Bateman would be proud, apparently

American psychos!

Wow, I have really been dropping the ball around these parts! It's been tough for me to find the time and energy to write here as of late. Perhaps that's because, as Christopher Ketcham of Orion Magazine suggests, it's really hard for foppish artsy-fartsy types like me to get by here in New York:

"High rent lays low the creator, as there is no longer time to create. Working three jobs sixty hours a week at steadily declining wages, as a sizable number of Americans know, is a recipe for spiritual suicide. For the creative individual the challenge is existential: finding a psychological space where money—the need for it, the lack of it—won’t be heard howling hysterically day and night."

Art is hard, as Tim Kasher once said. And Ketcham's right—it's especially hard here.

The article in question, entitled "The Reign of the One Percenters: Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City," has been floating around in my psyche since a friend posted it on Facebook last week. The piece is a lengthy jeremiad about how finance and related industries have gradually been crowding out arts and culture in the Big Apple. Like most people who say bad things about New York, Ketcham gets me nodding in agreement quite a lot. And like most jeremiads, "The Reign of the One Percenters" gets way off-base at times.

Let's start with its opening sentiment. Ketcham opens the piece with an anecdote in which he explains to his fifteen-year-old daughter that everyone who works in finance is a "sociopath":

"Here are the monuments that matter, I tell her: the offices of Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon; the JPMorgan Chase tower up the block; around the corner, the AIG building. The structures dwarf us, imposing themselves skyward. 'Linked together like rat warrens, with air conditioning,' I tell her. 'These are dangerous creatures, Léa. Sociopaths....'

'Here,' I tell her, standing in the canyons of world finance, 'is what New York is about. Sociopaths getting really rich while everyone else just sits on their asses and lets it happen.'"

I'm no fan of what the financial sector in this country has done over the past thirty years. I'm especially appalled by the amount of crony-capitalist governmental collusion it's participated in. I sympathize with Occupy Wall Street, even if many of the protesters themselves are filthy, repulsive hippies.

But Ketcham loses me when he fails to differentiate between the minority of influential Wall Street types who actually are corrupt bastards and the thousands upon thousands of other folks who work in the industry. This distinction is a more personal matter for me than it is for most. My father has worked various banking and finance jobs for my entire life. He's not a perfect man—who is?—but he's about as far from a sociopath as you can get. And he's not alone among his peers. 

This country desperately needs more effective regulation of its financial markets, but financial services are nonetheless an essential component of a functioning economy. Painting anyone who works to provide those services as a wild-eyed psycho who just wants to watch the world burn strikes me as unproductive.

Ketcham goes on to describe New York between 1945 and 1980 as "a city of equals":

"During this period of relative economic equality, roughly from World War II to around 1980—a period known to economic historians as the Great Compression, as income and wealth leveled out nationally following the reforms of the 1930s—the city also experienced a series of artistic and creative revolts that cemented its reputation as a cultural mecca. Jazz flowered here, so did folk music, so did the avant-garde of modern art, so did the Beats, so did punk and hip-hop."

 Now, I wasn't alive during this period, so maybe I'm mistaken. But my understanding is that New York was an awful fucking place to live during those years. Race riots. Waves of arson. Heroin epidemics. The rise of gang violence. The eighties weren't too hot either, what with crack, AIDS and the Club Kids, but the sixties and seventies flat-out sucked. Ketcham is right that a lot of great art came out of the city during this period. But as my dad is fond of saying, "you gotta suffer to sing the blues."

New York has gotten a lot safer, and a lot more expensive, since then. Ketcham identifies this larger trend with the death—not the diminution, mind, the death—of creativity in the city, largely because the high cost of living drives creative types elsewhere. He cites art critic Robert Hughes: “It was always the work of living artists, made in the belief that their work could grow best there and nowhere else, that fueled New York. The critical mass of talent emits the energies that proclaim the center; its gravitational field keeps drawing more talent in, as in the combustion of a star, to sustain the reaction. The process is now dying." Hughes has some support in this claim. "I just don't get that buzzy creative vibe from New York anymore," complains a journalist friend of the author's.

Well, I was drawn in by New York's music scene. So I find it a little difficult to take Ketcham's claim seriously. I'm intimately familiar only with my little corner of the arts world, but given how vibrant it is, it's hard for me to believe that the city is otherwise a creative moonscape. If Ketcham's got a 15-year-old daughter, he's probably reached the age where people start to bemoan the state of the world now in comparison to that of their youth. His complaints whiff of a middle-aged man who's lost contact with the arts world and has therefore decided that it no longer exists.

Ketcham then segues into a discussion of the effects of the current NYC environs on its residents: 

"A stressed person typically has higher cortisol, a steroid hormone that prepares body and mind to fend off danger and manage in an emergency. But if cortisol is high much of the time, it can act as a slow poison: the immune system is weakened, blood pressure rises, learning is impaired, bone strength is reduced, and, in some instances, the appetite is grossly stimulated." 

 Sounds about right to me. This idea confirms my suspicion that New York is slowly killing me. And I'm prepared to "fend off danger and manage in an emergency" most of the time here; especially so when I'm in the subway. His ensuing description of 'affluenza' is dead on:

"I see it all around me in New York, most acutely among young professionals. The type, in extremis, is that of the narcissist: Stressed, to be sure, because he seeks approval from others higher up in the hierarchy, though distrustful of others because he is competing with them for status, and resentful too because of his dependence on approval....Mostly he is envious, and enraged that he is envious. This envy is endorsed and exploited, made purposeful by what appear to be the measures of civilization itself, in the mass conditioning methods of corporatist media: the marketeers and the advertisers chide and tease him; the messengers of high fashion arbitrate the meaning of his appearance. He is threatened at every remove in the status scrum. His psychological compensation, a derangement of sense and spirit, is affluenza: the seeking of money and possessions as markers of ascent up the competitive ladder; the worship of celebrities as heroes of affluence; the haunted desire for fame and recognition; the embrace of materialistic excess that, alas, has no future except in the assured destruction of Planet Earth and of every means of a sane survival."

I went to school in Philly, which is hardly a relaxed backwater. But when I moved here, I was stunned by the level of competition that pervades the lifestyle. Seemingly everyone in New York is trying to elbow their way ahead of everyone else (sometimes literally). Ketcham is right that this attitude is most pronounced among yuppies, for whom this attitude is basically a virtue. It very much exists among Ketcham's sainted, supposedly non-existent creative people too. New York has too many people and projects but not enough space or time. The struggle to survive is fierce, but it's also a crucible: "if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere" is a popular aphorism in New York for a reason.

Then Ketcham arrives at his biggest applause line, at least for me:

"Look not to the youthful counterculture to challenge this madness. I am thinking here of the phenomenon of New York’s postmodern 'hipster'....The neohipster is a grotesque perversion of the original. If he fetishizes and hybridizes the cultural costumes of old hip—borrowing from the Beat poet, the jazzman, the rapper, the skater, the punk—it is only as a mockery of authentic anti-authoritarian countercultures....And not much in the way of creative product has issued from their midst. The 'hipster moment,' per New York Magazine, did not 'produce artists.' It produced tattoo artists. 'It did not produce photographers, but snapshot and party photographers… It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.'"

 Pretty much sums it up, judging by the examples I've spent time around. Hipsters are garbage. 

This passage reminds me of one of the more interesting features of hipster culture. In its modern sense, the word 'hipster' has always been a term of abuse. Nobody has ever said "I want to be a hipster" in the same sense that they've said "I want to be a punk rocker," or "I want to be a cool cat," or whatever. To the best of my knowledge, it's the only youth subculture that acknowledges its own uselessness.

Ketcham concludes the article with some old-tymey socialist rabble-rousing, exhorting us to "cry out, though the hour is late":

"What is needed is a new paradigm of disrespect for the banker, the financier, the One Percenter, a new civic space in which he is openly reviled, in which spoiled eggs and rotten vegetables are tossed at his every turning. What is needed is a revival of the language of vigorous old progressivism, wherein the parasite class was denounced as such. What is needed is a new Resistance."

As I said earlier, I sympathize with many of the grievances that motivate OWS types. But this kind of language sours me on their cause. I'm a left-leaning moderate—a terribly grouchy moderate, but a moderate nonetheless. I support higher taxes on the wealthy, tighter regulation of financial markets, trust-busting, and campaign finance reform (Citizens United was one of the most reprehensible Supreme Court decisions in the institution's history). But I don't support the "vigorous old progressivism," by which Ketcham presumably means the progressivism of his youth in the 60s and 70s. I'm not interested in throwing spoiled eggs and rotten vegetables at anyone.

Perhaps that makes me naïve, or some kind of sissy. But throwing expired foodstuffs at each other hasn't solved many problems lately, and I don't think that doing so from further to the left (or right) will improve matters much.