The U.S. economy is getting fat selling fat. Meanwhile, the public libraries are dying of malnutrition.
MAY 9
Jonathan and I are on the phone, arranging this afternoon’s date. He suggests we meet for lunch at his favorite cheap trattoria in the Village, then go to a movie.
I can’t go out for lunch, I remind him.
Do you want to just meet for the movie?
Nope, no movies. “I’m not buying—remember?”
“You mean you’re not allowed to go to themovies ?” This is the aspect of our project about which my friends are most incredulous.
I’m apologetic. “It’s nice out. Can we, like, take a walk?”
“A walk! You want to go for a walk?” He’s laughing now (he likes to walk). “Oh, Judy, you’re so boring!” When I say nothing in my defense, he laughs more gently, perhaps to soften the grim truth.
Before going out, I settle in with the SundayTimes. Images of naked prisoners in humiliating postures are impeding the Bush administration’s efforts at convincing the Iraqis that we wish them well. Nevertheless, I learn, Brand America is holding its own. “Even Muslims in the Middle East and Southeast Asia do not seem to translate their anger into a boycott of American products,” says the article. A nineteen-year-old Singaporean man emerging from midday prayers at his mosque tells the reporter that “even after seeing the pictures” of Abu Ghraib he has not lost his appetite for McDonald’s and KFC.
TheNew Yorker runs a cartoon by Mick Stevens of a dark-skinned man standing in a landscape of rubble, looking stunned. He is wearing a T-shirt with the logo “I USA” on it, and thought bubbles surround his head: “Am I losing my hair?” “Am I gaining too much weight?” “Is my breath OK?” “Do I need a new car?” “What’s on TV?” The caption:LIBERATED IRAQI .
There’s hope for Krispy Kreme, in Baghdad.
MAY 14
Paul and I go uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the exhibit of art of the Byzantine Empire in its final period, 1261 to 1557. It is an awesome show, in the old sense of that word. Walking among the icons, crucifixes, and cloaks in visceral reds and bottomless blacks, encrusted in gold, gems, enamel, and ivory, I am dazed.
As art institutions go, the Met is as wealthy as Byzantium. This is why over the years I have never paid more than a quarter to get in (read the two-point type: the entrance fee, $12 at this writing, is “suggested”). Maybe I’m paranoid, but I have noticed that the clerks consistently decline to thank patrons like me, who offer less than full fare. It is Friday night, free admission, but we’ve arrived a little before the cashiers close, so I give a quarter and ask for two buttons. The same thing happens: no thank-you. Suspecting a perverse policy, I ask the young man if the workers are instructed to subtly transmit ingratitude to the less generous public. I’m trying to adopt a tone of scientific disinterest, but it comes out sounding like a rebuke.
“Now you’re making me feel pressured,” he answers, and due either to pique or performance anxiety, hands over our buttons in silence.
I know, I know. I’m punishing the wrong guy. And even the highers-up whose orders he might be following are at the mercy of policies even higher up. This fall, when the Museum of Modern Art reopens after its renovation, it will charge a record $20. Facing public outcry, MOMA’s president will not back down. Want free arts? he’ll say. Me too. I suggest you write your congressman.
He’s got a point. America is the only advanced capitalist democracy that does not allocate a substantial portion of its budget to libraries and the arts (we’re also the only putative non-theocracy that does not give money to art in which anybody is naked). But many Americans would still rather spend $20 to see the Picassos than entrust Washington with paying for culture. At the moment I share this bias, given Washington’s current prejudices, for instance, against nakedness. But I resist my prejudice, since it’s a symptom of a pernicious political-economic philosophy: private is good, public bad, business is good, government bad, whether you’re showing paintings or building prisons.
Since the New Deal, this bias toward the private sector has ascended from heresy to conventional wisdom to hegemony, gaining the glow of gospel since the Reagan years. It’s also been criticized along the way. In 1958, inThe Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith dissected it with unique elegance. Because history has moved generally from autocracy to democracy, Galbraith wrote, “[n]ot surprisingly, modern economic ideas incorporated a strong suspicion of government…Even Marx intended that the state should wither away.” Public services “remain under the obloquy of the unreliability, incompetence, cost, and pretentious interference of prices…. Alcohol, comic books, and mouth wash all bask under the superior reputation of the market. Schools, judges, and municipal swimming pools lie under the evil reputation of bad kings.”
These days, public agencies are compelled to act like businesses. The Motor Vehicles Bureau, Department of Health, and state university systems refer to their service users, formerly known as drivers, patients, or students, as “consumers.” Even the most essential functions of government must advertise for business. I recently heard a spot on the radio for a product called “public transportation.” Its slogan was something like “So People Can Get Home Faster.” I had to laugh; the ad brought to mind Garrison Keillor’s Ketchup Advisory Board, promoting its product’s domestic-tranquility-enhancing agents. But the joke is on us. America’s most ubiquitous condiment obviously doesn’t need promoting. Public transportation, arguably more useful than sugary tomato paste, is a disappearing essential commodity.
The preference for private over public is based on at least two fallacies. One is that a dollar circulating through the government’s till behaves differently from one moving through Wal-Mart’s. Now, there are differences in how these dollars are spent. For one, unlike the Wal-Mart cashier, the worker at the Motor Vehicles Bureau is likely to belong to a union and therefore earn a decent salary and get health insurance and a pension. Antitax pundits would lead us to believe that we taxpayers are bankrolling the fat wage and benefits package of the public-sector worker, while Wal-Mart is carrying its own weight. In fact, by declining to offer its workers insurance or sufficient wages to buy the basics for themselves, Wal-Mart shifts the bill to the state. After all, the cashier gets sick anyway, her children get hungry. When these things happen, she turns to Medicaid or food stamps, and the rest of us subsidize not just the cashier but Wal-Mart itself.
Still, if you’re looking for growth (and that is about all economists look for as a sign of national health), there’s no way to distinguish the Motor Vehicles dollar from the Wal-Mart dollar as they travel through the economy. The gross national product is merely the sum of all goods and services exchanged; it does not discriminate between useful and useless, constructive and destructive, public and private expenditure. Uzis and gardening tools, pizza delivery and chemotherapy, football teams and nuclear waste cleanup—it all adds up to the GNP. A fact little publicized by the Bush administration is that in spite of cuts in domestic spending, the majority of new jobs created during its tenure have been government jobs. Is this bad for the economy? People with government jobs pay taxes—that’s good for schools and roads and missile shields. And they also shop at Wal-Mart, which is good for business.
The other fallacy is that the axis of evil Waste, Fraud, and Abuse belongs to the public sector, and the private sector never screws up. Amtrak can’t turn a profit serving the markets that the private airlines and bus companies have abandoned? A senator stands on the floor of Congress and declares that the government can’t do anything right. He doesn’t chastise the corporations for leaving travelers stranded. United Water takes over the efficient utility from the city of Atlanta and promptly raises rates and starts pumping out brown liquid? The free marketeers excuse United Water—poor thing, city water delivery turned out to be more complicated than the company had wagered—or, at best, they blame United Water for poor management. But they will never admit that a private mo
nopoly has little incentive to do a good job or that the city was doing a better one.
Under the privatize-everything ideology, no priority trumps market “choice” (like we really want a selection of three electric companies). No strategy can replace business strategies. In the case of troubled public services, that strategy is punish the under-performer. If children aren’t learning, cut the school’s aid. When trains derail because of inadequate track maintenance, show Amtrak the gallows.
The aim of this strategy is not exactly to improve services. It’s to unburden the nation of those pesky, expensive public amenities, amenities for which, under a progressive tax system, the wealthy pay more and the poor and middle-class pay less, even as the rich need and use them less and the rest of us use them more. Diminished budgets also affect the classes unequally. Public services decline. Middle- and upper-class parents opt for private school. Travelers who can afford it take the plane. Now CEOs, not publicly accountable elected officials, make the decisions about how much to pay teachers or where the trains should stop. Shareholders win; children in poor neighborhoods and residents of out-of-the-way towns lose. Tax revolts gain steam, even among those who are their victims—after all, why pay for lousy services? The antigovernment tax resisters have won: “the beast is starved.” And the most brilliant part, from their point of view, is that almost everybody is convinced privatization is in the public good.
So what about art? Without public money, institutions are turning more desperate by the day. At the Atlanta Ballet, I read, the highest bidder at auction wins the honor of owning—er, sponsoring—her favorite dancer. “I had so much fun running up to John [Welker] saying: ‘Guess what? I won you!’ ” bubbled proud patron Lynda Courts after one such auction. Shades of the Paris Opera Ballet circa 1860, when wealthy patrons “subsidized” dancers, in return for favors? Or perhaps of Paris, Kentucky, around the same time. Either way, it brings new meaning to the termslaves to art.
“Culture follows money,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said. Many of the best things in life are not free. The question is: Where does the money come from and who decides how it is spent? Does each of us have to shop for our own health, education, transportation, and welfare, as well as our own private pleasure and enlightenment? Or might some of these be considered public goods, meriting public funds? The advantages are many, from economies of scale to increased social equality to a more cohesive community. The costs of not having them are many, too. Besides the inverse of the above—inefficiency, social inequity, and a splintered community—the cost, most prominently, is the felt necessity of more private consumption. More and bigger cars, houses, pools, lawns, televisions, and all-terrain vehicles may boost the macroeonomy in the short term, but they eat away at our own personal bank accounts and the finite treasures that make up our earth.
I won’t oversimplify the processes by which art gets made and paid for. Arts funding is not just economic, it’s political. Back in Byzantium, this Jewish taxpayer might have been no happier with the art her government was buying with her hard-earned bezants than Jesse Helms was with Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black penises. Still, as I gaze into the solemn eyes of the black Madonnas at the Met, I think of what a state can do with the public’s money if only it has—and we citizens have—the will.
MAY 18
I drop by Flavio and Ann’s. Their children, Lucia and Emilio, are at the kitchen table working on an art project that involves gobs of glitter and glue. Both are iridescent. The back door is open to the garden, where the ground is scattered with plum blossoms. Flavio is unpacking groceries from the food co-op. I’m complaining about the privatization of everything.
“You guys should join the co-op,” Flavio says, as he frequently does, caressing an organic eggplant and stacking blood oranges in a bowl made by Ann. The organic oranges cost half what conventional ones would at a commercial grocer.
“I know we should,” I answer, as I frequently do, then recite my usual complaints about the Park Slope Food Coop, which has a reputation for its many rules and high work requirement of members. “I don’t have time for the eight-hour indoctrination,” I say.
He laughs. He loves the co-op, and not just for the good, cheap food. After all, low prices aren’t everything. The lure of low prices, absent all other considerations, can be insidious, in fact. “I feel when I go into the big store, the big chain, we all become marketing numbers” justifying bad wages, environmental degradation, and unfair treatment of suppliers, he says. “When Wal-Mart tells you they’re doing this to give the consumer the lowest price, they are using you as an alibi. Every time you shop there, you have to be conscious of that. It’s you that makes this possible. It’s not Big Brother watching over you. It’s you. And these are big consequences. It’s not me buying a fucking egg. It’s me buying this egg with all these consequences to everyone else on the fucking planet!”
He pauses to persuade Emilio to put on his shoes before going outside, then continues. “It is redeeming to know you are resisting [by going to the co-op]. But you wonder what kind of alternative is this. You’re working at dismantling, but what are you establishing? What kind of global alternative are you creating? You are boycotting, but what is next?” He laughs at what is sounding like a rather a grandiose sales pitch for the Park Slope Food Coop. The kids run in from the garden, screaming. It’s an appropriate punctuation. “I just like to shop in the co-op. I love this little idea that everyone works and everyone benefits,” Flavio says. “Maybe it’s made up—but I love that idea.”
“Okay, sign me up!” I say, practically bursting into the Italian communist anthem “Avanti Populo.” But I will rethink my resistance to the work requirement of two and a half hours per person per month. It’s not just for the cheap food. I love the idea, too.
MAY 22
Riding my bike to Prospect Park a few days ago, I noticed that a segment of Fifth Avenue has been rechristened Cucina Boulevard, after the restaurant that sparked the avenue’s gentrification more than a decade ago. I called the Brooklyn borough president’s office, but no one could tell me how this renaming occurred or how long it will last. I didn’t ask whether Cucina is required to sweep the streets and empty the trash cans in exchange for the honor (and free advertising) of the street sign, but I suspect the answer is no.
New York has never been a very civic-minded city. It has always belonged to the financiers and real estate moguls. But now its remaining public spaces are also being sold to the highest bidder. Last year, to stem budget shortfalls in the public schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg extended exclusive beverage vending rights to Snapple, trading textbooks and toilet paper for childhood obesity and cavities. Now he wants to peddle corporate sponsorships, along with naming rights, to subway stations, parks, buses, and bridges.
Paul comes home from Italian class. “I love our library,” he calls out as he enters the apartment. His proprietary feeling has grown with our dependence on the institution. I wonder if he would feel it was “our library” if the Central Branch were called, say, Bertelsmann BookCenter or Burger King’s Read It Your Way?
MAY 24
Analysis of $350 billion tax cut signed into law one year ago (source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities):
Average federal tax savings (by household income)
Middle 20 percent………………………$647
Top 1 percent………………………..$35,000
Incomes > $1 million (top 0.2 percent)…………….$123,592
Projected federal deficit by 2010
With tax cuts……………………..$675 billion
Without tax cuts…………………….$100 billion in most years
MAY 25
I have visited four other libraries in Brooklyn and Manhattan looking for the fabric-craft books. All are AWOL: Away Without Loan. “It’s tough to keep that kind of book on the shelf,” one librarian tells me. “They’re expensive, people want to own them, and we can’t afford to keep replacing them.”
I shake my head and walk away, unable to decide which distresses me more: the rape and pillage of the commons or the idea that a person who makes silk flowers would steal a book from the library.
MAY 27
Tonight, the Voluntary Simplicity group is talking about Finding the Work You Love. Jessica, one of our realists, reports on a conflict between the values of VS and those of the job market. She tells us about a friend who went for an interview at a computer company and took out a pad and pen to take notes. She didn’t get the job. Later she heard that the paper and pen had marked her as stodgy and technophobic. The firm wanted to see a Palm Pilot or BlackBerry. Hers was the consumer electronics equivalent of a working-class accent or country manners.
Maybe she couldn’t afford a BlackBerry, Dana suggests.
“Too bad,” responds Jessica. “You sometimes have to spend money to make money.” I flash on my journalism school dinner and the $100 I “wasn’t allowed” to spend, according to my “rules.” What networking opportunities did I miss? Buying makes you saleable.
Laura has brought an announcement for a “volunteer fair,” where visitors can check out good causes as they might do tables at a flea market. Children with AIDS? Cut-rate cosmetics? Hudson River cleanup? Vegetable-shaped refrigerator magnets? Laura, who is intelligent and more outwardly focused than almost anyone in the room, nevertheless seemed to pick her activity without a guiding principle. She spent last weekend working at a stray-cat shelter, even though she is allergic to cats.
The rest of the group is still looking inward. Dana, a therapeutic masseuse and “healer” in her spare time, is adopting a less literal, more spiritual approach to the problem of over-owning. “I think I’ve made friends with my clutter,” she tells us. “I made the decision that it will go in its own time. I can’t overstress about things I can’t do anything about.” Perhaps a Higher Power will take the old clothes to the Salvation Army. In the meantime, Dana is lowering her rent burden by getting a roommate. Jessica is doing the same, and also selling things for other people on eBay. The librarian Elisa, a practical sort like Laura, is discovering things about herself, too. She is surprised that she does not missThe Sopranos and not surprised that she misses her cleaning lady.
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