch volley at an angle that defies Euclid. And they’re inspiring. There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man. So actually more than one theory, then. Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.

These graphs are careful, accurate, precise and conversational. The bald folksiness of his opening four-word sentence indicates he’s not trying to trick readers, or patronize them. The word “totally” in his second sentence means what a valley girl understands it to mean: something like “completely,” but the ability to stretch out the long “o” sound gives it its special perfect campiness. The example vocations are perfectly chosen since a plumber and a managerial accountant are each basically the apotheosis of their respective collar colors. If you could overhear Condoleezza Rice and Sam Spade’s barroom conversation, you might get the breathtakingly beautiful difference in tone encapsulated in the twin phrases “competitive superiority” and “hard data.” This is kind of the point: you can overhear such a conversation because I myself know of a saloon that’s often showing old black-and-white movies on one flat-screen tv, CNN on another, and the Ravens-Colts game on a third. We live in a flux of language, a torrent, and for anything to sound “American,” it must account for this torrent and the ability of millennial American English to be all things at once. In terms of the ability to account for the torrent, no one’s language does so more effectively or entertainingly or energetically than Wallace’s.

Six-year-olds use the word “plus” to mean also or in addition, not adults. Certainly not adults who know of Chagall and Euclid. When DFW uses the word “inspiring” he’s deliberately thumbing his nose at what “inspiring” or “inspirational” has come to mean—some hackneyed story about a triple-amputee becoming a senator or rowing across the Atlantic in a specially constructed single oar kayak. Inspiring in its classical sense, actually has to do with breathing divine oxygen, being infused with the spirit of the gods. The next sentence has perfect rhythm, and adroitly employs parallel inversions and a delayed predicate. The sentence after, with its conversational tone and prepositional ending, perfectly undercuts the Baroque and overwrought one before. Then a short sentence that works like a mathematical equation: subject equals (the being verb) predicate. Then two longer sentences that elaborate on the equation.

There is perhaps something deep-down in every American that makes us think we’re free, or that freedom is our birthright. As always, seeing the shackles of servitude—in our case, the utter inability to escape from all the yammering noise—in a new way remains the only possibility for escape.

 

Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton

In a radio interview, Tracy Kidder, who’s written quite a few good books and at least one important one, advocated for a sort of Maxwell’s demon approach to book reading. He claimed to divide books into two main categories: books in which he has interest and books in which he does not. He went on to say that he hadn’t read James Frey’s memoir (wherein Frey fabricated some of the details of his battle with addiction)—but simply because trusted friends had told him it wasn’t a good book. The truth or falsehood of the details mattered little to him.

I myself know people who will read only “nonfiction,” and libraries and bookstores oblige the bold fantasy of such a label by neatly dividing and labeling their physical spaces so when patrons and customers tilt their heads sideways to scan titles, they know for sure which they’ll pluck from the shelf: sober edification or mere diversion. Have you noticed the lack of a truth section? That would be too bold for any secular institution.

I myself am reading a book of putative American history “nonfiction” right now (and, no, it’s not Team of Rivals). It’s Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the United States and as apposite a personage as there probably is at the close of 2008. The amount of effort that must’ve gone into making such a book makes one’s knees weak. Combing through the writings just of Hamilton, who was prolific even by torrential 18^th century standards, must’ve cost Chernow a few pairs of glasses. Add to this the fact that Hamilton’s friends and enemies also wrote as if paid by the word, generating a staggering amount of yellowed, hand-written, and microfiched Hamiltonalia, not to mention the ensuing 200 years of commentaries and biographies—one shudders. Wringing the pertinent tidbits from this Himalaya of materials and organizing them into an actually readable (and it is) relevant and necessary (meaning it provides something previous bios did not) narrative-style 731 page biography deserves praise, and many have heaped it. The NY Times declared it one of the ten best books of 2004. The WS Journal reacted like a schoolgirl to the Beatles.

But aside from the hope for praise and awards, this must have been a case where the subject’s terawatt-grade energy sustained the writer. Basically, there is nothing Hamilton didn’t do. Soldier, political philosopher, duelist, attorney, constant cause celébrè, author, pseudonymous author, Treasury Secretary, Wizard of Oz to two presidents, father to eight, founder of the modern US economy, etc, etc. When raising an army for a possible confrontation with the French, Hamilton begged Washington to come out of retirement to lead it, then designed the uniform the old Mount Vernonian would wear—right down to the color of the epaulets and the length of the boots. He never stopped working and, in a rare and stunning coincidence that made him perfect for his moment, his intellect and ambition matched his energy.

Most people know all this, and Chernow has to do more than rehash all this. Nonfiction has an argumentative burden which is different, slightly, from the burdens of fiction. Fiction’s burden is to not undermine the creation of the fictional world—sometimes called the dreamscape. My old teacher said you have to plunge a reader down into that rabbit hole and not let them out till the end. Fiction fails when readers look up and see sky. Nonfiction, on the other hand, has to make claims and support them. When it comes to Chernow’s Hamilton, the argument is fairly simple: this was an amazing cat who made a variety of mistakes, some big and some small.

Something has been bothering me about this book for a long time and I finally found a sentence which renders plainly explicit the problem I have with this book. In a chapter titled “The Reign of Witches,” wherein is discussed the most disastrous legislative acts passed by the young country, Chernow writes: “Unfortunately, […] Hamilton supported the Alien and Sedition Acts” (572, emphasis mine).

I’m not a political or financial historian, nor am I a biographer or even an avid reader of biographies. What I am, however, is a teacher of rhetoric, and therefore feel qualified to discuss the problem with that word I emphasized and how it explains the whole “problem” of the reading this text. The rhetorical structure of the book prevents it from being what I would call truthful–at least in the way it, as do all books labeled non-fiction, pretends to be. Chernow achieves “balance” by plainly stating, in places, that Hamilton made a “grave error in judgment” or a “mistake he’d soon regret.” But if the portrait overall is sympathetic, the effect of these transgressions on the reader’s imagination is minimized. I suppose it’s the historian’s job to take a position, but it strikes me what a different thing it is to say, “He was a good guy who made some mistakes,” compared to, “He was a bad guy who had some good qualities.”

So that word, “unfortunately” prompts one to ask: unfortunately for whom?  Certainly unfortunate for a biographer attempting to situate Hamilton in the most flattering light possible.

Let me get more specific. Hamilton’s energy was directed toward establishing a particular kind of country – one centered in New York and based on banking and credit and trade, and once he established this, his subsequent machinations focused on preserving this structure by quashing internal rebellions and raising an army to fight the French or anyone else who seized US ships or refused to trade equitably. Chernow unblinkingly supports these activities, and helps his reader see that the Alien and Sedition Acts were just instances of Hamilton extending his reach a bit too far to achieve his desired ends. Does reading this biography in 2008 force one to question whether Hamilton’s relative success against Jefferson and his Republican brethren was a boon for the country? In other words, can we question the ends in addition to the means?

Chernow’s lens forces the reader to see all events a certain way. For example, Aaron Burr pulled the old bait and switch when he created the Manhattan Company, which morphed from a utility company into a bank (which would compete with Hamilton’s creations: the Bank of New York and the local branch of the Bank of the United States) almost before its charter’s ink had dried. (btw-doesn’t this morphing seem a lot like Enron?). You see, Hamilton was in favor of banking and credit, but not competition. As Chernow puts it: “Hamilton opposed the vogue for state banks that proliferated in the 1790s, less from narrow political motives than from a fear that competition among banks would dilute credit standards and invite imprudent lending practices as bankers vied for clients” (586).

Hamilton, of course, had in mind the preservation of the system he’d created. Noble enough, seemingly. But the fact is that banks run by Federalists had the means to shape the credit landscape in such a way as to favor Federalist causes and starve Republican ones. No Republican bank charter would pass the legislature, so Burr elected to weasel his way in through the back door. Sometimes that’s the only door.

Even if I grant, with respect to the sentence quoted above, that Chernow can decipher which motivated Hamilton more, the base angels or the pure ones, I have to take issue with the contention that Hamilton’s desire for control over credit is such a noble one. He certainly understood what credit standards were best for his vision of the country’s economy, but it’s not beyond contention that his vision was most worthy of such monopolaic power.

But I hope it’s clear I’m not really trying to bash Chernow here so much as the deleterious effects of taxonomy when it comes to the good old printed page.  My overall point is that nonfiction is just as fictional as fiction, insofar as it requires of the reader the capacity to understand the nature of the world being created by the text. If a reader of nonfiction lets down her guard because of where she found it in the library, she has poorly served herself.

Alexander Hamilton does have a striking literary parallel. Both were New Yorkers with sketchy backgrounds, looked good in uniforms, achieved success in the world of finance, and died violent deaths. Recall, however, that Nick Carraway tells us Gatsby’s story, and is what’s termed an “unreliable” narrator. His emotional attachment to the characters, the fact that he is a character, compels a reader to regard all he relates with circumspection. The unreliability and subjectivity are what grant the tale its richness and power, which is a discussion for another day. The point here is that Chernow is no more reliable than Carraway, which is not to say that he’s a bad biographer.  He’s actually very good. What does follow, however, is that the book on Hamilton and the book on Gatsby have more in common than might be thought, and deserve to sit more closely together on the shelves of our minds.

 

Already There

One of the difficulties of diagnosing contemporary US culture is that we lack perspective. Here’s a helpful ichthyological fable I heard somewhere: Two young little fish are swimming around and they come across a big older fish who asks, “How’s the water, boys?” The little guys are unsure of how to respond and they swim on away from the big fish, befuddled. Then one little fish says to the other, “What’s water?”

I’m aware that stone-age people probably didn’t sit around the campfire discussing what their “culture” was and whether it was any good. Also, one of the major problems of our culture might be that we’re individually self-absorbed and -important enough to spend time explaining its collective characteristics and wondering whether these characteristics are admirable or stupid or inevitable or embarrassing or all of those.

I can quickly respond to such objections, then move to my more important point. 1) We are not stone-age folks, 2) our culture has spent a good deal of $ educating us and perhaps introspection is the price of the ticket, 3) plenty of empirical data suggest that our popular culture is unique in its scope, ubiquity, and velocity, and 4) many “counter” voices (in literature, film, and other arts) suggest that our culture more often retards life than fosters it – it offers not purpose but diversion, individuality and loneliness instead of connection and collective meaning.

One vector to attend to is our culture promising much more ecstatic fun than it can ever possibly deliver. This broken covenant, the world’s cruel gift to those of us born after around 1960, makes it awfully difficult to flourish as individuals. Here in the US there seems to have been made for us, sometime in the not too distant past, a Faustian pact—you’ll be endlessly entertained and all it costs is your soul. Which is why those little fish probably have all the right in the world to tell that older fish exactly how the water feels—whenever they figure it out what water is.

It used to be you could sell your soul for rock and roll, now they don’t even bother asking, for we have nothing left to give. The devil has left the rock arena, and the toothy corporate confidence man has taken his spot. I’m referring now to Motley Crue’s 2009 “Saints of Los Angeles Tour,” which begins February 2^nd right here in San Diego (buy tickets), is brought to you (I shit you not) by American Express. But first back up.

In the 1980s, Motley Crue made news by putting out top-selling albums and going on the road as a travelling circus act, playing music and finding time to abuse drugs and alcohol, urinate on fans, beat up concierges, exploit women, and etc. A Rabelaisian romp through the back alleys of our country is what it was, several metaphysical worlds away from button-down Reaganomic officialdom. They were an anti-everything, f the world dervish that gave full throat to and foregrounded, and thereby caricatured, the excesses of US pleasure-driven culture. They served as our soul’s conscience. Whatever line they crossed, they could say, and be correct: “You want us. You need us.”

Aside from being “brought to you by” American Express, the venues the sinister rockers will play on this ‘09 tour include Cox Arena (right on San Diego State University’s campus), Quest Center, Alliant Energy Center, Wells Fargo Arena, Bi-Lo Center, Scotiabank Place, Mohegan Sun Arena, and Verizon Wireless Arena. The thing to notice, and why this is the “water” that’s tough to see, is that this isn’t really selling out at all; it’s just what happens. Absurd commercialism is no longer odious; worse, it’s not even funny.

We no longer need Motley Crue; nor do we want them. But they need us. They’re reborn, Phoenixly sober, and now they too genuflect before the great true God who demands nothing, knowing that voluntary fealty is inevitable and forged of far greater stuff. Their smiles have the sheen of snake oil, not the real mischief.

Have you ever worried about something for a long time then realized it already happened? Is that the worst kind of nightmare? Vu déjà? Instead of “I been there before,” (what Huck Finn said in the middle of the 19^th century), the 21^st century American picaros ask: “What did you expect?”

 

Update – The Power of Art

An anonymous donor, who must have seen Prometheus Unbound or read sweetunrest, has solved the firepit crisis.