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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

The Esteemed Professor Almond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rumpus: Do the kids get what you do?

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

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

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

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

Rumpus: What’s next?

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

Rumpus: That’s hot.

***

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

Photo of Roper by Mara Brod.

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

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Although the blow was technically a mistake, I’ve always felt that I was seeking revenge for his bullying. My brother remembers it differently. He was told not to step into the path of my swing, but ignored the warnings.

Memory is not a recording device. It’s the past as filtered through the emotional needs of the present. In this sense, memory can be thought of as a creative act, though, crucially, an unconscious one.

***

You will have heard, by now, of the curious case of Greg Mortenson, the author of Three Cups of Tea. As documented by the author Jon Krakauer, among others, Mortenson appears to have falsified vast swaths of his best-selling memoir, including a dramatic abduction by the Taliban.

Over the past decade, the fake memoir has become a genre unto itself. A few years ago, an Oregon writer named Margaret Seltzer wrote a fake memoir called Love and Consequences, about her years running drugs in South Central Los Angeles. Around the same time, Misha Defonseca wrote Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, in which she claimed to have lived with a pack of wolves, while wandering Europe in search of her parents. Defonseca was not even Jewish.

The list goes on.

***

Every time one of these memoirs gets debunked, writers and critics debate what constitutes non-fiction. Often, there’s an argument put forward about something called “emotional truth,” which is supposed to provide moral cover for lying.

My definition of creative non-fiction is simple. It is a radically subjective account of events that objectively took place.

The moment you start making up events that you know did not take place, you’re doing another sort of work. It’s called fiction.

***

Fake memoirs are a symptom of the basic insecurity that plagues all writers: is my story worth telling?

It wasn’t enough for Mortenson that he tried and failed to climb a tall mountain, then met some villagers and decided to help build some schools for the local children. He had to gin up the truth.

I suspect he set about consciously refurbishing his story, and told himself he was doing so because a better story would bring in more donations for the kids. I’m willing grant that his motives for lying were, in part, noble.

***

Here’s what Margaret Seltzer told The New York Times, when she was confronted about her lies: “…I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

The italics are mine.

***

Is she making an excuse for lying? Yeah.

Is she also right? Probably.

Publishers have responded to declining readership by seeking books that include “author survivors,” inspirational figures the marketing people can dangle as interview bait. It’s not enough anymore to offer publishers a nuanced work of imagination. They’re looking for a pitch dramatic enough to resonate within the frantic metabolism of our news cycle.

***

Years ago, when I worked for a newspaper in El Paso, I wrote a story about the press in Juarez, Mexico. I spoke very little Spanish and had no business working on such a story in the first place.

The guy who translated for me worked for a leftist weekly. He told me that one of the biggest papers in Juarez was funded, in part, by drug money, an allegation I included in my story.

It was an inexcusable moral breach, and my paper was nearly sued.

We’re all subject to this impulse. We’re all constantly exaggerating, amending, confabulating – trying to make our given story more worthy of being heard. But we also know when we’re lying.

***

I’m pretty sure Senator Scott Brown, of Massachusetts, knows he’s lying in his new memoir, Against All Odds.

Time and again, Brown portrays himself vanquishing the violent, sexual predators who terrorized him during his youth. Here he is doing battle with a knife-wielding thirteen-year-old:

“As he closed his eyes, I raised the rock high over my head, drove it down into his face and head, and took off … I heard him howl in pain but I never looked back.” When the kid shows up on his doorstep, Brown stares him down.

The future Senator was seven years old at the time of this alleged heroism.

***

There’s this funny thing that happens when we read a book, even one that bills itself as non-fiction. We suspend disbelief. We make this choice because we want from our stories a brand of heroism, of exalted possibility, that we don’t encounter in our actual lives.

What depresses me are the brands of heroism we choose to privilege. In all of these memoirs, the fake stuff is utterly, almost comically, cliché. It always involves lurid violence, which the protagonist valiantly withstands or transcends.

There’s a poverty of imagination in these works that reminds me of reality television, those contrived biospheres in which real people wind up assuming roles – the vixen, the cad, etc. – cribbed from a million yellowed scripts.

***

What about weakness? What about doubt and terror? Isn’t that where most of us spend our given hours? If we’re honest, I mean. What makes fake memoirs offensive isn’t that someone has lied to us, but that we consent to being lied to. We lie to ourselves.

***

Some view the Mortenson affair as another overblown literary scandal, one of those rituals by which the Fourth Estate both makes hay and cleanses its conscience.

I’ll buy that. But it’s part of something larger, too: a radical shift in our relationship to the truth.

Leaders have always lied to their people. The ones who tell the most extravagant lies tend to do the best. What’s changed is our access to the truth, and our corresponding capacity for denial. The case for war in Iraq was built on lies. We all knew this. We all went along.

Politicians think nothing of lying, because there is no real political consequence to lying. Oh sure, the late night comics might kick you around for a few minutes. But that’s about it. Nobody investigates you. Nobody even tries to impeach you, unless you’re a Democratic president and you lie about an extra-marital affair.

***

In a sense, the internet has made us all memoirists. We spend more and more time in front of screens, constructing our identities. Rather than building small communities of friendship in the real world, we seek the adulation – or at least the attention – of a million strangers.

We tell the stories that make us seem heroic, and suppress the ones that reveal our cowardice and cruelty. Our rhetoric becomes more provocative, dismissive. We type things that common decency would forbid us from saying in person.

Our cultural habits of thought and feeling have begun to ape the tabloid news in which we marinade. Mankind has always needed myths. We invent beliefs to protect ourselves from unbearable truths. But I can’t think of an era in which clearly demonstrable lies of self-interest have been so richly rewarded.

***

I have no problem with David Sedaris goosing up his dialogue with a bit of drollery, as long as he’s making a good faith effort to reconstruct an exchange that actually took place. That’s his license as a humorist.

But writers who purport to be telling painful truths – like politicians speaking on the floor of the Senate – shouldn’t lie. And when they do, they should be held to account.

The problem isn’t that the truth is a slippery concept. The problem is that our cultural reverence for truth has eroded. It’s this erosion that has led us to ignore the scientific evidence of our own peril. It’s what allows an entire political party to subsist on innuendo and lies. And it’s what sends ambitious, insecure people such as Mortenson zooming into self-mythification.

He wanted to be heard. That meant turning away from the quieter, more terrifying province of truth.

***

When I was ten years old, I smashed my older brother in the mouth with a baseball bat. His memory says it was a mistake. My memory isn’t so sure. I was angry enough to want him dead. But I also worshipped him like a God. The truth isn’t one way or another. It’s not accidental or premeditated. It’s not evil or noble. The truth is I loved Dave but couldn’t make him love me back. That feeling never goes away. The truth is the blood.

***

“You Lie” rat by Banksy.

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But it feels wrong – and slightly dirty – to use that word. Because that would imply Sirota is part of the vast Grievance Industrial Complex, a wildly profitable adjunct to the Fourth Estate that seeks not to dispense fact but to excite primal negative emotions.

In fact, Sirota spends most of his life trying to reverse the odious effects of pundits. He is a genuine cultural commentator, one whose view of America is essentially moral. We are, he argues, a country in which greed has run roughshod over generosity, and the blind pursuit of wealth has led our politicians and journalists astray.

Sirota also happens to be a terrific writer. His new book, Back to Our Future, is a dazzling survey of the ways in which the 1980s managed to indoctrinate us. As those of us who were kids back then lumber into middle age, he observes, the ethos of that dark era has reemerged as the dominant cultural mindset.

It’s a very funny book, but one likely to induce sober realizations about the state of our union, as well as (in my case anyway) painful wardrobe flashbacks.

***

The Rumpus: Just so folks get a flavor of the book, can you explain why Alex P. Keating, the Michael J. Fox character on Family Ties, was the transcendental signifier of the Eighties? (Please remember that we are old and some Rumpus readers may not know what Family Ties is.)

David Sirota: Family Ties is a story of inter-generational friction fired through the concave lens of Reagan-era caricature. Here were fortysomethings Steven and Elyse Keaton trying to live out a yuppified suburban version of their pot-and-protest youth. And here was their son Alex, as the suit-and-tie Eighties conservative ridiculing their idealism. What made the show so enduring was its role reversal. Whereas President Reagan’s advanced age always made his Sixties-bashing seem a bit curmudgeonly, Alex was a younger hipper version of the Gipper who made his parents’ hippie liberalism look like the thing that was so outdated. In that sense, Alex was waging the anti-Sixties war California Gov. Reagan first waged on Berkeley hippies—only Alex carried that fight into the 1980s, and helped make that fight cool to the younger generation of television watchers who are today’s world-shaping adults. Now sure, the show poked fun at both Alex and his parents. But its humor fundamentally pivoted off of the Eighties backlash against the Sixties ethos—a backlash that replaced “kumbaya” with “greed is good” and faith in government with “government is the problem.” This backlash, of course, still frames our thinking today, whether it’s Wall Streeters justifying their avarice, Tea Partiers demanding a return to the pre-1960s, or politicians branding tax cuts as the ultimate public policy virtue.

Rumpus: Take us through some of the other obvious parallels between the Age of Bon Jovi and the Age of Gaga.

Sirota: Let’s start with Hollywood, which is not only remaking ‘80s brands (Karate Kid, A-Team, etc.) but actually setting up new movies in the ‘80s (Hot Tub Time Machine and Take Me Home Tonight, etc.). As much as that’s a lazy entertainment industry just betting big on nostalgia, it’s also the easiest way to psychologically meet the audience where we still are. Though there are certainly exceptions, we generally remain an Eighties culture—for instance, we generally fetishize obscene wealth, organize our economy around militarism, and remain obsessed with the anti-government idea of the “rogue.” And what’s really telling is that this remains a truism even in a moment of economic and imperial crisis. That’s right, we are still so totally Eighties, that even after the Wall Street collapse, we’re still worshiping the Gordon Gekkos and Sherman McCoys as untouchable Masters of the Universe. We’re still so totally Eighties that even after the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos, we’re still reflexively equating militarism with patriotism. We’re still so totally Eighties that even after deregulation ushered in a horrific recession, we nonetheless see government’s value as only that which can be mustered from its law-breaking Ollie North-style mavericks.

Again, this is a bit of a generalization, because some are (finally!) starting to see things a bit differently. But in general, this is what our society still is: an Eighties society.

Rumpus: I was trying to think of the book that sums up the Eighties as a literary era and the one that leaped to mind was Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. It was supposed to be a kind of chic minimalism. But it struck me as thinly veiled nihilism. The plot is basically, a bunch of rich kids drive around LA trying, and mostly failing, to feel anything. And yet I often wonder if the growing cultural addiction to screens and on-line interaction isn’t some version of the same thing. What do you think?

Sirota: I think you are onto something in that today’s screen addiction really seems like a symptom of something deeper – a narcissism and self-absorption that quite clearly intensified in the Eighties. This isn’t theorizing, by the way. Look at the public opinion data and you see that the 1980s was the moment that young people began telling pollsters that money and fame – rather than social change or justice – were their foremost objectives. It was the decade that conspicuous consumption – that is, buying inanely ostentatious bling for the sole purpose of showing off – really became a mass-market trend. And it was the decade in which concepts like solidarity and social movement went from being viewed as high-minded objectives to being ridiculed as wastes of time. This isn’t surprising coming from the decade of The Big Chill, The Secret of My Success, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Star Search, and of course, a president who was lionized for abject union busting. So when you add it up – when you realize that zeitgeist was injected into an Atari and Nintendo generation already addicted to the screen – you see that the 21st century of Facebook-conceit, Twitter whoring, and now-epidemic levels of diagnosed Narcissistic Personality Disorder is really just the longevity of the 1980s.

Rumpus: One of the most interesting sections of the book was about the A-Team and its anti-government message. Can you explain – particularly to my wife, an ardent A-Team fan – the insidious philosophy the show was peddling?

Sirota: Like your wife, I remain a big A-Team fan, if only because the show stands as one of the most unselfconsciously ridiculous spectacles of meme-amplification in TV history. And in being that, it provides a perfect example of how we were sold the idea that the government is both inherently inept and evil. Think about it: The premise of the A-Team is that these good guys were unduly incarcerated by the government – and for a crime that their government jailers secretly ordered them to commit. Additionally, the government is so incapable of performing the most basic incarceration functions, it lets these framed do-gooders “promptly” escape (as the voiceover tells us) and then can’t track them down, even though the government knows their rough location (Los Angeles, as the voiceover says), and even though average individuals can find them whenever they “have a problem” (again, the voiceover). That gets to the ultimate anti-government narrative: the A-Team busies itself righting societal wrongs that its government pursuers refuse to fix. This was the “rogue” meme of so many 1980s productions, from Highway to Heaven to the Ghostbusters to all the private detective shows. They told us that “if you have a problem” you cannot rely on your government. You can only rely on the hired gun. In the 1980s, kids called that hired gun The A-Team. And today those kids-turned-grownups call it names like Blackwater or Halliburton or Goldman Sachs. But it’s all rooted in the same Eighties ideology that says societal problems are best handled by the private gang rather than the public institution.

Rumpus: One thing I’d forgotten, that totally freaked me out, was that the final episode of The Cosby Show was actually aired during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. And even more weirdly, that Tom Bradley, the black mayor of LA, urged people to stay inside and watch the show. Can you sort of talk me through that weirdness?

Sirota: The 1980s saw a big shift in the images that were used to show African Americans to White America. In the broad strokes, the late 1960s was the image of civil rights protest. In the early and mid 1970s, it was Norman Lear’s ghetto sitcoms, which critics said minstrelized African Americans but which others said humanized them in regular working-class environs. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was onto programs like Benson and The Jeffersons that showed the upwardly mobile African American caught between the Lear world and the world of truly elite society. And then came The Cosby Show. It showed an upper-income African American family wholly ensconced in that elite society, and offered almost no references to racism, the black working class, or to the fact that most African Americans remained disproportionately poorer than whites. So basically, Eighties television started telling White America that racial inequality no longer existed. Then comes the Rodney King case, which exposed the reality of rampant racism. The whole thing just blew the doors off all this propaganda about America being a “colorblind” or “post-racial” society. And what was the reaction by our leaders? They told people to watch The Cosby Show. It was a desperate attempt to further shove all that 1980s bullshit down our throats, as if to beg America to keep averting its eyes from the reality of racism.

Rumpus: The book argues, quite persuasively, that folks in the Eighties lionized the Fifties and vilified the Sixties. But you’re also careful not to fall into the trap of painting particular decades with that lazy marketing brush.

Sirota: There are an infinite number of things happening in any ten-year period. Just because a ten-year period starts on the zero years doesn’t mean it’s any more worthy of “era” distinction than a more randomly dated ten-year period. So yeah, trying to come up with a finite definition of a decade is ridiculous, if you take it literally.

But that’s the thing – I don’t think you can take it literally. My book is as much about the ideas associated with these decades than it is about a chronological history of events in ten-year periods. That’s why in the book when analyzing how the Eighties distorted our memory of the Sixties and the Fifties, I referred to them with a trademark sign and spelled them out rather than calling them the 1980s, 1960s and 1950s – because they are concepts as much as actual epochs. In fact, I argue that when we think of The Eighties^TM we are really thinking about the entire Reagan-Bush era (1980-1992), when we think of The Sixties^TM we are thinking of the years after the JFK assassination and into the mid-1970s, and when we think of The Fifties^TM we are thinking of the entire period between the end of World War II and the JFK assassination. And as I show in the book, The Eighties^TM revised the actual history of the actual 1950s and 1960s to turn them into the The Fifties^TM and The Sixties^TM – that is, into ideologically-fraught memories that still define our thinking today.

Rumpus: One final question. The book is really, in a very canny way, a call to action. The idea – as I read it – is that we’re doomed as a country and a planet if we don’t shed the selfish and facile habits of thought and feeling that marked the Eighties™. What should people be doing?

Sirota: I think before we can mature beyond our Eighties-inhibited world, we need more of our society to better understand what a radical departure the Eighties was from our own previous history. It’s easy to forget this point because Eighties-marketed isms – narcissism, militarism, racism, to name a few – are now so baked into our present culture that it seems like the long-term norm. Now, I’m not saying there wasn’t greed, narcissism, militarism or racism in every historical era. Of course there was. But those ugly forces never became such mass-marketed, cheered-on, and ubiquitous parts of society before that decade. As just one example, take militarism. The 1980s began with polls showing the country rationally questioning our increasingly Pentagon-centric posture. The decade ended with the same polls showing the military as the country’s most revered institution.

So it’s important for there to be a deeper awareness that the Eighties pathologies that still define us today represent something ahistorical. Appreciating that basic fact is key because it reminds us that there is another way into the future than simply our current Eighties way – a way that is more about common good, a way that we’ve actually tried and succeeded with before the Eighties.

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(Yet Another) Rumpus Lamentation:

It’s a sunny winter day in Tucson, Arizona. There’s an event being held in the parking lot of a supermarket called Safeway. The local member of congress, a woman named Gabrielle Giffords, is meeting her constituents.

Among them is a young man with a gun who runs toward Giffords and shoots her in the head. He turns on the crowd. Before he can be wrestled to the ground, six people are dead, a dozen more injured. One of the dead is a nine-year-old girl recently elected to her student council. She wanted to see what a real political event would be like.

*

There’s a moment, in the beginning, when the enormity of the violence feels genuine. We’re compelled to wonder: How did we get here? How did we consent to live in a culture where an unstable 22-year-old can acquire a sophisticated weapon with such ease? Where his disturbed passions are not only tolerated, but reinforced, enlarged, given shape?

He didn’t just wake up one day and decide to murder a politician. He made a plan.

*

But remember: it’s just a moment. It dissolves.

Then we’re in America again and it’s all moving too quickly – our eyes, our screens, the facts. Someone says lone gunman. Someone says crosshairs. A surgeon in a strange hat announces that the bullet fired into Giffords’ head passed “through and through” and, after a moment, we understand what he means.

It’s like watching Kabuki theater, a saga of contrived sorrow and recrimination, the voices of a thousand news people sounding grave because it’s their job. After a while, we realize that we’re not just watching the Kabuki. We are the Kabuki.

*

An entire industry of madness has arisen to comfort lost souls, to relocate their anguish in the world at large. What begins as a personal crisis of mental health is transmuted into an annihilating rage.

It happens over and over.

A man blows up a federal building. A man flies a plane into an IRS office. A man enters a church and shoots a doctor. We’re supposed to act shocked. That’s our role. It reminds us of our own sanctity.

*

Sure, there were demagogues back in the olden days. But they enjoyed the latitude of a nation whose virulent forms of hatred were still sanctioned. White men were unquestionably in charge. They were allowed to discriminate, spared the anxieties of a true meritocracy.

Then came abolition and war and suffrage and civil rights. The bigotry had to become clannish, covert. The feelings didn’t disappear. They migrated. They had to go somewhere.

*

The central issue of the emergent mass media was how the airwaves were going to be used.

Because they were both public and limited, the Federal Communications Commission adopted the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, to ensure that licensees devoted “a reasonable amount of broadcast time to the discussion of controversial issues,” and that they did so “fairly, in order to afford reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints.”

In 1987, during the age of deregulation, the FCC did away with the Fairness Doctrine. The result was a talk radio (and later cable TV) industry, which gave voice to the unresolved psychological and emotional grievances of an increasingly insecure white majority. You couldn’t slaughter redskins or lynch niggers. You couldn’t even use those words. But you could still fantasize.

*

And so a new world is created, a universe of projected hatred, in which sadistic impulses are viewed not as pathological, but perfectly natural and indeed inevitable responses to the nation’s moral progress.

The democratic election of a president whose father was African becomes the portent of white slavery. Men are paid millions of dollars to appear on radio and television and play act how one might murder a member of congress, or burn a person alive. They joke about hanging elected officials in effigy, or driving stakes through the heart of the President.  A presidential candidate jokes about rape. Another declares that members of congress should be tarred and feathered.

Freighted within these histrionics is a steady flow of disinformation about the nature of our national predicaments and their potential remedies. The rich and powerful (who seek merely to protect their profits and fortunes) are benevolent patriots besieged by the true lurking evil: Government.

The balance of the fourth estate – desperate to remain solvent – serves not as a filter, but an amplifier to this sadism, till it seems we live in a dark weather of paranoia, every sin and fear and indulgence cast out of us and onto the dark forces of Government.

*

The young man with the gun put it like this:

I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications. The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.

*

On the morning of the assassination attempt, my family received a letter from our insurance company informing us that we would no longer have to pay for a host of preventive services. It will save us a few hundred dollars a year. This was owing to the health care reform law passed last year, for which Giffords voted, and for which she was reviled by people who interpreted her support for a more egalitarian system of medical care as an assault on their freedom.

I remain in a state of bewilderment.

*

Giffords’ opponent in the last election, a veteran of the invasion of Iraq, put it like this:

Get on Target for Victory in November
Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office
Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly

*

In initial reports, little mention was made of the fact that Giffords was Jewish. Then speculation arose that she might have been targeted because of her religion.

I keep thinking about how little we think about the religious right anymore. The church of the disenfranchised can now be found in the mass media. Its pulpits are bright studios with cameras and microphones. Its fire and brimstone preachers are entertainers who brag openly about market share.

In the Europe of 60 years ago, things got bad when anti-Semitism migrated from the Church to secular culture. The rhetoric of competing salvations became the propaganda of a political and economic movement.

*

Kurt Vonnegut believed the human race was doomed if we failed to engage with acts of imagination, because we would then become incapable of imagining the suffering of others.

Vonnegut was one of the few human beings who lived through the Allied bombing of Dresden. He was a POW cowering in a slaughterhouse as planes flew above, dropping bombs on people and buildings.

This was how America fought Fascism.

*

The historian Robert Paxton, who studied Europe during World War II, defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

America is not a fascist state. We still enforce ethical and legal restraints on our population. These do not include preventing mentally unstable people from purchasing semi-automatic guns.

*

Spencer Giffords, the father of the wounded congressperson, when he was asked if his daughter had any enemies, wept.

*

The author David Neiwert doesn’t believe America is a fascist state, either. He believes there is a pervasive mindset which “always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself — unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated ‘enemy’ as vermin…”

*

Jim David Adkisson, who walked into a Unitarian Church in 2008 and killed two people and wounded six others during a children’s musical, and who was an ardent fan of talk radio, put it like this:

Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contribdutes to the downfall of this great Nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is Kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather.

I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just Kill yourself, do something for your country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

*

A self-described veteran, upon reading an editorial I wrote in 2009, put it like this:

GET OUT OF AMERICA,

YOU ANTI-AMERICAN, NO GOOD, SCUM SUCKER!!!

I am sending your article in the Boston Globe to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan … Lot of our men and women from Massachusetts are there now, and they are looking forward to meeting (finding) you! GET OUT OF AMERICA!!! YOU HAVE NO RIGHT LIVING HERE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF MEN AND WOMEN OF HONOR AND RESPECTABILITY WHILE YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A LOWLY, COWARDLY, INSECT!!

*

We will hear much talk in the weeks to come of the Lone Gunman, an archetype useful to those of us who wish to absolve ourselves.

Sober news people will soberly shrug their shoulders and whisper into microphones about the mysteries of the human heart. It will be as if there was no motive for the crime, as if the murderer were a machine that malfunctioned rather than an American who mistook sadism for an expression of his beliefs.

The more hysterical reactions will come from those who feel themselves implicated, who fear the great con of their professions exposed. They will react with absurd rituals of denial, as if, after all their violent agitation, they are the ones being fired upon, the victims of some vast and unending conspiracy.

This operatic indignation is what I meant when I spoke, a few months ago, about the American descent into a shame culture.

It has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the capacity for moral self-reflection. What happens when a large and well-armed portion of our citizenry can no longer apologize? When humility becomes another form of humiliation? Their heroes exhort them: Never retreat. Reload.

*

The young man with the gun, in a final note to friends, put it like this:

Please don’t be mad at me… I cannot rest

He seemed to recognize that he was going to do wrong. But he couldn’t stop himself.

He was not merely following orders. He was attempting to construct a world in which it was bearable to live. When this became impossible, he sought to die for a noble cause.

*

William Butler Yeats, surveying the ruin of the First World War, put it like this:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

*

Violence – whether in word or deed – is both an inevitable human impulse and a failure of the moral imagination. That’s the business we’re in, as artists.

We can pretend we live apart from this compact and sickening drama. But we don’t. We’re a part of this world: our actions, our stories, our conviction. When the trains arrive with their cargo of human sorrow, we refuse to turn away. We’re the fools in charge of forgiveness.

**

More from Rumpus Politics.

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