Neoliberalism — make it stop, already.

There was a time when all the body’s members
Rebell’d against the belly, thus accused it:
That only like a gulf it did remain
I’ the midst o’ the body, idle and unactive,
Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing
Like labour with the rest, where the other instruments
Did see and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel,
And, mutually participate, did minister
Unto the appetite and affection common
Of the whole body. — William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

I spent the holidays out of reach of television, English-language radio, and English-language newspapers. Aside from the rare foray into town, a dial-up internet connection represented my only tether to the wider world, and when that connection proved inoperable my isolation became nearly total.

Smatterings of news reached me from time to time. Reports of a failed or thwarted airliner bombing wafted in on the stiff, frigid winds of late December. Evidently, a health-care bill of some sort passed — passed as all such dubious legislation is wont to: in the late hours before a holiday recess, with little fanfare or ado. If memory serves, such was the way the United States Federal Reserve system entered the world: just before Christmas, like some travesty of the Nativity, complete with wise men (representatives of J. P. Morgan and the Rothschilds), shepherds (government officials like Rhode Island senator Nelson Algren and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Abraham Piatt Andrew) and sheep (the American people).

My isolation also removed me from the daily signs of real-time collapse brought about by the recession. I saw no streets left unsalted and unplowed. I read no announcements on digital freeway signs announcing the the Motor Vehicle Registry will now be closed Wednesdays. I bounced over no potholes, gaping since winter last, now yawning to minor chasms. I passed no dead malls, whizzed by no unsold condos or foreclosed-upon homes.

The effect of my isolation I can only describe as tonic. Some moments I thought, “How bad could it get, anyway?” I ate simple meals, made some headway on a massive project that had been looming over me for some time, did “man-things,” as I jokingly called them, like hauling firewood and shoveling snow, and lost a few tenacious inches from around my belly in the bargain. Time slowed to the pace of continental drift, and I relished the boredom which it brought — a boredom that, unlike the boredom which finds me in my urban digs, didn’t scatter so much as focus my attention and my efforts.

My holiday seclusion rather reminded me of the character of Konstantin Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, who, after an enervating trip to bustling Moscow, returns to his estate. The solace of life there soon envelopes him.

When [Levin] went into the small drawing room where he always had tea, and settled into his armchair with a book … he felt that, strange as it was, he had not parted with his dreams and could not live without them…. He read the book, though about what he had read … and along with that various pictures of farm work and future family life arose disconnectedly in his imagination. He felt that something in the depths of his soul was being established, adjusted and settled.

I confess that I too felt as though something being established, adjusted and settled during my holiday. Call it getting back to basics, putting first things first, or what have you; there arose in me a certain satisfaction which comes when one realizes how little one really needs to sustain himself not just in bare existence but in comfort. A roaring fire, decent wine, and excellent literature elaborate themselves into an entire Eden under such conditions.

This sleek Tolstoyan satisfaction lasted only a few days. I quickly came to realize that the wood I hauled had already been purchased, stacked and cut for me. And, as it turned out, my snow shoveling turned out to be more therapeutic than essential; a neighbor came by daily on his tractor, outfitted with a snowplow, to free my car.

The bailouts of autumn 2008 impressed upon Americans the undeniable truth of their collective existence: the body politic had morphed into the body economic.

Still, my situation was a certainly more austere than I’m used to. Yet my version of roughing it would at any other time in human history be viewed as obscene luxury. My retreat was, after all, for all its relative isolation firmly nestled in a modern economy — a modern economy, which, to most reports, has these last 18 months been staggering, lurching, sputtering or stalling. However, when deprived of the various organs by which such reports reach me — the internet, mainly, but also radio (I don’t own a television) — I just didn’t have much sense of any such staggering, lurching, sputtering or stalling. Not even hiccuping, burping, or farting did I detect. I did see people just doing their thing. They drove. They shopped. They dined out. They walked their dogs. The night I arrived, Christmas Eve, as I was trying to locate my destination I passed one house. Through the house’s front window I saw a family, ensconced in a paradigmatically Yuletide scene, jumping and laughing, apparently playing some game. I only just glimpsed this, because I had to keep my eye on the dark, icy country lane upon which disturbingly many deer kept boldly advancing.

Dollar general: economic determinism in the neoliberal era.

In Imagined Communities historian Benedict Anderson defines a nation as “an imagined political community.” “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will ever know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,” Anderson continues, explaining his definition and, by extension, the very title of his book, “yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Anderson wrote this in the early 1980s, when neoliberal reform was still gathering force and had yet to visit its full fury on people around the world, but I think his definition retains some applicability if one permits a slight modification. The trend in recent years has to identify political life with economic life, the two having become closely intertwined in political demagogy as well as in actual policy. The bailouts of autumn 2008 impressed upon Americans the undeniable truth of their collective existence: the body politic had morphed into the body economic. One found greater enfranchisement at the mall than at the polls. Lifestyle became a point of convergence for otherwise incommensurable sentiments (case in point: so-called “Crunchy Cons“). This reached its absurd apotheosis in 2001, when, shortly after the September 11 attack in New York, then President George W. Bush exhorted Americans to go out and shop as a way of expressing their patriotism. Mutatis mutandis, then, the nation that is The United States of America corresponds to Anderson’s definition. It is an imagined political–economic community, with emphasis on “economic.” Americans will never know or even meet most of their fellow citizens, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. This image, however, appears not in the red, white and blue of Old Glory, but the peculiar green of the Almighty Dollar.

The notion that any financial institution is the bone and sinew of any community, imagined or otherwise, needs exposing for the horrendous illusion that it is.

What I’m trying to say is that so much of the panic and hilarity following the onset of the current recession reflects more a crisis of imagined community than of a real one — an imagined community whose phantasmatic character the money power of Wall Street does little to dispel (if, indeed, it does not actively encourage). It might be trite to say this, but during my vacation I came to see that where there is life, there is hope. As long as there are people able to move under their own power there is going to be an economy of some sort. The notion that any financial institution is the bone and sinew of any community, imagined or otherwise, needs exposing for the horrendous illusion that it is. Certainly many fortunes hung in the balance during the dark days of TARP, TALF, PPIP and the other bilious alphabet soups of the Great Panic of 2008. But, having over recent weeks pretty much gotten away from getting away from it all, to borrow the title of a fantastic essay by the late David Foster Wallace, I can’t help but think that it would’ve been better had the entire rotten edifice that is High Finance collapsed. At least then 2010 would have found America nearly two years into the rebuilding.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.

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