Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  Too few commentators, I think, explained why Nadya said she had undertaken the pregnancy leading to octuplets in the first place. It was a consequence of the conjunction of Suleman’s pro-life views and her doctor’s unusual implantation methods. Dr. Kamrava supposedly informed her that multiple extra embryos created for her earlier IVF treatments were going to be thawed and disposed of. As Suleman explained to television viewers later: “Because they’re frozen doesn’t mean they’re not alive. And they’re still—they are alive. They’re human lives!” Which meant she ought to help them to a better place. While the Catholic Church opposes IVF because it creates embryos outside of the mother’s womb, most Protestant antiabortion groups don’t, and may even propose it as a resort for couples who want to attain the ultimate goods of Protestant antiabortion ideology: babies, and the part Suleman skipped—traditional biparental family. Her church, she said, was the Evangelical megachurch of Calvary Chapel Golden Springs, average attendance thirteen thousand, but no staff member could confirm her as a congregant in that crowd. The pastors went so far as to deny her in multiple press releases. She had apparently come away anyway with her own syncretistic consumer theology.

  The human-uplift story unwound as rapidly as the markets had done six months earlier. Fury emerged even before journalists established that the seed capital for Suleman’s mother career had come from more than $160,000 in disability payments—which she had received for a back injury, it turned out, that she had endured as a psychiatric medical technician, when a state hospital inmate overturned a wooden desk on Nadya in a riot. (Anyone could see she was strong enough to carry a bellyful of kids, and then swan for Ann Curry on NBC.) The talk-show hosts went mental once “public assistance” was the red cape flourished before their horns. They could debate the merits of $700 billion in welfare to Russian-roulette-playing insurers and mismanaged banks, but they drew the line at supporting a houseful of kids. How on earth did an unemployed woman living with her parents pay for Hollywood IVF, with all those multiple trials and implantations? The talking heads, you could tell from their demeanor, knew what IVF cost—natural enough, since some of the female anchors, and the male anchors’ wives, likely had used it, or their friends or producers had. Who was going to pay in the future for fourteen diaper-soiling, unsupervised, potentially handicapped babies as they grew? This during the weeks when the famous octuplets still had not been released from care at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower, California, which was looking to Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid for more than $100,000 in reimbursement for the Suleman kids’ stay.

  Nadya’s volunteer PR person, Joann Killeen, on the job for the blink of an eye before abandoning the task, claimed to have recorded eighty-eight thousand e-mails in a week, including death threats (this from an “exclusive interview” with the Whittier Daily News):

  Emails and voicemail messages. People would call our office and just scream profanities into the phone. “F-you! F-you!” Or they would just say, “I’ll get on a plane and come to California and I hope you die!”…

  Generally, [the e-mails] say the same thing. People are really angry. They are mad about the economy. They are mad their homes aren’t worth what their mortgages are. They’re mad they lost their 401(k).

  They’re really disappointed in government because they pay their taxes and they’ve been a good citizen.

  They’ve controlled the number of children they can afford to have and they feel that, based on their perceptions of reading everything, they’ve jumped to shame and blame and judgment kind of comments about Nadya and that she has, according to them, milked the system—figured out a way to leverage the system so she can stay home and overpopulate the world.

  To summarize in the language we were all then coming to learn: Nadya had leveraged her disability payments into six babies, collateralized them (as a state liability likely to pay revenues for years to come), and then quite brilliantly leveraged those six babies into eight more.

  When Wall Street had done this—tried to wring profit out of bad risk by climbing deeper into the hole—the taxpayer money doled out to rescue their misbegotten investments was called a much-needed “bailout.” On Fox News and MSNBC, Nadya Suleman was called assorted names.

  By analogy, Nadya was made equivalent to the risk engineers who had sapped the economic system and run away with outsize rewards. Judge Judy, not normally notable as an economics commentator, spoke on CNN: “She’s really no different from AIG—only in a little microcosm. Her actions were reckless, irresponsible, and she’s using taxpayer money.” “Octomom” was a tentacular comic-book monster, slithering her baby-oiled limbs into the American money pot, for those who wanted to blame the little people for what big people had done. Doughy as she was still from pregnancy, soft-spoken, rabbit-eyed, naively mendacious, she was so easy to hate. The true lesson, as the official news sources made it out, was that here, before our eyes, in Nadya Suleman, we had the essence of the faceless ones who caused the crisis: the buyer of the five-thousand-square-foot home his family couldn’t afford, the taker of the $500,000 mortgage on $50,000 salary with no down payment (and perhaps a variable rate), now gambling with human life. Here was the new expanding lower middle class that didn’t save, but felt “entitled”; who inflated the bubble economy; who had tempted and motivated the poor financiers who traded those mortgages bundled into collateralized debt obligations, and written each other unfulfillable insurance against their default, and threatened to blow up everything unless the government, taking over failing banks, paid up. It helped that she was a “she,” the evil female consumer. Octomom was the fat spider at the center of a hanging web. Squash her!

  More often, her adventures simply edged the financiers off the day’s coverage. It seemed much easier to tail a woman into her lousy subdivision than to try to get an interview with the male executives, traders, and middle managers who had really devastated us—executives who lived in Wilton, Greenwich, Old Saybrook, or Stonington, Connecticut (where the news executives themselves also live)—or to explain how intelligent and well-spoken people could have immiserated so many strangers across their country.

  The great recession of 2008–09 yielded up a dearth of nameable villains. Their absence seemed to reflect a terror of naming villains. Never in any catastrophe in my lifetime has the “public discourse” seemed more cowardly, more unwilling to assign responsibility to individuals. Normally I would reject scapegoating. The mainstream press couldn’t even find a kid.

  Thinking back, whom can you identify, by name, who fell within the sphere of responsibility at a single one of the blown-up investment banks, whose risky positions spurred the chain reaction, the credit coronary that shuttered businesses large and small and wiped out 401(k)s? Who, for that matter, simply headed the failed banks in the periods that made them fail? If you can’t answer, it’s not because you’ve forgotten. Financiers were not held up to the mass public as news figures—with photographs and life histories, interviews with relatives and neighbors—whether as villains, or just as carriers of that dread disease overconfidence (and its partner, ineptitude). Who was it, by name, whose overleveraging, and chopped-up risk, and faulty mortgage-backed securities, and credit default swaps, froze the credit markets? Who terrified the government with half-truths and threats—until the surviving banks and insurers drained the Treasury of billions, to keep those businesses going, while their executives bathed in the gold coins of their 2007 incomes?

  If you remember Edward Liddy—the closest we ever came to seeing a visible individual in a position of responsibility on TV for more than one night’s broadcast—testifying to Congress as head of AIG in March 2009, you’ll remember that it was compulsory for the press to identify him as not the chief of the company in its bad old days. He was someone who must not be blamed, even as he argued for the $173 billion in tax revenues sucked out of government to prop up his new employer. The press didn’t follow up this sentence with the logical next one, naming the chief of AIG i
n the period for which someone should be blamed. Who was the old chief?*1

  But Octomom, Octomom! And Bernard Madoff. Is it in very bad taste to point out that the two villains we gained by name in the months of deepening recession, in early 2009, were a woman and a Jew? Suleman and Madoff. That is to say, at the moment when American capitalism tottered under the mistakes, bad bets, lies, overconfidence, cupidity, and evil of its financial firms, the press groped at traditional scapegoats—and it left one blinking, dumbfounded. In the past, when people told me scapegoating works in these vulgar ways, I didn’t believe them. Admittedly the anchors and editors had first stumbled around in a mode of semi-investigation for some months, September to December, seemingly unsure of whom to feature on the broadcasts, whom to wait for outside Wall Street offices (if anyone—I don’t remember this happening much), so near to their own television headquarters, or which bankers to sic TV investigative teams on (none, as I recall). Then they followed the lineups of congressional hearings from Barney Frank’s House Financial Services Committee, relying on the same live C-Span the rest of us were watching (but without the level of analysis mustered on any week’s Monday Night Football), increasingly uncomfortable, it seemed, with anything that might be fomenting “class war.” Luckily, Bernard Madoff took over the headlines in December 2008, and this fixation on one Jewish banker could not be anti-Semitism, because his prominent Jewish victims also wanted his head. Indeed, we had the sorry spectacle of Elie Wiesel, conscience of humanity, investor with Madoff, becoming the spokesman for vengefulness. “I would like him to be in a solitary cell,” Wiesel said, “with only a screen, and on that screen for at least five years of his life, every day and every night, there should be pictures of his victims, one after the other after the other, all the time a voice saying, ‘Look what you have done to this old lady, look what you have done to that child, look what you have done,’ nothing else.”

  Madoff had run a Ponzi scheme, which was at least easy to explain: a little money from later investors is paid to early investors to mimic great returns, the rest goes to the swindler himself, and nothing need really be “invested.” This felt as if it helped make sense of the meltdown. The problem was that it had nothing to do with the meltdown. Neither metaphorically nor literally, unless you consider out-and-out fraud a useful metaphor for legal forms of self-interested recklessness and illegal abuses undertaken in collusion by hundreds of people across financial industries. Bernard Madoff couldn’t affect the market because he wasn’t really investing to make his returns. The portfolio was fictitious. The downturn led to Madoff’s exposure as a curious side effect; as the real loss of value for investors elsewhere led them to try to withdraw cash from the fake fund, they found out their money wasn’t there anymore. Yet Madoff was on my front page every day and my news broadcast at night. Then, following Madoff, we had Octomom.

  —

  I don’t mean to suggest that Nadya Suleman isn’t a loon, or a wrongdoer. She clearly belongs to the tradition of the great American wrecks. Sweet, self-serving, at once devious and oblivious, she seems an inheritor of Joan Didion’s California “dreamers of the golden dream,” who can remake reality by sheer force of their denial of contradictions, practicalities, and other people’s eventual suffering. But the press followed sun-kissed Nadya into its own inner California—a land of editorials that write themselves and immoral behavior everyone can hate—without squinting to see what lay beyond.

  Pornographers were nimbler. Vivid Entertainment, known for its swift-footedness in releasing celebrity sex tapes (Kim Kardashian, Pamela Anderson), offered $1 million to Octomom to star in a new production. Sarah Palin had received similar treatment from Larry Flynt, though without any offers of remuneration, when he cast impersonators in the election-time release Who’s Nailin’ Paylin [sic]? (Straight sexism: I know of no W.’s Wang or Ballin’ Bush in which W. got drilled for oil.) But one felt Flynt and Hustler Inc. put money into a hardcore film representing Palin because they correctly sensed the American male—red state or blue state—not only wanted to tear the woman down, but also wanted to guess what she’d be like in bed. It mixed hate with, say, erotic curiosity.

  Vivid’s Octomom offer reflected not erotic but biological curiosity. Or anatomical—as in a frog dissection. One could only imagine Nadya supine, pullulating. Perhaps America wanted to look into that womb that had housed so many, in search of a visual confirmation of the prime mover. Yet if we’d looked in, we would have seen only another of those clichés in detective shows (“Taggart, look at this!”) where the two cops enter the suspect’s lair and, on one crazy-quilt wall, find clipped photographs from tabloids and magazines depicting the twisted ideal the madwoman has all along been stalking. In this instance, Angelina Jolie.

  For who was Nadya, progenitor of so many multiples, herself trying to mimic and double? It wasn’t a resemblance we were all looking at, when—I remember it as just about a week into the debacle—side-by-side photos ran on the cover of Life&Style, with a questioning headline, and Nadya was asked about it on Dateline NBC. It was more like a physical impersonation: eyes shaped this way, nose turned that way, lips surgically swollen and wide. She was plainly Angelina, stretched and inflated.

  And who is Angelina Jolie? Angelina, age thirty-four, actress, celebrity, humanitarian, fills many roles, but chief among them is that of America’s most famous baby getter. She hasn’t turned in a notable film performance since Girl, Interrupted at twenty-four. Yet Jolie now stands atop the celebrity journalism pyramid.

  She is an unusual cover girl. Angelina, like one of the ancient gods, is able to violate all laws, then fascinate us with her selective reintroduction of them. She takes what she wants. She is the virago who acquired Brad Pitt, sexiest and emptiest of male stars, and filled his blond vacancy with her life force, stealing him away from simpering Jennifer Aniston. Her swollen lips are not so much physically engorged with blood as metaphorically covered in it. But she does love children.

  After filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider on location in Cambodia (where it seems her performance as a stony-faced video game character didn’t engross her whole attention), she became interested in humanitarian crises. Contacting the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, she took on the role of UN Goodwill Ambassador. Deciding one day that she wanted a child refugee of her own, she acquired “Maddox,” replacing his Cambodian name, Rath Vibol. She decreed for him the considerable fortune of an actress’s legally adopted child, planted him on her hip, and, once his silky infant hair was long enough to style, gave him a Mohawk like a London conceptual artist’s.

  Three years later she took home a baby from Ethiopia, the daughter of a young woman who had been raped and become pregnant, then had been shamed and assaulted by her community. “I think [she] is a very fortunate human being to be adopted by a world-famous lady,” said the birth mother, reportedly, of her rescued offspring. Subsequently, Jolie had three biological children with Pitt. She then adopted a boy from Vietnam.

  Here is a woman who will do what we other Americans won’t: redistribute wealth to the poor, directly, in fact as directly as one can, adopting the poor and making them her heirs, ending their poverty forever. She takes responsibility. It’s as if she went on and added babies from her own womb just to show that she isn’t taking babies because she can’t make them. She can. Nor does she specialize in some one ethnicity that her adoptions will repurify; she picks up the kids when the spirit moves her.

  Of course, there’s one thing odd about this. She’s also, in her way, buying the kids. An alternative might have been to help the Ethiopian Muslim woman who had been raped. So if Jolie is America’s conscience, she is also a bearer of one of our less beautiful traits: the will to buy whatever we want. A news report said someone had tracked down Angelina and asked her about news of Octomom’s feat and the uncanny resemblance between the two of them. Jolie was said to be “totally creeped out.”

  —

  About the comparative strength of “trends�
�� in mass media, one should always be cautious. Baby interest, however, seems to have accelerated lately. Some celebrity babies fascinate because they represent the recombination of pairs of beautiful people (Brangelina’s, or TomKat’s). Some because they seem so suspicious (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s again, what with the undying rumors of his homosexuality, their Scientology, and her look of a kidnap victim). Some because people “too young” choose to keep them, with tabloids following as they do (Jamie Lynn Spears, Bristol Palin). Some because their philanthropic celebrity adoptions seem so frivolous (Madonna’s adoption of a Malawian infant in violation of Malawi law; when she finally had him brought over to the UK on British Airways, failing to go to Malawi herself to pick him up, she was accused of visiting with the new baby for only three hours before departing for Pilates class). Some because of the mystery of fertility treatment (Jon & Kate Plus 8’s sextuplets and twins; Octomom’s octuplets).

  Americans have many reasons these days to develop renewed trouble with the old question “Where do babies come from?” This is what spills onto the magazine covers. But there are two central factors that touch a number of these celebrity births, and reach beyond them—two supercauses of interest, I’d say. On the one hand, babies have become an ever more valuable commodity as couples suffer more trouble in producing them. Under conditions of sex equality, the upper and middle classes procreate later, whenever women are led by education and careers to delay childbearing—to the age of thirty-four, or thirty-six, or forty.