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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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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