Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. Risking Old Age in America. Richard J. Margolis. Westview Press, $36.50. "To a nation that runs more on instinct...
...Tao on tap," he calls the massification of hip...
...Show business is such a squid," he writes in the course of a profile of Tiny Tim...
...The worst thing about the recycled sixties blips and collages, which have choked the media during recent anniversaries, is that they lie by sentimentalizing...
...But no reportorial theory or method rises to all occasions, and "struggle for subjectivity" misrepresents what Goldstein actually does...
...Like Social Security, Medicare is a kind river in which all of us swim," Margolis writes...
...of the New Deal generation that a means-tested program inevitably makes for a meanspirited one...
...was proven true...
...Todd Gitlin A Feast for Lawyers: Inside Chapter 11: An Expose...
...American culture is a store window that must be periodically spruced and redressed...
...The distant, Associated Press approach could never in a million cold facts have gotten the story...
...A case in point is his treatment of one Steve Paul, a once-renowned New York club owner, who delivers himself of flawless "epigrammatic gems that go nowhere but look great," like "I refurbished this place by adding myself...
...Most impressive, he has traveled across the country listening to the elderly poor tell how they have been disserved by government programs designed to benefit them...
...The most fragile thing to maintain in our culture is an underground," he wrote from San Francisco in 1967...
...The cop you are likely to meet on the [Sunset .] Strip stands next to his bike like an erection in navy blue...
...Goldstein dryly notes that Paul "watches to see that written down...
...If universal entitlements are now failing the elderly poor—and they certainly are—in the future such programs will become even less effective in reducing poverty among the elderly, unless we find the moral and political courage to aim benefits, in one way or another, away from the affluent and to the needy...
...History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as anthology...
...Operating on its own, subjectivity oversimplifies the story...
...Yet Margolis's conclusion from it is to declare "the natural superiority of universal entitlements—programs for everybody—to means-tested benefits designed exclusively for the poor...
...Likewise, in his most arresting political report, Goldstein recreates his epiphany as a would-be revolutionary, telling how he came to yell "Pigs eat shit...
...Unwin Hyman, $34.95...
...Why not get them more involved in Chapter 11...
...He has gathered telling statistics...
...In his discussion of Medicare, for example, Margolis proposes numerous arguments for why the program should be expanded but never mentions that Medicare is officially projected to become insolvent long before today's middle-aged Americans reach retirement age...
...Richard Goldstein...
...Goldstein has a nice, flamboyant way with phrases...
...As he rails against this "unconstitutional deprivation of property," you begin to suspect that Stein himself may be something of a first-class pain in the patootie...
...In exchange for future protection, the young keep providing for the old, and in time the upstream givers become the downstream takers...
...Alongside the inverted pyramid, we now have the inflated ego, and neither by itself will do...
...The smoothly tailored pseudopersonal voice that fills today's slick magazines might as well be machinemade— a voice devoid of critical selfawareness, a voice as ignorant as it is smug...
...He notes, for example, that "the relatively generous benefits that Congress has made possible over the past generation have done almost nothing for the bottom echelon of Social Security recipients, serving only to widen the gap between the elderly poor and the elderly affluent...
...Oversimple again...
...But instead of searching for effective ways to humanize and streamline the bureaucracy, or for ways to attract greater political support for programs that target the needy, Margolis simply falls back on that cynical clich...
...Margolis's fixation on poverty among today's elderly does serve a useful purpose...
...Inadvertently, they shore up the mainstream belief that sentiment precludes clear thought...
...Indeed, with its highly regressive payroll tax, Social Security may already be pushing as many lowincome workers below the poverty line as it is lifting retirees above it...
...But by neglecting the challenges faced by the next generation of elderly, Margolis lapses into serious errors of logic...
...In the sixties," Goldstein writes in his introduction, "it was easier...
...His company's legal bills for one year of Chapter 11, Stein estimates, exceeded those of a quarter-century of normal operations...
...Thinking about old age as a policy issue brings with it some of the darkest and most uncomfortable emotions that can beset a human being: namely, the absurd injustice that we are all slowly dying, and that most of us can't afford to grow old...
...Far from the "protection" that the bankruptcy law supposedly offers, Stein soon discovers that Chapter 11 has put him at the mercy of greedy lawyers, bumbling judges, and vindictive claimants bent on his destruction...
...Goldstein's own sensibility serves as a resource: his willingness to serve, for a moment, as Paul's foil testifies to the man's powers and gives some insight into how the pop business works...
...Social Security, he goes on to observe, "turns poor wage earners into still poorer beneficiaries...
...As Margolis shows, that's not what our current programs do, yet these programs are already enormously expensive and will become more so as the population ages...
...But his loving subjectivity at least got him close enough to notice that, while Bob Dylan's Mr...
...By now, you're not surprised that this innocent victim has, on page after page, managed to bring out the worst in so many people...
...Eventually, he gets around to slamming his town's zoning board for refusing approval to turn Stein and Day headquarters into a housing development, which would have increased its value as an asset...
...In this "madhouse rather than a place of healing," which is how Stein comes to view Chapter 11, the only real winners are the judicial bureaucrats and, of course, the lawyers, who are cynically padding fees all along, the only skill at which they truly excel...
...His beat was rock, hip culture, widening out to movement politics on the left...
...Today's young, when they are old, will have paid in throughout their working lives at ever higher rates, and Medicare will probably go broke before they retire, according to virtually all experts in the field...
...Stein and Day Publishers, after it was forced to seek protection from its creditors...
...A new stereotype of the elderly is emerging that holds them all to be affluent greedy geezers...
...What's needed, he argues, is a less combative arena for helping troubled companies figure out how to survive, similar to the no-fault proceedings that have taken some of the useless courtroom bickering out of divorce...
...The facts that passion sees aren't necessarily deeper than the facts that passion screens out...
...Yet Margolis is still persuaded, in the face of this legacy of greed and neglect of the poor, that yielding to the demands of affluent retirees for still more subsidy will somehow relieve the suffering among the needy that he has so well chronicled...
...He demonstrates convincingly, for those who don't already know, that these programs are woefully underfunded, maddeningly complex in their rules, and administered by bureaucrats who are often uncaring and more often incompetent...
...And indeed he is critical of the program...
...Margolis certainly has all the facts he needs to demonstrate the moral, if not the political, failure of Social Security...
...Unfortunately, Margolis doesn't meet the intellectual challenge he recognized would confront him in trying to make sense of America's aging policies...
...It is a triumph of compassionate instinct over intellect that is almost embarrassing to witness...
...Margolis knows enough about the politics of Social Security during the last generation to realize that they have led, as he puts it, to "affluent retirees enjoying a lion's share of the gains...
...But having so diligently reported on the failure of Social Security and Medicare to end poverty among the elderly, Margolis ignores his own evidence and boldly defends spending still more on programs that distribute without regard to need, using arguments that are as tired as they are irrelevant to today's circumstances...
...He has mastered the complex legislative histories of programs like Social Security and Medicare...
...from the steps of the Art Institute during the Chicago Democratic Convention...
...Out of his unabashed love for rock culture, Goldstein distilled the recurrent insight of his collection: in the counterculture, hope and hype were entangled from the start...
...That's why old-style New Journalism cannot be resurrected...
...if a company was in trouble before it sought protection, it's a likely goner afterwards...
...Flower power," he noted as early as 1967, on the occasion of the murder of two Lower East Side freaks, "began and ended as a cruel joke...
...This polemic would be more effective if it weren't for Stein himself...
...But then, that's money that might have gone to creditors or to keeping the business going...
...He has interviewed policy experts...
...In those years, Goldstein proudly unlearned the inverted pyramid journalistic form he had been taught at Columbia, and signed up for what he calls, a bit pompously, "the struggle for subjectivity...
...That is a powerful indictment that many others have made before...
...Subjectivity or objectivity, says this belief: choose one...
...At his best, writing on the transitory promises and lasting inanities of pop culture, Goldstein finds his way into some of his characters—and then extricates himself just in time...
...Goldstein could have made the point that it was the straight press—playing by the self-made rule that what newsworthy people say is automatically news—that was most easily gulled...
...the disease...
...Most of us probably know as much as we need to know about the demographics of aging," he opines early on, and then just marches away from the subject, as if the aging of the population had no relevance to the policy prescriptions he offers...
...Phillip Longman Reporting the Counterculture...
...The freak culture of the hypothetical new age, Goldstein reminds us, had barely arrived in the Garden of Eden before it went into free Fall...
...M. Evans & Co., $18.95...
...The whole process has nothing to do with restoring his company to health or even with getting the best deal for his creditors...
...Once he gets up a full head of outrage, he complains about everything, even that law firms play music over their telephones while they put him on hold...
...Stein suffered...
...Certainly many frail, low-income seniors could be kept out of costly nursing homes if we did a better job of helping them cope with daily routines such as shopping, cooking, and, yes, home repairs...
...Already there are turnaround experts who specialize in bringing companies back...
...The lawyers collected for his sins...
...But why younger Americans, the vast majority of whom don't even own homes, should pay extra taxes so that millionaires can fix up their mansions Margolis never explains...
...When he buries that doubt, what he gets is one shallow fact after another, as in some unmemorable reportage of the 1968 Columbia University uprising, or blind rage, as in an uncritical report of the 1971 Marin County trial of Ruchell Magee and Angela Davis for the killing of a judge and the maiming of a prosecutor in an attempted prison escape...
...Margolis is very good at identifying real needs, but his solutions would surely hurt the needy most of all, at least in the long run...
...It's a noble and poetic thought, but one that we have no right to believe...
...The solution is anybody's guess, but certainly ignoring the need for one won't make it go away...
...Jones may not have understood what was happening, he was already figuring out how to package it...
...As girths widen and hairlines recede, reporters in their thirties and editors in their forties have revived the days when tie-dyed giants in long hair stalked the earth...
...This thoughtlessness about the future leads to all sorts of fuzzy sentiment...
...But tactics that worked in the sixties today have curdled into the automatic and mindless first person or the canned eccentricity of a Geraldo Rivera...
...His writing comes alive when he sees with binocular vision: one eye watching the scene, the other watching himself, each eye wide open...
...This "bizarre camaraderie between the fourth estate and the fifth dimension" was rampant...
...In reading his pieces about the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison, even about a hack songwriter named John Kramer, what's clear is that Goldstein succeeded in tracking rock music across American culture precisely because he loved and felt rock music...
...What purports to be a case study of three companies that filed for Chapter 11 is mostly an anguished personal account of what happened to the author's own company...
...To a nation that runs more on instinct than on intellect," Margolis writes in the conclusion of his book, "elderly poverty may be the sternest cerebral challenge of all...
...Still, in the end, the point is made: Chapter 11 is a cure that's often deadlier than...
...to sparkle and sass than to expose what lay beneath—in my case, doubt...
...He even calls for all seniors, rich and poor alike, to be provided with a handyman, who would perform subsidized home repairs...
...Margolis was apparently driven to this conclusion by his reporting on the horrors of Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, and other meanstested programs for the elderly...
...Nor does he explain how we will provide such expensive services to the needy if we squander so many resources on the rich...
...Subjectivity is still a subversive act," he writes today...
...Now that many reporters have adopted the spiteful kvetch as their voice, the question isn't whether subjectivity in journalism is a good idea, but what kind...
...John Rothchild...
...Today's old, when they were young, didn't contribute to Medicare because the program didn't exist...
...As Stein stands to address one of his least-favorite lawyers with "Mr...
...As Goldstein perceptively writes, the techniques of New Journalism "were refined at the moment when we first began to grapple with the power of mass media to standardize experience, and its embrace of subjectivity was an attempt to resist this processed consensus...
...Sol Stein...
...No sooner does a new tribe of rebels skip out, flip out, trip out, and take its stand, than photographers from Life magazine are on the scene doing a cover...
...In the end, the poor man and his wife (she's Day) lose everything...
...At least put a cap on the legal fees...
...The truth is that "the struggle for subjectivity" was won, but the war was lost...
...But it doesn't follow, as Margolis's own reporting unambiguously shows, that our non-means-tested programs have been of any greater benefit to the poor...
...One virtue of the best of Richard Goldstein's Village Voice pieces of 1966-1971, now brought to life between hard covers, is their reminder that partisanship and insight need not cancel each other out...
...The last laugh belongs to the mediamen, who chose to report a charade as a movement...
...As America grows older, the real cerebral challenge before us is how to persuade more middle-class Americans that it's a good idea to support government programs that will actually insure them against poverty in old age...
...And certainly, as the population ages, any program that distributes benefits on the basis of seniority alone will impose even greater burdens on younger taxpayers while also having to spread its benefits more thinly among the swelling ranks of the elderly...
...If you take a sassy Voice style, freeze it into the form of the pop profile, add a lot of money and 20 years, you get Vanity Fair...
...The publishing company is sold off for a pittance, perfectly saleable books are prohibited from being sold, the authors have no recourse, the creditors are shortchanged, everyone involved has wasted time and money on silly motions and hearings, and Stein is a pitiable wreck who can't even cash a check at the grocery store...
...Borri, when you've been in Who's Who for 30 years you can talk to me that way and not until then," you may even feel a stirring of sympathy for his numerous enemies...
...But the flip side of flip is glib, and Goldstein does succumb...
...Churchmen and social workers in mufti eyed each other suspiciously like rival CIA agents assigned to the same cell," he writes of a Haight Ashbury meeting...
...Having committed himself ideologically to the "natural superiority" of universal entitlements, Margolis goes on to propose, for example, that every retiree in America be entitled to free home care—or in other words, a free nurse, maid, and cook...
...Because old age is such a vulnerable time of life for virtually everyone, I believe the challenge can be met—but only if we recognize that it exists...
...that is certainly not true, as Margolis ably proves...
...If the whole Chapter 11 setup is based on the premise that it ought to be a punishment for people who can't pay their bills, then it works...
...In the Reagan years and even before, that clich...
...Why elderly poverty is a bigger brain-twister than, say, childhood poverty, Margolis doesn't say, but sure enough it's a tough subject...
...Today's American culture borrows energies— and bogeymen—from bygone times more successfully than it generates its own...
Vol. 21 • December 1989 • No. 11
