Peter Krupa

I have two things to say about The Bonfire of the Vanities. First, it’s profoundly racist. Not that Tom Wolfe is racist, necessarily. I don’t know the guy. But there’s not a single sympathetic black character in a 700-page book full of black characters. If there’s a non-racist explanation for this, I’d like to hear it.

Second, who ever thought that this book’s description of the excesses of Wall Street would someday sound, well, quaint? I mean, Great Jove! Sherman makes one million dollars per year? That makes him… like… a millionaire! And try to imagine an I-banker worried about losing his job over one $6 million mistake. Are you kidding? That’s petty cash! HIGH FIVE BRO!!!

I guess I don’t regret reading The Bonfire of the Vanities as a part of my cultural education. It’s just that as a piece of culture, it hasn’t aged well.

From The Bonfire of the Vanities:

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

In The Crash of 2008 and What it Means, George Soros makes the most eloquent critique of globalization that I’ve ever read.

In a nutshell, he argues that starting in the 70s, rich countries forced Washington consensus austerity measures on poor (“periphery”) countries, while at the same time reserving for themselves the right to enact countercyclical measures to keep their own markets stable and attractive for investment.

The status of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency coupled with this globalization of financial markets allowed the more attractive markets of rich countries (in particular the United States) to suck in the savings of the less-stable “periphery” markets, generating large current account deficits – that is, we borrowed heavily to spend beyond our means and fuel our prosperity.

This finally catches up to the rich countries. A series of government bail-outs starting in the 1980s coincided with the rise of “market fundamentalism,” the result being broad deregulation of financial markets coupled with a massive, throbbing moral hazard.

Now, the super-bubble has popped, and your average American is screwed. In addition, Soros predicts a prolonged move away from the dollar as a global reserve currency, ending the unlimited line of global credit that the United States has enjoyed over the last 30 years.

The “market fundamentalism” that Soros refers to is the orthodoxy that unregulated financial markets tend toward equilibrium. He places it alongside several other fundamentalist philosophies that ultimately ended badly: communism, national socialism, and  fascism.

He might have a point. We’ll see.

I had assumed Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo would focus on the clandestine U.S. goons hunting down Pablo Escabar. It did, partly, and of course we all love reading about the extra-legal international escapades of the United States of America. But Bowden dedicated the far greater and more interesting portion of his book to the Colombians.

This part was deeply unsettling. Not the fact of the violence, necessarily, but the image of a society that could not respond to it. Dismantle a lab? He kills five cops. Arrest him? He sets of a car bomb. Indict him? He kills the public prosecutor. Bring him to trial? He kills the judge, the next judge, and the next judge’s family. Then he gets acquitted. This all gave me bad dreams.

In the end, the only way to stop a guy like Pablo was to use his tactics against him – that is, go vigilante, burn his stuff, and kill all his associates, including family members. The irony in the whole thing (irony?) is that Pablo never would have become so powerful if he didn’t have so much money, and the source of that money – extremely lucrative cocaine smuggling – was made possible by U.S. anti-drug policy.

Oh, and cocaine prices haven’t really gone up in 20 years (PDF). Meanwhile, the body count has.