n+1

Brothel, Washington DC

2012-05-17T16:55:25Z

by Michael Merriam

Image: U.S. Capitol Dome, Washington D.C.

This floor was entirely asleep; others were roaming, and the last of us wouldn't be back from work until nearly dawn; The Pimp (hereinafter referred to as [Name Withheld]) was snoring to the south, and the dear, 300-pound, peach-complected Commander (Navy, retired,) who owned the whorehouse, was snuggled with his boyfriend to the north. To be fair, we did not call it a whorehouse, despite the fact that escorts lived and worked here. It was simply The House. It was like Disney's Haunted Mansion: thick drapes, creaking halls, many, many stairs, plus "discretion," exaggerated in a Dickensian way to mean something more like "occult secrecy."

I had been there a week. Apparently [Name Withheld] wished to retire and the house needed a Madame. I dubbed myself Madame Mike but the name didn’t stick. All the escorts had fake names. Escort Rich would not call me Madame Mike. He would not go on the museum outing I’d arranged, either. “It’s bad for the business,” he said. “One of them will be the queen, the others will wanna be princesses.” I lived on the third floor. It was implied that I’d get a salary as well as a small commission on every completed call—that is, if I could get the client to agree on the price and the escort, facilitate the meetup (either at the House or at the client’s hotel), and collect the House’s share (generally 50%) from the client, then I'd have succeeded. I found the salary part hard to believe, especially because the number was either $1,000 or $1,500 a month—but I wasn't in it for the money.

The details of my job ranged from the eye-rollingly menial (changing sheets in the downstairs rooms between calls) to the much more interesting (answering the phone and matching the client with the escort). Most clients were direct and boring. Maybe a little shy, seldom rich, they were sometimes middle-class, sometimes below. One client wanted a rebate—complained that the escort just wasn’t very good at it, and said that he’d had to make a choice that month between making a car payment and using our service. If the client was shy, it was usually because his fetish involved either feet or water sports.

I wasn’t particularly good at working the phones. I sent an African-American transsexual, Regina, over to see an African-American client. Bad move. Regina called me in a huff. “I’m sure [Withheld] told you that I prefer not to see African American men.”

“I understand, and will respect that, of course. Would you mind telling me why?”

“That is my preference, and that is how I choose to work.” Her tone was insistent. I’d encountered this kind of attitude before, when I was the personal assistant to an actress in New York. Reality isn’t good enough. Why didn’t I fix it before she stepped on it? I get it. And I agree.

In-calls were less frequent, that was more for the regulars, the old guard, or people referred by the old guard. People who were likely to sit on the porch for an hour or so afterward and chat with everyone. But the real money came in changing a one-hour visit to an overnight visit. Some boys were better at this than others. One, named Jeremy, was pure magic—he would always try to meet the client at a restaurant first, and memorize the locations of ATMs on the way. Over dinner, he’d find a way to express to the client how much he would rather stay all night than just an hour. Because the connection was strong, unusually strong. He would love to stay overnight . . . but [Name Withheld] had firm rules about that. If the client could give him $1,500 instead of just $250 . . . then [Name Withheld] would let him stay. While the client hemmed and hawed, Jeremy would tell him where all the nearby ATMs were. A few years later, during Passover, Jeremy would lose his shit and draw a big X on all the doors in the House and have to be hospitalized.

$1,500 was a baseline for us, for overnights. Some people went higher. Janet charged $3,500 for an overnight.

It was my first time in our nation's capital.

+ + +

I asked the Commander: Could I do it? You know, it? He sighed. He asked me to stand up, take my shirt off, turn around a couple times. “To be honest, I wouldn’t wanna send you out there before you spent a couple weeks in the gym. Now, that’s not to offend you, or to say that, on the civilian level, you’re unattractive. But this business is all about repeat clients.”

“Got it.”

As I put my shirt back on, it was explained to me that there used to be more women, “born women,” in this escort service. A lot of clients will want one, I was told, and we’ll run out early. Try to “up-sell” them. I assumed this meant to a transsexual, but the Commander said you can send a boy to a client who wants a girl.

“You can?”

He shrugged. “Once in a while. I usually just tell ‘em, ‘Hey, a blowjob’s a blowjob.’”

“Does that work?”

“It has worked.”

It was not a well-run business. In fact, only two women remained on the books, so to speak—though it used to be almost even. For whatever reason [Withheld] kept two women and several transsexuals and transvestites, who were also referred to with female pronouns. How I got the job is complicated and not interesting. A creepy guy asked me whether I'd like to make $250 an hour. I said "Wha...?" Then he asked me what percent of the male population my age could do that, make that kind of money, did I think. Two percent, he said. Shouldn't I take advantage of that? When I heard this escort service worked out of an actual house, I was intrigued, and like many things that begin with intrigue, it ended in an administrative job. I stayed because I was incredibly curious and thought at least I could work on my novel, a Western set in "The American Subconscious," a Jungian wonderland of heterodoxia. Mary Todd Lincoln was the villain, she was an evil Sorceress. I don't know how long I was there, but it's safe to say a month. Probably longer. I usually remember it as "a summer," but that doesn’t seem right.

+ + +

In the evening of the first day, I went to the roof, with the Commander and his boyfriend. We drank champagne and looked out over the neighborhood of —— ——, and could clearly see the capitol dome. It remains the only moment in my life of perfect, transcendent happiness. They asked me about my novel, but I was already very drunk, and had taken some of my pills. I babbled a bit about cowboys, time travel, wizards, magical realism, who knows what else.

The next morning, a new escort arrived from New York. He wore Gucci sunglasses and was all attitude. From Venezuela. “Now,” said [Name Withheld], “in a minute, Michael will show you around and give you the rundown of how this works. Your first call is one of our easiest clients, Dan. He’ll probably just want you to strip down to your underwear and do jumping jacks.”

Leon nodded, and kept nodding, a figure of attentive competence, as if he were starting a high-level position at a fashion magazine.

“We’re putting you on the roster as ‘European’ instead of ‘Hispanic.’”

At this Leon stopped nodding, not because he was offended, but because he was confused. “Am I from Spain?”

“We just say European.”

Leon resumed nodding, with marginally less confidence.

I showed him to his room. We fell immediately into gossip. He asked me if I was going to do some escorting myself, and I said no. He became shy, withdrawn, and asked me if it was because I didn’t want to get involved in that kind of thing. I laughed and said I’d do it if I thought I’d be good at it. He warmed to me again, said we should go grocery shopping—he’d show me how to be confident, if I decided to hook.

In the store he turned to me. "Enemas," he said. "You have to use enemas. So many escorts, they don't do nothing. It's disgusting! However they are, however they look, they just go to work. Nothing." He shook his head. "Also," he said, "you must not brush your teeth before a call. You must use peroxide." He held up the bottle to show me. "Because if you brush you teeth, you possibly will bleed, in your gums. And you could get sick if you kiss the clients. You cannot have blood in your mouth."

Leon’s disdain for the other escorts softened over the two non-consecutive weeks he worked at the house. One evening, an escort named Ahmed and I were talking while Leon prepared for an out-call at a hotel. He invited us to continue our conversation while he took a shower. Ahmed, who was nineteen, asked Leon, "Do you wax your ass?" Leon nodded and got into the shower, closing the curtain. Ahmed asked further, "Is that not incredibly painful?"

Leon opened the shower curtain again. "It is painful. But I have to have clients call me again and again."

Ahmed, with no prompting, removed his shirt. "I occasionally use Nair on my back," he said.

"Your chest?" I asked.

"I trim," he says.

"Is Janet coming back?" (Janet was the house’s most successful escort, a male-to-female post-operative transsexual.)

I laughed. "She did four calls today. I think she’s done.” (This was almost unheard of. Most escorts were exhausted after two.)

Leon rolled his eyes. “Janet is whore,” he said, and closed the shower curtain again.

We went to a museum. Maxx met us there. Typically, escorts don’t like to hang around each other, but it was good to see Maxx and Leon talking shop. Maxx’s motto is “Say it, they’ll pay it.” He told us how to fake an orgasm: pearl-colored shampoo slipped into the tip of your condom. You can take more calls per day, that way.

As the sun went down, we sat on the porch and talked, and drank. Well, I drank. It was me, a few boys, and the Commander’s 80-year-old aunt, Lucille. Janet was inside watching TV with a textbook open, studying. It was just like a big friendly house where a lot of friends lived and had guests over; or so it could seem, maybe, if you really tried to pretend. On the porch, Leon was still trying to use oblique language in front of Aunt Lucille, to speak in code. He gave it up. “This is surreal,” he said. “Everyone knows this is whorehouse. The workmen know. She know,” he nodded toward Lucille, who was pretending to be deaf, and rocking in her rocker. “She know everything.”

Yet no one seemed to want to shut us down. The closest we ever came to getting busted was when a dominatrix named Erin sat smoking on the porch, in full regalia, and ashed onto the neighbor’s lawn. He saw her do it and asked her not to. "Fuck you," she said (she's a dominatrix), and the authorities became involved. But they didn’t have much interest in getting too involved. The cops don’t want to bust prostitution, really. A vice cop once gave me a seminar, of sorts, on how not to get arrested for vice. If, say, your client is giving you some kind of problem, and you fear for your safety, and you really need the police, this is what you say: You met this guy, you liked him, you went home with him, he started the problem. The cop will know you’re lying, but he has more interest in arresting your assailant than in arresting you. Thus the vice squad is refigured as a sort of immune system, as the very force of differentiation between actual vice and, you know, the gold-hearted hooker and the charming scamp.

+ + +

We had rules about what not to do.

1) Refer to the escorts as hookers, hustlers, or prostitutes.

2) Refer to transsexuals as "he."

3) Drink to excess.

4) Encourage (or even allow, I guess) intimacy between resident escorts.

As I worked in the office, I would often hear odd, upsetting noises. "Must be Janet's two o’clock," I'd think. Then, a deep-throated, "I'm sorry, sir—auuughh!" and I would remind myself not to judge the whack-jobs Janet had as clients. Ah, but does she not usually work downstairs? Perhaps that noise . . . wasn't she . . .

And where did Rich go? Wasn't he in the living room? Was I hearing [Name Withheld] claiming some kind of employee discount? How does one establish consent in this arena? I went to the living room and turned the pages of a magazine. I heard a thud. A series of slaps and no response.

Later, I made an oblique reference to the noises to [Withheld], and it was explained to me that Rich borrowed money and hadn't paid it back yet. That's where the S&M came in, said [Withheld]. The breath control had nearly made Rich pass out, and he had to be revived with slaps.

"Is that—his thing, is he into that?" I asked, sipping coffee and staring at the floor, and knowing that had Rich been into S&M, it would have been in his file.

[Name Withheld] shrugged. "It's always more fun if they're not into it."

+ + +

One day the phone rang; it was one of our most popular escorts, the street-looking, straight-acting Chris, calling to renegotiate his rate to $450 an hour, which is ridiculous.

"And you still don't take it, you only give it?" I asked.

"This is my asshole: you can put your tongue in there, or your fingers in there, if you want to. That's it."

"And you still won't kiss the client?"

"Naw."

"If you're getting 450 an hour for freelancing, I encourage you to keep charging that while you're still young enough, but what you're asking [Name Withheld] to do is—"

"Mike—you haven't had my mouth on you. I'm sayin'—"

"—Chris, listen—"

"Naw, Mike, you listen. I have guys tellin' me all the time they can't even believe how good they just got their dick sucked. Now, if you want me to get with a girl? Okay, 250 an hour, fine by me, but for guys? No offense."

"How about this—we put you at 350 an hour, take our cut down to one hundred, no kissing, but—"

"—but you gotta tell these people, prices may vary. Like, if you're fat and you stink."

"What if it's just one or the other?" I asked, hoping to resolve this.

"What?"

"What if they're fat but they don't stink, or they kinda stink, but, you know, they're not fat?"

A long, exasperated pause, "If I'm tryin' to suck dick and there's a fat man's stomach bouncin' on my fuckin' head, that fat guy better have some fuckin' money on 'im, is what I'm sayin'"

"We'll pay for the chiropractor, if that happens."

Pause. Then, wearily, "Okay, buddy, bye."

We hung up. (Well, "we" might be stretching it.)

I do honor what these boys are doing; I wish there were some way to protect them better. On a good night, they get taken to the theater and to dinner and they're well-treated. It's not always a good night.

Somebody tried to solicit me and was told "no," in no uncertain terms, and not by me.

Later, I was told that five years ago the prospective client forced a kid to strip naked and threw him out into the snow. In another incident, he beat a handcuffed escort black and blue, and I don't remember what his third strike was, but it was loathsome. That client was dangerous—we usually sent him R, our 27-year-old S/M Top. R wore military clothes and was very combative. Nobody gave R any shit.

+ + +

I dated a hooker once. He was a nice guy, had been in a porno. (Actually he was an asshole.) I've known people who've done it—it's not very demanding. And people who say it sucks your soul are as wrong as those who say, on the other end of the spectrum, that doing, say, retail, is basically prostituting yourself. Oh but it's not—not basically, not even in any way—metaphors just don't stretch that far.

One morning at 2 am I was awoken by the sound of the Commander banging on the door. He held out a cordless phone. “Deal with this,” he said, and practically dropped it into my hand.

He glared at me while I talked. The guy on the other end was as drunk as I was, and more incoherent. He wanted someone who looked like Beyonce. I tried to help him out, but he wasn’t interested in a transsexual. I knew there was nothing I could do for him. The Commander watched me attempt to negotiate this situation. Didn’t take long before I just hung up.

I got some kind of a mini-lecture. I don’t remember the words. I wasn’t supposed to be asleep. People were still out and about. The Commander's hands were in the air as he turned his back on me, indicating that my conduct was so ludicrously inappropriate that he couldn’t even address it, that indeed no normal person would. He made surprisingly little noise descending the stairs, I noted, watching his vast body ferry his swollen soul.

I discovered the next day that I was fired. For alcoholism.

I was fired from a brothel for alcoholism.

It wasn't just that I'd gone to bed too early. Apparently I dialed people at 2:00 in the afternoon to tell them how miserable I was, but I don’t remember this. I ranted about something, offended some people and the next day Mr. [Withheld] called me into his office and asked me about it. “What got into you last night?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I told him so, nodding patiently and professionally as he described the events of the evening. I’d said some things about how whatever had befallen an escort named Jeffrey, who had been fired on the evening of the first day and had been missing ever since, was the Commander’s fault. How Jeffery had been right about all of them. “You ripped out my soul,” he’d screamed. How, given that they knew so many restaurateurs (who, like pimps, demand long hours for very low pay), it seemed Jeffrey would have been better off as a waiter or something. I’d made remarks, too, about the decor. Apparently the Commander and Jeffrey had been close—the Commander had been hurt that I thought they were bad people.

They were right to kick me out of there—they knew something about me I didn’t know myself. Whatever they said about me, to me, they were right. I don’t remember a word of it. The Commander offered me a ride to the train station, which I didn’t take. “We are good people,” he insisted, as I shook his hand for the last time.

+ + +

I always hesitate and breathe deeply before I tell any of these stories. I don't really know what they mean. Looking back, despite all my understandable enthusiasm, I never really made it deep enough in. I thought for some reason that I grasped what was happening and what it meant, but now I see I failed to penetrate the place. I was like every journalist in Washington, that way.

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Maple Shade

2012-05-15T14:00:09Z

by Daniel Nester

Image: "Welcome to Maple Shade." Thomas V. Hartmann. bythomasv.tumblr.com

If Maple Shade, New Jersey, is to be famous for anything, if there is any reason it makes it into the history books, it is for what occurs there in the early morning hours on June 12, 1950. That’s when two 20-year-old classmates from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, PA, go out for a ride in the country with their dates. They pull off Route 73 to Mary’s Café on Main Street. It is 12:45am. They sit down to be served.

The young men and their dates are black, and the waitress proceeds to ignore them. The men walk to the counter and order beers. The barkeep, Ernest Nicholls, also the owner, tells them the “best thing” would be for them to leave. The young men refuse, and sit back down at the table.

“I want you out of here!” Nicholls shouts, and takes out a pistol; other accounts say he takes out a shotgun. “I’d kill for less!”

He chases them out to the parking lot. He fires into the roof; other accounts have him shooting into the South Jersey sky.

The four leave, frightened, then angry, and drive down Main Street to the police station and file a complaint, which all four sign: Pearl E. Smith and Doris Wilson, who list their occupations as teacher and policewoman, along with the two young seminarians from Pennsylvania: Walter R. McCall and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nicholls is arrested. The Camden chapter of the NAACP files suit. The case is dismissed three months later, however, when witnesses from the bar—three Penn students—refuse to testify.

Most King biographers categorize the incident in Maple Shade as a formative epiphany. Some people even describe Mary’s Café as the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement in America.

+ + +

Maple Shade is a place that is pleased with its small-mindedness. It was and is a working-to-middle class town, proud of its outsider status as a blue collar island in a sea of richer towns: Cherry Hill, Moorestown, Haddonfield. There are other poor towns in South Jersey—Gloucester, Vineland, parts of Camden—but Shaders never mix with other towns, rich or poor.

“There’s a carload of people from Cinnaminson at the custard stand,” somebody would say while sledding on a hill. “Let’s help beat the shit out of them!”

Growing up, the King story was told to me with either tempered shame or perverse pride. Race certainly has a lot to do with it: Maple Shade is overwhelmingly white, born out of white flight after the war, had KKK marches in the 1920s, and is currently home to a leading white power record label. It’s also not, to use a term I have always hated, white trash. Still, I’ve sat next to old-timers in bars who said that King and his friend should have known better, that they were just a couple of black guys coming into The Shade. You don’t go to The Shade, one man told me, much less a local bar at one o’clock in the morning, if you’re a black guy.

It wasn’t clear to me if this man was talking about 1950 or the present day.

+ + +

My mother’s parents moved to The Shade and bought a house on Melrose Avenue after the war. My grandfather, who spent the Depression eel-fishing in the Schuylkill River and World War II aboard the USS Crescent City in the Pacific, worked a series of jobs there: milk man, non-union welder, and, finally, printer of New Jersey Turnpike toll tickets. Any homogenous blue collar town builds a wall around itself, circles its wagons, marks off its own territory. It made sense that, when folks from Philly’s working-class neighborhoods—Kensington, Fishtown, South Philly—came to Maple Shade, they brought insularity and prejudices with them.

My mom grew up in Maple Shade. My dad met my mom on Market Street in Philadelphia, where she worked as a secretary and he was stationed in the Navy. He came courting at my grandparents’ house, which was by then on Mecray Lane. And when they married, they moved five blocks down the street. My father worked as a local delivery truck driver, my mother a part-time secretary at the Catholic elementary school that she and then my sister and I attended. My father loaded up 18-wheelers on the night shift, brutal work, on a Teamster’s wage. We grew up comfortably, in the United States of America, oblivious to what we didn’t have or couldn’t afford. “Like most Americans,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “I’ve spent the better part of my life laughing.” Growing up, Shaders were clannish, but also no-nonsense and helpful. Every family knew every other family by siblings or neighborhood. Shaders had the sidewalk sale each September and the Jaycee Carnival each summer; they bought rubber parachute men for their kids at the 5 and 10. Shaders worked hard and went home, or they went to a bar—there were so many bars along one mile on Main Street (20) that Maple Shade was rumored to appear in record books. Shader guys played baseball and football and drank beer in the woods. Shader girls joined the cheerleading squad or played field hockey and drank beer in the woods. I played trombone and wore glasses that remained tinted indoors. I prayed to Our Lord Jesus Christ that my family could afford the monthly payments for me to go out of town to Catholic high school. I could not play baseball well and did not drink beer in the woods.

Shaders are prickly about how they are perceived. As I write this, I know that my stepfather Bill, an honorable and friendly dude and Vietnam vet who was my mom’s prom date in 1965 and reunited with her 25 years later in a marriage so Romantic and small town it makes me blush, will tell me again that I should “stop picking on Maple Shade,” that I have it all wrong. My mother attributes her husband’s boosterism to having never worked in town or raised kids there. If I had a chance to explain to him, I’d say picking on The Shade is only half the story, that in a way I had to hate the place in order to leave it, and once I did, I saw how it was the only genuine and interesting place I’d ever lived.

+ + +

When I moved to New York to go to graduate school, I’d encounter union organizers, activists, poets, fresh out of colleges that all seemed to end with -n—Oberlin, Bowdoin, Wesleyan. They were ready to join the revolution, any revolution. I wondered, sometimes to their face, whether, if I could transport them via holodeck to some bar in Maple Shade, they would feel the same way about their cause, whether they thought that it was worth it to fight for Shaders’ rights, these particularly crude people I love, moderate Democrats whose dads and moms worked as bricklayers, telephone linemen, jig and dye makers, plumbers, stood behind machines at coat factories, loaded coal trucks, operated heavy equipment, built ships. Every Shader I’ve known, much to their credit, saw through protest kids as people who had the time to march around out of noblesse oblige. Shaders don’t put it that way. They just don’t need or want help. They’re doing fine on their own.

That independent streak is also Maple Shade’s undoing. In The Clustering of America, Michael Weiss cites Maple Shade as an epicenter of “Blue Chip Blues,” “middle class people with working class values” who missed out on the waves of economic changes since the 1980s. Most of the 19,000 residents have not completed college, he writes, and don’t necessarily see the value in a degree.

“As long as the kids can learn a trade and make some money at it,” Weiss quotes one Maple Shade parent, “then we’re happy.”

You don’t need to be an actuary to predict where this goes. Twenty years after Weiss’s book, the country’s manufacturing base gutted, Shaders still fall behind the national averages of highest education level attained (some college, associate, bachelors, graduate). One of the Shade’s many paradoxes is how such a tight-knit town with solid families fails to pivot from blue to white collar or service jobs. Among Shaders my age, those who stopped at high school have iffy jobs (mall jobs, bartenders, non-union construction), and college grads, who mostly left town, have good ones (teachers, bank managers, accountants). At my sister’s 1985 graduation, I remember the principal handing out fifty-dollar scholarships for books to go to beauty school. One student was offered a full ride to Trenton State.

People didn’t talk about college in the Shade. You talked about which car you would buy once you started working. But I didn’t want to learn a trade. I didn’t care about making money, especially after my dad was laid off from his job. In the early 1980s, the trucking and just about every other industry began to unravel. My grandfather drove my mom out of town to discount groceries to spend her Food Stamps without embarrassment. To be poor in Maple Shade is to remind others how they are just a couple paychecks away from being poor themselves.

+ + +

In 1983, I was walking up to the Hilltop Diner to play some Defender when I met Tom Hartman.

I lived on 351 West Woodlawn, which ends in a curve, around a sewage processing plant, and continues up Park Avenue, and that is where Tom lived with his parents in a pink rancher. His parents owned a liquor store, and he was a senior at Maple Shade High. I remember striking out to him in CYO. As a kid, his mom called in to check on Tommy, and my mom the school secretary would answer the phone to reassure her that her son is OK. I was admiring his metallic blue Chevy muscle car in his driveway, when I heard him shout to me from his front door.

“So, Nester, I hear you’re into music.”

Tom always wore nice clothes and the latest sneakers. He was a husky pants wearer like me, but he did not wear the usual Deep Purple shirt and sparse mustache. He carried himself like an athlete. He played basketball with dudes who beat me up. I was surprised he knew my name.

“Yeah, sure. I have 250 records and 100 tapes. I haven’t counted my 45s.” Such a catalogue list must have made Tom smile. Sure, you have a collection. But what’s actually in your collection?

“Are you into punk rock at all?”

This question sounds corny now. Who isn’t “into” punk rock? But such a question in Maple Shade, where FM rock issued out of every bitchin’ Camaro or F150, where girls sat barefoot on Dodge hoods and sipped warm beer, where no one would predict they’d all be listening to country in 30 years--but they would be!--to ask someone a question about punk rock was like to asking if you read Communist literature in the 1950s. I said that I was, in fact, “into punk rock,”or at least curious, and he went back inside.

“I have Ramones albums,” I said. “That’s about it. My favorite new band now is R.E.M.”

“They’re alright,” Tom said. “But they’re too commercial.”

He goes back into his house, and brings out a short stack of LPs, all in pristine condition, some I read about in Record, Musician, The Bob and other music rags I subscribed to.

“Why don’t you borrow these and let me know what you think?”

If I could point to one moment where I was assured there was a way out of Maple Shade at least in my mind, where I could say there is a Before and an After, where someone or some force interceded and changed the way I look at the world, it would be when Tom Hartman handed to 13-year-old me the following records: Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade, Stiff Little Fingers’ Inflammable Material, the first Bad Brains LP, Another Music in a Different Kitchen by the Buzzcocks, Wire’s Pink Flag, and Snap!, the greatest hits collection by his favorite band and soon to be one of mine, The Jam.

I turned around to go back to my house. I would never play Defender with the stoners from town again. I would stop listening to Foreigner and Billy Joel and Blondie. Some of these records were played so much over the course of the next two weeks that I had to go to Sound Odyssey in the Cherry Hill Mall to buy Tom replacements.

+ + +

Whenever I am in the town’s limits, I drive by my old house on West Woodlawn to see how the owners are treating the ancestral home. My wife has grown tired of these detours. My sister drove by once and offered the current owners to go to Home Depot to replace the closet door where our parents penciled in our heights growing up.

A couple years ago, I drove up to the Wawa on Forklanding Road, where all the Shaders used to confer in the parking lot with their monster trucks, and I saw a couple of people in colored mohawks. Colored mohawks! I had rocks thrown at me because I listened to Squeeze on my boombox, and these kids were openly embracing funny haircuts and—could it be?—one of them was wearing a Black Flag t-shirt?

It felt, somehow, anticlimactic. I didn’t feel like a trailblazing pioneer as one of the few punk new-wavers in town in the 1980s; it was a means to escape the decrepit souls of my 08052 Zip Code. Still, it felt ingenuine how these young men were out in the open like this. They should be in basements, with headphones on, swapping import 45s they bought on trips to Third Street Jazz in Philadelphia. They should respect the provincial Maple Shade I knew. But now of course there’s no monoculture to rebel against, and these kids couldn’t muster the wanderlust to escape the Wawa parking lot, much less start a revolution. If anything, the Shaders’ stares they elicited were the same as if they dressed as Civil War reenactors.

This particular occasion was on the day I attended the viewing for my grandmother, who worked as the township manager’s secretary for almost 20 years. Hundreds of people came. I wept openly as I hugged and shook the hands of Catholic nuns, policemen, neighbors, people I never saw before and will never see again.

+ + +

We used to say that Martin Luther King was thrown out of The Jade, which is what Mary’s Café was known as when I was growing up. Its last incarnation was as The Moorestown Pub, a name that’s hilarious to anyone from the area. In a town with bar names like Jay’s Elbow Room and the Jug Handle Inn and The Alden, anything with the word “Pub” in it sounded pretentious, and this pub was not in Moorestown. One of the country’s wealthiest towns, named by Money magazine as the nation’s Best Place to Live, Moorestown is also a dry town founded by Quakers. The bar closed, overgrown with weeds, then bulldozed into another ramp to the highway. One historian has started a petition to place a plaque there, memorializing the King incident.

I used to zoom past The Jade on my bike along a hill out of town as I made my way to my job at Sunshine Car Wash. “A Town Called Malice,” a song by my new favorite band The Jam, blasted on my Walkman. I’d skid out on the iced-over driveway, crash into the tip box, grab towels from a shopping cart, and dry off the windshields of Moorestown doctors.

Also in 1950, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was run out of Maple Shade: my mother’s parents take Sunday drives across the Ben Franklin Bridge, looking for a house in the newly formed Maple Shade Township. They call the new houses, built out of apple and peach orchards, “God’s Country.”

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NHL Playoff Notes

2012-05-12T15:05:01Z

by Keith Gessen

Image: Jagr scores on Devils. From Flyers.nhl.com.

Rangers-Senators

The hardest thing to do in hockey is catch a pass properly. It is the last and most-neglected of the necessary skills. First you learn to skate; then shoot; then, much later, to look around and pass; and only then, to catch a pass. These are the stages of development and it sometimes feels like the Rangers haven’t reached the last stage. When they are on the powerplay, pucks bounce off their sticks, or over them—it takes a moment to recover, time is lost. Whereas the Senators' top line, on offense, makes crisp passes which the players then corral and release again. It's a matter of two feet, half a second, but in that half a second lies all the difference. That there should be such a gap in skill at this level—that a 180-pound rookie named Erik Karlsson can make veteran professional hockey players look stupid when they try to take the puck from him—is astonishing. It's no wonder the Rangers spent the first game trying to take his head off. He was the best player on the ice.

The Rangers' game is played behind the opposing net. The forwards throw the puck into the zone, then chase after it, hoping to frighten and intimidate the defensemen into a mistake. The defenseman, skating back for the puck where it’s sitting along the boards, knows he’s going to get hit. If he gets to the puck too quickly, he will get plastered into the boards; if he slows down too much to brace himself for the hit, the forward may steal the puck. In the end, more often, the forward and defenseman arrive at the same time, collide, both crash face-first into the boards, then go looking for the puck at their feet. Eventually someone comes out with it. If it's the defenseman, he looks for an outlet pass up ice; if it's the forward, he just throws it behind the net, where another forward will do battle with another defenseman, moving slowly with the puck along the boards. He will look momentarily to see if someone's open; if not, he'll throw the puck back behind the goal again, to another forward, and the whole thing will start over. This is called the “cycle." It consists 80 percent of players hacking at the puck along the boards, where it's pretty much invisible to everyone in the arena. But unless you can pass and catch passes like the Senators, it's what you're going to do, and eventually someone will come free, the puck will squirt out to the front of the net or find its way to the defenseman at the point, and a shot can be attempted. Half of these will be blocked before they even reach the net; of those that do reach the net, 90 percent will be stopped cold by the goalie, whose pads are too big.

Jagr

Jagr along the boards is a sight. His reach is so long, and he has become so strong over the years, that he can hold the defenseman off with one hand like a father playing with his young son. "Not now," says Jagr. "Jagr busy."

But Jagr is old. How old? Four years ago, he was already too old; he played his final season for the Rangers looking slower and clumsier than a premier player at this level ought to look. For the first time since his rookie year, he averaged fewer than a point a game, and during the off-season the Rangers told him they wanted to move on without him. It’s not us, it’s you. This meant a new star or scorer to orient the team around, and also letting go of some of the Czechs Jagr always insisted on having as teammates, so he would be less lonely. (Jagr's replacement was a broad-shouldered and much faster Slovak named Marian Gaborik.) So in 2008 Jagr retired and moved to Russia to play out his last years in a quieter, more pass-friendly, less punishing league. Also, as his friend Darius Kasparitis once said, Jagr likes Russia because you can park your car on the sidewalk.

In Russia he was touched by tragedy. A promising young player for Jagr's team, the Siberian Omsk Avangard, just north of the Kazakh border, turned out to have a heart condition. The team doctors chose to let him play. One night, sitting on the bench next to Jagr after a shift (they were linemates), he had a massive heart attack; he died before they got him to the hospital. He was 19 years old.

Jagr is six-four, which makes him tall even now, in the much bigger NHL, but when he began he was uncommonly tall, and also skinny. Don Cherry disparaged him as a "figure skater." Jagr's game was subtle passes, indirections, wrist-shots—he did not like to mix it up in the corners. I never really saw him play until his second season with the Rangers, after the lockout. Even then Jagr was a different, older player from the one who'd had 149 points in 1995-96, the most ever by a right wing—he had grown into his body, was now one of the heavier players on the ice. Bigger, but still inelegant, his long torso always bent forward from his giant ass so he could reach the puck, he made feather-like passes that he threaded through legs and sticks. He had an uncanny ability to see—not just what was happening at that moment (hard enough when trying to control the puck), but what was going to happen in the future; he seemed to know what players were going to do before they themselves knew. He finished the season with 123 points, two shy of the scoring title. In the next two seasons his production declined, and then he was off to Russia, a retiree. I saw him play once in Moscow: it was the same Jagr, #68 on the Avangard, but he had slowed; guys would steal the puck from him, somewhat to their own surprise. To see him back in the NHL is like seeing a rare bird, soon to be extinct. In February he turned 40.

Goals

Goals in hockey are so rare as to be almost meaningless. Statisticians sometimes discount them—they don't tell you anything, really, the sample size is too small. Only soccer has fewer goals. But they can come at any time.

Three identical plays: the left wing skating down the boards, a defenseman skating with him. The crowd is excited. But is it really dangerous? If the wing has blazing speed, he can head for the net, where his chances increase; but the defenseman is over six feet tall, and a good skater. No, the wing decides to shoot (maybe, like the rookie Chris Kreider in overtime against Ottawa in Game Six, he is simply too tired to skate any further). He raises his stick for a slapshot. This means more power but less accuracy, and also it will give the defenseman a chance to get his own stick in front of the shot. Nonetheless, a slap shot it is. Off it goes! More often than not, it sails wide of the net; the wing has tried to pick a corner, and missed; the puck bounces harmlessly off into the corner; or the defenseman deflects it with his stick, and it sails uselessly into the other corner. If it gets through, chances are very good that the goalie saves it. If he gives up a rebound, there is hope, but why would he do that? The goalie swallows the puck. The third option is that it's a goal. It sneaks past the goalie's pads somehow, or it whizzes over his shoulder, maybe after deflecting off the defensemen’s stick or skate, or it finds a way under his arm. Most of the time it's not a goal, and you wonder why you ever thought it would be. But then again, sometimes it is. You keep watching.

And yet this, if it's a goal, is a classic goal. Man skates, shoots, scores. More often the goal is a fluke, a junk goal, a garbage goal. Someone throws the puck at the net and it bounces off a stick, a leg, a divot in the ice, and skips over the goalie's outstretched glove. The goal counts, but is it a real goal? The announcers think so. "Just get the puck on goal," they intone the wisdom of the ancients. "It's never a mistake." And it's not just a cover-up for the randomness of goals, this business of getting the puck to the net. You really should! In football, lack of success in the Red Zone leads to demoralization—it's a bad omen, a sign that the tide is about to turn. In hockey, offensive zone pressure almost always eventually yields fruit—if not a goal, then a penalty from a tired defenseman. Then comes the powerplay, and even the Rangers can score on the powerplay.

So goals are not entirely random—except when they are. Flyers goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov takes a routine dump-in, handles it cleanly, sees a New Jersey forward skating toward him, for appearance's sake more than anything—except Bryzgalov suddenly shoots the puck into the forward's stick, causing it to bounce right back at the goal and through Bryzgalov's legs, 2-1 Devils, who go on to win the game, 3-1, and the series. Flyers go home. Jagr goes home! The Devils advance. But the goal is bullshit. A fluke. An oddity.

Is hockey meaningless? Is life meaningless? Certainly the regular season is meaningless. The top team during the regular season—Vancouver—fell out of the playoffs in the first round. So did the #3 team, St. Louis. The #4 team, Pittsburgh? Gone. Of the top four, only the Rangers, who couldn't hit a barn with a hockey puck if they were in it, remain.

Statistics

I will not speak for the other sports—they should speak for themselves. But in hockey the new statistics are meaningless. Goals are still meaningful; assists are meaningful. +/- is very meaningful. Beyond that? Beyond that is the evidence of your eyes. What you see is true. Hockey is a series of tiny, discrete battles for the puck. You either win them or you lose them. You know it, as a player; so does the person watching the game. Do we love math, or sports? I love both math and sports. But separately.

Ovechkin

Ovechkin is the oddest player going. You don't realize just how odd until you watch an entire game. On highlight reels he is always scoring acrobatic goals—goals while flinging himself through the air, goals from his knees, goals from his back—but in actual games what you see is that he's out of control. Ovechkin is graceless. His great rival, Sidney Crosby, when he skates, looks like he's barely touching the ice—Crosby levitates. Ovechkin looks like he's trying to dig a hole in it, like a dog flinging dirt in the backyard. He is out of control when he passes the puck, often just flinging it to the other side of the rink; and he's out of control when he hurtles down the left wing toward the goal. But he's also very fast and hard to stop. His speed creates space and time, and he has one of the best wrist-shots in hockey.

Ovechkin has been benched by various coaches at various points in his career, but this postseason has been something else entirely. The Capitals coach does not just occasionally bench Ovechkin if he's misbehaved; he sits him as a matter of course, bringing him out on occasion when the Capitals really need a goal (or are on the powerplay). One observer has suggested that we are witnessing the birth of a new phenomenon—the offensive specialist, called in for special occasions, like the designated hitter or the pitcher who only throws to lefties in the eighth inning. Maybe this is strange for hockey, but modernity demands it. It's interesting that an "old-school" coach is the one who pioneered it. Maybe what's strange is that it took so long.

Announcers

The announcers are good guys, more or less, but why are they so invested in authority? All this talk about playing “within the system”—Ovechkin’s great crime is that he refuses to. The announcers always take the side of the coaches. All the coaches are great coaches, according to the announcers, whereas the players are troublesome children who need to be controlled.

On the other hand, the fans always hate the coaches, thinking they could do better (the announcers are often former coaches; fans are mini-coaches, shadow coaches). Fans tend to take the side of the players. Coaches hate Ovechkin and fans love him. It’s the role of the announcers to speak for order, to speak for authority. Gives the fans something else to be angry about.

Violence

The league is undergoing a concussion epidemic. Players are missing not just a few games but entire seasons—Sidney Crosby, easily the best player of his generation, missed a season and a half. What other sport would tolerate this? And yet what can hockey do? The epidemic is the result of two things: one is the size and speed of the players, both of which keep increasing, playing on an ice surface that has remained the same size; and the other is the dramatic and sudden rise in medical attention to concussions, brought about (I assume) by the recent valuable media attention to the long-term affects of concussions on football players—specifically, brain trauma, early-onset Alzheimer's, depression, and death.

What to do? I don't know. The NFL has had some success in outlawing the kind of head-on-head hits that cause dramatic concussions (and broken necks), but they will not be able to do anything about the facemask-to-facemask hits that characterize every single play for the down linemen. In the long run, the NFL is doomed. The NHL does not have to be. Personally, I'd make the rink bigger; outlaw checking (but keep fighting); and for good measure I'd outlaw blocked shots. That's right. Officials can distinguish between a puck that merely incidentally goes off a player's skate into the goal, and one that is propelled goalward by a "distinct kicking motion"; they can do the same for blocked shots. But short of that, just expand the rink.

The West

I have no idea what's happening in the West. It appears be to some kind of exile to which players from the East are sent; they return angrier and faster and sometimes win the Stanley Cup. I guess the Phoenix Coyotes are the old Winnipeg Jets; the Los Angeles Kings meanwhile appear to be the 2008-2010 Philadelphia Flyers.

Rangers-Capitals

In the end the basic philosophical question is this: Can a team as profoundly untalented as the Rangers win the Stanley Cup? It seems the answer would have to be no. And yet so far they've beaten the more talented Senators and played the more talented Capitals to a stalemate. How did they do it? How does anyone do it? They must have scored more goals than the Senators. They dumped; they chased. They scrambled, threw the puck toward the goal, obstructed the view of the goalie. And their goalie was slightly better, which is no small thing in the desert of goals that is the playoffs.

Tonight is Game 7 against the Capitals. Someone has to win the game: it will definitely be the team that scores more goals. Beyond that? Will the team that won prove itself the better team? Will we be able to draw conclusions? No. And yes. The team that won will have been the better team by definition. But on another day, in another rink, things may have turned out differently. Which isn't to say that they will.

If anyone knows anyone with tickets, please have them call me.

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Lions in Winter, Part Two

2012-05-09T15:18:46Z

by Charles Petersen

Image: Construction of the New York Public Library's Main Reading Room circa 1906.

This piece is a preview of Issue 14, coming in early June. Subscribe now and your copy will be shipped directly from the printer. Part one appears here.

The main building currently houses around 5 million books. About 3 million reside in an extensive series of stacks that occupy the center of the building. They are made up of structural steel, some of it created by the Carnegie steelworks—as originally built, these stacks held about sixty-three miles of shelves. An additional 1.2 million books are held in “compact shelving” beneath Bryant Park, with the stacks on rollers; the rest are scattered through various parts of the building. There is an undeveloped floor beneath the compact shelving under the park, which could hold another 1 to 2 million books, but it has significant problems with water leakage, and the library is unlikely to spend the $20 million necessary to get it into shape.

At present, if you want a book from these miles of stacks, you get it the old-fashioned way: by filling out a paper slip and handing it to a staff member. Until the mid-2000s, the slip would then have been whisked away through a system of pneumatic tubes to the library’s “pages,” who track down books in the stacks. As older staffers retired, I’ve been told, the cylinders that ran through these tubes began to disappear, mementos of a long career. Today, in the main reading room, the call slips go through the dumbwaiter system, which still runs, and which carries the books back from the stacks. In my experience, it takes about twenty minutes to get a book. When the library opened, it took about six minutes. Such is the burden of age.

With Google Books the results come back much faster than with the New York Public Library’s steampunk system. Google has scanned more books more quickly than anyone a decade ago would have thought possible, and the scans, while not perfect, are quite good. Some cataloging information gets lost, sometimes pages are missing, but it’s certainly no worse overall than what you’d find at the average library. And the possibilities for research with Google Books are astonishing. The entire world library system holds about 6 million editions that were published before 1923, the rough cut-off date for copyright in the US, and Google has already digitized more than 2 million of them. Once all of these books are digitized, the history of the 19th century, or at least how it’s researched, will begin to look rather different. (Books published prior to the 19th century are generally too fragile for Google to scan, and many have already been scanned by companies like Gale and ProQuest and made available in subscription databases such as “Early English Books Online.”)

But the vast majority of books were published after 1923. While the world’s libraries hold about 6 million editions published before that date, they hold around 26 million that were published after, a number that is only growing. Google was never going to be able to do much with many of these books, because the rights-holders are still around; the scanning project might have sped up the rate at which publishers were able to provide digital copies of their back catalogues, but just because Google had scanned The Great Gatsby didn’t mean Scribner was going to start letting Google Books offer one of its biggest money-makers for free. The greatest predictions about Google Books, rather, arose from what the service was supposed to do with “orphan works,” the millions of books published during this time whose copyright no one has claimed but which, also, no one has disavowed. It’s pretty much guesswork as to how many orphan books there are, but the best guesses put it at about half of all books published since 1923. And herein, it turned out, lay the problem.

For the first several years of the project, Google was happily scanning anything it could get its Elphel 323 cameras on. Then the Authors Guild and the publishers sued Google for copyright infringement. The parties eventually put together a proposed settlement, which would have made it possible for Google to provide millions of orphan books to the public, with money set aside for any copyright holders who came forward. But that settlement is dead. For some reason, this news doesn’t seem to have penetrated: the Google Books settlement, as described ad nauseam in the press in the late 2000s, exactly the time when the New York Public Library and its consultants were thinking through their current plans, is quite simply not happening. All the talk of a “Google terminal” in every public library, which would have allowed anyone anywhere to read millions of out-of-print books, was effectively thrown out the window last March, when Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York issued his opinion stating that the problems at stake were too large for a court to determine. Congress, Chin said, should decide what happens to orphan works, not Google, the Authors Guild, and the publishers.

This was a victory of sorts for the public sphere, since it stopped Google from establishing a monopoly on orphan books. But the decision left the problem to Congress, and Congress, which almost invariably takes the side of copyright holders, isn’t exactly in a rush to deal with the problem of orphan books. Until Congress acts, if it ever does, the best that Google will legally be able to provide when users request orphan books is “snippet view,” the annoying feature that lets you search through a book and see a line or two whenever a particular word occurs, but nothing else. “Snippet view” is great for fact-checkers, translators, and book reviewers, who just need a few lines of text, but it’s of little use to researchers without access to the book itself. I use it all the time at the main branch of the New York Public Library—and when I find a book that looks interesting, I go and put in a call slip.[1]

It’s likely that, sooner or later, a solution will be found, if not necessarily through Google. The historian Robert Darnton, who became director of Harvard’s libraries in 2007, has argued forcefully for a kind of public option: a “grand coalition of foundations,” hopefully to be joined by Congress and private industry, should pay for the books to be scanned and made available for free; it’s in the public interest, Darnton argues, and our books are part of the national patrimony. (For just this reason, the French government has pledged $1.1 billion for the digitization of much of the holdings of the Bibliothèque Nationale.) No doubt there will be other solutions. But even if Congress were to act tomorrow, whether to break the Google Books deadlock or to fund Darnton’s plan, the availability of digitized books to the point where one could be confident of finding what one needed, in the way one can still be confident upon arriving at the New York Public Library, is still some years away. Five years? Ten years? Certainly closer to ten, probably closer to twenty. Yet the main branch of the New York Public Library has to exist in the present day. And the renovation is slated to start as early as next year and to be finished in 2017 or 2018.

Norman Foster’s preliminary plans have not yet been made public, but looking at some of Foster’s other projects you can begin to imagine what the new library will look like. The constraints of the space greatly limit what will be possible: Foster cannot add a new glass dome to the building, as he did at the Reichstag in Berlin, because the main reading room on the top floor cannot be touched; adding an entire skyscraper, like the addition at the Hearst building in New York, would of course be impossible. Instead, according to a former staff member who has seen the initial plans, Foster’s design may well call for the demolition of not just the stacks but of much of the marble facade that currently stands on the Bryant Park side of the building, and whose windows and marble pillars are exactly aligned with the rows of steel stacks inside. If the stacks go, the facade is likely to go as well. In the facade’s place, we will likely see some kind of ambitious new glass entrance; Foster’s designs are distinguished by their commitment to bringing natural light into interior spaces, and Foster will no doubt try to brighten up a building that is, in spots, a little gloomy. It also seems possible that the new library could expand horizontally, to take up the space where a restaurant currently sits, on the eastern edge of Bryant Park. Since the main building is landmarked, such an addition would require multiple approvals and will certainly be opposed by preservationists. It is unlikely that the preservationists will succeed. What’s most remarkable about the idea of adding an entrance on the Bryant Park side of the building is that there isn’t one there now.

Beyond that, it appears that the library inside the new glass entrance will be a compromise between huge open spaces like the main reading room and smaller meeting rooms where groups can congregate and talk and work—the activities the library’s administrators, following the latest trends among education visionaries, believe will be the main way people will learn in our post-book, post-sustained-silent-reading world. It will not be a giant internet cafe, exactly, as the Nation’s Scott Sherman and others have suggested. But much of the renovation will look more like what university administrators like to call a “learning commons” than what we tend to think of today as a library. In response to the question “What will replace the stacks?” the library’s website says, “Books!” That’s just not true, and it’s certainly not true in the long term. Micah May stated to me plainly: “We can’t build the new renovation around circulating books.” The new library will retain the circulating collection for a little while, but it will be designed for the digital future.

As for the research-level books, most of them are leaving. Of the 5 million books currently housed at the main building, only 2 million will remain. The chance that a book you want will be in Manhattan will drop from around 70 to around 20 percent. The administration says the standard turnaround time for books from the New Jersey facility will be twenty-four hours. This strains credulity. The small number of books already housed at Princeton typically take closer to three days to make it to Manhattan, and the new system will be dealing with many more books and requests. Anthony Marx, a political scientist and former president at Amherst who took over as library president last year, says that barcoding all the books will speed up the process. This is a non sequitur: the New Jersey facility only accepts barcoded books; it’s the books in the main building that haven’t been barcoded yet. Barcoding them won’t make the process in New Jersey any faster. Not that speeding up the storage facility would help: the workers there already get all requests to the loading dock on the day they are made. It’s in transporting the books from New Jersey to Manhattan that the library has been failing.

Even if the turnaround were twenty-four hours, it would significantly diminish the library’s value as a research facility. Imagine if every time you Googled something it took twenty-four hours to get a result. Only 300,000 of the 5 million books held at the main building, it’s true, were requested last year; the 2 million books that will remain on-site, moreover, are said to contain around 90 percent of the books being used. But these statistics are less meaningful than they appear. A better number might be how many people currently don’t request books at all because they would have to wait three days to get them. The library’s plan is unprecedented for a reason: no other research library has eliminated the vast majority of its on-site collection because no library can predict what books the next person through the door will request—and no researcher can know what books she will need until she begins to read, and sees where the footnotes, and her curiosity, take her.

+ + +

Over the course of the past two years, I’ve met with over fifty current and former library staff members to discuss the recent and upcoming changes at the library. Many of the librarians with whom I spoke had been forced out following the reorganization of 2007–08, and some had signed “Separation Incentive Program” agreements that offered small payments in exchange for agreeing, among other things, not to “disparage or encourage or induce others to disparage” the library. This is why so many former staff members mentioned in this article are cited off the record. One who did speak to me on the record was John Ganly, the former assistant director of SIBL, who started at the library in 1973 and retired in 2009. What struck me most about Ganly was how up-to-date and well-informed he was. His pet project, unrealized at retirement, was to work with Madison Avenue to archive, from conception to realization, the many digital advertising campaigns that appear online every year. Another former staff member, Howard Dodson, whom I interviewed before he stepped down as head of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, told me about his desire to archive pages on sites like MySpace and Facebook so future researchers would be able to track how young African Americans have constructed their identities online. Yet another former staff member, Donald McCormick, the former head of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, knew the ins and outs of digital copyright law as well as anyone I’d ever met. He told me about a project he had wanted to undertake to digitize and stream the library’s holdings, including cylinders made by Thomas Edison.

With few exceptions, the older librarians with whom I spoke were similarly technologically up-to-date. Unlike newspaper and book publishers, who greeted the internet and e-readers with fear, librarians have little attachment to books, since they have long provided patrons with everything from papyri to scrolls to broadsides to prints to photographs to manuscripts to 78 rpm records to CDs to 16mm films to VHSs to DVDs to databases. Librarians pride themselves on knowing more about how to access information than anyone. No matter how old the librarian, and no matter how much I learned about the latest trends, I continued to find that most everyone I spoke with knew far more about how to find things online than I did.

Nonetheless, almost every single former librarian with whom I spoke opposed the plan to renovate the main branch. Why? Ann Thornton, the system’s newly appointed top librarian, suggested that the concerns of former librarians are due to the fact that, as she put it, “Change is really difficult.” The change the older librarians had trouble dealing with, however, was not technological. It was the change in the library’s mission. No former staff member said to me, “The administration doesn’t care about books.” Rather, they said, “The administration doesn’t care about research.”

There was, for a time at least, a stronger alternative vision of what the research library could become. In 2007, the administration hired Josh Greenberg, a thirtysomething digital guru with a PhD in Science and Technology Studies, to help guide the transition to digital. Greenberg had been one of the principle creators of Zotero, a leading tool in the “digital humanities” movement which allows dissertation writers and others to easily embed and keep track of references to scholarly articles in their texts. At the New York Public Library, he was supposed to set up a research and development center to figure out what a public research library could do online that academic libraries and circulating libraries couldn’t. This center was to be called NYPL Labs, modeled on Google Labs, and it was supposed to create experimental beta projects that took on important research questions and involved the wider public in their solution—“crowdsourcing” at a high level.

Unfortunately, the financial crisis prevented Greenberg from starting many of the projects, and instead his team spent most of their time moving the library’s obsolescent website, which as late as 2009 still relied on individual HTML files, to a more flexible system. Greenberg himself ended up leaving for the Sloan Foundation in 2010. One of the few projects to move forward, the library’s “map warper,” gives an example of what NYPL Labs might have looked like. The project enables untrained users to stretch and pull old maps onto contemporary digital maps, until they overlay perfectly. Once enough users and libraries get involved, this project could create a kind of Google Books for old maps, allowing users to look up an address anywhere in the world and see how the landscape and its representations have changed.

Such a project could have been done over the course of decades with well-trained geographers and limitless funds; or it could be done now for practically nothing and with the help of dedicated amateurs. The difference is like that between Britannica and Wikipedia. Private companies can undertake such a project, but not for the public good; private universities can do it, because they have the money and the map collections, but they would not likely involve the public; an open-source collective of map enthusiasts could do it, but they might have trouble getting the old maps. The New York Public Library, by contrast, is uniquely well-positioned for exactly this kind of project: the library has the resources necessary to create new knowledge, in the form of millions of old books, maps, images, and so forth, and it also “has more surface area than any other institution of its kind,” as Josh Greenberg put it to me, “touching communities from the broadly public to the highly specific academic.”

The past decade and a half has seen a significant flattening in how research is done and what resources people use to do it. Media critics sometimes say that if the New York Times had been thinking straight in the mid-1990s, it would have invented Craigslist. By the same token, one could say that the New York Public Library should have invented Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive. At this point those projects are well-established, but it is not too late for the library to take the lead on initiatives that could excite similar enthusiasm among online independent scholars.

The library’s other most successful online project, aside from the map warper, involves inviting the public to transcribe its collection of approximately 40,000 menus, many of them handwritten. It has gotten off to a fast start. The library has also begun digitizing its Shelley archives and started a project to help navigate the recently released 1940 federal census records. But a handful of projects doesn’t exactly create an “NYPL Labs.” As Greenberg’s successor, Ben Vershbow, told a reporter at the Atlantic, NYPL Labs is “more an idea than a real unit.” The group’s other projects include a site that animates old stereograms, small collections of librettos and theatrical lighting plans, and a tie-in for an exhibition.

Learning about these developments, I was troubled that the library seemed not to be doing enough in a field they claim to want to embrace; I was troubled too by the degree to which the communications department had become involved in these projects, and by their insistence that the library’s online exhibition on Voltaire’s Candide, mostly designed to be used by school-age children, represented a genuine contribution to scholarship. The head of communications and marketing, Deanna Lee, would speak to me only off the record, but in the Atlantic she was quoted as saying, regarding her involvement with NYPL Labs, “PR and content are all tied together now.” With so much money going to construction, and with the library failing to maintain the budget for research-level acquisitions and expert staff, it’s hard to see where the money will come from for serious R&D projects in the future.

The other thing that stuck out in my conversations with former staff members was how skeptical they were of the administration’s reliance on statistics and consultants to justify their plans. Statistics have long been kept at the New York Public Library, but they were rarely given much attention, precisely because there’s no simple way to measure the creation of knowledge. A collection, moreover, has to be built with not just the present but the future in mind. In the last ten years, everyone told me, all of that has changed. What’s been behind this move to statistics and consultant-driven thinking? High finance has always been behind much of the library’s funding, and the board of trustees includes such Wall Street stalwarts as Alan “Ace” Greenberg, former chairman of Bear Stearns, and John Gutfreund, former chairman of Salomon Brothers (and one of the anti-heroes of Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker). But former librarians attributed the changes to the increasing presence of a new kind of board member—hedge fund managers, private equity kingpins (Stephen Schwarzman of the $100 million gift), and media tycoons like ex officio trustee Michael Bloomberg, whose mayoral administration has contributed mightily to the war chest that will make the renovation possible. Another is Joshua Steiner, the vice chairman of the board of trustees quoted earlier in this article, who was chief of staff in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department before becoming an executive at Lazard, Quadrangle, and NBC Universal.

This new breed of trustee is more data-driven and results-oriented. Heike Kordish, who resigned as director of the main building in 2008, told of giving a presentation to the trustees about the incredible materials in the library’s collection. “And people were surprised. ‘Oh my god, that’s in this collection?’” she said. “But it’s not something that you see. It’s not thirty children being read to.” Or as Victoria Steele, director of collections strategy, put it to me, the New York Public Library now has “a business sense that informs our activities, so that we are thinking about the costs that we’re putting into something and whether we’re getting sufficient return on our investment. . . . It’s more informed by people who understand business and metrics.”

Many conversations returned to the figure of David Offensend, co-founder of Evercore Partners, a private equity firm with a market capitalization of a billion dollars. Offensend joined the library in 2004, in part because the trustees felt that the institution’s money was not being handled with due care; he now serves as chief operating officer. According to staffers, Offensend has been instrumental in the shift toward a “business and metrics” sort of thinking. He told the Princeton alumni website in 2009, “If an organization is receptive, the application of business world experiences can have a huge positive impact.” But what kind of business and what kind of metrics? It was under Offensend that Booz Allen was brought in; it was under Offensend, and in the wake of the Schwarzman gift, that the ambitious plan to fundamentally reconfigure the library took shape. Offensend described the plan to me this way: “We did not think that putting the central library in [the main building] was an investment per se in the branch libraries versus the research libraries. It was rather one plus one will equal significantly more than two.” We can see here the familiar arithmetic of corporate downsizing.

No one I spoke with questioned the need for the library to change, but practically everyone questioned the direction in which it was heading. One former staff member summed up the concerns of many librarians like this: “The problem is you’re applying methodologies and analytic tools that were maybe best suited to a Starbucks or a Wal-Mart. For your collection of Dickens, so what, you get four readers a year, is that relevant? You’re supposed to be a research library looking not two months ahead of time but two hundred years ahead of time.”

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The public has been consulted only very minimally on the library’s decisions. There was no open architectural competition for the design of the renovation; there have been no public forums for a discussion of the plan in general. In recent months, as resistance to the plan mounted in scholarly circles, Anthony Marx, who inherited the plan from Paul LeClerc, began defending it in much the same manner in which it was conceived. Marx says that the plan will bring great savings—sometimes the number is $10 million a year, sometimes it’s $15 million (Offensend told me that “conservatively” the library is banking on $7 million)—but, most of all, that it will be “democratic.” In the words of the library’s website, the plan will return the main branch to “the original vision of the building as a democratized ‘People’s Palace.’” It is an attractive vision, and in a sense the increased number of people who will undoubtedly come to the more open, light-filled, renovated library would indeed make it more “democratic.”

But the New York Public Library has since its founding been democratic in a more than simply numeric sense. In 1911, the first request to be filled was for Moral Ideas of Our Time: Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Tolstoy, a book in Russian. The patron who requested it was David Shub, a 23-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant who lived at 1699 Washington Avenue, in the Bronx. The 1910 census entry for Shub’s apartment building shows that almost all of his neighbors were recent immigrants, with occupations from dressmaker to printer to laborer to clerk. Did they, too, go to the library? It’s possible. Shub, who himself worked a series of manual jobs, was part of that great movement of autodidacticism that swept the Western world in the late 19th and early 20th century, and which was responsible for the flourishing of institutions like the British Museum and the New York Public Library. Back then, ideas like democracy, a living wage, and an eight-hour day were still relatively new, and it seemed possible that the empowerment of the working class would lead to a new world of wide public research, in which every man and woman would be able to undertake a study of whatever interested them—just like the wealthy gentry of the past, who studied poetry, animal husbandry, or whatever else struck their fancy. This would be a productive use for one’s newly acquired leisure, otherwise known as the weekend and the late afternoon.

Shub, for his part, after more than forty years in the New York Public Library, where he met Trotsky and Bukharin, introduced many of his friends to the riches of the Slavic division, and wrote several small-circulation Yiddish texts, offered up the fruits of his research in the form of his one and only English-language book, Lenin: A Biography, which appeared in 1948.

A lot has changed in the hundred years since then, and especially perhaps in the last ten. A modern-day David Shub might spend his or her time editing Wikipedia, or watching a complete series of lectures about literary theory on YouTube. (This is in fact possible: Yale has recorded Paul Fry’s lectures and made them freely available. The first episode has 100,000 hits.) Given the possibilities for learning online, it can be hard to see why the public would support a marble mausoleum to what can seem like a dying ideal, the independent scholar, or why philanthropists would donate to an institution that serves impoverished researchers, rather than the illiterate. The typical user at the research library is “well educated but poor,” as Heike Kordish put it to me. That’s not a demographic that anyone, politician or philanthropist, is desperate to serve.

But that’s what the library was set up to do, and that is what it has done for the past hundred years—and while I certainly don’t begrudge the administration’s decision to devote resources to the users of its branch libraries, it is simply absurd to suggest that providing the best possible resources to anyone who walks through the door is somehow undemocratic because not every member of the public happens to make use of them. The people who do go to the library make the trek to Midtown precisely because they can’t get access to its resources elsewhere. Many of the heaviest users are students at City University and City College; it is frequently said that City University’s Graduate Center could not receive accreditation if its students didn’t have access to the New York Public Library, because the rest of its holdings are so paltry. The main building is in effect the university library for every local student, teacher, and professor who isn’t at NYU or Columbia. That’s a strong claim to a democratic purpose.

This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be a large and attractive circulating branch at the center of Midtown. But the library administration has been very creative in its real estate dealings in the past. In the early 2000s, the administration worked with the architecture firm Gwathmey-Siegel on a plan that included a gut renovation on the Mid-Manhattan building and the addition of eight more floors on top. The estimated cost was $120 million, and the result would have been 117,000 square feet of additional space. The plans, canceled after the dot com bubble burst, looked hideous, but they show what is possible. What the library could do now is tear down Mid-Manhattan; temporarily house the books at SIBL; build a brand-new building on the Mid-Manhattan lot, with the same amount of public space currently available at SIBL and Mid-Manhattan; then sell SIBL and move both the big circulating library and the science and business library into the new building.

With the sale of SIBL, valued at around $100 million, and the money from the city, the administration would have at least $250 million for such a project. The entire Rem Koolhaas–designed Seattle Public Library, by way of comparison, cost $156 million. It’s more expensive to build in Midtown, of course, but the 52-story Random House Tower, built in 2003, cost $180 million. With the money left over, the library could restore the research budget or build more new branch libraries like the $50 million Bronx Library Center, which actually brings in half as many visitors as Mid-Manhattan.

And if, two decades from now, the stacks at the main branch have begun to grow dusty, the copyright and licensing issues have been worked out with the help of Congress, and every book imaginable is only an iPad-fingertap away, then the administration can sell its attractive mini-skyscraper, dust off the Norman Foster plans, and go toe-to-toe with the preservationists and the last of the book lovers to build a glass box into the side of the beaux arts masterpiece in Bryant Park. In the (likely) event that physical books remain central to learning and scholarship, we’ll still have the stacks on hand; and in the (also likely) event that digital scholarship takes shape in a way no one today could expect, we won’t have spent $350 million on a structure designed for the “ebook age.”

That’s one way, in any case, of planning for the library’s future. I’m sure a public discussion with library administrators, staff, researchers, and citizens could yield many more. Instead, visitors to the library’s website are invited to “join the conversation” by submitting comments. The comments, however, do not appear on the website and there is no space for public discussion. The “conversation” goes one way. Similarly, when the administration, in response to growing criticism of the plan, convened a panel of scholars and writers to serve as an advisory board of sorts in the spring of 2012, it almost immediately vitiated whatever legitimacy the board could have by disinviting the respected essayist Caleb Crain, who had written about the advisory board, quite circumspectly, on his blog. This, unfortunately, is the way it was always meant to go. In a slideshow that presented the renovation plans to staff in 2008, there was a single box for how the administration would involve the public: “Communicate and market the strategy to key internal and external stakeholders.” Communicate and market—this is what “managed democracy” looks like.

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Whenever I asked the administration about the direction they had chosen, I was told the plan was fundamentally democratic because it gave the people what they want—and what the people want could be determined through the endless surveys and focus groups conducted by the library’s consultants and its own internal strategy department.

When librarians expressed concerns about the renovation, they got the same response. This constituted a huge shift in the library’s decision-making process. Where before members of the library’s staff were involved in an open process at almost all levels, with an internal committee of librarians parallel to a faculty senate at a university, now a few librarians are interviewed by consultants, and senior management makes virtually all large-scale decisions on its own. An internal culture of collegial debate, protected by an understanding that senior librarians had a form of tenure which gave them security to express themselves candidly, has been replaced at the library by what my interviews suggest is a culture of secrecy and fear.

Of all the justifications for the renovation, none is more disingenuous and misleading than the claim that the library is simply trying to make the main building more “democratic.” This is a facility that has stood for over a century and provided unparalleled service to a public that no other institution gives a damn about. It is the most democratic research library in the world, far more welcoming to the average user than the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Museum, or the Library of Congress, let alone the libraries at Harvard and Yale. The only American institution to offer a similar combination of excellence and public access is the University of California system, where anyone who wants to can attend a community college, and anyone who can handle it can attend a great research university.

If there really were no way to maintain a great research library and a great branch system, one could see why a democratic society might choose to give up on the research library and devote its resources to the branches. Similarly, one could see why California, faced with budget difficulties, might let Berkeley and UCLA decline in excellence, so the Cal system can continue to offer access to the wider public, and so funds could be freed up for community colleges. But that outcome would unquestionably be a lesser realization of an ideal democratic society, since fewer people would get the education they deserve. While the administration at the New York Public Library likes to pretend the renovation will not affect researchers, when pressed they insist the main building must be “democratized.” The result is a bad dialectic between the casual readers, who like to check out books, and the fussy, over-educated “elite” readers, who want obscure volumes. The administration thus recapitulates a familiar antagonism in contemporary American political life, one whose necessity the library, by offering the best possible resources to the widest possible public, has for the past century by its very existence refuted.

More than anything, this rhetoric reveals the fundamentally anti-democratic worldview that has taken hold at the library. It is of a piece with what the new Masters of the Universe have accomplished in the public schools, where hedge funders have provided the lion’s share of the backing for privatization, and in the so-called reforms to our financial system, where technocrats meet behind closed doors to decide what will be best for the rest of us. Oligarchs acting in the people’s name (with the people’s money) is not democratic; selling off New York’s cultural patrimony to out-of-town heiresses, closing down treasured divisions and branches, pushing out expert staff, and shipping books to a warehouse in the suburbs, all without consulting the public, is not democratic. If the reconstruction goes through, scholarly research will be more, not less, concentrated in the handful of inordinately wealthy and exclusive colleges and universities. The renovation is elitism garbed in populist rhetoric, ultimately condescending to the very people the library’s board thinks they’re serving. It suggests that no one other than an Ivy League professor or student could ever hope to engage in scholarship or original research. Leave the heavy lifting to the folks at Harvard and McKinsey (and the quants in our commodities division), the financiers are saying; for the rest of you, there will be lovely sun-filled spots to check your email.

1. Even “Snippet View” is currently being challenged by the Authors Guild in court. If the Authors Guild wins, and Congress doesn’t act, Google not only won’t be able to do anything at all with as much as 90 percent of the 20 million books that it’s digitized—the company may even be forced to delete the scans altogether, because it might not have had any right to create them in the first place.

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Lions in Winter, Part One

2012-05-09T15:11:27Z

by Charles Petersen

Image: Exterior marble work of the northeast corner of the New York Public Library circa 1906.

This piece is a preview of Issue 14, coming in early June. Subscribe now and your copy will be shipped directly from the printer. Part two appears here.

In March 2008, the New York Public Library announced a $100 million gift from private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and a sweeping plan to radically remake its landmark main building on 42nd Street. Six months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed; the plan, to no one’s surprise, was put on hold. Now, the administration has announced that the renovation, its budget increased from $250 to $350 million, is back on track. The proposed designs developed by British architect Norman Foster have not yet been made public, but the basic scheme remains the same: to tear out the steel stacks that occupy almost half of the main building—and that literally hold up the famed Rose Reading Room on the top floor—and replace them with a new circulating library. This library will offer plenty of books, DVDs, and other materials, which any patron will be allowed to take out of the building, unlike the current research collection. The plan will be financed through the sale of two of the library’s nearby branches—the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street and the Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) at Madison and 34th—and through a $150 million grant from the City of New York. The new super-library will also be designed for a time when the idea of physically circulating books becomes a thing of the past and practically all library “materials” will be available exclusively through digital devices.

That, however, is in the future. What the present will bring is the removal of the majority of the library’s outstanding collection of research-level books, which for most of the past century have rarely if ever been allowed out of the building. These books will be moved to a storage facility in Princeton, New Jersey. Some will remain in the stacks beneath Bryant Park, but the rest of the books in the library’s core collection will be available only by putting in a request and waiting for them to be brought back to New York.

The plan has much to recommend it. Right now the elegant research facility at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street sits catercorner from the Mid-Manhattan Library, the largest of the circulating branches; in contrast to its luxurious neighbor, Mid-Manhattan is decrepit and filthy, an accidental museum of 1970s-era New York. Eight blocks south, SIBL, built for $100 million in the 1990s, now looks like an expensive folly, its collections little used, its audience more like that of a branch library than the researchers it was intended to attract. The trustees and the administration feel the library can no longer afford to maintain so many major facilities, and they believe moreover that the library can sell Mid-Manhattan and SIBL for $100 million apiece. Given all this, the desire to move the two libraries into the main building makes a certain kind of sense. More people would then be able to work in one of the most beautiful structures in New York, and the library would have more money to fill the facility with computers, staff it with librarians, and extend its hours. The administration also says the library will use some of the space freed up to set aside several hundred desks for writers. As Joshua Steiner, vice chairman of the library’s board of trustees, put it in 2008, the renovation in many way represents the “further democratization” of the main building.

By contrast, a library staff member with whom I spoke called the removal of the books “the destruction of the research library.” And that, too, is true.

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The New York Public Library, at least until now, has not been just another public library. The eighty-seven branch libraries scattered around Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx are much like the branch libraries elsewhere in the United States—they receive their funding from the city and state, and offer circulating materials, as well as computers, internet access, printers, and sometimes children’s rooms, to the public. (The branch libraries in Brooklyn and Queens are run by separate organizations.) But the research division headquartered at the main branch on 42nd Street, with smaller but significant facilities at Lincoln Center, 34th Street, and 135th Street, receives much of its funding from private philanthropy, and has for most of the past century been one of the world’s great research libraries.

The collection dates to the 1840s and 1870s, when the Astor Library and the Lenox Library, both privately supported, were founded in Manhattan; their earliest strengths were Americana and religious history. These libraries remained separate until the late 19th century, when former New York Governor Samuel Tilden died and left almost his entire estate “to found a free library and reading room” in New York. Tilden’s trustees developed a plan to use the bequest, plus the books and funds held by the two existing libraries, to persuade the city to construct a central building to house a single centralized research facility, a place on par with the much-envied British Museum. The city proved surprisingly persuadable: the public, the administration decided, would retain ownership of the building, but the “New York Public Library,” a private charity, would staff the facility and fill it with books. A few years later, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie offered $5.2 million to build a network of neighborhood circulating libraries, on the condition that the city would maintain them and fully cover the operating costs. Unusually, the branches in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx ended up being run not by a city agency but by the existing New York Public Library. The result was a private-public partnership, still a relatively new idea in the early days of big philanthropy.

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While the Carnegie money went to the branches, the city spent $9 million laying down the beaux arts behemoth that stands on the edge of Bryant Park. When the building opened in 1911, it held 800,000 books; between 1911 and 1970, the collection grew to include 4 million books, as well as hundreds of thousands of pamphlets and millions of manuscripts, with particular strengths in American, Slavic, and African diaspora materials, along with a powerhouse performing arts collection and one of the world’s greatest collections of illuminated manuscripts (including works from Persia, Japan, and medieval Europe). Among the high points: the manuscript of Native Son, with Richard Wright’s handwritten corrections; the only surviving first edition of Columbus’s first letter to describe the New World (“if the library was on fire this would be the first thing I would grab,” the curator of rare books told me); a draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand; the first Gutenberg Bible to arrive on American shores; and more than 2,600 volumes from the personal libraries of the Russian royal family. In 1973, the critic Ellen Moers, writing in the New York Review of Books, could confidently speak of the New York Public Library in the same breath as the British Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale. “Its collections are so nearly complete,” she wrote, “its rarities so unusual, its catalogue so superb that scholars everywhere in America (and many from abroad) know they can turn to NYPL as a final and secure resort when hunting an edition, a pamphlet, a folio that can be found nowhere else.”

Moers wrote at a moment when the library, like the city whose pride it had become, was falling on hard times. In the final contract with the city, signed on December 8, 1897, the trustees of the New York Public Library had promised that they would keep the building open at their own expense, twelve hours a day, 365 days a year, with the exception of Sundays, when the library would open at 1 and close at 9. The administration did so without a blip for decades, only beginning to take public money in the 1940s, and then only for routine maintenance and housekeeping. But in 1971 the library cut its hours by almost half, leaving the main building open Monday through Friday, and then only for eight hours each day. The science and technology division and the performing arts collection were temporarily closed to the public, though their staffs, older librarians tell me, were by and large retained. The building, already shabby, fell into decay.

The library’s fortunes turned around in the 1980s with the fundraising work of Vartan Gregorian, a historian of Central Asia, who began the process of making the institution one of the preferred recipients of New York money, old and new. The funds raised went to a series of renovations, as well as to the hiring of new staff, a huge expansion in the collections budget, and the renewed growth of the library’s endowment, which had stagnated throughout the 1970s. In the early 1990s, under Timothy Healy, who served only a few years before dying in office, and Paul LeClerc, a Voltaire scholar who became president of the library in 1994, the administration took on the first large expansion in a generation, spending $100 million to renovate part of the old B. Altman department store on Madison and 34th Street. The result was SIBL, the Science, Industry, and Business Library, a gleaming, state-of-the-art facility with 45,000 square feet of public space, 60,000 square feet for science and business books, and enough classrooms to teach thousands of people how to use CD-ROMs, the futuristic medium around which the library was planned in the early 1990s.

That wasn’t all. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the administration renovated the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center at a cost of $38 million. Around the same time the administration undertook more work on its flagship building. An unused interior courtyard became grounds for a $29 million glass-and-steel structure called South Court. A grant from the family of real estate developer Frederick Rose also allowed for the wholesale renovation of the majestic third-floor reading room; the $15 million job included the purchase of more than three hundred exact replicas of the oak chairs that had stood in the library since 1911 (available to the public at $799 each), as well as sixty replicas of the room’s famed lamps, which came in at over $1,000 each (too pricey, the administration felt, for the gift shop). Under Gregorian, Healy, and LeClerc, the library also began using its large halls for impressive exhibits (on Vladimir Nabokov, James Gillray, and Jack Kerouac, among others, with almost all the materials culled from the library’s own collections), as well as an authoritative, well-attended lecture series. Then, of course, there were the library fundraisers, and more and more corporate rentals.

Meanwhile, across the street, the Mid-Manhattan branch, the largest circulating facility in the city, was crowded and dirty and books were frequently missing from the shelves.

While the library was renovating and expanding, a revolution was taking place in the presentation and consumption of reading material. Newspapers, faced with the wholesale migration of ad revenues to Google, were putting huge resources into their online operations, clearly preparing for an all-digital future. Magazines were next. And then books. In December 2004, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, announced partnerships with Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library to digitize their collections. At that point, the New York Public Library had nearly 9 million books (5 million at the main building, 2 million in New Jersey, and the rest at the other three research facilities). The library had taken more than a hundred years to build this collection. As of March 2012, eight years into the book scanning project, Google has already scanned around 20 million books.

By and large, librarians welcomed digitization. If there is a Hippocratic Oath of library science, it is to make books and other resources as easily available as possible, and digitization promised a giant leap forward. Branch librarians across the country would have noticed as early as the 1990s that many patrons were coming to use the libraries’ internet-accessible computers. Libraries adjusted as well as they could to this new demand. When the refurbished main reading room at the New York Public Library debuted in 1998, one of the most widely discussed features was the installation of forty-eight computers—with twenty-four linked to the internet! Every table was soon outfitted with ethernet outlets, and, eventually, the whole room was blanketed with wireless, so patrons could come with their laptops and easily get online.

But what to do about all the books? Over the past decade, as archives of digital materials from companies like ProQuest, EBSCO, and Gale grew in size, the cost of providing access to such databases increased as well, and many research libraries cut back on the number of new books they took in. Instead, the libraries began to discuss the possibility of working more closely together—maybe Harvard would buy half the German book market, while Yale bought the other half—and also set up joint off-site storage facilities. (MIT, Harvard, Brandeis, and others share a space outside Cambridge, while the New York Public Library shares its space in New Jersey with Columbia and Princeton.) Some universities also participated in high-speed loan networks, like the “Borrow Direct” system, which enables students at every university in the Ivy League (plus MIT) to request books from all the library systems and receive them in one to four days, much faster than the typical speed of interlibrary loan. Once these systems become more widespread and mature libraries will be able to avoid buying multiple copies of obscure and rarely used books, and the money saved can go to paying for databases, as well as to purchasing, processing, and storing unique materials like manuscripts and archives.

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These are some of the experiments that university research libraries have begun in recent decades to pursue. Since the New York Public Library, unlike other research libraries, is supposed to serve a vast and amorphous public, its way forward was less clear. In the mid-2000s the administration brought in two groups of consultants to help it think through the future. This was not the first time the library had turned to the consulting world for help, but the reports that resulted, given the magnitude of the changes the institution was facing, have proved more important than ever before.

The most influential group, according to former staff members, was McKinsey—first brought in around 2003, and then again for a second engagement in 2008–2009. In their first report, the consultants helped the library think through some of its staffing issues, looking with particular scrutiny at potential redundancy between the branches and the research division; the second time, brought in to consult on digital projects, the consultants laid out four possible “paths” for the library to take into the future: it could become a circulating library; a research archive; a museum; or a social service agency. But it had to choose. If the library didn’t choose to pursue one of the four paths, the report stressed, it risked mediocrity in all of them. An internal planning document paraphrases the later report this way: “McKinsey’s strong view was that it is prohibitively expensive to pursue leadership across all potential paths, but never choosing a path also risks never creating true leadership in any one area.” Former staff members made clear that the administration never entirely agreed with McKinsey’s view. Nonetheless, the administration had brought in McKinsey for just this kind of advice, and this was the choice the consultants presented.

In 2006, the administration brought in another consultant—McLean, Virginia-based Booz Allen. Booz’s report, like the two from McKinsey, has not been made public, but an article called “The Library Rebooted,” in Strategy+Business, Booz’s managment magazine, gives a sense of what the advice must have looked like. In a section titled “Expand the Metrics,” the Booz authors write: “Libraries will have to introduce new metrics to measure staff performance. There may be some resistance to this, especially if the library’s staff is conditioned to think of what it does as a government service that isn’t in jeopardy, that could never be in jeopardy, and that doesn’t operate in a changing ‘marketplace’. But in the bigger context of changes, this resistance to measurement should be easy to surmount.” Another hint about Booz’s advice comes from a chart a former staff member included in a presentation. The chart shows a sharp decline in the use of physical collections at the research facilities:

The steep decline in 1998 and 1999 was likely caused by the renovations at the main building and the Library for the Performing Arts, which at times made it inconvenient to use those resources. But the equally unmistakable decline from 2001 to 2006 could not be wished away. The internet had arrived. More and more resources had become available to researchers from the comfort of their homes, whether through free online databases, pirated digital editions, or the used book market, which had become mind-bogglingly quick and easy to navigate as early as 2000.

You might be forgiven, if you were the library, for beginning to think that research was not the best business to be in. Perhaps the library business was one that people should get out of entirely, since no one likes books anymore? That, actually, turned out to be false. While the use of the physical collections at the research libraries was plummeting, the use of the circulating collections at the branch libraries was going up, almost doubling between 2000 and 2010. Meanwhile the number of people actually visiting the circulating and research libraries remained about the same. It was the use of the materials that changed. People were checking out a greater number of books at the circulating branches than ever before, but research more and more was being done online. People still came to the research libraries, but they came and logged in to the wireless.

So what would you do, if you were charged with running the library? Library users, it seems, want more books to circulate; less and less do they want books for research. The drop in the use of the research collection has stabilized since 2007, contra Booz Allen’s prediction from the above chart. But the numbers haven’t returned to anything like the pre-internet era. In its press release about the renovation the administration put forward one particularly suggestive statistic: of the 5 million books currently held at the main building, only about 300,000 were requested last year. That means the rest of them—4.7 million, or 94 percent of the on-site collection—just sat around, taking up space, in one of the most prized real estate neighborhoods on the planet.

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I didn’t start using the research library until a few years ago. It’s a shame, because when I moved to New York in the mid-2000s a great library would have been a godsend. I grew up in a midsize industrial town in northern Idaho—the main products are bullets and toilet paper—and my intellectual life has always to a great degree depended on libraries. As a child, I was a library kid, taking out my limit in children’s books from the local Carnegie branch every week. As I got older, I read the New York Times on the computer I bought after saving money from mowing lawns—something that would have been impossible just a decade before, no matter how many lawns I mowed. For books, because I was brought up in the decade before mass digitization began, I had to rely on what was at hand. It wasn’t much. The Carnegie branch closed down in the 1990s. The one branch that remains sits in a former hardware store, built out of cinder blocks, with no windows; the signs that say “library” are often missing several letters. There’s a small college library in town, but the Idaho legislature hasn’t exactly endowed it with a marvelous collection.

I left Idaho in 2001 for a liberal arts college in Minnesota, where I learned what a real library could be. I saw complete works of authors—Kierkegaard, Coleridge, Shelley, Goethe—for the first time in my life. I discovered H. L. Mencken, and the entire concept of cultural criticism, by wandering a few stacks south of the Hemingway section. After college, everywhere I moved, the first place I went was the library: in Missoula, Montana, I worked on my German in the library of the University of Montana, mediocre but open to the public; in Seattle, I read about documentary film at the library of the University of Washington, fantastic and open to the public; and in Washington, DC, I read through the works of Stanley Cavell at the Library of Congress, also open to the public.

In New York, I ran into a roadblock. My previous libraries either had incredibly long hours, like the University of Washington, or had incredibly long hours and also let me check books out for free, like the University of Montana and my college library. The only exception, the Library of Congress, had mediocre hours and the books didn’t circulate, but the main building happened to be a short bike ride away from my cheap apartment on the edge of Capitol Hill. In New York, in that first year, the only place I could afford was a $560-a-month room in Crown Heights. My one reliable freelance gig—aggregating news articles for a blog—required me to send in my work at 11 AM. I spent the rest of the day working on book reviews. The main branch of the New York Public Library closed at 6 PM. It was an hour away by subway. When I got there, if I found the book I needed, I couldn’t take it home. I hardly ever went.

The other research libraries in town, at Columbia and NYU, refused to admit the public, and there was no way I could afford the fees they charged to get in the door, let alone the even more exorbitant fees they charged to check out their books. Strangely, given all the good books that have been written here, New York was the first place since leaving Idaho that I didn’t have easy access to a good library.

While I have grown to love the research library over the past few years—as I have relied on its millions of books to read about things the internet couldn’t care less about, from American Pragmatism to the labor wars of northern Idaho—the limited hours made it impossible to spend much time at the library whenever I had a full-time job. Even now, as a freelancer, the luxurious atmosphere at the main building is always overwhelmed by the sense of rush: get in, get your books, and take the notes you need—before they kick you out.

The library spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last three decades to renovate its interiors and to open SIBL, but the hours at the main branch improved only slightly. According to Micah May, the thirtysomething former McKinsey consultant who became director of strategy for the library in 2009, the surveys conducted by the library have led the administration to take a much greater interest in hours. This concern is part of the reasoning behind the plan to combine Mid-Manhattan, SIBL, and the main building: if the administration can bring the three facilities together, it can keep them open longer. It should be said that the logic here is a little shaky. The administration is going to sell two buildings, tear up the remaining one, and send a majority of the books to New Jersey—so it can extend the hours? It would seem like a simpler way to extend the hours would be to raise money to extend the hours. But the renovation, of course, is about more than just hours.

+ + +

By its nature, a research library is a conservative institution. It is constrained from reevaluating its commitments and embarking in new directions by the sheer amount of capital it has sunk into its collections. Even if fewer people used the Slavic collection over time, the fact that the library had one of the world’s greatest Slavic collections meant that it had little choice but to go on buying Slavic materials. The library couldn’t, for example, respond to shifting immigration patterns by reducing its budget for Slavic books and shifting to Hispanic books, because it would then be left with a Slavic collection that didn’t cover present scholarship and an Hispanic collection that didn’t cover past scholarship. A great research collection could be created only by starting early, as the New York Public Library did by buying pretty much everything in its specialties from the late 19th century onward, and then by continuing to buy in those same fields, basically forever. (The research library at the Getty Museum has tried to beat this game by buying up entire collections from scholars as they die, but it has taken years for the Getty to match top art libraries, and such an endeavor is only imaginable with the Getty’s billions.)

The advent of digital scholarship has begun to change this equation. Within a few decades it is likely that any reasonably well-endowed institution, the Abu Dhabi Public Library, say, will be able to subscribe to databases that will include more books than are held in the New York Public Library’s entire research collection. Large archives of unpublished material will still distinguish individual institutions—the more than 10 billion items held by the United States National Archives aren’t going to be digitized any time soon—but with most published books, it won’t matter whether a library became interested in the subject a hundred years ago or yesterday. If a library has a sudden influx of Slavicists, it will be able to purchase access to databases of Slavic materials; if the Slavicists stop coming, and more Hispanic studies scholars walk through the door, the library will be able to shift its budget accordingly, with few long-lasting effects.

Most research libraries will still be constrained in how they shift their budgets, because the audience for most research libraries is determined by the institution they primarily exist to serve—their universities. Whether students are checking out French books or not, the library will buy French books, or their digital equivalents, for as long as the university has a French department. At the New York Public Library, by contrast, the decline in requests for research books has allowed the administration to question the very purpose of the research library, because there are no academic departments to tell the library what to do. The administration sees this as a virtue. “We have a tremendous competitive advantage compared to university libraries,” Micah May told me, “because they’re tied to a faculty—so they’re not nearly as nimble.”

The ability to quickly shift missions could come in handy, because the digital age poses particularly difficult problems for a public research library. To understand why, consider the difference between circulating and research books. Circulating books have always been thought of as disposable commodities: a library buys forty copies of the new Harry Potter book, and expects that those forty copies will, on average, each be checked out forty times before they fall apart and have to be thrown away. The circulating library is OK with throwing them away, because in a couple of years there will be a new Harry Potter book and the library won’t need as many copies of the old one anymore.

While it may seem odd, there are not many difficulties in adapting this model to the digital world: instead of buying a book and throwing it away after forty people check it out, a library simply buys a license to circulate an ebook forty times. Functionally, it’s the same. The problem is that where previously libraries could buy any book they liked on the open market for the same price that any individual would pay, the move to digital licensing allows publishers to enforce more fine-grained “library pricing.” Now, instead of paying $10.39 on Amazon for a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and circulating that book until it falls apart, libraries will have to pay whatever publishers demand for the right to circulate a book a set number of times—probably a lot more than $10.39. It’s likely as well that libraries will eventually be competing with the literary equivalent of Netflix for the right to circulate ebooks. But while this new regime may force circulating libraries to cut back on the number of titles they provide, it won’t threaten their basic existence. Once publishers determine the market price to circulate a book, they will be all too happy to charge libraries that price.

The books in the research division at the New York Public Library are another story. While they are not unique, they are not quite commodities. The research division calls itself a “one-copy library”; it collects one copy of a book and keeps it forever. The library didn’t need to buy more than one copy because almost no books were allowed outside of its reading rooms. As a result, the books rarely got damaged or lost. The library has a first edition of Walker Evans’s American Photographs, published in 1938, that any patron can request; it is still in nearly mint condition. How many people have looked at this book since it was first purchased? Perhaps thousands. And while it’s not cheap to buy and store a physical copy of every important book that comes out each year, it’s not clear that it will actually be cheaper to provide access to electronic copies. Many of the books held by the research library, scholarly in nature, are considered to have only one audience—students and professors at universities. All the pricing schemes for electronic editions of such scholarly works are being developed with this audience in mind. And with few exceptions, these schemes work against the New York Public Library.

At the moment, most licensing arrangements for university libraries are set up so that students and faculty can log in and use the databases not just from the physical library but from anywhere in the world, twenty-four hours a day. University libraries can afford to pay for comprehensive access because they have a limited and well-defined user base—in the case of NYU, around 45,000 students, faculty, and staff. The New York Public Library can’t buy similar licenses because it has 1.9 million cardholders. “When a publisher hears that they get very nervous,” Denise Hibay, the library’s head of collection development, told me. That’s because if the New York Public Library did somehow persuade a company like ProQuest to let it buy licenses on the cheap, then NYU (and every other college and university in town) could just stop paying ProQuest and tell all their students who want access to sign up for a library card and log in through the New York Public Library.

The library already deals with this problem by only paying for on-site access to scholarly databases; a few databases are available at every branch, and a few can even be accessed from home, but most serious scholarly databases can only be used at the four research locations. This setup is significantly cheaper: fewer people make use of the databases, and NYU and other universities can’t discontinue their own subscriptions, since students expect to get access to any database they want from their dorm rooms. The consequence of these digital licensing schemes is apparent in the different approaches to physical space. For universities, the physical space of libraries has become less and less important—students mainly go to libraries to study, not to get books, and students can essentially study anywhere, so whether universities call a study space a “library” or a “learning commons” doesn’t matter. Technology has thus unsurprisingly led to a decrease in the importance of physical space and to the greater dispersion of knowledge. But for the New York Public Library or any other public research library, physical space has actually become more important than ever before, because the only way the library can afford to pay for access to truly research-level databases is by restricting the access to certain physical spaces. Technology combines with the peculiar economics of information to make physical space once again very important.

We assume that the internet can only make it easier and cheaper to access information, but what the internet really does, when it’s commercialized, is commodify information. In the future, publishers will be able to determine exactly how often a specific book or article is accessed, try a few different prices, and charge whatever turns out to be most profitable. If that profit can be generated by selling advertising, then the book will be made available “for free”; if not, users will be forced to pay. In the case of romance novels, this means “ad-supported books”; in the case of scholarly journals, if you don’t have an institution to support you, it means paying $5.99 to “rent” a single article for one day, the price currently being charged by Cambridge University Press.

Research libraries, because of the “right of first sale”—the law that allows libraries and rental stores to circulate materials without paying royalties—have long served as a refuge for knowledge outside of the reach of most market forces. It may seem like arcane scholarly works would be precisely the kind of thing that could be provided “for free” with advertising. But the existence of a large, well-endowed customer base, namely, universities, that cannot perform their basic functions without access to huge databases of such materials makes it very unlikely that copyrighted scholarly works will ever be provided for free. The “open access” movement, which would oblige all publicly funded academics to distribute free copies of their work, is one solution. Given how thoroughly the profit motive has worked its way into our education system, such a future should not be counted on.

+ + +

While the New York Public Library was wondering how to deal with this mercurial future, some internal events were also taking place. For one thing, the renovations in the 1990s kept coming in over budget, and once construction was done, upkeep on the properties was expensive. For another, one of the management consultants’ invaluable suggestions was that the library set up a strategic planning department, to give more advice along the lines of the advice McKinsey and Booz Allen had given. This wasn’t cheap either. And then there were health care costs, pension costs, materials costs—everything was going up. How to pay for it all? In his recent piece about the library for the Nation, the journalist Scott Sherman quotes a “high-ranking official” who told him, “Our sources of revenue from the city and state are not keeping up with inflation.” In fact, when I looked up the research library’s annual budgets (conveniently available in bound volumes at the library itself), I found that the city’s contribution has not only not decreased but in fact increased over the years—from $2 million in 1980 to $25 million in 2008. When adjusted for inflation, that’s still a significant increase. But the library was spending more money as well, and it may be more important that the administration thought they were short on money than that they really were.[1]

And so, like any large corporation with expenses exceeding income, the library in the middle of the last decade began to liquidate its assets. The assets were formidable. On view at the Edna Barnes Salomon Room on the third floor of the main building was Asher Durand’s 1849 painting “Kindred Spirits,” one of the masterpieces of the Hudson River School. It depicts Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant taking a walk in the Catskills, and was given to the library by Bryant’s daughter in 1904. Exactly one hundred years later, by unanimous vote, the board of trustees decided to put the painting up for auction at Sotheby’s.

The decision was controversial. Paul LeClerc made a point at the time of saying that the money would go to the purchase of books and manuscripts and to library’s endowment, and not toward day-to-day operations—that is, the library was not holding a fire sale, but merely trying to focus on its mission. “We’re not a museum,” LeClerc told the Times. “We don’t have a staff devoted to paintings and sculptures.” (After reading about his nonexistence in the paper of record, the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Chief Librarian of Art, Prints, and Photographs and Curator of the Spencer Collection Robert Rainwater decided to quit.) Critics pointed out that the painting was not just a national treasure but a treasure of the City of New York. Library officials countered that they would prefer that the painting remain in New York, on public view, and would grant “preferential” financial terms for such a bid. But what did “preferential” terms mean? Not enough, apparently. The winner of the auction was Alice Walton, an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune, who bought the painting for over $35 million and took it to Arkansas, where it can be seen at her new Crystal Bridges Museum. “We’re disappointed that the painting is leaving New York,” said the spokesman for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had united with the National Gallery of Art in an attempt to put together a super-bid for the painting, and failed. LeClerc for his part told the Times he was “delighted that it didn’t leave the country.” Nonetheless, after the controversy, a plan to sell the library's legendary "Double-Elephant folio" of Audubon's Birds of America and its Gutenberg Bible was scrapped.

But the library had other things to sell. In addition to being a major book owner, it is also a major property owner in the city, and in November 2007 the administration announced the sale of the Donnell Library Center, on 53rd Street. The Donnell, directly across the street from the Museum of Modern Art, was one of the premier branches in the system, with the best circulating foreign languages section. The library had sold it to a hotel chain, without any public discussion, for $59 million. As part of the deal, the hotel agreed to build a much smaller library on two floors in the basement and on the future first floor. The branch closed in 2008 but the hotel chain ran into financial difficulties; four years later, the building remains empty.

Along with selling off its most valuable assets, the library has made unprecedented cutbacks in recent years. Before physically combining the branch and research libraries, the administration combined their staffs. This “One NYPL” strategy, announced in 2008, led to some real savings; for instance, catalogers and preservationists from the branch and the research side now work together. But as the recession hit, the reorganization became more like a massacre: many of the library’s most experienced and highly regarded senior staff, including almost all of the division chiefs at the main building, were pushed into retirement or effectively fired—except for those, like Robert Rainwater, who had already resigned. In September 2008, the administration, without making any public announcement, permanently shut down three of its prized reading rooms, one occupied by the Slavic and Baltic division, the other two by the Asian and Middle Eastern division. Many staff members in these divisions, which dated to the earliest days of the institution, were transferred into other departments or pushed into retirement, including the curators who had run them for decades, Edward Kasinec and John Lundquist. None of the former librarians with whom I spoke could recall any similar events in the history of the library, even in the dark days of the 1970s.

The closure of the Slavic and Baltic room was particularly surprising, since unlike the “Kindred Spirits” sale this closure really struck at what McKinsey would call a core competency of the institution. The New York Public Library is universally believed to have one of the finest collections of Slavic materials in the world, made use of by Leon Trotsky, George Kennan, and Vladimir Nabokov. Slavic scholars have been angrier and more vocal than any other group about the library’s recent changes. In November, thanks to the work of these scholars, the administration appointed a curator for the Slavic collection, Stephen Corrsin. Corrsin was already working full time as curator of the library’s Jewish division. There is still no curator for the library’s collection of Asian and Middle Eastern materials, and after the Asian and Middle Eastern division was closed the administration took an endowment that had supported its chief, “The Susan and Douglas Dillon Chief Librarian of the Oriental Division Fund,” and redirected it to support a central administrator, the “Susan and Douglas Dillon Head of Collection Development.”

Less visible than the closure of these divisions have been the library’s cuts to other international acquisitions. In 2010, the administration decided, as Denise Hibay put it to me, “to bring our focus back to New York, things related to New York, and those subjects of interest to New Yorkers.” Many foreign language budgets have been cut across the board, and acquisitions in some languages have been eliminated entirely.

Finally, in 2007 the administration completely cut the research-level budget for every subject in the sciences, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and engineering, and, Hibay told me, “reduced or stopped acquiring” in many fields in the social sciences, including criminal justice, education, and psychology. According to John Ganly, former assistant director of SIBL, the administration also cut the budget for acquisitions in economics by around 80 percent. Hibay says economics continues to be collected in “selected areas”; Victoria Steele, director of collections strategy, explained that the library is “shaping our collections to make sense for our users. So genealogy, but not maybe advanced level economics.”

Individually, many of these decisions are understandable. Together, they paint a picture of an organization that has stumbled its way into the 21st century. While the administration has had no trouble finding money for new construction and renovations at the research centers, it has struggled to staff the resulting facilities and to buy the materials necessary to maintain them at a world-class level. And now that the administration has concluded that it cannot sustain these operations, it is not retrenching and raising more funds to run them, but instead selling off entire buildings, closing rooms, cutting back on research acquisitions, and directing the proceeds to the creation of a new circulating facility that can only be built by tearing out the heart of the central research collection.

Read part two here.

1. An analysis of the library’s finances reveals more ambiguities. In 2010, the research library spent $124 million. The money came from a mixture of state and private sources: $25 million from the City of New York (up from an average of $5 million in the 1970s); $9 million from New York State (down from an average of $14 million in the 1970s); $600,000 from the federal government (down from an average of $3 million in the 1970s); $27 million in grants and private donations (up from an average of $10 million in the 1970s); $32 million from investment returns on the library’s endowment (up from an average of $21 million in the 1970s); $9.6 million from fines, royalties, and assorted fees; and a final $18 million from the city and state capital funds for a one-time restoration of the main building’s facade. An additional $35 million came in donations directly to the endowment. (All of the historical figures cited here and elsewhere in this footnote have been adjusted for inflation to 2010 dollars.) While funding has been tight in recent years, the cuts made by the administration allowed the library to get through 2010 without a significant operating loss for the first time since 2000. By contrast, over the past ten years, the library had an average operating deficit of $9.5 million. Luckily the library has built up an endowment of $800 million, which has helped to picked up the shortfall.

The $124 million annual budget is a significant increase from the institution’s 1970s spending, which came in at just under $60 million. Much of the rise, an increase of around $30 million in baseline costs, occurred in the 1990s and 2000s. This increase did not, however, by and large go to the research library’s collections. Between 1975 and 1992 the research library’s collections budget went from $9 million to $13 million. The collections budget then stagnated at around $14 million in the 1990s, and only increased to $15 million in the 2000s. In the past few years, the collections budget actually declined to $11 million, its lowest point since 1985. Administration officials insisted that the reduction in the collections budget has been made up through additions to unique materials in the library’s archives, but according to the statistics provided by the Assocation of Research Libraries (ARL) the amount of linear feet of archives being taken in at the New York Public Library is now a tenth of what it was in the 1990s. The additional funding also didn’t go to the research library’s traditional staff, whose numbers, according to the ARL, dropped from 703 in 1990 to 454 in 2010, and whose total salaries and benefits remained stagnant for much of this time at around $30 million. Nor did the funding pay for computers or access to the internet: over the past five years, the library spent an average of $1.2 million a year for computer hardware and software and $600,000 a year for telecommunications.

Part of the increase has been due to a rise in pay for the library’s senior management, whose total budget went from $9.8 million to $14.1 million between 1991 and 2010. But again, even an increase of $4.3 million isn’t enough to account for the $30 million rise in the library’s baseline costs during this period.

Much of the increase was due, of course, to renovations and new construction. Between 1990 and 2010, the research library spent at least $310 million on such projects, an average of over $15 million a year. After years of neglect, some of these projects were necessary. But as the buildings became more and more luxurious, and the library’s hours and collections budgets barely improved, the renovations appear to have been driven more by the need on the part of the administration to find new places to slap donors’ names. Former president Paul LeClerc liked to say the library is a “billboard for philanthropy.”

Once construction was complete, the library’s baseline year-to-year costs also remained much higher than before. The reason for this is hard to pick out, but bringing together all of the publicly available data on the library’s budget shows that much of the increase in baseline costs has gone to pay the salaries and benefits of staff members whom the library, in the data it provides to the ARL, has not reported as part of its traditional staff. In 2010, these staff members received $28 million a year in salaries and benefits; the research library’s more traditional staff received only $26 million.

What exactly do these people do? They’re not senior management, and they’re not fundraisers. I asked the PR department repeatedly for more information and never received a definitive answer. Some of these staff members work for the digital department; others could be traditional catalogers who, since the research cataloging department was recently merged with the circulating cataloging department, may perhaps not be reported to the ARL. Many of the former staff members with whom I spoke suggested that a notable portion of these funds may be going to the library’s internal strategy department. A single department couldn’t account for such a large increase, but when asked about the current budget for the strategy department a library spokesperson could not provide a figure. Considering the amount of money going to these and other staff members, this is a subject more journalists may want to investigate.

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Eviction Defense in the Bronx

2012-04-30T15:55:48Z

by Mark Naison

Image: Evicted sharecroppers, Mississippi, 1939. Arthur Rothstein. Schumburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Remarks by Mark Naison, of Fordham University, at the Occupy Onward Conference, December 18, 2011, at the New School for Social Research, New York City. From Occupy! Gazette Issue 4.

In the 1930s, there was an incredibly powerful anti-eviction movement, one branch of which was focused on the cities, another of which was focused on rural areas. There was an organization in the Midwest called the Farm Holiday Association, which organized to prevent farms from being foreclosed by banks, and that basically involved people with rifles standing there and refusing to allow the house to be taken. There was also an organization in Alabama called the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, which resisted seizures of land, animals, and tools from African-American sharecroppers and tenant farmers who had mortgaged their properties. And there is a great book about that called All God's Dangers, which is something that people might want to read. But I want to mainly talk about the urban anti-eviction movement, which was on a scale that is difficult to imagine.

The Communist Party organized eviction resistance in the cities. Let me describe what eviction resistance involved. When the marshals came to put the furniture in the street, Communists in neighborhoods would organize people to put the furniture back and then, when the marshals came back, stand in front of the building and refuse to let the marshals take the furniture out again. The marshals could not normally stand the force, at which point the police had to come in, and would have to make a decision as to whether they wanted to enforce the eviction.

If you have 300 people against three or four police officers--well, what happened in Chicago was that one group of police officers shot and killed three black Communists involved in this movement. And then fifty thousand people marched through the city in a memorial parade--and after that it became incredibly difficult to evict anybody in Chicago.

But the biggest anti-eviction movement was right here in New York City, especially in the Bronx.

Here we have to talk a little bit about the Communist Party, which was the organization that coordinated these protests. This eviction resistance was not the first coordinated action that the Communist Party took in the face of the Depression. The first strategy were hunger marches. On March 6, 1930, there were marches in fifty cities around the country of Communists demanding worker wage raises; marches on city halls that in some cases involved thirty or forty thousand people; marches on charities like the Salvation Army. In the fall of 1930, the Communist Party, which had these Unemployed Councils, decided, "We need to something that concretely helps people." Because the system was bankrupt, at that point, in terms of being able to provide aid. The political leadership was not willing to take those steps at that time. So the Communist Party began telling its units around the country: Put the furniture back; organize the neighborhood to defend their neighbors. And the place that this took off the most was in the Bronx.

You began to have 100, or 400, and as many as four thousand people massing to prevent the police from taking the furniture.

Then you began to have rent strikes that the Communists organized to force landlords to lower rents so that people could afford to stay in their apartments.

By 1932, these rent strikes had spread throughout the Bronx so much that landlords were terrified they would no longer be able to run private housing in a profitable manner, because they couldn't pay their mortgages.

Now, the reason you could get four thousand people was that the Communists didn't come out of nowhere. The Communist Party in the Bronx was a real community organization: they ran social clubs; they ran sports leagues; they were organized in unions. So the Communist was not just somebody coming from nowhere; the Communist was your neighbor, helping you. And so when the Communist said, "We're going to all be out in the street if we don't do something," people listened. It got to the point where there weren't enough police to keep moving back the furniture.

And what you created was something of a system-wide crisis. How can you run private housing profitably if you have people not only refusing to pay rent, but then--remember it cost money to bring in marshals. And if every time you bring in the marshals, the furniture gets put back, you're kind of trapped.

So what you had in the Bronx was the landlords, the district attorney, and the police trying to create a coordinated strategy to stop this rent strike movement. They started to get ready to use injunctions. The injunctions were designed to give long jail sentences to the activists. This was all coming to a head in the fall of 1932.

The Communist Party and the other activists were now in a quandary, because they were facing massive arrests that would put people in jail for long periods of time.

But then the Roosevelt Administration came in and passed the Federal Emergency Relief Act, which gave over 2 billion dollars to the states for direct relief payments. At this point the Communists switched their strategy, from putting the furniture back to going to the relief bureaus to demand that families get relief payments.

Given that change in government policy, they were able to stop evictions by becoming a negotiating team for tenants on the verge of eviction. In any case, by 1933 evictions had substantially stopped in many cities.

When I think about what's going on today, and what I just heard [from other panelists], the opportunity is there again, with the Occupy movements. People in the community don't like to see their neighbors evicted. But you have to do it [this activism] as a member of the community.

Your willingness to put your bodies on the line makes a difference.

The other thing is, when you're talking about communities of color--when [an earlier panelist was] talking about people saying, "Where were you?"--I thought of something else from when I was doing my research. Some of you may know about the Scottsboro Case, when nine young black men were accused of rape in ridiculous circumstances and sentenced to death---the Communist Party was able to bring 5,000 mostly white people marching through Harlem saying "Free the Scottsboro Boys." And what that said to people in this community was: We are no longer alone.

Now there is a chance for an alliance between newly radicalized people, and people who have been fighting these battles for a long time.

I'm going to end by talking a little about who the Communists were, because it's relevant to what we have today.

When the Depression began, about 70 percent of the members of the Communist Party were first-generation immigrants. Most of them were non-English speaking radicals who had been radicalized in their country of origin; also people who had been members of the IWW, the International Workers of the World; and the Socialist Party.

But when the Depression started, a whole group of American-born people in these communities, who thought they were going to go to college, who thought they were going to become lawyers and doctors and teachers, were driven back into the working class. And those people became part of the Communist Party cadre. Young, newly radicalized people from the high schools and colleges. And what you had was a movement that changed this country, that put grass roots activism of the unemployed on the agenda, and also began to build the unions.

I see us on the cusp of a similar situation.

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Leaving Wall Street

2012-04-30T15:51:48Z

by Alexis Goldstein

Image: Wall Street, 1915. Paul Strand.

From Occupy! Gazette Issue 4.

When some people think about Wall Street, they conjure up images of traders shouting on the stock exchange, of bankers dining at five star restaurants, of CEOs whispering in the ears of captured Congress members.

When I think about Wall Street, I think about its stunted rainbow of pale pastel shirts. I think about the vaulting, highly secured, and very cold lobbies. And I think about the art passed daily by the harried workers, virtually unseen.

Before I occupied Wall Street, Wall Street occupied me. What started as a summer internship led to a seven-year career. During my time on Wall Street, I changed from a curious college student full of hope for my future, into a cynical, bitter, depressed, and exhausted “knowledge worker” who felt that everyone was out to screw me over.

The culture of Wall Street is pervasive and contagious. While there are Wall Street employees who are able to ignore it, or block it out, I was not one of them. I drank the Kool Aid. I’m out of it now. But I’d like to tell you what it was like.

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When you are wealthy and successful, you have a choice. You can believe your success stems from luck and privilege, or you can believe it stems from hard work. Very few people like to view their success as a matter of luck. And so, perhaps understandably, most people on Wall Street believe they have earned their jobs, and the money that follows.

While there are many on Wall Street who come from wealthy backgrounds, there are also many people from very humble backgrounds. In my experience, it is often those who do not come from privilege who are the system’s fiercest defenders.

When I was a summer intern, we met with various executives who’d tell us about their careers and pitch us on the firm. The aim was to sell the firm to everyone, even though only a few of us would ultimately be offered full-time positions at the firm. It had an element of redundancy to it, since we were clearly already interested in the firm, or we wouldn’t be there at all. The effect of these talks, then, was to make a competitive situation even more competitive. Welcome to Wall Street. One executive described the firm as a “Golden Springboard.” If we began our careers there, his reasoning went, there wasn’t anywhere we couldn’t go. The executive was right. Background becomes irrelevant once you have “made it” to Wall Street. Once you’ve gotten in the door, you’re one of “us.”

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Once hired, the cultural indoctrination begins in earnest, especially for those recent grads who begin their careers in “analyst training programs.” These programs are exclusively for college and graduate students, are often several months long, and are custom-tailored to the department you'll ultimately join. The Sales & Trading analyst program is more competitive than, say, the Technology training program. And while most of the training is job-specific, there is also an air of finishing school. A trader friend of mine was instructed not only in the mathematics of the financial markets, but also in wine tasting and golf. You are trained, but also you are groomed.

The grooming is not all fun and games and country clubs. Most of the message revolves around how hard everyone works, and how hard you are expected to work in turn. Wall Street views its own work ethic as legendary. Sixty-hour weeks are standard. An ex-boss of mine used to brag that for one six-year stretch he never took a sick day or a vacation. The streak ended when he contracted strep throat, refused to go to the doctor, and eventually had to be hospitalized (at least so he claimed).

While not everyone was as manic as my boss (Wall Street has more than its fair share of laziness and incompetence), even those who feel less committed to the job still buy into a concept of “face time.” It’s not right to leave your desk before a certain time. An ex-colleague of mine used to ask anyone who’d pass by his cubicle before 7pm on their way out the door, “Oh, half day today?”

This dueling masochism/machismo brings with it a tremendous superiority complex. People on Wall Street truly believe they work harder than anyone else. When confronted with the stark reality of, for example, a single mom working two jobs, the response is usually some variant of, “Well, if they’d only worked as hard as I did in school . . .”

But the key to truly understanding superiority on Wall Street is by looking at how it’s measured: with cold, hard numbers. Numbers can be amplified by honest work, but they can also be amplified by betrayal, manipulation, and cheating. And when everything is a cold cost-benefit analysis, why wouldn’t you break regulations--provided you knew the profits you stood to make would dwarf the fines you would pay should you get caught?

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On Wall Street, the best-paid employees actively seek out their “market value” by interviewing and cultivating job offers at competing firms. Once they’ve secured an offer, they go back to their boss and try to land what’s called a “counter-offer.” If the new firm is offering to pay $300,000, the old firm may counter that offer with $400,000.

But even in this game of betrayal, a little bit of lying will optimize your results. You can solicit a counter by handing in a resignation letter. But to resign and then accept a counter is to admit you’re a mercenary. This will get you labeled a “high flight risk.” No, playing the game correctly to maximize money means pretending the game is not about money at all. A more strategic route is to explain, “Well, this offer just fell into my lap, I really don’t want to leave, so is there anything you can do to help me out?”

Of course, manipulation isn’t only for tricking your bosses--it extends to the clients as well. On Wall Street, it is not frowned upon to “rip the faces off” one’s own clients. If the client is dumb enough to get hoodwinked, that means the client didn't work hard enough. He didn’t do his “due diligence.” In other words, if I screw you, you only have yourself to blame. That is the “zero-sum game” of trading.

But perhaps the zenith of Wall Street fitness is the unpunished cheat. Around the holiday season, inter-dealer brokers will send gifts to the traders, trying to curry favor with bottles of wine or champagne. Inter-dealer brokers are brokers who allow Wall Street banks to anonymously trade with one another, since the last thing you want to do if you’re Morgan Stanley is let Goldman Sachs know your position, though you may still want to trade with them. But there is a catch to the gift-giving: according to FINRA, Wall Street’s self-regulatory agency, the brokers are only allowed to spend a maximum of $100 per trader. On slow winter days, the traders would Google the bottles of wine, trying to determine which vendors had cheated. Often they would find that, yes, this vendor breached the limit. The response to the cheat was always the same: a smirk, and an approving nod. It’s not about who cheated. It’s about who cheated successfully.

This attitude extends to higher stakes games as well. Take the case SEC v. Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. According to the SEC, in 2007 Citigroup sold their clients a portfolio of assets (mortgage-backed securities, as it happens) that Citi was actively betting against. The SEC therefore charged Citigroup with securities fraud; it's been reported that the fearsome regulatory agency won't settle for anything less than a $285 million fine. Looks bad, right? Well, yes, unless you consider that, according to Forbes, Citigroup allegedly made $160 million on this one deal (investors lost $700 million). Citigroup looks like it's going to lose $125 million! But how many similar deals have gone un-prosecuted? If the answer is one, Citigroup is back in the black; if the answer is, as surely it must be, more than one, then Citigroup is doing very well, thank you.

This is why paying fines when you are caught breaking the rules is simply deemed “the cost of doing business” on Wall Street.

Poker is extremely popular across Wall Street, and provides an instructive lesson. The book Poker Winners Are Different by industrial psychologist and poker adviser Alan Schoonmaker presents a scenario where a player notices his best friend’s “tell”--that is, the best friend has a habit of showing when he has a good or bad hand. The book then poses the following dilemma: should you (a) tell your friend, (b) win a bit of money from him, and then tell him, or (c) exploit your friend, never telling him. The correct answer: screw your friend. Schoonmaker, who used to do “management development” work at Merrill Lynch, writes that winners will “do whatever the rules and ethics allow to maximize their profits.” This behavior is heralded in poker and it’s heralded on Wall Street. Despite what may be emblazoned on plaques or in mission statements, the ethics of Wall Street are purely about winning at any cost.

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If they didn’t know it going in, Wall Street employees quickly learn that even their company is an enemy. To the firm, employees are a cost to be minimized, or a producer to be exploited. You also learn that you must never show gratitude for your bonus. To appear satisfied with your compensation is to admit that they paid you more than they had to, so you must feign outrage no matter what. What happens to a culture that discourages gratitude?

But most people on Wall Street do not feel gratitude anyway. It does not matter that their compensation is enormous compared to the average American--that is not who a Wall Street worker is comparing themselves to. They are looking at the compensation of the top sales person, the top trader, or, at the very top, the CEO.

What this environment did to me is that I began to see everyone as a threat. From that idiot two cubicles down from me, to the moron on the other end of the phone (the client), to--more than anything--the faceless, imagined people on government assistance who I assumed (incorrectly) were what was causing such large percentages to disappear from my paycheck.

Many of the adverse reactions to OWS have been along the lines of, “They’re just jealous.” Of course the Wall Street critics think OWS is about envy. Envy is part and parcel of their daily lives. When you are living in a culture of envy, you see envy everywhere you go. Why wouldn’t you think envy is at the core of our movement, too?

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The envy and hostility of Wall Street leads many to a common goal: to amass enough money so as to enact your revenge. This end goal is called fuck-you money.

At one point in my career, I was being recruited by a hedge fund. During the recruitment process, one of my interviewers frankly described the fund’s founder--his boss’s boss--as a “spoiled brat billionaire.” My interviewer related a story about a meeting between the hedge fund and an executive at a company the fund wanted to work with. At one point, the visiting executive made statements the fund founder didn’t like. The founder turned to the visitor and said, “So, you came here just to try and fuck me over?” The visitor quickly stormed out in a rage. But the founder wasn't satisfied just yet. He followed the man out of the room, into the elevator, shouted the entire ride down, and then yelled at him in the lobby until he finally left the building. When the founder came back upstairs to greet his shaken employees, he said, invigorated and beaming, “Wasn’t that fun?!”

This is Wall Street’s equivalent of the American Dream: to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.

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Despite the toxicity I’ve described, Wall Street is not a collection of 1 percenters maniacally laughing at the 99 percent they have crushed under their boot. No, Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.

I am far from the only Wall Street employee ever to feel chewed up by the system, even as I worked to perpetuate it. Another ex-Wall Street employee described feeling like a “hyper-specialized pawn” who “worked all the time with little control” of her life, and “little personal satisfaction at the end of the day.” I, too, felt manipulated, and why shouldn’t I? That was the game, after all. I felt overworked, demotivated, and I was clearly doing nothing to help the world.

I was able to leave once I decided that my happiness was more valuable than money. This is no great revelation to anyone at Occupy, but to someone who lived and breathed the idea that money was everything for seven years, it was not so easy. The true key to getting out was taking off my blinders: meeting others who were outside Wall Street’s bubble. This was a long process that involved a lot of psyching myself up in order to quit. Wall Street is not an easy place to walk away from. But after a year of planning, I finally submitted my resignation. I now teach computer programming at several venues, including Girl Develop It, which is a group that provides low-cost classes to women (men are welcome, too) in an environment that strives to be non-intimidating.

It is hard to contrast the joy of community I feel at Occupy Wall Street with the isolation I felt on Wall Street. It’s hard because I cannot think of two more disparate cultures. Wall Street believes in, and practices, a culture of scarcity. This breeds hoarding, distrust, and competition. As near as I can tell, Occupy Wall Street believes in plenty. This breeds sharing, trust, and cooperation. On Wall Street, everyone was my competitor. They’d help me only if it helped them. At Occupy Wall Street, I am offered food, warmth, and support, because it’s the right thing to do, and because joy breeds joy.

I was privileged enough to make it in the door on Wall Street, and to get bonuses during my time there. But I never felt as fortunate, or joyful, as I did the night after the eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Liberty Square, when we had our first post-raid General Assembly. When the thousands of supporters who filled the park necessitated three waves of the people’s mic. When our voices together echoed not just down the park, but up into the sky as the buildings caused the sound to ricochet off their glass walls.

And so I say to my friends who still dwell behind the Wall: come join us. The spoils of money can never match the joys of community. When you’re ready, we’ll be here.

The author is a member of the Occupy the SEC working group and the Break Up B of A campaign in New York.

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Debt

2012-04-30T15:45:53Z

A panel discussion

by Astra Taylor, Brian Kalkbrenner, David Graeber, Mike Konczal, Sarah Jaffe

A panel discussion held at the Occupy! Gazette's Occupy Onward Conference, December 18, 2011, at the New School for Social Research, New York City. Transcript from Occupy! Gazette Issue 4.

David Graeber, Debt, The First 5,000 Years
Mike Konczal, The Roosevelt Institute
Brian Kalkbrenner, Occupy Student Debt
Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
Moderator: Astra Taylor, Occupy! Gazette
Transcribed by Elisabeth Asher

Astra Taylor: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our hastily arranged conference. It’s really nice to see you all here.

So, debt. It’s nice to talk about this subject here at the New School, the institution responsible for my debt, the institution I have begrudged for the last decade, every month when I pay $400 in interest.

One of my favorite moments of Occupy Wall Street was the second or third night. I walked up to Zuccotti Park—it was early on, I was shocked that there were so many people there—I’m walking along the corner of Broadway and Liberty, and there’s this guy, he’s playing a carnival barker, and he says, “Step right up! Write down what you owe to the bank; write down what you’re worth to the 1%!” He had these huge sheets of paper, and he had probably two dozen markers, and people were writing down what they owed and what type of debt. I actually walked by and went into the park and had this weird hesitation about putting that number down—because I would have to think about it. I would have to think about how much money I owed. But, as we were leaving, I went and took the marker and I wrote it down: $42,000. I felt sick to my stomach. Behind me, a girl who couldn’t have been more than 22 or 23 writes down $120,000 of student debt. And I thought, this is a radical moment, because we are articulating this number out loud, we are putting it in a political context, and this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. Something’s happening.

I’ll introduce the panelists as they talk. The first is Sarah Jaffe. She’s a reporter for Alternet, where she’s been writing about debt. I want to ask this very simple question: Why isn’t debt a personal issue? I signed those loans. I might’ve been 17 when I signed for the first one, but nevertheless, I signed my name. I took out the debt. It’s my fault. Why is it a political issue?

Sarah Jaffe: Oh, so many reasons. A lot of us are only paying interest on this debt. I’ve got 15 grand in student loans, and I’ve had the same 15 grand in student loans for going on 11 years now, because I’ve just been paying the interest. This is a problem. This is a political problem. The student loan debt alone is going to be a trillion dollars sometime in the next couple of months. That’s a trillion dollars that we’re all paying in interest to Sallie Mae, to Citibank—mine was with Citibank for several years—to Wells Fargo, to Discover Card Services, which bought a bunch of student loan debt recently, and to the federal government. But we’re not paying that into our local businesses. We’re not paying this into the corner store. We’re not paying this to the farmer’s market. We’re not paying this to anything. We’re not buying a home because we have student loans or we’re not going back to school because we have a home loan.

Debt has been a substitute for wage increases in this country for about the last thirty years, give or take. Real wages haven’t gone up in a really long time. We’re mortgaging our future on credit cards and home equity. And when the housing bubble popped, and the credit markets froze, we suddenly realized exactly how little we had that wasn’t promised to somebody else already. It becomes a drain on the future. My favorite example, about healthcare reform—there’s a shortage of primary care doctors, because primary care doctors make less than specialists. And most people who go to medical school owe a ridiculous amount in student debt. So we actually have a shortage of healthcare providers because of the student loans that they’re carrying.

We should not be ashamed. When people come out and talk about it, it’s a really powerful thing. We need to stop treating it as a personal failing. It is not a personal failing; it is a political issue.

Taylor: Brian Kalkbrenner is our representative from Occupy Student Debt. He’s also indebted—he has first-hand experience. I’d like to know, why now? A lot of us have been in student debt for years, and wondered why nobody was talking about it. Why is this issue suddenly on the public radar?

Brian Kalkbrenner: That’s a good question. I’m part of the Occupy Student Debt campaign, which came out of the Empowerment and Education working group, which Nicholas Mirzoeff spoke about earlier. I am a student debtor. It’s funny, because four months ago I was talking with a friend of mine who got me involved in this campaign, and we were talking about this very thing. There’s a ready-made population to be radicalized in student debtors. Everybody I know suffers from it. When I talk to people—even if they have nothing to do with OWS, they’re not radical people, they’re not activists—I talk to them about this campaign and instantly they say, “Oh man, student loans are so fucked.” Everybody knows this is a problem.

So why now? I don’t know; I can’t really answer it. But I want to talk a little bit about some of the stats around student debt. Graduating seniors in 2010 carried an average debt of $25,000, while unemployment for that same group was at 9.1 percent. College tuition has increased more than 400 percent since the 1980s, with no appreciable increase in wages or inflation; it outstrips inflation. The debt default rate at for-profit institutions is 29 percent, and more than half of the student population at these for-profit colleges is African American or Latino. It’s a problem that affects the whole spectrum. Student loan debts are exceptional in that they’re afforded no protections. Student debtors are not protected from bankruptcy; student loan debt can follow you to the grave. As of 2005, benefits like Social Security can be garnished, which is unprecedented. It’s very easy for loans to double or triple in a period of ten years—you fall behind on a payment, suddenly there’s this whole chain of fees that is triggered, and you’re sort of like underwater trying to get back, just recovering those fees, and then you start paying the interest, let alone getting to the principal.

All that is to say that student loans are predatory loans. And, you know, it’s not a privilege. There’s a view like, “Well, you know what you’re getting into, taking out student loans, this is a privilege problem.” It’s not a privilege problem, for several reasons. One is that a college degree has become a prerequisite in a knowledge economy. You have to take on student loan debt to get this degree, but then you graduate with this debt increasingly into an economy where you can’t get a job. So you’re already in a position of indenture-tude. The Occupy Student Debt campaign launched a few weeks ago, and it centers around a student debt pledge of refusal.

The pledge begins, “As members of the most indebted generations in history, we pledge to stop making student loan payments after one million of us have signed this pledge.” There’s also a pledge for faculty supporters; there’s a pledge for non-debtors, a non-debtor pledge of support. Pledges in the campaign are based around four principles: 1) That the federal government should cover the cost of tuition at public colleges and universities, which incidentally would be a price tag of about $70 billion, which is a paltry sum actually—it sounds like a lot but it’s not. 2) We believe that student loans should be interest-free. 3) We believe that private and for-profit colleges and universities, which are largely financed through student debt, should open their books. So these for-profit universities and private schools like the New School and NYU, they’re financed through student debt, and yet their operations are a private matter. They’re not a matter of public record. And finally, 4) the current student debt load should be written off.

Another thing we’re trying to do is change the language around student debt. We’re not asking for forgiveness. We don’t believe it’s something we should be forgiven for. There’re a lot of people defaulting on their student loans; there’re a lot of people buried by this debt. It’s an agonizing thing, when you’re making this decision whether to pay, like, this electricity bill, or my student debt bill. And I don’t know if you’ve been up against it, but I certainly have, and I’ve certainly chosen not to pay my student debt bill before, because, well, this other bill is more important. It’s sort of a harrowing experience for a lot of reasons, including feeling morally culpable, but also just helpless. And one of the things about this campaign is it provides a way for isolated debtors to join together in a collective body. And in doing that, in keeping with the spirit of OWS, we’re also not asking for any sort of reforms; we’re not asking for the powers that be to take a certain set of actions. Rather we’re trying to change the landscape of the power structure itself and create a new empowered body, political body. If you’re interested, our url is occupystudentdebtcampaign.org. The three pledges are there, there’s a lot of other information about it, and I’m sure more will come out as we talk.

Taylor: I wanted to talk a little more about just how punitive student debt is. Because when you say you default on your student loans, it almost sounds like maybe you default and get out of it. I know from experience that—I was very poor for a while, and I just stopped paying my student loans. And some months went by and I got a phone call, and they said, “You have not been paying your student loans, so we’ve added 19 percent to your principal.” Suddenly overnight, like $12,000 more. So in other words, I couldn’t pay, and they said, “You owe us more!” I don’t know if that was defaulting or what, but it definitely scared the shit out of me, which is why I never advise people to not pay their student loans. But what—you know, they can garnish your Social Security—what does it mean to default? What can they do to you?

Kalkbrenner: They can do all kinds of things to you, I guess. The most important thing is that there are all sorts of traps built into the system so that if you miss a payment or fall behind—this number just grows exponentially. And you find that a lot of the programs to, for example, reduce payment, you know, deferment and hardship programs—they’ll reduce your payment, but what they don’t really tell you or don’t emphasize is that in doing so, they do a kind of calculus which then increases your principal. Right? [Some laughter.] Yeah, see, some people know.

In garnishing wages, they can garnish up to 15 percent and that won’t count toward any of your interest principal. So the consequences are real, and this is part of the campaign, trying to mobilize this body. Again, we’re suffering the consequences in isolation, but, in coming together, it’s not that we’ll suffer these consequences together, it’s that we will be a voice for change. And because such a sizable portion of the population has this kind of debt, there’s a real radical potential, I think.

Taylor: Next up is David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He’s going to take us in his time machine to the beginning! And it’s perfect to pick up on this word, “forgiveness.” We’re not asking for forgiveness, because one thing David discovers in his book is that morality and debt are always deeply entwined, and that it is a kind of vacillating concept. Maybe you could talk about the issue of primordial debt—are we all indebted, just because we exist and we speak, we owe everything to everybody? Or is debt something that controls us and is connected to violence?

Graeber: OK, you want me to take that—

Taylor: Go.

Graeber: Oh, wow, OK—

Taylor: Seven minutes!

Graeber: Ahhh! All right, where do I start? I was thinking—this paralysis that you face when you’re in debt, the feeling that this is something I did terribly wrong—it’s a deeply personal thing. But maybe the best way to contextualize this feeling is to consider the fact that over the course of human history, it’s probably true that most people who have ever lived have been debtors. Think about that for a moment. Could they all have done something terribly wrong? It’s almost certainly the case, because the densest populations are usually in big empires, and in such situations, somehow or other it always seems to happen that a very small percentage of the population ends up creditors to everybody else. And, in fact, if you look at world history—and when I started researching debt, it was quite remarkable—you see the same thing, over and over again, across Eurasia, certainly, and China, and India, the Middle East: everybody’s a debtor. And that debt is identified with morality in the sense of moral obligation. What you owe to other people, as it were, is seen in terms of debt. So often you find the language of debt, guilt, and sin—it’s the same word. It’s true in a lot of different European languages. It’s true in Sanskrit; it’s true in Aramaic. The famous “Forgive us our trespasses, just as we forgive those who trespass against us”–it’s actually debt, in the original. “Forgive us our debts,” just as we forgive those who owe us money. Except, of course, we don’t. That whole point is like, “See, you’re a bad person. God forgive you.” So that's the kind of paradox of debt: on the one hand, that it’s morality; on the other hand, people who lend us money are universally recognized as being evil. It’s almost impossible to find any positive image of a moneylender anywhere in human history. I guess until the Grameen Bank came along—it was a heroic feat.

So there’s this obvious profound moral ambivalence going on. It’s especially so if you look at world religions where almost invariably they kind of start by saying debt and morality are the same thing, except they say, “Of course, not really.” In the beginning of Plato’s Republic, they start by saying, “Well, what is justice?" And someone throws out: "Justice is just paying your debts.” And Socrates says, “That’s ridiculous, of course it’s not.” And then they spend the rest of the book trying to figure out, if not that, then what. They never quite figure it out.

It’s the same with most religious traditions. In the Hindu tradition, they start with, your life is a debt you owe to the gods. And then they say, except, well, no—ultimately it’s recognizing that you and the cosmos are the same, then you’d realize there is no debt. Biblical tradition is the forgiveness of debts, cancellation of debts. So it seems like these people feel like they have to start with this language of debt as morality, but then get rid of it again. Why? It's because this very idea of shame, of sin, that is associated with debt makes it this incredibly powerful ideological mechanism, so that any time you have violent inequalities of power—and mass inequalities of wealth and power have to always be maintained by violence of some kind or another—the first move is to try to convince the people on the bottom that it’s somehow their fault, and debt is the easiest way to do that. The easiest, most obvious example is, if you conquer people, you say, “OK, you owe me your life because I didn’t kill you. So obviously, I expect you to pay up. I’m going to be a nice guy and let you off the hook for the first few months but after that, c’mon.” So suddenly you’re the nice guy and they’re running around, scrambling, feeling bad about themselves. It works amazingly well, except it also has this remarkable tendency to blow up in people’s faces.

Because it’s also true that the overwhelming majority of rebellions and insurrections, jacqueries, throughout world history, have been about debt—much more often than they are about more structural forms of inequality like slavery or serfdom or caste systems. People rebel about debt all the time. And part of the reason is because on the one hand it’s accusatory, and on the other hand, you’re saying, “Well, you should be my equal, you know, it’s an equal contract, except you fucked up.” And somehow saying that to someone is much more offensive than saying, “You’re just inferior.” Because the only response you can really make to that, if it’s destroying your life, at a certain point, is: “Wait a minute, who owes what to who, here?” This makes it a very explosive thing, so you get debt revolts, but it also means that the people rebelling end up using the master’s language, right? It’s the same if you look at Jubilee 2000 and efforts to forgive Third World debt, they said, “Well, you owe us.” Which is true, but, again, you’re framing things in terms of debt, morality is debt. So that’s why you have all these moral thinkers having to start by saying morality is debt, because that’s the language of politics that everybody on all sides is using at the time, and then trying to get rid of it again. And we’ve been in this moral dilemma in one form or another ever since.

I think it’s useful to bear in mind that these long-term historical problematics—they haven’t gone away.

Another thing I’ve discovered in research of the book is the idea of the generalized debt crisis—that we are experiencing today, I would say—is not new either. In fact, you might say that through most of world history, when moral thinkers and social thinkers thought about the sort of ultimate nightmare scenario, society completely breaking down, what they imagined was pretty much what we are experiencing right now. This is true of Confucian thinkers, or thinkers in the Middle Ages, or Aristotle. The tiny percentage of the population enslaves everybody else; they’re trapped in these terrible death traps that they can’t get out of; they’re forced to sell members of their family into slavery or themselves into slavery. I always say if Aristotle were magically transported to contemporary America, he would probably find the distinction between an indebted householder selling himself into slavery and renting himself to work for someone else as kind of a legal technicality. He would conclude that most Americans are, in fact, debt slaves. And would he be wrong?

There were methods that were put in place to get rid of this, to head this off, because it was assumed it would lead to generalized social breakdown. One of them was the jubilee—clean slates in Mesopotamia. For thousands of years it was considered standard practice if a new king came in, he would say, “All right, everything canceled.”They’d leave commercial loans, sometimes, alone, but all the consumer loans would just be wiped out, and they’d say, OK, start again. In Biblical texts, as some of us no doubt know, there was a tradition of cancellation every seven to forty-nine years. In the Middle Ages, they said, “Okay, we’ll get rid of interest-taking, we’ll get rid of debt peonage.” All of this was under pressure from popular movements. So there’s always some overarching institution to protect debtors so that you don’t have everybody becoming enslaved and the system breaking down.

This time around, ever since 1971, since Nixon went off the gold standard, what happened instead was they created the IMF and institutions like that not to protect debtors but to protect creditors, and to come up with this insane idea that no one should ever default, which flies in the face of even normal economic logic. The only way they can do it is by appealing to this very old idea of morality, that paying one’s debts and morality are the same thing.

Of course what we discovered in 2008 is that morality only applies to certain players in the game. Which has always also been the case. Another thing I’ve found quite regularly wherever you look is that there’s a huge difference between debts between equals and debts between, you know, rich people and poor people. Debts between rich people and each other—well, rich people can be incredibly generous and forgiving and understanding when dealing with other rich people, just as poor people can with each other as well. But when it’s between social classes, suddenly it’s like a religious responsibility, it’s sacred, you can’t possibly imagine how could they be defaulting! What we discovered in 2008 was that money, at this point, really is something they just make up with their magic wands. It’s a series of promises, of IOUs that we make with one another. It’s a social compact of a kind. When it’s really inconvenient, trillions of dollars can be made to disappear. The fascinating thing is that they absolutely refused to do it on a level of debts between big players and the little ones.

And this is why I think the sort of democratic core of this movement is debt and debtors. The Middle Eastern revolts actually had a lot more to do with debt than people let on. I always like to point out that Saudi Arabia actually did do a jubilee. That was their reaction to the Arab Spring. Well, they also doubled security forces. But they took a two-handed approach. They also canceled all debts. Of course they have a king; that makes it easier. They didn’t want to let it get out that they’d done this because it would set a bad example, they figured. But it can still be done. The old solutions are still available.

I wanted to throw that out, that we’re living in not historically unprecedented times. I think we need to think a lot larger than we have been. I think that has been gotten on the table—the idea that once we understand that debts can be waived away, they have been, they are being. If democracy is to mean anything, it means that who makes promises to who, what promises are kept, and what promises are being negotiated under what circumstances has to be democratically decided. It’s not a process that only 1 percent of the population can weigh in on. Especially now that we’ve realized that they’re not actually these amazing geniuses who are the only people who know how to run an economy, but are actually completely incompetent at anything but plundering and stealing.

Taylor: There’s a line in your book that says that it’s actually refusing to calculate that makes us human.

Graeber: Yes. We’ve come to see all morality as debt because we’ve come to see all of our relations in terms of exchange. This is something that has been thrust on us, and I think social science is just as guilty as economics in general. And one way that we can start to unimagine this world where we’re all debtors is to realize that many of our everyday interactions use completely different logic than economists talk about. I always like to say that communism is not some ideal, that it might exist at some point in the future; it’s the way most of us act with people we really care about all the time. A third of what we do is communistically organized, a third of it, often inside the family, is hierarchically organized—and we have to do something about that—and a third of it is exchange. The part of the economy where debt is even a meaningful term is a fairly slim portion. A lot of things that we’re talking about here might sound crazy and utopian, but they’re not. Communistic relations are the basis for all sociality. By reimagining them in terms of debt, we just throw ourselves into these series of logical traps, like religious thinkers who thought about your debt to the cosmos, or were forced to before saying, well, that doesn’t really work.

Taylor: Crazy and utopian Mike Konczal, from the Roosevelt Institute. We’re going to get back in the time machine and come back to the present day. We have a left right now that’s organized around higher wages and job security—and here we are talking about debt. What are the opportunities, what are the risks of that—and any chance for a jubilee in 2012?

Konczal: One of the things I like to emphasize is that when it comes to—you know, there’s obviously a lot of meta discussions about demands and what does the Occupation want—when it comes to debt, specifically when it comes to housing and student debt, we know a lot of things we can do, at the federal level, at the state level, at the local municipality level. Back in the 2008 primary, candidate Clinton proposed a foreclosure moratorium; candidate Obama proposed a modification bankruptcy, which he did not follow through on when he was elected. But we know things we can do. There are liberal wonks who can bore you to death with white papers. The problem is that, as we discussed a little earlier, debt is not seen as a political issue. It’s not seen as something that has gone out of whack. It’s not seen as something that necessitates a political response.

But the debt market is really a function of the government. If you look at the Constitution, our bankruptcy code is directly in there. The Founders were very aware of what that does. Besides slavery, more than half of all white people who came to the British colonies were indentured when they came here. They were very conscious of what that contract looks like. We talk about makeshift jubilees, right? Everything is kind of out of whack so they declare game over, they hit the reset button on debts. If you look at 19th-century US bankruptcy law, it looks exactly the same way. There were severe financial crises, severe depressions and recessions. And we just created the new bankruptcy code out of thin air and said, "You know what, all this stuff you couldn’t declare bankruptcy on before? You can do it now." They did it in the 1890s. There were two or three years of readjustments, things went through the courts, and then the economy started picking up again. It was very common. We did a similar thing in the Great Depression.

So what are the two main mechanisms we have under our economy in America to deal with too much debt? There are two primary ways: one is the bankruptcy code, and the other is inflation. Inflation balances the interests; it’s a way of handling money that balances the interest between debtors and creditors. It puts the economy on a more forward path. It reduces the claims of the past and orientates us more toward the claims of the future. The Fed could be doing more to balance the interest towards debtors, to generate more growth or inflation. They are choosing not to. So, the bankruptcy code: the bankruptcy code does some good things, some bad things, but in the two places where we need it to do the most, it is toothless, it is broken. And those two places are housing debt, and student debt. For housing debt, you cannot reset a mortgage in bankruptcy. There’s a long debate why this is, but for a primary residence, you can’t do it. If you have a vacation home you can do it; if you have investment property, you can do it. If you’ve ever heard “cram down”–that’s one kind of inartful term–that is the change they were trying to make. They tried to make it in ’09. Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and President Obama chose not to push it. A lot of progressive senators tried to make it a condition for TARP. Larry Summers said, “No, it doesn’t need to be; we’ll get it later.” They showed no interest in doing this. An absolute shameful act of the Obama Administration. If he loses the election next year, it’ll be mostly because of this, because I think it’s been a huge check on the economy.

Most of the really creative economic theory work going on right now explaining this depression is looking at debt levels, and they’re looking at places where foreclosures happen. And they say, you know what—now, to you, this may not be shocking, but if you’re an economist who deals with a lot of abstract models, this might be kind of shocking—places that are hugely indebted are not having a lot of growth. They’re not really healthy economic regions. Some people might win a Nobel Prize for this; I just want you to be ready for it. Because, from their point of view, every debtor has a creditor, and if the debtor’s struggling and drowning, the creditor’s going to be bouncing around, even happier. That’s actually not how it happens. So you’re seeing a lot more mainstream people. William Galston of Brookings, a senior economic wonk there, is calling for debt relief on housing. This is very shocking, right; this is not stuff you normally hear [from a centrist think tank]. So you’re looking there, and you’re seeing that housing debt is really detrimental: Foreclosures have huge costs to municipalities; they have huge costs to communities; they have huge costs to the people who go through them.

I want to emphasize one quick thing that wasn’t quite addressed by the previous panel: Why are so many foreclosures happening? Why isn’t the system naturally fixing itself? It’s an important question. The same predatory model that created all this bad stuff is the same model—it’s the same exact people, and it’s the same logic that’s supposed to try to mediate it now that it’s all collapsed. And, as we’re finding, they’re both irresponsible and incompetent in doing it. So Wall Street essentially acts as middlemen for these giant securitization bonds, and they’re supposed to handle these mortgages when they go bad. However, they’re paid first, out of any claim that happens afterward. They have no incentive to make sure these things work out. If you’re paid first, and you have no penalty if something goes under, what are you going to do? You are going to try to drive someone into bankruptcy; you’re going to try to drive the most fees on them, because you get paid those fees first.

So if you are a community activist and you’re looking at communities saying, this bank is incredibly aggressive in trying to get this person into foreclosure, even though, "Why do they want to own a home that’s going to be worth nothing with no one in it? It’s going to collapse.” The answer is they don’t care; they’re incentivized to do that.

There are ways to target that. In addition to forcing people into foreclosure very quickly, they’re not creating the paperwork necessary to foreclose—this is why you hear about the robo-signing scandals. If you’re going to be involved with Occupy Foreclosure, it’s worth taking a weekend and just educating yourself on what we’re referring to as foreclosure fraud. There’ve been a lot of primers on it—Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism; Dave Dayen at Firedoglake; the Huffington Post. Essentially, the banks are not even bothering to do the basic legal minimum. So what does that mean? Dave Dayen talked to a Register of Deeds in North Carolina. The Register of Deeds is not a radical person—this is one of the most boring civil servants you can imagine. But this guy became—in some small circles that I follow—Public Enemy #1 of the banks, because he actually went into the deeds and said, “You know, the banks have destroyed all these records. They haven’t submitted any of them correctly, and everything’s kind of wrong about them.” The amazing thing is that after he started asking questions, he was invited to meet President Obama two weeks later; it’s a totally amazing story. The Attorney General in Nevada said, “We’re going to pass a law saying, ‘If you submit incorrect documents for foreclosure, that’s a criminal penalty—and it actually sort of was already one, but we’re going to reemphasize that we will enforce it now.’" The moment they did that, foreclosure stopped across the state. Nevada is 70 percent underwater, the highest foreclosure rate possibly in history, but certainly in the country. Foreclosure just stopped immediately, because the banks are just not equipped or interested in following the rules—very bank-friendly rules, incidentally. As opposed to the Obama Administration, or certainly people in administration who maybe want to end up on Wall Street after the administration’s over, the Register of Deeds is not going to retire to a vice presidency at Goldman Sachs, right? The Attorney General of Nevada is probably not going to end up working for the Bank of America. These are people who see the devastation in their neighborhood, in their community, in their state; they want to work to try to fight them. So there’s a lot of room for cross-collaboration on the state and local level for foreclosure relief.

Last quick point on student loans: If I am driving around while texting, and I negligently run over and kill a child, or if I am in a gambling institution and I have an 11 and the dealer has an ace, and I mistakenly double down and get a huge gambling debt—those kind of debts—hurting someone, killing someone, gambling debts—are treated less harshly under our bankruptcy code than the debts associated with trying to educate yourself. Student loans are the most repressive debts under the legal structures that we have. These are democratic bills! People voted for them. Hillary Clinton voted for the 2005 bankruptcy bill. Biden voted for it; Biden pushed it. These are things we have chosen, and they are incredibly repressive.

Why are they exploding now? I think there are two things: One is generational. One-third of people under 35 have a student loan. That’s across the whole population, not just college graduates. Young people are just much more likely to have student loans and to have a higher amount of them. Across the board they have higher loans—it’s not just rich people who go to medical school and have high debts and that’s throwing off the statistics—across the board you see a real growth in student debt. It is truly a generational problem in the way that people over 40 or 50 just don’t have the right metrics to understand. Then, separately, I’d like to point to this one thing—the IMF went to Egypt three days before Arab Spring broke out there, and these two nice economists were giving a presentation, saying, "Hey, maybe you want to be worried about youth unemployment. It’s about 22 percent as far as we can estimate it here, and across the MENA, the Middle East, North African region, it’s in the twenties somewhere—some are high teens, some are like thirty, but in general it’s something to worry about." Right now in the US the unemployment rate for 16 to 19 year olds is 24 percent. For 16 to 24 years old it’s about 19 to 20 percent, or what it was in Egypt when the IMF was warning about revolution. Now, the MENA region has a huge amount of young people, which is probably why it’s a bit more explosive there. But here the unemployment crisis is hitting young people, and even young college graduates who have unemployment rates 9 percent above the national average, in a way that’s just really, really harsh, and I don’t think the national media quite understands that. These would be explosive and important issues even if there wasn’t a massive unemployment and economic crisis. But there is.

Taylor: To sort of massively oversimplify: the banks are taking our money—that we’re paying them—and they’re lobbying with it. Right? So what do we do?

Konczal: I still think just creating energy and creating visibility around these things will make a big difference. Occupy working with community activists on foreclosure events, as far as I can see, is quite amazing. It’s great to see that kind of energy work out. I think there’s actual room to work with civic and local and state authorities—either to put pressure on them directly or to see what kind of pressures are available, what avenues are available. Because their incentives are way different than the Democratic Party, way different than the Executive Administration, way different than the Senate or whatnot. They’re the people who live with the consequences of these things.

Jaffe: I just wanted to say, specifically on the student debt issue: a few months into Occupy Wall Street, Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education—not one of my favorite people—he’s a very school reform, pro-charter schools, pro-corporate, quasi-liberal Democrat—made a statement and said we need to sit down and we need to really think about this student loan crisis. To some degree, yes, being public about it, not being ashamed about it, telling your story, admitting that these things are a problem, and making some noise about it is on its own creating some movement in this administration on the local level, on the state level. Also, I just wanted to give a lot of love to Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. And Eric Schneiderman! We have one of the good guys in this state! We have one of the good attorney generals.

Kalkbrenner: The Occupy Student Debt campaign is doing a lot of outreach work to campuses across the country and is making a lot of connections to other activist groups. Here you have a massively organized group that’s ready and able to work on this campaign. You provide a conduit for people to get involved with it and change will happen.

Taylor: David, should we just abandon the concept of debt altogether?

Graeber: Well, yeah. There are stages. One of the critical things I’d really like to know right now and that I think would be really useful to spread as far and wide as possible is how much of the average American’s life income ends up getting expropriated by the financial sector. I’ve been trying to get these numbers and, sure enough, they’re almost impossible to come by. One thing I’ve been really fascinated by with Occupy Wall Street is why is it that the plight of the recently graduated indebted student suddenly speaks to a New York transit worker and all these other people who’ve been in solidarity with us? Which it probably wouldn’t have done thirty years ago.

I think there’s a fundamental shift in the nature of capitalism, where some people are still using a very old-fashioned moral logic, but more and more people are recognizing what’s really going on. They just don’t know the extent of it. It’s not even clear that this is capitalism anymore. Back when I went to college, they taught me that the difference between capitalism and feudalism. In feudalism they take the money directly, through legal means, and they just shake you down, pull it out of your income, and in capitalism they take it through the wage, in these subtle ways. It seems like it’s shifting more toward the former thing. The government is letting these guys bribe the government to make laws where they can pick your pocket, and that’s pretty much it. The best figures I’ve seen indicate that maybe 19 to 20 percent of incomes are now going—if you count interest payments, if you count all these fees they put in there, if you count insurance fees, if you add everything up—they’re taking about a fifth of your total life income. For nothing. For financial services of one kind or another. And of course, that hits some people more than others. So if you’re looking at these gross numbers, that means that for anybody who isn’t prosperous, it’s a lot more.

The other interesting thing I saw, however, is that that number shrank really rapidly. I saw 13 percent actually goes in interest payments—13 percent of people’s income—and that went down to 9 percent in two years since 2008. There is massive popular resistance on the individual level, just detaching yourself as much as possible from credit card debt, from the other more extortionate payment loans, other more extortionate forms. So it’s happening. People are starting to do it, just out of sheer necessity. I saw the figures; it was crazy—it went up, up, up, and then [exploding noise] like that, over the last two years. The challenge is giving political voice to what people are already doing by pointing out that they’re not alone, and also just point out what’s going on.

Taylor: OK, it’s question time. We have a few minutes here for questions.

Audience member 1: I just have a question regarding the tuition raise: Why is it 400% within the past twenty years? Is there a logical, layman’s term answer for that?

Kalkbrenner: I don’t know if there’s a simple answer for that. But it’s a good question—I’ll point out that up until the ''70s, CUNY was free. And so was the University of California system. There’s a lot of reasons why wages are stagnant and why the increase is so much, but it’s interesting—at the Baruch action last month, which happened the same day we launched our campaign—you probably saw the Baruch students being attacked by police—as we were walking to it, I overheard somebody saying, “What’s the big deal? It’s $300”–because CUNY had voted to increase tuition by $300 every year for the next five years—and so, well, anybody who knows, anybody who is in debt knows that the difference between paying one bill and another bill, and on top of that paying $1,500, is a hell of a lot of money, especially for what’s supposed to be a university which serves a low-income and also middle-income student body.

Jaffe: I was not that recently a graduate student and also a teaching assistant. One of the things about these university tuition increases is that the place they’re not going is in professors’ pockets. The place that they are definitely going is in administrators’ pockets. Universities are moving in large part, especially public universities like the one I taught at, to teaching assistants and adjunct professors who don’t have health insurance, don’t have benefits, make three grand a semester, and they’re cutting down on permanent faculty. So this is the other part of that equation: you’re not only paying more money, you’re getting a worse product.

Konczal: I just want to throw out a quick point just as background—a lot of pre-Zucotti Park occupations, globally, have been about student debt. If you look in Chile over the last couple years, if you look in Puerto Rico—which is part of the United States, but—if you look at Britain last year, if you look at Berkeley in 2009, “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing”—student debt is obviously a real crucible of where a lot of this energy is, so it’s exciting to see it come back to the campus.

Graeber: I was involved in the occupations in the UK last year. It’s a basic moral question of value, of why we’re even here—not only here in this room, but here at all. It was fascinating to see, because they’re trying to put in place in the UK the system that we already have in America. It started with this thing called the Brown Report, where they did an analysis of educational efficiency, based on the assumption that no one would every pursue a degree in higher education for any reason other than increasing their average life income. Then they proposed all these horrific neo-liberal reforms, like, we’ll triple tuition and put in student loans, which basically had the effect of making sure that people actually would be forced to act in exactly the way that the Brown Report described. You really had no choice, now, but to calculate everything in terms of your life income, because you were going to be in debt for the rest of your life. That was the point.

Every single occupation began with—it wasn’t a demand, but a statement—the statement that education is not an economic good, it’s a moral good: it’s a good unto itself. It’s crazy that positions that used to be conservative positions—I mean, you could say, “Education is necessary if you’re going to have a democracy; people need to be informed.” You could say, “Education is economically necessary," if you’re a neo-liberal. But what about, “Education is good. It’s better to understand the world than not to understand the world"? That used to be what conservative people said. And now just trying to make this argument makes you a crazed radical.

What I really think has happened to the talk of education in particular is a question of value. An educational system is where you explore any value other than the economic, where it’s okay to do so. For most people, you live a life for a few years where you get to think about something other than money. And the guys running the money completely fucked up the entire system. They almost sent the economic system of the world crashing to its knees. It’s clearly a moment where people start thinking of other ways of thinking about things, other things being important in life, other ways of imagining the economy—where’s that going to come from? The educational system. So the first thing they do is—splat—attack the educational system head-on, to make sure nobody in that system can think about anything except the terms that have already been set up. It’s just using brute force to enforce ideological hegemony. We need to recognize that that’s what’s going on.

Audience member 2: I really like this idea of debt as a political thing; however, I signed the faculty pledge. I teach at a small private college, and we announced this. We were basically shunned and almost silenced by the rest of the faculty members who said that we were pushing students to be irresponsible. And as an educator, I feel kind of responsible, because I’m not going to be there when the student will be defaulting and her wages are garnished. I’m not taking my signature back, but I still feel responsible, and how do we solve this ethical dilemma? Because I’m not going to be there when the student is in trouble.

Audience member 3: This is a devil’s advocate question, mainly for David Graeber, but if anybody else wants to answer it, feel free. Current crisis aside, is the goal, in your mind, a society where if someone gives you a truck and you said you’re going to pay them $50,000, and then you don’t want to or can’t, people shouldn’t expect that you feel obligated to fork over the cash at any point in the future? Is that sort of the goal?

Graeber: No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying we need to reset our entire conception of what money is, of what people’s relationships are. Basically what a debt is is making a promise, making it impersonal and quantifiable, enforcing it coercively and therefore making it transferable, which is arguably what money is, too. They’re deeply entangled in one another. It is the nature of all promises that they are both commitments one makes to another person and also, if circumstances radically change, they get to be renegotiated. You can make a system where they can’t, by this combination of math and violence. What I’m talking about is bringing us away from the strange idea that these particular types of promise that are framed in math and backed up in violence are somehow more sacred than promises that one makes to someone which represent an actual type of trust, which, by nature, are renegotiated if circumstances change. If you lend your brother $50,000 for a truck, and your brother suddenly gets wiped out by a flood, you’re going to take that into consideration. So, the jubilee—if we have a system that’s utterly out of whack, it’s a way of setting the reset button. How we then renegotiate obligations to each other, what sort of promises we make to each other in a truly free society is a very interesting question, and I don’t think it’s going to look anything like what we got now.

Taylor: Okay, we’re going to do lightning-fast questions—a few of them at once—and then answers.

Audience member 4: On that last point, David, another way to think about debt is to think about it as a framing, and using the 1%’s framing, but trust in many ways—from all I’ve heard in the past week, there’s been so many discussions and conferences—one of the commonalities is that we’re building new networks of trust. So if you’re talking about human nature and being an observer of it, what would you say are some of the ways we can go onward in terms of building trust?

Audience member 5: My question’s for David Graeber. In the recent New York Times article, they said that basically you’re a person who thinks things have to get worse before they get better—

Graeber: They did?

Audience member 5: Yeah, yeah, they did.

Graeber: Who said that?

Audience member 5: The New York Times Review of Books! They said that you’d also deny it, if you were ever confronted about it. But I just want to see if you would say something about whether or not you actually do believe that. And if you do believe it, I actually agree with you, because I think that some of these petty millionaires and upper middle class people who think they’re still part of the system, that they’re protected by it—which looking around this room, I think that probably covers a lot of people here—need to realize that they don’t care about you and you will be cut out.

Audience member 6: OK, hi. There were two assumptions that were unspoken behind a lot of what was said: One was that the economy of the US exists unto itself and the other is that debt is just an idea or a moral contract that could be forgiven. The example was given of the Depression—debt being forgiven, and this being part of what got us out of the Depression. I would propose that WWII and the swooping up of former British colonies for the US had a lot more to do with getting the US out of the Depression and actually affording the kind of forgiveness to certain sections of people and the creation of the middle class. Similarly in the '70s, the creation of the IMF had a lot more to do with mediating those neocolonies than just a moral reversal of debtors or creditors. And to this I would like to hear a response. The problem seems to be the existence of capitalism in an imperialist, globalized form today. There is still a need for actual revolution, to shatter that system and to create a different world.

Graeber: OK, you want the thirty second version of that?

Audience member 7: I just wanted to add on a little bit onto what David was saying. I was the president of the University of London student union last year, I’m involved in the student protests—hi, David. One of the things about the $9,000 a year fees—the government set that as an upper limit in order to introduce an element of competition within the education system so that some can charge higher than others, and, of course, all universities now are going to charge the top fee because nobody wants to seem to be providing a lower-value package, if you like. What the interesting thing about this is that the government, who are the ones who have to underpin all of the loans that the students are going to have to take out, aren’t going to be able to afford to provide those loans in the first place. Therefore students default, the government is going to default, and I think what we’re going to try to do is push something very similar to what you’re doing here, a mass non-payment campaign, because we know they work—it worked over the poll tax riots in Britain—and we know that what we have to do is push the political agenda forward. We know that they can afford our education if they can afford to bomb Libya. This came to a head last year when we challenged the Lib-Dems who put it in their manifesto—“Free education, we promise, we promise”—and I think something similar is going to happen here. All these politicians in the parliamentary system will just say whatever you want to hear in the run-up to the election, so we must hold them to account at all times, which has been well done over here. It’s been inspiring.

Graeber: It’s an interesting question, when you talk about the morality of debt—why is it that everybody says, “Oh, if you were to cancel debts, who’d make a loan, come on, the economy would suffer,” but nobody ever says, “If politicians break their promises to people—because they think that you have to pay debts to bankers and that’s much more important—well, nobody’s going to vote, and that’ll be the end of democracy.” Even though that’s exactly what happens. Why is one type of promise considered, “Oh, you can’t break that,” and the other is just made to be broken, even though we’re all a democratic society?

Taylor: So there were a few questions that were directed at you, and then there’s the question of professorial authority to student debt and solidarity with students, and I feel like that’s an interesting thing to think about.

Kalkbrenner: I’ll just say quickly that that’s a criticism that’s been leveled at us before. One of the professors involved with the campaign, there was a call from—I believe it was the Chronicle of Higher Education—a columnist called for a gag order on him, which was great publicity for us. I think I would say this: We’re not encouraging students to default, and we’re not encouraging debtors to default either; we’re encouraging debtors to take action. The pledge calls for people to refuse payment after a million people have signed the pledge. When a million people sign that pledge, the landscape is going to be radically different. So we need to think in terms of what it’ll look like, not what it looks like now.

Konczal: The thing about a debtor strike, especially a student loan strike, is that if you compare it to the logic of a factory strike—why does a factory strike work? It’s because the capitalist, the owner of the factory, wants the factory to be running. The first day he shows up and no one’s producing anything, he’s really upset. And then it’s a contest to see who can hold out the longest for what favorable terms.

The first day with a debt strike: Well, credit cards are the easiest things. If you miss a credit card payment, fees go up, your rates get jacked up, the owner of the debt is actually happy. It’s a long story but it’s pretty obvious: He can just jack up the amount you owe to him at that point. The same is true about student loans, like the story that Astra opened with. At the beginning of the strike, no one’s mad. The capitalist, who’s essentially the rentier in this case, is not upset about it; they’re happy about it. It goes with what David is saying—are we really in a capitalist society at this point with all this kind of stuff? Or is it more like a feudal society, where the idea of the debts growing is actually very favorable to an ownership class? That’s actually true of mortgage debt, too.

The other thing is about who’s on the other side—it’s the government; it’s us. We backstop most of the student debt. Why is that problematic? Well, there are things that social democrats like about having the government do things—it has a long time frame; it can print money; it has coercive abilities and compulsion. The flipside of that is that when the government uses those powers to become your debt collector, it’s incredibly repressive. They will find you wherever you go. They can take money out of your old age pension. They ultimately have no timeframe and no horizons, so they can wait you out. Whereas a normal credit card company would try to get your money and try to get you out the door, the government has an infinite timeframe for the person’s collection. So it’s a much more vicious type of debt collection. That’s one of the reasons why breaking the student loan models we have right now has to be one of the highest priorities for us.

Graeber: I think that we have to think of the system in a global context, absolutely, and we haven’t been emphasizing that here but I think all of us are well aware of that. We have this paradoxical situation, where you have what some refer to as debt imperialism. Well there’s an old joke: If you owe a bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you; if you owe a bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. It’s sort of the same thing: If Mozambique owes money to the US, Mozambique is in trouble. If the US owes money to Japan, Japan’s in trouble. It really depends on who’s got the guns. I’ve actually traced it out—you can look at the increase of the US deficit, the increase of the proportion of it that’s held abroad, and the increase in US military spending. It’s exactly the same curve. So basically what’s happening is that foreigners are paying for the US military that sits on top of them by making loans that are never paid, and just rolled over at a loss, and through Treasury bonds which act like gold and replace gold as the reserve currency of the world banking system, mainly spearheaded first by West Germany, when they were occupied by the US Then Japan, Korea, the Gulf States. Japan, China, even countries like Brazil are getting in on the game. (Of course it’s complicated. China seems to have a long-term strategy to hollow out the US and turn it into a military enforcer for East Asian capital.) We have this curious system whereby the US has this gigantic empire, which we can’t call an empire, the places that we occupy are sending us money, which we can’t call tribute so we call it a loan. And somehow we’re supposed to think this is just a problem with the balance of trade, that these guys are just sending us more stuff than we’re sending them, and, "It’s a real problem, isn’t it? We need to really do something about that!" It has nothing to do with the fact that we have this gigantic army sitting on top of them. If you suggest ways that it might, you’re a wing nut. We need to really make those connections—the whole money system has been linked to military systems for at least since the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and really much further back. That’s one of the things that an analysis of capitalism hasn’t really adequately addressed, how all those things are interlocked. I think that system is in crisis right now—that link between the military, what they call seigniorage, which is the term they make up for the economic advantage you get for being the guy who decides what money is. Which is essentially one of the big bases of American global power. It always seems to accrue to the guy with the biggest army. There is a crisis of that. We tried to pass off the crisis of the '70s onto the third world. I think they fought back relatively successfully—the IMF has been kicked out, has come home. What we’re really witnessing, I think, in all of these social movements—and this is really a cheap cartoon version—is the struggle over the dissolution of the American empire and what’s going to replace it. I think we have reason to be optimistic. Because look at Europe! They lost their colonial empire; it’s not like the rich grabbed all the cookies. They ended up with health care and social security and welfare state.

[Inaudible question from the audience]

Well, yeah, the immediate effects were pretty good. I’ll take thirty years of progress. The dissolution of empires does not necessarily mean that the 1 percent grabs everything. They’re certainly trying. But I think that’s the ground on which we’re fighting.

[Inaudible question from the audience]

Well, it didn’t lead to universal revolution but it sure did change.

[Inaudible question from the audience]

Oh, absolutely! Nobody’s denying that. What we’re saying is that the dissolution of direct empires does not mean that the ordinary people in the country get screwed. I’m not saying there aren’t still imperialistic structures. What I’m saying is that you can have political developments that are salutary for both sides. It’s not like the imperial structures are totally gone; it’s just that Europe was tagging along after the American empire at that point, and now we need to get rid of that. What I am saying is that progress can be made. The working class does not have a stake in the empire to the degree that it thinks it does, is basically what I’m saying.

Taylor: And with that, our panel and our conference will come to an end. But before I let you go, I will remind you to be kind to the workers in this building, because they will have to clean up our mess if we do not. So we need chairs stacked, if you have a few minutes. We need paper picked up and cups taken out. Thank you for coming.

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Coming Soon: Issue 14

2012-04-26T19:19:40Z

Hello from the n+1 office, where we're hard at work on Issue 14, otherwise known as "Ten Under 30." The issue, coming in June, features pieces from some of our best young writers: a virtuosic essay by Christopher Glazek on the brothers Phoenix and Hollywood psychodrama; an excerpt from Yelena Akhtiorskaya's extraordinary new novel; Charles Petersen's defense of the NYPL's immaculate collection; and Carla Blumenkranz's hotly-anticipated next installment of the Gordon Lish saga. Moira Weigel offers an authoritative history of the flatness of 3D. Nikil Saval moves to China. Dayna Tortorici demands sex-class action. Andrew Jacobs tears down Atlantic Yards. Molly Fischer lashes the backlash to her critique of women's blogs. Elizabeth Gumport is "Anonymous."

Subscribe now to send the issue straight to your mailbox, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to email editors [at] nplusonemag.com.

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Leave Your Cellphone at Home

2012-04-26T15:50:26Z

Interview with Jacob Appelbaum

by Sarah Resnick

Image: NSA headquarters, Ft. Meade, MD.

From OCCUPY Gazette 4, out May 1.

Earlier this year in Wired, writer and intelligence expert James Bamford described the National Security Agency’s plans for the Utah Data Center. A nondescript name, but it has another: the First Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center. The $2 billion facility, scheduled to open in September 2013, will be used to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store the agency’s intercepted communications—everything from emails, cell phone calls, Google searches, and Tweets, to retail transactions. How will all this data be stored? Imagine, if you can, 100,000 square-feet filled with row upon row of servers, stacked neatly on racks. Bamford projects that its processing-capacity may aspire to yottabytes, or 10[24] bytes, and for which no neologism of higher magnitude has yet been coined.

To store the data, the NSA must first collect it, and here Bamford relies on a man named William Binney, a former NSA crypto-mathematician, as his main source. For the first time, since leaving the NSA in 2001, Binney went on the record to discuss Stellar Wind, which we all know by now as the warrantless wiretapping program, first approved by George Bush after the 2001 attacks on the twin towers. The program allowed the NSA to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in charge of authorizing eavesdropping on domestic targets, permitting the wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and emails. In his thirty years at the NSA, Binney helped to engineer its automated system of networked data collection which, until 2001, was exclusively directed at foreign targets. Binney left when the organization started to use this same technology to spy on American citizens. He tells of secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities, controlled by the NSA, and powered by complex software programs examining Internet traffic as it passes through fiber-optic cables. (At a local event last week, Binney circulated a list of possible interception points, including 811 10th Avenue, between 53rd & 54th St., which houses the largest New York exchange of AT&T Long Lines.) He tells of software, created by a company called Narus, that parses US data sources: any communication arousing suspicion is automatically copied and sent to the NSA. Once a name enters the Narus database, all phone calls, emails and other communications are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders.

The NSA wasn’t the only intelligence-gathering agency to have its domestic surveillance powers expanded in the wake of September 11th. The USA PATRIOT Act, for instance, allows the FBI to spy on US citizens without demonstrating probable cause that its targets are engaged in criminal activities. Under Section 215 of the Act, the now infamous National Security Letters—which formerly required that the information being sought pertain to a foreign power or agent of a foreign power—can compel the disclosure of sensitive information held by banks, credit companies, telephone carrier, and Internet Service Providers, among many others, about US citizens. The recipient of an NSL is typically gagged from disclosing the fact or nature of the request.

It’s no secret that, whereas the Fourth Amendment prevents against unreasonable search and seizure, concerns over “national security” occasioned its disregard and the violation of privacy rights of even the most ordinary citizens. Activists have all the more reason to worry, repeatedly turning up as the subject of terrorist investigations. For instance, in 2006 the ACLU revealed that the Pentagon was secretly conducting surveillance of protest activities, antiwar organizations, and groups opposed to military recruitment policies, including Quakers and student organizations. Relying on sources from the Department of Homeland Security, local police departments, and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the Pentagon collected, stored, and shared this data through the Threat and Local Observation Database, or TALON, designed to track terrorist threats. Or take Scott Crow, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer in the global justice movement, who, as the New York Times reported last year, is one of dozens of political activists across the country to have come under scrutiny from the FBI’s increased counterterrorism operation. The FBI set up a video camera outside his house, monitored guests as they came and went, tracked his emails and phone conversations, and picked through his trash to identify his bank and mortgage companies, presumably to send them subpoenas. Others to have been investigated included animal rights activists in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When in 2008, President Obama took the reigns from George W. Bush, there was an expectation that much, or at least some, of this activity would be curbed. Yet, as Bamford’s article attests, the goverment's monitoring and collection of our digital data remains steadfast.

When the Occupy protests started in mid-September of last year, I relied on data-generating technologies increasingly, more so than I had ever before. Within a few weeks I had joined multiple OWS-related listservs; I’d started following Twitter with unprecedented commitment; I spent more hours on Facebook than I care to acknowledge. I doubt I am the only one. At the same time, there was a widespread sense of precaution—just because we were engaging in legal activities, covered by our First Amendment rights, no one, it seemed, should presume herself exempt from the possibility of surveillance. Sensitive conversations took place in loud bars, never over email. Text messages were presumed unsafe. In meetings, cell phone batteries were removed on occasion. Nevertheless, it was easy to feel unimportant (why would anyone watch me?) and equally easy to let standards relax—especially when it meant reclaiming conveniences that, once enjoyed, we're difficult to give up. Leaving a trail of potentially incriminating digital data seemed inevitable. But how bad could it really be? And was there no way to use these same tools while safeguarding our privacy?

In late April, I sat down with the independent security researcher, hacker, and privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum, who knows a thing or two about the surveillance state. Appelbaum is one of the key members of the Tor project, which relies on a worldwide volunteer network of servers to reroute Internet traffic across a set of encrypted relays. Doing so conceals a user’s location, and protects her from a common form of networking surveillance known as traffic analysis, used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. Tor is both free (as in freedom) and free of charge. Appelbaum is also the only known American member of the international not-for-profit WikiLeaks.

Resnick: The recent article in Wired describes where and how the NSA plans to store its share of collected data. But as the article explains, the Utah facility will have another important function: cryptanalysis, or code-breaking, as much of the data cycling through will be heavily encrypted. It also suggests that the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), expected to remain durable for at least another decade, may be cracked by the NSA in a much shorter time if they’ve built a secret computer that is considerably faster than any of the machines we know about. But more to the point—is encryption safe?

Appelbaum: Some of it is as safe as we think it can be, and some of it is not safe at all. The number one rule of “signals intelligence” is to look for plain text, or signaling information—who is talking to whom. For instance, you and I have been emailing, and that information, that metadata, isn’t encrypted, even if the contents of our messages are. This “social graph” information is worth more than the content. So, if you use SSL-encryption to talk to the OWS server for example, great, they don’t know what you’re saying. Maybe. Let’s assume the crypto is perfect. They see that you’re in a discussion on the site, they see that Bob is in a discussion, and they see that Emma is in a discussion. So what happens? They see an archive of the website, maybe they see that there were messages posted, and they see that the timing of the messages correlates to the time you were all browsing there. They don’t need to know to break a crypto to know what was said and who said it.

Resnick: And this type of surveillance is called ...?

Appelbaum: Traffic analysis. It’s as if they are sitting outside your house, watching you come and go, as well as the house of every activist you deal with. Except they’re doing it electronically. They watch you, they take notes, they infer information by the metadata of your life, which implies what it is that you’re doing. They can use it to figure out a cell of people, or a group of people, or whatever they call it in their parlance where activists become terrorists. And it’s through identification that they move into specific targeting, which is why it’s so important to keep this information safe first.

For example, they see that we’re meeting. They know that I have really good operational security. I have no phone. I have no computer. It would be very hard to track me here unless they had me physically followed. But they can still get to me by way of you. They just have to own your phone, or steal your recorder on the way out. The key thing is that good operational security has to be integrated into all of our lives so that observation of what we’re doing is much harder. Of course it’s not perfect. They can still target us, for instance, by sending us an exploit in our email, or a link in a web browser that compromises each of our computers. But if they have to exploit us directly, that changes things a lot. For one, the NYPD is not going to be writing exploits. They might buy software to break into your computer, but if they make a mistake, we can catch them. But it’s impossible to catch them if they’re in a building somewhere reading our text messages as they flow by, as they go through the switching center, as they write them down. We want to raise the bar so much that they have to attack us directly, and then in theory the law protects us to some extent.

Resnick: So if I were arrested, and the evidence presented came from a targeted attack on my computer, and I knew about the attack, I would have some kind of legal recourse?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s an interesting question. What is the legal standard for breaking into someone’s computer because they were at a protest? Congratulations, take that to the Supreme Court, you might be able to make some really good law. I think the answer is that it’s a national newsworthy incident—nobody knows the cops break into people’s computers. The cops break into someone’s house, the Fourth Amendment is super clear about that—it can’t be done without a warrant.

Resnick: In January of last year, it was reported that the records for your Twitter account— along with those of Julian Assange, Private Bradley Manning, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrjp, and Icelandic lawmaker Brigatta Jonsdottir—were subpoenaed by the US government. What is perhaps most notable in this case is not that the accounts were subpoenaed, but that the orders, usually gagged and carried out in secret, became public knowledge. Twitter contested the secrecy order and won the right to notify you. Several months later, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Google and the Internet service provider Sonic.net, had received similar orders to turn over your data.

Appelbaum: Twitter notified me. But as for Google and Sonic.net, I read about it in the Wall Street Journal like everybody else. So now I can talk about it because it was in a public newspaper. Those are “2703(d) administrative subpoenas,” and they asked for IP addresses, and the email addresses of the people I communicated with, among other things. The government asserts that it has the right to get that metadata, that “signaling” or relationship information, without a warrant. They get to gag the company, and the company can’t fight it, because it’s not their data, it’s my data, or it’s data about me, so they have no Constitutional standing. And the government asserts that I have no expectation of privacy because I willingly disclosed it to a third party. And in fact my Twitter data was given to the government—no one has really written about that yet. We are still appealing but we lost the stay, which means Twitter had to disclose the data to the government, and whether or not they can use it is pending appeal. Once they get the data, it’s not like it’s private or secret—and even if they can’t use it as evidence, they can still use it in their investigations.

Resnick: In January of this year, the Twitter account of writer and OWS protester Malcolm Harris was subpoenaed by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. I think it’s safe to assume these incidents are not anomalies. In which case, is there a way to use social media sites like Twitter without putting our private data at risk? Because these sites can be very useful tools of course.

Appelbaum: In the case of something like Twitter, you can use Tor on the Android phone—we have a version of Tor for Android called Orbot—and Twitter together and that’s essentially the best you’re going to do. And even that isn’t particularly great. Twitter keeps a list of IP addresses where you’ve logged in, but if you use Tor, it won’t know you are logging in from your phone. It’s powerful, but the main problem is that it’s kind of complicated to use. On your computer, you can use the Tor browser, and when you log into Twitter, you’re fine, no problem all—your IP address will trace back to Tor again. So now when the government asserts that you have no expectation of privacy, you can say all right, well I believe I have an expectation of privacy, which is why I use Tor. I signal that. And the private messaging capability of Twitter—don’t use it for sensitive stuff. Twitter keeps a copy of all its messages.

Resnick: During the perceived wave of Internet activism throughout the 2009 Iranian election protests, a new proprietary software called Haystack received a lot of media attention. Haystack promised Iranian activists tightly encrypted messages, access to censored websites, and the ability to obfuscate Internet traffic. You later tested the software and demonstrated its claims to be false. For those of us who don’t have your technical skill set, how can we assess whether a particular tool is safe to use, especially if it’s new?

Appelbaum: First, is the source code available? Second, if the claims are just too good to be true, they probably are. There’s a thing called snake oil crypto or snake oil software, where the product promises the moon and the sun. When a developer promises that a proprietary software is super secure and only used by important people, it’s sketchy. Third, are the people working on this part of the community that has a reputation for accomplishing these things? That’s a hard one, but ask someone you know and trust. How would you go on a date with someone? How would you do an action with someone? Transitive trust is just as important in these situations.

Another thing to look at is whether it’s centralized or decentralized. For example Haystack was centralized, whereas Tor is decentralized. Also, how is it sustained? Will it inject ads into your web browser, like AnchorFree, the producer of the Hotspot Shield VPN? Or is it like Riseup.net, whose VPN service monetizes not through your traffic, but through donations and solidarity and mutual aid? And if they can inject ads, that means they can inject a back door. That’s super sketchy—if they do that, that’s bad news. So you want to be careful about that.

Finally, remember: The truth is like a bullet that pierces through the armor of charlatans.

Resnick: What should we know about cell phones? It’s hard to imagine going to a protest without one. But like all networked technologies, surely they are double-edged?

Appelbaum: Cell phones are tracking devices that make phone calls. It’s sad, but it’s true. Which means software solutions don’t always matter. You can have a secure set of tools on your phone, but it doesn’t change the fact that your phone tracks everywhere you go. And the police can potentially push updates onto your phone that backdoor it and allow it to be turned into a microphone remotely, and do other stuff like that. The police can identify everybody at a protest by bringing in a device called an IMSI catcher. It’s a fake cell phone tower that can be built for 1500 bucks. And once nearby, everybody’s cell phones will automatically jump onto the tower, and if the phone’s unique identifier is exposed, all the police have to do is go to the phone company and ask for their information.

Resnick: So phones are tracking devices. They can also be used for surreptitious recording. Would taking the battery out disable this capability?

Appelbaum: Maybe. But iPhones, for instance, don’t have a removable battery; they power off via the power button. So if I wrote a backdoor for the iPhone, it would play an animation that looked just like a black screen. And then when you pressed the button to turn it back on it would pretend to boot. Just play two videos.

Resnick: And how easy is it to create something like to that?

Appelbaum: There are weaponized toolkits sold by companies like FinFisher that enable breaking into BlackBerries, Android phones, iPhones, Symbian devices and other platforms. And with a single click, say, the police can own a person, and take over her phone.

Resnick: Right—in November of last year, the Wall Street Journal first reported on this new global market for off-the-shelf surveillance technology, and created “Surveillance Catalog” on their website, which includes documents obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks has also released documents on these companies. The industry has grown from almost nothing to a retail market worth $5 billion per year. And whereas companies making and selling this gear say it is available only to governments and law enforcement and is intended to catch criminals, critics say the market represents a new sort of arms trade supplying Western governments and repressive nations alike.

Appelbaum: It’s scary because [accessing these products is so] easy. But when a company builds a backdoor, and sells it, and says trust us, only good guys will use it... well, first of all, we don’t know how to secure computers, and anybody that says otherwise is full of shit. If Google can get owned, and Boeing can get owned, and Lockheed Martin can get owned, and engineering and communication documents from Marine One can show up on a filesharing network, is it realistic to assume that perfect security is possible? Knowing this is the case, the right thing is to not build any backdoors. Or assume these backdoors are all abused and bypass them so that the data acquired is very uninteresting. Like encrypted phone calls between two people—it’s true they can wiretap the data, but they’ll just get noise.

When Hillary Clinton and the State Department say they want to help people abroad fight repressive governments, they paint Internet freedom as something they can enable with $25 million. Whereas in reality the FBI makes sure that our communications tech isn’t secure. This makes it impossible for people like me to help people abroad overthrow their governments because our government has ensured that all their technology is backdoor ready. And in theory, they try to legitimize state surveillance here, and there they try to make it illegitimate. They say, “In over-there-a-stan, surveillance is oppressive. But over here, it’s okay, we have a lawful process.” (Which is not necessarily a judicial process. For example, Eric Holder and the drones . . . sounds like a band, right?)

Resnick: Okay, so one thing I’ve heard more than once at meetings when security culture comes up is that . . . well, there’s a sense that too much precaution grows into (or comes out of) paranoia, and paranoia breeds mistrust—and all of it can be paralyzing and lead to a kind of inertia. How would you respond to something like that?

Appelbaum: The people who that say that—if they’re not cops, they’re feeling unempowered. The first response people have is, whatever, I’m not important. And the second is, they’re not watching me, and even if they were, there’s nothing they could find because I’m not doing anything illegal. But the thing is, taking precautions with your communications is like safe sex in that you have a responsibility to other people to be safe—your transgressions can fuck other people over. The reality is that when you find out it will be too late. It’s not about doing a perfect job, it’s about recognizing you have a responsibility to do that job at all, and doing the best job you can manage, without it breaking down your ability to communicate, without it ruining your day, and understanding that sometimes it’s not safe to undertake an action, even if other times you would. That’s the education component.

So security culture stuff sounds crazy, but the technological capabilities of the police, especially with these toolkits for sale, is vast. And to thwart that by taking all the phones at a party and putting them in a bag and putting them in the freezer and turning on music in the other room—true, someone in the meeting might be a snitch, but at least there’s no audio recording of you.

Part of informed consent is understanding the risks you are taking as you decide whether to participate in something. That’s what makes us free—the freedom to question what we’re willing to do. And of course it’s fine to do that. But it’s not fine to say, I don’t believe there’s a risk, you’re being paranoid, I’m not a target. When people say that they don’t want to take precautions, we need to show them how easy it is to do it. And to insist that not doing it is irresponsible, and most of all, that these measures are effective to a degree, and worth doing for that reason. And it’s not about perfection, because perfection is the enemy of “good enough.”

I would encourage people to think about the activity they want to engage in, and then say, Hey, this is what I want to do. Work together collaboratively to figure out how to do that safely and securely, but also easily without needing to give someone a technical education. Because that’s a path of madness. And if people aren’t willing to change their behaviors a little bit, you just can’t work with them. I mean that’s really what it comes down to. If people pretend that they’re not being oppressed by the state when they are literally being physically beaten, and forced to give up retinal scans, that’s fucking ridiculous. We have to take drastic measures for some of these things.

The FBI has this big fear that they’re going to “go dark,” which means that all the ways they currently obtain information will disappear. Well, America started with law enforcement in the dark; once, we were perceived to be innocent until proven guilty. And just because the surveillance is expanding, and continues to expand, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push back. If you haven’t committed a crime they should have no reason to get that information about you, especially without a warrant.

Resnick: Are there any other tools or advice you would suggest to an activist, or anyone for that matter?

Appelbaum: Well, it’s important to consider the whole picture of all the electronic devices that we have. First, you should use Tor and the Tor browser for web browsing. Know that your home internet connection is probably not safe, particularly if it’s tied to your name. If you use a Mac or Windows operating system, be especially careful. For instance, there’s a program called Evilgrade that makes it easy for attackers to install a backdoor on a computer by exploiting weaknesses in the auto-update feature of many software programs. So if you have Adobe’s PDF reader, and you’re downloading and installing the update from Adobe, well, maybe you’ll get a little extra thing, and you’re owned. And the cops have a different but better version of that software. Which is part of why I encourage people to use Ubontu or Debian or Linux instead of proprietary systems like a Mac or whatever. Because there are exploits for everything. If you’re in a particularly sensitive situation, use a live bootable CD called TAILS—it gives you a Linux desktop where everything routes over Tor with no configuration. Or, if you’re feeling multilingual, host stuff in another country. Open an email account in Sweden, and use TAILS to access it. Most important is to know your options. A notepad next to a fireplace is a lot more secure than a computer in some ways, especially a computer with no encryption. You can always throw the notepad in the fireplace and that’s that.

For email, using Riseup.net is good news. The solutions they offer are integrated with Tor as much as possible. They’re badass. Because of the way they run the system, I’m pretty sure that the only data they have is encrypted. And I’d like to think that what little unencrypted data they do have, they will fight tooth and nail to protect. Whereas, yes, you can use Tor and Gmail together, but it’s not as integrated—when you sign in, Gmail doesn’t ask if you want to route this over Tor. But also, Google inspects your traffic as a method of monetization. I’d rather give Riseup fifty dollars a month for the equivalent service of Gmail, knowing their commitment to privacy. And also knowing that they would tell the cops to go fuck themselves. There’s a lot of value in that.

For chatting, use software with off-the-record messaging (OTR)—not Google’s “go off the record,” but the actual encryption software—which allows you to have an end-to-end encrypted conversation. And configure it to work with Tor. You can bootstrap a secure communication channel on top of an insecure one. On a Mac, use Adium—it comes with OTR, but you still have to turn it on. When you chat with people, click verify and read the fingerprint to each other over the telephone. You want to do this because there could be a “man in the middle” relaying the messages, which means that you are both talking to a third party, and that third party is recording it all.

As for your cell phone, consider it a tracking device and a monitoring device and treat it appropriately. Be very careful about using cell phones, but consider especially the patterns you make. If you pull the battery, you’ve generated an anomaly in your behavior, and perhaps that’s when they trigger people to go physically surveil you. Instead, maybe don’t turn it off, just leave it at home. Because, as I said earlier, in a world with lots of data retention, our data trails tell a story about us, and even if the story is made of truthful facts, it’s not necessarily the truth. On a cell phone, you can install stuff like OStel, which allows you to make encrypted voice-over-the-Internet calls, or PrivateGSM—it’s not free, but it’s available for BlackBerries, Android phones, iPhones and so on. Which means that if they want to intercept your communication, they have to break into your phone. It’s not perfect. Gibberbot for the Android allows you to use Tor and Jabber—which is like Google Chat—with OTR automatically configured. You type in your Jabber ID, it routes over Tor, and when you chat with other people, it encrypts the messages end-to-end so even the Jabber server can’t see what’s being said. And there are a lot of tools like that to choose from.

Another thing to consider is the mode in which we meet. If we want to edit something collaboratively, there’s a program called Etherpad. And there’s a social networking application called Crabgrass, and hosted at we.riseup.net. It’s like a private Facebook. Riseup still has a lot of the data, but it’s private by default. So it’s secure, short of being hacked, which is possible, or short of some legal process. And if you use it in a Tor browser, and never reveal information about yourself, you’re in really good shape. Unlike Facebook, which is like the Stasi, but crowdsourced. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. I once had a Facebook account—it’s fun and a great way to meet people. But it is not safe for political organizing, especially when you’re part of the minority, or when you’re not part of the minority, but you are part of the disempowered majority.

As a final thought, I’d say just to remember that a big part of this is social behavior and not technology per se. And a big part of it is accepting that while we may live in a dystopian society right now, we don’t always have to. That’s the tradeoff, right? Because what is OWS working toward? The answer is, something different. And if we want an end to social inequality, the surveillance state is part of what we have to change. If we make it worthless to surveil people, we will have done this. So, it needs to be the case that what we do doesn’t hang us for what we wish to create.

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Letter from Tasmania

2012-04-19T18:15:12Z

by Robert Moor

The first man to pick us up, as we hitchhiked out of Launceston on our way to Cradle Mountain and down to the capital city of Hobart, had his fingernails cut into rough polygons and a lot of tools in the back of his extended cab pickup. But right away he made it clear to me (an American) and my travel companion, Remi (a Sydney native living in New York), that he didn’t take kindly to insinuations that Tasmania is less culturally developed than the mainland. When I asked him what he thought distinguished Tasmanians from other Australians, he reckoned, with a smile, that “For one thing, the rest of Oz isn’t worth a shit.” He then turned to Remi, and added, politely, “No offense, mate.”

From my two hours in the state—which had consisted of standing by the side of a road and eating some dry fast food chicken with a Styrofoam cup of brown gravy—I was having trouble discerning any distinction from the mainland whatsoever. The cuisine, customs, and accents seemed surprisingly similar. We’d heard it would be colder here, but the sun glowed like a white-hot coil. In Tasmania, as in the north, the roadsides are dotted with yellow signs depicting Pokemon-like creatures (cuddly wallabies, echidnas, and wombats blindly crossing the road; super-strong kangaroos overturning cars) and alarmist PSAs urging drivers to pull over every two hours to take a rest. People bemoan the latter as the work of “the nanny state,” which makes it illegal even to hang one’s arm out of the driver side window. As Remi explained it, Australians love to be governed because Australians love to do reckless things, but don’t want others to do the same.

Our first driver, arm brazenly dangled out the window, went on to recount a story from when he’d traveled around the mainland, working odd jobs. A group of Queenslanders had once asked what happened to his second cranium. (Tasmanians are often teased as being so deeply inbred that they suffer from polycephaly.) He responded that he’d sliced it off, boxed it up, and sent it over to the mainland so they could “sew it on to the asses where their heads should be.” Again, an apologetic glance to the backseat.

The economics of hitchhiking are simple: people pick you up, and you keep them entertained, either by stroking their egos with easy questions or providing exotic anecdotes from your travels. Nine times out of ten, for us, it was the former, which meant we found ourselves talking about the decline of the famed Tasmanian devils. (Tasmanians just call them “devils.”) The charmingly ornery little marsupials are dying of a contagious cancer that travels from snout to snout. Since 1996, the scourge has reduced their population by at least 70 percent, putting the species on a fast track to extinction.

I mentioned to one driver—a well-tanned woman in her late thirties, with the smoky voice of a barfly and a baby seat full of potato chip wrappers—that I’d read that a team of researchers had created a sperm bank to preserve the devils’ DNA. She laughed that that would be one hell of a tricky job. With some regret, I punctured the thought bubble floating above her head. No, I informed her, in order to harvest the devil’s seed the researchers are forced to euthanize them first.

She in turn recounted the story of a local man who was recently startled by a Copperhead slithering up his pant leg for warmth. Another driver, a kindly rancher driving a flat bed truck, dittoed the warning about snakes. The antipodean summer is their mating season, and sex apparently makes the local Copperheads and Tiger snakes irrationally aggressive. The rancher drove with one hand on the wheel, the other at turns shifting gears and pointing out the passenger side window at the scenery: a mountain that loomed like a rotten tooth, the soil all fallen away from the jagged brown dolerite; his ranch, with low yellow grass stalked by jet black Herefords; and a string of high-voltage wires, which he had strung up at his day job as an electrical technician.

A little farther along, he motioned to a grove of Eucalypt trees standing in a rectangular grid, like gravestones. He said that eight years ago, Gunns, the state’s largest timber company, had proposed to build a $2.3 billion pulp mill outside of nearby Launceston, mostly to sell paper to the Japanese market, and landowners were given tax breaks to start up tree farms to feed the mill. But the state’s surprisingly robust Green Party (the world’s first) argued that the mill would spill dioxins into local waterways and incentivize razing old growth forests. State officials threw the brakes on the project. In an effort to appease the Greens, Gunns pledged to stop logging old-growth forests and transition to exclusively farming trees. This inspired farmers to plant even more trees and invest in even more expensive harvesting equipment. With the pulp mill still tangled up in red tape and Gunns hemorrhaging millions, those machines now sit rusting in sheds. Meanwhile, the Eucalypts keep growing, by as much as twelve feet a year, and the Tasmanian countryside looks to be landscaped with some of the world’s most symmetrical forests.

+ + +

Snakes, trees, devils, and also dams, vineyards, and Martin Bryant, a young man with hair like a Dogtown skater who murdered thirty-five people one day with an AR-15 machine gun. Of all these topics of conversation and others, the one that kept sprouting in the most unexpected places was a new museum in Hobart, the Museum of Old and New Art. The MONA was founded last year by David Walsh, a native Tasmanian who made millions of dollars designing computer programs for gambling and then sank the entirety of his fortune into this passion project. Walsh describes the MONA as an “un-museum,” partly because it compulsively breaks taboos of a sexual, morbid, or scatological nature. It proudly features a number of artists who have been banned by the National Gallery of Australia.

Though the un-museum courts outrage, so far it hasn’t received much. (The only protest of the museum that I’m aware of was led by Brian Ritchie of the Violent Femmes, who drolly took to the streets decrying the MONA FOMA art and music festival he helped organize.) Everywhere we traveled in Tasmania, no matter how rural, someone had either been to the MONA or was intending to go. I read in the paper that the museum had become the state’s top tourism attraction, with over 400,000 visitors in the last year. Forty-six percent of those visitors came from in state. Over breakfast one morning at the Hungry Wombat, a gas station café near Lake Sinclair, the owner told us she had just visited MONA on a nudist tour of the museum led by conceptual artist Stuart Ringholt. I asked her how it was. “Oh, it was lovely,” she smiled.

After finishing our breakfasts, we stepped outside and approached a spindly Canadian driving a camper van. We had a hunch he might be heading to Hobart that day, and we were right. Two-and-a-half hours later, his van pulled into the hedged rows of MONA’s vineyard and up to the low-slung, modernist museum. We waved good-bye to the Canadian and queued up in front of the building. Its curved chrome façade reflected and redoubled the sun’s heat. Behind us, a whimsically out-of-place synthetic grass tennis court baked and shimmered.

“If you are Tasmanian, and identify yourself as such (yes, yes, second head etc etc), you get in for free,” says the MONA website. We did not identify ourselves as such, and paid $20. We were issued two iPhones, or, as the docent called them, “O-devices.” This is the kind of racy double entendre that Walsh seems to like: O, as in The Story of; Mona as in Lisa, but also as in “one who moans.” The museum’s ongoing exhibition is called Monanism.

The Os had been specially jailbroken to disable the calling features and web access, but strangely not email, so Remi and I—who had been out of email contact for six days—promptly sat down in a pair of lime green Fritz Hansen recliners and answered emails for the better part of an hour. Afterward, we descended the spiral staircase into the main gallery, which resembled the Bond-villainous lair where the WikiLeaks servers are stored in Stockholm. I couldn’t help wondering if the whole museum wasn’t some grand scheme by Walsh to steal our identities. (Sure enough, when I dropped off my O-device and exited the museum some four hours later, I realized I had forgotten to sign out of my Gmail account.)

Underground, we crossed a catwalk to the main gallery space. On our left, the walls had been dug from 250-million-year-old Triassic sandstone. The air was moist and cold, with a strong mineral smell, and behind that, something laboratorial and decaying. Lower down, the walls had already begun growing a swirled skin of salt crystals and flora from the moisture of our collective exhalations. Far below, the catwalk overlooked a brushed steel bar glittering with cut-glass tumblers, slices of fruit, and bottled amber. Nearby lay the source of the museum’s old-refrigerator smell: Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional, a machine that eats turkey wraps and fruit salads from the café upstairs and excretes dry-looking turds.

We spotted a queue and blindly attached ourselves to it. The people in front of us informed us that it was for the mummy exhibit. Off to our left, an electronic poem was projected on to the sandstone. The O told me that it was called “Encyclopedia,” by Charles Sandison. It was too fuzzy to read, but maybe that was the idea.

As we neared the front of the line, I overheard the docent begin to tell a group of people how the mummy died, then stop herself. “Oh no, I don’t want to ruin the surprise.” Curiosity now piqued, we urged her to tell us, but she wouldn’t budge. Instead, she gave us a stern warning. “In the tomb there’s some black stuff that looks like glass, but it’s actually water that’s been dyed black. You might step on it, because it doesn’t read like water.” I thanked her for her nanny-like concern, confidently walked into the tomb’s first corridor, and immediately almost stepped into the water. It had read to me like a stairway leading down into somewhere very dark.

In the main room, Andres Serrano’s famous photograph of a dead man (The Morgue: Blood Transfusion Resulting In AIDS) glowed on the wall and wavered in the fluid inverse. We walked across some large granite stepping stones and up to two sarcophagi, one real, the other a rectangular video display of the same being run through a CT scan—layer after layer melting away, slowly revealing the bones of the interred. The mummy, too, it seems has died a painful death---his ribs and left arm had been crushed. This was the surprise. Walsh’s installations always seem to always have one epiphanic “point,” turning his museum into a sort of video game where one moves from stage to stage, collecting what the poet-novelist Ben Lerner sardonically calls “profound experiences of art.” After I returned home, I would be able to view a 3D map on the museum’s website displaying all of the exhibits I had visited. (“Gotta peruse ’em all” MONA’s tagline could run.)

At one point, I was followed by the slapping flip flops of a bleached blond woman through a series of corridors upon whose walls the Epic of Gilgamesh had been inscribed in binary code. “Ooh, a maze!” exclaimed the woman behind me, veering around the corners. In each new space, as we neared the center, ambient harmonics rose in register. It was a difficult piece, ideally enjoyed by a cryptologist, perhaps, or a sentient computer. In the final space, the walls rose to a mirrored ceiling, and the harmonics built to a frenzied pitch. I stood for a moment in this dislocated space, staring up at my own staring eyes, surrounded by the coded and the arcane. The woman ducked her head in, glanced around, then called out to her boyfriend, “Nope, there’s nothing going on in here, Nick. It’s just a square!”

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After Toulouse

2012-04-18T15:14:09Z

On the French Election

by Elisabeth Zerofsky

Image: Hollande in Toulouse. From ibtimes.com.

How the shootings in Toulouse will affect this weekend’s presidential election in France is both the first and the last question on everyone’s mind. It is the last question, or at least it ought to be, because a nation in shock should be permitted not to think about the crass matter of politics, the self-importance and mudslinging of which are particularly calamitous to respect for the victims and the sufferings of their families. But the timing of the incident was brutal, as the French have an immense decision to make only one month after the fact, and therefore the election is also, naturally, the first question.

Each candidate was required to respond; those who were quick to react were immediately chastised, by those who were slower to the bit, for using tragedy for political purposes. This brings the sum total of politicians who will stand to benefit from the incident, whether by responding to it or affecting to defer their response, to every one of them.

But the truth is that Nicolas Sarkozy thrives in situations like this one. His introduction to the nation occurred in 1993, when, as mayor of the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly, he rescued a preschool full of children from a hostage situation. A man with explosives strapped to his body entered the school making lunatic demands. French police surrounded the building, but Sarkozy went in alone to negotiate with the man. He managed to talk him into letting some of the children out, and live cameras beamed footage across the country of Sarkozy emerging from the school with children in his arms. After a standoff that lasted nearly two days, the cops went in and shot the attacker dead. “That was the moment he was introduced to the French people,” the novelist Philippe Labro told Adam Gopnik in a New Yorker interview in 2007. “Two things were apparent. Courage? Yes. But also an almost crazy appetite for living on the edge that is completely outside the normal experience of French politicians. He likes risks, enjoys risks, revels in risks.”

The accuracy of this diagnosis has been more than proven in the intervening years. As the tough-talking interior minister, Sarkozy faced the suburban riots that engulfed the country in 2005 head on, charging into the housing projects in the poor banlieues and promising, to much outcry, to clean out the “riffraff.” Since assuming the presidency in 2007, he has maneuvered himself into the international driver’s seat in one crisis after another, from the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 to the air strikes in Libya in 2011. The euro crisis has been an exemplary case, in which Sarkozy, unable to take control of the problem, attached himself at the waist to Angela Merkel. The French press has long ascribed to him a “Zorro complex.” The author and academic Claude Millet wrote in the French magazine Le Point that “crisis is the Sarkozian mode of existence.”

Indeed, the images of Sarkozy suspending his campaign in order to crisscross the country to visit the people affected by the shootings, then return to Paris to speak to the nation from the Elysée Palace, inspire confidence and some measure of comfort. And the numbers are there to prove it —Sarkozy’s approval ratings go up when, and only when, he is exercising his skills in crisis management. But this is not to suggest a purely cynical explication of the present situation—Sarkozy’s elegy to the victims was eloquent and moving. And, in an important gesture, he stated firmly that, “Our Muslim compatriots have nothing to do with the insane motivations of a terrorist. We must not allow any confusion.”

And yet, when Sarkozy makes comments such as, “We are strong when we are united around our values,” the phrase can evoke something quite different. In recent years, “values” has become the code word in France for insidious discussions about whether Islam is or is not taking over the country. “Values” was part of the justification for the ban on the full-facial veil passed by the French Parliament in 2011 and for the public “forums” on French identity that the government initiated in 2009 and 2010. “Values,” can refer to many things, but the debate surrounding them is more frequently about their importance, and not their exact definition.

And while “values” might well mean, in light of the March shootings, the place in French society for tolerance and religious freedom, it would be difficult not to read into the phrase a signal to a certain subset of voters—namely those who might be most enticed by Marine Le Pen, the 43-year-old new leader of the far-right Front National party. When the first reports about the victims in Toulouse began to circulate—three paratroopers of North African descent, three Jewish children and a 30-year-old Jewish father—the immediate reaction was that this was targeted violence against France’s “others,” primed by the country’s increasingly vitriolic debate. When the French police narrowed in on the 23-year-old Mohammed Merah as the perpetrator of the crimes, and it became clear that he was, or at least claimed to be, a “home-grown” jihadist, those sentiments made a 180-degree turn. Here, acted out in all its monstrosity, was the fear at the heart of the debates about immigration and French identity—that of a young man born in France who does not seem to adhere to what it is to be French, who is willingly swayed by a foreign political ideology to turn to violence against his compatriots. This is the insinuated central argument of Le Pen’s campaign against immigration. Certainly there is an economic component to it at this time of crisis, that illegal immigrants are taking jobs and sinking the social security system. But Le Pen also suggests an element of danger in a way that, when taken to its extreme, arrives at the figure of Mohammed Merah.

And so Le Pen is being attacked for using the incident for electoral gain, though such an accusation seems so self-evident as to be unnecessary. She has been admonished for shameless fear-mongering, but when she asked, in a public address, “How many Mohamed Merahs are there in the boats and the airplanes that arrive every day in France full of immigrants?” she clearly intended to remind voters that she is the only candidate who has been willing to speak about these fears all along. While her approach to the topic of immigration is less blatantly xenophobic than that of her father and the former party head, Jean-Marie, she does not hesitate to be blunt. One issue of her official campaign publication features a front-page photo of a boat full of Arab-looking men; a poster has an image of a French residency permit with the message, “203, 000 per year—was Sarkozy elected for this?” Le Pen is not afraid to mix the issues of immigration and security or to criticize the current administration for its “laxity” about immigration and “underestimation” of its dangers. Florian Philippot, the strategic director of Le Pen’s campaign, told Le Monde in the days following the attacks that, “[Le Pen] has a certain credibility. She has never avoided these topics. This just shows that Marine Le Pen is right to address certain subjects and the others are wrong to cover their eyes.”

Le Pen is correct in her appraisal that “security is a theme that has just signed up to the presidential campaign.” An election that, prior to Toulouse, was almost purely about economics now has a charged new dimension. This is evident in Sarkozy’s attempts, over the past few weeks, to overcome the fact that Merah had been flagged by French intelligence after trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan and was on the US no-fly list by taking a new preemptive approach to the issue of security. Early April brought news of the roundup of nineteen so-called “Islamic activists,” along with assault rifles, and the commencing of at least five deportations, likely to be followed by more. Sarkozy has also proposed a slew of new anti-terrorism laws, including one that would criminalize looking at extremist Islamic websites. These measures will be difficult to get past the French Constitution, but, in a political environment that has allowed for the rise of the Front National, Sarkozy clearly considers them crucial to his campaign.

+ + +

The French presidential election is divided into two rounds, with the first round, this year on April 22, open to all eligible candidates (this year there are ten of them), and the second round, two weeks later, a run-off between the two top scorers. Traditionally the finalists have been the candidates from the two mainstream parties, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), Sarkozy’s party, and the Parti Socialiste, whose candidate this year is François Hollande. Hollande has held leadership roles in his party for more than a decade but has never been thought of as a persuasive front man, and this perception followed him into his campaign. He lost his party’s nomination for the presidency in 2007 to his former partner and the mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, during which time he acquired the nickname “Mr. Royal.” His candidacy for this year’s election came about only in the wake of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s withdrawal from the race following the scandal involving a maid in a hotel room in New York. Hollande, who unlike most presidents of the Fifth Republic, has never held a cabinet position, has offered a traditional Socialist agenda of raising taxes and the minimum wage, hiring more teachers to boost the education system, and opposition to the austerity programs sweeping through Europe at present, but his demeanor has failed to inspire much enthusiasm. Still, it is widely acknowledged that many French, particularly elites, harbor a deep rancor toward Sarkozy, and a significant proportion of voters have admitted to pollsters that their vote for Hollande is a vote against Sarkozy. Despite Sarkozy’s brief surge in the polls the week after the Toulouse shootings, Hollande has been consistently projected to win a runoff between the two, and supposedly international leaders have begun to discuss what might change if the current French president becomes the latest European head of state to fall.

There are the wild cards, however, of the fringe candidates. The memory of the 2002 election, when Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie, then head of the Front National, unexpectedly advanced into the second round of voting, is still quite fresh. Le Pen père’s victory was more than anything a fluke—a plethora of candidates on the left split up voters who normally voted Socialist, putting PS candidate Lionel Jospin, with 16.18 percent in the first round, below Le Pen’s 16.86 percent. But these results also had not been predicted by the polls, which in the weeks leading up to the election did not even indicate that such an upset was possible.

Marine Le Pen is far more popular than her father. As early as January, a shocking 30 percent of French voters admitted to agreeing with her ideas, making her something akin to a mainstream candidate. These ideas, in addition to her well-articulated views on immigration, include both somewhat ludicrous protectionist measures, such as pulling out of the euro, closing French borders to trade, and “reindustrializing” the country, and more left-leaning measures, such as increasing the minimum wage and decreasing the retirement age to 60, from its Sarkozy-initiated and widely-detested recent increase to 62. This puts some aspects of her platform oddly close to that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the former Socialist who has emerged as a surprisingly popular far-left candidate. Mélenchon, who has attempted to pick up the pieces of the old French left and assemble them under his Front de Gauche, likes to frame his ideas in ways that border on demagoguery but have aroused passions where Hollande has failed. Mélenchon also wants to pull out of European trade agreements and raise the minimum wage, in addition to “taxing the wealthy at 100 percent” on all income above $470, 000 a year. Polls in recent weeks have shown him capturing 14 percent of the electorate. Neither Le Pen nor Mélenchon stands a real chance of winning the final round, but their ability to affect the numbers, and positions, of the two center candidates in the first round is substantial.

As French authorities have continued to investigate into Merah’s background, his claims of connections to Al-Qaeda have become more and more questionable. Where to draw the line between a young man radicalized by fundamentalist ideologies, and someone whose personal life, marked with failure and disenfranchisement in a society that is often hostile to its young minorities, brought him to the snapping point, has become increasingly difficult to discern. But those details probably won’t matter so much—latent anxieties have already been released into the civic debate, and will be felt for some time to come.

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NY and LA events, April 21 and 22

2012-04-16T15:23:49Z

We're pleased to announce that you can party with us on both coasts this weekend.

On Saturday evening, in the middle of the LA Times Festival of Books, we're throwing a party with our friends at Paper Chase Press on Sunset.

Join Chad Harbach, Jon-Jon Goulian, and Rebecca Solnit
for a celebration of n+1 magazine.

6 to 9 PM, Saturday, April 21
Paper Chase Press
7176 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles

rsvp@nplusonemag.com.

And on Sunday, Paper Monument is celebrating its sleeper hit, Draw It With Your Eyes Closed, at PS1.

Draw It With Your Eyes Closed launch party
Readings from Mira Schor, Christine Hill, and Jeremy Sigler
Assignments from John Baldessari and Paper Monument
Plus drinking and dancing

3 PM, Sunday, April 22
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave.

Book your ticket now to hit up both!

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Stray Dogs

2012-04-12T20:31:59Z

by Rafael Gumucio

Image: Student protesters in Santiago, Chile. From www.abbysline.com.

Two hundred ownerless dogs are marching along the Alameda, Santiago’s main thoroughfare. They have been ejected from their natural territory by a demonstration 150,000 strong. Students, teachers, administrative staff, and idlers dressed up as pirates, knights of the round table, gravediggers, the undead—a lot of zombies everywhere. And in the vanguard, heading the demonstration, is this horde of stray dogs, a leaderless pack weaving along like confused eels, the mangy, sick or just plain unwanted dogs that are the first thing any tourist notices about Santiago—a capital that is otherwise clean and tidy, proudly modern, postmodern even, but that has never managed to remove, control, nor even count the multitude of ownerless dogs that inhabit its streets.

Dogs sleeping, barking, reproducing on the steps of public offices and buildings, on the sidewalks of the main avenues, outside the headquarters of the department stores. A world of dogs that is usually peaceful and goes all but unnoticed by the capital’s human inhabitants, now displaced for the first time in centuries from this territory that is also theirs, the center of this easygoing city that, like this interminable year, has suddenly become feverish, unpredictable, tempestuous.

The homeless dogs running off in search of new territory are the perfect symbol for the whole country. Who has not felt lost, uprooted, in this year of protests, marches, debates, barking aimlessly at other dogs of whose existence we have only just become aware?

+ + +

Thousands of students will lose a semester or even a year of their studies because the public universities—which in Chile are public in name only, with 70 percent of their financing coming directly from students’ parents—are no longer receiving their tuition payments. Proportionally, education in Chile is the most expensive in the world. The median cost of attending a public university is 1,746,784 pesos, or $3,400 in US dollars, in a country where the average monthly middle-class income is 752,000 pesos, or $1,541. What’s worse, public expenditure for higher education is barely 0.5 percent of GDP, the lowest in the world.

The protests that continue to roil the country started, as protests always do, with an attempt to remedy a small injustice: asking for a “scholar pass” that would give students free access to public transportation. By 2006, however, backed by marches of hundreds of thousands of students, demands had quickly escalated to asking for a full-scale state takeover of the educational system. The system had been largely privatized by the promulgation of the Organic Constitutional Law of Teaching (LOCE), which was implemented in 1990, a parting gift left from Pinochet on the last day of his regime. By divesting the state of all but a regulatory function over Chilean schools (secondary and higher education included), the LOCE essentially eased the ability of private corporations to take over school funding and administration. (Today only 45 percent of Chilean students study in fully public institutions.) These demands tested the administration of former Prime Minister Michelle Bachelet, eventually forcing her to replace her minister of education and negotiate face-to-face with the student protest leaders, who by then had gained widespread support throughout the country.

Nevertheless, a commission of student leaders and eighty experts, coached by business leaders, watered down the original demands. At the end of the process, LOCE was replaced by a new law that not only failed to take into account what the students wanted but also deepened the privatization of education through a skewed subsidy system. A new wave of protests began to coalesce, led by the Confederation of Chilean Student Federations (CONFECH), a tightly organized and disciplined university student organization. Its demands, clear and forthright, were drawn up in the “Acuerdo Social por la Educación Chilena,” which, among other things, called for increased state funding for schools and laws easing student participation in university governance.

But beyond the specific goals of the protest, what the student movement did was resurrect traditions of protest, debate, and vision that the country had long ceased to observe. With the earthquake, the few certainties that had comforted us in nights of doubt simply collapsed. A country older than the democratic transition and the dictatorship, the country of the Unidad Popular, the country of Neruda and Violeta Parra, reemerged on the ravaged surface from the depths of its geography. Tranquility, maturity, passivity—these were no longer the mood. Over the six long months of school sit-ins, marches, unavailing efforts at dialogue, barricades, and gunshots, everything shifted and is still shifting, an unending moral earthquake in a country that seemed to have turned away from great moral questionings, the pain of the dictatorship, the urgency of reconciliation. Amid the ruins of the earthquake we found the ghost of our expired rebellious selves, the forgotten urge to go out into the street and shout No.

+ + +

Che Guevara badges, red flags, the Andean songs of Quilapayún and Inti Illimani, legendary protest singers we thought were lost in the dustiest recesses of memory. Amidst the marches, I cannot help confronting my own ghosts, my memories: protests against the dictatorship in the mid- and late '80s, a kind of desperate left-wingery I was happy to abandon in the '90 to embrace the market, women with well-applied lipstick, money, and television. My youth at the tail end of the dictatorship, the central committee, the party discipline, the empty cardboard coffin symbolizing public education being carried to the gates of the girls’ school run by nuns next to my own, which was mixed and much poorer. And the chauffeur of one of the girls, drawing a pistol. And Pirri, later a sailor, who risked his five feet of skinny, pale flesh by shouting at him: “Go on then, you jerk, shoot.” And the driver firing straight into the air, and the protesters racing away, out of breath and legs shaking, like pigeons in the park scattered by a kick.

Today’s protesters chant the same slogans and sing the same songs as when we were young. But do the youth of today know what fear is? Do they know its opposite, which is nameless, because its name is not courage but perhaps just sheer nerve, or the sheer speed of talking and thinking and saying no and running, and then running some more so their enemies can never catch them? Well fed, adored by their parents, downloading song after song on their computers, ceaselessly texting: do these kids know what the enemy is, an enemy that has no name, no face, not even hatred? Do they know what it is to have an enemy?

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I am in the middle of a student march with a friend who was an activist with me in the 1980s. I ask him what he is doing for a living.

“Ontological coaching,” he tells me. “I advise people on how to change their lives. Most people change what they ‘do’ but not what they ‘are.’ The key is in being, not doing,” he goes on. This mixture of marketing terminology and spiritual goals is perhaps the hallmark of my generation, which grew up under the dictatorship but then at 20 gained access not just to democracy, but also to the market, travel, businesses of our own, and to unceasing, bewildering communication for which nothing ever prepared us.

We did not choose to live this way. The dictatorship privatized the state-owned companies, the public universities stopped being free, the private universities grew rich. This change was not without trauma. The country went through one of the worst economic crises in its history in 1982, but Pinochet’s strongman rule did not change course and the country came through to an enviable and envied prosperity. Companies did not become publicly owned again, though, nor did universities become free. Out of necessity, demands for a restored and expanded welfare state were forgotten. We children of the abortive socialist revolution adapted perfectly to the ongoing neoliberal one.

My generation, those born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, learned to live with fear. Our childhoods were never free for a moment from the the military regime, nor were they free from scrutiny by opposition activists, who permitted neither frivolity nor criticism, fun nor clarity of thought. Everything was too solemn. Neutralized twice over, we learned to distrust collective and epic aspirations. Educated in fear, in a country that taught us it was every man for himself, we found the very word equality unpardonably vague. Those of my generation live happily in the present.

We thought the only possible rebellions were personal, that the most private part of private life—sex, nostalgia, memories—was the vein we had to follow. We thought we had signed an armistice with reality. Then, mysteriously, it all started over. In front of the Moneda, the presidential palace, a thousand students dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, dressed as zombies because they “we will die paying” the debts of millions of pesos that await them at the end of their studies. In Santiago, a group of art students go round and round the Moneda. They plan to keep this up for 1,800 hours, symbolic of the $1,800 million they think need to be injected into higher education. The street is taken over by Lady Gaga imitators, open-air nudity, and three thousand passionate kisses in front of the cathedral.

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I cross through quickly, as though I were afraid of this vast crowd and its contradictory demands: gay marriage, no dams in Patagonia, cycling and animal rights. Few or no traditional party flags, few or no traditional party leaders, because they were jeered at mercilessly whenever they tried to join a column of demonstrators.

These young people remind me of my own youth, then, but also of what was lacking in it. Cuba in ruins, Che Guevara a movie—they are playing at changing the world because they believe it cannot change. They have no other project, they are upholding no other power. They have enemies but no allies. Their petition is for a return to a social democratic approach (that of the New Deal in the United States) to education. The faith of their forefathers, the memory of their world transmitted by Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. The greatest novelty of this movement is that it does not for a moment aspire to be new; hence the miraculous support they have garnered among their parents and grandparents.

It may be novel in the way it communicates (social networks), but not in its message, a rebelliousness that moves between nihilism and reformism. As though in a giant play, young people have once more donned all the costumes of the 20th century, its ideologies, its sensibilities, its hopes and despairs: Camila Vallejo, the beautiful communist; Giorgio Jackson, the likeable Christian leftist navigating a sea of Trotskyites and anarchists of every stripe and age; transvestites and transgenders en masse; bandanna-wearing youths with stones and Molotov cocktails, preparing for their own Intifada once the celebration that rounds off every march is over and the other party begins, the party of looting, broken glass, broken heads, tear gas canisters, and police horses that sometimes fall, bleeding heavily, to the ground.

These are the Chilean “indignants.” Like its Spanish equivalent, or like Occupy Wall Street, the student movement combines new technological platforms and sophisticated and creative forms of protest with a nostalgic wish list calling for a return to a social protection state. But the Spanish protesters and their American counterparts are the children of an economic crisis unparalleled in history. Their indignation is not ontological but simply logical: they will not be entitled to the same privileges and opportunities as their elders. The system screwed them and they feel entitled to screw the system. This is not the case with the Chilean students, part of a generation that was given large-scale access to higher education their parents could not aspire to, citizens of a country that is visibly growing and prospering, albeit in a visibly unequal way (it is the most unequal country in the OECD).

The student movement was not born out of rage nor hunger, hence its freshness and vitality, its strength. It is driven not by the personal demands of the perennially excluded but simply by a struggle to live in a normal country. The government called the students privileged when they started to take to the streets. But that is their merit. Camila and Giorgio were not the most disadvantaged in the system. They went to private schools and obtained places in highly selective universities where the richest study, but they rose up in defense of the rights of those who were not so lucky.

What is wrong with them? Why aren’t they content with what they have? Why don’t they let the disadvantaged, the forgotten, stand up for their own rights? In the eyes of my generation, the ontological coaching generation, these protests are completely incomprehensible. This generation has nothing to gain from their struggle and it is not clear what those who will follow them can gain, either. What has driven them to struggle, to fight, to sacrifice themselves in an unequal battle in which they personally stand to lose a great deal more than they can gain? Ethics? That much overlooked thing, simple morality? The desire to wield power and be seen on television? All of the above, but also something else that escaped and continues to escape the calculations of my generation.

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In 1862, Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Sons, the story of a son who goes to visit his father on a country estate in Russia. With him goes a friend who is obsessed with questioning everything. The novel gave wide currency to the term nihilist, what Bazarov, the friend who goes on to become the main character in the novel, calls himself. He is a wastrel who does not dare seize the great love that is within his grasp and absurdly allows himself to die of a curable disease.

Fathers and Sons could also be the name of a novel about the Chilean students. The problems of education and inequality that they attack have been a constant in Chile. If they are protesting now, it is perhaps because relations between parents and children have changed even more radically than economics or politics. The relations with each other are just the opposite of those in Turgenev’s novel, because here it is the parents who are the nihilists, the suicides, the silenced, the frustrated, and the children who are the reformers, the realists, the strategists.

These young people’s parents admire them. Perhaps because those parents were the last generation to be oppressed, they do not oppress their own children. Partly because they experienced real physical hunger, they are obsessed with seeing that their children lack for nothing, not even the pleasure of fighting for justice. Camila Vallejo’s father, Reinaldo, is a communist, and when the revolution was canceled he married Mariela, had children, and acquired a home and a small heating and boiler installation business. Giorgio’s mother worked for the Catholic Church, dealing with food rations for the homeless and the very poor. Born and raised in the struggle against the dictatorship, how could they fault their children for carrying on the ritual rebellion, the struggle for which ontological coaching was no substitute?

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The communist youth, responsible for the security of all their leaders, are putting up cordons. The press officer for the FECH and the FEUC answers calls from France, Australia, and Britain on a cell phone so old and worn out it is all but falling to pieces. A compact mass shoves a group of twenty leaders who are hemmed in by a tide of photographers, camera operators, and reporters of all nationalities.

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Two years before the protests began, a world congress of Darwinists was held in Chile. The novelist Ian McEwan was the main guest at an event that included biologists, economists, and psychologists, was widely covered by the world’s press, and attracted the interest of numerous business people and right-wing politicians. The fact that Darwin himself visited Chile is only part of the reason for the success and prestige of this event, in a part of the world where the business and political elite tend to view science and culture with unease, mistrust, or just indifference. A certain idea of natural selection—one that would not have been shared, incidentally, by neither Darwin nor his followers—was one of the underpinnings of the Chilean neoliberal revolution. Indeed, several of those who promoted it were among the organizers of the event. The idea of the survival of the fittest explains why life expectancy is ten years less in some communes of Santiago than in others and why raffles and parties have to be held to raise money for friends’ hospital expenses. The same Darwinism explains why the poorest Chilean students have no choice but to borrow from private banks to obtain a professional qualification.

Some of these business people and politicians looked and still look to Darwinism for a biological explanation of inequality. Certainly, there is nothing more unequal than nature, nothing less fair. Yet when I see the dogs desperately looking for a pack to join, to mingle with, to disappear into, I cannot help seeing a Darwinian explanation for the protests setting Chile and the world alight. These dogs need a familiar pack to conquer unknown territories, to inhabit those they know. They bite and bark at one another because it brings them closer. They are capable of surviving alone but would prefer not to.

My generation, educated in Hobbes to purge any recollection of Rousseau’s naiveté, always saw the pack as oppression, danger, prison. When every dog has its territory, its food, and its home, this is true. When it is forced to travel, the pack ceases to be a prison and becomes freedom. This is what was forgotten by my generation, which has had to forget so much: the simple idea that equality can be as natural to pack animals like people and dogs as freedom. It is a hunger for equality, as voracious and as undeniable as the hunger for freedom that I witnessed and participated in, that is filling the streets of Santiago, New York, and Damascus, with citizens in their hundreds desperately searching for a pack to tell them who they are.

—Translated by Nile Davidson
(with thanks to Luke Epplin)

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Meet the Mets (and Marlins)

2012-04-06T14:38:24Z

Baseball Preview

by Will Augerot

Image: From the7line.com.

The champions of baseball’s offseason were the Miami (née Florida) Marlins, who not only got a hip alliterative name and fresh uniforms, but also moved into space-age Marlins Park this week. To complete the makeover, they made a host of pricey upgrades, adding the twin loose cannons of Chicago, manager Ozzie Guillen (of the White Sox) and pitcher Carlos Zambrano (of the Cubs), as well as pitchers Mark Buehrle (another exiled Chicagoan) and Heath Bell (to whom the Marlins gifted a cool $27 million). Then, despite already having a very good young shortstop in Hanley Ramirez, they pulled off the coup de grace—signing away the Mets’ best player, the thrillingly talented Jose Reyes, for $106 million.

In Miami, of course, nobody much cares; there’s little need for hot-stove chatter (or a stove of any kind) when you’re eating sushi on the beach in January. But Mets fans care year-round, and with most of the local news of the depressing, damage-control sort—where would Reyes go? Would the Madoff case force Fred Wilpon to sell the team?—we spent the winter with our eyes turned southward.

The Marlins have been menacing us for years. On September 28, 2008, the Florida Marlins knocked the Mets from the playoffs on the season’s last day—in the last game ever played at Shea Stadium. The exact same thing had happened in 2007. In neither year were the Marlins in contention; in both, they played as hard as they could to spoil our Series dream.

Taking Reyes from us, though, may be Miami’s worst offense yet. Not just because of his impact on the win column (which is marked), but because of the beautiful and hyperathletic way he plays, the sense you get that anything can happen when he’s on the field. He’s a product of the notoriously corrupt Dominican baseball industry, signed by the New York Mets as a 16-year-old in 1999. He grew up without either a baseball glove or a television (or, for that matter, an indoor toilet). Reyes made his major league debut at Texas on the day before his 20th birthday, and he’s played against the grain for nine years, using his speed to reframe what had become a fatso’s sport of sluggers.

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The second-to-last game of the 2011 season was the last I attended, and it turned out to be Reyes’s second-to-last as a Met. Paid attendance was 30,027, but the crowd was certainly smaller, due to the threat of rain and secondhand tickets still listed on StubHub. Almost all of us were seeing Reyes for the last time, but there wasn’t much buzz in the crowd. He hit two home runs, oddly—he only had seven on the season—and went 3-for-6. After each at bat an update on the batting title (for which he was competing with eventual National League MVP Ryan Braun) flashed on the scoreboard: Reyes .336, Braun .335. This contest (which Reyes wound up winning, at .337) overshadowed the game; it didn’t matter whether the Mets would win their 77th or the Reds their 79th. Even those two home runs, such un-Reyes-like occurrences, interested the crowd mainly for their effect on his batting average.

In the field Reyes stands straight up, his feet nearly touching until the pitch is thrown, when he crouches down a bit. His dreadlocks bounce as he scoops and throws. In the batter’s box he’s a switch hitter. Regardless of which side of the plate he’s on, his knees sink a little deeper than seems natural, but after contact he takes off toward first—with third always on his mind and ours—as quick as anyone I’ve seen.

Home runs aside, the vintage Reyes sequence of the night occurred in the bottom of the ninth. The game was tied, and nobody was on base for the Mets. Reyes tapped the ball softly down the third-base line, and after he rounded first the pitcher, the Cuban rookie Aroldis Chapman, threw wild, allowing Reyes to advance to second. A few pitches later, he stole third. Meanwhile two of the Mets’ worst hitters, Jason Pridie and Justin Turner, made outs. Reyes took a big lead off third base. I thought he was going to steal home, and, to my eye, he induced a balk from Chapman. But the ump didn’t call it, and Jose never made it home.

In the top of the tenth, improbably (since he’s best known as a washed-up pitcher), Dontrelle Willis pinch-hit for Chapman. He struck out; the inning was over; the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight” (the song I listened to more than any other in 1996) blared out of the Citi Field stereo system. Reyes trotted in from short, his cap in his hand, his dreadlocks visible, and some of us stood up and clapped. It wasn’t the heartiest ovation ever, but there was such an ambiguity to what was going on—when the game would end, whether he’d be back next year—that I can’t really blame the crowd. I knew it was time to go; I lingered to smoke a cigarette outside the Rotunda, the radio broadcast sounding loudly in space, and then I walked to the 7 train. Reyes wears number 7, and it’ll always be hard to forget him en route to the stadium. The game lasted 13 innings, another loss for the Mets.

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The Marlins-Reyes courtship started at midnight on October 30th, a bizarrely snowy night in New York. At the precise moment the free-agency period began, Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria (a Manhattan art dealer best known for the way he ran the Montreal Expos into the ground) walked into the Hotel Carlyle on the Upper East Side—which, as an ESPN article claimed, is “famous for hosting President John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe a half century ago”—with a Jose Reyes Miami Marlins jersey under his raincoat. According to Marlins president David Samson, as quoted on ESPN.com, “A few other people in the bar thought that this was some sort of strange, freaky show, because the owner of the team stood up and literally went like this [flashed open his coat], and underneath was Jose Reyes’s jersey.” It was Halloween season in New York, but Reyes may be wearing his costume for the next six years. More likely, given the Marlins’ history of trading away every good player on their roster every few years, he’ll finish out the contract somewhere else. Reyes doesn’t have a no-trade clause; the Marlins don’t allow them. He’ll almost surely be shipped off to the highest bidder circa 2015.

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Historically, all of the Mets’ best players have either arrived or left in the middle of their careers. Tom Seaver, Tom Terrific, was traded to the Reds at 32 in the Midnight Massacre. Darryl Strawberry left for the Dodgers at 29, and his career fizzled soon thereafter. But the Mets have acquired several other teams’ homegrown stars: Keith Hernandez via trade with the Cardinals, Carlos Beltran through free agency, Mike Piazza through a strange series of events that also involved the Marlins.

Knowing all this, fans rallied at Citi Field throughout last season as trade rumors flew, often clogging the Shea Bridge in right field, imploring the team to keep Jose. Darren Meenan, a t-shirt designer who runs the website The7Line, was the face of the movement—we saw him on TV, on blogs, in the papers. It was hard to tell whether he genuinely cared or was trying to drum up shirt sales—perhaps both—but after Reyes signed with Miami, he posted a picture (previously published in the Daily News) of himself holding a “Don't Trade Reyes” sign as Jose walked back to the dugout, with Reyes’s autograph on the print. It’s treacle, it’s self-promotion, but it’s also the salient image of Jose’s departure, and it makes me sad.

WAR (wins above replacement) is the best single way to measure a player's “value.” Developed by statistician Tom Tango, WAR approximates how many wins a player adds to his team’s total, over and above what would be expected of a hypothetical journeyman. According to FanGraphs, Reyes earned the Mets 6.2 wins in 2011, more than Albert Pujols (5.1, though he gets more than 8 in a typical year) or Prince Fielder (5.5), despite losing almost a quarter of the season to a hamstring injury. (Pujols and Fielder both signed $200+ million contracts this winter, with the Angels and Tigers respectively.)

Though Reyes does great in this totalizing stat, he does it differently from other players. He uses his speed, though stolen bases have been viewed skeptically by the statistically minded since the early days of Orioles manager Earl Weaver and the writer Bill James. Because he legs out so many doubles and triples, his slugging percentage, .493 last year, is very high for a nonslugger. His raw batting average lead the National League at .337, lifting his on-base percentage to .384 even though he walks infrequently. His exuberant post-triples celebrations are really felt, and after watching the 15th halfway through the 2011 season I made up my mind that I’d rather the Mets lose with Reyes than win a World Series without him. Now that he’s gone, we’ll surely get neither.

I don’t think we watch baseball only to see a winning team—the World Series is won by so few teams, usually the Yankees or the Cardinals. What’s great about following a team, in my case the Mets, is that there’s a new beginning every year. The age-old baseball slogan “just wait till next year!,” to my ear, could be rephrased as one of the Occupy Wall Street chants: “We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!” We’ll win, someday. We want to see statistically unlikely things; we want to be surprised. If we could measure players by this sense of open possibility, the sense of play, I suspect that Reyes would lead the league. The late Gary Carter, recently dead of brain cancer, had a similar exuberance, and right now it feels like we’ve lost them both.

+ + +

Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ GM since late 2010, attended Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, but self-identifies as a Marine. When the Mets hired him during the 2010 World Series, a blog at The Military Times said “He faces a challenge in Queens, with the Mets’ roster featuring broken-down stars playing with bloated contracts.” There’s some truth there, but the language seems to echo conservatives’ calls for fiscal austerity in Europe. He was a bit player in the book Moneyball, a mentor to Billy Beane, whom he preceded as the GM of the A’s. The Mets blog Amazin’ Avenue temporarily renamed itself Alderson Avenue, and we hoped that his prudent approach would allow the Mets to win even with a declining payroll. Alderson’s a smart guy; I was happy when the Mets hired him.

All this hope, though, amounted to little while Mets owner Fred Wilpon’s involvement in his friend Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was dominating the headlines. Fred Wilpon, along with his real estate partners at Sterling Equities, has had control over the Mets since he bought out his partner Nelson Doubleday Jr. in 2002. But he and his Sterling partners lost $550 million in book value the day the Madoff swindle was exposed, and it’s affected the team. Wilpon’s real estate fortune and Mets ownership were in many ways dependent on the steady 10-percent returns Madoff gave him. That money isn’t available anymore, and in a real estate market that hasn't recovered from its 2007 highs, with the Mets apparently having lost as much at $70 million in 2011, the team's payroll is slated to fall from $140 million in 2011 to $90 million this year—a record drop. Almost half of that $90 million will go to recovering-from-surgery Johan Santana and broken-down Canadian leftfielder Jason Bay, who may or may not be contributors this year.

Irving Picard, the Madoff liquidation trustee, and Judge Jed Rakoff effectively ran the Mets’ front office this winter. The Mets job was supposed to be Alderson’s first chance to have a little money to work with since the pre-Moneyball Athletics, who won three straight pennants and the 1989 World Series, but instead he’s spent his time with the Mets dodging questions about when star players will depart or when injured guys will start throwing or running again.

According to a settlement between Picard and Wilpon entered into on the day a jury trial was set to begin, Wilpon must pay back $162 million in fictitious profits, none of which will be due for several years; he'll also stand on line with other net-losers to recover the $178 million that he lost. According to experts, he could end up getting back 60 cents on the dollar. None of this, however, solves the problem of replacing the income that Wilpon had expected year after year from Madoff.

+ + +

The Marlins’ management, meanwhile, has had its own troubling brush with the law. This past December, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into Miami-Dade County and the City of Miami’s issuing of $500 million in public bonds to fund the new retractable-roof stadium in Little Havana. Did the Marlins need public funding? Of course not—but they expected and received it, just like every other professional franchise in the country. At issue is whether the local government did its due diligence on the team’s finances in an era of municipal budget cuts—but even if they had, and balked, the Marlins would have gotten their money from some other desperate city.

It turns out that neither city nor county looked at the Marlins’ books before they agreed to put up the bonds; neither did they disclose to their investors (i.e., the buyers of the bonds) that they’d likely be facing a big tax bill on the parking garages the city agreed to build next to the stadium. The subpoenas are an attempt to figure out what was going on: were there bribes involved, or what? It’s possible that a civil suit could be filed by the SEC, if securities laws were violated—or if something more sinister is revealed, the case could be referred to the Department of Justice to file criminal charges. What certainly won’t happen is a lowering of ticket prices, and if the city faces a multimillion-dollar tax bill for the parking garages, budget cuts will follow, spreading pain to fan and non-fan alike. As with all new stadiums, the deal was stacked in the Marlins’ favor: while the team will be getting nearly all of the revenue from the ballpark, the local government put up 80 percent of the cost of building the place.

Loria has a singularly awful reputation—killing baseball in Montreal, refusing (until now) to spend any revenue-sharing money on the team. But the SEC’s investigation won’t really tell us much. While the team may have flouted the rules in a more obvious way than others, all public-private stadium deals are basically appalling. It’s like the world of finance more generally: Madoff got a million years in prison and ended up getting talked about more than the people who do the real damage to Americans’ well-being.

Obviously, paying athletes (or anyone) upwards of $25 million a year is obscene, but we have to remember that it would be the owners getting that money otherwise. So we may as well support the people we’re there to watch. It’s still hard to forget, though, just how much money athletes make: the paychecks of the most coveted baseball players often approach one thousand times their fans’. So where does Reyes stand in relation to the 99 percent? It’s an ambiguous position. In the music video for his recent reggaeton number, “No Hay Amigo” (a very sad title in Spanish), he’s depicted driving around a suburban landscape in a white Ferrari. He complains about people using him for his money, but we also see him teaching kids in the Dominican how to run the basepaths, and we remember that he must have been one of those kids not much more than ten years ago. And while he may make nearly as much as a CEO, at least he’s providing something of value. I’ll take triples over collateralized debt obligations any day.

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So how will the Mets do this year? Well, there are few standout teams in the NL, and now that commissioner Bud Selig has added an extra playoff team in each league, it’s not inconceivable the Mets could make the postseason. But all up and down the lineup, we see only question marks, poets, and freak injuries. Start with slick-fielding first baseman Ike Davis, who—after missing most of what could’ve been his breakout season in 2011 after a freak ankle collision with David Wright—contracted “Valley Fever,” an obscure Southwestern fungal infection of the lungs, at his off-season home. Ex-ace Johan Santana, meanwhile, will be trying to rebound from anterior capsule surgery on his shoulder, never an easy task, while the Mets pay him $55 million over the next two years. And star third baseman David Wright has an abdominal tear that could linger into the early part of the season. (Meanwhile, Wright’s struggles at Citi Field inspired Alderson’s biggest move of the off-season: the shrinking of Citi Field. The wall in left has been moved in and halved in height, and some of the random quirks in right have been ironed out, to make the park more hitter-friendly.) Speculation about trading Wright could dominate this Mets season as speculation about Reyes did the last.

Reyes’s replacement, the Panamanian Ruben Tejada, is a great fielder. His face looks like Rafael Nadal’s, and he covers the dirt in Queens like Nadal does the clay in Paris; when he ranges into left-center field and nabs a ball you’d expected to fall in, it’s hard not to think of Nadal’s tough saves against Federer. He’s not fast like Reyes, and he’s an average hitter—but average, for a sharp-fielding shortstop, is pretty darn good.

R. A. Dickey, the Mets' best pitcher, is a knuckleballer from Tennessee who sometimes rides the subway to games, even on the road. He climbed Kilimanjaro for charity this winter, despite the team’s objections. He’s unique among knuckleballers: he mixes in fastballs regularly. He wasn't always throwing the knuckleball. He was drafted 18th overall in 1996 by the Texas Rangers, but after the Rangers discovered that he was born without an ulnar collateral ligament in his right (throwing) elbow, he bounced between minor and major league teams before eventually turning to the knuckleball. Dickey has a strong poetic streak: he describes the knuckleball as “a ball that looks like a butterfly in a windstorm.” As he wrote for the Tennessee Alumnus, “Although I was an English major at the University of Tennessee, I must admit that the bulk of my knowledge, when it comes to literature, is self-taught.” His pitching style—even if he did learn a lot from watching Tim Wakefield and Phil Niekro—is similarly autodidactic.

Perhaps the quintessential 2012 Met, however, is pitcher Jon Niese, a talented young lefty from Defiance, Ohio who just signed a five-year deal, and whose Roman nose ex-teammate Carlos Beltran (now of St. Louis), liked to poke fun at. Beltran offered to pay for a nose job, and Niese took him up on it. The new nose doesn’t look much different, but Niese claims to be breathing better. Let’s hope this augurs good post-surgical health for the whole team.

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The Marlins, meanwhile, have made Reyes cut off his signature dreadlocks. Loria demands it of all “his” players. They were snipped by a Bronx barber during a broadcast on the MLB Network. We watched as he sat in the barber’s chair on the set in New Jersey, shaking his head. “It’s painful, man, believe me,” Reyes said, laughing, but you could tell he didn’t like it. The network posted an unedited feed of the haircut on MLB.com in which you hear Harold Reynolds, near the end of the cut, say, “Don’t get up, Jose, when he’s finished.” Jose nods, says OK. “We got to take pictures of you and all that.” The hair was authenticated by Major League Baseball and auctioned on eBay for $10,200.

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Confessions of a Cycle Messenger

2012-04-05T13:30:41Z

by Jon Day

Image: At the CMWCs. Photo by Ben Day.

On his last day of work as a bicycle messenger, my brother organized a race. Messenger races, known as alleycats, usually consist of straightforward if anarchic runs across the city. A raggle-taggle peloton will gather at some anonymous starting point, then commence on a mad dash from checkpoint to checkpoint, a wave of rubber and steel crashing through the streets. But my brother's race was different: an urban steeplechase with a fox-hunt theme. He strapped a huge bottle to his back containing a few gallons of paint, with a pipe running down the bike frame that terminated in a small tap. He attached a fox's tail to one of his belt loops. At the start of the race he opened the tap; the paint started to flow as he pedaled off into the traffic, a line of white glistening on the tarmac in his wake. After a few minutes I released the racers, a pack of bicycle-hounds. With a blast of horns, the race was on.

We followed the splattered line of paint on the tarmac, competing with the other street markings as it traced a ghostly outline of my brother's journey. It recorded the positions of cars and busses as they had been a few minutes earlier, swerving erratically around now non-existent obstructions. The line had also registered his speed. There were larger spaces between the splatters when he'd gone faster, smaller ones as he'd slowed down. At one junction it led onto the pavement, across some blue duckboards and dropped back onto the road. Some racers followed the route blindly. Other, cannier riders spotted the line continuing up the road and carried straight on, avoiding the now pointless detour. One fell off his bike and was left behind. Like a manic pied piper, my brother led the pack of cyclists around the East End of London, through parks and across wasteland, over the shifting pavé of old cobbled streets and down the dark tunnels that run under the railway lines around Brick Lane. After a while the splashes became irregular. The paint was running out, or the pipe was blocking up. As the pack crossed Bethnal Green Road for the second time we spotted a big splatter of paint in the gutter. My brother had slipped on a drain cover and buckled both his wheels. He was fine, able to limp back to the start, where the paint completed its Pollock-like circuit of dribble and splash. But his bike, which he pushed along beside him, was a broken, creaking mess. Though he is no longer a messenger, my brother still occasionally rides in alleycats. They're hard things to give up. The white line can still be made out here and there on the roads around Brick Lane, a faint memorial to the route.

+ + +

"Warsaw has had it pretty rough over the last century," I read in a guide issued by The Warsaw Car-Killers, part of the welcome pack for the 2011 Cycle Messenger World Championships. "First the Germans had a dream to turn her into a lake, then the Russians rebuilt her using cheap-ass Russian concrete slabs, making her grey and dull." Most of the city, I learn, was destroyed during the Second World War, after which much of the old town was laboriously reconstructed brick-by-brick (relying partly on paintings by Bernardo Bellotto, court painter to the king of Poland in the eighteenth century, who recorded several famous vedute of the city). The old town now squats on a hill overlooking the river Vistula, giving off strong whiffs of age while coyly declaring its youth on unobtrusive plaques. Warsaw's memory lives in its streets rather than in its buildings. Only the shape of the map, the cobbles, and the inclines and turnings of the alleyways remain faithful to their past lives.

The CMWCs are usually quite a lo-fi affair. In 2010 the race took place in Panajachel, a tiny town in the Guatemalan highlands, and resembled something from Mad Max. Guatemalans are allowed to carry guns as long as they're kept on display, and a few messengers in Panajachel sported pistols alongside the radios and mobile phones they carried bandoleer style across their chests. Some of the events were nearly canceled when "La Ocho," the figure-eight shaped track slated to host some of the races, was swept away in floods, along with several homes. It was rebuilt overnight. When the track races finals eventually took place they were illuminated by car headlights.

This year the race was to take place on a peninsula jutting out into the Vistula from the western bank of the city, near to where, at the end of the war, the Polish Home Army had waited for Soviet support that never came. A grand brutalist sculpture of a minesweeper commemorates the failed uprising. At racer registration I was given a race number and a map of the peninsula. The course was roughly the size of a small city block, criss-crossed by tracks and punctuated by twenty six checkpoints. Streets were named things like "Skid Row," and "Main Stage Alley." The race was to be a sort of a real-life game of Grand Theft Auto, somewhat akin to Enki Bilal's sport of Chessboxing, testing both mind and muscle. We were given a checklist of instructions:

You:

- Need to learn this city by heart.

- Need to figure out a lot by yourself.

- Can't plan this race, it will change all the time.

- Need to find the shortest routes and make the best decisions as everyone is given the same calls in the same order.

Modern Warsaw is not particularly bicycle-friendly. Vast, multi-lane roads cut the city into fragments, while a complicated system of overpasses and bridges take you on mad and terrifying detours. We were told to beware of the police, who come down hard on drunk cycling. Until recently they could revoke your driving licence if you were caught cycling under the influence. In the welcome pack, under the heading "General Rules of Engagement in Warszawa (surviving the streets)" we were instructed to "stick to the middle of the right lane," and that drivers "can react insanely to middle fingers." "Poland has a ZERO TOLERANCE for soft drugs," the advice concluded, "with reefer madness at full swing the cops are like cats chasing mice. SAY NO TO DRUGS!"

As I cycled back to my hostel on a rented bike, I noticed little covens of messengers dotted around the city, cruising the streets in packs or huddled together to look at maps. Messengers spend a lot of time waiting around, on park benches or on the steps of buildings, and so they're good at discovering those spaces where cities offer amenities: near public toilets or under the ducts that spew out warm, recycled air from the bowels buildings. Messengers live like parasites on the city—skimming a living off the top of commercial exchange—and they're parasitic on its architecture, too, and on the flow of its traffic. On a cycle path next to the Royal Lazienki park I got talking to a man from Vienna whose bicycle had been stolen from outside a club the night before, and who was trying to find a replacement. "I still need to work when I get back" he murmured sadly, as he clattered off down the street, walking awkwardly in his stiff-soled cycling shoes.

A pair of cyclists pulled up next to me, their bikes running the tiny gears that are the tell-tale sign of the bicycle polo player. They asked if I knew where the polo courts were. I didn't. They told me that a messenger from Dublin had been hit by a car the previous night while crossing the Solec, an enormous multi-lane motorway that runs by the river alongside the race course. He'd been hit hard. His bike had been destroyed, and he was in a coma in the hospital.

Later that evening, under a concrete overpass, the messenger tribes of the world gathered. I bumped into friends from London who'd driven to Warsaw in one mad dash, relying on amphetamines and coffee to stay awake. Within hours of arriving their driver had been arrested for cycling with a can of beer in his bidon holder, and the others were trying to get him bailed. They were worried that he'd been caught with pockets full of drugs, enough to land him a lengthy prison sentence in Poland. As we were just about to cycle to the police station to see if they'd let him go, he rolled up sheepishly on his bike. "They never checked my pockets," he said, "just put me in the back of the van. So I ate all the speed." He already had glassy eyes and a wild stare. He would stay awake for the rest of the week, growing increasingly confused and belligerent. Mosquitoes swarmed in the dampness of the forest. The rain fell. No one wanted to talk about the messenger from Dublin.

+ + +

The next few days of the CMWCs were largely indistinguishable from each other. On the second day we assembled under the Łazienkowski Bridge on the peninsula to watch the qualifications. A steady stream of competitors walked through race HQ, collected their manifests, and set off to navigate their way round the course. Race officials tramped around making sure they obeyed the rules of the road, admonishing those who ignored the one-way systems and confiscating the bikes of riders who neglected to lock them up. Some messengers competed on foot, and did well. Others cheated: discovering unmarked tracks and secret routes through the forest. A pair of messengers raced on a tandem. I sat at a checkpoint in the forest for a while, smoking soggy little spliffs with a bored Polish man who spoke no English. Occasionally messengers would emerge from the trees, ask if they were in the right place, and cycle off again. The organizer of the race, a messenger from Amsterdam called Fish, explained to me how he had designed the race using a complicated logistical algorithm that could be applied to any course. He said that his system would revolutionize the world of competitive messenger racing, standardizing its rules and allowing objective trans-competition comparisons to be made. I cycled to another check-point and watched the stream of competitors slip down a muddy hill. The course was strangely quiet, far removed from the usual sounds of a working day: the urban white noise of horn-honks and idling engines, or the whale-like groans of a bus's air brakes. After a few hours it was all over.

The rain was still falling, and the site had become a sea of mud. On the stage a brave DJ played reggae music into a howling hail. He was largely ignored by the messengers, who sat under trees drinking beer and smoking weed. I spoke to a man wearing a helmet festooned with two large video cameras. His name was Lucas Brunelle, and he used to be a professional cyclist. Now he runs a software firm, and spends his free time traveling the world racing in and videoing messenger races. He'd been a messenger once, long ago, and like many couldn't quite give up the job.

I listened to a discussion about the industry hosted by the International Federation of Bicycle Messengers, during which representatives pitched their proposals to host next year's CMWCs. Lausanne and Mexico City were the main contenders. The team from Lausanne distributed free beer tokens to be redeemed in 2013. They won the bid. The whole thing felt a bit like that scene in The Warriors when the gangs of New York assemble in an abandoned baseball pit to strategize about the coming urban order.

Later, I wandered off to watch the bike polo. A sprint competition ran on the only decent length of tarmac on the peninsula. Elsewhere people cheered on the Goldsprints, where cyclists went head-to head riding stationary bicycles on rollers while digital avatars projected onto the underside of the bridge marked their progress.

In the afternoon the sun came out, and a large crowd gathered around an old car, which had been wheeled out for the wing-mirror smashing competition. Competitors had to cycle alongside the car and knock off a mirror stuck on with Velcro, with points awarded for distance and style. Some tried to kick with one foot while pedaling with the other, but the most effective strategy was to use a U-lock as a bat. Someone cycled up and pulled an endo, using their back wheel to broadside the mirror, winning hands down on style points. Eventually people got bored of the controlled destruction and the competition degenerated into a near-riot. The car was kicked to pieces and smashed up with locks, before being overturned and almost ending up in the river. Someone tried to set it on fire before one of the organizers climbed on top and asked people to stop, as the car was to be used as the winner's podium. Across the river, a pair of old men who'd been fishing quietly withdrew. Eventually the police turned up.

That evening I sat by a fire tended by a dreadlocked, moon-faced man from Budapest, who admonished people for upsetting his shopping-cart grill. A friendly drunkard stumbled over and sat down heavily on the embers. The comforting stench of several hundred messengers wafted in the evening air. Bored by the rain, I left the campsite a few hours later and derivéd back into the city, guided by a Polish messenger who I knew from London. Half way home he showed me a street of clubs and bars, on one side of which stood an empty, half-finished office building, dotted with clubbers taking the air. Couples sat with their legs dangling from its empty windows like figures in a doll's house. We locked our bikes, climbed through a fence and explored the concrete skeleton of the building before sitting down on the roof and watching the city.

On the third day, my last in Warsaw, I wandered around the racecourse on foot. No working London messengers had qualified for the main race. In the hours before it began, the most serious competitors sat studying maps of the course they'd drawn on their arms in permanent marker. Some tinkered with their bikes, adjusting gears and brakes that had become clogged with mud. My brother had tacoed the back wheel of his hire bike trying to pull 180s on a grassy bank, so we sat with a spoke-spanner and tried to true the buckled wheel so we could reclaim our deposit. Eventually we found some German mechanics who, with much pushing and swearing, coerced it back into something like a circle. Riders who hadn't qualified for the finals, or couldn't be bothered to race, relaxed in a homemade jacuzzi which the team from Lausanne had brought with them. Steam rose into air, meeting the rain half way.

During the finals I helped man a checkpoint in the howling winds and rain while bedraggled cyclists emerged from the mists and presented their soggy manifests to be stamped. Our umbrella was blown away in a gust and drifted dangerously toward the Vistula. Along the Solec, a professional peloton roared by. The Tour of Poland had come to town, conducting a five lap circuit of Warsaw. We cheered them on: allez! allez! One rider had his dick in his hand and let fly a steady stream of piss as he rolled along, pushed on by his teammate. The messenger from Dublin was still in the hospital. I heard no more about him.

+ + +

Five years ago I was looking for a new job. Three months as a runner at a TV production company had given me taste enough of office life: days spent tea caddying, photocopying and washing up left me cold. The only part of my job I liked was the daily run to the edit suites, over the river in Soho, which I did by bike. I'd volunteer for any job that would take me outside the office and across the city, the further the better. Going to the warehouse to dig out old tapes and trekking across London for some specific prop became absurdly exhilarating. It was the solitude I valued; the freedom of the outside; the sounds of the street; the thinking time. Soon I gave up my TV job and became a bicycle messenger.

I found I loved cycling for a living. I loved learning what London taxi drivers call 'the knowledge': an intimate litany of street names and business addresses. Though I'd lived in London all my life, I'd never quite realized how it fitted together. My experience of London had left me with the impression of a fragmented city, composed of a series of disconnected villages, each surrounding their own tube station or bus stop. Messengering connected the dots, drew the London map together in my mind.

This intimate geography, learned from the saddle, was a product of the bicycle itself. Cycling is a collaborative act, a meditative engagement with the world of material things, and riding a bike encourages you to build up a private map of the terrain you travel over. You learn what it's like to ride down a particular road when wet (noting the placement of slippery drain covers that wait to catch you on sharp turns), or the specific sequence of traffic lights at a much-crossed junction. For drivers the road is merely, in Iain Sinclair's words, that "dull silvertop that acts as a prophylactic between driver and landscape," but for cyclists, like pedestrians, every road has a personality. Roads possess an enduring identity borne of their shape, and of what it's like to ride them, and cycling allows you to feel their grain, to decipher their bumps and inclines as a single continuous experience. "The cyclist's derriere," writes Paul Fournel, "is the locus of historic dramas, of furious boils, of sneaky swellings that alter the outcome of races. For me it's the locus of a particular intelligible sensitivity. With my eyes closed I'm sure I could recognize, just by sitting in the saddle, the texture of a road long ago inscribed in me."

Through cycling miles and miles a day I also got to know my body. I learned how much food it needed to run smoothly, how it performed in the heat or in the rain. For the first time in my life I felt physically exhausted at the end of a day's work. I was beguiled by the wonderfully straightforward economies of the job: carry a package from one zipcode to another and you get paid accordingly. If it needs to go further or get there quickly you get paid more. For two years I carried checks from bank to bank, passports to embassies, urine samples or bags of blood (the realization of the metaphor of circulation was pleasing: I became a blood-cell in the arteries of the city) from one hospital to another. On an average day I'd cover sixty miles or so, deliver twenty jobs and earn about £3 per job.

My controller, whose job assigning work to riders over the radio was a complicated logistical dance, was an Ahab-like savant called Dave. Dave ran the pedal-cycle circuit as a benign dictatorship, and we let him because he was a good controller. He had an incredible memory for jobs and runs, and was able to keep track of the circuit better than any of his riders. He remembered where you were and how many jobs you had on board with eerie precision, better than you did yourself. He'd sit hunched over his computer like a magus, casting spells over the city and sending crackly instructions out over the ether to our radios. He had a heavy cocaine habit, and every now and then would send one of us to pick up grubby wraps of coke from his dealer and drop them back at the office.

Like running away to sea, or joining the circus, the job can appeal, as it did for me, as a mild act of rebellion. For others it is the easiest way to make a living. You don't need great language skills to be a messenger, so the workforce is composed largely of economic migrants (Poles and Brazilians in the UK), attracted by the lax fiscal scrutiny and flexible hours. The companies themselves have little interest in who actually does the delivering, as long as the package gets there. Occasionally when a motorbike rider gets deported, another will silently inherit his bike and identity, only a slightly modulated accent over the radio betraying the change. Most messengers are self-employed subcontractors, meaning they get paid only for the work they do, and receive no employment protection if they're knocked off their bikes on the job. (In the US, they have no health insurance either.) It's dangerous work, and like other dangerous work it fosters a strong sense community, an informal support network focused on races, drinking, and listening to each other's interminable stories about bad controlling, impossibly lucrative jobs, or sublimely satisfying runs.

Now everyone is on the secret, and bicycle messengering is increasingly seen as a dying trade. The narrative of decline is familiar to all messengers, whether they subscribe to it or not: since the advent of the fax machine messengers have been living at the end of days, and email has further eroded the need for their services. Old hands reminisce about the good times (which were probably never all that good), and predictably the trappings and fashions of the job are being appropriated. These days everyone is a cyclist. The very visible cycling mayor of London, the Wodehousian buffoon Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, recently introduced a city-wide bicycle rental scheme along the lines of the Vélib' bikes in Paris, sponsored by Barclays. Twice a day, during rush hour, the gutters of London's roads (many of them painted cyan, Barclays' corporate colour, as part of the "cycle superhighway" network) are filled with what Iain Sinclair calls "the raging peloton." "Every inch pedaled," writes Sinclair, "every tiptoeing carbon-footprint advance, is a political act. YouTube is blistered with competitive bicycle imagery: naked propaganda for anarcho-liberal bikes-for-all schemes funded by the generosity of corporate bankers."

Of course, regardless of the municipal politics, everyone should be biking—biking more, and driving less. The notion that cycling is or should be the preserve of a dwindling messenger crowd or the critical-massers—naked cyclists and bikepunks who see each revolution of the wheel as one more turn towards a mutual aid paradise, toward the greater revolution—is as alienating as it is wrong-headed. But on the final reckoning bike politics don't amount to much of anything. The fact is that most working people still prefer the subway; the rising cult of simplicity surrounding bicycle travel has corresponded exactly to the decline of complex public infrastructure that most people use. In most cities the bicycle selfishly profits from this decline, gaining an advantage as traffic snarls up and trains fill up. A bicycle is only faster than a car or motorbike across town because the roads are clotted. Messengers cling on only because they inhabit the economic and architectural edgelands of the modern city.

In an age of austerity, the metro systems of London and New York are literally grinding towards collapse; meanwhile for a transport official eager for popularity, nothing is easier than taking a can of paint and siphoning off a portion of pavement for a bike lane. The class of people this pleases most is small but increasingly vocal, highly visible in portions of cities where they were once scarce. When a bike shop appears in a depressed neighborhood, you can be sure it's on the verge of gentrification.

Where I live in northeast London, the bicycle shop has become a destination in itself. Boutique bike shops serve coffee and cake while the mechanics, stars of the show, fix bicycles in the middle of the room while everyone watches. The nostalgia can be seen in the bikes people choose to ride. In the '90s, I'm told, most messengers rode fat-tubed mountain bikes bristling with gears. Now there's been a turn toward the simple honesty of the fixed-gear track bicycle, with its single gear, its perpetually revolving pedals, its decent and uncluttered lack of brakes. Leather Brooks saddles and waxed-cotton saddlebags adorn these simple machines. Lycra is banished to the lower layers. Out on the streets, faux-messengers, fakengers, cruise around on spotless steel track bikes, carrying enormous single-strap bags and wearing their bonsai cycling caps. Their bags are empty. They wear the bottoms of their trousers rolled.

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Time to Get Out

2012-04-02T11:46:11Z

by Kirill Medvedev

Image: Banner-making in Washington, DC, December 2011. From static.scripting.com.

Those who once left for the West
for stability
for a normal life for their children
to get away from this trash
this Soviet mindset--
are returning today to Russia,
where the local diumvirate has created a more or less
decent environment for the middle class
and reasonable conditions for business.
Not, of course, like in the good old days,
the 1990s,
but still better than now
in the barbaric socialist West
where the self-proclaimed people have gone into the streets,
the anarchists and the immigrants,
and hung huge banners
from the buildings:
"Capitalism is outlawed!"

—Translated by Keith Gessen

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Office Responds to NYTimes Challenge

2012-03-29T18:37:34Z

The New York Times is asking readers to try out assignments from Draw It With Your Eyes Closed and upload the results to the Times website. At the n+1 office, we took them up on the challenge, choosing the assignment, "Defenestrate objects. Photograph them in midair."

Here are the results[1]:

An apple

Draw It With Your Eyes Closed

All the Sad Young Literary Men

Chad Harbach's signature baseball

—Photos by Dayna Tortorici and Ian Epstein

1. A limited number of prints are available. For more information, write to dayna [at] nplusonemag.com.

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Seemingly Innocuous Assignments That Will Lead to Improbable Calamities

2012-03-29T15:21:20Z

Cautionary Notes for Teachers, Unfortunately Based on Personal* Experience

by Kevin Zucker

Image: Hermann Nitsch, 3. Aktion, Fest des psychophysischen Naturalismus, Wien, Perinetgasse 1, June 28, 1963. Photo: Ludwig Hoffenreich.

The following piece comes from Paper Monument's new book, Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment, now available for sale and much cheaper and arguably more instructive than art school.

Make something ugly

Some twisted genius will stumble upon the ultimate solution to this art school chestnut: when it's their turn to be critiqued they'll just stand up and destroy the work of one of their classmates. An administrative shitstorm will ensue.

Make a work on paper that is either embarrassing or serves a confessional purpose

This assignment turns out to be appropriate only for grad students, who, unlike undergrads, can generally be trusted not to pin you against the crit wall and try to make out with you. Not that you'd be that comfortable getting publicly molested by any of your students, but it bears noting that the student who does this will inevitably be of the gender you're appreciably less into making out with. Still beet-red fifteen minutes later, you will have to find some way to address the "work" in a group critique where nobody can stop laughing. Since the assignment was given in a works on paper class, you, at a total loss, will first ask how paper was in any way involved—to which the student will point out that the wall against which the performance took place was made of Homasote, technically a paper product.

"The Five Obstructions"

Each member of the class is asked to bring in a successful work they've made previously. They then watch Lars von Trier's The Five Obstructions as a group. After this screening each student has to sit silently and transcribe as their classmates shout out possible ways to "obstruct" that student's previously successful works (as von Trier does to Jørgen Leth in the movie). Finally, they take the lists they've transcribed back to their studios and have two weeks to produce five obstructed remakes of their original, based on five of the suggestions.

As above, you can give this to grad students. In the hands of BFA students, however, someone will find a way to reinterpret a champagne-colored abstraction as a performance in which they funnel an entire bottle of champagne in a matter of seconds and then immediately puke it back up into a garbage can. (You will have to explain to your department head that it happened too quickly for you to intervene.) Years later, when you email this former student to see if he can remember what assignment he did this in response to, his helpful answer will end with the line, "it was intended as a foil to the Saab painting."

Bring in a song you're embarrassed you like / bring in images of past work you're now embarrassed by

Here the opposite proves to be true: whatever marginal credibility you have as an authority figure with undergrads will prevent them from staging a revolt in response to this first-day-of-class, getting-to-know-you assignment. Grad students, on the other hand (especially if you're not too much older than some of them), will demand that you participate, creating a situation where you're all sitting around listening to an unforgivable Gin Blossoms song you taped off the radio in eighth grade while watching a slideshow of the weird-shaped canvas/wall drawing show you did with the Belgian gallery you haven't heard from since. Squeezing your eyes shut hard as the song comes to its lame conclusion, you will wonder how anyone in the group of MFA students you're supposed to work closely with for the next two years will ever take anything you say seriously.

Indexical drawing ("index" in the sense of Peirce's semiotics: a sign whose signifier and signified have a real and often physical relationship to one another prior to interpretation. Like, you might explain when introducing the assignment, smoke coming out of the window of a burning house, lipstick on a wine glass, or the Cage / Rauschenberg tire-track print made by a moving car)

You should have known better than to give this assignment again after the time a student with an obscure skin condition that makes even light scratches stand out in welts had a friend trace something across the surface of her back with a fingernail, and the whole class looked on while the words GRAD SCHOOL slowly appeared in raised skin surrounded by angry red marks. This time, nobody will admit to pinning the skidmarked undies to the wall. Thankfully they will disappear after the first break, sparing you and the class the indignity of having to critique them. Still, fuck.

Détournement

Don't forget how easy it is for them to find images of your work on the internet.

Go on a field trip to Dia Beacon

The trip itself will be pleasant and uneventful. However, the following day, officials from the charter bus company will call your department head and allege that student behavior on the return drive involved alcohol consumption, the formation of an impromptu mobile drum circle, and verbal abuse of the driver. While these allegations will be persuasively denied by both the teaching assistant chaperoning the bus (who's older and probably more responsible than you are) and the forty or so 22-year-old students present, you will nonetheless be censured for not being on the bus in emails that will be copied to a large part of the school's faculty and administration.

Anything related to Viennese Actionism

Do not mention it, in any class, ever. If a student brings it up, give them a patronizing laugh and "patiently" explain that the whole thing is an urban legend. Even if for some reason you have to admit that the movement actually happened, don't allow any license for studio work to be made in response to it. This should probably be self-evident, but if you haven't been teaching for that long you might forget exactly what 19-year-olds are capable of, and naively think it would be good for them to know what something genuinely shocking might look like. Years later, never quite the same, you will still be haunted by the things you saw that semester.

Give a presentation on an artist of your choosing

Someone will pick Richard Prince, and focus on his early work. The student will do a good job, but when the dean comes in midway through the presentation to sit in on your class as part of the review process for pre-tenure faculty, there will be a very large image of Prince's Spiritual America projected on the screen at the front of the room. Some of the students may find the reflex bad joke you make about your "history of child pornography seminar" amusing, but the person responsible for determining whether your contract gets renewed will not.

Bring food to class

Someone will decide that everyone in the class would like to unknowingly eat pot muffins at 8 am on a Tuesday. You will have to wander around for the next four hours with a bunch of tripping students, trying to explain to those unfamiliar with the experience that "yes, it's way more intense than smoking it" and "this will only last a couple of hours" and "no, there's nothing wrong with your heart, just stop holding your breath."

One particularly innocent student, someone you suspect has never so much as taken a drag off a cigarette, will actually start doing the "dude, have you ever really looked at your hands?" thing that nobody ever does except in movies about hallucinogens made by people who have never taken hallucinogens. When you, concerned, ask how she's feeling, she will pause for a long time before slowly looking up from her outstretched palms and thoughtfully replying, "I feel very . . . focused."

Figuring if you just handle this yourself you're going to get fired for it, you will bring your entire class, stoned and giggling, to your department head. She will have no choice but to call the school's public safety office, which will then apparently have no choice but to call the local police, who will threaten to charge the baker of the muffins with nine counts of felony poisoning. While you would be happy to see her get in some kind of trouble on the principle that everyone should have the right to decide themselves what drugs they want to do and when, the prospect of her having to do hard time seems a bit extreme and everyone involved is relieved when nobody shows up to arrest her.

Later that afternoon you will have to endure a lengthy meeting with someone from the college's "risk management" office. This official's job description, enthusiasm for discharging his duties, and Men's Wearhouse suit will all combine to make you bottomlessly sad. For the next hour he will run through the whole Aristotelian taxonomy of logical fallacies as he tries to shoulder you with responsibility for the situation in a transparent effort to minimize the school's exposure to litigious parents. After he finally gives up and goes away, you will fall asleep in an uncomfortable chair in your office. When you wake up hours later, sweating, in the middle of the night, you will have missed your train back to New York.

* The first one happened not to me but to someone I know. The rest are firsthand. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events at the school at which I am presently employed and hope to pass tenure review soon is purely coincidental.

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Antonio Tabucchi, 1943–2012

2012-03-26T16:26:24Z

In a truly dark time for Italy, the death of one of its great writers is a particularly unusual cruelty. I have always wanted to be a writer, but Tabucchi was the figure whose works convinced me that it was necessary to be a writer on the left. His novel Pereira Declares (Sostiene Pereira), published in 1994, was an instant classic of political fiction, as slim and fiery as a pamphlet, but as careful and tragic as a work of art. Telling the story of a blithe and careless Portuguese newspaper editor, a gourmand with little interest in public affairs, who suddenly finds himself called to action by the rise of the fascist Antonio Salazar, it beautifully conveys the vagaries of deliberation and doubt that might prevent, but could also strengthen, the commitment of literary people to politics at a moment of crisis. Appearing just as Berlusconi came to power, Pereira Declares crystallized resistance to the neofascist tendencies of the new regime, which, like the Salazar dictatorship, threatened to control all organs of free expression. Reading it at the grimmest point in the Bush Administration, when writers all around shirked their responsibilities or capitulated in craven ways to the government, it was a tonic, and as clear an appeal to political conscience as I have ever encountered. Together with Pereira Declares, his beautiful novellas inspired by Fernando Pessoa (whom he translated into Italian), such as Indian Nocturne and Requiem, and his shorter interventions in the magazine MicroMega, angrily protesting every transgression of Berlusconi, make him a virtually peerless contemporary example of the writer in politics.—NS

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Spring Events, NY and LA

2012-03-26T15:45:41Z

Dear New York and Los Angeles–area friends,

Please join us for the following spring festival weekends.

The weekend of April 21, we'll be in LA to celebrate Chad Harbach's nomination for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and for our first-ever appearance at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Look for us with Tin House at Table 389, and stay tuned for information about a party at Paper Chase Press.

The weekend of May 4, we'll be in New York, in two places at once.

We'll be sharing a table with our sister art magazine, Paper Monument, at Frieze New York on Randall's Island.

And (most of) the editors of our Occupy-inspired Gazette—Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, and Nikil Saval—will be appearing on a panel at PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. Come hear them talk about the future of the Gazette and their hopes for the Occupy movement at 1 PM on Sunday, May 6 at the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union.

We hope to see you soon.

—The Editors

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The Essential and the Unclear

2012-03-26T14:36:48Z

Gallo vs. Clooney

by Chris Fujiwara

Image: Essential Killing (d. Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland, 2010) / The American (d. Anton Corbijn, US, 2010)

George Clooney made a revealing remark in an interview about his film Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), which concerns how Edward R. Murrow used his CBS-TV program to denounce Senator Joseph McCarthy’s tactics in the crusade against Communism. “I started watching [Murrow’s] speeches again,” Clooney told IGN, “and I thought they were incredibly inspiring. . . . I miss that kind of clarity at times. When was the last time you saw Network and listened to Paddy Chayefsky’s words and you go, ‘Wow, I wish somebody had spoken like that.’”

Though neither Clooney nor his interviewer seemed aware of it, the phrase “I miss that kind of clarity” is a quote from Sydney Pollock’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), in which it is spoken by John Houseman’s CIA director, recalling the world wars of the past. It’s interesting to hear a liberal repeat the words of a fictional CIA director to praise Edward R. Murrow, not just because the choice of phrase implies some ideological confusion but because it suggests that real historical figures exist in the same space as the characters of 1970s conspiracy thrillers. As for Sidney Lumet’s Network, the 1976 film is evoked again in a later Clooney project, Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007, starring and co-executive-produced by Clooney), in which Tom Wilkinson’s Arthur, a corporate lawyer who suddenly balks at defending a client against a class-action suit over a carcinogenic weed killer, reincarnates the Peter Finch figure of Network, the successful organization man who turns against the organization in an apocalyptic, all-or-nothing way that the audience is meant to regard as basic truth.

As Houseman’s Condor character was nostalgic for his Great Wars, now even the cold war era, looked back on, seems a lovely time when people could enjoy the luxury of an uncomplicated view of American power. Of course this possibility, given the real content of cold war politics, is a fiction, but today it has the force of a mass-culture hallucination. This is why the Bourne films are successful: not because having U.S. spies play a villainous role constitutes some important step forward in escapist action movies, but because the films sell nostalgia for that simpler time when it was possible to see the CIA as the worst the USA could inflict on the world.

Another aspect of 1970s cinema that is today viewed with nostalgia is the freedom of filmmakers to make what might be regarded as art films for mainstream audiences (e.g., Zabriskie Point, Five Easy Pieces, The Conversation). Limping stylishly after that interrupted trend, Clooney’s The American (2010, directed by Anton Corbijn) is a lethargic work that breaks out intermittently into action and suspense, an American movie for people who don't like American movies. Clooney’s Jack is in the profession of killing: the beginning of the film finds him in snowbound rural Sweden, where he efficiently dispatches two gunmen who are after him; for good measure he also kills his innocent girlfriend. Jack relocates to sunny Castelvecchio, Italy, where he takes on a new assignment. Who Jack’s employers are is never known; nor are any political stakes indicated in either his activities or those of the people who keep trying to kill him. The tattoo on his shoulder reads “ex gladio equitas” (justice from the sword), which is not a motto of any (known) American military entity but suggests a military provenance. The vagueness that surrounds Jack stamps him more firmly as someone who doesn’t just happen to be American, but represents America.

The switch in landscapes, the brutal killing, the ambiguity about politics all link Corbijn’s film to a work that is in some important ways its opposite: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing (2010). The clarity that Clooney said he missed can be found in spades in Skolimowski’s film, whose clarity has a demonic ineluctibility that is enough to wipe out the vagueness of a dozen movies. Maybe the only failing of Essential Killing is that everything in it is seen so sufficiently that one doesn’t feel the need to go back to watch it another time (unlike most great films, which improve on repeated viewings).

Essential Killing is all the more political a work for refusing the obvious ways it could be about politics. Vincent Gallo plays a person who apppears to be an Arab, perhaps an Afghani, though this is never declared; neither are the nationalities of the changing landscapes—initially bright desert and rock, later an icy wood—through which he moves. The opening sequences, in which Gallo’s character is captured, interrogated, and tortured by American soldiers (from whom he then manages to escape), turn the ostensible political substance of the film into caricature, divesting it of weight. The way the Americans look and talk is a kind of uncanny simulation of American-ness, reminiscent of the way Italian genre films of the 1970s and 1980s that were set in the United States (such as Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper or Antonio Margheriti’s Cannibal Apocalypse) sometimes seemed too American. Meanwhile, the brief flashbacks that show the Gallo character undergoing what might be Islamist indoctrination are almost perverse in their emptiness. The resort to cliché in the early scenes of Essential Killing knocks politics out of the film, along with ideology and nation, advising us that we should respond to the film on a different level, where, eventually, politics returns. This is the opposite of the procedure of The American, which keeps nudging us to add political content to a narrative that has been drained of any.

Vincent Gallo is one of the most disliked of current film actors, while George Clooney is one of the most admired, but most viewers of Essential Killing—American, Belgian, Sri Lankan, or Japanese—probably have more in common with Gallo’s “Mohammed” than they have with Clooney. Anyone can be targeted, victimized, have their eardrums blasted out, be forced to hide and kill in order to survive. All these are possibilities of human existence that, at the advanced stage of civilization we enjoy, are available to everyone. But to be George Clooney? He may make it look easy. It’s in the voice, however, that the deceptive quality of the Clooney figure can best be detected. Clooney, who is from Lexington, Kentucky, speaks with an unmarked accent, an accent of zero. His vocal deadpan (so soothing in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox [2009]) projects a reasonableness and an authority that do not impose themselves through any apparent violence. When he talks, it’s as if he were saying nothing. Such a talent makes him indeed The American.

Clooney’s saying-nothing quality is used in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), Syriana (2005), Michael Clayton, and The American to suggest an abstract being, a cipher. The very incorporeality of Clooney’s CIA agent in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (which he also directed) becomes the main device by which the film denies the historical reality of the USA’s actions. The people of the world of low-grade espionage to which Clooney’s shadowy figure introduces TV-game-show producer Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell) are all, like Clooney himself, disembodied apparitions; the film presents Barris’s “problem-solving work” for the CIA as another of the unreal image-spheres Barris trades in. In Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, what little Clooney has to say has to be dragged out of him, as in a scene in which his character, a veteran CIA Middle East expert, irritates some high-level US officials by speaking his mind about the prospects for democratic reform in Iran (not that he offers anything more insightful than his initial, tentative “it’s complicated”). Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn after Reading (2008), which makes fun of the discourse of intelligence by having its CIA experts habitually refuse to distinguish between the merely asserted and the actually true, aptly casts Clooney as an obsessive who finds himself living in a parody of 1970s Hollywood conspiracy thrillers.

If Clooney talks but says nothing, Gallo goes further in Essential Killing: he doesn’t speak at all. We confront this non-hero strictly as an object, but he is so purely an object (the course of the film, its one-thing-after-another survival narrative, is a strange purification ritual) that he is absolutely comprehensible, beyond language and beyond the intention to signify. Part of the success of Skolimowski’s work lies in a simple strategy: even while the film estranges us from the Gallo character and his surroundings, certain things also appear that are familiar. The mother riding a bicycle on a road through the woods (at the start of what has become the most notorious episode of the film) carries, along with her infant, a shopping bag. The detail of the shopping bag suddenly brings Essential Killing into a familiar world, one where women take their babies along with them to do their marketing and go home with shopping bags. This world solicits us and claims us totally because we know that we, like this mother, are the signs of our activities. Only Gallo’s character is not a sign: he is pure activity without signification. Stripped of the need to communicate, reduced to the effects he can make on his environment, this entity (in this light he can’t be called a character) is us as we would be if we didn’t have the option of accommodating ourselves to reality but instead were forced to try to reconquer it step by step in every one of our acts.

Here is where Essential Killing can be considered a political film rather than just a brutal epic of survival. Skolimowski shows the Gallo figure struggling (for the most part) not with the elements, wild animals, and mere mechanical forces, but with a world that is constantly being changed by money, a world dominated and maintained for global capitalism. Not physical reality as such but the world of total twenty-four-hours-a-day televisuality where everything is visible and exploitable. What he opposes to this world is not this or that banal and strident cause, god, or program but unadulterated Shakespearean need.

In the sublime last section of the film, he comes upon another person who can respond to his need, not out of fear and self-preservation but in recognition of a possibility in humanity that must be preserved. With each scene, by way of images and landscapes that cancel one another out, Essential Killing has come closer and closer to the unadorned statement of this possibility.

The exact opposite of Skolimowski’s policy of saying nothing in order to be about the most important things can be found in films such as Syriana and The American: despite being about many things, they contrive to say little. The tourist-like quality that gives these ostensibly courageous works away as routine Hollywood productions is especially pronounced in Syriana, which shows us the mean streets of Beirut from the back of a taxi, through Clooney’s eyes. Pretending to pay homage to the collective, this multi-storyline film conjures it away by making the collective merely an element in a tired personal drama. The excruciatingly glib cutting from one story to another relieves the film of having to commit to any sustained analysis or point of view. Notable too is the need to arrive, through all the self-congratulatory ambivalence of the screenplay, at a happy ending that is irrelevant to the political issues and exists in purely personal terms, a pat reconfiguration of the points on the connect-a-gram of the cast list.

Syriana and The American are films designed to flatter the American audience by worrying them. These films ask: Is our conscience clear? Have we learned enough yet? To pose these questions is the limit and the point of the exercise. Essential Killing doesn’t bother with issues of conscience, of learning, and it doesn’t even address or construct an “us.” The Westerners of Skolimowski’s film are no less alien than the Middle Easterners. The politics of the film could be stated like that: whoever we may be, we are aliens too.

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Regrets at Fordham

2012-03-22T14:06:05Z

by Helen DeWitt, J. D. Daniels, Keith Gessen

Image: Veturia pleads with her son Coriolanus not to attack the Romans. From ancienthistory.about.com.

The following panel took place on December 17, 2011, at Fordham College in New York, before an audience of thirty, mostly college students. The participants were Helen DeWitt and J. D. Daniels; Keith Gessen moderated. See the original Regrets transcripts, back in print for the first time since 2010.

Keith Gessen: A few years ago I gathered two roundtables of n+1 writers and editors to ask them about their regrets: what they wished they had read earlier, what they wished they had never read, what they wished they had known earlier, and what they wished they had never learned. We turned this into a little book. And now, four years later here at Fordham, I thought we might attempt a sort of live version of this with two writers whom I admire a great deal. Helen DeWitt and J. D. Daniels have agreed to this experimental format. They've agreed to tell the truth.

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KG: Let's start with books you wish you had read earlier.

Helen DeWitt: Much of my rage at university was that there were things I hadn't been able to read before I came there. I only started reading ancient Greek at university--I had not had the chance to do it earlier. This is one of the great literary languages of the world. My last year of high school we were made to read Sophocles's Oedipus plays in this horrible translation, and I realized that it could never have survived the millennia if had been that bad in the original Greek. I wish I had been able to read Homer in the original Greek before going to college. That's sort of a wasteful thing to be doing at 18. It displaced other things I could have been doing.

KG: What did you get from reading in the original that you didn't get from the translation?

HD: From Homer I got the composition, this rapid narration. There's something profoundly moving and interesting about the way that Homer (the Homeric poets) uses these formulaic building blocks to put together the hexameter. You think, "How is this possible?" If you are a writer this is something you need to know. It's like Martin Amis talking about the war on cliché. Whenever I read that I think, "I'm sorry: What's the difference between cliché and formulaic language of the kind that Homer uses?" Does he think the Argonautica is better than the Iliad?

KG: Do you regret learning languages at a point when you could have been thinking?

HD: I think it displaced other things, things I started reading much later like Polanyi's The Great Transformation, Marcel Mauss's The Gift, Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death, a fabulous book, Erving Goffman, certainly for a novelist, he's a very important person to read, so The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; Stigma; Asylums.

KG: John, what's a book you wished you had read earlier?

John Daniels: It's always been difficult for me to talk about books. I think it's partly because of the way I grew up: not in a bookish family, not in a bookish milieu--I don't even know if that's how you say milieu.

I have trouble talking about books because to me it feels like narcissistic display. I'm reading this great book because I'm so great. Now, that's not what people really mean when they talk about books, but it makes it difficult for me. "What is a book you wished you had read earlier?" A book I had read earlier in order to do what?

KG: Anything.

JD: Metaphor reveals what is ready to hand. It seems to me like a kind of Men's Health question: Ten books you should read or else die the death. I don't have a control life and an experimental life to compare and see where they diverged, and consider what was I reading at the time.

KG: You mean your life could not have gone in some different direction?

JD: Had I read a book?

KG: Or anything. Had you done anything.

JD: It could have, I suppose. But probably the most important book I've read in my life is less important to me than the least important member of my family, in terms of having an effect on what I was going to be like. Graham Greene, when asked if Henry James influenced him, said, "How can a mountain influence a molehill?" I suppose things could have been different. I'm reasonably happy, which is something that time will do for you.

HD: What tends to happen for me in books is that I think I know something and realize I have no idea. The background, whatever it was, is something that it helps to have. Take engineering; I wouldn't be able to dedicate three years to learning it.

JD: That's part of the pain of life: You will not master everything. In fact, you may not master anything.

HD: For things I'd wish I'd read earlier, John Hicks's Market Theory of Money. I read it while doing a doctorate in classics. It would have helped to have read Hicks at 21 rather than at 26.

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KG: John, do you feel short on time?

JD: Sure. Yes.

KG: Do you feel shorter on time now than you did ten years ago?

JD: Yes. Every day my knees hurt more, and I think: it's going, it's going. My body is rotting out from under me. This is what it's like to get old: you still feel 19, except your knees hurt, your back hurts.

KG: Does this cause you to read more? To write more? What is your reaction to this feeling?

JD: I wonder where I got the idea that it would be any different. We're embodied and we're in time. What fancy crap to say at a college!

You guys should know I dropped out of college three times. I went to the University of Louisville, chiefly noted for the excellence of its men's basketball team (and justly so).

KG: Did you drop out of Louisville three times?

JD: Yeah. Thrown out, kicked out, dropped out. I started at the University of Louisville in '93. In '95 I had a psychotic breakdown and was hospitalized, dropped out, fell out, tripped. Don't worry, I'm fine. But I went back and dropped out again and again. What is difficult for me in this setting is having "what I should have known" cast as "what I should have read." There are ways of knowing other than reading. There's a very interesting and strange thing said by Siddhartha Deb in the original pamphlet. He says, "We were learning Shakespeare in India. We were reading Coriolanus and there were bombs going off down the street." Mr. Deb says he was trying to get that together in his mind. What did Shakespeare have to do with a bomb going off down the street? Possibly nothing, but you could go down and see what was going on in the street where the bomb went off. I dropped out of college because I'm not a literary intellectual. I wanted to be a writer.

KG: So were you writing?

JD: Yeah.

KG: You've been writing ever since? Did you ever stop writing?

JD: For a while I didn't write, I just played music in bars. I lived over a grocery store in Louisville.

I went to middle school, high school, did a bachelor's degree and most of a master's degree all within the same city block, like a little rat in a terrarium. I wish I'd had more courage, but I have it now.

HD: I started college at Smith and dropped out twice. It felt as if everybody there had this thing in their mind, a stereotype of a certain type of person. When you talked to them they thought about what that type of person would say, and behaved accordingly. I took a year off and read a lot. I read Proust, Pound, Eliot, and I thought, "Now I really know what the life of the mind is like." I read Hume, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

JD: So you dropped out of Smith…

HD: I thought if I could study classics at Oxford it would be worth it. I studied for these exams and then I got in. I learned later that you don't have to matriculate; you can go into those lectures, walk in off the street. It's never about this or that college. It's about who is good to work with--that is the crucial thing.

I couldn't really see how to be a writer. I thought it was impossible. But Greek and Latin had been important to the writers I read, so I thought it could be helpful.

KG: Is your study of philosophy finished or are you still studying it?

HD: Study is possibly a strong word. I still read. I'm still thinking about the working of language. In the philosophy of language you have things like "ordinary language study." You have to see what people are doing within a system to figure out how it works. I think that if I, for example, knew Python and Perl and Ruby, I would have a better understanding of language and it would help me as a writer. Those are the things I think I need to be doing now.

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KG: John, when did you feel that you had become a writer? Do you feel that way now?

JD: No. I left my teaching position to write a novel. "When are you going to write a novel? When you're 40? 50? When you die? Tomorrow?" I went down into the basement to write my novel. I looked at the desk. I hit my head against the desk for forty days and forty nights. Then Wes Enzinna called me from the Oxford American. I should have kept beating my head against the desk. It's the book that's going to last, not the magazine. I mean, the magazine . . . I used to have a parakeet. The book you put in the library, the magazine you put in the recycling.

KG: Helen, when did you feel like you had become a writer?

HD: I'm not sure. I had about a hundred fragments of novels on my hard drive (and one was 300 pages long). I thought: "I will write a book in a month, I will send it out. Maybe it will get published, maybe it will not, but at least I will know." This was my first novel.

KG: You wrote The Last Samurai in a month?

HD: I wrote a lot of it in a month. Day one there was a blank piece of paper and soon there was a chapter: this whole world that didn't exist before. I had been doing all kinds of jobs for seven years, and here was this whole other thing where I gave myself this uninterrupted block of time. I thought: People will realize all they need to do is leave me alone in my room with time. And actually the kiss of death for dealing with the publishing industry is thinking that your time has value.

KG: Do you regret publishing your book?

HD: No, but it's difficult. If a book is being published in different countries, or being published at all, it's not like taking it to Kinko's.

KG: You should have published it with Kinko's.

John, any ideas for how to clear time?

JD: Sure. When Diogenes saw a man drink from his hands, he threw his cup away. Does it sound too much to say: "You have twenty-four hours a day. Other people have written books. The library is full of them. Some of them are good, some are bad--the books, not the people (but the people, too). You can do it." It is educational to retype a novel so you can see how long the physical task actually takes--not long. It's the fucking around that takes so long. It's about sacrifice, which is hard. You give up this and that.

I have plenty of time. I just don't seem to be able to assess my work in a way that is not completely self-destructive. You have a pile of pages, how bad can it be? There must be something good in there. [Mimics flipping through a pile of pages.] It's bad, it's bad, it's bad. You get to the bottom and you see the desk. I don't want to see the desk! I want to see the Nobel Prize under all those papers.

I need less time. The more time I have, the more time I have to bite myself. If I have twelve hours, there's nothing left.

KG: John, did you do an MFA?

JD: I did an MA in writing. I'm glad I did it because I met the woman I love there, but then they threw us out.

—Transcribed and edited by David Wescott

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Mad as Mel

2012-03-21T14:38:04Z

by Ben Maraniss

Image: The Patriot (d. Roland Emmerich, US, 2000)

In the late 1970s American politics and American cinema entered a prolonged period of right-wing backlash, spurred stealthily from Australia: in 1976 Rupert Murdoch purchased the New York Post, promoting a conservative political agenda in the country’s largest media market and pushing headline writing into today’s era of “Obama Beats Weiner.” Three years later, Mel Gibson appeared in the student-film-budgeted masterpiece Mad Max. Murdoch already had a publishing empire in Australia and the UK and seemed a likely actor in politics. Gibson was a B-movie actor, with no preceding reputation. That Murdoch would become a modern-day William Randolph Hearst seemed predictable, but Mel Gibson’s transformation into the raving id of the American psyche took the world by surprise; the culture is still recovering. Fittingly, Gibson’s story is reminiscent enough of Oedipus Rex that it leaves cinephiles with the desire to pluck out their eyes.

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Mel Gibson’s Australian upbringing was prefaced by childhood in upstate New York, a family history defined by soaring achievement, emotional crack-ups, and paranoid rages. Gibson’s paternal grandmother was an opera contralto, Eva Mylott, born in New South Wales, so promising she was sent to Europe and America to perform. In New York she met a Long Island plumbing supplies salesman named John Gibson, got married, had two sons, fell in the bathtub, and died, a horrible irony considering her husband’s profession. She left a grief-stricken John to bring up their sons, two-year-old Hutton and infant Alexis, alone. After his wife’s death, John’s business went under, and he drank heavily. He died twelve years later. Alexis died less than ten years after that, and Hutton was left to make his life over again, also alone, God his only minder—a bitter reality he would take seriously for the rest of his life.

Hutton Gibson was brought up Catholic in the Chicago area between the World Wars. His religious identity would prove to be both the most constant and schismatic presence in his life. After completing high school at fifteen (third in his class) Hutton studied to become a priest, but he disagreed with the Seminary’s modernist inclinations and left to avoid serving as a missionary in Asia. He served in World War II; then, frustrated with traditional education—“Nobody’s ever going to get me in a classroom again,” he said—he became, over the next twenty-four years, an autodidact, a husband, a father of eleven kids.

In December 1964, Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father, by then a brakeman for the New York Central Railroad, fell on the job, sued his employer, and in 1968 he was awarded $145,000. To bolster this settlement, Hutton appeared on the original Jeopardy! and became that year’s grand champion. Days without work, coupled with fears that his oldest son might be drafted (cryptically he reasoned, “I saw what happened to my war—they just gave it away”), inspired Gibson to move his family to Australia, his mother’s home country. When the family arrived in Sydney, Hutton set himself up as a computer programmer, and the Gibsons began attending the local Catholic parish where they were jarred to encounter the reform liturgy in English. Trouble started when the kids were given a catechism titled “Shalom,” (“peace,” “hello,” and “goodbye” in Hebrew). Its appearance in his children’s religious instruction excited a latent conspiratorial anxiety in Hutton Gibson. After reading through the documents of Vatican II, Hutton’s mind would never be at peace again.

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Vatican II states that the teachings of the Church are no longer considered to be the only words of God. This reform was, in part, an act of conciliation with other faiths. To Hutton Gibson, it was a surrender of the Church’s authority and a personal beytrayal. In revolt, the Gibsons joined a traditionalist Catholic congregation called the Latin Mass Society. Hutton wrote the group’s newsletter, but was later kicked out for the overzealousness of his anti-Papal sentiments. Never one to waste an experience, Hutton then published his own religious tracts, with titles such as “Is The Pope Catholic?” and “The Enemy Is Here,” the cover of which depicts the map of Italy as a boot kicking the island of Sicily, marked “Tradition,” with Rome the only labeled landmark. Both screeds declare Vatican II an apostasy and call every Pope since John XXIII a fraud.

From there it got worse. A central obsession of Hutton Gibson’s is the Vatican’s official rescinding of the accusation that the Jews killed Christ. Gibson has mocked John Paul II’s comment that “[The Jews] are . . . in a certain respect, our oldest brothers” by writing “Abel had an older brother too.” All through his statements is a thread of paranoid conspiracy, a Greatest Hits of Western Prejudice: Vatican II is “a Masonic Plot backed by Jews,” the hijacked planes on 9/11 were crashed by remote control, and the Holocaust was physically impossible: “Go and ask . . . the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,” Hutton has said. “It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?” The elder Gibson’s devotion to the rules of his own crackpot world, in which the powerful are corrupt, mostly Jewish, and always arrayed against him personally, would be of absolutely no significance if his son had not tapped into these anxieties and dramatized them, publicly and on a grand scale.

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The anatomy of the cinematic revenge narrative is as follows: a good person is dealt a terrible injustice (usually the loss of a loved one), which is compounded when the authorities fail to deal with the perpetrator in a way that satisfies the victim’s desire for retribution. When the perpetrator offends again, the protagonist takes the law into his own hands, finds his own justice, and sacrifices his civilized nature. This motivation can be found in movies stretching back to Griffith, but in the early 1970s it reemerged in movies designed to exploit their audience’s fears of a newly permissive and diverse society.

John Boorman, Don Seigel, and Michael Winner, among other directors, revived the form with Point Blank (1967), Dirty Harry (1971), and Death Wish (1974), though only the latter two are explicitly political. In Point Blank, Lee Marvin plays Walker, a thief who’d been double crossed by his partner (John Vernon) and his wife (Sharon Aker) during a heist, sending Walker to jail. Upon his release, Walker stalks around the urban dystopias of Los Angeles and San Francisco in relentless pursuit of his money, killing most in his path. In the end, though the nominal villains have been punished, Walker’s fate is left unresolved, and the film ends on an unpromising note.

Dirty Harry preserves Point Blank’s Bay Area location, but gives us a cop, Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), in place of a robber and a political agenda in place of a motivation. Harry pursues “Scorpio” (Andy Robinson), a rampaging sniper based on the Zodiac Killer, with no regard for post-Warren Court police procedure. At the film’s conclusion, Harry throws his inspector’s badge into a lake, echoing Gary Cooper in High Noon, and implying that even if his goal is justice, Harry has acted beyond the moral limits of civilization and must be banished from it.

Death Wish merges its predecessors, diminishing the genre. Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) is a New York architect, a political liberal, and a combat novice. His wife is murdered and his daughter raped in his Upper West Side apartment. Resentfully, Kersey wanders the streets at night, attracting and killing thugs as if they were mosquitoes, until crime in New York drops dramatically. In the final scene, Kersey arrives in Chicago. Seeing a woman harassed by teenagers, he playfully mimes firing a gun with his index finger, then smiles at the camera. Kersey’s transformation is complete: his motives are clear, his methods and his politics reactionary and lunatic.

With few exceptions, Mel Gibson’s career has been devoted to the elaboration of the themes of these films. He has been honored for it in ways his predecessors never imagined possible. Lately Gibson has taken the role of embittered, vengeful victim beyond performance and into the real-life personification of the wronged man. Though the film industry has turned on him, as the industry of journalism is now turning on Murdoch, both men have gotten very rich stirring these emotions to define the national mood. Now their work threatens to eat them alive.

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Mel Gibson’s first two movies to acquire American distribution were Mad Max and Tim (both 1979). The latter is an odd romance in which a twenty-year-old, developmentally disabled Australian handyman (Gibson) and an older, well-off American woman (Piper Laurie) fall in love. Its unexpected success hinted that Gibson could work as a romantic lead. Mad Max became an international phenomenon, grossing enough money to transcend its B-movie origins, and morphing into a money-making Hollywood franchise. The affection in which action-movie fans hold this film can’t be overstated: the cheap effects, punk rock fashions, the obsession with speed, follow a long line of similar movies (Vanishing Point, Death Race 2000), but the execution goes beyond such earlier efforts. No action film has surpassed it, certainly none with a lower budget.

Mad Max follows the revenge fantasy formula precisely. The story is of a good cop, Max Rockatansky (Gibson), fighting homosexual barbarian gangs in the post-apocalyptic Outback. When Max’s wife and infant son are murdered, Max hunts down and kills his enemies, using his car as a weapon. Max’s ultimate revenge against the sniveling Johnny “The Boy” (Tim Burns) is one of the very few non-vehicular homicides in the film, and it is almost a duplicate of the final scene in Dirty Harry, only instead of throwing his badge away, Max drives aimlessly into the desert, becoming a Harry Callahan of the wasteland, once a family man, now a loner, vindicated but beyond the bounds of civilization.

After Mad Max and its sequel Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981) came a pair of well-received films made with Australian director Peter Weir. Gallipoli (1981) and The Year Of Living Dangerously (1982) are both gritty historical dramas, serious films. Each contains enough action for Gibson to capitalize on the momentum of Mad Max, but, crucially, each also allowed him to play a romantic lead, proving that he could appeal to a female audience—something that did not come as naturally to Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson.

Lethal Weapon (1987) showcased both sides of Gibson’s persona and was itself a synthesis of three distinct narrative formulas so well established by the time it was produced that they could be parodied without losing the action audience. Joel Silver, the film’s producer; Shane Black, his screenwriter; and director Richard Donner took the storytelling philosophy of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer—triumphalist struggles, modeled on Saturday Night Fever and the Rocky films—and combined it with the revenge fantasy plot outlined above, adding an element of romantic comedy that distinguished Lethal Weapon from its contemporaries.

The conventions of the rom-com include a cute meeting of the two romantic partners (in Lethal Weapon, Danny Glover’s Roger Murtaugh mistakes Gibson’s Martin Riggs for an armed perp and, in attempting to take him down, ends up being taken down by his new partner instead), followed by a period of mutual acrimony that is tolerated for the sake of a shared mission (here, a murder case). The couple’s pursuit of a common goal forces the antagonists to put aside their antipathy, and in doing so they find a basis for intimacy that brings them closer than they’d thought possible. This is externalized during the family dinner scene at Murtaugh’s house in which his daughter, Riane (Traci Wolfe), falls in love with Riggs, her attraction being an echo of the affection that Murtaugh feels for Riggs himself. The later crisis of Riane’s abduction unites them further, putting the safety of the family at stake and finally clarifying Murtaugh’s resolution to postpone retirement and Riggs’s decision to forego his own planned suicide. Each has thrown over their destructive paramours (age and despair) in favor of a productive and healthy love for each other.

Lethal Weapon made Mel Gibson a bona fide Hollywood movie star—a macho lead capable of projecting vulnerability. He would repeat this act often: if pushed, he will fight back, especially when his family is at stake, and, like Max Rockatansky, he will wander in the desert.

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The third phase of Mel Gibson’s career is his auteur phase. It is here that he reached his greatest critical and commercial success and slowly revealed his obsessions. His first feature, The Man Without A Face (1993), came and went quietly, but its subject matter takes on new interest in light of later events. The homosexual dimension of the source material is diminished in the movie. When asked about his decision to ignore it, Gibson replied that he was interested in being “more positive” with the film, and admitted that he had never read the book before he got the script. That was a mistake he would not make again.

His follow-up, Braveheart (1995), became one of the most celebrated films of the 1990s. In retrospect, this seems amazing. It is hard to think of another Best Picture Oscar winner that has dated so quickly or been cast in such a sharp new relief by subsequent events in the life of its creator. The familiar revenge fantasy tropes return in the retelling of the life of 13th-century Scottish patriot William Wallace. We move from the murder of his wife, Murron, through his torture and death at the hands of Edward I, to the final battle at the field of Bannockburn, where Robert the Bruce, Wallace’s betrayer in life, leads his troops against Edward’s, winning Scotland’s freedom, redeeming himself, and consecrating the memory of Wallace.

The film is beautiful to look at, the battles scenes have a campy verve more reminiscent of Conan the Barbarian than Henry V, and its commitment to overwrought emotionality keeps it from dragging over its three-hour running time. Beneath the epic posturing, references to the Gibsons’ personal animus glare. These might be overlooked as esoteric obsessions if they did not also reveal the prejudices of the culture that celebrated this movie.

Given the tradition of Anglo-American males’ centrally enforced domination of all cultural, commercial, financial, and professional institutions in the US, it may seem odd to realize that the English are perhaps the most despised ethnic group in the country’s history—even among their own local descendants. To contemplate Englishness in America is to conjure up the historical memory of the nation’s first enemy—the imperialist yoke, which had to be cut loose for the West to be tamed and the country transformed into bravery’s home/freedom’s land. “Englishness” represents all things that Americans resent about Europe generally: its ruthless colonialism, its ethnic prejudice, its cultural pretense. The benefits of America’s wariness of European traditions are substantial: without it, there would be no Declaration of Independence or Constitution, no establishment clause. Even so, this progressive, democratic impulse has been overlaid with a reactionary counter-force: a tendency toward extreme regional sectarianism, anti-intellectualism, and the paranoid fear of unseen interests (“elites”) beyond the influence of ordinary (“real”) Americans. Those elites, those effete, pampered, aristocratic tax-thieves that infest the deep folds of the American imagination, are in some essential sense the English to us all.

Bravheart’s Englishmen, Edward I (Patrick McGoohan), and his son Edward, Prince of Wales (Peter Hanly), embody their clichés so thoroughly that it’s embarrassing to watch. The King plots obsessively to expand his Scottish territory and frets over the looming succession of his son, a whimpering, lisping homosexual, who is so easily manipulated by his lover, Phillip (Stephen Billington), that the King is forced to defenestrate him for the sake of the nation. Edward I’s heavy-handed administration leads directly to the deaths of William Wallace’s father and brother and forces Wallace and Murron (Catherine McCormack) to marry in secret to avoid Murron’s submission to primae noctis—a custom by which brides are required to have sex with their local feudal lord the night before their marriage.

The obvious attraction of Princess Isabella of France (Sophie Marceau) to Wallace, coupled with her contempt for the husband who has abandoned her sexually, moves her to reveal her father-in-law’s plans. Edward I will negotiate peace terms with the Scots, distracting Wallace’s army long enough to invade Scotland, regardless of Wallace’s response, setting up the film’s penultimate battle sequence. Thus, Scotland’s integrity is guaranteed by the sexual charisma of its ancient defender against the remote authority of scheming faggots. Gibson, to the best of my knowledge, has never been asked whether this nuance made the story of William Wallace more positive, but it surely made it more palatable to an audience that takes its cultural stereotypes for granted.

This theme would be developed, though not exactly refined, in The Patriot (2000), in which Gibson plays a farmer reluctantly called to help throw off the shackles of British colonial rule; Gibson's fictional character, Benjamin Martin, personally humiliates Tom Wilkinson’s absurdly re-imagined General Cornwallis. Indeed, Gibson’s next work as director carried this much further. The Passion of The Christ (2004) has been so thoroughly dissected that even writing the title invites dread. The controversy that accompanied its production, distribution, and release now seems moot: the film is patently and obviously anti-Semitic. No fair-minded person could dispute it. The rotten teeth, hooked noses, and cynical plotting that define virtually every Jewish character in it are obvious slanders. Picking apart the apologia the film received from Jewish supporters like Rabbi Daniel Lapin and film critic-conservative commentator Michael Medved is a tedious a task to contemplate only seven years after the film’s release.

Assuming that a plot summary is unnecessary, I’ll stick to the most damning and revealing moment in the drama—the moment when Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia), the Jewish high priest who plots the murder of Jesus (Jim Caviezel), claims outright that “[h]is blood is on us and on our children!” The quote is a paraphrase of Matthew 27: 24-25, and it’s a line unambiguous and brazen in its hatred. Like the moment the person you’re arguing with about politics finally tells you you’re ugly, it’s a moment to savor. Sadly, audiences unfamiliar with Aramaic did not get the opportunity to do that. Though the words are spoken, Gibson deleted the subtitles from the film’s US release after the Anti-Defamation League, among others, issued public complaints.

Gibson’s excuse for including the line at all was predictable, defensive, and prickly: “It's one little passage, and I believe it, but I don't and never have believed it refers to Jews, and implicates them in any sort of curse. It’s directed at all of us, all men who were there, and all that came after. His blood is on us, and that's what Jesus wanted. But I finally had to admit that one of the reasons I felt strongly about keeping it, aside from the fact it's true, is that I didn't want to let someone else dictate what could or couldn't be said.” Leaving aside the annoying and untrue implication that free speech is at stake in this decision, this may be the most sincere defense that Mel Gibson has offered for The Passion of the Christ. It is also the most misunderstood.

When asked about his father’s beliefs during the promotional riot that accompanied the film’s release, Gibson responded that his father had “taught me my faith, and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life.” When asked about the divergence between his religious beliefs and those of his non-Catholic wife (and mother of seven of his children), Robyn Moore, Gibson responded more fatalistically: “There is no salvation for those outside the Church. . . . I believe it. Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am. Honestly. She's . . . Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's just not fair if she doesn't make it. . . . But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.” From this statement it is simple enough to conclude that when Gibson says that Caphaias’s blood curse is “true” he is in fact accusing everyone from the Jews to the Episcopalians (with their implicit shades of Englishness), to the atheists to the Roman Catholic Church which nearly destroyed his father’s faith, uprooted his own allegiance, and pushed his family into social isolation.

In his mind we are all responsible for Christ’s death, but some (presumably including himself and his father) are less responsible than the rest of us—this is not his opinion, it “is a pronouncement from the chair.” On that basis it is possible to guess that when he denies his own anti-Semitism, what he is actually saying is that his dislike for the Jews is not personal but doctrinal. Mitigated as it is by a more general pre-Vatican II chauvinism, this is a distinction without a difference. Fittingly, given the persecution complexes of Gibson’s protagonists, the personal and religious traumas that sent Hutton Gibson on his vengeful holy crusade may finally prove to be most profitable to celebrity character-assassination sites like TMZ and Radaronline.

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The release of The Passion of the Christ bound an entirely new audience of observant Christians to Mel Gibson’s work. Their devotion, and their propensity for buying tickets in bulk, propelled the film into the ranks of the most profitable independent films ever made. But its success set the backdrop for Gibson’s personal and professional self-destruction and was a precursor provocation for a mobilized and insane American right wing.

On July 28, 2006, Gibson was pulled over for speeding in Malibu, California, then given a breathalyzer test that measured his blood-alcohol level at .12 (the legal limit is .08). Gibson was arrested and responded with the first of his public meltdowns. The content of Gibson’s rant and its cultural effects (the now widespread use of the term “sugar tits”) are less interesting than the way they serve as a kind of plot point in the public story. Here was a newly anointed Christian spokesman, whom many evangelicals had spent a lot of time defending, acting in a way that supported the worst accusations against him.

The reaction in Hollywood ranged from panicked damage control (Jeff Berg, Chairman of ICM, Gibson’s agency at the time) to hypocritical condemnation (super-agent and former ICM burglar Ari Emmanuel) before the event dissolved into a predictable, if unsuccessful, apology tour. What is fascinating in retrospect is the tone Gibson adopted for this version of apology. He issued a public statement, the first and last paragraphs of which read as follows:

There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark. I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge.

This is not about a film. Nor is it about artistic license. This is about real life and recognizing the consequences hurtful words can have. It's about existing in harmony in a world that seems to have gone mad.

The beginning is boilerplate that could have been (and almost certainly was) drafted by a publicist; the final paragraph, with its oblique reference to The Passion of the Christ and its critics, followed by the neutral observation that words can hurt, then ending with the lament that it is the world (as opposed to a single person within it) that has gone mad, imply that larger forces are responsible for this personal act. That kind of language is rarely used in celebrity PR rehabilitation, but it is exactly the kind of statement that political campaigns use to disown responsibility for outrageous behavior while still keeping the base motivated. And it is this recasting of those who support and those who revile him as agents of good and evil that has split Mel Gibson’s cultural identity into national zeitgeist.

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The crazy fringe element of the right wing gained enough prominence to politicize even the raising of the nation’s debt limit. Most of the winning freshmen candidates (as well as three most visible losing candidates, Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, and Christine O’Donnell) were all Tea Party nominees and each of them ran on a reactionary anti-federalist pledge to “shrink the size of government” and clung to very narrow (or, in the case of O’Donnell, counter-factual) readings of the Constitution to back up their cases. That each was expressly mistrustful of intellectuals and non-committal on the President’s birthplace during the campaign went without saying. News reporting on the wave of Republican victories centered on the party’s base, but obscured an intra-party bifurcation motivated less by the usual moderate vs. far-right rhetorical clichés (though those were certainly present) than by the hyperbolic anxiety attack collectively known as the Tea Party movement. The electoral losses of the absurd Senate candidates reflects the limits of the far right’s hold on the political imagination, but the impressive victories of the Republican House freshmen mirrors the extent to which the country has drifted into a paranoid mind-state that thrives on the repetition of the revenge fantasy narrative.

Mel Gibson and Rupert Murdoch coincide again here, having both built their careers in America by stoking the paranoid mentality of their audience. Talk to the average Fox News viewer and you’re likely to find someone who believes that they have been dealt a terrible injustice, rightly understood to be related to the collapse of the financial markets, but never tied to the deregulation policies that began during the Reagan administration. This bitterness is compounded by a sense of vulnerability fostered by physical isolation from the power centers on the Coasts, which historical memory perceives to be full of effete, pampered, tax-thieving elites who have no regard for the suffering in the rest of the country. While it’s absurd to blame the excesses of a political movement on the persistence of a generic movie plot, if you excite this anxiety enough, you have the perfect canvas on which to allude to the President’s complexion and his foreign-sounding name, and to suggest that he is working to take something away from “real” Americans. Viewed this way, it is a very short distance from Sharron Angle’s insane advocacy of “Second Amendment remedies” to William Wallace’s climactic battle cry “They may take our lives, but they will never take our FREEDOM!” All that’s missing is a character passionate enough to slap on the white-and-blue war paint and ride full gallop into oblivion. The audience is ready for the third act, though gratification may be delayed—Mel Gibson and Rupert Murdoch have both entered their baroque phase.

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A month after his arrest, Gibson and his wife separated, divorcing in 2009. In January 2010, Edge Of Darkness, about a Boston-area police officer’s (Gibson’s) quest to solve the murder of his activist daughter, targeted by a weapons manufacturer, was released and flopped. It would have disappeared completely from memory if the promotional interviews Gibson did in support of it had not exposed his resentments again. When KTLA-TV’s Sam Reuben broached the subject of Gibson’s arrest, Gibson snapped on camera, asking the Jewish Reuben “Do you have a dog in this fight?” In the same week the microphone caught him calling another reporter an “asshole” via remote feed. In July it was reported that Radaronline possessed telephone-audio recordings of Gibson abusing his former girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva. When the recordings were released, they proved even more damning than anyone could have imagined: on them a drunk, hysterical Gibson accuses Grigorieva of being a gold digger, tells her she deserves to be gang-raped, and says that he’s capable of putting her in a “fucking rose garden.” He blurts out later that he and his wife had no “spiritual connection,” but that Grigorieva has no soul at all.

Reaction was swift: William Morris Endeavor Agency (Ari Emmanuel’s new home) dropped him, and the commercial failure of The Beaver (2011), a film in which Gibson played a depressed toy company executive in the midst of an emotional breakdown, followed. The Beaver was produced for $21 million and has so far grossed only $970,816, roughly the inflation-adjusted budget of the original Mad Max. The only positive reversal came with critical assessment of Gibson’s performance, which was so positive that, had the film succeeded, he might have been in a position to re-make himself as a paternal character actor along the lines of Michael Caine or Sean Connery. At the moment, Mel Gibson’s fate, like Walker’s, Paul Kersey’s, Harry Callahan’s, or Max Rockatansky’s, is unresolved.

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Mel Gibson and Rupert Murdoch are united again at the end of their careers, each brought down by the exposure of private messages—Gibson as target, Murdoch as spy. As of this writing, Murdoch’s British tabloid the News Of The World has folded after its senior administration admitted to tapping the phone of a thirteen-year-old murder victim, thus interfering with a police investigation. Several News Corp. executives have resigned, arrests have been made, American indictments are expected to follow, and, if they do, the sun may yet set on the Murdoch Empire. Given the vindictive nature of the Murdoch papers and the phenomenal influence of Murdoch’s money on politics in the UK, we can all enjoy the irony that, at last, Britain has lost a portion of its right-wing press, but it has not lost its FREEDOM!

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