It's a joke, of course, mocking the idealism for idealism's sake that materialized in the country's post-sixties hangover. But as I watched the movie the other night (it's on an HBO rerun loop this month) it struck me - Mrs. Stroud sounds like a lot of stuff we're hearing today. The populists, the protectionists, the redistributionists... A fair number of people are offering the same criticisms of this country made in the seventies.

Look at any magazine, paper or twenty four hour news channel and you'll see a piece on why or how excessive risk created this economic crisis, and why we may want to move back to the temperate habits and goals of the "company man." How we might be returning to the safety and comfort of traditional, long term employment and putting aside the entrepreneurial mindset and hyper-capitalism of the last few decades. Resigning ourselves to a future of lowered expectations and greater structure and giving up our love affair with risk. And that somehow this would be a good thing.

A highly impressionable swath of the public, and the media that serves them the red meat populism they want, seem to be reaching a consensus our society was far too enamored with the concept of risk. We'd be better served to work steadily, loyally at a job "producing something" than attempting to front load ourselves an early retirement using leverage or striking out in entrepreneurial ventures. That's a shame, because risk - sensible risk - bears none of the fault for our current financial mess. It's maligned for no good reason, confused with the actual causes. And this is a dire concern, because right now, sitting in the shithole we've dug for ourselves, risk is our only hope out.

As with any large event, a million smaller, finite causes led to the disaster that started last September. But they can broadly be boiled down to three simple categories, each of which might sound and look like "risk" but in reality is something entirely distinguishable.

On the corporate side there was opportunism, exploitation and fraud. Opportunism in that the people who were involved in creating and selling mortgage-backed securities and the people who brokered mortgages to home buyers both worked under "heads I win, tails you lose" bargains. Bargains so one-sided only a fool wouldn't have abused them. By as early as 2005, economists were warning that the housing market was overheating and would inevitably bust. At this point, the mortgage brokers on Main Street and the securities packagers and salesmen on Wall Street had two options. Suck all the profits they could out of the bubble before it burst, ballooning it even higher in the process, or pull back. Neither had any real skin in the game. Both knew they'd be laid off or see drastic decreases in income after the bubble burst, and that if they didn't push the market even further, someone else would. They did what any opportunist would - bankrolled as much as they could and waited for the walls to come down.

This led to the exploitations and frauds. Bankers pimped what they had to have known were garbage securities to all sorts of investors while brokers pushed liar's loans to any buyer with a heartbeat. Even the smaller local and regional banks got in on the deal, writing mortgages for people who clearly couldn't afford them, taking fees and flipping the paper to the larger securitizing banks. Everybody was incentivized by short term income structures and nobody faced any responsibility. Everything done at the banks was under the corporate umbrella, every actor one of thousands. The same went for the mortgage pushers. If countless other brokers were writing up garbage notes all over the country and every transaction was plausibly honest on its face, what chance was there any single malfeasant would ever face charges?

The first was for a writer calling himself the Velveteen Lust Catcher. Yes, the name caught my interest. Here are a couple excerpts and the link:

It seems that we have at least one thing in common when it comes to a Libertarian viewpoint, and you've mentioned in a past exchange that this sentiment is probably more widespread than it seems. I agree with you. The lack of cohesion among free thinkers most likely results from the absence of an appropriate atmosphere to express thought. What do you think the answer to that is? Can the mighty internets save us all? Or do you think we'll see the same degradation that we have with most mainstream media platforms?

I don't think individual thinkers will get together en masse because, by definition, they don't easily congeal behind any movement. Most rational people - and I think there are a lot of them out there - compile bits and pieces of various ideologies to form their views. The Internet's a wonderful device for creating independent thinkers because of the number of different viewpoints competing on it. But I don't think it will create a wave of independent thinkers arguing for logical, sensible policies. Those people tend to look at the broader systems, recognize them as hopelessly flawed and corrupt and focus on taking care of themselves.

[Do] you think that your criticisms of human behavior in the legal profession are specific only to that, or can it be applied on a more general scale? Is there something about human nature that allows individuals to fall so easily into the power structure of social and "corporate" hierarchy? Do you think it's just easier for people in general to buy into the illusion that they're important, or is there something about the Legal field in particular?

I guess we're just pack animals, and you have to play the game to compete for resources in this regulated jungle of ours. Regarding law, I think it attracts a lot of people - men, mostly - who are making up for shortcomings elsewhere. The title, the "prestige" it used to confer. The male ego's a ridiculously fragile thing, and nowhere is its weakness more on display than in law. Wall Street, sales, entertainment... People say professionals in those fields are driven by ego. I think they're driven more by money. Law's different. It's not a direct path to big money. I think the real currency a lot of lawyers are seeking is respect.

Of the myriad disingenuous arguments for marijuana legalization made over the years, none is less credible or more embarrassing than the present claim that rolling back its prohibition would create a desperately needed windfall in tax revenue for the states regulating its sale. The dumbest position yet. Dumber than the medicinal marijuana argument that has anyone claiming anxiety, sciatica or swimmer's ear walking out of "clinics" in California with bags of Blueberry Indica. Dumber than that nonsense your pony-tailed uncle spews about how hemp is superior to nylon - how we can build radial tires for Peterbilts from it we wanted to. "The Swedish do it, man... Or was that the Finns? I always mix them up. Which one's the island?"

Have you tried to make Champagne lately? Vodka? How about a nice Bourbon? Can't do it, can you? But if you could, you would. Who'd ever go to the liquor store again if he could brew Basil Hayden's or Perrier Jouet in his basement? And that's exactly what'll happen if the states legalize dope. Everybody you know who's smoked pot in the past or continues to recreationally use it today - roughly a quarter and a fifth of the people you've met under 50, respectively - would start up a garden or grow room in his house. Neighbors would swap strains of Sativa at coffee klatches the way they swap tuna casserole recipes. And that tax gain to the states? Minimal, if anything. A slight bump from the shoppers looking for super premium stuff only a large retailer could import. Or lazy jackasses like me who don't know shit about gardening.

But it's not the imbecilic economics of the argument that make it so offensive. The thing that makes this pitch so horrendous is it's a clear, pathetic pretext. If you support the concept of legalization as an issue of personal liberty... If you believe that we don't have a Bill of Affirmative Rights and Entitlements, but a Bill of Limitations on How Much Government Can Interfere in What Ought to be Private, Personal Decisions... And if you believe in having a society of people who take personal responsibility for those decisions, then you're smart enough to realize that this type of silly Trojan Horse argument ducks a long overdue conversation America needs to be having with itself.

As well meaning or effective as they might be, pretexts are sleazy arguments. Something hired liars use in courtrooms, lobbyists stuff into talking point memos and television ministers spit from the pulpit as "1-800-GIV-2GOD" flashes on the megachurch's Jumbotron. They're what you say you're doing when you can't say what you're actually doing because what you're actually doing is dumb, solely self-interested or malevolent. They're also embarrassingly obvious. Anybody with a child's appreciation for the art of debate can spot a pretext coming a mile away. And no, the fact that the other side's position is a fraud doesn't give you license to offer an equally false response, particularly in regard to an issue as important as personal freedom.

Why? Because all a pretext does, all it can ever do, is degrade and confuse the debate, invite the usual crowd of scolds, zero tolerance zealots and nanny state teetotalers to offer equally disingenuous arguments. That or the pretext's dim, but often effective counterpart - the "Slippery Slope" rebuttal:

"Legalize marijuana and we'll be substantially closer to balancing California's budget!"

"But--but--but if we allow that, then the people will use ecstasy, and then cocaine, and when they get bored with that they'll go on to LSD, and then they'll go on to PCP and heroin and as the older people become junkies the children will have no guidance and the users will get younger and younger and we'll have it in the high schools! We'll have the PCP and the LSD and the heroin, and grade schoolers will be sniffing the Angel Dust! I know what happens with this! I grew up in the Sixties and my sister followed the Jefferson Starship and she was never the same and you might think it's harmless but when it comes to your third grader with methamphetamines, you tell me-- tell me! Who will think of the children!"*

Never underestimate the power of an hysteric's imagination. They may not be much for facts or logic, but they can whip up doomsday scenario PR attacks faster than Simon Cowell can fart one hit wonders onto the pop charts.

I've worked in an office most of my adult life, but never really, fully been there. Anything I see or hear can take me from the moment, set me thinking about something entirely disconnected from everything I'm doing. Any image or sound I come across - the slightest stimulus providing a hint of a basis to start my imagination racing away from Where I'm Stuck. An advertisement for cheap plane tickets on a passing city bus will have me running a reel on what it might be like in Prague that time of year through the balance of most of the morning. A disc jockey's joke about George Bush crackling out of a radio in the bodega where I pick up the newspaper leaves me musing on what the administration's plan was - what the end game might have been in that seemingly mindless war, and why we can't seem to get the oil spigots flowing. Perhaps a conspiracy's afoot - some nasty plan between the administration and oil companies. But how would the delay help? What would their aim be?

Sometimes it's just that random image or sound repeating over and over like some warped form of meditation - focusing the mind on an odd, innocuous distraction. And once it's locked in my head, it'll often stay for hours, jammed on a rerun loop. I'll find myself humming and half-singing "Panama" under my breath in the line at the Starbucks on Market Street, unaware as to why - forgetting I'd just heard the song blasting from a car at a stoplight. And the playback's always vivid. I'll be standing there, salivating over the first caffeine fix of the day, moving in sync with the line, pulling the dollars out of my pocket and readying myself to pay, in every outward manifestation totally enveloped in the act of preparing for a day at the office. But in my head it's a different story. The spoken word "solo" near the end of the song is rolling.

I reach down, between my legs... and ease the seat back... The video of the song plays in the background, as immediate and electric as it was when I was thirteen on my parents' couch, watching it on MTV. She's blinding, I'm flying... Right behind the rear-view mirror now... David Lee Roth's sailing over the stage on a suspension pulley above Eddie Van Halen and Michael Anthony, and for a second I'm wondering what it was like in the dressing room after one of their shows - just how many groupies were involved in the orgies. Piston's popping... Ain't no stopping now...

"Sir, what size?"

"What?"

"What size?"

"Oh... Venti."

Then, of course, there was this unfortunate incident I wrote about earlier, with those overtones of "kidnapping," "assault" and "terroristic threats," inspired by Tanqueray. That got me rethinking gin. Not in any sense of concern, or quitting it. More with an eye toward change - to the easier, smoother white liquor (one that might not have me aiming weapons so easily).

I shifted to vodka as my default "clear liquor" and a long time love affair ensued. Vodka's the cleanest of buzzes, and with some Eastern European blood in my veins, it went down like mother's milk. Somewhere in the fading days of college, I forgot about the charms of gin. I stuck with the bourbon for friends, the vodka for anesthetizing myself at business-related gatherings and the scotch for, well... Good scotch was a special event thing, for raping a friend's expense account. There's lovely ring to the words "Johnny Walker Blue" followed with, "Yeah, we'll call this a 'business dinner.' You're a client!"

"Of course I am. Now let's get down to brass tacks on this Penske file. You've got one of those Dartmouth kids fucking the whole thing up."

"Is there a good hand job joint nearby?"

"Which would you prefer on the charge receipt? 'A-1 Briefcase Repair' or 'House of Crepes, LLC'?"

I'm going to miss the boom years. I didn't get rich myself, but there was always that sense of excess - that the money would never stop. You didn't have to work on Wall Street. You only had to be in its shadow. Family, friends, neighbors, half of everyone you met... The world was drunk on its gains. Even the fucking lawyers were enjoying high class scraps. An actual trickle-down revolution, from '96 straight through to '07. And now it's over - popped finally, For Real. And here we are confused, trying to grapple with a semblance of what it was like in the days before the cleaning lady was worth six figures in Cisco stock and the high school guidance counselor down the street was flipping vacation homes in Naples and Avalon with financing from Bloated and Overlevered Bank, Inc.

People old enough to remember that decade say today's like the '70s. I wouldn't know. All I remember of those days was riding in the back of my old man's red coupe, hearing that sax line from "Baker Street" and all those awful Eagles tunes. To me it feels like the early '90s, the fading but nasty edges of the George Bush I Recession. And perhaps that's why I recently rediscovered gin. A sense of déjà vu, of a feeling I had back then that all wasn't going so well. That vodka wouldn't dull things enough, and bourbon would clarify too much. Gin's a nice middle ground - a sneaky, quirky buzz. Stronger than vodka or scotch, and smooth where bourbon enflames.

But who knows why, really? Might have just been laziness - finding a bottle of Tanqueray in a pile of holiday gifts, reacquainting myself with the taste and thinking, Damnit. Where have you been the last sixteen years?

I'm the kind of person who meets a problem head on, and I view the lack of gin in my recent history as a deeply disturbing shortcoming. In the spirit of making up for lost time, I've been soaking it up like a bar towel for the past several months. And I feel a need to share my experiences, in the hope nobody will forget the gin the way I did, and look back with all that regret.

I'm nothing if not a giver, so here we go - my top five:

Of course not. You don't shop art as you'd buy milk or meats. Or at least you shouldn't - if you're sane. So why do so many people do it online?

Sixty percent of the Net being filled with "expert" advice about how you can "Master the Internet and to get paid six figures!" or "Maximize your social media for optimal business networking!" I run across a lot of articles discussing how to write a "successful" website. The main thrust's always the same: "Post as much as you can. Post new material all the time!" "Make it pithy and constantly update!" People have died of heart attacks trying to maintain ridiculous posting schedules, working around the clock without sleep. And for what? To satisfy an asinine paradigm - a terrible mass production business model borrowed from the old line media.

Whether something's "new" or "breaking" is a concern for newspaper writers seeking scoops. There's no reason on Earth a website creating general entertainment bits or comedy should feel any obligation to flood its pages with constant new material. If what's written in the site is written well, and timeless, the site should work like a book. The reader can click in, scan the volumes of text and read what he or she likes. The only reason website content producers feel the need to crank out "New! New! New!" shit every day is because they've decided, for reasons beyond me, to compete with the 90% of bloggers who do nothing but grab hot stories, comment on them and link other comments about it from people in their network of friends. That's not an audience - that's an echo chamber. And lumping that stuff in with actual writer-created material is a horrible confusion of content with amateur editorializing.

A couple of months ago, in the context of a quasi-investigative look at "Pick Up Artist" culture, I wrote a review of The Complete Asshole's Guide to Handling Chicks. I picked it as my favorite book in the genre because it wasn't actually a pick-up guide at all. It was funny satire of pick-up guides, laughing at a subject that deserved to be laughed at. I also found it hysterical that loads of readers bought a book with that title thinking it was an actual, earnest pick-up guide. It seemed ridiculous anyone could reach that assumption. Amazingly, disturbingly, many did. From hardcore PUA adherents upset at the book's lack of serious strategy tips to fulminating feminists foaming-at-the-mouth in response to the book's obvious conceit, it was clear: This was a deeply misunderstood text.

At the time, I thought about riffing on the subject of satire and allegedly "offensive" humor. Why some people get satire and some people don't, or don't want to, and what the difference is between the camps. Why some people can laugh at anything, while others have such hard-ons for their personal sacred cows. And what all of these biases say about their private neuroses.

My theory was that nasty satire can be disconcerting for certain audiences. Reality the's punchline, the gag never ends, nothing's held above reproach, and there's no obvious Fourth Wall between what's joking and what's serious. It makes a person who likes to keep high boundaries between the funny and the serious work for the payoff. And in a meta sense, it says, "Everything's a joke" (or at least everything about the subject at hand). I think that touches on truths about the absurdity of our lives a little too closely for some. They get the payoff and don't like it very much.

But that's a hell of a concept to flesh-out on a website's brutal deadlines, and I wound up lashing a pile of pedantic gibberish onto the page as I tried. Kind of like the pedantic gibberish in that last paragraph.

Thankfully, I got this email a few days later. It's from Dan Indante, one of the authors of The Complete Assholes' Guide, and he wrote what I couldn't, along with many other amusing things that ought to be said. This is untouched, used by permission and yes, we're 99% certain it's from the real author.

I am focusing on my next book right now, and I can't write that while publishing lengthy pieces here. Only so much time in the day, and I also have business interests to attend to. So for the balance of the season, I'm going to write shorter, more frequent pieces. The longer, dialogue-based material will return later. My idea for now is to offer rants and commentary on current events, along with the occasional "top five" list here and there - sometimes philosophical, sometimes juvenile, usually both.

But more than that, the aim will be to provide and create a discussion of some ideas, issues and observations neglected in the public discourse over the direction of the country. This is a unique time in history, a once in a century reckoning. And right now, it doesn't appear we're answering its challenge. What I'm seeing emerge is the usual Pendulum Effect. We swung too far in the direction of unfettered markets, greed and materialism and now we're going to swing too far in the direction of regulation, confiscation and soft collectivism.

But this isn't just about a failure in the way we manage the government, economy or financial markets. I'm talking about a broader intellectual laziness in the way this country approaches just about every controversy or crisis it faces. Historically, we don't seem to be able to adjust to anything in a sensible fashion. It's just one extreme to the next. Part of that's a failure of our political system, a structure creating professional politicians interested in nothing but re-election. Part of it stems from the nature our spoiled, soft culture - a mindset thrilled to celebrate free markets in upticks, indulging in what it couldn't hope to afford, then immediately crying for a generous safety net when the inevitable correction comes.* Part of it's the media, which makes its money carving us into warring factions at the poles of debates, pretending fringe players like Limbaugh or Olbermann represent the views of a significant constituency of voters.

And part of it - the biggest part - is the reasonable middle of this country never opening its mouth. For years we've been running on treadmills, harried, on the edge of burnout - slaves to Blackberries in a vicious "efficiency cycle" where the corporations we served beat more and more labor out of fewer and fewer bodies, all while the cost of living exploded around us. We shifted to a culture of unthinking execution, of being too stressed and overworked to consider what we were doing... to wonder if maybe there was a better way.

Well, our economy's in the shitter and unemployment's headed for 12% before this thing is over.** We've got more than enough time to think now, and we'd better. Every element of our culture, from business to law to government - it's all being restructured. And if the moderate middle of this country doesn't open its mouth, the usual useless mouthpieces will again control the debates. The cures for the current problems will be crafted by politicians responding to the media's Right or Left spin on public sentiment, with dissent given over to the blogosphere's Molotov cocktail throwers and conspiracy theorists. And that'd be a goddamn shame, because good ideas - solutions beyond what's "politically possible" or attractive enough to gain thirty seconds of interest among a pack of narcissistic Twitterheads - can be intensely powerful. They can catch fire and, given the current technologies, circle the globe, creating an army of supporters in less time than it takes to fry an egg.

I think most of the audience here shares my affinity for ideas outside those offered by the usual participants in the important debates. There seem to be four viewpoints in America today - the Left, the Right, the Crazy and the Reasonable, the last being nearly unheard. I think maybe, if among the filthy jokes, book out-takes and bizarre noodlings I post on the site this summer, I raise a few questions on some important issues, and you, the readers - many of whom have as much, if not more, insight than I do - respond or raise your own, perhaps a good solution or two will gain some traction online. At a minimum, it'll get people thinking.

And really, what else are we going to do right now? Bust our asses for bonuses at work? Trust me folks - this is a Jelly of the Month Club kind of year.

The first new post will be up Wednesday.
________________________
* This applies to both the "Capitalists" on Wall Street and the credit the junkies they enabled, and everybody else in this country who lacks the will to entertain the discussion we need to be having: Is our aggregate standard of living in this country unrealistic? Are we just deferring a brutal, inevitable collapse, in so doing making the pain worse for the poor generation that faces it?
** Many respected sources claim the real rate is already over 15%. Look up "real unemployment rate" on Google.

Yeah, yeah... I've held you here long enough. Time to leave, get on with the graduation pictures, pack up the car and bolt. But don't be in such a hurry. While I'm rambling here, take some photos of the buildings, the trees. Feels like you can't get away fast enough right now, but trust me - you're going to miss this place in a couple months.

18. There's no virtue in sacrifice.
That's just something we tell people to make them feel better about not being able to have the things they think they want, another of the endless rationalizing tautologies we use to turn our lack of something into a benefit. There's no morality in the concept of consumption. The only rule is this: If you can afford it, or handle it, and you want to have it, go ahead and buy it, eat it... fuck it. Just be aware, the law of diminishing returns kicks in awful quickly. Quantity's never going to be quality, and on the buying end of the spectrum, the more you get addicted to the kick of smaller repeat acquisitions, the less cash you're going to have to buy the big ticket items actually worth owning. If you always wanted a second home at the beach, putting plasma screen televisions in your bathrooms isn't going to scratch that itch. Twenty day trips to the Jersey Shore don't equal two weeks in Bali. All those substitute impulse purchases do is siphon away the money you might have been able to stockpile to get what you really want. So yes, though there may not be any virtue in sacrifice, that doesn't mean there isn't wisdom in it.

19. Early in your career, a lot of you will be prisoners of a false meritocracy. No use in getting mad about it. All you can do is work through it.
The kids with degrees from the highest ranked universities are always going to get the best jobs coming right out of school. This is going to anger a lot of you who, due to factors beyond your control, like a lack of money for the astronomical cost of private college tuition, won't be able to compete right out of the chute. Get over it. None of that's going to change, and as much as you feel uniquely slighted, it's nothing personal. Business doesn't have the time to vet every warm body sending in a resume. Like any rational consumer, it defaults to brand reputation, and Brown beats Ball State every day of the week. That and a fancy name will always provide insurance for the people doing the hiring. The Human Resources monkey playing gatekeeper at Big Company, Inc. has a singular goal - keeping her $85k desk-warming gig to retirement. When a candidate from a highly ranked school turns out to be an idiot, she's got a built-in excuse - "But he went to Amherst!" If you didn't, the best you can do is claw your way up the ladder and, to borrow from Bill Murray's speech in Rushmore, "take dead aim" on the kids sliding by on credentials. We're in a merciless new economy. Value's paramount, and the days of pedigree trumping production, and protecting poor earners, are fading. However gag-inducing the exercise might be, open your mouth, self promote. Be a noticeable asset, ready to grab the slot above you as the paper tigers get axed. And they will.