Carolita Johnson | Longreads | October 2018 | 8 minutes (1,969 words)
On October 5th, 2018, the Nobel peace prize went to activists Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege, for their work to end rape and sexual violence as weapons of war.
Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege
On October 6th, Brett Kavanaugh was named to the Supreme Court, in spite of multiple allegations of sexual assault against him and his shameful response to them, goaded on by a man who promotes the violation of women’s bodies as one of the wages of financial and political power, and ridicules women who speak out against and report sexual assault; I’m talking about the 45th president of the United States.
The bodies of women have historically been used to unite men in drunken fun of the type that remains, as Christine Blasey-Ford memorably said, “indelible in the hippocampus” at traditional frat parties that purportedly upstanding citizens like Brett Kavanaugh attended and organized and which continue to take place. These same men are often united in their outrage over the questioning of their right to be excused for such “youthful indiscretions” or collegiate, “boys will be boys” fun.
Will Meyer | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,846 words)
In July of 2015, writer and ex-McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas addressed a room full of elites and their good company in Aspen, Colorado. He was a fellow with The Aspen Institute, a centrist think-tank, which was hosting an “ideas festival.” Giridharadas’ talk took aim at what he dubbed the “Aspen Consensus,” an ideological paradigm in which elites “talk a lot about giving more” and not “about taking less.” He earnestly questioned the social change efforts and “win-win” do-goodery promulgated at the business-friendly get-together. In the speech, Giridharadas walked a thin line: both praising the Aspen community which “meant so much” to him and his wife while also laying into its culture and commandments. He dropped the mic: “We know that enlightened capital didn’t get rid of the slave trade,” and suggested that the “rich fought for policies that helped them stack up, protect and bequeath [their] money: resisting taxes on inheritances and financial transactions, fighting for carried interest to be taxed differently from income, insisting on a sacred right to conceal money in trusts, shell companies and weird islands.”
The talk received a standing ovation, though certainly ruffled some feathers as well. An attendee confided in Giridharadas that he was speaking to their central struggle in life and others gave him icy glares and called him an “asshole” at the bar. The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the speech — which had hardly prescribed any policies — and clearly felt so threatened by it that his resulting column was titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” and attempted, albeit poorly, to nip any systemic critique of his favored economic system in the bud. But Brooks too realized that there would be a “coming debate about capitalism,” and his column prompted Giridharadas to post his talk online, stirring lots of debate — not quelching it. Read more…
Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home.
For years, I found solace in “Wildflowers,” written by Parton and performed with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on their record Trio. The song’s instrumentation is spare, with the tinny chords of the autoharp and Ronstadt and Harris’s harmonies. In a near warble, Dolly sang of a “rambling rose” who didn’t “regret the path” she chose.
I moved away from home in ways more profound than the physical leaving, and it sometimes caused me to feel the pain of committing a betrayal. My grandmother Laverne warned me: “Don’t forget where you come from.”
Natalie Lima | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,165 words)
Yesterday I woke up and looked at my body in the mirror. My nightgown was tighter on my stomach, the folds in my skin forming a silhouette of my shape on the fabric. I’d put on more weight over the summer. Panicked, I gathered all the visible clothes in my bedroom, pulled them off hangers and out of drawers, and threw them into a hamper. I carried the hamper outside. The sun was out and directly overhead, but the desert-winter air was cold, and I could see each puff of my breath in front of me. I tossed the hamper onto the driveway and some panties spilled from the top. A white cat sitting across the street, licking itself, scurried off. An elderly man with a Fitbit on his wrist speed-walked directly in front of me, past my house, but didn’t acknowledge me, which was perfect, as I was still in my very snug nightgown, braless, and standing over a laundry basket with panties spilling out onto my driveway.
I looked up at the bright sun (only briefly because it hurt my eyes) and I lit a cigarette and burst into tears, chunky black eyeliner from the day before streaking my face and running down my chest like wet soil. After a few puffs, I dug out the nail polish remover that I’d thrown into the basket during my frenzy, and I emptied the liquid onto the mound of clothing. Then, without a moment of reassessment, I flicked the remainder of my burning cigarette onto the hamper and watched one of my favorite maxi dresses slowly ignite. And everything else in the basket followed. Before long my driveway was a summer bonfire against a Tucson mountain range. A car alarm went off close by, but I didn’t know whose it was; I didn’t care either. My knees buckled and I fell back against the garage door and slid to the ground. Sobbing, I watched my now too small clothes burn into ashes right in front of my house. I eventually lifted the collar of my nightgown and hid my face underneath. “Oh my god, when did I get so fat?!” I cried and cried into my chest. After who knows how long, I leaned over and blacked out.
* * *
Everything you just read was a lie. But as I was writing that opening scene, I did imagine the deep satisfaction of being able to take all the crap in your life that upsets you and burn it up. However, despite my fondness for melodrama, there’s no way that story could have actually been fact because I’m a broke grad student and I have neither a house nor a garage, and I don’t really know anyone else my age (31) who does. My mom owned a house at my age, on a housekeeper’s salary, which I see as a testament to the present economic state in this country, but hey, that’s another essay.
So let’s start with the truth now.
Yesterday I woke up to the song of a lesser goldfinch outside my window (I think that’s what it was, but I’m not one of the Irwins). I announced to my sleeping dog, “Today is going to be a good and productive day!” then leaped out of bed and started a pot of coffee. Eventually I walked into the bathroom and looked in the full-length mirror and I saw myself — my chin was sagging a little lower, my nightgown with a cartoon bunny and the word “friends” printed across the front was snug on my body. It was clear that I’d put on a significant amount of weight in recent months (that part was true).
This happens sometimes, that we actually take a sincere look at ourselves in a mirror and maybe spend a few minutes — probably because of untreated anxiety — picking at some old blackheads populating our nose. But if you’re like me, after excavating some of the grime, you continue on to examine all of the changes in your appearance, notice how you’ve aged, think about your mortality, and remember the cross-country drive with your mom the summer your dad left and you turned 15, and how she made you leave your dog behind with a stranger, and how you didn’t see the point in existing anymore — not without your sweet pitbull who used to lick your eyeball without warning. And in the middle of this musing, you finally pause and tell yourself: Stop thinking about your childhood traumas before 8 a.m. Then you lean further into the mirror, as much as your back will allow, your nose almost touching it, and you think: Every day I wake up I’m another day closer to my imminent death.
This is when you know it’s time to turn away from the mirror.
Any sort of unwanted bodily change can make me want to sink into myself; it can prompt me to want to cancel all of my commitments for the day so I can brood over a salad and question my current self-care practices (or lack thereof). But usually this is not the case. In reality, things are busy and there is a hot cup of coffee that needs to be drunk, emails that need to be sent, a dog running in circles around my living room who needs to go out (and poop, or things will get ugly and I have carpet). In those first moments of the day, I am quickly reminded that life is in session and the weight is there, whether I like it or not. I know that the fat on my body is part of me, and I can choose to carry it like a backpack weighing me down, bruising my shoulders by the end of the day. Or I can carry it like a fashion accessory that is a key part of the outfit I slipped on that morning. Most days, I make an effort to carry mine like an artsy tote bag that bears an edgy photo of Joan Didion or Frida Kahlo smoking a cigarette.
* * *
How should we actually carry ourselves anyway? I don’t know the right answer to this, but I think about it often, especially since adopting a dog a few months ago. The skin on her belly hangs low, due to overbreeding, due to nature and circumstance. When I walk her, strangers point out how much her stomach sags, how it makes her look much heavier. Sometimes, they even point out the largeness of her uneven nipples. My dog doesn’t care, of course. I watch her move the tiny limbs attached to her sausage-shaped body fearlessly, in a way that I wish we all moved about in the world. I also think about our place as humans in the animal kingdom: our supposed superior intelligence, with our big Homo sapiens brains (though the brain of the sperm whale wins for biggest). Yet we worry about the aesthetics of extra flesh. We worry about how we carry everything around.
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When I was growing up, my mom used to tell people that my excess weight was baby fat. I’d run into the kitchen after dinner, during Fresh Prince commercial breaks, and ask her for a second slice of flan. She’d groan, then cut me a slightly smaller slice, with less syrup drizzled on the plate, and hand it to me. I’d smile and leave the kitchen. She’d instantly turn to her friend Kristina, the wife of my father’s best friend and an aerobics instructor. “It’s just baby fat,” my mom would say, sincerely, as she placed the remaining flan in Tupperware. “Hopefully she loses some of it when she goes through puberty. You know, your body changes then.” Kristina would smile and nod. It was evident that neither of them believed the baby fat theory. I didn’t believe it either (I could hear the whole conversation from the next room; our house was, um, compact). After a silent moment, my mom would finally change the topic to the less stressful O.J. Simpson trial.
Presently, I’m the heaviest I’ve been in years. My mom lives across the country now, and I call often to check in and ask about my nephew and sometimes about my brother. My weight occasionally creeps into conversation. It’s never to shame me, not anymore at least. Often it’s me complaining about how I need to get active again, and she listens and agrees. She reassures me that I’ll lose the weight again. Sometimes I’m tempted to say, “Mom, what’s the problem? It’s just baby fat.” But I don’t want to make her upset.
* * *
I’ve spent my entire life in a large body. I have chosen “large” as the most accurate adjective to describe my body because the word is vague, and my weight fluctuates from year to year — 100 pounds lighter one year, 50 pounds heavier the next, 115 down the year after that. Sometimes my body is on the smaller side of large, more Queen Latifah in The Last Holiday, that movie where she’s told she only has three weeks to live so she jets off to Europe, eats caviar, and falls in love with LL Cool J. And sometimes my body is closer to Chrissy Metz in This Is Us, and I eat comfort food late at night, shove the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos wrappers immediately into the trash can, and ask myself, Why is this my life? — all while dressed in fashionable prints and versatile shrugs.
Because of the current body I occupy, I have to acclimate to everything that comes along with it — larger clothes, tighter chairs, and by far the most unpredictable component: people’s reaction to it. Last fall, I ran into one of my former professors who I hadn’t seen in more than a year. We were at a reading, listening to a well-known poet discuss palm leaves and the rhythm in his lines. My professor did a double take when he spotted me across the conference room, his eyes wide open but blank as he sized me up, unsure if it was me or a stalker who was staring too hard at him. Ultimately he turned away, deciding it wasn’t me. I called his name twice, “Charlie! Charlie!” and his eyes finally widened in recognition.
“I knew that was you!”
“Of course you did!” I said but didn’t actually mean it. I gave him a hug and almost added: Maybe I should become a spy since I’m virtually unrecognizable now. In the moment, I thought this joke was funny, but I figured it would have embarrassed him so I refrained.
* * *
My current bodily state is, of course, mostly of my own doing. Bad habits, things I’ve been trying to kick my whole adult life. Then, last spring, I fractured my ankle. I was walking across the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa one day, watching the squirrels run about and bury nuts. I had just finished my tutoring shift in the Writing Center, where I’d spent the past hour copyediting a male student’s paper, an argumentative essay for why abortion is murder and should be made illegal again. To decompress, I stopped in front of the campus library and watched the squirrels for a while. One squirrel sprinted across the grass into a little hole it had dug itself and popped back out with a nut in its hands like a magician. Two other squirrels wrestled near a large tree (at least I think this is what they were doing; I don’t know a ton about nature without Google). After a stressful afternoon, watching these animals do their thing — watching life in motion — soothed me immensely.
A few minutes later, I continued my walk back to the parking lot to play the “Where did I park my car this morning?” game, and I looked up at the cloudless blue sky. Every existential thought I’ve ever had filled my head: Wow, life is so beautiful/Why don’t we all take time to slow down more often?/We’re all glued to our smartphones/We don’t appreciate the simple things anymore/I remember a time when I used to pick up the phone and call all my friends/Maybe this is why our society is sick and full of broken people, because we don’t take time to pause/I wish I could play the cello/I think I’m lonely/What is connection in this world anyway?/Nobody connects anymore, except to send nude photos/I can’t believe Snapchat moved past the era of sending temporary nude photos to strangers/When all my religious friends started using Snapchat to send photos of their weddings and babies, I knew I was getting behind the times —
Then I tripped. Not on something blocking my path that shouldn’t have been there — like a rock or a fallen tree branch after a springtime windstorm. I simply fell over nothing. Which has become the most unimpressive ankle fracture story anyone has ever heard. Sometimes I have to share how I fractured it; I actually have to say it aloud. “Can you slow down?” I plead with a friend as we walk to a class together. “I messed up my ankle a few months of ago.” They always reply with a sympathetic “of course” and proceed to slow down because my friends are decent people. But, invariably, the follow-up question is: How did you mess it up?
“I tripped. That’s it.”
“Over something? Was it during sex?” they joke.
“No,” I chuckle. “I tripped, just walking. There was no sex. Well, there were squirrels. What I’m saying is: My life is horrible.”
My friend laughs and pats my shoulder in consolation.
* * *
Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t live in a body? Or if we all lived in ones that looked exactly the same? I imagine us like Flubber, a green goo-like substance bouncing around a lab and happily jiggling all day. All of us green and unwieldy and free. However, I have considered how this sameness could eventually get boring. Sometimes we might have the desire to pair up with someone less green and more blue, or someone less gooey. Sometimes we might not appreciate the ordinariness of our own gooeyness and sink into a depression and chronic self-loathing. But this concept — of what life would be like untethered to a body — never leaves me.
* * *
A few weeks after tripping over air, after some squirrel-watching and ankle-fracturing in Tuscaloosa, I left my program and moved home to South Florida. It was for the summer only, before driving out to Tucson to try out a new grad school and a new, larger, more progressive city that seemed like a better fit. The move back home made for a good kick to my ego. Not only was I less mobile and speedily putting on weight, but I was also in my thirties and moving into my mother’s three-bedroom apartment — an apartment she shares with her husband, my younger brother, his girlfriend, and my 3-year-old nephew, Mugen.
I spent those weeks hobbling around, and because there wasn’t much space, I slept on a small daybed in the living room. Each morning I awoke to the song of a screaming toddler who, for some reason, was always fed in a high chair placed two feet from my head. At night I often cried into my pillow, distressed about the current shape of my life, regretting that I quit my full-time job and gave up my crappy-but-cozy apartment in Los Angeles to attend graduate school — for the financially lucrative dream of writing short stories. Though I slept in the middle of the living room, and though I was the largest person living in my mom’s apartment, I remained essentially unseen. No one knew of my daily weep-fests. Everyone else’s life, too, was in session.
The night before my cross-country drive to Tucson, my mom returned home from work and cooked my favorite meal — garlic chicken, red beans and rice, and avocado salad. She was calm as she stirred the beans, and it calmed me to watch her. My mami, nine inches shorter than me and less than half my size, mothered me that night. I decided to ignore the past few weeks so I could enjoy this last meal with her. I forgot about my screaming nephew and the tiny daybed. I forgot about my body and my messed up ankle, and decided — for just that evening — I didn’t have a body because bodies didn’t exist anymore. That night I was a glob of green goo.
My mom handed me the avocado salad and sat down. “Mi’ja,” she said. “Wasn’t it nice to get to spend these last few weeks with little Mugen?”
Before I could answer, my brother stepped into the kitchen. He rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What are you two talking about?” He asked.
“Natalie was just saying how much she’s gonna miss Mugie.”
“Aww,” my brother said. “Isn’t he the sweetest?”
“I think I’m getting a dog,” I said, then shoved some rice into my mouth.
* * *
What’s great about relocation is that everyone in the new place is unfamiliar with your body. They’ve never known its shape any bigger or smaller; there are no emotional attachments to the way they assume its size should be, like the disappointment when you see the plate with your favorite recipe come out of the kitchen with too much cilantro on top. People fasten themselves to what they’re used to, including bodies they don’t live in. A perplexed glance from a friend or loved one at a party, and you’re instantly reminded that you showed up covered in too much cilantro.
* * *
Once I had driven past miles of endless cacti, after listening to all the available X Factor auditions on YouTube and every mediocre cover of Whitney Houston in existence, I eventually reached Tucson, Arizona. I quickly moved into a modest apartment (and by “modest” I mean it had roaches). When I noticed the the bugs zigzagging across the bathroom floor one night, I called the apartment manager to complain. “We don’t have roaches here,” she said. For me, this translated to: Natalie, move out before you wake up with roach eggs lodged in your ear canal.
By this point I had acquired some furniture — a new bed, some tables, a reading chair — and I needed a truck to transport everything to the new pest-free apartment I’d found. However, I was nearly broke from traveling, and my parents failed me by never teaching me any practical moneymaking skills, like carpentry or identity theft. This left me having to brainstorm creative ways to secure a truck without landing myself in jail — in a city where I had no one to bail me out. I could:
(a) spend the last bit of my travel money and commit to never eating ever again;
(b) sell my voice to Ursula the Sea Witch in exchange for Prince Erik to come help me move my stuff with his royal carriage; or
(c) sell my kidney.
I settled on the only realistic option — (c).
Okay, I’m kidding. I decided that before making any hasty decisions, I’d sleep on it.
A couple of days before I was scheduled to move out, I found myself at Circle K, wearing a raggedy dress that should have been relegated to pajama status, pumping gas and buying a Chaco Taco to help me cool down from the Arizona heat (but who doesn’t love a Chaco Taco in the winter, too?). On my walk back to my car — ice cream–filled taco in hand — a tall, lumberjack-looking dude stepped out of his truck to pump gas. He sized me up with the eagerness of a dog who has spotted the can of wet food instead of the kibble.
“I like your dress,” he said.
I offered a half-hearted “thanks” and quickly licked up the vanilla ice cream running down my hand. He walked into the store, and I looked over at his truck. I stared it down just as he had done to me. It was a giant, white Ford F-150, definitely big enough to transport all my furniture in a single trip. It was perfect. When he came walking back to his truck, I appraised him. I quickly decided that I wasn’t picking up on any serial killer energy, based on nothing except that he was smaller than me and I felt I could take him in a fight, if it came to that.
“Hey! Sir.” (Don’t ask me why I called him sir, I already hate myself.)
He turned to face me, with the jolly, wide-mouthed smile of a 13-year-old who just met his favorite Laker — which just so happens to be the same exact smile of a man who thinks he might be able to stick his dick in you.
“Any chance I could borrow your truck to move some furniture?” I asked, eyes twinkling. “I’m new here.”
My lumberjack’s smile wilted. “My truck?” What?” The confusion on his face was unexpected. Wasn’t he used to people in his life asking to borrow his big-ass truck? Isn’t that what trucks are for?
“No,” he huffed. “What I’m looking for is a date. With a big, sexy lady like you.”
If this had been the first time I’d been told something like that, had it been the first time a man I’d never met announced how much he likes big women — like it was suddenly my lucky day — I might have clenched my pearls. But this wasn’t the first time, because I’ve been in this body for more than three decades — and all of those decades fat. After a big sigh, I looked over at his truck again and, in my mind, kissed it goodbye. “I understand,” I said, nodding. “But I can’t go on any dates right now. I need a truck to move my crap.”
I jumped into my car and sped off.
* * *
There’s a scene in the series finale of Sex and the City where Carrie walks around Paris, sad music playing in the background, wallowing in her sorrow. She has recently abandoned her life in New York to be with her artist lover in France. However, upon her arrival, her lover is busy preparing for his upcoming show at some fancy art gallery and has no time for her. This leaves Carrie exploring the City of Love alone. During one of her solitary, daily walks she passes by a busy cafe and, through the window, notices a group of women sitting at a table, laughing hysterically together. The women remind her of her own best friends, back in New York, and suddenly her face falls and she sinks into a deeper state of melancholy.
Anyone who has moved to a new city can, to some extent, relate to Carrie’s loneliness (though we haven’t all been invited to Paris by Baryshnikov). Now take that loneliness and compound it with the inherent loneliness of living in a large body, of having to navigate the world in a body that is often stigmatized, made invisible or hyper-visible at any moment. A multilayered loneliness.
* * *
The next day I rented a U-Haul and moved into the new apartment without trouble, just an achy lower back and some sweat stains on my shirt. I slunk down onto the carpet, then lay flat on my back and attempted some stretches I saw on YouTube. Mid-stretch, my phone buzzed. It was a text from a good friend, a meme:
Dear Big Girls:
Don’t be afraid to get on top
If he dies, he dies
I cackled. Which hurt my back a little, but the laugh helped me relax. I let my body unfurl on the floor right then, let it just be for a while. I rubbed the (supposedly new) carpet with my fingers and thought about every awkward romantic encounter I’ve ever had (which I blame on porn and the patriarchy but that, too, is another essay). The text from my friend was a magical moment of big girl solidarity, where I was reminded that I am never alone in this complex existence inside of a body. Everyone has to deal with living in a body and, some of them, bigger bodies like mine. So the next time I find myself climbing on top of a man, laughing because of the meme, I know he likely won’t die. But if he does, there are certainly worse ways to turn up one’s toes.
* * *
Natalie Lima, a 2016 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and VONA/Voices alum, is an MFA candidate in creative non-fiction at the University of Arizona. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the absurdities of living in a body.
Trump Tower against cloudy sky. Midtown Manhattan. New York. USA. January 2018. (Getty Images.)
This week, we’re sharing stories from Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and David Barstow, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Jaeah J. Lee, Shelley Puhak, and Sarah Miller.
At 11:53 a.m. on March 31, 2015, I received a text from Dad. “I just dropped off the keys to the house…and said a prayer one last time on behalf of the family,” it read. The house in question was the first concrete thing he’d bought in America way back in 1979, a modest, nondescript one-story suburban starter home we’d moved out of some 26 years and three months earlier, in the winter of 1989. He’d hung onto it, tending to it, landlording it, in hopes of one day gifting it to either me, my sister, or brother. This would not come to pass.
When I saw his text, relief washed over me. After a tortured year of preparing to put it on the market he’d actually gone and finally put it on the damn market. Of course, it wasn’t just that one year of re-carpeting, repairing faucets, replacing bathroom tiles, fighting with the homeowners’ association over loose gutters and paint colors. It was years of Saturday afternoons spent fixing leaky pipes, broken tiles, fritzing-out air conditioners, or trying, failing, and calling in a contractor, who often seemed to be a brown guy named Jim Patel.
From around age 10 to 14, I accompanied him on these trips. Dad would wear his Saturday man’s-work-attire: white polo, dark-blue work shorts, long white athletic socks, lumpy, nondescript running shoes, ill-fitting generic white cap. “It’ll be very quick, baba,” he’d say somewhat mindlessly, hopping out of the Chrysler Plymouth, slamming the door behind him, plastic Home Depot bag swinging from this hand as he bounded across the crunchy lawn. He treated the old house like a child he’d had to leave behind, but had never forgotten.
What’s to say of the unremarkable thing itself? A small dining room was separated from the living room by a waist-high, white brick wall. Along one side of the living room stretched a long window looking out onto the backyard and patio. An exposed white brick fireplace. Columns buttressing an intimate dining room, giving it someone’s notion of a backwoods lodge. An L-shaped hallway leading to two bedrooms and a master bedroom; an attic, its air thick with the expulsion of discarded memories, a graveyard of knicknackery and emotional flotsam.
For the ten years we lived in it, the old house was where Dad brought his grieving, cataract-afflicted mother from India — for him, a place of pain, anger, and loss — to live out her remaining years, haunted by the losses of her husband and several sons. It was the site of many a dinner party of uncles and aunties and screaming, runny-nosed, onesie-clad toddlers, everyone in their own way marveling (some with more braggadocio than others) at their great fortune at landing in vast, income-taxless Texas with its booming energy economy and cheap housing and quality public schools, its friendly, Christian neighbors, its public pools and Tex-Mex.
Flickr CC / Getty / Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Sarah Weinman | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (3,096 words)
In the summer of 1952, George Edward Grammer was living a compartmentalized life, like so many middle-class executives of his kind. His wife, Dorothy, a Sunday school teacher, was spending the summer in Parkville, on the outskirts of Baltimore, with the couple’s three daughters — Patricia, Dorothy, and Georgia Lee — caring for her bereaved mother, settling the estate of her recently deceased father. During the day, Grammer, who was known as Ed, commuted from his apartment in Parkchester, a planned community in the north end of the Bronx, into Manhattan for his job as an office manager for the Climax Molybdenum Company. Grammer had worked there for about a year, returning to a full-time position after a few years on his own as a sales representative, itself a change of pace from wartime military work he couldn’t discuss with others. Perhaps it prepared him for the split life he led, visiting his family on weekends, and his mistress on weeknights. Read more…
September 2008 was a whirlwind month for Michael Grynbaum, then a markets reporter for the New York Times. A self-described “newbie” to the paper’s business desk (he had previously worked on the metro desk), Grynbaum was immediately thrust into reporting on a financial maelstrom, a period which included the collapse of Lehman Brothers (otherwise known as the largest bankruptcy filing in United States history), the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the transformation of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into bank holding companies, and what very well could have been the collapse of the nation’s economy.
Among Grynbaum’s responsibilities was “covering all the daily market plunges and the economic reports,” he told me, which meant he was busy that September, trying to keep pace (along with the other Times reporters like Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jenny Anderson, Eric Dash, and Michael de la Merced, among others) with a tumultuous flurry of daily breaking news. “As a reporter, you couldn’t divert your gaze for one minute,” says Diana B. Henriques, then a senior financial writer for the Times. “It was like an atomic blast, with ripples going in every direction.”
One of those ripples was the House of Representative’s September 29th vote on a $700 billion economic rescue plan; despite pleas from both President George W. Bush and Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, the House voted down the bill, 228-205, a move which prompted the Dow Jones Industrial Average to fall nearly 800 points.
Grynbaum remembers reporters and editors gathering around TV screens scattered about the Times’ newsroom to watch the landmark vote, and as it became clear the proposal (which entailed using taxpayer money to buy and absorb troubled assets) would fail, “an eerie silence fell over the newsroom,”he says. And then, “The Bloomberg machines started flashing red: the market was plunging.” He soon realized on that late September day a decade ago that he had to write the “breaking story about a historic stock collapse.”
“Everyone was working on adrenaline, aware of how consequential this moment was,” he says of the coverage:
At 1:30 p.m. the House began to vote on the rescue package that Mr. Paulson and Congressional leaders negotiated over the weekend. About 10 minutes later, when it became clear that the legislation was in trouble, the stock market went into a free fall, with the Dow plunging about 400 points in five minutes.
At his home office in Great Neck, N.Y., Edward Yardeni, the investment strategist, received terse e-mail messages from clients and friends. “Is this the end of the world?” one asked. Another sent a simple plea: “Stop the world, I want to get off.”
At some point, Grynbaum thought to call his parents, suddenly aware of the affects a stock market free-fall would have on their 401(k)s and portfolios, which were “taking a massive hit.” Ten years later, and another Great Depression averted, and Grynbaum can recall those weeks with some necessary and illuminating perspective, adding, “It was a thrilling and slightly scary time to be covering Wall Street.”
To others intimately involved with the roller-coaster fall of 2008, like Gary Cohn, then the president of Goldman Sachs, that same sense of measured introspection is notably lacking.
Since resigning as the director of the National Economic Council, Cohn has emerged as arguably the lone sane voice operating within the current chaos—aka within the Trump administration. First there were reports of his near-resignation following President Trump’s comments on the violence in Charlottesville, VA, and Bob Woodward’s recently published Fear alleged Cohn removed letters from Trump’s desk, thus saving trade agreements with several countries. During a period in which many feel as if they are vainly screaming into a void, Cohn’s protests—real and alleged—have endeared him to those looking for any sort of official resistance.
But that aura shattered around the time of the collapse’s ten-year anniversary. During an interview with Reuters, Cohn outlined the primary cause of the financial crisis, and surprisingly, the former Goldman exec largely laid the blame on Main Street’s front porch, saying,
“Who broke the law? I just want to know who you think broke the law. Was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?”
Cohn’s comments echo a popular opinion for many of those in the financial industry, and yet, that doesn’t disqualify his statements as anything less than mind bogglingly obtuse. It’s easy to navel-gaze in an attempt to diagnose the financial near-collapse and subsequent recession: yes, Americans became entranced with debt—at the bubble’s peak, the average American owned 13 credit cards—and yes, people flagrantly spent, running up an average household debt of roughly $15,000. But to absolve Wall Street and its employees is negligent, and ignorant that Wall Street became just as cozy with risk. Lehman Brothers and its ilk posted leverages (or the debt to equity ratio) of $30-plus to $1, and the notion that these investment firms, which were in the midst of accumulating massive annual profits (and bonuses for its executives), heeded any attempt to self-regulate proved farcical.
So yes, while that waitress accumulated homes (a fictionalized anecdote that borrows heavily from Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which recounts a similar—but not exact—instance), Wall Street was creating—and profiting spectacularly off of—the vehicles that allowed people to gamble so recklessly. The events of 2008 were the result of one massive feedback loop: the embrace of a free market economy led to lax oversight of financial firms, which enabled banks to pursue strategies that would lead to tumescent payouts. As the housing market was seen as the bedrock of the American economy, those strategies sought to commercialize that stability, and thus complex and complicated securities and derivatives like CDOs, MBSs, and CDSs were born; everyone wanted to get rich now, and those catchy acronyms allowed both the American people and banking execs to plunge ahead. Greed on Wall Street fueled greed on Main Street (and vice versa), until the very thing that inflated the bubble—debt—was so overextended that it had no other option but to fail. The illusion couldn’t hide anymore.
Cohn may have been the sanest person in the White House, but that he would lay the blame squarely on Main Street is utterly preposterous, and suggests a lack of nuance and perspective that—ten years after the nation’s economy nearly collapsed—is frightening. In Margin Call, a 2011 film which is arguably the best depiction of the financial crisis, Jeremy Irons plays the CEO of an investment bank that, thanks to the levels of risk it carries on its books, is threatened with extinction. After a 24 hour period in which the firm survives by unloading its risk onto Wall Street (thus eliminating its own exposure but contributing to the toxicity that soon engulfs the financial world), Irons justifies the bank’s actions:
It’s just money. It’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t have to kill each other to get something to eat. It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different today than its ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, ’37, ’57, ’84, 1901, ’07, ’29, 1937, 1974, 1987—Jesus didn’t that fuck me up good!—’92, ’97, 2000, and whatever we want to call this. It’s all just the same thing over and over. We can’t help ourselves. You and I can’t control it, or stop it, or even slow it, or even so slightly alter it. We just react, and we make a lot of money if we get it right, and we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been, and there always will be, the same percentage of winners and losers. Happy fucks and sad sacks, fat cats and starving dogs in this world.
That speech is a perfect encapsulation of what happened in 2008. There is none of this equivocation of whoever deserves a greater share of blame, and Irons’ monologue contains more truth and accuracy than anything Cohn is peddling on his rehabilitation tour.
The ’90s Are Oldis a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.
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In 1998, my first real job — at which I was terrible — was as an editorial assistant for a New York book publisher. My breathtakingly privileged days consisted of emailing mean jokes about the assistants I didn’t like to the assistants I did, and slacking off at my desk during my boss’s long lunches. That’s when I discovered these things called “webzines.” My 1993 black-and-white PowerBook had been powerful enough for abysmal college essays on Heinrich von Kleist, but not for something called a browser, so it was not until my entrée to the professional world and its professional-issue Windows 98 that I began “surfing the ‘Net” in earnest.
In the nascent years of online ubiquity — when CHHHHHHHHHH BEEboo BEEboo BEEboo became a household noise, and not just something for extreme nerds — the web was both very big and very small. In 1996 there were only 100,000 websites in the Whole Wide World. (Today there are almost two billion.) Plus, aside from a few early leaders in e-commerce, ’90s sites were usually personal homepages, accessible only to the visitor patient and accurate enough to type the precise address, down to the tilde. Alas, what made the webzines of the late ’90s the best was also what would end up making the internet the worst: anyone could publish anything about anything, and very few people expected to be paid.
How many times can you start your life all over again from zero? If there’s anyone who knows the answer to that question, it’s Claudia Amaro. She had to do it for the first time when her father was murdered, when she was ten years old. She started over again for a second time when she was thirteen and her mother decided to move the whole family, including Claudia and her three sisters, to the United States, fleeing violence. She had to hit the reset button again when she was thirty and a deportation order for her husband destroyed her family and the life she had built over the past two decades, sending him, Claudia, and their US-citizen son back to Mexico, a place she no longer felt was home.
And with nothing left to lose, in the hope of getting back a little of the life that had been hers, in 2013, at thirty-seven, Claudia started over for the fourth time. She was prepared to spend as much time as necessary in a detention center in the US. She crossed the border north and at the entry gate said she wished to apply for political asylum. A few months later, her husband, Yamil, did the same. Claudia spent three weeks in detention. Yamil was locked up for two years and three months.
Back in Kansas, a place they both consider their home, Claudia and Yamil live under the ever-present shadow of possible deportation. Neither of them knows if they would be able to start over from nothing for a fifth time.Read more…
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