I Love This So Much.
From Vanderleun, via Charlie (Colorado). I don’t know where V. got it or whose copyright I’m violating. I can’t help myself.
Killing America
It’s probably a bad idea for someone like me, with a weak grounding in economics, to think about economics. But you can’t help thinking about economics nowadays. And I probably should have been thinking about it all along.
Thinking about it is hard work for me, in part because so many people I instinctively dislike and mistrust have weighed in on it so loudly, with opinions that seem to me based on flawed premises. But that doesn’t mean their conclusions are to be dismissed.
Look, here’s what I see. I’m 50. When I was a teenager, banks were local. In Philadelphia, you had PSFS and you had Girard. Both storied old names with deep local roots. You could open a savings account there and get 4% or 5% interest on $100. It taught you how to invest and grow your money. Both are gone now. The banks you see now on the city’s streets, I don’t even know where they have headquarters.
And nobody except rich dudes and eccentrics played the stock market. It was understood to be a form of legalized gambling in which the small and uninitiated investor was almost certainly going to be cheated, unless he worked his tail off at it. When you bought stock, you got a big engraved piece of paper with the name of the company on it.
When you had a good job, you had a pension fund. Your employers, who probably were local, had it invested in a local bank, which lent it out at interest to people it knew and trusted, to buy homes, build stores, etc.
There were many problems and pitfalls in all this. But it seemed to work well enough for modest growth and reasonably good employment.
Then, in 1978, along came the 401(k). I don’t think anyone intended it to have the effect it had. But it eventually made everyone an investor in the global financial markets. Nobody except government workers seems to have a pension fund now. In short, all of us gradually came to feel our interests were identical to those of the Wall Street sharks, because our pension funds were parked in the same places as their play money.
Worse, new financial products were devised which sliced and diced and repackaged investments like sausage meat. So you didn’t know if your money was in this company or that company, but you felt you were playing the game. And you were, but now it was a shell game. By the mid-1980s, guys in the barbershops were reading the stocks pages and bragging about their investments. As though the shark tank had become a Disney ride, as though they still weren’t guppies.
Short term, big profit. If someone bought up the local silverware making company and shipped the work off to China and Mexico, that put 150 people in your town out of work, but it also meant that company could make a lot more profit, and as we all were, technically, invested in corporate profits, it seemed like a good thing in the end overall. A little sad, maybe, if you knew one of the unlucky few. But we had learned to think of ourselves like little tycoons.
The Wall Street mentality. I don’t know any bankers, or any investment house executives. But I know the kind of rapacious swine they brought in to take over newspapers in the 1980s and ’90s, when they passed from family hands to corporate investments. They are people you don’t ever want to be beholden to for anything.
This guy can tell you what really killed journalism in America. The newspaper is a product that, unlike a lightbulb, can’t be outsourced to China or India to make (though, gods help them, they have tried). Doesn’t matter. It was subject to the same evisceration as any other American industry:
In fact, when newspaper chains began cutting personnel and content, their industry was one of the most profitable yet discovered by Wall Street money. We know now – because bankruptcy has opened the books – that the Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly 100 editors and reporters in an era when the paper was achieving 37 percent profits. In the years before the Internet deluge, the men and women who might have made The Sun a more essential vehicle for news and commentary – something so strong that it might have charged for its product online – they were being ushered out the door so that Wall Street could command short-term profits in the extreme.
Such short-sighted arrogance rivals that of Detroit in the 1970s, when automakers – confident that American consumers were mere captives – offered up Chevy Vegas, and Pacers and Gremlins without the slightest worry that mediocrity would be challenged by better-made cars from Germany or Japan.
In short, my industry butchered itself and we did so at the behest of Wall Street and the same unfettered, free-market logic that has proved so disastrous for so many American industries. And the original sin of American newspapering lies, indeed, in going to Wall Street in the first place.
When locally-based, family-owned newspapers like The Sun were consolidated into publicly-owned newspaper chains, an essential dynamic, an essential trust between journalism and the communities served by that journalism was betrayed.
So didn’t it all start with the gentle, subtle, paradigm shift that made the average American worker (when there still was such a thing) feel like his interests were aligned with those of the worst sort of corporate bosses? That has occasionally happened before in our history (in the 1830s and 1850s, for instance), but it is not a stable position, because it is so palpably false. But now it’s become the fiction that sank the ship we rode this far.
I don’t think anyone did all of this deliberately, even though it was accomplished in a lifetime. I don’t think any one political party is to blame for all of it. But I do think some people steered it and nudged it for their own benefit. And they still have not been called to account for it.
And I would like to see them all shipped off to a barren rock of an island in shark-infested waters, with no trees and no shade and no fresh water, and left there. I’d even go get a pilot’s license and fly them there myself.
A Thought-Provoking Forward
Not much hope that enough people will act on it — because in this economy lowest price rules, and because people just won’t be bothered; they have too many worries and diversions on their minds.
But who knows. Maybe if the right celebrities and media picked up on it. Maybe it could become a viral meme.
> One Light Bulb at a Time
>
> A physics teacher in high school, once told the students that while one grasshopper on the railroad tracks wouldn’t slow a train very much, a billion of them would. With that thought in mind, read the following, obviously written by a good American.
>
> Good idea . . . one light bulb at a time . . .
>
> Check this out. I can verify this because I was in Lowes the other day – I was looking at the hose attachments. They were all made in China . The next day I was in ACE Hardware, and just for the heck of it, I checked the hose attachments there. They were made in USA .
>
> Start looking — In our current economic situation, every little thing we buy or do affects someone else – even their job. So, after reading this email, I think this lady is on the right track. Let’s get behind her!
>
> My grandson likes Hershey’s candy. I noticed, though, that it is marked made in Mexico now. I do not buy it anymore..
>
> My favorite toothpaste, Colgate is now made in Mexico . I have switched to Crest.
>
> You have to read the labels on everything . . .
>
> This past weekend I was at Kroger. I needed 60 Watt light bulbs and dryer sheets. I was in the light bulb aisle, and right next to the GE brand that I normally buy was an off-brand labeled “Everyday Value.” I picked up both brands of bulbs and compared the stats – they were the same, except for the price. The GE bulbs were more money than the Everyday Value brand – – – but the thing that surprised me the most was the fact that GE was made in MEXICO and the Everyday Value brand was made in the USA, in a company in Cleveland, Ohio!
>
> So on to another aisle – Bounce Dryer Sheets . . . . . yep, you guessed it, Bounce cost more money and is made in Canada. The Everyday Value brand was less money and MADE IN THE USA! I did laundry yesterday and the dryer sheets performed just like the Bounce Free I have been using for years and at almost half the price!
>
> So throw out the myth that you cannot find products you use every day that are made right here. My challenge to you is to start reading the labels when you shop for everyday things and see what you can find that is made in the USA – the job you save may be your own or your neighbor’s!
>
> If you accept the challenge, pass this on to others in your address book so we can all start buying American, one light bulb at a time! (We should have awakened a decade ago!)
>
> Let’s get with the program . . . we have the power to help our fellow Americans keep their jobs and create more jobs here in the USA.
>
> I passed this on . . . will you?
Great Tributes to J [UPDATED]
Just in case you haven’t seen them:
by True Ancestor (my brother David)
by The Love Goddess (my friend Dalma Heyn)
by Head Butler (J’s old friend Jesse Kornbluth) (follow the link within for more)
by Stuck in the ’80s (St. Petersburg Times blogger Steve Spears)
by Dreidel Hustler (virtual friend Brian Abrams, formerly of Heeb magazine, who wanted to declare J an “Honorary Heeb.” Which he was, anyway.)
The last two focus on J’s cameo of pop-culture immortality in Trading Places; there is even a clip. (Proof that we can’t direct our own legacy. What I’m going to be remembered for is this.)
I will add any others that turn up and front-page this post for a day or two each time.
The very friend who introduced us over cats writes to me:
Before a memorial gathering, isn’t it pushing on an open door to get an obit of Jacques printed in the NYT? He is pure Big Apple legend. And of course as photogenic as Nicole Kidman – in his own way. The snag is you would have to write it. … Do you have it in you to do this so close out? It does not have to be magnificent. As your brother proved, the heart will tell the story.
I’m not sure I have it in me just yet, and if too early for me it must already be too late for the NYT; doesn’t an obit have to be news?
Meanwhile, I’m on the way to pick up his ashes. When I called the mortuary, I was a bit staggered by a cheery, “He’s ready!”
Ready when you are, C.M.
UPDATE: From the Kyokushin Karate community in his birthland of Romania, old friends in Bucuresti, Sibiu, and Tirgu Mures. I could almost translate them, but not quite.
Afterburn
A dear friend just wrote me a long e-mail in which she said, among many other things, that where J is now he isn’t thinking about food, because “the soul doesn’t have a stomach.”
I sent her a two-word reply: “His does.”
Stupidity is Forever. [updated]
That’s the punchline of a Romanian joke. God is handing out various qualities to people getting ready to be born, and finally there are only two left: Beauty and Stupidity. The last one in line is Bula, the hapless hero of many Romanian jokes (a sort of wise fool, or idiot savant, whose name bears a near-miss resemblance to the word for “penis”). God gives him a choice, and to His surprise, Bula chooses stupidity. “May I ask why?” says God. And Bula says, “Beauty is fleeting, but stupidity is eternal!”
Lots of paperwork has arrived, and it has perversely cheered me (if also made more work for me) by being all wrong.
Social Security, taking my statement over the phone, misheard and misrecorded J’s date of death as November 16, which will necessitate at least one more phone call to set it straight. Screen Actors Guild has been sending his pension to his legal name, Jack Herman, for years, but is now addressing correspondence to his professional name — another potential source of rich confusion. (Partly our stupidity, in this case, for maintaining multiple names.) But it is American Express that takes the cake. When I called them to have J’s senior gold card account, on which I was an additional cardholder, transferred to my name, they gave me their condolences and said no problem, but they would be sending me a new primary card with a new number, which they did on November 23. On the same day, they sent me the following notice:
To the Estate of
Annie Gottlieb
C/O Annie Gottlieb
Re: Account Ending [NEW card number!]To Whom It May Concern:
We are sorry to learn ot the death of Annie Gottlieb and want to thank you for taking the time to notify us. We value our relationships with our customers and are pleased that you want to continue with Cardmembership. . . .
Please complete, sign, and return the enclosed Primary Cardmember Change Request Application so that we may process your request to transfer this account. . . .
We need to receive the completed and signed application within 30 days, or we will have to close Annie Gottlieb’s [NEW!] account, as well as any Additional Cards.
Delicious. I’m bracing myself for J’s death certificate. What can they get wrong there? Maybe they’ll send me a birth certificate instead?
One of my ex-brothers-in-law, who was Mexican and unsure of his English and also hung over at his wedding to my sister over 30 years ago, screwed up the vows and actually married himself.
Night Thoughts [UPDATED AGAIN]
“Home” from Florida.
I’ve taken to putting “home” in quotes for Chapel Hill. Florida is home. New York, which I’d about given up on, is rapidly reacquiring its homelike magnetism. (I had to write my address this morning and almost wrote my New York address.)
Chapel Hill never “took” for J — he always just assumed he was in New York — and it seems it hasn’t taken for me, either. For one thing, I never got out into it and got to know it. It has only been the place where I took care of J. And so it only reminds me of him. I can’t go through the parking area without seeing him sitting in his wheelchair in the sun. Or seeing him not sitting . . . or not seeing him . . . The place is totally defined by an absence. It is hollow.
Not that New York won’t be strange without him. But New York is where our hale and active life was, as well as both our lives before we knew each other. The beginning where we part company again. The reverse fork in the road. The place to reclaim all that, separate, together, separate. I need to give J back to New York, where he was something of a famous character, in his element, before I entered his life. (His dementia taught me the humbling lesson that the best days of his life, his pride and prime, were before he met me.) And I need to resume — immeasurably fortified — the independent discovery that he interrupted, even hijacked, the best thing that could have happened to me. “Jacques therapy.”
* * *
My father asked me, “What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn’t met Jacques?”
Unanswerable question, of course, but I tried to answer it. “I probably would’ve gotten married, had a couple of kids, and gotten divorced. I would have been more of a typical member of my cohort — an ecofeminist, or something. I probably would’ve written more books, but they would’ve been more like other people’s books. I’d have been a bird of a feather.”
* * *
As J was dying, I chanted to him the names of some of the cats and people who would be waiting for him on the other side, if there is another side. It was quite a while afterwards before I smacked myself in the forehead and said, “I forgot his sister!” Who died as a prisoner in Russia, unknown to him, only 50 miles from where he was, only a few months after her capture. Whom he rarely talked about. Then: “But maybe that’s because I am his sister.” I’ve long thought that. If there is reincarnation. It would fit, in timing and many other ways.
* * *
I always thought of J as robustly physical. So I was very surprised, after he died, to discover that more than two-thirds of that had been energy, not matter. That’s why it doesn’t bother me that his body has been cremated. It wasn’t him — at all. This is true of everyone, but it seemed more true of him. He seemed more physical and was, if anything, less so. What do you know.
UPDATE: Well, of course this place is empty. He wouldn’t hang around here for a second. He’s back in New York already!
UPDATE 2: I was worried that my going to Chicago for 4 nights, and leaving J in the (supposedly excellent) hospice facility, where they had trouble taking good care of someone as big and relatively healthy as he was — someone who was just “parked,” rather than departing — was the trigger for his shingles. I wasn’t comfortable about leaving him there, but needed respite and, having lost my job, could not afford a round-the-clock aide. I asked my main ally the home hospice aide whether I should bring along extra-large Depends from the supply she brought me, and she said, “Oh, no, they have everything there, and if they don’t, they can get it from the warehouse right across the street.” As it turned out, they didn’t have any extra-large Depends, and they didn’t bother to get any (though I brought him on a Thursday, so they didn’t have the weekend excuse). So they couldn’t dress him, couldn’t sit him up straight in his wheelchair, left him parked on his bare tailbone in a hospital gown, and he got a pressure sore in 4 nights that he hadn’t gotten in 4 years. The home hospice team was upset and angry that this had happened; but they were also on the verge of having to decertify him because he was too “stable.”
I’ll never know whether that discomfort and temporary sense of abandonment (he expressed his distress to me over the phone) contributed to his depressed immune system and the outbreak of shingles, but something else struck me. Every time he has gotten seriously ill, it’s been in the fall. He got a spinal staph infection in October 1975, descended into aspiration pneumonia in November-December 2006, and now this. The dread of winter impressed on his very cells in Russia, and triggered by the cooling and shortening of the days, may have been the greater factor.
Even if I came up with this to make myself feel better, it is also true. And as surprisingly “stable” as he seemed for how long he had been ill, the robust façade was deceptive. He had declined, and was vulnerable. His disease, called Lewy body dementia, had very slowly, with remorseless patience, dragged him down within death’s reach.
One more odd note: significant events of his life tended to take place on the 19th. He crossed into the Western zone of Germany on February 19, 1947, two days before his 19th birthday. He fought in the Jack Dempsey tournament on September 19, 1949 or 1950. He died November 19.
Ambiance 