Horror of Dracula, 1958

The synchronicity between the heightened vogue for vampire fiction and Wall Street greed is surely no accident. Our society has been waiting for a long time to see a little empathy from its vampire class, a little trickle-down mercy.

Instead it gets one rip-off after another, more fine print, another tricky health insurance plan, another mortgage written in hell. And all the while the supply-side economists promise that the vampires will show mercy if only they can have another transfusion.

That’s why we’re in love with the vampire on the wagon, because he’s trying not to drink our blood, because he’s trying to behave as nicely as we’re supposed to behave, he ‘s trying to play by our rules. But we know he has a card up his sleeve, he can revert to his old ways.

He’s addicted to our blood, we’re addicted to his addiction. How boring our lives would be without these beautiful creatures out for our blood. How much more seductive a vampire’s lies than down-home truths: witness the ascent of the Fox propaganda machine.

The poor are already drained, a boneyard, and the middle class lies bleeding profusely, unable to get out of its sickbed.

The blathering media talk about a housing stimulus, incentives for banks, relief for homeowners, one-time-only write-offs, but hardly a glance at the most obvious truth: we can’t afford the homes we live in because we built too many in the first place and we don’t have the income to pay the mortgage. And unlike the bankers who screwed us, we don’t insist on the God-given right to obscene bonuses for amoral work.

And nary a glance at that other obvious truth: we don’t have the income to pay for our homes because Corporate America doesn’t want us to have it. It has transferred our wealth to cheap labor markets and never again intends to pay Americans decent wages or humane benefits. Never.

Facts are like statistics, they can be bent any which way, and a Fourth Estate that depends on Corporate America for its revenue isn’t about to stare these obvious facts in the face. We are becoming a Third World nation because that suits the profit-takers. They are not playing by American rules, they are playing by amoral internationalist rules. And here I’d like to propose a notion about the vogue for the Apocalypse: it’s a handy out for not having to give a damn about injustice.

We are in trouble because we have bought and continue to buy a bill of goods, namely that unions are communist conspiracies and government and taxes are instruments of the Antichrist. We continue to believe the vampires when they say they’ll take care of us.

We look on with horror as states go bankrupt, school systems and hospitals fire people, roads and bridges crumble, power grids deteriorate, cities cut back police and fire protection—and yet we refuse to admit that we have been suckered into believing that tax cuts and business deregulation will give us all the things we are now catastrophically losing.

Why are we hooked on vampires? They’re familiar, aren’t they? Some of them are family. We went to school with them. They’re the beautiful men and women we want to like us, to love us. They’re the liars whose promises we long to believe. Their lies are lovelier than our crappy truths. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if their wealth trickled down to us, if we could reduce taxes and still have the privileges they do? —Djelloul Marbrook

Hear me read and talk about poetry

Perhaps a national news organization supported by a combination of subscriptions and advertising could be designed to do this job, to focus entirely on money, how it’s raised, allocated and managed. It would mean endless hours of reading the Federal Register, state registers, public notices, fine print and budgets. It would take nerve, commitment and integrity, and at the end of the day we would be a much better republic for it.

But we have a financial press, you say. Yes, we do, and it’s beholden to special interests. It has an agenda. It’s censored by its advertisers, and if it had been much good in the first place it would have warned us long ago that an economy based on unsustainable home building and bad loans and  financed with money borrowed from China was bound to crash down on our heads. Why didn’t it warn us? Because it was deriving advertising revenue from predatory lenders, builders, realtors, appraisers and those infamous Wall Streeters who devised credit default swaps so complicated even George Soros and Warren Buffett didn’t understand them. Neither did the press.

At every level of government, especially in our hometowns and state capitals, we fail to exercise our rights to public information, to the documents that map just how our money is spent and—between the lines—to the skullduggery by which our money is wasted and we are betrayed. If we continue to discount this precious right to access it will be gradually and covertly taken away from us by politicians bribed by corporate interests, and they will claim they’re doing it for our safety. But the real enemy is within, at home, not abroad.

The public’s anger at the recklessness and greed of Wall Street wouldn’t be half so great if we were not aware that our trust is being betrayed, but awareness and anger are impotent unless we find ways to use the rights we already have to the fine print. That means a far better, more responsible and idealistic Fourth Estate than the pale ghost of itself we have today.

We need investigative accountants now, accountants who can write, who can explain where the money is going and why, because the safest bet in our country right now is that a great deal of the bailout money will be misspent and a lot of corruption will take root in every community that receives help. With money comes power and the potential for corruption, and the American press is too enfeebled to cover this story.

There’s no advertising revenue to be lavished on a press that exposes corruption. That’s how censorship in America works. So while we lament the loss of our newspapers we should engage in a national discussion of how we can finance a free and aggressive press. Such a press needs forensic accountants who know how to track money and tell us whose pockets it lands in. —DM

“Mr. Bush’s father deftly managed the Soviet Union’s dissolution. President Bill Clinton did a poorer job managing Russia’s post-cold war decline and Mr. Bush has done even worse managing its resurgence.”

Managing? Another country’s affairs? I know perfectly well The Times is referring to the management of our response to events in Russia. But, having at its disposal a language so rich in nuance, it strikes me as odd The Times would use such a word.

What I fear is that corporate imperialism dictated this language. The Times, after all, like most America media, belongs to the world of corporate globalism—policies pursued in the interests of business, which may or may not coincide with the interests of the average citizen.

We should not be managing any nation’s affairs, particularly at a time when we are doing so poorly managing our own.  Yes, we must respond to developments in other countries, but in a society that finds it as difficult as we do to tell business how to manage itself it seems perverse to tell other nations what to do about their own business.

I think the root of the problem is that our political and social ideals, as they have evolved since the Boston Tea Party, are often at odds with the aims of corporate America. Thomas Jefferson said he feared business’s power to corrupt. I fear The Times has unwittingly expressed the defining de facto circumstance in which we live, namely that our military and foreign policies serve big business and that we have become more consumer units rather than individual citizens. —DM

There they are, standing in hospital waiting rooms, in news rooms, in class rooms, in back rooms. And here we are,  navigating around them like waiters with a tray of cocktails over our heads. Problem? Cocktail, anyone?

Anyone who has ever tried to schedule a test with a hospital or a laboratory and encountered a telephone tree, in fact anyone who has ever encountered a telephone tree anywhere, has been run over by one of these elephants.Human beings are disappearing from the service landscape as surely as jobs are disappearing from America. We are said to live in a service industry society: where is the service?

Here we are pretending not to see the elephants in the room, even though they’re standing on our toes and crushing us into wallpaper.

We know something is terribly wrong with our way of life. It simply isn’t what we say it is. It isn’t what we say we want. We’re a nation of churchgoers, espousing compassion for one another, and yet we have allowed Corporate America and its political stooges to fashion a society that doesn’t give a damn about us. How do they do that? Well, they game our individualistic tradition against our concern for each other, just as they game the race card and the sex card and call them by other names.

We know the energy crisis isn’t going away, but the politicians keep on pretending there are quick fixes, such as drilling offshore. They think a democracy can thrive on their lies, or do they really believe in democracy anymore? Is democracy what they can get away with?

We know many of us are sickening and dying because our health care system is inferior to that of thirty-six other nations, according to the World Health Organization, but the politicians act as if they’re patching old tires with tired ideas.

We know our wages are inadequate, but the politicians tell us to spend more for God and country. The banking, real estate industries and credit sold us defective and risky instruments and now they’re blaming the borrowers and asking for tax money to bail them out.

We know the flag represents our ideals, but the politicians tell us it belongs to an exclusive club to which many of us need not apply. They tell us it belongs only to those who support reckless military adventures in support of our largest industry, the defense industry.

The elephants are popping the walls, crushing our feet, and yet we have agreed to play this terrible game of not noticing that something is wrong.

We open our mouths to talk about the deterioration of our quality of life, and the politicians and preachers say, Let’s talk about family values, right to life, gay marriage, stem cell research, and all those other issues that loom so large when your grandmother is dying of medical neglect and your kids are flipping burgers because you have no money to send them to college.

We notice our jobs slipping away, and the politicians say, Hey, let’s kill some Arabs or bomb Iran or have conniptions because the sovereign state of California is allowing gays to marry.

Just as long as the CEOs get their bonuses for ruining companies and lying to shareholders, just as long as the press remains a corporate press release, just as long as the politicians keep stuffing their pockets with legalized bribes, forget about the elephant in the room.—DM 

When I was a young man I fell in love with a young woman who was attending that school in the early 1950s and I can attest that by then Balanchine’s anatomical preferences had been fully expressed. So, contemplating those women in the window, it occurred to me that American culture has developed schizophrenia in the matter of body mass.

On the one hand, the advertising and entertainment industries have presented us with the ideal of fencing-foil bodies that verge on the anorexic, while the food industry encourages us to consume as if our sole ambition is to become dirigibles. We’re caught in a commercial vise. We’re asked to idolize thin people while turning ourselves into blimps. It’s not unlike the television advertisements still cajoling us to buy SUVs while we’re implored to save gasoline. It’s even more like the dilemma of being urged by feckless politicians on the one hand to save while at the same time being urged to spend more to rescue the economy.

The paradoxes are many. We tell pollsters we want good schools, roads, bridges, health care and social programs, but we also tell them we want tax relief. Nobody bothers to ask us where we think the money will come from. We gaze at thin fashion models and gorge ourselves with doughnuts and greasy burgers. We’ll leave the discipline to the models and dancers and actors; that’s the price of their popularity, but we don’t have to pay that price.

Of course we do pay it, in higher medical costs, sickness and premature death, just as surely as we drive up medical costs with our alcohol consumption while blaming the problem on every other disease.

I live in the mid-Hudson Valley, where the farmers and orchardists can’t find labor while at the same time communities are fretting about not having jobs for their young people. When I look at young people waddling out of fast food joints and convenience stores it’s a wonder to me that the high schools can find athletes. No wonder these kids eschew farm work. Many of them could not do the farm work to which I was accustomed as a boy in Suffolk County, NY.

But the American way is to try to have it both ways—good services, low taxes, thin performers, fat fans, rich pols, poor soldiers: the politics of prestidigitation, economics by sleight-of-hand. It’s not working. It was supposed to work only for those who plan to get rich off the backs of the rest of us. For the country to work, I think we will have to slim down, get fit, and stop trying to have everything both ways. If we care about each other, as we say we do, we must give each other a hand, and that doesn’t mean promises of tax breaks from cheap politicians who’d say any damned thing to get elected so they can feed at the public trough. American individualism never meant to hell with everybody else, but we’ve been voting for a long time as if it did. —DM
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Note: The Eisenstadt photograph appears in Balanchine Then and Now, a collection of essays edited by Anne Hogan (128pp., Sylph Editions/American University of Paris).

What the news needs more than anything else is historical context, the very thing news executives have always eschewed in favor of immediacy. Without historical context the news becomes a major cause of ill-considered, slogan-driven policy.

The news industry has given itself a pass for its culpability in taking us to war in Iraq, but while we’re remembering the distortions of intelligence data and the downright lies of the White House we ought to remember how CNN and Fox News melodramatically beat the war drums and how the print media failed at due diligence when there were plenty of Arabists around to challenge the war policy.

Anyone who has ever watched the Discovery, Military, History or Weather channels may have observed that they often give us far more food for thought than the so-called news channels. They are more reflective, less inclined to dramatize. Such was the case this week when the Military Channel reopened the case of the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898.

With the exploding of the Maine, American foreign policy departed from its republican ideals to take a distinctly imperialistic turn. The impetus, of course, was money, business. We had considerable monies invested in Spanish-held Cuba, and we had embarked on the expansion into the Pacific Basin that ultimately brought us into conflict with Imperial Japan.

The press, led by the ultraconservative and hawkish Hearst newspapers, jumped to every conspiracy theory conceivable. The Navy commission established to investigate the sinking, pressured by Congress, concluded that it was an act of terrorism either by Spanish sympathizers or by Spain itself. The slogan, Remember the Maine, To Hell With Spain, led us into a war in which we ultimately seized Cuba and The Philippines from Spain and destroyed what remained of its empire.

The parallels with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that legitimized the Vietnam War and with George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s bogus rationale for invading Iraq can hardly be more compelling. But in each case a complacent, irresponsible press played a major role and then stood by acting as if it had had nothing to do with war hysteria but was merely an objective bystander. Ever since the press has been tsk-tsking all the way to the bank.

The Military Channel recounted that in 1974 four-star Admiral Hyman Rickover, a controversial maverick, headed another commission of inquiry that concluded that the Maine had sunk because of an explosion within the steel-plated ship itself. This cast doubt on the Spanish conspiracy theory but failed to put it completely to rest.

But now scientists, using computer modeling and cutting-edge metallurgical research unavailable in 1974, have shown that the explosion originated in a coal bunker by spontaneous combustion, a frequent occurrence wherever coal was used to power ships, and then ignited gunpowder in the Maine’s hold. So much for the Spanish conspiracy.

Here we have three instances in which a democratic republic, which had renounced empire and colonialism from its inception, went to war in behalf of imperialist interests on the basis of misinformation and even chicanery. And the press, which had been envisioned by our founders as a bulwark against government misdeeds, took part in inflaming public opinion.

The media role in the sinking of the Maine (which has been explored closely by scholars) and in the Vietnam and the Iraq wars should give us pause. What we think of as news is more a tsunami of ephemeral reports and events, self-serving interpretations and political posturing. Sometimes the press may argue, as it did regarding the Maine, that there was nowhere to turn for countervailing viewpoints, but it had no such excuse in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

The Internet, to which the news industry is reluctantly transitioning, offers a unique opportunity to redefine news. Indeed, we might usefully revisit the very word. What we need is information and contexts in which to put it. We need new nomenclature for the ideal media role in the 21st Century. Perhaps a word like context. The reason for hope is hypertext, which enables the news industry to put events in perspective. For example, when the White House was making its case for barging into Iraq in the name of democracy, the press could have said, Whoa, Remember the Maine, and then linked breaking stories to all those previous doubts about how the Maine actually blew up that winter’s day in Havana harbor. The press could have revisited the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and its historical reexamination.

But even more significantly, the press could have turned each Iraq story into a virtual index of issues related to modern Iraq history. Readers would have clearly seen that the British had failed in the 1920s to create a balance among Iraq’s sectarian parties. They would have seen how many Arabists thought it a bad idea to invade. They would have understood the secular nature of the Ba’ath Party and the unlikelihood of its having made common cause with Al Qaeda. They would have been able to ask themselves who would benefit most from an Iraq incursion. The answer, of course, would have been big oil and Pentagon contractors.

All these matters eventually came into play, but too late, because our concept of news is not broad enough to prevent nitwit sloganeers and conspiracy theorists from hijacking foreign policy.

The 2001 anthrax incident is another case at hand—a string of developments without context. If the FBI can convince us, as it is now trying to do, that Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biochemical researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who recently committed suicide, was in fact the man who in 2001 killed five people and threatened many more, will the media remember that it was the anthrax scare and not the September 11th attacks that frightened us into allowing our civil liberties to be eroded in the name of national security? And will the media reopen the case with the same vigor with which they have reported each development? By reopening the case I mean, Will the media point out that a nation of 300 million souls was made docile by fear that foreign terrorists were using anthrax powder against us rather than a domestic terrorist for reasons that are not entirely clear?

If the media continue to refuse to take responsibility for the issue of context, if they persist instead in providing a steady stream of developments and smart-alecky punditry, they will have forfeited the opportunity of a century to redefine American journalism in the name of public enlightenment. The media have traditionally taken the position that it is for historians to make sense of things, to provide overview. But in a world as fast-moving as ours we can’t wait for the historians; we must instead take advantage of what is already archived. The current formula of literally poisoning news with punditry is a sorry excuse for putting news in context. It accelerates the polasrization of an already profoundly polarized society, because it daily invites partisans to pick their poison, leaving independent-mind citizens to fend for themselves.

There will always be a segment of our population that prefers ideology to fact, simple-minded solutions to nuanced examinations, and war to peace. Profiteers depend on this predilection for easy answers. One would think, would hope that the press would be the antidote to knee-jerk hawks and profiteers, but the press is owned by big business and takes its responsibility to make money for investors more seriously than its First Amendment responsibilities. A democracy can never be reminded too often that war is big business.

That is why the idea of citizen journalism is so spectral to press moguls. The idea of being no longer capable of hyping and propagandizing news by ownership of media outlets is truly intimidating. And yet nowhere in today’s presidential campaign is the issue raised of who will control the Internet. That’s no accident. It’s the last issue corporate media wants raised.—DM

Why indeed? In some cases, as in southern California, assessors are lowering evaluations. But in other areas, such as Nevada, where the assessment formulas are more complicated, evaluations are holding fast or even rising. Many communities will lower evaluations and then raise tax rates, but this is bound to strike most homeowners as sleight-of-hand and nobody can predict the political fallout from such a maneuver.

The political challenge with this is that anything but lower evaluations is so counterintuitive that taxpayers are bound to be up in arms about it, and it won’t be long before lawyers see lucrative court cases looming.

The even larger problem is that the housing boom, which has enabled Washington to claim credit for American prosperity, was in fact a symptom of economic illness. It consisted of buying and selling each other houses with money borrowed from China.

The rising costs of fuel make that kind of lifestyle untenable. The suburbs are probably cooked. Cities with good public transportation look increasingly desirable, especially medium-sized cities like Providence, RI, and Portsmouth, NH. Rural America now must reorganize itself, having depended on cheap fuel since World War II. The mega malls that have destroyed the cores of small towns and cities are now dinosaurs, and the cheap foreign goods on which they’ve thrived are becoming expensive because of high shipment costs.

One alternative for strapped towns and cities is to provide homeowners with the tax relief they will inevitably demand and tax businesses more. This won’t be popular either, and it too is counterintuitive. But too many towns have depended on homebuilding to support town services and have failed to encourage business growth. They have bought a bill of goods from homebuilders and banks, and now banks, having been burned by their own greed, are reluctant to make the loans businesses need to expand.

With transportation costs soaring, it’s possible that local industry and farming will revive. It’s possible we’ll import less and become more self-sufficient. And the countries from which we have been importing so much may have to do the same, because they too are facing rising fuel and transportation costs.

Globalism may have been overtaken by peak oil.

But we must prepare for a horrendous yowl from homeowners if assessors fail to give them some relief because arguing for static or even higher taxes in an environment in which property values are plummeting won’t go down well. The upside of this is that communities may have to sober up from their oil binge, stop giving the store away to homebuilders and mega-malls and start figuring out how to revitalize business.

Meanwhile, whole neighborhoods have been spoiled by foreclosures, creating a problem for police, fire and social welfare departments. In other words, demands have been put on communities without an expanded tax base to pay for them. These communities, lulled into complacency by a predatory climate, must now seize the initiative. Salvation is not going to come prettily packaged from state capitals or Washington.

The news anchors keep talking about Main Street, but the fact is that main streets were long ago sold out to malls using Wal-Mart as magnets. Main Street has been rotting for decades. Where have the anchors been?—DM

And even if we were to become a military state like ancient Sparta the morale, the genius of the state would be best served by everyone serving equally. How else can children of wealth discharge their duties to a state from which they have benefited? Everyone should be willing to defend a state in which they believe, whether by active military service or by engaging in such projects as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

The argument should be not only about the quality of the army but the quality of the state and the ideals it holds. The argument is too one-sided, too limited to military science; the broader interests of the state should be considered too. The military does not exist for itself; rather it exists to uphold and defend our ideals, and it should not be allowed to take part in dismantling them in the name of expedience. Not even Sparta for all its militarism would have countenanced that.
We should consider, too, that historically the use of mercenaries is a measure of a civilization’s decline. We have used soldiers for hire in Iraq. When Iraq’s medieval empire under the Abbasids decided to use mercenaries it foreshadowed a breathtaking decline. The same may be said of Rome and the Ottoman Empire and many another world power.

By eschewing the draft we are making the case for an elitist society, saying not that Yankee Doodle will defend us when necessary but that poor Yankee Doodle will do the job. If the lords of the land, our fatted upper class, is unwilling to send its children to war it tells us they’re Americans for what they can get out of the rest of us, not because they believe in our ideals.

If we are to remain as egalitarian as we say we are, as egalitarian as those who wrap themselves in the flag and try to make traitors out of dissenters say we are, then let the rich put their money where their collective mouth is. If their children object to war, let them serve in other capacities. This is not just a military issue, it is a social issue. We do not exist to serve our military. We do not exist to adjust to it; it exists to protect our commonly held birthright. If we become a military state, or merely a state that panders to its military-industrial sector, we forfeit that birthright.

But by all means let us rid ourselves of a circumstance in which old, overweight white men wearing flag pins and waving for the camera send children of color, poverty and despair to war—and then desert them when they come back broken. —DM

We assume everybody secretly wants to be like us. But we never ask ourselves: does this mean that everybody secretly wants to be a dupe of high-flyers who confuse capitalism with larceny? Peak Oil and other crises don’t bother them because they’re getting theirs now. Their talk about victory in Iraq, which nobody can define, is a cover-up for the fact they’ve already won: they’ve ripped off the taxpayers for billions of dollars.

Savor for a moment the flabbergasting chutzpah of insisting everyone else wants to be like us when we have the most expensive health care system on the planet and it ranks only 37th in quality. But, hey, the insurance industry loves it, and the guys who bad-mouth social welfare and “socialized” medicine think nothing of socialized welfare for insurers who already get huge
tax breaks. The American Medical Association, once its adamant foe, is now for single-payer health care, like Medicare, because doctors are sick of spending so much money and time fighting insurance companies to get paid, which in turn drives up overall costs.

How can a society such as ours, unfathomable in its contradictions, assume that it’s the standard from which everybody else diverges or to which everybdy else aspires? When we were indignantly renaming French fries Freedom Fries we weren’t thinking about France’s better and less expensive health care. No, we were upset because the French didn’t support our mendacious Iraq policy.

Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are landmarks of human progress. They have inspired our visionaries in every generation. We mention our founders at the drop of a hat, but we abuse their advice just as our nation’s leaders abuse statistics to prove their convictions. For example, George Washington warned us against foreign entanglements. How did that turn out? Thomas Jefferson warned us against the power of corporations to corrupt society. The Pentagon can’t even account for the money it has lavished on private businesses in Iraq. Dwight Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex. Maybe that’s why we praise Ronald Reagan: he didn’t bother us with any advice about greed. To hear the White House tell it, our founders would have approved of our invasion of Iraq.

The cult of the blonde with the gold circle pin should have taken notice of the other pretty girls, the ones with fine minds, the athletes, the caretakers, the girls who would never get to represent their home town or state in a bathing suit, the ones whose skin color differed from our phony norm. And we should take notice of societies that don’t think like us, and have every right not to think like us.—DM