That’s all changed. Low inflation has brought low interest rates and big profit-taking to the bond market since the early 1990s. But bond market investors, who only get paid the value of the dollars they lend, aren’t trusting, and that makes the bond market anything but staid. Who knows where interest rates will be ten or twenty years from now? A sharp upturn in rates would send prices plummeting—producing big losses for investors holding long-term (twenty- to thirty-year) bonds. So this nightmarish guessing game has buyers and sellers tripping over each other to secure mere fractions of a percentage point in interest.
So much for the markets. If you feel like dipping your big toe in, be forewarned: The old adage that you should never invest more than you can afford to lose still holds true. In fact, it’s truer than ever. Leave the fancy stuff and the big bets to the old hands. After all, they know more than you.
Or do they?
Economics Punch Lines
In the past, all the good jokes were about doctors, lawyers, and politicians, but now that economists control the politicians and make more money than the doctors and lawyers, it’s they who’ve become the butt. As it happens, the jokes themselves are far too long to recount here. Which means you’ll have to be content with the punch lines:
Joke 1: “Do you have any idea how many economists you have to kill just to get a pound of brains?”
Joke 2: “Who do you think was responsible for creating all this chaos in the first place?”
Joke 3: “The economist says, ‘First, assume the existence of a can opener.’”
Joke 4: “The good news is that the bus just went over the edge of the cliff. The bad news is that there were three empty seats on it.”
Remedial Watching
for Chucky Fans
It’s one thing when they try to get you on opera: You really can simply wave your passport in their faces and announce that that isn’t what we do here. It’s quite another when they hit you with movies, which are as American in spirit and allure as you are—or aren’t. Birth of a Nation got you down? Or Potemkin? Or Citizen Kane? This’ll help. THE BIRTH OF A NATION
(American, 1915)
Director
D. W. (for David Wark) Griffith. The original and still, to some, the greatest. Newcomers to Griffith (and, obviously, to film history, in which he is always a long Chapter 3, right after “The Movies Are Born” and “The Movies Find a Public”) may, however, appreciate a couple of touchstones. The first: Thomas Edison. Like him, Griffith was a practical genius, a boy-scientist type who wanted to solve the problem, not promulgate the theory. The second: Charles Dickens. Like him, Griffith was sentimental, melodramatic, and hopelessly Victorian. A reactionary in terms of his subject matter (big moments in history, American rural and domestic life, moral-religious allegories) and a philistine when it came to “art,” he nevertheless single-handedly propelled movies out of the realm of stage-bound theatricality and into that of the cinematic. He also realized, a full decade before anybody else even got around to thinking about it, the possibilities of the new medium, and contributed its two most basic techniques: the cross-cut (in which we watch a little of one scene, then a little of another, then back to the first, etc., in a way that suggests simultaneous action) and the close-up (in which we get to feel we know, and are maybe not so very different from, the characters up there on the screen). Birth of a Nation and Intolerance (1916, an interweaving of stories of cruelty from four different civilizations, from Babylonian times to Griffith’s own) are the “core” Griffith; cultists, by contrast, dote on Broken Blossoms (1919). Ironical note: Griffith lived too long, with industry honchos first stripping him of his creative freedom, then forcing him to edit the botched efforts of other directors, and finally refusing even to take his phone calls. He died, forgotten, of alcoholism, in a Hollywood hotel room.
Story
Nation—in the form of two families, the abolitionist Stonemans of Pennsylvania and the plantationist Camerons of North Carolina, who are, despite their differences, great friends—is torn apart by Civil War. Reconstruction proves even worse: Negroes are uppity; Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh)—a.k.a. the Little Sister—jumps off a cliff to avoid being raped by Gus, an emancipated house slave, and it takes the Ku Klux Klan, led by Ben Cameron—a.k.a. the Little Colonel— who, by the way, is in love with Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish), to set things right. Stay put for the climax: cross-cuts between two simultaneous Klan rescues, one of Elsie, whom a mulatto with a heavy black-supremacy rap wants to make “queen” of an all-black empire, the other of the entire Cameron family, with a Stoneman thrown in for good measure, from a cabin being besieged by Negroes and carpetbaggers.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
Nobody had ever seen anything remotely like this: a three-and-a-half-hour epic, with a coherent plot, persuasive performances, chase scenes, lots of camera movement, brimming over with emotion and what appeared to be ideas; plus, it had been budgeted at an unheard of $100,000 and cost an equally unheard of $2 a head to see. Without warning, movies emerged from the penny arcades into respectability. The era of the feature film was born and with it the pattern for the blockbuster, in which huge sums of money are invested in the hopes of even huger returns at the box office. Needless to say, not all the East Coast reviewers thought much of the movie’s bathetic story, simple-minded thesis, and overwritten title cards (e.g., “Bitter memories will not allow the poor bruised heart of the South to forget”). And the racism riled black and liberal viewers. There were riots in New York, Boston, and Chicago; city fathers demanded cuts; and Jane Addams and the president of Harvard, among others, wrote chiding letters. All the brouhaha did, though, was (1) incite Griffith, himself the son of a Kentucky colonel, to counterattack, first with pamphlets and then with Intolerance—in his opinion proof positive that he, at least, was free from prejudice; (2) suggest to anybody who’d managed to keep his cool just how inflammatory this new medium could be; and (3) fuel the movie’s publicity and box-office operations. Not that Birth needed a shot in the arm; it was an immediate hit. As President Wilson said, “It is like writing history with lightning.”
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Some people are still stuck on the racism, but most of us have moved on to Griffith as fashioner of the “grammar and rhetoric” of film, from his stockpiling of technical devices to his discovery that the emotional content of a scene, rather than its physical setup, determined where to place the camera and when to cut. Then there was his overall success with actors—how he got them to function as an ensemble as well as to underact (well, for the times it was underacting)—and his particular success with those contrasting types of womanhood, Lillian Gish (idealized femininity, purity, frailty) and Mae Marsh (the girl next door). Birth is also a valid historical document, not of Civil War days, but of the country fifty years later, still in reaction to that war. None of which makes for easy viewing: Birth (ditto Intolerance) has most modern audiences checking the minute hands of their wristwatches. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI