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.