What Is This “Economy” I Hear So Much About?

Donald Trump delivering his first State of the Union address

Twenty years ago, I was an outspoken Republican who hated Bill Clinton. You name it, I hated it: his wag-the-dog military policies, his sententious preaching about ethical responsibilities, his well-documented womanizing. The man just got under my nails. My fellow Republicans and I had a stock response whenever he did something we considered horrible, we trotted out the same response: “But at least the economy’s doing good!” *eyeroll*

Imagine my surprise, two decades later, after my politics shifted, seeing Democrats trotting the same response to Donald Trump. He accepts credit for the lowest unemployment rate since, ahem, Bill Clinton, and the lowest Black male unemployment rate ever, and Dems roll their eyes. The economy apparently falls second to whatever moral and ethical issues we consider paramount. And by “We,” I mean whatever party doesn’t control the White House.

The economy provides a shield for whomever has power. The Clinton Administration saw unemployment dip below five percent for the first time in twenty years. The Trump Administration stands poised for the lowest unemployment rate since Lyndon Johnson. Everything is good, right? Yet my rent hasn’t been on time in over a year, I cannot afford to save for retirement or even dinner out, and Walmart remains America’s largest employer.

So what is this mythical “economy” I hear so much about?

Following Trump’s first State of the Union speech, the National Association of Manufacturers paid to push a Twitter hashtag, #YearWon, purporting that Trump’s first year marks some high of market analytics. Record High Manufacturing Output! the accompanying video touts. 16,000 New Manufacturing Jobs Each Month! The video doesn’t cite sources, because it isn’t fundamentally about facts; it’s about ginning support from the already convinced.

All economic reports swing according to two variables: what factors economists consider noteworthy, and what information economists have. Economist Lorenzo Fioramonti writes that standard GDP measures, which aggregate the very rich and highly productive together with the furloughed and poor, are always outdated, possibly by years. And John C. Médaille writes that calculating market inputs always involves what economists call “imperfect information.” Which is exactly what it sounds like.

The #YearWon push assumes high output and hiring equal improved conditions for workers. But neither number correlates with actual pay. Ramping up hiring, without a concomitant increase in wages, results in more poorly-paid peons. Without revenue and autonomy, simple hiring is basically serfdom. And productivity, measured with dollar signs, tells us only what corporations receive, not what they share with actual workers.

Bill Clinton delivering the 1996 State of the Union address

Low unemployment is desirable, obviously. More people working means more people participating in society’s most basic exchanges: buying food with the products of their labors. But simply calling people employed doesn’t mean they’re active in the economy. Most children with Saturday lawn-mowing businesses make enough money to count as, technically, employed. Adults need something more robust to participate in the economy. And the economy needs more from them.

Watching the #YearWon video, it implicitly assumes that increased manufacturing, measured in dollars, naturally caused increased hiring. Yet if America has increased manufacturing, it’s been mostly behind automation. When I worked in the factory, I observed how much of the manufacturing process is controlled by machines. Humans participate only when parts or processes are asymmetrical, requiring two eyes to make informed judgements. Which isn’t very often.

Raw numbers, disaggregated from where the money comes from and where it goes, tell us remarkably little. Adam Smith and Karl Marx, whose conflicting economic visions fueled our last hundred years, both walked into factories (mostly in England) and described what they saw, assigning numerical values and mathematical functions only latterly. They didn’t think their graphs and histograms were reality; they acknowledged they were only attempting to describe.

That’s the mistake I keep seeing contemporary economists making: they think their models prescribe reality, rather than describing it. Models like the supply-demand arc and the Laffer Curve are treated as magic keys that cause economic reactions. This is categorically untrue. Our economy is the actual exchange of labor, goods, and money. If statistical models don’t work, or produce incorrect predictions, then the models are wrong and must be discarded.

In other words, the economy consists of us. White or black, rich or poor, documented or undocumented, we are the economy. And any policies or models that exclude us, with our ethical concerns and lived experiences, are perforce wrong. This isn’t about political parties; both are guilty of magical thinking. It’s about a systemic disdain for ground-level work. Our economy will continue foundering until this problem is resolved.

The Immigrant Dream and the Post-Colonial Nightmare

Sharon Bala, The Boat People: a Novel

A rusty, filth-strewn freighter drops over five hundred Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka on Canada’s west coast. Among these refugees, Mahindan and his six-year-old son hope to create a new life away from the violence that cost them their wife and mother. But the Canadian government fears this ship hides members of the Tamil Tigers separatists, prepared to recruit and attack inside Canada. Soon, these poor, hopeless refugees’ status becomes a global contest of wills.

Sharon Bala’s debut novel couldn’t be more timely, hitting shelves amid such circumstances as the American immigration debate, and Brexit. As first-world superpowers debate what they owe global neighbors, Bala frames their story from the “foreigners” perspective. This ongoing battle develops through three viewpoint characters, all non-white, all outsiders to Canada’s power structure to various degrees. Since this freighter really does shelter terrorists, Bala forces the question: how much injustice is permissible to prevent violence?

Mahindan once believed the peace process would stabilize his homeland. He and his wife dared to open a business and start a family. In flashbacks, we get the episodic story of how Mahindan lost everything, except faith that the future is possible. But in Canada, he finds himself housed in a prison, his son foisted onto strangers, his legal status in permanent limbo. Picked over like an unadoptable puppy, even his faith starts to fade.

Priya Rajasekaran, in her post-law school residency, got picked to aid a veteran immigration lawyer because she’s Sri Lankan. Her mentor basically believes, because she’s brown, she speaks Tamil. But she was born in Canada, daughter of immigrants who wanted to assimilate. She doesn’t understand Tamil language or culture, much less immigration law. Getting dragged through Canada’s sluggish, politically motivated immigration courts provides a harsh education, awakening curiosity about heritage she didn’t know she had.

Grace Nakamura is third-generation Canadian. Her family business got expropriated during the war, but she considers the past a dead letter; she’s worked hard to achieve a trusted position in Canada’s government, and her future remains bright. She starts at the Immigration Review Board just as the politically unpopular refugee freighter case hits. Struggling with both these unwanted “foreigners” and her Westernized children, Grace is unprepared when her elderly mother begins divulging long-lost family history.

Sharon Bala

Bala’s three characters bring three different understandings of immigration, insidership, and the Canadian dream. Each character has dreams, which veteran readers already know will crash on the shoals of reality. The question is, when longed-for future collides with grim present, which will change? Each character also has a past, which we discover incrementally: in Mahindan’s case, though flashbacks, while Priya and Grace must tease personal and ethnic heritage out from evidence and other people’s stories.

Each character also brings an entire ensemble into the story. Mahindan’s fellow refugees have multiple reasons they fled Sri Lanka. Bala teases our expectations, keeping us guessing which is secretly the Tamil Tiger we know is aboard. Priya’s fellow attorneys, aid workers, and volunteers have different reasons they care about immigrants, some more noble than others. In order to do her job, Grace must untangle the morass of ideals and loyalties amid Canada’s entrenched bureaucracy.

Bala’s use of Westernized immigrants brings an interesting spin to post-colonial literature. Where authors like Arundhati Roy or Amitav Ghosh write from the colonized perspective, Bala reminds us that even in a successful country like Canada, with its primarily European cultural heritage, most people’s families came from somewhere else. Though Canada sloughed its directly colonial status in 1867, its history within British dominion colors its constitution today. Though seldom considered as such, Canada is post-colonial.

Therefore, immigrants have distinctive standing within Canada’s social structure: they provide a reminder that Canadian “heritage” is conferred, not innate. Bala depicts ranking politicians channeling, and possibly creating, nativist sentiment to keep these refugees in permanent limbo. Before long, it becomes clear, white Canadians fear these refugees, not because one or two might be dangerous, but because they remind Canadians how tenuous their own grip on citizenship really is. They remind us we’re immigrants, too.

This novel requires readers willing to adjust themselves to Bala’s timing. An immigrant herself, Bala captures the ponderous rhythms of Canadian immigration courts in excruciating detail. But she also captures the human drama behind the superficially joyless procedures. By turns emotionally packed and languid, Bala’s storytelling brings readers through the extremes of her characters’ experience. Not everybody gets what they want, in Bala’s unsentimental world. But she lets us glimpse what her characters really need.

But What's It Like To Survive a Police Shooting?

Robbie Tolan and Lawrence Ross, No Justice: One White Police Officer, One Black Family, and How One Bullet Ripped Us Apart

Police shot Robbie Tolan, in his own driveway, accusing him of stealing his own car. A white officer panicked and shot the black Tolan, in a script so rote, we can probably recite it from memory: misidentification, hasty violence, media uproar, acquittal. Except Robbie Tolan did something few black police shooting victims do: he survived to tell his own tale. Now he figures we’re ready to hear what happened that night, nearly ten years ago.

Tolan lived with his parents on December 31, 2008. The Tolans were one of the few black families living in Houston’s prosperous Bellaire suburb, a community rife with common, but largely undiscussed, frictions between minorities and the police. Driving home from the store in the small hours, a white patrol officer misidentified his car as stolen, skipped verification protocols, and decided to tail the mysterious black driver. The resulting gunpoint confrontation has disturbingly familiar overtones.

Waking in the hospital with a collapsed lung and pulverized liver, Tolan, a committed athlete with a future ahead of him, faced months of rehabilitation just to walk unaided. Many local commentators suggested he should count his blessings that he had any future coming whatsoever, since many youths in his situation became voiceless statistics. Then the online death threats began pouring in, as they do in these situations. This only motivated Tolan to speak out.

This book fits into Tolan’s larger campaign. A regular media figure now, he provides a rare opportunity to witness police shootings from the other side. He’s also fought vigorously to return to baseball, without success. (He remains optimistic within these pages.) He considers himself at war with the Bellaire city government and its police department, a metaphor he uses repeatedly throughout this book, but he refuses to let that war circumscribe him, or his options.

Besides surviving the shooting, Tolan had celebrity on his side. At 23, he was playing baseball for a regional minor-league team, building his career. His father, Bobby Tolan, batted southpaw for the 1967 World Series-winning St. Louis Cardinals. Yeah, people knew the Tolan family. His case became a celebrity cause when Bryant Gumbel interviewed him, an interview made possible by his athletic connections. His poise before the camera, discussing painful circumstances, probably helped his cause.

Robbie Tolan

In a fairly unusual move, the grand jury voted to indict Tolan’s shooter on criminal charges, including aggravated assault. Tolan spoils it, so I feel no compunction in sharing: the jury acquitted his shooter. But Tolan also provides an insightful tour of the actual justice system, which shook him, since he only knew it from TV courtroom dramas. He walks us through the banal, frustrating procedures and frank boredom that characterize a real life trial.

Tolan makes a subtle, sophisticated witness. His descriptions are earthy, sensory-based, and salted with just enough vulgarity to keep cynical readers engaged. (One wonders how much that owes to Tolan’s ghostwriter, Lawrence Ross, an experienced journalist and media professional.) But he also describes how his family’s religious faith kept them anchored during his ordeals: they didn’t just fight injustice because Robbie suffered it, but because God gave them strength to keep speaking truth to power.

Other authors have attempted to situate recent police violence against African Americans in a larger context. Matt Taibbi’s recent biography of Eric Garner, for instance, is more about Garner’s world than Garner himself. But that’s mainly because most high-profile victims of police violence don’t survive to tell their own stories, and many who do lack the eloquence demanded by today’s media-saturated environment. Even Eric Garner’s survivors admit, he was a lunky guy, no media superstar.

Robbie Tolan, by contrast, has both an athlete’s strength and a media professional’s poise. Even before this book, he’d become a veteran interviewee, speaking both for himself and for African Americans generally. Therefore, this book spends less time than others on the black experience context. Tolan occasionally cites statistics and scholarly studies about police violence and the resulting blowback, for example, police officers on trial. But throughout, he keeps the narrative focused on his experience.

This book presents the longing for justice, not as an abstract philosophical concept, but as the lived experience of one man who simply wanted to drive home. How readers respond to Tolan’s story will probably reflect what the believed going in, as all such recent discussions have mostly done. Yet it provides a needed antidote to either formal stats-driven journalism or informal finger-pointing. Robbie Tolan makes clear, this is his own story, personal and important.

Just Another Beatnik Teacher Comedian

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 10
Taylor Mali, Conviction

You’ve probably already read Taylor Mali’s poetry without realizing it. His centerpiece poem, “What Teachers Make,” has circulated online since the heyday of e-mail trees and webrings, frequently bowdlerized. But Mali, who paid his dues on New York’s poetry slam circuit, never wrote his poetry for book readers; he’s always been a performer first. Perhaps that’s why he’s released more audio recordings than books. Or maybe it’s because he’s a top-range performer.

Chicago poet Marc Smith invented Poetry Slam, but if you attend any modern slam and listen to the sarcastic humor and rapid-fire patter that tends to win, most slammers clearly want to be Taylor Mali. This album, compiling live presentations of his most significant work, reveals why. Several poems on this recording also appear in his book What Learning Leaves, but Mali has a compelling presence as a performer that you can only savvy when you hear his voice.

Audiences listening to performance poets ask two important questions: Is the poetry any good? And does the performer carry the work effectively? As a poet, Taylor Mali writes in an easygoing vernacular style. He doesn’t use the inscrutable metaphors and weird juxtapositions favored by MFA programs and awards panels. Though he certainly uses heightened language, his verse nevertheless has a plain-English conversational quality that doesn’t require a postgraduate degree to follow.

His poetic structure comes across in titles like “Falling In Love Is Like Owning a Dog,” or “Silver-Lined Heart.” Like Mali’s verse itself, these titles involve metaphors which have depth, but don’t require unpacking. We understand what they mean, though as Mali investigates them further, we increasingly understand what he means by them. As poetry, they aren’t difficult, but they reward the audience’s willingness to follow Mali on a nuanced inner journey.

In performance poetry circles, Mali sometimes gets stereotyped as a poet who writes about his teaching career. Considering the widespread influence of “What Teachers Make” (included on this collection), this isn’t unfair. But only five out of twenty-three poems on this album, including one hidden track, are about teaching. Four are about being a poet, four are about his father, and four are by other poets, featuring Mali as a member of the performance ensemble.

Taylor Mali

Mali has a distinctive baritone voice, accentuated by his performance style, which we could generously describe as “in on the joke.” He avoids common poetry slam affectations of offbeat pauses and strange, syncopated emphases. He doesn’t fear to laugh, just slightly, at his own jokes, especially on willfully humorous poems like “I Could Be a Poet” or “Totally Like Whatever.” His performance feels like a friend, inviting you to share the passionate hobby he’s spent years perfecting.

Many people encountering Taylor Mali for the first time comment upon his humor. If your high school English was anything like mine, the emphasis on somber tone and portentous themes left you feeling glum. Poetry slam, by its structure, discourages this attitude: because audiences have liberty to boo performers off the stage, performance poets learn to engage the audience’s humor and curiosity. Mali has taken this tendency further than most poets, and become a role model for others.

I'm less keen on Mali’s group pieces, especially two written by Celena Glenn. As the ensemble basically sings acapella behind the poet, Glenn’s voice doesn't carry, and the poetry disappears in a distracting soundscape. This recording also features two poems written by Mali but performed by other poets. They suffer from some lack of direction: one has flat affect, while the other weirdly over-accentuates the poetic foot. I could really have done without these tracks.

But when Mali performs his own work, he shows himself truly a rich artist. His poems run the gamut between  joy, confusion, laughter, grief, and more. Poems like "Labeling Keys," "Voice of America V/O," and "The Sole Bass" put the lie to the slander that slam poetry is shallow and ephemeral: they aren’t Walt Whitman, but they exist on many layers at once and demand just as much contemplation as the poetry you studied in school.

As a reviewer, I’ve grown weary of saying a particular item I’m reviewing isn't for everyone. That certainly isn't the case here. This CD will appeal to a diverse audience whose only criterion is open-mindedness. Like most poetry slams, this album has uneven moments, especially toward the middle of the evening, but overall this may be one of the few poetry collections in many houses that doesn't just sit on a shelf gathering dust.

Indiana Jones in the Temple of Rhyme

Aaron Poochigian, Mr. Either/Or: a Novel in Verse

One sunny weekday, when you’d rather be gallivanting around Manhattan’s privileged haunts, a call comes from your other life. Your Federal Agent handlers require your unique services to recover an ancient artifact. So you pause your daytime undergraduate identity and pursue a mysterious Chinese chest into Gotham’s rankest sewers, literally and metaphorically. But just as you think you’ve escaped this relic’s curse, an even more malevolent fossil threatens to destroy everything New Yorkers hold dear.

Aaron Poochigian is a noted classicist, famed mostly for translating Sappho’s fragments. He’s also published two volumes of his own poetry. So it’s difficult to qualify whether this is his third book, under his own byline, or his sixth. But calling it “a novel in verse” makes it sound more solemn and sententious than it really is. It’s more an Indiana Jones-like pastiche of mid-20th Century pulp potboilers, handled with a poet’s level of care.

Pressed into service, you dive into conflicts that involve alien conspiracies, ancient curses, lingering scars of Western colonialism, and more. In one early scene, you (the narrator insists on the “you” address, though you have multiple aliases) must defend a Chinese jade reliquary from a battle between Maoist insurgents and Latino gangsters, because Manhattan. But you don’t dwell on implications. You aren’t the ruminative type; you’re constantly busy plunging from one high-tension encounter to another.

Poochigian writes with the practiced confidence of a classicist, of someone intimately familiar with time-honored poetic forms because he’s maneuvered them across languages. But poetry, for him, isn’t a dead letter. He uses form because it heightens his story, which, like his shorter verse, is salted with short, punchy vernacular English. It simultaneously does and doesn’t read like conventional poetry:

Business cuts, taupe ties, and muted suits
are shrieking G-men—two more barbered brutes
churned from assembly lines of matching brothers,
each a tool as blunt as all the others.
You’ve always snobbed their brand, detested dashing
douchiness, cursed the smug conspiracy
to fix the markets of what man should be.
Lord look at them, all puff and polish, flashing
badges and sizing up your robot brain….

Most lines rhyme this way, though some parts are written in Saxon-style short, alliterative lines. The shift gives Poochigian’s action scenes real punch.

Aaron Poochigian

Other verse novels I’ve read use poetic language for long, discursive cogitation on important philosophical points; long-form poets think their outsized form gives them permission to write like Homer. Not Poochigian. Calling his storytelling “fast-paced” undersells his turbo-charged cadence. Not only does his story unspool faster than most poets would permit, even most paperback novelists would say “Hey, slow down, dude.” Yet somehow his story always feels quick, never hasty. You decide whether that’s good.

The second-person protagonist of this novel (more like a sequence of linked novellas), has the vocabulary and thought processes of a “C” student at NYU. That is, an average student at a top-flight university. He, you, whatever, has fantasies about chucking everything and becoming a real student, and he romances scholarly types who assist his investigations, in the best James Bond tradition. But time doesn’t permit him to think deeply; he’s a man of action.

This collision between the stately conventions of rhyming verse, and the frenetic exigencies of Poochigian’s story, really sell the tension. Like Indiana Jones, this story isn’t for everyone. I admit, I didn’t initially appreciate Indiana Jones, because I didn’t understand the narrative intent. Like those movies, I struggled to adapt my thinking to Poochigian’s unusual structure. I needed to get several chapters in before I appreciated his form. Some readers won’t give him that chance.

Maybe that’s the message of his title. In opening pages, Poochigian identifies Mr. Either/Or as the hero straddling two worlds, either a student or a secret agent, never quite both. But simultaneously, this book is either an contemporary adventure comedy or a traditional verse epic. And we, the audience, are either willing to follow Poochigian’s journey, or too strung up on formal interpretation. This duality dogs the entire book, forcing us readers to take sides.

So, Poochigian requires readers willing to suspend judgment. That’s not easy for everyone (certainly not me). But, like most of the best poetry, it rewards readers who adjust their rhythms to the verse. It’s just that, where most verse adjusts our rhythms to languid timelessness, Poochigian prefers craggy whirlwind modernity. I don’t think I could do that very often. But I’m glad Poochigian brought me along on his strange, Lovecraftian journey, just this one time.