Business Items :: Early, Early Monday Morning

{ 2009 06 08 }

Early, Early Monday Morning

Symposium - If you have the time, you really ought to read the excerpts the New York Review of Books has published from the symposium on the economic crisis it held at the end of April. Few institutions have both the clout to get Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson and the cajones to put them on a panel together. It’s left to the reader to determine whether the blatant carping between them stands as unintentional comedy or humor with a point. One might also expect disappointment from a last word delivered by Bill Bradley, considering that the panel included the aforementioned economic nemeses as well as George Soros and Nouriel Roubini, but Bradley offers some succinct observations on the road map to our current folly.
Elsewhere, Simon Johnson provides a serendipitously similar perspective to Bradley’s with his point that the strength of America’s capitalist democracy is founded in the country’s cyclical struggle to wrest disproportionate power from those controlling the commanding heights. Although the naturalized limey doesn’t say it, his argument is rather post-Marxian inasmuch as it hinges on saving capital for the private sector by limiting its influence. Then again, I may just be assuming that any government descending into oligarchy would inevitably provoke revolutionary insurrection. Is anyone else ready to grab a picket and chant “Regulation not revolution!”?

Legislation - Looking at the proposed time line for a prospective health care reform bill, one has to feel a certain amount of ambivalence about the American system of government. Sure, health care reform is a big issue, and one expects it to be addressed by a big bill. The matter of drafting a bill in committee at the top of June in the hopes that it will reach the floor by the beginning of October might even give a person some confidence in the deliberative power of representative bodies. Over the course of 4 months, after all, the people chosen by the people ought to be able to slap together a fairly comprehensive and non-schwag piece of legislation. Getting that bill to the floor at October’s outset, however, leaves only a few weeks to debate, vote, conference, and vote again before the session is out, and that blithely assumes the current time line doesn’t suffer any setbacks. Unless the political climate shifts, we could easily see critical elements — such as the establishment of a public option to compete with private insurers — neutered in committee and eliminated on the floor for the sake of necessary expedience. Say what you will about the Chinese government, but at least they act quickly…and imprison anyone who speaks against those actions. Okay, maybe a few months delay and a bit of mitigation isn’t too steep a price.

Book - For fear of appearing a philistine (or other civilization-challenged epithet), I rarely offer opinions on books that I’ve read. Usually, I just rant about the inequity of popular social science tomes in reaction to the press junkets acompanying their release. Having, with the exception of his guide to Portland, read every book Chuck Palahniuk has written, I feel somewhat obligated to provide an opinion of his most recent novel, Pygmy.
The short, pseudo-structuralist version is this: If you haven’t read Palahniuk’s third novel, Survivor, then you should go ahead and do that. It’s funny. If you have, then you might not want to read Pygmy. Beyond the overt stylistic differences and nauseatingly socially-acceptable conclusion, it’s pretty much a re-write, and the first iteration was better.
That might read as bitter and disappointed, but I knew what I was getting. As time has progressed, Palahniuk has subjugated originality to stylistic cohesion. Along the way, an expectation of taboo has inured readers to the power of its description, and the voice that was once a breath of fresh swamp gas has become repetitious. At the same time, Pygmy is selling like rubbers, and that’s probably good news for the world. A warmed-over retread from Chuck Palahniuk remains more meritorious of reward than the bulk of worthless prose for which Americans willingly exchange currency.