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Finding meaning in an economic crisis.
Like anyone, I have an immediate and direct interest in all the economic upticks and downturns. Food, gas, housing — we’re all in this together.
However, from a dramatic point of view, I have an even keener interest. Reading the financial pages from any random day over the past six months is akin to stumbling into a Russian novel: the plot twists and reversals almost too severe and absurd and far-reaching to follow. But fascinating nonetheless.
What I find particularly bizarre, however, is how surprised everyone seems to be. First, an admission: As anyone who knows me can tell you, once the talk turns to derivatives, we might as well be discussing agricultural practices of the ancient Mayans, in Mayan.
Nevertheless, for the past four years, every time I traveled to Los Angeles, at some point during a lull in editing, conversation would turn to the housing market. To paraphrase, it almost always ran something very like this:
“What’s going on with housing?”
“Still going up.”
“Still?”
“Yep.”
“Who’s going to buy them?”
“Don’t know.”
“What’s the market?”
“Don’t know.”
“When I flew in, all you could see were huge swaths
of five-bedroom homes going up in the desert.”
“I know.”
“In the desert!”
“It’s all desert.”
“But hours outside of L.A.!”
“Yep.”
“How much they going for?”
“Millions.”
“Millions? Who’s going to buy them?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long can they keep it up?”
“Every year, I say the same thing … ”
“This is the year?”
“This is the year.”
“But it never is?”
“It isn’t yet.”
Until now, of course. Because of course, it had to stop. And I wasn’t surprised in the least. And as I have already pointed out, my interest in economics runs principally to its ability to shed light on the human condition: our strengths, weaknesses, vices, virtues, failings, blah, blah, blah, storyteller stuff.
But storytellers are arrogant; they like resolution, they like to believe that stories illuminate by lending logic where none previously existed. Why did Charles Foster Kane build an empire and then collapse into a pathetic, wizened heap? Because his innocence, as symbolized by his childhood sled, Rosebud, was bartered away like a broken-down bike. That may be too simple, childishly simple, but it made for a good story and an even better movie.
And yet, within this current financial crisis, I see no logic, no Rosebud. Greed? Since when are we not greedy? That’s abstract, so abstract it possesses no meaning. A good storyteller needs specifics. Where’s the injury, the psychological failing, the emotional shortcoming, the key to unlocking our fervent belief that we could run headlong into a brick wall and return unbroken, not bloodied, bruised or even scratched?
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about one night when I was traveling abroad: small pub, no more than 15 feet by 15 feet; a bar ran down one side, and six tiny tables filled up the rest of the room. There was a long handwritten list of beers on offer, and an even longer handwritten list of whiskeys. However, most interesting was the food: just a few olives and nuts until, around 8 p.m., a woman entered from the front carrying a large ceramic pot — that night’s special, homemade stew. As you can imagine, it was excellent and I soon surmised that the cook was the wife of the owner, who was also the bartender.
Immediately, I thought, why haven’t I ever been to a place like this before? The why quickly became apparent, however, as I retold the story to people back home: What’s your overhead? How do you make any money? Code violations. You need more variety in drinks. More variety in food. And so on and so on until I became completely convinced: You’re right, I thought, this is a business plan that could never make sense in America.
But in light of the recent financial downturns, I’ve started to wonder anew: Does it make sense now? And if it does make sense now, does this signal a kind of sea change? Is this a moment when bright, educated, talented, reasonable people see more value in operating a small corner pub, or farm, or theater, or shop, or — as I recently read in The New York Times — one of America’s first domestic prosciutto concerns than they do in flipping houses that eventually can no longer be flipped?
If so, as a storyteller, I’d say that this is significant, that making something useful, immediately useful, even with thinner profit margins, is a good way to go, perhaps the best way to go. What does this mean for the logic of our story? Who knows? But maybe, just maybe, that five-bedroom house in the desert is our Rosebud. In this case, however, losing it will not have been tragic; it will have been redemptive.
