Insomniactive

If Michael Lewis’s stature as the best working business writer needed any burnishing, his Portfolio piece on housing-induced collapse of Wall Street certainly does the trick. Referring to his 1989 classic Liar’s Poker, he sets the stage:

thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

Please, please read Ms. Olsson’s piece about the impact of the April immigration raid on the Pilgrim’s Pride chicken plant in the East Texas town of Mt. Pleasant. This is just absolutely terrific reporting and writing. Bravo.

Peter Schjeldahl’s piece in the New Yorker is the review I would have written after attending the opening of Prospect 1 in New Orleans. That is, if I could write remotely like Peter Schjeldahl:

Be it ever so small and poor, and despite catastrophic displacements, New Orleans can’t help but remain New Orleans, which is to other cities what a poem is to prose. The phantasmagoria of high and vernacular architecture, polyglot flavors, omnipresent music, exuberant cemeteries, and geographical unlikelihood, of a seaport largely below sea level, stokes continual wonderment. Desire isn’t only a street name there. A municipal tradition of giddy impulsiveness, shadowed by recent tragedy and chronic woes—including a high incidence of crime—has got to many of the invited artists in Prospect 1….You may disdain the frequent sentimentality in the show if you can suppress your own uprushes of sentiment. I could not.

The en masse arrival of the art world at the scene of Katrina’s crime produced a series of tableau that not even curator Dan Cameron could have imagined. Our small group beat the crowds to the Lower Ninth Ward on a crackling, breezy fall day, the quiet surrounding Mark Bradford’s signature Ark both heartbreaking and preternatural. A dozen stoop-sitting neighbors eyed us with more curiosity than suspicion; to be sure, ours was the only gleaming black Escalade they’d seen in quite some time. Maybe ever, unless Brad Pitt has an Escalade.

Debbie, our thoroughly native driver, an attractive, forty-something blonde with a swoon-inducing Cajun drawl, apologized for needing the festival-supplied map. It seems Debbie had never visited these parts, even though her own home is not more than 15 minutes away. “Twenty,” she hedged through an embarrassed laugh, “with traffic. ” Parked as we were beside a weed-strewn lot, our vehicle’s air conditioner worthy of a sun-belt Wal Mart, traffic anywhere nearby seemed an unlikely abstraction. The wind made the only sound that our party didn’t.

Then, just up the road, the only evidence that anything like commerce once was conducted here: the vestigial remains of a Long John Silver’s and a KFC, long since abandoned by their YUM Brands ovelords. Was there a grocery store in this neighborhood’s past? A laundromat? No such evidence presented itself, and if the Captain and the Colonel knew, they weren’t talking. A tight-lipped stoicism seemed to attend their recent demotion from quick-serve icons to street-corner relics. Or to the contrary, maybe they had settled nicely into their sinecure, standing silent watch over a neighborhood with few neighbors. In either case, they didn’t seem to want for much, least of all company.

A companion muttered something about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Then, farther over still, the tour buses, their drivers loathe to silence the loud and noxious engines. Not with diesel at three buckas a gallon. Shouted explanations of the installations, halted for translation into a handful of languages. Cell phone cameras raised high. Much Prada and air kissing, as if the scene were the Arsenale or the Shore Club; Pier 92 or the Schaulager rather than Ground Zero of America’s Greatest Natural Disaster. Then, with the tacit and sudden purpose singularity of a fire-ant brigade, back on the bus. Other wards to visit before cocktails back at the Windsor Court.

On each of the abandoned houses, a large, spray-painted X. Each v comprising the X contains a coded fragment of devastation, inconsistently placed: the date the house was searched; number of living found; identity of the search team; and other annotations addressed to no one in particular, e.g. “2 dogs ded undr porch.”

I asked Debbie about the difference in elevation between the French Quarter and the Lower Ninth; between moldy, fetid inconvenience and the death of a way of life. “Ten feet,” came her quick, terse reply, fashionable sunglasses pointed resolutely forward. Debbie’s answer was the stuff of received wisdom, not approximation. She had pondered the deeper meaning of those ten feet many times. “Look,” she said simply, directing my gaze to the high-water mark near the top of a very tall stop sign.

Said curator Cameron to critic Schjeldahl, and probably to dozens of others: “I’m a tourism promoter.” Perhaps that’s what I was while in New Orleans-a tourist. Nonetheless, I felt like something else entirely: a voyeur? Maybe. But this profoundly odd day was both more and less than voyeurism, both more pleasurable and more shame-inducing. I’m left with a feeling, six weeks later, which I can no more describe than I can chase away.

That’s the headline after the markets opened this morning. What it really meant, of course, was that

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 149 points, or 1.9 percent, and the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-index rose 1.8 percent, a day after the major exchange dropped 5 percent or more for a second day.

Don’t junior high journalists learn not to anthroporphise the inanimate, especially what already starts out as a metaphor? Who owns the headline style guide at the Paper of Record, anyway?

The more nagging question, of course, is why such things drive me crazy.

I have always been a Tom Daschle fan. His defeat by a somewhat limited John Thune was one of my (many) low points in 2004.

I had hoped that President Elect Obama might pick Daschle as his Chief of Staff, as I’ve particularly admired the evenness of the former Senator’s keel. But recently, I’ve become convinced that Obama and Daschle are likely too temperamentally similar to have that relationship, and that the choice of Rep. Emanuel for that post is likely a good one.

Which brings us back to Daschle. I wrote admiringly in May about his book, Critical. If as Politico reports, Daschle is also to be the anointed health care czar, a fascinating drama could be set to play out in Congress. Assuming his head is still where it was when he wrote his book, Daschle proposes to take health care reform and administration largely out of the hands of Congress, and place it in the hands of a body not unlike the Federal Reserve. Like monetary policy in 1913, Daschle thinks that health care reform is too complicated and subject to conflicts of interest to be handled by Congress. As a former Senate Majority leader from a populist state, it will be most intriguing to see how he fashions his argument.

It will also be interesting to see whether Daschle, unlike almost everyone else who talks about health care reform, properly defines the problem as one of excess costs and inefficiency rather than one of insufficient coverage. Obama started down this road early in the primary campaign, but had to veer off this message due to what his campaign judged was its excessive complexity (and due to Clinton’s incessant hammering of the wrong key on the piano). Intricate propositions the likes of ”the reason we can’t cover everyone is because covering everyone is too expensive” could simply not compete with “shame on you for not covering everyone.”

With any luck, Daschle will buy himself enough distance from the 24/7 news cycle to indulge in a little reality-based analysis. According to the newly printed, delightfully highbrow procrastination enabler Economist World in Figures 2008, the United States spends a world-topping 15.4% of its GNP on health care. From the top the rankings tumble to West Bank/Gaza, Malawi, Lebanon, and-finally-Switzerland, a country we’ve sort of heard of and actully visited occasionally.

Switzerland spends 11.5% of its GNP on health care, a full third less than the U.S. And whereas Switzerland ranks #5 among nations in life expectancy, the U.S. ranks #41.

What gives, and what will Daschle be forced to deal with? More on that tomorrow.