. . . the ”New Economy“ is a fraud. Tom Friedman’s formula ”One dollar, one vote“ is not the same thing as universal suffrage, as the complex, hard-won array of rights that most Americans understand as their political heritage. Nor does it mitigate the obscenity of wealth polarization one whit when the richest people ever in history tell us they are ”listening“ to us, that theirs are ”interactive“ fortunes, or that they have unusual tastes and work particularly hard. Markets may look like democracy, in that we are all involved in their making, but they are fundamentally not democratic. We did not vote for Bill Gates; we didn‘t all sit down one day and agree that we should only use his operating system and we should pay for it just however much he thinks is right . . . The logic of business is coercion, monopoly, and the destruction of the weak, not ”choice“ or ”service“ or universal affluence.
Meeting an author is, of course, not the same thing as reading one. I liked Frank a lot, but both in person and on the phone, it was clear to me that he is a specialist who has spent a lot of time thinking about a few major topics but feels uncomfortable when asked to step outside his chosen intellectual domain. In my no doubt incoherent way, I threw a lot of things at him in the interest of opening things up. I asked him about his childhood and upbringing and family; I asked him what he thought about France, whose leading newspaper he has written for and whose government implements many of the policies he advocates here; I asked him if he had noticed that publications edited by Republicans are sometimes more hospitable to opposing viewpoints than leftist ones; I asked him if he had read his fellow Chicagoan, novelist Saul Bellow.
Frank’s responses were rarely illuminating. He said that he had read half a Bellow novel, but immediately put in that he had serious problems with Bellow‘s friend Allan Bloom, a predictable leftist response. He admired certain things about France but was quick to reassure me that he is first and foremost an American, as if that were ever in doubt. He had not noticed my point about conservative publications, even though he contributes to The Wall Street Journal. And he felt extremely awkward talking about himself beyond offering that his father is an engineer, that he was on his high school debating team, that he grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, and that he has always been interested in history. ”The past isn’t even past,“ he told me, quoting Faulkner. ”The past is with you every day.“
Well, fair enough, I suppose. Lots of people feel uncomfortable talking about themselves, and no doubt there are plenty of other Chicago novelists Frank has read with great care. (One of the nice things about the Baffler is that, alongside the sociological stuff, it also prints good fiction and poetry.) Still, I felt a little disappointed. It‘s more fun when intellectuals mix it up a bit -- in the spirit of Norman Mailer, say, who called himself a ”Left Conservative“ when he ran for mayor of New York, made fabulous speeches, got drunk, proposed that the East Village be turned over to acid freaks, and lost. But perhaps Mailer’s not the best example.
”It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,“ wrote Oscar Wilde. Sitting across from Frank at the restaurant, I saw a formally dressed, bespectacled young man who in many ways seems quite conservative but who is intent on viewing absolutely everything from a leftist viewpoint. So far, Frank has managed to leaven his sometimes doctrinaire writing with a satirical overlay that crosses political boundaries and has the great distinction of being definite about things in an indefinite time. But a bit more flexibility would be nice.
After lunch, I drove Frank to the KPFK radio station in North Hollywood, where he was interviewed about his book by Marc Cooper. ”He‘s just so wonderful!“ exclaimed a KPFK worker who apparently had not known of him before. Several hours later, he gave a reading at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, before an impressively large crowd. Frank was nervous, and drank a lot of water -- ”It just tastes so good!“ he joked, advertising-style -- but he was definitely a hit. There were lots of questions, and there would have been more but he had to leave for the airport. This time, someone from KPFK was giving him a ride.
When I got home, I told my wife, who reads the Baffler, that Frank had been dressed in an incredibly formal-looking pinstripe suit. ”Oh, he probably got it in a thrift store,“ she said.
