So Czarry

Mickey Kaus aptly observes in Slate that the government might as well appoint a Czar Czar to oversee the work of all the other ad hoc plenipotentiaries. Kaus links to Laura Meckler's balloon-deflating piece in The Wall Street Journal on a concept that seems to be about as useful as a Fabergé egg:

"There've been so many czars over last 50 years, and they've all been failures," said Paul Light, an expert on government at New York University. "Nobody takes them seriously anymore." He pointed to officials placed in charge of homeland security and drug policy.

The problem is that "czars" are meant to be all-powerful people who can rise above the problems that plague the federal agencies, he said, but in the end, they can't.

"We only create them because departments don't work or don't talk to each other," Mr. Light said, adding that creation of a White House post doesn't usually change that. "It's a symbolic gesture of the priority assigned to an issue, and I emphasize the word symbolic. When in doubt, create a czar."

The enterprising reporter traces the Czar concept only as far back as the Clinton Administration, but a few of us were born before that time, and I seem to remember that the first person to be called Czar was former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, appointed Energy Czar by Richard Nixon in the early seventies. It's strangely relevant that Simon eventually authored a book called A Time for Truth. Indeed.

Czar is too haughty a title to ascribe to the Prince of Peace, humbly born into the world in a manger, but that doesn't satisfy the curmudgeonly Christoper Hitchens, who vents articulately as always in his article "'Tis the Season to be Incredulous." Christopher definitely feels crowded:

The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events. Originally Christian, this devotional set-aside can now be joined by any other sectarian group with a plausible claim—Hanukkah or Kwanzaa—to a holy day that occurs near enough to the pagan winter solstice.

His facts are all quite true, of course, though the reaction is his own (and the label "mythical events," even though I agree with him, seems an unnecessary gibe). I'm just glad they don't display Warner Sallman's Head of Christ that used to be so ubiquitous in my childhood, or poor Hitchens might have to be blindfolded for his own sanity. I agree with him that the concept of Heavenly Hosts is more inspirational than factual, but fortunately, I don't find myself in the same distress as he does, though I may come close when the holiday mélange played over my office intercom includes, of all things, Christmas Tree from Home Alone II, God help us, as though that were becoming a holiday treasure! If Hitchens wants to man the barricades on that one, I'm with him!

Perhaps Hitchens, whose mental acuteness I respect a great deal, can so condition himself that whenever he hears the Christmas Muzak, he can go into a trance and believe himself to be listening, instead, to the marvelous Christmas Concerto of Arcangelo Corelli. Exactly what Corelli had in mind when he wrote it I can't say, but it fits the Season of Advent, reminding the listener of someone hastening to a momentous event, quickened by anticipation of a meeting long desired.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

All a-twitter

From the destination of Chaucer's pilgrims and the site of the martyrdom of Becket comes a sensible dissent on Twitter®. Still, if Hugh de Morville had Twittered his sovereign on the question of what he was doing right then, Henry Plantagenet would have died with at least one less burden on his conscience and need not have repaired to Canterbury to be whipped. Using more traditional media, crusading editor Tom Gish, owner of the Whitesburg, Kentucky Mountain Eagle, served, with his wife, Pat, as the conscience and scourge of strip mining companies, unresponsive school boards, and heavy-handed police (the paper's offices were fire-bombed after Gish exposed police brutality in 1974). I had never heard of Gish, who died Friday at 82, but listened to this feature from NPR last night, a fine tribute to his life and work.

Meanwhile, the much-maligned mainstream media does its part with this article by Daniel Gross in Newsweek, pointing out, first, something that ought never to have needed to be said: that the subprime crisis cannot be blamed on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977:

In recent months, conservative economists and editorialists have tried to pin the blame for the unholy international financial mess on subprime lending and subprime borrowers. If bureaucrats and social activists hadn't pressured firms to lend to the working poor, the narrative goes, we'd still be partying like it was 2005 and Bear Stearns would be a going concern. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has repeatedly heaped blame on the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), the 1977 law aimed at preventing redlining in minority neighborhoods. Fox Business Network anchor Neil Cavuto in September proclaimed that "loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

This line of reasoning is absurd on several levels. Many of the biggest subprime lenders weren't banks, and thus weren't covered by the CRA. Nobody forced Bear Stearns to borrow $33 for every dollar of assets it had, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't coerce highly compensated CEOs into rolling out no-money-down, exploding adjustable-rate mortgages. Banks will lose just as much money lending to really rich white guys like former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld as they will on loans to poor people of color in the South Bronx.

More importantly, Gross describes the work of ethical subprime lenders, and no, apparently, that is not an oxymoron. Part of a "community finance" movement, small banks and credit unions, of the sort whose chief officers don't make millions or get pictured in Business Week, are changing their communities for the better, instead of turning them into urban and suburban wastelands. Newsweek describes one example:

"We're in business to improve people's lives and do asset building," says Linda Levy, CEO of the Lower East Side Credit Union. The 7,500-member nonprofit, based on still-scruffy Avenue B, doesn't serve the gentrified part of Manhattan's Lower East Side, with its precious boutiques and million-dollar lofts. The average balance in its savings accounts is $1,400. The typical member? "A Hispanic woman from either Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic in her late 40s or early 50s, on government assistance, with a bunch of kids," Levy says. Sure sounds like subprime. But the delinquency rate on its portfolio of mortgage and consumer loans is 2.3 percent, and it's never had a foreclosure.

What have these modest enterprises discovered that MBAs from the Wharton School have not?

What sets the "good" subprime lenders apart is that they never bought into all the perverse incentives and "innovations" of the late subprime lending system—the fees paid to mortgage brokers, fancy offices and the reliance on securitization. Like a bunch of present-day George Baileys, ethical subprime lenders evaluate applications carefully, don't pay brokers big fees to rope customers into high-interest loans and mostly hold onto the loans they make rather than reselling them. They focus less on quantity than on quality. Clearinghouse's borrowers must qualify for the fixed-rate mortgages they take out. "If one of our employees pushed someone into a house they couldn't afford, they would be fired," says CEO Bystry.

Speaking of the causes of the subprime crisis, Gross also wrote in praise of Timothy Geithner as "The Un-Paulson" in Slate last week, and in its October issue, Harper's printed a first-person account of "trashing out":

...a phrase we use to describe the process of entering a home that has been foreclosed upon by the bank, and that the bank would like to sell, and hauling all of what the dispossessed owner has left behind to the nearest dump, then returning to clean the place by spraying every corner and wiping every inch of glass, deleting every fingerprint, scrubbing the boot marks off the linoleum, bleaching the cruddy toilets, sweeping up the hair and sand and dust, steaming the stains out of the carpet (or, if the carpet is unsalvageably rancid, tearing it out), and eventually, thereby, erasing all traces of whoever lived there, dispensing with both their physical presence and the ugly aura of eviction....

And speaking of trashing out, the never-bashful Christopher Hitchens has this and a great deal more to say about the President-elect's projected appointment of Senator Clinton as Secretary of State:

A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers?

All too true, though I still think it may be a shrewd move on Obama's part: the Secretary will either rise above herself or not and will do so on the world stage. As Someone Else once said to an associate of uncertain loyalties, "That thou doest, do quickly."

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.