The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn’t want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

When Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was published in 1984, it took the publishing world by storm and ushered in a new era of edgy young writers.  Bright Lights, Big City chronicles the emotional, psychological, and spiritual downward spiral of a young would-be writer in the fast-lane of the mid 1980’s Manhattan club scene.  His wife has left him, his job oppresses him, and he lives in a cocaine-addled twilight zone.  The first chapter, entitled “It’s 6 AM, Do You Know Where You Are?” begins:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.  But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.  All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.  Then again, it might not.  A small voice in side you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.

Confessional stories about people on the descent, whether into madness, depression, dissipation, alcoholism, or any other form of self-destruction are a genre unto themselves that was not invented by McInerney.  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells us about his own drive toward that cliff he hopes to protect all the children. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood descends into suicidal depression.  In John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, Ben Sanderson literally drinks himself to death.

What makes McInerney’s novel so unique both then and now is that it is entirely written in second person.  “You,” the reader, are character in the story.  It is a testament to McInerney’s talent that he wrote a whole book in this unusual still and managed to pull it off.  I am as amazed by it now as I was when I first read it.

Present tense, in your face…

The book is also written in present tense, which although is nowhere near as unusual as writing in second person, is still fairly uncommon.  Present tense gives a piece of writing a sense of immediacy and places the reader in the middle of the action.

Point-of-view is probably the most critical choice that a writer will make in telling a story.  It not only determines how the writer will envision the story – what parts of the narrative are known and what have to remain hidden – but also how the reader experiences the story.  A first person story told in past tense, as most are, can be more contemplative and reflective.  The “I” in the story is not only the narrator as a character, but also the voice of the narrator at some point in the future, after all of the events in the story have occurred.  Presumably, the narrator has been changed in some way by the story he or she is telling, so we are hearing the story from that changed perspective.  When Nick Caraway, begins The Great Gatsby with “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since,”  he has already witnessed and participated that riotous and tragic Long Island summer.  He knows everything that will happen and can tell the story with an objectivity that can only come with reflection.

In a first person present tense narrative, there is no reflection, no contemplation.  Everything is immediate and there is no second voice, wiser by having gained the experience of the story we are reading.  It’s a very constrained mode of storytelling, nearly as constrained as play, but it is very effective in telling certain kinds of stories.  We live our lives not knowing what will come next and the only wisdom we have in the present is what we already have, not what we will gain in the future.  There is no possibility for objectivity at all.  That lack of insight and wisdom can make present tense narratives uncomfortable for both writer and the reader alike.  It is that discomfort in the storyteller’s voice at not knowing what’s coming next in the storyteller’s voice keeps the reader on edge.

“Natural Selection,” my story in the current issue of Cantaraville is written in first-person, present tense for that very reason.  It’s a dark, downward spiral kind of story that was in part inspired by Bright Lights, Big City.  I wanted the reader to be on edge, knowing that my narrator is headed for bottom simply by what’s going on in the story, but not knowing what’s going to happen next.  I cheated a few times and told some back-story in past tense flashbacks, but the driving force of the story is meant to be immediate and in your face.

“Natural Selection” is about a corporate layoff that has ironically become more timely now than when I first started writing it four years ago. Even when I finally completed, last fall’s economic meltdown that has thrown millions out of work was still unimaginable.  Given long submission-rejection cycles and long lead times, some stories take years to get published.  Stories written before “Natural Selection” are still on their journey out into the world.

Computer Guys

In July of 2005, I attended my first writing conference, The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.  The writing teacher for the second week of my fiction workshop was Gish Jen.  Prior to registering for the workshop, I hadn’t heard of her, so I ordered her collection, Who’s Irish, and read it before attending the conference.  Gish Jen is an amazing writer.  An American of Chinese descent, she writes with wit and sly humor some of the most deeply moving stories I have ever read.  “Birthmates,” the second story in the collection was selected by John Updike for an anthology titled The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and aptly so.  It’s an incredible story and I immediately felt intimidated.  How on earth had my pitiful writing sample gotten me accepted into a class taught by her?

I was still in awe of her the second week of the workshop when Jen took over.  My work, excerpts from my work-in-progress novel, had been reviewed during the first week when we were lead by Elizabeth Benedict. (Liz, if you’re reading this, I was in awe of you too).  Jen began by going around our circle and asking us to introduce ourselves, as we had during the first week.  Most of my fellow students were young graduate students, studying creative writing or literature.  When my turn came, and I said that I was a software engineer, it piqued Jen’s interest and she started asking me all about what I did and where I worked.  I was a road-warrior consultant at the time and Jen said “my husband does that.”

As I said, I was awestruck at the time and it was only later that I made some mental connections to “Birthmates,” a story about a down-on-his-luck computer guy, working for a down-on-it’s-luck software company, attending a tradeshow.  When I first read the story I found it refreshing.  All too many pieces of literary fiction have protagonists who are  editors, or architects, or college professors or any other profession that serves as a substitute for “writer.”  I fall into that trap myself.  Jen’s computer guy was outside the norm for literary fiction.  I was also struck by the accuracy of the depiction of down on his luck computer guy’s life on the road and the mind-numbing reality that is a technology tradeshow.  They aren’t that way at first, but after attending them year after year, they all blend together into a cacophony of bluster, hype, and desperate boredom.  Jen captured it perfectly and after looking at her educational background I wondered how: BA from Harvard, MFA from the Iowa Writer’s workshop, Harvard Faculty.  No visible experience in the software business.  She must have accompanied her husband on a trip to a computer tradeshow or two.  Or three.

It was during a class break one day later in the week that we were talking about this and she told me that given my background, I owed it to myself and my readers to use it in my writing  I was unique, both working in the corporate and technical world and having a literary mind.

My initial reaction was, “God no!” I try to keep my writing life and my professional life as separate as possible.

“Who are you pissed at?”

During the previous week, Elizabeth Benedict and I had been talking about using personal experience as inspiration for fiction.  “Who are you pissed at, Fred. That’s your story.”  I don’t think she meant it to mean writing fiction as a means of revenge, even though that’s sometimes to hard to resist.  But for any any sensitive introspective literary type, there’s only one truthful answer to the question, “who are you pissed at?”

“Me.”

A few weeks later, considering the advice of both my teachers, I began writing a story about a software manager reaching the end of his rope, so to speak, professionally and personally.  Like millions of others, I have had the experience of both laying off employees and being laid off myself.  I can’t say that I’ve learned anything by either experience other than that it’s psychologically and emotionally traumatic and you don’t really ever get over it.  It becomes part of the baggage that you accumulate in the course of living a life.

The story was very hard to write and I tended to avoid working on it in favor of other less intense pieces.  I had chosen first person, present tense for all the reasons outlined above, which contributed to difficulty get through the first draft.  I finally finished the first draft two years later in one all night writing session.  It was due a few days later at Skidmore for that year’s conference.  I was so emotionally drained by it, actually repulsed by it, that I couldn’t read it.  Instead, I just printed it out, stuffed it in the envelope and sent it out without even proof-reading it, thereby subjecting my fellow students and Elizabeth Benedict, who was again my teacher, to thirty pages of raw anger, embarrassing typos, comma splices, and run-on sentences.

I absolutely hated the story.  I despised narrator even more even more than the other characters, most of whom were despicable in their own unique ways.  Nonetheless, it was in the mail and was going to be photocopied and distributed and analyzed a month later in the workshop no matter how I felt about it.  I was just going to have to sit there, grit my teeth, and get through it.

A month later when the story finally came up for discussion, the class saw some things that I hadn’t, which is what I look to a workshop to do for me. It’s kind of like showing a movie to a test audience.  They were hesitant to comment at first, but after I assured them that the ending was complete fiction, they opened up.  My narrator was certainly a bit of a creep, but not a completely unsympathetic one. They found the title, “Natural Selection,” to be a recurring theme in the story in ways that I hadn’t realized.  They picked out some recurring themes about family that I hadn’t noticed.  There was more to the story than I had originally thought.

Now, a year and a half later, the story has been published.  Between then and now, millions have lost their jobs.  For me, it has confirmed that I got at least one thing right in the story.  It’s shattering, it’s traumatic, and it breaks you.  And after you put yourself back together you’re not quite the same and you can’t quite figure out why.  It is one of those demarcation lines in your life defining  a before and an after.

“Natural Selection” is available in Cantaraville Eight.

Bright Lights, Big City

Jay McInerney. Vintage 1984, Paperback, 208 pages, $6.99

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger. Back Bay Books 2001, Paperback, 288 pages, $6.80

The Bell Jar (P.S.)

Sylvia Plath. Harper Perennial 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, $7.29

Leaving Las Vegas

John O’Brien. Grove Press 1995, Paperback, 189 pages, $3.99

Who’s Irish?

Gish Jen. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 224 pages, $5.94

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

John Updike (Editor). Mariner Books 2000, Paperback, 864 pages, $8.49

Mentors, Muses & Monsters

Elizabeth Benedict. Free Press 2009, Hardcover, 278 pages, $0.05

F. Scott Fitzgerald

These words of F. Scott Fitzgerald from The Great Gatsby, are the ultimate judgment of the beautiful and  rich by Nick Carraway, and presumably Fitzgerald himself.  Today’s bankers, stock traders, car company executives, and hedge fund managers prove that nothing much has changed.  Gene Mirabelli at Critical Pages offers this brief profile of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Crack-Up

Edmund Wilson (Editor). New Directions 2009, Paperback, 352 pages, $9.26

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner 1999, Paperback, 180 pages, $7.12

This didn’t suddenly happen on January 20th, it didn’t just happen last fall, or even in the last eight years.  Over the last thirty years, we have seen the most massive transfer of wealth in this country since the early days of the twentieth century, and one only has to look up “1929” to see how well that worked out for us.

Ironically, it was the assault on all the protections that were put in place as a result of the Great Depression that has gotten us to where we are now.  We can accurately point the finger at the Republicans for their slavish devotion to the free market, economic Darwinism, and trickle-down theories, but there was no shortage of Democrats to act as willing accomplices.  The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 was signed by Democrat Bill Clinton after having been passed by a veto-proof two-thirds majority in Congress.  The  repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had prevented savings and commercial banks from also being investment banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies,  set us on a path that future historians may view as inevitable.  The depression-era regulations, designed to prevent exactly what had happened, seem to have worked very well.  It was when they were systematically weakened and eliminated that something happened that bares a closer resemblance to the meltdown of the early 30’s than anyone wants to admit. To all you sober-minded economists who appear on the Sunday morning talk shows, I know what you’re thinking but won’t say.

While all this was happening – the transfer of wealth, the reckless destruction of financial protections – there was no outrage.  Americans were convinced that government was incompetent, businessmen were the true wise men  (and yeah, it was mostly men), and what was good for CEO’s was good for them.  One of President Obama’s few gaffes during has campaign was his tactless remark about voters in Pennsylvania being difficult to reach because they are cynical of politicians and “cling to guns and religion.”  It was a huge mistake, but I remember thinking, “Poorly stated, but not wrong.”  I admit that I fall into that ideological group known as Eastern Liberals.  The uproar that followed, however, proved the exact point Obama had been trying to make.  His opponent, Hillary Clinton, started wistfully remembering going a-huntin’ as a child with a beloved uncle and got herself seen doing shots in working-class bars.  Obama himself tried to get into act until a set of bowling pins showed him that pandering just isn’t his style.

It’s no surprise that Americans who live in depressed rural areas, or those former industrial states now called the rustbelt are cynical of politicians.  For years, politicians have claimed kinship with them and played to their fears and emotions.  Their hardships were not caused by incompetent corporate management, or by greedy CEO’s, or by a tax policy that encouraged companies to send jobs overseas, or by the fact that the people who do most of the work in this country don’t have lobbyists funding political campaigns.  Instead, their hardships are caused by the anti-gun activists, Cadillac-driving welfare queens, easily available condoms, CEO’s paying too much income tax,  Mexicans, and Michael Moore.

During election years, Republicans standing in front of abandoned factories was as ubiquitous as Democrats standing on front of piles of rubble in the South Bronx.  And yet, all they’ve ever managed to do was to convince people to vote against their own interests.  After generations of misdirection and pandering by politicians as things have gradually gotten worse is it any wonder that they are not trusted?  What’s amazing is how long it took for the fraud to be exposed.

It still continues.  I’m getting a tax cut.  Chances are so are you.  So are the vast majority of American families.  Most of us don’t even come close to earning $250,000 a year.  Yet, the rhetoric that is repeated over and over by ideologues and by mainstream journalists is that Obama is raising taxes.  Raising the top marginal tax rate from 35% to 39% to help support a middle-class tax cut only sets the marginal rate back to what it was in 1999, before George W. Bush’s budget breaking tax cuts.  And this marginal rate applies to income over $372,000.  How many of us does that apply to?

Historically, the marginal tax rates were highest from 1932 through 1980, peaking at 92% in 1952-1953.  In an admittedly simplistic analysis, the marginal tax rate was at its highest during the 1950’s and 1960’s when the middle-class expanded and their quality of life improved.  Executive compensation during that period remained relatively flat.  Even adjusted for inflation, a corporate executive of today wouldn’t get out of bed for what his 50’s or 60’s counterpart earned (and yeah, it’s still mostly men).

I lose no sleep over the fact that someone who earns millions of dollars in compensation is going to pay 4% more, and I find it hard to believe that anyone else besides Joe-The-Make-Believe-Plumber would shed a tear.  Joe, however, is an example the way we have been deluding ourselves.  If Joe was in that bracket, if Joe was actually earning 10 million dollars a year, like all of us wish we ourselves earned, he certainly would resent paying an extra 4%.  I know I would, and I’d be certain to talk about it to my senator over lunch at the Capital Grille.  Joe, unfortunately, has as much chance of earning 10 million dollars a year as a real plumber as I have of playing centerfield for the Yankees.  Or outselling Stephen King.

But no, it’s all about jobs isn’t it?  When the wealthy get their taxes cut, they invest, they create jobs!  How has that worked out for us?  Based on what we see from the series of financial scandals that have been rocking us since Enron and before, they haven’t really been investing.  They have taken the wealth of our nation and, like gambling addict Bill Bennett, they have been on a binge of epic proportions. They literally broke the bank.

Outrage, welcome back.  You have been missed.

Disclaimer: I’ve been to the Capital Grille several times (although not with my Senator), and it gets my ringing endorsement.  The food and service are exquisite, but all the well-healed old white guys, who comprise most of the other clientele, make me feel like someone’s going to grab me by the collar, lift me out of my chair, and say, “Who let you in here, Punk?”

Senator Cardin, you have an open invitation.

Related Post: Pizzigati’s Wakeup Call

I have always been amazed when conservatives rail against the idea of “wealth redistribution.”  They seem to be completely ignorant of history and that one of the fundamental purposes of government is to redistribute wealth.  This has been true since the beginning of civilization.  Sometimes wealth is distributed less inequitably than others, but make no mistake, wealth has always been redistributed.  When we consider the wealth of the entire nation, the profits that are produced by all of the people, it has always been redistributed.

In his book, Pizzigati, traces the history of that redistribution, from times where most of the income flowed into a tiny percentage sitting at the top of the pyramid, the so-called gilded age, to the golden age of the middle class, the 50′s and 60′s when tax rates for the rich were the highest, labor unions were strong, and government intrusion into business was at it’s height.  It was during that time that CEO’s of major companies, although well paid, were low-key figures, and who’s homes were modest compared to today’s royal standards.  And it was not that long ago.

Pizzigati specifically takes on some of today’s CEO’s and their unbelievable compensations and asks several questions.  First, are they, is anybody, worth that much money?  Given what many of them actually did to the companies they led, the answer is no.  Second, is the growing chasm separating the tiny group at the top of our society that owns ninety percent of the wealth from the vast majority who create that wealth god for us as a nation, and as a society?  How has it poisoned our culture?

Pizzigati’s remedies may come across as radical and could be labeled by the right as socialist, or even communist, but they are not.  He is simply arguing for a return to a set of national and social values that flourished during a significant portion of the twentieth century and created the richest, and for a time, the one of most equitable of nations.

Updated 2/1/2009:

Too Much: Sam Pizzigati’s web column.

Greed and Good

Sam Pizzigati. Apex Press 2004, Hardcover, 659 pages, $14.95