Silver Lining

I was out of town for Naomi Klein at the NYPL . I'd heard her on Brian Lehrer, and read the Harper's piece on the flight out. It's a smart if popular (or should I say, and popular?) analysis and I'm glad she has written it and that it is getting so much attention. One ominous-felicitous term she uses is 'disaster apartheid'. This is what happens to communities that lose their public services to private contractors, a phenomenon that is exacerbated in crisis or catastrophic situations (the US war in Iraq, for example). The reconstruction (I use the term advisedly) of public education in post- Hurricane Katrina New Orleans demonstrates how government and the private sector exploit emergencies to transfer the social contract to market, such that the citizen goes to bed with rights and responsibilities, and wakes the next day with a bill for services rendered.

Michael Ontdaatje (a few stanzas from Secular Love, replacing is with to as I recall a red moon)

I write about you
as if I own you
which I do not.
As you can say of nothing
this is mine.

When we rise
the last hug
no longer belongs,
to your fiction
or my story

Mulch for the future.

Whether we pass
through each other
like pure arrows
or fade into rumour
I write down now
a fiction of your arm

Playing with my food

As a child, I loved games of imagination, and was forever mapping new continents on the local rocks and trees and streams and populating them with hapless neighborhood children assigned to represent complex genealogies of colorful characters with multisyllabic names. In more recent years, my playground, like that of many urban Americans, has been restaurants. The venue, the menu, the lighting, the designers, the company, the relationships with chefs and suppliers and critics and diners are among the multiple variables in an improvisation in which everyone conspires to assist in and be promoted by a winning performance.

I have that in common with at least one other person I have known for whom a successful performance required props on the order of wagyu carpaccio, gold leafed sushi, and magna of Cristal. As tiresome and embarrassing as I found him and his insistence on misrecognizing my own epicureanism as equivalent to his own, there is no way around the fact that I enjoyed many of the benefits of his company and incidental largesse. I might buy local when no one is watching, where he would do so solely to burnish his image (actually this is not a good example, because buying local was not something that registered to him, or his people. That may have changed.), but the uncomfortable truth is that however much I might want to distinguish our values, interests, and styles, we weren't all that different either in our net impact or in our recognition that dining out was about so much more than just the food.

So anyway, this is partial context to how I came to frequent a particular Hollywood restaurant that caters to the self important. Once, Benicio del Toro reached across my table to introduce himself to Don Rickles, who introduced himself to me in turn. On another occasion, Ron Jeremy held court at an adjacent table with a number of very young female--colleagues. Once George Clooney was in the house, another time Robert Shapiro. There was a big menu, but only a few items worth ordering: the swordfish, the steak a la Dabney Coleman, the bouillabaisse, the caesar. And cocktails.

Occasionally it was really a lot of fun, late at night (and they are open late, so it was actually kind of a default or last resort) to show up and be recognized and get a table right away.

I've been away for several years now but ended up on the red vinyl banquette again the other night, for much the same prosaic reason--late hours--that often put me there in the past.

This time, it was no fun at all. The loud parties of tarted up women and botoxed men (some older ones with hennaed hair) and the waiters with their calibrated posture between abuse and subservience and especially the meat-- a steak that I'd enjoyed in the past was just so obscenely thick and fleshy, I might as well have torn into the haunch of a living beast. And then there was the feeling that my friend and I both felt nothing, except that the past truly was past.

One of my favorite LA restaurants was always Yongsusan. This time, the banchan included things like iceberg salad in mayonnaise dressing and dumplings (not mandoo). There was a mingy eun dae gu jorim with bizarrely tablet-shaped slices of turnip (2 of them, actually) and fried bits in the soup and other things tasted old or freezer burnt. The kimchee in cabbage leaf-- the piece de resistance, was soggy and poorly pickled. I even suspect this was frozen. I loved this place but I would now consider it one of the worst Korean restaurants. Barely even a Korean restaurant.

Craft LA was also a disappointment. I was prepared to allow that Century City might have been transformed but in fact it was troupes of conventioneers wearing name tags, and giant portions of food (peas & prosciutto and sweetbreads for me), rather than the small focussed plates that made me fall in love with Craft back in the 1990s. That said, I haven't been to Craft proper in a couple years and maybe they've changed too. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson came and left and looked terrific actually. So what do I know.

Take 62

I live and work in the neighborhood, so for the past week have navigated barricades, stalled traffic, clusters of ill-assorted men in ill-fitting suits, and all the other annual inconveniences of the General Assembly. The protesters with bullhorns have been less in evidence and I'm trying to recall whether I've got my seasons confused and they really only appear in the spring and summer (I know they do show up then but I thought now too). At any rate, there is one group that has set up along the Second Avenue side of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for the past week, protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency and his appearance before the UN. They have set up a barricade of lurid photographs depicting the executions over which he and his government have presided.

I am conditioned by the anti-abortion lobby and their crude intimidation tactics to disregard gruesome close-ups of aborted fetuses and other visual, visceral efforts to supplant reason and law with emotion and religion.

One photograph disturbs me terribly though. It's a woman in a white chador, facing the camera with an expression of extreme anguish. She is at a 30 degree angle, buried above her elbows, surrounded by men with shovels who are intent on completing the job.

It's incredibly ugly. But however righteous, indignation and outrage should not supplant discussion and debate.

The Good Society (part 2 of 2)

The philanthropy of the wealthy serves many purposes, but primarily it assists in the social reproduction of the upper classes.

So Teresa Odendahl concluded in Charity Begins at Home: Generosity and Self Interest Among the Philanthropic Elite. In addition to demonstrating that the primary beneficiaries of the philanthropy of wealthy individuals are wealthy individuals, Odendahl criticized the complicity of the US tax code in perpetuating this kind of self-dealing, through limitations on the threshhold for itemizing charitable deductions, for example, and an estate tax code that preserves the prerogative of the wealthy both to familial inheritance and institutional influence. Since charitable tax deductions are justified on the premise that the individual and the state are and should be partners in a trust for the public good,it's hardly surprising that Odendahl's book was received in 1990 with skepticism from parts of the non-profit and academic (ie university) communities that were implicated in its findings. (This is anecdotal; a google search turns up a lot of other more supportive academic responses as well).

I'm not a scholar in this area, and until Stephanie Strom's piece in the NYT (see part 1 of this 2-part post), I hadn't seen her analysis showing up in popular discourse on philanthropy, which has itself exploded thanks to the celebrity billionaires who realize that saving the planet is a good long-term (and short-term) business strategy, and the eager media who cover their missionary activities for the same reasons.

Not surprisingly, these increasingly prominent and influential donors are approaching their new philanthropic enterprises with the kind of entrepreneurial, often creative, sometimes speculative strategies and expectations that worked for them in the corporate world, and in the process they are reshaping the way traditional not-for-profit organizations do business.

For one thing, they are demanding unprecedented levels of organizational control in exchange for their 'gifts', and are succeeding in attaining this control in the name of 'accountability' and 'transparency'-- virtually unassailable pieties in this post-Enron era. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the establishment of the lofty sounding Center for Excellence in Higher Education 'that will advise donors on how to attach legally enforceable conditions to their gifts'.

In other words, the difference between 'donors'[:a term that conventionally describes those who make 'gifts'(:a term that not only conventionally but legally describes payments made with no reciprocal exchange of goods or benefits)] and 'purchasers' (a term conventionally understood to describe those who are specifically and explicitly engaged in the reciprocal exchange of goods or benefits) is no longer meaningful.

I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that (and I would welcome legal opinion on whether) the IRS exceeds its mandate in granting 501(c)(3) status to an organization established to 'advise donors on how to attach legally enforceable conditions to their gifts'.(A relevant passage from the IRS web site on criteria for exempt status:The organization must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests.... No part of a section 501(c)(3) organization's net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual. A private shareholder or individual is a person having a personal and private interest in the activities of the organization. If the organization engages in an excess benefit transaction with a person having substantial influence over the organization, an excise tax may be imposed on the person and any organization managers agreeing to the transaction).

All of these developments bespeak the increasing deference of the state to the market and its abdication of responsibility for the public good to those who have the least interest in pursuing it.

Major universities and other not-for-profit organizations could certainly benefit from external audits that might puncture some of the simultaneous hubris and false humility many regard as a badge of honor and service. (The classic equation is: we'll pay people badly, but reward loyalty, long hours and commitment to the cause and culture. Never mind performance. This plays well to boards comprised of wealthy people who serve in order to enhance their social positions and placate their consciences).

Today's capable and increasingly activist donors are rightly lauded for their commitment and worthy ambitions, but they also threaten the independence of not for profit entities and the public good and public trust they represent. It's been so long now, I'm trying to think of what you call the indigenous managers who implement colonial rule. That's what our American ngos risk becoming under the influence of high stakes, big money philanthropy, and that's what threatens the interests they are authorized and privileged to represent. It's odd that Americans are so quick to condemn and eager to regulate large contributions to individual public servants on the general assumption that big gifts obviously buy influence; and yet so indifferent to the growing influence of large donations to corporate public servants (ie, not for profit 501(c)(3)s) . Obviously individual and corporate interests are much more closely intertwined than this dichotomy suggests, but this is yet another instance where we Americans continue to demonstrate our willingness to sacrifice real individuals to our constitutional fetish of the individual.

My Name is Paul Holdengraber

I had read some of the New Yorker pieces and Istanbul and My Name is Red before my first trip to Turkey this time last year, and while frankly I have found Orhan Pamuk's exquisitely detailed universes to be more admirable than engaging (the miniature is truly his metier), I was very keen to attend his 'Conversation with Paul Holdengraber' which opened the fall season of the NYPL's LIVE series this past week. He's got a big fat new hardcover collection of essays called Other Colors and Sonny Mehta was in the audience which I know not because I saw him but because in the 10 minute ad with which Paul Holdengraber introduced and promoted the series and himself, he made sure that no one could be in any doubt about cultural and social importance of the occasion. (Along with Mr. Mehta, Holdengraber singled out Pamuk's publicist, 'absolutely the best publicist in all of New York'. What do you want to bet a big fat new hardcover of Conversations with Paul Holdengraber is in the works)?

I better understood my own response to Pamuk after hearing him talk about his return to painting (he had trained as a painter during his youth and is co-teaching a class at Columbia this term called Word and Picture which sounds charmingly mistranslated) and repeatedly referring to books and essays as 'objects'.

But mostly what I understood was that like an interview with Barbara Walters or a photo with Elvis (and no I'm not linking either), a conversation with Paul Holdengraber is never really about anything, or anyone, else.

The Good Society (part 1 of 2)

There have been a couple of articles recently in the WSJ and NYT that go a ways toward exposing, or inviting the exposure, of some trends and fallacies in contemporary philanthropy that should be of interest to anyone who participates in the 'not-for-profit' economy and that's pretty much all of us.

Stephanie Strom's piece in the Times focuses on, and disrupts, two foundational premises about charitable giving in the US: 1) the 'common perception of philanthropy ... that one of its central purposes is to alleviate the suffering of society’s least fortunate and therefore promote greater equality'; and 2) (quoting Eli Broad) "what smart, entrepreneurial philanthropists and their foundations do is get greater value for how they invest their money than if the government were doing it". The merit of Mr. Broad's assertion can be assessed both with respect to data documenting the impact of private vs public dollars on causes that we might all agree are of 'greater value' (ok, I know I beg indulgence here) and also with respect to the overall social contract such a statement implies. Are individual entrepreneurs providing greater value to society than the state? Is this desirable? What is the cost?

A recent study co-sponsored by the University of Indiana Center on Philanthropy and Google found 'that less than one-third of the money individuals gave to nonprofits in 2005 was focused on the needs of the economically disadvantaged. Of the $250 billion in donations, less than $78 billion explicitly targeted those in need'. One telling statistic concerns charitable giving to benefit the poor as a percentage of income. Out of 4 income brackets: 1) less than $100,000, 2) $100,000-$200,000, 3)$200,000-$1 million and 4) $1 million or more, those reporting income of $1 million or more gave the LEAST to causes that benefited the poor-- 22 per cent, as opposed to over 35 per cent for those making incomes of $100,000 or less. What's especially fascinating about this finding is how sharply it contradicts the self-reported priorities of wealthy individuals as documented in another important Center of Philanthropy report, the Bank of America Study of High Net Worth Individuals. The BofA study, which defines high net worth individuals as those with an annual income of over $200,000 or net worth of $1 million or more, found that the top motivations for giving reported by this group were to 1) 'meet critical needs' (86.3 per cent) and 2) 'give back to society' (82.6 per cent). By contrast, such self interested motivations as making good business sense, doing what was expected of one's social set, and leaving a legacy were reported by between 26 and 29 per cent--- the lowest scores on the survey (with the exception of 'limiting funds to one's heirs', which suggests nobody wants to confess keeping company with Leona Helmsley).

Strom notes that there are also substantial amounts of money-- largely from or patterned on The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, going 'primarily to improve the lives of the poor in developing countries'. The Gates Foundation's 2006 990 describes approximately two thirds of a total $1.5 billion in grants as being dedicated to 'global development' or 'global health'. (I was looking for the actual awards but haven't found them yet which is odd because they are usually spelled out on every 990. Maybe they submit their appendices differently). I really don't want to fault the Gateses of the world, or Bono for that matter, for aiming to eradicate disease, end poverty, and generally address the kind of extreme problems that you'd be embarrassed to contemplate unless you were God, Miss America, Mr. or Mrs. Gates or Bono). I mean, these people could be using their billions to colonize outer space or run for office (there were too many candidates to decide on a link so I leave that one to your imagination). But it's more than cynicism to observe that a population that is unemployed, uneducated, diseased and deceased does not spring to mind with the words 'emerging market'.

And of course, we all know that those who can make money, should. This was Carlos Slim's contrarian rejoinder to the benediction Warren Buffett was accorded following his paradigm-shifting decision to give away a fortune, to another agency that didn't bear his name, to spend down on today's needs rather than to augment its coffers that it might continue to dole out smaller amounts over longer periods of time to redress/sustain problems that will have persisted due to the paternalistic spending policy of the comfortably endowed granting foundations.

Earned money used to follow inherited money where charitable giving was concerned. And for the most part it still does. What's different is the level of control to which today's newly rich, often young and entrepreneurial donors are accustomed to exercising and are now capable of bringing to bear in their charitable activities. In courting and securing the megagifts that are increasingly the lifeblood of not-for-profit organizations (I will return with data), entities that are privileged--both by the state and by the public--on the basis of their claim to serving the public good, are at serious and deserved risk of losing the public trust.

What's worse is that the'public' may not care.

Coming soon: the business of philanthropy, the philanthropy of business, and 'good' government.

The Draughtsman's Contract

What could be more deplorable or pernicious than the triumph of anecdote and common sense over evidence and logic? (see: George W. Bush, presidency ).

Following a childhood and adolescence on the losing side of history, I was privileged to pass several engaging years among more or less like-minded people, during which I developed an intellectual arsenal, and (if I may be so immodest--and this being my own blog, I daresay I may)-- a fair strategy with which to counter the overwhelming tide. Yet the excitement of discovery and collaboration (the apogee of my education) quickly gave way to competition for the academic, social, professional and economic rewards of marginal mastery as demonstrated through increasingly codified and subtle gestures whose refinement went further to impress an internal constituency than it did to advance any more consequential position.

I liked the game; I was good at it. The social identity that was more often a liability in my daily life gave me a marginal edge in the marginal community in which I found myself, the more so because I explicitly rejected the ideological basis of that authority. (Here, I should probably disabuse any reader of the reasonable inference that I am describing a reluctant career in investment banking).

I specialized in the 'got you' moment: exposing internal inconsistencies in various arguments about identity, particularly by demonstrating how they were contradicted by their premises. Sometimes it was enough to observe that another scholar or body of scholarship that you had failed to consider effectively rendered you obsolete. Yes, you. Sometimes it got personal. It was competitive, and occasionally, acutely exhilerating. But it was also exhausting, as I bunkered down into increasingly compulsive research, hairsplitting claims, and straightjacketed prose in an effort to immunize myself against the charges I levied on others.

Then one day (or more accurately, gradually over thousands) I discovered that I owed much of my profound discomfort to the position I'd been occupying on the spearhead of my own petard. If others had failed to acknowledge and adjust fully to the implications of the linguistic turn--if burnt bits of essentialism (to be even more specific) still adhered to whatever new idea you were cooking up-- well, not only was my pot as black, but so had I ruined my own taste.

I quit.

I read Trollope for a year.

I stopped writing for ten.

The whole culture of self exposure and blogging and so forth is in many ways anathema to me and I was astonished to find myself entering the field not long ago, and even more astonished to discover that I was enjoying writing again. I found that being anonymous and having no expectations to satisfy was, tentatively, liberating.

I ventured to imagine I could be personal here, confidential. Confessional, even, within this vast and wonderfully indifferent universe.

But then I realized that, through my own error, I am known to the few people who have visited me here.

My first instinct was actually to delete the blog entirely.

It has taken me three difficult days to write this post. It wasn't my idea, but it barged in and threw out everything else.

There are lots of things I want to talk about. Most are equally unimportant, insubstantial, and insignificant. I haven't kept up with the literature, and I fear I have become inconsistent, and thereby reactionary. A recent respondent reinforced my concern that I have begun to exhibit dangerously libertarian tendencies.

But mostly I don't want to perform again.

The ethicist

I know a man named Richard. He has one lung and is receiving chemotherapy, intermittently, from what I can gather. Whether this is due to his own availability or that of his doctors, I cannot say. But he did show me his empty inhaler. Today was humid and it was getting to him. He'd picked up 14 of the 26 dollars he needed for a refill before I found him and I left him a few bucks closer.

This assuaged neither his need nor my conscience. I had more than $20 in my wallet when I found him and more than $20 when I walked away. Why? I often think about Richard and look for him whenever I pass that corner. I am disappointed when I don't see him, and sometimes worried. But today, I was in a hurry. I have plans this evening and didn't think I'd have time to get to the bank, to replenish taxi fare; I've overspent already this month and my remaining dollars are committed. And so on.

Do I really value the birthday dinner I'm buying a friend tonight, the cab fare, the sake on sale just through next week, the shoe shine, the cut and color, the holiday tips for building staff (already dreading my deficit there), the dog grooming, the tailoring, the subscription to the New Yorker, the NYPL membership, the flowers I buy once a week-- above the extra 10 bucks it would cost to relieve a dying man of a few more hot hours of discomfort and discouragement on the corner of 38th and 3d?

Evidently.

Do you think this is a fair equation?

I lived in downtown LA for a few years at the end of the last and beginning of this decade. My neighborhood housed the largest concentration of homeless people in the US. My apartment, first on the fifth and then on the 12th floor of a newly converted loft building (I moved to the other coast but came back), afforded a prime view of the cardboard roofs lining the streets. The neon sign on the adjacent building still advertised it as a flop house. It was a nice flop house, and the smell of bleach reached the streets in the morning, and a couple characters who lived there would still show up at the old bar they'd frequented from 10 am every day for the past 20, 30 years, indulged in their other preferences by espresso artists whose tatoos were far more literary and expensive than those of their customers. My landlord employed security guards from the newly released inmates enrolled in a job placement program at the halfway house across the street. I tutored homeless children at a local shelter, conveniently located three blocks away, and let my dog introduce me to anyone she fancied. She fancied the pungent.

Life was good.

But there was a down side. In my neighborhood, trash bins had become a contested terrain. For some scavengers, they were a source of income (I don't know actually know the going price for bottles and cans); for others, a source of sustenance (discarded food). I was one of the few newcomers--city dwelling, law-abiding, dog-walking neighbors-- who looked at the bins and saw trash.

None of us (I hope) was so deluded as to think that we were welcomed by longer-term residents with unmitigated delight. More often than not, I found myself standing in line behind a neighbor perusing the trash for another purpose, and frequently ended up running from corner to corner to corner with my leash in one hand and baggy in another as I sought a free bin at which to discharge both legal and civic duties with the least conflict between these occasionally incoincident imperatives.

Nor did I seek conflict with my neighbors. It was no different from seething in line behind some damned tourist who didn't know a grande from a venti. You just focussed on the paper and got your own request in order, so as not to hold up the process in turn. Only in this case, you knew, or think you knew, that the connoisseur before you was weighing the finer points of something that might actually make a real difference. Maybe because deciding whether to pick up a spent cigarette butt is the most significant independent choice she might be privileged to make all day.

After one too many mornings late for work on account of pondering these imponderables, longing for garbage just to be garbage, I emailed the New York Times columnist Randy Cohen, 'The Ethicist', for his expert guidance.

Should I feel justified in tossing my bag into a receptacle that might already contain some one else's breakfast? should I wait my turn (and just spoil some one else's breakfast)? should I leave the offending mess on the sidewalk, on the ground that my fellow 'urban pioneers' and I should just suck it up as part of the local color (and in the process, add to the misery of those we were --let's be honest-- further displacing), to hell with city ordinances? Should I persist until I could locate an unoccupied bin and thereby elude the multipurpose dilemma? Was it my ethical duty to bring the matter to the city council or take other measures?

I wish I had his response still but I don't. Basically, it was an excoriation for my frivolity. It was disgusting that I should pit my convenience (as he put it) against another's basic human needs. There was apparently no ethical framework that could accommodate such an offense.

I was trying to figure out how to act ethically in an unjust situation. If ethics can't offer any guidance then, when?

Are those of us who are privileged to choose whether to ask questions such as those I posed to 'The Ethicist' not obliged to do so? The Ethicist suggests that those of us who are contaminated by our positions should contemplate our shame. And I think most of us do. It's called liberal guilt.

But an 'ethics' that doesn't provide a rationale and strategy to propel its interlocutors beyond that acute point of recognition is nothing more than censure.

Which I believe belongs to the domain of morality.