Instead of getting down to work this morning, I thought that I should take a walk, and pay a visit to Carl Schurz Park at an unaccustomed hour. I would take advantage of the sun’s position to give a number of familiar views a different look. After crossing York Avenue, I got out the camera, to take a picture of a doorman hosing down the sidewalk — and learned, as I had just moments before feared, that I ought to have changed the battery before leaving the apartment. I retraced my steps without too much complaint and was in the Park about twenty minutes later than I should have been. I ran two errands on the walk home. Bushed by this modest exercise, I sank into my reading chair and devoured Nicholas Lemann’s thoughts about Mitt Romney. My blood ran cold as I remember Lemann’s prediction, made in the same pages (The New Yorker) twelve years ago at just about this point in the election cycle, that George W Bush would win in November. I scoured the new piece for any evidence of a similar forecast about his subject — happily, in vain. Then I made a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich. Here I am.

***

Among the many interesting pieces in the current New York Review of Books that I wolfed down over the weekend, the one that kept me thinking was Jonathan Friedman’s commentary on Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream?According to Friedman, Smith posits a conspiracy of economists, executives, lobbyists, and other persons of means as the force that steered the United States into its current backwater of income disparity (and associated political inequality), but does not actually demonstrate its existence. I myself am not inclined to believe in conspiracies — not where large numbers of participants and issues are concerned. There is no way that anyone could have planned the nation’s move toward rentier capitalism; what’s far more likely to have happened — and this is not inconsistent with Smith’s argument — is cascading opportunities that were launched by a few policy changes (in the deregulatory direction) were seized by hundreds if not thousands of businessmen, inspired by free-market economists and equipped with lobbyists who fed their successes back into the legislative loop. With a restored conservative judiciate (the norm in American history), property rights took preference over personal (humanitarian) rights, and the vicious cycle became steadily more vicious. There was no need for a conspiracy; opportunists responding to momentary conditions were far abler to effect the revolution. It helped that most of the Americans who did not take part in this overhaul also had (and have) little or no interest in business. These other Americans think not of business but of something that businessmen would rather not think about: jobs.

(The purest capitalist is the businessman who employs no one. This — and not industrial or any other kind of production — is the core principle of capitalism.)

Friedman says something else that’s very itchy.

(Moreover, Smith’s view that these and similar actions at many other companies were a way of systematically favoring shareholders over workers needs to confront the fact that, for American business as a whole, the past fifteen years have been a period of exceptionally poor retunrs on common stocks…)

No, it doesn’t! When wheelers and dealers talk of “shareholder value,” they really mean precisely the opposite: sharedumper value. Dividends are of no account; it’s flipping stocks that provides the payout. Private equity firms infest a company, saddle it with debt, prune its operations, and sell off what’s left to a bunch of suckers. That’s when they realize their “shareholder value.” As Joe Nocera puts it in today’s Times, “The candidate [Romney] and the nation’s richest share a fondness for capital gains.” Capital gains accrue when investments are liquidated, when stocks are sold. Sayonara time. Every time you see “shareholder value,” read “platinum parachute.”

***

A massive pile of ironing awaited. And awaited. It was massive in the middle of August, before I left for Fire Island. I grabbed the unpressed handkerchiefs and packed them for the month. The pile grew more massive upon return. The closet door would no longer close. We ran out of napkins.

Two books arrived today, the new Pankaj Mishra and the new Zadie Smith. I was sinking my teeth into the former when a pang of guilt ruined my appetite. I really ought not to be sitting reading. I ought to be ironing. I had, I estimated, just enough energy. For a treat, I would watch Miranda, the second season.

It was important to ascertain which episode is the “Are we?” episode. Stevie develops a tic of making her inquisitiveness even more annoying by tacking “are we?” onto every question. “Off to have lunch with Tamara, are we?” The climax comes when Stevie shows up at Gary’s restaurant in a rather youthful top and skirt, and Miranda has her revenge: “Mutton dressed as lamb, are we?” It’s Episode 10, and I won’t forget that in future because “Tamara” and “are we” have a sort of rhyme. Episode 10 ends with the appalling revelation that Gary married Tamara in Hong Kong (Episode 7), so that she could get a green card. I didn’t know that they had green cards in Britain — that their green cards are actually green. I wonder if that’s true. Anyway, it’s a true marriage of inconvenience. Plus you can go to jail, although that’s not what happens to Gary, thank heaven.

Kathleen wondered if there will be a third season of Miranda. I’m inclined to think that there needn’t be. Like the lovers on Keats’s grecian urn, Gary and Miranda will remain in their technically unconsummated relationship for all time. Miranda Hart will go on to something else (as indeed she already has done, with Call the Midwife). But it’s hard to imagine that any role will ever suit Patricia Hodge more deliciously.

Because I saw no videos — movies, TV, or anything else — while I was on my seaside vacation, it was such fun! to get back to the rudulent funbags of Miranda. And I was delivered of much ironing.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 at 1:18 pm.