By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until–in all honesty–some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and “lucky” enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee’s relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be. 

By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society–slave population–in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. Brazil was close. But in 1860 American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately three and a half billion dollars–that’s just as property. Three and a half billion dollars was the net worth, roughly, of slaves in 1860. In today’s dollars that would be approximately seventy-five billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America.

By KEVIN SACK

FLINT, Mich. — Carol Y. Vliet’s cancer returned with a fury last summer, the tumors metastasizing to her brain, liver, kidneys and throat.

As she began a punishing regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, Mrs. Vliet found a measure of comfort in her monthly appointments with her primary care physician, Dr. Saed J. Sahouri, who had been monitoring her health for nearly two years.

She was devastated, therefore, when Dr. Sahouri informed her a few months later that he could no longer see her because, like a growing number of doctors, he had stopped taking patients with Medicaid.

Dr. Sahouri said that his reimbursements from Medicaid were so low — often no more than $25 per office visit — that he was losing money every time a patient walked in his exam room.

The final insult, he said, came when Michigan cut those payments by 8 percent last year to help close a gaping budget shortfall.

“My office manager was telling me to do this for a long time, and I resisted,” Dr. Sahouri said. “But after a while you realize that we’re really losing money on seeing those patients, not even breaking even. We were starting to lose more and more money, month after month.”

It has not taken long for communities like Flint to feel the downstream effects of a nationwide torrent of state cuts to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor and disabled. With states squeezing payments to providers even as the economy fuels explosive growth in enrollment, patients are finding it increasingly difficult to locate doctors and dentists who will accept their coverage. Inevitably, many defer care or wind up in hospital emergency rooms, which are required to take anyone in an urgent condition.

Mrs. Vliet, 53, who lives just outside Flint, has yet to find a replacement for Dr. Sahouri. “When you build a relationship, you want to stay with that doctor,” she said recently, her face gaunt from disease, and her head wrapped in a floral bandanna. “You don’t want to go from doctor to doctor to doctor and have strangers looking at you that don’t have a clue who you are.”

The inadequacy of Medicaid payments is severe enough that it has become a rare point of agreement in the health care debate between President Obama and Congressional Republicans. In a letter to Congress after their February health care meeting, Mr. Obama wrote that rates might need to rise if Democrats achieved their goal of extending Medicaid eligibility to 15 million uninsured Americans.

In 2008, Medicaid reimbursements averaged only 72 percent of the rates paid by Medicare, which are themselves typically well below those of commercial insurers, according to the Urban Institute, a research group. At 63 percent, Michigan had the sixth-lowest rate in the country, even before the recent cuts.

In Flint, Dr. Nita M. Kulkarni, an obstetrician, receives $29.42 from Medicaid for a visit that would bill $69.63 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. She receives $842.16 from Medicaid for a Caesarean delivery, compared with $1,393.31 from Blue Cross.

If she takes too many Medicaid patients, she said, she cannot afford overhead expenses like staff salaries, the office mortgage and malpractice insurance that will run $42,800 this year. She also said she feared being sued by Medicaid patients because they might be at higher risk for problem pregnancies, because of underlying health problems.

As a result, she takes new Medicaid patients only if they are relatives or friends of existing patients. But her guilt is assuaged somewhat, she said, because her husband, who is also her office mate, Dr. Bobby B. Mukkamala, an ear, nose and throat specialist, is able to take Medicaid. She said he is able to do so because only a modest share of his patients have it.

The states and the federal government share the cost of Medicaid, which saw a record enrollment increase of 3.3 million people last year. The program now benefits 47 million people, primarily children, pregnant women, disabled adults and nursing home residents. It falls to the states to control spending by setting limits on eligibility, benefits and provider payments within broad federal guidelines.

Michigan, like many other states, did just that last year, packaging the 8 percent reimbursement cut with the elimination of dental, vision, podiatry, hearing and chiropractic services for adults.

When Randy C. Smith showed up recently at a Hamilton Community Health Network clinic near Flint, complaining of a throbbing molar, Dr. Miriam L. Parker had to inform him that Medicaid no longer covered the root canal and crown he needed.

A landscaper who has been without work for 15 months, Mr. Smith, 46, said he could not afford the $2,000 cost. “I guess I’ll just take Tylenol or Motrin,” he said before leaving.

This year, Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, has revived a proposal to impose a 3 percent tax on physician revenues. Without the tax, she has warned, the state may have to reduce payments to health care providers by 11 percent.

In Flint, the birthplace of General Motors, the collapse of automobile manufacturing has melded with the recession to drive unemployment to a staggering 27 percent. About one in four non-elderly residents of Genesee County are uninsured, and one in five depends on Medicaid. The county’s Medicaid rolls have grown by 37 percent since 2001, and the program now pays for half of all childbirths.

But surveys show the share of doctors accepting new Medicaid patients is declining. Waits for an appointment at the city’s federally subsidized health clinic, where most patients have Medicaid, have lengthened to four months from six weeks in 2008. Parents like Rebecca and Jeoffrey Curtis, who had brought their 2-year-old son, Brian, to the clinic, say they have struggled to find a pediatrician.

“I called four or five doctors and asked if they accepted our Medicaid plan,” said Ms. Curtis, a 21-year-old waitress. “It would always be, ‘No, I’m sorry.’ It kind of makes us feel like second-class citizens.”

As physicians limit their Medicaid practices, emergency rooms are seeing more patients who do not need acute care.

At Genesys Regional Medical Center, one of three area hospitals, Medicaid volume is up 14 percent over last year. At Hurley Medical Center, the city’s safety net hospital, Dr. Michael Jaggi detects the difference when advising emergency room patients to seek follow-up treatment.

“We get met with the blank stare of ‘Where do I go from here?’ ” said Dr. Jaggi, the chief of emergency medicine.

New doctors, with their mountains of medical school debt, are fleeing the state because of payment cuts and proposed taxes. Dr. Kiet A. Doan, a surgeon in Flint, said that of 72 residents he had trained at local hospitals only two had stayed in the area, and both are natives.

Access to care can be even more challenging in remote parts of the state. The MidMichigan Medical Center in Clare, about 90 miles northwest of Flint, closed its obstetrics unit last year because Medicaid reimbursements covered only 65 percent of actual costs. Two other hospitals in the region might follow suit, potentially leaving 16 contiguous counties without obstetrics.

Medicaid enrollees in Michigan’s midsection have grown accustomed to long journeys for care. This month, Shannon M. Brown of Winn skipped work to drive her 8-year-old son more than two hours for a five-minute consultation with Dr. Mukkamala. Her pediatrician could not find a specialist any closer who would take Medicaid, she said.

Later this month, she will take the predawn drive again so Dr. Mukkamala can remove her son’s tonsils and adenoids. “He’s going to have to sit in the car for three hours after his surgery,” Mrs. Brown said. “I’m not looking forward to that one.”

Bob Dylan: Messiah or Escape Artist?

by Ron Rosenbaum

Bob  Dylan:  Prophet,  Mystic,  Poet
by  Seth  Rogovoy
Scribner  Books,  336 pp.,  $26

In 1978, a young graduate student traveling in India named Daniel Matt wrote to Gershom Scholem, the 80-year-old Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The letter discussed his experiences, his ambitious plans to translate the central text of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, and, most of all, about Bob Dylan, who he hoped Scholem might appreciate.

      I’m also sending you Bob Dylan Approximately, whose author believes that Dylan draws
      on Kabbalistic sources consciously or unconsciously (whatever that means). The thesis
      does not hold water … Be that as it may, the book is still interesting as a collage, and
      will give you a hippie’s perspective on Robert Zimmerman (Dylan’s real name).

Scholem replied:

      Your detailed account of your travels in the East and your experiences there with several
      friends and gurus I read with great interest … Who was or is Robert Zimmerman, called
      Bob Dylan? … Please let me know if he is a Jew. The Zimmermans divide 50% into Jews
      and goyim … My receptivity to music is, alas, nothing, therefore I forego the pleasure of
      listening to “Blonde on Blonde” or even the more seducing “Desire.” The title “Highway 61”
      arouses no desire in me. Maybe I am too old for it.

“Who was or is Robert Zimmerman, called Bob Dylan?” Is he a Jew? Good questions! Almost from the beginning of his career Bob Dylan né Zimmerman has had an odd, intense, divisive, often mysterious, relationship with Jews and Judaism. For some Jews (and Christians too) he has become a virtually messianic figure. In his new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, Seth Rogovoy portrays him as a kind of biblical prophet on the order of Isaiah or Jeremiah.

I’m not exaggerating the cult-like devotion of those whom I’ve come to call “the Bobolators” (after Shakespeare’s “Bardolators”). Although there are many brilliant commentators who are able to separate the wheat from the chaff, there are others for whom there is no chaff, those for whom his every word and line in every lyric, no matter how casual or trivial, seems to be a burning bush of signification that speaks with numinous authority in a blaze of encrypted poetry.

He was the chosen one for the secular Jewish folkies who saw him as able to bring the messianic, if not Marxist, social gospel to the gentiles in his protest songs. While some kvetched about his name change, realistically “Zimmerman” wouldn’t have served the Woody Guthrie persona he crafted. And the Woody Guthrie act worked. It worked so well that this middle-class Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota, passed as a kind of Okie hobo. Of course, talent played a part: Dylan’s “Song to Woody,” really the first sign he was capable of conjuring up transcendent beauty, decisively signaled his difference from all of the other Greenwich Village faux Okies.

That is, until he got tired of that act and caught fire with electric rock and roll, leading to cries of betrayal and “Judas!” That famous cry of “Judas!” was heard as Dylan launched into an electric guitar set in his 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert (now available as Live 1966 and arguably the best of the live Dylan albums). And when you think about it, it was an accusation that he was being Judas to his own Jesus.

He was wickedly good at electric rock and roll and there was a period when he was writing unconsciously great songs, with an alchemy of cynicism, nihilism, psychedelicism, and absurdist black humor: The flash and filigree of “Highway 61 Revisited”; the “thin wild mercury” sound (as Dylan once described it) of Blonde on Blonde. I still believe this was his moment of greatest transcendence culminating in the pure masterpiece, Blood on the Tracks. In those first two albums, especially, one could place Dylan in a secular Jewish cultural/historical context: the largely Jewish “black humor” movement whose genesis lay in the absurd horror of the Holocaust, from Lenny Bruce to Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer to Philip Roth.

But, as Matt wrote to Scholem, some Jews have always wanted to claim him for more traditional Jewish piety, and Rogovoy is the latest. It should be said that those who labor in the vineyards of Dylanology (and I’m now working on my own take on him) owe Rogovoy a great debt for persuasively tracking so many Dylan words, lines, and allusions to Biblical sources we might not have noticed. But should we therefore expect Dylan to behave himself as a specifically Jewish artist?

Rogovoy tries to make the case that the most important thing about Dylan is his Jewishness. Even when Dylan converted to Christianity, Rogovoy assures us, he—and his songs—were still really Jewish. And for a time—after the explicitly Christian period of the late seventies and early eighties passed—when Dylan was seen on Chabad Lubavitcher telethons and then, more privately at Chabad services all over the map, it seemed like Dylan had finally found his home in the messianic Hasidic sect.

But then, somewhat to Rogovoy’s misfortune, just as this book proclaiming Dylan’s essential Jewishness was about to be published, Dylan’s label made an announcement that even those like myself, no longer easily shocked by Dylan’s choices, found shocking. Rogovoy’s Jewish “prophet, mystic, poet” was going to release a “traditional” Christmas album, entitled “Christmas in the Heart.” Yes, we all know (as Garrison Keillor churlishly reminded us recently) that Jews have written many Christmas songs, but mostly of the secular “White Christmas” sort. In this album Dylan sings real devotional songs, including “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

Could there be a connection between Rogovoy’s book and the Christmas album? Rogovoy is so relentless in nailing every Dylan utterance to some Biblical or Talmudic or kabbalistic source that on some level Dylan might have known he was about to be tied to this procrustean bed of piety for good. This is more metaphorical conjecture than biographical theory. But if you watch the video of “Must be Santa” from the Christmas in the Heart album (by far the best thing on it), you see a Dylanesque guy desperately trying to flee from a Christmas party and hurling himself through the glass of the venue to escape it.

That’s Dylan: more escape artist than preacher. It was Dylan who told us he became his own “enemy / in the instant that I preach.” Nonetheless, Rogovoy’s source-hunting is so relentless, one can only bow to his ingenuity as he pins just about every Dylan line you can think of, like a dead butterfly, to its biblical source box. I was particularly impressed by the wealth of allusions to the Davidic stories he finds. On the other hand, Dylan has been aptly described as a “magpie” who snatches images and allusions from any context, as he happens upon them. And what Rogovoy sees as piety may be mag-piety. A less contestable aspect of Rogovoy’s exemplary research is his deepening of the detailed picture now emerging of Dylan’s Jewish upbringing. Rogovoy shows that the Zimmermans were at “the center of Jewish life in Hibbing,” and that young Robert’s bar mitzvah broke attendance records at the local hotel.

Certainly, we know Dylan has remained preoccupied with God. There’s an excerpt in Rogovoy’s book from an interview with Dylan (this was in the late ’70s and the interviewer, as it happens, was me). Dylan was discussing the ills of the modern world and, in his inscrutable deadpan, suddenly mentioned that he had seen a Time magazine cover that asked “Is God dead”?

“Would you think that was a responsible thing to do?” Dylan asked me, with an emphasis on responsible that made it either genuinely indignant or joking—or both. Then he added “What does God think of that? I mean if you were God, how would you like to see that written about yourself?” It was funny, Dylan trying to feel God’s pain, asking the primal Dylan question of God: how does it feel?

Perhaps the biggest stretch of the book is Rogovoy’s rationalization of Dylan’s Jesus period. Talk about taking the Christ out of Christmas. Consider when he comes to what he calls “Dylan’s most direct statement of Christian belief,” on the album Slow Train Coming. “The official published lyric of ‘When You Gonna Wake Up’ has him singing, ‘There’s a Man upon a cross and He’s been crucified / Do You have any idea why or for who He died?’”

“But,” Rogovoy tells us, as if he has discovered a loophole, “on the recording Dylan actually sings, ‘There’s a man on the cross and he’s been crucified for you / Believe in his power that’s all you gotta do.” Either way it’s a pretty straightforward declaration that the crucifixion is the path to salvation. But wait! Rogovoy seeks to obfuscate Dylan’s rare if unappealing didacticism: “The line seems tacked on to the end of the song; nothing that comes before prepares a listener for this statement of faith; there is no case being made that leads up to this as the logical (or illogical) conclusion; it’s practically a non sequitur as it appears in the song.”

You can almost see him sweat. But it’s simply not true that nothing prepares the listener or that it’s a non sequitur. It’s more like a culmination that Rogovoy can’t abide. He denies Dylan the right, misguided or not, to be the person he was then, because it challenges the ironclad rigidity of Rogovoy’s thesis. This transparent sophistry (“tacked on” could be another person’s “triumphant conclusion”) allows Rogovoy to avoid confonting Dylan’s soul-searching.

Still, there’s something there. As Daniel Matt, now the distinguished translator of the Zohar, put it to me in an e-mail:

For many years I worshiped Dylan. I occasionally referred to him as Baba Di-lan, Aramaic for “our gateway,” to truth and wisdom. For some reason, I always wanted him to be very deeply Jewish, whether or not he was. I felt that he saw things in their stark reality, that his prophetic vision penetrated to the core of everything and his poetic genius enabled him to share that with others.

The Jewish Standard

Steven Eidman • Letters

Published: March 4th, 2010

By Corby Kummer

Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.

Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart’s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical—a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food.

Really? Wasn’t this greenwashing? I called Charles Fishman, the author of The Wal-Mart Effect, which entertainingly documents the market-changing (and company-destroying) effects of Walmart’s decisions. He reiterated that whatever Walmart decides to do has large repercussions—and told me that what it had decided to do since my Natchez foray was to compete with high-end supermarkets. “You won’t recognize the grocery section of a supercenter,” he said. He ordered me to get in my car and find one.

He was right. In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I’d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods. The bunched beets were from Muranaka Farm, whose beets I often buy at other markets—but these looked much fresher. The service people I could find (it wasn’t hard) were unfailingly enthusiastic, though I did wonder whether they got let out at night.

During a few days of tasting, the results were mixed. Those beets handily beat (sorry) ones I’d just bought at Whole Foods, and compared nicely with beets I’d recently bought at the farmers’ market. But packaged carrots and celery, both organic, were flavorless. Organic bananas and “tree ripened” California peaches, already out of season, were better than the ones in most supermarkets, and most of the Walmart food was cheaper—though when I went to my usual Whole Foods to compare prices for local produce, they were surprisingly similar (dry goods and dairy products were considerably less expensive at Walmart).

Walmart holding its own against Whole Foods? This called for a blind tasting.

I conspired with my contrarian friend James McWilliams, an agricultural historian at Texas State University at San Marcos and the author of the new Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. He enlisted his friends at Fino, a restaurant in Austin that pays special attention to where the food it serves comes from, as co-conspirators. I would buy two complete sets of ingredients, one at Walmart and the other at Whole Foods. The chef would prepare them as simply as possible, and serve two versions of each course, side by side on the same plate, to a group of local food experts invited to judge.

I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.

The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.

Ron McCormick, the senior director of local and sustainable sourcing for Walmart, told me that about three years ago he came upon pictures from the 1920s of thriving apple orchards in Rogers, Arkansas, eight miles from the company’s headquarters. Apples were once shipped from northwest Arkansas by railroad to St. Louis and Chicago. After Washington state and California took over the apple market, hardly any orchards remained. Cabbage, greens, and melons were also once staples of the local farming economy. But for decades, Arkansas’s cash crops have been tomatoes and grapes. A new initiative could diversify crops and give consumers fresher produce.

As with most Walmart programs, the clear impetus is to claim a share of consumer spending: first for organics, now for locally grown food. But buying local food is often harder than buying organic. The obstacles for both small farm and big store are many: how much a relatively small farmer can grow and how reliably, given short growing seasons; how to charge a competitive price when the farmer’s expenses are so much higher than those of industrial farms; and how to get produce from farm to warehouse.

Walmart knows all this, and knows that various nonprofit agricultural and university networks are trying to solve the same problems. In considering how to build on existing programs (and investments), Walmart talked with the local branch of the Environmental Defense Fund, which opened near the company’s Arkansas headquarters when Walmart started to look serious about green efforts, and with the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. The center (of which the Walmart Foundation is a chief funder) is part of a national partnership called Agile Agriculture, which includes universities such as Drake and the University of New Hampshire and nonprofits like the American Farmland Trust.* To get more locally grown produce into grocery stores and restaurants, the partnership is centralizing and streamlining distribution for farms with limited growing seasons, limited production, and limited transportation resources.

Walmart says it wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states. (The heirloom varieties beloved by foodies lost out at the same time, but so far they’re not a focus of Walmart’s program.) This would be something like bringing the once-flourishing silk and wool trades back to my hometown of Rockville, Connecticut. It’s not something you expect from Walmart, which is better known for destroying local economies than for rebuilding them.

As everyone who sells to or buys from (or, notoriously, works for) Walmart knows, price is where every consideration begins and ends. Even if the price Walmart pays for local produce is slightly higher than what it would pay large growers, savings in transport and the ability to order smaller quantities at a time can make up the difference. Contracting directly with farmers, which Walmart intends to do in the future as much as possible, can help eliminate middlemen, who sometimes misrepresent prices. Heritage produce currently accounts for only 4 to 6 percent of Walmart’s produce sales, McCormick told me (already more than a chain might spend on produce in a year, as Fishman would point out), adding that he hopes the figure will get closer to 20 percent, so the program will “go from experimental to being really viable.”

Michelle Harvey, who is in charge of working with Walmart on agriculture programs at the local Environmental Defense Fund office, summarized a long conversation with me on the sustainability efforts she thinks the company is serious about: “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.”

“We support local farmers,” read a sign at an Austin Walmart. I didn’t see any farm names listed in the produce section, but I did find plastic tubs of organic baby spinach and “spring mix” greens with modern labeling that looked like it could be at Whole Foods. My list was simple to the point of stark, for a fair fight. Some ingredients seemed identical to what I’d find at Whole Foods. Organic, free-range brown eggs. Promised Land all-natural, hormone-free milk. A bottle of Watkins Madagascar vanilla for panna cotta. I couldn’t find much in the way of the seasonal fruit the restaurant had told me the chef would serve with dessert. But I did find, to my surprise, a huge bin of pomegranates, so I bought those, and some Bosc pears. The sticking points were fresh goat cheese, which flummoxed the nice sales people (we found some Alouette brand, hidden), and chicken breasts. I could find organic meat, but no breasts without “up to 12 percent natural chicken broth” added—an attempt to inject flavor and add weight. I wasn’t happy with the suppliers, either: Tyson predominated. I bought Pilgrims Pride, but was suspicious. The bill was $126.02.

At the flagship Whole Foods, in downtown Austin, the produce was much more varied, though the spinach and spring mix looked less vibrant. The chicken was properly dry, a fresh ivory color—and more than twice as expensive as Walmart’s. My total bill was $175.04; $20 of the extra $50 was for the meat.

Brian Stubbs, the tall, genial young manager of Fino, and Jason Donoho, the chef, were intrigued as they helped me carry bag after bag into the restaurant’s kitchen. They carefully segregated the bags on two shelves of a walk-in refrigerator. The younger cooks looked surprised by the Whole Foods kraft-paper bags, and slightly horrified by the flimsy white plastic ones from Walmart.

The next night 16 critics, bloggers, and general food lovers gathered around a long, high table at the restaurant. Stubbs passed out scoring sheets with bullets for grades of one (worst) to five (best) for each of the four courses, and lines for comments.

The first course, bowls of almonds and pieces of fried goat cheese with red-onion jam and honey, was a clear win for Walmart. The Walmart almonds were described as “aromatic,” “mellow,” “pure,” and “yummy,” the Whole Foods almonds as “raw,” though also more “natural”; they were in fact fresher, though duller in flavor. (Like the best of the food I saw at the Austin Walmart, the packaging for the almonds had a homegrown Mexican look.) The second course, mixed spring greens in a sherry vinaigrette, was another Walmart win: only a few tasters preferred the Whole Foods greens, calling them fresher and heartier-flavored. And only one noticed the little brown age spots on a few Walmart leaves, but she was a ringer—Carol Ann Sayle, a local farmer famous for her greens.

So far Walmart was ahead. But then came the chicken, served with a poached egg on a bed of spinach and golden raisins. A woman whose taste I already thought uncanny—she works as an aromatherapist—compared the broth-infused meat to something out of a hospital cafeteria: “It’s like they injected it with something to make it taste like fast food.” I thought it was salty, damp, and dismal. The spinach, though, was another story: even the most ardent brothy-breast haters thought the Walmart spinach was fresher.

Dessert was the most puzzling. I had thought that Walmart’s locally sourced milk and exotic-looking vanilla would be the gold standard, but the Whole Foods house brands slaughtered them (“Kicks A’s ass,” one taster wrote). People couldn’t find enough words to diss the Walmart panna cotta (“artificial, thin”) and praise the Whole Foods one (“like a good Christmas”). I wished I’d bought the identical Promised Land milk at Whole Foods, to see if there is in fact a difference in the branded food products that suppliers give Walmart, as there is in the case of other branded products. The pomegranate seeds, sadly, were wan, with barely any flavor, particularly compared with the garnet gems from Whole Foods. But Walmart got points from the chef, and from me, for carrying pomegranates at all.

As I had been in my own kitchen, the tasters were surprised when the results were unblinded at the end of the meal and they learned that in a number of instances they had adamantly preferred Walmart produce. And they weren’t entirely happy.

In an ideal world, people would buy their food directly from the people who grew or caught it, or grow and catch it themselves. But most people can’t do that. If there were a Walmart closer to where I live, I would probably shop there.

Most important, the vast majority of Walmarts carry a large range of affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. And Walmarts serve many “food deserts,” in large cities and rural areas—ironically including farm areas. I’m not sure I’m convinced that the world’s largest retailer is set on rebuilding local economies it had a hand in destroying, if not literally, then in effect. But I’m convinced that if it wants to, a ruthlessly well-run mechanism can bring fruits and vegetables back to land where they once flourished, and deliver them to the people who need them most.

Correction: The article originally stated, incorrectly, that the Agile Agriculture partnership included the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

By Thomas Doherty

“It sucks,” decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of sharp-eyed cinema scribes have been winnowed to a curt kiss-off. In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream. Just log on, vent, and hit send.

The transfer of film criticism from its print-based platforms (newspapers, magazines, and academic journals) to ectoplasmic Web-page billboards has rocked the lit-crit screen trade. Whether from the world of journalism (where the pink slips are landing with hurricane force) or academe (which itself is experiencing the worst job market since the Middle Ages), serious writers on film feel under siege, underappreciated, and underemployed.

The ballast of traditional credentials—whereby film critics earned their bones through university degrees or years at metropolitan dailies—has been thrown overboard by the judgment calls of anonymous upstarts without portfolio but very much with a DSL hotline to Hollywood’s prime moviegoing demographic. In film criticism, the blogosphere is the true sphere of influence.

A sure sign of the bleak diagnosis for the ink-and-paper crowd is the arrival of the sympathy cards. While tanking as a viable livelihood, American film criticism is up to its eyeballs in affectionate, retrospective tributes. In 2006, the Library of America bestowed its seal of approval with American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate, a professor of creative writing and literature. Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (University of California Press, 2007), by the film professor Dana B. Polan, and Inventing Film Studies (Duke University Press, 2008), a collection of metacritical articles edited by the film scholars Lee Grievesen and Haidee Wasson, focus primarily on the academic institutionalization of the discipline of film studies, but both also track the deep backstory of a practice as old as the nickelodeon. Forthcoming (April) from Santa Monica Press, the film critic Jerry Roberts’s The Complete History of American Film Criticism lives up to its title with a quick march through every top-billed byline from the Kinetoscope to Blu-ray. Finally, just out in DVD, For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009)—a documentary mash note directed and written by the critic-scholar and now filmmaker Gerald Peary, a professor of communications and journalism and longtime film critic at The Boston Phoenix—sounds last call at the wake.

The history lessons are revelatory, both for uncovering the long tradition of discerning film criticism in America (it didn’t start in the 1960s) and for the surprising number of brand-name writers who have slummed as movie reviewers: Carl Sandburg, on the silent screen in The Chicago Daily News in the 1920s (on Garbo: “slim, pale, like willows turning yellow in autumn”); John Updike, who took to the pages of The Boston Globe to defend the Goldie Hawn-Kurt Russell rom-com Overboard (1987) (on Goldie: “a semicomic valentine surrounded by tumble-dried blond hair”).

Turn-of-the-(last)-century critics fixed on film early on as a canvas to mull over and carp about. Watching the Life and Passion of Christ (1903), Joseph Medill Patterson wondered, “Is it irreverent to portray the Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension in a vaudeville theatre over a darkened stage where half an hour before a couple of painted, short-skirted girls were doing a ‘sister act’?” More than one of the pioneers used his perch as a steppingstone to the other side of the screen. D.W. Griffith’s racist hallucination, The Birth of a Nation (1915), was co-written by the film critic Frank E. Woods, though the guild might want to keep quiet about that one. The future playwright and screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood—The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)—first caught Hollywood’s eye for his prescient film commentary. Writing under the heading “The Silent Drama,” he knew the curtain was coming down on pantomime after one listen to The Jazz Singer (1927). “I, for one, suddenly realized that I shall have to find a new name for this department,” he proclaimed.

  

 

Appropriately, a congenial place to sample American film criticism is at the movies. Peary’s For the Love of Movies grants film critics star billing. Begun as an homage, however, it plays more as a requiem for the heavyweights of a dying vocation, a film-geek version of The Way We Were. Like Lopate’s anthology and Roberts’s survey, the documentary rewinds the forgotten prehistory of film criticism, but its narrative spine is the legendary grudge match between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, the Tracy and Hepburn—or maybe Trotsky and Stalin—of American film criticism. Kael threw the first punch in her scathing 1963 attack on the cult of the director as auteur, “Circles and Squares,” an essay that launched two birds with one screed—her own as a hit woman not to be crossed, and her target’s, who suddenly found the obscure pieces he published in the low-circulation Film Comment the manifesto of a new credo.

Each corner had a claque of fierce camp followers (dubbed “Paulettes” and “Sarrisites”) who shadowboxed for their mentors. “We made each other, we helped each other,” Sarris admits. “We established a dialectic.” Yet the fact that Sarris speaks for himself in For the Love of Movies and Kael appears only in archival footage creates an unfortunate disequilibrium; the pair were nothing if not evenly matched. Peary started shooting in 2001, by which time Kael was too infirm to participate. (She died of complications from Parkinson’s disease later that year.) Denied the romantic-comedy ending—Andy and Pauline falling into each other’s arms—the viewer is also denied the sight of the lions clawing at each other in winter.

By the 1970s, with the blistering auteur wars ending in a TKO for the Sarrisites, the veterans regrouped just in time to man the barricades for the Second Golden Age of Hollywood. Kael was firing on all cylinders at The New Yorker, defending the kiss-kiss bang-bangers Brian De Palma and Sam Peckinpah, Sarris was obligatory reading in The Village Voice, championing cinephilic New Yorkers like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, and across the nation, dozens of newspapers and magazines lent copious space and splashy cover stories to long-form think pieces analyzing filmmakers happy to be hailed as great artists.

Lopate’s collection gives a fair sampling of the gems—Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel at Time, Molly Haskell at The Village Voice, Vincent Canby at The New York Times, and Susan Sontag anywhere. Of course the gauzy flashbacks to a time when voracious moviegoers devoured erudite essays by equally passionate critics is as romantic a conceit as any released by MGM. But the box-office returns accrued by offbeat hits suggest a symbiotic relationship. Cheek-to-cheek, film and film criticism thrived.

Even when Hollywood turned to high-budget but lowbrow blockbusters in the 1980s, film criticism maintained its sharp edge and upward arc. Reviewing the decade, Peary, Lopate, and Roberts all give due regard to the salutary impact of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, the Chicago-based tag team whose television point-counterpoint, which made its debut nationally on PBS in 1978, brought a new level of film smarts to a video forum long dominated by dolts in turtleneck sweaters. “At their best, Siskel and Ebert’s lively talks were marked by the immediacy, drama, comedy, intelligence, and surprise of live theatre,” argues Roberts.

Then a different kind of termite art burrowed into the house that film criticism built. In the mid-1990s, the wide-open frontier of the blogosphere allowed young punks who still got carded at the multiplex to leapfrog over their print and video elders on user-friendly sites with hip domain names. If the traditional film critic was a professorial lecturer who lorded his superior knowledge and literary chops over the common rung of moviegoer, the Web slinger was a man-boy of the people, visceral and emotional, a stream-of-consciousness spurter with no internal censor or mute button. Listen to the war cry of the Internet Movie Critic ensconced at http://home.earthlink.net/~usondermann: “What sets me apart from the Siskel & Eberts of this world is a simple truth: I don’t read books!”

The poster boy for the fanboy-as-critic is the bearded, gnomish taste master Harry Knowles. In 1996, Knowles executed an Internet end run around print film critics by setting up his own aisle seat at Ain’t It Cool News (http://aintitcool.com). Soon his site was as coveted an imprimatur as the opposable thumbs of Siskel and Ebert. Knowles boasts two and a half million readers a day—though maybe “hits” is a better measurement—which explains why Hollywood ads are now more likely to quote from Web sites than from print critics.

Predictably, the old guard sees the newbies as semiliterate troglodytes who prowl the viral veld grunting out expletives. “The Internet has made the proliferation of these people possible in a way that it never was before,” rasps Rex Reed in Peary’s film. Schickel concurs: “What I see of Internet reviewing is people of just surpassing ignorance about the medium expressing themselves on the medium.” Many film critics would agree with the condemnation of “the spectacle of 22- and 23-year-old boys taking 40- or 50-year-old artists to task without being able to show a sign of technical knowledge.” (Actually, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels said that last bit after banning uppity critics from Reich newspapers in 1936.)

Defenders of the bloggers, texters, and tweeters laud the democratization of opinion and the instant access to inside dope. (Many Web-based critics have few qualms about pirated scripts and studio screeners.) Untethered to the industry and not co-opted by plush press junkets, the argument goes, the unpaid fan-bloggers are more independent, more honest, and more in sync with the mass audience than the jaded sexagenarians. Moreover, purely as a media forum for cinematic analysis, the widescreen Net blows away the printed page, offering unlimited space for analysis, links to like-minded sites, and photo “captures” and streaming clips for illustration. The bloggers get the info out first and fast, the readership bookmarks its own comfort zones, and critic and reader begin a two-way conversation that collapses the distinction between interlocutors. The print-bound critics are lumbering dinosaurs grousing about their own extinction. Survival of the fittest, gramps.

To watch their backs and retain their 401(k)’s, most print critics have been forced into sleeping with the enemy. As a form of ancillary outreach, blogs, podcasts, and chat-room discussions have become a required part of the job description for print reviewers. Or maybe the print part of the gig is now the ancillary outreach.

Feeling the same heat, academic critics have also plunged into the brash new world. The film-studies panjandrum David Bordwell—think Knowles with chops in postmodern theory—runs one of the most closely watched blogs at David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (http://davidbordwell.net/blog). The impact of the academic bloggers on Hollywood’s box-office gross is negligible (sorry, David), but the online work of the digital hordes is already making a substantial contribution to film scholarship—in the spirited parry and thrust of the dialogues, in the instant retrieval of past research, and in the factoid jackpots provided by the film databases.

The problem, however, especially for graduate students and younger scholars, is that the powers that be in academe still have not sussed out how to calibrate the value of online work in decisions about hiring, tenure, and promotion, how to weigh the contributions on Web sites like Sense of Cinema (http://sensesofcinema.com) and FlowTV (http://flowtv.org) against peer-reviewed brands like Cinema Journal and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. Is heavy Web-site traffic the modern version of frequent citation from respected colleagues? Is a year in harness as a conscientious Webmaster equal to the publication of a scholarly article? Not yet, but the hoary admonition to “publish or perish” may soon morph into “post or perish.”

For the print-minded film critic who refuses to evolve, the writing is on the digital wall. The jacket cover for Lopate’s anthology shows a pair of analog antiques: a creaky 35 millimeter projector and a clunky manual typewriter. The freeze frame closing out Peary’s film shows Sarris, clutching a cane, and Molly Haskell under a theater marquee, as if about to enter their last picture show.

Not good omens for a craft rooted in the literary grace and humanist sensibility of the revered Agee. “The Italian made Shoeshine is about as beautiful, moving, and heartening a film as you are ever likely to see,” he confided to his readers in 1947, in full swoon over Italian neo-Realism. “I will review it when I am capable of getting more than that into coherent language and feasible space.”

Coherent language within feasible space—words to write by, even when the prose is no longer bound by linear rhetoric and finite column inches. The demise of that tradition of film criticism would really suck.  

By Peter Schmidt

 

Benjamin Rasmussen

Behold the regal rainbow trout, dappled denizen of deep lake and rushing river, fierce hunter of fish and fly—and prize of pork-barrel politics, invigorator of men, eradicator of native species, payload of numerous bombing missions.

An angler can catch a lot of rainbow trout and yet have no clue what a remarkable force of nature—and mankind—the creatures truly are. Anders Halverson, a research associate at the University of Colorado’s Center of the American West, hoists them up for close inspection in a book just released by Yale University Press: An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World. 

 

Few one-that-got-away stories sound nearly as improbable as his account of how our species, Homo sapiens, spread the fish species, Oncorhynchus mykiss, beyond its native range.

Consider that as of the 1870s, the rainbow trout and its sea-run variant, the steelhead, lived only along the Pacific Rim, from California to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Since then, Halverson says, the fish “have been introduced to every state in the United States and to at least 80 different countries on every continent except Antarctica,” an expansion of range that took humans, corn, sheep, and dogs thousands of years to achieve.

Halverson offers statistics that illustrate how much humans are still involved in the spread of rainbow trout: For each of the roughly four million people born in the United States each year, he says, state and federal hatcheries stock about 20 of the fish in public waters. Most of them being mature, they weigh a total of about 25 million pounds.

Enlarge Photo

Why make such an investment in spreading this one species of fish? It grows rapidly in hatcheries and withstands warmer waters and more-difficult conditions than other trout. Perhaps more important, Halverson says, the stocking of rainbow trout—which fight hard and leap acrobatically when hooked—has “satisfied a powerful human need”: the primal urge to seek out and battle prey.

Halverson’s book is a microhistory, an examination of America’s involvement with a favored fish that sheds light on broader truths regarding our recent relationship with the natural world.

He says he fished for stocked rainbow trout while growing up in Colorado but eventually got bored with the pursuit and thought little of the fish until he became a graduate student in aquatic ecology at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in 2005. At Yale “I came to realize there is a real paradox to the way so many fisheries are managed these days,” he says. “Like most fishermen, I see fishing as a way to escape civilization and industrialization, and a way to sort of make peace with the natural world.” Yet most rainbow trout, being either the products of hatcheries or the descendants of hatchery fish, “are in many ways a product of that industrialization.”

He decided to write a book examining the artificial spread of the rainbow trout and obtained a National Science Foundation grant to help finance the undertaking. He initially expected the project to be mainly an exercise in muckraking (he had worked as a newspaper reporter before going to graduate school). But “the more people I met and the more people I interviewed,” he says, “the more I realized what a complex topic this is.” Although he came across case after case in which efforts to spread the trout led to environmental disasters, his book generally does not paint those involved as fools or villains.

When it comes to government policy regarding trout, he says, “there are a lot of issues for which there are no clear answers.” He points to the dilemma posed by rainbow trout’s ability to mate with the increasingly rare—and unhealthily inbred—cutthroat trout of the American West. Such interbreeding is causing cutthroats to become even rarer as a distinct species, but the purebred cutthroat population is having so much trouble surviving on its own that hybridization might represent the single best hope of passing the fish’s genes along to future generations. It is unclear whether the long-term survival of cutthroats requires keeping rainbows at a distance or bringing the two species together.

The oddest specimens in An Entirely Synthetic Fish are the people. They include Livingston Stone, a New Hampshire pastor who abandoned the pulpit to raise brook trout on a fish farm, then ventured to California in the 1870s, initially to set up a federal salmon hatchery in the Sacramento River Valley. He encountered the rainbow trout and ended up propagating that species in a hatchery on the McCloud River, where he lived under threat of attack by outlaws and members of the Wintu tribe. In one report on his activities, he remarked, “With tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes, Indians, panthers and threats of murder our course here is not wholly over a path of roses.”

Among others described in Halverson’s book is Al Reese, a crop duster and barnstormer who in the late 1940s helped persuade California’s Department of Fish and Game to drop rainbow trout into mountain lakes from the air. (He tested the fishes’ ability to survive the trip partly by holding live specimens out a car window at 70 miles per hour.) The state agency recruited World War II pilots and purchased surplus military airplanes to dump the fish, generally from about 200 feet. Many of the trout died on impact with the water or ended up stuck in trees, but enough survived to inspire the agency to similarly drop turkeys, partridges, and even beaver (in burlap sacks attached to parachutes). About 50 years later, the agency learned that it had gone overboard with its fish-bombing runs, inadvertently ridding lakes of rare frogs, which the fish had devoured, and filling some lakes with so many trout that their growth was stunted from too much competition for food.

California fish-and-game officials are hardly the only ones who eventually altered trout-stocking policies in response to evidence of money wasted or doing more harm than good.

The book devotes a chapter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision in 1962 to deliberately poison the Green River in Utah and Wyoming to wipe out the native fish and make room for rainbows. At the time, few in the agency questioned the idea of pouring huge amounts of the piscicide rotenone into a body of water. Since 1952 federal and state fisheries managers had used the chemical, which kills anything with gills, to clear the way for rainbow trout and other game fish in a long list of rivers and lakes around the nation, even within national parks.

A few scholars at Colorado State University and the University of Utah spoke out against the Green River plan and subsequently complained of efforts by state and federal agencies to shut them up by threatening to cut off grants to their institutions. Many of those involved in the river poisoning lived to regret it, for it ended up being a disaster for both the environment and public relations.

The project’s planners assumed they would be able to keep the keep the river from carrying the rotenone into Dinosaur National Monument park by having workers neutralize the poison upstream from the park with potassium permanganate, but they were wrong. When dead fish turned up in the park, the Fish and Wildlife Service found itself in the cross hairs of the National Park Service. Perhaps even more important, about three weeks after the incident, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, helping spawn an environmental movement that barraged officials in Washington with angry letters about the Green River kill.

The secretary of interior at the time, Stewart Udall, responded by curbing the use of rotenone by federal agencies and calling for the welfare of unique species to be a “dominant consideration” in such projects from then on. All four of the chief so-called trash fish that the Green River poisoning sought to kill—the humpback chub, the bonytail, the razorback sucker, and the Colorado pikeminnow—now have a place on the federal endangered-species list. The federal government has spent more than $100-million trying to save them.

An Entirely Synthetic Fish recounts many other governmental attempts at improving nature that went awry. In the 1960s, for example, researchers discovered that stocking a river with hatchery trout can decimate the wild trout population and actually leave it with fewer trout over all; the hatchery fish aggressively compete with the locals for food, and many end up being eaten themselves because they seem to associate the shadows of predators with those of hatchery workers tossing kibble. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Colorado Division of Wildlife inadvertently unleashed trout epidemics by stocking rivers with rainbows infected with parasite-born whirling disease, which leaves its victims disfigured and prone to swimming in tight circles.

The book also compellingly traces how the nation’s attitudes toward fishing have varied over time. In the 17th century, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regarded fishing with a hook and line as an exercise in idleness deserving punishment. During and just after the American Revolution, fishing suffered a similar image problem, thanks to its association with the English aristocracy. Beginning in the mid-1800s, however, interest in sport fishing boomed as it gained status as a diversion for the wealthy and came to be viewed as a pursuit that helped keep men virile and in touch with nature. Politicians eager to take credit for bringing hatchery jobs and better fishing to their states happily supported federal efforts to stock waters with game species.

Throughout much of America, one can still encounter the absurd sight of fishermen gathered on riverbanks next to hatchery trucks, hoping to catch naïve rainbow trout minutes after they are stocked. While not exactly shooting fish in a barrel, perhaps no other experience comes as close.

For his part, Halverson is attempting to restore the populations of rarer species of trout by, counterintuitively, encouraging people to fish for them. Taking a cue from the culture of birdwatchers, many of whom will travel long distances to add to their “life list” of species they have seen, he has set up a Web site that encourages anglers to catch and release as many species as they can. His logic is that if enough people roll into small towns and say they are out to hook rare fish species X or Y, the local chambers of commerce will get word, and new constituencies will be created to lobby for the fish’s restoration.

Writing An Entirely Synthetic Fish has renewed his own interest in angling, both for rainbows and for other trout, Halverson says. “I actually love fishing again. You pick one of these rainbows up, and it is just a book that says so much about us.”

Introducing the Mesofact

By Samuel Arbesman  

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.

But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.

Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.

For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information. We recognize rapid change, whether it’s as simple as a fast-moving object or living with the knowledge that humans have walked on the moon. But anything short of large-scale rapid change is often ignored. This is the reason we continue to write the wrong year during the first days of January.

Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.

Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.

Mesofacts can also be fun. Let’s focus for a moment on some mesofacts that can be of vital importance if you’re a child, or parent of a child: those about dinosaurs. Just a few decades ago, dinosaurs were thought to be cold-blooded, slow-witted lizards that walked with their legs splayed out beside them. Now, scientists think that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded and fast-moving creatures. And they even had feathers! Just a few weeks ago we learned about the color patterns of dinosaurs (stripes! with orange tufts!). These facts might not affect how you live your life, but then again, you’re probably not 6 years old. There is another mesofact that is unlikely to affect your daily routine, but might win you a bar bet: the number of planets known outside the solar system. After the first extrasolar planet around an ordinary star made headlines back in 1995, most people stopped paying attention. Well, the number of extrasolar planets is currently over 400. Know this, and the next round won’t be on you.

The fact that the world changes rapidly is exciting, but everyone knows about that. There is much change that is neither fast nor momentous, but no less breathtaking.

by Hale “Bonddad” Stewart

This week, the president announced the creation of a panel to look at the federal budget. As such, it seems appropriate to look at the federal budget in detail to get a sense of what’s there. All of the information contained in the graphs that follow is available from the CBO. Please click on all images to see a larger image. Also, all data starts in 1970 and goes through fiscal 2009.
The US has run a surplus 4 years since 1970, or about 10% of the time. Over those 39 years we’ve had Republican and Democratic control of both the White House and Congress. This leads to a very simple conclusion: no party can make a legitimate claim to being fiscally responsible.
Above is a chart of the total deficit for each year going back to 1970. First, note (again) only four years show a surplus. This means that for 35 years (and in fact for a longer period) the US has issued debt on a continuing basis to pay for its revenue shortfall. This means the US — like most US corporations — has to manage its Treasury operations. All this means is the US Treasury has to decide what maturity of Treasury bond to issue, how much of a particular Treasury bond to issue and when to issue it. Again, this is standard procedure from a corporate finance perspective.$12.4 trillion and total US GDP is approximately $14.4 trillion. That makes the debt/GDP ratio 86%. While that is not good, it is not fatal.
Above is a chart of total federal outlays as a percent of GDP. Notice the number has been remarkably constant since 1970, fluctuating right around 20% for most of that time.
Personal income taxes (the top blue line) comprise the largest percentage of federal tax receipts. In addition, these have continually comprised about 45%-50% of total federal receipts. The biggest change since 1970 has occurred in social insurance taxes (the yellow line), which have increased from a little over 20% to about 35%-40% over the last 10 years. Corporate taxes (the light purple line) have also been consistently responsible for about 10% of total tax receipts. Finally, note that estate and gift taxes (the light blue line at the bottom of the graph) overall contribution is more or less negligible on a percentage basis.
The above chart looks at federal receipts from a percent of GDP basis. Fist, note the percentages have been fairly consistent since 1970. Personal income taxes total between 8%-10% of GDP, corporate taxes total about 2% of GDP and estate and gift taxes account for less than 1% of GDP. The only big change has been an increase in social insurance taxes, which have increased to about 6% of GDP.
The above chart breaks federal spending down into mandatory, discretionary and interest payments. Mandatory spending has increased from a little under 40% of the federal budget in 1970 to right around 60% over the last few years. Discretionary spending has decreased from right around 60% in 1970 to a little under 40% over the last few years. The progression of mandatory spending is at the center of much of the budgetary concern in Washington and the public.
Above is a chart of the 10-year CMT (constantly maturing treasury). Interest rates have been dropping for about 20 years. While there is considerable debate regarding the possibility of this continuing, we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out.
Above is a chart of mandatory and discretionary spending as a percent of GDP. Interestingly enough, despite the increase in the dollar amount of discretionary spending, it has remained more or less constant on a percent of GDP basis. The recent spike may be the result of the extraordinary budgetary circumstances the country is currently in. Additionally, discretionary spending actually dropped until the beginning of the decade when it started to rise again. Finally, interest payments are under control for now.

Let’s start with a chart of government revenues and expenditures, starting in 1970:

Currently, total US debt is approximately

Let’s take a look at the components of federal revenue.

Finally, note that interest payments are in fact pretty much under control. The primary reason for this is the near 20 year downward trajectory in interest rates:

Finally, the chart above shows the percentages of SS, Medicaid and Medicare of mandatory spending. The big issue here is clear: note the increase of medicare as a percentage of mandatory spending. It’s been increasing for some time.

So, what does all of this tell us about the US budget?

1.) The total federal debt/GDP ratio and interest rate payments (both on a percent to total expenditures and percent of GDP) are manageable at current levels. All of this has been aided by a two decade long decrease in interest rates. It’s doubtful that will continue given the current pace of expenditures. Most importantly, given the current rate of spending and debt growth, changes will have to be made once we are out of the recession for sure. And that’s where the real political problem lies.

2.) While mandatory spending has remained constant as a percent of GDP, it’s increase to about 60% of the current federal budget is perhaps the biggest problem the US faces going forward. And as the percentage increase in medicare payments indicates, medical payments are a primary reason for the problems the country faces at the federal fiscal level.

3.) The argument that the US is taxed to death is wrong. On a percent of GDP basis the US is taxed at moderate rates.

4.) I’m surprised how unimportant estate and gift taxes are to the overall scheme of things. Even before the generous estate tax credit of the last few years (essentially exempting estates worth less than $3.5 million), estate and gift taxes are remarkably unimportant from a total revenues perspective. It’s obvious they serve another purpose such as the theoretical prevention of dynastic wealth transfer.

By Ruth R. Wisse

On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard’s famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the German invasion of September 1. To stage the current production its co-directors, Debra Caplan, a Harvard graduate student of Yiddish and Cecilia Raker, an undergraduate concentrator in drama, assembled a cast willing to learn their parts in a language most of them had never heard. The directors kept all the musical numbers in the original Yiddish and used a new English translation for the dialogue, adding dancers to the production to compensate for the verbal delights an English audience would miss.

Of the dozen plays I had studied with these students in a course on Yiddish drama, Shulamis was by no means the most obviously appealing to contemporary taste. Its theme is trustworthiness: a young man Absolom neglects the vow of marriage he made to the rustic Shulamis, who endures bitter years of waiting until he repents the alliance he made instead and returns to her. Beneath the intricacies of the love story throbs the Jewish national motif of keeping faith with covenant. What most intrigued the student-directors was the moral and psychological fallout of such faithfulness: How do we account for the suffering of the woman Absolom marries, and for the death of their two infant children in apparent retribution for his sin? When Absolom leaves his wife and fulfils his promise, can an audience forgive him as fully as Shulamis does, and is the reconciliation at the final curtain really meant to erase the effects of those intervening years? The excitement generated by such questions among cast, musicians, technical crew, and among scholars and graduate students invited to participate in an intercollegiate symposium on the play seemed to bear out the website’s claim for “a resurgence of interest in Yiddish among young people.”

Much of that interest is currently stimulated by institutions of higher learning, like Columbia, NYU, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Stanford, Emory, Brandeis, and universities of Indiana, Michigan, Albany, and Texas, all of which offer programs in Yiddish. Harvard’s current cohort of eight PhD candidates in Yiddish is its largest and liveliest since the inception of the program in 1993. Yet the field of Yiddish is hardly stable. The University of Maryland has just announced that it may drop its Yiddish position as a cost-saving device, sacrificing an apparently marginal subject—one unlikely to figure prominently in the college ratings of US News and World Report. The news from Baltimore generated anxiety in what had until recently been the expanding sphere of Yiddish studies. Comings and goings of faculty sometimes determine the status of the language, since many university positions in Jewish Studies are open ended, and shift their priorities according to the specialty of the person hired.

by Jay Rosen of PressThink

This is a post about a single line in a recent article in the New York Times: Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right.

Before I get to the line that interested me, I need to acknowledge that the investigation the Times undertook for this article is wholly admirable and exactly what we need professional journalists to be doing. Reporter David Barstow spent five months—five months!—reporting and researching the Tea Party phenomenon.

He went to their events. He talked to hundreds of people drawn into the movement. He watched what happens at their rallies and the smaller meetings where movement politics is transacted. He made himself fully literate, learning the differences between the Tea Party and the Patriot movements, reading the authors who have infuenced Tea Party activists, getting to know local leaders and regional differences, building up a complex and layered portrait of a political cohort that doesn’t fit into party politics as normally understood.

This is original reporting at a very high level of commitment to public service; it is expensive, difficult, and increasingly rare in a news business suffering under economic collapse.

So I want to make it absolutely clear that I treasure this kind of journalism and indeed devoured Barstow’s report when it came online. (Although I wish it had been twice as long.) And I have no problem with his decision to confine himself to description of the Tea Party movement, rather than evaluating its goodness or badness. The first task is to understand, and that is why we need reporters willing to go out there and witness the phenomenon, interview the participants, pore over the texts and struggle with their account until they feel they have it right.

“A narrative of impending tyranny.”

As Barstow said in an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, “If you spend enough time talking to people in the movement, eventually you hear enough of the same kinds of ideas, the same kinds of concerns, and you begin to recognize what the ideology is, what the paradigm is that they’re operating in.” The key words are spend enough time and begin to recognize.

Now to the part that puzzles me:

It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny. This narrative permeates Tea Party Web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and YouTube videos. It is a prominent theme of their favored media outlets and commentators, and it connects the disparate issues that preoccupy many Tea Party supporters — from the concern that the community organization Acorn is stealing elections to the belief that Mr. Obama is trying to control the Internet and restrict gun ownership.

Running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny…That sounds like the Tea Party movement I have observed, so the truth of the sentence is not in doubt. But what about the truth of the narrative? David Barstow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. He ought to know whether the United States is on the verge of losing its democracy and succumbing to an authoritarian or despotic form of government. If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story. The New York Times has done a lot of reporting about the Obama Administration, but it has been silent on the collapse of basic freedoms lurking just around the corner. Barstow commented on the sentence that disturbed me in his interview with CJR:

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways. I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

It kept coming up, but David… did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can.

As a matter of reported fact

Now we can predict, with a reasonable degree of confidence, what the reply would be from the reporter, his editors (who are equally involved here, as the Times is a very editor-driven newspaper) and his peers in the press. The reply is the reply that is given by the common sense of pro journalism as it is practiced in the United States. “This was a news story, an attempt to report what’s happening out there, as accurately and fairly as possible. Which is not the place for the author’s opinion.” Or: “I was trying to describe the Tea Party movement, and to understand it, which is hard enough; I’ll let others judge what to make of it.”

Sounds good, right? But this distinction, between fact and opinion, description and assessment, is not what my question is about. It may appear to be responsive, but it really isn’t. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but… as a matter of reported fact, is the United States actually on the verge of tyranny? That is my question. Would a fair description of the American political scene by the Washington bureau and investigative staff of the New York Times lend support to the “impending tyranny” narrative that Barstow observed as a unifying theme in the Tea Party movement?

It’s a key point, so let me state it again: Based not on a subjective assessment of the Tea Party’s viability or his opinion of its desirability but only on facts he knows about the state of politics and government since Obama’s election, is there any substantial likelihood of a tyranny replacing the American republic in the near future?

I think it’s obvious—not only to me but to Barstow and the journalist who interviewed him for CJR—that the answers are “no.” For if the answers were “yes” it would have been a huge story! No fair description of the current scene, nothing in what the Washington bureau and investigative staff of the New York Times has picked up from its reporting, would support a characterization like “impending tyranny.”

In a word, the Times editors and Barstow know this narrative is nuts, but something stops them from saying so— despite the fact that they must have spent over $100,000 on this one story. And whatever that thing is, it’s not the reluctance to voice an opinion in the news columns, but a reluctance to report a fact in the news columns, the fact that the “narrative of impending tyranny” is ungrounded in any observable reality, even though the sense of grievance within the Tea Party movement is truly felt and politically consequential.

A faltering sense of reality

My claim: We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved. That’s what created the pattern I’ve called “regression to a phony mean.” That’s what motivated the rise of he said, she said reporting.

I explained the quest for innocence in a 2008 essay on campaign coverage for tomdispatch.com. (It also ran in Salon.)

But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to play up their detachment. Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists. Ever noticed how spirits lift when the pundit roundtable turns from the Middle East or the looming recession to the horse race, and there’s an opportunity for sizing up the candidates? To be manifestly agenda-less is journalistic bliss. Of course, since trying to get ahead of the voters can affect how voters view the candidates, the innocence, too, is an illusion.

The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things! As it did in Barstow’s account. Now let’s speed up the picture and imagine how this interference in truth-telling happens routinely, many times a day over years and years of reporting on politics. What’s lost is that sense of reality Isaiah Berlin talked about. In its place is savviness, the dialect of insiders trying to persuade us that they know how things really work. Nothing is more characteristic of the savvy style than statements like “perception is often reality in politics.”

“For some reason, American political coverage is exempt.”

And in fact frustrated observers of political journalism have complained about this loss of the real. The latest to groan about it is George Packer in the New Yorker. He was commenting on how David Broder of the Washington Post, the dean emeritus of political reporters, had written a surreal column about Sarah Palin that nonetheless seemed entirely normal if you know the genre:

Broder wasn’t analyzing Palin’s positions or accusations, or the truth or falsehood of her claims, or even the nature of the emotions that she appeals to. He was reviewing a performance and giving it the thumbs up, using the familiar terminology of political journalism. This has been so characteristic of the coverage of politics for so long that it doesn’t seem in the least bit odd, and it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way.

Italics mine. Packer’s point becomes clearer when he transplants this kind of reportng to Afghanistan with the sense of reality dropped out. “Imagine Karzai’s recent inaugural address as covered by a Washington journalist,” he writes:

“Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully co-opted his Pashtun base while making a powerful appeal to the technocrats who have lately been disappointed in him, and at the same time he reassured the Afghan public that his patience with civilian casualties is wearing thin. A palace insider, who asked for anonymity in order to be able to speak candidly, said, “If Karzai can continue to signal the West that he is concerned about corruption without alienating his warlord allies, he will likely be able to defuse the perception of a weak leader and regain his image as a unifying figure who can play the role of both modernizer and nationalist.” Still, the palace insider acknowledged, tensions remain within Mr. Karzai’s own inner circle.

This sounds like politics the way our journalists narrate it, but as Packer notes, “A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt.” Exactly. That’s the exemption Barstow was calling on when he wrote. “… running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.” Somehow the reality that this narrative exists as a binding force within the Tea Party movement is more reportable than the fact that the movement’s binding force is a fake crisis, a delusion shared.

I leave you with a question: how the hell could this happen?

By Amanda Fung

Six months after Mo Vaughn set up Omni New York in 2004, the fledgling real estate firm struck, snapping up a 286-unit affordable housing complex in the Bronx. By the end of its second year, Omni New York had tripled its holdings to a total of 869 units.

As far as most people were concerned, however, Mr. Vaughn was still a Mets first baseman, even though his baseball career ended in 2003.

“I wanted people to take us seriously and know that we were the real deal,” says Mr. Vaughn, who is seated at a Brooklyn eatery with his partner, Eugene Schneur, explaining his transition from baseball hero to real estate mogul—albeit one whose new uniform includes not just sharply tailored suits but large diamond-encrusted hoop earrings. “I wanted respect.”

These days he’s got it—not as the American League’s former MVP but as the managing director of one of the city’s best-regarded and most active buyers and managers of affordable housing. Along the way, Mr. Vaughn and company have earned a place as one of the city’s top choices for turning around distressed residential properties.

Today Omni ranks as a midsize firm capable of competing with the bigger players, swallowing up sprawling properties such as the decrepit 14-building, 416-unit complex in the South Bronx that Omni bought the mortgage on at a foreclosure auction—with the city’s blessing—in December. “Given their track record, they are ideally suited to deal with troubled projects,” says NYC Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Rafael Cestero.

Since 2004, Omni has spent over $500 million buying and rehabilitating 21 affordable-housing buildings with a total of nearly 3,500 units in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Long Island and as far away as Wyoming. The majority of the buildings they own and manage are Section 8 buildings, whose low-income tenants rely on federal vouchers to help pay their rent. Omni finances its deals using tax-exempt bonds and the proceeds from the sale of low-income-housing tax credits.

Making money and doing good

That is exactly what it did when it acquired the Noble Drew Ali Plaza in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn—the 2007 deal that put Omni on the map. At the time, the five-building complex with 358 units was a haven for drug dealers and addicts, its hallways urine-soaked and graffiti-lined and its apartments crumbling.

Omni purchased the property out of bankruptcy for $23 million with financing from various city agencies, including HPD, as well as federal grants. The developer then poured $25 million into refurbishing everything from new elevators and energy-saving appliances to 326 security cameras. After two years of work, Messrs. Schneur and Vaughn capped off the revitalization by giving the complex a new handle: “The Plaza.”

“Noble Drew Ali, without a doubt, was one of the most complicated projects [we've seen],” says Mr. Cestero. “They restored it to a quality place for people to live by taking a very aggressive approach to renovating buildings.”

Today Mr. Vaughn, who played for the Boston Red Sox in the 1990s, spends most of his time on the operations side of the business, working with Omni’s construction, management and maintenance teams, while Mr. Schneur focuses on the dealmaking.

“I’m the eyes,” said Mr. Vaughn, who got his start in real estate by investing in Manhattan nightclubs with help from Mr. Schneur, then his attorney. “I make sure that everything that needs to get done gets done.”

In fact, Omni was his idea. In Ohio, where Mr. Vaughn spent his off-seasons, he met a developer successfully buying affordable housing using tax credits and decided to try the concept out in New York.

“They are smart people,” says Lisa Gomez, executive vice president of affordable housing developer L+M Development Partners. “They get how to do affordable housing and look to the double bottom line [of making money and doing good].”

Size doesn’t matter

But competition for distressed properties is increasing as the drought in luxury housing deals drags on. Meanwhile, the price of tax credits—a key currency in such deals—has plummeted by nearly a third, forcing Omni to scramble for more state and city subsidies to fill the gap.

“We used to be able to get deals done without subsidies,” says Mr. Schneur.

Omni’s rapid growth also presents challenges. By year’s end, it expects to have close to 5,000 units. For a firm whose two founders visited their early holdings as many as four times a week, the sheer scale of the portfolio now makes maintaining that degree of oversight difficult—even with the aid of a staff at its midtown headquarters that now numbers about 120.

“We can’t cut corners and be complacent,” says Mr. Vaughn. “If we continue to be humble and work hard, we will be fine.”

In fact, Mr. Vaughn and his partner are stepping up their act. Prior to the market collapse, Omni had been priced out of Manhattan. Mr. Schneur recalls one deal where Omni bid $20 million for a Manhattan building that went for $30 million.

Last month, Omni had better luck, buying its first Manhattan properties—two Section 8 buildings in Harlem with 53 units—for $5.5 million. Now, as a number of big, financially troubled properties, including Lawrence Gluck’s 1,230-unit Riverton in Harlem, make their way through foreclosure, they are weighing a bid. Even Manhattan’s vast middle-income oasis Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village looms as a potential target.

“Size doesn’t matter,” says Mr. Vaughn. “They fit within our philosophy of preserving decent affordable housing.”

by Mark Lawson

Norman Mailer speaking at a protest against the war in Vietnam. Photograph: JP Laffont/Sygma/Corbis

January 27 is becoming a black-letter day in American literature. On that day in 2009, John Updike died and, this year, the first ­anniversary of that loss was marked by the news that JD Salinger was dead. It’s an artificial coincidence – of a sort that authors as good as Updike and Salinger would have scorned in their stories – but the deaths in close succession of members of the literary generations born in the 1910s, 20s and 30s do have a symbolic significance. If we add the deaths within four months of 2007 of Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut – members with Salinger of the set of major American writers formed by service in the second world war – it’s clear that an era in American literature is coming to a close.

There is an obvious temptation to believe that the authors who have recently died form – with others who fought in the war (such as Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal) or were teenagers in America during it (Philip Roth) – the greatest literary generation the country has ever seen or ever will see. This triumphalist but nostalgic position holds that these writers took advantage of their nation’s geopolitical power – and a media culture and bookstore customer-base which regarded serious writers ­seriously – to create a superpower of the pen to match the financial and military clout of the US during what became known as the American century.

The counter-argument is that this army of old soldiers was very male and masculine and white in its concerns – tempered only by a grudging, late admission to the halls of fame of writers such as Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates – and that the standard narrative of 20th-century American literature is partial and distorted. This case is made persuasively in Elaine Showalter’s recent book: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

These contrasting presentations of recent American letters are explored in Capturing America, an eight-part Radio 4 series on which I’ve been working for several years. And – even before the death of Salinger during final editing – there had been melancholy signs that this was the right time to take stock. The programmes contain the final ­major interviews with Mailer, Vonnegut and Updike. The latter seemed healthy and energetic in the BBC’s New York studio in the autumn of 2008 as he discussed his life-time mission to write “an alphabet of novels”. But The Widows of Eastwick, three short of the intended 26 full-length fictions from this man of letters, became the last when he was diagnosed, just 10 days after our conversation (according to the dated poems in Endpoint, his final volume of verse) with the pneumonia that would lead to diagnosis of lung cancer and his death on the date that lay in wait for Salinger 12 months later. When I began to think about the series, the question of who was America’s greatest living novelist would spark lively debate at a book festival. On the eve of transmission, that medal automatically defaults to Philip Roth.

There were other signs that this was the right time to analyse Am lit. Updike, in that last interview, reflected on having twice been pictured on the cover of Time magazine, part of the nation’s honours system, to mark the publication of Couples in 1968 and Rabbit Is Rich in 1982. Now, the novelist who takes that prize is Dan Brown. And so the changing of the guard in American fiction is arguably not just generational but cultural: the large, interested readership who lined their shelves with Updike’s Rabbit Quartet, Bellow’s Herzog, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and other bestsellers of serious literary merit had perhaps migrated to the quick-read thriller and the confessional memoir.

Any overview is immediately subject to accusations of oversight which are followed just as inevitably by a defence of compression; but my definition of modern American literature concentrates on authors whose first work appeared after 1945, which was, in so many ways, a break-through date.

Roth, in The Plot Against America, imagines that a protectionist government prevented the US from entering the second world war when it did. But, if this had been historical reality, The Plot Against America is not the only major American novel we might now lack. The major American novelists of the middle years of the 20th century are all, in various ways, direct beneficiaries of their country’s involvement in that conflict.

Norman Mailer served in the 112th Cavalry in the Pacific theatre, where Gore Vidal, enlisted in the US Army Reserve, was master of a supply boat. Joseph Heller was a bombardier in the 12th Air Force and Kurt Vonnegut a private in the 106th Infantry Division. Jerome David Salinger, drafted into the 4th Infantry Division of the 12th Infantry Regiment, fought on D-Day. Saul Bellow, though Canadian by birth and older than the others, signed up for the Merchant Navy.

Apart from Salinger, this squadron of future novelists saw little military action – Mailer was mainly utilised as a cook and Vonnegut rapidly became a prisoner of war – but all had found material for stories. Indeed, Mailer was clear that he had joined the army with the hope of writing the novel that became The Naked and the Dead (1948). Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, drew on the war period, while Vidal’s experiences at sea gave him the title for a volume of memoirs – Point to Point Navigation – and a combatant’s jaundiced perspective which informed his long sequence of historical novels about the growth of American military ambition: Chronicles of Empire.

But the 1939-45 conflict (1941-45, in American terms) was not just a compelling subject for the country’s writers; it was, for some, a passport to authorship. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (colloquially known as the GI Bill) was almost voted down by the nation’s politicians – opponents citing anti-socialist objections similar to those afflicting Obama’s healthcare proposals now – but it transformed the nation’s education. Before this legislation, the level of college fees largely restricted entry to the children of the wealthy but a provision in the GI Bill to fund the studies of veterans democratised teaching. By 1947, just under half of undergraduates were recipients of this generosity.

Among them were Mailer and Bellow – who wrote early novels in Paris, courtesy of servicemen readjustment grants – and Heller and Vonnegut. Towards the end of his life – when we spoke in New York– Vonnegut had not forgotten the lucky consequences of war service for himself and others of his generation: “Heller and I would have been washing machine salesmen if it wasn’t for the GI Bill.”

The greatest of the novels that this legislation enabled Heller and Vonnegut to write are striking examples of the centrality of war to modern US literature. Both writers took two decades to turn their experience of conflict – Heller in the belly of bomber planes, Vonnegut as a PoW during the fire-bombing of Dresden – into books which, coincidentally, turned tragic events into savage comedy and had numbers in their name: Catch-22 (1962) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Because of their lengthy gestation, these novels accidentally became handbooks of the anti-Vietnam protesters, and this is a striking example of the overlaps that tend to occur in America’s literature of conflict.

The same authors inspired and educated by the second world war remained involved – on the page at least – in subsequent 20th-century battles. Mailer published the polemic Why Are We in Vietnam? and The ­Armies of the Night, an account of a great anti-Vietnam march on Washington which records the literary odd couple he formed in that protest with Robert Lowell, the poet who had been imprisoned for conscientious objection during the war in Europe. And, in his final years, Mailer railed – as did his contemporary, Vonnegut – against the last American military intervention of their lifetimes: the invasion of Iraq. The latter, in A Man Without a Country, as a German-American once incarcerated in Dresden, even compared the administration of George W Bush to the Nazis.

During Vietnam, a Lowell poem predicted that America would be involved in “small war on the heels of small war, until the end of time”. And, though we hopefully still have some time to go, this has so far proved accurate. A nation established by victory over the British – and, within a century, almost split by civil conflict – developed, after its unarguable role as the saviour of ­Europe, a doctrine of allegedly defensive interventions overseas which turned its authors into war reporters.

Even those who were teenagers during the second world war have contributed to the conflict literature: Roth, in The War Against America; John Updike in Terrorist; and EL Doctorow who, during the Bush years, published The March (a civil war novel) and Homer and Langley, set in the early 40s but in which the accounts of GIs sending home recordings to their families inevitably made us think of current troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stories of one war that clips at the heels of another.

And, in recent US history, definitions of peacetime have been relative: violent divisions over race, place and wealth – some of them dating from the civil war – have meant that even non-war stories are often conflict literature. The critic Harold Bloom told me that Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) – in which the wounds of the 19th century bleed copiously – has some claim to be the greatest modern American novel because it deals with the nation’s deep tendency to violence. Bloom’s view has perhaps recently been vindicated by the growing sense (helped by high-profile movies of No Country for Old Men and The Road) that McCarthy is now the country’s most fashionable serious writer – although the 76-year-old from Rhode Island, who latterly adopted Texas as his home and literary location – has done almost nothing to encourage that popularity.

One of the major pleasures of my long investigation of American writing was meeting writers who have been heroes since I read as a teenager the Penguins and Picadors which – now yellowed and buckled – became research material 30 years later. Time and again, the jacket photographs miraculously came to life.

Norman Mailer, standing in greeting at the top of his tall house in Brooklyn Heights, with its view to the Statue of Liberty, and growling, in a perfect parody of his reputation for obsession with masculinity: “You’re a big man. Do you box? You should box.” Philip Roth skittish and wickedly jokey as the technical preparations were made, sombre and professorial as soon as the interviews began. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most vociferous writers in literary history (around 150 publications, including all pseudonyms and genres), so softly spoken in a Princeton University office that she could hardly be heard over the purr of the heating. Toni Morrison, giving a magisterial reading and analysis of America on the brink of electing Obama. John Updike, arriving at a snowy Boston hotel, wearing a black knitted cap and clutching a Dunkin Donuts cup of decaf coffee.

And just hearing these voices was a kind of literary criticism. The theatre director Sir Peter Hall once said that if you want to know how a play should sound on stage, you should listen to the playwright speaking, because the tone of authors’ prose or dialogue will generally reflect their speech patterns. And I thought of that as Edward Albee – on a summer day in a Soho loft filled with an impressive art collection made possible by the royalties from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Three Tall Women and The Goat – delivered witty, twinkly, stinging sentences about his plays and his critics.

In this odd position of having coffee with set-texts, I also often thought of the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye who comments that a good story makes you want to get the author on the telephone and talk to him. But, as Salinger possibly realised with a quiet laugh even in 1951, the writer of those lines was among the few, in an age of strenuous literary publicity, from whom we never heard.

The paradox of Am lit is that it is notable for possessing both the most publicity-conscious writers in literary history – Mailer had an eye for photo-ops generally only found in reality TV contestants – and the most publicity-shy. Salinger refused interviews and public appearances throughout his career, an example followed by Harper Lee and Thomas Pynchon.

For decades, the only pictures of Salinger and Pynchon were school yearbook photos, captured before they took their vows of invisibility. Eventually, the Salinger gallery extended to two exhibits, when a paparazzo snapped him on an errand. Don DeLillo – who featured a reclusive writer in his novel Mao II – told me that this image of a startled old man looking over his shoulder at the shutter-click he had for so long avoided is one of the most upsetting he has ever seen. But that – as the illustrations to the obituary coverage showed – did not stop a couple of other cameras subsequently snapping him.

Perhaps the reason for this Mailer/Salinger dichotomy – one happy to run for public office, the other running from the clicking shutter – is that literary fame in the US is potentially so vast that responses need to be extreme: absolute promiscuity, total celibacy. Those who have tried to take a middle path of occasional cooperation – Roth, McCarthy – have suffered intrusive coverage and unwanted attention.

The level of visibility that a major writer is offered may be one explanation for the centrality of the self in modern American literature. Mailer, in a literary equivalent of a conversational tactic pioneered by sportsmen, frequently wrote about himself in the surname third-person, a tactic which can be seen as ego but which may also have acknowledged the increasing impossibility, in a time of furious curiosity about writers, of the observing character being a neutral “I”.

In a similar strategy, Roth and Updike responded to the increasingly looming presence of the alter ego who was out there selling the books – and, often, being described and reviewed as brutally as the novels – by summoning up fictional surrogates.

Roth (Nathan Zuckerman), Updike (Henry Bech) – these novelists like to write about writers. Vonnegut’s characters included a science fiction author called Kilgore Trout, who feels like a self-portrait, and three of the major novels of John Irving – The World According to Garp, A Widow for One Year and Last Night in Twisted River – have protagonists who are novelists. These authorial stand-ins can be viewed as self-indulgence but a more charitable interpretation would be that they are self-protection against the energetic efforts, in American letters, to appropriate a writer’s identity.

Bellow, although offering no authorly surrogate as openly declared as Zuckerman or Bech, seems to have been a routinely autobiographical writer, once describing each of his novels as “a bulletin on my own condition”. Fairly typically, when Bellow left the university where he was teaching for Bucharest, to visit the mother of his then wife, the result was The Dean’s December (1982), in which an American academic takes a trip to see his mother-in-law in Romania. The story also incorporates, flimsily rewritten, two actual murders that had occurred contemporaneously in his home city of Chicago.

Such direct memoir is often seen as a weakness in fiction: “All the men are Saul and the women are the wives” has been a frequent complaint against Bellow’s novels; Harold Bloom made a version of it when we met. But we only know because we know; if Bellow had done a Pynchon or Salinger, we might have taken the events in Bucharest as vivid imagination. And so one of the consequences of the industrialisation of publicity in the US book business has been to expose the origins of novels in a way that can then be turned against them.

Many of the ­nation’s ­poets, however, have willingly participated in this striptease, without apparent misgivings. At least Bellow’s bulletins on his own condition changed the names and occasional details. The output of a group of New England ­poets – Lowell (1917-1977), Sylvia Plath (1932-63) and Anne Sexton (1928-74) – perfected the genre of “confessional” verse, in which the life (and, in the cases of Plath and Sexton, likely future death by suicide) frequently seems to undergo little change beyond rhythmic shaping to fit the lines.

This verse was often literally therapeutic – Lowell, Plath and Sexton were all treated at the same psychiatric clinic in Massachusetts – but began a debate about whether the genre should sometimes be subject to an equivalent of medical confidentiality. Lowell – in Notebook (1969) and The Dolphin (1973) – quoted directly from the letters of an ex-wife. Whether or not this was ethical, it was true to two increasingly important ideas in American culture during this period: the primacy of the self and a prejudice that fact had more validity than fiction.

Those perceptions also drove an influential new genre which emerged at the same time as confessional poetry: the new journalism. Tom Wolfe (born in 1931) and Hunter S Thompson (1937-2005) overturned two well-cemented tenets of American journalism – the reporter as a discreet, objective presence, and a reverence for fact over opinion – to create a new strain of factual narrative in which the reporter is a star of the story. Books such as Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) introduced the devices of fiction to journalism and would eventually encourage the same development in reverse.

Perhaps conscious that arguably the finest work of new journalism had been written by a novelist – Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1980), which recreated, in visceral physical and psychological detail, the life of the murderer Gary Gilmore – Wolfe responded, within a decade, by producing the finest novel written by a new journalist: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). In promoting this book, he also provoked a long-running and entertaining feud with career novelists – including the New England Johns, Irving and Updike – by suggesting that their work was insufficiently observant of the real world.

This energising slippage between fact and fiction continues in the work of two of the most exciting talents of the new generation: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), published as fiction, and A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) by Dave Eggers, released as non-fiction, are both genre-crossing family memoirs that combine agonising truth with storytelling tricks and have unreliable narrators with the author’s own name. True to one of the key developments in modern American writing, ­Safran Foer and Eggers achieved literary celebrity through first books that acted as though they already had it.

The ambition of the nation’s prose writers is a commonplace of American literary studies: the idea that its ­authors are competing to compose the great American novel. But this contest is probably a myth – wasn’t it won, as early as 1851, by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick? A different source of extraordinary boldness and scope is American theatre.

Between the eve of the second world war and the beginning of the 1960s, a series of plays appeared which revolutionised American drama: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) by Albee. Each of these dramas is set predominantly within a domestic residence of its era and has a surface of realism; each has become a standard of the classroom and the provincial theatre repertoire, with the stamp of conservatism that such endorsements inevitably bring.

Yet all of these plays contain significant non-naturalistic or experimental elements: dream sequences or flashes forward or back. Seeing Our Town last year – in the acclaimed off-Broadway revival by David Cromer for the Barrow Street Theatre – I was startled by the darkness and strangeness, in both structure and tone, of a script which I remembered as a linear hymn to small-town life. No sooner are characters introduced than the audience is told of when and how they will die horribly; an entire act takes place in a graveyard filled with people looking back on unfulfilled lives.

British theatre did not achieve a radical change in content and form until the 50s and 60s – driven first by John Osborne’s stable-cleansing Look Back in Anger and then the abolition of censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s office – but the equivalent breakthrough in the playhouses of the US occurred at least a decade and a half earlier.

It is also notable that America’s dramatists, though the mecca of their profession has always been the commercial stages of Broadway, consistently questioned the optimistic rhetoric of politicians and businessmen about the supremacy of its way of living. The dominant figure of postwar American drama is the fantasist or liar with a life which is in some way unsustainable: Miller’s Willy Loman, Williams’s Blanche DuBois, Albee’s George and Martha.

This radicalism of tone and structure continued among the younger generation of dramatists. Though the leader of the new pack is a minimalist – David Mamet, whose plays, including American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, rarely detain the audience beyond two hours – US stages still spawn plays of a scale more commonly associated with multi-episode television serials.

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992) runs, across its two parts, for around six hours and, as its subtitle (“A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”) makes clear, follows those pioneering plays of the immediate postwar period in mixing the naturalistic with the non-realistic and even the supernatural. So too does August Wilson’s The Pittsburgh Cycle (1982-2005), which has an architecture even larger than Kushner’s: 10 plays, each dealing with a different decade of African-American history in the 20th century. Wilson also moved freely between fact and fantasy: his characters include a 322-year-old woman.

The most recent serious play to become a box-office hit on Broadway – August: Osage County (2007) by Tracy Letts – is another of these daring constructs: a three-act, three-hour-plus attempt to show that domestic tragedy can still be written in an ironic age. Though working within a system that worships commerce – Miller, Williams and Albee all suffered spells of neglect in which they were grateful for subsidised theatre in the UK – American playwrights have, when it comes to form and politics, consistently dared to go for broke.

Writers are frequently seen as being unworldly figures, but, as it turns out, the White House and the CIA would have been better prepared for 9/11 if they had read American novelists and dramatists rather than field reports. After the attacks, the intelligence community reportedly consulted Hollywood screenwriters about likely future threats, having spotted that movies such as Die Hard anticipated the methods and level of terrorist threat to the US, but they might just as fruitfully have called in DeLillo, Charles McCarry and Kushner.

DeLillo’s most resonant books so far have examined the politics of the American past – Libra (1981), about the JFK assassination and Underworld (1997), exploring the cold war era – but his earlier fiction proves to have been percipient. Though the threat of terrorism entered general consciousness in the US only after 9/11, it figured in DeLillo’s work from the 70s, an insight he attributed to having lived in Greece.

McCarry is a former servant of the secret world – working as a CIA agent under deep cover in Asia and the Middle East during the cold war – who now has some claim to be the best-kept secret on the great American writers shelf. His The Tears of Autumn (1974) is one of the three best literary explorations of the JFK assassination – the others are Libra and Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995) – and the one which perhaps explains most plausibly what happened.

Though far less well known than John le Carré, McCarry has been just as geopolitically aware and is the writer who came closest to directly predicting the 11 September attacks. His book The Better Angels (1979) includes suicide bombers sending planes against America, directed by an Arab malcontent whom contemporary readers will inevitably visualise as Osama bin Laden. Kushner’s play Homebody/ ­Kabul (2001), written before the attacks, includes an Afghan character warning Americans that the Taliban are “coming to New York”.

In the interviews they gave at what turned out to be, in too many cases, the end of their lives, the great fictionalists of the US were almost uniformly gloomy about the future of serious writing. Mailer and Updike detected the retreat of a readership for complex stories. Among living practitioners, Albee feared that Broadway ticket prices mean that only sentimentality and spectacle can sell, complaining of the “middlebrowism that is afflicting American theatre because it is a commercial theatre”.

Roth was also concerned about a coarsening of culture: “The population of intelligent, attentive readers capable of concentration and focus of the kind that is required by a serious novel . . . has decreased. Not because there aren’t the same number of intelligent people around but because they have been torn away like Lady Macbeth says she tore away the child from her breast. They have been torn away from the breast of literature by the screen.”

Vidal, with characteristic dyspepsia, argued that America cannot have suffered a cultural decline because “we never had a culture”, but accepted that his earlier work was published at a more receptive time: “The attention of readers has shifted away . . . it feels to me very much like a dying moment for literary culture in my country.”

The history of sport, though, warns us that the great players of the past are prone to believing that the finest achievements belonged to their own era and will not be bettered by the disappointing generation which follows.

A more optimistic reading is that intelligent literary culture will adapt to the new conditions of the marketplace and may be revived, as the country always has been, by immigration. The Jewish-American, Irish-American, ­African-American and European-­American writers of the great postwar generations may be followed by authors who are, say, Indian-American (Jhumpa Lahiri, left, with Unaccustomed Earth), Dominican-American (Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) or Korean-American (Chang-rae Lee, whose novel The Surrendered, published this spring, extends the nation’s rich war literature by treating the ­Korean war from an Asian perspective). With these books and others, a new phase is beginning.

Image credit: Fredrik Broden

By Don Peck

How should we characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.

The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work. 

All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year. 

There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill. 

The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be. 

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years. 

Since last spring, when fears of economic apocalypse began to ebb, we’ve been treated to an alphabet soup of predictions about the recovery. Various economists have suggested that it might look like a V (a strong and rapid rebound), a U (slower), a W (reflecting the possibility of a double-dip recession), or, most alarming, an L (no recovery in demand or jobs for years: a lost decade). This summer, with all the good letters already taken, the former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote on his blog that the recovery might actually be shaped like an X (the imagery is elusive, but Reich’s argument was that there can be no recovery until we find an entirely new model of economic growth). 

No one knows what shape the recovery will take. The economy grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the third quarter of last year, the first increase since the second quarter of 2008. If economic growth continues to pick up, substantial job growth will eventually follow. But there are many reasons to doubt the durability of the economic turnaround, and the speed with which jobs will return. 

Historically, financial crises have spawned long periods of economic malaise, and this crisis, so far, has been true to form. Despite the bailouts, many banks’ balance sheets remain weak; more than 140 banks failed in 2009. As a result, banks have kept lending standards tight, frustrating the efforts of small businesses—which have accounted for almost half of all job losses—to invest or rehire. Exports seem unlikely to provide much of a boost; although China, India, Brazil, and some other emerging markets are growing quickly again, Europe and Japan—both major markets for U.S. exports—remain weak. And in any case, exports make up only about 13 percent of total U.S. production; even if they were to grow quickly, the impact would be muted. 

Most recessions end when people start spending again, but for the foreseeable future, U.S. consumer demand is unlikely to propel strong economic growth. As of November, one in seven mortgages was delinquent, up from one in 10 a year earlier. As many as one in four houses may now be underwater, and the ratio of household debt to GDP, about 65 percent in the mid-1990s, is roughly 100 percent today. It is not merely animal spirits that are keeping people from spending freely (though those spirits are dour). Heavy debt and large losses of wealth have forced spending onto a lower path. 

So what is the engine that will pull the U.S. back onto a strong growth path? That turns out to be a hard question. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who fears a lost decade, said in a lecture at the London School of Economics last summer that he has “no idea” how the economy could quickly return to strong, sustainable growth. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, told the Associated Press last fall, “I think the unemployment rate will be permanently higher, or at least higher for the foreseeable future. The collective psyche has changed as a result of what we’ve been through. And we’re going to be different as a result.” 

One big reason that the economy stabilized last summer and fall is the stimulus; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that without the stimulus, growth would have been anywhere from 1.2 to 3.2 percentage points lower in the third quarter of 2009. The stimulus will continue to trickle into the economy for the next couple of years, but as a concentrated force, it’s largely spent. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said last fall, “By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth,” adding that she didn’t expect unemployment to fall significantly until 2011. That prediction has since been echoed, more or less, by the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs. 

The economy now sits in a hole more than 10 million jobs deep—that’s the number required to get back to 5 percent unemployment, the rate we had before the recession started, and one that’s been more or less typical for a generation. And because the population is growing and new people are continually coming onto the job market, we need to produce roughly 1.5 million new jobs a year—about 125,000 a month—just to keep from sinking deeper. 

Even if the economy were to immediately begin producing 600,000 jobs a month—more than double the pace of the mid-to-late 1990s, when job growth was strong—it would take roughly two years to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in. The economy could add jobs that fast, or even faster—job growth is theoretically limited only by labor supply, and a lot more labor is sitting idle today than usual. But the U.S. hasn’t seen that pace of sustained employment growth in more than 30 years. And given the particulars of this recession, matching idle workers with new jobs—even once economic growth picks up—seems likely to be a particularly slow and challenging process. 

The construction and finance industries, bloated by a decade-long housing bubble, are unlikely to regain their former share of the economy, and as a result many out-of-work finance professionals and construction workers won’t be able to simply pick up where they left off when growth returns—they’ll need to retrain and find new careers. (For different reasons, the same might be said of many media professionals and auto workers.) And even within industries that are likely to bounce back smartly, temporary layoffs have generally given way to the permanent elimination of jobs, the result of workplace restructuring. Manufacturing jobs have of course been moving overseas for decades, and still are; but recently, the outsourcing of much white-collar work has become possible. Companies that have cut domestic payrolls to the bone in this recession may choose to rebuild them in Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Bangalore, accelerating off-shoring decisions that otherwise might have occurred over many years. 

New jobs will come open in the U.S. But many will have different skill requirements than the old ones. “In a sense,” says Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution, “every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start all over. They don’t even know what industry they’ll be in next.” And as a spell of unemployment lengthens, skills erode and behavior tends to change, leaving some people unqualified even for work they once did well. 

Ultimately, innovation is what allows an economy to grow quickly and create new jobs as old ones obsolesce and disappear. Typically, one salutary side effect of recessions is that they eventually spur booms in innovation. Some laid-off employees become entrepreneurs, working on ideas that have been ignored by corporate bureaucracies, while sclerotic firms in declining industries fail, making way for nimbler enterprises. But according to the economist Edmund Phelps, the innovative potential of the U.S. economy looks limited today. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, he and his co-author, Leo Tilman, argue that dynamism in the U.S. has actually been in decline for a decade; with the housing bubble fueling easy (but unsustainable) growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice. Phelps and Tilman finger several culprits: a patent system that’s become stifling; an increasingly myopic focus among public companies on quarterly results, rather than long-term value creation; and, not least, a financial industry that for a generation has focused its talent and resources not on funding business innovation, but on proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, and arcane financial engineering. None of these problems is likely to disappear quickly. Phelps, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the “natural” rate of unemployment, believes that until they do disappear, the new floor for unemployment is likely to be between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent, even once “recovery” is complete. 

It’s likely, then, that for the next several years or more, the jobs environment will more closely resemble today’s environment than that of 2006 or 2007—or for that matter, the environment to which we were accustomed for a generation. Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, notes that if the recovery follows the same basic path as the last two (in 1991 and 2001), unemployment will stand at roughly 8 percent in 2014. 

“We haven’t seen anything like this before: a really deep recession combined with a really extended period, maybe as much as eight years, all told, of highly elevated unemployment,” Shierholz told me. “We’re about to see a big national experiment on stress.” 

“I’m definitely seeing a lot of the older generation saying, ‘Oh, this [recession] is so awful,’” Robert Sherman, a 2009 graduate of Syracuse University, told The New York Times in July. “But my generation isn’t getting as depressed and uptight.” Sherman had recently turned down a $50,000-a-year job at a consulting firm, after careful deliberation with his parents, because he hadn’t connected well with his potential bosses. Instead he was doing odd jobs and trying to get a couple of tech companies off the ground. “The economy will rebound,” he said. 

Over the past two generations, particularly among many college grads, the 20s have become a sort of netherworld between adolescence and adulthood. Job-switching is common, and with it, periods of voluntary, transitional unemployment. And as marriage and parenthood have receded farther into the future, the first years after college have become, arguably, more carefree. In this recession, the term funemployment has gained some currency among single 20-somethings, prompting a small raft of youth-culture stories in the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Weekly, on Gawker, and in other venues.

Most of the people interviewed in these stories seem merely to be trying to stay positive and make the best of a bad situation. They note that it’s a good time to reevaluate career choices; that since joblessness is now so common among their peers, it has lost much of its stigma; and that since they don’t have mortgages or kids, they have flexibility, and in this respect, they are lucky. All of this sounds sensible enough—it is intuitive to think that youth will be spared the worst of the recession’s scars. 

But in fact a whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale, has studied the impact of recessions on the lifetime earnings of young workers. In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times. 

But what’s truly remarkable is the persistence of the earnings gap. Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size. 

When Kahn looked more closely at the unlucky graduates at mid-career, she found some surprising characteristics. They were significantly less likely to work in professional occupations or other prestigious spheres. And they clung more tightly to their jobs: average job tenure was unusually long. People who entered the workforce during the recession “didn’t switch jobs as much, and particularly for young workers, that’s how you increase wages,” Kahn told me. This behavior may have resulted from a lingering risk aversion, born of a tough start. But a lack of opportunities may have played a larger role, she said: when you’re forced to start work in a particularly low-level job or unsexy career, it’s easy for other employers to dismiss you as having low potential. Moving up, or moving on to something different and better, becomes more difficult. 

“Graduates’ first jobs have an inordinate impact on their career path and [lifetime earnings],” wrote Austan Goolsbee, now a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, in The New York Times in 2006. “People essentially cannot close the wage gap by working their way up the company hierarchy. While they may work their way up, the people who started above them do, too. They don’t catch up.” Recent research suggests that as much as two-thirds of real lifetime wage growth typically occurs in the first 10 years of a career. After that, as people start families and their career paths lengthen and solidify, jumping the tracks becomes harder. 

This job environment is not one in which fast-track jobs are plentiful, to say the least. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, job offers to graduating seniors declined 21 percent last year, and are expected to decline another 7 percent this year. Last spring, in the San Francisco Bay Area, an organization called JobNob began holding networking happy hours to try to match college graduates with start-up companies looking primarily for unpaid labor. Julie Greenberg, a co-founder of JobNob, says that at the first event, on May 7, she expected perhaps 30 people, but 300 showed up. New graduates didn’t have much of a chance; most of the people there had several years of work experience—quite a lot were 30-somethings—and some had more than one degree. JobNob has since held events for alumni of Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard; all have been well attended (at the Harvard event, Greenberg tried to restrict attendance to 75, but about 100 people managed to get in), and all have been dominated by people with significant work experience. 

When experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are taking unpaid internships, not much is left for newly minted B.A.s. Yet if those same B.A.s don’t find purchase in the job market, they’ll soon have to compete with a fresh class of graduates—ones without white space on their résumé to explain. This is a tough squeeze to escape, and it only gets tighter over time. 

Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different—and damaged—people. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. “Some people say, ‘Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,’” Mossakowski told me. “But that isn’t true.” 

Examining national longitudinal data, Mossakowski has found that people who were unemployed for long periods in their teens or early 20s are far more likely to develop a habit of heavy drinking (five or more drinks in one sitting) by the time they approach middle age. They are also more likely to develop depressive symptoms. Prior drinking behavior and psychological history do not explain these problems—they result from unemployment itself. And the problems are not limited to those who never find steady work; they show up quite strongly as well in people who are later working regularly. 

Forty years ago, Glen Elder, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and a pioneer in the field of “life course” studies, found a pronounced diffidence in elderly men (though not women) who had suffered hardship as 20- and 30-somethings during the Depression. Decades later, unlike peers who had been largely spared in the 1930s, these men came across, he told me, as “beaten and withdrawn—lacking ambition, direction, confidence in themselves.” Today in Japan, according to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development, workers who began their careers during the “lost decade” of the 1990s and are now in their 30s make up six out of every 10 cases of depression, stress, and work-related mental disabilities reported by employers. 

A large and long-standing body of research shows that physical health tends to deteriorate during unemployment, most likely through a combination of fewer financial resources and a higher stress level. The most-recent research suggests that poor health is prevalent among the young, and endures for a lifetime. Till Von Wachter, an economist at Columbia University, and Daniel Sullivan, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recently looked at the mortality rates of men who had lost their jobs in Pennsylvania in the 1970s and ’80s. They found that particularly among men in their 40s or 50s, mortality rates rose markedly soon after a layoff. But regardless of age, all men were left with an elevated risk of dying in each year following their episode of unemployment, for the rest of their lives. And so, the younger the worker, the more pronounced the effect on his lifespan: the lives of workers who had lost their job at 30, Von Wachter and Sullivan found, were shorter than those who had lost their job at 50 or 55—and more than a year and a half shorter than those who’d never lost their job at all. 

Journalists and academics have thrown various labels at today’s young adults, hoping one might stick—Generation Y, Generation Next, the Net Generation, the Millennials, the Echo Boomers. All of these efforts contain an element of folly; the diversity of character within a generation is always and infinitely larger than the gap between generations. Still, the cultural and economic environment in which each generation is incubated clearly matters. It is no coincidence that the members of Generation X—painted as cynical, apathetic slackers—first emerged into the workforce in the weak job market of the early-to-mid-1980s. Nor is it a coincidence that the early members of Generation Y—labeled as optimistic, rule-following achievers—came of age during the Internet boom of the late 1990s. 

Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’” 

In her 2006 book, Generation Me, Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also expected that they would be earning $75,000 a year or more by age 30; the median salary made by a 30-year-old was $27,000 that year.) Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread. 

These efforts have succeeded in making today’s youth more confident and individualistic. But that may not benefit them in adulthood, particularly in this economic environment. Twenge writes that “self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work,” and that “the ability to persevere and keep going” is “a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem.” She worries that many young people might be inclined to simply give up in this job market. “You’d think if people are more individualistic, they’d be more independent,” she told me. “But it’s not really true. There’s an element of entitlement—they expect people to figure things out for them.” 

Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.” 

All of these characteristics are worrisome, given a harsh economic environment that requires perseverance, adaptability, humility, and entrepreneurialism. Perhaps most worrisome, though, is the fatalism and lack of agency that both Twenge and Alsop discern in today’s young adults. Trained throughout childhood to disconnect performance from reward, and told repeatedly that they are destined for great things, many are quick to place blame elsewhere when something goes wrong, and inclined to believe that bad situations will sort themselves out—or will be sorted out by parents or other helpers. 

In his remarks at last year’s commencement, in May, The New York Times reported, University of Connecticut President Michael Hogan addressed the phenomenon of students’ turning down jobs, with no alternatives, because they didn’t feel the jobs were good enough. “My first word of advice is this,” he told the graduates. “Say yes. In fact, say yes as often as you can. Saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to new experiences, and new experiences will lead to knowledge and wisdom. Yes is for young people, and an attitude of yes is how you will be able to go forward in these uncertain times.” 

Larry Druckenbrod, the university’s assistant director of career services, told me last fall, “This is a group that’s done résumé building since middle school. They’ve been told they’ve been preparing to go out and do great things after college. And now they’ve been dealt a 180.” For many, that’s led to “immobilization.” Druckenbrod said that about a third of the seniors he talked to that semester were seriously looking for work; another third were planning to go to grad school. The final third, he said, were “not even engaging with the job market—these are the ones whose parents have already said, ‘Just come home and live with us.’” 

According to a recent Pew survey, 10 percent of adults younger than 35 have moved back in with their parents as a result of the recession. But that’s merely an acceleration of a trend that has been under way for a generation or more. By the middle of the aughts, for instance, the percentage of 26-year-olds living with their parents reached 20 percent, nearly double what it was in 1970. Well before the recession began, this generation of young adults was less likely to work, or at least work steadily, than other recent generations. Since 2000, the percentage of people age 16 to 24 participating in the labor force has been declining (from 66 percent to 56 percent across the decade). Increased college attendance explains only part of the shift; the rest is a puzzle. Lingering weakness in the job market since 2001 may be one cause. Twenge believes the propensity of this generation to pursue “dream” careers that are, for most people, unlikely to work out may also be partly responsible. (In 2004, a national survey found that about one out of 18 college freshmen expected to make a living as an actor, musician, or artist.) 

Whatever the reason, the fact that so many young adults weren’t firmly rooted in the workforce even before the crash is deeply worrying. It means that a very large number of young adults entered the recession already vulnerable to all the ills that joblessness produces over time. It means that for a sizeable proportion of 20- and 30-somethings, the next few years will likely be toxic. 

No young people were present at a seminar for the unemployed held on November 4 in Reading, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar city about 60 miles west of Philadelphia. The meeting was organized by a regional nonprofit, Joseph’s People, and held in the basement of the St. Catharine’s parish center. All 30 or so attendees, sitting around a U-shaped table, looked to be 40 or older. But one middle-aged man, one of the first to introduce himself to the group, said he and his wife were there on behalf of their son, Errol. “He’s so disgusted that he didn’t want to come,” the man said. “He doesn’t know what to do, and we don’t either.” 

I talked to Errol a few days later. He is 28 and has a gentle, straightforward manner. He graduated from high school in 1999 and has lived with his parents since then. He worked in a machine shop for a couple of years after school, and has also held jobs at a battery factory, a sandpaper manufacturer, and a restaurant, where he was a cook. The restaurant closed in June 2008, and apart from a few days of work through temp agencies, he hasn’t had a job since. 

He calls in to a few temp agencies each week to let them know he’s interested in working, and checks the newspaper for job listings every Sunday. Sometimes he goes into CareerLink, the local unemployment office, to see if it has any new listings. He does work around the house, or in the small machine shop he’s set up in the garage, just to fill his days, and to try to keep his skills up. 

“I was thinking about moving,” he said. “I’m just really not sure where. Other places where I traveled, I didn’t really see much of a difference with what there was here.” He’s still got a few thousand dollars in the bank, which he saved when he was working as a machinist, and is mostly living off that; he’s been trading penny stocks to try to replenish those savings. 

I asked him what he foresaw for his working life. “As far as my job position,” he said, “I really don’t know what I want to do yet. I’m not sure.” When he was little, he wanted to be a mechanic, and he did enjoy the machine trade. But now there was hardly any work to be had, and what there was paid about the same as Walmart. “I don’t think there’s any way that you can have a job that you can think you can retire off of,” he said. “I think everyone’s going to have to transfer to another job.” He said the only future he could really imagine for himself now was just moving from job to job, with no career to speak of. “That’s what I think,” he said. “I don’t want to.” 

In her classic sociology of the Depression, The Unemployed Man and His Family, Mirra Komarovsky vividly describes how joblessness strained—and in many cases fundamentally altered—family relationships in the 1930s. During 1935 and 1936, Komarovsky and her research team interviewed the members of 59 white middle-class families in which the husband and father had been out of work for at least a year. Her research revealed deep psychological wounds. “It is awful to be old and discarded at 40,” said one father. “A man is not a man without work.” Another said plainly, “During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” Noted one woman of her husband, “I still love him, but he doesn’t seem as ‘big’ a man.” 

Taken together, the stories paint a picture of diminished men, bereft of familial authority. Household power—over children, spending, and daily decisions of all types—generally shifted to wives over time (and some women were happier overall as a result). Amid general anxiety, fears of pregnancy, and men’s loss of self-worth and loss of respect from their wives, sex lives withered. Socializing all but ceased as well, a casualty of poverty and embarrassment. Although some men embraced family life and drew their wife and children closer, most became distant. Children described their father as “mean,” “nasty,” or “bossy,” and didn’t want to bring friends around, for fear of what he might say. “There was less physical violence towards the wife than towards the child,” Komarovsky wrote. 

In the 70 years that have passed since the publication of The Unemployed Man and His Family, American society has become vastly more wealthy, and a more comprehensive social safety net—however frayed it may seem—now stretches beneath it. Two-earner households have become the norm, cushioning the economic blow of many layoffs. And of course, relationships between men and women have evolved. Yet when read today, large parts of Komarovsky’s book still seem disconcertingly up-to-date. All available evidence suggests that long bouts of unemployment—particularly male unemployment—still enfeeble the jobless and warp their families to a similar degree, and in many of the same ways. 

Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and “a kind of bereavement” in its own right. Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home. 

Especially in middle-aged men, long accustomed to the routine of the office or factory, unemployment seems to produce a crippling disorientation. At a series of workshops for the unemployed that I attended around Philadelphia last fall, the participants were overwhelmingly male, and the men in particular described the erosion of their identities, the isolation of being jobless, and the indignities of downward mobility. 

Over lunch I spoke with one attendee, Gus Poulos, a Vietnam-era veteran who had begun his career as a refrigeration mechanic before going to night school and becoming an accountant. He is trim and powerfully built, and looks much younger than his 59 years. For seven years, until he was laid off in December 2008, he was a senior financial analyst for a local hospital. 

Poulos said that his frustration had built and built over the past year. “You apply for so many jobs and just never hear anything,” he told me. “You’re one of my few interviews. I’m just glad to have an interview with anybody, even a magazine.” Poulos said he was an optimist by nature, and had always believed that with preparation and hard work, he could overcome whatever life threw at him. But sometime in the past year, he’d lost that sense, and at times he felt aimless and adrift. “That’s never been who I am,” he said. “But now, it’s who I am.” 

Recently he’d gotten a part-time job as a cashier at Walmart, for $8.50 an hour. “They say, ‘Do you want it?’ And in my head, I thought, ‘No.’ And I raised my hand and said, ‘Yes.’” Poulos and his wife met when they were both working as supermarket cashiers, four decades earlier—it had been one of his first jobs. “Now, here I am again.” 

Poulos’s wife is still working—she’s a quality-control analyst at a food company—and that’s been a blessing. But both are feeling the strain, financial and emotional, of his situation. She commutes about 100 miles every weekday, which makes for long days. His hours at Walmart are on weekends, so he doesn’t see her much anymore and doesn’t have much of a social life. 

Some neighbors were at the Walmart a couple of weeks ago, he said, and he rang up their purchase. “Maybe they were used to seeing me in a different setting,” he said—in a suit as he left for work in the morning, or walking the dog in the neighborhood. Or “maybe they were daydreaming.” But they didn’t greet him, and he didn’t say anything. He looked down at his soup, pushing it around the bowl with his spoon for a few seconds before looking back up at me. “I know they knew me,” he said. “I’ve been in their home.” 

The weight of this recession has fallen most heavily upon men, who’ve suffered roughly three-quarters of the 8 million job losses since the beginning of 2008. Male-dominated industries (construction, finance, manufacturing) have been particularly hard-hit, while sectors that disproportionately employ women (education, health care) have held up relatively well. In November, 19.4 percent of all men in their prime working years, 25 to 54, did not have jobs, the highest figure since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the statistic in 1948. At the time of this writing, it looks possible that within the next few months, for the first time in U.S. history, women will hold a majority of the country’s jobs. 

In this respect, the recession has merely intensified a long-standing trend. Broadly speaking, the service sector, which employs relatively more women, is growing, while manufacturing, which employs relatively more men, is shrinking. The net result is that men have been contributing a smaller and smaller share of family income. 

“Traditional” marriages, in which men engage in paid work and women in homemaking, have long been in eclipse. Particularly in blue-collar families, where many husbands and wives work staggered shifts, men routinely handle a lot of the child care today. Still, the ease with which gender bends in modern marriages should not be overestimated. When men stop doing paid work—and even when they work less than their wives—marital conflict usually follows. 

Last March, the National Domestic Violence Hotline received almost half again as many calls as it had one year earlier; as was the case in the Depression, unemployed men are vastly more likely to beat their wives or children. More common than violence, though, is a sort of passive-aggressiveness. In Identity Economics, the economists George Akerloff and Rachel Kranton find that among married couples, men who aren’t working at all, despite their free time, do only 37 percent of the housework, on average. And some men, apparently in an effort to guard their masculinity, actually do less housework after becoming unemployed. 

Many working women struggle with the idea of partners who aren’t breadwinners. “We’ve got this image of Archie Bunker sitting at home, grumbling and acting out,” says Kathryn Edin, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and an expert on family life. “And that does happen. But you also have women in whole communities thinking, ‘This guy’s nothing.’” Edin’s research in low-income communities shows, for instance, that most working women whose partner stayed home to watch the kids—while very happy with the quality of child care their children’s father provided—were dissatisfied with their relationship overall. “These relationships were often filled with conflict,” Edin told me. Even today, she says, men’s identities are far more defined by their work than women’s, and both men and women become extremely uncomfortable when men’s work goes away. 

The national divorce rate fell slightly in 2008, and that’s not unusual in a recession: divorce is expensive, and many couples delay it in hard times. But joblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and—when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis—poses “a profound challenge to marriage,” especially in lower-income communities. It may sound harsh, but in general, he says, “if men can’t make a contribution financially, they don’t have much to offer.” Two-thirds of all divorces are legally initiated by women. Wilcox believes that over the next few years, we may see a long wave of divorces, washing no small number of discarded and dispirited men back into single adulthood. 

Among couples without college degrees, says Edin, marriage has become an “increasingly fragile” institution. In many low-income communities, she fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But “the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,” Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities. 

Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower-middle class. “It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job—some way of illustrating to your neighbors that you have at least some grasp on some piece of the American pie,” Edin says. Increasingly, people in these communities see marriage not as a way to build savings and stability, but as “a symbol that you’ve arrived.” 

Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities—more than half of all new mothers without a college degree are unmarried. For both men and women in these communities, children are commonly seen as a highly desirable, relatively low-cost way to achieve meaning and bolster identity—especially when other opportunities are closed off. Christina Gibson-Davis, a public-policy professor at Duke University, recently found that among adults with no college degree, changes in income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth. 

“We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities,” Edin told me, “including white communities. And where it’s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you’re just seeing astonishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don’t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.” 

Many children are already suffering in this recession, for a variety of reasons. Among poor families, nutrition can be inadequate in hard times, hampering children’s mental and physical development. And regardless of social class, the stresses and distractions that afflict unemployed parents also afflict their kids, who are more likely to repeat a grade in school, and who on average earn less as adults. Children with unemployed fathers seem particularly vulnerable to psychological problems. 

But a large body of research shows that one of the worst things for children, in the long run, is an unstable family. By the time the average out-of-wedlock child has reached the age of 5, his or her mother will have had two or three significant relationships with men other than the father, and the child will typically have at least one half sibling. This kind of churning is terrible for children—heightening the risks of mental-health problems, troubles at school, teenage delinquency, and so on—and we’re likely to see more and more of it, the longer this malaise stretches on. 

“We could be headed in a direction where, among elites, marriage and family are conventional, but for substantial portions of society, life is more matriarchal,” says Wilcox. The marginalization of working-class men in family life has far-reaching consequences. “Marriage plays an important role in civilizing men. They work harder, longer, more strategically. They spend less time in bars and more time in church, less with friends and more with kin. And they’re happier and healthier.” 

Communities with large numbers of unmarried, jobless men take on an unsavory character over time. Edin’s research team spent part of last summer in Northeast and South Philadelphia, conducting in-depth interviews with residents. She says she was struck by what she saw: “These white working-class communities—once strong, vibrant, proud communities, often organized around big industries—they’re just in terrible straits. The social fabric of these places is just shredding. There’s little engagement in religious life, and the old civic organizations that people used to belong to are fading. Drugs have ravaged these communities, along with divorce, alcoholism, violence. I hang around these neighborhoods in South Philadelphia, and I think, ‘This is beginning to look like the black inner-city neighborhoods we’ve been studying for the past 20 years.’ When young men can’t transition into formal-sector jobs, they sell drugs and drink and do drugs. And it wreaks havoc on family life. They think, ‘Hey, if I’m 23 and I don’t have a baby, there’s something wrong with me.’ They’re following the pattern of their fathers in terms of the timing of childbearing, but they don’t have the jobs to support it. So their families are falling apart—and often spectacularly.” 

In his 1996 book, When Work Disappears, the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson connected the loss of jobs from inner cities in the 1970s to the many social ills that cropped up after that. “The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness,” he wrote, 

are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.

In the mid-20th century, most urban black men were employed, many of them in manufacturing. But beginning in the 1970s, as factories moved out of the cities or closed altogether, male unemployment began rising sharply. Between 1973 and 1987, the percentage of black men in their 20s working in manufacturing fell from roughly 37.5 percent to 20 percent. As inner cities shed manufacturing jobs, men who lived there, particularly those with limited education, had a hard time making the switch to service jobs. Service jobs and office work of course require different interpersonal skills and different standards of self-presentation from those that blue-collar work demands, and movement from one sector to the other can be jarring. What’s more, Wilson’s research shows, downwardly mobile black men often resented the new work they could find, and displayed less flexibility on the job than, for instance, first-generation immigrant workers. As a result, employers began to prefer hiring women and immigrants, and a vicious cycle of resentment, discrimination, and joblessness set in. 

It remains to be seen whether larger swaths of the country, as male joblessness persists, will eventually come to resemble the inner cities of the 1970s and ’80s. In any case, one of the great catastrophes of the past decade, and in particular of this recession, is the slippage of today’s inner cities back toward the depths of those brutal years. Urban minorities tend to be among the first fired in a recession, and the last rehired in a recovery. Overall, black unemployment stood at 15.6 percent in November; among Hispanics, that figure was 12.7 percent. Even in New York City, where the financial sector, which employs relatively few blacks, has shed tens of thousands of jobs, unemployment has increased much faster among blacks than it has among whites. 

In June 1999, the journalist Ellis Cose wrote in Newsweek that it was then “the best time ever” to be black in America. He ticked through the reasons: employment was up, murders and out-of-wedlock births down; educational attainment was rising, and poverty less common than at any time since 1967. Middle-class black couples were slowly returning to gentrifying inner-city neighborhoods. “Even for some of the most persistently unfortunate—uneducated black men between 16 and 24—jobs are opening up,” Cose wrote. 

But many of those gains are now imperiled. Late last year, unemployment among black teens ages 16 to 19 was nearly 50 percent, and the unemployment rate for black men age 20 or older was almost 17 percent. With so few jobs available, Wilson told me, “many black males will give up and drop out of the labor market, and turn more to the underground economy. And it will be very difficult for these people”—especially those who acquire criminal records—“to reenter the labor market in any significant way.” Glen Elder, the sociologist at the University of North Carolina, who’s done field work in Baltimore, said, “At a lower level of skill, if you lose a job and don’t have fathers or brothers with jobs—if you don’t have a good social network—you get drawn back into the street. There’s a sense in the kids I’ve studied that they lost everything they had, and can’t get it back.” 

In New York City, 18 percent of low-income blacks and 26 percent of low-income Hispanics reported having lost their job as a result of the recession in a July survey by the Community Service Society. More still had had their hours or wages reduced. About one in seven low-income New Yorkers often skipped meals in 2009 to save money, and one in five had had the gas, electricity, or telephone turned off. Wilson argues that once neighborhoods become socially dysfunctional, it takes a long period of unbroken good times to undo the damage—and they can backslide very quickly and steeply. “One problem that has plagued the black community over the years is resignation,” Wilson said—a self-defeating “set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how to respond,” passed from parent to child. “And I think there was sort of a feeling that norms of resignation would weaken somewhat with the Obama election. But these hard economic times could reinforce some of these norms.” 

Wilson, age 74, is a careful scholar, who chooses his words precisely and does not seem given to overstatement. But he sounded forlorn when describing the “very bleak” future he sees for the neighborhoods that he’s spent a lifetime studying. There is “no way,” he told me, “that the extremely high jobless rates we’re seeing won’t have profound consequences for the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods.” Neighborhood-specific statistics on drug addiction, family dysfunction, gang violence, and the like take time to compile. But Wilson believes that once we start getting detailed data on the conditions of inner-city life since the crash, “we’re going to see some horror stories”—and in many cases a relapse into the depths of decades past. “The point I want to emphasize,” Wilson said, “is that we should brace ourselves.” 

No one tries harder than the jobless to find silver linings in this national economic disaster. Many of the people I spoke with for this story said that unemployment, while extremely painful, had improved them in some ways: they’d become less materialistic and more financially prudent; they were using free time to volunteer more, and were enjoying that; they were more empathetic now, they said, and more aware of the struggles of others. 

In limited respects, perhaps the recession will leave society better off. At the very least, it’s awoken us from our national fever dream of easy riches and bigger houses, and put a necessary end to an era of reckless personal spending. Perhaps it will leave us humbler, and gentler toward one another, too—at least in the long run. A recent paper by the economists Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo shows that generations that endured a recession in early adulthood became more concerned about inequality and more cognizant of the role luck plays in life. And in his book, Children of the Great Depression, Glen Elder wrote that adolescents who experienced hardship in the 1930s became especially adaptable, family-oriented adults; perhaps, as a result of this recession, today’s adolescents will be pampered less and counted on for more, and will grow into adults who feel less entitled than recent generations. 

But for the most part, these benefits seem thin, uncertain, and far off. In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, the economic historian Benjamin Friedman argues that both inside and outside the U.S., lengthy periods of economic stagnation or decline have almost always left society more mean-spirited and less inclusive, and have usually stopped or reversed the advance of rights and freedoms. A high level of national wealth, Friedman writes, “is no bar to a society’s retreat into rigidity and intolerance once enough of its citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead.” When material progress falters, Friedman concludes, people become more jealous of their status relative to others. Anti-immigrant sentiment typically increases, as does conflict between races and classes; concern for the poor tends to decline. 

Social forces take time to grow strong, and time to dissipate again. Friedman told me that the phenomenon he’s studied “is not about business cycles … It’s not about people comparing where they are now to where they were a year ago.” The relevant comparisons are much broader: What opportunities are available to me, relative to those of my parents? What opportunities do my children have? What is the trajectory of my career? 

It’s been only about two years since this most recent recession started, but then again, most people hadn’t been getting ahead for a decade. In a Pew survey in the spring of 2008, more than half of all respondents said that over the past five years, they either hadn’t moved forward in life or had actually fallen backward, the most downbeat assessment that either Pew or Gallup has ever recorded, in nearly a half century of polling. Median household income in 2008 was the lowest since 1997, adjusting for inflation. “On the latest income data,” Friedman said, “we’re 11 years into a period of decline.” By the time we get out of the current downturn, we’ll likely be “up to a decade and a half. And that’s surely enough.” 

Income inequality usually falls during a recession, and the economist and happiness expert Andrew Clark says that trend typically provides some emotional salve to the poor and the middle class. (Surveys, lab experiments, and brain readings all show that, for better or worse, schadenfreude is a powerful psychological force: at any fixed level of income, people are happier when the income of others is reduced.) But income inequality hasn’t shrunk in this recession. In 2007–08, the most recent year for which data is available, it widened. 

Indeed, this period of economic weakness may reinforce class divides, and decrease opportunities to cross them—especially for young people. The research of Till Von Wachter, the economist at Columbia University, suggests that not all people graduating into a recession see their life chances dimmed: those with degrees from elite universities catch up fairly quickly to where they otherwise would have been if they’d graduated in better times; it’s the masses beneath them that are left behind. Princeton’s 2009 graduating class found more jobs in financial services than in any other industry. According to Princeton’s career-services director, Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, campus visits and hiring by the big investment banks have been down, but that decline has been partly offset by an uptick in recruiting by hedge funds and boutique financial firms. 

In the Internet age, it is particularly easy to see the bile that has always lurked within American society. More difficult, in the moment, is discerning precisely how these lean times are affecting society’s character. In many respects, the U.S. was more socially tolerant entering this recession than at any time in its history, and a variety of national polls on social conflict since then have shown mixed results. Signs of looming class warfare or racial conflagration are not much in evidence. But some seeds of discontent are slowly germinating. The town-hall meetings last summer and fall were contentious, often uncivil, and at times given over to inchoate outrage. One National Journal poll in October showed that whites (especially white men) were feeling particularly anxious about their future and alienated by the government. We will have to wait and see exactly how these hard times will reshape our social fabric. But they certainly will reshape it, and all the more so the longer they extend. 

A slowly sinking generation; a remorseless assault on the identity of many men; the dissolution of families and the collapse of neighborhoods; a thinning veneer of national amity—the social legacies of the Great Recession are still being written, but their breadth and depth are immense. As problems, they are enormously complex, and their solutions will be equally so. 

Of necessity, those solutions must include measures to bolster the economy in the short term, and to clear the way for faster long-term growth; to support the jobless today, and to ensure that we are creating the kinds of jobs (and the kinds of skills within the population) that can allow for a more broadly shared prosperity in the future. A few of the solutions—like more-aggressive support for the unemployed, and employer tax credits or other subsidies to get people back to work faster—are straightforward and obvious, or at least they should be. Many are not. 

At the very least, though, we should make the return to a more normal jobs environment an unflagging national priority. The stock market has rallied, the financial system has stabilized, and job losses have slowed; by the time you read this, the unemployment rate might be down a little. Yet the difference between “turning the corner” and a return to any sort of normalcy is vast. 

We are in a very deep hole, and we’ve been in it for a relatively long time already. Concerns over deficits are understandable, but in these times, our bias should be toward doing too much rather than doing too little. That implies some small risk to the government’s ability to continue borrowing in the future; and it implies somewhat higher taxes in the future too. But that seems a trade worth making. We are living through a slow-motion social catastrophe, one that could stain our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years to come. We have a civic—and indeed a moral—responsibility to do everything in our power to stop it now, before it gets even worse. 

by Joshua Green

Fans of the Grateful Dead are big believers in serendipity. So a certain knowing approval greeted the news last year that the band would be donating its copious archive—four decades’ worth of commercial recordings and videotapes, press clippings, stage sets, business records, and a mountain of correspondence encompassing everything from elaborately decorated fan letters to a thank-you note for a fund-raising performance handwritten on White House stationery by President Barack Obama—to the University of California at Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz was understood to be a fitting home not only because it exemplifies the spirit of the counterculture as much as, and perhaps even more than, Berkeley and Stanford, which also bid for the archive, but because the school’s faculty includes an ethnomusicologist and composer named Fredric Lieberman, who is prominent among a curious breed in the academy: scholars who teach and study the Grateful Dead.

It’s worth noting right up front the hurdles Dead Studies faces as a field of serious inquiry. To begin with, the news that it exists at all tends to elicit grinning disbelief; a corollary challenge is the assumptions people carry about its practitioners, such as my own expectation when arranging to visit Lieberman last year that I would encounter an amiable hippie, probably of late-Boomer vintage and wearing a thinning ponytail. Rough mental image: Wavy Gravy with a Ph.D.

Lieberman is nothing of the sort. A small man with parchment skin, wisps of white hair, and large round glasses, he could have looked more professorial only by wielding a Dunhill pipe. His interest in the Grateful Dead, he explained, had arisen largely by chance. In the 1960s, he studied under the noted ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger (father of Pete Seeger) at UCLA, and came to share his mentor’s dismay at the academy’s neglect of popular and non-Western music. Lieberman went on to teach a series of classes in American vernacular music and, though he held no particular fondness for the Grateful Dead, became one of the first academics to teach the band’s music, in the early 1970s.

In 1983, the Dead’s drummer, Mickey Hart, asked Lieberman to help catalog his vast collection of instruments. When the project developed into a larger study of world percussion, Hart invited Lieberman to join him on tour. “I thought it would be interesting to treat it as an ethnomusicological field trip,” Lieberman told me. For some years, when he wasn’t teaching he traveled with the band, introducing Hart to ethnomusicologists by day and attending shows by night. If you squinted hard during any number of the Dead’s most famous shows in the 1980s and ’90s, you might have glimpsed the unlikely spectacle of an ethnomusicologist crouching in earnest concentration behind the drummer, going about his fieldwork.

Lieberman apologized for not being able to show me the archive. The whole thing was under lock and key in a Northern California warehouse whose location was a closely held secret—a precaution against overzealous fans’ plundering a hoard that many would regard as akin to Tutankhamen’s treasure. On March 5, the New York Historical Society will open the first large-scale exhibit of material from the Dead Archive. Then, if all goes as planned, the collection will become the centerpiece of a new campus library at Santa Cruz slated to open later this year. Among other things, it is hoped that the Dead Archive will galvanize a nascent group of scholars across many disciplines who, like Lieberman, study the Grateful Dead—not just musicologists but historians, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, and even business and management theorists. Some have risked their academic standing in the belief that the band and the larger social phenomenon that surrounds it are far more significant than is commonly understood. Lately, the world has been changing in ways that make that not so hard to believe.

One of the first academic articles on the Grateful Dead appeared in the Winter 1972 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, a periodical for medical professionals, and drew on emergency-treatment records to compare drug use at a Grateful Dead concert with that at a Led Zeppelin concert. (Verdict: Deadheads favored LSD, Zeppelin fans alcohol.) The popular association between the Dead and a drug-fueled counterculture did little to encourage respectable academic endeavor.

As the band’s following grew, the notion that it might have something to offer scholars, particularly in the social sciences, became somewhat less far-fetched, though still not without professional risk. In the late 1980s, Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who studies friendships formed across distances, noticed deep bonds between Deadheads. The bonds seemed to belie the idea, then popular among leading social thinkers, that communities based on common interest, whose members do not live near each other, lack emotional and moral depth—that Deadheads might belong to what sociologists call a “lifestyle enclave,” but couldn’t possibly form meaningful relationships. Adams brought a class on tour with the Dead—an opportunity, she thought, to teach classical theory while letting students study a cutting-edge contemporary community.

She became instantly famous, among a small group of scholars, and then, suddenly, among a much larger group of people. One day, without warning, Senator Robert Byrd, the histrionic and prodigiously opinionated West Virginian, gave a speech decrying what he considered an appalling decline in the standards for higher education, and cited Adams’s class as an example. Adams had unwittingly placed herself in the crosshairs of the culture wars and was beset by, among other things, an inquiry from the president of North Carolina’s state university system. Though she survived with help from her chancellor and her department head, and though the question fell squarely within her specialty, Adams was politely discouraged from pursuing her line of inquiry. “I was advised to concentrate on the more respectable areas of my research,” she told me.

Other aspects of the band nevertheless continued to invite academic examination. Musicologists showed interest, although the band’s sprawling repertoire and tendency to improvise posed a significant challenge. Lieberman says that fully absorbing the Dead’s music could take years, and he has noted its similarities with South Indian classical music, with its complex notational system and highly formalized four-hour concerts. Engineers studied the band’s sophisticated sound system, radical at the time but widely emulated today. Even legal scholars took note, some contending that the American criminal-justice system, including the courts, unfairly profiles Deadhead defendants and has, on occasion, treated fandom as evidence of mental illness.

Oddly enough, the Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.

As Barnes and other scholars note, the musicians who constituted the Dead were anything but naive about their business. They incorporated early on, and established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other members of the Dead organization. They founded a profitable merchandising division and, peace and love notwithstanding, did not hesitate to sue those who violated their copyrights. But they weren’t greedy, and they adapted well. They famously permitted fans to tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales. According to Barnes, the decision was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.

It’s precisely this flexibility that Barnes believes holds the greatest lessons for business—he calls it “strategic improvisation.” It isn’t hard to spot a few of its recent applications. Giving something away and earning money on the periphery is the same idea proffered by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his recent best-selling book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Voluntarily or otherwise, it is becoming the blueprint for more and more companies doing business on the Internet. Today, everybody is intensely interested in understanding how communities form across distances, because that’s what happens online. Far from being a subject of controversy, Rebecca Adams’s next book on Deadhead sociology has publishers lining up.

Much of the talk about “Internet business models” presupposes that they are blindingly new and different. But the connection between the Internet and the Dead’s business model was made 15 years ago by the band’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, who became an Internet guru. Writing in Wired in 1994, Barlow posited that in the information economy, “the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.” As Barlow explained to me: “What people today are beginning to realize is what became obvious to us back then—the important correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the more valuable it becomes. In the physical world, that works beautifully. But we couldn’t regulate [taping at] our shows, and you can’t online. The Internet doesn’t behave that way. But here’s the thing: if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced. That was the value proposition with the Dead.” The Dead thrived for decades, in good times and bad. In a recession, Barnes says, strategic improvisation is more important then ever. “If you’re going to survive this economic downturn, you better be able to turn on a dime,” he says. “The Dead were exemplars.” It can be only a matter of time until Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead or some similar title is flying off the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere.

Recently, Barnes has been lecturing to business leaders about strategic improvisation. He’s been a big hit. “People are just so tired of hearing about GE and Southwest Airlines,” he admits. “They get really excited to hear about the Grateful Dead.”

Until now, scholars who studied the Dead were limited to what was available in the public domain. Barnes sought access to internal documents more than a decade ago and was turned down. When the Dead Archive opens, he and others expect to gain many new insights, because they’ll finally be able to draw on primary source material—and there’s plenty. For years, unbeknownst to just about everyone, the band’s longtime office manager obsessively stashed away everything that came into her office. The possibilities seem manifold. “From the economics folks to the anthropologists,” Barlow says, “increasing numbers of people are going to make a pilgrimage to the archive to see how this all came together.”

When a famous author or statesman donates his papers to history, the task of studying and making sense of them usually falls to some obvious discipline. That’s not quite the case here. Even with the recent renaissance, Dead scholars are few. The bulk of the expertise lies outside the academy, with ordinary Deadheads. So Santa Cruz library officials have devised a novel approach (some would call it strategic improvisation) to curating the collection. They intend to post as much of it as possible online in the hope that Deadheads—zealous social networkers that they are—will contribute their knowledge, and perhaps material of their own, to help build up the record. With the culture wars of the 1960s finally beginning to subside, the possibility for sober reflection on a charged era is more feasible than it once was. Today, the Dead are more attraction than liability. The library will seek to become a haven for the study of pop culture since the 1960s, with the Dead Archive anchoring its collection.

“Revolutionaries get vilified, and then, once they get older, they just become cute,” says Steve Gimbel, who is a philosophy professor at Gettysburg College and edited the recent collection The Grateful Dead and Philosophy. “Think of Oscar Wilde. Once they’re not dangerous anymore, it’s okay to discuss them in serious ways.”

To promote his partisan fear-mongering attacks, the former Judge invokes the very arguments he once scorned

Glenn Greenwald

Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey has become the leading spokesman for a Cheneyite national security attack, which relies on scaring Americans into believing that Obama is endangering their lives in those rare instances when he deviates from Bush’s Terrorism approach.  Toward that end, Mukasey has yet another fear-mongering Op-Ed, this time on today’s oh-so-liberal Washington Post Op-Ed Page (along side Michael Gerson’s stirring tribute to the virtues of GITMO, Bill Kristol’s call for regime change in Iran, a warning from Blackstone Chairman Steven Schwarzman to stop being so mean to banks, and a Charles Krauthammer column blaming Obama for something or other).  Mukasey specifically accuses the Obama administration of losing valuable intelligence by allowing Abdudlmutallab access to a lawyer, and insists that the accused Christmas Day bomber had no constitutional rights because — despite his being detained in the U.S. — he is merely an “enemy combatant.” 

But when Mukasey was a federal judge, he made the opposite arguments.  In 2002, the Bush administration detained Jose Padilla at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, publicly labeled him The Dirty Bomber, declared him an “enemy combatant,” transferred him to military custody, and refused to charge him or even to allow him access to a lawyer.  When a lawsuit was brought on Padilla’s behalf, Mukasey was the assigned judge, and he ordered the Bush administration to allow Padilla access to a lawyer.  When the Bush administration dithered and basically refused (asking Mukasey to reconsider), Mukasey issued a lengthy Opinion and Order threatening to impose the conditions himself and explaining that Padilla’s constitutional right to a lawyer was clear and nonnegotiable.  So resounding was Mukasey’s defense of Padilla’s right to a lawyer that, when he was initially nominated as Attorney General, many anti-Bush legal analysts — including me — cited Mukasey’s ruling in Padilla to argue that he was one of the better choices given the other right-wing alternatives.  Indeed, I analyzed his decision in Padilla at length to argue that, at least in that case, Mukasey “displayed an impressive allegiance to the rule of law and constitutional principles over fealty to claims of unlimited presidential power,” and that he “was more than willing to defy the Bush administration and not be intimidated by threats that enforcing the rule of law would prevent the President from stopping the Terrorists.” 

What’s most striking is that, in the Padilla case, Mukasey emphatically rejected the very arguments he is now making to attack Obama.  The Bush DOJ repeatedly insisted that Mukasey — by allowing Padilla access to a lawyer — would destroy their ability to interrogate him and obtain life-saving intelligence, thus endangering all Americans.  As Mukasey put it:  the Bush DOJ is “none too subtle in cautioning this court against going too far in the protection of this detainee’s rights, suggesting at one point that permitting Padilla to consult with a lawyer ‘risks that plans for future attacks will go undetected‘.”  Incredibly, that argument — which Mukasey decisively rejected back then — is exactly the one he’s now making against Obama.  Listen to what the Bush administration told Mukasey in demanding that he withdraw his order directing that Padilla be given access to a lawyer — this is what Mukasey quoted from a Bush DOJ brief and refused to embrace back then: 

DIA’s approach to interrogation is largely dependent upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and the interrogator. Developing the kind of relationship of trust and dependency necessary for effective interrogations is a process that can take a significant amount of [redacted]. There are numerous examples of situations where interrogators have been unable to obtain valuable intelligence from a subject until months, or even years, after the interrogation process began. 

Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool. Even seemingly minor interruptions can have profound psychological impacts on the delicate subject-interrogator relationship. Any insertion of counsel into the subject-interrogator relationship, for example — even if only for a limited duration or for a specific purpose — can undo months of work and may permanently shut down the interrogation process. Therefore, it is critical to minimize external influences on the interrogation process. . . .
 

Permitting Padilla any access to counsel may substantially harm our national security interests. As with most detainees, Padilla is unlikely to cooperate if he believes that an attorney will intercede in his detention. . . . Any such delay in Padilla’s case risks that plans for future attacks will go undetected during that period, and that whatever information Padilla may eventually provide will be outdated and more difficult to corroborate. 

Mukasey dismissed all of those fear-mongering claims as speculative hyperbole, and explicitly told the Bush DOJ:  “if the government had permitted Padilla to consult with counsel at the outset, this matter would have been long since decided in this court” — i.e., Mukasey told the Bush DOJ that the dilemma was its own doing because it should have allowed Padilla access to counsel from the start.  Yet in order to try to convince Americans now that Obama is endangering their lives by allowing Abdulmutallab access to counsel, Mukasey resorts to the very fear-mongering that he long ago rejected.  That’s called being a dishonest hack of the lowest order. 

More dishonestly still, Mukasey in today’s Op-Ed claims that he ordered Padilla to have access to counsel only “as a convenience to the court and not for any constitutionally based reason,” and only because Padilla (unlike Abdulmutallab) was a U.S. citizen.  Both of those excuses are blatantly and demonstrably false.  The whole legal basis for Mukasey’s ruling was that (1) he would order Padilla to have access to counsel even if he had believed Bush’s fear-mongering claims because Padilla had a constitutional right to counsel; and (2) the basis for that right is not that Padilla is a citizen, but rather, that all “persons” on U.S. soil have that right.  Just listen to what the Mukasey back then said in order to see how blatantly dishonest the Mukasey of today is (emphasis added): 

Even if the predictions [of the Bush DOJ] were reliably more certain than they in fact are, I would not be free simply to take the counsel of Admiral Jacoby’s fears, however well founded and sincere, and on that basis alone deny Padilla access to a lawyer. There is no dispute that Padilla has the right to bring this petition, and, for the reasons set forth in the Opinion, the statute makes it plain that he has the right to present facts if he chooses to do so. . . . 

Arbitrary deprivation of liberty violates the Due Process Clause, Foucha v. Louisiana, 504 U.S. 71, 80 (1992), which “applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States,” Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693 (2001). . . . [U]nless he has the opportunity to make a submission, this court cannot do what the applicable statutes and the Due Process Clause require it to do: confirm what frankly appears likely from the Mobbs Declaration but cannot be certain if based only on the Mobbs Declaration — that Padilla’s detention is not arbitrary, and that, because his detention is not arbitrary, the President is exercising a power vouchsafed to him by the Constitution. . . . 

The Court in Hamdi took pains to point out that its holding was limited to “the specific context before us — that of the undisputed detention of a citizen during a combat operation undertaken in a foreign country and a determination by the executive that the citizen was allied with enemy forces.” Hamdi, 316 F.3d at 465.  That wise restraint is well worth following in this case by recognizing explicitly the limits of the current holding, and thereby recognizing as well the contrast between this case and Hamdi. Unlike Hamdi, Padilla was detained in this country, and initially by law enforcement officers pursuant to a material witness warrant. He was not captured on a foreign battlefield by soldiers in combat. The prospect of courts second-guessing battlefield decisions, which they have resolutely refused to do, e.g., id. at 474; cf. Stencel Aero Eng’g Corp. v. United States, 431 U.S. 666, 673 (1977), does not loom in this case. 

It’s true that this decision did not address the question of Miranda warnings, but the point is that Mukasey’s reasoning there directly negates what he is now arguing.  Based on those two findings — that (1) there was no clear evidence that allowing access to a lawyer would jeopardize intelligence-gathering and, even if there were, it wouldn’t matter, because (2) Padilla, as someone detained on U.S. soil., had a constitutional right to a lawyer — Mukasey ordered the Bush DOJ to comply with his directive in unusually strong language: 

Lest any confusion remain, this is not a suggestion or a request that Padilla be permitted to consult with counsel, and it is certainly not an invitation to conduct a further “dialogue” about whether he will be permitted to do so. It is a ruling — a determination — that he will be permitted to do so. 

Note, too, that Mukasey insisted that courts have the constitutional obligation to ensure that presidential-ordered detentions “are not arbitrary,” a claim both the Bush administration and now the Obama administration, in some circumstances, vigorously contests. 

This entire Miranda/Abdulmutallab controversy has been rife with deliberate misconceptions from the start: 

• the inane notion that super-dangerous Terrorists innocently believe that they’re required to spill their guts if they aren’t given Miranda warnings (recall that the premise of Bush officials, including Mukasey, is that Terrorists are so hardened and Evil that they have to be tortured to get them to speak; the very idea that they would feel compelled to answer all questions unless told they did not have to is laughable on its face);
• the empirically false claim that defendants stop co-operating — and that interrogations must stop — once they are Mirandized (huge amounts of co-operation from the accused occur once they’ve been Mirandized and have lawyers);
• the invented allegation that Abdulmutallab was speaking freely until he was Mirandized, at which point he stopped talking;
• the obviously misleading suggestion that it’s easier to interrogate and convict Terrorists in a military commission system than in civilian courts (the exact opposite has been true, by far); and,
• the dishonest implication that we somehow lost something by Mirandizing and trying Richard Reid in our civilian court system, which sentenced him to life in prison with little effort, in contrast to the debacles produced by the military commission system).  

The ignorance of media stars about these issues allows fear-mongering politicians to make these claims over and over without challenge (although see Savannah Guthrie’s impressively aggressive, well-informed and effective interrogation of Sen. Kit Bond about this case: it’s the exception that proves the rule, and illustrates what effective adversarial journalism can accomplish).  And much of this is the fault of the Obama administration:  because they themselves have embraced the Bush/Cheney policies of military commissions and indefinite detentions, they’re incapable of articulating any coherent principle why civilian trials are needed, and are instead reduced to the pitiful spectacle of relying on a “Bush-did-it-too” defense to try to show that they’re sufficiently “tough on Terror” (as though the same administration which Obama spent two years depicting as radical, destructive and lawless is the standard-bearer for how Terrorists should be handled). 

Still, Mukasey’s dishonesty is worse than the standard political/media freak show, both because he knows better and because (as a judge) he renounced the very myths which (as a hardened right-wing partisan) he is now disseminating.  He has become a leading practitioner of the hysterical fear-mongering he once rightly scorned. 

* * * * *  

Long-time commenter DCLaw1 has rejuvinated his excellent blog, InsideOutTheBeltway, and has a typically insightful post on how the media has re-cycled blatant myths — grounded in sheer ignorance — about Miranda and Abdulmutallab. 

John B. Judis

Walt, who blogs for Foreign Policy’s website, recently revived the argument, claiming in a self-congratulatory column titled “I don’t mean to say I told you so, but…” that Tony Blair’s testimony last month before Britain’s Iraq War Commission confirmed that “the Israel lobby … played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.” I have read Blair’s testimony. I don’t find it to be proof of anything of the kind; and I don’t think Walt’s accompanying restatement of the argument is any more persuasive than the version he and Mearsheimer put forward in his book.

Walt says that Blair’s statement to the commission “reveals that concerns about Israel were part of the equation [that is, the decision to go to war] and that Israel officials were involved in those discussions.” Here is what Walt, citing a column in the New Statesman, quotes Blair as saying about his early April 2002 meeting in Crawford, Texas, with George W. Bush:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Now there are at least three problems with the inferences that Walt draws from this statement. First, even if we were to grant that Blair is saying that he and Bush were talking about Israel’s role in or importance to the Iraq invasion, this certainly does not show that the Israel lobby had anything to do with the decision to go to war. Nor, secondly, does it show that the Israeli government pressured the U.S. to go to war. The “conversations” could have easily consisted of the Bush administration informing Israelis of their plans.

But these are minor objections. The real problem is that Walt does not seem to have taken the trouble to have read the transcript of Blair’s testimony. If he had, he would have realized that Blair was not talking about how invading Iraq might benefit Israel, but about the conflict then occurring between Israel and the Palestinians. The second intifada had reached a new height with the Passover and Haifa suicide bombings and the beginning of the siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and Blair was concerned that the Bush administration was not actively pursuing the peace process. Blair wanted the administration to put the Arab-Israeli issue on a par with the threat of Iraq. The former prime minister makes this clear in other parts of his testimony. Here is an exchange between Blair and Sir Roderic Lyne:

Lyne: … Just one more point arising from Crawford, but not just from Crawford. You said–you reminded us that the Arab-Israel problem was in a very hot state at Crawford. You said you may even have had some conversations with Israelis from there, and obviously it was something that was a large part of your conversations with President Bush. I think it is right to say–indeed, Jack Straw said it–that you were relentless in trying to persuade the Americans to make more and faster progress on the Middle East peace process. Ultimately, Jack Straw said it was a matter of huge–in his evidence the other day–it was a matter of huge frustration that we weren’t able to achieve something which you had been seeking so strongly …

Blair: … I believe that resolving the Middle East–this is what I work on now–is immensely important, and I think it was difficult, and this is something I have said before on several occasions, it was difficult to persuade President Bush, and, indeed, America actually, that this was such a fundamental question …

Lyne: But surely you must have said to him, “Look, this thing is only really going to have a chance of working well if we can make this progress down the Arab-Israel track before we get there”?

Blair: Well, I was certainly saying to him, “I think this is vital,” and I mean, this was–you could describe me as a broken record through that period …

The talks at Crawford and subsequent discussions led eventually to getting Bush to launch the “road map” for peace. In other words, he and Bush were not saying that they had to invade Iraq to assist or appease the Israelis. Nothing that Blair said in his testimony should have provided the slightest evidence that this was occurring. And it seems clear enough that the discussions Blair and Bush had with the Israelis were not about Iraq but about the peace process.

I am sorry to say that this kind of sloppy research and reasoning is typical of the way that Walt and Mearsheimer deal with the question of whether the Israel lobby influenced the decision to go to war. In their book, they claim that the U.S. would “almost certainly” not have gone to war without the influence of the Israel lobby. That’s a very strong claim, but they do not back it up either in the book or in Walt’s current blogging. Let me briefly deal with their logic here.

There are three ways in which the Israel lobby could have made itself indispensable to the decision to go to war: first, in White House-Pentagon deliberations; second, in significantly influencing the critical Congressional vote in October 2002; and third, in dramatically shaping public opinion. Their argument falls short on all these counts.

White House: To contend that the “Israel lobby” influenced the White House decision to invade—which had more or less been made by the spring of 2002 when Blair visited Crawford—Walt and Mearsheimer expand the “lobby” to include “neoconservative intellectuals” such as Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. They then imply that Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives favored regime change in Iraq primarily because it would benefit Israel.  No evidence has surfaced to show that Wolfowitz was acting in this manner.  There were other neo-conservatives in the administration – such as David Wurmser and Douglas Feith – who had in the past explicitly linked regime change in Iraq to Israel’s welfare, but they were not in a decision-making capacity. Indeed, the two people outside of the President who appear most responsible for the decision to invade — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney — could not be categorized, even by Walt and Mearsheimer’s absurdly broad standards, as part of an Israel lobby.  So while it would be foolish to rule out that Israel’s welfare was not discussed or mentioned in discussions about whether to invade Iraq, there is no basis for saying that the White House decision to invade Iraq was driven by neo-conservative preoccupations with Israel’s security.

Congress: Walt cites my quoting of AIPAC head Howard Kohr’s boast that AIPAC had been “quietly lobbying” Congress to pass the war resolution in October 2002. I don’t doubt that AIPAC officials favored going to war, as did the leaders of some other pro-Israel organizations. But AIPAC did not aggressively lobby for the war resolution the way it lobbied in 1981 against the AWACs surveillance plane sale to Saudi Arabia or recently for refined petroleum sanctions on Iran. I have interviewed AIPAC people and members of other Jewish lobbying organizations on this question, and they say the same thing. It was not a make-or-break legislative priority. And there is very good circumstantial evidence to back this up. Some of AIPAC’s most dependable supporters on the Hill—such as Senators Daniel Inouye and Carl Levin and Representative Jerrold Nadler—opposed the resolution. So, yes, AIPAC probably did “quietly” make its preference known; but it can’t be credited or blamed for the outcome of the vote. And no other pro-Israel or Jewish lobby possesses comparable clout on the Hill.

Public Opinion: Did the Israel lobby have a sine qua non influence on public opinion in favor of the war? If so, one would expect that its influence would at least show up among Jewish Americans, who would be most likely to listen to their arguments. In a 2003 survey, the American Jewish Committee found that 54 percent of Jewish Americans disapproved of going to war with Iraq and only 43 percent approved. At the time, a majority of Americans approved of going to war. So, far from being a leader in pro-war sentiment, American Jews were lagging behind. Walt and Mearsheimer concede this point, but it’s important nonetheless to include it because it is the only other way in which the Israel lobby might have had a decisive effect on the decision to invade, but did not.  

There is, in other words, no basis at all for accepting Walt and Mearsheimer’s contention that, without the Israel lobby, the U.S. would likely not have invaded Iraq.  It’s not anti-Semitic to make these charges–they have quotes and anecdotes in their book–but they don’t add up to the proof of any overriding influence. Nor does Walt’s use of Blair’s testimony to the Iraq War Commission. I think it’s time for Walt and Mearsheimer to put this part of their argument to rest.

By Edward Luce

The team seen most often in the Oval Office
David Axelrod, senior adviser A former journalist on the Chicago Tribune who quit to set up a political advertising firm, Mr Axelrod, 54, is Barack Obama’s longest-standing mentor, from his days in Chicago politics. Always at the candidate’s side during the election campaign, he is the chief defender of the Obama brand. Still a journalist at heart, he describes himself as having been “posted to Washington”.

Robert Gibbs, communications chief

The most visible face of the White House for his sardonic daily briefings. Mr Gibbs, 38, is perhaps the least likely member of the circle – he is a career Democratic press officer from Alabama who quit John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and shortly afterwards went to work for Senator Obama. A constant presence during the campaign, he is also seen as a keeper of the flame.

Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff

The best story about Mr Emanuel, 50, concerns the dead fish he delivered to a pollster who displeased him. The least honey-tongued politician in Washington, he is also one of the most effective. Friends say he is relentlessly energetic, critics that he has attention deficit disorder. He has enemies but even detractors concede he may well achieve his aim of becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House of Representatives.

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser

An old friend of the Obamas, having hired Michelle to work in Chicago politics in the early 1990s, Ms Jarrett, 53, is probably the first family’s most intimate White House confidante. A former businessperson and aide to Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, she was briefly considered as a candidate to fill Mr Obama’s Senate seat. She was part of the circle he consulted before running for president.

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

“It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This is a kind of ‘we few’ group … that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding – and unexpected – failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion – not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law – and with it would have become a historic president.

But the normally liberal voters of Massachusetts wished otherwise. The Democrats lost the seat to a candidate, Scott Brown, who promised voters he would be the “41st [Republican] vote” in the Senate – the one that would tip the balance against healthcare. Subsequent polling bears out the view that a decisive number of Democrats switched their votes with precisely that motivation in mind.

“Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim Morone, America’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master.”

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” says an exasperated outside adviser.

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”

In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration, Mr Emanuel has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr Emanuel described liberals as “f***ing retards” after one suggested they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.

“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2” visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”

Then there are the president’s big strategic decisions. Of these, devoting the first year to healthcare is well known and remains a source of heated contention. Less understood is the collateral damage it caused to unrelated initiatives. “The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade [on carbon emissions] and then financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr Obama. “But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”

Insiders attribute Mr Obama’s waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

The same applies to reforming the legal apparatus in the “war on terror” – not least his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year of taking office. That promise has been abandoned.

“Rahm said: ‘We’ve got these two Boeing 747s circling that we are trying to bring down to the tarmac [healthcare and the decision on the Afghanistan troop surge] and we can’t risk a flock of f***ing Canadian geese causing them to crash,’ ” says an official who attended an Oval Office strategy meeting. The geese stood for the closure of Guantánamo.

An outside adviser adds: “I don’t understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?”

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”

The White House declined to answer questions on whether Mr Obama needed to broaden his circle of advisers. But some supporters say he should find a new chief of staff. Mr Emanuel has hinted that he might not stay in the job very long and is thought to have an eye on running for mayor of Chicago. Others say Mr Obama should bring in fresh blood. They point to Mr Clinton’s decision to recruit David Gergen, a veteran of previous White Houses, when the last Democratic president ran into trouble in 1993. That is credited with helping to steady the Clinton ship, after he too began with an inner circle largely carried over from his campaign.

But Mr Gergen himself disagrees. Now teaching at Harvard and commenting for CNN, Mr Gergen says members of the inner circle meet two key tests. First, they are all talented. Second, Mr Obama trusts them. “These are important attributes,” Mr Gergen says. His biggest doubt is whether Mr Obama sees any problem with the existing set-up.

“There is an old joke,” says Mr Gergen. “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”

by Abraham Verghese

Strong is your hold O mortal flesh . . .

From The Last Invocation, Walt Whitman

Is it just me, or are you also getting a bit tired of all the hype about the genome? Don’t get me wrong– it’s pretty incredible that in my lifetime we have mapped out the 25,000 plus genes in our DNA. What’s even more amazing is that the price for that chart of the human genome has gone from millions to less than $50,000 and now it takes only a few weeks. I bet by next year it might be a few hundred dollars and take a day! Companies like 23andMe (an innovative venture with a great marketing plan) offer to check you for genetic markers that predict your risk for certain diseases for just a few hundred dollars.

But the fact remains that for most of us, the genotype is much less relevant than the phenotype. What is phenotype? It is the things we can see, the outward or observable physical or biochemical characteristics and they are determined by both your genetic makeup and environmental influences. Your blond hair, your weight, your strange nose, green eyes and that funky shaped little toe of yours –all examples of phenotype.

So what do I mean when I say phenotype is more relevant than genotype? Well, let’s say a new patient, a male, walks into my office and he is in his fifties. Let’s say he happens to have the outline of a pack of cigarettes showing in his front pocket. As a male he already has one risk factor for coronary artery disease–just being male, alas. The cigarettes tell me that he is four times more likely to have a heart attack than his peers who don’t smoke. His risk of sudden death is at least doubled. Let’s say I notice he happens to be carrying more than 30 pounds of extra poundage above the belt line: that allows me to predict he has a higher chance of being at risk for diabetes, if he is not already frankly diabetic. Let’s say that I notice too the pale outline of a recently-removed wedding ring (I can’t help it, my eyes are always looking at the body as text–even when I am out of the hospital), then I know that his risk of death as a  recently divorced man can be double that of his married peers.

At this point, before he has even said a word or before I have examined him, I already know so much about his risk of death and disease. Once we talk and I learn more about his job, his stress, his heredity, his habits, his past illnesses, then my predictions get more accurate. Once he disrobes and I examine him, I might find other phenotypic markers that predict risk (such as yellow plaques related to high cholesterol on his eyelids or elbows; high blood pressure; skin tags and velvety darkened areas of skin that predict diabetes; narrowed blood vessels when I look into the back of his eye . . . the list could go on for pages). In short, I’ll have an excellent sense of my patient’s risk for death or disease. At that point, mapping his whole genome, sexy as it might seem, won’t tell me much more than I know and will probably matter much less than getting him to quit smoking, exercise and lose weight.

The famous Whitehall Study of British Civil Servants ranging in ages from 20 to 64 found that the lower grades of civil service had higher mortality rates from heart disease and from all causes than did people in higher grades, even after accounting for risk factors like obesity and smoking. (Yes, it was counterintuitive and that is why we do studies).  Stress was thought to be the factor responsible for this disparity.

The Whitehall studies are ongoing and one of the latest reports from that study made me think of Walt Whitman and reminded me that the phenotype is so relevant. In their report (titled, “Utility of genetic and non-genetic risk factors in prediction of type 2 diabetes: Whitehall II prospective cohort study” and appearing in the British Medical Journal, 2010 Jan 14;340:b4838), the scientists compared a panel of genetic tests for diabetes (common single nucleotide polymorphisms) with non-genetic or phenotypic findings like age, sex, drug treatment, family history of type 2 diabetes, body mass index, smoking status, HDL, triglycerides, fasting glucose.

What they found was that the phenotypic tests did better. Indeed the gene tests added little to the risk already determined by phenotypes. In their own words, “the addition of genotypes to phenotype based risk models produced only minimal improvement in accuracy of risk estimation  . . .”  Translation: use your eyes, take a good history, weight the patient and get a few simple blood tests, and you can predict risk far better than a panel of genetic tests. 

I am not a Luddite (I find I say that a lot) and indeed, I do think the genome studies will help us eventually understand more about causes of disease, and perhaps even point to particular treatments. But utill then the message for us in the trenches is: Strong is your hold O mortal flesh and that’s where the money (speaking diagnostically) is.

Dave Eggers

I first want to say that I think this is a very sad week for American letters. Howard Zinn was the embodiment of the term “living legend,” and his effect on how we see and teach history is immeasurable. And the man worked till the very end, it seems. He’d just done work at Mission High School here in San Francisco last year. He was an astonishing guy; it’s hard to think of what the landscape would look like without him.

To lose Salinger the same week is odd, given that his work and life serves as an interesting counterpoint. If Zinn was the archetypal engagé writer-historian-activist, Salinger was his opposite. And for decades I’ve wondered what exactly happened to Salinger to drive him away from publishing and people, from much of an active participation in the world. Clearly he was wounded by the attention he received, and I’ve always wondered exactly what the breaking point was.

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” the average number of times for a young person my age—which is to say, every few years between when I was sixteen and twenty-six or so. When I was about twenty I read the rest of the books and stories, and when I began to teach, about ten years ago, I usually included a Salinger story in every syllabus, usually demonstrating the use of dialogue to illuminate character. His is still my favorite dialogue, the dialogue that rings truest, that’s at once very naturalistic and musical; it’s really remarkable how difficult it is to do what he does between quotation marks.

I like to think that had he continued to write and publish, he would have continued to evolve in bold new ways. The man was an artist, no doubt about it, and his work was always growing in new—darker, stranger, more wonderfully obsessive—directions. And always, no matter where the stories go (or don’t go), his sentences are so beautiful, and so unlike anyone else’s. A few years back, when he backed out of the publishing of “Hapworth,” I wanted so badly to write to him, to say that we’d publish that and anything else he saw fit, and that we’d do it in whatever quiet and respectful way he sought. It’s clear he wasn’t so crazy about the splashy aspects of publishing on a certain scale, and I can identify with that—with the desire to just have the book look like you want it to, on the scale you feel comfortable with. But I don’t think he ever could strike that balance between the public and private worlds of writing and publishing his work.

To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. If he indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.

My own pet theory is that he dabbled with stories for many years, maybe finished a handful, but as the distance from his last published work grew longer, it became more difficult to imagine any one work being the follow-up; the pressure on any story or novel would be too great. And thus the dabbling might have continued, but the likelihood of his finishing something, particularly a novel, became more remote. And so I think we might find fragments of things, much in the way “The Original of Laura” was found. But there’s something about the prospect of actually publishing one’s work that brings that work into focus. That pressure is needed, just like it’s needed to make diamonds from raw carbon.

Of course, the possibility most intriguing—and fictional-sounding—would have Salinger having continued to write for fifty years, finishing hundreds of stories and a handful of novels, all of which are polished and up to his standards and ready to go, and all of which he imagined would be found and published after his death. That, in fact, he intended all along for these works to be read, but that he just couldn’t bear to send them into the world while he lived.

I guess we’ll see.

by Adam Gopnik

 By Adam Chandler

Let me get this little bit out of the way right now: Louis Menand of The New Yorker wrote the following about “The Catcher in the Rye” ten years ago and I don’t think it’s been said any better and I have the good fortune of being wise enough not to try to.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is a sympathetic portrait of a boy who refuses to be socialized which has become (among certain readers, anyway, for it is still occasionally banned in conservative school districts) a standard instrument of socialization. I was introduced to the book by my parents, people who, if they had ever imagined that I might, after finishing the thing, run away from school, smoke like a chimney, lie about my age in bars, solicit a prostitute, or use the word “goddam” in every third sentence, would (in the words of the story) have had about two hemorrhages apiece. Somehow, they knew this wouldn’t be the effect.

Menand adds:

Supposedly, kids respond to “The Catcher in the Rye” because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book. Fourteen-year-olds, even sensitive, intelligent, middle-class fourteen-year-olds, generally do not think that success is a sham, and if they sometimes feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it, it’s not because they think most other people are phonies. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that you don’t know why you feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it. The appeal of “The Catcher in the Rye,” what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with a reason. It gives a content to chemistry.

Alright, are we good? Good. So let’s start with what is generally (?) known of J.D. Salinger: American writer, famous recluse, Holden Caulfield, Mark David Chapman/Lennon, and perhaps some stories about the Glass family. And to that, add this: J(erome) D(avid) Salinger, grandson of a rabbi, son of a *ham* and cheese importer/father and a mother who hid her true Irish-Scottish (read: not Jewish) roots until after his bar-mitzvah.

Of course, it was not until the deluge of tributes today that some (most) of us may have first sifted through his biographical information with any topical urgency. Now that we have, can we just concede that there is enough material in that early biography for a lifetime’s worth of not only storytelling–Great American or other–but a level of torture that is so specifically Jewish that, if amplified, it might give the entire Bernard Malamud canon a run for its money? (This is, of course, not even a slight knock on Malamud.)  

So why do we not place Salinger in the Malamud-Bellow-Roth-Mailer pantheon of 21st century Jewish American writers? Well, first of all, while we know about his roots, little is known about whether he identified as Jewish later much beyond his youth and, from the few interviews he gave in his long and winding life, not much has been parsed. We do know that later in his life he was partial to some eccentric ideologies.

Some literary authorities suggest that because Salinger so deftly camouflaged the Jewish experience in his writing it became unrecognizable. Therefore we, tortured as we are, couldn’t really claim him. Janet Malcolm, in a typically blistering essay, adds it’s not that Salinger didn’t find the Jewish experience salient or pure (she admits we’ll never really know), but rather, that because those edges were blurred the alchemy of solitude in his stories were made more universal.

Characters, beyond the obvious Caulfield, like Franny Glass exhibited symptoms of isolation and outsiderness that really feel particularly “Jewish” (gleamed from what is either known by us or found in the works of the aforementioned the Jewish greats). But they also feel human in a way washed of any explicit tribal suffering. This irked Jews like Maxwell Geismar whom Malcolm quotes:

“The locale of the New York sections is obviously that of a comfortable middle-class urban Jewish society where, however, all the leading figures have become beautifully Anglicized. Holden and Phoebe Caulfield: what perfect American social register names which are presented to us in both a social and a psychological void!”

To echo Malcolm, perhaps it resonated because it was a sting so bare and unadorned.

As for the rest of Salinger’s bio, well, a glancing over of it smacks of what many (or at least I, perhaps foolishly) would consider a very American experience: he hated high school on the Upper West Side, flunked out, hated military school, wrote about that, hated college, popped in and out of places, wrote banal and formulaic stories, they were rejected, wrote more, was published, was drafted for World War II (spoke German well enough to interrogate POWs and deserters), wrote about his service (“For Esmé — With Love and Squalor” is one of his best and most haunting), landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, had a breakdown, was one of the first to walk into a liberated camp, befriended Hemingway all the while, published more brilliant stories, slipped off the radar more, experimented with Eastern religions, Christian Science, Dianetics/other crackpot philosophies, wrote more stories, then wrote ones without stark endings that were circular and so brilliant that people called them too weird to be enjoyed, had affairs with younger women, married a few times and had a few children (one delegate from both his wives and children wrote damning books about him calling him abusive, brooding, drinker of his own urine), sold the movie rights to a story for money, was dismayed by the outcome of the movie, never sold film rights again, had more affairs with younger women while locked up in the New Hampshire hinterlands, kept fellow reclusive friends, stopped publishing stories in 1965, remarried, stopped interviewing in 1980, sat quietly on a growing cache of unpublished work for 45 years, died at 91.

Perhaps this later Salinger biography (sparse in its convention, mythical in its hermeticism), the adult version of the one to which Menand so aptly links youth and Caulfield, is a reflection that says something about Jews in America. Something unspecific, something, like his work, inchoate and generally unsaid by the great Jewish American writers: we’ve arrived, our travails are universal, we don’t have to name our experiences so much. Or perhaps we do. I suppose once all of Salinger’s hidden treasures are pillaged and finally published, we can enjoy trying to claim him.

By Dan Koeppel

You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?

You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.

Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.

Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.

Granted, the odds of surviving a 6-mile plummet are extra­ordinarily slim, but at this point you’ve got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page—an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet. That classification means you have the advantage of being attached to a chunk of the plane. In 1972, Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic was traveling in a DC-9 over Czechoslovakia when it blew up. She fell 33,000 feet, wedged between her seat, a catering trolley, a section of aircraft and the body of another crew member, landing on—then sliding down—a snowy incline before coming to a stop, severely injured but alive.

Surviving a plunge surrounded by a semiprotective cocoon of debris is more common than surviving a pure free-fall, according to Hamilton’s statistics; 31 such confirmed or “plausible” incidents have occurred since the 1940s. Free-fallers constitute a much more exclusive club, with just 13 confirmed or plausible incidents, including perennial Ripley’s Believe It or Not superstar Alan Magee—blown from his B-17 on a 1943 mission over France. The New Jersey airman, more recently the subject of a MythBusters episode, fell 20,000 feet and crashed into a train station; he was subsequently captured by German troops, who were astonished at his survival.

Whether you’re attached to crumpled fuselage or just plain falling, the concept you’ll be most interested in is terminal velocity. As gravity pulls you toward earth, you go faster. But like any moving object, you create drag—more as your speed increases. When downward force equals upward resistance, acceleration stops. You max out.

Depending on your size and weight, and factors such as air density, your speed at that moment will be about 120 mph—and you’ll get there after a surprisingly brief bit of falling: just 1500 feet, about the same height as Chicago’s Sears (now Willis) Tower. Equal speed means you hit the ground with equal force. The difference is the clock. Body meets Windy City sidewalk in 12 seconds. From an airplane’s cruising altitude, you’ll have almost enough time to read this entire article.

By now, you’ve descended into breathable air. You sputter into consciousness. At this altitude, you’ve got roughly 2 minutes until impact. Your plan is simple. You will enter a Zen state and decide to live. You will understand, as Hamilton notes, “that it isn’t the fall that kills you—it’s the landing.”

Keeping your wits about you, you take aim.

But at what? Magee’s landing on the stone floor of that French train station was softened by the skylight he crashed through a moment earlier. Glass hurts, but it gives. So does grass. Haystacks and bushes have cushioned surprised-to-be-alive free-fallers. Trees aren’t bad, though they tend to skewer. Snow? Absolutely. Swamps? With their mucky, plant-covered surface, even more awesome. Hamilton documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn’t compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won’t “open up and swallow your shattered body.”

With a target in mind, the next consideration is body position. To slow your descent, emulate a sky diver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward. This adds friction and helps you maneuver. But don’t relax. This is not your landing pose.

The question of how to achieve ground contact remains, regrettably, given your predicament, a subject of debate. A 1942 study in the journal War Medicine noted “distribution and compensation of pressure play large parts in the defeat of injury.” Recommendation: wide-body impact. But a 1963 report by the Federal Aviation Agency argued that shifting into the classic sky diver’s landing stance—feet together, heels up, flexed knees and hips—best increases survivability. The same study noted that training in wrestling and acrobatics would help people survive falls. Martial arts were deemed especially useful for hard-surface impacts: “A ‘black belt’ expert can reportedly crack solid wood with a single blow,” the authors wrote, speculating that such skills might be transferable.

The ultimate learn-by-doing experience might be a lesson from Japanese parachutist Yasuhiro Kubo, who holds the world record in the activity’s banzai category. The sky diver tosses his chute from the plane and then jumps out after it, waiting as long as possible to retrieve it, put it on and pull the ripcord. In 2000, Kubo—starting from 9842 feet—fell for 50 seconds before recovering his gear. A safer way to practice your technique would be at one of the wind-tunnel simulators found at about a dozen U.S. theme parks and malls. But neither will help with the toughest part: sticking the landing. For that you might consider—though it’s not exactly advisable—a leap off the world’s highest bridge, France’s Millau Viaduct; its platform towers 891 feet over mostly spongy farmland.

Water landings—if you must—require quick decision-making. Studies of bridge-jump survivors indicate that a feet-first, knife-like entry (aka “the pencil”) best optimizes your odds of resurfacing. The famed cliff divers of Acapulco, however, tend to assume a head-down position, with the fingers of each hand locked together, arms outstretched, protecting the head. Whichever you choose, first assume the free-fall position for as long as you can. Then, if a feet-first entry is inevitable, the most important piece of advice, for reasons both unmentionable and easily understood, is to clench your butt.

No matter the surface, definitely don’t land on your head. In a 1977 “Study of Impact Tolerance Through Free-Fall Investigations,” researchers at the Highway Safety Research Institute found that the major cause of death in falls—they examined drops from buildings, bridges and the occasional elevator shaft (oops!)—was cranial contact. If you have to arrive top-down, sacrifice your good looks and land on your face, rather than the back or top of your head. You might also consider flying with a pair of goggles in your pocket, Hamilton says, since you’re likely to get watery eyes—impairing accuracy—on the way down.

7:02:19 AM

1000 Feet

Given your starting altitude, you’ll be just about ready to hit the ground as you reach this section of instruction (based on the average adult reading speed of 250 words per minute). The basics have been covered, so feel free to concentrate on the task at hand. But if you’re so inclined, here’s some supplemental information—though be warned that none of it will help you much at this point.

Statistically speaking, it’s best to be a flight crew member, a child, or traveling in a military aircraft. Over the past four decades, there have been at least a dozen commercial airline crashes with just one survivor. Of those documented, four of the survivors were crew, like the flight attendant Vulovic, and seven were passengers under the age of 18. That includes Mohammed el-Fateh Osman, a 2-year-old wreckage rider who lived through the crash of a Boeing jet in Sudan in 2003, and, more recently, 14-year-old Bahia Bakari, the sole survivor of last June’s Yemenia Airways plunge off the Comoros Islands.

Crew survival may be related to better restraint systems, but there’s no consensus on why children seem to pull through falls more often. The Federal Aviation Agency study notes that kids, especially those under the age of 4, have more flexible skeletons, more relaxed muscle tonus, and a higher proportion of subcutaneous fat, which helps protect internal organs. Smaller people—whose heads are lower than the seat backs in front of them—are better shielded from debris in a plane that’s coming apart. Lower body weight reduces terminal velocity, plus reduced surface area decreases the chance of impalement upon landing.

7:02:25 am

0 Feet

The ground. Like a Shaolin master, you are at peace and prepared. Impact. You’re alive. What next? If you’re lucky, you might find that your injuries are minor, stand up and smoke a celebratory cigarette, as British tail gunner Nicholas Alkemade did in 1944 after landing in snowy bushes following an 18,000-foot plummet. (If you’re a smoker, you’re super extra lucky, since you’ve technically gotten to indulge during the course of an airliner trip.) More likely, you’ll have tough work ahead.

Follow the example of Juliane Koepcke. On Christmas Eve 1971, the Lockheed Electra she was traveling in exploded over the Amazon. The next morning, the 17-year-old German awoke on the jungle floor, strapped into her seat, surrounded by fallen holiday gifts. Injured and alone, she pushed the death of her mother, who’d been seated next to her on the plane, out of her mind. Instead, she remembered advice from her father, a biologist: To find civilization when lost in the jungle, follow water. Koepcke waded from tiny streams to larger ones. She passed crocodiles and poked the mud in front of her with a stick to scare away stingrays. She had lost one shoe in the fall and was wearing a ripped miniskirt. Her only food was a bag of candy, and she had nothing but dark, dirty water to drink. She ignored her broken collarbone and her wounds, infested with maggots.

On the tenth day, she rested on the bank of the Shebonya River. When she stood up again, she saw a canoe tethered to the shoreline. It took her hours to climb the embankment to a hut, where, the next day, a group of lumberjacks found her. The incident was seen as a miracle in Peru, and free-fall statistics seem to support those arguing for divine intervention: According to the Geneva-based Aircraft Crashes Record Office, 118,934 people have died in 15,463 plane crashes between 1940 and 2008. Even when you add failed-chute sky divers, Hamilton’s tally of confirmed or plausible lived-to-tell-about-it incidents is only 157, with 42 occurring at heights over 10,000 feet.

But Koepcke never saw survival as a matter of fate. She can still recall the first moments of her fall from the plane, as she spun through the air in her seat. That wasn’t under her control, but what happened when she regained consciousness was. “I had been able to make the correct decision—to leave the scene of the crash,” she says now. And because of experience at her parents’ biological research station, she says, “I did not feel fear. I knew how to move in the forest and the river, in which I had to swim with dangerous animals like caimans and piranhas.”

Or, by now, you’re wide awake, and the aircraft’s wheels have touched safely down on the tarmac. You understand the odds of any kind of accident on a commercial flight are slimmer than slim and that you will likely never have to use this information. But as a courtesy to the next passenger, consider leaving your copy of this guide in the seat-back pocket.

Greg Milner

They met in 1967, on the day Smith showed up penniless in New York. She headed for Brooklyn in search of old friends, knocked on the wrong Fort Greene door, and there he was, “pale and slim, with masses of dark curls.” Smith had a knack for this sort of fateful encounter. Long before she forms a band or cuts a record, she dates Sam Shepard and Jim Carroll, befriends Harry Smith and Johnny Winter, sings one of her first songs to comfort a distraught Janis Joplin, meets Jimi Hendrix outside a party both are too shy to enter, and gets chatted up in an Automat by Allen Ginsberg, who mistakes her for “a very pretty boy.” When she finally does perform with musicians and makes a big local splash, she frets that it is all coming too easily.

Smith depicts herself not so much a scenester as a sober (in both senses of the world) observer. For all its period detail and depictions of semi-voluntary squalor, Just Kids is hardly a Please Kill Me-style tell-all, but it is a vivid portrayal of a bygone New York that could support a countercultural artistic firmament. Even the geography remains unexplored. When Mapplethorpe decides he needs an embryo in formaldehyde for an art installation, the two find one by combing the ruins of the old City Hospital on Welfare (soon to become Roosevelt) Island.

Like her music, Smith’s rarified idea of the Artist (“I did it for poetry, I did it for Rimbaud,”) is occasionally grating, but much of the power of this book comes from her ability to recall lucid memories in straightforward prose. Even with all their relationship’s permutations (romantic, Platonic, maternal)⎯especially when Mapplethorpe begins to confront his sexuality⎯it comes off nearly devoid of melodrama. Just Kids makes a convincing case that faith in another’s expressive capability can form a bond as strong as any physical or emotional commitment. Smith nudges Mapplethorpe toward photography. Mapplethorpe urges her to put poetry to music, and bankrolls her first recording session.

If there was a point where their relationship really came to fruition, it was with the iconic photo Mapplethorpe shot for the cover of Smith’s first album, Horses. In appropriately gender-bending terms, she describes the result as “my aural sheath swathed in Robert’s image.” “When I look at it now, I never see me,” she writes. “I see us.”

By Rebecca Solnit

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer—his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.

What Would You Do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill

We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out, “At one time loot was the soldier’s pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control—the American military calls it “security”—rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a “stampede” and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

We live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services—like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina—to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced, and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing… Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected—or appointed—office.

Learning to See in Crises

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I’m making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse—food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment—might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.