Dear David,
You have touched on an issue that comes up a lot at the Baffler. Where do such highbrows as us get off taking the side of the working class? Who do we think reads us, anyway?
My colleague David Mulcahey, who is sipping a 40-ouncer at the next desk as I write this, suggests that our audience is largely made up of people who like good writing but feel like they're getting a raw deal at work. Think Microsoft temps or academic adjuncts. They are, in short, Proletarian Bohemians, or ProBos. Mulcahey, who claims to have worked years ago at a Beef-a-Roo before he took a job at Manpower, also believes we might start up a restaurant chain of our own with that name. Poetry, pierogies, and a pitcher at Probos!
I am not excited about a Bush presidency, but I think one positive thing might come of it. It just might sink Clinton and all his political seed into the Sargasso Sea. Just maybe this defeat will help the party to shake loose the dead weight of the Democratic Leadership Council and all their self-destructive triangulations.
But the next big pundit battle, I think, will be the race to pin the coming recession on somebody. Despite yesterday's rally, the NASDAQ is still off over 40 percent since its March high. And the op-ed pages have been full of pre-emptive blame assessment. Often in these cases, it's labor unions that are brought out to take the fall. But that's going to be difficult this time around, since American managers have basically destroyed organized labor over the last 20 years. Still, when a disaster of this magnitude is at issue, you can see some pretty creative punditing.
First, the straight news stories on the subject. The front page of Monday's Wall Street Journal, generally the most reliable space to watch for economic news, plumbed the depths of the looming catastrophe. It's a classic overproduction crisis, with massive automobile and computer backlogs. The crazy New Economy optimism of recent years, it now seems, only served to accentuate the usual problems of the business cycle. In the Sunday New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson weighed in with a devastating story about the gullible Wall Street economists who blithely accepted corporate estimates about earnings and thus did their part to pump the late bubble up to such unsustainable heights. Back in October the Financial Times reported that nearly 40 percent of Internet CEOs had shady pasts. (Case in point: the amazing story of Pixelon.) A columnist for TheStreet.com is now predicting that the NASDAQ, once hailed from all sides as the exchange of the common man, will drop all the way to 1,500 before leveling out.
But in the land of punditry, none of this seems to have registered. Even though its front page had brought the sober tidings of overproduction, the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page on Tuesday featured one Brian Wesbury proclaiming that the looming disaster was the fault of those darn liberals who refused to cut personal taxes. Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly, the star of the Fox News team, worked desperately last Wednesday to pin the NASDAQ shakeout on Al Gore and--I kid you not--a devilish conspiracy of the liberal highbrows. Declaring himself a "populist reporter" concerned only about the well-being of "the working Americans," O'Reilly announced that he had "heard" that Democrats, whom he identified in usual market-populist fashion as "the smart money," were plotting to "wreck the economy" and thus discredit W. (patron and protector of the dumb money, I guess) along the way.
They might as well demand that legislation be passed mandating 15 to 20 percent returns every year, dammit!
Meanwhile, one of our local dot-coms is transitioning to nonexistence, and last night I had to commiserate with a friend whose employment there is about to cease. Remember the phrase "Content is king"? The market now seems to be saying, "Sic Semper Tyrannis!"
[end]
Carl
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