Supreme Decisions

PAC ads are now running ceaselessly.  How many times have we heard that hushed voice, solemn in its accusatory tone, “In 2008, Barack Obama said, ‘We can’t mortgage our children’s future on a mountain of debt.’ Now he’s adding $4 billion in debt every day, borrowing from China for his spending. Every second, growing our debt faster than our economy, Tell Obama, stop the spending.” 

Last week the Supreme Court made two major decisions, the really BIG one -- perhaps in part to ensure the Court's integrity as an non-partisan institution --  was to uphold the Affordable Care Act, but in a less publicized one it also declined to reconsider the Citizens United decision that has led to viral PAC advertising by corporations and wealthy individuals.  Montana had challenged the decision by contending its century-old Corrupt Practices Act might be applied to PAC advertising in state and local elections. Not so, said the Supreme Court:  let the PAC advertising flow, with all its inherent sound bites and vapid fury!

And concerning the Supreme Court's courageous decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act , our local Palm Beach Post columnist/humorist, Frank Cerabino, wrote a wonderful satire   In this age of posturing over substance, he shows how it could be used as a political harangue from any viewpoint, merely by twisting a few words in each sentence.  I quote the beginning paragraphs, but the full text can be found at the link here.

"My Dear Fellow American:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s (historic / activist) decision to uphold (the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare) is but a temporary (victory / setback) in our long fight ( for access to health care / against government intrusion ) in (America / the marketplace.)

The law that the Supreme Court upheld on Thursday will mean that scores of (uninsured / reluctant ) Americans will be (covered / forced) in a system that provides the kind of (care / costs) that the rest of the (civilized / Socialistic) countries of the world already (enjoy / are saddled with).

(Unfortunately / Fortunately), the Supreme Court’s decision won’t be the last word on this (triumph / travesty) of justice. There are already (sinister forces / courageous voices) who are prepared to take this battle to Congress, which can (subvert / stop) the health care law through (vindictive / corrective) legislative action."

"Even if the Dream Isn't Real, the Dreamers Are"

20th century American literature is awash in a particular version of the American Dream, the green light that always seems to be in grasp through the accumulation of wealth.  But as Balzac purportedly opined, "behind every great fortune there is a great crime", be it to society or one's family or both. It plays out in our literature and one only has to read a newspaper to see it in life.  Gatsby or Madoff, living the dream, for love or money or both, at least for a while.  

In the last thirty years we have had two real estate busts, people pinning their hopes of wealth by buying and selling, flipping,the greater fool theory at work in its purist form, like a game of musical chairs, until the music stopped.  And so it is for the protagonist in Eric Puchner's first novel, Model Home, as well as it was for the author's father.  While the novel is in some ways autobiographical, in subtle or more transparent ways, so are most novels.

For some time I've been "worrying" about who will carry on the tradition established by our great American novelists and short story writers, the most recent ones (in my opinion) being John Updike, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver and perhaps to that list I might add some of my other favorites, ones who could join the ranks of the big four, Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, John Irving, Russell Banks, E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, and Jonathan Franzen (merely on the merits of two novels).  Unfortunately, of the first four, only Roth is still alive, but anything he writes, and the others I mentioned, I will buy and read.  That goes for Pat Conroy, Anita Shreve, and Ethan Canin as well.

So it was a thunderclap when I read Eric Puchner's novel (hat tip to my son, Jonathan).  Here is a serious contemporary writer who knows how to tell a tale, paint a picture of American life through his characters, make us feel moved, walking the line through the comic-tragic, drawing us into something important about family relationships.  It remains to be seen whether his first novel will be his best, a literary catharsis of his own life experiences, or whether this is setting him up for a truly great literary career.  Puchner also has published a collection of short stories, Music Through the Floor, and although I have not yet read them (but will do so), I understand there are elements of Carver and Cheever in those stories.  I can't think of a higher praise than that.

The story itself, although set in the 1980s, is as relevant for today's economic times.  It is about a family, the Zillers, who have moved to California for the "good life" -- a family which was close when they lived with more modest expectations in the Midwest -- but now find themselves being pulled apart.  The father, Warren Ziller, hides his deteriorating economic circumstances from his family, which makes his wife, Camille, suspect him of having an affair.  No such luck -- that would have been an easier road to travel.

In an ironic twist, the real estate development that Warren had been hawking, in the middle of the desert, but portrayed by him as an upcoming idyllic community (with the promise of a major shopping center which is actually being constructed as a waste treatment plant that stinks up the neighborhood literally, and their lives figuratively), ultimately becomes their own home, the only such residents, when Warren's secret comes out and his older son, Dustin, suffers disfigurement from the explosion and fire of their former home before it was repossessed.  Meanwhile, his younger sister, Lyle, has had an affair with the security guard from their former community, Hector, who later becomes Dustin's caretaker (for reasons best explained by reading the novel). The younger child, Jonas, is neglected by his family, left to wander the desert outskirts. 

This is a family that has been incinerated by the American Dream, and after a metaphorical  climax, they are hurled in different directions.  Puchner draws heavily on his own family history to portray the heartbreak of this devolution. Some of the author's feelings about his own childhood are endowed in Jonas.

Most great writers have a strong sense of place.  Cheever had his NYC suburbs, Updike had New England and PA, Roth harkens back to Newark and its environs, Richard Ford's New Jersey, and Anne Tyler and Baltimore are peas in a pod.   Puchner has staked out California to explain his version of the American dream.  Ah, California, when as a publisher, I used to visit the American Film Institute and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, monuments to the documentation of the American dream itself.  I felt LA, or at least that part of it, was unreal.

Puchner's particular focus is not California's glamorous Hollywood, it is the underbelly of the American dream as played out in the California desert.  Remember Dreiser's lobster and squid in mortal combat, a scene from his The Financier?  As a child, Frank Cowperwood, the young financier, watches this battle in a fish tank, Dreiser writing: "It answered in a rough way that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: How is life organized? Things lived on each other – that was it…Sure, men lived on men.”

I couldn't help but think of that quote reading Puchner's description of Jonas' sojourns in the California desert: "Most days he spent roaming the desert. It was a relief to be free of school, that gloomy place where the teachers wore shorts and his locker was so hot he had to open it with a sock over his hand, where no one spoke to him except the garbled voice in his head and he'd somehow completed his transformation into a ghost. In the desert, at least, there were extraordinary things. There were scorpions eating each other. There were rats hopping around like kangaroos. There were wasps dragging tarantulas around by the leg. There were snake skins dried into paper, bird nests as small as contact lenses, lizard skeletons dangling from creosote bushes, delicate as ice. Once, not far from the house, he saw a roadrunner go after a rattlesnake, its right wing extended like a matador's cape, When the snake lunged, the roadrunner snapped up its tail and then cracked it like a whip, slamming its head against the ground - over and over - to bash its skull."

And when one pursues dreams of riches, or in its more sanitized version, the better life, there are winners and losers.  Even the material winners may find their dreams to be vapid.  Warren's fall from grace is even harder, a once happy family, now grappling with his mismanagement and unfortunate economic circumstances.  Like Madoff, Warren's life became one of lies and self deceit, convincing himself that even though they were rapidly running out of funds, the big payoff will come when he makes a success of his land development scheme (Auburn Fields, an ironic name for a place in the middle of the desert), all will be well: "He did not want to lie to her, but every time he considered telling her the truth-that he'd lost their retirement funds, the kids' college funds, and every fund in between-his tongue dried up like paper and he couldn't speak. When he managed to get Auburn Fields off the ground, he reminded himself, he'd be able to put the money back in." 

And dreams are not only Warren's.  His wife, Camille, pursues approbation from her family and colleagues as a producer of educational films, without much success.  Ultimately she has to leave him:  "She could forgive him for moving them out to California, perhaps, for bankrupting them in pursuit of some fantasy of wealth, for falling victim to a malady of shame he could never pay off -- she could forgive Warren these things, but this was different from getting over them.  In the end it was her disappointment in him that had proved toxic.  He'd squandered the life they might have had together....Now that she'd left, she could see him more clearly: a broken man, well-meaning but not as brave as life required, who'd become something he'd never imagined."

Dustin, the older son, sees a fabulous career for himself as a rock musician but becomes a withdrawn malcontent after being disfigured in the explosion. Jonas who is mistakenly blamed (by himself as well) for Dustin's accident becomes the invisible child.  Lyle, the daughter, has dreams of attending Columbia, but is convinced that hope is remote: "Driving to work, Lyle tried not to let the monotonous brown vistas lull her into a coma. She distracted herself by touching the Columbia bumper sticker on the dashboard. She made an effort whenever she could, so that its Ivy League juju would enter her fingers and climb upward to her brain, transforming her into a perfect applicant. She liked to fantasize that she was the only one to get a sticker in the mail: so eager was Columbia to have her as a student, they'd slipped it into her application materials like Willy Wonka's golden ticket. Lyle had stuck it on the dashboard  to remind herself -while she was driving through the barren, dream-sucking desert - that she wouldn't be living out here forever."

Each family member feels like he/she is on the outside, looking in, dazed by the events that profoundly change their individual lives and drive them apart.  Puncher writes from Camille's perspective: "What had happened?  How had they unraveled again, worse than before?  The mystery of life was not how it started, Camille thought.  It was how people with every excuse to be close could grow distant as satellites."  Then, there is Warren's take on it: "What an odd thing a family was, Warren thought.  The permutations, like the patterns of a chess game, seemed endless."

In fact, the forty-nine chapters of the novel constantly switch back and forth between the main characters, almost like a series of tightly woven short stories with the commonality of the Ziller family experience.  And Puchner's writing can be quite moving and beautiful, such as when towards the end of the novel, Warren is trying to make a living and salvage some self respect working as a cutlery salesman, and while selling to a woman who has a son and a daughter, younger than his, Warren "pretends" that his own family is watching him in action: "He was making a pitch to them as well, the family he'd lost.  It was not the words themselves that mattered but the fact that he was making them.  He was doing something for a change.  In the end, if it was a good-enough pitch, his family might even buy what he had to offer.  They would say, It's not too late, you've actually learned something, your life hasn't been entirely hapless and for naught."  Knowing Warren's huge fall from grace, these words are heart-rendering.

A "must read" companion piece is GQ's March 2011 nonfiction piece by the author, Schemes of My Father; Like most California dreamers, my East Coast dadtried to relocate—and reinvent—himself in the land of red-hot cars and eternalsuntans. Too bad we all got burned   It explains much about the novel's autobiographical elements and passion, particularly the author's love for the "real California" which is not the beach life that we've all associated with the state.  As Puchner puts it: "It's this real California—and not the one my father invented for us—that I still call home, one that's closer to my heart than any place on earth. There's something about my father's love for the state, no matter how misdirected it was, that seems to have seeped into my blood. Or perhaps it's the love itself that I love. Which is to say: Even if the dream isn't real, the dreamers are. There's something about the struggling actors and screenwriters and immigrants who live here, the pioneer spirit that despite everything still brings people to the edge of America in search of success, that makes me feel at home."  Puchner writes with uncommon honesty.

The novel made me think of the "model homes" of my own life.  We bought our first home in Westport, CT in 1971, staying there for only three years.  Although a cottage, it was situated on two beautiful acres of pine forest.  We moved to Weston, CT where we lived for twenty two years, the home where we raised our family.  It too was secluded in the woods.  We constantly worked on the house, expanding it until it was truly a rambling ranch.  I wept the day we left that house, not only because of what we put into it, but for the symbolism of leaving it with our sons now grown.  Ironically, it was ripped down a few years after we moved to build one of those "McMansions," all that work, all those years, poof! --  vanished!  This was followed by four years in a home on the Norwalk River, perhaps the home that had the most spectacular views, as Oyster Boats went out each day or barges would move up the river.  Then finally our home of the last twelve years in Florida, again on the water, where one can always find that special sunset.  So, two homes in the woods and two homes on the water and none in the desert.  We've been lucky. 

I eagerly await Puchner's next work.

Political Low Tide

An instructive article from Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Liberals Are Ruining America. I Know Because I Am One by Steve Almond.

I suppose I am a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, seemingly incompatible, but only in short term objectives, not long term aspirations.  In other words, I truly believe that with cooperation we can achieve that fine balance of a safety net for those who need it, and a fairer tax system, with fiscal controls.  But the pollution of the media by extremist talk shows and PAC messages, is crazy making, sound bites to incite their followers, and draw reactions from the opposition.  We've become a nation of finger pointing screamers, and now from arsenal of the Web and Cable, political grenades can be lobbed endlessly, 24x7.   

Back to Steve Almond's admonition:  Imagine, if you will, the domino effect that would ensue if liberals and moderates simply tuned out the demagogues. Yes, they would still be able to manipulate their legions into endorsing cruel and self-defeating policies. But their voices would be sealed within the echo chamber of extremism and sealed off from the majority of Americans who honestly just want our common problems solved.

I'll try, Steve

Some Good News?

To offset the abundant  "bad news" of the last entry, here is an interesting article from Marketwatch on the deleveraging progress: U.S. debt load falling at fastest pace since1950s; Despite surge in federal deficit, America is deleveraging

Some salient points:

* Little by little, our economy is reducing its debt burden, slowly repairing the damage caused by 10, 20 or 30 years of excess.

* Total domestic — public and private — debt as a share of the economy has declined for 12 quarters in a row after surging over the previous decade.

* The level of public debt is indeed worrisome, but it’s not as big a worry as the economy’s total level of debt — public and private.

* As much as we hear politicians, pundits, tea-party patriots and the Congressional Budget Office obsessing about government debt, it was excessive private debt — not public debt — that caused the 2008 financial meltdown. And it was private debt — some of it since transferred to the public — that lies behind the current European debt crisis. (

* The U.S. is actually doing much better than you’d think if you just listened to the conventional fears about how we’re rushing headlong into a debt Armageddon.

* In fact, since the recession ended in June 2009, total U.S. debt has risen at the slowest pace since they began keeping records in the early 1950s. While Washington has taken on a lot of debt since then, the private sector has paid off, written off or dumped on the government almost as much.

* Economists who have studied the impact of indebtedness have found that low levels of debt are essential to growth, but that high levels of total outstanding debt can hurt an economy. Beyond a tipping point, adding on more debt will reduce growth over the long run, even if it inflates a bubble in the short run.

*According to a study by McKinsey published earlier this year, U.S. households may have two more years of deleveraging left before their debts are sustainable again. If McKinsey is right, the U.S. economy may have to endure a couple more years of slow growth.

Another little mentioned factor is that while the public debt has surged during the past few years, maturing debt is being replaced by new debt with coupons (interest rate) of one half or even one fifth the maturing ones. For instance, the US Treasury 30 year bond issued in 1982 had coupons of some 15% while the most recently issued US Treasury 30 Year bond was issued at 3.06%.  Ten year yields are now less than two percent, replacing US Treasury Notes in the 4 - 5% range.  Servicing the debt is actually getting cheaper, although these savings are probably offset due to the expansion of borrowing that has been needed to fend off a depression.. The low rates also leave investors with a continuing dilemma.