Here’s Part II of my book recommendations.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe

An often forgotten text because the rest of the author’s catalog is staggering, this is the high point of the first wave of New Journalism.  The book’s overwritten, over-detailed and often overly dramatic.  But its florid approach to the story is exactly what the topic needed.  The only thing harder than writing about being on drugs is writing about other people on drugs.  The subject’s, well… subjective.  Almost past comprehension.  How do I know what you saw on acid?  How do you know what I thought on mushrooms?  And why would any of those personal moments interest anyone outside the immediate scene?

Painting a picture of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters a person not “On the bus” would comprehend is a job I’d never want to tackle.  The fear would be boring the reader, droning on and on about a bus trip with no destination but “Furthur.”  Wolfe was up to the challenge.  Where he could have drawn the Pranksters as mindless hedonists and had more than enough simple action to write a shocking expose that’d scare the Christ out of buttoned-up America, he instead went deep, and personal.  He draws the more lost than rebellious Pranksters as victims of their own silly faiths.  He offers Kesey as a fraudulent enigma, guessing as he goes more than thinking.  And in the best portrayal of the book, the cartoon-like “Cowboy Neal” Cassady appears as the sum of his manias – a ball of amphetamine psychosis, foot stamped on the gas, driving through life with the knowledge he’d only be stopped by a wall.  It all adds up to what should have been the ultimate had-to-be-there-to-grasp-it experience described in a fashion any reader can appreciate.

As some critics have asserted, including Kesey himself, the emphasis on style and flow that makes the text read so well may have caused Wolfe to omit some important events.  But that charge misses the point.  It’s obvious The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test wasn’t written to serve as the definitive history of the genesis of the Hippie Revolution.  Only the most entertaining.

Modern Manners: An Etiquette Guide for Rude People – P.J. O’Rourke

The title says it all – Emily Post for the terminally crude.  There are a millions different satirical guides to manners floating around Amazon, but this book easily remains the best.  And though O’Rourke’s famous for much more in-depth works (Parliament of Whores, Holidays in Hell, Give War a Chance), this is the sharpest use of his humor – a nihilist pen unhinged from any sense of boundaries or good taste.  To wit:

On suicide etiquette:

You should consider the feelings of other before you commit suicide.  Try to kill yourself in a public place.  Climb up on a bridge or ledge so that crowds can gather… Let at least one policeman climb out after you… This is how they get medals and promotions.

On who should pay for cocaine:

There’s considerable debate about this.  Some say the guest should pay for cocaine as way of saying thank you to the host.  Others say the host should pay for cocaine as part of the entertainment.  Most people, however, say society at large should pay for cocaine by having to watch maniacally indulgent stand-up routines, pathetically disconnected pop music performances, and dreadful late-night anti-drug commercials on television.

On masturbation:

Sophisticated people masturbate without compunction.  They do it for reasons of health, privacy, thrift, and because of the remarkable perfection of invisible sex partners.  But, more important, they masturbate for philosophical reasons.  It is an ethos of modern life that before you are able to love others you must first love yourself.  And what’s love without sex?

If that doesn’t assure you the book is worth multiples of its price, consider this fantastic review it garnered on Amazon:

Perverted disgusting garbage, March 19, 2006

Reading Mr. O’Rourke’s All the Troubles in the World gave me the impression that he is an excellent political/economics analyst with a tolerable bad streak. The fine writing in that book encouraged me to acquire some of his other work.

I was horribly repulsed by the explicit language, immature humor and overall repugnance of his guide to manners. What I had hoped would be a light poke at contemporary society so sickened me that I threw the book in the trash before I was halfway done. I regret reading even that far.

Anything that gets a scold’s panties in that tight a twist has to be flat-out hysterical.  And it is.  I recommend reading this in tandem with The Modern Drunkard.  You’ll know all you’ll ever need to walk properly through high society.  And high through proper society.

In Defense of Elitism – William A. Henry

This book pissed a lot of people off when it came out, for exactly the reasons you’d expect.  Henry, who sadly passed away shortly after it was published, basically said the following: Certain ideas, beliefs, and social policies are, objectively speaking – based on logical, rational assessment – better than others.  And we should elevate them so, while openly and loudly devaluing their inferiors.  We should not be forced, out of guilt or deference to certain people’s delicate sensibilities, traditions or “feel good” political goals, to countenance foolish policies or arguments.

Henry argues aggressively and concisely why we need to develop a pecking order among philosophies debated in the public sphere.  Why we need to reach agreement about what concepts hold more validity than others.  That individualism trumps tribalism.  Education trumps neo-illiteracy and “folksiness.”  Darwin trumps faith.  And social Darwinism trumps Utopian attempts to create “Everyone’s a winner!” societies via governmental policy.  Henry also offers an important warning, prescient then and even more compelling now: That if we neglect to call out the lightweights, if we shrink from mocking their illogic, by our silence we grant them credibility.  Faith becomes a rebuttal to science, intrusive government intervention as natural as the free market. Regressive cultures lose all stigma, their backwardness seen as benign “uniqueness.”

Henry offers an excellent argument for why that needs to end, and why the only way to stop the degradation of our aggregate intellect is for people who know better – people who can spot sophistry, mysticism and Utopian policy-making for what they are – to reject them out of hand, before they can even pretend to have a place in any serious debate.  This is a book everyone needs to read.  Particularly if it sounds like it’ll piss you off.

House of Cards – William D. Cohan

This is a sprawling narrative, similar in its approach to Mark Ebner’s Six Degrees of Paris Hilton.  Everything I lauded about Mark’s methodology in my review of that book can be applied here.  Cohan leaves no rock unturned.  Every detail regarding the why and how of Bear Stearns’ failure is yanked from the ashes of the fallout and re-assembled in a taut chronology – four hundred plus pages worth.

What sets this book part, however, isn’t the detail or research.  It’s the sense you’re there in real time. The way the author gives the dry action life, show the cracks spider-webbing through the dam, increasing with speed as they grow and an inevitable sense of doom eclipses every effort to save what you know is going to collapse.  And this is the shrewdest of analyses, because time is the essence of the story.  Yes, it’s a book about money, Wall Street, hubris and excess.  But more it’s a book about timing, and what happens when your timing’s terrible.

Bear Stearns might have lived another day.  If it had more time to get bought, if the financial crisis came earlier and it was able to use the Fed lending window as firms in its place were later… If it held on as long as Lehman, kept the short-sellers and rumors in check. Then perhaps it could have rolled its debt.  Because as anyone who’s run a business knows, the revenue eventually comes. The problem’s all in the cash flow, in being stuck without funds to pay down the credit line, or money to cover the office lease or mortgage.

Bear Stearns died in the pincers of a panic, a smaller, individualized version of the same type of liquidity crisis that took down Lehman Brothers, and should have taken down Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.  And in emphasizing how Bear was a victim of poor timing – a simultaneous lack of confidence in the firm on the part of all of its borrowing sources – the book speaks volumes on why America feels nothing but revulsion for the Too Big to Fail banks that survived.

Every banking profit that’s ever existed derives from a risk premium.  It’s the heart of the concept of lending, the only reason the industry even exists.  And part of assessing risk, a massive part of it every competent businessman understands, is hedging against a temporary cash crunch – keeping reserves on hand to offset the worst of worse case scenarios… having an emergency fund to tap in those Black Swan instances where it all goes to shit, where you can’t meet this week’s payroll or cover the vendors’ invoices.

The average business doesn’t fail due to lack of revenue over a sustained period of time. Those businesses never get off the ground.  The average business fails because it runs into a temporary dry spell. It defaults, and then the default interest runs and it has to lay off workers and the expenses pile one top of another, all while it can’t produce a thing.  The banks and creditors hammer it and in period of weeks or months, what was once a thriving concern turns into a empty shell.  All due to one bad stretch… a space of time where it didn’t have the money it needed to keep going and consequently drowned the way a shark does if it isn’t moving.

Currently, if you’re listening, you’re hearing people like Lloyd Blankfein defend a firm like Goldman Sachs, saying “We didn’t need the TARP money.” Bullshit.  If the TARP rescue hadn’t happened, Morgan Stanley was headed down the drain, and Goldman was trailing in its wake.  It’s not a rebuttal to the critics that Goldman paid it all back with interest.  Because as Cohan’s book eloquently shows, the difference between winners and losers in pure capitalism is all a matter of timing.  How well equipped was a firm to deal with that short-term worst case imaginable?

The answer’s clear on Goldman.  As clear as it was on Citi, Lehman and Morgan Stanley.  Not very well.  They only survive today because the ref stepped in and changed the rules.  Where Bear and Lehman died on the field as the clock ran down, Goldman and others got the world’s biggest bridge loans.  I agreed with giving it to them then, and I still hold that position today.  Too big too fail is too big too fail, and saving those banks saved our economy.  But their success in the time elapsed since hasn’t changed them into winners.  And it doesn’t give people like Blankfein a pedestal to claim now that they didn’t need the money before.

Goldman Sachs failed, and the primary reason it survives where Bear Stearns collapsed is that Goldman started teetering in the middle of the credit crisis, rather than at its outset, when the government believed it could let a few investment banks go.  The Fed was forced to give Goldman a lifeline, or at least the appearance of one, to get it past a drought of cash and confidence identical to the one Cohan brilliantly chronicles as the cause of Bear’s insolvency. I recommend reading House of Cards if for no reason than grasping that point – seeing the reality Goldman, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch barely escaped.  And I recommend somebody sending a copy to Mr. Blankfein, as a reminder that, No, technically speaking, his firm is not a successful capitalist endeavor, but actually a well-rescued loser.  And that the only real difference between him, Richard Fuld and James Cayne is timing.

The Great Derangement – Matt Taibbi

I’ve a private theory that half of the people believing in any movement or religion don’t even know what they’re following.  They’re along for the ride.  Born into it, stumbling into it in a moment of recovery from some rotten diet pill addiction, or buying into something, anything, for the sheer comfort that comes with conceding the wheel… With knowing that as mad, ludicrous, irrational, preposterous and flat-out imbecilic as the thing you’re believing might be, You’re Not Alone.  Hundreds, thousands, millions are sharing your delusion.  There’s wisdom in crowds, right?  Somebody wrote a book about it once.

Taibbi stares down the New Crazy on the Right and Left and paints a shocking, hysterical picture showing just how far this deranged need to buy into a movement can go.  On the Right, he joins a megachurch – pastor’s John Hagee’s, specifically, whom you might recall as the one time “spiritual adviser” to John McCain.  I say “one time,” of course, because the presidential candidate was forced to distance himself from Hagee after the preacher’s raving, Apocalyptic sermons about Jesus’ imminent return to Israel and conversion of all of its Jews to Christianity were discovered and broadcast on national media. On the Left, Taibbi takes on the “9/11 Truthers” movement.  You might know these people as the charmers responsible for dozens of Youtube movies pinpointing the location of hidden dynamite charges going off in the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks and hundreds of websites detailing how George Bush and the CIA, rather than Al Queda, blew up the towers.

This would all be deeply depressing if not for Taibbi’s treatment. Rather than waste time and effort scowling at the nuts, or dismantling what’s clearly madness, he does the only thing a rational mind can – laugh at it, screw with it, immerse himself in the insanity and treat it as a theatre of the absurd.  To give you an example of what to expect, here’s an excerpt about a prayer retreat at which Taibbi, pretending to be a born-again Christian, has to offer a story about some childhood pain he’s trying to cure through Jesus:

“Hello,” I said, taking a deep breath. “My name is Matt.  My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversized shoes.”

.  .  .

“He’d be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television,” I heard myself saying.  “And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he’d pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know – whap!”

I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me.  I could tell that my coach had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group.  But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought – after all, who would do such a thing?

The book’s filled with ridiculous, cringe-worth incidents like this, culminating in Taibbi challenging a rabid 9/11 Truther to step outside and fight.  And actually going outside and waiting for the man.  At its peaks, the book recalls some of the savage satire of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. Telling a room full of Jesus freaks you were abused by a clown may not seem as crazy as Thompson’s creation of a rumor picked up by the media that vice presidential candidate Edwin Muskie was addicted to Ibogaine, a rare and exceedingly potent South American hallucinogen.  But that fails to consider the likelihood of actual physical harm being visited on Taibbi.  None of the reporters duped into the Ibogaine story were going to attack Thompson for pimping that fabrication.  Taibbi was alone with a field trip of earnest salvation junkies in the middle of nowhere when he pulled off the “abusive clown” gag.  That takes a hell of a lot of balls.

But what takes even more balls is to write a book ripping the Right and Left at once.  Most authors pick a side, figuring for marketing and sales purposes it’s better to gobble up all of either camp than alienate and challenge members of both ideologies.  Taibbi leans a little to the Left politically, but he’s careful to keep that in check, to blame both sides where they deserve it.  That’s rare in our bought-and-paid-for media.  And in the end, that might be what makes this book such an engaging read.  Taibbi doesn’t care what you think.  He’d just prefer we all do so.

Part III next week.

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