The Shaking Knee

Carlyle Group Redux

A journalist recently got in touch with me looking for some comments about how Bill Kennard, the former F.C.C. chairman and Carlyle Group Advisor also happened to be on the board of the New York Times. She wondered if I thought that may have skewed the Times' coverage of the Carlyle Group over the years, and whether I thought the Times review of my book, The Iron Triangle, was unnecessarily harsh.

I think the New York Times, and most other major media outlets, have misunderstood the concept of "conflicts of interest." Because we live in a litigious society, most people believe that if you can't prove something, uncover the smoking gun, or follow the trail of money, then it's not a crime.

But there is a far more insidious form of crime that happens every day in Washington. It is the kind of back-room dealing, the currying of favor, the unspoken arrangements that make good people make bad decisions.

Carlyle is an instrument of this culture. It seamlessly combines the worlds of politics and money. By concentrating so much political power with so much global wealth, it puts people like former president George W. Bush in a position to be spending wildly on military deployments that enrich the very company his father works for. That is not a possible conflict of interest. That is a conflict of interest. It puts the president in a position to either knowingly or unknowingly make decisions that affect his family's personal finances. That is the nature of a conflict of interest. It doesn't need to be proved. It just is.

Just because these arrangements are not illegal doesn't mean they aren't an outrage. And they should be illegal. Because if there's anything we've learned in the early days of the Obama administration, with all of its rhetoric contrasted against the repeated moral failings of its cabinet candidates, it's that we need desperately to believe that our politicians are acting on our behalf, not their own. It is hard enough to cultivate this belief when our elected officials' actions are transparent and scrupulous. It is almost impossible to cultivate this belief when their actions are opaque and in conflict with the interests of the people.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and a host of other politicians (not just Republicans) should know this. They should know that the people need to believe in the righteousness of their elected officials. That's 90 percent of what leadership is about. But they either did not care or didn't understand this. That is why they lost the trust of the American people. That is why their administration will go down as one of the worst and most damaging ever. And that is the most tragic failing of our current political system.

As for the review of my book in the Times, in all honesty, I think it was spot on.

Oops…I did it again.

A few years ago, after a night of heavy drinking with a buddy at an East Village bar, I had an apocalyptic dream. In this dream I was with my wife and kids in a parking lot heading to church. The sky was strikingly blue, the same color it was on September 11th, 2001. Not a cloud to be seen.

Suddenly a massive lightening bolt ripped from one end of the sky to the other…and everything went black.

At this point I woke up, of course. The dream was short, but very vivid. In it I knew that I was witnessing the end of the world. I even knew why it was happening: the magnetic reversal of the poles. This was a concept with which I was completely unfamiliar at the time. I’m totally convinced that I had never even heard of that possibility. But after the dream I did a little research and learned that scientists believe that magnetic reversal of the poles has happened before, will happen again, and is thought to be accompanied by catastrophic consequence.

In the dream I remember being thankful that I was with the people I loved most when the end came, and that it came quickly and painlessly. But it was the feeling I was left with after the dream that resonated most deeply.

This dream awakened me to the very real possibility that life as we know it could end in a heartbeat, with no warning whatsoever, for reasons that we cannot even begin to fathom. This is something I’ve always known, I suppose. But now I was suddenly and keenly aware of how little we really know about where we live, how we got here, and how long it would all last. And all of this brought to light the absurdity of life all around me.

It didn’t help that I had a dead-end job at a dying magazine that published bullshit stories about information technology. But the absurdity was all around me, and my thoughts would daisy chain from something small and absurd to the grander, all-encompassing absurdities. For example: I’m sitting at my desk, editing some crap copy from a lazy freelancer, and I think: “Who gives a rat if this story makes its way into the world or not? Will it make the world a better place? Or just fill it up with more crap?”

The answer of course was obvious. But it led to other more debilitating thoughts. Like, “Who even cares if this magazine ever gets published again? Or any magazine for that matter? Or whether a stockbroker makes his quota and gets a bonus? Or another computer ever gets sold? Do we need ANY of this crap? It’s all just businesses supplying other businesses so that more business can get done. It’s a ponzi scheme. There’s nothing being made or added or improved. It’s just money changing hands. It’s all so absurd.”

Now, it’s easy to see how this kind of thinking can spiral out of control. And it did. It robbed me of my motivation to do anything but be with my family. What the dream did was pierce the veil. It made apparent all of the human constructs and endless distractions we use to tolerate everyday life. To make ourselves busy. To keep us from thinking about anything that is real.

There’s a literary term for when the protagonist of a story learns that everything he or she believed to be true is a lie (and no, it’s not epiphany, but I can’t remember what it is.) It’s like realizing that you’ve been plugged into the matrix. And it is not a comfortable feeling.

I spent two days knowing that almost everything I did – my job, my commute, fixing my car, paying insurance bills, feeding the cat, mowing the lawn, etc. – was unnecessarily complicated, distracting, and absurd. It was heartbreaking, soul-sucking, and utterly debilitating. It was threatening to break me.

And then I did something that I’m still not sure how I feel about: I plugged myself back into the matrix. I made a purposeful decision to repair the veil. I started poring over baseball box scores. Watching action movies. Reading magazines, books, and following stocks. I forced myself to care about things I knew meant absolutely nothing. And in a matter of days, I was happy again.

This is why people get religion.

For years, everything was fine in my world until this whole economic collapse. There are two thinkers that are dragging me back out of the matrix, re-piercing the veil I’d worked so hard to reconstruct. The first is Peter Schiff, the economist and talking head that continues to point out the absurdities of America’s economy.

But even Schiff doesn’t see far enough. He simply wants to replace one delusion with a slightly more meaningful one, but still based on the same guiding principle of money and economic growth.

David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist really nails it in this lengthy but worthwhile speech. In it, he points out the self-destructive, self-deluding nature of modern society. And points out the false choices between economic growth and ecological responsibility. It will blow your mind, so you must be ready to be unplugged.

And so I’ve come unhinged again. The constructs have been exposed. And I’m seeing the world with dizzying clarity. But will this time be different? Will I choose to stay unplugged, no matter how unpleasant reality is? Or will I admit to hopelessness, drink the Kool-Aid again, and settle back into comfortable absurdity?

Stay tuned. 

Is Facebook Queering the Chronology of Life?

I'll spare you the suspense...the answer is yes. Life is supposed to move in a straight line. You're born, you lose your teeth, you get new ones, you get acne, survive high school, and so on. And when you leave high school, college, your 20s, and countless ex-girlfriends and acquaintances-of-circumstance, you are supposed to move on. You are supposed to leave them behind, wonder what ever became of them, and never, ever hear from them again. That's the way it used to be. And you could argue that it's the way it always should be.

But not anymore.

Facebook has taken every single time period of my life and crammed it into a silly, maddening, beautiful, incomprehensible web site. I am simultaneously conversing (online of course) with friends from kindergarten, grade school, high school, college, odd jobs, India, and across the street. Life is no longer linear. It's enough to make my head explode. But I can't stop. I just...can't...stop.

The fact that life is circling back on itself is not Facebook's fault, of course. It's the internet, which has been doing this for years now. Facebook just concentrates it into a fantastically small space.

Puzhalsta

I have no idea what I was expecting from Russia. Frankly, I'm not sure I thought all that much about it. I had every intention of bringing myself up to date on the history and current climate of the former center of the Soviet Union, but time just got away from me, and before I knew it, I was touching down at Sheremetyevo airport, 12 kilometers and 2 hours from the Hotel Baltschug Kempinski. Besides, how important could the history of the nation that co-dominated the geopolitical landscape for the better part of the last century be?

 

Hotel Baltschug Kempinski on a cold, cloudy day.

The truth is, Moscow is mind-blowing, even if you don't know all the historical details. It's both progressive and backwards. It's European, Asian, and Middle Eastern. It's fashionable and pedestrian. I suppose then it's not surprising that I was a bit disoriented the whole time I was there. I mean, what do you expect? After decades of images on American television and ominous footage of tanks and missiles on parade in Red Square, what was I to think as I strolled casually inside the walls of the dreaded Kremlin? Or looked dumbly at the Cyrillic lettering spelling out L-E-N-I-N on the country's most famous mausoleum?

 

Lenin's totally creepy tomb.

This is weird. That's what I was supposed to think. Normally I hate that word. Too vague. But sometimes it just hits the mark. It was nothing if not weird.

I spent most of my time in Moscow interviewing Muscovites about how they perceived the U.S. during the cold war, what life was like before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and what were the first things they did after Communism failed (some picked up once-forbidden British invasion rock records). We had dinner in some throwback, 1950's era place across from the old KGB headquarters with an old jazz band and an aging lounge singer (again, weird).

But perhaps the most interesting bit from my stay in Moscow was the sense that this is a country still very much in search of its identity. After nearly a century of being told what to do, where to work, and how to think, it's bound to take a country some time to recover. And the Russians are trying on everything, from fashion to ethics. They're desperately looking to find something that fits. No one is sure what is cool, or what is acceptable, and what is not. And they are most assuredly unclear about what it means to be Russian.

St. Basil's Cathedral, the future home of Disney Russia.

   Ican only tell you what I think it means. It means you smoke too many cigarettes and wear your hair like a 1980's hockey player. Other than that, the jury is still out.

Compulsive Disclosure Disorder

Just wanted to get a placeholder in here. I've been using a term for the past few years to describe my bizarre need to blab about anything and everything to anyone who will listen. I tell people not to tell me secrets. I tell my wife she'll never have to worry about me keeping an affair from her. I tell people things. I can't help it. Does that make me a bad person?

Anyway, I call it Compulsive Disclosure Disorder, and I was sure I wasn't the first person to use the term. But a quick google search turned up nothing. So I'm calling myself the inventor of this disorder, and one of its many victims. And I believe that in this, the era of blogs and Facebook pages (okay, Web 2.0 if you must), I think it will become increasingly common. Because it's never been easier to tell more people your inner monologue, no matter how mundane.

So there it is.

And here's my latest post on the GIO blog, named, appropriately, Compulsive Disclosure Disorder.