Nice little pieces of self-parody

I too fear the overreach of regulation of the free enterprise system due to the global economic collapse. As an aspiring entrepreneur, I sure picked a rotten time to flee the world of the legacy corporation.

But why are some of the biggest voices of libertarianism either in a state of self-parody or fearing, gasp -- socialism! -- because their purist economic beliefs have been put to the test, and have failed?

When The Economist is advocating some interference in the markets, and when the author of "Liars Poker" reveals how nobody on Wall Street could see what the hell was coming on (and those few who did were ignored), shouldn't that be a sign that a certain ideology that, like most when taken to extremes, has gone off the rails?

It's one that I still want to identify with, certainly more than either Bush-style conservativism that lies in wreckage, and quasi-New Deal cries on the left for protectionism, single-payer health care and expansion of entitlements.

But it's embarrassing to read the lunatic prose of "The Libertarian Moment," the first piece linked here, and especially this sequence harkening to the immediate days after Nixon's resignation:

"Yet even during that dark night of the American soul, with all its eerie echoes of George W. Bush’s final miserable days in office, premonitions of liberty-loving life abounded for those who knew where to look. The contraceptive pill, which gave women unprecedented control over their sexual and reproductive lives, had been made legal for married women in 1965, and was on the verge of being legalized for unmarried women too."

The Constitution lay in tatters; but hey, thank God single people could screw their brains out and forget all about Watergate thanks to the pill! Precisely the segue I would have made!

Except that, following that logic, and as Bush has pardoned his last Thanksgiving turkey (fowl freedom!), we have the decision in California -- Ahnuld's Kalifornia, supposedly libertine, if not libertarian -- to roll back marriage rights for gays that had been previously granted. Oops! How did that happen?

Libertarian ideas are still compelling to me, but I do want these folks to grow up and get real. Just a little bit. Please?

"The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster. They are bankrupt, and this time, there will be no bailout."

That fabulously creepy Highsmith feeling

One of the underrated pleasures of reading the Wall Street Journal (especially given the grim economic news and the paper's reactionary editorial page) are some of the features in its Saturday Weekend section.

Crime fiction historian Leonard Cassuto's remembrance this weekend of Patricia Highsmith's "Strangers on a Train" gave me some delightfully harrowing recollections of her novel that Alfred Hitchcock adapted for the cinema. Some comparison has been made to our own time, the so-called Age of Terror, with the chilling dawn of the nuclear age that led to mass paranoia and a search for scapegoats that Highsmith loaded into her early works:

" 'Strangers' was her debut novel, but her sense of anxious foreboding was already fully formed in the crucible of Cold War paranoia that surrounded her. For Highsmith, who was gay, that paranoia was shot through with anxiety, for American Cold War politics intertwined with an intense homophobia that branded homosexuals as an official national security risk. Highsmith's creative goal, she wrote in her notebook at the time, was 'Consciousness alone, consciousness in my particular era, 1950.' "

Much of Cassuto's piece is an homage to a female writer who essentially created her own stylistic form, one that was largely disdained and unappreciated in her native land for much of her lifetime:

" 'Strangers on a Train' began Highsmith's career-long tour of the minds of characters who aren't comfortable in the world, and her edgy, original thrillers have always defied easy categorization. Even more popular now than when she was alive and writing, Highsmith stands as an utterly unique genre writer."

I've read about a half-dozen Highsmith novels (but none of the Ripley 5 as yet) and when she steps outside the mind of criminals, like Bruno, she still evokes blood-curdling suspense that is hard to top. My personal favorite is "Tremor of Forgery," but even those rare novels in which no crime is committed, such as "Edith's Diary," her psychological insights are tremendous.

Frightening, deeply unsettling, but tremendous. She broadened the suspense genre as the Cold War period was subsumed by Vietnam, Watergate and the rise of the conservatives, taking in all of these developments.

Highsmith wrote during times in which Americans weren't thrilled about being confronted by their darkest impulses, and they didn't appreciate someone willing to step deep into the shadows to expose them. As Cassuto writes, Highsmith was an amoralist -- "I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares whether justice is ever done or not."

I'm still waiting for an American novelist of this time to step into that breach. Then again, the power of her work may be precisely because the topics that she explored were considered taboo.

Grateful for this Veterans Day

Not just to those who have served in the past and continue to do so, but also because of the recent safe return of my brother from his deployment. He's finally met the baby daughter whose birth he missed!

Today also is the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day, and The Guardian is running an excellent commemorative series this week on World War I. Here's a video link (unfortunately it cannot be embedded) to an interview with a surviving British World War I veteran that captures the hatred of war and idealism (even pacifism) that many of those who fought in "The Great War" spoke about for decades:

A friend recently told me about a trip he had taken to St. Michel, in eastern France, and toured through a private American World War I cemetery.

"I was there thinking no one has visited these souls for probably years and its a forgotten place in history."

This conflict is of special interest to me as a former history major and lifelong history buff because of how it shocked a Victorian world a half-century before Vietnam had a similar effect in America.
The unsentimental historian Barbara Tuchman, wrote at the end of her eminent "The Guns of August" that of the war's "many diverse results" there was

"one dominant one transcending all the others: disillusion."

It's one of many outstanding pieces of scholarship about The Great War. Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory" and Modris Eksteins' "Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age" are exceptional for their fascinating examinations of the war's effects on literature, art and culture. As Eksteins writes in his introduction, in one of many brilliant passages about the war ushering in modernity:

"That buffer, between thought and action, a positive moral code, has disinegrated in the twentieth century, and in the process, in the colossal romanticism and irrationalism of our era, imagination and action have moved together, and even have been fused.

"Sensation is everything. The ghost has become reality and reality a ghost."

Why we fail to learn from this history -- and I'm thinking of the neoconservative plunge into the Middle East that will have the U.S., and some of its few remaining allies, bottled up for too many more years -- is as great a tragedy as the wars themselves.