A Short History of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Told in Quotations from Some of Its Greatest Citizens

by A. S. Hamrah

“We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”
-John Winthrop

“The noble craftsmen we promote,/Disown the knave and fool;/Each honest man shall have his vote,/Each child shall have his school.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Boston is an oasis in the desert, a place where the larger proportion of people are loving, rational and happy.”
-Julia Ward Howe

“Our country is the world-our countrymen are all mankind.”
-William Lloyd Garrison

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
-Henry David Thoreau

“In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

“For what Pericles said to the Athenians has long been true of this Commonwealth: ‘We do not imitate-for we are a model to others.’”
-John F. Kennedy

“Everywhere/giant finned cars nose forward like fish;/a savage servility/slides by on grease.”
-Robert Lowell

“Boston-spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming-has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade. Now, one supposes it is all over at last.”
-Elizabeth Hardwick

“Because I could not stop for Death,/He kindly stopped for me.”
-Emily Dickinson

“I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck.”
-Scott Brown

A. S. Hamrah is the film critic for n+1 and has a piece in the latest issue of The Baffler.

Tom Scocca: You are familiar with the “Free for All” page of the Saturday Washington Post?
Choire Sicha: Ha, vaguely.
Tom Scocca: In which serious complaints about the paper are mixed willy-nilly with letters from cranks, in a great condescending gesture of false responsiveness?
Choire Sicha: Indeed.
Tom Scocca: So they got three letters about Haiti coverage-one rebuking them for calling a rescue “something like a miracle” rather than “a miracle,” one criticizing them for hunting up someone to defend Rush Limbaugh’s comments, and one, at the top, saying it is unfair to call people in Haiti looters.
Tom Scocca: “These people are scavengers doing important and dangerous work to feed their struggling community, not pillaging looters. Put yourself in their shoes before you label them.”
Choire Sicha: Uh oh.
Tom Scocca: Accompanied by a photo and caption: “Scavengers scramble away Tuesday with goods stolen from a building that collapsed in Port-au-Prince.”
Choire Sicha: Hoo boy.
Tom Scocca: It’s nice to see that amid all the sloppy and incompetent handling of copy that the Free for All page has been permitting readers to note, week after week (“2 SE men found fatally shot by police”), someone at the understaffed paper had time to carefully compose a photo caption to be as insulting as possible to the letter-writer and to the Haitian earthquake victims.
Choire Sicha: Man.
Tom Scocca: What did Don Graham say? “If you want to join Mr. Sherman and judge the Post, I suggest you read this morning’s paper-and tomorrow’s, and the day after’s.”
Tom Scocca: OK, Mr. Graham! I’m judging!

You know what the Internet does? It takes fun things and makes them ugly. This morning’s Twitter trending topic, “#doesntmeanyourblack,” is now the subject of inter- and intra-racial warfare over grammar.

*HIDES*

Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden will not run for his father’s old Senate seat, because he’s really busy with the Attorney General thing and also Democrats are never going to win another election again.

When London hosts the Olympics in 2012, athletes at the highest level of their sports will be competing in a stadium constructed out of recycled knives and guns. And this is not a new thing for Knifecrime Island: Recycled weaponry is frequently “melted down and used in the structures of bridges and buildings, as well as in car and train production” and also winds up in photo frames and jewelry. Even the very crown that rests upon the monarch’s head was made from old Robbins of Dudley push daggers. Prince Charles is PART SWITCHBLADE. They like knives, is what I’m saying.

The Obama administration-now in frantic populist make-up mode-may be pondering beefed-up regulation of the banking industry, but the titans of Wall Street finance are plainly in no mood to be fenced in. Not only did investors pull a major funk last week, putatively thanks to their skittishness over the White House’s antibanking posturing, but Manhattan’s monied class is primed to get frisky once more in the luxe consumer marketplace, according to New York Times Sunday Styles correspondent Laura M. Holson. It’s bonus season, and for all the high dudgeon finance moguls affect to feel over their D.C. victimhood, their generous federal bailouts have put them back decisively in the pink (if not the black, strictly speaking); Morgan Stanley plans to reward its employees with average (which means, highly top-skewed) annual bonuses of $235,000, while Goldman Sachs plans to kick in on a $489,000-per-employee basis.

However, the de facto motto for this round of bonus binging appears to be “but softly.” The lesson that the power elite took away from last year’s allegedly endemic populist rancor was the prospect that “mobs with torches would descend on their gated estates.” So as bonus-flush bankers pour forth into the Hamptons real-estate, market, say, they move with the reticent mien of an abashed adult-cinema patron in the Times Square of old.

“Don’t ask him to talk about it, because he won’t,” says Diane Saatchi, an agent with Saunders and Associates, about a bank executive who just coughed up $4.9 million for a Hamptons spread. “They don’t want anyone to know they’re buying”-including, it seems, the banker’s own extended family, since he “is worried they will ask him for money.”

That disclaimer serves as a not-so-subtle reminder that much more is at play here than populist outrage-what propels our lords of finance to reward their labors so lavishly is something that a less jaundiced outlet than Sunday Styles might call indecent greed, to the plain exclusion of our culture’s supposed noble fealty to kin and kith. You pick up the same unseemly undercurrent of licentious gelt-lust in the testimony of an unnamed banker’s wife, who huffs from one side of her mouth that “Everybody wants someone to blame and rich people are an easy target,” while enthusing from the other that “it is a good time to buy” in the vacation-home market, since distressed sellers abound; she points approvingly to a financial-executive chum who picked up a sweet Vermont haven in a pre-foreclosure fire sale.

One wishes that Holson, or better yet a trained psychological professional, could take this confused soul aside to explain that the reason rich people make for an “easy target” in the present climate is that they seem to be missing the compassion gene-the small inner voice that might suggest that it’s not right to exult in profiting from others’ misfortune, particularly when the industry you run had a direct hand in making that misfortune happen.

Still, Manahattan’s sizable high-end retail sector relies on the guiltless circulation of just this brand of pelf, so its lead merchants have some pointers for skittish finance moguls experimenting with discretion for the first time. Saks Fifth Avenue general manager Suzanne Johnson, for instance, points to one banker who came in with his wife a month ago to size up a $5,000 pair of earrings-only to have the banker come in solo recently to scoop them up. This, Johnson, suggests is a case study in time-delayed indulgence: “They are turning ‘looking’ into an ‘impulse buy.’ It is about inner self-gratification rather than letting people know how rich you are.”

That’s making a great deal, it seems to me, out of what might simply be a disorganized or overscheduled pair of turbo-shoppers. Besides, it’s far from clear how the pricey baubles in question showcase “inner self-gratification”-unless, say, one were to earmark them only to be worn on special yoga-spa getaways.

Still, however tortured the rationales may be, Saks is clearly hellbent on packaging luxe consumer junkets more or less on the downlow-next month, for example, Johnson says the store is hosting an event at its Kiton’s men’s boutique timed to bonus season that will market made-to-order suits, which can run north of $20,000. The idea, she says, is to capitalize-discreetly-on the collective impatience with “frugal fatigue” among the pecuniary elite.

Of course, “frugal fatigue” remains a luxury unto itself, in an economy that’s placed finance bailouts well ahead of anything resembling an industrial policy or viable long-term job growth; my own household, for instance, is perilously close to “no income” status.

So forgive me my little recherche neo-populist outbursts-and for the suggestion that if these abashed Wall Street plutocrats really want some inner self-gratification, they could always park a big chunk of their bonuses in Haiti. Or Detroit. (If nothing else, that way they can rest assured that their families are unlikely to get their hands on their dosh there, either.) The most efficient way to disaccumulate your surplus income without dread public stigmas, after all, is to try to get out of the habit of buying shit that provides an objective basis for social embarrassment.

Chris Lehmann would be content with a hand-up.

The single greatest real estate transaction failure came to pass overnight, with Tishman Speyer actually giving up crazy purchase Stuyvesant Town instead of filing for bankruptcy. Now, the property was entirely a lended and borrowed deal, though everyone talks “Speyer this” and “Speyer that.” Of the $5.4 billion raised, Tishman Speyer only put up $112 million, and for some reason I don’t understand, there was also $56 million as well from Mr. Jerry Speyer and his goodlookin’ son. (Why bother? They clearly weren’t good for much more.) Their pals in the real estate wing at BlackRock, the immense investment management services, scraped together $3 billion in secured debt and another $1.4 billion in mezzanine loans from everyone around the world pretty much. Everyone wanted in on this trough! Reading the Times, Reuters and the Post this morning, however, no one actually names pretty much any of the huge number of creditors who were defaulted on earlier this month and who, yes, now own Stuyvesant town. Hey, who’s your landlord? The creditors include basically everyone everywhere: Winthrop Realty Trust, SL Green Realty Corp and/or Gramercy Capital Corp… and around the world it goes! Deutsche Genossenschafts-Hypothekenbank AG! Hartford Financial Services Group! Allied Irish Banks Plc! Oh right: you know, those suckers that are the state of Florida.

It’s amusing watching people flip out about the New York Times article on the weblog Little Green Footballs and its proprietor, Charles Johnson. (For those who have lives, LGF was pretty insanely right-wing, or at least, crazy, and now is sort of moderate, I guess.) “Chuckie is getting mainstream coverage when his influence and his traffic are guttersnipe low,” writes birth-certificate-questioning Pamela Geller at her blog, Atlas Shrugs. Oh really.

While LGF has definitely shed (presumably) conservative readers over the last two years, and certainly hasn’t entirely replaced them with whatever its intended audience is now, what about Pamela’s recent traffic v. LGF?

The other thing is: these people (from Pamela Geller to Michelle Malkin to the Jeff Jarvis of old) have been nattering on and tearing at each other online for pretty much a decade now. Why haven’t they done anything to defeat their mortal enemies, the horrible Islamofascist menace? Why have they failed America’s security system? They’re pretty busy, is part of the problem. This summer brings Geller’s book, “The Post-American Presidency; The Obama Administration’s War on America.” What does she believe? This: “A Muslim population from Africa moving freely into Europe threatens America.” And: “[I]nternationalism is already destroying what has made Europe free and great. And now Mr. Obama seems to want to do the same to America.”

So the high school baseball coach who had his players text him upon completion of their masturbation sessions was found guilty Friday. He’s set to be sentenced to prison in April, facing up to 100 years. You get the feeling The Boss won’t be writing a song about this one.

The provenance of this video is unknown, but I don’t care if it’s been all over the Internets already; on a dull and grimy day like this one where you’d rather just pull up the covers and listen to the new Tindersticks record-great, btw-than do anything else, it is a good enough way to start the morning. And the best part is the laughing baby in the background. Sigh. Mondays.