Please Stop Calling the Republicans the "Business-Friendly Party," As If They Were the Only Game in Town.

It’s a truism of American politics that the Republican Party is the “business friendly” party, largely because of the GOP's definition of the term as adherence to two ideas: 

1. Lower taxes, and
2. Less regulation.

The GOP's devotion to these two laissez-faire economic principles approaches the religious. In today's political climate, it's heresy to question them. And their fanaticism on the subject has led to the perception, shared by Republicans and non-Republicans alike, that the GOP has a monopoly on being good for business.

But there’s something fundamentally wrong with this equation. According to the GOP's definition, "business friendly" translates to “give ‘em what they want whenever they ask for it whether or not it’s good for them." By that logic, the parent who lets their kid subsist on pixie sticks and Hershey’s Kisses is a “kid friendly” parent. Furthermore, even leaving out all the arguments one could make about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama being among the most “business friendly” Presidents we’ve had, the Democrats’ model of public/private cooperation is, in the long run, better not only for the majority of Americans, but for business itself. 

Under its current corporate configuration, American business is fundamentally unable to look ahead. Admittedly, this accusation sounds counter-intuitive. After all, the existence of venture capital is, by definition, based on the ability to look ahead, and all the major banks and investment houses have projections/forecasting departments staffed by uncounted numbers of analysts whose job it is to do nothing BUT “look ahead.”

But by ahead, I mean way ahead. Rarely does one read projections that go much beyond the next quarter or fiscal year. Forget about thirty-, twenty-, or even ten-year projections. It’s all about short-term gain, and, again because of the corporate structure of most American businesses, there's good reason for this shortsightedness.

First, investors won’t wait decades for a return. They want returns soon, if not now. And this isn’t unreasonable, considering that most American investors are over 65 (retirees make up the largest group of investors, and the median age of the retired investor is 67). If they take too long a view, they’ll be dead before they realize it.  

Secondly, corporations are run not by proprietors, but by employees. CEOs are just as much employees as are the guys on the assembly line (albeit they do own more of the company). They serve at the pleasure of the directors and the shareholders. They aren’t thinking about their legacy, or about a business they can pass down to their children. They collect a paycheck and stock options, and, all too often, couldn't care less about what happens after they go as long as they get theirs. If the meltdown of 2008 showed us nothing else, it showed that far too many corporate executives operate under the “IBG” principle: “When the chickens come home to roost, it won’t matter, because I’ll Be Gone.” Apres moi, le deluge. 

This is why the government—a disinterested entity which does not function like a business, and, indeed, shouldn’t, and which exists not to turn a quick buck, but to look ahead for future generations of Americans—needs to take an active role. And in doing so, be a better friend to business than business is itself.

This isn’t a new idea. The government has been in the incubator business for a long time. The prime engine of 19^th century economic expansion was the railroads, which provide an excellent example of public/private collaboration. The railroads simply would not have happened were it not for the government pushing their development, providing the land, the capital, the protection (both financial and physical), and, frequently, the labor itself (such as Chinese immigrants brought here at the taxpayers’ expense, or prison chain-gangs).

As corrupt as the process of building them was—and it most certainly was, rife with sweetheart deals, kickbacks, and plain old-fashioned bribery and influence-peddling—the railroads did get built. And the ability to move vast amounts of people and products across unimaginable distances at unprecedented speed laid the groundwork for America’s 20^th century industrial primacy.  

This model provided the United States with the prime engine of economic expansion again in the 20^th century with the postwar construction of the federal Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Again, the process was fraught with corruption, backroom deals, and shady dealing on the part of major corporations like General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil (all of whom had good reasons for wanting highways, not streetcars or light rail, to be built). But once again, public empowerment of the private sector had worked, again generating millions of jobs and trillions in revenue.

Massive investment in physical infrastructure isn't the only way government helps business. Virtually all of the major technological advances of the last 50 years have either been directly created, or heavily subsidized, by the federal government: microwave ovens being just one small, but lucrative, example of gadgets generated by the space program that subsequently made it to the commercial sphere. The research which eventually led  to the Information Revolution conducted at Bell Labs, the Xerox Research Facility at Palo Alto, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc., was funded, in large part, by your tax dollars. And profitably. Even if not immediately.

Think of the Internet. In the late 1960’s when the idea of computers exchanging data was first murkily emerging, the smart money wouldn’t have touched it any more than they would have touched a plutonium-coated leper. Most Americans didn’t know what a computer was. It was science fiction, and capital doesn’t mess around with science fiction. Thankfully, the U.S.Government (specifically, the U.S. Military, which recognized its potential as a means of military communication) funded that research, which led to the development of the prime engines of economic expansion in the 21^th century. Pretty good return on the initial investment of your tax dollars, even if it did take forty years.  

It should be clear to even the most casual observer that the Next Big Thing—the next engine of economic growth—is going to be renewable, sustainable energy. The added urgency to developing alternative energy is that not only will it be profitable--it'll be necessary. 

The first reason for this is that we’re running out of oil. Opinions differ as to when “peak oil” production, and the subsequent decline, is going to kick in. Many industry professionals believe we’ve hit peak oil already. But no one in the industry seriously doubts we’re approaching that point. Oil- shale refining, drilling in wilderness preserves, and other schemes to squeeze yet more oil out of the ground are short-term band-aids. The clock is ticking on oil. 

And secondly, the bad publicity is becoming intolerable. No serious person really doubts that rampant fossil fuel consumption is contributing, in terrifying ways, to global climate change and compromising our health. Alternative energy—wind, solar, plant-based, you name it—is going to be the juggernaut that carries us forward.

But again, the IBG-driven short-sightedness of American business leadership kicks in. In the short term, it's cheaper to just keep doing things the way we're doing them now. Peak oil may not hit for a few decades yet, and when it does—ten, twenty or thirty years down the pike—the suits now calling the shots will either be retired or dead. And it won’t be their problem.

Inevitably, when one makes this argument, Solyndra gets thrown up as, at worst, an example of bald-faced corruption on the part of the Obama administration, or at best, as an example of why the government should stay out. But supporting Solyndra, and companies like it, is what the government should do, precisely because it’s not the (immediately) profitable move, but because it’s the responsible move.

American business needs the government—not merely for the resources that an entity the size of the government can throw behind new ventures, but to save it business from itself. American business needs an entity that is not dependent upon shareholder approval or animated by the corporate “get rich now” ethos to originate and support what the “smart money” won’t touch until it becomes irresistible not to. American business needs the long-term vision of the government—an entity which is not beholden to shareholders, but to the future of the American people. 

Paul Ryan May Be Just The Dreamiest Congressman Out There, But for Pete's Sake, Quit Calling Him an Intellectual.

Republican sexuality creeps me out. Generally, they hate and fear sex, probably because that party is comprised almost entirely of Evangelicals and WASPs, two of the most repressed groups in human history. So they suppress it and hide it. But as Dr. Freud taught us, you can’t crush it down—the sexual urge will surface. So their sexuality finds expression in the disturbingly erotic attraction they evince for their candidates.  

Nowhere is this more evident than in the current orgy of gooing and cooing over Mitt Romney’s pick for VP, the dreamy, blue-eyed, fit-as-a-fiddle Paul Ryan. Read the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan Facebook fanboy/girl pages on Facebook. Those Conservative broads just soak their collective capacious, poly/cotton, six-to-a-pack-at-Walmart panties over this guy.

“Such a beautiful family,” they sigh (SQUISH). “Look at those eyes!” they moan (GUSH). “He’s like a knight in shining armor!” they whimper (GLOOSH). And worst of all, “He’s so smart! He’s such an intellectual” (SPLURSSSSSHHHHHH).

Barring the vulgar sound effects I added purely for the sake of cheap comedy, I’m not making any of this up. These are real quotes.

The Republican fangirls (and, one can only assume, some boys) are not alone in their adoration. The mainstream media also went gaga for him, blathering about his “undeniable brilliance”, his “impressive brainpower”, and the “intellectual heft” he brought to the ticket. Which left me scratching my head. Paul Ryan an intellectual?

Bitches, please.

“Intellectual” is, like “obscenity”, a tough concept to define. But, to swipe Justice Potter Stewart’s line about obscenity, I know an intellectual when I see one. Paul Ryan ain’t one. He’s actually not very bright. Matter of fact, this twerp is actively anti-intellectual. And here’s why I think so.

1. He doesn’t have any of the traditional markers. Paul Ryan holds no advanced degrees, speaks no foreign languages, and has no significant publications to his credit. Now, while it’s not necessarily a prerequisite to have an advanced degree or fluency in a language other than one’s own, either or both is, in today’s world, a pretty good indicator.

         At the very least, having them indicates a quality that Ryan doesn’t have, namely...

2. Intellectual curiosity. Ryan exhibits none. This guy, by his own admission, hasn’t changed his opinion on anything since he was 14. If your thinking hasn’t evolved since you were 14, it’s not only a pretty good indication you’re not only NOT an intellectual—it’s a pretty good sign you’re stupid. The guy is content to believe what he’s believed since before he finished puberty. Finishing that process alone ought to change your view of the world. But not Paul Ryan.

3. Paul Ryan has no significant publications to his credit. Intellectuals generally do a lot of writing and publishing. This is how we know they’re intellectuals. The one “book” he’s participated in “writing” (the originally-titled “Young Guns,” coauthored with those intellectual heavyweights Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy) was ghostwritten. Again, I can’t define “intellectual,” but whatever they are, I’m pretty sure they write their own books.

4. The guy doesn’t have an original thought in his head. The much-lauded "Path to Prosperity" Ryan budget contains precisely no new ideas, no innovative solutions, or any stunning, earth-shattering revelations. Yes, the deficit is a big problem, but no one on either side of the aisle debates that. His economic philosophy, as expressed in his budget, is nothing more than a warmed-over rehash of the same tired, shopworn old supply-side, trickle-down claptrap peddled during the Reagan years—which even its architect, David Stockman, now openly disavows. Because it didn’t work.  

5. He is avowedly anti-science. The examples are legion: he thinks scientists are involved in a “global conspiracy to delude the public about climate change”; under his budget, over 1 million college students would lose Pell grants over the next ten years; he voted to take away federal funding of both PBS and NPR; and he is opposed to stem-cell research. Again, I can’t define what an intellectual is, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t anti-intellect. There is nothing in this guy’s voting record or public utterances to suggest he respects knowledge, or those who add to, gain, and share it. In fact, there’s a lot to suggest he doesn’t.

6. Bill Maher makes an excellent point about this guy, which is worth quoting in full: “Why is he the intellectual of the Republican Party? He has, from what I can see, two ideas. One, let’s stop having rich people pay taxes at all, and poor people should look for food in the woods. This is the intellectual? He’s a step up from Sarah Palin? Actually, you know, he’s more articulate than Sarah Palin, but tell me one area where he and Sarah Palin would disagree. I cannot find one area. So somehow, he’s the smartest guy in the party, and she’s the stupidest woman on earth, but they agree on everything.”

Hell of a point. Most Republicans will, at mention of the Belle of the Bible Belt, kind of grin sheepishly and admit she’s as dumb as furniture. But there’s no difference between her thinking and Paul Ryan’s.

7. Finally—and let’s let this nail close the coffin on Paul Ryan’s “intellectualism”: the dumb son of a bitch still takes Ayn Rand seriously.  He says it himself: “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” 

Problem is, no serious academics or intellectuals take Ayn Rand seriously. They never did. She’s not taught in the political science or political philosophy departments of any legitimate, accredited universities. She’s a tenth-rate philosopher and a 15^th-rate novelist. If Ayn Rand is a serious philosopher, David Barton is a serious historian.

And, much like her acolyte, she also didn’t have an original thought in her head. Her “philosophy”, that “Objectivism” and “rational self-interest”, was lifted, part and parcel, from Herbert Spencer’s late 19^th century “social Darwinism”—essentially, in society, the fittest should survive and the rest of them die. Through a little misreading of Nietzsche in there—“God is dead, and let’s go beyond good and evil”—and mix in a dab of anti-Soviet resentment, and you’ve got Ayn Rand in a nutshell.

Ayn Rand appeals to the barely-literate, the mean-spirited, and the guilty. Her garbage is what upper middle-class 14-year olds who’ve heard their grandfathers bitch about welfare and extol the virtues of being a self-made man read to justify their own privileged existence.

Ryan, in his pandering bid to woo Bible-beatin’ middle America, has recently back-pedalled from his prior endorsement of the half-baked “philosophy” of this outspokenly atheistic, abortion-havin’, adulterous, altruism-hatin’ Russian radical, but make no mistake—by his own admission, he’s a big fan.

Again, I can’t define “intellectual,” but I know anyone who takes Ayn Rand seriously sure as shootin’ ain’t one.

John Stuart Mill once said, “I never meant to say that the conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”

Being conservative isn’t necessarily a mark of stupidity—there are plenty of very intelligent conservatives with legitimate reasons for their beliefs, who articulate their views well, and who make valid criticisms of leftist thought and policy. Friedrich Hayek, Irving Kristol, John Podhoretz, P.J. O’Rourke, David Brooks, and Leo Strauss all leap to mind. I disagree with them, but I can respect them. But Paul Ryan isn’t in their company. He’s not one of them. He isn’t fit to carry their library card. 

You know, I remember a far, far distant time—2011—when Newt Gingrich was supposed to be the in-house intellectual of the Republican Party. Newt, at least, has a doctorate in history. I’ll give him that. But somehow, he’s had to give up his seat to the mediocrity in pants that is Paul Ryan.

I put in this picture for no other reason than it angers Romney and Ryan supporters. That's as good a reason to add a picture as any. 

I'll Punch You Right In The Heart If You Think I'm Poor.

The election of 2012 may well be remembered by future historians as the Fight for the Middle Class. The words “middle class” are as much a mantra to both Romney and Obama as “maverick” was to Sarah Palin. The parties are fighting like piranhas on bath salts for the privilege of being the One True Champion of the Middle Class.

But neither side is saying much about the poor.*

This is because America hates poor people.

Let’s just admit it. We hate the poor. We detest them. We make brutal fun of them at best (watch an episode of the mercifully-cancelled "My Name is Earl" or pay a quick visit to peopleofwalmart.com, if you don't believe me)--or we insult them by using some of the ugliest words and phrases in the language: “Welfare queens.” “White trash.” “Niggers.” “Trailer trash.” Our hatred of the poor cuts across racial lines. We hate and mock and fear poor whites as much as we do poor blacks. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that America’s perennial “race problem” is more about class than race. I think Americans hate poor people worse than we hate black people. It’s just convenient that so many black people are poor. Makes it easier for us to conflate the two categories of people we hate the most.

This disdain for the poor is so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that I wonder if it’s become part of our genetic code. And, honestly, I’m no better than anyone else.

I was recently caught in a traffic backup that put me home a half-hour later than usual. I fumed behind the wheel, inching forward, until finally I saw the source of the snarl: a twelve-year-old, rust-spotted Pontiac, hood up, smoke pouring out, stopped in the center lane.

The driver—one of those skinny, flaxen-haired, wife-beater-clad, chinstrap-bearded types that Missouri produces in such vast numbers—was standing helplessly beside his car, arms outstretched as if to say to all us angry motorists, “Hayell, man, I ain’t got no idear why she quit.”

I lost it. “Get your &#%$ing oil changed next time, you @%#ing redneck!!” I shrieked from behind closed windows, revved my engine just to let him know how mad I was, and sailed merrily on before I realized that I—a card-carrying Socialist—had just cursed a poor person for having the audacity to let his poverty inconvenience me for half an hour.

It’s not just that we hate poor people—we’re also terrified of being thought poor ourselves. Our politicians aren’t stupid. They’re appealing to the “middle class” because no one in America wants to admit they’re poor. We can stand being called “middle class.” But not even the poorest among us can stand being called “poor.”

"Socialism never took root in America,” said John Steinbeck, “because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Never were truer words spoken. We don’t think of ourselves as poor—and we go to great lengths to convince ourselves (and anyone who’s watching) that we’re not.

In fact, we make ourselves poorer so that we don’t look poor. We drive cars, live in houses, and buy clothes more expensive than those we need, but that make us think we look rich. The rash of outlet malls creeping over the landscape like open herpes sores exists solely so that we can wear Polo, Calvin Klein, and Ann Taylor—just like rich people wear!—without actually having to pay full price. In essence, they’re there to help us fool people into thinking we’re not broke as junkies.

~          ~          ~

I can't say for certain where this peculiarly American dislike of poor people comes from. I suspect, however, it comes from our Calvinist Puritan roots. Prosperity, to the Pilgrims and their ilk, was a sign of God’s favor. Those whom He loved would He bless with riches (which goes completely counter to everything Jesus ever preached, but don’t expect Christians to be Christlike). This idea is the source of what sociologist Max Weber called the “Protestant work ethic”: work your ass off and make all the money you can. Get rich or die tryin.’ Otherwise, people might think God doesn’t like you.

This idea finds secular expression in a phrase that's become America's nickname, its unofficial moniker: “The Land of Opportunity.” “America is the Land of Opportunity!” we tell ourselves in civics class, political rallies, and damn near everywhere else where Americans gather to tell ourselves how great we are. It’s our most sacred shibboleth. Our national Kool-Aid. It’s practically an article of religious faith. “Anyone can make it in America! You just work hard, apply yourself, keep your nose to the grindstone, don’t take any wooden nickels, and you, too, can end up a millionaire!” 

And it’s sort of true, maybe, kind of, a little. Both my grandfathers were born dirt poor, worked their asses off, and ended up doing okay (although honest labor may have had less to do with it than I like to imagine. My father is fond of saying, “Sonny boy, one of your grandpas went to jail, and the other one should’ve”).

But “The Land of Opportunity” has a dark side that is terrifying in its implication. If America truly is the Land of Opportunity, it means that if you don’t make it in America, it’s... your... fault.

Taken to its logical conclusion, if you’re poor in America, it means there’s something wrong with you. You’re defective in some measure. It means that you’re lazy. Or stupid. Or dishonest. Or immoral.

Think about how we talk about  those poor people who have the nerve to collect welfare: “They’re lazy. They’re promiscuous. They have all these kids they can’t take care of. They don’t want to work. They’re thieves. They’re all on drugs. They’re like animals, they just want free handouts. They’re just soaking up my hard-earned tax dollars.”

Cripes, who’d want to be described like THAT? Who’d want to help THOSE people? No wonder we treat the poor like lepers. No wonder we flee, not just from the physical location of the poor, but from any association with them.

What’s implicit in calling America “The Land of Opportunity” is that the poor deserve their poverty. And much of America buys it, which turns traditional values upside down. The rich have become our folk heroes—and the poor have become the villains of the American narrative. This makes it okay to treat the poor like criminals—insisting, for example, that we humiliate them by making them undergo drug tests before they get their welfare check. Or implementing a draconian “three strikes and you’re out” policy and calling it “welfare reform.” Or entertaining such inhuman proposals as scrapping free and reduced lunch programs for poor children in public schools, as I recently heard right-wing AM talk radio host Michael Savage suggest.

The truth, as anyone who cares to get beyond the current American cacophony of wealth-fetishizing sycophancy knows, is different. In most cases, people are poor for reasons beyond their control. Their jobs go away, they get sick and can’t pay for it, their families couldn’t afford to educate them—dear God, there are a zillion reasons for poverty that have nothing to do with any fictitious inherent defects on the part of the poor.  

But many of us don’t want the truth. We’d prefer to pretend. We’d prefer to idolize the rich and deny compassion to the less fortunate. We’d prefer to vote Republican, since, after all, that’s the party of the rich—like us—and that Mitt Romney, who is, after all, a millionaire (like we’ll be some day), better represents our economic interests than the party of the free welfare handouts. We’d prefer to project, through our clothes and houses and cars and stuff, the fantasy that we’re rich.  

We’d prefer to believe we’re just temporarily embarrassed members of the Middle Class.

---

* With the exception of Mitt Romney, who says, quote, “I’m not worried about the very poor.” Good on you, Mitty. I just bet you’re not. 

"There's No Such Thing As Money."

I remember the moment when I realized America had lost its collective mind.

Sarah Palin had just wrapped up her interview with Katie Couric, delivering quite possibly the most embarrassing interview performance in televised history. I mean, Jesus, even if you don’t like the lady—and I don’t—it was painful to watch. “Well, that’s it,” I thought. “If that’s what comes after John McCain’s coronary, we might as well make it unanimous for Barack.”

Katie Couric and Sarah Palin, from Sarah's historic interview--a moment in television history proving that two dunderheaded broads whose joint IQ doesn't equal my shoe size can still be fascinating, as long as they're hot. 

But that didn’t happen. Within seconds of the Couric/Palin interview, Fox News commentators began talking about how Mrs. Palin had done a “brilliant job fielding tough questions from a hard-as-nails interviewer.”

This is horseshit of a mindboggling level of audacity. Katie Couric lobs more softballs than a minivan full of lesbians. But tons of people chose to believe Fox News’ interpretation of the events. And I realized that a large chunk of the American public just flat out chooses to opt out of reality.

I don’t think it was always this way. I truly do believe that at earlier times in our history, we as a nation and as a people have been more engaged with reality. But for some reason, we just opt out of it now.

I’m not sure why, but I have a sneaking suspicion that television has a lot to do with it. I’m not saying there’s no place for escapism, but at least in the old days, when you went to see a movie, you entered the theater, a physical place distinct from the rest of the world. The lights went off; and when the movie was over, the lights came back on and you left. It was like waking up from a dream. There was a definite break between the fantasy world of the movie and reality—a distinct separation between fantasy and reality.

But television is in our homes (in many houses, in every room in the home), on our computer screens, on our phones. It surrounds us with a damn near inescapable cocoon of fantasy and unreality, integrating fantasy into the fabric of our daily lives. It’s warped our collective psychology and both facilitated and hastened our headlong retreat from the real world.

Resulting in huge chunks of America that willingly swallow the biggest, most baldfaced whoppers you can imagine and outright lunacy like,

• “Your child set fire to the shop teacher not because he’s a psychotic little asshole, but because he’s gifted.” 
• “Taking pills will help you safely lose weight.” 
• “Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.” 
• “The Koch Brothers’ economic interests are your own.” 
• “Barack Obama was not born in the United States.” 
• “Lower taxes on billionaires will result in more jobs for all of us.”
• "People actually care about what you made for dinner/where you visited recently/how your health is when you post it on Facebook."

But perhaps the most glaring evidence of our retreat from reality was the economic meltdown of 2008.

I don’t get the Great Recession. I don’t. I mean, I do, sort of, maybe, in the sort of foggy way that most people get it... banks made a ton of bad loans to people who had no way of paying them back, and then somehow it all went to shit and now everyone’s scared for their jobs. I guess I get it, a little bit.

But on a much more fundamental level, I don’t fucking get it at all. We still have the ground. Stuff still grows out of it. We still pull metal and fuel out of it. People still need to eat and wear clothes and buy stuff made out of metal and drive cars and stay warm. It isn’t like we lost a big chunk of the ground. It isn’t like the western half of the U.S. fell into the ocean. The economic meltdown was not caused by a drought, a flood, a famine, a hurricane, or anything else that affected our ability to produce stuff that other people need.

In other words, nothing that happened in the real world actually affected either our needs or our ability to produce goods to meet those needs. Nothing physical, material, or based in reality happened to change the system. 

But we’ve succumbed, somehow, to some sort of worldwide mass psychosis. Modern capitalism is based on absolutely nothing at all. Nothing. Zip. Bubkes. Zlich. The entire “financial industry” based on a delusion—a perception of reality. But it’s all, essentially, one big bubbleful of nothing. We've opted for the fantasy that nothing actually amounts to something--and we've allowed it to ruin countless lives. 

Here’s how I understand it. A bunch of banks knowingly lent a bunch of nothing (okay, not nothing, some pieces of paper with some numbers on them, but for our purposes, it was still pretty much nothing) to people to buy houses with nothing. The banks then took this nothing that the people who bought the houses had promised to them, and packaged and re-packaged and re-re-repackaged this nothing into different and various other forms of nothing, which they then sold to other people, in exchange for more nothing. The other people then used this new nothing to finance their acquisition of more nothing, and with that nothing, they were able to leverage their ability to borrow more nothing, which they then SOMETIMES used to do some actual stuff, but mostly was just in exchange for more nothing.

Along the way, different chunks of this nothing were given interesting names like “stocks, “bonds,” “hedge funds,” “derivatives,” “money markets,” “options,” “futures,” “mutual funds,” “triple renooberated fiduciary allocatives,” and other terms which I don’t understand, and neither do you, and that’s precisely what the people who gave them those names intended. But at the end of the day, they were all just names to signify the transfer of nothing from one set of people to another set of people.

Didn’t matter, though. The nothingniks figured out ever more ingenious ways to make money off of nothing. They would bet nothing against nothing. You could buy a piece of the odds of those bets—which were nothing—and then resell that nothing for more nothing. And then you could shave little bits off that nothing and repackage those little shaved bits of nothing into other forms of nothing with new and even more opaque names.

And everything was going along swimmingly, until someone committed the financial equivalent of yelling “FIRE” in a crowded theater and said, “HEY! They’re not paying back their nothing! There’s nothing here!”  At which point, it all went to shit in a global cataclysm of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and people started beating each other up in Athens and camping out in Zuccotti Park.

And somewhere along the line, we forgot that the whole goddamn thing was all about nothing.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Our species seems prone to losing our collective shit in vast numbers. Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds may well yet be the best book on the subject ever penned, with chapters on Tulipomania, the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi Land Bubble, the Crusades, and other hullabaloos and to-dos over absolutely nothing. But in recent years, no one example, or person, better sums up what I’m talking about than Robert Maxwell, the British media baron who fell off his yacht and drowned in 1991.

This is Robert Maxwell, the biggest crook in Britain's history, and a virtuoso of the art of making nothing look like something. 

Maxwell, while alive, was one of the world’s wealthiest men—or so people thought. But after he died, it turned out that he was zillions of pounds sterling in debt, he’d looted his companies’ pension funds to pay off debts, and his empire, an intricate web of more than 300 different companies and entities, collapsed in flames. He’s still the biggest crook in Britain’s history.

I wouldn’t call him precisely a hero, but I am fascinated by him, and I’m not the only one. For some reason, this great, fat, replete, smiling bastard, this ubershnook, this super-criminal who could have stepped off the pages of a James Bond novel (in fact, he was the inspiration for Elliot Carver, the villain in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies), captivates a lot of people. He’s been used as a character in novels. There are tons of books about him (I’ve read five of them), two plays, and a full length BBC movie, Maxwell, starring David “Poirot” Suchet in the title role, and written by a guy named Craig Warner.

I mention the writer because, being of that persuasion myself, I like writers, and because this guy Warner is a bona fide genius. Two passages that he wrote illustrate, perfectly, the delusion I’m talking about.

In one scene, Maxwell, discussing the value of his companies with two of his bankers over dinner on the roof of his London skyscraper, waves his great fat flipper of a hand and says dismissively,

We talk about “tangibles” and “intangibles,” but do we really know what we mean? Cash is supposed to be tangible. But cash has no real value. It’s just paper. And on it is a promise of something, a promise of some sterling silver. But who goes to the Bank of England to demand their silver? No one. We just trade the promise.

Later on, Maxwell is dictating his plans for the next day into his little pocket tape recorder:

Buy as much MCC [Maxwell Communications Corporation, his flagship company] as you can. Support the price. Take the money from MCC itself and give it to Robert Maxwell Holdings for investment. And then to McMillan to buy their printing presses for half what they’re worth, and then buy them back at half price, which gives us a 300% profit on those assets, which we’ll record as trading profit. We shall go back to MCC and buy more shares and we can use their certificates to guarantee loans, which will then be funneled through Liechtenstein, and with that, we’ll buy more MCC shares. And, well, if anyone asks who controls Liechtenstein, we’ll say “who the FUCK knows. It’s a charitable trust. We’re not omniscient.”

He pauses, smiles, and then turns the recorder back on and says,

There’s no such thing as money.

See, Maxwell got it. He knew that the system was all based on nothing, and he figured out how to manipulate it, work it, and leverage all that nothing into a seat in Parliament. Yachts. Planes. Helicopters. Mansions the world over. Suits from Savile Row, shoes from John Lobb. Art and antiques. Invitations to the best parties, access to world leaders, dinners with the Queen, awe and admiration, women, Cuban cigars, and enough caviar, prime rib, and champagne to eventually swell him up to over 400 pounds.

He figured out how to turn fantasy into reality. Granted, it all came tumbling down, but he had a hell of a run at it while it lasted.

Amoral as all hell? Well, sure. But there’s something in me that admires the hell out of a guy who figures out that it’s all based on nothing and makes a hell of a livelihood at it. Especially while the rest of us continue, willfully, to believe in the fantasy that the gobbledygook and doubletalk slung at us by the bankers, stockbrokers, estate attorneys, financial planners, Federal Reserve, and President means or signifies anything more than a great, steaming, pile of nothing.

You can watch the entire movie "Maxwell" on YouTube. Well worth the time. 

Of Baseball, Cuba, Corporate Power, and Free Speech.

I’m a newly-minted baseball fan. Suddenly, after close to forty years of simply not giving a damn about sports of any kind, I am a rabid baseball-a-holic and diehard supporter of the St. Louis Cardinals.

It happened last year, when the Cards, in one of the most dramatic World Series games ever (Game 5, bottom of the eleventh, two outs, two strikes, bases loaded, David Freese belts in a grand slam homer) defeated the Texas Rangers.

In other words, the team once owned by Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis' oldest and most beloved business which, thanks to George W. Bush, was picked up at a bargain-basement price by the Belgians, defeated the team once owned by Dubya hisself.

If you don’t see cosmic significance in that, you’re crazy.

My old Midwestern rust belt city’s jaw-dropping ass-smacking of Dubya’s Rangers at the eleventh hour turned me, formerly indifferent verging on hostile to professional sports, into a fan. Since then, I’ve been watching baseball, and the issues surrounding it, with a lot of interest. And it frequently strikes me that baseball, that quintessentially American sport, is a flashpoint for many other issues which with Americans wrestle.

For example, the latest brouhaha engendered by Florida Marlins’ GM Ozzie Guillen’s comments on Fidel Castro.

For those of you living in hermetic isolation who missed it, Ozzie Guillen recently gave a magazine interview wherein he said he admired Fidel Castro for his ability to stay in power and flip off the world’s biggest, baddest superpower from less than 90 miles off its coast for more than 50 years.

Now, while it is less than a ringing endorsement of unqualified support for all the aspects of El Jefe’s character (and honestly, considering the old bastard has survived a zillion cockamamie U.S. plots to kill him, including, but not limited to, planting explosives in his cigars, who DOESN’T have a sneaking admiration for him?), it still wasn’t the smartest thing to say. Not if you’re the GM of a team in a city where exiles from Castro’s Cuba make up a big chunk of the city’s population and wield a hell of a lot of political and economic clout.

Couple of things to point out here. One, Ozzie is Venezuelan by birth. And after more than a hundred years of essential U.S. colonization and tyranny, it’s understandable that the Venezuelans might be oriented more towards Castro than towards Washington. Ask Hugo Chavez. He sure is.

Two, Fidel Castro, as son-of-a-bitch dictators go, is a little lower on the Satanic Maleficence of Son-Of-A-Bitch Dictators scale than, say, Saddam Hussein. Or Muammar Khadafy. Or the Kims of North Korea. Or the Assads of Syria. Or the Saudi royal family. Or Kony. Or Idi Amin. Or General Suharto. 

Predictably, though, Miami's rabidly anti-Communist and Republican Cubans—who, thanks to their economic success and thick concentration in Dade County, have a hell of a lot of political influence—went absolutely loco. They choked on their cigars, spilled their mojitos all over their white suits, and frothed at the mouth with holy righteous indignation that someone said something about Fidel Castro that didn’t end with, “...and demons should sodomize him with fire-ant covered rattlesnakes in hell forever and ever, amen.”

Ozzie called a press conference, apologized profusely, said he’d been “misquoted,” that he "hated Castro," that he’d been “thinking in Spanish and speaking in English,” and essentially stumbled over his own dick in an attempt to backtrack faster than Mitt Romney in a room full of pro-lifers and show how sorry he was by groveling like a prison bitch.

And the Marlins, just to show Miami’s Cubans just how appalled, shocked, indignant, and aflame with holy righteous indignation they were, suspended him for five games.

Something about this rubs me the wrong way.

Dumb thing to say? Well, yeah. But Ozzie Guillen broke neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of Major League Baseball. Poor judgment or not, he exercised the basic American right of free speech. Ironically, a right which, presumably, Miami’s Cuban exiles came here to enjoy. And he was penalized for it.

My father makes the point that while he has the right to say what he said, the Marlins, likewise, have the right to suspend or fire him. Legally, it appears my dad is right. They do. But I’m not sure they should. It’s illegal for corporations and companies to punish, penalize or discriminate on the bases of race, religion, age, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation. Those categories are all protected classes. Why, then, is it acceptable and legal in the United States to penalize someone for exercising their constitutional right to free speech?

Regardless as to why it’s legal, it is. Which raises, in my mind, an even more disturbing issue. The First Amendment protects our right of free speech from the government. But free speech does not seem to have any protection whatsoever from corporate power, the ability of which to muzzle American citizens grows apace.

This scares the shit out of me. It should scare you, too.

What I wish the Marlins had done is issue a statement saying, “The Florida Marlins neither endorse nor agree with the statements made by our General Manager. We, like  you, think Fidel Castro is an asshole. However, inasmuch as he made those comments as a private citizen and did not claim to speak for this organization as a whole, there’s really nothing we can do about it, so kindly fuck off and take your goddamned protest signs with you.”

Putting principle above profit would have been the morally laudable thing to do. But they didn’t. And, more to the point, they couldn’t. You see, they’re a corporation. And corporations are, by definition, incapable of acting in a moral fashion.

This is not to say that they always act in an immoral fashion. They don’t take the low road any more than they take the high road. They are utterly amoral entities. Low road and high road, right and wrong, moral and immoral, are immaterial. They always take the profitable road, because that’s the only one they’re capable of taking.

It is illegal—a prosecutable crime—for the directors of publicly held corporations to act in any manner, or perform any action, that may jeopardize the corporation’s profitability. Even if it's the right thing to do.

Now, they dress this amorality up in fancy, high-falutin’, altruistic-sounding language: “We, the directors of this publicly-held entity, have a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard the economic well-being of our shareholders.”

It sure sounds nice. Look at the words they use. Public. Fiduciary. Well-being. Responsibility. Safeguard. Cripes, you’d think they were Mother Theresa.

But strip away all the high-blown rhetoric, and what they’re really saying is, “We’ll do whatever it takes to make money, regardless of whom or what we fuck over in the process.”

This has terrifying implications for American citizens. Because corporations are very good at making money—indeed, have a legal mandate to be very good at it—and because money is the mother’s milk of American politics, it means that the government has ordered corporations to take over, to the detriment of the citizenry.

Say that a corporation owns a manufacturing facility which produces toxic waste. And the people of the neighboring town, understandably, would prefer that said toxic waste not seep into their groundwater, get blown into their air, or settle all over their crops.

The moral thing, of course, would be to truck it away somewhere safe, or, better yet, find a way to make your shit without generating poison. But corporations can’t act morally. They can only act profitably. So if it’s cheaper for them to hire lobbyists, form PACs, make political contributions, subvert democracy, and get the laws rewritten so that it’s perfectly legal for them to dispose of their toxic waste wherever the hell they feel like it, that’s what they’ll do. Citizens be damned.

Essentially, corporations are, by definition and by legal mandate, sociopaths.

Which is why it was disheartening as hell to see the Marlins management take the weaselly way out instead of standing up for their employee and his Constitutional right to free speech. Disheartening. But not surprising.

Ozzie’s not alone. The list of public figures who’ve been taken down by the bitches’ brew of public indignation and the alacrity with which corporations move to protect their economic interests is getting pretty long. 

Tragically, though, I’m afraid that Jimmy the Greek, Helen Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Tracey Morgan, and all the others who’ve been punished because of “offensive” things they’ve said are just the beginning. Their ordeals are merely the harbingers of something even worse. Corporations don’t care about the constitutional rights of Americans. They only care about their bottom lines, and if profitability depends on running roughshod over our rights, then it’s our rights that'll go. We have no recourse against them. And so long as they continue to increase their power, it’s only going to get worse.

You don’t have to like Helen Thomas, for example. You don’t have to agree with her assertion that the way to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East is “[for] all the Jews [to] leave Palestine and go back to Europe.” I don’t. But she shouldn’t have lost her job for saying it. 

What the cases of Helen Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Jimmy the Greek, and all the rest of them show is very simple: We have allowed corporations to criminalize dissent. And when dissenters have no protection, then we have no plurality of thought. And when that happens, democracy dies. 

But who cares? So long as we still have baseball (and we will, so long as team ownership continues to turn a profit), will anyone miss democracy or even notice when it's gone? 

Batter up.

Power in a Union

I recently removed from my Facebook friends' list a guy with whom I'd gone to high school and with whom I'd kept in sporadic touch over the years. This is the first time I'd actually done that. I realized full well that I had the nuclear option, but I had decided not to exercise it until someone committed the sin of Unforgivable Douchebaggery.

This is a photo from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, when 146  young women--mostly recent immigrants from Russia and Italy--died in a factory fire as a result of unsafe working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which claimed more lives than any other disaster in New York until 9/11, provided great impetus and moral force to the labor movement. Now, it's all but forgotten by the public. 

Generally, I welcome dissent on my page. I like a good fight, and I've got the kind of vibe going on there where everyone, regardless of their political or religious persuasion feels comfortable commenting on any topic under the sun, so long as they keep it more or less civil. But he'd stepped over the line, in my book, at least, when he said how proud he was of the state of Indiana (where we grew up) for passing "Right to Work"--a law which, essentially, chops the balls off unions by making it illegal to have a closed shop.

That was it for me. I canned the guy. So long. Go shit on labor unions somewhere else, because I'm not putting up with it.*

On no other topic is the Republican party's virtuosity with PR--and the stupidity of their supporters--more evident than on the topic of organized labor. The Republican Party, bless their black and withered little hearts, has done an absolutely masterful job at demonizing American organized labor.

Try a thought experiment with yourself--say the word "union" out loud, and then tell me what's the first image that pops into your head. I bet it's some fat unshaven lazy guy with a bad mustache in a flannel shirt. Or a Mafioso. Or some guys on a picket line beating the shit out of a scab. Or Jimmy Hoffa. We don't think of our uncles. Or our dads. Or people whom we know and love. Nope, the Republican party has firmly taken control of the image and turned it into something vile--and in doing so, they have managed to turn us against our own financial and economic interests.

And you can't change people's minds on the subject. Facts don't work on conservatives. They don't understand statistics, so you can't show them what real wages looked like in the 50s and 60s and what they look like now that American organized labor is an emasculated, whimpering, beaten, bloody shell of its former self. They'll simply never change their minds. Unions are havens for lazy slobs. Unions are responsible for the death of the American auto industry. Unions are anti-jobs (which is a bit like saying, "Butchers are anti-meat," but go reason with a conservative). Unions are ruining America.

Well, since facts, statistics, rational inquiry, and logic don't work on these people, when I argue with them, I take a page out of their favorite philosopher's lesson plan book and use a couple of parables (actually, they aren't parables. They're anecdotes. But your average union-basher isn't going to be smart enough to know the difference. Just say "parables." Jesus taught with parables, so it should be good enough for them).

My great-uncle--my grandmother's brother--dropped out of high school in 1941, when America entered World War II, to go to work for the war effort. He wasn't old enough to enlist (he tried--they figured it out) so he went to work in a munitions factory in St. Louis. He never graduated from high school.

After the war, he got a job as a meat-cutter. And he joined the union. My great-uncle today owns two homes, free and clear, two late-model luxury cars, sent both his children to college, saw both of his grandchildren graduate from college, and will, God willing, see both of his great-grandsons graduate from college as well.

My father-in-law came to this country from Greece in 1956. Had the equivalent of a second-grade education--didn't speak a lick of English. Supported himself and his family by working at Greek restaurants as a waiter until one of his friends got him a job at Anheuser-Busch Brewery in St. Louis--at which point he joined the union.

My father-in-law now owns his own home free and clear, sent all three of his children to college, and is now worth probably upwards of a million in real estate and investments.

The money that these two men plowed back into the American economy during their lifetimes and the increased, enhanced productivity of their families thanks to access to education is due, largely if not entirely, to  American organized labor.

No one is saying that there weren't abuses. No one is saying that unsavory characters didn't occasionally get mixed up in union governance. And no one is saying that unions shouldn't do a better job at policing themselves. I also realize that these are just two stories, and anecdotal evidence isn't worth a plugged nickel, but the facts are on my side. American organized labor built America's middle class. Unions built this country. Labor unions made it possible for millions, MILLIONS of Americans--and their dependents--to realize the American dream.

Union-bashing makes me about as mad as anything does because it's so goddamned stupid. When you hear someone doing it, it's pretty much proof positive they've been brainwashed into thinking their interests are those of Mitt Romney and Lloyd Blankfein.Americans would rather believe, by the million, that organized labor is a big, fat, greedy parasite with its suckermouth firmly planted on the neck of American industry, sucking it dry. For some reason, they don't want to believe that management is a big, fat, greedy parasite with its suckermouth grinding into the neck of the American working class, sucking IT dry.

The next time you hear someone going on and on about how unions are responsible for America's economic decline, how they're killing American industry and hurting the country, sit back, let them finish their rant, and then while they're gasping for air, ask them a very simple question: "What do the letters AFL-CIO# stand for?"

And when they can't answer it--as they won't be able to--smile broadly and say, "You're presenting yourself as an expert on the havoc being wreaked on the American economy by organized labor, and you can't tell me the name of the biggest union in the country?"

It probably won't change their minds, but it might make them feel really stupid for a millisecond or two. And as the old Chinese sage said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step."

*Well, that, and because he was a rude dick about it. Enough of my other friends who didn't know him complained about him to the point where I figured it just wasn't worth having him around. If you're a Facebook friend of mine, feel free to disagree with me about unions. But do it civilly. 

#American Federation of Labor-Congress of International Organizations. They might get the first three, but no one ever gets the second three. It's fun to watch them try and figure it out, though.

SOPA and PIPA

That is all.

Have a nice day.

My Kid's Bedtime Stories Are Cooler Than Your Kid's Bedtime Stories

Because I am a religious non-believer—or a non-religious non-believer—or a non-believer in religion—there’s very little I hold sacred. Hardly anything, actually. About the only thing that’s absolutely sacrosanct is my daughter’s bedtime story. This is because we have a twist on the usual bedtime-story routine that I flatter myself is ours and ours alone. I’m rather proud of it.

It began some years ago. We were traveling and accidentally forgot her storybooks. She was inconsolable at the thought of having to go to sleep without a bedtime story, so I improvised—something about a raccoon who’s freezing his ass off in the woods, but who finds a nice warm attic with fluffy blankets where he can curl up and sleep safely.

It was half-assed, plotless and derivative. (I swiped the idea from “Miss Suzy,” an oldie but goodie illustrated by the late great Arnold Lobel.) But she liked it. The next night, after a trip to Borders to score another copy of “Goodnight Moon” or something, she asked for the raccoon story again. This time, I expanded upon it. The raccoon woke up hungry and set off to find a snack. And our nightly tradition of what she calls “The Imaginating Story” was born.

Since then, every night before bedtime, we dutifully trudge through a book story (which we do purely pro forma so that I can fulfill my Responsible Parent’s obligation to read to the kid for 15 minutes day) and then, with a sigh of relief, we charge into The Imaginating Story.

These aren’t just stories. These are sagas. I’ll come up with a character, and we follow that character through whatever adventures I can dream up. Each night brings another episode in an epic that can go on for months or years at a stretch.

We’ve done several of them. The “Zaidy Yussel” series was one of my favorites, a story cycle about the adventures of my great-grandfather in Russia, where he was born, outwitting Baba Yaga, the famous witch from Russian folklore, and then continued on once he came to this country. He goes camping, gets kidnapped by the Osage Indians, becomes an Indian brave (maybe a little subconscious nod to Mel Brooks’ Yiddish-speaking Indians from “Blazing Saddles”), escapes, gets picked up by a boatful of riverboat gamblers, jumped ship, and painstakingly makes his way back up the Mississippi from Memphis.

We moved on to the story of The Greatest Thief in the World—that was a fun one—and then on to the story of Samira, a little girl from a fishing village on the Caspian Sea, and her quest to rescue her father and brother, who were picked up by pirates, who sold them to slave traders who shlepped them across the Mediterranean to Genoa (where vampires had taken over and Samira had to defeat them).

I’d like to say I have the discipline to plan out the stories in advance, but I usually think up the next installment on the spur of the moment. I frequently feel like a first year teacher who’s only one step ahead of her students and who frantically bones up on physics or biology the night before each lesson. But somehow, wing and a prayer, it works. I like the challenge. I also like the flexibility that the Imaginating Story format gives me. I can use it for practical matters.

When our dog finally gave up the ghost (with some assistance), it was, understandably, pretty traumatic. The vile beast’s presence in our family predated the daughter’s. He was a constant in her life. So for the next few months, we recounted his adventures as a puppy at the farm where he was born—saving foals from coyotes, baby chicks from rats, and falling in love with a fox and deciding whether to run off with her into the woods or stay at the farm. It helped her say good-bye to the old boy, who, his tendencies toward drooling, shedding, and chewing up book-bindings notwithstanding, was a good dog and deserved a good sendoff.

Making up stories helps me empower her, too. Our current story, which has been going on for nigh on to a year now, is about Stella Finkelkraut, who lives in the town of Waukepetonsett next to her best friend, Tubbs Teitelbaum. Stella wants a pet—as did my daughter when we began it—so her dad takes her to Animackity’s Animal Emporium, where she discovers the secret back room of the shop. That’s where Mr. Animackity keeps the magical animals: dragons, vampires, phoenixes, griffins, basilisks, sea serpents, etc. And thus begins Stella Finkelkraut’s adventures in the World Behind, the magical world that exists just behind our own.

Stella and Tubbs have, thus far, traveled to Arimaspea, restored Good King Romolan to his throne, saved a family of sasquatches, survived shipwrecks, ridden dragons, and defeated a whole host of evil magicians, marauding bands of trolls, cloaked assassins, dangerous beasts, and unfortunate circumstances with a combination of pluck, brains, and the kind of winsome eccentricity that characterizes her audience, my daughter.

One reason I keep the Imaginating Stories going is because children’s literature is, largely, dreck. Buying kids’ books is one of the most goddamn depressing tasks a conscientious parent can undertake. With rare exceptions, kids’ books fall into two categories: pablum or the kind of snarky nastiness that kids’ book authors employ as an attempt to be hip and contemporary. It’s either baby shit or Bratz dolls. There’s very little soul—almost nothing truly funny, empowering, or genuine. There’s very little that actually captures the whimsy, the wonder, the magic of childhood.

Maybe I’m being too hard on children’s book writers. Maybe it’s analogous to clothes-buying. You can get them off the rack, but tailor-made always fits better, and I’m creating stories tailored expressly for my daughter—bespoke stories, if you will.  

For whatever reason, she likes them better than the book stories. When bedtime is later than usual, forcing us to forego either the book story or the Imaginating Story, she invariably chooses the latter. And when I’m traveling, I set aside a chunk of every evening to call her so that we don’t miss even one night’s worth of on-the-spot fantasy.

I hope there’s some benefit there for my daughter. I hope she’s learning the magic and the wonder of creating one’s own stories. I hope she’s learning the power of imagination, and how to speak and think extemporaneously. And I hope that, once I’m dead, she’ll remember that her daddy, his myriad failings as a father and as a human being aside, loved her enough to put some effort into creating something that was uniquely hers—done for her alone.

As good as I think the Imaginating Story is for my daughter, I confess I like it too. It’s been an exercise in storytelling, in crafting a narrative. It’s like folk music. Much as Bob Dylan takes old tunes and passages from a zillion different sources and put his own twist on them, I’ve lifted shamelessly from other sources. Some of Zaidy Yussel’s adventures, for example, sound a lot like Brer Rabbit’s. Stella Finkelkraut once landed on an island more than a little reminiscent of the island of Krakatoa in William Pene du Bois’ magnificent “The Twenty-One Balloons.” And our saga about River’s adventures on the farm as a puppy owes a big debt to Thornton Burgess’s shamefully forgotten “Mother West Wind” stories.

It’s fun, too. I’ve always loved it when characters from one story show up in another, and I get to do that a lot. Baba Yaga, from the Zaidy Yussel stories, recently made a cameo appearance in the Stella Finkelkraut saga—she mentioned a little boy she’d known almost a hundred years ago. “Hey!” my daughter interrupted excitedly, “she’s talking about my ancestor!”

And Fenric Volk, the friendly werewolf who helped Samira get across the Black Sea, is about to make a reappearance in the Stella Finkelkraut story as well. I love doing this. Moving characters from story to story creates a sort of trans-story world—a world that belongs exclusively to me and my daughter.

But there’s something else there, too. For years, I’ve been working on a Serious Novel based on the life of my hero, Joseph Pulitzer. I’d like to think I’ll finish it some day. But having a full time job, two rambunctious kids, and a house, mortgage and car payments does seem to sap both one’s energy and ambition. The Imaginating Story, in its own way, has become my Serious Novel. Much as Mr. Holland never finished his symphony—the lives of his students became his opus—my daughter’s imagination may just become my own opus. It makes the idea of never finishing the Serious Novel a little easier to bear.