Gotham Diary:
Whirlwind
August 2018 (III)
16 and 17 August
Thursday 16th
Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification.
— James A Garfield
What attracts me to this gem, found in Beth Macy’s stupefyingly discouraging Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Company That Addicted America, is certainly not its prosody, which I would characterize as homefalutin, a peculiarly American patois. I think that it’s the vintage that appeals. I don’t know when Garfield said it, but it wasn’t after 1881, the year of his assassination. Also, it’s a president speaking, expressing what I regard as a central fact about humanity. It concerns not individual humans, with their widely differing characters, but people acting in concert. No matter smart or well-intentioned those people may be, the organizations that they design inevitably fail — unless, as seems to be the case at Oxford University, they periodically renew themselves from within. Come to think of it, the British have a knack for stealth radicalism that may explain the uniqueness of such institutions as Parliament. (A good argument in favor of Brexit would be that membership in the European Community stifles the United Kingdom’s vitally important genius for muddle.)
Americans, who are really much more German than English, do not share this skill; Americans like their reform noisy — revivalist, almost. We also have a passion for writing brand-new laws instead of overhauling old ones. The other night, Kathleen and I were speculating on the benefits that might have accrued from a mid-Seventies re-think of the three major securities laws (which in this house we call the ’33 Act, the ’34 Act, and the ’40 Act), and it occurred to me that such an overhaul would have been a splendid occasion for folding the Glass-Steagall Act into the regulatory framework overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission. I doubt that, had he had to deal with the SEC, Sanford Weill would have had such an easy go of annulling Glass-Steagall — by violating it. (No event more directly precipitated the Crash of 2008, and lots of us predicted disaster when the knot was untied ten years earlier.)
A brilliant and well-seasoned lawyer recently told me that he believes that all human arrangements need to be reconstituted every hundred years. It sounds appalling at first — an invitation for organized highjacking. On reflection, I think it would be better not to wait so long. Let’s say that reform is designed and imposed by one clear-sighted generation. The next generation grows up with it, and the third generation takes it for granted. The fourth generation begins to specialize in workarounds, as circumstances and opportunities never dreamed of by the reformers develop in the normal course of social evolution. The backbone of the original reform may have lost none of its importance, but it may be embedded in stale and outdated provisions. For example, did you know that New York State public health law still requires movie theatres to staff glove-wearing matrons, to supervise children’s matinees? Well, it did in the 1980s, when Kathleen was working on a commission related to the secession of Staten Island. It was laughable then. Laws should never be laughable.
***
Dopesick is about two things: a pair of twisted addictions — to drugs on the one hand and to money on the other — and the hopeless mess that we have made of treatment, rehabilitation, and recovery. The addiction to money is illustrated by the nicely contrasting examples of Purdue Pharma sales rep bonuses, which were legal at the time (and may still be, albeit curtailed) and the story of Ronnie Jones, for six months the Shenandoah Valley’s heroin kingpin. Known in the trade as “DC,” Jones never used the drug. “He was much too scared of heroin to ever use it,” one of his henchmen told Macy.
But from the first moment he sent one of his subordinate dealers out in Woodstock to sell a gram’s worth of heroin he’d paid $65 for in Harlem — and the dealer returned with $800 in cash — DC was hooked on another drug. (153)
It is hard to believe that opioid addiction would have mushroomed as it has done without the boost that it got from money addiction. And let’s not forget the money addiction that drug addicts themselves quickly develop, as they lose their jobs, their homes, their assets, and in general all lawful sources of income.
As for the hopeless mess — I just can’t. I can barely read Macy’s crackerjack reporting. The nub of the problem is an only-in-America polarization between believers in medically-assisted treatment (MAT) and believers in abstinence, among whom figure the proponents of Twelve-Step programs. The message that the destructive effects of alcohol come nowhere near those of opioid drugs is not universally accepted.
Adding to the confusion is the plethora of organizations charged with partial responsibility for treatment, together with the authority of competing jurisdictions. There are programs at the municipal, county, state and federal levels. There are also religious and other charitable operations. Each of them may be above reproach, but taken together they inflict a lot of stupidity and faulty doctrine.
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Friday 17th
The most extraordinary little book came my way yesterday. Published for the first time in 2017, and now appearing as an NYRB imprint, it was written in 1939 and 1940, the diary of an Italian aristocrat of complicated, Anglophone background. Entitled A Chill in the Air, it documents the slow-motion whirlwind of Italy’s descent into World War II. That is its only topic.
Iris Origo was the daughter of Bayard Cutting, an American millionaire, and Lady Sybil Cuffe, the daughter of an Irish peer. Her father died when she was seven, and her mother brought her up at the Villa Medici in Fiesole, above Florence. Although the girl’s ambition to go to Oxford was thwarted by her mother’s preference for débutante cotillions, Iris was educated by the galaxy of brilliant visitors to her mother’s salon, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Bernard Berenson among them. Craving a simpler, more purposeful life, Iris married the aristocratic scion of Italian industrialists, Antonio Irigo, in 1924. They settled down on a desolate estate in Tuscany with a view to restoring its agricultural fertility. The loss of their son, Gianni, to meningitis put a strain on the marriage, but as the warclouds gathered, Iris recommitted to her marriage and to her estate. It was at this point that she decided,
Perhaps it might be useful to try to clear my mind by setting down, as truthfully and simply as I can, the tiny facet of the world’s events which I myself, in the months ahead, shall encounter at first hand.
The diary runs from March 1939 to July 1940; Origo set it aside after the birth of her daughter, Benedetta — an event that is prefigured in the most unusual way. In an entry from the previous month (15 June 1940), Origo writes,
William Phillips has come up from Rome. After a second air raid last night, he does not recommend it to me as the most restful place for my accouchement.
There has been no earlier mention of a pregnancy. We do know that William Phillips is the American Ambassador and Origo’s godfather. She will be delivered at the American Embassy — and that will be the occasion for abandoning the diary. By then, of course, the ambiguity and confusion that set the tone of the diary’s atmosphere will have evaporated in open hostility, with Churchill’s Britain Hitler’s only opponent. But the rigor with which Origo’s attentiveness to “the world’s events” eclipses all merely personal notations is stunningly professional, and it goes far to recreating, in a way that I have never seen done, except perhaps in Jean Paul Rappeneau’s glamorous film, Bon Voyage, the nightmare of not knowing what’s going happen next in the world at large. (And the film, it must be noted, is riotously personal.) Most narratives of World War II focus on the terror of being hunted down, a horrific experience that disturbed relatively few people. The crisis that Origo covers affected everyone.
She is a privileged observer. This does not mean that her information is better than anybody else’s (although she has a great deal more of it than most Italians), or that she “really knows” what’s going to happen. In fact, she teaches the opposite lesson. Her richly-networked perch allows her to see something that the man in the street is unlikely to discover.
The truth is that, according to the company in which one happens to be, one knows beforehand what the opinion will be on any of the current topics. Among the anti-Fascists, Chamberlain is spoken of with contempt and Bonnet with loathing; Roosevelt is admired. In Fascist circles the odium falls on Churchill and on the Labour Party; Catholics unite to deplore the advances to Russia. Moreover one also knows beforehand where the blind spots will be. The Fascist averts his mind from the refugee problem [in the Tyrol] and the situation in Czecho Slovakia (“All very much exaggerated — one must allow for foreign propaganda.”) The Catholics turn a deaf ear to all accounts of executions in Spain; the anti-Fascist has seldom heard of any trouble in Russia. Only on one point are they all agreed: they don’t want war. (6 August 1939)
This lockstep chaos is magnified, of course, in the press, and in the radio broadcasts that, until the very end, announce nothing not already known. There rumors, of course, and the diary is stuffed with the lively anecdotes in which they’re embedded. (Origo has a good head for dismissing the baseless ones.) In an astonishing promotional gesture that I had never heard of, Mussolini had himself filmed in a cockpit, apparently flying through a storm, reminding viewers that you don’t bother a heroic pilot with unnecessary questions.
Even Mussolini didn’t want the war, but he had no choice — not in the summer of 1940. After the Fall of France, his only alternative was to invite a German invasion that would in all likelihood have repeated the French capitulation. As A Chill in the Air progresses, the contemporary reader’s chill is likely to emanate not so much from the uncertainty of war (which cannot be fully shared, knowing, as we do, what happened) as from the figure of Il Duce. The fact that, to the best of my knowledge, the United States is not currently anywhere near Italy’s pre-war crossroads, is the only source of warmth when I consider the following entry. The speaker, Count Senni, belongs to a “Black Roman” family, more loyal to the Papacy than to the Kingdom, notwithstanding which he has served Mussolini for years.
Count Carlo Senni has just been talking about his years with Mussolini, to whom he is whole-heartedly, but not wholly uncritically, loyal. He emphasizes one trait which strikes everyone who has ever worked with Mussolini: his unbounded, almost undisguised, utterly cynical contempt for his own human instruments. Except for his brother Arnaldo (now dead) and perhaps, to a lesser degree, his daughter, there is no human being in the world whom he loves and trusts. He believes in the ability of his son-in-law [Count Ciano]; he does not trust him. A sentimentalist about “the people” en masse, he is completely cynical about all individuals, and measures them only by the use to which he can put them to … Yet so great is his personal ascendancy that his underlings — knowing that they themselves will be kicked away as soon as they cease to be useful — to retain their personal devotion to him. (31 July)
Perhaps, in the case of Donald Trump, the ascendancy is less personal than symbolic: Trump stands for destruction. That is why, says the discarded Steve Bannon (if not in so many words), he is mobilizing for Republican candidates at the midterms: it will keep that wrecking-ball swinging. The awful truth is that some Americans do want war.
Iris Origo (1902-1988) was an accomplished biographer whose reputation has faded, as reputations do when new titles stop appearing. Until, that is, the writer is for some reason or other rediscovered. A Chill in the Air ought to prompt such a rediscovery. The woman certainly knew how to write.
Bon week-end à tous!