Give The People What They Want

American Fiction was one of this year’s Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. It in turn is based upon Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. I read the novel and watched the film in pretty close proximity to each other.

Let me just start by saying that both are excellent. Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture, I would place it in my personal top two or three. The novel is the perfect combination of being amusing, fun to read, having compelling themes, and being an unconventional read.

The closest parallel that I can think of is the film Memento vs the short story upon which it was based, Memento Mori. The screenplay was by Christopher Nolan and the short story was written by his brother Jonathon.

They are both outstanding examples of their respective forms. They clearly share a source DNA. Even though from the same material, their messages are different. In the film, it’s a complex, clever, twisted, whodunit. The short story is much more philosophical. Given the main character’s short term amnesia, this results in almost a multiverse situation where every few moments a new person inhabits the amnesiac’s body. Most of these new people are idiots. Every now and then, for a moment, a genius inhabits the amnesiac’s body. It is paramount that, when a genius does step in, that they figure out some way to leave breadcrumbs so that when the next genius occupies the body, they can pick up where the previous one left off. It’s an interesting idea to explore that appears nowhere in the film.

Similarly, although their plots are nearly identical, Erasure and American Fiction have different messages.

In both, the protagonist is Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. Monk is highly intellectual. His father, brother, and sister are all doctors. He eschewed the practicalities of medicine and studied esoteric theories of literature. He is now a published author. Since his books are literate, sophisticated, reinterpretations of Greek classics, they are not best sellers. His agent encourages him to write more Black. He finds this infuriating since he is a Black man and, by definition, anything that he writes is Black, be it about a Greek classic or not. While he is having trouble getting his current novel published, he notices that another Black author is experiencing wild success with her crude, stereotypical depiction of Black culture.

All of this comes to a head when his sister is killed. She was the primary caregiver for their mother, who is rapidly beginning to degenerate mentally as she ages. Monk is forced to give up his university position and move to the East Coast to take care of his mother. Faced with astronomical healthcare costs, his novel not being published, and his frustration at seeing other Black authors succeed with fare that he considers offensive, he lashes out in fury and pounds out the most horrible, hackneyed story of being Black in America

Called My Pafology, he sends it to his agent as a joke. The agent sends this monstrosity out to publishers and, lo and behold, it immediately gets interest. Ultimately Monk receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for the publishing rights and millions of dollars for the movie rights. When Monk, still raging, insists that the title of the book be changed to Fuck, if anything, interest becomes even more intense.

On the one hand, Monk has now averted a serious financial crisis brought on by having to take care of his mother. On the other hand, he now hates himself for being part of the problem of Black representation in American culture. When he is interviewed under the book’s nom de plume of Stagg R Leigh, although he just sits there silently, the inevitably white interviewer is simultaneously thrilled and terrified to be in proximity of such an authentically Black presence.

The film presents all of this wonderfully. Jeffrey Wright is amazing in the role of Monk. Having seen four of the five Oscar nominations for Best Actor (including Wright), I think that Wright would have received my vote. He does a great job of portraying the conflict that this brings to Monk. The rest of the cast brings their A Game as well. It is simply a very well done film.

Of course, I won’t spoil it since the film is so new, but the ending is possibly the best ending that I’ve seen in years. The ending was shocking, funny, and brought all of the main issues to conclusion. Beyond that, it was also meta-fictional.

The reason why I specifically called out the meta-fictional component of the film is that it’s a callback to the novel. The novel is more sophisticated in its structure than the film. Written in the first person, there are several novel in a novel elements. For one, the entirety of Monk’s novel Pafology is included in Erasure. A short story, a metaphor of how stacked the world is against Black people and how greased the skids are for White people is hilariously told in the form of a game show. Strewn throughout the novel are partially developed story ideas. There are conversational snippets among various historical avant garde artists suffering from cultural oppression. Also interspersed are fishing anecdotes. I mean, seriously, the film ends with a Latin quote from Sir Isaac Newton. The novel is a rich stew of literature and I was there for all of it.

I’m guessing that this probably would have been one of those films that would have never been noticed by the Academy before it started taking significant steps in diversification in recent years primarily due to the #OscarsSoWhite movement. I saw over twenty-five films that were released in 2023. On the one hand, that’s a lot. On the other hand, it’s a small fraction of the films that were released. I’m just so happy that this film somehow was raised so that it caught my attention. Not only that, but the film in turn sparked my interest in the novel and my newfound desire to read more of Percival Everett’s work.

From Selling Beaver Pelts To Dying On The Titanic

Title: Astor

Rating: 4 Stars

As a word of warning, this book is not an in depth history of the many generations of the Astor family. It’s a slightly gossipy, relatively brief history. Since the Astor family was so deeply embedded into New York City (except for the branch that escaped and ultimately became titled British peers), this book also serves as a even briefer and lighter weight history of New York City itself.

As probably most people know, Anderson Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt. The Vanderbilt’s were another incredibly wealthy New York family that managed to squander an unimaginably vast fortune in a bit over a hundred years. In fact, Cooper remembers, as a young boy, meeting Brooke Astor, the last of the Astors, at a lunch where Gloria and Brooke, both representing the last of their family line, warily engage each other.

It all starts with John Jacob Astor. He migrated to the US at the age of twenty in 1783. He wasn’t exactly a rags to riches story as he did arrive equipped with some of his brother’s flutes to sell. Originally planning on being a butcher, he changed when he saw some of the animal pelts available that could be sold back in London at great profit.

Not afraid to get his hands dirty, he started working directly with the Native Americans and fur trappers that provided the product. Doing so allowed him to drive efficiencies into the business and made him wealthy. Being an early prototype of a Jeff Bezos kind of businessman, he ruthlessly began to extend his reach and to dominate the market. He even had dreams of creating a West Coast nation separate from the US that would be essentially his domain. Although he failed in that goal, his reach was continent wide, as can be seen by the number of towns named Astoria that are dotted around this country.

Back in New York City, he saw another financial opportunity. At the time (and is true now), there was a housing shortage for the waves of immigrants that were landing on our shores. Astor seized this opportunity by buying up large tracts of land in Manhattan. He’d then throw up some primitive tenements, which soon were overrun with multiple families per room. This was a source of even more profit for Astor. I’m not sure if he was quite the first, but he was certainly the largest slumlord in New York City, setting the pattern for generations of building owners that continue to this day.

His son, William Astor Sr, continued on the tradition of his father. Much more of a plodder and conventional businessman, he increased his family’s real estate holdings. He’s most famous for starting the library that ultimately became the New York Public Library.

When William died, he split his estate among two sons, John Jacob Astor III (the II, the son of the original, was mentally unstable, so had no role in the family dynasty) and William Jr.

When talking about multi-generational wealth, it seems to be true that the competitive drive begins to shrivel a bit by the third generation. This seems to be the case for the Astor family.

William Sr probably made a mistake in splitting his estate into two pieces. There was no longer a single driver for the Astor fortune. JJ III did continue on the traditional role of managing his inherited assets. It turned out that William Jr was more interested in activities like horse racing and cruising around on his yacht.

Things get even more divided with the next generation. The naming also gets even more confusing. John Jacob Astor III had a son named William Waldorf Astor. Disenchanted with New York City, Waldorf moved to England. Ultimately, he was able to basically buy his way to a peerage, becoming Viscount Astor. That title lives on today.

William Jr had a son named, you guessed it, John Jacob Astor IV. Known as Jack, he is most famous for dying on the Titanic. Before he died, he had a child named Vincent Astor. Known generally as a difficult person, his first marriage did not get off to a great start since it was generally known that his wife was a lesbian. Not only that, at his wedding, he had the mumps, which among other things, can have a side effect of sterility. Considering that he had no children, that seems a likely result.

Vincent remarried again. When that marriage failed, he refused to divorce unless his soon to be ex-wife found him a replacement (no joke). One of her candidates was a Bush (yes, as in the Bush family that produced two Presidents). Independently wealthy, she was not particularly enamored with Vincent, reportedly telling him, “Marry you? I don’t even like you”. When told that he had only three years to live, Bush replied “But what if the doctors are wrong?”. Considering he was still a very wealthy man, those are two pretty harsh digs. Eventually, Brooke became his third wife and the last American Astor.

At the same time that he’s relating all of the gossip and drama in the Astor family tree, Cooper used the Astor name indirectly to relate back to significant New York City highlights. One relates to a very violent riot that was ostensibly caused by the performance by a Shakespearean actor. Although this was a tragic event, I’m always amused by the fact that a riot could take place in 1849 over this (I wrote about it here, in a blog title that still makes me smile, My Shakespearean Kicks Your Shakespearean’s Ass).

Another historical event is discussed because of a second John Jacob Astor in New York City. Yes, there was more than one. In fact, the second Astor was probably a not that distant relation of the original. However, he was not as successful and ended up dying in poverty. Cooper used his story as the starting point about the New York City Draft Riots, a multi day riot in which several people died. It was sparked when the Union first instituted a draft in 1863 during The Civil War. Poor Irish workers, understanding that they were to be cannon fodder for a cause that they didn’t even believe in, rioted before the draft could start. It turned into a race riot where most of the people killed were Black, including the burning down of an orphanage for Black children.

Although this was certainly not an exhaustive history, Cooper is an engaging and entertaining writer. If you’re interested in a lighter weight history of New York City using the Astor family tree as a framing device, this would certainly be worth your while to read.

Ozzie and Harriet Run A Death Camp

Title: The Zone of Interest

Rating: 5 Stars

I know that I’m late to this film. This is now the ninth film that I’ve seen of the ten films nominated for 2024 Best Picture by the Academy. The only one that I haven’t seen yet is Past Lives. I don’t know, it just seems like a pretty basic missed connection love story kind of film. I may or may not get around to watching it.

However, I loved the The Zone of Interest. It’s an interesting conundrum for a filmmaker. How do you film a historical event that is unspeakably, unimaginably evil? Specifically, how do you depict the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration / death camp? How do you depict Rudolph Höss, the commandant there for three and a half years. Caught and hanged after the war, when told that he was responsible for three and a half million victims, he replied that he was only responsible for two and a half million, the other million simply starved or died from disease (clearly not his fault, right?).

Some filmmakers try to picture the reality of this madness. Think of Schindler’s List and Ralph Fiennes’ chilling portrayal of commandant Amon Göth. Some go for overkill of the details. Think of Shoah, a nine hour documentary interviewing Germans that had varying levels of involvement in the mass deaths.

The Zone of Interest makes a different choice. The interior of the camp itself is never shown. You never see any deaths. Instead, the film focuses on the Höss family. Rudolph was married and had five children. They set up house directly outside the gates of the camp. The house is a large, immaculate, beautiful house full of laughing children. There is a very nice garden that shares a wall with the prison camp.

In this domestic bliss there is a constant stream of discordant noises in the background. There are the occasional gun shots. There are the barks of vicious guard dogs. There is the sound of trains. There are heavy mechanical noises. There are regular plumes of smoke. Sometimes there are flames shooting out of a furnace.

It seems as if this lovely family and their lovely home are obliviously placed right next to hell. Of course, that is precisely the situation. The head of the house, the loving father Rudolph, is the lead devil.

It’s clear that, when the film takes place, that the Höss family has lived there for some time. No one, not even the children, reacts to the sound of gunfire.

The willful ignorance of the suffering taking place just a few meters from their house is breathtaking. Their dinner tables, garden tables, and picnics are laden with more food than any of them can possibly eat. Their ever present dog sneaks uneaten food off of the table. Meanwhile, next door, victims are starving to death. Every night, a polish girl steals out at night to hide apples for the inmates to find.

There’s not a lot of backstory to the characters, but I’m guessing that the mother grew up poor. She has that look and attitude of someone that has climbed to a height never contemplated. This has made her cruel. She’s harsh to the servants, off handedly threatening one by telling her that with one word her husband can burn her to dust. She makes offhand jokes about the Jews living next door. Her mother comes to visit. Initially impressed by the house, once she actually understands the horror of what’s going on next door, she abruptly leaves.

The Nazis go to great lengths to pretend that evil is not taking place. In one scene, several German industrialists meet with Höss to discuss a new method of cremation. They carefully use terms like how the product moves through their system and the expected increase in yield. If you did not know differently, you wouldn’t guess that they are talking about mass incineration of executed prisoners.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the banality of evil. She was talking about Adolph Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Final Solution. She found him not to be evil incarnate but a bland, bloodless bureaucrat ambitiously moving up the Nazi hierarchy. Since designing mass murder was what an ambitious Nazi bureaucrat had to do, he did it.

Is this what the film is touching on here? Höss and his wife are up and comers. Although the film doesn’t go into it, Höss was a pretty early member of the Nazi Party. He clearly saw the Nazi Party as the ticket to fulfil his ambition. Perhaps, if the Nazi Party didn’t exist, might he have ended up a middle manager of a factory somewhere?

People say, when doing something that they know is not right, that you have to break a couple of eggs to make an omelet. In the case of Rudolph Höss, he had to break three and a half million eggs (give or take a million).

This film was a disturbing picture of what the banality of evil really looks like.

Short People Got No Reason To Live

Within the span of a week, I read the novel and watched the film Anatomy of a Murder. I hadn’t done the novel / film thing for a while. Since I’d never really heard of the novel or the film before last week, this might seem to be a strange exercise to embark upon.

Even though little known now, these were actually significant events in their time. Released in 1958, the novel was a best seller and even now gets consistently good reviews. It was so popular that the film version was released shortly thereafter in 1959.

What distinguished the novel was that the author was a practicing attorney. A district attorney for ten years, John Voelker (writing under the pen name of Robert Traver) had been voted out of office and was kind of at loose ends. Among other things, he decided to write a novel that would, instead of sensationalizing a trial and the legal system, would actually describe how it actually works. The result of that was the novel Anatomy of a Murder.

There’s a couple of interesting things about the film. First of all it was directed by Otto Preminger. Preminger is a fairly famous director of film noirs (most famously, Laura) and socially liberal films. Being a fan of film noir, it’s weird that this is the first Preminger film that I’ve seen. It has an impressive film cast starring a range of actors in various stages of their careers. Everyone from James Stewart to George C Scott to Eve Arden to Orson Bean to Ben Gazzara appear in this film.

The basic plot is the same in both the novel and the film. Barney Quill allegedly rapes Laura Manion (Eve Arden). Infuriated, Laura’s husband Frederick (Ben Gazzara) goes to the bar where Barney is serving drinks and immediately shoots him dead. There are multiple witnesses. There is no question of guilt.

Into this impossible situation comes Paul Biegler (James Stewart). Biegler was previously a district attorney until voted out of office. Now in private practice, Laura Manion asks him to represent Frederick. Stuck with limited options, Biegler figures that his best option is to enter a plea of temporary insanity.

Knowing that this is a high profile case, the borderline competent new district attorney gets help in the form of a state attorney Claude Dancer (George C Scott). During the trial, it is the very aggressive Dancer pitted against Biegler. Much of the trial is the two of them sniping at each other with the judge (Joseph Welch) trying to keep the court in order. Even though it’s a 65 year old film, I won’t spoil it. Since James Stewart is the star and protagonist, I’m thinking that you can probably guess how it ends up.

There were differences between the novel and the film that I found interesting. One is that the film was significantly more explicit on sexual matters than the novel. Typically, it’s the opposite, especially keeping in mind that the film was released in 1959 (released under the Hays’ Code).

First of all, in the film Laura is much more sexually suggestive. She is positively alluring as she not so subtly tries to seduce Biegler. A motive in both the novel and the film is Frederick’s jealousy of Laura. In the novel it’s portrayed as a character flaw. In the film, you get the sense that perhaps he has legitimate reasons for his jealousy of Laura.

The rape is described fairly graphically at trial, especially considering the year in which it was released. Dancer’s cross examination of Laura is brutal. He highlights the fact that Laura was a divorcee who almost immediately married Frederick after her divorce was finalized (gasp!). In the rape, Laura’s panties had gone missing. A woman’s undergarments was a pretty risqué subject in 1959 but the film dealt with it very explicitly. The overall tone of the cross examination was that Laura was a floozy asking to be raped. As jarring as it seems now, slut shaming rape victims was actually considered a legitimate legal maneuver in the not so long ago past. Preminger, with his liberal social beliefs, purposely highlighted how offensive this is.

The novel was much more focused on the duel between Biegler and Dancer. The two men at times shout at each other. Biegler all but accuses Dancer of prosecutorial misconduct by intentionally keeping possibly exculpatory facts from him. Most weirdly (and what inspired the title of this post), there are multiple cutting references to Dancer’s size. There are many times where he is referred to as the little man or to the short man. It’s not like he’s a little person. He’s just a man that’s below average in height. The constant references to his lack of stature just seemed odd.

It’s pretty clear that Biegler is actually Voelker. The novel is written in the first person. For this edition, Voelker wrote a preamble describing what inspired the novel. The style of the preamble is essentially indistinguishable from the novel. Biegler and Voelker are both former district attorneys that recently lost elections. They are both avid fishermen. In fact, this case is based upon one that Biegler defended. A man was accused of murdering the man that allegedly raped his wife. He was acquitted on an insanity plea. I get the feeling, when writing this novel, that Voelker used the trial transcript as the starting point. Another reason I believe that is because the novel is less dramatic than the film. There are few courtroom grandstanding fireworks in the novel.

So, which one would I recommend? They’re both worthwhile. They’re both good representations of their time (late 1950s). I’d probably give the edge to the film, if nothing else you get to see James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, and George C Scott act against each other.

The Banality Of PowerPoint Evil

Title: When McKinsey Comes to Town

Rating: 4 Stars

Looking at their web site, they seem like a company with a strong set of corporate values. They recognize climate change and pledge to become carbon neutral. They have an audit committee that evaluates their potential clients for ethical fitness. Any of one of their employees can opt out of an assignment if it does not live up to their own personal values. In fact, since they primarily recruit from the most elite universities, since said universities, if you believe the angry, anti-woke conservatives, are bastions of liberal snowflake biases, their new employees are often young, idealistic and passionate about wanting to make the world a better place. They really do appear to want to be a good corporate citizen.

And then you read this book.

It’s pretty amazing. Think about the most disturbing patterns of corporate misbehavior that have become commonplace over the last forty years. Think about the worse corporate scandals over that same period. Seemingly all of them have McKinsey either at their root or somewhere on the sidelines providing guidance.

Do you think that I’m joking? Well, here is a partial list of events that McKinsey had a hand in.

Executive pay: A McKinsey partner named Arch Patton wrote the seminal paper describing a new competitive executive compensation model. Executive compensation committees took that paper and used it to build much richer compensation packages. Once one executive got a much larger package, it then became an arms race. Before that paper, executives were content making ten times their employees. Now, they’re making closer to one thousand times their employees.

Outsourcing: More often than not, when McKinsey is brought in to consult, their recommendation is nearly always to reduce cost. Starting in the 1980s, if they were brought into a manufacturing company, their advice pretty much always boiled down to outsourcing. To make it even more profitable for them, McKinsey set up offices in countries like India to facilitate the moving of work.

Opioid epidemic: You guessed it. Purdue Pharma was a major client of theirs. McKinsey was responsible for ideas such as targeting/rewarding physicians that write the most prescriptions and advising to change the bonus system to reward those most effective at pushing pills. At the same time that they were working for Purdue, they were also working for the FDA. In fact, they would send one of their FDA experts to consult with Purdue employees that were working to get drugs approved by the FDA. McKinsey ended up paying a 600 million dollar fine. Perhaps their most shocking recommendation (straight off one of their infamous PowerPoint slides) was, since pharmacies were becoming increasingly reluctant to dispense opioids, to offer pharmacies a rebate plan for each opioid death that one of their prescriptions caused.

Tobacco: Their support for corporations that kill their customers predates the opioid epidemic. They provided guidance to several tobacco companies as they attempted to boost their sales. Even when tobacco fell out of favor, McKinsey continued to provide consulting support to Juul and their vape products. This was during the time when Juul was selling flavors that were clearly skewed to the child market. At the same time as this, the FDA was giving McKinsey eleven million dollars for advice on how to regulate tobacco.

Healthcare: They got into state provided healthcare programs. As you can probably guess by now, they were not interested in providing better service but in reducing costs. Among other things, one approach that was taken to reduce state Medicaid costs was effectively to reduce the patient population. No, it’s not like a lot of people in Missouri all of a sudden got big raises and no longer qualified. They managed to discourage a large number of qualified people to leave the Medicaid rolls.

Enron: Yep, they were involved in probably this century’s biggest corporate scandal. Jeffrey Skilling, the Enron CEO, was an ex McKinsey employee. The whole financial shell game of using shell companies to shield losses and to somehow convert debts into assets via securitization is exactly the kind of ‘creative’ capitalism that comes from the minds of McKinsey.

2008 Financial Collapse: By now, you shouldn’t be surprised. Ex McKinsey employees were all over the leadership of the investment firms that either failed or were taken over to avoid failure. McKinsey was an early, evangelical adopter of the idea of securitization. McKinsey published some of the first, most enthusiastic papers on the subject, including one specifically for investment companies that was essentially a how-to manual. Even now, fifteen years after the meltdown, the original author was defending his work, seemingly oblivious to how clearly his ideas were inevitably bound to lead to disaster.

Oil and Coal: Yes, there are McKinsey people at Davos or at the Aspen Institute giving talks about how important climate change is, that it will be the defining issue of our time, and, while offering themselves up as a shining example, shaming other corporations to do their part. At the same time, McKinsey associates in Australia are working with the largest coal companies to increase their output and their exports to other countries. They are working with oil companies to help increase their yield. Quite literally, one of their PowerPoint presentations was titled “Drill and Blast”.

Saudi Arabia: Remember MBS (Mohammad bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia)? Among other things, he stands accused of ordering the murdering and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khasoggi. No, McKinsey was not in the room on that fateful day. However, they did spearhead the effort to monitor the social network activities of the very online Saudi population. Using this information, the government can identify and crackdown on dissent, and when I mean crackdown, that apparently includes dismemberment.

Houston Astros: Now I know that you did not see this one coming. If you follow baseball at all, you know that the Astros are notorious for having been caught blatantly cheating. As an organization, the Astros had completely moved away from the traditional notions of baseball scouting and were completely devoted to baseball analytics, otherwise known as Moneyball. During the time when they were cheating, the heads of the organization were former McKinsey employees. Their quest to dive as deeply as possible into the data to gain insights led them to actions that were explicitly prohibited by baseball.

See what I mean? Think of every bad thing that has happened to our country in the past forty years, from Oxycontin to CDOs to Enron to somebody banging on a garbage can to signal a changeup and there McKinsey is, collecting their fees and telling everyone how good they are.

I’d kind of like to know where all of the McKinsey associates were when JFK was shot.

How America Got Borked

Title: Our Was The Shining Future

Rating: 4 Stars

This book is about the American Dream and how we lost it.

First, the American Dream. Leonhardt’s thesis is that a basic tenet of American life is that the current generation has always had it better than the previous one. This is a pretty common belief and is thought to be the reason why Americans historically have seemed more optimistic than citizens of other nations.

This is one of my issues with this book. Simply put, I don’t really believe it. Maybe it’s fairer to say that I haven’t seen compelling evidence that has convinced me. As Leonhardt himself admits, there simply has never been any long running, multi-generational, longitudinal studies that could be used to prove this, one way or the other. There is simply no way to systemically prove that adults living in 1840 had a materially improved life than their parents living in 1820.

The Census Bureau has released anonymized data dating back to the 1940s. With this data and armed with sophisticated data analysis, sociologist/statisticians have made a compelling case that the generation of Americans after 1980 are living comparatively more difficult lives than the generation that lived from 1940 to 1970. He uses that information to claim that the American dream is dead or, at least, on life support.

Here’s the thing. I’ve written about this before but in my opinion the period of time spanning 1940 through 1970 is an anomaly. Having just survived a depression, the US economy was on the verge of an explosion. Also, with the advent of World War II, the US became the global supplier of war materials. US manufacturing during the war grew at an almost unfathomable rate. With so much of the economy focused on the war effort, there was tremendous pent up consumption supply, just waiting to be unleashed when the war ended. If all of that was not enough, Japan was destroyed. Germany was destroyed. The Soviet Union was in a perilous state. Much of Europe was barely able to feed itself, let alone be an economic competitor. The US was truly a colossus relative to the other nations. Until the countries recovered, a recovery that would take decades, and oh yeah, was powered by US manufacturing, the US simply stood alone. It only stands to reason that, given all of those advantages, that the American standard of living would dramatically increase.

Even so, given that, how did we lose the plot? After all, since 1980, income growth has been stagnant for most of the population. Most of the wealth that’s been accumulated has gone to the wealthiest elite. Our life expectancy is significantly lower than other nations. Our healthcare costs are skyrocketing. We are one of six nations that has no national paid parental leave (the other being the mighty nations of Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga). We have tens of millions of Americans who think (according to recently published surveys) that we might need an authoritarian government.

What happened?

First of all, Leonhardt did acknowledge that the world caught up to us. It was inevitable. In fact, with the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, and our willingness to open up trade to China, we actively played a part in that. The relative disparity between us and the rest of the world was bound to close.

He lists three other factors.

One was the development of the New Left. Starting with the Port Huron Statement in the early 1960s, the progressive movement shifted its primary focus from economic gains to civil rights gains. This, obviously, is not a bad thing. Subsequently we have had an explosion of gains in rights. People of color, women, LGBTQIA+, and the disabled all have more rights and visibility than they did sixty years ago. That’s to be celebrated.

In so doing, the progressive movement took their eye off of the economic ball. They minimized their outreach to unions. Not only that, but members of the unions were generally more conservative. I’ve written about this before, but many of the union members of that time were veterans of World War II and of the Korean War. Having risked their lives for their country, they were unsurprisingly deeply patriotic. The New Left’s demonstration against the Vietnam War seemed to such men as being unpatriotic. Being predominately white men, civil rights wasn’t an issue that was going to inspire mass support.

The New Left leadership skewed younger and its actions were directed, to a large extent, towards the college educated. Especially in the 1960s, when acquiring a college education was still relatively rare, this emphasis led to even more of a narrowing of support.

The second development was the rise of men like Robert Bork. Starting in the 1930s, liberal ideas were dominant. There was little competition from conservative voices. For years, economic libertarians toiled away in relative obscurity at places like the University of Chicago. Now with an opening due to the missteps of the New Left, corporate funds and wealthy benefactors donated millions to set up institutes to give voice to their conservative beliefs.

They were very anti-regulation. They were deeply suspicious of any governmental interference in business. As long as monopolies reduced prices, they should be allowed. After all, if a monopoly were to unfairly raise prices, this would only open it up for competition, right? They had an almost messianic belief in the infallible nature of a free market.

Robert Bork and Lewis Powell were the two main evangelists for this school. Powell ended up on the Supreme Court. Bork was nominated but his views were so extreme that he was denied the nomination (all future such denials were to be called being ‘Borked’).

Their views ended up carrying the day. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President. Being an eternal optimist, he was able to put a rosy glow on conservative principles. After all, according to their theory, lowering taxes causes more economic activity which generates more income so that tax receipts will actually increase. You can have your cake and eat it too! Even Democrats drank some of that Kool-Aid. Clinton ran as a neo-liberal, saying that the era of big government was over.

From 1980 to 2020, we discovered how misguided this economic theory was. With unions in decline, wages stagnated. Corporations got so large that they can charge whatever they want. They’re so large that they can destroy any other company that tries to enter their space. It’s been estimated that $3000 of annual income has been transferred from individuals to corporations. Wealth inequality is worse than it was even during the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century.

The third development was immigration. The immigration act that was passed in 1924 was deeply racist, strictly limiting immigration from non-White nations (and when I say non-White, I’m including nations such as Greece and Italy). The Immigration Act of 1965 changed that. Instead of nation by nation quotas, there was one number of total immigrants that would be allowed. We would only allow immigrants with a specific set of skills and those with families already in country. By keeping this low limit, this would protect American working class jobs.

There was only one problem. In the final draft of the bill, that total number only applied to immigrants with the special skill sets. There was no absolute number for the family member immigration. This opened the flood gates. Millions of immigrants ended up coming to the US. Millions of them took working class jobs, driving down labor rates.

That’s one thing that I never really understood. Before 1965, since immigration had been so restricted previously, we really were a Black and white nation. Obviously, there were Asians and Hispanics, but their numbers before 1965 were very small. In the early 1960s, only 4% of Americans were foreign born. Decades later, that percentage is now 14%.

Since the New Left is consistently supportive of civil rights (which, again, is a good thing), they are typically pro immigration. If you’re a working class person seeing your wages stagnate as people that don’t look like you work for less pay, you’re not going to be amused when a university educated intellectual lectures you about the benefits of immigration.

If there is optimism, it’s that our country’s beliefs have a tendency to swing like a pendulum. If the 1930s to 1970s was a time of liberal progress and the 1980s to the 2010s was a conservative reaction, there are signs that perhaps things are starting to swing back a bit. Even though a small percentage of Americans belong to unions, support at least for the concept of unions is increasing. Leonhardt holds up as an ideal the tough, pragmatic liberalism of Robert F Kennedy. In no way am I comparing him to RFK, but Biden’s approach is more focused on unions and the working class than either Obama or Clinton were. An ironic side effect of living through a pandemic and the resulting trillion dollar stimulus packages is that a good slice of wealth inequality has been removed.

Who knows, maybe the next thirty or so years will be another flowering of worker’s rights and gains.

A 21st Century Prince

Title: The Dictator’s Handbook

Rating: 2 Stars

As I was reading this, it seemed to be, at its core, a fresh look at the same set of topics tackled in Machiavelli’s The Prince. It eschewed theory or philosophy and was dedicated to the basic concept of how to gain power and how to keep it. It advertised itself as a realistic look at the nature of power.

It starts with the axiom that leaders, for all of their talk of progress, fair play, and justice, are actually only interested in getting power and keeping it. This is true regardless of whether the leader is Abraham Lincoln or Adolph Hitler. It’s not even limited to political leadership. The same holds true for corporate executives. Fair enough.

A leader’s population can be broken into three constituents. One group they call the interchangeables. This is the group of people that have a nominal say in the selection of their leaders. This group can range from Americans that do have a choice of candidates to the old Soviet Union, where the only choice a citizen had was to vote yes for the slate of candidates.

Next we have the influentials. This is the group of voters that actually choose the leader. Using the same example nations, for the US, the president is actually decided by an electoral college. Its members have theoretically free choice in the manner, although they have nearly always been bound, either legally or via elective norms, to select the candidate that their state’s voters have chosen. In the old USSR, the influentials would be members of the Communist Party.

The third group are the essentials. These are the people that actually decide who rules. Although the people vary, in the US, at least in the last couple of elections, it has been a very small set of voters spread out over Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. In 2020, out of some 150 million votes cast, something close to 100,000 votes spread across these states made the difference. No wonder Donald Trump was so eager to find 11,000 more votes in Georgia. In the old USSR, the essentials would have been the relatively small number of members of the Politburo who had the power to select a new leader, enact policy and, if necessary, replace the leader if circumstances demanded it (I’m looking at you, Krushchev).

Given these categories, it’s apparent that, if a leader wishes to stay in power, that they must work hard to keep the essentials happy. They are the group that, if they abandon the leader, will inevitably lead to the leader’s downfall. A leader has to at least heed the influentials. They are free to ignore the interchangeables as they have no real role to play in the leader selection process.

As I’ve mentioned, these categories aren’t limited to political leadership. In a large corporation, individual shareholders are the interchangeables. The managers of funds that hold large blocks of stock are the influentials. The board are the essentials.

How is this useful? Well, depending upon how the population is split among the three constituencies, leaders will want to lead differently. For instance, in an autocracy, the interchangeables are really meaningless. The essentials, small in number, wield enormous power. To keep the essentials content, the leader must bestow riches upon them at the expense of the interchangeables. The structure of this leads almost inevitably to something approaching a kleptocracy.

On the other hand, in a robust functioning democracy, the interchangeables, even if individually have little power, collectively have a tremendous amount of power in choosing a leader. A leader cannot stay in power by just bribing essentials. Not only that, since the group of interchangeables is so large, a leader can’t even bribe them. The leader must commit to public works that they hope convinces the interchangeables that he has their interests at heart. Again, the point is that the leader is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. In a democracy, this is the only way to stay in power.

That’s the basic argument. The authors have many examples from history. From this basic idea, they draw several additional conclusions. Democracies will historically have stronger economic growth than autocratic ones (the statistic that they bring out is that 24 of the top 25 economies are democratic in nature, Singapore is the only exception). Autocracies are quicker to go to war with the hope of invading, stealing treasure to further enrich their essentials, and then just as quickly exiting the war. Democracies, on the other hand, are slower to war, but once they commit to war, they stick to it as long as it takes (look at how long the US fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). In autocracies, educated people are potentially a threat, therefore education in such states typically ends at primary school.

What do I think of all of this? Well, some if it seems pretty obvious. Leaders want to acquire power and keep it. There’s nothing particularly earthshattering about that. Leaders recognize who they owe their power to and will do whatever necessary to appease those to stay in power. Again, duh.

As I was reading this, several questions came to mind.

First of all, this was written in 2011. Hence they had no words about Ukraine or Trump. In the case of Ukraine, the idea that autocrats just want to get in, steal wealth, and exit again is at odds with Putin. First of all, Russia has been fighting Ukraine for years now. Secondly, I don’t believe that Putin had a short term goal in mind. I think that he wants to reconstitute the old Soviet Union and that this was just a step in that process. That seems to defy the short term thinking that the authors hypothesize.

Donald Trump is, if anything a thornier problem. Who is his constituency? They do not seem to be motivated by possible riches as much as avenging grievances and poking sticks in the eye of those that they presume look down upon them. Anger and vengeance seem to be their priority.

In fact, this idea of the motivation of Trump’s essentials strikes at the heart of my major concern with the book. In economics, there is the theory of the Economic Man (ie Homo Economicus). This is the idea that, if left to their own devices, that people will always choose the path that is most materially advantageous to them. People will choose with perfect rationality. This is one of the great arguments of libertarians. If left unregulated, people will naturally choose the best course of action for them which then collectively adds up to the greater good.

By now, I think that this has been pretty much debunked. In fact, people choose with all kinds of biases or misunderstandings or just plain cognitive mistakes that are irrational in nature. We are not perfect calculating machines.

So it is here. Thinking that leaders are perfectly rational beings that make decisions based upon some cold calculation of facts does not reflect reality. Since the authors essentially brag that their book is based upon nothing but how the real world works, this would seem to be a serious flaw in their argument.

A Danish Lazarus

Title: Ordet

Rating: 4 Stars

This film is kind of a milestone for me. I have now completed my goal of watching the top fifty films on the BFI Sight & Sound’s best films list. There’s some 260 films on the list. I am not committing myself to watching the rest. In fact, I’m not sure if I’m even going to make it to 100. I must say that this has been a pretty awesome introduction to international cinema.

Ordet is a Danish film. Made in 1955, it was the same director (Carl Theodor Dreyer) that, in 1928, created the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (click here to view my post on that film). That film is in the top twenty-five of the best films list. It’s pretty astonishing to me that one director made two such classic films, one silent and the other in sound, over a span of nearly thirty years.

Thematically, you probably wouldn’t be surprised by this fact. Dreyer must be fascinated by the experience of religion. The Passion was about a group of religious scholars trying to berate Joan into renouncing her beliefs.

Ordet is quite different but certainly deeply religious. The film is about the Borden family. The patriarch, and believe me, with his craggy features and long flowing beard, very much looks the part, is Morten. He is devoted to a religion based upon happiness and light. His eldest son, Mikkel, has no faith. Mikkel is married to the pious and pregnant Inger. Morten’s middle son, Johannes, appears to be slightly touched in the head, going around seemingly in a trance, claiming to be Jesus Christ. His youngest son, Anders, confesses his love for Anne, the daughter of Peter the Tailor.

Morten thinks that the tailor is below them in class and refuses to bless the marriage. He does agree to talk to Peter. When he does, he discovers that Peter also refuses to bless the marriage. His reasons have to do with faith. He is devoted to a much more conservative and darker Christianity and refuses to allow his daughter to marry outside of the faith. Incensed that Peter is rejecting Anders, Morten changes his mind and demands that Peter approve the wedding. Peter refuses.

At that moment, the phone rings. Inger is in labor and is experiencing difficulties. Peter takes that moment to wish for Inger’s death as a learning experience for Morten. Not cool. The two fight and then Morten and Anders return home. The baby is dead but it appears that Inger is safe.

That is, until she’s not. She soon after dies. The family is stricken with grief. Peter and Anne arrive. Peter apologizes for, you know, wishing that the now dead woman would die and not only that, but is now fine with Anders marrying Anne. There’s a weird moment, with the dead daughter-in-law quite literally lying in her coffin a couple of feet away, where Morten is like, well, it looks like we got a replacement to do all of the drudgery work that women do, so that’s good.

In the middle of this, Johannes walks in. He says, why don’t any of you believe that I’m Jesus. If just one of you believed, I could bring her back to life. Of course, everyone thinks that he’s mad. Inger’s daughter takes his hand and says that she believes. He looks down at her and nods. He voices a prayer to bring Inger back to life and, what do you know? Inger’s back, baby!

With this miracle, Morten and Peter bury their differences. Mikkel, awestruck, confesses that he now believes as well.

I did enjoy watching this film. Dreyer represented the different elements of faith in Denmark. There are the liberal beliefs of Morten. There are the conservative beliefs of Peter. Quite often, people who share a pretty broad set of beliefs but differ at the fringes engage in the most vociferous debates. Here you see that with Morten and Peter.

Mikkel has the modern suspicion of faith, belief, and miracles. Morten’s reverend represents the mainstream religious authority. It is the reverend who tries to stop Johannes from trying to bring Inger back to life, probably considering it an embarrassment to the established religion that he’s charged with defending.

Finally, there is the physician representing all that is rational. He pooh-poohs religion and prayer and says that the only thing worth believing in is that which can be done with human hands (and oh, by the way, he has the worst bedside manner in history; when Morten asks to see the baby (not knowing that it’s dead), the physician casually points to a bucket and says that he’s in there, in four pieces. Wow).

Obviously, in the face of the miracle of the resurrection, everyone is stunned. The schism differences, in this new context, become meaningless. The physician is stunned into silence. Of course, Mikkel gains faith. I mean seriously, if I just witnessed a dead person coming alive, I might be tempted to toss in a couple of amens as well. Having said that, I am reminded of an old Far Side where a bear, in a casket at a funeral, sits up and says “I was just hibernating. Didn’t any of you think to check for a pulse?”. Especially before modern medicine, being buried alive was a legitimate fear. It could be that Johannes just caught a really lucky break.

The film is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, the sets are really bare. Apparently, Dreyer was incredibly meticulous about determining the exact minimum number of items in each setting. The scenes are quite long. It’s shot with one camera that swivels. That allowed Dreyer to shoot scenes that lasted several minutes involving actors in motion throughout a fairly large room. It must have required serious discipline for actors to recite their dialog and to reach their various marks.

One final amusing point is that this film had serious pipe action. Several characters regularly smoked pipes that were somewhat uniquely shaped. The pipe that Morten smoked at home was approximately the size and shape of a small saxophone.

Ordet was a nice way to finish off my top fifty accomplishment. The only minor issue is that it’s not very available to stream. You can’t even rent or buy it on Amazon. I did manage to find it on the Criterion Channel. This channel has some kind of relationship with Max. Criterion films often are available to stream there. For whatever reason, Ordet was not. I had to sign up to Criterion to watch it. They do have a seven day no risk trial period.