If you guessed picturesque violence as a means of psychological liberation you are technically correct. But I have in mind something even more fundamental. Strip away the circumstantial differences and The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, and Weeds are all about the acquisition of capital, territorial expansion, the liquidation of assets and enemies.

Americans love this story. It’s a kind of bootstrap fairytale that exalts the glories of the free market for those willing to unyoke ambition from conscience. We know, in our brains, that Tony Soprano is a gluttonous thug. But in our rancid capitalist hearts we root for him anyway.

At least I do.

***

I’ve been thinking about all this because last week Americans got a rare peek at how the One Percent actually rolls in this country. All it took was the disclosure of a single annual tax return by Republican frontrunner and part-time humanoid Mitt Romney.

Mitt released his return under duress, having concluded (rightly) that not releasing it would only prolong the media narrative. He did so on the same day as the President’s State of the Union Address, and the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations, which wasn’t quite enough to bury the matter.

The short version: Mitt paid $3 million in taxes on the $21.7 million he received in 2010, for an effective rate of 13.9 percent. The former governor, whose grasp of his own finances is charmingly fuzzy, originally told reporters that he paid “about 15 percent” in taxes, which translates as another $240,000. (A quarter of a million dollars is known, in Mittville, as “a rounding error.”)

Of course, the big revelation for those of us not intimate with affluence was that Mitt’s millions are what economists call – with no apparent sense of irony – “unearned income.” Mitt doesn’t work for his money. His money works for him. Had his $21.7 million been earned, it would have been taxed (theoretically) at the top rate of 35 percent. That’s $3.6 million more in taxes.

Those politicians who decry unemployment benefits as a dangerous inducement for people not to work would do well to ponder this scenario.

***

There were lots of other fascinating tidbits from Mitt’s disclosure, including the fact he had a Swiss bank account, and dough socked away in several countries considered tax havens, from the Cayman Islands to Ireland. But the most striking thing on display was the essential nature of extreme wealth.

Your average American still conceives of wealth along the Soprano model. Tony, he sees an opportunity, bribes the necessary officials, bumps off the necessary rivals, and collects the booty. We like to think this way because it means that with sufficient industry, imagination, and risk, we too might become Tony. Or at least Paulie Walnuts.

But the vast majority of wealth in this country is passive in nature, occasionally amassed but far more often inherited. Rich people make money not by doing things but by owning things. They own stock and collect dividends. They own bonds and earn interest. They position themselves in such a way that money has to flow through them to get to somewhere. (This is called leverage.) Or they play one force against another, such as hiring a Chinese worker to perform labors formerly undertaken by an American, then selling the resulting product for the same price and pocketing the difference. (This is called arbitrage.)

Mitt’s labors at Bain Capital consisted, almost exclusively, of leverage and arbitrage. He bought companies, often with borrowed money, improved their financial health—or at least the appearance thereof—then sold them at a profit. Sometimes, the companies failed and people lost their jobs. Bain executives awarded themselves special dividends anyway. It was a very Soprano way of doing business.

Mitt’s current income, by contrast, derives from his manipulation of our financial and tax regulations.

That’s what the public is finally figuring out. Or, anyway, what it has an opportunity to figure out. Really rich people don’t work harder than the rest of us. They don’t sit around dreaming up new ways to create jobs, or rejuvenate the economy. They hire lobbyists to craft legislation, and asset managers who can navigate the ensuing maze of loopholes.

To offer but one example: back when Mitt actually was a working stiff, he availed himself of the so-called “carried interest” loophole. This allowed him to be paid a deferred salary from Bain in the form of capital gains. And thus to have the untold millions he earned was taxed at 15 percent rather than 35 percent.

Nobody knows how much money this allowed him to avoid paying in taxes, and we are not likely to find out, because citizen Mitt Romney really wants to be President. I am going to estimate a gazillion dollars. Give or take a quarter a mil.

***

In the boom years following World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower enforced a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent. The idea was to force the super rich not to sit on their dough but to reinvest it by opening factories and hiring workers.

If you take a quick look at this chart, you will see that I am not actually making this up. You will also notice that in 1982, when Ronald Reagan took office, he and his loyal Congress lowered the top tax rate from 70 percent down into the 30s, where it has remained ever since. The result has been a steady upward surge of wealth. Everyone else has seen wages stagnate and benefits plummet. Also: massive federal and state deficits.

I realize I’ve gone somewhat wonky here. But the point is simple: the most crucial issue of the 2012 campaign already has emerged. Will voters—offered an object lesson in extreme wealth—finally revolt against the glittering mythos that protects our gilded class?

***

Mitt’s job, in the days ahead, will be to convince us that he’s Tony Soprano – the private sector Godfather who can make us all rich, rather than Willard Romney the amazingly life-like tax cheat. He will rely both on his personal fortune, and the lucre pouring in from those who stand to benefit from his policies. He’ll at least flirt with choosing as his running mate New Jersey governor and Tony Soprano body double Chris Christie.

But his greatest ally, I’m afraid, will be our own capacity for self-delusion. After all, Americans can be counted upon to ignore the most obvious signifiers of our own predicament.

The truth is, we can’t become Tony Soprano because we don’t belong to the mafia and because we lack his gift for psychopathic greed. But we can still vote for him.

***

I realize I should conclude by quoting from Mitt’s most recent gospel of prosperity, in which he said unto CNN, the morning after claiming the Florida primary, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”

But that feels like dirty pool.

Instead, let me offer a more intimate and revealing statement, which also recently emerged from his mouthhole:

“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

Let’s do this thing, Paulie.

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That sounds cruel, but I don’t want to be cruel. There’s enough of that in the cultural bloodstream. I’m genuinely curious. So if any Mitt Romney supporters read this I’d love to hear what it feels like for you, especially if you’ve ever chanted Mitt.

I myself sort of feel for Romney. He keeps having to claim it wasn’t his idea to run for President over and over, which sounds disingenuous, and not just because Romney lacks the gift of sounding genuine. Consider his biography. He was born into tremendous wealth and ambition. His father was Governor of Michigan and ran for President. His mother ran for Senate. It’s not exactly subtle.

Mostly, when I see Romney, I think about this passage from The Grapes of Wrath:

“If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’.”

***

I think about this insight not just in relation to Romney, but in relation to the manner in which we, as a people, think about and discuss politics.

There is almost no explicit discussion of governance, of the policies advocated by the candidates in question and the practical implications of those policies upon what the Founding Fathers (and later Steinbeck) referred to as the we. Politics, in other words, has become divorced from morality.

It’s become fashionable to blame this on the “media.” But our Fourth Estate, with a few exceptions[2], operates not at the behest of a creed or corporate sponsor, but simply by the rules of late-model capitalism: to mint profit. If they treat politics as a form of athletic combat, focusing on the polls score and trash talk, if they maroon their coverage a sea of celebrity gossip, it is only because we pay them to do so. They are merely the lens through which we choose to gaze.

***

So that’s what the WiG (The Week in Greed) is up against: our own willingness to think like owners, to be frozen into a suicidal self-regard, to ignore the moral outcomes of our electoral decisions.

It will also endeavor to cut through some of the more egregious bullshit that passes for coverage. Yes, I’m going to have to listen to NPR. (But only in the car, honest!)

A few days ago, for example, on Talk of the Nation, the host asked why the Republican candidates who stood no chance of winning the nomination were staying in the race. The expert panel droned politely. Nobody mentioned that running for President has become a lucrative job for political wash-ups, or that presidential candidates are, almost by definition, monsters of narcissism.

***

A few obvious questions:

*Will WiG (The Week in Greed) be following the campaigns on, like, a bus or something?

No. Current funding levels do not accommodate such coverage. Nor would I seek to compete with professionals such as David Foster Wallace or Stephen Elliott. This is more like an armchair psychoanalysis of the process.

*So you won’t have any “access” to the candidates?

No. But I would argue that the candidates, in an existential sense, have no access to themselves. I will therefore, on occasion, fabricate interviews with them.

*Will the WiG be related to the various Rumpus lamentations?

Only in the sense that they come from the same HQ of despair.

*But won’t the WiG have a liberal bias?

It will have a bias against greed, self-deception, disregard for the truth, and the more poignant instances of projection. Plenty of liberals indulge in these vices. I’m one of them.

*Can I send hate mail?

Totally. Direct vitriol to stevealmondjoy AT gmail.com.

*Will you be writing stoned?

Yes.

***

What else?

From time to time I will print items that strike me as particularly revealing of the current cultural climate. Here is an example. It is a letter to the editor by a man named John Anthony that appeared in Metro, the free daily distributed around subway stations in various major American cities.

Obama must be a sociopath

In my opinion, Obama is steeped in a repressed anger stemming from his dysfunctional childhood that was forged in the flames of elitist, anarchical and militant ideologies and manifested in a thirst for control and revenge. Look up “antisocial personality disorder” – I strongly believe we have elected a full-blown sociopath to the presidency. His polished charm, fluid deception, Olympian conceit, pedantic admonishings, fragile ego and rat-quick temper are signs of a seriously disturbed man. In this light, his actions are understandable, even logical. He’s angry and now he’s getting even.

The letter is dated April 10, 2009. That is, three months after Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

***

Something tells me Mr. John Anthony was not one of those folks chanting Mitt! Mitt! Mitt! a few days ago. (I see him more as a Ron Paul guy.) But he’s just as American as the rest of us. He’s part of the we.

Next stop: South Carolina, birthplace of the war of Northern Aggression.

[1] Broken Dream Machine aka “The Internet”

[2]Fox News pushes corporate interests that mimic the Republican agenda. But its content is essentially psychological. It’s Sesame Street for the aggrieved. It works because there are millions of aging white people in this country who enjoy feeling ripped off.

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A Rumpus Exaltation of the Rule of Law:

The video shows us everything; the outside of everything anyway: the UC Davis students on the sidewalk, their heads bowed, the law officer brandishing his canister of pepper spray to the assembled crowd, the thick mist spattering the face and hair of those kids.

And who else remembers now the fanciful claims made by those advocating another war with Iraq: that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical weapons. Imagine the horror: chemical weapons dropped onto innocent Americans?

***

It’s more complicated than that. It’s always more complicated. The law officer isn’t just some psychopath. He believes he’s protecting the peace, doing what he has to do.

The kids know their civil disobedience. They’re prepared to be removed for blocking a public sidewalk. So our officer has to figure out what to do. Do me and my men drag these kids off this sidewalk, or do I blast them with a chemical agent that will soften them up first?

Maybe he feels agitated by the omniscient gaze of all those camera phones, angry at the way his actions will be thrust into the public domain without his consent. Maybe the cameras make him determined to appear authoritative, to send a message to others who might disrupt the peace of his given precinct by sitting on sidewalks. If I don’t send a message, he figures, it gets worse. Isn’t my job to keep things from getting worse?

There’s some part of him that enjoys wielding his power, of course. We all possess such secret nodes. Maybe he sees the kids as spoiled brats who won’t listen, who need to be taught how the world really operates. He’s going to teach them. You don’t get into law enforcement just to write tickets.

He has to make a decision. It always comes down to this. One person—one imperfect person—has to make a decision about what to do. It is in this way that the Rule of Law devolves into the Rule of Man.

***

It’s happening all over: New York City, Portland, Oakland, your town. Police officers are taking matters into their own hands, deciding to harm unarmed citizens, often unnecessarily. In most cases, these folks are breaking no law. They have a constitutional right to peaceably assemble. Such abuses are nothing new. What’s new is that there are all these cameras around. Perhaps this is what happens when a surveillance state finds itself surveiled.

***

In a recent Republican presidential debate, the moderator noted that Rick Perry had overseen 234 executions as governor of Texas. The crowd seated in the Ronald Reagan Library offered the loudest applause of the evening.

They weren’t being ghouls. On the contrary, they were expressing support for the authoritarian model, in which punishment of the wicked is the most effective means of establishing order and therefore the highest civic good.

There is a reason that police procedurals such as Law & Order and 24 hold such power over the American imagination. They are modern fables meant to reassure us that the wicked will be brought to justice, that our authority figures will protect us from chaos, even if they must abandon agreed-upon standards of morality to do so.

***

And what about the ethical climate in which these authority figures exist? Does it matter that our domestic police force has been dramatically militarized over the past two decades? That officers recruited to protect and serve a particular community have been enlisted in a national War on Drugs, then a War on Terror, and have been armed with increasingly sophisticated tools of war? How, exactly, can this not matter?

***

I don’t imagine that anyone who applauded for Governor Perry’s execution stats would have made the connection, but Ronald Reagan himself owes his political legacy to civil unrest. Back in the 1966, he won the governorship of California in part by promising to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” He meant the anti-war protests, which he claimed were being carried out by “cowardly fascists.”

Three years later, Reagan ordered in the California Highway Patrol. The ensuing clash left one protestor dead, and another blinded. Reagan then sent 2200 National Guard troops to occupy the city of Berkeley and crack down on protestors. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” he explained. “No more appeasement!” Several days later, four students were shot to death on the Kent State campus.

Reagan explained that his remark was “only a figure of speech.”

***

As with the movement for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) arises from a vacuum of moral leadership. Our elected officials refuse to confront the corrosive greed that fuels late-model capitalism: the sickening concentration of wealth at the top, the conversion of that wealth into raw political power.

The basic message is the same as Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. It poses the same sort of radical challenge to those invested in the status quo. This is why a prominent lobbying firm recently offered the American Banking Association an $850,000 plan to promote “negative narratives” about the movement and any politicians who support it. This is how corporate interests express panic: they hire lobbyists.

***

Please don’t be surprised to see conservative activists attempt to “infiltrate” OWS, or otherwise foment chaos. The conservative movement has invested billions of dollars in think tanks and media infrastructure and public relations firms. So long as people believe that a “community organizer” is a communist in disguise, or that an agency dedicated to the poor exists to enable child prostitution, that money is well spent.

The notion that the nation’s moral discourse might be shaped by a spontaneous uprising of self-interested citizens is surely terrifying to them.

***

The authoritarian beast within the American spirit has been roused. It is heavily armed and lavishly underwritten. It wants, more than anything, to reduce our minds to panic machines. The OWS protestors have shown heroic restraint to this point. They’ve refused to fight back. Nor have they backed down. Instead, they’ve greeted the bullying theatrics of the last few weeks as evidence of the growing anxiety among those who oppose them.

Consider the end of the video taken at UC Davis, how the police officers huddle together, looking, for all their weaponry, confused and defenseless. The students watch them go. They chant a little, peacefully. “You can go,” they chant.

And the police do.

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When I was four or five years old, my mom and dad called me and my brothers into the living room. I can’t remember what they said exactly, but the gist was that dad might be going to jail for a few days. He was going to protest the war by joining hands with other people at the gates to a nearby air force base.

I thought the situation strange. Why would the police send you to jail for holding hands?

***

Activists weren’t some fringe element back then. They had defeated the naked bigotry of the Jim Crow south. They had waged a war on poverty. Now they wanted to end a senseless war. People believed that taking to the streets could change the moral condition of the country. There weren’t nearly as many screens in our lives; we hadn’t begun pouring so much of ourselves into them. Idealism wasn’t an object of ridicule. It was a legitimate, even laudable, belief system.

***

The Occupy Wall Street movement is now entering its fifth week. It has spread from a few hundred protestors in downtown Manhattan to most major cities in the country. The mainstream media, ravenous for conflicts that excite passion without invoking morality, initially ignored the protests, then attempted to dismiss them. They are now, reluctantly, having to reckon with the notion that genuine activism is not dead in this country, that American citizens – faced with a vacuum of responsible leadership – are capable of demanding an end to the economic corruption initiated by our richest citizens and upheld by the elected officials who serve at their behest.

***

As the weeks drag on, we will be treated to another one of those false equivalencies that our feeble Fourth Estate faithfully manufactures. We will hear the Occupy Wall Street movement compared to the Tea Party, over and over.

The individual citizens who show up for Tea Party events are, by their own reckoning, activists seeking to make their voices heard in our democracy. They deserve our respect, if not our support.

But you would have to be willfully blind to ignore the corporate lucre that helped forge and sustain the Tea Party “movement.” Its history is utterly transparent: corporations paid lobbyists to gin up grassroots support for their interests. The Tea Party reflects a genuine disillusionment with the status quo in Washington. But its amorphous goals boil down to preserving the status quo, to vilifying government so as to keep corporate power intact.

***

This, after all, is the Great Con of the conservative movement: to redirect the anger of the mob away from the wizards of Wall Street and the lobbyists of K Street (who abscond an ever greater share of this country’s wealth into their coffers) and toward “the government.”

The government, in this case, is a term of convenience. It doesn’t consist of firemen or policemen or soldiers or the people who build our highways or inspect our food or battle our plagues. Government is, instead, a golem – a dark figment borne of our civic paranoia and economic grievance. It’s some fat faceless Orwellian bureaucrat lounging in an office somewhere, dreaming up mindless regulations, skimming the cream from your paycheck, laughing quietly at your anguish.

The working and middle classes of this country know they got mugged. They just can’t identify the perpetrators.

***

The Occupy Wall Street movement is an effort to identify the perpetrators. It takes direct aim at the financial speculators and corporations who caused the economic implosion of 2008, the corrosive influence of money in our political system, and the obscene economic inequality this influence has wrought.

It consists of citizens – mostly progressives, but also independents and conservatives – who decided spontaneously to take to the streets. They were not exhorted by for-profit demagogues, or chauffeured to the site in luxury buses airbrushed with focus-grouped slogans.

They take their inspiration, at least in part, from the protests of the Arab Spring. They are not seeking to overthrow the government. They are simply tired of listening to politicians parrot the sick myth that unfettered greed will lead to shared prosperity. Their prospectus is that of Jesus of Nazareth, not Karl Marx.

***

Mitt Romney, the multi-millionaire businessman who is the likely Republican nominee for President, branded the protests “dangerous” and “class warfare.”

He did not explain, nor was he asked to explain, why the protests were dangerous, or to whom. His hysterical assertion of “class warfare” can be taken to mean that Romney fears his taxes may be raised by a few percentage points.

House majority leader Eric Cantor referred to the peaceful protesters as “growing mobs.” He blamed President Obama for “condoning the pitting of Americans against Americans.”

***

The movement is called Occupy Wall Street. It’s not called  Destroy Wall Street. Or Burn Wall Street. The protestors want to be physically present. They want the traders who work on Wall Street to face the human consequences of their machinations. And they, the protesters, also want the chance to gaze upon the traders:

As in Psalm 52:

Behold the man! He did not take God as his refuge, but he trusted in the abundance of his wealth, and grew powerful through his wickedness.

***

Socio-economic mobility has always been central to the American dream. But our civic culture is actually carefully structured to keep us segregated. The wealthy lock themselves away in luxury vehicles and gated suburbs. The impoverished remain in blighted areas, obediently out of view.

The system is self-reinforcing. As the money concentrates at the top, less is devoted to those resources that are shared by all of us – parks, schools, community centers, subway trains – the very places where people of different classes might peaceably mingle.

The wealthy hire lobbyists and tax lawyers to game the system. They remove themselves, physically and psychically, from their duties to the poor. In this way, the interests of the few crush the interests of the many.

***

If it was up to me, America would be a socialist democracy. The unforgivable crime of socialism is that it asks people to share. It puts the interests of the many before the interests of the few.

But most of the protestors aren’t advocating for socialism. They just want to see the government put an end to the cruel and disastrous excesses of capitalism.

Something worth remembering: during the Eisenhower administration, the tax rate on the richest Americans was 91 percent. Because they knew the government would get their dough if they tried to sock it away, the wealthy built factories and bought new equipment and hired workers instead. The economy boomed. High tax rates on the wealthy, it turns out, makes them better job creators.

***

The protestors don’t just want to be seen by Wall Street traders. They want to be seen by the politicians in Washington, and by their fellow citizens. They want their individual stories told. They are trying to rouse a great nation from its moral slumber. Look, they are saying: the era of passive complaint might still give way to collective action.

***

The response from most Democratic politicians has been tepid support. Many of them seem caught off guard, as if the sudden appearance of a national conscience were a chimerical beast bent on upsetting the natural order.

But it’s really not that hard to explain. Americans do, eventually, get fed up when they feel their values and interests are being ignored. They are capable of following the money. The great tragedy of the democratic party is that it has moved so far to the right that it no longer recognizes the protesters for what they are: agents of moral progress. Versions of who they used to be.

***

There is a history of activism in this country. When faced with atrocity, Americans don’t just sit around. They demand moral improvement: suffrage, abolition, the labor movement, civil rights. They come together in public spaces to consecrate the possible.

Imagine what happens if the protests get larger: ten thousand people, a hundred thousand, a million? The media can only ignore the underlying message for so long. Eventually, they will have to start to talk about economic injustice. The discourse will shift away from the failed catechism of tax cuts and deregulation, and toward the question of how much avarice we, as a people, will tolerate.

The real question is: what are we going to do? Are we going to do the inconvenient thing and turn off the computer and join the movement? Are we going to be counted by history? Are we going to consecrate the possible?

***

My father was arrested for protesting the war. He didn’t spend long in jail. That same afternoon he appeared at the end of our street. He was wearing a suit and tie. My twin brother Mike and I were on the sidewalk pretending to make pancakes, pretending we weren’t waiting for him. We ran to hug him.

Years later I would learn that my dad, who was at this time a junior faculty member at Stanford, had organized student protests against the war. His activism was frowned upon by the administration, and he was not asked to stay on. He was counted by history.

***

Update: After reading this piece, my father emailed me the following:

For the record book, your Mom and I picketed Woolworths in downtown New Haven during our first year of med school after a southern Woolworth’s refused to seat blacks at the lunch counter.  This was one of the first actions of the civil rights movement.

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A Rumpus Lamentation on What We Lost

Say you took the long view of September 11, 2001, the view from the heavens, the view of a compassionate celestial being. From up there, you’d see that approximately 150,000 earthlings died that day. Most of these deaths were caused by malnutrition and age-related illnesses, roughly 1500 were murders, hundreds more were due to civil wars. Also, 2,977 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington.

***

A lot of human beings died, that’s my point. They all left behind mourners.

Imagine the mother who watched her child die of hunger. Here’s this tiny person, a daughter. She has a name, a face. She doesn’t explode or fall from a skyscraper. She simply stops breathing. No cameras record her final moment, the lamentation of that mother. These images are not replayed on the television over and over and over. What would be the point of that?

***

I recently went on a radio program to discuss the literature of 9/11. The host spent most of the hour chatting with people about their memories. They all talked about watching television. They were telling personal stories about watching television.

***

One of the duties of the artist – not the only duty, but a central one – is to impel people to imagine the complexity of thought and feeling inside another person. Art complicates moral action, because we have to accept that other people matter, that their hardship and suffering, even their rage and sorrow, are, to some extent, our responsibility.

Propaganda has the opposite aim: it is intended to simplify moral action. People get to disregard the humanity of others. This makes them easier to ignore, deport, imprison, torture, enslave, and kill.

***

The story of 9/11, the grand fiction we constructed as a culture in the days and months and years afterward, ran something like this:

A band of religious psychopaths, acting without rational motive, murdered the innocence of a proud and blameless nation. Slowly, heroically, that brave nation dug out from the rubble and exacted revenge.

It was a story bled dry of doubt or nuance, a piece of propaganda. It divided the world along the fault-line of the zealot. America had been wronged and therefore could do no wrong.

***

At one point on this radio show, a TV producer discussed his decision to stop showing footage of the attacks. The host said she wanted to see those images; that she wanted to remember what had happened and how she’d felt. She was glad networks were going to re-broadcast that footage in the next few days. She added that didn’t want to see people jumping to their deaths, just the towers falling.

***

One of the novels I talked about on this radio show was Mao II by Don DeLillo. It envisions an age in which the novelist’s power to “alter the inner life of the culture” has been hijacked by terrorists whose “major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings.” Mao II was written in 1991.

***

If one of my relatives had died that day …

But, you see, none of them did. It felt fraudulent to me to appropriate the emotional life of those in mourning, to pretend those atrocities were something personal, to rhapsodize about national unity. What I felt was dread, a sense that my country was going to respond precisely as the terrorists intended: by becoming less human.

I visited a friend a week after the attacks, a good-hearted fellow who spent a lot of his time and money establishing a school for at-risk kids. He told me that he didn’t know exactly who’d done this to us, but that he wouldn’t mind seeing Uncle Sam drop a few hundred bombs on them. He looked down as he said this, because he knew, I think, that it was a shameful thing to say, that he was calling for other human beings to be killed, not because they had harmed him, or his family, but because they had harmed his sense of omnipotence.

***

The first line of the Iliad:

Sing, oh goddess, of the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles and its devastation

***

There was so much talk back then about how much we were feeling. We had all these feelings. The histrionics of the daytime talk shows infiltrated prime time. A culture addicted to images of artificial violence had finally gotten a jolt the real stuff: the unscripted ruin, the blood relics. It was a snuff film writ large. People got off on it. Watching the coverage was a turn-on: the pornography of grief. There was a sense of hysterical indulgence to it all, a bullying narcissism.

Nobody stood up – in Congress, in the bright studios of our corporate media, in city hall – to make the obvious point that millions of people in other parts of the world live in a state of perpetual danger. And that the events of 9/11 might therefore require of us a greater empathy for those suffering elsewhere, might even nudge us toward a more serious consideration of our own imperial luxuries and abuses, and how these might relate to the deprivations suffered in less fortunate precincts.

That’s not what we talked about. No, we talked about our feelings. Americans were bloated with empathy in the weeks after 9/11. But something fatal was happening: as a nation, we were consenting to pursue vengeance over mercy. We were deciding – with the help of all that deeply feeling propaganda on our television sets – that the only human suffering that mattered was American.

***

The tragedy of 9/11, then, wasn’t that 2,977 people died. It was that 2,977 Americans died.

***

In Corsica, the social code known as vendetta required Corsicans to kill anyone who wronged the family honor. One fourth of the population of Corsica was murdered, thanks to this code, in three short decades.

***

Freud and others were fascinated by the concept of “infantile omnipotence.” This is what a child feels early in his life, and what he must eventually surrender, when he realizes he does not, and cannot, control the world.

There are some people, though, who can never quite accept this truth. They don’t have a strong enough sense of self to sustain the psychic injury. And thus, they resort to magical thinking, delusions of grandeur, angry projections, wild superstitions. They become, in this sense, more closely aligned with primitive cultures.

It is my belief that the enduring legacy of 9/11 resides in a permanent regression of the body politic, a narcissistic injury that we return to as a talisman of self-victimization, and which allows us to frame our sadistic urges as moral duties.

The attacks stunted our capacity to accept the awful truth of the world. This is most obvious in the ravings of demagogues. But in the end, the demagogues merely provide cover for our own quieter, more subtle abdications.

***

Let us return to the long view, to the benevolent celestial being who may (or may not) be looking down upon us, and ask: Has the mass murder that transpired a decade ago made us a more compassionate people? More united? Less fearful? Less paranoid?

And if not, why not?

I believe the transmission of stories has something to do with this. Watching a building collapse on television is not a story. It engages the viewer in a spectacle, not an act of moral imagination.

What of the stories we tell ourselves, and our children? What do we, as artists, as parents, as citizens and activists, ask of our leaders? What do we ask of ourselves? That we gaze backwards at a misty image of our own bruised nobility? That we look ahead to some childish rapture? What of the horrors and holocausts of our present? What of the girl, her mother? Can the heart still feel what the heart must feel?

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Jennifer was, by all appearances, a typical Boston College student: well-dressed, well-behaved, well-groomed. She had gorgeous red hair, pleated with elegant clips. I did not harbor high expectations.

Then her first story arrived in my chamber of pain and I enjoyed that rare, true sensation: the confounding of my own bigotry.

Jennifer’s prose was sleek and playful, and it possessed the one quality sure to provoke my villainous cackle. It was subversive. Her narrator could see just a little bit more than the people around her–more of the lying and more of the hurt.

Keep your eye on this one, I said.

As so often happens when I say this, Jennifer is now more famous than I am. Knopf has just published her debut novel, Girls in White Dresses, to considerable acclaim. The book, which I read in a single indulgent evening, offers a keen (and keenly subversive) portrait of young women adrift in the big city.

There is much drinking and a good deal of fretting over marital prospects. Think Jane Austen–shaken, not stirred.

Once or twice a week, I check the book’s Amazon ranking. It remains almost unrecognizably low.

The Rumpus: A lot of readers are going to want to know if you’ve based any of the characters in “Girls in White Dresses” on me, your extremely famous former writing instructor. You may now comment.

Jennifer Close: I think we both know that the chapter titled, “The Best Writing Teacher Ever,” was pulled from the book, thanks to your lawyers. It’s out of my hands.

Rumpus: What, if anything, do you remember from our time together in class? Specifically: please explain in what ways you would never have been able to pursue a career in the literary arts without my guidance. [Note: in previous installments, interviewees have rushed through this question, and it has proved fatal to their careers.]

Close: I remember your painted briefcase (there was a cow on there, right?) and that I was always afraid you were going to yell at me.  You yelled a lot. And you called us all fuckers. All the time.  I now realize what an effective teaching tool that was, because I was ALWAYS prepared in your class.

Some other things:

You were the first person to introduce me to George Saunders, which started a slight obsession.

You once asked the class if any of us had ever seen anyone get shot.

You told us you stole Advil from CVS.

There was a girl in the class that had no sense of smell, and you got really excited about that. You wrote down the name of the condition so that you could use it in a lie later on.

Also, I remember chicken fingers. Everyone remembers the chicken fingers.

Rumpus: I admit I felt a little sad reading the book–that finding love is still such a sad and fraught endeavor. Did you feel sad writing the book?

Close: There were some times that I felt sad for my characters, especially when they were in a situation that they couldn’t see past, and I knew they felt like things would never get better or that they’d never move on.  But I think that there is a tendency in your 20s, to dwell and even indulge in your own sadness, because you’re at a time when you can do that.

But I also felt really happy at times, because there were little flashes of hilarious things that happened to these characters and even though they were sad sometimes, they also had a lot of fun.  That’s just the way it goes.

Rumpus: Any blowback from friends or exes who saw themselves in the pages?

Close: Well, my fiancé seems to think that every single male character in the book is based on him. Which is just greedy, when you get down to it.

No blowback yet, but as far as I know none of my exes have read it yet.  So thanks for making me nervous.  It surprises me how much people want to find the “real” parts of the book, no matter how many times I tell them it’s fiction. Of course, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t little pieces that I stole from my life. But that’s just what happens.  If your brother submits “whore” as a Scattegories answer when the category is “things that are sticky” during a drunk family Thanksgiving, then that is noted and will be used.  Sorry, Kevin.

Rumpus: There’s a gorgeous riff, late in the book, about a reality TV program in which fat people struggle to lose weight. What impressed me was the sudden compassion your character feels for the contestants. Did you have any idea, when you were writing the book, that my wife and I had gotten into a rather nasty “The Biggest Loser” habit?

Close: Um, no I didn’t know that but I’m not surprised.  I had my own nasty “Biggest Loser” habit and that’s what inspired that scene.  I’m not particularly proud of that part of my life, but I’ve moved on.  I do have to say that I cried—a lot—at that show, and I’m not a big crier.  There’s something so naked about their struggle.  It’s so physically challenging and every part of it is filmed, which is just downright embarrassing and makes you realize how desperate they must be to have agreed to such a thing.

Also, once I thought of the phrase, “Bawling at the big people” I really wanted to use it.

Rumpus: Please speak about your “publishing experience.” You may not use the word “grateful” or “platform.”

Close: Ok, I won’t say either of those words, but I will say this: It was really, really, lucky.  From start to finish, the whole thing went so well.  And I know this is not the case for so many writers, so whenever someone asks me how it went, “lucky” is my go to word.

I just feel so grateful to have this platform, you know?

Rumpus: It’s been a while since you’ve thought about this, so please return to our time together in class. Try to imagine what your life would have been like had you not had me as an instructor. Dwell in this dark place for a few moments. Now breathe.

Close: My life would have almost certainly been void of all things happy.

But seriously (and I’ve told you this before) I’m not sure that I would have pursued writing in the same way if it weren’t for your class. You gave us a lot of practical information for living as a writer.  You told us that the hardest part of being a writer was just doing the work, which I remind myself daily.

And you told me the most important bit of advice that I’ve ever gotten.

You said that it was embarrassing to be a writer—that it’s hard to tell people you want to be a writer, that you expose a lot of yourself in the process, and that it’s just embarrassing at times, not just for yourself but for your friends and family.

I think about that quite often, and I tell myself that it’s part of the job and that it’s worth it.  Because you told me it would sometimes feel this way, I know that I’m not alone, and that’s comforting.

Rumpus: Nice work. Your check’s in the mail.

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But it’s not why you should read the book. You should read the book because it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read before. That’s not blurbspeak from a pal. It’s stone-cold truth. The sentences are dazzling and distressed, driven along by the addled rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the absurd insights of Barry Hannah. They made me laugh for many weeks.

Billy’s a pal, so I’m not going to pretend I’m an impartial source. But he’s a guy worth listening to, then reading. You’ll see.

***

The Rumpus: So you gave me a draft of Busy Monsters, what, three years ago?  And I can remember reading the first paragraph and saying: “Holy shit! He’s done it!”  I said this out loud, though I didn’t know I was saying it outloud, because my wife said, “Who’s done it?”  The point is, I could tell from the first hundred words that you were writing in this insane, ecstatic voice, that you’d finally let the madman out of the cage.  What’s so strange to me is that you didn’t seem to understand how good the book was.

William Giraldi: When I showed you that draft I was terrified because I had spent four years working on it in secret and suspected that I had composed something slightly unholy and hellbent, and often one’s first impulse upon being confronted by something like that is to quash it.  I feared it was a spider on the wall that would surely get flattened, and my feelings are so easily hurt, so easily trespassed upon, I was just too afraid to show you or anyone else.  When I began the story, I remembered reading an essay by the great Austrian writer Karl Kraus in which he writes, “My language is the universal whore I must make a virgin,” and the wisdom of that line really speared me, so when I sat down to begin Busy, I knew that I wanted to wield English in a way that was unusual, both barbarian and virginal.

I also tried to heed your call for me to unshackle myself from the influences of Hemingway and Carver because you didn’t believe they permitted the full range of my personality to flourish on the page.  That was hard.  I wanted to be as emotionally raw and truthful as some of your own stories—“The Body in Extremis,” say—while crooning in this daimonic, Dionysian voice that made me feel possessed.  Creating that carnival of characters in Busy Monsters required a hell-for-leather inhibition that I was never capable of before because I think I was just too fearful of revealing the ecstatic madness in me.  Novelists fail if they’re afraid on the page.

But it wasn’t clear to me that I might have succeeded in my aims because I was just too full of doubt and trepidation, as most writers are, or should be, I think. I knew that the effusive language and ecstatic vision were going either to get readers excited or else make them very angry. And I feel grateful that I have any readers at all, that the reaction to Busy so far seems to be the former and not the latter.

Rumpus: There’s a contradiction in what you’re saying here, but a fascinating one. Writers do have to be fearless. But they also have to be in touch with their self-doubt, able to sniff out their own evasions and indulgences. That’s the basic balancing act between masturbatory prose and writer’s block. What impresses me about you, frankly, is that you’re able to use reading as your ballast. You connect so deeply to the minds of other writers, and to use their words for your creative guidance. You’re the most voracious and devout reader I know. I think that’s what keeps you humble.

Giraldi: You and I both know writers, in Boston and elsewhere, who are truly solipsistic. Anyone can spot them a mile off, because they have nickels where their hearts should be, eyes for only themselves.  One of the major blemishes I see in first novels by youngish writers is a stylish nihilism they mistake for ironic or satirical depth.  Solipsism and nihilism are always indicators of moral myopia, and a novelist with no moral center is like a planet with no sun: not a pleasant place to visit.  Of course we writers are interested in our own selves, but we must also be interested in others with equal or greater gravity, because human communion is the business of every storyteller.  Even a deeply interior, solitary, and ostensibly misanthropic novel such as Ivan Goncharov’s masterpiece Oblomov, in which the protagonist chooses “suicide by sofa,” is intimately concerned with human relationships.  Literature is an avenue to enlargement, to other experiences.  We read for pleasure, yes, but also for wisdom, for the chance to glimpse other minds and hearts, and for a possible hint about how to live our own lives in the midst of so much madness.

I’m often baffled and inexplicably depressed, and I’ve always suspected that betterment is to be found in books.  Harold Bloom insists that literature doesn’t make better people, and I agree with him that Matthew Arnold’s notion of literature as social corrective and surrogate for religion is a flawed notion indeed, but personally speaking, I read because I want to be better—a better writer, teacher, father, husband, human—and somewhere, in some important book, I’m going to find out how to begin to do it.

Rumpus: See, this is what I love about how you discuss books. You’re always focused on the book itself, and how its words enlarge the human conversation. One of the perversities of our age is this incessant focus on the author rather than the book.  It’s the by-product of a culture that doesn’t have the patience, the degree of attention, required for reading.  Most folks would rather gossip about a writer than talk about a book.  Some years ago, you’ll remember, that sweet jackass blogger spent a few hundred words insulting me. What amazed me about this guy—who passes himself off as a passionate advocate for literature—is that he had nothing to say about my work.  He hadn’t read any of my books. To me, that’s the real insult. I’m not saying that writers aren’t allowed to call each other out.  But it has to be about the work, and it has to be an honest disappointment in the quality of the work, not some fucked up grievance masquerading as an aesthetic complaint.

A few months ago, for instance, I reviewed a novel by a promising young writer, a guy whose work I’d read and enjoyed in the past. It was deeply disappointing.  By which I mean: he never developed the characters into real people. They spent most of their time alone. From time to time, they spouted dogma at each other. Occasionally they had sex, but not the kind that makes you feel anything. I spent the last half of the book frantically searching for some glint of genuine emotion, something I could praise.  So writers, and writer/critics, are allowed to dislike work.  But they have an obligation to say how and why the work fails, and to be explicit.  You and I have a difference of opinion here, but I feel any critic who levels an accusation against another writer’s work should provide a fair sampling of the prose to back it up. I hate feeling that I’m having to trust some critic, whose motives I don’t know. I’d rather trust the reader to make her own judgment.

Giraldi: We don’t disagree at all about the necessity of critics providing examples to support their claims, but I do dislike a critical essay or review that is just a smattering of quotes flanked by summary.  I think where you and I might disagree a bit on this is in my somewhat stubborn belief that one doesn’t really have any business writing professionally about books unless one’s business is books, because of course a novel or story collection isn’t composed in a vacuum but rather is a luminous or lackluster addition to a vast mosaic, has predecessors informing it, guiding it whether or not the author is aware of the influence, the anxiety of that influence.  This view might be unabashedly Bloomian but I think it happens to be true in most cases.

Some reviews in major venues are mere book reports, no better than what you see on Amazon, and reading reviews on Amazon is rather like looking for relationship advice on the wall of a public bathroom.  I won’t bemoan the current state of literary criticism or book reviewing because that’s painfully predictable and has been done by lots of critics in every era after Aristotle, and besides, I don’t believe criticism is in serious peril: wonderful critics are writing beautifully in important papers, magazines, and journals.  Meaningful intellectual and emotional engagement with the work should be the goal, I think—you’re right: the writer as a personality doesn’t matter—and I hope I always attempt that meaningful engagement, a placing of the book onto the mosaic.  Gore Vidal was my first American model for this.  I read his mammoth collection United States when I was nineteen and knew immediately that I wanted to learn to do something similarly dynamic with the literary essay.  I’m still learning.

But that word you used, “trust,” that’s the key, because the best critics and reviewers establish their authority in their prose and in their assertions and make it possible for you to trust them even when you don’t fully agree.  I don’t always see eye to eye with Hazlitt or Trilling or Kazin, but I always trust that they are being fair, that they have thought long and deep about what they are asserting, because I know that literature is their lives.  Those people you mention, those who gossip about writers: they are merely weekend readers, tourists in the land of literature, quasi-scribes with no authentic appreciation or love for the literary.  One of the smartest sentences ever written is another by Karl Kraus: “So many people write because they don’t have the character not to.”

Rumpus: I love that you keep quoting Karl Kraus.  We were lovers before the war.  Okay, one last question, and it has to do with Busy Monsters.  I think it’s a masterpiece, and I think a lot of people are going to agree with me.  You’re making the language new, in the manner of your heroes, from Barry Hannah to Hemingway to Hopkins.  And I think a lot of younger readers are going to read it and feel the thrilling yank of literature. But what I want to know is: are you freaking out, man?  Because I tend to freak out when things are going well, especially around my work.

Giraldi: Well, my son just turned two, and Katie is expecting our second child, so I’m not freaking out too much over Busy because I’m freaking out over how properly to raise this little hurricane I live with, and where we’ll put our new baby—our condo is a cubby—and trying to save money, etc.  Like you, I’m a father and husband before I’m a writer, and so my family keeps me grounded, keeps me from getting sucked down the publishing world’s rabbit hole.  But I’m immensely grateful for the good luck Busy has enjoyed thus far, for all the hard work Norton has done on its behalf.  One writes a novel nowadays and expects it to register not at all, so I feel very fortunate and, yes, even a little blessed.

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Weiner did not step down because he broke any laws, or because his desires made him behave in stupid and dishonorable ways, or even because his constituents turned against him. He stepped down because the media was going to flog the story until he did.

***

So here we are, citizens, back in the kingdom of the Starr Report, that sad realm where the Fourth Estate, in its desperation to enthrall and thereby profit, abdicates what the antique moralists among us might call a conscience.

For the past two weeks, actual grown-up Americans have risen from their beds and put on their grown-up clothes and driven their grown-up cars to their grown-up offices and pretended, collectively, that the most important event occurring on earth was not the possibility that the United States will default on its debt, or the mounting evidence that our planetary climate has gone kaplooey, or even any of the three and a half wars in which we are, as a nation, mired.

No, the big news was that a horny guy did some dumb shit.

***

“Horny Guy Does Some Dumb Shit.” That’s your Onion headline.

***

Long ago, in a past life, I left my job as an investigative reporter for a newspaper in Miami. I had lost my faith in journalism, but I still spent a lot of time with journalists because nobody else liked me. One night, a former colleague dropped by my apartment. She was an intense young woman who had spent some years in Central America, reporting on the atrocities visited upon those small and vulnerable countries. Now she worked for a major news magazine.

We talked for a while about her new job. She seemed agitated. Eventually, she confessed that she was working on the Monica Lewinsky story. In fact, she said, she was one of the only people on earth who had, in her possession, at that very moment, copies of the secret tapes made by Linda Tripp, in which Lewinsky described her trysts with President Clinton.

“They’re right out in the car,” she said. “I could get them.”

She stared at me for a moment, with her beautiful dark blue eyes, and there was something terrible in them, a creepy desperation to include me in her sin.

I’m not someone much burdened by self-control. But I didn’t want to hear those tapes. And I wanted that woman out of my house.

***

A friendly reminder: Thomas Jefferson took one of his slaves as a lover. Grover Cleveland had a child out of wedlock while in office. JFK fucked everything in sight.

The White House correspondents knew all about JFK’s tomcatting. But they didn’t regard it as a story. It was a private weakness, or a private need, not one that rose to the level of a public interest. They were busy reporting on boring shit like the Cuban Missile Crisis and Civil Rights.

***

It’s worth asking why Anthony Weiner’s indiscretions were so newsworthy, as compared to those of his colleagues. Weiner, after all, did not frequent prostitutes for kinky sex, as did David Vitter, the Louisiana Senator. Nor did he sleep with a member of his staff, then attempt to pay that staffer and her family tens thousands of dollars in hush money, as did John Ensign, the former Nevada Senator. Nor did he win high office by trumpeting his moral superiority in the realm of family values, as did both Vitter and Ensign.

Weiner’s great sin was more basic: he took pictures.

***

We live in a visual era. For a story to stick in the current media environment there must be, as the TV people so charmingly put it, footage. Much of the reason our media have virtually ignored our ongoing wars is because there’s no good footage of Americans dying, or Americans killing. At least, there’s no good footage they’re willing to air.

As with so much else in the modern condition, this speaks ultimately to a failure of the imagination. Stories aren’t enough. If we can’t see it, it’s not happening.

***

With Weiner, we could see it. There it was. A scrawny chest, poignantly waxed and flexed. A pair of grey underwear bulging with no-longer-private needs. The secret dispatches tapped out to women he’d never met, whom he didn’t really know, the words almost touching in their raw and hollow need, drawn straight from the pornographic idiom every man harbors in his lizard brain.

***

Not only did Weiner supply us images and a script, he transmitted these via the new technologies, with which the old media are entirely obsessed.

These technologies have nothing to do with the traditional virtues of journalism–the dogged pursuit of money and power, the ability to explain complex chicanery in simple terms, an abiding concern for the public good. On the contrary, they’ve accelerated our most pathological compulsions: to consume data passively, to graze the Internet for stimulative distractions, to forego the rigors of moral reasoning.

Watching our Fourth Estate treat some brandidate’s latest electronic fart as “news” is like watching an insecure chaperone attempt to moonwalk at a high school dance. It’s what all the kids are doing, right?

***

The technologies by which Weiner sought to assert his manhood and find a human connection – he was doing both – are the same technologies by which we are all voluntarily eroding our own zones of privacy.

What a complicated and Christian pleasure it is for us to watch someone else punished for our sins.

***

The fake moralists who staff the Opinion Industry–having fueled the obsessive coverage of guys such as Weiner, generally for partisan reasons–love to then retreat from their handiwork and draw lofty conclusions about what it all means. They trot out aphorisms like, Power corrupts and It’s the cover up that kills you.

But the Weiner saga resonated, fundamentally, because it was about loneliness and sexual desperation and the way in which our private anxieties can be conveniently relocated in a public scandal. Not a lot of us can afford to pay high-priced hookers, or pay tens of thousands of dollars in hush money. But we’ve all surrendered to more homely forms of temptation.

I wonder how many of the reporters who took part in Weiner’s downfall have ever sent a sexually yearning text message? Or taken a photo of themselves in a state of arousal?

I know I have. Have you?

We all leave evidence of our need. It’s what humans do.

***

When this evidence threatens to surface, we lie.

***

We are forever telling the world the same two stories about ourselves. One is about the person we want to believe we are–wise, compassionate, upstanding. The other is about the person we know ourselves to be – petty, cruel, sexually destructive. The best of our literary art arises from the collision of these two stories.

But journalists don’t like to admit to such literary inclinations, so they have to pretend that something else is going on, that they’re engaged in the dissemination of actual news. It’s a tough job, ma’am, but someone’s got to do it. Can you imagine what would happen if we weren’t out here guarding your children?

***

Now it’s time to talk about fallout. What will the fallout be? It’s one of those dependably disassociating “news” words. Now that we’ve destroyed a guy’s life, let’s step back, as if we’re just innocent and thoughtful bystanders, and assess the damage.

The immediate impact, politically, is pretty clear. Weiner was one of the few legislators who stood up to the corporate kleptomaniacs who now dominate the policy discourse of this country. He spoke in blunt terms about the ways in which the rich seek to impose their will upon the rest of us.

His elimination will make it that much easier for the powerful interests aligned against common decency to practice their black arts. Our political culture will be further sapped of its capacity to solve our common crises of state.

Winning!

***

The more profound impact will be in our growing confusion over what really matters to us as a people, and whether we can put aside the childish forms of titillation and dishonesty which hold us back from genuine moral progress.

Joan Didion, in writing about the Lewinsky scandal, noted that most Americans didn’t want that story told. They understood that the President had done some untoward things in the private realm. But they were more concerned about the things he did in the public realm, which effected them.

It was the media who rolled out the Lewinsky scandal, and who kept pumping time and money and fake emotions into it, as if it were a new product we desperately needed in our lives.

***

But we didn’t need it–not then, and not now. What we need is mature and ethical governance.

***

Weiner himself is gone, off to the pillory. He is sure to return to us soon enough, in the pinstriped cloak of a pundit, the bruised grin of an ironic cameo. For those of us left behind, the question remains: what can we do? How can we put an end to this kind of crap? The answer is pretty simple.

Stop gazing at the Weiner.

This is how it works in America right now: you vote with your attention and your money. You do it every day, whether or not you mean to. Every single time you give in to your worst impulses and click on a link that involves gazing at a Weiner or listening to a phony candidate tell lies (or even getting teased for telling lies), every time you choose to indulge in a “story” that you know has no real moral impact on our governance, you are taking part in the degradation of this country.

***

When I say you, of course, I mean I.

***

The goal of the media in late-model capitalism could not be more transparent. They are an industry. Their agenda is profit. All they want is your ears and eyeballs, on behalf of the sponsors. If you click on sexual hi-jinx and hairstyles and corporate propaganda, that’s what they’ll keep serving up. They will do so to the exclusion of those stories that might illuminate the growing perils of our species, and their potential remedy.

***

I think now (for whatever reason) of my grandfather Irving Rosenthal, who believed that all men and women should share equally in the bounty of our planet. He recognized the unlikelihood of this ever happening, given the prevailing greed of his homeland. Still, he remained convinced that a daily investigation of The New York Times might yield some elusive cause for hope.

I can only imagine what he would have said last week.

So much suffering in this world and I’m going to waste my time staring at some schmuck’s putz?

***

History will look back upon this moment with mirth and great sadness. The Weiner affair will be seen as yet another parable about our sexually neurotic and lonely population, unwilling to face up to its adult challenges.

But we write our own history. We need not service our devils. It is possible that Americans can and will grow up, that we will demand of our Fourth Estate an honest accounting of our condition.

They’re not going to get any better until we do.

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***

This isn’t his obituary. An obituary would require me to cite his accomplishments and transgressions, to refer to him as Mr. Scott-Heron, to traffic in the bogus gravitas that we use to commemorate the dead in print. The entire formula feels completely fucked up and wrong.

If you want to know who Gil Scott-Heron was and why he mattered to me more than any other artist on earth, check this out:

***

I first heard Gil back in 1984, when my uncle Pete gave me his Best of album as a high school graduation gift.

I had no idea what to make of the record at first. It did not sound like “Cruel Summer” by Bananarama. Nor did it sound like “Shark Attack” by Split Enz. The arrangements baffled me. Was this Latin music? Funk? And what of the strange instruments (flute? timbale?). Gil sang beautifully – when he chose to sing. But more often he delivered the words in a sly chant that confused and enthralled me.

It’s the reason we become enamored of certain singers, I think, because they project the voice we wish to summon within ourselves. His was a masterpiece: deep, resonant, slightly muddied by the South, learned but playful. “The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia,” he explained, in the track “B-Movie.”

They want to go back as far as they can even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment.… someone always came to save America at the last moment, especially in B movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan. And it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at like a B movie.

I’d never heard anyone explain, in language so simple and persuasive, the phony messianism of the Reagan Revolution.

***

Gil was was often hailed as the “Godfather of hip-hop.” It would be more accurate to say that he invented rap. He was the first person to fuse the tradition of the street preacher with that of the soul singer. In 1971, Gil released what remains his most famous song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang would not be released for another decade.

***

But this isn’t something we need to argue about, who invented what. It’s a kind of pointless critical dick measuring that gets us no closer to the art.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is frequently mischaracterized as a song about Black Power. It is a song about the tranquilizing effects of screen addiction, about how our compulsion to sit back and watch keeps us from taking action.

It was written more than forty years ago.

***

Actually, GS-H explains the song more eloquently than I  can.

That’s who died on May 27. That guy.

***

More than any single issue, Gil’s essential topic was America, how the nation had fallen away from its moral precepts and into ruin, a condition of spiritual malaise that would eventually deliver us the bigotry and psychotic greed of the Bush Era.

If this makes Gil Scott-Heron sound didactic, the fault is mine, for it is the unique talent of the prophet to convert rage into poetry. Gil did so by creating a musical lexicon that ranged from Marvin Gaye to John Coltrane, from James Brown to Tito Puente. “Shut ’Em Down” may have been about nuclear power plants, but it was also a joyous hymn, complete with horn charts and gospel singers. “The Bottle” managed to turn the ravages of addiction into a salsa party.

***

I saw Gil in concert years ago, flying from Miami to Washington, D.C., for the chance. It would have been impossible for him to live up to my hopes. Like any disciple, I expected an ascension. Why not? The club was small and we had good seats.

But Gil.

Gil was a wreck, a muttering wreck, jittery, coked up, or tweaked out on some other cruel amphetamine. He looked skeletal. He couldn’t remember the words to his songs and so resorted to vamping. Between songs, he delivered semi-coherent soliloquies in which the essential topic was his own desolation.

I was devastated. I was devastated because I have a birth defect, or possibly some other kind of defect, wherein I expect my musical heroes to shower the air with lilies of patience and wisdom. It didn’t occur to me at the time that prophecy – a heightened sensitivity to our moral lapses, a compulsion to declaim – might arise from internal distress. Certainly not in the case of Gil, whose precision as an observer of American folly was the equal of Twain, and who enjoyed the refuge of music.

***

What I had failed to discern (forgive me, I was still in my twenties) was that true prophets are cursed. They wind up stoned to death. Or alone in the desert, naked and howling. We might take as proof the fact that none of Gil’s albums reside in Rolling Stone’s Top 500. Such lists are reserved for the true artists of our age, the Def Leppards and TLCs. Gil has become a curious relic, the original uppity rhyming nigger, though he has no more to do with the contemporary hip-hop stars who sample his tracks than Isaiah did with the idolaters of Judah. He preached – with a great and useless eloquence – against the delusions of materialism and violence.

***

Gil himself became a spectral presence, arrested on drug charges, imprisoned for ten months on Rikers Island. An old girlfriend of his (or a woman claiming to be) described him as a crack addict living amid squalor, claims he denied. It was hard to know what to believe.

Still, I find myself wanting to defend the guy’s honor. The prophet is an idealist unable to silence his disappointment, who lashes out at the world’s demons at the risk of awakening his own.

His fate certainly came as no surprise to me. It was clear from the moment I set eyes on him in that club. The years had ravaged his face. His long body flicked like a sparrow’s. Time and again he looked in sorrow at a snifter of cognac, which trembled on his keyboard. And when he sang, his voice – once a magnificent gravelly croon – sounded torn.

***

You can find more of Steve Almond’s musings about music in his book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life.

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Does this mean that everyone who takes a class with me will meet a similar fate? I want to say no, that writing is too involved a process, too fraught with personal meanings and opportunities for self-abuse to be “taught” in the traditional sense, and that the most a teacher can do is inspire her pupils to withstand the slings and arrows of doubt. By which I mean yes.

This feeling is especially verdant right now, because Jane has just published her debut, Eden Lake, a novel that magically synthesizes my two favorite topics:  death and the sexual liberation wrought by summer camp.

Next year, St. Martins will publish a memoir loosely based on her popular blog, which documents her experience raising twin daughters. The fact that she has libeled me on the internet legally requires me to interview her.

***

The Rumpus: Talk me through the class in which we met. Anything you can remember that doesn’t involve how poorly I dressed.

Jane Roper: I remember that you showed up late for the first class, looking all frantic and rather mussed. You had a Wild Turkey bottle filled with water and I thought, Jeez, this guy is trying way too hard to look cool. But I gave you the benefit of the doubt because you were so poorly dressed.

Rumpus: I want to salute your ability to capture, in 50 words, my tardiness, my implied lack of professionalism, my sad and no doubt compensatory effort to look cool, and my poor wardrobe. Still. I’m troubled by the Wild Turkey bottle. It’s just not my style. Is there any chance you meant Hennessy?

Roper: Yes! Entirely possible it was Hennessy. Which makes it somewhat less pathetic as an attempt at cool, I guess. Bourbon is a sort of cliché writer drink, isn’t it? Cognac is much more unexpected.

Rumpus: Let’s move on to how deep I am.

The Esteemed Professor Almond

Roper: I remember you continually hounding us about going deeper into what our characters needed and desired and longed for. (You said them in italics). And I remember that you thought the first story I put up for workshop was really strong, which put me over the moon because it was only, like, the fifth short story I’d ever written, and I thought maybe I was some kind of genius. But the second one—whose title I still remember: “The Six-Foot Duffy”—you deemed not so great. (Title notwithstanding.) Which brought me right back down to earth, where I belonged.

Rumpus: A few years after that class, you went off to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I remember feeling a little worried on your behalf, because Iowa is such a tough little aquarium of talent. What was it like?

Roper: Yeah, that place was a bit of a mindfuck. It’s not that the students were outwardly competitive with each other. I really liked my classmates, learned a lot from them, and made some good friends. But the instructors weren’t particularly accessible. And the whole place had an aura of expectation about it; a sense that it was some kind of proving ground, and if you didn’t succeed here, then you probably wouldn’t succeed as a writer, period. Which is, of course, absurd.

The financial aid system at the time (I think it may have changed) was based on “merit,” so you always had the feeling there was this unspoken pecking order of talent. And I was pretty sure I was one of the lowliest and scrawniest of the literary chickens.

To this day, I suspect that I got in as a result of a clerical error. I’m not joking: A few weeks after I was accepted, I got a call from the administrative director of the program who said something weird like, “So, did you get that letter from us?” And then, “Well, do you know what you’re going to do?” Like she was kind of hoping I was going to say no, so they could give my spot to Jean Ropeer or whoever it was they actually meant to admit.

Rumpus: As a former summer camper, I tore through Eden Lake. It felt like you knew that world inside out.

Roper: I spent the first fifteen summers of my life at summer camps in Maine that my parents worked at or owned—all very progressive, idealistic, nontraditional places. So that culture was very much a part of my upbringing, and is recreated in the fictional Camp Eden Lake. The book is very much about how that sort of place—equal parts utopia and rich-kid summer resort—shapes/warps/traps/liberates the people who run it.

Sadly, since I was a “staff brat” at camp and my parents were always around, I never got to experience the sexual liberation that camp was for a lot of other kids. I was way too embarrassed by the idea of my parents catching a glimpse of me canoodling (as opposed to canoeing) with some other camper to act on my crushes, or even respond in the affirmative when boys indicated interest. I still regret saying no when Jeremy Goldstein asked me “out.” But part of it was just that I was a late bloomer. I would have been too chicken even if I had been away at camp on my own.

Rumpus: You have a serious following as a blogger for Babble, writing about your twin girls, Elsa and Clio. How do you toggle between those dispatches and the more serious literary work you do?

Roper: What, you don’t think writing about my children’s toilet habits qualifies as serious literary work? Actually, writing the blog has been huge for me in terms of developing my voice and building my confidence as a writer. And that confidence tends to carry over into the other writing I do.

Rumpus: Do the kids get what you do?

Roper: They know that Mommy is a writer, and that I write words and stories on the computer, and even that I write about them. But it’s all still pretty abstract. When the first copies of my novel were delivered, and I proudly showed them to the girls and said, “Look! Mommy wrote this book!” they were like “Yeah? So?” They write books all the time. We staple little pieces of construction paper together and they draw pictures of giraffes and ladybugs and then dictate stories for us to write down under them. Boom. Easy.

Rumpus: Your husband, Alastair Moock, is a fantastic musician and a very generous poker player. We love him a lot. What’s it like to be married to another artist, nay, a musician?

Roper: Except for the lack of steady income—and thanks, by the way, for your help with that, at the poker table—it’s awesome. I am a huge believer in cross-pollination of the arts, and I love that music and performance is such a big part of our lives. Before Alastair and I met, I listened to crap music. I still listen to crap music, but also a lot of really great music, too, thanks to him.

I also love that both Alastair and I are writers, but of a very different sort. We find a lot of common ground when it comes to the creative process, and we help each other out—I am his first lyrics-listener and he’s my first reader—but there’s never a sense of competition or jealousy or any of the other weird dynamics I imagine that partnered artists working in the exact same medium experience.

Rumpus: What’s next?

Roper: I just finished writing a memoir, inspired by my blog on Babble, about parenting twins and wrestling with clinical depression. That’s going to be published by St. Martin’s sometime in 2012. Once I finish with the revisions on that, I’m going to jump into another novel, this one set in Bridgeport, Connecticut—another setting from my youth. Just like a summer camp in Maine, but with more poverty, crime and human suffering.

Rumpus: That’s hot.

***

Jane Roper is the author of Eden Lake and Baby Squared, a narrative blog for Babble.com. Her memoir on parenting twins and dealing with clinical depression will be published in 2012. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and twin daughters.

Photo of Roper by Mara Brod.

If you live in New York City don’t miss Jane Roper’s Eden Lake book release party, featuring Rumpus rockers Diana Spechler and Elissa Bassist, at Housing Works on June 9th.

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