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

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

​***

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

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

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

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

​***

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

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

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

​***

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

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

​***

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

​***

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

Private equity. Much classier.

​***

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

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

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

​***

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

​***

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

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

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

​***

Still, I keep thinking about that damn photo.

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

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

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

​***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​***

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

______________________________________________________________
1 Newt Gingrich

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I was so afraid of facing the guards at the airport that I had a difficult time imagining the rest of my trip. I would picture myself walking around Ramallah with my sister, or attending a concert, or visiting my aunts, or seeing the separation wall, or staying at the American Colony Hotel for an evening, and I would draw a blank. There was a wall there, too, between my thoughts and Palestine.

John Scalzi tries to explain privilege to straight white men without invoking the word privilege.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

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Pablo Airaldi spent seven months in detention waiting to find out if he would be allowed to stay in America. This is from his daily journals written during that time.

I locked my bike on Worth Street in Manhattan, a.k.a. “Avenue of the Strongest,” and stared at her for a moment. Something didn’t feel right.

It was Oct. 13 and I was headed to Federal Plaza for a pretrial hearing, one of what seemed an endless string of court dates in which I had to argue my right to stay in this country. The judge admired my progress as she read through a print article on the bike shop I just helped start. She lectured me about hiring a lawyer—to which I replied that I was still too poor, too disillusioned from this place—and then adjourned court to next April, wishing me luck. Relief washed over me. Earlier, I had been so worried of being deported that I called my best friend Becky, a messenger working for Elite Couriers, my old workplace, and had her grab my bike key.

As I made my way toward the elevator, I noticed two rather menacing figures following me. The arrow down button had barely lit up when they asked my name, then told me they had some questions they’d like to ask. The two led me into the elevator. As soon as the doors had shut, out of sight of any courtroom, I felt the handcuffs go around my wrists.

It’s been two months since Immigrations and Customs Enforcement wanted to ask me some questions. After a mind-numbing, soul shattering, eight-hour ordeal through processing, they shipped me in shackles to New Jersey into the loving arms of Hudson County Correctional Facility. I was stripped of all clothing and handed one pair of 3XL boxers, one pair of 3XL pants, and a green 4XL shirt in return. Seeing that I’m 5’7” and 140 pounds, this was not the best fitting outfit. Upon complaint, I was laughed at and told to keep moving. Pants in hand, I was led to a temporary dorm filled with petty criminals. A week later, they transferred me to the block I currently call home.

There are seven immigration-specific dorms here. E-500-South is a roughly 100’ x 40’ concrete box half-filled with 32 double bunks made of steel; the other half is a cafeteria-style common area. Two TVs man the border between the two areas. There is no outside rec. for us, no library, other than a law library, and maybe four board games to share between 64 detainees. Ninety percent of the men here spend their time alternating between TV and dominoes, the other ten percent rarely even get out of bed, too forlorn or confused to even make the effort every morning.

Our day officially begins at 6:30 a.m., a piercing electronic bell screams out through the PA system. This bell is the bane of my existence that I swear was put here solely to destroy my sanity. It floods our ears at 1 p.m., signifying midday lockdown, again at 3 p.m. to let us loose to the common area, again at night for 3 successive periods from 8:45 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. to tuck us into our final lockdown. You would think that would be enough of this unholy thing but just in case you went to sleep early, it goes off around 10:30 p.m. and once more at 3 a.m., I’m guessing just for kicks. Each mind-melting ring varies in length depending on the amount of malice in the heart of the officer in the control room, which is usually well above the normal amount of spite any one human should contain.

All of the men subjected to this nonsense have either paid their debts to society already or have not committed any crime at all. I’m not saying we are saints but this system is here for much more than the upholding of Federal law—someone needs us to be the bad guys. There are fathers of citizens here taken from their children, husbands torn from wives, kids barely 18 being deported to countries they know nothing about. Unlike criminals charged by the state, an attorney is not appointed for us if we cannot afford one. We’re just shit out of luck, left to fend for ourselves inside the maze of newly amended immigration laws. Month after month we are strung along while still detained, many get so frustrated from the continual postponement of judgment that they sign papers of voluntary deportation so they can feel the sun once again.

Every so often, I awake in the middle of the night, in between the infernal bell, to the sound of C.O.’s and shuffling feet. There, in the wee hours of the day, they ship the unknowns off to a state where their family will have trouble contacting them and where the judges are stricter to the plight of the immigrant. I was lucky enough to have a community behind me to prevent this from happening to me, but I was forced to watch this happen at least once a week.

We, detainees, are suspended in a purgatory of concrete and steel where days are spent shiftlessly wandering 4,000 square feet and nights sleepless, listening to grown men weeping because they don’t understand what is happening to them. There are no definite release dates for us, simply an ominously hanging question mark. No guarantee of anything, just a realization of a dream turned nightmare.

Everything these men have worked tirelessly for is erased by the whim of a government fanatically trying to duct tape that failing dam that is our economy. They will deport some of this nation’s hardest workers by claiming we are the reason honest Americans can’t find a job.

Some mornings when I wake, I have trouble believing this to be my reality. Every night, my dreams take me back to my beautiful Brooklyn life. Every night I walk through the Chicken Hut, the old factory loft I share with amazing friends, and take great care inspecting each piece of work hanging on the walls and the ceiling. Some nights send me back to those Manhattan streets I’ve ridden through thousands of times during my four years of being a bike messenger. Every scum-filled pothole still fresh in my memory, the timing of the avenues, the distinct smell of each neighborhood, the nods from fellow messengers, it all reels through the screen of my subconscious cinemas. My old, beaten-up laptop, my books that litter the room I lived in, my friends’ paintings hanging on the walls of my room, the random traveler that is usually on our couch, the endless, brilliant drunken nights at the kitchen table surrounded by empty bottles and filled by laughing, beautiful characters, it all comes to me in the darkened hours of this delirium. It takes every ounce of strength I have to not break down, so I wait until the lights are low, the room is still, and I curl up and drown in the force of these memories.

These were the dreams my mother had in mind for me when she met and fell in love with a charmer from a small town in Indiana. In 1988 she first sent for me while I was living in our apartment we shared with my grandparents in Montevideo. After a solo 20-hour flight she met me at the gate entrance. I came back in 1989, and we eventually settled down in that small town then moved to Indianapolis where I spent what should have been my formative years. The fairy tale unraveled quickly: by 9 my stepfather barred us from speaking Spanish in the house, by 12 I had lost my native tongue; at 16 I witnessed our last big fight, 17, homeless, 18, arrested. Realizing how wrong the life I led was for me, I decided to make a clean break from it all. At around 20, after one last go at their “normal life,” I gave up everything but my skateboard, a bike, and whatever I could carry on it and took off.

From Bloomington, Indiana, I rode to Minneapolis; from Minneapolis to Chicago to Nashville. I hitched rides to New Orleans, Austin, hopped freights through Georgia and the Carolinas. I became obsessed with finding the America that Whitman turned into prose, that Kerouac ingested, that nation so loved by Steinbeck that he devoted his entire life to exemplifying its complex yet simple beauty. It was during these two years of constant travel that I began to believe that this America still existed. I found it in every stranger willing to help me along my way. A warm meal, a friendly roadside conversation, a place to sleep for the night, I felt as if this country had finally adopted me as her own through her generosity.

At the end of those truly formative years, I received a phone call from my friend Jimmy inviting yet another move, so after having fought to gain true pride for this country, I made the move to her crowning achievement, New York City. During my first week it hit me that this was where I was supposed to live, where I would grow into the man my new parent nation could be proud of. As I sit at my tiny metal desk now, I can still picture her skyline that would steal my breath daily as I climbed the bridges from Brooklyn into Manhattan for work. My eyes would caress those elegant, jagged curves as they blended perfectly into the sky and fill up with wonder at the heights man could achieve.

My stay here is all up in the air now. There is a good chance the only time I’ll see my city again is in shackles as I’m escorted to JFK for my flight into exile. Although I miss the country of my birth dearly, I’m crushed when I think that my time here could be through just when I was finally blossoming.

The word freedom comes to my mind a lot in here, the word that attracts millions to this nation every year, the word that birthed this nation… and then I look around me, into the eyes of caged men, and see what has become of this word. Is this word doomed to simply be a soap box selling point, or will it be taken back by the beautiful population it has come to represent?

***

Author photo by Jennifer Galatioto

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“The things we fear are the things for which gods and governments show no promise of resolving. Every religion and every society espouses fairness and order. But the souls of the poor have swum through the net. I will not ask a beggar his name because it’s a false pretense of sharing a moment’s equality. My horror at the world is not his. Mine is the horror of conscience; his is the horror of fortune.”

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

“It was a hack job. It was vicious.”

“He was just easy pickins.”

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

**

More from Steve Almond.

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Some people angry at the outcome of last night’s election have started a petition to ask the Democratic National Committee to move their nominating convention out of Charlotte as a result. I don’t expect it will happen, given the incredible amount of money it would cost to do so, and the logistical challenge it would pose, but I do expect that the effort by some state Democratic party chairs to have marriage equality as part of the platform will get some more support than it might have otherwise.

Something I think is important to remember about the current state of marriage equality is that even the fact that this vote took place–horrid as this may sound–is a sign of progress. Forty years ago, the idea that a majority of people would support same-sex marriage (the way they do today) would have been a pipe-dream. These votes are happening because opponents of LGBT rights and marriage equality know that they’re going to lose in the long run, so they’re throwing up as many barriers as they can to stop progress. They didn’t happen before because no one imagined it could ever happen. But anti-marriage-equality people are scared now, and they know they’re on the wrong side of history.

Who would have imagined even ten years ago that a sitting president up for re-election would come out in favor of same-sex marriage, as President Obama has just done? Maybe a lame duck president, or one who’s out of office (as former President Bill Clinton did a while back), but a sitting president in the middle of a campaign? That’s a sign of how far we’ve come.

We still have a long way to go, though, and pointing fingers or mocking or saying stupid things like “we should have let the South go when they wanted to go” isn’t the way to do it. After all, there are 31 states (including mostly progressive California) which have done just what North Carolina did. If marriage equality means a lot to you, then work hard to make sure that you elect people who support it. Change peoples’ minds and get them to support those candidates as well. Vote, but don’t just do that. Voting is the bare minimum you have to do to be a citizen. Do more than the minimum.

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