The Self-Absorbed Americans

TOTALLY self absorbed.

At least according to the editors of Time Magazine, USA edition.

I really, really wish I didn't believe this...

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America the Meritocracy

News item:

Chelsea Clinton has been hired by NBC News, joining George W. Bush’s daughter, Ronald Reagan’s son, John McCain’s daughter, and Tim Russert’s son.

I am really tempted to make an unforgivably snide and rude comment ...

... but I'll wait til next time.

The Elites have failed

I know, it is something I have been harping on for some time. But I believe it is true and important to recognize. It could be the start of an epic civilizational change a la Toynbee, or the alarm bell that sparks some genuine reform. Or both? I'm not sure, but it should be an interesting time.

Every now and then I see something Steve Pearlstein has written that I like, partly because he hits the Democrats as hard as the Republicans in a logical honest way that pulls me back towards a more centered universe. I have a positively Hellenic passion for the Golden Mean.

Today's column by Pearlstein is a case in point. Just the title deserves a place on Sententiae. "The Epic Global Leadership Fail." Love it. The content is even more pointed:

The global financial system teeters on the edge of collapse because European politicians refused to tell citizens of their crumbling economies that they could no longer guarantee them “la dolce vita” - the sweet life - they had come to expect.

Top executives at Olympus, one of Japan’s leading companies, resign in shame after acknowledging that for nearly 20 years they used a complex accounting scheme to hide billions of dollars in speculative trading losses.

A revered coach and a respected president at Penn State are fired because they were more concerned about protecting their own reputations, and that of their school, than protecting young boys from an alleged sexual predator.

And a former governor, senator and head of Goldman Sachs resigns as chief executive of MF Global after bankrupting the broker-dealer with overleveraged bets on European sovereign bonds.

Welcome to this week’s exciting episode of “Failures in Leadership.”

Read the whole thing. Unlike most of the stipendiary punditocracy he offers some solutions. Let's hope he is as realistic as I think.

me, as an historian: I'd just as soon miss a civilizational change.

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Bashing the elites

Never let an opportunity go by to point out the fecklessness of our elites.

I don't usually read Paul Krugman but his column today caught my eye. By and large I agree with it - which means he is getting smarter! Here's the core of his argument:

... what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

He then goes on to name names. One theme that I repeat over and over on this blog is that the elites have all disgraced themselves in the era of the double aughts. And now they are trying to blame it all on you and me.

we should be ashamed of ourselves for causing all this mayhem.

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American exceptionalism

One of the biggest jokes on the planet. Whatever the truth once was, how can you read stories like this and not feel the fetid breath of history (as in "He's history!" blowing down the nape of your neck.

Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.

I'm sure we're ahead of somebody.

aren't we?

there is, of course, a slight trick to these results. Reassured?

The rich get richer

Not exactly a news flash, but it is what I think is one of the main reasons the Roman Empire fell (especially the Byzantine part starting in the late 13th century).

Anyway, here is our version of it, at least according to Bob Herbert in the New York Times.

Of course, we can dismiss it as liberal class warfare.

The Elites

It has been a steady thesis here that the elites, old and new, failed and were seen to fail during the double aughts. It is one of the reasons, I suspect, that the Tea Partyers are so angry. But who are the elites?

There is a revealing article here from the Washington Post that may throw some light on the 'new' elite. Fortunately (from my pov) I don't fall into this category: didn't go to an elite university (though I went to an excellent one - Un of MN), live in a small town (really small), don't work for an elite school (ahem), didn't marry a fabulously elite and wealthy spouse (that's not a complaint!), and actually have a few good friends who are Evangelicals (despite being an Episcopalian from birth, once the sign of the 'inner' elite).

The major thing that worries me about the new elite is that their predominate ethic seems to revolve around careerism.

a type of family value btw

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Elites

A funny thing happened on the way to the Tea Party.

Read Dana Milbank on the plutocratic co-option of the Tea Party.

Assuming there ever was a Tea Party.

The collapse of the elites

It is always a bad bet to count out the elites of any society, especially ours, where the elites simply put on jeans and a plaid shirt and pretend to be just one of us (George Bush comes to mind: a millionaire son of a millionaire's son who was famously regarded as a 'common man'). But if Sententiae ever concentrated enough to have a theme, it must be this: no one's reputation survived the Double Zeros. Not the business elites (Wall Street? Bankers?), not the industrial elite (Detroit? BP?), not the political elite (do I even need an example?). Not the military elite (Pat Tillman fiasco, Jessica Lynch lies, etc) though the common soldier looks golden.

What is the final upshot of this? Perhaps the Tea Party Movement, though the elites are working hard to co-opt whatever it really is. Perhaps this, as discovered by Richard Cohen in today's Washington Post after watching a superbly qualified political candidate present himself as an anti-Washington jerk on TV:

Bennet's reticence about his stellar qualifications represents something sad: the collapse of the elite. People who should know better -- who, in fact, do know better -- slum with political primitives, thinking they can be wallflowers at the tea party and still go home with their integrity intact. The elite -- often wrong, often unwise -- are scorned not for their mistakes but for their very credentials. It is somehow better to know a little than a lot. In this way, the average person gets a government in his own image -- a standard no one would seek in a dentist.

As for me, so far historians researching the North Iranian peoples have not yet covered themselves in disgrace. So that is the way I am going to self-identify until they do.

it will prevent me from recognizing I am part of an elite.

But you knew this already ...

... the elites of all sectors are busy trying to continue to squeeze the system so that they can become even more elite. And this most certainly includes the presidents of our leading universities (see, that last phrase let's me off the hook with my own employers).

From The Washington Monthly:
* Given universities' financial troubles, it's not at all encouraging to see so many college presidents give themselves raises.

The sense of entitlement by our leaders in finance, politics, business and academia is out of control. And it is not as if they were actually doing anything other than leading the institutions they lead anywhere upwards.

Or am I too cynical?

Now that everyone's rep has been destroyed

For some time I have been harping on the idea that no one's reputation has survived the Bush Years, or the Double 'Aughts, so much so that I have become a broken record. But it reflects a bitter truth that I think we should be aware of. Now this loss of reputation, indeed of basic trust and respect, has spread throughout the entire system of our society.

Here is Peggy Noonan in today's Wall Street Journal:

I spoke to a Manhattan-based psychiatrist who said there is an uptick in the number of his patients reporting depression and anxiety. He believes part of the reason is that we're in a new place, that "When people move into a new home they increasingly recognize the importance of their previous environment." Our new home is postprosperity America; the old one was the abundance; we miss it. But he also detected a political dimension to his patients' anguish. He felt that many see our leaders as "selfish and dishonest," that "our institutions have been revealed as incompetent and undependable." People feel "unled, overwhelmed," the situation "seemingly unsalvageable." The net result? He thinks what he is seeing, within and without his practice, is a "psychological pandemic of fear" as to the future of things—of our country, and even of mankind.

This morning, as I drank the first cup of coffee, I read on the front page of the paper the bitter fulminations of a selection of Bernie Madoff's victims - they want his head on a platter.

So who's next?

New word alert!

This one from Peggy Noonan: Goldsmansachs Head

I think there is an illness called Goldmansachs Head. I think it's in the DSM. When you have Goldmansachs Head, the party's never over. You take private planes to ask for bailout money, you entertain customers at high-end spas while your writers prep your testimony, you take and give huge bonuses as the company tanks. When you take the kids camping, you bring a private chef. Goldmansachs Head is Bernie Madoff complaining he's feeling cooped up in the penthouse. It is the delusion that the old days continue and the old ways prevail and you, Prince of the Abundance, can just keep rolling along. Here is how you know if someone has GSH: He has everything but a watch. He doesn't know what time it is.

Schadenfreude. Pure schadenfreude.

well, I always said that as a political analyst Noonan was a good wordsmith.

Thomas Frank is a genius!

By which I mean of course that he thinks as I do. As all right thinking citizens ought. He reveals this in an article he wrote in the Wall Street Journal (of all places when you see what he says). Now I have often been accused of being a reverse snob (by Carmen, for starters) but every single jot and tittle of this screed about class and the candidates makes sense to me. Read it.

And while I have no important book or any other public writings out to trash the way he refers to, I agree with the following whole heartedly.

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

for the record, it is a little known fact, but I prefer Courvoisier


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Another political ad I like

It's all about that elitist pig Bruce Springsteen. The one who supports that other elitist, Barack Obama.

Me, I'm just waiting for David Brooks to explain what the little folks of small town America really want in their political debates. Not that he's an elitist or anything.

The failure of our business leaders

During the Bush years virtually every class of leadership within American society has failed. Don't know why this is, but it is so. Here is just one example of how unserious American elites have become. It's from AOL, so no link.

What Subprime Mess?

In July, as Bear Stearns execs futilely attempt to prop up two hedge funds that ultimately collapse amid the subprime meltdown, CEO James Cayne spends ten of 21 workdays out of the office, playing golf, competing in a bridge tournament and, allegedly, smoking marijuana.

I am sure that all that down time allowed him to recharge and face the problem with a perfectly clear mind. Clear ... as in utterly blank.