Sotomayor, Empathy, and Intellect

I watched today as President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the United States Supreme Court. Official America, yes, is changing, and better reflecting what real America has been for years. I believe Judge Sotomayor is excellently qualified for the highest court, not because she’s Latina, not because she’s a woman, but because she possesses an intelligent, incisive legal mind. What struck me were the comments in the media that perhaps Sotomayor didn’t have the “intellectual gravitas” or “judicial temperament” to be a Supreme Court judge. When will accomplished Latinos get their due? Perhaps it’s time again to kick down these walls of prejudice, to expose glaring double standards for Latinos. Let me tell you some of my stories.

You can have a handful of Ivy League degrees, you can have books published by wonderful presses, and you can even be somebody’s boss, yet that somebody may still stereotype you, for their advantage. That’s what happened to me when I served on the board of directors of a literary organization for many years. A few tidbits. I pointed out financial mismanagement when other board members did not bother to study financial reports. I was labeled a troublemaker, a loose cannon. Or I questioned the cozy management practices of cronyism, practices that cost our organization valuable dollars needed for our survival. I was a hot-headed Latino.

After many years of struggle, I won this war, as my nemesis finally left and we hired a terrific, open-minded leader for our organization. But what struck me as I analyzed the many battles I had fought and the scars I lived with, was how often polite niceness, even if it was prejudiced, and the glad-handling of fake smiles won over passionate arguments and blunt, to-the-heart criticisms. My lesson: lie, speak in half-truths, and even stab people in the back, and you can get away with it for years as long as you don’t yell or ever frown. I instead wore my heart on my sleeve. If I saw something wrong, if I caught a contradiction, if I smelled a power play, I would say something about it. After board meetings, in whispers, this righteous attitude was too often turned against me.

Wearing your heart on your sleeve does not mean you are not thinking. Quite the contrary, what you are thinking is Aristotlean. That is to say, what you are thinking is that if you don’t do anything and you know it’s wrong, then you will denigrate what thinking is. Thinking is about doing. Thinking is assessing the situation and doing something about it. Thinking something is wrong, and doing nothing about it, is thinking as a cop-out, as an escape into the head (Plato), what polite society does every day. I am not polite.

When Sotomayor is criticized for not having the right judicial temperament, is she being criticized for being outraged when she sees someone being shafted? In the Bronx, I’m sure she learned to be Aristotlean. Being calm or even pleasant when you see an injustice is not a sign of a good temperament. It’s an indication of a coldness to humanity and human suffering. It’s a sign of using your intellect to escape from the world, to avoid changing it. The worst atrocities in the world have been justified with such a temperament.

When Sotomayor is criticized for not having intellectual gravitas, is she being criticized because she doesn’t argue calmly, because she’s blunt? Being serious, evasive, and mathematically abstract is not a sign of intellectual gravitas. It’s a sign of an intellectualism that lives by itself, that pleases itself, that thinks the human being as only an abstract idea. Our Founding Fathers knew better; that’s why they set up a series of checks and balances with the separation of powers in government.

A Puertoriqueña from the projects and the South Bronx. Summa cum laude at Princeton. Yale Law School. Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Appellate court judge for over a decade. That’s the kind of Aristotlean intellect-in-action we should have in the Supreme Court.

East Harlem Cafe and Hit List Reading

Last Thursday I read at a place I am still entranced by, the East Harlem Café owned by Michelle Cruz, at 104th and Lexington in El Barrio. Two other authors from Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, read with me, Carlos Hernandez and Richie Narvaez. A few hours before, Richie and I appeared on the Victor Cruz Show, a radio talkfest from Brooklyn. Man, did I have a good time. This is the thing about getting out there, reading and talking to people about your work. You meet new people who wow you, you get to discover what they have created, and you feel lucky. Let me count the ways.

After you read this blog, turn off your computer or Kindle, and visit the East Harlem Café. I walked in, a few minutes early to the reading, and I was in coffee heaven. The place has these stylish mosaics on the wall, comfortable seating, and a long bar to order your café and pastries. I wish we had a place on the Upper Westside as welcoming, as cool as the East Harlem Café. Starbucks is not in the same league. That a young, savvy Latina was la jefa was just icing on the cake for me. These entrepreneurs who take risks to make a difference in their neighborhood should be enthusiastically supported, especially when they’ve created something special.

Just before the reading, I had been roaming Brooklyn looking for Jay Street and the studio of the Victor Cruz Show. I stumbled over the cobblestone and was almost to the Hudson River when I found it, a warehouse-like building whose elevator led me to a floor of indie film offices and Victor Cruz. I was met by this red-headed Puerto Rican with hundreds of freckles who seemed at the brink of laughter. Victor, his friend Gil T, Aurora Anaya-Cerda, owner of La Casa Azul Bookstore, and I had a freewheeling conversation about Latino Lit, Mexican-American border politics and history, Mariachi Plaza in the Boyle Heights district of LA, and fighting for the Latino voice in the arts. I kept thinking, as I listened to my new friends, we’ve got the brains, the talent, the drive, the laughter. We should be taking over the world.

On this special day, the two people I got to know the best were Richie Narvaez and Carlos Hernandez, the other authors in the Hit List anthology. Richie is this sharp Nuyorican who read from his story, “In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino,” about an “enterprising woman” named Iris. Carlos read “Los Simpáticos,” about the producer of a TV show “A Quien Quieres Matar?” I couldn’t stop laughing. Carlos, like his story, is mischievous and laugh-ready. I’ve always been too serious for my own good; it’s my nature. But I love it when people make me laugh.

Liz Martinez, one of the two editors of Hit List, also read a story, by Mario Acevedo. Thank you, Liz, for saying you loved my story, “A New York Chicano.” For a sourpuss like me who is all-too-ready to tear himself apart, kind words help get me out of my little world. This whole day got me out of my world, and I am happy I said yes and took the chance.

This Thursday, May 21st, Richie, Carlos, and I will be reading at the Mysterious Book Shop at 58 Warren Street in Tribeca. The reading will be from 6-8:00 PM. A free book to whomever makes me laugh so hard I pee in my pants. See you there.

Bertha E. Troncoso

I should have written this on Mother’s Day, but I was traveling. I did phone my mother, Bertha E. Troncoso, the E for Estela, on the day, and my wife Laura and I did send her flowers. My kids, Aaron and Isaac, created cards for Laura, our tradition of preferring handmade drawings to anything store-bought, and our family had a delicious brunch at G.W. Tavern in Washington Depot, Connecticut, the GW for George Washington. My mother has been my family heroine for a long time. Here are snippets of her story.

She was born in a rancho near Chihuahua City, and anytime I whined in El Paso about throwing out the trash or hosing down the trash bins she would remind me of not having shoes until she was ten-years-old. She had a beloved dog named Sultán, and a mother, my abuelita, who was tough and sometimes cruel. Doña Lola was a single mother before she married the genial man I would know as my grandfather. She survived the Mexican Revolution, machos in el rancho, and grinding poverty, so maybe my abuelita had reasons to be la generala.

My mother’s family moved to Juárez when she was a teenager, and Bertha Estela was so beautiful that she began to model clothes for local department stores. I have seen pictures of my mother in her wedding dress, particularly a close up my father has enshrined in our living room in Ysleta. My mother looks like a Mexican Jane Russell.

As my mother recalls, she met my father at a plaza in Juárez, and when they married she had saved more money than him. My father Rodolfo was a poor student studying agronomy, and my mother had a steady job as a saleswoman. When my father is feeling nostalgic, he retrieves old newspaper clippings of my mother modeling the latest post-war fashions.

I remember my mother being the strictest mom on San Lorenzo Avenue. Doña Bertha, as the neighbors called her, definitely inherited the steel from her mother. Mamá would never allow us to play at neighbors’ houses; our friends had to play at our house, under her watchful eye. And on weekends and after school, boy, did we work! Polishing furniture. Cleaning up after our dogs. Painting the house. Pulling weeds from outside our fence next to the canal. I was head of Sanitation. Our neighborhood, a colonia next to the Mexican-American border, had gangs, Barraca contra Calavera, and drugs, so in retrospect perhaps my mother had a point. As my friends in New York have said, I grew up in an “at-risk neighborhood,” and how you gain the drive and discipline to succeed with that beginning is to have parents who are tougher than the dirt at their feet.

As I grew older, I began to notice how intelligent my mother was, yet how she confined herself to the role of dutiful wife. Mamá still has dozens upon dozens of her friends' phone numbers committed to memory. Once, before I left for Harvard, I tried an experiment with her. I said a friend’s name, and she would give me their phone number. We got up to 36 before we stopped. She made thousands of dollars as a manic Avon lady in Ysleta, enough to buy a sleek Buick station wagon with a tinted moon roof, which I used on hot dates. My mother was and still is a voracious reader of everything from Selecciones to the Bible. I buy her a yearly subscription to The El Paso Times, which she reads from front to back.

Yet she was happy to first take care of my abuelitos when they became infirm and had to live with my parents. My mother fed and bathed them until they died in an apartment my father built in our backyard. Now that my father can shuffle but a few feet without his walker, my mother is taking care of him. They are the same age, but my father is weak and insular while my mother is indefatigable, funny, and quick to ask when my next book will be published.

I don’t know how she does it. Bertha Estela could have done anything she wanted, but she chose to take care of her family; she chose love and sacrifice over personal accolades and accomplishments. Now you know why she is my heroine. I hope I will always follow in her footsteps.

Cinco de Mayo: A Victory for the Underdog

One of the many hats I wear is that of an investor. For decades, I have invested in the stock market, beginning after college when I had saved a few thousand dollars. I enjoy the number-crunching of investment analysis, finding undiscovered small companies, and putting my money where my mouth is. It is always a challenge, and I have made mistakes, but I have also returned to my mistakes to learn from them. Serious investing is investigative and practical. It is also a recursive process in which you are constantly evaluating your premises for a particular investment, as well as your evolving skills and sensibilities as an investor.

One of the things I learned about myself, during this vicious bear market, is that I need to increase my allocation for bonds in my overall portfolio. There is nothing like a heart-thumping drop in the stock market, month after month, to force you to reevaluate your strategy. I did not sell any individual stocks or mutual funds, so I did not panic and I have benefited from this bounce back from recent lows.

But in March I did feel financially vulnerable, since in four short years my older son Aaron will attend college. Now that the S&P 500 is above 900 at least for a day, I won’t go back to my 80/20 split for stocks and bonds, but instead will keep adding new money primarily into my bond portfolio. I am focusing on short-term bonds, because I believe interest rates are at historic lows, and can only go higher. Short-term bonds will be hurt the least when this happens. Remember, bond prices go down when interest rates go up, and vice versa, and this relationship is more pronounced the longer the maturity of the bond.

I am a contrarian, and this belief in my head was indeed proven by what I did with my hands and feet. I did not panic as the Obama administration got a handle on the financial mess it inherited, and as credit markets froze and threatened to turn a deep recession into a depression. I did not panic as a few mega-banks teetered near insolvency, as deficits soared because of federal bailouts, as swine-flu hysteria gripped the nation. It is important to assess how you reacted in critical situations to get a sense of who you are. You don’t know what kind of soldier you are until the bullets whistle past your ears.

We are not out of the woods yet. Corporate earnings may turn more negative than they have been so far, or we may experience flat to weak economic growth for many years, or some unforeseen event, like a run on the dollar, may undermine financial stability. The second and third waves of past flu epidemics have often been deadlier than the initial wave. So I am still wary, but I have taken steps to take advantage of overreactions and to be better prepared for the next crisis.

I am a relentless cost-cutter, and this attitude has helped me to evaluate what we spend money on and whether it is worth it. This cost-cutting also helps me to be better prepared for crises: companies and individuals who are careful with their money and carry little debt are better able to weather downturns. That’s a truism we should live by as investors and as responsible parents.

Sometimes my writer friends, who are terrible at managing their own financial affairs, ask me why I worry so much about money. Invariably this happens a few days after they’ve asked for a loan. I tell them what I’ve always told them. Investing is not about getting rich, or having more toys, or impressing others. It’s about independence. It’s about doing what you want, when you want, and not having to ask an ornery friend or a boss for more money, and not getting it.

Cinco de Mayo celebrates the underdog Mexico defeating powerful France at Puebla in 1862. The individual investor is the underdog in today’s investment world. Do your homework, know thyself, and think independently, and perhaps you will also reap an unlikely victory. Happy Cinco de Mayo.

Pandemic Flu and Xenophobia: A History Lesson

The year 1918 was an exciting and terrible time for El Paso and the border: the Mexican Revolution was nearing its bloody end and an outbreak of Spanish influenza incited one of the most shameful and neglected episodes in American history: the decades-long delousing of Mexicans, with insecticides, gasoline, kerosene, and cyanide-based pesticides to make them ‘clean.’ David Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution recounts this remarkable story.

Today when we are facing another pandemic flu, it is useful to review the irrational decisions made back in 1918, by demagogues who already hated Mexicans and who used the fear in the populace to advance an agenda that didn’t in fact help to stop the spread of Spanish influenza. Delousing physically harmed and psychologically scarred thousands of Mexicans, including my grandfather Santiago Troncoso. Let’s not repeat this kind of American history, but learn from it.

First, facts. The ‘Spanish influenza’ began in Kansas. Why it was given this misnomer is probably another legacy of how easily it is to blame the poor and those not media savvy. Also, of course, gasoline and kerosene and pesticides did not kill the Spanish flu, but it did harm and shame many people who were forced to strip naked at the border as they were sprayed with ‘the solution.’ Finally, and most remarkably, Zyklon B was used in El Paso in 1929, the same chemical agent that in more concentrated form was subsequently employed by the Nazis in their death camps to exterminate the Jews. Romo even uncovers evidence to suggest that the use of Zyklon B in El Paso directly inspired German scientists to start looking into its properties for cleansing a country of its ‘pests.’

Today the possible pandemic is swine flu, and we should redouble our efforts to act on facts, rather than on fears or prejudices that end up hurting innocents, or worse. I am waiting for a weak politician, or media loudmouth, to exploit the swine flu fears to further a xenophobic agenda. I am waiting to see whether stereotypes of Mexicans are privately reinforced and maybe even publicly acted upon, with the same bloody results. I hope I will have to wait forever, but I am still wary.

I don’t know if we as a country have a mature-enough political discourse to resist such temptations. The glib media rule the airwaves, including Twitter, and passing along short bursts of fear, instead of thoughtful analysis, is our modern forte. Moreover, the groundwork for xenophobia against Mexicans has already been reinforced by the many years of attacks demonizing undocumented workers in the United States. Perhaps the saving grace of the current situation is that we have a new administration that I believe will be more sensitive to the abuse of public hysteria to further a xenophobic agenda.

Early reports, in the Wall Street Journal, for example, indicate that this swine flu outbreak did start in Mexico. But even here the picture is more complicated than we might think. One of the first swine-flu cases was that of a five-year-old boy from Veracruz who lived near a pig farm operated by Smithfield Foods Inc., an American company based in Virginia. The company denies any involvement in the swine flu outbreak.

All this tells me is that we are interconnected, whether we like it or not. We get our food from all over the world. We get our people from all over the world. This has been our world for a long time, and I don’t attempt to imagine some false pure state where I am island and if I return to this island I will somehow be safer, or better, or truer in some metaphysical sense. Reaching back, or forward, to false utopias, especially during crises in our communities, has always prevented us from solving the problems in the first place, and too often spawned horrific ‘solutions’ that expose our greatest human frailties and moral failures. Work the problem, people. Not the fear.

Putting a Price on Time

Often in this blog I write about the smallest events, sometimes in Connecticut, where we go to decompress from the thrill and headache that is New York City. In the Big Apple, time is money. Everyone’s butt is on fire to get somewhere, to be somebody.

I have been recently thinking how the television media in particular distorts careful thinking, whether it’s on Obama or the financial crisis or the burgeoning deficits. Pithy, three- or four-second comments replace complex thought and analysis. ‘We must entertain at all costs’ seems to be the mantra. Outlandish comments are entertaining. Quick put-downs are entertaining. Outrage, genuine or fake, is entertaining. Whether any of it is true is beside the point. Capture those eyeballs, keep them riveted on you, and you will win this game.

I have also been pondering the decline of literary books, the rise of publishers as cogs of conglomerates, the domination of celebrity books in publishing, the sad decline of reading as a serious pastime for many Americans. There are small enclaves of literary publishers and serious readers, and those enclaves will continue to exist. But I think there is little doubt that literature is not central to American culture. Movies are the ticket. Television is the nightly companion for the lonely and not-so-lonely.

It is a world I have shunned with more recent effort in part because I do not like how my ‘openness’ to this world affected me. It did not improve my thinking, but instead circumscribed it to self-satisfied, meaningless reactions. It did not encourage self-analysis and self-improvement that would be long-lasting, but abandoned me at spectacles.

I have turned off the TV, except for the occasional news. I have switched radio stations to those with minimal, or no commercials. I have ended subscriptions to idiotic magazines. On the Internet, I have stopped reading the trash to waste time, and focused on acquiring the information I specifically need, or sending the necessary email.

I feel I must create this island in me, to preserve and explore a truer self, to achieve something beyond the effluvium that is popular culture. Do others feel the same way? Have others taken up this internal call to avoid the awful noise that surrounds us?

In Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I can focus outside the mainstream, in the quiet of the trees, to read, to work on planting strawberries, to ride a bicycle for dozens of miles without seeing a soul on the country roads. Thoreau had the right idea in Concord: you can find yourself if you spend some time away from the city and the crowd.

Yet I do not live in isolation. I am not a Luddite. I focus on talking to my kids and Laura. I read good books. I exchange often lengthy e-mails with many fascinating people across the world. I am writing and editing stories. But I do not dive into this world anymore as if it all equally mattered. I know most of it doesn’t matter at all, and is just like the traffic outside, a nuisance. I have stopped rubber-necking. Even in New York City, after a ferocious thunderstorm, there is a quiet near midnight that lets you work and imagine.

Easter in El Paso

I am a few hours late with my blog today, because I have been having too much fun in El Paso, Texas, my hometown. Every morning my father, mother, brothers, Laura, Aaron, and Isaac have sampled my parents’ favorite breakfast joints, so far Elmer’s near Bassett Center and the Bronco Restaurant not far from Ysleta High, my alma mater, on Alameda.

Chilaquiles, chile rellenos, huevos rancheros, frijoles con queso, menudo (I prefer to pick out the panzas and just eat the pozole), enchiladas, gorditas. On our first night, my brother Oscar bought fresh, mouthwatering asaderos from Licon’s Dairy in San Elizario. It really is good to be back home.

My sons asked me, “Why is the food in El Paso so much better than the food in New York?” I tried to explain how there are no warm-fresh asaderos in New York, and how Manhattan’s Mexican food, except for Gabriela’s on Columbus and 95th Street, isn’t even close to the real deal. I tried to tell them there’s a world of difference between the tostadas from Las Cruces, and the prepackaged ones from New Jersey at Gristedes in our building on Broadway.

The pastel de tres leches my mother brought for my son Isaac’s birthday celebration was the coup de grâce. My kids adored it. I gave up trying to explain anything anymore, and I just told them, “It’s just better here. What can I say?” Aaron and Isaac glared at me for a second, as if I have been mistreating them for forcing them to live in NYC, and begged their abuelita for seconds of the pastel.

To work off this glorious gluttony, we went to Album Park near Yarbrough for Easter, to walk around, to run, to chat more about how beautiful the weather is this time of the year. The scene at Album brought back many memories and comparisons of how our family spent each Easter in El Paso, and how these get-togethers always brought us closer to each other.

For us, Easter meant, after church, a mega-barbecue. An all-day affair of eating, playing baseball and football with other families in the park, making new friends, searching for Easter eggs, which were painstakingly prepared weeks before, and ambushing everybody and anybody by smashing our confetti-filled ammo on their heads. By nightfall we were dirty and exhausted, and we didn’t want to say goodbye to this little community we had formed for one day in the park.

I noticed that at Album Park Easter today is the same and different than it was when I was a kid. Extended families, from abuelitos to niños, still gather together under the sun and trees. But now a few families had fancy Coleman tents and even gas-powered generators. I also saw many more volleyball nets and soccer games than in my time. All the dogs are on leashes too.

But this unofficial micro-history, what may seem trivial to many, is what we should savor. This history about what families did for Easter, how they stayed together on the Mexican-American border, what this togetherness meant not only for your bonds with your father and mother, but also for the bonds you try to recreate with your family in as far flung locales as New York City, this is what stays with you forever and becomes who you were and who you always will be.

Planting Apple Trees

I find the simplest things the most rewarding. Is that a sign I am becoming wise, or just getting old? This weekend Laura, the kids and I were in the Litchfield Hills. Laura was busy in her garden; she’s inherited her green thumb from her father. On rainy Saturday, we drove to the Kent True Value Hardware store to get eight bags of cedar mulch for Laura’s two flower gardens.

I wanted to take a look at apple trees, which we had thought about planting last year but didn’t because we were too busy. We drove down the road a few minutes to Kent Greenhouse & Gardens. It was almost closing time, but we managed to find Cortland and Royal Gala apple trees, which we liked, and you need at least two so they can pollinate each other. But we left without a purchase in part to get out of the rain.

The rest of that dark, wet Saturday we spent indoors. I read Salman Rushie’s Midnight's Children, and have particularly enjoyed the Padma character, whom the narrator interacts with as he tells the story of the birth and rise of free India. I also edited a novel I have been working on, despite fighting an awful cold/flu which seemed to get worse as the night progressed. By the time I collapsed on the bed, I couldn’t inhale even the slightest whiff from my nose, and I wondered if I would be able to get up the next morning. I dreamed of chasing an apple cart through my version of New Delhi (I’ve never been there), and was the last to rise out of bed the next morning, still exhausted and my head in a fog.

One thing was clear to me on Sunday: I wanted to plant those apple trees. Laura was reluctant because she was busy with other garden chores, but I got her to put fluorescent orange parking cones in spots we thought the apple trees might go. I have my ways. So throughout the day, we watched what spots received the most sun, which were shaded by trees in and around our property, and which still seemed to be ideal, after a few hours of imaging a plethora of apples on the trees and ground.

The hour was getting late on Sunday afternoon, but I enlisted my son Aaron, who also loves apples, and got Laura to drive him to Kent Greenhouse to pick the apple trees they liked while I started digging the holes. The first hole was almost done by the time they returned, and I had to pry out a few large mica rocks embedded in the soil. The Litchfield Hills was long ago a mining area and known as the arsenal of the American Revolution, providing the iron ore for General George Washington’s cannons.

As Aaron and I worked to finish the first hole, I pushed and shoved at one last rock at the bottom, and the old wooden shovel, which I had found in the forest three years ago, snapped in two. So this time, I returned to Kent True Value Hardware, but the store was closed. I drove to Kent Greenhouse (that’s three times in one weekend!), and bought their fancy, ergonomic stainless steel shovel. By the time I returned, Aaron had nearly finished the second hole with the small spade.

We finished planting the apple trees, mixing the planting soil from Kent Greenhouse with the soil we had dug up. Aaron went back to his homework. I cleaned up the area, and raked and shoveled away the excess soil, and watered our new apple trees. I realized I was sweaty and exhausted, my pants were filthy, and my fingernails were black with grime. But I could not have had a more satisfying weekend this early spring.

"The Brothers Warner" and Writing To Educate

My family attended the Kent Film Festival this weekend, in Kent, Connecticut (population: 2,858), nestled next to the mighty Housatonic River in the Litchfield Hills. We love visiting Kent because it’s so different from New York City: forests with deer, bobcats, and bears, and a small-town sensibility and pace that bring you back to the peace of sitting under a giant oak to read a book in solitude.

We saw an excellent documentary, “The Brothers Warner,” about the four brothers who created the film studio famous for making everything from “Casablanca” to “Looney Tunes.” The film was directed and narrated by Cass Warner, the granddaughter of Harry Warner, and what struck me was her description of why the brothers originally went into moviemaking and how different the industry is today. Their goal, of course, was to entertain audiences, but the brothers also wanted to educate and enlighten them. They saw films as powerful tools for promoting the social good.

For example, Warner Brothers made the first anti-Nazi film in the late 1930’s, even when the U.S. State Department was warning them not to do it. Warner Brothers also pioneered movies depicting racism against blacks, teenage rebellion (“Rebel Without A Cause”), and even the history of medicine (“The Story of Louis Pasteur”). One of the points of the documentary was that the brothers Warner often sacrificed profit for message and that marketing did not rule their decisions about what movies to make. They repeatedly put their “toochis ofn tish,” a Yiddish phrase meaning they put their “ass on the table.” The brothers took risks, political, social, and economic risks, to communicate something new through movies.

Not only did this make me think of all the junk movies today, hooked on the steroids of special effects or hot bodies, movies memorable for about five minutes; but the documentary also made me think of my industry and how marketing and celebrity literature have overwhelmed the world of books. Most of the books produced today are meant to be disposable, a quick hit to the bottom line of a corporation, and then forgotten and shredded. Rarely do commercial publishers publish anything that they don’t think will be a huge financial success, and so they follow often outmoded, safe realities of what editors, agents, and reviewers think will sell.

For example, I appeared in a new anthology this month, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, and a reviewer from Publishers Weekly criticized the anthology for not having “fiction examining distinctively Latino themes.” What stereotypical box does this reviewer want us to fit in before he or she gives writers a chance to tell their stories? The anthology was published, not surprisingly, by a non-profit press, Arte Publico from Houston. If the anthology sells, perhaps more doors will be opened to Latino writers wanting to write stories outside of preconceived notions of who or what Latinos should be. But don’t expect commercial publishers to lead the charge to educate a changing public about what deserves to be American literature today.

I find the most interesting movies are created by independent producers, and the most interesting books are published by small, often non-profit presses. These are the creative works in which it is still important to entertain, but the point is also to enlighten, to explore a subject that has been overlooked or forgotten, to perfect a work that will sustain its brilliance for a long time, and to challenge and break stereotypes. If you want to take a voyage that truly opens your eyes, rather than lulls you to sleep or gives you a fleeting high, then go independent, go non-profit, and experience the thrill of new thinking.

Burning Down Your Own Neighborhood

The bill passed by the House last week, to tax ninety percent of bonuses for any employee making over $250,000 who works for a financial institution receiving more than $5 billion in bailout funds, will be a self-imposed financial disaster that will increase the chances of a deep economic recession becoming a depression. It may make the demagogues in Congress feel good, and the legions suffering in this economy may jump for joy that they are sticking it to the bankers, but all of us will wake up the next morning amid the burning ruins. Let me count the ways.

1) The legislation does not only penalize the tiny fraction of AIG employees in the financial products division, mostly in London, who took on enormous risk and have brought AIG to its knees; it also penalizes tens of thousands of employees from at least eight major U.S. banks who had nothing to do with this mess.

What are those employees doing? They are not spending because of their fear of what Congress will do next; they are leaving the banks we badly need to be healthy; they are taking fewer appropriate risks in their businesses, like making mortgages to individuals and loans to companies, because they don’t know what the idiots in Congress will do next.

2) Many banks will be forced to return the TARP money, to avoid being burned at the stake by Congress. Nancy Pelosi will be happy- we get the taxpayers' money back! But these same banks, the ones that can survive returning the bailout money, will restrict lending to save capital, just at the moment when we need for them to do the opposite. The banks that don’t return the bailout money will be targeted as weak banks, and expect many of them to fail and fall further into the clutches of the government. Anybody remember what a run on the banks looks like? It isn’t pretty.

3) The House legislation rewards foreign banks with a competitive advantage. Deutsche Bank isn’t a U.S. company targeted by the House legislation, but it operates a big investment banking unit in New York City. Guess where all the best bankers from Bank of America, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs are sending their resumes? Instead of keeping the best bankers to clean up the messes of a few, we are driving away the talent, and decimating our American banking system. Why doesn’t Congress focus on why AIG bailout funds made whole foreign banks that exploited loopholes in European legislation on derivatives? Oh, I forgot. That requires thinking, and actually being productive, not just livid.

4) The U.S. government owns AIG, we lent AIG most of the bailout money (yes, that’s true: it’s mostly a loan), and the vilification embodied by the House legislation destroys the value of AIG. Who in their right mind would now buy the assets of AIG? Yet selling AIG’s assets is the primary way in which taxpayers will get their money back. Killing AIG, rhetorically and financially, is only hurting ourselves again. It’s stupid.

5) The House legislation will hurt New York City the most. Many of the tens of thousands of employees of major U.S. banks targeted by the House bill work in New York. Bonuses are the way people in the financial industry have been paid for years, from high profile bankers to analysts out of college to secretaries. If anything like the House bill becomes law, expect NYC to teeter that much closer to bankruptcy. New York sponsors of the House bill, Charlie Rangel and Steve Israel, and Senate supporter Charles Schumer, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Maybe some good ol’ boys will be secretly thrilled at the prospect of watching these Yankees suffer, but remember the 1970’s: the nation stagnated, and what happened in NYC was mirrored in the rest of the country.

The ways in which the House legislation will hurt all of us do not stop at five. You can’t run any business with Congress changing the rules every week. You don’t inspire confidence in foreign investors of U.S. Treasury securities when you have a Congress legislating out of revenge, instead of focusing on new, tough, permanent legislation to regulate the financial industry so that these problems do not happen again. You do not turn the corner in the bear market in stocks by attacking everyone who makes money.

Even if our anger is justified, even if it is wild, we should focus on why we allowed trading in certain derivatives to go unregulated, why the SEC was not aggressively enforcing current laws and investigating financial fraud, and what legislation creates new, tougher rules for banks and other financial institutions while allowing them to do business that will help our economy prosper.

Or, we can burn down our own neighborhood, watch the flames in the night, not caring who is in the burning buildings, or whether they had anything to do with our justifiable anger. But remember, we will all wake up tomorrow morning, more sober and perhaps less angry, and we will have to walk through the smoky rubble to buy our groceries. If the grocery store is still standing.