“Because of the circles you run in, you may think you are one of the strong creatures. But you’re not, you’re one of the weak ones. You’ve survived because you’ve been protected by the strong, but they’re not strong anymore.”

So goes a one sided conversation between Detective Leckie to J in Animal Kingdom, a movie that is The Departed set to the slow burn of The Godfather.

The movie revolves around a family of outlaws, a matriarchal grandmother, 3 uncles, a close friend and their crooked lawyer, that welcome their teenage nephew into the fold. he criminals are engaged in a bloody feud with the local police, who are, in turn, not above extrajudicial sentencing. Each scene and character is economical, with very little wasted effort. The result is a quietly menacing film that is emotionally taut from opening to close, underscored by ominous musical notes that are almost always present as the aural backdrop of each scene. Each character’s nature is revealed with a minimum of dialog, exposition or action.

(Minor spoilers, I’ve tried to keep them to what one could see in the trailer or in the first scene.)

The plot twists and turns from the opening scene, it is not unexpected actions that twist, but the emotional context. We meet J watching TV with his sleeping mother, only to find out that she is not sleeping, but has overdosed and pronounced dead by paramedics. J calls his Grandma for help, and the audience could assume that his mother was a pariah of the family owing to her drug addiction and J is going to live with his sweet grandmother, which may benefit him. Upon meeting the Grandmother and family, we find out the real reason J and his mother were estranged from them. (And sure as shit it was not over a dispute about the rules of a card game.)

Two characters that stick with you after the credits roll are Pope and Grandma Smurf. Pope is a complete psychopath whom we first meet standing in the shadows and is one of the strong ones. A play fight between Pope and Craig is shot to look like a couple of wolves or lions play fighting, with the dominant one on top and the subordinate on bottom with paws on his face. Pope is most terrifying when remaining still or engaging in a seemingly innocuous conversation. Grandma Smurf is just as cold blooded as Pope, but covers her true nature with a false warmth and sweetness that makes her even creepier. When doting on her family, she gives mouth to mouth kisses that linger for a little too long, which makes me wonder if the point is to show that her outward warmth is an emotional put on that she doesn’t quite know how to play correctly.

The plot follows the growth of the young nephew, J, as he struggles to figure out how to survive in the unforgiving jungle. J’s placid demeanor and passivity could at first be taken to be very wooden or poor acting, but that is actually his initial survival strategy. At first, J tries to survive by remaining detached and removed from the events around him, the opening scene underscores this point brilliantly, but he soon finds he can’t play possum forever. Later, Detective Leckie puts it to J straight and tells him that he has to start making decisions. His emotional turn comes after he continues following orders and casts off the one person he loves, only to see things come horribly undone anyway. The eerie calm in the first half of the movie before his emotional outburst makes the payoff riveting, and from there we see J grow from possum to tiger as he begins taking action and thinking for himself to ensure his survival in the jungle of criminals and cops.

In one scene that underscores J’s transformation and the dangerous environment he inhabits, a police officer escorting J puts a gun in his face. J doesn’t look even look or flinch and outwardly appears as impassive as he has always been, except in the context of this scene the viewer realizes that J is already actively working toward his long term survival with a plan, part of which involves playing the cops for protection, but the full details of the plan are not revealed until the final scene. Will J become one of the strong ones like Pope or Smurf? Or will he find a way to survive under the protection of others, like his uncle Darren?

Despite knowing this, every year I find myself entertaining the idea of moving back there. While anyone can decry how depressing the finger lakes can be in wintertime, I think it’s safe to say that anywhere around here, regardless of proximity to PY or not, is pretty dreary once the snow starts flying. Additionally, Penn Yan its self is not exactly chock full of business opportunities or decent-paying jobs; while they are within reasonable driving distance, they’re virtually non-existent within the immediate realm of Pennsylvania Yankeedom. But the most detrimental thing in my mind, the most off-putting aspect of the place, has always been the intellectually inert paradigm that prevails over the municipality of pVegas.

Look, I’m not making a blanket statement that everyone in or from Penn Yan is stupid—that’s quite obviously not the case. But there does seem to be an entrenched attitude of anti-movement there. I had always looked at that as a negative trait. Sometimes people are such stalwarts with regard to resisting change and potential progress, and they make the argument for never changing anything so vigorously and boisterously, their points are obscured by the foolhardy way by in which they present them. Penn Yan seems to be a haven for these sorts people. As usual, the actions of the few ruin a situation for the many.

But lately it’s occurred to me that there is something to be said for a somewhat complacent attitude. Yates County has no expressways, and that’s great. People move a bit slower, and generally don’t pressure themselves to cram as much into a day as they possibly can. It seems that they can appreciate the subtleties of everyday life to a greater extent than those of a more urban persuasion. It’s like I said in a recent status update: “Life is best experienced under 20 or over 80 mph – anything else is just boring transit.”

The latter part of that statement is only meant to reflect my affinity for the adrenaline rush gained by driving my car at 120 mph; the former part is the part that I really identify with more on a day-to-day basis. I ride my bike not only for exercise, but also as a way to kind of recharge my mental batteries. I usually go alone so I’m not distracted by conversation. You notice so much more when you’re all alone, cruising along a back road lined with vineyards at 15 mph, than you would otherwise. I had a conversation with a turkey buzzard on Skyline Drive last Friday as he stalked me from the sky. Despite its one-sidedness, I doubt that interaction could have happened were I going any faster than I was.

But that’s not the whole story either. I feel that there are more fundamental reasons for wanting to settle into a groove, so to speak. Last week I found myself actually wistfully recalling what it’s like to mow a lawn. To my way of thinking, there’s something profoundly existential about cutting grass. Learning the nuances of a specific plot of land, how to tackle it efficiently, the idiosyncrasies of the mower, and how best to maneuver it while holding a High Life™. It doesn’t have to be a task, it could also be the satisfaction gleaned from another person’s company. Not necessarily undertaking activities with a partner, or a lively conversation, but the simple appreciation of another human being’s presence, even when there is no interaction. Understanding that they choose to be there, regardless of the minutiae with which you both might occupy yourselves, you are there together in that specific place and time because you wish to be. I feel that these things that put you in the moment, they are the fabric of complacency; it isn’t about what you are doing (or not doing,) it’s about gaining an appreciation for that specific set of circumstances. You’re actively involved in being OK with whatever you are choosing to do in said moment, and embracing the existentially static nature of where you are. It’s like something a great friend said to me just over 7 years ago: “We’re not called human doings, we’re human beings.”

The truly hard part is maintaining a balance with regard to spontaneity and complacency. I tend to think that one must maintain a conscious awareness of this balance, because doing otherwise risks falling into one extreme or another. Overdoing the spontaneity invites tumult; if one’s life is in constant upheaval, you have strayed into the culture of speed, and are missing out on what some call “the little things.” Conversely, becoming too complacent is the best way to ensure a protracted slide into the abyss of laziness. Maintaining the mental equilibrium to enable toeing the line on either side of this equation isn’t easy, but it must be done.

I feel that living in a place like Penn Yan is the best option for someone like myself. I am, by nature, impetuous, and a seeker of instant gratification. I tend to think that this might be why I perennially resisted the idea of living in a place where everything seems to stagnate, but in reality it’s probably the best yin to my proverbial yang. The problem was that I was too blinded by my own innate drive toward the “everything now” culture that has become avant garde in recent years. Maybe it’s age, or just getting to know myself better, but I’m realizing now that I’ve been missing out on a lot of things – and not just interpersonal exchanges with bluff wildlife. I think I’m finally learning to appreciate merely existing. I’m embracing complacency.

But there’s a little more to the Royal Tenenbaums. I identify with those kids. Richie is so vulnerable, so restrained, and at times, so earnest. Margot goes to such great lengths to hide herself from everyone else – she’s terrified of the idea of being judged for who she really is. Chas is so crushed by the loss of his wife he’s hell-bent on ensuring that nothing can ever hurt him that badly again. They’re all supposed geniuses as children, as sure of their own actions as the most brash world leaders – but as adults they’re tepid & terrified. I think this reflects what society does to all of us (to varying degrees) over the course of our maturation – regardless of what shape pegs we might all be from the factory, the world has a way of pounding us all into square holes. We’re too afraid to be ourselves after taking a certain amount of shit, and as a result the faces we present to the world are somewhat watered-down versions of the real deal.

The thing that really gets me about Richie & Margot is that they understand their own flaws, but they don’t know what to do about them. They know they do some ridiculous things, but they don’t know why, or how to stop themselves from doing so. And I think that that knowledge depresses them a bit. It sucks knowing that we do stupid or irrational stuff, but not knowing how to address it. A lot of this has to do with growing up. Even after Richie tells Margot he loves her, she reciprocates in a roundabout fashion, and implies that they should keep it between the two of them. It’s like a scene straight out of 4th grade recess.

And the part that strikes me as the most real, is that this is how people really act toward one another. We’re still really just kids on swingsets. The girl kisses the boy, then runs away, and neither one of them really know what the fuck is going on. Everybody’s so mortified of the potential scenarios, that we all just isolate ourselves in our own minds and hope that time will sort it out. This is the shit that Anderson is so good at portraying: the subtle minutiae of interpersonal relationships, and the way we tiptoe around one another. Until the dam starts to leak, and then we find ourselves smoking cigarettes on a rooftop, hanging out with our falcons.

Our thesis is that the rich are the dominant drivers of demand in many economies around the world (the US, UK, Canada and Australia). These economies have seen the rich take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years, to the extent that the rich now dominate income, wealth and spending in these countries. Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries.
…
Why as equity investors do we care about these issues?

Despite being in great shape, we think that global capitalists are going to be getting an even greater share of the wealth pie over the next few years, as capitalists benefit disproportionately from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor… Indeed, if the rich keep getting richer, as we suggest, savings rates might get even worse in the plutonomy countries. If plutonomy explains away many conundrums that our equity clients worry about, then this suggests the risk premia ascribed to equities might be too high. Furthermore, if the rich will be getting even richer in the coming years, this bodes extremely well for businesses selling to or servicing the rich, be it for example luxury goods stocks or private banks. The rich are a growing and captive market, who have the nice habit of relatively little price elasticity. The plutonomy basket of luxury goods stocks, private banks etc. has handsomely outperformed the S&P500 index since 1986, and we expect similar out performance from these types of stocks in the years to come…

Our whole plutonomy thesis is based on the idea that the rich will keep getting richer. This thesis is not without its risks… the rising wealth gap between the rich and poor will probably at some point lead to a political backlash … At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich … We don’t see this happening yet, though there are signs of rising political tensions. However we are keeping a close eye on developments.

Equity Strategy. Revisiting Plutonomy: the rich getting richer
Citigroup, March 5, 2006

A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits
At the head of the chamber of commerce
Mama’s in the fact’ry, she ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley, he’s lookin’ for the fuse
I’m in the streets with the tombstone blues

Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues

A fairly compelling argument by conservatives and libertarians, and compelling only because the facts as they describe them are impeachable, is that regulating business does not work because of regulatory capture. This is true and they don’t have to retreat to the abstract to make the case. As we have seen, the latest example is the Minerals Management Service, big business eventually overpowers government agencies that are originally set up to regulate their affairs and eventually has these agencies doing their bidding. The agencies approve of everything they want, which actually gives some legal cover for some of their dicier profit-making designs.

Where libertarians go astray here, as usual, is in identifying the culprit – government. Their other sin is one of omission. It is not just government that is captured, but actual free market agencies as well, which are just as susceptible to capture. The glaring example at hand for the moment are the credit ratings agencies like Moody’s that gilded the financial services’ lily with their triple AAA rated bullshit mortgage backed securities. Moody’s and other credit  ratings agencies were captured just as wholly as say, the Fed, because they are of and serve the same interests as the forces they are interacting with. Moody’s is exactly the kind of free market solution that libertarians are always suggesting would spring up and perform the role of government agencies with far better efficiency and ability if government would get the hell out of the way and let the markets work.

Another institution prone to capture is the U.S. media with its advertising revenue based model. Ironically, deregulation of the media and the mass consolidation that followed has led to a greater capture of the news media in adopting, promoting and protecting the interests of the elite and wealthy.

So if more regulation is not the answer, and neither is less regulation, what the hell is the answer? The question is the problem. Many of us want an easy to adhere to ideology or framework from which all answers spring. There is no easy answer, or at least one that wraps everything up nicely and solves every problem and creates an equilibrium after which we can retire to the couch and watch Project Runway and post pictures of our kitty Snookums to the blog. There will always be trade-offs and problems inherent in any human system, those considerations should not put us off from considering alternatives or reform of the existing one.

Propose a ‘radical’ position, like anarchism, and you are faced with two immediate responses: a poor understanding of what anarchism is and a reluctance to countenance a wholesale reordering of our economy along those lines and some half considered consequences of doing so. The reality is that we are buffeted by forces and institutions beyond our control. The obvious way to fight back is a collective, dedicated, and widespread pushback. This does not mean pulling levers in a polling booth or writing blogs. The U.S. worker has shown an ability to organize and fight in the past, but the system has gotten a lot smarter and more sophisticated. Along with the traditional tactics of division like race, gender or religion, it now has Jersey Shore and Transformers. Ok, well, maybe that isn’t so much smarter, but we are a hell of a lot dumber.

I recall an episode from one of my graduate school classes in 2006 or so. Somehow the discussion had turned to America’s place in the world. The teacher was a woman from Guatemala and she let slip that she hoped that the American government would find some humility in light of recent history. This was just after Katrina and we had a few students from NOLA who were enrolled in our school while their city rebuilt itself. One of these transplants objected strenuously and gave an impassioned 4 or 5 minute plea on behalf of how great America was, our leadership, innovation, how people came from all over the world to study, work and live here. Americans like to talk about how awesome we are, which makes me think that we are all at some level fairly insecure about whether or not that is true.

After WWII, every other industrialized economy had been reduced to rubble except ours. We helped them rebuild to great profit, which provided a boon to our industrial economy through the 1940s and 50s. By the 60s, the world had rebuilt, and things were starting to level off. True, we had Korea and Vietnam, sinkholes of wealth and men, but we had enough house money to exit winner. Business had already been chipping away at the gains labor had made in the New Deal and the economy of the 1950s and turned the tide in the 70s, when working wages began stagnating and elites grew their slice of the wealth pie. They really turned the screws in the 1980s and the passage of NAFTA in the 1990s sealed the deal. A speculative technology bubble papered over this, but when that burst in the early 2000s, the whole thing threatened to come apart. Fortunately, another bubble was at the ready – the easy lending, credit fueled housing boom. Now that this has ended, there does not appear to be another bubble in the pipeline. Green technology was supposed to be it – from what I can tell –, but it doesn’t appear ready for the big time for at least a few more years.

So what next?

It occurs to me that there is no next. Elites played the angle of newer, smarter professions when they off-shored industrial labor, but as some have pointed out – there is no reason why we can’t offshore any profession. I work in IT, and we are already seeing this happen.  I currently have 3 or 4 Indians doing some of our work and truth be told, my company could probably manage without me, an extra Indian or two, and a consultant who puts in a handful of hours a week gathering requirements and coordinating with them. They may even ask me to train the consultant should they ever get to really counting the beans. I fully expect to be making half of what I do now in 10 years adjusted for inflation, in 20 years I’ll be scraping for a living wage and chronically having trouble finding employment.  I also think that by that time, our economy will have settled to a level where it is no longer as attractive to hire Philippine or Chinese workers because American labor will be as cheap, or close enough that the transaction costs make off-shoring more expensive. This is already happening, actually, and my forecast is probably an off by a factor of 10 on the forgiving side.

I am not whining about this and do not say this with a woe is me tone. It is as plain as day that this is the way things are trending and have been for several decades. I’m shocked it hasn’t already happened to my industry, to be honest. Many Americans have been going through this already and the recession is worsening the deal for them. There remain several myths about the American economy that people are holding onto, because those myths give them hope, or some sense that it won’t happen to them. People in my profession are pretty well convinced that they are indispensible, that by virtue of their high tech skills and training, no 3rd worlder could do what they do.

These are the carrots that keep all us jackasses moving forward. The myths of education and technological innovation hold that the role of advanced economies and their labor are to remain ahead of the curve. Questioning these myths on the grounds that staying ahead of the curve by way of learning how to use Excel or program in C# is no way to employ tens of millions of people and moreover, there is no reason or barrier for workers in other countries to undercut these prices as soon as they get up to speed on these skills – actually, they already have. This argument elicits the Tom Friedman response by the time the third world has caught on to this, we need to be on to the next thing. And round and round we go. To underscore the point here, this is the optimistic, well meaning liberal advocacy, that in the future, we reboot our careers and training every 5-10 years, with attendant geographical relocations. We are going to be a transient, low skilled, low wage work force with a plutonomy at the top. As Citigroup’s original plutonomy memo put it to investors,

“With the exception of the boom in the Roaring 1920s, this super-rich group kept losing out its share of incomes in WWI, the Great Depression and WWII, and till the early eighties.Why? … The rise in their share since the mid-eighties might be related to the reduction in corporate and income taxes. … while in the early 20th century capital income was the big chunk for the top 0.1% of households, the resurgence in their fortunes since the mid-eighties was mainly from oversized salaries. The rich in the U.S. went from coupon-clipping, dividend-receiving rentiers to a Managerial Aristocracy indulged by their shareholders.”

Labor projections for the next couple of decades hold that the most readily available jobs, the highest growth, will be low wage, low skill jobs. The people coming of age in this time will no doubt be persuaded by parents and well meaning teachers to get educated so they can better their economic prospects. As tuition increases continue outpacing inflation, many of these people are going to be walking away from college with a luxury car to mortgage sized mountain of debt on their backs, only to be handed a broom and told to start sweeping. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.

I wonder where or if this is even a breaking point for Americans, or if we are just going to accommodate ourselves to an unraveling. There is so much bullshit, delusion and entitlement larded into a perception of loss that is grounded in reality, that I doubt Americans will ever have a coherent reaction to these events. You know how doctors once bled patients to heal them, and then upon finding their condition deteriorating after healthy blood letting, concluded that they had not bled them enough yet? Look at what is going on in real time, our misconceptions and faulty understanding of what is happening only causes us to double down on those same problems, thereby strengthening the hand that is holding us. See, for instance, the working class uproar over providing health care or raising taxes on the wealthy. Some of the more ridiculous manifestations of this, such as the Tea Party, are wildly overblown and exaggerated, but there is enough ‘there’ there to support this point. This is the greatest trick the elites have pulled, to put in the minds of the working class the perspective of the wealthy. That is the absurdity of having a guy struggling with 3 part time jobs become visibly upset at talk of unions. The other great trick has been the prolific exploitation of cognitive dissonance, of, for example, a public school teacher enraged at government spending or a medicare recipient pissed off at the prospect of government getting involved in health care.

My guess is there will be no breaking point, we’ll settle into a banana republic style economy in the next couple of decades. There will be a wealthy, globe-trotting elite funded by hordes of wage slaves at the bottom that are too busy fretting over the possibility that their neighbor is buying milk and bread with food-stamps and sympathizing with his landlord that the eviction process has too much red tape to take stock of the situation beyond that.

Um, right. Aaaaaanyway…

The rally started in Ghirardelli Square and meandered through the touristy section of San Francisco. The participants wore ‘bag monster’ costumes, which are about what they sound like. Each costume has about as many bags as the average American uses in a year. I weaseled out of having to wear one in case I was called by work to handle an emergency; instead I carried a lame protest sign that read, “Plastic bags are trashy.” As near as I could tell, I was the only person who made any attempt at humor, so I probably had the funniest sign by default. Well, actually, my lame pun was probably less humorous than the sign that earnestly attempted to appropriate a Bob Dylan lyric, “The bags are a-blowin in the wind, my friend.” Indeed.

Here are some observations from the good seats.

1. In general, people were supportive. People clapped, gave us some right ons. Although I saw one guy call out to us that we were littering. The bag monster costumes were in a constant state of falling apart, loose bags or whole sections were constantly falling off. There was a group of about 7 people trailing behind and picking up the loose bags, of course, but I imagined that the guy, if he mentioned this bizarre spectacle at all, probably said that what he saw was a rally against plastic bags that also littered bags everywhere! “Ha, those morans!”

2. The girlfriend got into an argument with some preacher man from Hunter’s Point. She recognized him as a somewhat infamous paid for shill by the bag industry that pays him to show up with some of his congregation and claim that the bag ban is a bag tax on poor people. I didn’t quite follow his argument, we already pay for bags as a built in cost of buying groceries, and by making this cost explicit, you could avoid paying the price by bringing your own bag. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that It took me until a day later to put this all together, the guy was a smooth talker and charismatic –I found myself at the end of the rally crossing sides and handing out fliers with him.

3. The bag monster costumes are visually off-putting; people look like shambling mounds of animated trash. Another advantage of weaseling out of wearing them was that if anything went down in the street and the police set about clubbing relatively easy targets, I could easily outrun people wearing the bags. Alas, there were two mounted officers watching us at one point, which would have neutralized my foot speed if it came to that. One bag protestor, trying to mug for a photographer by posing with the police, ran toward the officers. Upon seeing this bizarre looking thing charging right at them, the horses spooked and one of the officers cursed out the bag wearing fool.

4. “Hey ho! plastic bags have got to go!” – We need better chants.

5. Some suggestions for future rallies:

a. The march should end up on the Golden Gate Bridge, and then we would rip off the bag monster costumes and throw them off the bridge – symbolizing the protest against littering the world with plastic

b. A rider to the bill to change our proposition system, which I believe would save the state of California. Instead of letters and numbers, we would use names – like how they name tropical storms. Prop Sally or Phil sounds so much friendlier than Prop13. I think the key to future for California politics is the realization of this proposal. Look at all that bullshit we had to go through to get prop8 overturned, you think if it were named Prop Chet Spencer Chesterton III it would have ever passed? Who would ever vote for such a dickish name!?

c. Set aside some money and buy our own reverends to neutralize the bag industry shills. I like the idea of battling demagogue preachers.

d. Create paper bag and cloth bag monsters and stage a massive rumble, with the cloth bags emerging victorious from the carnage of an almost too real street fight with bloodied plastic bag scalps in hand. A little of the old ultra-violence.