East Of Eden And The Annus Horribilis

As an Aristotelian, as I've said here, my job is to look for causes. The project I don't seem able to put down for the time being is to look for the causes of 2020, one of the chief features of which was the COVID crisis and what I think is an associated moral panic, which appears to me to far outwigh the actual medical issues of the disease.

The last clear moral panic, as far as I can see, was the Day Care Satanism panic of the 1980s, most clearly exemplified by the McMartin Preschool case in the Los Angeles area. I was prompted by an offhand remark in a recent TV special on the case that moral panics reflect underlying social tensions, and in that case, the real issue was changes in family life and child care caused by wives and mothers working outside the home. (Although this had become acceptable following World War II, it wasn't until the stagflation and fuel crises of the 1970s that it became economically much more essential.)

Then, for reasons I can't fully articulate, I began binge-watching YouTube lectures by Michael Neiberg, a Warld War I historian at the US Army War College. His overriding theme is that World War I had causes that the Versailles Peace Conference failed utterly to solve, and many of the unrealized solutions, like the disposition of the Ottoman Empire, remain urgently with us.

So in the middle of the night I sat up and said "There's a book that deals with the status of women and the family and World War I. It's Steinbeck's East of Eden." It deals, of course, with a great deal else, and I've read it carefully twice over the past 20 years or so. Elia Kazan saw a great deal in it for his 1955 movie version, but apparently Kazan said he understood the novel better than Steinbeck did, and he covered only the last secton of the book, which centers on Caleb Trask's discovery that his mother was not dead, but a madam in a nearby brothel.

For a time after my first reading, I tended to agree. But my wife and I were lucky enough to see an entirely new stage production of East of Eden by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2015. I assumed at first this would just be based on the Kazan film, but I was wrong -- it dealt much more with the middle section of the novel. the psychopathic woman Cathy's marriage to Adam Trask and her abandonment of the family. That made me see there's more to the book than what Kazan saw.

Like other broad-brush novels that treat of recent memory in their era, like Middlemarch, East of Eden speaks by implcation of other issues, like the causes of US entry into World War I -- Prof Neiberg would, I suspect, not disagree with Steinbeck's depiction -- and the decline of the brothel as an American institution. (By 1952, the year of the novel's publication, they were as much a period curiosity as ragtime or player pianos.) This has wide implications for the status and role of women and the maintenance of social order. The local sheriff, who knows the secrets, is a key figure throughout.

So the longer I live, the more I think East of Eden is an important book, in my increasing view up there with, say Moby Dick (John D Rockefeller, by the way, saved the whales), Middlemarch, and War and Peace. Steinbeck and another underrated 20th century author, Ferdinand Lundberg, are a path to understanding the underlying issues that led to our just-past Annus Horribilis.

Marty Lagina: Smart Rich Guy

Yesterday, I twlked about s really dumb multibillionaire, Jack Dorsey. Today I want to talk about Marty Lagina, who so far doesn't seem to be a multibillionaire, but he's a much smarter rich guy nevertheless. Lagina, who is the senior figure on the Curse of Oak Island show, is in effect a star, but it's pretty well implied that he also approves the project plans and signs the checks. The publicly available estimate of his net worth is $100 million, altough he didn't make this money off TV appearances.

It looks like he got rich on fracking in the 1990s, which was smart, . But according to the link,

His company Terra Energy was a pioneer in extracting natural gas from shale around the mid-west in the 1990s. Marty eventually sold Terra Energy to a company called CMS Energy for $58 million. He then launched a new company called Heritage Sustainable to focus on wind power. Heritage is currently planning to build 60 wind turbines in Missaukee, Michigan. That will make Marty the largest wind-energy producer in the entire state of Michigan and one of the largest overall producers in the mid-west. He believes he can eventually power 25% of Michigan's power by wind and wants to replicate that process around the country.

So, let's parse this out. He made a bundle in fracking when it was hot and new, but I would guess that he could see a downside coming from the anti-fossil fuel lobby, so he sold the franchise while it was still relatively uncontroversial. And what did he get into? Why, wind power, of course.

I've got to assume he's politically very savvy, since wind power is the creature of government policy, and utilities are tightly wired into state politics. Most people who get rich leverage it off some version of government licensing or other favor, and it looks as if Lagina's main assets are in green energy -- and I assume he's doing well in it.

If his objective in life was to get rich, he's behaving consistently/ On top of that, he's acting the way the rich have mostly learned to act since the early 20th century -- use your public relations people to keep you out of the news, not in it. He's a public figure on the Oak Island show, which gives him a brand that he can use to his advantage, but he's otherwise low key, and his family is even lower.

What piques my curiosity more than anything else is how Oak Island fits into the picture. Lagina is clearly a savvy operator. He recently said he thinks there's a 40% chance that there was ever a "treasure" in the Oak Island money pit, and only a 20% chance that any of it is still there -- and he said that means he's more optimistic than he was when he started out.

Yet he bought the whole island, and it looks like he's a major player now in the Nova Scotia economy -- Irving Equipment, which does many of his big excavation projects, gives him lots of freebie hats and jackets. It looks like the province gives him whatever permits and waivers he needs.

He's a businessman. There's got to be something in it for him. Off the top of my head, I've got to assume he has a piece of Prometheus Entertainment. The green energy thing likely dovetails with other ambitions in media -- but we'll have to see.

He's a smarter guy than either Zuckerberg or Dorsey.

Cracks In The Facade

Ferdinand Lundberg said that industrialist families tend to work in combination, and I would say that's generally true, but Lundberg at the time he published The Rich and the Super-Rich in 1968 was still living in a culture dominated by the post-Civil War robber barons' desendants. The major industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lumber, mining, steel, railroads, oil, and automobiles were still staples of the economy, with air transport on the rise. Computers still used punch cards.

One of Lundberg's main theses, in fact, was that more recent fortunes made from the 1920s onward were mostly hype, and few new industrialists of the 1950s and 60s started from scratch -- their opportunities arose because their families were already wealthy, and a closer look would show that modern fortunes were often smoke and mirrors. This was before the rise of authentic new multibillionaires like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates.

While the super-rich do often work in concert when it suits them, and some of the great fortunes have had staying power, this doesn't cancel out the fact that some multibillionaires are more successful than others, and some are phony products of PR. Rockefeller Sr is reported to have said, on learning the actual value of Pierpont Morgan's estate, "And to think he wasn't a wealthy man". This is likely the case with the current group of arrivistes.

This brings me to Jack Dorsey. He's best known as CEO of Twitter and most recently for banning Trump from the platform while he was still in office. The problem is that both Twitter and its much larger companion app Facebook basically sell advertising over the internet, which neither controls. They folllow the old broadcast model, in which access is "free" or at fairly low cost to individual users, who select their own programming.

The advantage for Twitter, Facebook, and the many similar products is that, unlike newspapers or traditional television, markets are much more clearly identifiable, since the apps can gain much more information about individual consumer preferences, which makes it possible for advertisers to target them much more granularly.

The difficulty for this business model is that, unlike traditional broadcast, there are few barriers for new competitors to come into the market. TV and radio need government licenses to operate, which are few and expensive to get. A new clone for Facebook or Twitter needs far, far less. And when the magnates behind them, like Dorsey and Zuckerberg, become tone-deaf and ill-tempered, it's easy for their customers to switch to just another "free" app.

This is why the traditional big fortunes were made in fields like railroads, lumber, steel, old media, and mining, where barriers to entry could be erected. Dorsey and Zuckerberg need to play whack-a-mole with each new competitor.

So there are smart multibillionaires and dumb ones. I think this is something Lundberg only partly understood: he was in an age when, by the early 20h century, the robber barons had come to understand the value of public relations, and the advertising and PR fields were working effectively in a stable environment. Traditionl print and broadcst media had well-established markets with well-developed public stereotypes and high barriers to entry.

The current environment is nothing like that. This is probably another component of the social tensions behind the current global panic.

Parler, Bezos, Dorsey, Zuckerberg, And The Rich And The Super-Rich

I've said here before that Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today is one of the most important literary works of the 20th century if considered in the same genre as Milton's prose or Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. (It's available in pdf here.)

Lundberg's thesis was that US politics are dominated by an exclusive combine of wealthy families who manage centers of corporate and social power in the Fortune 500, the Ivy League, foundations, the federal govenment, and other institutions. I think he would have found no surprises in the saga of Parler, the social media upstart, over the past week. According to the Wall Street Journal,

In a complaint filed Monday in Seattle federal court, Parler alleged that Amazon Web Services kicked the company off its cloud servers for political and anti-competitive reasons. The conservative social network founded in 2018 exploded in popularity among supporters of President Trump after the November U.S. election.

“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus. It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter , ” according to the complaint, which also accused Amazon of breaching a contract between the parties.

Amazon said Saturday that it would cut off Parler because it wasn’t confident in its ability to sufficiently police content on its platform that incites violence. The company said while it would no longer provide web services to Parler after Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time, it would preserve the platform’s data and help it migrate to different servers.

In related moves, Google and Apple removed the app from their stores. It was plain that the tech bilionaires regarded Parler as outside the bounds of received opinion and felt entitled to remove it. If it removed a potential competitor, so much the better.

But the recent crop of the super-rich, such as Bezos, Dorsey, and Zuckerberg, differ from the robber-barons and their descendants who were Lundberg's targets. The arrivistes, if they have descendants at all, won't be producing Rockefeller Jrs, Nelson Rockefellers, or Averell Harrimans. Those families, as well as their associates, struck me as magnanimous in the classical sense, endowing public institutions and undertaking public service.

The current crop strikes me as a group of petty, cowardly, small-minded men, not in the same league as Lundberg's rogues gallery, thuogh they may be just as influential, at least for now -- but this may be part of what's at the root of the social tensions behind the currnt global panic. These folks are terrified of Trump, it's plain, or they wouldn't be trying to engineer a bill of attainder against the guy.

The problem is that Trump was an opportunist who saw an opening. He didn't create the opening. Whatever becomes of Trump -- and I think 2024 is too far in the future for any sort of prediction -- the trend will still be there, and it will still be something that can be understood through Lundberg's insights.

The Collapse Of Conservative Opinion

A news item yesterday was American Thinker's retraction of allegations against Dominion Voting Systems that it acknowledged were "completely false". But this wasn't the end of the story. At the same time, alhough apparently for reasons umrelated to Dominion, the site deleted its comment section. And although there doesn't seem to have been an announcement, the site no longer carries ads.

My reaction to this is somewhere between "no great loss" and "good riddance", and I characterize myself as conservative. I used to visit it now and then, but I never did during the 2020 election cycle. The pieces there showed no particular insight and usually amounted to just preaching to the choir. In fact, the site has a lot in commom with the other currently popular sites like Breitbart, Red State, Conservative Treehouse, and so forth -- it runs hysterical headlines about days-old news and reiterates same old-same old viewpoints. What we aren't seeing, at least so far, is any attempt to regroup after\ the Trump defeat, recalibrate, and recover.

This brings me back to what I think is a key year, 1976, and what conservatives did to prepare for a Reagan victory in 1980. In the 1970s, I read both Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal, especially its editorial page. (I voted for Carter in 1976, but by 1980, I'd dropped Rolling Stone and voted for Reagan.) WSJ at the time was intellectually stimulating: it nurtured supply side economics, while Benjamin Stein wrote for them as well. It tackled current issues like the fuel crisis and stagflation with innovative policy recommendations that worked when Reagan applied them.

So far, I'm seeing nothing like that in the wake of 2020. If there were an equivalent of Robert Bartley's Journal now, it would be publishing influential critiques of COVID policy and serious discussions of Persian Gulf stragegy. Instead, it's simply gone never-Trump, which isn't what we need. Let the Democrats self-immolate over Impeachment II and start to ask serious questions about why Trump couldn't expand his base and why he lost with an unimaginative replay of his 2016 campaign.

Nobody's doing this. The most respectable conservatives right now appear to be unserious people like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. Rush Limbaugh is on his deathbed, figuratively at least, but he's always suffered from the need to fill three hours a day when there's only 20 minutes of good material.

How to address issues like big tech censorship is a separate but related question. It seems to me that there are two parts to it. One, as only a few commentators have pointed out, is that Parler neglected a basic business duty by not planning for contingencies. If your business requires a vendor to supply servers, as Parler did with Amazon, you absolutely need to have a backup vendor, and not just in your Rolodex -- you need to have someone on contract, and you need to test yuur ability to recover on the backup, like twice a year. Yeah, Amazon can break its contract on a whim, but a hurricane or earthquake can take them out, too. Parler was an amateur show on that basis.

The other question is the income stream. Talk radio hosts now and then speak of their problem getting out of the painkiller-and-erectile-dysfunction ad market, where many are stuck. Most of the conservative web sites rely on hysterical clickbait headlines to pay the bills. Some of these people need to work out a better ad strategy.

The same applies to YouTube, since the YouTubers are mostly doing this as their main job and supporting themselves by letting YouTube sell ads for them. If YouTube doesn't think ads on their channel will sell, they won'tt run them. This is no different than if you were trying to sell stories to the Saturday Evening Post back in the day. Some YouTubers are willing to experiment, and many are doing the essential business task of planning for contingencies.

But the fact remains that old venues like National Review and the WSJ are no longer markets for innovative thinking, while the list of commentators who've flamed out over the past several years, like Jonah Goldberg and Michael Medved, is lengthening. Dr Sebastian Gorka is not a credible replacement. Buckley is long dead.

The Dog That Isn't Barking

So we've had two of the most respectable blue politicians, Gov Cuomo and Mayor Lightfoot, announce that lockdowns don't work and economies must reopen. There are headlines of a "narrative shift" with the appearance in Newsweek, which nobody has read for decades, of a respectablke study that says lockdowns don't work.

So, where is the groundswell of opinion that says, "What came over us? Of course lockdowns don't work. We're destroying the economy! I hereby decree that schools immediately return to in-person classes, sports resume, restaurants and bars reopn!" Er, no. Not happeing. Gov Cuomo, in whose power it is to say those very words, has been silent. He may as well decree that the rain stop, or start, as the case may be. The lockdown is a force of nature over which he has no control, it would appear.

I more or less expected this, though I'm not sure what the reasons for it are. One might be that Cuomo and Lightfoot are holding their economies hostage for bailouts. That lockdowns would create a situation where closing "non-essential" businesses would severely reduce tax revenues was known from the start. While Republicans had some measure of control, the federal government wasn't going to go far enough to restore these revenues by gifting them to the states and cities. With Democrats in control, this is much more likely. The message that's actually being sent is hurry up and bail us out, or. . .

There are two implicaations here. One is that, although government workers generally are deemed "essential", some, in the Department of Redundancy Department and elsewhere, have had their pay reduced. Federal bailouts will restore them to full pay and bring the arrears up to date as well. We may rely on that.

The second issue is all the "non-essential" workers who won't be in that privileged class. At this point, all they've had is some measure of unemploymennt -- that is, if they're eligible; many aren't for variouis reasons -- and ex gratia payments of $600, $1200, or $2000, whatever it is, every six or eight months. This is not enough to sustain people. Exactly what governments are going to do to address this if they choose to continue lockdowns indefinitely is a vexed issue, and it's by no means clear.

David Freiheit of the Viva Frei YouTube channel is beginning to recognize these issues as they relate to the Quebec lockdown-cum-curfew:

The curfew is reinforcing a new social arrangement, whereby government workers in particular are "essential" (and bus drivers continue to drive empty buses at full pay), while those not in the elite are screwed. He doesn't expand on this, but it's worth considering that the lowest class, on public assistance, continues to receive public payments. The wealthiest and those lucky enough to have pensions, are largely unaffected. The people who are badly hurt are those in the middle, the plebs.

Oh, by the way, journalists and opinion writers are "essential" and even get to work from home -- including the hacks who write for the conservative sites. They're pretty much fine with all this, too, left, right, or center.

Meanwhile, the US states show no special urgency in distributing vaccines. The people who matter don't see a problem. Even the right wingers are still just mourning the kraken.

So, Which Is It?

An unintended consequence of the 2020 electoral cycle is that it's put full responsibility for handling the COVID crisis in the hands of Democrats. This is another parallel I see with 1976, where Democrats took over in the face of worsening inflatoin and a fuel crisis and were incapable of handling them, which led to a Reagan landslide in 1980.

This morning's headline is that Chicago Mayor Lightfoot is "seeking to reopen Chicago’s bars and restaurants for indoor service as soon as possible". The public rationale is that alllowing indoor drinking and dining will provide a "safer outlet" for people who will otherwise, apparently, make their hookups elsewhere. I assume that's what's meant by "cut down on underground parties where attendees do not social distance or wear masks".

I suspect the real reason is that the city can't tax underground parties. I think Gov Cuomo was slightly more ingenuous when he said, “we are looking at months of shutdowns and the economic, mental and spiritual hardships they bring. We need to act now." I think it's starting to sink in that even with a Democrat congress and executive in Washington, there's no way any federal bailout can remedy the tax deficit the blue states and cities have brought on themselves.

In a move that hasn't been generally reported, Pennsylvania allowed a three=wek ban on all indoor dining to expire on January 4. This in itself is unusual, since California has simply renewed an equivalent three-week ban on even outdoor dining, with no relaxation in sight.

However, restrictions on alcohol in Pennsylvania (served only with meals, none after 11 PM, all visible drinks removed after midnight) continue. As seems to be the case with COVID curfews, this appears to be intended in practice to discourage fornication -- you'd better have your hookups arranged before 11, and you've gotta buy them dinner.

Well, as long as we get the tax money, we can still do something about the fornication as well, huh?

The problem for Mayor Lightfoot specirically is that she's up against "scientific" targets Pritzger has imposed on the state, and neither Chicago nor Cook County is anywhere near them. The targets -- under 6% testing positivity rate, for instance -- have been as a practical matter unattainable. Similar tasrgets in California have all but the most rural parts of the state locked down.

The difficulty is that all such targets are simply decrees, never passed by a legislature and never negotiated through any political process. Normally, lobbying groups for restaurants, food service unions, and others would have a chance to balance their interests against public health. This isn't happening here.

In effect, those who petition for redress must approach the emperor, or at best gain the ear of the emperor's mother, or possibly Cardinal Schmidlap. Clearly this is what's beginning to happen here, but it's all now intramural, with Trump out of the picture and Fauci ascendant. I would imagine someone is going to have to come to Fauci with an offer he can't refuse, and maybe then he'll let Cuomo reopen "safely". I assue "safely" means in a way that responsibly limits above all the opportunities for fornication among the plebs.

Good luck. I don't think this is going to work.