by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
This Is London, City of (Eighty) Billionaires
The collective net worth of Britain’s wealthiest one percent has doubled since the financial crisis of 2008.
That news – reported laconically over the weekend in a business story on the Guardian’s UK home page – is an astonishing flat-world counterpart to the news of the earthquake that struck Nepal.
How on quaking earth has the net worth of Britain’s wealthiest one percent doubled in six years? Through use of the same investment mechanisms that the financial crisis brought to light, I’d bet. Because how else? There hasn’t been any remarkable new commercial enterprise – like railroads in the middle of the nineteenth century, computing and the Internet at the end of the twentieth – that would have produced such an upswell in wealth. There hasn’t been an annexing of new territory, as happened after the Spanish-American War, or an opening of formerly closed markets as happened post-1989. There hasn’t been a regime change, a revaluation of the currency, or a profound restructuring of the tax system – all ways in which rich people have doubled their money in other times and places. The UK economy hasn’t been spectacularly successful – or even notably more successful than that of its obvious counterparts, as far as I can tell. Nor as far as I know has there been a single phenomenally successful Briton – a J.K. Rowling, like, say, the Beatles before her – who earned so much money so quickly that her success boosted all the superwealthy.
No, it’s probably just the case that for the wealthiest one percent, the doubling of one’s net worth in six years is the new normal, a simple matter of people engaging other people to make their money work for them. And the “financial crisis”: that wasn’t a crisis. That was actually a soft opening for the global financial system’s current production (“Bigger and Better Than Ever”) – a chance for the people who run things to work out the kinks in the production and gain a few extra accommodations from their friends in government before the actual opening, which is what we are now in.
Down in the Corner
One of the truly great pieces of sports writing I’ve read is “Mad Cathedral,” by my friend Thomas Kelly, an essay published in Esquire in 1998. It’s a love song to the old Yankee Stadium, and a fight song raised up when the Yankees were threatening to build a new stadium on the West Side of Manhattan or in New Jersey. Tom’s argument is that the old Stadium is so full of ghosts – of players past, of family members lost – that it can’t be rebuilt or replaced, and it’s heartbreakingly persuasive.
So I feel a little guilty, and a little shallow, going to the new Yankee Stadium and simply enjoying myself – feeling that the new Stadium is “close enough to the old one, in location and design, that all the old memories are still there.” And that’s one reason why going to NYCFC matches at the Stadium is so enjoyable. All the old memories are still there – but they’re not burdened with comparisons to the old Yankee Stadium, or the old Yankee Stadium before the 1976 renovation, and so on.
An essay of mine about going to see NYCFC – that’s New York City Football Club – is up on the New Yorker web site. (It’s my fifth piece there, I’m happy to say.) I think of it as a pendant to Tom’s great essay, a shout-out to the Ghosts of Stadium Present alongside his hymn to the Ghosts of Stadium Past.
The Lone Correspondent, Yesterday and Today
The shortlists for this year’s PEN Literary Awards were just announced, and the five of us who are judges for the PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award settled on five works of general nonfiction from 2013 and 2014.
The other five books on the longlist are strong in their ways – and their strengths support the case for the recent move toward longlists by PEN, the National Book Awards, and other prize-giving bodies.
Clay Risen’s The Bill of the Century, for example, carries a passage that by-the-by and matter-of-factly serves to counter several cherished ideas – clichés – of writing about the media just now.
Here’s the passage:
The members of the United States Senate slogged their way to the Capitol on the morning of Monday, March 30, through a freak early spring blizzard that dropped five inches of snow on Washington. In the midle of the storm, just outside the massive edifice, stood CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd. A D.C. native and a rising star on CBS’s national news reporting staff, Mudd had made a name for himself covering such seminal events as the March on Washington and the Kennedy state funeral. In early 1964, Fred Friendly, the new president of the network’s news division, had suggested that Mudd cover the filibuster in a one-man, flood-the-zone campaign, “not only on the evening news with Walter Cronkite but also on each of the network’s four other TV newscasts and on seven of the network’s hourly radio newscasts,” Mudd later recalled. “My initial reaction was less than enthusiastic. It sounded more like a flagpole-sitting stunt.”
And here are the clichés it counters:
1- The notion that round-the-clock news coverage (the twenty-four-hour news cycle) is a thing of the present, whereas coverage in the past consisted of the evening news.
2 - … that the lone reporter is a product of today’s diminished news staffs, whereas the halls of the Capitol used to be full of correspondents, many from each network.
3 - … that TV news executives cooking up clever, gimmicky reporting (and being resented for it by their reporters) is a trait of our diminished media age, not of the past golden age characterized by the robust and conscientious CBS News and its anchorman, Walter Cronkite.
4 - … and that “unseasonal” snowstorms are evidence of climate change: way back in 1964, it was snowing in Washington at the end of March.
Truly, media commentators who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it. That Clay Risen knows the past is clear all the way through his book.
The image is of Mudd outside the Capitol after the Kennedy assassination.
David Brooks: Calling the Outer Life
“I
came to the conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born —
that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue,
built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.”
That’s David Brooks, introducing what I take to be the main idea of a forthcoming book. An idea he is calling –
“If we wanted to be gimmicky, we could say these accomplishments amounted to a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible inner life.”
Here’s hoping he comes up with a non-gimmicky name for the idea before the book is published – because the idea is an awfully good one. It fact, it may be the oldest, best good idea there is: the idea that we can learn how to be good, and even can become a little better, by finding out how exceptionally good people came to be good and trying to do likewise.
One of Brooks’ “deeply good people” is Dorothy Day, who, in this abridgment of his taxonomy of goodness, represents Energizing Love.
Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”
That kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.
She made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural self-centeredness all of us feel.
The more I like a Brooks idea, the more niggly and correcting I am about it, and I like this one a whole lot. So I have to ask: Is it really right to identify goodness with “inner virtue” and the “inner life”? In doing so, isn’t Brooks still captive to the self-focused categories he is trying to break out of with this project? Isn’t a Dorothy Day – and isn’t this is what made her so radical – characterized by outer goodness, by the quality of her outer life?
The photograph is of a signpost indicating public footpaths in Marshlands, East Yorkshire.
Talk About the Passion (While You Watch It at Home in HD)
Holy Week came early this year – camelast fall, in fact, when Peter Sellars and Simon Rattle brought their semi-staged version of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to the Park Avenue Armory.
I got to go, and got to write about it for this site; so did Alex Ross, who joined David Remnick in the lobby at the act break. (Alex wrote about it for the New Yorker.)
Now
– ‘tis the season – I am seeing it again, on a video available
through the Berlin Philharmonic’s website. (Type in the code “WQXR”
for a 48-hour pass.) It’s a strange experience. It’s strange to see
the singers performing while they sing. It’s stranger to see them in
the close-ups the camera affords (a bared shoulder, a pair of hands
clasped, Evangelist Mark Padmore’s throat corded with tension during
an aria). It’s stranger still to watch the Passion at my desk,
toggling back and forth between a piece of writing and a Bach Passion
every few minutes – from the sound of the Passion
to the sight of it.
Or
is it so strange? This desk – this square yard of space in
Brooklyn – is where I have listened to several thousand hours of
the recorded music of Bach over the years; and the listening was
undertaken in part with the end of finding words for the cultural
change that such an experience reflects – for the range of
encounters with the music of Bach that new technology has made
possible. That is the idea of Reinventing Bach.
What’s
different this time, here at my desk, is that the technology is video – and it’s with
the ubiquity of video in mind, I suspect, that Sellars and Rattle
devised this semi-performed interpretation.
There
are 30 hours left on my 48-hour pass; I’m going back to Sellars’
Passion now.
Dateline: A Dangerous Place
“Asthe 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling
city today, exploding thunderously into buildings all around, a
disheveled, stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a
plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his
cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.
“There were only two people to hear him, and both fled, dodging from doorway to doorway, before the performance ended.
“Each day at 4 P.M., the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, walks to the same spot on the pedestrian mall for a concert in honor of Sarajevo’s dead.”
That’s the opening of a piece of reportage – dateline SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 7, 1992 – by Times foreign correspondent John F. Burns.
Burns reported 3300 pieces for the Times, most of them from war zones beyond numbering. He retired this week after nearly forty years with the paper. Many of us saw entire wars through Burns’ eyes – and to spot his byline was to know that the paper had its very best reporter in the war zone, not a stringer or a headstrong young reporter with a taste for danger.
Burns has a successor in C.J. Chivers, who has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Russia and the neighboring republics for … I was going to write “for more than a decade,” but I see now it has been nearly twenty years.
Chivers and photographer Tyler Hicks spoke about their work at Georgetown the other night, in the first conversation in a series dedicated to the slain Lebanese journalist Salim El-Lozi.
Here is Chivers on reporting from a war zone, particularly an ambush during a patrol in Afghanistan in which Hicks nearly died:
“From the moment you’ve diverted the activity or the direction or the decisions of the people you’re with, if anything happens it’s on your soul,” Chivers said.
“You’re in a tunnel, everything vanishes,” Chivers said of the ambush. “You have to toggle between your safety concerns, which are constant, and being able to inform the reader you’re out there because you’re not out there for you, you’re out there for your readers. Everything you do has to have a journalistic purpose.”
Lucky we are that reporters like John F. Burns and Chris Chivers and photographers like Tyler Hicks are out there – and not for a year or two, but year after year, decade after decade. Out there – lest we forget – for us.
When Harry Met Nietzsche
In current long-form journalism aboutreligion, the set-up passage (so often borne like a burden by the writer) doesn’t get any better than this:
If you gathered all the ex-Catholics in the United States, they would form the country’s second-largest religion, with nearly 23 million “members.” Only the Catholic Church itself is larger.
By comparison, the number of self-identified American atheists is small – less than 3% of the adult population. But that number has been inching upward, passing American Jews (2.2%) in the latest round of surveys.
I’ve been following that ascension for years, watching America’s “atheist awakening” burst forth from a few best-sellers to become a force with the potential to reshape the country’s culture, politics and spirituality.
But I am also interested in the small picture – less atheism as a mass movement and more the thoughts that flicker and burn through someone’s mind as he forsakes faith. As a man like Harry begins to bend toward atheism, what are the turning points, and what happens after the last corner is turned?
I talked to Harry for 10 months about those questions. And the more I asked, the more complex his answers became. I soon realized that Harry is not a typical atheist. He’s part of a bevy of former believers who, while trying to raise atheist children and create secular communities, are tapping an unlikely source: the religions they left behind.
It’s all there – nimbly, personably set out: Catholic exodus, atheist awakening, and the convergence of these in the lives of people like Harry Shaughnessy of Wake Forest, North Carolina – in the flickerings and the questions.
It’s from Daniel Burke’s profile of Shaughnessy and family. The piece is on cnn.com, but I am reading it in the measured way I’d read a New Yorker profile. There are snapshots and videos, the whole multimedia package, but frankly, the prose piece is sufficient unto itself.
The photograph is of Charlotte and Harry Shaughnessy.
When Gary Met E. J. – and the Era of “Character” Began
Reading Matt Bai’s All the Truth Is Out for the PEN/Galbraith Award, I come upon this sketch of E.J. Dionne, and realize the things I didn’t know about the early career of this Georgetown colleague. Such as that E.J. was the writer to whom Gary Hart’s advisers granted the first full access to the candidate in 1987:
That they chose E.J. Dionne made perfect sense. It wasn’t just that Dionne, who was about to turn thirty-five, was perhaps the most obvious star of the new generation, having already reported from Paris, Beirut, and Rome, while somehow making time to cover two presidential campaigns. Nor was the main factor in the decision that Dionne would write his profile for the cover of The New York Times Magazine, which combined a more literary gravitas than the newsweeklies with the influence of a large national circulation.
What made Dionne special among the younger crowd , more than any of this, is that Hart actually respected him. Nerdy and sputtering with energy (“harried like a border collie with a bad herd,” in Cramer’s inimical description), Dionne wasn’t just another privileged dilettante in search of some wry observation he could peddle on Nightline. A Catholic school kid from Fall River, Massachusetts, which was no one’s idea of a patrician paradise, he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he had earned a doctorate in sociology. He was a serious, first-rate intellect, and to Hart that meant that Dionne could be, if not quite co-opted, then at least made to see the relevance and urgency of Hart’s agenda. At least Dionne didn’t go dead in the eyes when you talked about economic transformation or the decline of the nation-state, which is more than Hart could say for most of the boomers on the bus.
However much Dionne may have been a man of ideas, he counted himself among a generation of reporters who had been heavily influenced – whether they were scholarly enough to know it or not – by the work of Erik Erikson … [who is] most famous for having pioneered the concept of “identity” – and what he called the “identity crisis” – in the 1950s and 1960s. “If Teddy White can be credited with opening the back room of American politics to the public view,” Dionne said, “a writer like Erik Erikson could be credited for opening the back room of the psyche.”
And such as this: that E.J. is the writer whom Hart, dogged by rumors of
marital infidelity, told: “Follow me around.”
Does Bai connect the dots and make the point that E.J.’s anti-patrician Fall River Catholicism may have shaped his depiction of Hart – and of the rumors about Hart’s philandering – as much as Harvard or Oxford or Erikson or The New York Times did? Still reading – and eager to find out …
Robert Putnam: The Heart Has Reasons the Data Knoweth Not
Jill Lepore’s piece about Robert Putnam’s new book and income inequality is a perfect example of what makes the New Yorker so essential, so admirable, so enviable – and, sometimes, so infuriating.
Like Adam Gopnik’s piece about the Warburg Institute in the same issue, it’s at once an expert tour d'horizon (of the history of the iconological study of art in the Warburg piece, of recent thinking on income inequality here) and an argument about same. And Lepore’s argument, taken on its own terms, is clear, convincing, and unimpeachable. She begins by drubbing Putnam for approaching the problem of income inequality (in his new book, Our Kids) in terms of the communal feeling he first gained through, and still identifies with, his upbringing in Port Clinton, Ohio, in the 1950’s.
For Michael Gerson, writing in the Post, Our Kids is “sociology … as an act of social solidarity.” For Lepore, though, the emotional approach, foregrounded by the title, is the flaw of the book. Income inequality, she insists, isn’t a problem of empathy, requiring a moral solution, a change of heart. It’s a structural problem, requiring changes in institutions and laws – in this instance, the laws that have led to an inequality of representation of different American populations in Congress.
So far, so good. But the problem with this analysis of the problem is that is doesn’t begin to account for why the problem is a problem in the first place.
“How much inequality can a democracy bear?” the contents-page teaser asks. Well, the obvious fact is that when it comes to income inequality, the democracy that is the United States can bear a very great deal. I don’t like to say it, but it’s true. On aggregate, our unequal democracy is doing quite all right. No one is credibly suggesting that it will founder because of income inequality, that we are on the verge of systemic collapse, violent revolution, a return to monarchy, or anything like it.
So why, then, is income inequality a problem at all? The reason (obvious, you’d think, and yet not taken up by Lepore) is that it’s a moral problem, a problem of fairness – or, to put it more perennially, of justice. And the idea of justice depends, to a large extent, on the idea that all citizens in a society are essentially equal – are brothers and sisters, in some respect. This idea is one that historically has been communicated from age to age through feeling, through kinship and neighborhood, through texts and symbols (and here the Warburg piece is apt), as much as through laws and institutions.
“How much inequality can the human heart bear?” That is the question – and the answer, once again, is, alas, a very great deal.
If you ask me, income inequality is so pronounced in the United States, first of all, because there is so much income to go around in our wealthy society; and secondly, because so many of the people whose incomes place them at the top of society just don’t see the people whose incomes place them at the bottom as essentially their equals – don’t see them as brothers and sisters at all. In the view from the top, income inequality isn’t unjust, or an offense to the heart; it’s just the way things are.
That state of things is a problem; and as I understand it, Putnam’s wish with the new book is, first of all, to identify the problem and to call it a problem – our problem.
In The New Yorker, Thomas Merton Is 100 (and Still Counting)
It’s a little-known fact that before Thomas Merton wrote The Seven Storey Mountain
– before he became a Trappist monk – he had a chance to write
about his pilgrimage to the Abbey of Gethsemani for the New
Yorker. Robert Giroux told
the story, which I then related in The Life You Save May Be
Your Own:
When the retreat was over, Merton was thrust back into the world. In Louisville, where he went to board a train for New York, the things of everyday life assaulted him: billboards, traffic, harried businessmen shrouded in their newspapers.
In Manhattan he went to see his college friend Robert Gerdy, an editor at the New Yorker, and then to the Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue. There, unexpectedly, he met another college friend, Robert Giroux, who had edited the Columbia literary magazine. He told Giroux that he had just returned from a Trappist monastery and that Gerdy had asked him to write about the experience. Giroux was surprised – at Columbia, Merton had not seemed monkish; he told Merton that an article about a Trappist monastery in the New Yorker would be something truly remarkable. “Oh, no,” Merton told him, “I would never think of writing about it.”
So it was neat that I had the chance to write a little essay about Merton for the New Yorker website – about an exhibition of Merton papers now on view at Columbia to mark his centenary.
Another little-known fact (this one from the essay):
It’s a little-known fact that J. D. Salinger took a writing course in the Extension Division at Columbia in 1939, when Merton was teaching writing in the Extension Division at Columbia.
All the neater that my piece about Merton is up on the New Yorker site just when the site is featuring Eric Schlosser’s piece about Catholic anti-nuclear activists. It’s enough to make you think there’s still a Catholic left left.