by Ayad Akhtar
And all this was before the financial crisis.
What Mike said to me that night in Harlem six months before Trump’s election was that he had started to see what was happening not just to the black community but also to the very notion of American community itself. His father’s ideas, his own life in Opelika—these had prepared him to understand the implications of what he was learning in courses such as Corporate Tax Theory and Topics on American Property Law. Like Riaz, Mike started to see that there was no way to turn back the tide of what had begun in the ’80s. Our ideas had changed. Yes, money had always been central to notions of American vitality, but now it reigned as our supreme defining value. It was no longer just the purpose of our toil but also our sport and our pastime. We discussed a movie’s weekend gross before its plotline, an outfielder’s signing bonus before his batting average. The market had seeped into our language; we sought upside and minimized our exposure and worried about the best investment of our sweat equity. Even suffrage was monetized, true political power lying not in the ballot box but in one’s capacity to write a check. We were now customers first and foremost, not citizens, and to buy was our privileged act. No longer ruled by a personified abstraction, Zeus or Yahweh, we now appeased a material one: the Economy. We feared its humors; we were grateful for its dispensations; we tended to its imagined well-being with our ritual purchases. When the Economy was well, we were a happy people; when the Economy faltered, premonitions of doom were never far.
Unlike his father, Mike would leave Alabama for good. He would go first to New York, where I met him, then to the West Coast. He’d met and married a woman from Michigan, which, he said, gave him a Yankee perspective on the looting of American life he’d seen back home: his wife, Morgan, had grown up in Flint.3 That night at Red Rooster, Mike said something that reminded me of Mary Moroni’s lecture remarks almost a quarter century earlier, about American self-pillage and plunder, but in a more despairing key:
It’s like nobody even sees it like a country anymore. I don’t know if they ever did, but they sure don’t now. My dad used to say it’s ’cause they’ve had to accept us coming into their part of the picture. We ruined it for them. Everything was fine when we were picking their cotton, but now that they might have to be picking ours? That’s enough to say: “Fuck it. This ain’t my place anymore. I’m gonna change the rules, take what I can, hide behind some gate, and fuck the rest.”
Mike didn’t see a political solution. To him the Democrats had betrayed not only blacks but also the country itself. Liberalism, as it was practiced today, was no less a route to self-enrichment than its opposite was. One needed look no further than the ever-rising postpresidency net worth of the Clintons—the blockbuster book deals, the $750,000 speaking fees—to recognize there was no longer a competing ideology in America. Everything was about getting rich. At least Republicans were honest about it. Mike saw a country where people were poorer, where they were lied to, where their lives felt meaner, where they had no idea how to change any of it. They’d taken the unprecedented step of putting a black intellectual into the highest office in the land, a man who promised change but offered little, whose admittedly genuine concern was marred by his superciliousness, who gloried in his pop-culture celebrity while bemoaning a system whose political dysfunctions prevented him from leading. Obama’s victory had turned out to be little more than symbolic, only hastening our nation’s long collapse into corporate autocracy, and his failures had raised the stakes immeasurably. Most Americans couldn’t cobble together a week’s expenses in case of an emergency. They had good reason to be scared and angry. They felt betrayed and wanted to destroy something. The national mood was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, nihilistic—and no one embodied all this better than Donald Trump. Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy, as Mike saw it, but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we’d allowed ourselves to become. Sure, you could read the man for metaphors—an unapologetically racist real estate magnate embodying the rise of white property rights; a self-absorbed idiot epitomizing the rampant social self-obsession and narcissism that was making us all stupider by the day; greed and corruption so naked and endemic it could only be made sense of as the outsize expression of our own deepest desires—yes, you could read the man as if he were a symbol to be deciphered, but Mike thought it was much simpler than all that. Trump had just felt the national mood, and his particular genius was a need for attention so craven, so unrelenting, he was willing to don any and every shade of our moment’s ugliness, consequences be damned.
* * *
As I walked home after our dinner at Red Rooster—up Lenox and then west, across 141st, the night was brisk and the street uncharacteristically quiet. I made my way past the empty basketball courts abutting the perimeter of the public housing projects. Mixing along the sidewalk were the scents of wood fires and marijuana smoke. As I approached Frederick Douglass Boulevard, I saw an orange couch in the middle of street and ahead, on opposite corners, two groups of young black men who paid me no mind as I passed. One of the groups was huddled around a box, picking at a frosted cake with their fingers.
My building was at the top of the hill off Convent Avenue. I marched up four flights of steps and, once inside, made a beeline for my notebook. For the next hour, I sat at the folding table in my kitchen, writing out an account of the evening, some twenty pages, front and back, shorter on details than it was on my disorientation. Despite my affection for Mike, despite my respect for the unusual granular purchase of his intellect, I couldn’t pretend to myself I didn’t think he was full of shit. His criticisms of Obama sounded petty. I suspected envy. I thought his prognostication about Trump’s victory was wrong. My father had “thoughts” about Trump, too, and those were silly. I concluded that my front-row seat to all that nonsense was no worse a perspective than Mike’s wide-ranging abstractions—probably better. If anything, I saw in my father’s silly infatuation with Trump a human component at work—weak, irrational—that didn’t fit tidily into the clean shapes Mike was drawing around the national spirit. Ever the artist, I trusted the mess.
I noted the fiery turn our talk took at the end of dinner, when he brought up just how much he hated paying taxes. At root, he said as he picked at a piece of sweet potato pie, a government built by whites could only be expected to do harm to black people. I knew my Baldwin; I’d read Ta-Nehisi Coates; I didn’t doubt what he was saying was probably right, but hearing it still shocked me. I glanced over my shoulder at the table behind us to see if our neighbors had heard him. Then I remembered where we were.
As he inveighed against the evils of government and being forced to pay into them, I will admit I thought I heard him reframing talking points already familiar to me from the GOP. The fierce glimmer in his eyes as he spoke made less and less sense to me as I mulled the staggering paradox at the heart of his politics: he believed the American government didn’t deserve his dollars because they would be used against him, a black man, forever the American enemy; so he voted for candidates who promised to lower his taxes, which meant he was ever more inclined to vote Republican, fully cognizant that Republicans were only more and more open about their intent to further ruin the lives of American blacks.
What was I missing?
“You’re missing the forest for the trees.”
“Mike. I don’t understand—”
“What they built, they built for themselves. The system they’ve got, we ain’t gonna change that.”
“But you’re not even trying.”
“That’s not true. I am.”
“How? Not paying taxes? Really?”
“The more you have, the more you can do. That’s the only way to change anything here. Money.” He paused. “You ever hear that thing about the Taino Indians praying to the pile of gold?”
“No.”
“It’s a crazy story, bro. But it kind of says it all. You know who the Taino were, right? They were the natives on a lot of the Caribbean islands before the Spanish sho
wed up. When they got here—the Spanish, that is—it turned out all they were looking for was gold, and the Taino were happy to lead them to it. It didn’t mean much to them. Soon enough, the Spanish put them to work digging up that gold, though. Turned them into slaves. Word got out. So now, when the Spanish showed up on some new Taino island, the natives would just flee. They’d take their boats and head to a different island. They got pushed around the Caribbean, island after island—until they decided to make a last stand. But not by fighting. Instead, they gathered all the gold they could find and put it in a big pile. Then they prayed to that pile to let the white man leave them alone. To let them have this final island. They had their own gods, but they prayed to the gold. As they saw it, that was the white man’s god.”
“Your point?”
“Gold ain’t got no mercy. Those Indians were right. For white people, it’s all about the cash. Always has been. And we’re living in a world they made. See, maybe if we play our own game by their rules, maybe then we got a shot. But that means we gotta be keeping our money. We can’t give it to them. And we have to use it, because it all boils down to the spend. How much you are willing to spend to make what you want happen out there in the world…”
That night at my folding table, I transcribed the conversation as I recalled it and found myself only more dumbfounded in reading it back. Mike had spent the better part of two hours vilifying the white corporate property grab, and here he was advocating the conditions for an eventual corollary black one. Hadn’t he been making a case for a larger vision of the nation than one riven by race? Hadn’t that been the whole point of what he was saying about Trump? That the nation as a whole had been suffering? That it behooved us finally to see it that way? I started to doubt there was any cogent way to square his so-called concern for dwindling community with his support for Republicans who—per his own analysis!—had done so much damage to the foundations of American community in the first place. Wasn’t he just a hypocrite, like the rest of them? And what in God’s name did the Taino have to do with any of this!?
I wrote and wrote, but nothing I wrote moderated my frustration. I sensed there was something here beyond my ken, but I wasn’t convinced understanding it would make any difference. At some point, I shut my notebook and went to bed, but my aggravation lingered and led me back to my laptop, where I bounced about for an hour between websites about antitrust law and posts on Facebook about Trump’s latest antics. I tried to sleep again, but still couldn’t. Around 3:00 a.m., I got out of bed again, turned on the TV. On some barely known cable network pages way down on the on-screen guide, I noticed an airing of It’s a Wonderful Life under way.
The movie’s charcoal shades were both brisker and more somber than I recalled, like a chiaroscuro in some American Caravaggio. It was at that point in the story where Jimmy Stewart’s suicidal George Bailey is being led by his guardian angel through what would have become of his beloved town of Bedford Falls if he’d never been born. Now the town is called Pottersville, renamed for the avaricious banker Henry Potter, who has basically taken it over. Without Bailey’s building and loan association, there’s no longer a bank in town lending money at a fair rate to the local working class. Potter has been able to buy all the real estate and establish a monopoly that has its residents paying him rents they can’t afford. What was once a quaint, lovely, idyllic town is now a dreary, debt-ridden slum. Capra’s vision of municipal nightmare in Pottersville had been terrifying to me as a child, its sleazy, neon-lit enticements—the gambling, the drinking, the prostitution—without a scintilla of human allure, a foreboding police state where every relationship we’ve come to love in the film has succumbed to death, despair, or the bleak grip of Potter’s greed. I couldn’t then imagine a place like Pottersville being real, growing up as I did in an affluent westerly suburb of Milwaukee not unlike Bedford Falls. But now, as I watched the film for the first time in twenty years, my thoughts still addled by Mike’s vision of our country, Capra’s evocation of America’s darker side seemed nothing if not prescient.
I’d never realized just how much the movie was about money. George Bailey is a banker. The plot is set in motion by the loss of a client’s deposit. The antagonist is another banker, a predatory lender, who refuses to loan George the money to cover the lost deposit. An upcoming audit is what drives George to attempt suicide: his life insurance policy can cover the shortfall, keep the building and loan solvent, and ensure that his customers won’t be thrown out of their homes. In his guardian angel’s tour through a world without him, Bailey comes to see that the good of his having lived on earth was that he was able to keep his fellow citizens in homes of their own, sheltered from Potter’s exploitive rentals. Even the film’s extraordinarily moving finale—through which I cried that night, as ever—showed the townspeople of Bedford Falls gathered around their beloved loan officer, George Bailey, all with cash donations in hand to cover the missing deposit, a joyous celebration of fiscal surplus, as George realizes that he has even more money now than what’s needed to save his bank from collapse.
I run the risk of drawing too strong a conclusion here, but only because I’m trying to balance what I would come to understand with what I still couldn’t see: that this most enduring of American Christmas tales, among the most popular of all American works of art, had already envisioned the nation we would become—impoverished, indebted, a place where our softer stewards had succumbed to the hard pinch of profit for its own sake, where our fates had been subsumed by the owners of property, where the American dream was suffering literal foreclosure, where even our most affective dilemmas could only find true resolution through the accumulation of cash. Not to see this picture of the country was, in fact, to choose not to see it. In a year’s time, my shares in Timur Capital would make me rich enough finally to understand what I hadn’t with Mike that night: money comes with its own point of view; what you own, when you own enough of it, starts making you see the world from its perspective.
That night at Red Rooster I had wanted to hear something else. I’d wanted Mike to affirm—despite the encompassing cynicism of his worldview—that he still believed the arc of history bent, however slowly, toward justice. But he was saying: he didn’t believe that. He was saying: property has its own interests, and those interests will always be served above others. And he was saying: justice is the will of the strong borne by the weak—and those who own are the strong. In giving up the liberal humanist illusion, he was also making the only honest case he felt he could to preserve the hope this illusion fed. Back then, I couldn’t hear these nuances, for I still believed—as George Bailey puts it in the quotation that begins this chapter—that the living, dying rabble matter more, must matter more, than what their accumulated rents are worth to an owner on a spreadsheet; back then, I was still hopeful that history would eventually favor the meek and righteous; back then, I couldn’t assemble the various pieces in a way that would account for the darker truths I was resisting.
The movie ended just before dawn. Something was stirring inside me. I got up from the couch and went to the window, where the earliest light of day was appearing beneath the clouds over East Harlem. Through the single-pane glass, I heard the faint screech and churning of a distant toiling sanitation truck. I remember standing there, sensing the swell of something new inside me, something hard and vivid, chilly, for which I had no good words. My favored music was too tender, marred by private yearning and compulsive need. I would have to find new words. A new language. Colder notes and meanings. Jangled chords for shriller songs—hymns to the esoteric din, to decline, to the dollar, to our ailing nation and its foundering myths. But all that—like President-elect Trump—was yet to be. What I sensed that morning at my window in Harlem was only this: the time had come to start listening beyond my hopeful heart.
Footnotes
1 I am following Mike’s practice in not using “African American” here and throughout.
2 A company like Walmart was only possible in t
his new regime, coming to control more than 50 percent of grocery sales in more than forty metropolitan areas by 2015, in contrast to the measly 8 percent market share that was seen as anticompetitive by the courts of the late 1960s; or Amazon, which, in selling books for less than it costs to manufacture them, would first drop its wrecking ball into the publishing world and, later, use the same scorched-earth business model to attempt the wholesale dismantling of brick-and-mortar retail itself.
