If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship--without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s. (We're all yuppies now.) The Boston Globe's Drake Bennett asked a bunch of people, including me, what a 21st-century Depression might look like. The results sounded pretty damned good to some people--a sure sign of an affluent society, or at least affluent commentators.
The prospect of a Depression is already creating jobs for (a few) writers. Hodding Carter IV has gotten a book deal described by Publishers Weekly this way:
After 10 years of profligate spending fueled by real estate flips, refinancing and credit card debt, the author will write about living on what he actually earns. In order to do so, he and his family of six will mine cost-saving techniques from the Great Depression and the first cookbook in America, and stay within their budget, whether that means growing their own food or bartering for things they need. Carter is writing a column based on his experiences for Gourmet.
If that last line doesn't bring a smile to your face, you really are depressed.
I applaud Carter's entrepreneurial spirit, but I don't think that living within your means really requires growing your own food or relying on ancient cookbooks. This is just a book gimmick.
Even more entrepreneurial is Blogging Queen Arianna Huffington, with a plea for more free content:
So we want to hear from you. How is the downturn affecting you and your family? Have you lost your job? Your home? Are you seeing For Sale signs on your street? Are more businesses in your town going under? How are you making ends meet? What are you hearing from your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers? Even if you still have your job and your home, and the ability to send your kids to college, how has the deep economic recession affected your outlook, your mood, your spending habits? If you work for a charity or a food bank -- what are you seeing?
Tell us your stories. Blogging about them and your feelings -- including your anger, your fears, your hopes -- is a great way to cope with the many personal, social, and professional dislocations that the hard times are producing.
Brilliant. She gets free writers. You get therapy. Readers get Depression Porn. How can Tina Brown ever compete?
Meanwhile, ReadyMade magazine, whose founders' experience with economic downturns is limited to the dot-com bust, calls on designers to imagine New Deal-style propaganda for a New Depression:
How might the current government stem the tide of economic and psychological depression? Can artists and designers help in similar ways today? It's curious that the WPA style has been reprised in the recent past as a quaint retro conceit, but today may be an opportune time for a brand-new graphic language — equal in impact to the original initiative, but decidedly different — to help rally the cause of hope and optimism.
Oh the thrill of imagining a Great Depression. It's an opportunity for Great Design and Really Cool Government.
Some designers are already profiting. The Telegraph reports that Depression-themed Christmas cards are a hit.
So far, fortunately, these are all fantasies. Peggy Noonan is right when she observes that "everything looks the same." Stocks have crashed to 2004 levels, but today's 6.5 percent unemployment rate, while high, is a lot lower than rates in the first half of the 1980s. And don't get me started on the horrors of the 1970s. (Speaking of which, I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Robert Samuelson's new book, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence
, reviewed here by Jonathan Rauch.)
It's not a Depression, folks, and it wouldn't be nearly as fun to think about if it were.
UPDATE: Followup post here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 04, 2008 • Comments
I talk about Obama's glamour with Glenn Reynolds on PJTV. Check out my post-chemo hair.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 12, 2008 • Comments
Jacob Levy will be giving lectures at UCLA on Thursday and Friday. Details here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 11, 2008 • Comments
Joanne Jacobs asks the question. She also has a post on how my old public school district is stifling information about charter high schools.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 06, 2008 • Comments
Judging from both overheard conversations and personal communications, gays in California are feeling punched in the stomach. As my friend David noted on his Facebook page, California voters gave farm animals new rights while eliminating rights for loving couples. Over on Volokh Conspiracy, Dale Carpenter has a smart, comprehensive, and pessimistic post on the subject. An excerpt:
But the narrow margin of yesterday's loss masks some hard facts for the gay-marriage movement. Counting the losses for gay marriage in Arizona and Florida yesterday, we are now 0-30 in ballot fights. In California, we lost under circumstances that were as favorable to our side as they are likely to be for some time. We lost in deep blue territory on a blue night, when Obama carried the state by an astonishing 61% (running ahead of the opposition to Prop 8 by more than 13%). We lost despite being on the "no" side in a ballot fight, with the built-in advantage that gives you among those who vote "no" on everything out of understandable proposition fatigue. We lost despite the state attorney general changing the ballot title to reflect that it "eliminates rights," something most Americans don't like to do no matter the subject.
All of this suggests to me that actual support for gay marriage in California is something less than the 48% vote we got. My best guess is that actual electoral support for gay marriage in California is somewhere in the low 40s, when you factor out ballot fatigue, the blue tide, and the favorable ballot title — all of which you would have to presume in trying to reverse Prop 8 in a future initiative requiring an actual "yes" to gay marriage. And, of course, to reverse Prop 8 we'll have to raise lots of money and put together a petition drive just to get to the ballot. My estimate is that last night's loss — barring federal or state judicial intervention to undo Prop 8, which I regard as unlikely — means there will be no gay marriage in California for at least a decade.
I'm more optimistic than he is about the timetable, because attitudes are changing rapidly and, to be crass about it, there's a big enough generation gap that normal mortality works in our favor. But I'd still give it six to eight years, assuming we make an effort to persuade, or at least desensitize, the public rather than relying on the flim-flam of hiding the gays under the carpet while Dianne Feinstein opines that "no matter what you think about marriage" you should "vote against discrimination." No matter what you think about marriage???? Who the hell came up with that inane line? (The only voters it makes any sense for are the rare birds who think the state should stay out of the "marriage" business and only establish standard civil-union contracts. Not a bad policy--but let's apply it evenly.)
Conventional wisdom maintains that the hide-the-gays strategy was good politics, but a) it insulted voters' intelligence on an issue that was not hard to understand b) it seemed desperate c) it suggested that gay marriage is, in fact, something to be ashamed of instead of an extension of normal family life and, of course, d) it didn't work. The political and cultural reality is that either people think it's OK for gays to get married, or they don't. And if they don't, they think this kind of discrimination is good--and completely different from the bad kind of discrimination. Besides, when you say the issue is "discrimination" and equate traditional limits on marriage to (now-illegal) racist practices, traditionalists can claim, without seeming crazy, the next step will be to outlaw even private, religiously based limits on marriage. Isn't that what we do with discrimination?
Ideally, we would persuade skeptics that gay marriage is good. But, at the very least, we need to persuade them that it's not bad. A lot of people are still in the muddled middle on this issue. They just need more evidence and more experience. As hard as it may seem right now, gay families need to be more, not less, public about their lives.
UPDATE: A sore losers lawsuit is the opposite of public persuasion. How big a backlash do you want to invite? Nobody can control Gloria Allred, but Lambda should think beyond its donor base's immediate demands and concentrate on the future. (Of course, maybe my interpretation is wrong, and this is secretly just an effort to clarify the status of a future referendum that would repeal Prop. 8.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 05, 2008 • Comments
As I wrote in Reason:
Barack Obama has not run as the typical candidate, selling specific policies, a worldview, experience, or executive competence. He has instead sold himself, a glamorous icon onto whom supporters project their hopes and dreams and, in many cases, their own identities. If elected, he will have not a policy mandate but an emotional one: to make Americans feel proud of their country, optimistic about the future, and warmly included, regardless of background, in the American story.
Last night's excellent speech, with its sober tone and appeal to unifying national ideals and experiences, suggests he understands what he was elected to do. Of course, that doesn't mean he can keep it up.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 05, 2008 • Comments
Pretty amazing. What he said. And I'm old, and southern, enough to remember.
Now I may have to go back to being a Republican, to gear up for the struggle between the Jindal-Daniels wing and the Palin-Huckabee wing of the party.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 04, 2008 • Comments
I'm a fan of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, not just because he's been known to plug The Future and Its Enemies but because he's largely committed to the ideas expressed in it. (Somewhere buried in my files I have an old speech he gave when he was an executive at Eli Lilly, telling his fellow Big Pharma execs that they needed to embrace dynamism in their own industry.) RiShawn Biddle explains why Daniels is way up in the polls, despite riling the state's establishment (not to mention being a Republican in a Democratic year).
UPDATE: Reihan Salam jumps on the Daniels bandwagon.
In other political news, I am hereby announcing my write-in candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives from the 30th District of California. I just can't bear the idea that Henry Waxman has no opposition, not even from third parties. This way at least the Postrels will vote against him.
UPDATE: Apparently there are ballot access rules even for write-in candidates. So that's just one more race where I won't be voting.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 02, 2008 • Comments
My DeepGlamour co-blogger Kate calls my attention to this shocking bit of political intolerance out of supposedly neighborly South Pasadena:
California has a proposition on the November ballot seeking to reverse the right of same-sex couples to marry. I am a heterosexual, married mother of three, but I find Proposition 8 no different from any other attempt to deny people their fundamental rights.
Our neighbors have a "Yes on 8" sign on their front lawn and on their many minivans. While I respect differences of opinion, to me this is hate speech and deeply offensive. My meager "No on 8" lawn sign hardly seems enough. Can I destroy their sign?
Anonymous,
South Pasadena, Calif.
Supporters of Prop. 8 could not have invented a more persuasive argument for their cause. Here is a woman who believes their free speech rights should be stamped out in the name of tolerance. Like the seven-year-old quoted below, she fails to understand that the other side is equally offended by her position and that the right not to be offended is inimical to a free society.
Jonathan Rauch needs to go on tour with a speech wrapping his message in Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought
together with his message in Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America
. Yes, you can (and should) be for BOTH gay marriage and free speech.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 01, 2008 • Comments
In 1975, Andy Warhol praised the sexual revolution for destroying the glamour of marriage:
I love every "lib" movement there is, because after the "lib" the things that were always a mystique become understandable and boring, and then nobody has to feel left out if they're not part of what is happening. For instance, single people looking for husbands and wives used to feel left out because the image marriage had in the old days was so wonderful. Jane Wyatt and Robert Young. Nick and Nora Charles. Ethel and Fred Mertz. Dagwood and Blondie.
Being married looked so wonderful that life didn't seem livable if you weren't lucky enough to have a husband or wife. To the singles, marriage seemed beautiful, the trappings seemed wonderful, and the sex was always implied to be automatically great--no one could ever seem to find words to describe it because "you had to be there" to know how good it was. It was almost like a conspiracy on the part of the married people not to let it out how it wasn't necessarily completely wonderful to be married and having sex; they could have taken a load off the single people's minds if they'd just been candid.
But it was always a fairly well-kept secret that if you were married to somebody you didn't have enough room in bed and might have to face bad breath in the morning.
The drive for gay marriage represents the end of the sexual revolution. Marriage lost its glamour. It lost its connection to sex. Divorce got so easy that "single mom" became a sympathetic political trope. Cohabitation became normal. Nowadays, nobody--least of all gays--has to get married to be a respectable member of society. And yet people want to get married. They want to bind themselves to be monogamous. They want to promise in public to face bad breath in the morning. That's pretty remarkable.
UPDATE: Welcome Andrew Sullivan readers. There's more on the main page.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 31, 2008 • Comments