So a friend whom I’ll call Chweched Chwaer (at least until they pick their own moniker) asked me about the mortgage crisis.  And this got me thinking about a couple of things. 

The first is that I’m not an economist.  Which doesn’t mean that I don’t get to have an opinion.  But it does mean that my opinons — even, to use more formal language, my considered judgement — on the matter are perhaps not as, ahem, cluttered by the bullshit they call “rational choice theory.”

The second is that while it is true that I’m sometimes prone to conspiracy theories, and while in many cases this reduces rather quickly to a kind of paranoiac self-indulgence, at the moment it seems pretty obvious that something strange is going on with this little situation we got goin’ on right here.  And maybe this has to do with specific people profiting from specific actions and decisions; or maybe it’s simply that our economic system got out of control — and this “happened” to benefit particular people.  As one of my profs in graduate school pointed out: the thing about capitalism is that it’s a system — it doesn’t require a smoky back room to work.  You could have a bunch of baboons running the NYSE and capitalism would still “work” (perhaps better than it has recently, in point of fact).  

So, on to trying to figure out what’s going on.  Let us start with a statement by someone in power.  Our esteemed Attorney General was recently asked whether we need to institute a formal legal inquiry — a la Enron — into the massive amounts of fraud that went on.  His reply?  In a word, “no.”  Why?  Because apparently this is not a “conspiracy” so much as it was the result of “white collar street crime.”

A revealing reply, that.  One that is not, perhaps, without some truth.   As bizarre as it seems to me, there evididently were people literally cold-calling for ARMs and whatnot out of suburban strip centers, making ponzi-scheme loans to the desperate, the deluded, and the easily persuaded.  How this worked in precise terms (what, with credit cards? as temporary “consultants” to legitimate banks?) is a little beyond me, of course.  But the fact that the fellows who did this looked remarkably like the, ahem varsity baseball team a-holes I vaguely remember from high school, says probably more about my prejudices than it does about who, in fact, was selling bad mortgages to the credit-poor. 

Leaving that aside for the moment, I want to return to our esteemed AG’s metaphor.  Because it betrays a revealing  ”irritable mental gesture” (to quote Hofstadter, himself quoting Trilling) that passes for conservative logic.  Namely that “the problem” lies in the arithmetic progression of a multitude of “bad actors” doing bad things.

This is, to put the matter in precise social-science language, utter horseshit.

A multitude of bad actors doing bad things may produce Ishtar or Waterworld or Plan 9 from Outer Space.  However, unless you are willing to admit we — you and I and everyone you know — is causing global warming, I don’t want to hear boo-shit about how “the problem” with the housing bubble stemmed from the concatenated effects of a bunch of a Chico State frat boys selling fradulent mortgages for McMansions in Elk Grove.

That they were doing so is straightforwardly true.  However, what is obviously not true is that “fixing” all those bad actors for the bad things they did (i.e., rounding up all those goofy-looking chunky white boys and throwing them in the slammer) would do anything more than precisely zippo to either repair the damage to our financial system or prevent it from occuring again.  It is this “irritable mental gesture” on the part of conservatives that sets my jaw all aclench.  Namely to believe that making a scapegoat of some poor fool (a fool so unlucky as to get caught for doing what the bigger boys do for much richer rewards) would somehow “set an example” and “show tha evuldoers” how sinful behavior is righteously punished.

No.  No, no, no, a thousand times no.  Deterrance theory is not the issue here.  The issue here is, frankly, a giant three-card monte game parading as a principal-agent problem.  And the way to solve that is not to make examples of the Garrett Griffith Gilillands of the world (oofta and I thought I had a silly name).   No-one — and certainly not the big boys who made all the real money off credit-default swaps etc. — will be paying attention when (if) they ever catch that poor bastard. 

The problem, people, lay in the fact that we made it possible to buy and sell mortgage notes to all kinds of third parties (the principal-sagent problem) and even worse to bundle them into packages and then sell them all (or better yet, shares of said packages) on the open market, with all the usual fabulously glamorous meretrixities of Vanity Fair applied. 

The problem, in other words, lay in the fact that capitalism must be regulated if it is work at all.  We cannot argue over whether regulation is “good” or “bad” tout court.  It is a given.  If we do not regulate, the system collapses.  If we do not set down a set of rules by which everyone plays — a set of rules by which everyone understands that all must play — then we end up in a knife fight where some bleed and others die (and not the ones holding the knives, neither).  if we “depend upon the invisible hand” to correct the inevitable irregularities of supply and demand, the invisible hand f*cking slaps us bitches upside the head for being fool-ass hoes willing to get f*cked for way too cheap a price. 

The issue is the same now as it has always been since the engineers of Woonsocket and Cromford lit the fire of the industrialism, the conflagration from which has left a burnt-over district in Stockton and Orlando just as before it left Liverpool and Detroit and Bethlehem and Long Beach ashy husks of consumed detritus. 

The issue is how and where and to what end we must regulate the business of getting money.  We can argue about how to lock up Chico State frat boys — which will only end in a nation-wide episode of Cops — or we can argue about the rules by which people are allowed to borrow, to sell, and to lend money.  

Thus endeth the lesson.  I sure hope our honored solons in DC understand this point. 

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These are the thoughts that occur to me as I’m listening to Clear Channel’s latest attempt to anesthetize my brain, the better to pick my pocket (”omigosh, you declared bankruptcy?  Wow.  Can I just say, you look hawt in that new dress!”):

What she’s thinking.

What she’s thinking he’s thinking.

What he’s thinking she’s thinking.

What he’s actually thinking.* (note the ringtone available for download!)

*Not to be confused with What he’s definitely not thinking.

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Proving yet again that he is a fecking hack, Ben Bernanke is openly blackmailing Congress; in effect “give me 700 billion or I trash the economy for the next president.”

The wonder of it to me is that anyone is still pretending that we’re not in a recession.

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So, in an effort to socialize myself into my new role as a gubmint beeyourowkrat, I’ve taken to listening to the local “all-request” radio station.  To be honest, this is more so to drown out the not-very-censored arguments of the fellow in the next cubicle over, which he appears to have every morning about 9:30 with either the other parents or the teacher from his children’s private school (since the arguments are conducted in Cantonese, I’m at a loss for the details).

In any case, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend.  The adverts have lately swung toward the “debt advice” end of the spectrum.  As in “call us, we’ll help you declare bankruptcy.”  Now, I’m a big believer that professionals ought to advertise their services — how else are the rest of us to know that they’re available, after all?

What I take exception to is the content of the ads.  As in, the happy cheerful neighbor who says “gee, I thought we bought our homes at the same time.  My mortgage just reset, but I see you bought a new car — what happened?”  Or the chipper housewife who says “oh, honey, I’m so glad our worries are taken care of.  Now we can take the kids shopping!”

Shiver.  Boy am I glad I got out of Texas.  There’s a hard rain a’ coming, and it’s gonna get ugly before it gets better.

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Now that it’s after Labor Day, I can resume political commentary.  At least to some extent – I work full-time, after all, and can only really do this after-hours. 

So I’ve had this nagging set of thoughts recently about the state of our democracy.  And it goes something like this: somehow, sometime (let’s say 2000 just for shits and giggles) a major segment of the political class read a college course syllabus in post-modernist, post-structuralist, social constructivist, Foucauldian deconstructivist analytics and said “Woah, wait a minute, here… We could actually use this shit!”

Bear with me for a moment on this.  When Karl Rove says “we create our own reality” this is simply taking a page out of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality – only he puts the emphasis on first-person agency, rather than third-person structure.  The slippage is telling, really.  By emphasizing the active creation of the world, Rove posits forcefully that, well, there is nothing that might impinge upon his freedom to shape the world.  Not Democrats, not critics, not the “enemy” – however construed – and, most importantly, not “facts.”  The world is as he (and those with whom he shares power) says it is.  And those who would say different are simply reacting to his first move on the ideological chess board, always shadow-boxing around a set of “facts” and “truths” and “realities” that BushCo have brought to fruition.

Most of us in the “reality-based community” would beg to differ, of course.  Most of us would hold, following the Enlightenment and (ultimately) Plato, that while our dim perceptions of the world may be poor, reality is still there.  Even if (pace Berger and Luckmann) we participate in the creation of reality through collaborative meaning-making that reality – structure, not least in the form of traditions we inherit – still exists, and it shapes our actions just as much (sometimes more) as we do it.  And sometimes reality bitch-slaps you with the cold, hard facts.  That, in a word, there is tradition and reason and experience and through all three (along with maybe at least one other thing), we discern not just Truth, but reality.

To hold this view – and the corollary that to ignore reality is foolish ignorance – has its perils.  For there is a limited way in which Rove is right: for the people who answer to him and his ilk, he creates both Truth and facts.  And those of us who say different are not simply nattering nabobs of negativity: we threaten the very structure that they see as reality. 

This bears some thinking on.  It is not simply that I disagree with the evangelical christabigot mob – by disagreeing with them I threaten them, their truth, their reality.  When I (or anyone) call Sarah Palin a lying bull-dog bitch it is equivalent to trying to knock a pier out from under their shoddy ideological superstructure.  And who appreciates that, really?

There is, of course, a religious element to all this: evangelicals are famous for nothing if not the combination of confession-makes-one-unimpeachable with a commitment to the personal power of prayer.  For believing not just in the power of positive thinking, but moreover in the idea that this power is available only for a Chosen few (pay your fee and say the magic words and “poof!” you’re part of the magical evangelical Amway family).  So, for instance, confessing Jesus as the one and only Savior grants one the superstitious ability to re-shape reality simply by beseeching Him to Make It So – as for instance in believing that you could shake the thunderstick and make God pour down a rain of “Biblical proportions” on Obama’s speech at Bronco stadium.  Never mind that God made it 72 degrees and clear – this is evidence not of the ultimate unknowability of God’s purposes for us and this world, nor of the disgusting heresy of making God your personal dogsbody by telling Him when to act and when to stay. 

No, the thing to concentrate on is the logical corollary here: if you have not confessed Jesus, then your prayer has no power with God.  If you have not confessed Jesus, then every word that passes from your lips is, by definition, blasphemy. 

Like a lot of liberals I was sometimes confused at the amazing capacity of Republicans to lie, to twist plain facts to fit their warped vision of the world, to not see the truth staring them in the face.  And then it occurred to me – it’s not simply that they’ve fooled themselves.  No – if it were only that, then I could speak the truth and show them the way.  If it were only ignorance, they could be taught.  If it were only poor theory that befogs their vision, they could be shown a better one.  If the truth exists, then I (or someone, surely) could led them out of their filthy cave and show them the true light of day.

But they don’t hear it when we call them liars, fools, and worse.  They refuse to hear the truth because we speak it, and we are the other. 

If anyone ought to be ashamed for having bought this pack of blasphemous lies, it’s not Sarah Palin.  I will call her out on every damnable lie she tells from her blackened power-hungry heart, but her sin is original — she is Assemblies of God, after all.  When she bares her breast and starts whipping up the bulldogs for war, I know the enemy when I see it.  And I know how to fight it.

No, the real sinner here is John McCain.  The sinner here is George W. Bush.  Sinner-man, thy name is George H. W. Bush.  Somewhere along the way, they abandoned the faith of their fathers — the Episcopal faith, in point of fact — abandoned the quiet search for truth that comes through work and dialogue and study.  They left behind those instruments and reached for the apple of power.  McCain, in particular, chose that path when he plucked Palin from the dust and anointed her his helpmeet.  His sin is different from hers: he used to be a man that one could talk to – but now he creates his own reality, and in so doing rejects utterly the possibility that he might be dialogue with others, that he might, in fact, be wrong.

I don’t know how to talk to such a man.  And for damn sure Obama and Biden and Dean and all the rest better learn quick how to fight this sort of evil.

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Unfortunately, I have a number of relatives who not only live in this fellow’s district, they likely voted for him.

I wish I could say something to the effect of “so it begins” in regards to a cracker calling a black man “uppity,” but I don’t think this even begins to touch the ugliness we’re going to see.

Best phrase overheard at a Mission party: “Cindy McCain = Tales From the Crypt Barbie.”

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