I'm Still Kicking Mitt While He's Down--A Few Reflections On The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie

I recently had occasion to look over some old family photographs with my dad. There aren’t many. Pop’s family wasn’t much for taking pictures, and some of the places in the photos I didn’t recognize. When I asked Pop where they’d been taken, his answer surprised the hell out of me.

“Oh, that one’s at the Country Club,” he said offhandedly.

“Your family belonged to a country club?” I asked, surprised.

“We all did,” Pop said. “All the families my folks knew did.”

My pop is most assuredly not the country club type. He’s a lifelong Democrat, he bristles at any form of exclusivity, and he doesn’t really have proper country club demeanor. He swears. A lot. He likes to pick fights with Republicans. He’s been known to throw his clubs into the water hazards when he shanks it. But what surprised me even more than my father’s family having belonged to a country club was that there had been one in his hometown.  

“Peru had a country club?” I asked, dumbfounded.

Peru, Indiana, my father’s hometown and the town where I spent my adolescence, is a mighty desolate place these days. In the two decades since I left for college, the population has sunk from 14,000 to 11,000. There’s not much to eat if you don’t like Subway, Taco Bell, or McDonalds. Forget shopping there. The town’s only remaining major employer manufactures auto parts, and it’s been shrinking as those jobs go to China. Jobs are scarce, wealth practically nonexistent. How a place like this had ever sustained a country club was beyond me, and I told Pop so.

“You don’t get it,” Pop said. “When I grew up, there were lots of small businesses and small businessmen. That’s how you make money. You don’t get rich working for somebody else. Hell yes, there was plenty of money in Peru when I was a kid. There was a real middle class. But that’s all gone.”

He’s right. It is all gone. Peru has few, if any, small businesses left. It’s a strip of chains from one end of the rapidly-shrinking little town to the other. Blue’s Drugstore is now a CVS. First Farmers Bank and Trust is now a Bank of America. The town is a wasteland of corporate outlets staffed by part-time employees grateful for whatever crumbs they can get from their corporate overlords.

But this phenomenon isn’t limited to places like Peru. My St. Louis suburb is located right off Watson Road, a pretty busy street lined with businesses on both sides. After Pop and I spoke, I realized that St. Louis, like Peru, is losing small businesses left and right. Along Watson Road, it’s all Office Max, Office Depot, Home Depot, Kohls, McDonalds, KFC, Bank of America, and just about every other big chain you can imagine.

~          ~          ~

It’s rare that I would agree with Mitt Romney. On anything. But one line he spoke in one debate sort of resonated with me--that about starting your own business. “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,” he said, citing a friend of his who took out a $20,000 loan from his parents.

Borrow a little money, start a business. Have a good idea, believe in yourself enough to go for it, sell the idea to an interested investor, and make money with it. It’s not bad advice.

Or at least it wouldn’t have been forty years ago, when it was still possible to be an entrepreneur. Because about ten seconds after Mitt gave his fatuous advice, two reasons occurred to me as to its fatuity.

1)      Whose parents have $20k to stake them to a business? Not the vast majority of Americans who are barely getting by.

2)      The time to be an entrepreneur in America is pretty much over, thanks to Mitt Romney himself and people like him—the sons of bitches who leveraged other people’s money into buying businesses, stripping them of their assets, selling them off piece by piece, and firing the workforce. Ask the people who used to work for Ampad. Or Kaybee Toys. Or any of the other businesses—started by entrepreneurs—that Bain Capital took over in hostile takeovers and then dismembered.

As Mitt Romney knows full well, because he’s the miserable prick who did it, so fuck him and his fatuosity.

It may sound counterintuitive, but big business, which you’d think would be the successful end result of entrepreneurialism, kills it. In essence, big business—almost always with the collusion of your elected representatives, whom they’ve bought—gobbles up the little guys, underprices them, drives them into extinction, or forcibly takes them over. Mom-and-pops disappear under the big-box’s parking lot, and suddenly, where Cutler’s Hardware used to be, there’s a Lowe’s. Instead of Scholin Brothers, we get Office Max. Goodbye Cunetto’s House of Pasta, hello Olive Garden.

Not only do you not get rich working for the chains, you don’t even make enough to survive. The big-box stores keep their employees in a state of perpetual indentured servitude. Each Walmart, for example—the biggest, ugliest, and most evil of the bunch—according to a recent study, costs its community approximately $900,000 a year in public revenue, because they pay their workers so little that most of them are on food stamps or other forms of public assistance.

“Well, hell,” you can almost hear the conservatives saying, “let ‘em vote with their feet! If they don’t like it, let ‘em go get a job somewhere else!”

Except there isn’t anywhere else to go, because Walmart’s already driven its competitors out of business.

~          ~          ~

And as small businesses go, so goeth the Middle Class—the kind of people who could afford to belong to a country club in Peru, Indiana. It may not have been big or fancy. But at least there was one. Now there isn’t. Matter of fact, there’s not even a Walmart. They did a feasibility study, and concluded that there wasn’t enough money left in the town to justify building one there.

The demise of the American Middle Class terrifies me for a lot of reasons. One, I’m a member of it, and who wants to be on a sinking ship? But two, because a middle class is absolutely necessary for a stable civil society.

The Middle Class has certainly come in for its share of abuse. To refer to something as “bourgeois” is to relegate it to the realm of the chintzy. The realm of bad taste. Small-mindedness, pettiness, puritan attitudes. Webster’s defines it as “marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.”

The upper classes—the aristocrats—scorn the bourgeois for their parvenu tastes, their vulgarity, their gaudiness, their pathetic attempts to ape the manners and mores of the aristocracy, for the unforgivable sin of not having been born one of them. The lower classes despise them in equal measure. “Boozhie” has been a Black English insult for a long time now. Napoleon Bonaparte derided his enemy England as “a nation of shopkeepers”—a country of petty bourgeoisie, hardly worthy of notice.

Wonder if he ever thought about that in exile on St. Helena. Because the Nation of Shopkeepers, in the end, proved tougher than the nation of Bastille-burning peasants and ancient aristocrats.

You can mock them all you want, but there’s no getting around the fact that society, in order to be able to function as a society, needs the middle class. We need our doctors, our lawyers, our teachers, our dentists, and, perhaps most importantly, our small businesspeople, not only to provide us with the goods and services we need, but to employ us as well.

Russia is a terrific example of a country without a functioning middle class. For a number of historical reasons to complex to go into here, Russia, in the early part of the last millennium, divided itself essentially between the serfs—the peasants—and the aristocracy. Throughout most of the history of the institution, it was forbidden to educate serfs. Serfs were not allowed to have their own money, and serfs couldn’t leave their masters’ estates—they were born, lived, and died in the same place.

Which meant that a middle class, an entrepreneurial class—that class of people that understands money, how to get it, how it works, and how to use it to make more of it—never developed. Which meant, further, that the class which spawns the professionals that society needs to function never developed. Which meant, yet further, that Russia was, throughout most of its history, forced to rely upon non-Russians (Jews, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, Poles, etc.) or marginalized Russians (the Old Believers, who, because of their resistance to reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church, were cast out of mainstream Russian society) to perform the roles played by the middle class.

In essence, Russia outsourced its bourgeoisie, with predictable—and lousy—results.

The middle class does more than just provide society with the people it needs to get stuff done. It’s a moderating influence in society—it’s a buffer zone between the exploiters at the top and the exploited at the bottom. The middle class is, generally, the most highly educated of the social classes—the rich don’t need it and the poor don’t have access to it. It stabilizes society. The more people you have in the middle class, the fewer potential recruits you have for angry mobs of penniless proletariats.

Take the case of Germany. At one point, the German Principalities had a large and thriving middle class. But then came the Revolutions of 1848, the Uprising of the Bourgeoisie, which decided that, as the backbone of society, it deserved a little more say in running the affairs of the nation.

It had worked in England. The English Civil War has traditionally been cast as a religious conflict, one between the Anglican Cavaliers and the Puritan Calvinist Roundheads. But Michael Walzer’s “The Revolution of the Saints” recasts the conflict as one between the emerging bourgeoisie (largely Calvinist) and the traditional English aristocracy (almost exclusively Anglican). And the middle class, for the first time, got a stake in the running of society, which, predictably, calmed everyone down and gave England the stability, the industry, and the infrastructure it needed to become the world’s first superpower.

But it didn’t work in Central Europe. The Revolutions of 1848 were put down in pretty short order. And as a result, a gigantic chunk of the German middle class—its lawyers, journalists, professors, teachers, bankers, artisans, businesspeople, etc.—packed up and left Germany altogether. And they came to the United States.

There is an interesting school of thought that holds that Germany, once the pinnacle of European civilization, was able to slip so easily into the fanatically nationalistic militarism that led to Bismarck, the Kaiser, and, eventually, Hitler, because its middle class—that tolerant, synthesizing, moderating force within society—had come here.

The lesson is pretty clear: countries that never develop a middle class, or which dispose of them, come to bad ends. And America’s middle class is in bigger trouble than the African white rhino. It’s being strangled, bit by bit, by tax policies which favor the wealthy and ignore the poor, but which hit the middle class especially hard; by the migration of good-paying jobs overseas; and by an ever more powerful and predatory plutocracy of corporations that crushes small business, and with it, the potential of entrepreneurialism.

“It’s all over for the little guy,” laments Soprano Family soldier Pasquale Parisi in Season Six of the show. He’s leaving a Jamba Juice store, unable to shake it down for protection money as he used to do to its predecessor, a Mom-and-Pop poultry store forced to vacate the premises for this single store avatar of the soulless corporate giant behind it.

And he's right. It is over for the little guy. It’s done. There’s no more room left for the entrepreneurial spirit in America. And with that goes the middle class. And with that, I fear, so goes the America we grew up believing would last forever. We’re becoming a nation of wage-slaves and wage-slave masters—and no democracy can sustain itself like that. 

Oh, The Places He Took Us: Why I Love Dr. Seuss.

One bright and sunny winter’s day when I was a young and callow grad student studying Russian literature at the University in Pittsburgh and still believed I’d get a job one day, I ran into a Russian friend of mine taking a walk with his young daughter along Forbes Ave. I think she was four at the time. We stopped to chat, and I complimented Vadim on his daughter’s English (they’d only been in the States for a couple of months at that point).

“Well, there’s a problem,” Vadim said. “She’s in daycare right now, and she’s learning her English from Dr. Seuss.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

“Do you like snow?” the little sylph interrupted her daddy to ask.

“I do,” he answered.

“Well, here you go,” she said, smearing a fistful on his jacket.

“Do you want some in your face?” he asked, bending over and picking up a handful.

The little girl took a step back and howled, “I do not want it any place!”  

I think it took me the better part of 45 minutes to recover from the mixture of hilarity and awe this exchange occasioned.

One of my greatest heroes—shamefully unrepresented on the masthead above—is the immortal Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known, of course, as Dr. Seuss. I, like about a zillion other American kids, grew up on his books (and his TV specials, brilliantly given sound and motion by Chuck Jones, the genius animator behind Looney Tunes). But we did more than just read him. We traveled with him. Each Dr. Seuss book was a doorway into Seuss’s own world.  

Even though Seuss peppers his text with references to real places (one of his characters, clad in a slicker, runs off to Palm Springs to avoid the Midwinter Jicker) and some of his language and allusions are unmistakably mid-century American, I have this theory that Seuss’s books, with the exception of his first, “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street,” all take place in a different world: the world that young Marco, the narrator of “Mulberry Street,” imagined.

Seuss's world is one in which the bizarre is the norm and where the mundane would seem jarring and out of place. It's a strange, loopy, colorful, surreal place of physically-impossible architecture, nonexistent (yet perfectly logical) flora and fauna, and dazzling wordplay (much of it created with his own words) that seemed perfectly natural when I was a kid, and stuns me by its genius today as I read it to my own kids. Dr. Seuss had, arguably, the richest internal life of any of our American writers or artists, and his ability to make it accessible and comprehensible to generations of readers indicates a rare sort of genius.

Having opened that window in “Mulberry Street,” Seuss leaped through it and never looked back. And he took his readers with him.

The audacity of the man’s accomplishment is stunning. Lots of other storytellers have been content to mine the same mythological veins that have informed our storytelling for millennia—C.S. Lewis didn’t invent fauns, or lions, or the idea of traveling to other realities. Lewis Carroll didn’t make up playing cards or caterpillars. But Seuss made up his own mythology. Ex nihilo. Out of the whole cloth. And he isn't part of a tradition, either. There are no influences, no precursors, to Dr. Seuss, either to his style of drawing or his writing style in children's literature. His art resembles that of the first generation of comic strip creators--he's closer in tone to George Herriman of "Krazy Kat" or Elzie Segar of "Popeye" than he is to any other illustrators, and perhaps newspaper cartoons are where one should search for Seuss's roots--he was a cartoonist for Judge, Puck, and other humor publications before he went into advertising (his first career), and he once considered a regular strip called Hejji before giving up the idea.

He's also the first children's book writer for whom the illustrations are an essential--indeed, indispensable--part of the story. They aren't there merely to support the copy--they're a part of it. That seamless melding of words and pictures speaks more to comic strips than it does to traditional illustrated literature.

He is, sometimes, fatuously compared to Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but had neither of those gentlemen ever been born, there still would have been a Seuss. He didn't need them, and he isn't indebted to them. While Carroll and Lear were clever, no doubt, neither of them wrote, or could have written, what is in my humble opinion the most perfect poetic passage in the English language:

          I had terrible trouble in staying alive. 
         Then I saw an old pipe that said "Vent Number Five."
         I didn't have time to find out what that meant, 
         But the vent had a hole. 
        And the hole's where I went. 

*     *     *

He was clever enough to make his work educational (another towering accomplishment, to make a world of the sheerest, merriest whimsy educational. Had he been a chef, I have no doubt he would have somehow made Twinkies good for you). “Green Eggs and Ham”, which was written (on a hundred dollar bet) using only 50 words, got him into educational publishing. He pretty much started Beginner Books, an imprint of Random House, on his own. The fact that it was educational, and explicitly marketed as such, served as excellent camouflage. It obscured the deeply subversive nature of his work.

Subversive? Dr. Seuss? A kiddie books writer? You better believe it.

Geisel himself wasn’t exactly the kind of person that most American parents of the period—or now—would want teaching their kids. Politically, he was a flaming liberal, radical to the core. A dedicated anti-Fascist who drew reams of political cartoons for the wartime liberal magazine PM¸ he accused home-grown conservatives and isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and Gerald L.K. Smith of treason, lacerating them as viciously as he went after Tojo, Mussolini, and Hitler.

Later on, he lent the text of "Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Leave Now" to his friend Art Buchwald, who reproduced the entire book in his column, replacing "Marvin K. Mooney" with "Richard M. Nixon," after the Watergate break-in had made the headlines.

His politics came out explicitly in later books like The Sneetches, The Lorax, and The Butter Battle Book. They espouse dangerously anti-Establishment sentiments, and it was noticed. They were banned from any number of school libraries, which puts Seuss in good company. But by the time those books—about racial prejudice, corporate destruction of the environment, and the idiocy of the arms race—appeared, he was already too well-established, too beloved an American icon, to ignore or marginalize.

Personally, he was hardly an exemplar for the rosy-cheeked and well-scrubbed children of Middle America, either. He was a chainsmoker, consumed copious amounts of vodka, was gleefully profane, and, in one of the darker episodes of his life, an adulterer and wife-stealer (his first wife, Helen Palmer, committed suicide after finding out about his long-running affair with Audrey Stone Dimond, who became his second wife). In his early days as a young and successful Madison Avenue adman, he was a carouser, a practical joker, and more than a tad ribald, a quality demonstrated by the earliest poem of his which survives: 

           

            Mrs. Van Bleck

            Of the Newport Van Blecks

            Is so goddamn rich

            She has gold-plated sex.

            Whereas Miggles and Mitzi

            And Blitzie and Sue

            Have the commonplace kind

            And it just has to do.

Not someone who can be trusted to be a good influence on the kiddies. Matter of fact, I suspect he was at least partly responsible for the social unrest of the 60’s. 

Consider what children’s literature looked like before Seuss—Dick and Jane dutifully doing their homework, helping Mother set the table, going to church, putting their clothes away, learning to be good citizens. Dick assiduously studied his math and science so we could beat the Rooskies into space—Jane was in training to be a good little mommy just like her mommy. Children’s literature was “moralistic” in the worst possible way, the way George W. Bush, who is responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqis is considered “moral” for no better reason than because he didn’t screw around on Laura. Kids' books were insipid, dictatorial, and preached conformity. There was a norm, you better comply with it, and it was all for the good of God and country and good solid American values.

And then came the Cat in the Hat in 1957. Under the guise of “this is good for you because it’s teaching you to read with simple sight-words,” Seuss unleashed his own demons of whimsy and contempt for societal mores upon a whole generation of tender young American readers. The Cat, this capricious Spirit of Anarchy, with his disdain for property rights and good manners--his impossible three-looped bow tie is itself an affront to both sartorial conformity and physics--bursts into the children’s house while Mother is away, and proceeds to destroy it over the protests of the fish, who’s obviously a big fan of Dick and Jane--the Superego to the Cat's unbridled Id. 

The Cat turned children’s literature on its ear. Suddenly, instead of putting toys away and making beds, the protagonist is turning the entire house upside down, smashing this, juggling that, turning loose evil little equally-destructive minions, and throwing order, propriety, and social niceties out the window. Dick and Jane's center couldn't hold. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world.    

Sure, the Cat eventually puts everything back in order at the end. But the message is clear: do whatever you want as long as you can get away with it. And authority, in the form of that goddamned goody two-shoes fish, is there to be questioned, flouted, mocked, and stuffed in a box.

Dr. Seuss. He also liked bow ties. 

This was revolutionary. And by the time that generation of readers who’d grown up on Dr. Seuss hit college, they were deeply disenchanted with the status quo, and ascribed to a different, deeper morality than the "be a good citizen" variant practiced by Dick and Jane. It was a moral code according to which treating black people, or gay people, or women, as second class citizens, or bombing people in their own country, or raping the environment in the name of profit, is immoral. It was the the morality of Seuss's antifascist wartime cartoons, and that of  "The Sneetches," "The Lorax," and "The Butter Battle Book." It was a generation of young people who, perhaps unconsciously influenced by Seuss, rejected the reality imposed by their parents’ generation and instead created their own. 

And eventually, after some fits and starts and setbacks and Kent State, America began the process of becoming a much nicer and more civilized place.

I don’t think it’s too much to ascribe to Seuss the same kind of influence that Bob Dylan had. Seuss plowed the fields on which Dylan planted the seeds. I just don’t know if “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” would have taken root if the Cat hadn’t already tilled the soil.

*     *     *

Dr. Seuss is irreplaceable, and his work is irreplicable. There is no school of Seuss, no Seussian movement, no disciples, or at least none worthy of carrying his mantle. He's one of a kind. No other creator of children's literature even begins to come close to him. In the history of children's literature, Seuss stands alone. Much as I've been unable to identify any influences, I've been unable to identify any worthy successors.

After his death, his characters, images, and name were all licensed--criminally, in my view--by his second wife, Audrey Stone Dimond Geisel, of whom I am not a fan. The result has been ghastly. None of these posthumous properties--the books like “Cooking With the Cat” and “There’s No Place Like Space”, Seussical The Musical, Seuss Landing at the Universal Studios theme park, the Grinch and Cat movies with Jim Carrey and Mike Myers, or his website--has the ethos of the originals. They’re all pale and transparent imitations. They may look, fleetingly, Seussian—but they’re soulless, inauthentic, and more than mildly irritating to those of us who grew up on the real thing. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, “I can’t define Seussian, but I know it when I see it.” Those ain’t it.

These later Seussian properties are bowdlerized, whitewashed, made safe for society. The original sense of mischief, that gleefully subversive spirit, is gone. They lack danger and unpredictability. They’re tame, which is the antithesis of the Seussian spirit. Ted Geisel's world was scary. There are vugs lurking under the rug. There's a lunatic destroying the house. There are skritzes and skrinks and green-headed Quilligan quails lurking behind every rock, poozers snarling in Pompelmoose Pass, Grinches plotting in the mountains, and Once-lers cutting down all the Truffula trees and making the Bar-ba-loots sick.

Dr. Seuss, in a word, was dangerous, and the world he created was a dangerous world. But our world is dangerous, too. Every kid knows that. Danger is the flip side of wonder. And it’s that danger, that wildness, that unpredictability, that makes his world so much more real, authentic, and ultimately satisfying to us than the world of his predecessors, the creators of Dick and Jane, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Nurse Nancy, or any of his successors who've failed to live up to the standards he set. 

The Population Bomb Turned Out To Be a Dud

The state of the planet scares me. It really does. I don’t just believe in global climate change—I know it’s real, and my family is trying, in our own small way, to be more or less green and more environmentally responsible.

We recycle. We have a composter. It doesn’t really compost, but I’ll get around to figuring that out one of these times. We use those super-efficient halogen bulbs in all our lamps. We installed energy-saving windows on our house. My wife drives a Prius. I recently installed rainwater-catching barrels to my downspouts. We grow a ton of our own food and just got a couple of chickens for eggs.

But—and it may just be the contrarian in me—the one thing I absolutely refuse to get worked up over is overpopulation. I don’t think it’s a big deal.

People get angry if you say this out loud. Overpopulation is an absolutely sacred shibboleth of the environmental movement. I’ve had people look at me, dumbfounded, and say things along the lines of, “But you’re an intelligent human being! How in the world can you not be worried about overpopulation?” as if I’d said something really crazy, like I believe in the Immaculate Conception or creationism or supply-side economics.

But it’s true. I genuinely don’t believe population growth is a problem. And I have good reasons for doubting it.

The overpopulation scare isn’t a new one. Way back in the 18^th century, a particularly gloomy (even for a Calvinist) English pastor and amateur economist, Thomas Malthus, postulated that humanity was, very soon, going to reach the point beyond which it could feed itself, and his prediction was, admittedly, based on sound reasoning.  

Malthus pointed out that the human population increases geometrically. Two people can have ten kids. Each of those ten kids could, theoretically, have another ten kids, and so on and so on. Every generation, the population increased exponentially. Whereas, on the other hand, food production can only grow arithmetically. One acre of land can only yield 100 bushels of corn. If you want to grow more food, you need to cultivate another acre. As the human population increases, land cultivation may keep up for a while, but eventually, it’s going to catch up—and then we’ll all be screwed.

But Malthus turned out to be wrong. Almost embarrassingly so. He was wrong for two reasons: first, because he didn’t take into account human ingenuity, and our ability to improve crop yield. Through selective breeding for hardier plants that yield more produce, improved fertilization and irrigation, and other clever improvements we’ve made to the soil and to the plants that grow on it, we’ve also been able to increase our crop yield exponentially as well.

Malthus isn’t the only one to make this prediction. It was famously revisited in the 70’s by Paul Ehrlich in his extremely influential book The Population Bomb. And, like Malthus, many of Ehrlich’s predictions haven’t come true, either. But still, the spectre of overpopulation terrifies us. Ehrlich himself advocates zero-population growth, and people still take him seriously.

But I don’t.

No one is debating that the planet is seriously strained, that there are a lot of hungry people, and that we could be reaching unsustainable levels of consumption. But that’s the key concept right there: consumption. The problem isn’t too many people. The problem is the misallocation of resources.

My country is, without question, the worst offender. Americans aren’t humans, they’re locusts. We gobble up way more than our fair share of the world’s resources. We’re not the biggest per capita meat-eaters on the planet (that distinction, oddly enough, belongs to Luxembourg), but as a country, we do consume the most meat. And meat consumption is a disaster for the environment. It’s incredibly wasteful. It takes more than 2500 gallons of water to put a pound of meat on a cow, and the amount of land it takes to grow enough feed to put a pound of meat on an animal could feed 16 people for a year. The Amazon valley is being deforested largely for use as cattle ranches, all to feed the American appetite for meat.

Likewise with oil. The United States, with 4% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of all the oil produced worldwide. And fossil fuel consumption is, again, a disaster for the environment. And it’s like that for nearly every other commodity on the planet. Americans gobble up far more of their fair share and then they wonder where the planet's resources are going. 

There’s something deeply disturbing about this picture, and something almost racist about it. Essentially, when Americans rail about overpopulation, what they’re saying to the rest of the world is, “You need to quit producing people so that we can continue to consume way more than our fair share of the world’s resources.”

Resource allocation aside, the other reason I don’t lose too much sleep over overpopulation is historical demographics.

One of the things that concerned Malthus was that improvements in medical science were saving way too many lives. Far fewer children were dying in childbirth—far too many of them were living to adulthood. And it’s true, the European population did spike like crazy in the early 19^th century thanks to pretty basic advances in medicine. Like, you know, washing your hands.

But then something happened that Malthus didn’t foresee. The European population actually started going down, and has continued to do so. Most European countries are now not only at zero population growth, they’re at negative population growth, and the only ones that haven’t experienced negative population growth are those which have grown due to immigration.

What happened? Industrialization happened, that’s what happened. When people leave the farms and go to the city, their families shrink. You need lots of kids to work the family farm when you live in the country. You don’t when you live in a tenement apartment in the city. Matter of fact, all those mouths to feed become a liability, not an asset.

I can point to an example from my own family. My great-great grandparents had eleven children, all of whom lived to adulthood. Oscar, Wolf, Ida, Lena, George, Louis, Maude, Pearl, and who can remember all the rest of them. This was from about 1870 to 1890. Although they weren’t farmers, their livelihood was closely related to agriculture. They owned grocery stores, and I suppose they needed the extra help, much like farmers needed the extra help in the fields. But my great-grandmother, Pearl, only had two kids in her family. Her daughter, my grandmother, likewise had only two children. And so did my mother. And so do I. And my brother doesn’t have any children at all.

That’s a pretty precipitous drop over the course of three or four generations.

That pattern fits not only Europe and the United States, it fits the rest of the world as well. India and China, the two largest populations in the world, are rapidly industrializing. In fact, they’re doing so at a much more rapid rate than Europe and the States did. China’s got its own set of unique and self-inflicted problems. Thanks to its draconian one-family, one-child rule and the rather predictable resulting mass abortions of girls, China is facing a major demographic crisis in the next generation, so watch for their population to take a rather precipitous dip.

Malaysia, Indonesia, and other major population hot spots will also most likely level off and then decline as their populations move from rural, subsistence-farming model to the urban, industrial model as well.

Moreover, more and more girls worldwide are being educated. That’s a good thing, not only for the girls themselves and for the societies in which they live, but for humanity. There's a strong correlation between the number of educated girls and a drop in birthrates. And increasing numbers of educated girls worldwide is inevitable. For every young girl the Taliban shoots in the face for the unforgivable sin against Allah of wanting to be smarter, thirty or forty will take her place. And when they’re studying, and working, and taking their rightful place in the world, suddenly the prospect of having ten or more children is far less attractive.

Overpopulation, like so much else that we worry about, is an oversimplification of the problem. It’s another example of looking for a silver bullet to a complicated problem. Yes, there’s a shortage of resources in the world. But too many people isn’t the cause of it. And as long as we keep ignoring the underlying causes of the resource crisis, it won’t get any better. 

England Ascendant

About a year ago, I wrote a script for a graphic novel called “Doctor Falk,” which I’m trying to talk a pal of mine into drawing. It’s about a scientist of the supernatural who lives in London.

The story is loosely based on the life of a real person. There actually was a guy named Chaim Samuel Jacob Falk. He was born somewhere in Eastern Europe (opinions differ as to where), fled (for various supposed reasons) to London in the 18^th century, and set up shop as a magician, sorcerer, and wonder-worker—a “practical Kabbalist.” Sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s not. The fact that it isn’t is sort of the kernel of the story.

That’s where the resemblance between the real guy and the character I made up end. Beyond that, I’m proud to say I did absolutely no research whatsoever.

I let another friend of mine (I do have more than one) read it for his opinion. After he finished it, he looked at me and said, “Boy, you really have a thing for England, don’t you?”

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk with a proper Holmesian pipe. 

His reaction surprised me, because that genuinely wasn’t what was in my mind when I wrote it. Dr. Falk—the real Dr. Falk, and, by extension, my character—actually did flee his shadowy origins in Eastern Europe to live in London. Consciously, I didn’t think of England as anything more than a backdrop, a setting, the place where Falk does his weird stuff. So I re-read my own script (which I hate doing. Benjamin Disraeli once said he had a horror of reading his own books: “It is worse than masturbation”) in light of his comment. Turns out he was right. I do have a thing for England. It’s as obvious as the nose on my face.

Unwittingly, I’d peppered “Doctor Falk” with all kinds of quotes, allusions, references, and homages to England and the English imagination. Falk himself veers perilously close to being a pastiche of that most English of characters, Sherlock Holmes: the cold, tweedy, sexless, emotionally-deficient, quirky, yet heroically patriotic and morally upstanding wizard of Baker Street. The central conceit of my story—a brilliant eccentric living in the center of London whom desperate people consult for help—would not have been possible without having read Conan Doyle’s. Matter of fact, I actually ripped off a few lines verbatim from Holmes (“This looks like one of those tiresome social summonses that calls upon a man either to be bored or lie,” and “[I am going] To smoke. It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you will not disturb me until morning’) and stuck them in Falk’s mouth.

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk in his study, a
subterranean chamber underneath his shop.

And along the way, I shoehorned in bits and pieces from Shakespeare, Disraeli (like I did a few paragraphs above. Did you notice?), The Lion in Winter, Dickens, Smollett, Thackeray, Tintin (not technically English, actually—created by Herge, a Belgian, but lots of the stories take place in and around Tintin’s friend Captain Haddock’s country-home of Marlinspike Hall. Come on. Does it get any Englisher than that?) and Robert Louis Stevenson. Falk goes to Stonehenge, hobnobs with British aristocrats with names like Lord Aethelthwaite, the butchers of Hogbristle Square (okay, I made that place up, but it sounds an awful lot like the kind of place you’d find in England), and is finally rescued by the brave sailors of the Royal Navy.

Even more revealing is a squib of a paragraph I stuck in the creative brief, to give a bit of a visual guide to the artist:

The London where he lives is a gloomy, foggy, dark, Gothic place with tons of weird little details half-hidden in the fog and darkness. It’s exaggeratedly English, Dickensian—quirky and eccentric, full of grotesque people and stone buildings leaning over at crazy, dangerous angles; silhouettes of castles and cathedrals against the moon. Signs advertising the kinds of shops and places that people THINK might exist, but don’t really; streets with ridiculous Englishy-sounding names like Dunwhistle on Tyne, Old Baptist’ry, High Harlotry, Hogbristle Market, etc. A decent amount of ravens and the kinds of places where ravens might live.

In other words, England as imagined by someone who’s never actually been to England.

Essentially, this script that I wrote about a profoundly non-English guy—a (probably) Ukrainian Jew—is a paean to Great Britain. A tribute to England. Why I was so struck by this, I don’t know. It should have been obvious.

I once had a professor, Fred Stopsky, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, who said that the first time he went to England, it felt like home. It struck me, because here was a guy who had not a dash of England in his background. His family’s trajectory had been a straight shot from the shtetl to Brooklyn. And yet, England felt like home to him. And I remembered his remark as I reconsidered my funnybook script, because he’s right. Even if we’ve never been there, somehow, for most Americans, England is home.

I could pontificate on the power of a shared language (although the English might debate whether we actually share a language at all), on the cultural bonds between Brits and Americans, or on the idea that Great Britain and the United States constitute one great Anglo-American commonwealth, irrespective of different governments and the ocean and centuries that separate us, the central thesis of Kevin Phillips’ book The Cousins’ Wars. I could mention the interesting hypothesis that the American Civil War was merely the last battle of the English Civil War, that epic struggle between the industrious, middle-class Roundheads and the aristocratic Cavaliers.

But all that aside, there’s no denying how deeply and profoundly the English imagination has influenced, and continues to influence, the American one.

The typical bookish American child, as I was myself some millennia hence, spends very little time in mythical America and a hell of a lot of time in mythical England. Sure, we’ve got Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and cowboys and Indians—all red-blooded American kid stuff. But we spend far less time rafting down the Mississippi of legend than we do in the England of legend.

Instead, we travel with the Pevensie children through the wardrobe door to Narnia or join the Fellowship of the Ring in Middle-Earth which, while, admittedly, are non-existent countries, are still about as British as it gets. Or we travel with Alice down the rabbit hole or though the looking-glass. Or we picture ourselves standing on Platform 9 ¾ , donning black robes and attending Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, and Herbology with Harry, Hermoine, Ron, and Neville at Hogwarts, that perfectly idealized version of an English public schools. Or we check each candy bar we open for a golden ticket that’ll let us tour the Chocolate Factory with Charlie.

When we get a little older, we move up to Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe (whose characters we identify with as fellow-Brits marooned on distant islands, and, with them, we dream of returning to the Blessed Plot) and Sherlock Holmes and John Galsworthy. We wish there really was a Drones Club where we could hang out with Bertie Wooster and have Jeeves sort out the disasters of our own making and pick out our clothes for us. We wander the dusty, crumbling hallways of Gormenghast with Titus Groan. And we take Neil Gaiman’s hand, and let him guide us across the vistas of his imagination, a world that may initially appear as terrifyingly phantasmagoric as any we’ve ever seen, but which, at its foundation, remains as comfortingly and as unalterably English as Surrey.

The truly geeky among us graduate to Doctor Who—not even human, but nonetheless about as quirkily, and stereotypically, English as a guy from Gallifrey with two hearts can be, what with his long scarves, tweedy coats, bow ties, and cricket gear. Our sense of humor derives, almost in totality, from Monty Python, part of that great old British music-hall tradition. And we remain glued to our screens to see who dies next on Downton Abbey.

I suppose that’s why, when, as a high school graduation present, my grandmother (whose own family history mirrored that of Professor Stopsky) took me to England for a week, it hardly felt like I was in a foreign country at all. I felt as though I was coming home, back to the very place that had spawned the imaginary landscape in which I’d spent my childhood.

This is not to say that we love the place unreservedly. There’s a lot about English history and culture—and current policy—for progressives like myself to despise. We can detest what was done in the name of King and country during the colonial period. We can mock their outdated class system and deride them for being a bunch of effete crumpet-monkeys. We can blame them, with some justification, for how they handled their custodianship of Palestine, resulting in many of the headaches the Israelis and Palestinians now suffer. We can discern, in the New Atheists’ (like Dawkins and Hitchens) disdain for the religious tendencies of the less advanced peoples of the world, echoes of the same arrogance and certainty of British superiority of colonial times. And we can excoriate the cowardice and hypocrisy of Tony Blair and his servile second-fiddle role in Dubya’s sacred mission to stamp out terrorism in the wrong country. And those of us of Irish descent have a hell of a lot to hate the Brits for.

But regardless of the tragedies of national histories,  if you’re an American kid who likes to read, you simply won’t be able to escape become a citizen of the England of the imagination. Even if you’re from one of the countries and peoples who suffered under the colonial boot, eventually it’ll suck you in. Ask Salman Rushdie who, his Muslim Indian roots notwithstanding, is about as properly British as a guy can get, from his posh BBC accent to his penchant for two-tone Oxford shoes he mentioned in his memoir Joseph Anton—a strangely revealing choice of footwear, if one puts any stock into semiotics at all.   

As justified as our anti-England vitriol may be, we simply can’t help but be Anglophiles at our core. How can you hate, in any consistent and thoroughgoing fashion, the place that spawned you, that gave form and landscape to your imagination, that informed your sense of story, and peopled it with the best characters ever created?

Peter S. Beagle, in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring, wrote, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.” Maybe that’s England’s final triumph, its most fully-realized colonization. It may be a second-rate power in the temporal world, reminiscing about the day when Victoria Regis et Imperatrix ruled an empire on which the sun never set, but “Rule Britannia” never stopped playing in the empire of the imagination, and probably never will so long as the species survives.

Now you’ll pardon me as I reflect on this with a spot of tea.

Calling King David Gay Is Kind of Silly.

Although I’m a nonbeliever, I still enjoy reading the Bible. Why this is I don’t know. It may be the connection I feel with people whom I like to imagine are distant ancestors. It may be for the same reason that Simon Dubnov, the great historian of Russian Jewry and a nonbeliever like me, kept a Bible on his bedside table: as a talisman, a symbol. 

It may be just because it’s a cool text: a breathtakingly ambitious collection of old legends, half-remembered stories, snatches and bits and pieces of God only knows how many old tales and songs from forgotten kingdoms and families and people, all massaged into a more or less cohesive whole. How this book came to be is a fascinating story in and of itself. In recent years, I’ve enjoyed fewer books more than Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s Unearthing the Bible and David and Solomon, which compare the Biblical record with the archaeological one. Not surprisingly, there are some pretty serious discrepancies. But finding out that much of the Biblical record is baloney doesn’t lessen its import for me. Instead, it deepens my appreciation for the nameless writers and editors at the court of King Josiah who compiled the thing. As a writer of fiction, I appreciate the talents of other writers of fiction, and whatever else those guys (or possibly women) were, they were talented.

Or maybe it’s just that the Good Book, whether or not one believes in its divine origins, has some good stories.And the best of them is the David story. 

I'm not the only one who says so. The David story has inspired geniuses from Michelangelo to Joseph Heller to take a stab at it. The story has inspired artists in every generation, and so universal that everyone on earth can identify with some aspect of David.

I get this. People like to see, in stories and characters, aspects of themselves. It makes us feel less alone. But one thing that irritates me is when people claim that David was gay.

This is a pretty old and prevalent theory. Lots of people do this for lots of different reasons. Liberal Christians and Jews make the claim, most likely, to emphasize the welcoming, nonjudgmental, big-tent nature of their congregations. Biblical detractors, on the other hand, throw it like rocks at more traditional believers as an insult to one of the Bible's most sacred heroes. 

More serious thinkers also fall into the same trap. Jonathan Kirsch, the author of King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel, certainly thinks David and Jonathan had a thing, going so far as to cite homosexual relationships between bandits (as David became, after fleeing Saul) in other cultural contexts as an indicator of David’s own proclivities and behavior. 

But for whatever reason people do so, they’re wrong to do it. I don’t say this out of homophobia. Far from it. I don't care who’s gay, bisexual, or straight. Our society’s current obsession with the topic strikes me as nothing more than prurience, and an invasion of people’s, living or dead, privacy. I object to gayifying David because I believe, strongly, in historical accuracy and in respecting the text. 

First off, there is absolutely nothing in the text suggesting King David was gay. Yes, he was close friends with Saul’s son Jonathan. And okay, there is that one line in David’s famous elegy to Saul and Jonathan after their deaths (Saul’s by suicide) in battle: “Very pleasant has thy love been to me, Jonathan, surpassing the love of women”). Okay, sounds gay by our lights, but then again, we live in a post-Freudian age.

You could parse the whole David story, line by line, or scrutinize David’s own words, in search of evidence of his homosexuality. Maybe you could make a compelling or even convincing case for it, based on what’s written about, and purportedly by, him. 

But it would be a complete and utter waste of time, for one simple reason: the Good Book is, as I mentioned above, largely malarkey.

The fact is that we know precisely one fact about King David. One. One fact. That fact is that he existed.

We know this because of a stone fragment of a victory arch—the “Tel Dan Stele,” so named because it was found at an archaeological dig at Tel Dan in Israel—erected by the Aramaean king Hazael, boasting about his victory over “The House of David.”

That is the extent of extrabiblical documentation for David. (There’s another busted-up old piece of rock, from a victory arch erected by King Mesha of Moab, which may or may not refer to the House of David. So okay, there’s maybe two. But there’s only one concrete, universally-accepted piece of evidence that doesn’t occur in the Bible for David.) And it doesn’t even refer to him specifically, but rather to his descendants, his “House.”

That’s it. We know he existed. Period. We don’t know anything else. We don’t know if any of the Bible’s claims about him—that he was red-haired, that he was a shepherd, the son of a guy named Jesse, a crack-shot with a sling, or a songwriter of Bob Dylan-esque ability—are true or not. We don’t know if he actually killed a giant named Goliath (the Bible itself is a little confused on this score. There’s a verse claiming that someone named Elchonon killed Goliath. So much for Biblical inerrancy) in the service of King Saul. We don’t even know if there was a King Saul.

But we do know that a lot of what the Bible says about him is false. Thanks to archaeology, we know that there actually was no great United Empire under David. The region of Judah was, in David’s time, a sparsely-populated scrub country, inhabited by semi-nomadic tribespeople who lived in villages which rarely exceeded 50 people. Jerusalem, in the time of David and Solomon, was no magnificent capital of an empire the size of Maine. It was a tiny hamlet of no importance to anyone whatsoever. It barely existed.

In the absence, then, of any trustworthy evidence, we are forced to treat King David the same way we treat King Arthur: as a fictional character who may or may not have been based on a real person. Thus, in order to judge whether claims of David’s homosexuality have any merit, we need to consider the author’s intent.

I’m always half irritated and half amused by people who write long, scholarly essays purporting to have detected a homosexual subtext in Frodo and Sam’s relationship, or in that between Holmes and Watson, or that between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, because I have little to no doubt that neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor Arthur Conan Doyle nor Bob Kane intended their creations to be gay. Nor, for that matter, do I believe that the anonymous author(s), or compiler(s), or redactor(s), of the David story did. 

Finkelstein and Silberman make a convincing argument that the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, was largely slapped into its present configuration during the realm of King Josiah of Judah. And yes, there was definite authorial intent there. But it wasn’t sexual. It was political. The Bible was crafted to give legitimacy to, and justification for, Josiah’s territorial ambitions: he wanted all of Israel, northern and southern kingdoms both.  

Thus, Israel—the northern kingdom—is portrayed in the Bible as a renegade, rebel state, ruled over by asshats like Omri, Ahab and Jezebel, the descendents of the illegitimate dynasty of Jeroboam. Judah, the southern kingdom, on the other hand, was ruled by Josiah, a good and Godly man, the descendent of God’s own anointed king, to whom God had promised an everlasting kingdom.

Which pretty much worked out like all of God’s other promises. But that’s another topic.  

At any rate, in that light, the friendship between David and Jonathan takes on a completely different character. David also married Saul’s daughter Michal. And took over his kingdom. Which indicates that the authorial intent was not a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan, but rather a progression of Saul losing everything to David: his daughter, the loyalty of his own son, and eventually, his kingdom.

Considering, moreover, that homosexuality was already considered an abomination punishable by death in Josiah’s time, it’s hard to believe that a gay relationship between David and Jonathan was really what the author intended.

Me personally, I could care less if David, the actual person, was gay or not. Wouldn’t bother me if he was.  He might also have been fat or thin, tall or short, hunchbacked or upright. He might also have had one eye, twelve fingers, a vestigial tail, or a twenty-two inch shmeckel. Sure, they all sound ridiculous, but there’s as much reason to believe any of those as there is to believe he was gay—which is none at all.

He may very well have been gay. Plenty of people have been, are, and will be. But to claim that he was on the basis of what’s written about him is nothing more than pushing an agenda, and an abuse of the text. The chances are that we’re never going to know anything more about the historical person of David than that he existed.

And frankly, it’s better that way. Pablo Picasso once said that “Art is a lie which tells the truth.” David’s story, even if it never took place (or did so in a fashion radically different from what the Good Book tells us) is a perfect example of this. As per what we know about Judah and its inhabitants in the time of David, he was, most likely, a minor tribal chieftain—just one of the innumerable, ten-for-a-dollar petty Bedouin sheikhs who’ve been crisscrossing that region since time immemorial. It’s the imaginary David, the legendary David, whose story moves us, inspires us, captivates us, and whose universality speaks to all of us. His story is one of courage, love, betrayal, tragedy, and redemption. It’s a testament to the power of fiction and of art.  

The Minute Progress Becomes Political, You Can Kiss Your Country Good-bye.

Right after the Civil War, St. Louis was the place to be. There was a victory mood in the air. The city’s staunchly anti-slavery and pro-Union Germans had kept it, and the rest of Missouri, out of the Confederacy, and their side had won. Progress was ascendant. The town was booming—all kinds of stuff was flowing down the river to rebuild the South, people were going west in greater numbers than ever before and passing through the Gateway City on their way to do it, and all that commerce was generating unheard of amounts of wealth. The city was the fourth largest in the United States. There was serious talk of moving the U.S. capital from DC to St. Louis. City boosters like Logan Reavis wrote books like, “St. Louis—The Future Great City of the World,” in which he predicted that St. Louis, the great city at the very center of the greatest country in the world, would quite possibly grow into the greatest city in the history of the species. The future was so bright you had to wear shades. St. Louis had nowhere to go but up.

Or so it thought. But something happened. The mood of the city changed, a shift in mindset best expressed by St. Louis’ postwar mayor, German-born Henry Overstolz, who shot down a proposal to install streetlights by saying, “Vell, ve got a moon, ain’t it?”

What happened? Complacency and politics set in. St. Louis turned up its nose at the railroads—no one could imagine that the river, the original source of the city’s wealth, could ever be superseded by the Iron Horse—and let Chicago take the lead on that one. Things were good enough, weren’t they? Why change anything? Why install streetlights? Ve got a moon, ain’t it?

The city became conservative and rigid, with predictable results. The 1880 census revealed that St. Louis’s hated rival to the north, Chicago, had overtaken St. Louis in population. It was a body blow to city’s collective ego. Chicago continued to blow its doors off in every conceivable way. And my city began the long, slow decline to where it is now—a second-tier Midwestern city with nothing particularly remarkable about it. The city, once flush and vibrant with immigrants—in 1860, over half the adult population was foreign-born—ceased to become a destination for new Americans. Right now, it’s got the lowest percentage of foreign-born residents of any major metro area in the U.S. And it shrank. The City of St. Louis has lost population in every census since 1950, and the metro area is now 19^th in terms of population.

And as went St. Louis, I fear, so goes the United States.

There have been prophets of doom foretelling the country’s downfall since before the country even existed, and it’s possible that, at the age of 42, I’m falling into the thought patterns of the elderly, insisting that things used to be better, but they suck now. Could be. But I just can’t shake the feeling that the U.S. has peaked, and that the long, slow decline has now set in.

I’m starkly reminded of this every time I read another article about how Denmark, Germany, Norway, and China and India are passing us by in alternate energy research and implementation. Twenty-two percent of Germany’s energy now comes from renewables—a quarter of that comes from solar power. The country is the leading photovoltaics installer in the world. The Germans have even more ambitious plans: 50% of their energy will come from solar power by 2020, and 100% by 2050.

The Danes are right there with them. They have also set themselves the goal of being completely independent of oil by 2050. India’s not far behind, either. The country is a leader in wind power as well as solar—its growth rate for wind-generated energy use is the fastest in the world. China’s also kicking our asses. Seventeen percent of China’s energy comes from renewable resources, and it has the world’s largest number of hydroelectric generators.

Watching the rest of the world move this direction should be deeply embarrassing to every American. Especially when we find ourselves still mired in two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have precisely dick to do with our national security, and everything to do with controlling Mideast oil reserves. Especially when we’re still convulsing ourselves over whether the Keystone XL pipeline should be built, even after a disastrous Exxon pipeline leak in Arkansas shows that oil pipelines are nothing more than environmental disasters waiting to happen. Especially when the Gulf is still recovering from the catastrophic BP oil spill. Especially when we’re so desperate for oil that we’re now reduced to squeezing the shit, drop by drop, out of tar sands and seriously considering “fracking”—pumping high-pressure caustic chemicals (including lead, mercury, hydrochloric acid, and a bitches’ brew of other toxins) into our groundwater in hopes of busting open the shale to get the natural gas inside.

And while the rest of the developed world blows our doors off in science and math education, we in the United States continue to wrestle with whether or not we should give horseshit nonsense like “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design,” which is unmitigated nonsense for numbskulls, equal time in public schools along with the Theory of Evolution. Essentially, we’re arguing over whether we should make ourselves stupider than ever.

I genuinely don’t know why this is the case. I don’t know what turned the country of entrepreneurialism and innovation into a country where adherence to outmoded, worn-out, and frankly ridiculous modes of thought is almost religious. I don’t know what turned the country of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jonas Salk into the country of Donald Trump.

It’s possible complacency and smug self-satisfaction had something to do with it. Maybe we just drank our own Kool-Aid about being the biggest, the fastest, the richest, the toughest, and the coolest for so long that we figured the rest of the world would never catch up, and we could sit on our laurels. But I suspect the real cause is more pernicious than that.

Money gets into politics, and then suddenly, somehow, things that just shouldn’t be political got politicized.

Take energy, for example. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why oil is a political issue. But it is. Conservatives love it, liberals hate it. But I see no good reason why energy should be a right-left divide. If you’re using something that’s toxic, causes cancer, takes zillions to get out of the ground, involves your country in fatal adventures overseas, and which you’re running out of, then looking around for another energy source shouldn’t be a political issue. It should be common sense. It is the height of stupidity to remain dependent upon oil. But oil producers got involved in conservative politics, and suddenly, oil fetishizing became identified with conservatism. Conservatives abandoned common sense, adopted oil dependence as one of their shibboleths, and now viciously attack anything that calls oil production or consumption into question. Drill, baby, drill! Build that pipeline! Or else you hate America.

How about eating healthy? Not eating pink slime—ground-up, shit-containing, ammonia-treated meat—shouldn’t be a political issue. This should be an issue on which every American can agree. It’s utterly disgusting, as well as dangerous. We shouldn’t be eating it. We shouldn’t allow this abomination against our bodies to even be produced.

But food production is big money, and you can use big money to buy off elected officials. Once again, something utterly vile and stupid became identified with conservatism, and conservatives, once again, abandoned common sense and now scorn and deride those of us who’d prefer our hamburgers to be shit- and ammonia-free as a bunch of latte-drinking, effete elitists.

The problem is that the powers that be—the corporations that control American politics—have a vested interest in keeping things just the way they are. They don’t want change. They’re doing just fine. And they can afford to buy off our parties and our politicians, who have now turned the engines of their donors’ profits into sacred articles of conservative faith.

I can't, however, through all the blame on conservatives. Those of us on the left have done important causes--causes that should not be political issues--a great disservice by turning them into political issues. We've claimed the monopoly on environmentalism, sensible gun control, healthy eating, healthcare, GMO labeling, and a myriad of other issues. These shouldn't be liberal issues. These should be issues that all Americans should care about, and about which all Americans should be able to reach consensus. But by painting these issues with the "liberal" brush--or by allowing them to have become liberal issues--we've pushed tons of potential supporters away. 

The end result is that the idea of progress itself has become political. Instead of leading the world in innovation, big chunks of America now actively hold it back. Now the very idea of moving forward is under attack. Science is either discredited or ignored, innovation is viewed as suspect, and anything that could possibly lead to the betterment of the species is attacked with all the ferocity of a pit bull on HGH. Far too many Americans are terrified of progress. We used to delight in discovery. Now we’re afraid of it. It’s a pathetic thing to see the country that used to set the standard for the rest of the world in technological achievement become a bunch of sniveling cowards, terrified of the future and doing our best to keep it at bay.

Throw this phenomenon into the mix along with a healthy dose of complacency and smugness about your incontestable, eternal “We’re Number One” status, and you have a recipe for decline. Which is what America is doing.

I suppose there’s an odd comfort to be taken, though. I suppose as the lights dim over what used to be the greatest country in the world, we can take refuge in the fact that “Vell, we still got a moon, ain’t it?”

Death and How To Deal With It.

I’m a huge fan of Groucho Marx. It’s not just that he makes me laugh like a crazy person (though he does)—I identify with him. His view of the world and its inhabitants—equal parts acid and anarchy—resonates with me. His inability to leave any pomposity unpunctured and his propensity to insult anyone and anything (and get away with it) remind me of myself. Groucho's example allows me to rationalize those parts of my personality that have led lots of people to describe me as an asshole. 

I can spout Groucho anecdotes and one-liners ‘til the cows come home. The time he said, “I didn’t know you guys were allowed to have mothers,” to a priest who'd mentioned his mother. The time he snarled at an annoying drunk, “I never forget a face, but in your case, I’ll be glad to make an exception.” The time he told a woman who explained her 21 children by saying, "I just love my husband," “Madam, I like my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”

But none of those lines, funny as they are, touches me like the ones from his final days: how, when his old friend George Fenneman lifted him under his arms and carried him, face to face, from his armchair to his bed, he growled, “You were always a lousy dancer, Fenneman.” Or how, when a nurse came to his room to see if he hand a temperature, he said, “Don’t be silly. Everyone has a temperature.”

I envy that quality that allows a man who’s facing death to crack wise. I’m not entirely sure what it is. It’s not courage, quite. Call it irrepressibility. Whatever it was, Groucho had it. So did my grandfather.

Since I’ve already written about my grandmothers and aunt on this blog, I beg the (most likely nonexistent) reader’s forgiveness as I slip once again into the self-indulgent slough of memoir. But death seems to be on my mind, and nostalgia is a cheap and easy refuge from the thought of the last stop on the track.

Billy Palmer was what was called in his time and place a character. He was a good-looking man, with a head of thick, curly hair and broad, sly grin. He wasn’t tall, but by the time I knew him, he’d acquired enough bulk to give him physical presence to match his personal charisma, a quality of which he had enough to make him intimidating, scary even, to a small and somewhat insecure boy growing up in a family of larger-than-life personalities.

The ancestral Palmers. Bill Palmer, my grandfather, is second row,
directly behind the middle child in the front row. 

He was born dirt poor in the tiny north-central Indiana town of Macy, one of seven children, four of whom succumbed to alcoholism and one of whom took her own life. His father was a mild but none too ambitious day laborer. His mother probably had a good enough brain, but stunted circumstances had made her mean and shrewish. 

His quick wit manifested itself early. When he was five or so, his mother barked that those who didn’t work didn’t eat, and set her small son to hoeing the garden. A sister who’d somehow escaped their mother’s baleful attention sauntered by and asked snidely, “Whatcha doing, Billy?” “Oh, just hoein’ myself up a little dinner,” Billy replied.

Times were brutal for most rural folk in the 1920’s, and people reacted in one of two ways: they either became crusty, hardbitten, taciturn, narrow of eye and tight of mouth, like most of the old Indiana men of his generation whom I knew—or you let your ebullience become the source of your resilience. Billy Palmer chose the latter route. 

He had a congenital and aggressive kind of charm, a natural magnetism that drew all eyes to him when he walked into a room. He augmented it with snappy clothes, big diamond rings, and Lincoln Continentals as big as his personality. He liked attention—it was his medium, he worked in it like other artists work in clay or oils, and he knew how to get it, hold it, mold it, and use it like a master.  

He was a natural salesman. He didn’t inspire trust, exactly. He was a little too glib, a little too quick, a little too overpowering for that. What he inspired was the fierce desire to please him. You wanted to be Billy’s friend—you didn’t want to be left out in the cold. And you got into his good graces by buying what he was selling.

What he sold was cattle. If you ever drove between Indianapolis and South Bend on Indiana 31, you probably saw a big white billboard trumpeting, “W.V. Palmer, Stocker and Feeder Cattle, Indiana’s Largest Selection, since 1950”—a claim as grandiose as the man who made it. I have no idea if he really WAS Indiana’s biggest cattle broker, but he sure acted like it. He bought and sold cattle when lots of farmers kept a small herd of twenty, thirty, or forty head. He loved the business, and he did pretty well at it. In his later years, he sold cattle to bigger outfits like Armour, Iowa Beef (he claimed to have been a personal friend of Armand Hammer), and McDonalds.

My father says he was the best salesman he’d ever seen. “Wuh, hell, you’re right,” he’d say to some farmer who’d thought he’d try to negotiate. It was a mistake. Billy would come in close, loom over you, and start poking his finger in your chest. “You’re right. You saw right through me. I was trying to rob you blind, and you saw right through me. Shit, those animals aren’t worth a damn. Why, I tell you what, I tell you what I’ll do right now, I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you turn around right now and DON’T buy these animals. I’ll do it right now,” and he’d reach into his pocket, pull out a thick wad of cash, and start peeling off twenties.

Billy cut a hell of a dash, although my father, more restrained and better with figures, knew the real story. “He rode the ragged edge of financial disaster for most of my childhood,” my pop says, shaking his head and smiling a little ruefully. “But he knew how to make it look good.”

He could make it look good, all right. Eventually, it actually was good. He died a rich man. But as much as he loved trading cattle—and as good as he was at it—cattle were not, at the end of the day, the source of his prosperity. Land was.

My father knows the tax codes better, but Billy was no slouch at number-crunching himself. He figured it was cheaper to grow feed than to buy it in the 50’s and 60’s, when Indiana farmland was so cheap you couldn’t give it away. Bit by bit, farm by farm, bank loan by bank loan, he came to own a good chunk of Miami County.

Naturally, the Federal Government farm subsidy program paid him not to grow feed. But Billy pocketed Uncle Sam’s largesse with a wide grin, kept growing, and went to Vegas three or four times a year with his good pal, the Miami Country Farm Commissioner, who looked the other way. And when land prices shot up, the old boy began to buy and sell whole farms the way he sold cattle. 

Billy enjoyed the high life, and he felt right at home in Vegas--a hustler’s town, a shrewd and gaudy place that invented itself and created its own legend. He liked to drink (he was an alcoholic, but, like his finances, he hid it well) and he liked to gamble. He’d show us grandchildren the fat stack of bills he’d come back with—the big time high roller just back from cleaning out Vegas. “I’ll go back when they’ve got more money,” he’d say. "And I'll clean 'em out again."

As with so much else in his life, this was largely invention, too. After he died, a very nice letter of condolence from Caesar’s arrived, asking if the heirs wouldn’t mind honoring that $10,000 marker left outstanding by Mr. Palmer’s sad death.

A lifelong Democrat, he was a two-time delegate to the National Convention (’64 and ’68), about which he was very proud. My father occasionally snorts that it wasn’t much of an accomplishment (“Hell, there’re only six Democrats in the whole damn state”), but Billy liked being a big shot. He also liked meeting Lyndon Johnson, the one guy whose powers of persuasion matched his own.

Unless it was a good-looking lady, Billy never seemed too interested in anyone else. Why bother? He was  the most interesting person in the room. This disinterest extended to his progeny—he never seemed too enamored of his grandchildren, although he liked to call me “Perfesser,” and he dutifully attended my brother's and cousin's baseball and football games. It was part of his mystique to turn the dynamics of any relationship to his advantage: people fell over themselves to pay him attention. No one minded that he paid very little to anyone else.

A long slow decline would have been out of character. Mercifully, his final illness didn’t last more than a month or two. I drove up to Indiana from St. Louis to say goodbye the day of the Farm Sale, at which all his equipment—the tractors, harvesters, combines, manure spreaders, etc—were sold at auction. Moments after I arrived at my grandparents' house (they lived in a big rambling house nowhere near any of the farms themselves), my father drove up in the Lincoln, with a shrunken, emaciated withered, hunched-over, and rheumy-eyed shadow of Bill Palmer in the passenger seat.

“Sad day, huh, Grandpa?” was all I could think to stammer. He looked nothing like the big and vibrant man I remembered. 

“Well, Billy’s not in much shape to do a whole lot more farming, are ya, Billy?” said my father, lifting the old man into his wheelchair. My grandfather raised his quivering head from the folds of his bathrobe and flannel pajamas and rasped, “Ooohhh... maybe just light work.”

They’d set up a hospital bed where his big blue leather recliner had been. Hospice nurses tended to him, giggling apologetically as they did it. To the end, Billy kept his lightning wit. He refused his pain medication, telling one nurse, "I'm afraid it might be habit-forming.” When another complimented his full head of curly white hair and said he was still a good-looking man, he leered at her and croaked, “Isn’t Betty [his wife, my grandmother] lucky?”

Those might have been his last words, come to think of it.

I don’t know if you can call it courage. The quips, the one-liners, might have been a distraction from the inevitable. Maybe it's easier to face death when you don’t think about it, because you’ve still got an audience to entertain. Whatever it is, though, whatever let Groucho and Grandpa greet the Reaper with a wisecrack, I hope I’ve got it. Bill Palmer was no saint. He was a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, a sharp dealer—you better believe he had his dark side. In fact, he was more or less defined by it. But when we remember him now, it’s with laughter. His humor both softened the blow of his death and gilded his memory. There are worse ways to go.