Death wish

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

—“In a Station of the Metro,” by Ezra Pound

Almost daily, I’m subject to apocalyptical thoughts because two roads leading to our home are Taylor Avenue and Edwards Avenue, which in turn lead me back to grad school, where we pored over the potent words of Puritan poet Edward Taylor (1645-1729) and revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Edwards Avenue then connects to Bethel Avenue, Bethel (“God’s house”) being the place in Genesis where Jacob saw the Ladder joining heaven and earth, with angels bustling up and down like Ezra Pound’s Parisians in the subway at rush hour. St. Pete’s Bethel is now known for its mega-Christmas display with over half a million lights and a tall signpost directing us to various religions, with JESUS on top and YOGA mysteriously on the bottom.

So my thought of the week is: America’s capitalists, like sinners in Edwards’ most famous sermon, may be “spiders dangling over the pit of Hell.” I suppose that, like normal sinners, they just can’t help themselves: the Devil made them do it — they followed the wrong sign, to Yoga maybe.

The old Puritans weren’t always pleasant people, but they learned one truth early from their first schoolbook, The New England Primer, published eventually by the worldly Benjamin Franklin: “In Adam’s fall, / We sinned all” (followed by such pleasant couplets as “The idle Fool / Is whipped at school”). They understood that we’re all sinners, and bankers and businessmen need whippings as much as workers and schoolchildren; probably more, because more money’s at stake — and not just their own.

For example, when American tobacco companies were being sued for fires caused by cigarettes, instead of cutting back on cigarette advertising they backed flame retardant furniture. It turned out that this flame retardant itself is carcinogenic — but the furniture was cleared for manufacture because the companies loaded a “Citizens for Fire Safety” committee with pro-cigarette doctors. Toxic dust still migrates from sofas to pets to children playing on the floor. A recent New York Times article talks about “pre-polluted babies.” Those dust bunnies can be lethal.

This scenario plays out so often (tobacco fabricators, NRA ranters, oil spillers, climate change deniers, food diluters) that it seems that American capitalism has an unrepentant suicidal bent. The name of the game is “Beat those Regulations”; the prize is big money. The world knows we need fewer guns in our homes, less carbon dioxide in the air, less gas in our cars, cleaner water, and healthier food; but in these areas American businesses have fought — tirelessly — every change down the line.

I’m all for creative capitalism; we have investments, too! We lived in Poland and watched Communism drag the economy to its knees. However, since the 1980s America’s opened the money spigots a lot wider than previously imaginable — primarily in financial areas, where they don’t have to make or invent anything, just move money around (entirely upward: it hasn’t trickled down). The huge salaries and bonuses were sold to the public as deserved compensation, in order to attract “the best and the brightest.”

But this is hogwash: we never used to think these bossmen were so smart (see almost any old New Yorker cartoon). As David Brooks observed, it was just an Old Boys network with a WASP mentality, banded together against “burdensome regulations,” so our homes can be legally filled with toxic flame retardants, salt-crammed food, carcinogenic poisons, and AK-47s.

Capitalism can also breed a territorial greed (always connected to money) that leads to disaster. During our 10-year anniversary of the Iraq war, when soldiers in both countries still wander the streets like accusing ghosts, we’d do well to remember cranky preachers like Edwards and Taylor, who tried to apply restraints and regulations on our lives. Like wise friends, they wanted to spare us from hellfire, perhaps more realistic than we think.

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization…

—from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

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