A performer in the Opening Ceremonies. (Getty)

In the glare of the Opening Night Ceremony for the 2012 Olympiad, NBC’s custodians of sporting goodwill would occasionally suggest that the spectacle unfolding beneath their gaze would prove a boon to cash-strapped East London.

The event’s own labored narrative arc told a different story: If the receding industrial prosperity of the East End would ever return, it would only be in the tightly scripted precincts of imagineered spectacle. As a retinue of factory workers poured like so many Orcs out of the Glastonberry Tor erected at one corner of the facility, they hastened to a makeshift foundry to pretend-forge one of the Olympic rings. To Matt Lauer, this tableau was not merely a visual triumph, but an olfactory one: “Not only are you watching this ring being forged actually on the field, you’re now smelling it. They’ve found a way to pump that sulfur smell, that factory smell, out to 65,000 people.”

In all likelihood, the costly, cumbersome Olympiad, arriving as Britain’s economy continues to reel under the fallout from the 2008 financial meltdown, won’t produce any whiff of prosperity more genuine or enduring than that fleeting, simulated stench of the Victorian era’s dark mills. The $30 billion-and-counting that have so far lubricated the London Games will probably billow out of sight once the Olympic Village is vacated. “The typical pattern in host cities is steep cost overruns,” said Helen Lenskyj, an emeritus sociology professor at the University of Toronto who’s published many critical studies on the impact of the Games in host communities. “But the organizations sponsoring the event never learn from that experience.”

Olympics boosters like to point to the stimulative impact that the Games had for Barcelona in 1992. But a more instructive case study may be Greece in 2004. The Greek economy was already a basket case when Athens was gearing up to stage the summer Games; indeed, the event furnished a glittering adjunct PR drive at a precarious moment, when Greece was contracting yet more unstable debt in its misguided drive to enter the now-imploding Eurozone. But once Greek leaders had coughed up the standard 11-figure fees for sponsorship, security details, hospitality and the like, there would be little to do but watch their lovingly assembled Olympic infrastructure molder away in the shadows of the domestic economy’s broader collapse.

What’s puzzling is how civic leaders ever expect any other result from the mobbed-up oligarchy known as the modern Olympic Games. Even in hale economic circumstances, the governing body of the Games, the powerful and secretive International Olympics Committee, is not the sort of organization designed to lift all boats in a rising tide. Ever since the 1980s, when the Games came into their own as a cross-branded extravaganza of sponsorship, ad revenue and media market share, money is very much the performance-enhancing drug of choice at the upper reaches of Olympic power. The sitting head of the International Olympics Committee, Jacques Rogge, is a Belgian count and a retired competitive yachtsman—and that’s what passes for a crusading reformer in the money-blighted world of I.O.C. privilege.

Mr. Rogge was groomed as the successor to the Games’s long-running chieftain Don Juan Antonio Samaranch y Torelló, First Marquis of Samaranch, Grandee of Spain, a former sporting official with the fascist government of Francisco Franco who managed to reinvent himself as a global ambassador of sport with the large-scale financial backing of Adidas shoe mogul Horst Dassler. Mr. Samaranch oversaw a stunning litany of corruption in his two decades on the job—encouraging influence peddling, arranging sinecures for family members and cronies of committee members, and padding the I.O.C. board with fellow authoritarians and baksheesh impresarios. In his more expansive moments, Samaranch would also grace vicious dictators like Romania’s Nicolae Ceacescu with awards for their alleged contributions to international sport. When an HBO interviewer confronted Mr. Samaranch on this latter trespass, he curtly replied that he was “very proud” of Ceaucescu’s garland, adding that the I.O.C.’s judgment was not to be questioned because “we are more important than the Catholic religion.”

Since he came to power in 2001, Mr. Rogge has softened Samaranch’s air of thuggish self-regard, but otherwise little has changed about the Committee’s graft-friendly business model.  On Mr. Rogge’s watch, the BBC uncovered a 2004 scandal in which two reporters posing as East London businessmen persuaded Bulgarian I.O.C. member Ivan Svalkov to agree to sell his vote to site the Games in London outright for cash—just two years after the bribery-steeped Salt Lake City Games that Mitt Romney had putatively stepped in and “saved.”

Just last year, Joao Havelange,  the former head of the international soccer federation FIFA and a longtime Samaranch crony, was forced to resign the I.O.C. board in the midst of a multimillion dollar bribery scandal involving broadcasting rights doled out to ISL, the now-bankrupt sports-licensing franchise Mr. Dassler founded to coordinate marketing for the Olympics. Jeremy Hunt, the British government’s chief liaison to the I.O.C. for the 2012 Games, has been implicated in a vast Rupert Murdoch bribery scandal involving News International’s plans to catapult BskyB to the forefront of the Asian market. Strongman leaders are still permanent fixtures on the Committee; Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was unable to travel to London with his country’s delegation because of EU sanctions against his ghastly human-rights record. Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, however, is on hand, despite his government’s routine detention of journalists and dissidents. Even Henry Kissinger sits on the Committee, presumably because it’s one of the only gatherings of global autocrats in which he looks comparatively unindictable.

The I.O.C., in short, specializes in the sort of workaday level of corruption that attends daily life in a strongman kleptocracy in Africa or South America—but on a much more lavish Old World scale. The difference is that the developing world’s tinpot dictators haven’t managed to leverage their marketing clout into flattering global media coverage. When NBC lavishes the Olympics with a $4.38 billion contract—and when the network's corporate parent, GE, has forked over a multimillion-dollar sponsorship fee for the games—detailed investigations of bribery charges and judging scandals don’t exactly abound. And when more stubborn journalists, such as the Scottish investigative reporter Andrew Jennings, are able to stir up some real trouble, the I.O.C. hits them with criminal lawsuits in its home jurisdiction of Switzerland.

Still, one can easily understand why economic forces well beyond East London are embracing the current festivities in a half-prayerful mien: The other great models of international market comity are shuddering and heaving in the wings. Just a few miles from the where the Industrial Revolution was being re-enacted on Friday night, the British Parliament has been investigating the rampant bank fraud committed in the LIBOR scandal, which reduced the very basis of the global credit economy into a fiction. Shortly after the Games wind down, the flailing Euro Zone faces fresh reckonings in the German courts and the Dutch polls while weighing more bailouts for the still wheezing Spanish and Italian economies.

In short, the only path forward for the great neoliberal sachems of our global market could well be the model pioneered by the I.O.C.: gauzy, soft-focus tales of heroic individual achievement for the masses, and coercive results-rigging and generous payoffs for the privileged few behind the scenes. After all, as the slickly produced montage celebrating the ineffable virtues of the Scepter’d Isle announced at the outset of Friday’s ceremony, Britain is a land “where fairy tales never end.”

Diamond of Barclays.

From outside the elite preserves of the financial industry, Britain’s LIBOR scandal follows a wearily familiar narrative arc: Yes, a leading investment bank has confessed to gaming a central borrowing index—the so-called London Interbank Offered Rate, which establishes how much banks charge each other to borrow money. And yes, that bank—Barclays of London—has coughed up 290 million pounds in fines to stave off the prospect of a criminal prosecution. But jaded consumers of financial news can be forgiven for thinking that this all amounts to the perennial status quo for the investment class, in the city and on Wall Street alike. Haven’t these characters always sought to live by their own self-seeking code—and haven’t fund managers long been little more than glorified corruptionists? If we systemically prosecute this sort of behavior, are we just futilely attempting to issue a restraining order against human nature?

In reality, the LIBOR dustup is a very big deal—and largely because of its very routine profile. Barclays has confessed to artificially deflating its LIBOR rate going back to 2005, in an effort to stave off jitters among investors in the bank’s sprawling derivatives portfolio. But the costs of marginal vanity upgrades to an institution’s profitability run very quickly into the billions in a market that covers hundreds of trillions in investments. LIBOR numbers govern just about every sort of borrowing done on a major scale, from bad mortgage bets to the credit default swaps used (delusionally, it turns out) to hedge against them. What’s more, the evidence suggests that conduct of Barclays—one of 16 banks now under investigation, on both sides of the Atlantic, for manipulating its LIBOR numbers—prolonged, in sweeping fashion, the ghastly derivatives bubble that collapsed in 2008. With much of world economy transacting its credit business on artificially swollen bottom lines during those wheezing boom years, the fallout from LIBOR fixing could run easily into the trillions.

The unprecedented scale of the LIBOR scam helps explain the alacrity that British lawmakers and regulators have so far shown in at least creating the appearance of a crackdown. The present drive across the pond to punish the lords of capital comes, we all know, athwart a long-standing culture of impunity in financial matters; the real outrage of jury-rigging the LIBOR is that it exposes the whole global credit system as an exercise in cronyist bad faith. And even symbolic shows of civil authority in the dealings of the city trigger large-scale cognitive dissonance at this point. Robert Diamond, the American head of Barclays, seemed a bit flummoxed to be so suddenly prevailed upon to resign; if Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein continue to reign securely atop their scandal-rocked investment fiefdoms, why should he be made an example of—especially with some 15 other banking chieftains potentially on the LIBOR make as well? And why should Paul Tucker—the presumptive incoming head of the Bank of England, who has sedulously groomed himself for the top slot since his arrival at the British equivalent of the Fed more than two decades ago—suddenly be dragged before Parliament to find his nomination in jeopardy for little reason beyond a vague impression that he should have done more to hunt down evidence of LIBOR-rigging back in 2007?

In truth, if British authorities were themselves more vigilant, the LIBOR mess wouldn’t have festered on for so long in the first place; a little-noted institutional side benefit of these nine-figure immunity deals that regulators so routinely cut with prosecution targets is that they insulate both the banks and their lax regulatory stewards from unwelcome public scrutiny. But even so, the public outrage stoking the British inquiries makes for an instructive contrast with America’s largely fatalist outlook on financial malfeasance. As Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osbourne announced in a recent speech on the LIBOR scandal before Parliament, “Fraud is a crime in ordinary business—why shouldn’t it be so in banking?”

Why, indeed? In the United States, the long-hapless Commodities Futures Trading Commission has been conducting its own years-long inquiry into LIBOR-fixing and has a grand jury reviewing potential criminal charges. But as Mr. Diamond well knows, these official investigations have a distinctly Potemkin feel in the States: At most, a fine is assessed, and a plea deal entered. Nothing as gauche  as an actual criminal prosecution ever dogs our scandal-plagued investment class, even though maximum-minimum sentences are standard fare in most jurisdictions when nonaffluent citizens commit their own repeat offenses, or run afoul of our draconian drug wars.

Even though England is a far more class-bound social order than ours is reputed to be, it’s clear at moments like this that the American polity has no real stomach for holding our financial overclass accountable to anyone. Indeed, our leaders have precious little real incentive to put the brakes on the stateside regime of banking impunity when financial titans can pull up stakes from their jurisdictions, taking both payrolls and donor rolls with them—even though the anemic condition of our credit and employment economies is largely the handiwork of that selfsame banking sector Better to shunt the whole business over to the largely captive regulatory system, which at least brokers its appointed fines and honors its appointed silence in somewhat decorous fashion. To really get to the bottom of something like the LIBOR cartel, you have to subject a whole culture of corruption to sustained scrutiny—and worse, to work out actual, enforceable measures to prevent it all from happening again. We have, it seems, gone in stunningly short time from a financial order deemed too big to fail to one that is simply too big to care about.

For collateral evidence of this trend, one need look no further than the wheezing machinery of the presidential race. Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney clearly had banked (as it were) on widespread public indifference to financial niceties when he misleadingly claimed that his tenure as CEO at Bain Capital ended in 1999. So what if, as Mother Jones’ David Corn noted, SEC documents clearly listed him as CEO and 100 percent owner of the equity fund as late as 2002—well past the job-hemorrhaging Bain takeover of the GST steel mill in 2001, recently featured in a series of Obama attacks? Who reads SEC filings, let alone their supporting documentation? And until The Boston Globe sleuthed out the damning documentary record last week, Mr. Romney’s bet was bearing fruit; indeed, the same day The Globe story broke, Mr. Romney’s campaign released its own counterattack ad, seeking to refute the GST saga largely on the grounds that the entire deal went down at a time when Mr. Romney was no longer affiliated with Bain.

One little-noted casualty of the LIBOR scandal is Mr. Diamond’s public role as a Romney booster. Diamond had been a major overseas bundler of expat donations to the Romney campaign and was scheduled to host a July 27 fundraiser for Romney during the candidate’s trip to London for the 2012 Olympics. For obvious reasons, Diamond has had to relinquish that high-prestige gig as well. It’s a pity—the two men doubtless would have had a lot to talk about.

editorial@observer.com

Indeed, Newsroom, which Mr. Sorkin has tirelessly flogged in his own media interviews as a paean to the endangered idealism of the news business, comes bearing the none-too-subtle brief of reviving the apostles of the American intellect with fresh infusions of cultural and political power. The show’s opening set piece features Mr. Daniels delivering an unscripted jeremiad, in the great fictional tradition of Howard Beale, the “mad prophet of the airwaves” featured in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 news satire Network. Only where Peter Finch’s unhinged anchor offered a litany of searing political grievances, Mr. Daniels bemoans the passing of a genteel, high-achieving American meritocracy—a time when the idea of intelligence didn’t “make us feel inferior,” when the country went to war “for moral reasons,” and when it “cultivated the world greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy.” What’s more, he fulminates, “we were informed by great men, men who were revered.” Lest the show’s viewers forget this crucial point, the opening credits of Newsroom feature footage of the long-departed lions of the postwar network news scene: Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley.

However, as is the case in most of Mr. Sorkin’s productions, these dazzlingly smart creatures fall into pat, pasteboard character arcs: They are either loyal or cunning, cynical or idealistic, clever or, well, cleverer. They are, in short, model American meritocrats—people who hew to the bedrock belief that an academic credential or a professional award is the most invaluable window into the human soul. In another of the show’s strangely lifeless confrontations, disgruntled senior producer Don (the cunning one!) seeks to discredit a distrusted incoming executive producer, bearing the echt-preppy name of McKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) with this curiously precise kiss-off: “She’s like a sophomore poli-sci major at Sarah Lawrence.” His rival senior producer Jim Harper (the loyal one!) one-ups him, though, by citing the two Peabody awards (and one battle wound) she earned covering the war in Afghanistan. It is without a doubt the whitest version of “the dozens” ever played—except, perhaps, for this priceless snatch of shouted dialogue from the bow-tied, dipsomaniacal network exec Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston): “I’m gonna beat the shit out of you; I don’t care how many protein bars you eat!”

Not even a grizzled on-the-job drunk is permitted to forget for a moment, in Sorkin-land, the American culture of self-disciplined high achievement.

With this kind of omnicompetent brilliance everywhere on display, it’s little wonder that Mr. Sorkin seems to think that the entire problem with TV news can be solved via a shift in format. Charlie Skinner believes that news can be great again if the network just gives it enough time and space to breathe, in an hourlong newsmagazine format, with gloriously exciting real-time reporting bringing it, just barely, in under deadline. “We just decided to,” he says of the media’s halcyon age of network news reporting, as though the wise men atop the Big Three’s news operations might just as easily have decided to cure cancer, or carry off a cup at Wimbledon.

Or, as Mr. Sorkin’s meritocratic fancy would have it, a more tightly focused, and properly motivated (idealistic!) body of valedictorians could report out the tangled, much-litigated saga of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in, oh, 20 minutes or so. Mr. Sorkin shadowed several cable news organizations as part of his research, but not long enough to learn that the unglamorous work of investigative reporting involves much more than hanging up a prestigious credential and letting the plaudits roll serenely in. As news of the explosion on the BP rig comes across the wires, the savvy Harper—the loyal one, remember—works the phones and sizes up, in no time, the true environmental devastation in the offing. When McAvoy and McHale press him for his sources, he divulges that, yes, his former college roommate is a senior executive at BP, and his sister is placed in a sensitive spot high up on the Halliburton chain of command.

This is a risibly awful depiction of the activity of reporting, and not just because it conforms in every way to the smugly insulated social vision of Sorkinism. It so happens that throughout the BP spill crisis, I was a national news editor—at one of the online news outlets that Mr. Sorkin and his characters all gleefully despise on uninformed principle—and I can attest that family connections and school ties produced precisely zero worthwhile reporting on the catastrophe. (The only thing less plausible at that time would be turncoat executives at Halliburton and BP serving as primary sources on the disaster.) Indeed, for all the wall-to-wall coverage that TV news shops devoted to the BP-spun versions of the disaster, much of the best reporting came from unconnected, hard-working reporters on the ground, such as Mac McClelland with Mother Jones and (I am proud to say) Brett Michael Dykes, the spill reporter I supervised at Yahoo News.

But for Sorkin to grasp this essential point, he’d have to suspend, ever so briefly, his unquestioning allegiance to the world-changing excellence of the credentialed overclass. Much is made in the show of the inherent democratic value of newsgathering. “There’s nothing more important in a democracy than a well-informed electorate,” intones McHale—who was, of course, the daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s ambassador to the U.N. But in the sort of blinkered social order where citizen-viewers must be patiently tutored in the high-professional folkways of anchorman reverence, the struggle for democracy has already been waged and lost.

Meanwhile, progressive-minded commentators and political leaders drew obsessive attention to the first of these factors, noting that out-of-state Super PACs and national GOP organizations helped Governor Walker roll up more than a seven-fold funding advantage, pulling in nearly $30 million compared to something shy of $4 million for his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. “If you have enough money, you can put out not only an alternate message,” lamented Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who chairs the Democratic Governors Association, “you can put out an alternate set of numbers, an alternate story, an alternate reality ... trying to convince everyone that the reason they’re not doing better is because school teachers have pensions.”

The influence of campaign cash is indeed a toxic and disfiguring force—but as Governor O’Malley himself went on to note, the recall vote faced other daunting obstacles, chief among them the procedural objection that Governor Walker shouldn’t have faced a recall in the first place. Even though his assault on public-sector unions was wildly unpopular—stoking dramatic mass protests outside the state Capitol the previous winter—some 60 percent of Wisconsin voters told pollsters that recall campaigns should be reserved for cases of ethical and/or criminal misconduct.

More fundamentally, though, doting on campaign cash or the strategic merits of the anti-Walker crusade changes the subject in the face of the true, distressing moral of the failed mobilization of a grassroots left in Wisconsin: the Potemkin façade of progressive politics in our age. National Democrats never really galvanized money or balloting power behind the recall, for the simple reason that the Democratic Party stopped serving as a persuasive advocate for wage-earning Americans about two decades ago. When unions bitterly contested Governor Walker’s ultimately successful bid to rein in collective bargaining among government employees, the Madison rallies had the look and feel of a bona fide economic uprising of the disenfranchised, akin to the spontaneous protests of the Occupy movement. So one might expect national Democrats to harness their wagon behind an energized corps of voters seeking to strike a blow for fundamental rights in the workplace—especially in a presidential election cycle providing precious little in the way of energizing economic progress. (For just the most recent current example, see President Obama’s stunning bid over the weekend to channel John McCain, circa September 2008, and pronounce that the American private sector is “doing fine”—news, certainly, to the 12.7 million or so Americans still unable to find work in it.)

Yet union campaigns and workplace representation count for very nearly nothing in the sanctums of national Democratic strategy. As early as 1992—the cycle in which Bill Clinton and his cohort of “third way” economic strategists shook off the alleged stigmas of the Democrats’ “anti-business” image—polled majorities began to identify the Democrats as the party of the rich. By the last presidential cycle, the evidence unambiguously supported that view: A 2009 USA Today analysis of Census data found that Democratic lawmakers represented 57 percent of households earning $200,000 or more in annual income; in 2005, the GOP had represented 55 percent of that income demographic. Small wonder that President Obama could rouse himself to back the Walker recall only long enough to send out a solitary, belated pro-Barrett tweet—a suitably distracted, digitized and managerial response to a historic material reversal in the cause of worker self-determination.

This shift simply punctuates the steady migration of the Democratic leadership class away from the party’s historic working-class base. Once he was in office, Clinton wasted little time in selling the interests of union Democrats down the river with the ratification of NAFTA and the erection of the executive branch’s current job-hemorrhaging protocols of free trade. Obama followed the same new Democratic bait-and-switch playbook in the early months of his presidency; after booking at least $200 million in union donations to his 2008 campaign, the president quietly shelved labor’s prime legislative goal: “card check” legislation to streamline organizing drives in workplaces, and thereby (so labor leaders hoped) to begin reversing the disastrous decades-long decline in private-sector union membership. Instead, Obama prioritized a health-care overhaul riddled with boondoggles for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries—a law that Democrats are now scared to highlight in their own campaign dossiers, even if the Supreme Court manages to uphold it later this month. Card check never even came up for a floor vote.

And in a political version of battered-spouse syndrome, unions largely played along with the strategy. Andy Stern, then the president of the 2.2-million-member Service Employees International Union, was the most frequent visitor to the White House during the height of the health-care battle in Congress. On one level, Mr. Stern made his own narrow political accommodation to the lobbyist-first ethos of the Democratic nomenklatura—the SEIU, which kicked in a cool $60 million to the 2008 Obama campaign all by itself, represents a good share of workers in the health-care industry. Still, it’s impossible to imagine, say, Charles and David Koch, the energy barons who’ve engineered their own multimillion-dollar backing for today’s conservative movement, sitting placidly by while Republican leaders announced that, while they very much appreciate the truckloads of coal and oil money the Kochs have backed into the loading docks, well, offshore drilling just can’t be a prime order of business before Congress these days.

Nevertheless, our commentariat, the Democratic Party elite and—most puzzling of all—organized labor itself continue faithfully reprising the pantomime fiction that the Democrats are the party of the toiling masses, arrayed against the expropriating classes. The real surprise in Wisconsin, in other words, wasn’t so much the magnitude of Governor Walker’s victory, or Mayor Barrett’s defeat; it was, rather, that at this late date, anyone expected the Democratic establishment to contribute anything more than a lousy Tweet to the cause.

Romney. (Getty)

It’s rare that the soulless machinery of the presidential campaign system emits a telltale creak, exposing the terrifying vacuity that lurks just beneath all the overheated  microprocessors on the motherboard. Yet on the eve of the holiday weekend, we were witness to just such a spectacle, in an interview that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney granted to Time magazine’s politics correspondent Mark Halperin.

Early on in the proceedings, Mr. Halperin lobbed a simple procedural question Mr. Romney’s way: Why should a Romney administration tarry in its appointed mission to roll back the spending excesses of the Obama age? Why not, he wondered, “go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?”

But in his response, Mr. Romney gave away the whole sick game of Republican austerity-sloganeering: “Well, because, if you take a trillion dollars, for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5 percent. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”

Got that? Mitt Romney, who is feverishly wooing the support of fiscal conservatives, conceded an obvious truth: that government spending stokes economic growth, in a broadly equitable fashion.

Mr. Romney’s reply drew no follow-up from Mr. Halperin, the most horse-race-addled and otiose member of our political press corps. But the candidate’s entirely sensible reply laid bare the great lie of the reigning economic consensus on the right. Deficit spending is not some mystically enervating drag on the American economy and, indeed, remains one of the surest stimulus measures on offer for the major slumps in demand and constrictions of credit that have kept growth so anemic over the past four grim years. Battered economies don’t much care where money comes from; money is fungible, as the economists like to say, and so a restorative jolt of the stuff needn’t claim any high-toned pedigree. The cash can be tapped from a federal agency or a drug cartel or a bloated hedge fund—so long as it courses through the weakened channels of commerce. Demonizing government spending during this sort of liquidity crisis is a bit like a hemorrhaging medical patient declining a blood transfusion because the original donor was blond.

And yet, that counter-empirical reflex continues to be the central creed of austerity-minded conservatives. For ready confirmation, look no further than the wearily familiar spectacle of the GOP House leadership threatening to revive the lunatic 2011 showdown over the debt ceiling—or the still more baroque and pointless showdown ahead over the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

All you really need to grasp the bankrupt logic behind the tax-slashing austerity program is a basic acquaintance with the modern history of the upper-bracket tax cut. The supply-side faithful routinely disclaim any fallout from tax cuts aimed at the upper brackets by citing a bastardized brand of Keynesianism that dare not speak its name (while, of course, also deriding anyone pointing out the innate unfairness of such giveaways as an un-American “class warrior”). A rising tide lifts all boats, the standard shibboleth here goes; create incentives for the heroic entrepreneurs who throng to the investing class, and presto: a broad-based prosperity inevitably ensues.

Even more inconveniently for the supply-siders, the modern history of the upper-class tax cut is a parable of Keynesian deficit spending run amok. When Ronald Reagan pushed through his first battery of upper-bracket tax cuts in 1981, they blew an entirely predictable gaping hole into the heart of the federal budget. So in the following year, the patron saint of the modern tax-cutting right signed legislation to raise taxes once more, so as to keep pumping money through the spiraling U.S. defense budget. Then he did it again.

The “Reagan revolution” in economic affairs represented, in pure structural terms, no kind of revolution at all: It was the classic Keynesian formula of raising marginal tax rates while sending massive outflows of government cash into the broader economy through the defense budget. Liberals during the Reagan years decried the expansion of the Cold War military, but the money didn’t care what agenda it was serving—and the on-again, off-again tax-slashing profile of the Reagan Treasury Department mattered even less.

Nevertheless, at nearly every Republican primary debate during this bleak primary season, Newt Gingrich would wind up his standard refrain of Reagan adoration, insisting that the Gipper had midwifed an unparalleled run of prosperity due to his heroic record of slashing away at taxes. All the other econo-cons on the debate stage would echo the same stock untruth—or else nod sagely in assent, together with assembled press worthies presiding over the proceedings, mini-Halperins all.

And the ironies don’t stop there. As Matt Yglesias and other commentators have noted, the economic advisers of the George W. Bush White House made the pitch for their 2001 package of upper-bracket tax cuts in explicitly Keynesian terms. Once the asset bubble of the tech sector met its long-overdue doom in 2001, the Bush team explained that their tax giveaways were the swiftest corrective on offer for the slumping investment economy—in other words, they were selling a structural formula of deficit spending as a way of tacking through a business downturn, in exactly the same terms that defenders of the 2009 Obama stimulus plan did. The Keynesian profile of the Bush program was forcefully multiplied with the addition of two wars on the federal budget line—along with the massive entitlement expansion known as the Medicare Part D plan.

Under the cover of its opportunistic exploitation of the Nasdaq collapse, the Bush White House was actually enacting a dramatic upward redistribution of wealth over the course of a decade—a program that, so far, the Obama White House has carelessly rubber-stamped for its own short-term political gain. Thus the cottage industry of Keynesian denialism has become a curious D.C.-based asset bubble of its own. Only this bubble seems likely to expand indefinitely, unless our myopic leadership class somehow summons the nerve to raise marginal tax rates.

Sarah Phillips (Courtesy Deadspin)

The self-obsessed world of online journalism came close to a singularity moment early this month, when an up-and-coming young sports columnist was exposed as a garden-variety con artist. Over at the Gawker sports site Deadspin, John Koblin reconstructed the luridly fascinating saga of ESPN.com writer Sarah Phillips, who had landed a plum perch in the enormous, vastly profitable industry of sports journalism without benefit of a single in-person job interview. Ms. Phillips’ career path was largely a con job—she had previously set up shop as a sports-betting columnist at the betting site Covers.com, with no discernible background in either sports fandom or wagering—so perhaps it felt natural for her to set about gulling impressionable sports-minded writers and web proprietors out of piles of money on the promise that, together, they would all come into tidy fortunes by cracking wise about the sports world on the Internet. “I’m a writer for ESPN.com. And I have a plan to take over the world,” is how Ms. Phillips succinctly put things to one of her marks on Gchat.

The plan, such as it was, involved reviving a version of ESPN’s lapsed Page 2 franchise, and bulking it up into a network of sports-comedy blogs. “By my ESPN.com senior director estimates,” she explained in her world-conquering Gchat pitch, “each of the five of us [contributing content to the network] will be making over $100K. My ultimate goal, being that I work for ESPN, is to sell the site to ESPN and become a blog on ESPN.com.” But inevitably, there would be some strategic hitch along the way—photo rights to purchase, seed money to collect, advertising to pay for—and once Ms. Phillips had that stake in hand, she’d typically vanish.

The deal on offer probably sounded vaguely plausible in Ms. Phillips’ own head—the key to carrying off an effective scam, after all, is for scammers to project confidence in their own ornate fantasies; that confidence is what they are selling to their clientele. And since the managers at ESPN had already hired Ms. Phillips without even a minimal semblance of due diligence—so certain is the mass appeal of a comely young woman writer in the online sportswriting world—well, who’s to say what’s possible? (Mr. Koblin reports, by the way, that Phillips was not merely an online con artist, but also something of a sock puppet: She had a history of channeling sports forecasts and betting odds by a longtime male confrere named Nilesh Prasad; the two had attended high school together in Oregon, and worked at the same T-mobile store until they’d both been fired for allegedly perpetrating another online scam there, involving the resale of company phones on Ebay.)

But like all cons, the Sarah Phillips episode is more interesting for what it reveals about the marks than about the perpetrator, whose motivations almost always turn out to be sad, venal, and banal. But since this con was aimed squarely at the great enabling myths of the rapidly monetizing world of social media, it speaks volumes about the ultimate end-uses we envision behind the frantic connectivity of our online lives.

Just consider the inner workings of the Phillips pitch. There was the testimony of the geektrepreneur who had swiftly monetized her own online brand—her identity, that is—and who was now extending the same bounty to a corps of web-savvy self-starters, just like her. There was the credibility of major online brands dangled before the marks as a classic inducement-cum-distraction.

And there was, most of all, the the illicit allure of a hot-seeming twenty-something woman reaching out to shut-in geeks with the promise of easy money explicitly rewarding them for their pet obsessions—in other words, the very fantasy of transcendent personal specialness and irresistibly attractive genius that keeps most young men transfixed before the Internet for hours on end in the first place.

From the demand side of the equation, the Phillips scam also had to seem invitingly credible in a broader sense, as well. After all, the standard come-on of Web business prophets is that the self-generated marketing of your personality online is the hidden secret of online prosperity. “The new American Dream is to go viral,” burbles the cyber-visionary hack Jeff Jarvis. The interactivity of the Web has enhanced all manner of enterprise, announces the NYU digital cheerleader Clay Shirky, precisely “because there is no way to filter for quality in advance: the definition of quality becomes more variable, from one community to the next, than when there was broad consensus about mainstream writing (and music and film and so on).” Lay these entirely representative specimens of pat and content-free managementspeak side-by-side, and you have the high-theory version of Sarah Phillips’ business plan.

The ever-elusive quest for the optimally self-marketing kind of personality was also why my former corporate superiors at Yahoo News would obsess over the intangible magic of the online “voice” in the site’s coverage of the news cycle—even though the occasional appearance of a strong voice in a Yahoo-branded platform was also guaranteed to send them into operatic bouts of managerial fretting. One of the more curious sidelights of the Phillips affair, indeed, was a scam whereby the young hustler would purchase individual Twitter accounts outright to boost her own social media profile. This may be the saddest footnote to the Phillips saga: Madly seeking to monetize a Web-branded personality, the con artist is reduced to subcontracting the illusion of an appealing online persona.

It used to be an elementary job requirement for charming hucksters that they at least be colorful—but in today’s social-media-verse, all that evidently matters is that you seem popular. And that you don’t get caught.

]]>  

Sarah Phillips (Courtesy Deadspin)

The self-obsessed world of online journalism came close to a singularity moment early this month, when an up-and-coming young sports columnist was exposed as a garden-variety con artist. Over at the Gawker sports site Deadspin, John Koblin reconstructed the luridly fascinating saga of ESPN.com writer Sarah Phillips, who had landed a plum perch in the enormous, vastly profitable industry of sports journalism without benefit of a single in-person job interview. Ms. Phillips’ career path was largely a con job—she had previously set up shop as a sports-betting columnist at the betting site Covers.com, with no discernible background in either sports fandom or wagering—so perhaps it felt natural for her to set about gulling impressionable sports-minded writers and web proprietors out of piles of money on the promise that, together, they would all come into tidy fortunes by cracking wise about the sports world on the Internet. “I’m a writer for ESPN.com. And I have a plan to take over the world,” is how Ms. Phillips succinctly put things to one of her marks on Gchat.

The plan, such as it was, involved reviving a version of ESPN’s lapsed Page 2 franchise, and bulking it up into a network of sports-comedy blogs. “By my ESPN.com senior director estimates,” she explained in her world-conquering Gchat pitch, “each of the five of us [contributing content to the network] will be making over $100K. My ultimate goal, being that I work for ESPN, is to sell the site to ESPN and become a blog on ESPN.com.” But inevitably, there would be some strategic hitch along the way—photo rights to purchase, seed money to collect, advertising to pay for—and once Ms. Phillips had that stake in hand, she’d typically vanish.

The deal on offer probably sounded vaguely plausible in Ms. Phillips’ own head—the key to carrying off an effective scam, after all, is for scammers to project confidence in their own ornate fantasies; that confidence is what they are selling to their clientele. And since the managers at ESPN had already hired Ms. Phillips without even a minimal semblance of due diligence—so certain is the mass appeal of a comely young woman writer in the online sportswriting world—well, who’s to say what’s possible? (Mr. Koblin reports, by the way, that Phillips was not merely an online con artist, but also something of a sock puppet: She had a history of channeling sports forecasts and betting odds by a longtime male confrere named Nilesh Prasad; the two had attended high school together in Oregon, and worked at the same T-mobile store until they’d both been fired for allegedly perpetrating another online scam there, involving the resale of company phones on Ebay.)

But like all cons, the Sarah Phillips episode is more interesting for what it reveals about the marks than about the perpetrator, whose motivations almost always turn out to be sad, venal, and banal. But since this con was aimed squarely at the great enabling myths of the rapidly monetizing world of social media, it speaks volumes about the ultimate end-uses we envision behind the frantic connectivity of our online lives.

Just consider the inner workings of the Phillips pitch. There was the testimony of the geektrepreneur who had swiftly monetized her own online brand—her identity, that is—and who was now extending the same bounty to a corps of web-savvy self-starters, just like her. There was the credibility of major online brands dangled before the marks as a classic inducement-cum-distraction.

And there was, most of all, the the illicit allure of a hot-seeming twenty-something woman reaching out to shut-in geeks with the promise of easy money explicitly rewarding them for their pet obsessions—in other words, the very fantasy of transcendent personal specialness and irresistibly attractive genius that keeps most young men transfixed before the Internet for hours on end in the first place.

From the demand side of the equation, the Phillips scam also had to seem invitingly credible in a broader sense, as well. After all, the standard come-on of Web business prophets is that the self-generated marketing of your personality online is the hidden secret of online prosperity. “The new American Dream is to go viral,” burbles the cyber-visionary hack Jeff Jarvis. The interactivity of the Web has enhanced all manner of enterprise, announces the NYU digital cheerleader Clay Shirky, precisely “because there is no way to filter for quality in advance: the definition of quality becomes more variable, from one community to the next, than when there was broad consensus about mainstream writing (and music and film and so on).” Lay these entirely representative specimens of pat and content-free managementspeak side-by-side, and you have the high-theory version of Sarah Phillips’ business plan.

The ever-elusive quest for the optimally self-marketing kind of personality was also why my former corporate superiors at Yahoo News would obsess over the intangible magic of the online “voice” in the site’s coverage of the news cycle—even though the occasional appearance of a strong voice in a Yahoo-branded platform was also guaranteed to send them into operatic bouts of managerial fretting. One of the more curious sidelights of the Phillips affair, indeed, was a scam whereby the young hustler would purchase individual Twitter accounts outright to boost her own social media profile. This may be the saddest footnote to the Phillips saga: Madly seeking to monetize a Web-branded personality, the con artist is reduced to subcontracting the illusion of an appealing online persona.

It used to be an elementary job requirement for charming hucksters that they at least be colorful—but in today’s social-media-verse, all that evidently matters is that you seem popular. And that you don’t get caught.

]]> http://observer.com/2012/05/05082012-social-media-espn-scammer-sarah-phillip/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver sarah-phill http://observer.com/2012/04/read-it-and-whine-writers-dont-need-prizes-they-need-ideas/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:58:27 -0400 http://observer.com/2012/04/read-it-and-whine-writers-dont-need-prizes-they-need-ideas/ http://www.observer.com/?p=234966

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]>

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]> http://observer.com/2012/04/read-it-and-whine-writers-dont-need-prizes-they-need-ideas/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver Eugenides(MarriagePlot) Ricardo Barros http://observer.com/2012/04/quisling-like-me-imagining-life-as-dealbks-kevin-roose-imagining-life-as-a-billionaire/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:16:08 -0400 http://observer.com/2012/04/quisling-like-me-imagining-life-as-dealbks-kevin-roose-imagining-life-as-a-billionaire/ http://www.observer.com/?p=232076 I’m a financial reporter for a certain paper of record, tasked with monitoring the daily mood swings and professional machinations of the Wall Street overclass. Yet I must periodically affect an air of professional puzzlement—about the masters of the universe who make up my beat, about the larger, destructive drift of the speculative paper economy, and about the best way to justify my glorified courtiership. And like all practiced petty cynics, I need to blunt any chance that my ruminations might create any real moral or cognitive dissonance with an exculpatory mood of ironic detachment.

So on a lark—duly approved by my editors, and subsidized by the discreet providers of luxe personal services, who ache to have their carriage trade identified with the .01 percent—I’ve donned all the fripperies and acquired all the emollients of the ultrarich for a day, as part of my paper’s stupendously tone-deaf and section-long celebration of wealth for wealth’s sake. Just to give you a sense of how clumsy and unselfaware the whole enterprise is, we have christened my feature “Rich Like Me,” in a ghastly misguided homage to the undercover reporting of Southern journalist John Howard Griffin, who lived as a black person for six weeks in order to expose the workaday dehumanization of Jim Crow racism. (Griffin, in turn, had cribbed the title for his project from a poem by Langston Hughes, an African-American socialist—now, that’s irony for you.)

And naturally, my paper has contrived an ingenuous theoretical justification for my one-day project of passing as a plutocrat. “The experiment illuminates a paradox,” I write in its pages, in the classic tone of a patiently didactic reporter introducing a complicated thought that is anything but. “In the era of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the global financial elite has been accused of immoral and injurious conduct, we are still obsessed with the lives of the ultrarich. We watch them on television shows, follow their exploits in magazines, and parse their books and public addresses for advice. In addition to the long-running list by Forbes, Bloomberg now maintains a list of billionaires with rankings that update every day.”

Close readers of that enabling brief will recognize that it contains a universe of professional shame. You might note, for instance, that the evidence I’ve cited to demonstrate our collective adulation of the wealthy is paper thin. It is, indeed, entirely composed of the cynically produced content of media corporations like mine, which desperately chronicle the antics of the hyperaffluent in a bid to market their own readerships to advertisers as robustly “aspirational”—i.e., easily suckered. (Further weakening the case for any spontaneously conceived popular romance with all things plutocratic, companies like mine try to relieve the sheer monotony involved in such coverage by dwelling on the rich’s trademark peccadillos, megalomanias and legal trespasses, all rendered in an inertly lurid tone of vague moral disapproval. If this counts as obsession or fascination, it renders the “paradox” at the heart of my piece’s conceit pretty much a dead letter.)

Finally, you’ll note that I try to seal the case for the widespread forensic infatuation with billionaireship by name-checking two publishing empires that are, in fact, named for, and owned by, billionaires, and serve up breathless rankings of the world’s billionaires to make their brands seem still more exclusive.

Still, such methodological blasphemies are not, if you’ll pardon the expression, a luxury I can afford. No, to hew to the various rickety pretenses of my assignment, I must resolutely skim the surface of the wealth question. I convene a “power breakfast” at Manhattan’s exclusive Core Club—but I only meet with the club’s founder, the aptly named Jennie Enterprise, who burbles over her clientele thusly: “They’re people who want to change the world—though not always for a noble purpose. It would be for profit, and potentially a great deal of profit.”  And the Core is there to grant these missionary souls a kind of free-standing spiritual rubdown, while skimming its own world-changing profit share, to the tune of $15,000 a year, on top of a $50,000 initiation fee: Core clients “want someplace that respects their privacy,” Enterprise enthuses. “They want a place that they can seamlessly transition from work to play, that optimizes their time.”

Well, now that’s all settled! On to another infomercial-style interview aboard a hedge fund manager’s private jet! My host requests that he remain anonymous in my piece—and small wonder, since once we’re safely ensconced on his Gulfstream IV, I’m grilling him with searing questions like “what it’s like to be among the richest people in the world.” And here’s the journalistic paydirt I harvested in return: “I think all it does is make things easier . . . I don’t think it changes you that much. The happy guy who makes tons of money is still happy. If someone’s a jerk before, he’s a jerk when he’s got a billion dollars.” At last I’ve run down a source who can explain why the American power elite is so banal! If only I’d been able to get him on the record!

Back on the ground for a business confab in Georgia, Mr. Gulfstream continues effortlessly exuding privilege; a mechanical failure stalls out the Mercedes convertible that fetched both of us from the airport, so he simply swaps it out for another. At one point, I notice, “warm chocolate chip cookies magically appear”—just in case my day in the overclass hadn’t yet infantilized me enough. How can all this doting luxury possibly be justified? “Somebody’s got to live this life,” my host grandly instructs me. “God decided it should be me.” Oh.

As it happens, at the end of the same week I recounted my great billionaire adventure, my paper published a rare front-page dispatch on the trials of the less divinely favored members of the U.S. economy. Jason DeParle, the Times poverty correspondent whose byline should by rights be a regular front-page fixture in the throes of the worst economic downturn of the past seven decades, reported on the recent wave of abrupt cancellations of state income-support programs for poor families—and on the way that cash-strapped state governments now routinely use federal welfare block grants to mend other unrelated holes in their budgets. This punitive bit of social cruelty masquerading as social policy has kicked poor mothers who’d previously relied on welfare payments to the curb: They now sell groceries obtained on food stamps to pay rent and utility bills; they send their kids on dumpster-diving expeditions for returnable bottles and cans; they sometimes drift into the underground economy of shoplifting, robbery and petty theft.

But everybody knows that these kind of downer stories are nonstarters. Meanwhile, I’m putting out Twitter requests for readers to submit their own billionaire fantasies. (See—we really are obsessed with the wealthy!) And I’ve got a new suit—after all, you never know when the hedge funds are going to start hiring again.

Remembering Trayvon Martin. (Getty)

As the adult world continues stoking the senseless battle royale of the presidential primary season, the youth-entertainment complex has briefly overtaken the news cycle. Everyone not living in their own life-or-death competitive isolation dome knows by now that this past weekend ushered in the blockbuster movie adaptation of the first installment of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ dystopian teen scifi trilogy about children compelled to destroy each other for the amusement of the jaded, power-mad political leaders of the future. The basic plot of the Collins franchise is by now well-known: In the authoritarian North America of the third millennium—rechristened Panem—this ritual sacrifice of the young serves to tamp down any impulses of mass rebellion, and the games’ sole surviving winner is bought off with a life of ease, fame, and prestige.

But no sooner had the great Hunger Games colossus alighted at the multiplex—with a box-office take of $155 million over its first weekend—than a sober retinue of adults began clambering to impose their own agendas on the strange new teen spectacle unspooling in their midst.

Anti-hunger advocacy outfits staged a confused online protest campaign under the slogan “Hunger is not a game”—seemingly not quite grasping that the point of a dystopian novel is to repudiate, rather than endorse, the central soul-destroying activity at the heart of the action. Critics sought to find subtexts in the movie matching the present-day political scene—and these efforts likewise proved embarrassingly obtuse. Washington Post film reviewer Ann Hornaday speculated the movie’s depiction of the Capitol City and its licentious excesses “might make it a dog-whistle hit with Tea Party audiences”—even though the most cursory reading of Ms. Collins’ novel turns up a critique of worker exploitation that is, if anything, Marxist in overtone. The novel’s protagonist, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, hails from the former Appalachia, which despite the many technological advances that mark life in the former North America during the third millennium, is still mainly devoted to dangerous, ill-paid industry of coal mining; her father, indeed, had been killed in a coal-mining accident. In one scene, Katniss even has an extended conversation with a fellow contestant—Rue, a tiny 12-year-old farm laborer—that pivots largely on the “immiseration thesis”: Marx’s notion that capitalists only permit the proletariat sufficient provisions to be healthy enough to continue working. Rue explains that the farmers in her district aren’t permitted to eat their own crops, and are publicly flogged when they’re caught doing so. There’s just one exception, she explains: “They feed us a bit extra during harvest, so that people can keep going.”

Finally, of course, there’s been an extended discussion of whether the actress depicting Katniss, 21-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, is the wrong body type to play a food-deprived teenage girl: Ms. Lawrence is merely rail thin, as opposed to emaciated, so critics such as Manhola Dargis at The New York Times have questioned her casting on grounds of verisimilitude—once again failing to note a crucial bit of empirical evidence from Ms. Collins’ novel. There, it’s stipulated that Katniss, an accomplished hunter, has matured into an athletic build courtesy of an unusually high-protein diet, and what’s more, had deliberately gorged herself on a banquet of rich foods made available by the event’s organizers in order to retain her fighting form.

Ms. Collins’ novel, which like all good YA fiction teems with a healthy scorn for the trademark hypocrisies and superstitions of adult life, features an exchange that doubles nicely as a gloss on these willful grownup misreadings. Shortly after she arrives in Panem’s Capitol City to take part in the tournament, she’s paired up with a fashion designer named Cinna—the only adult in the novel who proves not to be a venal, corrupt, inept and/or drunken fool. Absorbed in the garish spectacle of the city’s preparations for the games, she falls into speculating about the economic logic that undergirds the social vacuity on such painful display around her:

“What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting for a new shipment of tribunes to roll in and die for their entertainment?”

“I look up and find Cinna’s eyes trained on mine. ‘How despicable we must seem to you,’ he says.”

Needless to say, as The Hunger Games has undergone its own high-end makeover for the big screen, such flourishes of dubiously marketable contempt have been banished. Indeed, the movie even effaces the central tension that stokes the rationale for the brutal tournament: the continued existence of an underground resistance movement determined to topple the Panem regime. The novel goes out of its way for Katniss to build an unspoken bond with a young rebel girl who is now conscripted into duty as a servant for contestants in the games. (The bond is unspoken, by the way,  because Panem’s leaders have had the girl’s tongue cut out as punishment upon her capture.) By contrast, popular unrest takes place in the movie only in pointed response to Katniss’s individual heroics, as captured in the games’ telecast: By performing a respectful burial to a fallen colleague, she provokes Panem’s viewing audience to react in outrage to the barbaric spectacle of the games, seemingly for the first time ever. The logic here is plain: Katniss’s struggle to survive can’t involve any broader notions of solidarity, just as her character isn’t permitted any sustained reflection on her standing in the economic hierarchy of Panem, or disparagement of the adult vanities that have put her young life in danger. These calculated elisions are of course standard fare in Hollywood adapatations—and Hunger Games director Gary Ross, whose resume includes sunny fables of individual success such as Seabiscuit, which channeled much of the agony of the Depression through the epic triumphs of a scrappy racehorse, has followed the playbook closely here. Not only is Katniss rendered as a solitary force for unalloyed good; the pernicious evil of Panem is distilled almost entirely into the character of the president—played with nasty relish by Donald Sutherland.

The baby-simple logic here is that Panem is a bad place only because it’s governed by a bad man; put in a better leader, and the oafish retinue of overdressed grownups who make things tic will all become nicer as well. It’s hard to imagine a subtext more at odds with the bleak, and thoroughgoing, indictment of adult social privilege in Ms. Collins’ novel. Katniss can only triumph, and win the crucial adoration of the crowd, by virtue of her own undeniable charisma: The teen fantasy of the market decisively trumps the teen longing for rebellion.

As it happened, though, this was not the most propitious weekend to trot out a depoliticized Hollywood fable of gratuitous teen sacrifice: The recent killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, has highlighted the many brutal ways that pursuers of young outcasts can make a law unto themselves, not unlike the proprietors of the Hunger Games—especially if the youths in question happen not to be white. Martin was shot to death by Neighborhood Watch vigilante George Zimmerman, whom the Sanford police have declined to arrest under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which permits gun owners to shoot anyone perceived as a threat without the traditional constraint in self-defense law that compels shooters to retreat before opening fire.

While the racial politics of the Martin case are justly the main focus of public discussion, the incident also speaks volumes about the stealth epidemic of violent crime against children in America. As the now-moribund 2011 Violence Against Children Act reports, the Bureau of Juvenile Statistics has found that children between the ages of 12 and 19 are twice as likely to be victimized by violence than their counterparts aged 20 and above. What’s more, the bureau estimates that just 35 percent of all violence perpetrated against children is reported to the authorities in the first place.

Perhaps, in other words, the real problem adults have in getting the point of the The Hunger Games has nothing to do with the franchise’s ideological profile, or Jennifer Lawrence’s relative svelteness quotient. Maybe the trouble here is that in a news culture dedicated to promulgating bullshit moral panics about teen social pathologies, teen sexual mores and (for that matter) teen-themed entertainment and fashion, The Hunger Games has forced adults to reckon anew with the fables they like to tell each other.