How to sum up the 2000s?  Well…

It started out in a vacuum, the space left by an implosion.  The tech boom of the Nineties was fading.  The last straw was a Judge up in Washington, ruling Microsoft ought to be broken.  That was April, and it was more than the market could take. Five trillion dollars in wealth, disappeared with the sagging universal recognition it had no business existing in the first place. “The metrics are all different now!” “Dow 36,000!” “P/E ratios mean nothing!” The profits would never cease.  The Internet would change all the math. Only it didn’t.  Because in 95% of the cases, there wasn’t any revenue behind it.  Just a whole lot of neat business models and people talking “paradigm shifts.”

Then we had the election.  We argued and debated and nobody knew what to do.  Nobody knew who’d run the country.  Some judges saw it one way, some another, and then a bunch of really powerful ones stepped in and picked a winner.  They came up with a logic for the ruling, offered some tortured explanations.  But nobody really bought it.  The decision was basically a coin flip, and though the judges labored hard to give it heft, that’s how it’ll always be remembered.  Not much of anything behind it.

Next came September 11^th, which seemed to change the whole world.  Everything got tactile for a while, a re-assessment kicked in. That, of course, passed in a flash.  The President told us to spend.  Run off to Disneyworld, Forget.  Crank up the engine of consumption!  A boom will bring the country back!  We agreed and opened our wallets.  But not really.  We didn’t have any money.  So we borrowed and spent someone else’s.

The first war followed soon after that.  We chased bin Laden way up into the hills, dropped bombs all over Tora Bora. The news gave us constant updates – how we were closing in on Osama, how our jets bombarded the mountains and a Coalition pitched in to help, because madmen like Al Queda… Well, they didn’t have any allies. Then, somehow, bin Laden got away, and everybody pretty much forgot about what was going on in those hills.  Press didn’t bother much.  Rebuilding’s an interesting story, but it takes an attention span to watch. Not much in ratings behind that.

Besides, by this point, we were too busy spending to watch any news on TV. We’d just started emerging from a recession.  Unfortunately, the recovery was jobless. Luckily, that didn’t matter.  A bunch of politicians a few years before had decided everyone ought to have a home, even if they couldn’t afford one, and that the government should back all the loans.  In turn, a bunch of bankers gave all sorts of money to all sorts of home buyers, and sold all kinds of securities in their mortgages to people far, far away, a lot of them in Iceland and Finland. This brought the banks more money, to make all kinds of interesting loans to just about every kind of American who ever wanted a home.  As that happened, millions of people who used to make money going to work started making money buying and selling houses, or borrowing against the value of their own, which kept going higher and higher. And we kept doing as the President told us. Spent and spent some more. Because everybody knew, unlike that Internet boom, there were real revenue streams behind this one. Housing prices never go down.

While we were flexing all our equity lines, the President decided we needed another war. He argued that Iraq had “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and that Saddam was a dire threat. The skeptics among us called bullshit, but half of us were pretty damn sure he had something to do with 9/11. Those people vote more than the skeptics, and the cost of being wrong on one side outweighed being wrong on the other, so most Senators and Congressmen agreed with the people who wanted Saddam gone. Colin Powell went to the U.N. and held up pictures of those weapons of mass destruction and based on all of that evidence, we invaded a little while later.  This time, however, we couldn’t get a Coalition built.  The rest of the countries looked at the pictures and listened to our argument, and they didn’t see much behind it.

There was another election in 2004.  We hadn’t found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the war had gone very badly, but the people who were sure those weapons existed showed up to vote as they do, and the President got another term.  A lot of other people figured he’d lose.  Democrats were angry and Michael Moore had put out a movie exposing how he’d stolen the 2000 election and lied us into Iraq. Problem was, the more people examined the film, the more they noticed Moore had fudged a lot – that half of its conclusions were fiction.

But a nation divided on politics can still hold much else in common.  Like reality television. We fell in love with the O.C. and The Hills and it was all so awesome because, like, it was different and better than, like, every show that ever came before.  And it was real.  Except for how it wasn’t – how it was scripted.

Back on the political side, after it got crushed in 2006, the GOP started purging all of its RINOs, Libertarians and Rockefeller Republicans, reconnecting with its moral majority – the salt of the earth, God-fearing base of the party. This seemed like a really good idea.  Until a number of politicians who were part of that new moral base got busted for sexting young men, sleeping with their donors’ wives and soliciting oral sex in airport bathroom stalls.

As all this was going on, the unthinkable happened – houses stopped rising in value.  And worse than that, all the people who couldn’t afford them stopped paying for them.  This caused a panic in the banks, and not just from the cruel recognition that a person lacking any source of income can’t afford to pay on a mortgage. Though they’d passed on the risk of those loans to those people in Iceland and Finland, the banks were also acting as insurers. To make a bit more money on the notes they’d securitized and sold, they agreed that if the borrowers defaulted, they’d step in and pick up the tab. This was an excellent idea and it worked except for one little problem – lack of money to pay. Unlike an insurer’s guarantee, the banks had no reserves for that behind them.

We all freaked out a bit when the Treasury asked for $700 billion dollars to prop all the big banks up, but not too much. Twitter’d come along by this point, on top of Facebook, which had taken over from Myspace.  “Social media” they called it, and it was the next huge thing. We got it on our IPhones, like texts, and it was going to revolutionize all of our communication, how every type of business was done. “Web 2.0,” making every man his own advertising agency, creating a whole new base of customers for everyone on it.  And now Twitter’s got a hundred million users, Facebook’s valued in the billions, and these social media platforms are filled with all kinds of really social people telling all the other people how those sites are the key to our future… How they can blow up a business overnight, make it an instant sensation. But there’s this one nagging question no one asks – a lot like some I heard in the Nineties: How does Facebook make money? Where’s the revenue behind it?

But I don’t think about that a lot.  I’m a glass is half full kind of guy, and luckily, the decade ended on a high note.  We got a President of Hope and Change.  He said he’d fix our health care problems – make it so everybody who didn’t have insurance got it, and all the people who had it got their treatment a whole lot cheaper. So now, after the Senators and Congressmen did their fighting, and all the insurance companies lost the battle to stop it, we’re going to get Reform. Everybody’s going to receive more and better care.  Only issue is that cost-cutting thing, because as lots of suspicious sorts predicted, if you look really close at the bills, there isn’t much in savings behind them.

That’s alright, though, because China keeps buying our bonds, which lets us buy tons and tons of health care, along with anything else we might want.  The Chinese are a money juggernaut, with eight percent growth every year.  Just look at the economic numbers their official apparatchiks put out. And things there are only getting bigger. Their real estate market’s red hot and millions and millions of people who never had houses before are borrowing from the big state banks, buying up all the construction builders can’t erect fast enough.  They’ve got a trillion in stimulus money to keep that run-up rolling, and even if foreign demand’s collapsing, they’re still the world’s manufacturing center. With a billion people in the country, they can always just trade among themselves. China could never, ever go down.

And the stock market over here’s hot. With all of those earnings reports, and the banks back standing on their feet, it feels a lot like 1999. The talking heads on the finance networks are calling it a paradigm shift – that we’re emerging from a long malaise. One man in a bold striped suit said that the rally is just now beginning, and we’re headed for Dow 15,000.  I guess he knows a lot more than me, and I certainly hope that he’s right.  But again I have a couple questions.  These profits have all come from cost cuts, unemployment’s going to reach 12%, and I can’t shake this déjà vu feeling we’ve been through this run-up before… And that we’ll go through it faster, more extremely and more often for the rest of our lives. Different drivers, winners and losers, but the same essential governing gravity – that there won’t be much of anything behind it.

The best way I can sum this decade?  It isn’t easy drawing an absence.  The only description that fits is “A whole lot of crazy, important stuff happened.” But not really.

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.

People have been asking me for reading recommendations for a while.  Other than pimping my own book, I’ve been lax in responding for one simple reason – I tend to give books away when I’m done with them.  Terrible habit, I know.  And, of course, it’s impeded my ability to easily offer suggestions.  In the spirit of providing a list for the holidays, however, I’ve made an inventory of what I recall, dug through the moving boxes of yellowing texts still sitting in the basement, and scoured the bookshelf in the living room.  Here’s why I came up with – the first of the three part catalog of books you might like reading.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People – Toby Young

Young is a whiny, socially ambitious English fop – the sort of character I’d every reason to loathe.  And yet I loved every page of this book; didn’t want to reach the end.  As comedic memoirs go, this is the gold standard.  The stories are so ludicrous (ordering strippers for a Conde Nast executive’s birthday gathering, crashing the Vanity Fair Oscar party after your boss, Graydon Carter, explicitly bars you from the event) and the narrator so clueless and impenetrable, you find yourself laughing at every page.  I assume there’s a tremendous amount of embellishment here, as no one could be as much of a fool as Young makes himself out to be (some scenes come off like a hybrid of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Three Stooges).  It’s welcome, however, and perfectly placed, enough to make a book about a slice of society I’ve almost zero interest in not only appealing, but utterly fucking hysterical.  And as bonus, in the spaces where Young pulls back and gets serious, his cutting observations on New York media professionals, and in particular, Carter, are as astute as they are amusing.

Snowblind – Robert Sabbag

Forget about Scarface or the myriad sagas written and filmed about Carlos Lehder or Pablo Escobar.  This is the mother of all drug smuggling stories, and one you’ll never see produced into a movie.  Why?  Because it’s true, and the main character, a Hamptons born silver-spooner turned smuggler, Zachary Swan, gets away with it all in the end.  Where comfortable, reinforcing narratives give us failures like Blow’s George Jung doing decades in federal prison, Swan beat the prosecution, walked away from the business and lived out his days as a farmer in North Carolina.  But it’s not just the challenging ending, or the harrowing circumstances Swan found himself in, or the fact that he didn’t have to smuggle for a living and seems to have done it primarily out of boredom, that make the book so riveting.  Sabbag’s impeccable attention to detail, flawless prose and nuanced storytelling make the text an absolute masterwork.  Where most of these stories offer cheap blood and guts portrayals of hideous, malevolent actors, Sabbag draws us a cast of neophytes – real, normal human beings from more than stable backgrounds – learning the world’s most dangerous trade on the fly. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is “the best book on the dope decade,” Snowblind is easily the best on dope smuggling.

The Ginger Man – J.P. Donleavy

This is one of the best developments of a character ever committed to print.  Every inch of Sebastian Dangerfield, the appalling anti-hero, is drawn in excruciating detail.  Drunkard, spendthrift and recidivist delinquent debtor… Absentee father and husband, deviant and abusive leech… There’s nothing to like of this lout and yet still, somehow, Donleavy makes him hilarious – charming in his endless grotesqueries, a razor-tipped wit in his cups.  You won’t find insight in this book, nor will find much action.  But that was never the point.  This isn’t a plot-driven page-turner, and it’ll frustrate, if not infuriate, anyone coming to it from the “story trumps delivery” perspective.  The magic here’s all in the prose, and those who simply want to get to the end might be better served by a Yugo headed down a straightaway, where the writing here is more along the lines of a Ferrari doing donuts.  Part poem, part stage comedy, part novel, I’d struggle to find a better styled text, or better timed jokes in dialogue.  Just remember to read it carefully.  The back and forth between the characters is fast, and if you miss a set-up quip, the punchlines might be obscured.

Class – Paul Fussel

Reared upper middle class in a depressed state, I’ve always be fascinated by class and status neuroses.  The envy, the angst, the displaying and comparing of our wares to one another… that endless, cringe-inducing black comedy driving our absurdist economy.  Fussel nails it all in spades, with a subtle but merciless wit – an encyclopedia of nasty bon mots delivered from a pitch perfect, staring-down-his-nose-at-the-aspirant perspective.  Be forewarned, however.  I doubt there’s a reader alive who won’t find himself in the cross-hairs of at least a handful of Fussel’s sarcastic barbs. I’ve never held any pretensions about my upbringing or station, but it wasn’t until I finished this book that I realized just what a middle minded boor I very well might be.

The Modern Drunkard – Frank Kelly Rich

Here’s the obligatory disclaimer: Yes, the author of this book provided a blurb for the back of Happy Hour is for Amateurs.  But that’s not why I’m lauding his work.  And really, considering what’s in my book, why wouldn’t the author of both a book and magazine with that title give me a quote?  It’s only consistent, right?  Well, not exactly. Modern Drunkard’s unique.  It’s not a Gonzo narrative, and it doesn’t rely on any shock for its humor.  If anything, it’s a retro comedy – a half-satiric look back at a form of drinking culture sadly vanishing from our nation, banished by Puritan scolds, corporate taskmasters and health-nuts… People telling us the three martini lunch was an abomination, college binging is a “national health emergency” and that anyone downing more than three beers a night is a borderline alcoholic.

Where a book like mine revels in mocking the hypocrisies of this teetotaler revolution, Modern Drunkard pretends it never even came into being, rewinding the historical record to the days when booze wasn’t a vice.  When a Manhattan with lunch was standard.  When every office had a bar, and not just for use at Christmas.  With its vintage Early-60s graphics and copies of classic liquor ads woven through the jokes, the book’s almost reminiscent of Mad Men.  And as it celebrates a lifestyle deemed unhealthy, you can’t help asking, “Why?  With who’s set of eyes?”  Sure, the hooch might  kill you early.  So might a lot of other things.

But the best of The Modern Drunkard isn’t wrapped up solely in its message.  The book’s delivery is just as important, with its litany of genteel set-ups followed with uppercut punchlines. Frank Kelly Rich is a superb prose stylist, entirely unfit for the “dick-lit” tag affixed to this or anything else he’s authored. If Man Men is an apt comparison, and it is, Modern Drunkard’s what Don Draper would sound like doing stand-up.  Half in the bag, but smooth… unnervingly rational and utterly unapologetic:

The book you hold in your hands will not only show you how to behave once you’ve had a few, it is also a rallying cry for a large – and largely scattered – tribe. It is the embodiment of the inevitable backlash against the army of self-appointed nannies who believe any manner of fun shouldn’t interrupt the long, grey lockstep toward the prison of death.  Those who have codddled and browbeat society into believing that everything must be done in exact moderation (and that extends to happiness), under penalty of social osctracism.  That anything that makes us feel good must inherently be bad.

This book seeks to alleviate that misplaced guilt, to affirm the notion our grandfathers held to be true: It is perfectly fine and normal to want to get outside of one’s head, to take a vacation from oneself.

Of course, critics will attempt to diminish this fine escape by rather smugly stating that our troubles will still be there when we wake up.  Which makes as much sense as canceling your vacation in Cancun because, hey, your job will still be there when you get back.  They’re failing to grasp two very fundamental truths: 1) even a temporary escape is better than no escape at all, and 2) alcohol is very cheap in Mexico.

And that’s just from the Introduction.

Buy this book.  It’ll make you a better person.  Or at least a better drunk.

Part II later this week.

Vodka. You’ve known it since junior year in high school. It’s what you stole from your folks’ liquor cabinet. What you swilled with Gatorade or Jolt in your best friend’s parents’ basement bar. What your girlfriend inhaled with diet Sprite the night she vomited all over your dashboard. It’s what your first fuck had probably been drinking. And most of all the rest since.

It’s what the freshman girls sucked out of squeeze bottles, mixed 1:1 with Crystal Light. What the neighbor with the medicated stare sips from those tumblers sitting on her deck. A sneaky, underhanded drunk… The fount of those terrible thoughts, like “I can pull out in time,” or “What? It’s just an M-80…” The cause of that lost night in Georgetown, where you passed out and woke up in the kitchen, a topless girl next to you on the tile, an open bag of cold cuts in your lap.

Vodka’s been with you forever, wherever you’ve found yourself drinking – the ultimate shape-shifting liquor. Screwdrivers, Greyhounds and Hurricanes… Southamptons, Cape Cods and Bay Breezes… White Russians, Red Deaths and those disgusting shots of Sex on the Beach – the ones you choked down at sorority cocktails. All of them made with vodka. And you’ve known it in all its forms, from the rotgut Banker’s Club sewage you drank in fraternity basements, to the Stoli in your Sunday morning bloodys, to the frozen Smirnoff in the Lemon Drops the paralegals suck back at happy hour.

But you’ve probably never thought about it much. Figured vodka was just a neutral spirit, a fuel more than a beverage. And that’s a shame, because vodka’s complicated – a lot more than its alcoholic proof. It’s a nuanced flavor, of course. But when you’ve drunk it enough, you know it, and you learn the good from the bad. I’ve imbibed a fair amount of vodka – enough to appreciate the difference – and when I’m in the mood for the stuff, these are the top five I choose (in order of preference):

5. Hangar One

An oddball pick to start with – vodka made in San Francisco, and yes, in an old airplane hangar. But this isn’t a novelty choice. This is premium, small batch liquor, better by a mile and half than the other top shelf grain based brands like Belvedere or Grey Goose (more on that shite later). I can’t say it’s packed full of flavor. This vodka trades more on its clarity. And that it brings the palate in spades. From the start through the last of the finish, there’s not a single offensive sensation. It’s a got a bit of a burn at the front, and it doesn’t mellow much going down, but it’s clean and sharp the whole way.

Mixer: I’m conflicted. It’s good with a handful of ice cubes, but it’s also good to mix with Red Bull. Yeah, I know… Who mixes the high end shit with an energy drink? Me. Why? Because Red Bull kills the flavor of most vodkas. You feel like you’re drinking some horrid mix of Limoncello and tonic. This is one of those rare vodkas that doesn’t disappear under the citrus and carbonation, however much of the “weekend warrior’s liquid cocaine” you pour on top of it.

Ideal for: Yourself. It’s not the easiest vodka to find. Keep this bottle hidden from guests.

4. Ketel One

I don’t think there’s any list of vodkas anywhere that doesn’t put this one near the top. And though I might be a congenital contrarian, some things are just simple fact, agreed to by everyone who matters. One of those truths is this: Ketel One is the finest grain vodka on the market. Not surprising, of course, as the family that’s been brewing this liquor’s been doing so since 1691. Still, attention must be paid. The flavor’s in perfect balance, not overly sweet or sharp, with little, if any, aftertaste. If there’s one bad thing I can say, it’s that Ketel One might be too good. The recipe’s so damned tight, the product so damned smooth, that you can almost drink it like water. If I were rating vodka based on production, on the distiller’s ability to craft a liquor that was pleasing to the broadest population of palates, this would be number one. But I’m not. I prefer a little more character, a noticeable flaw or two. And that’s why this is number four.

Mixer: Anything. Or nothing. It’s fine either way.

Ideal for: Everything. Works for interviews, PTA meetings, therapy… surgery, base jumping, NHRA Top Fuel funny car racing… Anywhere, any setting, where you just feel like cutting the edge. Scentless, painless, and with seven generations of distilling under the founding family’s belt, the kindest, most subtle of vodka buzzes. The rest might eclipse it in flavor, but Ketel’s what you want be drinking when no one can know you’ve been drinking.

Even better for: Marriage counseling, interventions.

3. Ciroc

No. Not because Diddy claims to drink it. I was a fan of this spirit way before the company gave him an equity stake to pimp it. Why? Because it’s one of the most unique vodkas you’ll ever have. Where most are made from wheat or rye, and a few here and there from potatos, Ciroc’s distilled solely from grapes. You might think that’d be a liability – that it’d offer too much flavor where a vodka’s better off leaning back. Ciroc found an ideal balance. There’s the faintest hint of grape essence, almost like a touch of grappa, layered on an ultra-crisp base. This isn’t a round or complex drink. The taste’s simple, direct and couldn’t possibly be missed – an intensely clarified, amazingly clean spirit with a touch of a bitter fruit finish.

Mixer: I like it straight. But it works well with citrus juices, which bring out the grape flavor. This is what you want to use when your girlfriend wants a Cosmopolitan.

Ideal for: If you absolutely must be there, if you’ve been dragged to one against every imaginable protest, drinking at dance clubs. Thanks to its new marketing hook, any cramped dark space pulsing with Lady Ga Ga mash-ups, flooded with strobe lights and packed with hipsters in black t-shirts and Robert Pattison haircuts will stock at least five cases of Ciroc.

Even better for: Funneling into soup-bowl sized Cosmopolitans, to flatten your girlfriend and her friends enough that they forget about going to the club, and you can take them to a tolerable bar instead.

2. Boyd & Blair

A high end vodka from outside Pittsburgh? Yes. That’s not a misprint. Still, a number two slot? Again, yes – it’s that good. There are two kinds of vodka in this world – potato vodka and everything else. And Boyd & Blair is an excellent potato vodka. It’s a bit harsh, with a bite that emphasizes the ethanol over some of the flavor. But a fine ethanol it is – the sort you’ll often get with much more expensive brands that have been distilled four or five times. Make no mistake, however, this is not a medicine-like vodka, in the vein of overdistilled stuff like XO and Imperia. B&B has a noticeable, well rounded essence hiding behind its initial punch.

Mixer: Ice. You don’t adulterate a good potato vodka. It just isn’t done.

Ideal for: Martinis. A touch of vermouth will cut B&B’s edge. But no olives. That’ll kill the delicate flavor.

1. Chopin

Among the real, honest potato vodkas, Chopin is easily the best. Crisp, smooth, with absolutely no aftertaste and just the right touch of sweetness, reminding you of its starchy, sugary base. You can buy those $50.00 super-premiums until you’re bankrupt. None will hold a candle to this vodka. The only negative I can offer is I once came across a bad batch. Didn’t even taste like Chopin. But I ran into that years ago, and I’ll assume it was a random outlier, as I haven’t bought a bad bottle since. And there’ve been more opportunities for that than I’ll ever admit out loud. Or even like to privately consider.

Mixer: Ice, minimally – barely a cube or two. Anything more is sinful.

Ideal for: Bludgeoning an expense account. Doubles can run to $20.00 in the better bars. And you won’t stop at two.

Even better for: Numbness at fancy corporate functions. You won’t find it at a Marriott, but if you’re stuck in a Four Seasons or Ritz for some conference or dinner, two of these make a conversation or presentation about “synergies” and “goal setting” pleasantly sufferable. Three might even bring you to paying attention, out of lack of energy or interest in bothering to formulate a decent daydream… “Right-o, Melvyn. The bit on the firm’s strategic planning was inspired. Brought me near to fucking tears. Churchill would’ve toasted that Powerpoint on revenue stream reallocation.”

Dishonorable Mentions:

Grey Goose

Not because it’s the favored vodka of cul-de-sac yuppies, Wall Street date rapists and people who buy their wine by the price. And not because I drank a whole bottle of it a few years back, with God only knows how many Red Bulls, and thought I was going to die the next day. It’s just that it’s a terrible vodka. Tastes like something not made in a machine, but actually from a machine. As if some aging mechanical device had been dismantled, its parts ground to dust, mixed with water, and the resulting slurry distilled and bottled in a spirit. This is a vodka absent any soul, with nothing but a chemical essence. The only good I can say of this grossly overpriced, grossly over-rated liquor is the name was expertly chosen. “Grey” describes its every feature.

Mixer: Enough of anything to cover its taste entirely.

Ideal for: Varnish removal.

Even better for: Re-gifting to arseholes who’ll think it’s flattering.

Absolut

If it were possible for alcohol to sour like milk, this is what rotten vodka would taste like. A mix of sugary and bitter at the front, with a pungent aftertaste of mold. The ultimate triumph of marketing over quality. A nifty bottle, a brilliant ad campaign and an utterly undrinkable product.

Mixer: Whatever chemical you’re using to poison the recipient of the drink.

Ideal for: Serving to detested guests.

Even better for: Powering your riding mower.

Pink

Proving two great tastes don’t always taste great together. Everyone loves stimulants. Everyone loves alcohol. And everyone loves them together. Whiskey and blow, champagne and ecstasy, single malts and crystal meth… It’s a goddamned American tradition. So why not put them in the same bottle? Infuse a vodka with liquid caffeine? Perhaps because the resulting product tastes like fucking Windex. I was conflicted about even discussing Pink here, as I’m not sure it qualifies for human consumption, let alone as liquor worth reviewing. “Vile” is a generous description. I’ve injested bong water with better character.

Mixer: Soap shavings and oil.  Makes a decent Molotov Cocktail.   

Ideal for: Feeding to 17 year old girls who think it’s chic.  

Even better for: Staying alert, yet calm, through your Mann Act trial.

Author’s Note: This is a piece written for the book review section of a large commercial website. You may see it published there in the future, but I’m interested in the message now, so I’m putting up here today. If they choose not to run it there because I offered it to you in advance, selah… When I have an idea in my head, I want it published. And I don’t like waiting.

The Internet Isn’t Killing Books (In Reality, It’s Probably Going to Create a Huge New Market for Them)
by The Philadelphia Lawyer

I write online, at Philalawyer.net, and I’ve also written a book, Happy Hour is for Amateurs, and I’m writing here today to tell you this: From what I’ve seen, the Internet will never kill books. To the contrary, the book industry will not only have a long and healthy life, but ultimately, the Internet, and the text-based forms of communication embraced in its wake, may be on the verge of creating a huge, new resurgence in it.

How? Let’s deal with the commercial issues first. High quality internet content cannot be monetized, or least not monetized for sufficiently profitable margins under any of the models available. I’ve written perhaps 1,000 pages of text online – serials, editorials, bits of satirical journalism.  The time invested in the process could never be made back on the advertising dollars collected.  The fact was, as much as I love the freedom to write whatever I like online (and Lord knows I’ve done that), I had to write a book to make money from the endeavor. It’s simple math.  No widget to sell, no revenue.  For almost all serious writers, Internet content works as a loss leader.  I only keep pumping it out because, well, I like my audience. And I like writing.

This leads to a second, noncommercial point.  When you like writing, when you’re told you have talent for it, you’ve no choice but to tackle the concept of a book.  It’s the White Whale. No one who’s put pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard hasn’t envisioned a two or three hundred page book as the ultimate destination. In this regard, the Internet works as a natural minor league for the major league of publishing.  A driving range of sorts.

Of course, many critics disagree with this notion. Their chief complaint is, as much the Internet encourages writers to put out books, it works an opposite effect on the audience.  That the premium it places on brevity conditions online readers to a rapid form of consumption incompatible with the detailed narratives offered in books. As someone who’s sold a decent number of units for a first book that came out in the midst of last year’s financial meltdown, and received zero media attention, I reach the opposite conclusion. The internet readers I’ve encountered want a more detailed narrative. Why?  Because anyone who reads online knows – the Internet can become predictable. The push is always to get to the end, to the punchline. Give the harried workplace reader something he can digest between the time his boss passed his cubicle and the time he’ll pass again. Too much of that, and too many competing choices, providing similar reductionist fare, become exhausting.  With a book, the reader has no choice but to marry himself to the story.  A full fledged book’s greatest attraction is its ability to allow the reader to forget his world for a time.  This doesn’t happen so easily reading a five hundred word blog post.  And it’s hardly worth noting, in this economy, many people want a vacation from their minds.

That isn’t a criticism of blogs, or any other internet content providers. It’s a distinction that outlines the complimentary differences between websites and books informing a final, most important point.  We are in a new age where writing is the default method of communication. Email and Blackberries never fully replaced the spoken word, but that was before texting.  Before social networks. We don’t call each other anymore, at all. We instant message, Tweet and comment on each other’s blogs or Facebook pages. And as we do that, though some of us will further debase the lexicon with horrible all caps abbreviations and cringe-inducing expressions, many more of us will have no choice but to become better writers. We’ll embrace the medium young, and as one who spoke publicly for a living would want to hear others in his trade speak, the texter will look to the blogger for hints on how to write with more expression.  The blogger will look to producers of more detailed content, like this site, or mine, to determine how to create more comprehensive work. And people like me will hone our craft to write books. It’s just a question of how many take that natural path. But rather than view the glass as half empty, assuming the Internet threatens books, why not look at how the mediums naturally compliment one another?  Look at the fact that millions of new potential book buyers might just be falling in love with the written word?

Below is the intro to the first installment of a new series of pieces I did with Dr. Rob, author of Shrinktalk, titled “Is America Psychologically Devolving?”:

Unless you’ve been in a cave on Mars for the past few years, you’ve probably asked yourself, “Is America beginning to unravel?”  Has this nation finally gone mad?  Drooling and staggering ahead like some lost ward of a sanitarium – its faculties all but destroyed, crushed under the weight of a society defined by its sloth and ignorance… its greed, envy and mendacity?

This is a dumb, rotten age, and allusions to Rome aren’t extreme. Imbeciles and thieves at every turn, stalking us in all the headlines. Wall Street a gentrified dog track, television filled with common fools and Washington driving the Republic headlong straight off a cliff. And as the flames get higher and higher, the fiddling only gets louder. Self-help pimps rule our literature, mega-churches swell with frightened masses and the “MySpace Nation” soldiers on, blissfully unaware as it consumes its diet of Kardashians, Ritalin and low carb Mango-tinis. A country “doped,” as Lennon sang, “with religion and sex and TV.”  Welcome to the New Dumb, the United States of Decline.

It’s said these times test faith. But that misses the crux of the issue. Other than possibly laughing, God’s nowhere to be found in this mess. This is a scientific matter, better addressed to Darwin, and the question at the center is simple. Is the cause of our failure and embarrassment a medical, clinical regression? Is America Psychologically Devolving?

You can read the rest of the discussion here.

Here’s the second batch of bons mots from my Twitter account:
• Generally, a person’s IQ tends to be inversely proportional to the number of conspiracies he notices in the world.
• I’ll never be an alcoholic. I couldn’t live with the cure.
• If the Founders could see today’s tea parties, they’d beg for the return of the monarchy.
• Say what you will about the evils of sexism, fucking your way up the ladder sure as hell beats working your way there.
• Why does Notre Dame warrant an Obama speech at commencement? Same reason we have to watch their shit football program on NBC?
• Braless in t-shirt, in jeans w/no underwear > Any frilly lingerie. (The more teddies a woman has, the less interesting she’ll be in bed.)
• There’s plenty of private capital out there. It’s just waiting for the basement, to become our natl landlord for pennies on the dollar.
• The cruel irony of the average breast augmentation is it tends to look best when clothed.
• The reason for a random semi-erection when you’re just walking through an office building is?
• Please, tell me more about your views on the torture memos. And while you’re at it, I’d also like root canal, and a dry hand job.
• Risk is wrongly demonized. Look at every ill in the world, at its core, its rotten foundation, and you’ll find something else – certainty.
• The biggest obstacles to formal pot legalization are the types of people arguing most vehemently for pot legalization.
• In a better world, neither tenacity nor talent could exist outside the presence of the other.
• Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t do or teach become pundits.
• Stimulus Good = With all that cash being printed, everybody will be a millionaire in five years. Stimulus Bad = Cheeseburgers will be $75.

(more…)

When I first joined Twitter, I made fun of it. Called it what it seemed to be – a mindless, narcissistic indulgence for the ADD-addled set:

I’ve joined, and you can find me at “Phila_Lawyer” (I wasn’t about to pay a Zimbabwean squatter $500,000,000,000.00 for “Philalawyer”). And I’m probably going to write a bunch of stuff for as long as the site remains hot, as long as people stay interested in hearing what other people are doing sitting in traffic (through May, possibly June).
But I’m not just going to write about masturbating. I’m going to write what I happen to think, whatever grabs me in the moment. Because you and I both know, this is important shit. These are turbulent times, and if you don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know what you’re doing, we might not know if what we’re doing is something worth doing anymore. If there isn’t something better we ought to be doing, or a different, faster place where we could learn more about what other people are doing more effectively and quickly… The race is to instant knowledge, and email just won’t do. What good is it for me to know my buddy Bob was “Taking a dump” once it’s already over? I’ve missed the show, the drama. I’ll never know that connection – that deep, enduring link… That I was standing on the train platform, just reading a Blackberry and yet inextricably, I was also in Kentucky, in Bob’s office restroom, staring at the tile on the floor and sharing the instant of release.

-Because You Need to Know, Immediately! (If Not Sooner)
None of that opinion’s changed. It’s still filled with inane people writing inane things, masturbating their egos under the ridiculous delusion someone cares what flavor ice cream they’re shoveling in their children’s pie holes, that they’re on a charity walk for research into nearsightedness or that they just bought five hundred thread count bedsheets. But it’s also spawned a stand-up culture of amateur comedians, pundits and philosophers using the site as a platform for jokes, barbs and rhetoric. Of course, that’s my approach. The only problem is, Twitter’s impossible to read. The more you post new material, the deeper the old stuff is buried. I don’t think it should be lost. Some of the lines are gems (or so I’ve been told). So here it is in linear form, the best of Philalawyer on Twitter, in reverse chronological order, from today running backward to February:
• When you meet a middle class liberal who’s met a payroll or filed a corporate tax return, steal his unicorn.
• “It’s a rosary. But it’s also ben-wa balls.” (Product descriptions you’ll never hear on the Home Shopping Network)
• “NASA. Of course we crash a few on purpose. Otherwise no one would have paid attention since 1983.”
• Acid and skeet shooting. TGIF!
• Levi Johnston to pose in Playgirl for $25,000.00. Way to go selecting Vice Presidential families, John McCain.
• Buck up, Kate Gosselin. You may have blown all the money, but the damage to our national dignity caused by your show’s success is forever.
• I like Obama, but his Nobel Prize might be the second most undeserved award in history. Crash winning a Best Picture Oscar remains first.
• The Clash = Prep school punk. The Pistols = Serious nihilist punk. The Ramones = Overrated punk.
• In a perfect world, John Ensign would impregnate Nancy Pelosi. And everyone would die in childbirth.
• Social Conservative (n.) – Oxymoron. Ex: “John said he wanted tiny govt, but then sought laws telling everyone who and how they could fuck.”
• Missionary (n.) – One who lamentably chose to study the Bible during etiquette class.
• “Socialized healthcare will cause a cutback in Medicare benefits!” The GOP sees the irony in this argument, doesn’t it?
• Legalized Marijuana (n.) – Superficial recognition of what’s been accepted de facto in sensible society for over three decades.
• Lies of fabrication = Fraudulent, sanctionable. Lies of omission and mischaracterization = A $250 per hour service. #advocacy
• Health Care Reform (n.) – The status quo repackaged confusingly enough to allow both sides to claim victory. #meetthenewbosssameastheoldboss

(more…)