Weekend Update: Costs
The problem with my new weekend schedule — no work from Friday to Monday! (or at least until Sunday evening) — is that I get used to being away from the computer, away from the Internet, away from what is indisputably now my day job. My weekends, for the first time in about twenty years, are just like everyone else’s: short holidays that end with a downcast sigh. Do I have to? Do I have to go back to work?
And the answer for me is the same as it is for everybody else. Not for the same reasons, perhaps. Heaven knows I’m not putting food on the table by churning out the weekly reams. But the financial standpoint is the only one in which stopping what I’ve been doing at The Daily Blague would have any kind of explanation. People who know me would conclude that something was amiss, for I’m not the only one who thinks that blogging has made sense of my life, or at least given it a much-needed organizing structure. Nevertheless, the question loiters on my tongue: do I have to?
It may be that the momentary appeal of ongoing idleness stems from the crisis all around me. Never has the world seem so in danger of coming completely unstuck. I spent an hour or two this morning with “When Fortune Frowned: A special report on the world economy,” a tear-out collection of articles at the center of this week’s Economist. Partly I wanted to know what that newspaper’s sage heads made of the mess we’re in — and the chances of its getting worse — but, more than that, I wanted to see what, presumably, the financial community would be reading in its pages. This is a time when the very exclusiveness of The Economist — its considerable expense, its utter lack of interest in pop culture — make it invaluable. If The Economist is trying to sell magazines, it is going about the job invisibly.
Whatever the outcome of the credit crunch, and however long the apparently inevitable recession lasts, I have made up my mind about one thing: No citizen of any democracy to be heard speaking of him- or herself as a victim. We are all complicit in this disaster. We have elected the leaders who made it possible. I will hear no talk of Wall Street pirates. The boldest move on Wall Street in the past twenty years was Sandy Weill’s concoction of Citigroup, an assemblage of organizations that ought to have been illegal but that, because it was “so big,” and Washington — the people you’ve voted for if you’re a citizen of the United States (and could be bothered to vote) — was so craven, was instead ratified by Congress, by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, one of the cardinal safeguards of American finance. If the Congressman or Senator for whom you voted was actually opposed to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, you’re still not out of it, because neither you nor that representative managed to mount an effective opposition to Mr Weill’s bluff.
To speak of yourself as a victim of financial chicanery, of being obliged, as a “taxpayer,” to bail out a gang of greedy idiots, is to confuse our brave democracy with a sort of emporium, a department store in which, in exchange for your tax dollars, you get goods and services that are guaranteed to work (or your money back!). Anyone over ten who thinks of being an American in such consumerist terms doesn’t deserve democracy of any kind.
So you see I was not really taking the weekend off at all. Aside from the ominous economic backdrop, the weekend was delightful. (But in New York we are used to having the worst things happen on the loveliest days.) Back from her turnabout trip to London, Kathleen found that she’d actually gotten a lot of rest on the flights (as she rather enviably can) and was refreshed by meeting new people (her English partners, mostly) in new places (none of them more than a quarter of a mile distant from the Bank of England). She had breakfast with a South African client yesterday, and we had a nice dinner party in the evening. (Since I really hadn’t been busy at anything for more than a day, I was at the top of my game in the kitchen.) This afternoon, we strolled up Madison Avenue to Carnegie Hill for brunch, running into a couple of friends at the door of the restaurant that we’d chosen. They were leaving, so we caught up on the sidewalk. The husband made an excellent joke about the status of his 101(k).
After lunch, I bought a Perfex salt mill at Williams-Sonoma, stunned by sticker shock even though the price was no surprise at all. I can at least be confident that the thing will outlast me — a consideration of no small importance these days. When we got home, I continued catching up with magazines, because, even though I am “not working,” that is what I do on Sundays. I badly wanted to read The Maias instead, partly because Eça de Queirós’s romance is blossoming in the most lyrically menacing way, and partly because I’m wondering if I will ever actually finish his novel and live to read another. (Francine Prose’s Goldengrove, for instance.) But I was strong. I read, or at least started to read, an interview with Woody Allen in L’Express, a weekly that, because it’s shipped from France, costs even more than The Economist, and so is therefore even more obligatory reading. I don’t know why, exactly, but I wouldn’t expect Woody Allen to give an interview to an Anglophone publication in which he confessed that he set Vicky Cristina in Barcelona because the location would get him his financing, or that he had never seen Penélope Cruz in a film before Volver, because, in his opinion, her American films didn’t seem to be worth his time. He may think these things, but he doesn’t say them — not in English.