A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  If you’re into sunspot theory, increased negative ionization during sunspot maximum periods increases human excitability.

  The sunspot-sodden American right—in this instance the male right—is imploding under the sheer pressure of its repressions, always nearer the surface than in the more decorous psychic plumbing of the liberal legions. It feels like we’re back in 1960 when the pill first came on line and predictions of moral collapse were selling by the gross at every convenience store.

  March 23

  “In the twenty-first century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education,” President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union Address, just as millions of high schoolers across the nation were embarking on the annual ritual of picking their preferred colleges and preparing the grand tour of the prospects, with parents in tow, gazing ashen faced at the prospective fees.

  The image is of the toiling students springing from lecture room to well-paying jobs demanding advanced skills in all the arts that can make America great again—out-thinking, out-knowing the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, South Koreans, and Germans in the cutting edge, cut-throat high-tech economies of tomorrow.

  Start with the raw material in this epic knowledge battle. As a dose of cold water over all this high-minded talk it’s worth looking at Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum’s recently published Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The two profs followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-nine universities, selected to represent the range of America’s 2,000-plus four-year college institutions. As summarized by Steven Kent in Daily Finance:

  Among the authors’ findings: 32 percent of the students whom they followed in an average semester did not take any courses that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week. Half did not take any courses in which more than 20 pages of writing were assigned throughout the entire term. Furthermore, 35 percent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone.

  Typical students spent about 16 percent of their time on academic pursuits, and were “academically engaged,” write the authors, less than 30 hours a week. After two years in college, 45 percent of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36 percent showed little change. And the students who did show improvement only logged very modest gains. Students spent 50 percent less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.

  Students who majored in traditional liberal arts fields like philosophy, history and English showed “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” But of course these are the courses and instructors being ruthlessly pruned back.

  One of the study’s authors, Richard Arum, says college governing boards, shoveling out colossal sums to their presidents, athletic coaches and senior administrative staff, demand that the focus be “student retention,” also known as trying very hard not to kick anyone out for not doing any measurable work. As Arum put it to Money College, “Students are much more likely to drop out of school when they are not socially engaged, and colleges and universities increasingly view students as consumers and clients. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that all students want to be exposed to a rigorous academic program.”

  The US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that in 2010 only 20 percent of jobs required a bachelor’s degree, whereas 26 percent of jobs did not even require a high-school diploma, and another 43 percent required only a high-school diploma or equivalent.

  Please note that the latter 69 percent were therefore free of the one debt in America that’s even more certain than taxes—a student loan. At least if you’re provably broke the IRS will countenance an “offer in compromise.” In fact they recently made the process slightly easier. No such luck with student loans. The banks are in your pocket till the last dime of loan plus interest has been extorted.

  Now for the next dose of cold water. The BLS reckons that by 2020 the overwhelming majority of jobs will still require only a high-school diploma or less and that nearly three quarters of “job openings due to growth and replacement needs” over the next ten years will pay a median wage of less than $35,000 a year, with nearly 30 percent paying a median of about $20,000 a year (in 2010 dollars).

  As Jack Metzgar, emeritus professor of humanities at Roosevelt University, correctly remarks, “Put these two sets of numbers together, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Americans are over educated for the jobs that we have and are going to have. It’s hard to imagine why anybody would call us ‘a knowledge economy.’ ” In other words, millions of Americans are over-educated, servicing endless debt to the banks and boosting the bottom lines of Red Bull and the breweries.

  The snobbery, as Metzgar points out, stems from the fact that America’s endless, mostly arid debates about education are conducted by the roughly one-third who are college-educated and have okay jobs and a decent income. The “knowledge economy” in the US now needs more than six million people with master’s or doctoral degrees, with another 1.3 million needed by 2020. But this will still be less than 5 percent of the overall economy.

  Even if we expand the definition to include jobs requiring any education beyond high school, the “knowledge economy”—now and a decade from now—will still represent less than one-third of all available jobs. This is a lot of jobs, about forty-four million now, and if you work and live in this one-third, especially in its upper reaches, more education can seem like the answer to everything. Indeed, according to the BLS, having a bachelor’s degree should yield a person nearly $30,000 a year more in wages than a high-school graduate. But most of the American economy is not like this.

  The BLS’s three largest occupational categories by themselves accounted for more than one-third of the workforce in 2010 (forty-nine million jobs), and they will make an outsized contribution to the new jobs projected for 2020. They are: office and administrative support occupations (median wage of $30,710); sales and related occupations ($24,370); food preparation and serving occupations ($18,770). Other occupations projected to provide the largest number of new jobs in the next decade include childcare workers ($19,300), personal care aides ($19,640), home health aides ($20,560), janitors and cleaners ($22,210), teacher assistants ($23,220), non-construction laborers ($23,460), security guards ($23,920), and construction laborers ($29,280).

  So what is the best anti-poverty program? Higher wages for the jobs that are out there, currently yielding impossibly low annual incomes. The current American minimum wage ranges between $7.25 and $8.67 per hour. From time to time senior executives of Walmart call for a rise in the minimum wage since, in the words of one former CEO, Lee Scott, “our customers simply don’t have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks.” The minimum wage in Ontario, Canada, is currently well over $10 per hour, while in France it now stands at nearly $13. Australia recently raised its minimum wage to over $16 per hour, and nonetheless has an unemployment rate of just 5 percent.

  March 23

  From: Michael Dawson, Portland, OR

  In Harm’s Way: This one was apparently used by our friend Staff Sgt. Robert Bales in a 2009 Pentagon-published discourse on how to distinguish “good guys” from “bad guys”: “We discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants, and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us. I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm’s way like that.”

  In harm’s way. It dehumanizes and dehistoricizes all enemies. It flatters the speaker as somebody who chooses to stop Evil, presumably also suggesting the notion that, once one gains that status, one has the right to go shoot up a village.

  April 5

  I’d say the chances of George Zimmerman spending time behind bars for killing Trayvon Martin are about the same as Sgt. Robert Bales doing time for killing those sixteen Afgha
n villagers the night of March 11. Zero.

  Like most things that happen in America these days, the Trayvon Martin case is turning into yet another hearse trundling the Republican Party to its doom in November.

  Zimmerman stakes his defense on Chapter 776.013 of the Florida criminal statute on home protection and the use of deadly force. Paragraph 3 states, “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.” This is what’s colloquially known as the Stand Your Ground Law.

  Outrage about the case built across the first two weeks of March. By the third week it was a national scandal. Black columnists described how they warn their sons not to run in any crisis situation, always be polite to the cops no matter how provoked. The Rev. Al Sharpton covers the case full volume on MSNBC. The usual litter of deadly cop shootings of blacks are exhumed from recent Florida police records. Protest demonstrations are held in Sanford.

  There are the obvious questions. If Martin had wrestled the gun away from Zimmerman and shot him, would he have been allowed to walk away free? No, Sir. Political pressure forces the appointment of Special Prosecutor Angela Corey, to determine whether to charge Zimmerman. If she does so, it will probably be for second-degree manslaughter.

  President Obama speaks on March 23 about the killing of Trayvon, saying, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon … I think [Trayvon’s parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

  Two Republican candidates for their party’s nomination to the presidency promptly bring out the hearse, most recently deployed to freight denunciations of women’s right to birth control. Newt Gingrich states that Obama’s comments are “disgraceful” and that “Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified, no matter what the ethnic background. Is the President suggesting that, if it had been a white who’d been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense.”

  Then Rick Santorum chimes in, stating that Obama should “not use these types of horrible and tragic individual cases to try to drive a wedge in America.” This unleashes Rush Limbaugh who says that Obama is using the case as a “political opportunity.” Geraldo Rivera suggests Martin brought it on himself by wearing a hoodie. At which point the conservative columnist William Tucker has had enough. In the hard-right American Spectator, under the headline: “Count Me Out on Trayvon Martin: Why Gingrich, Santorum, and Many Conservatives Are Dead Wrong on This One,” Tucker writes, “Republicans have no reason to intervene in this fight. Seventy-five percent of the public thinks Zimmerman should be charged with something … Personally, I can’t wait until Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum get offstage so we can start running a presidential campaign that isn’t based on trying to alienate the vast majority of Americans over irrelevant issues.”

  What is it that prompts Republicans to try so hard to alienate women, blacks, Hispanics, independents, and all those millions and millions of Americans to the left of the Tea Party they’ll need to beat Obama? Maybe they feel it’s their last throw. All the demographics look unfavorable for any future Republican majority. So there is a desperate effort to get everything they can right now. Conning working-class whites with racism, sexism, anti-gay/anti-immigrant rhetoric, etc., has worked so well since Nixon that it’s become an addiction.

  April 18

  This has been a bad year for grand restaurants in the three- to four-star range. The clang of their closing doors raises the question—is the whole gastro-frenzy that stirred into life in the mid-1970s finally lurching towards closure? Goodbye Iron Chefs, sayonara “molecular gastronomy” in the style of Ferran Adrià, farewell those overcooked paragraphs of fine restaurant writing that became the hottest reading in the New York Times.

  On March 7 the high society eatery La Côte Basque (used as a chapter heading in habitué Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers) closed its doors. This last Wednesday the New York Times mourned at length the Chicago restaurant Charlie Trotter’s, slated for extinction in August. According to the Times, Trotter’s “had a huge and lasting impact on Chicago’s culinary landscape, if not the nation’s.”

  Okay, a couple of big time restaurants bite the dust in the great recession. So?

  For several years one of the New York Times’ most avidly read writers was Sam Sifton. Sifton approached his job con amore. Not from him any cavils about price, let alone high-end gastro flim flam. His prose had the confident lilt of a man writing for Wall Streeters for whom a couple of thousand dollars dropped on a dinner for four was absolutely no problem, and indeed almost an emblem of parsimony.

  In early October last year he published an emotional eulogy to Per Se, “the best restaurant in New York City,” located in the Time-Life building at Lincoln Center. A photo disclosed no less than six Per Se employees mustered round a dish being plated for some expectant customer.

  “Per Se’s signature starter course is Oysters and Pearls,” wrote Sifton. “It combines a sabayon of pearl tapioca with Island Creek oysters (small, marble-shaped, from Duxbury, south of Boston, fantastic) and a fat clump of sturgeon caviar from Northern California. These arrive in a bowl of the finest porcelain from Limoges. Paired with a glass of golden semillon from Elderton, they make a fine argument for the metaphor of transubstantiation.”

  After this rather laconic reference to the Eucharist, an editorial note disclosed that this was Sifton’s last review. I’ve no idea whether Sifton’s liver couldn’t take the pace any more (“I have eaten in restaurants five or more nights a week for the last two years”) or whether the Times simply felt things were getting a little out of hand, and the paper was becoming a stand-in for Gourmet magazine. Either way it seemed we’d got to the end of an era. The day it announced the closing of Charlie Trotter’s, an article counseled Times readers on how to use leftovers.

  The readers seemed to be getting testy too, though they are by nature on food sites, saving for the post mortem all the things they didn’t dare tell the waiter. Oliver Gardener from Florida wrote: “Ate there one time in 2006. Was awful. Paid $400 for a bottle of wine that retailed for $60. Ridiculous mark up. A couple of the courses were very good, but each consisted of about two bites of food. It was over before you knew it. Attitude like I’ve never seen. Snooty snooty snooty. Would not return. Better meal, by far, at Momofuku Noodle Shop.”

  When I first came to New York in 1972 the high-end gastro-porn industry was barely in motion. If you wanted to have a fancy French meal, you went to Lutèce, which closed down in 2004. Domestic kitchens were wreathed in smoke from burned offerings to Julia Child. Fiery Hunan cooking was all the rage, followed by a pallid style of cooking known as cuisine minceur, where tasteful dollops of steamed chard held sway.

  Then, in 1975, Craig Claiborne reported on the front page of the New York Times that he and Pierre Franey had blown $4,000 on a thirty-one-course, nine-wine dinner at Chez Denis in Paris, a feast offered by American Express at a charity auction.

  In those post-Vietnam days, columnists kept whole stables of moral high horses pawing the ground in their stalls. Espying the $4,000 binge, Harriet Van Horne stabbed furiously at her typewriter: “This calculated evening of high-class piggery offends an average American’s sense of decency. It seems wrong, morally, esthetically and in every other way.” Above the column I remember an editor ran the head “Edunt et Vomant” (they eat and they vomit).

  People were shocked but Claiborne had put down a marker. Thirty years later, you didn’t need to eat your way through thirty-one courses to run up a tab of $4,000. The wine alone could cost that. These da
ys several restaurants offer food clad in gold. New York’s Serendipity, for example, advertises “the Golden Opulence Sundae, a chocolate sundae covered in 23-karat gold leaf, suffused with gold dragets, and served with an 18-karat gold spoon that diners can keep.” The price? $1,000. (Don’t eat the spoon. Any gold of less than 23 karats may contain other, possibly harmful, metals.)

  Mannerism began to creep onto the food pages. In 2010 bugs were suddenly all the rage. “A five-course Mexican feast at the Brooklyn Kitchen in Williamsburg last Saturday night [was] engineered to introduce New Yorkers to the succulent wonders of edible insects,” the New York Times reported. “The first couple of courses [offered] yucca frites dotted with mealworms, a smoked corn custard sprinkled with crispy moth larvae … at some point during dinner a bowl of squirming wax moth larvae was passed around.”

  Good restaurants are still cooking excellent food. Restaurants establishing direct relationships with small farm suppliers is surely a good thing, though often the menu in such places begins to look like a gazetteer, and one does ask oneself, is the “Niman ranch” really all that it claims to be? Overall the standard, domestic as well as professional, of American cuisine has never been higher. It’s just that one doesn’t pick up that crackle of excitement, that rush to get a table at that new place down the block.

  Also, there have been unpleasing stories of the darker side of the profession, with the owners or managers of restaurants, such as Mario Battali, stealing the tip income of their miserably underpaid waiters. In a recent story in the Guardian by Moira Herbst, three Manhattan bartenders accuse the owners of downtown wine/tapas spots Bar Veloce and Bar Carrera of skimming up to 30 percent of their tips, along with failing to pay proper wages and overtime.