Daily Office: Friday
¶ Matins: Jason Kottke is attending The New Yorker Conference — not to be confused with the New Yorker Festival, which takes place in the Fall. The Conference is a pricey event — $1200 last year (meals included); $2000 this. Kathleen has encouraged me to go, but I’ve worried that I’d feel like a rich kid whom the big boys were tolerating even as they milked me. On the other hand, getting in on Davos-for-brainiacs while it’s still cheapish (and requires no serious travel) appeals mightily. So I am following Mr Kottke’s every word.
¶ Nones: I’ve seen a number of movies in the past five years that have made me ashamed to be an American, but The Visitor is the first film to make me ashamed of being a lawyer.
¶ Compline: What I really wanted to do late this afternoon was to start in on the weekend tidying. I’m on a roll in that department: every time the apartment is swept by my attentions, things are not only better-organized, but there are fewer of them. Instead, though, I dutifully digested Thomas Powers’s review of recent books about our Iraqi misadventure, for this week’s Friday Front.
Oremus…
§ Matins. My main concern about attending the conference is egotistical: what would my participation amount to? Paying a lot of money to hear some smart lectures is something that I’m a bit too old for. At the tender age of sixty, I would rather participate in discussions than simply listen to them. Beyond that, I have no interest whatsoever in the kind of futurology that has made Faith Popcorn, inter alia, wealthy if not wise. The problems that face us right now interest me far more than the solutions that beckon from just around the corner. I’m not sure that we understand the problems well enough to talk about solutions.
Take Mr Kottke’s summary of Michael Ovogratz’s explanation of the current global economic situation. As it happens, I couldn’t agree more with the conclusions attributed to the 317th richest American — but I’m not sure that I find them newsworthy. I may not be any good at arithmetic, or strong in the sciences (although I surprised everyone with my gift for trigonometry), but the hydraulic nature of global economics occurred to me many years ago. Cheap laborers inevitably become consumers. They stop being so cheap, and they add to the number of people who are using things up. And this is for the good, or at least not for the bad; because, ideally, workers in China and workers in the United States ought to be identically remunerated and equally endowed with robust markets. That’s Kant 101. The fortunes that are to be made in a global economy, however, must be plucked before that ideal has been achieved. Whether you call it “arbitrage” or “buy low, sell high,” the kind of economic opportunity that makes some people rich enough to lobby against provincial national interest depends on asymmetric markets, which, when the hydraulic equalization of incomes is eventually achieved, must ceast to exist. The engines of globalization, in short, are designed to self-destruct. Isn’t that obvious?
§ Nones. It might not be so clear to the general public, but anyone with legal training will see in an instant that what has gone very wrong in the United States’s immigration policy is a framework of procedural thinking that borrows heavily from corporate defenses against liability. And, as Thomas McCarthy’s film makes abundantly clear, the government has greased this already slimy slope by outsourcing such public functions as detention to — corporations!
More about this beautiful film tomorrow. (As usual.)
§ Compline. We have a semi-big weekend coming up. Megan’s “second Dad” — the great Texan guy who kept in close touch with Megan, long after he and her mother stopped dating, and I left Houston for law school and Gotham — will be making a first trip to New York this weekend. Originally, we were going to have a semi-big dinner tomorrow night, and I gave my Orpheus tickets to LXIV without thinking twice; but then Saturday dinner became Sunday brunch, and LXIV, whose musical friend wasn’t free to take the seat, insisted that I accompany him. Better me than Fossil Darling, surely. I’ve been trying to persuade FD to give Orpheus a try for two seasons at least, but a program of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Respighi’s The Birds will only confirm his notion that Orpheus is a tinkly baroque ensemble. You’ve heard of The Enlightenment? FD is strictly a Romantic.
After the concert, LXIV and I will pick up Kathleen, who was relieved to have the evening free to work, at her office, and find our dinner somewhere in Midtown.