I looked at it in disgust. “No,” I said. “I want a real dollar bill.”

This is the same grandfather who was a member of the Communist Party for most of his life, who believed that the bounty created by human industry should be divided based not on lineage or talent or temperament, but on need. I can’t imagine how sad that moment must have been for him. To stare into the face of so much childish want. It must have been like staring into the entire futile history of his life.

​***

Here’s another image that’s been haunting me recently:

The funny this is, this photo wasn’t even supposed to exist. It was just one of those things that happens when you’re young and full of beans, when you’ve raised $37 million of other people’s money, and when you plan to use that money to make even more money because, well, money is the whole point. It’s how you decide what matters. It’s the language you speak: value, security, worth.

​And so there you are posing with the rest of the guys at your new company, and after they finish the official portrait for the official Bain Capital brochure, where everyone has to stand around looking responsible, looking like guys who can be trusted with surplus assets, someone (not you, one of the other guys) suggests that the photographer take some more informal shots.

​There are seven of you, clean young executives with dark eyes and white grins, trying to figure how to let your hair down, how to show the world the souls beneath your suits. When the twenties come out, you go with it. Some of the other guys get a little overzealous. They line their collars and pockets. They take the bills into their mouths and grin rakishly. Why the hell not? It’s not against the law. This is 1984. Reagan’s in the White House. The Dow looks poised for a bull run. Gordon Gekko doesn’t even exist yet.

​***

A week ago, Joe Biden told a crowd in Youngstown, Ohio that Mitt Romney didn’t understand them. “My mother and my father believed that if my brother or sister wanted to be a millionaire, they could be a millionaire. My mother and father dreamed as much as any rich guy dreams. They don’t get us,” he bellowed. “They don’t get who we are.”

Biden was hailed for delivering such a rousing populist speech. But look at what he was saying: that the American dream resides in having a child who might someday be a millionaire.

Isn’t that exactly what Mitt Romney is saying? Isn’t that the underlying premise of a photo in which adult men eat money?

​***

Back in 1984, companies like Bain Capital were known as Leveraged Buy Out firms. Here, in brief, is how they made money. They got other people to give them money, which they used to buy “undervalued” companies. They made these companies more valuable by cutting costs. These efficiency measures included firing American workers and hiring cheaper foreign labor, and cutting worker benefits. They also used the companies as collateral to borrow money and issue a special dividend to repay their investors. Bain then sold the company at a profit. Whether or not these businesses survived (some did, some did not) the Bain guys made a profit. And because these millions were classified as “capital gains” they were taxed at fifteen percent.

In the words of one known Communist[1], Bain Capital was “a small group of rich people manipulating the lives of thousands of people and taking all the money.”

​***

A simpler way of putting this would be to say that Romney was very good at capitalism, which, in its purest form acts like a centrifuge, concentrating wealth at the top of the economic test tube.

​***

The reason Bain Capital is now called a Private Equity firm, by the way, is because the term “Leveraged Buy Out” got a bad rep. It was associated with swindlers such as the junk bond dealer Michael Milken, who raised money for Bain and other LBO firms. Also, back in the recession of the early nineties, a whole bunch of leveraged firms went bankrupt. A couple of books came out exposing the inner workings of the LBO world. It was a branding problem. So they changed the name.

Private equity. Much classier.

​***

In a rare burst of cogency, President Obama had this to say about his opponent’s experiences at Bain: “The reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Gov. Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience. He is not touting his experience in Massachusetts. He is saying he is a business guy, and this is his business.

“When you are president as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who get laid off and how are we paying for their retraining.

“If your main argument for how to grow in the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you are missing what this job is about.”

​***

Let me now, via the magic of the Internet, kiss Barrack Obama on the mouth.

​***

But look: greed has always existed. The desire to have more than your neighbor. We’re needy and rapacious creatures. Ask the rest of the species. Before humans hoarded bills and coins, we hoarded pelts and beads and wives and land. The Old Testament is, among other things, a long and rambling poem about the virtues of wealth: birthright, military might, desirable real estate. To quote the prophet Sting: get your harlots for nothing and your slaves for free.

My own sweet daughter, who is five years old, has collected money obsessively since she was three. She understands what it represents: autonomy, status, power. There’s a dark magic in abundance. We have only to gaze into our loyal screens, where the worship of wealth has replaced religion as a path to redemption.

In this sense, Mitt Romney has offered us a consistent and admirably candid vision of his worldview. Corporations are people. Worth should be defined in material terms and coveted. Efficiently managed greed is the essential engine of our republic.

​***

Still, I keep thinking about that damn photo.

I keep wondering: How would people react to that image if the people in it were young African-Americans in saggy pants and chunky gold jewelry? What assumptions would we make about their values? About the means by which they acquired their prosperity? Or if the figures looked like Paulie Walnuts, with slicked back hair and pinkie rings and tracksuits?

Capitalism wears many uniforms. But it’s designed to select for psychopathic behaviors. You don’t get ahead by doing the right thing, by being kind.

Asking Mitt Romney to help poor people is like asking a hammer to help a nail.

​***

There are times, usually late at night, when my mind replays that moment with my grandfather. I keep telling him I don’t want his lousy fake dollar bill. I want real money. What am I trying to tell him, really?

A few years later, my twin brother Mike and I accompanied our grandpa to the airport. We were supposed to be saying goodbye because he was going back to the Bronx and we wouldn’t see him for a long time. But all we cared about was checking the little change compartments at the bottom of the pay phones for coins. We ran around the airport in a kind of frenzy.

​It must have broken his heart that we spent our final moments with him dashing around after money, that his love wasn’t enough. But he was our grandpa. After a few minutes, he called us over and suggested that we check the two pay phones closest to him. He had left in each of them a single shining dime.

​We knew he’d put them in there for us, but we never said thank you, because we had to pretend it was just luck.

​We were children. The world was about us, our foolish wants. We knew almost nothing about our grandpa back then. I still know very little, because his life was really two lives: the safe, public version in which he worked for an insurance company and fought his way into the middle class and supported a motley cast of relatives. And the secret life, as a member of The Party who wrote articles under a pseudonym and watched his wife surrender her job as a elementary school principal in Harlem to avoid naming names, who dreamed of a workers’ paradise.

​Years later, in the months before cancer took him under, I visited him in his small co-op apartment in the Bronx. I could see that he was in tremendous physical pain and so I sat across from him in the dusk and tried to think of how I might apologize, whether it was too late.

Somehow, for us, for humans, love is never enough.

​***

Honestly, you think you’re eating the money.
But it’s the other way. The money’s eating you.

______________________________________________________________
1 Newt Gingrich

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Jim wasn’t a jock or a charmer. His social manner was awkward and his voice was oddly high-pitched. But he was big and handsome enough and most of all he was rich and this gave him a sense of entitlement that the rest of us understood and accepted. I don’t remember what Jim said to Tammy exactly, but they’d done this kind of hostile flirting before, and so Tammy said something back to him and suddenly he grabbed at her breasts. She tried to knock his hands away and laughed, mostly, I can see now, to stave off her own panic.

I remember that Tammy had a friend named Jen, and that a friend of Jim’s reached for her boobs and that she yelled No as loud as she could. I can still see her pretty face, flushed with the sudden color of her terror, which was enough to get this kid to stop. Jim didn’t stop. He got behind Tammy and wrestled her to the ground and began to rub himself against her. I don’t know how long they were on the ground. Maybe it was just a few seconds. Maybe it was minute.

What I do remember is that he reached between her legs and grabbed her there and that he looked up at the rest of us who were standing just a few feet away, watching, doing nothing, and with a look of abject triumph he said, “Man, Tammy, you’ve got some big ass pussy lips.”

*

He sexually assaulted her. That would be the simple legal description of what he did, though it was worse than that, because he didn’t just want to harm her. He wanted to humiliate her publicly. And he wanted us to take part, to bear witness, to watch and admire what he was man enough to do, and to hear him malign—in that eerie, effeminate voice of his—her intimate anatomy.

I wish I could report that I did a single thing, that I confronted Jim, that I comforted Tammy, that I told a teacher. But like the rest of the kids in fifth period social studies at Wilbur Junior High, I shuffled into class and sat at my desk and tried not to look at Tammy, who was trying desperately not to cry, or at Jenny, who was trying to comfort Tammy without drawing the attention of our teacher, who was trying to get us to give a shit about the Constitutional Convention.

*

That’s how adolescence works. It’s a place of tremendous pain and recklessness, a place where you have to pretend not to care about anyone or anything too much because to do so would release the chaos of your actual self into the world. It’s a place where tyranny resides as much in circumstance as in character, a place where our shadow selves emerge: ugly, ferocious, lit up by shame.

I remember every single cruelty I endured and inflicted, teasing a disabled teacher behind her back, grappling with a classmate and ripping open the stitches on his head, weeping in fear and confusion at the kids who bullied me in metal shop. Adolescence scrawls its crimes on the heart.

*

And thus we arrive at this, reported in the Washington Post:

In the spring of 1965, when Mitt Romney was a senior at an exclusive Michigan private school, he became obsessed with the unconventional haircut of another student, a soft-spoken younger boy named John Lauber who was routinely teased for being a suspected homosexual. “He can’t look like that,” Romney told a friend of his. “That’s wrong. Just look at him!”

A few days later Romney, who was at this point the son of the state’s governor, led a posse of fellow students in a physical assault on Lauber. They tackled him and pinned him to the ground. Lauber’s eyes filled with tears and he screamed for help as Romney hacked away at his hair with scissors. Romney then led the cheering mob back to his room.

The reason we know this happened is because five different friends of Romney who either witnessed or took part in the assault spoke to the Post about it, independently and on the record. Every single one of them expressed remorse.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me … What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

“It was a hack job. It was vicious.”

“He was just easy pickins.”

One of Romney’s close friends recalled expecting some punishment to be meted out to the governor’s son. But nothing ever happened to him.

Lauber was later expelled from the school for smoking a cigarette.

*

The Post also reported that Romney made degrading comments about another classmate he felt was effeminate, and orchestrated a “prank” in which he caused a nearly blind teacher to walk into a glass door.

*

Romney’s response to the story has been two-fold. First, he said this:

“I’m not going to be too concerned about [the Post] piece. They talk about the fact that I played a lot of pranks in high school and they describe some that, well, you just say to yourself, back in high school I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended obviously I apologize but overall high school years were a long time ago.”

He insisted that he didn’t remember the hair-cutting episode.

Then his campaign began scouring the candidate’s Rolodex for old friends who could vouch for what a jolly good fellow Romney was in high school. Because that’s what Romney does when he’s “not too concerned” about a major newspaper reporting that he was a vicious homophobe in high school.

*

Romney performed public service in high school. He met his future wife. He was a poor athlete who collapsed near the finish line during a cross-country race, and later he became a cheerleader. He petitioned to be admitted into honors classes, after being denied. His cruelty to others seems to have derived from a compulsion to be popular. Do people ever really change?

*

As I read about Romney’s adolescent exploits, I found myself thinking about Tobias Wolff’s sad and lovely novel, Old School. The narrator of that book is an insecure and manipulative scholarship student trying to pass at a fancy prep school, a kid who understands the prerogatives of wealth: “You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.”

But I don’t think Romney feels this way, not deep down. I think he has more in common with Wolff’s striving narrator, actually. By which I mean that he seems to display, as an adult, the same need to scheme and maneuver to get ahead. Like George W. Bush, he was an essentially frightened, unloved young man who came of age under tremendous pressure to live up to a famous father, who failed to distinguish himself as a scholar or an athlete and was relegated to the sidelines, whose desperate jocularity was shot through with a kind of unexamined sadism. Both men have forged a path to success via an alarming absence of self-reflection.

*

I don’t mean to suggest that Romney is without compassion. I believe, for instance, that he loves his wife and his children, and that he believes in God and the flag. But there is something in his character that I am starting to get frightened about, an unwillingness, or an inability, to feel remorse, to simply own up to a moral failing, to apologize not just if “somebody was hurt” but because you know, deep down, that you hurt someone.

Think about it: here are these half dozen men who took part in a savage act nearly fifty years ago. It has haunted all of them. And the ringleader, the guy who made the plan and led the mob and cut the victim’s hair off remembers … nothing?

It’s just bullshit, total fucking sociopathic bullshit. And it makes me sad that such an episode comes to light and all Romney can do—a guy who wants to be elected to our highest office—is nervously lie and make excuses, as if this were political problem.         It’s not a political problem. It’s a moral problem. It’s a sin he committed for which any believer would seek atonement.

*

John Lauber, the boy whose hair Romney would not tolerate, died of cancer some years ago. A fellow high school classmate happened to run into him in an airport before his death. The classmate apologized for not doing more to help him during the attack. Lauber paused, then spoke about how frightened he’d been during the incident. “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then,” he said.

*

“It was the nature of literature,” Wolff writes, “to behave like the fallen world it contemplated, this dusky ground where subterfuge reigns and certainty is folly.”

It’s no coincidence that the one man willing to lie about his savagery as an adolescent is the one running for president. In a sense, the modern political system selects for this kind of moral amnesia.

But it matters. George W. Bush was a destructive president because he was a deluded man. He made bad policy because he lacked the empathy and humility to think about the human cost of those policies.

*

Another way of saying all this would be for me to admit that, wherever else I might be in this world, I am also back there at Wilbur Junior High, standing in that breezeway before fifth period social studies as Jim walks up to Tammy and grabs her breast and tackles her to the ground and digs his hand between the legs of that poor girl and even now I’m doing nothing to stop him and I should have but I didn’t because I was too frightened and there is nothing I can do for the rest of my life that will undo that cowardice or the shame that any decent human being, in remembering such a thing, should feel.

**

More from Steve Almond.

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I certainly don’t mean to pick on Adam Shell, but I’m not sure he’s reading the same play I am.

The Willy Loman in my head is a 63-year-old white man in a state of angry dependence (on both his boss and his best friend), a guy who worships the free market system that has crushed him, and who retreats into grandiose delusion rather than face his circumstance. Were he around today I suspect Willy would be ripe for the aggrieved pageantry of the Tea Party, not that grubby populism of Occupy Wall Street.

It’s a dopey argument, I guess. Joyce Carol Oates is right: Willy Loman is all of us. We all fail in our quest for the heroic. We spurn the rescue offered by those who love us. We expect more of people than we should. We’re all lonely nomads “way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.”

***

I can’t read that line, in particular, without thinking about Mitt Romney, your GOP nominee at last. Mitt having to travel around and pretend to give a shit about cheesy grits, trying to quote lyrics from an ancient rap song so as to “connect” with the young African-Americans awkwardly huddled around him for a photo op. Why make him do this? Why make him pretend?

But we’re a country of salesmen, so when the time comes to choose our leader we put our would-bes through this ritual humiliation. The ones who grew up poor—your Clintons and Reagans and Obamas—come to it naturally. They’re used to having to sell themselves. And there are a few wealthy outliers, folks like JFK and FDR and even Dubya, who recognize that charisma resides in a genuine desire to commune with the masses.

Romney, who inherited and enlarged a fortune, does not possess such gifts. He’s handsome and has a talent for lying without sounding defensive about it. But the main thing he has going for him is a shaky economy. It may be enough. Ask Herbert Hoover. Ask Bush the Elder.

***

Romney’s real job for the next six months is to get people to buy into a form of capitalism that is stacked against them. He might be pretty good at it. Think about all those workers at the factories he acquired. He had to convince them to get with the program, even when the program called for them to kiss their jobs or pensions goodbye. Why? So he and his board of directors could flip the business for a profit.

It’s not against the law. On the contrary, it’s the law of the jungle.

Romney needs to convince us that jungle law can make us all rich. And for this to happen he needs to awaken our inner Willy Lomans, so we’ll look upon him as Willy looks upon his older brother Ben:

Willy: Boy! Boys! Listen to this. This is your Uncle Ben, a great man! Tell my boys, Ben!           

Ben: Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into jungle and when I was twenty-one I walked out. [He laughs] and by God I was rich! 

           

Willy [To the boys]: You see what I been talking about? The greatest things can happen!

***

Radical naivete in the service of the ego. Romney is going to have to push this dope. He’s going to be that handsome, well-dressed boss who pays a visit to your failing branch for a pep talk. You won’t remember what he said, but you will remember the cut of his suit, the sheen of his hair.

It’s important to pay attention to what he says, though, because he is, in his own way, telling us the truth. His first formal attack on President Obama as the GOP nominee was an open defense of privilege. He began by noting, with a straight face (which is, if you’re Mitt Romney, the kind of face you’re pretty much stuck with) that America under Obama has “effectively ceased to be a free enterprise economy.[1]

What he said next was truly fascinating:

“We’ve already seen where this path leads. It erodes freedom. It deadens the entrepreneurial spirit. And it hurts the very people it’s supposed to help. Those who promise to spread the wealth around only ever succeed in spreading poverty.”

***

Translated from Romney into Proletarian:

“The people who promise to concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of the few are the only ones who can cure poverty.”

***

We’re properly in the territory of Orwell here. But the pitch aims straight for Willy Loman. Remember: he’s the guy who turns down the job his friend Charley offers because, after all, that’s a handout. He wants a golden dream to chase into ruin.

The greatest things can happen!

***

People tend to forget that “Death of a Salesman” was written in 1949, at the dawn of America’s post-war boom. The government’s official policy back then was “spread wealth around!” There were banners and everything.

The tax rate on the Mitts of the day was 90 percent. New Deal reforms had shackled Wall Street. Labor unions represented a third of the workforce. The GI bill made college and housing affordable. The man who oversaw all this Communism was General Dwight Eisenhower.

And here’s what happened: a broad American middle class emerged. Rich people did just fine. (Spoiler alert: rich people always do fine.) But everyone else prospered, too.

***

So how, then, do we explain Willy Loman? How did he miss the boat? He missed the boat because there are always people who miss the boat when it comes to our hallowed free enterprise system. Even in the good times, people fail.

Arthur Miller was writing about (among other things) the anxiety of capitalism, what it’s like to live in a nation where success and failure is measured in material rather than moral terms. How the slavish pursuit of wealth impoverishes your soul.

Mitt and his industrial allies are going to throw billions into portraying Obama as a Stalinist Black Panther with secret Muslim loyalties. That’s the playbook when your actual policies are wildly unpopular. But Mitt as a candidate is only going to resonate if enough voters still think and feel like Willy Loman, if they look upon the tycoon as a sign of American vitality, rather than a symptom of our spiritual sickness.

_____________________________________________________

[1]Two things. First, speaking as America’s only openly socialist pundit, let me just say: wouldn’t that be awesome? If Obama just went Teddy-Roosevelt-style nuts and dismantled our country’s consolidated engines of greed? If he issued executive orders nationalizing our energy sector? If he slapped a luxury tax on the sickening excess of the swells? Shit. I’m getting hard just thinking about it.

Second, should Romney ever expose himself to a question from someone not employed by Roger Aisles, I am hereby begging that person to ask Romney to explain, precisely, what Obama has done to end free enterprise. Maybe he can offer me some hope.

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Nearly 200 years later we got Watergate, in which Richard Nixon, a sitting president, consented to having his underlings conduct a wide array of dastardly deeds, including spying on political opponents and recruiting conservatives to infiltrate opposition groups. The latter practice was known as “ratfucking.”

The eventual exposure of Nixon’s lies, and subsequent resignation, provided the nation a comforting sense of moral reassurance. We were not, to quote the man in question, crooks. Nor would we brook such skullduggery amongst our leaders.

But the true fate of dirty tricks in modern American politics resides in a more obscure story, that of the chubby, bespectacled teenager who, in the fall of 1970, lied his way into the campaign offices of Alan J. Dixon, the democratic candidate for Treasurer of Illinois. Without anyone taking notice, the teenager stole 1000 sheets of campaign stationary, which he turned into fliers touting “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing” at the next Dixon rally. He then handed them out at local soup kitchens.

Karl Rove: you were adorable as a youngster!

***

Rove and a colleague wound up touring the country, training young Republicans in the fine art of ratfucking. These pep talks earned the young college dropout a bit part in the Watergate saga. The Washington Post ran a story about them in August of 1973, a year before Nixon resigned, with a headline noting that the Republican party was probing a minor official “as Teacher of Tricks.”

But here’s the crazy part. Rather than sending Rove into political exile, the chairman of the Republican National Committee—a man by the name of George Herbert Walker Bush—brought him to Washington. Four years later, Rove was sent to Texas where he met Bush’s hard-drinking son George W., and became his lodestar.

Rove learned two enduring lessons. First, that fortune favors the bold. And second, that the Republican party—for all its moralizing—almost never punish politicians or their advisors for dirty tricks. It promotes them.

In subsequent years, Rove built an empire dedicated to what is known in political circles as “driving the negatives.” The idea is simply to carpet bomb the electorate with direct mailers and television ads that accuse a candidate of whatever seems scariest. The truth of these claims is, to an astonishing degree, irrelevant. What matters is that the accused candidate never gets to discuss his or her own policies, because they are stuck defending themselves.

Dirty tricks are especially effective in wooing what political commentators generously call the “low-information voter.” A recent survey revealed that a majority of Mississippi Republicans believe President Obama is a Muslim. The low-information voter constructs reality according to his bigotries, and folks like Rove make sure those bigotries are kept at a boil.

But driving the negatives also works to keep voters in a state of perpetual disgust that obscures their own best interests. This is why voters overwhelmingly support the particular provisions of health care reform—the provision that forbids insurance companies from refusing coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, say—but oppose the law. Muddy the political bath water enough and out goes the baby of policy.

***

Dirty tricks thrive today because of fundamental changes in the laws regarding money and political speech. Back in the days of Watergate, Dickie Nixon actually was held responsible for the activities of the Campaign to Re-elect the President. Thus, he was forced to lie about their activities, to engineer a cover up. And it was the cover up that doomed him.

Candidates these days don’t have to worry about cover ups. They simply outsource their dirty work to organizations that claim to be independent entities. Some of this outside money goes to political action committees. But Super PACs require that donors disclose their names.

And so increasingly, dirty tricksters are choosing to create tax-exempt non-profit groups which are ostensibly operated “exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” Karl Rove has a Super PAC (American Crossroads) but also a non-profit called Crossroads GPS. To clarify: Crossroads GPS is a 501 (c) (4). The IRS considers it a “civic league or organization,” an entity of the sort traditionally formed to fight cancer or foster the arts or, you know, promote social welfare.

Billionaire donors love these new shadow PACs because they can give unlimited cash anonymously. Which is why Crossroads GPS has raised twice as much money as Rove’s plain old Super Pac. Both entities will be pouring tens of millions into driving the negatives of democratic candidates this fall, as they did in the past election cycle, when Republicans regained the House majority.

Ratfucking also has become an accepted practice among the quasi-journalists at the extreme ends of political spectrum. The late Andrew Breitbart, aided by his loyal enemies in mainstream media, built a career on ratfucking. Lacking the courage or integrity to practice, or sponsor, genuine investigative reporting, he simply sat in his basement and edited videotape dishonestly. Rather than being arrested, or ignored, he became a regular on the cable TV circuit.

***

These innovations in ratfucking have been a Godsend to Mitt Romney. The former Governor has proved an unmitigated disaster as a retail politician. He is unable to win voters over via the traditional channels of human interaction. People don’t like him. They don’t trust him. On a gut level, they don’t feel they know him.

But Romney and his backers have one thing his opponents don’t: lots and lots of money. And they have used that money to dispatch one challenger after another by pouring millions into nasty television ads. Romney clobbered Gingrinch in Florida, and Santorum in Illinois and Wisconsin not by winning voters to his cause (whatever that might be) but by driving their negatives up.

Romney could, of course, pursue another course. He could seek the counsel of his conscience. He could ask himself why he wants to be president, what he believes in and who he is. And he could make an effort to put that across to voters. But he’s not that kind of guy. He’s a creature of the business world, a pragmatist. He knows what works. Why give a heartfelt speech, or take questions from the public, when you can pay for a private appeal to voter’s resentments and fears, delivered via television? It’s risk-free ratfucking.

Over the course of the primary season, it’s become painfully obvious that Romney and Rove and company are going to conduct their campaign against Obama in precisely this manner. Look no further than the upcoming Pennsylvania primary: the barrage of hate advertising aimed at Rick Santorum over the next two weeks is but a misting of the slime to come.

The members of the Fourth Estate might certainly ponder how the production and distribution of raw political propaganda can be characterized as “promotion of social welfare.” That, my friends, is a riddle you might want to take up with your local representative, or newspaper editor, or with the Supreme Court

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Which is fine. The money’s good, enough to send home a bundle every month and to pay for a one-bedroom outside Indio. You’ve got a coffee maker, a microwave, a flat-screen the resort was ready to trash. From where you came, from what you grew up amid, this is a dream life, safety and abundance, and you love America, even if nobody visits, and the only night sounds are the drone of the A/C and the dumb rumble of the big trucks on I-10.

***

But then it’s Friday morning and the guy who acts like your boss – he’s not really your boss, but he could make trouble about your papers, so he gets to deliver orders like they were his – tells you there’s no work today, no work tomorrow, or Sunday. You look at him like, What? Because this is late January, peak season, and the register lists every single room as booked through Monday.

Go home, he says. Don’t come back till Tuesday.

Am I in trouble? you say.

Just get the fuck out of here, he says. Crack some beers. Have a fiesta.

You want to ask someone what’s going on, but you can tell from the way this asshole’s talking to you that he’s scared, too, that whatever’s happening is bigger than he can pretend to understand. So what you do is park yourself behind a berm near the driving range, and watch as the black SUVs glide in from the airport. Men emerge from them, alone, in suits mostly, a few golf shirts. They blink at the sun, glance around, slip into the lobby. You’d like a closer look but you realize, suddenly, that there are private security guys flanking every entrance, standing in the small rods of shadow cast by the columns. There’s a queasy charge in the air that reminds you of something you saw as a little boy, standing outside the municipal building with your father. A phalanx of bodyguards passed by, at their center a plump man in a fedora and sunglasses.

You asked, Is it the governor, papa?

Your father issued a sharp hiss and lowered his head and you understood, without wanting to, that it was your place also to fall silent and look away, that this was the nature of true power, to make itself invisible, and to impose its will through the garish, costumed puppets of the church and state.

***

So you go home. What choice do you have? It’s not your place to solve the mystery of American democracy. But here, in fact, is what’s happening:

Charles and David Koch, inheritors of an oil and chemical fortune, have invited 250 of their wealthiest allies to a retreat which will raise $100 million in a single weekend. This money will be funneled into political action committees to buy television ads against the President. Virtually every single one of these ads will be driven by distortions, or outright lies. They will represent an unprecedented infusion of propaganda into the political discourse of the United States. The special interests once focused on morally malleable elected officials will try their luck lobbying a lazy and aggrieved electorate.

The reason you and the rest of the staff have been sent home—that the restaurants have been closed, the facilities locked down—is because the Koch Brothers don’t want people to know what they’re doing. If word gets out, protestors show up, then the media, then people start asking questions about the motives of those willing to pony up $100 million to shape the electoral process.

***

You can’t know this, but there’s a long back story here, which starts in 1973, when President Richard Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment. The Watergate scandal grew out of a break-in engineered by Republican operatives. They were seeking to illegally tape Nixon’s political opponents. The following year Congress, in an effort to curb corruption, set a strict limit on contributions. Republicans lost badly at the polls.

Ever since, they have been trying to figure out how to get more money into the political process without breaking the law.

It’s worth asking why conservative candidates need all this money and the short answer is because, as a rule, they can’t win on the issues. And they can’t win on the issues for the simple reason that their core economic policies—cut taxes for the rich, cut spending for everyone else, deregulate business—are wildly unpopular.

The way Republican candidates win, therefore, is the way Nixon won the presidency in the first place: by appealing to the primal negative emotions of an electorate willing to set aside its own economic self-interest. His Southern strategy was predicated on scaring white Democrats into voting for him by playing to their anxieties about an empowered African American population.

***

What Republican operatives quickly realized was that they needed a way around those pesky contribution limits. And the way around them was to form political action committees, PACs, that were officially unaffiliated with campaigns, but worked on their behalf.

These “independent groups” not only funneled millions of dollars into elections, but provided cover to candidates who enjoyed the political benefits of sleazy ads while dodging blame for running them. George Bush, for instance, ran for the presidency in 1988 against Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis. Bush the elder won partly because of an “independent” ad featuring the mug shot of an African American murderer named Willie Horton, who had raped a woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. The message was simple: elect Dukakis and your (white) women get raped.

The Bush campaign claimed to have nothing to do with the ad. But Bush’s media consultant, Roger Ailes, later joked about creating a version for the official campaign: “The only question is whether we should show Willie Horton with a knife in his hand, or without.” Ailes currently works as chairman and C.E.O. of Fox News.

Sixteen years later, George W. Bush was the recipient of a similar gift, when a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth produced an ad questioning the valor of Bush’s opponent, John Kerry, who served in Vietnam. The ad deflected attention from the fact that Bush avoided serving in Vietnam.

Because these ads are, by nature, salacious and incendiary, the corporate media covers them obsessively, thus magnifying their impact. In this way, campaigns drift further and further from matters of actual policy.

***

From time to time, legislators have sought to limit the money in politics. But Republicans recently have found solace in the judiciary. Stacked with conservative appointees, the Supreme Court ruled two years ago, in Citizens United, that the government cannot limit spending for political purposes by corporations and unions.

The result has been a deluge of corporate money into PACs, and the expansion of a kind shadow army, consisting of operatives and ad men utterly unmoored from the codes of conduct that govern traditional political campaigns. To extend the metaphor: political war in this country has gone rogue. It is no longer waged by soldiers loyal to the Geneva conventions, but mercenaries who are beholden to nobody but the men who pay them.

***

And this, of course, is what brings us back to the Renaissance Esmeralda in Indian Wells, and to you, the worker sent home for the weekend. Because what the Koch Brothers are doing, while perfectly legal, is morally unsightly. Americans take pride in their democracy. They don’t like feeling that they live in some primitive backwater, where oligarchs meet in secret to buy elections.

And you yourself, though an immigrant in this place, mostly reviled, probably want to believe this, too. That’s partly why you came here. It wasn’t just because there was money to be had, but because you assumed that in America power resided with the many, not the few.

And this is why you feel such a strange foreboding as you watch these men gathering on the grand rotunda. You will feel it later on as well, in the night, the same reverberations of dread, as you gaze out your window at the flicker of the screens in the homes around you, the people staring into them, hypnotized by rage and innuendo, ready to believe. You will be reminded of the sudden obedience in your father’s eyes, the way he consented to his tyranny, the way he wouldn’t look up.

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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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