Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites

OVER the last year or two, I've given myself a crash course on social criticism -- wonderfully grim and eloquent books by Bell, Ehrenreich, both Packers (Vance and George) and various "mass culture" theorists of the '50s. I hope to get into some of them over the next few months.

One of the best of them is Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: American After the Meritocracy. I'm often stirred or intrigued by a book, but it's not often that one really changes the way I think. Hayes's book, which looks at the meritocracy that followed the WASP establishment, is one of a very short list. He considers how a system that supposedly rewarded talent and intelligence helped lead us into the Enron debacle, the mishandled Middle Eastern Wars, the Great Recession, baseball's steroid scandal and the mess that is the Catholic church.

I should say that the premise of this book very much goes against my grain: I've thought over the years that belief in a meritocracy was what my family had instead of religion or a sense of ethnicity. But reading Hayes argument and reflecting on how nasty the 21st century has been made things look different. (The book has recently been released in paperback.)

If you still have bitter memories of Judith Miller, Dick Cheney, Bernie Madoff, the cardinals who looked the other way during the pedophile scandal, and so on, Twilight of the Elites will help you make some sense of it all. They're the new "best and brightest," and just as fatuous and dangerous as Halberstam's gang that got us into the Vietnam War.

HERE is a Salon Q+A with the author by my friend David Daley.

The Web, Jaron Lanier and the Disappearing Middle Class

TODAY I have a long and I hope substantial Q+A with web visionary-turned-skeptic Jaron Lanier. Here it is. We get into some ideas that reflect on my investigation of the fate of the creative class in the 21st century, including the growth of a tiny digital plutocracy at the expense of the imperiled middle class.

The piece is provoked by his powerful and odd new book, Who Owns the Future?

Publishing and the Creative Class

IT was easy to miss, because of the chaos created by Sandy, but publishing may be on the verge of a serious contraction or at least rearrangement. It's hard to tell what is going on -- a lot of only vaguely related issues are coming together at once -- but this is not good news for people working in the business.

Here is my story from Salon, the latest in my series on the pressure exerted on the creative class. For now, my focus is on the announced merger of Penguin and Random House, but there could be more.

I speak to a number of people here, including FSG boss Jonathan Galassi and publishing veteran Ira Silverberg, now at the NEA.

Please don't let the story's provocative headline distract you from my argument. Capitalism is part of the problem here, indeed, but capitalism also allowed publishing (and the creative class itself) to develop and thrive.

What I fear is the wrong kind of capitalism -- the kind that would trouble not just people on the left, but folks like Teddy Roosevelt in his trust-busting days -- is taking over.

Oliver Stone's History Lesson

ABOUT a week ago, I spent some time with Oliver Stone, and his co-writer, the historian Peter Kuznick, talking about their new "Untold History of the United States." The 10-part program, which goes up on Showtime starting tonight, is in a Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky line in looking at international and domestic issues, starting with World War II.

Perhaps the key theme of the series is the idea of American exceptionalism, which the two see as quite dangerous, and tied to a Manichean worldview that dates back to the Puritans.

Of course, people on both sides of the aisle have reasons to be wary of Stone's view of history, American and otherwise. Check out my story, here, and let me know if you are persuaded.

Death of the Clerk

TODAY I've got a new story from my Salon series on the demise of the creative class. It looks at the humble store clerk and asks, What does it means that these people -- and the places they work, like Rocket Video, Tower Records, Dutton's Brentwood Books, and so on -- are disappearing?

I spoke to a video store clerk, writers Jonathan Lethem and Dana Gioia, an MIT research scientist and others.

Here is that story.

UPDATE: Here are some late-breaking figures about the decline of creative jobs in Southern California.

Christopher Hitchens, R.I.P.

SOMETIMES even when you know something's coming, it knocks the wind out of you when it arrives. That's the way I felt this morning when I opened the paper and saw that Hitchens had succumbed to cancer that virtually every reader knew he had. (Here is the New York Times obit.)

I've spent the last few mornings reading an essay or two in his latest collection, Arguably. I don't always, or even often, agree with Hitchens, and on some political matters, such as the Iraq War, I tend to disagree rather strenuously. But I can't think of a livelier or wider ranging writer: The essays on turmoil in the Middle East, rebel John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Orwell's Animal Farm, or conservative hero Edmund Burke could only have come from Hitch.

I'd long enjoyed Hitchens' writing, but thought of him as a kind of witty, debate-club contrarian until I met him in 2004, during an article I was writing about his friend Martin Amis. Hitchens and I had a drink -- it was about noon, so mine was lemonade, his a double (or was it a quadruple?) Johnny Walker. Hitch was funny and engaging as we spoke about shared interests -- the life and work of Salman Rushdie, George Orwell -- and entirely sincere on the matter of the Iraq War. (Which ended, sort of, the same week he died.) I was not convinced of this war launched by an incompetent boy king, but I was entirely persuaded that Hitchens had his reasons, and they were not merely for show.

(Here is a smart piece for Salon about the told-you-so by religious zealots after the death of the atheist writer.)

Since then, out mutual friend and literary agent Steve Wasserman, who was at his bedside last night, has kept me apprised on Hitch's condition; I felt like I knew him even though he would not likely have recognized my name. I'll wager that Hitchens, because he wrote so personally and so forcefully, had that effect on a lot of people. We won't see his like again.

UPDATE: Here is a fascinating Katha Pollitt obit that does not let him off the hook for his political switch, his bullying or his self-destructive drinking.

The Perils of the Creative Class

WE were supposed to be entering a laptop wielding, latte-sipping world where the Internet made us all more "connected," weren't we? But the Internet, combined with the bad economy and a restructuring of American life, has led to an erosion of the very creative class it was supposed to invigorate.

HERE is my new piece in Salon which looks at the state of the much hyped creative class in 2011. It's the first of a series in which we look at how artists, writers and people who deal with culture are faring -- a story that has been largely untold.

I spoke to a number of sources, including artists and writers struggling with the creative life and Internet skeptics Jaron Lanier and Andrew Keen.

Pres. Obama and the Plight of the Middle Class

FOLKS, I'll be appearing on KCRW's To the Point with Warren Olney, which will broadcast today at noon on 89.9 FM in Los Angeles and later, presumably, elsewhere around the country on the PRI network.


We'll be talking about Obama's jobs speech and the larger issue of the middle class during the economic downturn. I'm there to discuss my experience as a laid off newspaper reporter who's struggled with the collapsed economy.


One bit of Obama's speech was especially resonant for me: 

These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share -- where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in a while. If you did the right thing, you could make it. Anybody could make it in America.

Anyway, we'll be discussing this and more shortly.

Update: With the show now up and broadcasting from KCRW, I want to recommend a very intelligent discussion in which your humble blogger was just okay.

One point: Chicago small business owner Jay Goltz, who wrote a smart piece for the New York Times about hiring, took issue with something I said about taxes and the rich. He made the point that someone making $250,000 is in very different shape than a billionaire hedge fund guy. I did not have time to respond, but I agree completely. (We need more small business owners like him and fewer too-big-to-fail corporations.)

Finally, this matter connects to a larger point which I did not get time to make, but: The most affluent 400 people in this country hold as much wealth as the bottom 150 million. So to even talk about the middle class is a bit of a nostalgic fiction, at least in the way we used to discuss it as a robust center of American life.

These days, politics dances to the tune of the top 1 percent, not the middle class. There is class warfare in this country: It's that very richest tier against the rest of us -- and they're winning. Bigtime.

The Failure of AT&T

THE other night, during the relentless stretch of rains that hit Los Angeles around Christmas, I was awoken just after 1 a.m. by pounding on my front door. Stumbling to the door in my bathrobe, I was greeted by two uniformed members of the local police department, one of whom shined his flashlight into my eyes.

         The reason for this unexpected visit? In large part this was caused by the idiocy and selfishness of AT&T. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

         “Is everything alright in there?” one of the cops asked. Apparently my phone line -- which had shorted during the storm -- had dialed 911.

The two asked if they could come in, and as my wife walked out of the bedroom rubbing her eyes, the officers went into my 4-year-old son’s room to make sure he was safe and sound.

         I was several days into having no phone or Internet service – the fourth time I’d lost my connection since mid-November. The rains made life difficult for a lot of people, but these problems go back long before the bad weather. David Lazarus, in his excellent column in today’s LA Times, points out that AT&T still has 70,000 “trouble tickets” in Southern California.

I work, of course, as a journalist and blogger; losing my connection is serious business. I had to speak to a very rigorous New York Times copy editor from a loud coffee shop where I spent most mornings getting a few hours of WiFi for the price of a latte. I ran to the local library – grateful for its presence but cursing the shortened hours – so I could email articles to the LA Times and LA Weekly. I became much harder than usual for my editors to contact.

And since the only consistent line I had to the outside world was my cell, which does not work very well from my hilly neighborhood, it was almost impossible to have a conversation for longer than about a minute. My Christmas calls to my family back east did not exactly benefit from this.

I spent hours calling AT&T, punching my land line number into my cell phone, waiting on hold for 30 minutes at a time, getting passed from one customer service person to another, having to retell the story each time.

Lazarus spoke to the company’s technicians, who argued that the problems were aggravated by bad weather but did not have to be nearly this bad:

"The company hasn't kept up with maintenance and upgrades for the network," one said. "That's why the problems are so widespread."

The technicians said cables and phone lines wouldn't have been so waterlogged if their casing and insulation had been inspected and repaired at more regular intervals. Both cited hungry squirrels chewing on lines as a key reason water gets in.

They also said flooding of underground vaults and pipes wouldn't have caused so much damage if the facilities had been regularly maintained.

Eerily, everyone who came out from the phone company was friendly and seemed competent, but in every case but the last (knock wood), my service was down again in a matter of days.         

         By the time the cops came back a few days later, after another errant 911 call, it was more stupid than scary. (Though a serious waste of the police’s time. And if another emergency call came in, the officer told me, I’d have to pay for their appearance.)

Here’s Lazarus again: I'm not telling AT&T how to run its business. But for a company that pocketed $12.3 billion in profit in the third quarter of 2010 alone, maybe it wouldn't hurt to have a few more techs on hand.

         It was only Sunday, TWO FULL WEEKS after I first reported the trouble, that my service was restored. Since mid-November, I’ve been without phone and Internet more often than I’ve had it. This is the worst customer service I’ve had in my life, proof that companies cannot regulate themselves. Here’s hoping AT&T does as better job in 2011, or it risks losing a big chunk of its business.

WikiLeaks and Daniel Ellsberg

IN September, I interviewed Daniel Ellsberg, famed for his role in leaking the Pentagon Papers and thus helping to end the Vietnam War. At the time he spoke of the importance of the actions of WikiLeaks, arguing that governments keep so much secret that almost any leak is a good one. (Here is my piece, timed to the excellent documentary on the former RAND analyst.)


Now he has come out again in favor of WikiLeaks: Here is a letter to Amazon, terminating his account and urging a boycott of the online retailer.


"I'm disgusted by Amazon's cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China's control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing." 


The whole letter is pretty scorching.


And here's a relevant bit from my article: 


He's heartened by the recent cache of documents released by WikiLeaks on the Afghan war, though he thinks newspapers are more credible places to publish than the Internet. But he applauds the site for offering a clearer look at what the U.S. government is up to: "There should be a Pentagon Papers out ever year," he says.

Billy Bragg and Mavis Staples at UCLA

FRIDAY night at Royce Hall saw an unlikely double bill, with British folk-punk hero Billy Bragg playing a full set mixing politics and pop before soul goddess Mavis Staples, who channels the spirit of the black church and the civil rights movement.

This incongruous pairing ended up being a blast, though the two may have more in common politically than musically. (Both artists have also, of, course, worked with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy.)

It's easy to love Billy Bragg's early music -- those rough songs from the '80s belted out with a thick British accent and an electric guitar. For a while in the early '90s it seemed like Bragg was going to ride the alt-rock boom into something like fame: He had a small hit with the jaunty "Sexuality," co-written with Johnny Marr.  But the music that's come since the early '90s with some exceptions like the Woody Guthrie records with Wilco, has seemed less urgent.

So it was a thrill to see Bragg set up solo on the Royce stage with just a stack of amps and Telecaster. His set leaned heavily on political songs, including a cover of Woody Guthrie's "I Don't Have a Home in This World Anymore," and some new numbers that sounded good. His political rants in between songs were about as engaging and persuasive in their common sense and compassion. The recent U.S. elections clearly inspired him.

And his love songs -- "Greetings to the New Brunette," "Milkman of Human Kindness," "A New England" -- still sound great. I'd forgotten how great Bragg could be live. My wife lamented that she could not vote for this British citizen for president.

The highs of Mavis Staples -- best know as part of the Staples Singers -- were high indeed even if she was less consistent than Bragg. Alongside gospel -- "Creep Along, Moses" -- and soul numbers, with stirring vocal harmonies, she sang CCR's "Wrote a Song For Everyone" and The Band's "The Weight."

At times in the set Staples seemed to get lost, and she's some of her voice's middle range sounded worn. But Staples gave off so much decency and positive energy it was hard to mind, and her band was spectacular.

A fuller review HERE by Steven Mirkin in the Orange Co Register.

Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets

THE home where the once-reviled Daniel Ellsberg has lived since the late '70s is hard to find: It's down a small redwood lined street and its address is out of order with its neighbors. When you review what Ellsberg went through in the '70s -- national manhunt, Nixon hiring thugs to break into his therapist's office, Kissinger denouncing him as "the most dangerous man in America" -- it's not hard to see why Ellberg, now nearing 80, would choose to live somewhere a bit removed. 

Nixon and Mao, 1972

A few weeks ago I met Ellsberg to discuss his leaking of the Pentagon Papers -- the record of our involvement in Indochina -- which helped destroy the Nixon presidency and, eventually, bring an end to the war. We talked about the events of those days, secrecy itself, and the very fine POV documentary that goes up tonight on PBS, The Most Dangerous Man in America.


HERE is my piece from today's LATimes. Sobering stuff.


There's some fascinating stuff in the doc, some of which comes from Ellsberg's memoir of the period, Secrets, including tapes in which Nixon urges Kissinger to use nuclear weapons in the conflict. "I just want you to think big." Nixon also told his secretary of state: You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care."

"California Crackup"

Anyone living in California right now knows how hard the state is straining, with unemployment above 12 percent and well over that in some inland areas, schools slicing teachers and firing librarians, the infrastructure rotting, and very little faith in our action-hero governor.

Joe Mathews was one of the many talented investigative journalists at the LAT Times when I arrived, and like many he chose to leave what he considered a sinking ship. He is now Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and co-author Mark Paul, a former state deputy treasurer and journalist, of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It. The book is brisk, well-argued, at times darkly funny -- and deserves an audience far broader than the policy wonks who will be drawn to it.

What follows is a Q&A with Mathews on the crisis facing the state, and the hope that things might change.

 -For all the wealth, creativity and innovation in the Golden State, we're near the bottom in a number of categories, including employment. What are the direst indicators?

California has traditionally lagged the nation in unemployment, one of the consequences of being a state that attracts lots of fortune-seekers and risk-takers. (Such people often fail and experience hard times). The most dire indicators have to do with education and higher education, which is where the budget crisis has its most pernicious effects. Before the current crisis, California was not producing enough college graduates to meet its own economics and jobs needs; the Public Policy Institute of California says we'll be short one million college grads in 2025. That's a problem not just for the state but for America. U.S. competitiveness has lagged as we've fallen behind other countries in college graduates. To catch up, California needs to produce more graduates. Because of our problems with governance and the budget, we're going to be producing fewer graduates now and for at least the next few years.

-Every state has its problems, especially these days. Why do California's seem so intractable?

Because we have a governing system that does not allow us to make decisions in a timely, democratic fashion. Our system is three systems at war with each other. We elect lawmakers and executives through a majoritarian system -- first-past-the-post, plurality elections, which is in essence a British system for making majorities. Then we ask them to govern in a system that requires two-thirds votes -- essentially consensus -- to get things done. And on top of that, we throw a third system, an initiative system that permits voters to lock in all kinds of spending and tax mandates into the constitution, without providing off-setting moneys or cuts in the budget to make things balance. Such a system simply can't work. So Californians are in a position where they know there are problems that need to be addressed, but they live under a governing system that gives them no clear means to address them.

-How much of a culprit is Prop. 13 and other instance of so-called direct democracy like initiatives and recalls?

Recalls aren't a problem of this system. And there's nothing wrong with the use of initiative--other states and countries use it, and don't have California's governance problem. The real problem is with the rules around our initiative process--particularly the inflexibility of the process. California is the only place on earth where an initiative can't be amended by the legislative body without another vote of the people. And California, unlike most places with the process, does not give the legislative body an opportunity to get involved in the process. We've made it a fourth branch of government, beyond the reach of the other branches.

Prop 13 is a contributor to this, not so much because of what it did on property taxes but because of its role in centralizing power in Sacramento. Prop 13, by making it hard for local communities to raise their own taxes and revenues, essentially shifted power into the hands of a very few people in Sacramento, who make all the tax and spending decisions (albeit with all sorts of restrictions also imposed by the people). And when those people don't get along, the entire state -- including every local government -- suffers.

-The Governor has said he inherited a broken system, which your book bears out. Does he deserve any of the blame for the mess we're all in now?

He does and he doesn't. I'm more sympathetic than most Californians to the job he's done. I think he's made multiple, difficult, honest attempts to fix the state's broken budget system. But he hasn't been able to convince voters -- and frankly, his proposed solutions, while having some important elements (he has pushed for a larger rainy day fund than the ones we currently have), haven't gone far enough in unwinding the current system we have. And in political reform, he wasted time too much time pursuing and winning very, very modest reforms in redistricting and open primary when we need bolder changes (such as multi-member districts that include proportional representation) to create real political competition.

And in his own policies, he pursued too much borrowing, particularly at the beginning of his first term with Prop 57. But as with nearly everything in California, voters went along. And that's the most important point: the authors of the current system are voters. To blame a governor or legislators is beside the point; they are merely the clean-up crew for the constitutional messes we ourselves have made.

-What are some of the things that need to be done?

Three big things. First, we need a new election system that makes every vote count and gives the legislative body enough credibility so that voters can be convinced to restore a saner system. The best way to do that is by adopting the best of successful voting systems all over the world (in the same way Apple took the best technologies from around the world and molded them into an iPhone). We should have regional legislative districts with multiple members, some of whom are chosen by proportional representation, so that every vote counts (a party needs every vote it can get in a proportional system, so both parties would compete everywhere), so that media cover legislative elections and agendas (regional districts would solve if they were based on the regions covered by media organizations--with single-member districts, regional media like TV stations or the LA Times have no incentive to cover each little legislative race), and so that everyone has representation (even Republicans in San Francisco might have one or two Republicans representing them in a regional district).

Once you've done that, you need to get rid of the two-thirds rules that govern budgets, taxes, school funding, local government funding and just about everything else. The majority party in the legislature must be accountable for what happens in the legislature; two-thirds rules obscure accountability becasue both parties must sign on. As part of stripping the constitution of all sorts of budget restrictions, we need to devolve power back to local governments -- including the power to raise taxes -- so that spending and taxing decisions are made on a particular program are made at the same level of government.

Finally, we need to update our system of initiative and referendum in ways that give more power and choice both to the people and to their elected representatives. The initiative process should no longer provide a way to do an end-run around the legislature; the legislative body should be able to change anything the people do, and ballot initiatives that mandate spending or tax cuts must live within the legislative budget. But by the same token, it should be easier for the people to call a referendum on an act of the legislature. The goal is to get a noisy conversation going between the people and their government -- that's direct democracy.

-Given that Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman are lined up for the gubernatorial election, and giving the existing mix in Sacramento, what are the chances the state'e leadership will take these kinds of serious steps? What will it take to get real change?

I don't see any hope in Brown or Whitman. They are running conventional campaigns that at best ignore -- and at worst lie about -- the realities of the state's governing system. If we're lucky, the next governor will be irrelevant to the reform discussion. Voters also might note that if they leave their ballots blank when they vote for governor, that decision will make it easier for reformers to qualify ballot measures to change the system (since the qualification standards are a percentage of the number of people who vote for governor). A none-of-the-above vote has real force in California.

Real change requires major constitutional changes. That can be done either through a convention or through a revision commission. It will require multiple votes of the people. And it will require years of work to educate the public and put public opinion in line with reality. Californians believe they can have something for nothing from government (they also believe things that are wrong, like that prisons are the number one state expenditure and that the lottery provides significant money to public education).

I am not terribly optimistic about the ability of Californians to be educated and take the action that is needed.

If you look at California history, it often takes a truly terrible event -- a profound catastrophe like the San Francisco earthquake (which fueled the major Progressive changes of the early 20th century) -- to get Californians engaged in making major government reform. I'm afraid that it will require something of that scale to spur us to action. In other words, if we're not doomed, we're probably doomed.

BARACK OBAMA AND EZRA JACK KEATS

Amazing amount of excitement, anticipation, and i expect resentment and suppressed fear right now around the obama inauguration... i will try to avoid getting too deeply into politics in this blog despite my fascination with it -- i've learned the hard way over the years that there is actually some wisdom to the old warning about talking about politics and religion across the dinner table.

but obama's arrival has me thinking about someone else: old-school children's writer ezra jack keats. we learned about him as children, as the first writer to bring black characters into mainstream kid lit -- i guess i assumed he was black himself. but turns out he was of polish-jewish descent -- his dad's last name was "katz."

so first off, i love the fact that the offspring of european jews took the surname of england's greatest romantic poet (who was himself a cockney and spoke that weird rhyming slang) and created a character who resembles, both physically and in his habits of mind, the nation's first black president. (born just a few months before keats' best book was released.)

by that i mean that the protagonist of "the snowy day," 1962, who lives in that keatsian world of brooklyn-ish brownstone pastoral, shares not only a haircut but an introspective, analytical temperament with the nation's soon-to-be-leader. there are several scenes, including one of peter in from the cold, soaking in the bathtub, where there are virtually no words on the page and we see him >thinking<: it's among the few images i know from kid lit that show characters in the act of reflection or imagining. (peter also shows up in another book i like, "whistle for willy.") there's a wonderfully simple illustration of his footsteps across the white snow that reminds me of the work of alt-comic artists like seth.

it's too soon to tell how obama will govern, and how he will handle this incredibly bad economy and a demoralized nation -- i will not make any predictions... but i think it's fair to say it's been a long while since we've had a president with this reflective, even poetic, temperament that we find in keats' books. (there's probably a counter-argument here that what we need is "a man of action." let's table that for the moment.)

so my final irony here is that my son ian, a blond, blue-eyed two-year-old living in the hills above 21st century los angeles, can respond so fully to the tale of a black kid walking in the snow, almost five decades ago, in a city my kid has never visited and a season he has never really experienced. the book gives ian a glimpse into a world he's never seen before.  through his enthusiasm, he's taken me there too.

Photo credit: Ezra Jack Keats Foundation