W. and the Mad Barber of Cranbrook: A Fable

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Peter Vilbig

Romney’s bullying.

Given that this blog has assiduously avoided anything topical with the secret goal (more or less realized) of making itself invisible to search engines, what on earth might now possess me to add my words to the torrent on Romney’s great haircutting debacle? Only perhaps that I was shocked. As a headline scanner, I had first thought: well, so Romney teased a boy who was gay about his hair. What a jerk. Then I read the story. I suppose there are those who think attacking someone—leading the group in the attack—and cutting his hair is no more than a mild prank. But really holding someone down and taking scissors to him? “Like a pack of wild dogs,” as one participant remembers it. Did you do things like that in high school? I didn’t think so.

Others have pointed out that this incident was not entirely unique. They noted how Romney seems to have taken particular joy in guiding a teacher with poor eyesight into a glass door (Gail Collins in the Times), and still others conclude that his claim not to remember the haircutting attack is perhaps as bad as the event itself (Charles M. Blow, also in the Times, among others).

But I’d like to come at this story from a slightly different angle. Here’s what I propose: I’d like to recall an incident of bullying I observed as a child growing up in Texas at roughly the same time that Romney was attending prep school in Michigan. I’d then like to suggest that this incident was an example of a culture of bullying then present in Texas that seemed as normal and natural to its perpetrators and victims as it did to its audience—and bullying is primitive theater, let’s not forget that. I’d then further like to take a leap and suggest that the Texas I grew up in helped shape the personality of George W. Bush, the Republican figure Romney most resembles, despite their widely variant styles and personalities, and that Bush and Romney both share a propensity for playing the bully.

•

When Mitt Romney was in high school I was a student in a North Dallas junior high. Every day after lunch several hundred of us were turned loose to roam across a large asphalt playground behind the school gym. There was a boy named Robert Jacobson who played among us (name changed to protect, even after all these years). Robert suffered some unidentified disorder or incapacity—probably undiagnosed, given the times. He walked on his toes and did not connect appropriately with others. He just stood out. His nickname—and it was his only name on the playground—was Twinkletoes. During lunch kids would throw pennies, and Robert would chase them, running in an awkward stiff legged gait, high on his toes, his arms flung out, unbent at the elbows, after the pennies. Day after day. It was only years later that I realized the significance of the pennies: Robert was of course Jewish. And as everyone around me seemed to know, Jews will chase pennies.

So there you have it. A crude anti-Semitism. A vicious mocking game aimed at someone who was defenseless. I’ve pondered over the years how I didn’t understand the meaning of the pennies. I believe some part of me must have known. Yet I knew better than to know. Because another part of me, equally buried, understood only too well the threat of violence and retribution that lay behind the playground game, and recognized my lack of immunity. I was no hero. I witnessed but did nothing.

•

If you are now thinking that I’m making too much of this story about Robert Jacobson, that I’m reliving a childhood trauma that bears no connection to my stated purpose, I can only tell you that I could unwind many other tales of bullying, taunting, and brutality in those days. Nor is Robert’s story primarily about anti-Semitism—though that topic deserves its own discussion. Vicious as it was, hatred of Jews was only one spice in the toxic brew in which my age-mates and I were steeped in those days. Blacks—especially blacks, let’s remember that—Jews, gays, the retarded, the mentally ill, the politically dissident—all were fair game for hate and reprisal. (And no, of course, it was not only Texas, but it was Texas; and I could unwind another long list of stories about all the kinds of hate I witnessed, felt, learned of, and knew to be average facets of the world I lived in.)

George W. Bush grew up in this world too, in Midland, Texas, a few hundred miles west of the playground where Robert chased his pennies. And of course that doesn’t make him guilty of anything. But this was the same George Bush who built his career around the notion of his being shaped and formed by his Texas boyhood, his values and perceptions of life arising out of his Midland roots. And so when I say that George Bush was immersed in his boyhood in the same culture I was, I’m just saying what he’s saying. Except that I’m adding that I suspect that what he learned in his Texas youth, in addition to all those heroic qualities we heard about endlessly in his political campaigns, was the fondness for reprisal and dominance that are the core of bullying, its thrill of reaching through the boundaries of another’s selfhood and violating it with impunity, its assertion of ownership—of the Other, but also of the cultural landscape itself, territoriality being one of its key features.

Am I right? Was George Bush manufactured as a bully in his West Texas boyhood? No way to prove it. We know of his subsequent actions: how he laughingly mocked Karla Faye Tucker, the woman whose death sentence he refused to commute. We know about his ready resort to violence—and this readiness lies behind all bullying. Of his childhood, no certainty. But what I do know is the milieu in which he operated. I know that it was a common sport among West Texas boys in those days to run down (as in run over and kill) jackrabbits and wild dogs in their cars and trucks on the back roads and ranch lands. (I knew a man in East Texas who would cruise its black tops at night running over possums who had come out to sleep on warm asphalt—running them over at slow speed and then watching in the red glare of his taillights as they writhed.)

Nor am I claiming that George Bush went on those hunts after rabbits and wild dogs in West Texas, or that he was violent in the way that man in East Texas was. I take him at his word—and not in the smarmy way of members of his political party when they comment on Obama’s religious beliefs—when he speaks of compassionate conservatism. It was no false veneer. Liberals mistook him by assuming hypocrisy where something more complicated was going on.

No, I believe George W. Bush believed in his compassionate conservatism without reservation. But I also suspect his views were an elaborate psychic countermeasure against the brutality he grew up with, whose wrongness he must have sensed. For I feel certain, looking at what Bush became, and his fearful reaction after 9/11, his authorizing of torture and his swaggering across the international stage (his administration peopled with the kind of full-on bullies that the doubtful bully often surrounds himself with—the Cheneys and Boltons who would do the real dirty work), that this man’s moral outlook, as he grew up in a Texas whose politics were being shaped by the nascent John Birch Society, in a Texas where racism and anti-Semitism comprised an almost universal lingua franca, was formed through a series of reactions to the violence and bullying he saw around him—that toxic mix of fear and complicity, of signing up because not signing up meant a fall into oblivion, and demurral because some part of every person withdraws, at least at first.

•

Back to George Romney. So we now know that Romney was definitively an abuser in his childhood. The idea—repeated by that amiable bully Bill O’Reilly, whose whole career has been built on the pleasures viewers receive in seeing the defenseless attacked (c.f. his comments on New Orleans flood victims as they were literally scrambling to survive on rooftops)—is that what happens in childhood should stay in childhood. But of course what happens in childhood doesn’t stay in childhood. It creeps into the land beyond, only perhaps papered over with a civilizing veneer, or sluiced into a socially acceptable direction, unless a kind of conversion experience, built on deep awareness, intervenes. Romney has clearly not experienced such an intervention, about this or any of the other many episodes of bullying and teasing he engaged in. That is the true shame of his silence and denial in his response to the Washington Post story.

Romney is very different from Bush: a real man of business, whereas Bush was always closer to the greeter at the casino, the guy who was content to keep the touts happy and then get teary-eyed and sentimental when the big winners raked it in. Romney by contrast was far closer to the genuine article—in fact not so much a businessman as the financial world’s variant of the old-fashioned industrialist, an occupant of the highest rung of the food chain, who believes himself to be entitled to every bit of it.

Yet both of them are bullies in their own way, and this comes as no surprise. For in this new century, and for a variety of perhaps complicated but also obvious reasons (the electorate’s compensation for feelings of powerlessness, old-fashioned rage at the possibility of displacement and diminishment of privilege) can it really be possible to imagine the Grand Old Party, now transformed into something that would have made those Birchers in the ’60s proud, nominating anyone for president who is not a bully?

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Remembering Shock and Awe Nine Years Later

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Peter Vilbig

The war began on television nine years ago this week, and I’m wondering what we remember about it. I mean not the war and all that came after, but specifically its beginning: the Shock and Awe bombing campaign that started on March 21, and the fighting that continued in the coming days. And by remembering I mean something more than that vague sense we have of a long-ago episode from an old TV program long since canceled. I mean do we really remember what it felt like and what we thought, as the first concussions ripped the night air of Baghdad? Because in fact, those first days of the war were as bizarre as any moments ever recorded on live television, and now, nine years later, it’s as if this deeply strange experience we all lived through has just disappeared. Never to be spoken of.

•

The key was that it was all televised, and televised more specifically as though it were a theatrical event produced for public consumption. We can summon, if we try, the strangeness of the time: how arcs of light poured out of our television sets in living rooms and offices, in waiting areas and barrooms, in airports and kitchens, the explosions seeming almost to rock the rooms we lived in. And it was true: cameras were everywhere, including, astoundingly in Baghdad itself, at the very nexus point of the violence. (If you balk at the idea that television was all important, consider that a war of retribution in Afghanistan had already been fought, a war which, due to local conditions, had failed to offer the satisfying theatrical experience that Iraq produced on its opening night alone.)

This second round thus had its own aesthetic logic and became necessary as a matter of art. Those blooms of fire over Baghdad—retribution, caught in the camera’s lens—were the direct payout for the debt of fire over New York. The visuals were what really mattered. For many—and perhaps this is what is most troubling—the raw wounds of 9/11 were being healed that night.

•

And who can forget what followed in the coming days, as the first week of battle unfolded? How the television lens carried us on a vertiginous carnival ride into the heart of battle. We were all there, caught behind the lens. One moment: tanks roaring across the desert—dust, noise, and the thrilling disorientation of war spilling into our living rooms. A wind-whipped correspondent shouting into a microphone. A troop carrier blasts past. Soldiers dig in the sand. Fast cut to a carrier deck. The war whoop of an F-18 careening into flight and suddenly we’re on board the aircraft, the horizon tilting, the great dusty landmass of Iraq below. (A television correspondent actually asked one of the pilots returning from a sortie, “How was your performance tonight?”)

A second quick cut, and now we’re in a oil field, burning, and even before we’ve had a chance to imagine the acrid smell of the smoke, we fast cut to a small arms gun battle on the outskirts of some village, a scene so rich in imagery and drama, people will say it’s better than Saving Private Ryan. (And people will actually say this.) And then the coup de grâce, the most thrilling images of all, because it’s so like a video game: film from a helicopter gunship, or a Warthog, of an Iraqi soldier or a lone station wagon on the ground, and we watch as the gun sights lock, sudden trails of the weapons smoking through the air, the erasure in the sand of the human being, the vehicle, reduced to ant lion hill smudges, all calmly recorded in the neutral eye of the lens. (And I heard young men, and more than one—and this is pure fact—talking gleefully about these images. Did you see that? they said. They wiped that fucker out! Laughing.)

•

All of it then was performance, but really all of it (and here I’m borrowing from Slavoj Žižek, the philosopher and social theorist): not only those on the stage (the Iraqis, Saddam, the troops, George W., Cheney, and Rumsfeld), but us (the audience). We were performing too—as though the theater itself with cast and audience had been set up on a still larger stage. And that’s the key point. Not who we were performing for—read Žižek if you want elaboration on that point. But that we too, the watchers, were participating in a performance that thematically advanced a single idea: that we, like the townspeople in the old Westerns, had witnessed justice being done.

•

In Zarathustra, human beings distorted by the spirit of revenge are called tarantulas. And their motto: “Let it be the very justice of the world to become full of our vengeance.” And so Iraq became full of our vengeance.

•

There is a kind of embarrassment in having been swept away by an aesthetic spectacle that we later acknowledge to have been meretricious. Our teen-age enthusiasms we sometimes look back upon with a benevolent but knowing eye. More problematic are the memories of more humiliating enthusiasms. These we simply suppress, living as though they never happened, even as they remain part of the ocean floor we travel over.

I submit that those early days of the Iraq war fall into this second category of pure suppression. Obviously, under such conditions, there’s no possibility of reckoning or contrition. And why should there be? If we were to acknowledge our wrongs, we would deprive ourselves of the right to witness future performances of similar spectacles. Somewhere in the farther reaches of the psyche we want to hold on to a ticket to a later run of the same play, with only a few scenes changed, and with a new cast. That ticket is our right to violence without regret. It may be bad art, but it’s the art we need to justify our lashing out and our indifference to the meaning of our own conduct.

•

In the days following the opening of the Iraq campaign, I had just moved into an apartment in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was an odd time to be in an unfamiliar neighborhood, with the different sounds, the feel of daily life new and strange—and all punctuated, illuminated by those flashes of light pouring out of the screen into the living room.

It was a damp chilly March, but not so cold that the windows couldn’t be left open, and I remember night after night in the kitchen as I cleaned up, listening to the call of a bird just outside, and night after night, the same bird calling. Its whistle was clear and pure, and I soon realized its two-note call was always the same: a minor third, starting at the tonic. A mournful, lonely sound. I’ve never heard such a call, before or since, but listening to that brief song, repeated again and again in the otherwise silent night, an eerie sense invaded me. This became the music of my spring, the music for me that played contrapuntally against the sounds of that faraway battle pouring out of the TV screen. The blue notes, the music of elegy and regret.

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An Elderly Lady Sneaks into the Men’s Locker Room—A Valentine’s Day Story

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Peter Vilbig

A little incident at the gym a while back says something about love and desire that bears passing on. I had finished my workout and was dressing in the locker room when someone in the corridor outside said: “What’s this?” By tone the voice was that of an older lady.

A somewhat muffled response followed—“No, no, don’t go that way. That’s the men’s …” A younger voice. Suddenly a woman loomed in the locker room doorway and stared in on us. She was old indeed, perhaps eighty, and though not seriously physically debilitated, she must have been suffering one form or another of the mental or behavioral problems related to aging—hence the muffled voice: her attendant. The speed with which one draws such conclusions is a little startling.

It was equally clear that she’d made it into the men’s locker room on purpose and against her assistant’s wishes. Whatever loss of capacity she’d suffered, she knew very well where she was headed, and stood there for a count of five before the other woman, now behind her, touched her arm and said, “Come on. You can’t be here. This is the men’s locker room.” The elder woman cast one more glittering look upon us and then acceded meekly to her keeper, and off they went.

I want to focus on that count of five. There were perhaps two other men in the locker room at the moment, in various states of dishabille, though none of us was in a terribly embarrassing position. It didn’t matter. In that woman’s body—and she was a venerable old pile, somewhat broad in the beam, with rude hints of her former health caught here and there among the ruin and wreckage of time—lay a pair of eyes, drinking in the enjoined scene, as bright and vital as they must have been when she was sixteen.

So it was: her face like silt, dried and cracked in the sun, a statue dug from an ancient site, and yet: those eyes glowing like two flames, alive with mischief and cheekiness. The count only lasted to five, yet, man, was she having fun! A whole history of life could be read there, a history that contained many proper moments—no doubt, a husband, children, a social scene (the presence of the attendant meant that there was money, had been money, always). But the eyes gave away an alternate story: all those proper moments must have been a slog. The propriety of her former life and a pair of eyes like that don’t mix.

And so here she was, jettisoning propriety at last, on the main chance of what I’m pretty sure was her first and only visit to a men’s locker room, just to see what was there, and why not? She had bamboozled everybody about her senility, which amounted mostly to an inattention to details she no longer cared about. And who was to judge her? Perhaps she had spent her life worrying about that question, but not now. She would take a gander at an illicit place. She would step out of her veils as the waters prepared to close over her as they must close over us all.

You might be thinking I’m making too much of a fleeting moment at the gym. And perhaps you’re right. Or perhaps you had to be there to witness her moment of joyful trespass. Yet on Valentine’s Day, with its endless red hearts and cherubic Cupids, I like to remember her, that count of five, her aging physical self, and those eyes alive with glee at being in a forbidden place.

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I Had A Dream I Was A Soldier

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Peter Vilbig

Visages of War -- Salvador Dalí


The details of my dream are not so important. My unit was in the mountains in a column of jeeps (but old-style WWII jeeps). Suddenly we were under attack, an ambush, machine gun fire raking the road, bullets pocking the hood of the jeep—it happened with crushing rapidity, no drama, no buildup, and then I was wounded. I knew that it was probably fatal, though I felt very little pain. I crawled under the jeep.

What happened next is why I’m recounting what was otherwise a pretty silly dream—perhaps sparked by all the stories about the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The point of view suddenly shifted. I was now part of the ‘we’ of the unit. The voice at this point became novelistic. It was some time after the attack, and we were in a duty room or barracks, and we were all hoping for the survival of our fellow, the wounded soldier. Indeed the unit’s morale had become deeply tied up in the fate of the wounded man, who was nonetheless in grave condition. It was clear to us that things could go either way.

Then came news that the soldier would survive, though he was to be limited physically in some undisclosed way, and we were happy and relieved. At about this time, I partially woke up. It often happens this way: when the narrative improbability of a dream reaches a certain level, the only way to keep the story intact is to enter a semi-conscious state—which allows me to maneuver the dream’s unwieldy violations of logic a few steps forward in half sleep.

Once I was fully awake, I understood that I’d had a somewhat embarrassing adolescent dream: about being a soldier, about facing death, etc. Except for the odd part: that narrative shift. I recognized that it had to do with deflecting the burden, the anxiety of the injury I suffered. The ‘we’ narrator allowed the dream to linger on; confronted with my fate on the battlefield I would have woken up immediately.

Yet this was only part of the dream’s mechanism. Its full significance only dawned on me when I realized that its structure more or less mimes the national response to the wounding of soldiers in the current and recent national wars. (I won’t call them ‘warriors’ because this seems part of the same phenomenon.)

The unconscious shift of narrative focus allowed me to turn the dream of my own wounding into a feel-good story, into a story about the well-being and morale of the rest of us; it allowed me to avoid facing the wound and its consequences. Something like this feels familiar in current news stories about wounded soldiers, which all seem to suggest in different ways that the good spirits of the wounded, their perseverance, and their survival against the odds are our good spirits, our perseverance, and our survival against the odds—though without our ever having to suffer the inconvenience of actual risk or harm.

Seeing this, I was reminded that it would be a mistake to believe that the illogic of dreams is confined to them. As Delmore Schwartz reminded us, in dreams begin responsibilities. But in my case, my dream hinted at an irresponsibility that runs much deeper than my petty and self-serving unconscious.

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Top 10 Most Important Things That Happened to Me in 2011

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Peter Vilbig

And the trees mourned the year's passing ...


10. Once again failed to interest Marvel in my Thus Spake Zarathustra comic book.

9. Two words: parking ticket. Two times. Ouch.

8. For the third year in a row my efforts to memorize the Biblical book of Genesis shuddered to a stop at the scene where the giants come down to earth and have sex with the humans. I don’t know why. I just can’t get past it.

7. One night I saw the new moon with the old moon in her arms.

6. A catastrophic moment: wait, I’m drawing a blank here. But trust me, it happened.

5. After taking an over-the-counter allergy med before bedtime last spring, I awoke with a start in the middle of the night with an entire poem etched in my consciousness. I had the feeling that a Sprite or Muse had dipped my brain in fairy dust in which the words had been traced with the index finger of an angel. For a moment I considered getting up and writing down the poem, but it seemed so fresh and clear in my mind, and I was very sleepy. Assuming I would remember it in the morning, I slipped back into a contented sleep knowing that when I awoke the history of poetry was about to undergo a shattering change. Alas, in the cold light of day, the poem had vanished. I remember only one phrase: a damsel with a dulcimer. Hell of line, too.

4. One day I looked out the window. Something I don’t do that often. Out of fear. About what I might see. About what might be out there. Or in here. That I couldn’t see until I looked out there. Bad cycle.

5a. During an “Internet search,” I realized the “damsel with a dulcimer” line was from a famous poem from the Past.

3. My novel, The Doom Prophecy, was not picked up by a publisher—once again.

2. A potted basil plant in my windowsill began sprouting roses. I think so at least. Or perhaps this was only a dream.

1. And the number one thing that happened to me in 2011: I stole a kiss from the new moon while the old moon lay in her arms.

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The Tiger’s Wife of Swamplandia!

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Peter Vilbig

Cover photo from The Tiger's Wife in Swamplandia!

First of all I want to say that spontaneous combustion of the human corpus is a fact, not a theory. And second: I’ve been drinking a bit this evening in my little workshop, the Atelier™, after learning that my novel, The Doom Prophecy, was not chosen as a Top Ten Book of the Year by the New York Times. For maybe the fifth or sixth consecutive year.

No bitterness. Really. To prove which point, I offer the following notes on one of the books on the list, a wonderful read, by the way, and I don’t say that lightly, having long ago renounced the modern novel (frankly, as far as I’m concerned, literature came to an end with The Good Earth by, I think it was, St. Vincent Benet Ramsey).

The novel I’m urging you to read, like The Doom Prophecy, is a first novel, and like The Doom Prophecy, a first novel with a ‘wild and wacky’ plot and many ‘touching’ characters. It’s titled The Tiger’s Wife in Swamplandia! and was written by Karen ‘Téa’ R. Oberht Hornung. (The R. stands for Russell, the name of her father or of a Jack Terrier her father was fond of; Wikipedia is currently having quite a dustup on the issue. As for Hornung, Téa, as her fans call her, is apparently related to the great Green Bay Packers’ running back, Pat Hornung.)

The Tiger’s Wife in Swamplandia! tells the story of a young medical student who spends her weekends in the swamps of South Florida—an ambiguous term which here means the Everglades—collecting specimens of fungi that might someday lead to still more potent forms of erectile dysfunction drugs, when she comes upon a weird minstrel show from Coney Island called Shoot the Freak, stranded in the swamp and mourning the loss of the grandfatherly owner of the show in an ugly alligator attack, as if there’s any other kind.

Meanwhile the owner’s daughter, a rather tremendous and often bikini clad looker in her own right, has come upon a tiger escaped from another carnival also lost in the swamp after careening off the road on Alligator Alley following a near collision with the touring bus for the band Wang Chung (ask your parents—scratch that, ask your grandparents).

You can guess where the plot is going. The medical student falls for the daughter of the carney show operator. The tiger eventually is called upon to save the pair when they wander into a particularly tall stand of cattails during one of their lurid trysts and are attacked by the same alligator that killed the grandfatherly carney show operator, though how they knew the alligator was the same or that it answered to the name of George was a bit unclear. (The freak in the Shoot the Freak show, by the way, driven mad by the fact that no one had shot at him for days, futilely sacrifices himself to the alligator—I said futilely not feudally.)

There’s a cleansing ritual that’s pretty erotic in my view. But what’s really amazing about this story is that it turns out the tiger actually has a wife, a big bruiser of a gal, half Annie Oakley and half Dame Edith Sitwell, who comes roaring out of the swamps on an air boat, accuses the tiger of infidelity, and reveals herself to be the mother of both the medical student (by a Brazilian exchange student who died long ago in a samba accident) and the carnival show operator’s daughter (by the recently deceased carnival show operator himself—meaning the two protagonists are half sisters, and the tiger is none other than the medical student’s stepfather! Oh the drama, oh the deep down drama!)

Things roar along after that at a spanking pace with sparkling prose. Though I’m not saying The Tiger’s Wife in Swamplandia! is perfect. After all, even The Doom Prophecy has some (very minor) flaws.

Some readers will have trouble with the scene in which the tiger spontaneously combusts in a not entirely credible explosion that takes out the villain of the piece, a former Serbian war criminal who is negotiating to buy the Shoot the Freak franchise.

Not a problem for me. The scene of the tiger’s death left me weeping helplessly—I had grown quite fond of Tyg, as I had taken to calling him. As for the Serbian war criminal, the author’s decision to give him dialogue straight out of a Mickey Rooney movie, say of the Love Finds Andy Hardy period, was a risky move. I don’t think it fully works.

But these are minor quibbles, and I’ve had a bit too much to drink. The Tiger’s Wife in Swamplandia! is a fine book, and I’m feeling a bit sleepy. This always seems to happen when I drink. It didn’t use to. And though 2011 was not my year (as was not 2005 to 2010, more or less inclusive), my spirits lift to know that when the New York Times reveals the Top Ten books of 2012, The Doom Prophecy will be among the winderkins. Wow. I meant to say winners, and I said winderkins. Weird.

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How I Learned to Love Servicing the Rich

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Peter Vilbig

From their balcony Wall Street grandees drink champagne and mock OWS protesters

By now the evidence that a bifurcated economy has risen out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis—its upper branch expanding and healthy and its lower branch contracting and seriously ill—is overwhelming. The news stories documenting this reality come like pulses of blood from the lower depths: Price increases of only a few cents on basic necessities at Walmart lead buyers to stop purchasing products; a quaint sales technique from the distant past, layaway plans, are back; and consumer confidence has crashed to historic lows. Conversely, like showers of gold and jewels out of the high heavens, comes news of skyrocketing prices on luxury goods, feverish sales in high end Manhattan apartments, and the best market in years in yacht sales.

These facts get repeated often enough, but like peanut shells thrown at the rhinoceros in the zoo, they bounce off harmlessly. The news of—shhhh—endemic inequality is almost a new kind of fact, a ghost fact that ought to be of normal density and opacity yet somehow becomes weightless and transparent.

This invisible density, like dark matter, affects the public discourse, but in a distorted way. A discomfort seizes its denizens who react by longing for a return to a mythic status quo ante that in fact endorses the status quo hic et nunc.

Facing the truth means first facing—I started to say elementary economic reality—but it’s more basic than that. Call it simple math. Here’s the formula. The accrual of wealth at the upper margin—driven in significant measure by a transfer of money from the lower and middle registers—collapses the markets that those in the middle and at the bottom might otherwise compete in. To put this another way: The old route to social mobility was to build a better mousetrap. But the rich have no need of a better mousetrap, and the rest of us can’t afford one.

Is there hope? Well, it turns out there is, and it was hiding in plain sight all along. I discovered the solution to our economic woes indulging one of my favorite pastimes: thumbing through the endless mounds of old yellowing New York Times editions I keep stacked in my living room. I stumbled upon the following headline on this article dated November 27, 2010: “Some Very Creative Economic Fix-Its.”

In the article, Professor Andrew Caplin of New York University speculated about a new economy that he believes is emerging in the U.S. He told the Times: “Unfortunately, there will be income inequality. But enough people will make money that those who don’t would do well, in as much as they understand the needs of that group.” (italics mine)

The phrasing is somewhat convoluted, but the meaning is clear. If all the money is at the top, then the rest of us will survive the Darwinian free-for-all best by learning to enjoy servicing the rich. The Times went on to summarize Caplin’s views: “[The professor] says he expects a rise in what he calls ‘artisanal services,’ like cooks, nutritionists, small-scale farmers. He sees services emerging that aid the wealthy at the intersection of health and genetic science. He imagines a rise in technology services, too—experts who keep clients current about technology which can advance their interests in business, in the media, on search engines and so on.”

So memo to the rehashed flower children of Occupy Wall Street: Put down your pitchforks, and take up a broom—no, I don’t mean the kind you sweep the streets with but the smaller variety used by valets to brush the coats of their masters. Make yourself useful to the Wall Street grandees, the kind who were seen drinking champagne from a balcony during the early days of the misguided OWS protest. There are shoes to be shined and champagne glasses to be replenished. Whole new industries and specialties will spring up: Nose hair trimmers to the rich and famous. Ear wax removers. Foot massage specialists whose hands have been specially softened by nightly dips in hog lard. Highly skilled experts will make very satisfactory livings managing the rectal well-being of the elite. Additional favors will no doubt pay favorable rates. As for artist, some adjustments will be necessary. For musicians, soothing ditties with modest dance beats; for painters, a new vogue in heroic portraiture; for satirists, scathing portrayals of the lazy poor.

It’s quite simple really. Everyone agrees the country needs a course correction. Professor Caplin has given us the bearing. So quit your griping; there’s money to be made out there, y’all. Forward, then, to our glorious future.

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Genesis of a P.J. Harvey Fanboi

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Peter Vilbig

It’s a bit strange to find yourself mugged by a record album. At a certain age, that is. Young, it’s normal. But that obsessive, slightly sweaty, adolescent quality that goes along with getting a song stuck in the cerebral cortex in a way that feels like infatuation—that’s unexpected. And yet here I am under the sway of one Polly Jean Harvey and the record she released earlier this year: Let England Shake. My embarrassment doesn’t end there: I’ve been vaguely aware of P.J. for a couple of decades without ever really listening, so not only am I a sudden fan, I’m a late fan. It could hardly get worse. (Though in my own defense, Let England Shake hasn’t made that big a splash in the US market—nothing like Adele. I can’t imagine why.)

Faced with the incomprehensible—on so many levels—I turned to old behavior. Yes, just as I did ‘back in the day’ when I fell in love with a record, I went to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the place where teens can let the nation know what they’re thinking about ‘pop’ music. It was good to be back in old Studio B. Dick must have remembered me from way back when, because I was hustled right up on the bandstand, where, preliminaries over, Dick took me through the paces of the old ritual:

Dick: What makes this record special?
Me: Lyrics and beats, Dick!
Dick: Can you dance to it?
Me: Absolutely!
Dick: It reminds you of?
Me: Best record since Sgt. Pepper. Or maybe Trout Mask Replica. Anyway, also Early Velvet and Lou Reed of Dirty Blvd.
Dick: [slight puzzlement noted] Ah, great. Best lyric?
Me: So many, Dick. How about: ‘Goddamn Europeans/Take me back to beautiful England/And the gray damp filthiness/Of ages and battered books/And fog rolling down behind mountains/On the graveyards and dead sea captains.’
Dick: [puzzlement increasing] Yeah. Okay. Overall thoughts?
Me: An examination limning the role of violence in producing culture, nationhood, the self in the tradition of Macbeth—a work almost entirely unique in the history of pop culture rich in reference that ranges from Gallipoli and the Great War to Iraq, from Pound to Eddie Cochran.
Dick: [frozen smile, suddenly brightening into something genuine] Time for a commercial break!

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Attack of the Cumbrios

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Peter Vilbig

One of the earliest images extant of the cumbrio, at the corner of Prince and Lafayette in Soho.


The cumbrios first came among us some time ago, though the exact date of their arrival remains a puzzle even to the naturalists who have studied them. The reasons are simple: the cumbrios were initially quite shy, rarely showing their snouts in daylight or in crowded parts of the city; in addition, they looked very much like dogs. The adult male cumbrio has a tawny pelt, is about five feet long, and has a pointed nose (though not so pointed as a fox, for example). They are built low to the ground in a way that most dogs are not. In other words they look like a long, low-slung, and somewhat slender though powerfully muscled dog. If only.

•

We now recognize that the trouble with the cumbrios started soon enough. But at the time we only knew that the city was experiencing a series of disappearances. They were heartrending. A Stuyvesant student whose family had fought its way out of poverty, an ingénue who had won her first part in a Broadway production, a professor of nutrition. The only people getting any benefit out of this were the newscasters, but after the beloved weatherman for Channel 2, Olaf Kottfoder, (sometimes referred to as the Swedish tornado due to his amazingly pomaded swirling crest of silver hair) turned up missing, even the newscasters began to look worried. It would be some time before we realized that these disappearances were occurring because the cumbrios were really hungry.

•

Apparently the cumbrios arrived because the pickings were good. Wherever they had been before: well, not so good. Which raises an interesting point: wouldn’t these mammals, having sudden access to an unlimited nutrition source, grow fat and contented? Not so. The cumbrios were biologically a kind of wildcard: the more they ate, the more actively they consumed. This was a key feature of the cumbrios, their mad overreaching appetite, but sadly, that was not the half of it. For the feeding habits of the cumbrios underwent an important shift, and if we had only been smart enough, we would have understood then that like French aristocrats so gluttonous as to unable to be sated on anything less than pâté of hummingbird tongue, the cumbrios were soon killing us to satisfy a gourmandizing instinct.

•

It happened this way: within a few weeks of their arrival, the cumbrios stopped eating all their kill. The thumb and left foot of an Internet mogul were found outside a nightclub in the meatpacking district. A young schoolboy’s nose was found on Canal Street near a video game store. The left buttock of a socialite was discovered outside the parking garage of her Eastside townhouse. Manhattanites were soon waking to body parts strewn from Manhattan Valley to the Financial District. Admittedly, the police were ham-handed with their theory that a terrible axe murderer was on the loose. We should have been so lucky. But when bodies began to show up with a single vicious fang-like bite to the neck, producing, according to the coroner, almost instantaneous death through a traumatic puncturing of the thoracic vertebrae, the authorities finally admitted that the attacks might be the work of an animal (or of someone managing to pose as one). A more disturbing change in the style of the attacks soon followed that left officials reeling: victims were now being found, bodies largely intact, except for this startling and deeply disconcerting fact: their penises or vaginas had been torn away. We would later learn that the cumbrios had determined these to be the most delectable portions of the human anatomy.

•

Naturally, wild superstitions pulsed through the metropolis. The cumbrios were vampires or werewolves. Whole literatures were soon being published on these themes, revitalizing the moribund publishing industry. However, the first video recording of a cumbrio attack revealed the truth. The victim, a museum volunteer and baking student from Belarus, dressed in the shabby clothing of a Dostoyevsky hero, was walking on Bleecker Street near Bowery when a cumbrio trotted up to him. Amazingly, the cumbrio presented itself as a kind of super-emoting dog! Man’s best friend indeed!

In essence, the cumbrio seduced Kharchovay by calling up within him that most deeply buried desire that lies within the human being to connect with the animal within, to be a dog, yes, to bark like a dog. (This almost Svengali-like capacity to place the victim in a kind of trance was key to the cumbrios’ continuing success.) Soon the cumbrio jumped to its hind legs and placed its paws on Kharchovay’s chest. Kharchovay was leaning forward to complete the standard canine-human embrace, when, with a delicacy the police commissioner would later call almost human, the cumbrio killed the young lad almost instantly with a single thrashing bite of its powerful mandibles. Then, like the bears in Alaska that catch salmon only to slice open their bellies with a claw and solely eat the roe, the cumbrio neatly sliced Kharchovay’s jeans open and gracefully removed his penis, which the animal consumed by flipping it upward with a toss of the head and gobbling it down in much the same way that humans eat oysters.

•

Now that the true source of the attacks was known, people felt an odd relief. After all, the government would soon array its vast resources against the scourge, right? We wished. Yes, commissions were created. Yes, cable channels held panel discussions. Yes, unhinged harangues were delivered on C-Span. But the attacks continued. The various agencies complained about jurisdictional issues and argued that animal welfare laws had tied their hands. Soon political figures were casting blame on one another, while others darkly hinted that the politicians were benefiting in some mysterious way from the presence of the animals. The police grew demoralized, and the populace itself began to project a new psychological state hitherto unknown on our island, a state that can only be described, imperfectly, as glazed.

•

Though the cumbrios were no more intelligent than the average canine, the beasts soon took on a swagger, moving about the city with impunity. People stayed indoors, of course, whenever possible, but they needed to live, to get to work, to buy food; and as a result, the cumbrio continued to dwell among us, in its new ecosystem of Manhattan, where an odd sort of protection, hypo-legal in every sense, seemed to be afforded it. (Indeed, this may have explained the vast exodus of residents to nearby Brooklyn, where the cumbrio had not yet migrated—though who could believe that a trio of ancient bridges would confine the affliction for long to Manhattan.)

•

Well. We all know what’s happened. Time’s passed, as it always does. And while the pundocrats tell us that our ultimate reaction to the cumbrios is a testimony to human resilience and adaptability, we know this: the cumbrio has made itself master of our island. No thought, no decision, no action, can be taken that does not first take into account their violence and the ravaging effects of their attacks.

•

Yet as everyone knows, terror has its own expiration date. And as numerous commentators have pointed out, life distracts us from the very matters that most demand our attention. How true it is in the case of the cumbrios. For as many a wise person has noted in our dark days, who has the energy to attend to alarums, when we are occupied, as we now must be, with just getting through the day with genitals intact?

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An Act of Kindness and the Death of a Rat

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Peter Vilbig

The station at 7th Avenue, Brooklyn


The animal was clearly dying, and that’s the last thing I expected to see.

I was at the 7th Avenue stop of the Q train in Brooklyn, on my way to Manhattan. The weather was good that day, the station mild and pleasant and almost entirely deserted, probably because a train had passed through recently.

My Q train strategy: walk to the front of the platform (more chance for a seat there). So I’m heading in that direction about thirty feet from the end, and then I see something moving on the concrete before me, something small and definitely ugly and yet clearly alive, about the size of a grown man’s hand. I stop dead. What gives the moment its strangeness is that at first I can’t tell what it is. (I think: a bird, a squirrel, a rat—in the subway, naturally you think: rat.) A living thing is here where it shouldn’t be, not down in the tracks, but here where we wait for the train, and what I feel then is the very specific fear of contamination.

My first reaction is to back away, but I’m also curious, and so I step forward cautiously. And then I know: it’s a rat, after all—but so thin and desiccated as to be hardly recognizable, its coat sparse, patches of livid pink showing through, bleak eyes staring, dark and empty.

It’s trying to walk but keeps listing badly to one side.

I suppose it’s an odd thing to say, but until this moment, I’ve never considered what it must be like for a rat to face death—not abstractly, that is, but actually. And yet here it is, the dying animal’s eyes somehow alert (and yet still lusterless and empty) with something like puzzlement. And I understand that what I’m witnessing is the animal response to the intransigence and failure of the body.

And so here I stand, trying to decide whether I need to do anything—report this to the stationmaster? But what would he do? More people are gathering on the platform. I sense them behind me, and glance quickly back in that surreptitious manner of the subway. I have the feeling that everybody is aware of the animal lying there just beyond me, but they’re also trying to ignore it.

But now someone else has come closer. I turn my head (again, that quick, hooded look)—and see a woman perhaps in her late thirties. She has that somewhat pinched or strained appearance of people who have been in the city a long time, perhaps living alone and working some unglamorous job steadily and punctually. (It’s just a feeling I have—for all I know she may be a glamorous but dressed down magazine editor.) Then a moment unfolds between us, the urban ritual, in which two people consider whether to say something to one another and then decide not to.

We stand like that, watching the rat trying to drag itself off somewhere but unable to do so, while the rat watches us, or seems to, but without any real interest, its attention focused entirely on trying to make its awkward body function right.

At some point I become aware that the woman standing near me has opened her bag and is poking around inside it, and then I realize that she’s removed a small container. It’s transparent plastic, and so I see at once that it’s filled with dry cat food. Perhaps our eyes skip past one another’s again. But then she steps forward, closer to the rat—far closer than I would have dared to—and taps a few pellets of the cat food onto the concrete in front of the animal. She steps back to her former position. Our eyes may have met again, but again neither of us says anything. I have the feeling that almost everyone on the platform has noticed what she’s done. Then the grinding sound of a train enters the station, pushing a wind down the length of the tube. The rat begins to nibble on the dried pellets, but listlessly, as though it’s a purely mechanical reaction.

Then the train comes to a stop, the doors slide open, and everyone steps inside—the woman with the cat food has disappeared into another car. The doors slide shut, we’re sealed inside, and we begin to move, and then I catch one last glimpse of the rat with its little storehouse of food as the train enters the tunnel.

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