Years of Poems and Spirits

I can’t help but to sing praise to the movie District 9. Upon knowing how old the director (Neill Blomkamp) is, I was very impressed. The kid certainly has wisdom beyond his 30 years. Of course, he is from South Africa. Still, being able to distill an almost biblical human sin into a short movie, he’s got talent.

The reason it moved me so much is that it says so much about we Socio-sapiens. There is an exclusive impulse that is innate to us, not unlike the territorial instincts in beasts from who we evolved. But now that we did evolve and call ourselves creature-of-sapience, we therefore have to invent so many words and so much pretense to cover up our beastly inner-self, in order to carry on whatever brutality without a guilty conscience.

In fact, we don’t need a whole lot words in order to achieve that. One is enough, and that is the word ”alien”. Besides direct citations such as ”illegal alien”, there are other synonyms such as “terrorists”, “rogue nation”, and in an earlier ear, “the Communists”.

Once a collection of people is attached with the “alien” (or alien-alike) label, the cruelty, the violence, and the suppression of humanity directed toward them is henceforce justified. Such a pattern permeates time and space, so much so that I can pick out stories like this easier than picking the blackberries in my backyard in late August.

I grew up in Shanghai where people from Subei (and their descendants) were considered second class. If something goes wrong involving a native and a Subei-ren, it is without question the fault of the latter. On a more grand scale, the Old Testament is an epic tale of God-Man collaboration of alienizing “the other”. A more secular story, from a different angle, tells a similar belief. My father told me that when Deng Xiaoping visited the U.S. in the late 1970s, he hugged and kissed the girls greeting him at the tarmac. This simple gesture apparently left a deep impression with Jesse Helms who said something like: a Commie can do that?

Having observed endless stories like such, I found District 9 a very powerful rendition of who we are. In this case, Blomkamp stripped all the pretense and left the story to a bare-bone scenario—what if we are to live with aliens? Not the illegal immigrants, not people who speak different languages or practice different customs, or of different skin color or sexual preference. But real aliens.

More to the point: what if the reality–however it was lead to or sustained–offers us plenty of excuses to despise them. And we have the power to dispense them too. What do we do? The main character, Wikus van de Merwe, however cheerful, is a bureaucrat-henchman: he has no strong sense of right-or-wrong. If he had problem with soldiers carrying too much ammo it is because making-a-scene would hurt his career growth. Once at work, he is courageous, effective and even creative (as he improvised ways to get around the problem of the Prawns don’t know how to sign their names). So he is the perfect executioner of our collective judgment. The fact that the aliens have feelings like us–the desire to procreate, caring for their young and grieving for their dead–does not bother him at all. In a way, Blomkamp portrays John Yoo better than Yoo himself would recognize.

The movie didn’t try to come up with an answer. That is another reason I like it. It is hard to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. Sometimes I wish I could lose a few pounds or to grow more muscles. But in the end, I have to live with the image in the mirror. To give the movie a wishy-washy ending would have ruined it altogether.

1. Feel somewhat vindicated when I saw Time’s “Decade from Hell” soon after I posted the last entry on the gloomy 00’s. One thing I forgot to add: the constant talk of Global Warming–just another example of how pervert scientific advancement feels in this decade. Sometimes I wonder how I would look back at the last 10 years when I am really old. It was exciting, but what does it mean?

2. Liked Krugman’s idea about taxing financial transactions, a.k.a., the Tobin tax. Tobin thinks such a tax will “throw some sand in the well-greased wheels” of speculation. Keywords: “well-greased”–the Monetarists always compared credit to “engine oil fir the economy”. And “speculation”. It is a word few mentioned in the current debate. But during the Depression Era, it was the received wisdom that excess speculation was what caused the Wall Street crash and the subsequent economic melt-down.

Now we do have a much more sophisticated understanding of why we should not use the S word as a catch-all phrase to describe all financial activities. Yet I am still at a loss at why people are not seeing the obvious: whatever the apologists say, there are speculations that are so rotten and everyone knows it. By taxing financial transactions–all of them, not just a few, the State can establish a framework within which it regulates an activity with not only economic but profound socio-political importance. I hope one day people will wake and say, hey, credit market is a public asset!

For this reason, I am very disappointed at the makeup of Obama’s economic team. The Monetarists dominate the decision-making (e.g. Geithner, Summers, Bernanke and their supporters vs. the likes of Paul Volcker) in a time their theory is fundamentally questioned. The rise of the Wall Street Gang is closely linked to the rise of the Monetarists.  Yet at a time when the Wall Street is totally discredited, the Monetarists protects them with the same tactics the NRA uses to let drug gangs keep their assault rifles.

3. The question about excessive debt. First read James Surowiecki’s column, soon after heard an interview of an author on private equity. The gist: the tax code that allows deduction on interest payment unintentionally created a debt-happy society. Particularly, the code that applies to business enables LBO. The consequence is that heavy interest payment (vs. flexible dividend) depleted several industries. Something I never really thought about. Thoughts now -

a. If LBO is such a risky proposition, why there are banks still willing to lend money to the buyers (or is junk bond still a viable alternative to bank lending)?

b. Are there industries that, for better or worse, call for this type of attack? E.g. mature industry,  fixed competitive landscape, good cash flow, etc. In other words, are there situations where earnings are better distributed to investors through interest payments than dividends?

c. How do I look at this issue using capital structure theories? e.g. M2 theory? Or they are not related at all?

d. Can I look at national finance using capital structure terms? Say credit/liquidity as equity and public debt as debt? Wish I can catch Jennifer K. in the hall way and ask her that …

What will this decade be remembered for?

50s … that was fun, full of post-War burst of energy. Dow finally recovered from the Great Depression.

60s? Crazy but not short of sparks: feminism, civil rights, anti-poverty … a succession of promises of a fairer, more just future.

70s? That is probably comparable to the doldrums we live in now. But the post-structuralist ideas boomed and man reached deeper beyond Positivism.

80s, pretty bleak too. Yet there was Said’s Orientalism. In China, that was my Enlightenment Age, epitomized by the 读书 magazine.

90s? That was the high time, tech innovations, the promise of a new economy and new paradigm. If anything, you know your material life will be quite different and exciting in the future.

2000s, Terror plus GWB. The Preemptive War doctrine, the Patriot Act, the renditions, unauthorized domestic surveillance, the great cave-in to the Executive Power by the other two branches.  And now the financial crisis that put the entire legacy of Economic Man on trial. In the tech field, it is full of echoes of popping false promises (social networking), dark prediction of new breakthroughs (brain scan, bio-engineering, gene altercation, etc.) or incessant chatter from a narcissistic crowd.

If Evolution is as what Jay Gould suspected–a cyclical pattern of bursts and slumps, I suspect human thoughts goes the same. And I feel like living in the Dark Age nowadays.