Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, March 21, 2013

When the Money Gets Too Big

People lie about reading books as often and casually as they lie about having sex—less about who, what, or how good than about how much. Remember George Bush’s annual competition with Karl Rove? In 2006, the year Iraq descended into civil war, Bush supposedly read ninety-five books to Rove’s hundred and ten. Most readers try to make their exaggerations more credible than this, but the honest will admit that the Internet, social media, T.V., and the flood of information to which we subject ourselves every day, if not every minute, have seriously cut into not just book reading but book readiness. Add small children, and the nineteenth-century novel threatens to disappear from your life.

A couple of months ago, to find out if I was still capable, I set out to read Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now.” Trollope kept a log of his literary production, making sure to write two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes of his three-hour workday, and he was so efficiently prolific that if he finished one novel before the day’s clock had run out he would start another. Trollope began “The Way We Live Now” on May 1, 1873 (he was fifty-eight; this was the thirty-second of his forty-seven novels), and he wrote its thousand pages, or four hundred and twenty-five thousand words, in twenty-nine weeks—longer than it took me to read those pages, but not dramatically longer. Trollope, hugely popular through most of his career, wrote in an age of unthinkable attention spans.

“The Way We Live Now” is one of the last examples of the three-volume serialized Victorian novel. If the genre seems nearly as alien to contemporary American readers as the Renaissance epic poem, the world that Trollope portrays is not so remote. Trollope’s London is a satirical distortion of the city that he found upon returning from eighteen months of overseas travel: the luxurious center of a vast empire floating on limitless credit, a society defined entirely by commercial interest, a hothouse of financial speculation and status competition, a place where relationships have become purely transactional. In his autobiography, Trollope described this London in the harsh language of a moralist: “If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel.”

The mysterious figure looming at the center of “The Way We Live Now” is Augustus Melmotte, a financier (the term had just been coined) of obscure origins—French? Irish-American? Jewish?—and unsavory reputation. No one knows how Melmotte made his fortune—there are rumors of jail time in Germany and fraud in France—but he’s rich, unimaginably rich, maybe the richest man in the world, and that’s enough for almost everyone in London society to swallow their blue-blood prejudices and distaste for his upstart manners. City investors beg to buy shares of Melmotte’s newly incorporated South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a murky project for a rail line from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz that has all the signs of being a fraud. A lucky few are given seats on the company’s board; young aristocrats chase after the hand and income of Melmotte’s unlovely but unexpectedly tough-minded daughter, Marie; socialites trade favors to score scarce tickets to his sumptuous dinner in honor of the emperor of China; the Conservative and Liberal Parties vie to put Melmotte forward as their parliamentary candidate for Westminster (the Tories win). Whether or not he’s a fraudster doesn’t matter, as long as the music keeps playing.

Just about everything in this money-soaked world is false. Love and marriage, for example. The female characters in “The Way We Live Now” are sold off in marriage to the highest bidder like horses at a bazaar. Marie Melmotte’s prospects turn so decisively on up-to-the-minute appraisals of her net value that, after being wooed and dropped by several suitors, she finally abandons her romantic fantasies and comes to a clear-eyed conclusion: “I don’t think I’ll marry anybody. What’s the use? It’s only money. Nobody cares for anything else.” The man who finally wins her hand, a California businessman named Fisker, does so by pitching marriage as a straightforward deal, minus the pretty words: “Let us go in for life together. We’ve both done uncommon well.”

The same mercenary attitude applies to literature: publishing a book is not that different from creating a speculative investment bubble. Lady Carbury, a financially anxious widow of forty-three, sets out on a literary career to fund her handsome, good-for-nothing son’s prospects of marrying an heiress (first target: Marie Melmotte). Her means of ascent are flirting right up to the edge of sex, favor-trading (no one praises anyone else’s work without a direct personal interest), and relentless networking with newspaper editors. “She could write after a glib, commonplace, sprightly fashion, and had already acquired the knack of spreading all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.” Even the I.O.U.s with which her son, Sir Felix, and his aristocratic buddies make gambling bets at their private club turn out to be as worthless as shares of stock in the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway.

One character tries to stand athwart the tide of finance and falsehood. Roger Carbury, Lady Carbury’s cousin, is a bachelor in his late thirties, doomed to love a much younger woman (Lady Carbury’s daughter, Hetta) who can’t bring herself to reciprocate. He’s an old-fashioned country gentleman with disdain for just about everything that England, with its stupendous new wealth, is becoming. He’s the only character who isn’t dazzled by Melmotte and his money: “A miserable imposition, a hollow vulgar fraud from beginning to end,—too insignificant for you and me to talk of, were it not that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age. What are we coming to when such as he is an honoured guest at our tables?”

Trollope always complicates the moral starkness of his portraits. Carbury—the closest thing in the novel to an authorial stand-in—is not only a man of unshakeable principle but also a self-righteous prig who never hesitates to tell friends and family how to live their lives. Lady Carbury’s devotion to her vacuous son is pathetically ennobling. When the music finally stops playing, and London society abandons Melmotte as feverishly as it embraced him, he achieves a kind of anti-heroic grandeur, surveying his own demise with ruthless objectivity. Still, Trollope didn’t flinch from the consequences of his vision, even when it had grown so uncharacteristically dark that it led him, at the height of his career, to produce a novel that, for once, was unpopular. For all the stylistic infelicities, the sentences that wouldn’t survive a nanosecond in a creative writing workshop (“When Hetta Carbury received that letter from her lover which was given to the reader some chapters back…”), Trollope has the advantage of being unafraid, which gives his social criticism its vivid power. This, he tells us, is what extremely civilized people become when the money gets too big.

The new money in London is mostly foreign—continental and American—and with it come new character types. An American woman, Winifred Hurtle, is the most compelling figure in the novel—divorced (maybe) and beautiful, with a passionate nature, a rumored murder or two in her past, an intense admiration for men who dare great things, and ultimate contempt for England and the weak, hesitant Englishman whom it’s her misfortune to love. Roger Carbury deeply disapproves of Mrs. Hurtle and her “wild cat” American ways: “He pictured to himself all American women as being loud, masculine, and atheistical.” But new money brings new energy, and forces open the restrictive doors of English society. A pronounced streak of xenophobia and anti-Semitism runs through “The Way We Live Now”—mostly attributed to Trollope’s high-society characters, but the author doesn’t completely escape the taint. He describes a Jewish financier named Brehgert as “a fat, greasy man of fifty, conspicuous for hair-dye.” When Brehgert proposes to a young Englishwoman who’s overestimated her own worth for too many years to be picky, the reaction is nearly universal horror, but she’s more pragmatic: as long as the man is rich, why should anyone care about his religion? Greed can be the leading wedge of freedom.

Something similar is true of the glittering capital of an American empire perched on a speculative bubble. There’s no limit to the money accumulating at the top of New York (and other centers of wealth), no limit to the fascination it exercises over the rest of the country. Every time it seems as if the tide of fantastic wealth is going out—after 2008 was the most recent moment—it surges back, higher than ever. Greed is eternal, but when the money flows as plentifully upward as in London circa 1873 or New York circa 2013, and is as unequally distributed, it becomes a moral toxin, saturates the world of culture, makes relationships more competitive, turns desire into the pursuit of status, replaces solid things with mirages.

And, as in Trollope’s London, money and its pursuit can have a democratizing effect. Old social codes, some worthy and some iniquitous, give way because money makes them matter less. Formerly oppressed groups, once-despised minorities, and the foreign-born, along with wife-beaters and ex-drug dealers, all have a shot at the top in a society that is much less equal and much more free than the one most of us grew up in. Scandal, cheating, and even crime are only short-term obstacles—there’s always a second chance if you’re the head of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs were in the same business, doing the same things, until 2008—now the first is a disgraced pariah while the second continues to receive White House invitations and sit on philanthropic boards. The only difference is between failure and success. You have to go bad to the extent of a Madoff, or a Melmotte—that is, you have to lose your money, along with everyone else’s—to be banished from the game for good.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: George Packer

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