There was an era when human beings could be divided into two categories: folders and crumplers. This was sometime between the invention of modern toilet paper in l857 by Joseph Gayetty and the end of the Cold War. Toilet paper actually goes back as far as the Tang and Yuan dynasties, but its modern form is a product of American ingenuity, and something that has yet to catch on in India, where water is still used for cleansing, but without the power of the modern industrial bidet.
On the most basic level, the folder acted in a premeditated fashion and was capable of the kind of impulse control that allowed him to create a strategy. Conversely, the crumpler was an impulsive, charming sociopath, gifted at extemporization, but with a deficiency in the kind of brain chemistry that allows for sublimation. A crumpler was not likely to turn his sexual energies into art. Rather he would immediately try to fondle the object of his desire.
Due to genetic mutations, this easy dichotomy seems to have changed radically. Just as infidelity, which was all the rage in the America chronicled by O’Hara and Updike, was made obsolete by cybersex, so the easy insight into personality through bathroom folderol started to decline in the last decade of the Twentieth Century.
Both the FBI and CIA, which had used longitudinal studies of wiping patterns to profile world leaders, ceased producing microfiches on the subject in 1995. All Soviet diplomats, from Gromyko to Shevardnadze, had been targeted by intense studies involving interviews with hotel staff who were adept at identifying crumplers based on reports of clogging and requests for plungers emanating from certain V.I.P. suites.
But with the advent of the Putin era, Congress has not appropriated the necessary funds to continue this important research. Within the major think tanks, folding/crumpling is still considered to be an important metric, but the data has become increasingly unreliable.
President Bush was widely regarded as a crumpler, while Dick Cheney was his folding counterpart, or “enabler,” to use recovery movement jargon. Colin Powell represented the new politics, an amalgam of folding and crumpling that epitomized the best of the Hegelian dialetic: thesis (fold), antithesis (crumple), synthesis (origami).
It is hard to come up with a Wikipedia-style entry to describe the fate of folding and crumpling, especially as regards the current administration. Is Barack Obama truly a folder? It’s fun to try to speculate as to whether Timothy Geithner or Hillary Clinton are truly the crumplers they seem to be. (One wonders how crumplers can rise as far as they sometimes do in public life.) But what is emerging is that the old folding/crumpling criteria, which proved such dependable predictors of human behavior in the past, have turned out to be only one way to get the poop on leaders, here and abroad.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Will GM Become a Not-for-Profit?
Not-for-profits are the basis upon which eleemosynary activities take place. Most of these nonprofits, known as 501(c)(3) organizations, are corporations created to support a particular cause. However, with the downturn in the economy, many companies have become de facto not-for-profits, even though they have yet to draft the requisite mission statements to replace their original for-profit goals.
While Citibank did show profits in the last quarter, they have developed a pattern that puts them squarely in the not-for-profit category. Bank of America became a candidate for not-for-profit status when it acquired Merrill Lynch. Bear Stearns might have been rescued from the jaws of JP Morgan Chase when it was on the verge of collapse, and Lehman Brothers might have avoided its fall, if only these two dinosaurs had quit the investment banking business and declared themselves charities.
Though shares in the insurance giant AIG, whose London office singlehandedly engineered the creation of the credit default swaps that brought down the American economy, are trading briskly, this shouldn’t prevent AIG’s board from declaring it a not-for-profit. There is no doubt that AIG runs enough executive dining rooms to allow it to become one of the world’s great soup kitchens. Didn’t Maurice Greenberg, the ousted AIG executive who so vituperatively argued for the competency of his decisions, once say, “Let them eat brioche”?
General Motors would make a great not-for-profit, as would Chrysler. The only question is, would these two automotive giants continue to manufacture cars, or would their assembly lines be better used to produce avant-garde plays in nonprofit venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music? Even if the assembly line is not a proscenium, who’s to say it couldn’t house a theater? We already have theater in the round; the GM plant at Ypsilanti would be a perfect location for theater on the belt.
Who knows what wacky Wachovia will be when it grows up? Can we ever forget that Wells Fargo was once a stagecoach company? What does that mean in terms of its potential viability as a 501(c)(3)? Quite simply it means that once they retire from the business of making money, they’ll have something to fall back on.
Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan need not feel like they are being left out. Sure, they have paid back all their stimulus dollars and are making money hand over fist, but that doesn’t mean that someday they won’t have a chance to find a hallowed place in the not-for-profit world.
As the recent crisis stock market crisis showed, anything can happen, usually overnight. That’s what makes America great.
While Citibank did show profits in the last quarter, they have developed a pattern that puts them squarely in the not-for-profit category. Bank of America became a candidate for not-for-profit status when it acquired Merrill Lynch. Bear Stearns might have been rescued from the jaws of JP Morgan Chase when it was on the verge of collapse, and Lehman Brothers might have avoided its fall, if only these two dinosaurs had quit the investment banking business and declared themselves charities.
Though shares in the insurance giant AIG, whose London office singlehandedly engineered the creation of the credit default swaps that brought down the American economy, are trading briskly, this shouldn’t prevent AIG’s board from declaring it a not-for-profit. There is no doubt that AIG runs enough executive dining rooms to allow it to become one of the world’s great soup kitchens. Didn’t Maurice Greenberg, the ousted AIG executive who so vituperatively argued for the competency of his decisions, once say, “Let them eat brioche”?
General Motors would make a great not-for-profit, as would Chrysler. The only question is, would these two automotive giants continue to manufacture cars, or would their assembly lines be better used to produce avant-garde plays in nonprofit venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music? Even if the assembly line is not a proscenium, who’s to say it couldn’t house a theater? We already have theater in the round; the GM plant at Ypsilanti would be a perfect location for theater on the belt.
Who knows what wacky Wachovia will be when it grows up? Can we ever forget that Wells Fargo was once a stagecoach company? What does that mean in terms of its potential viability as a 501(c)(3)? Quite simply it means that once they retire from the business of making money, they’ll have something to fall back on.
Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan need not feel like they are being left out. Sure, they have paid back all their stimulus dollars and are making money hand over fist, but that doesn’t mean that someday they won’t have a chance to find a hallowed place in the not-for-profit world.
As the recent crisis stock market crisis showed, anything can happen, usually overnight. That’s what makes America great.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Ang Lee Trips
Ang Lee’s films make retrospective sense. Lust/Caution was mystifying and unsettling, but the forward progression of the film constantly made the viewer rethink what they had already seen. Ultimately, Lust/Caution was a film about the fine line between the willing suspension of disbelief and psychosis as it relates politics, art and sex. Taking Woodstock has a similar effect, with the early scenes feeling slow, sentimental, and in some senses even misguided, particularly in the portrait of Holocaust survivors.
But the subject becomes belief itself, and in particular belief in the notion of liberation. Ang Lee and James Shamus (who like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala of the Merchant/Ivory team has become the literary amanuensis to Lee’s sensibility) exude a love of theater in both films. In Lust/Caution, it’s a production of A Doll’s House at a Chinese university as the Japanese invasion looms. In Taking Woodstock, it's a motley theater troupe from Vassar alternately doing Chekhov adaptations and taking off their clothes in the style of Julian Beck’s Living Theater.
There is also a novelistic sensibility at work here that is rare in film directors, who generally ransack novel plots for the purposes of film while eschewing the complexities of novelistic technique. In The Ice Storm and again in Taking Woodstock, Lee shows an ability to totally immerse himself in worlds completely foreign to his personal history. But it’s in the weaving of his tales without the usual resolutions and catharses that Lee shows an uncanny ability to include the kind of complexity more often found in novels than on the big screen.
Taking Woodstock is a succession of loose threads. The protagonist’s homosexuality is portrayed as innuendo rather than with the grand strokes of choice and ideology (so common to film these days). Significantly, the main figure never actually sees the concert for which he has been the prime mover. Meanwhile, his old-world parents, with their old-world fears and animosities, eat some hash brownies and totally loosen up. Yet after an initial white light experience, the refugee mother ends up crawling into a stash of greenbacks she has hoarded for years and falls into a stupor.
As Taking Woodstock makes clear, an enormous change has taken place, but it’s less a watershed than a form of evolution, and doesn’t necessarily yield a higher state of consciousness. If there is a moral center to the film, it’s the transvestite, former marine security guard (played by Liev Schreiber), whose very existence as an imaginative construct is a testament to the dubiety of certainty.
But the subject becomes belief itself, and in particular belief in the notion of liberation. Ang Lee and James Shamus (who like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala of the Merchant/Ivory team has become the literary amanuensis to Lee’s sensibility) exude a love of theater in both films. In Lust/Caution, it’s a production of A Doll’s House at a Chinese university as the Japanese invasion looms. In Taking Woodstock, it's a motley theater troupe from Vassar alternately doing Chekhov adaptations and taking off their clothes in the style of Julian Beck’s Living Theater.
There is also a novelistic sensibility at work here that is rare in film directors, who generally ransack novel plots for the purposes of film while eschewing the complexities of novelistic technique. In The Ice Storm and again in Taking Woodstock, Lee shows an ability to totally immerse himself in worlds completely foreign to his personal history. But it’s in the weaving of his tales without the usual resolutions and catharses that Lee shows an uncanny ability to include the kind of complexity more often found in novels than on the big screen.
Taking Woodstock is a succession of loose threads. The protagonist’s homosexuality is portrayed as innuendo rather than with the grand strokes of choice and ideology (so common to film these days). Significantly, the main figure never actually sees the concert for which he has been the prime mover. Meanwhile, his old-world parents, with their old-world fears and animosities, eat some hash brownies and totally loosen up. Yet after an initial white light experience, the refugee mother ends up crawling into a stash of greenbacks she has hoarded for years and falls into a stupor.
As Taking Woodstock makes clear, an enormous change has taken place, but it’s less a watershed than a form of evolution, and doesn’t necessarily yield a higher state of consciousness. If there is a moral center to the film, it’s the transvestite, former marine security guard (played by Liev Schreiber), whose very existence as an imaginative construct is a testament to the dubiety of certainty.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Vergangenbangenheit
Big German compound words radiate authority. They’re verbal weapons guaranteed to neutralize your opponent.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung (reckoning with the past) and Gesellschaftsgeschichte (the history of society) are the big guns. But even smaller ones can be quite useful, like Fehlleistung (Freudian slip), Wissenschaft (knowledge), and Leidenschaft (a passion of the kind that engulfs Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde). It’s truly wonderful how these German compounds produce meaning in the manner of a Hegelian dialectic. Gemeinschaft (society) carries a certain weight, especially when offered up as part of a double barrel, as in the classic sociological text Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.
Vergangenheit means the past, but it sounds like something the Hells Angels might do, or perhaps that’s Vergangenbang.
Then of course there’s Latin. Lucretius wrote De Rorem Naturae, which is translated as The Order of Things, and Seneca’s only comedy is Apocolocyntosis, or The Pumpkinification of the Emperor Claudius on His Way to Heaven (a long-winded translation if there ever was one). Another favorite is apologia pro vita sua, which means defense of one’s life.
As for the French, only faute de mieux (for want of something better) or the overused plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose (the more things change, the more they are the same) and Louis XV’s famous après moi le déluge come to mind.
Latin has mystique and French is pithy, but the German compound words convey entire ideologies and philosophical systems. Who can ever forget the Nazi’s infamous Lebensborn (fount of life).
In 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded England, he made French the language of the upper classes, leaving the Anglo Saxon of Chaucer, with its German roots, as an indigenous language whose most famous word is still fuck. In Bohemia, the Slavic language that became modern Czech was relegated to the demotic culture, while German became the cosmopolitan language of writers like Franz Kafka. Peter the Great attempted unsuccessfully to Europeanize Russia by adopting French as the language of the aristocracy, though neither Pushkin nor Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Gogol were ever tempted to write their masterpieces in French.
Still, there is nothing like the roar of a German howitzer to perk up someone's ears. It’s like answering “Harvard” when someone asks where you went to school. When conversation drags, a well placed Weltanschauung or Verfremdungseffekt can get things rolling again. The late Pina Bausch founded Tanzteatre Wurpertal—the very name inspires reverence. Then there was the Princess von Thurn und Taxis, whom some people referred to simply as the Princess von buses and taxis.
Several years back, in the TLS, the critic George Steiner breathlessly invoked the Festschrift, commemorating the work of Mircea Eliade, the famed historian of religion. Festschriften are real conversation stoppers in otherwise mundane sentences. One can almost hear some vested scholar with pince-nez at Marburg, Freiburg, Heidelberg or one of the other great German universities whispering somberly, "Und jetzt kommen die Festschriften."
Vergangenheitsbewältigung (reckoning with the past) and Gesellschaftsgeschichte (the history of society) are the big guns. But even smaller ones can be quite useful, like Fehlleistung (Freudian slip), Wissenschaft (knowledge), and Leidenschaft (a passion of the kind that engulfs Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde). It’s truly wonderful how these German compounds produce meaning in the manner of a Hegelian dialectic. Gemeinschaft (society) carries a certain weight, especially when offered up as part of a double barrel, as in the classic sociological text Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.
Vergangenheit means the past, but it sounds like something the Hells Angels might do, or perhaps that’s Vergangenbang.
Then of course there’s Latin. Lucretius wrote De Rorem Naturae, which is translated as The Order of Things, and Seneca’s only comedy is Apocolocyntosis, or The Pumpkinification of the Emperor Claudius on His Way to Heaven (a long-winded translation if there ever was one). Another favorite is apologia pro vita sua, which means defense of one’s life.
As for the French, only faute de mieux (for want of something better) or the overused plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose (the more things change, the more they are the same) and Louis XV’s famous après moi le déluge come to mind.
Latin has mystique and French is pithy, but the German compound words convey entire ideologies and philosophical systems. Who can ever forget the Nazi’s infamous Lebensborn (fount of life).
In 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded England, he made French the language of the upper classes, leaving the Anglo Saxon of Chaucer, with its German roots, as an indigenous language whose most famous word is still fuck. In Bohemia, the Slavic language that became modern Czech was relegated to the demotic culture, while German became the cosmopolitan language of writers like Franz Kafka. Peter the Great attempted unsuccessfully to Europeanize Russia by adopting French as the language of the aristocracy, though neither Pushkin nor Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Gogol were ever tempted to write their masterpieces in French.
Still, there is nothing like the roar of a German howitzer to perk up someone's ears. It’s like answering “Harvard” when someone asks where you went to school. When conversation drags, a well placed Weltanschauung or Verfremdungseffekt can get things rolling again. The late Pina Bausch founded Tanzteatre Wurpertal—the very name inspires reverence. Then there was the Princess von Thurn und Taxis, whom some people referred to simply as the Princess von buses and taxis.
Several years back, in the TLS, the critic George Steiner breathlessly invoked the Festschrift, commemorating the work of Mircea Eliade, the famed historian of religion. Festschriften are real conversation stoppers in otherwise mundane sentences. One can almost hear some vested scholar with pince-nez at Marburg, Freiburg, Heidelberg or one of the other great German universities whispering somberly, "Und jetzt kommen die Festschriften."
Friday, September 4, 2009
Swinestock
Taking Woodstock is now in theaters. Meanwhile, the Center for Disease Control envisions a more sinister spectacle—Swinestock. Swine Flu has definitely returned from summer vacation (New York Times, Sept. 4), and comparisons to the recent avian flu scares and the legendary influenza epidemic of 1918 have created a level of apprehension that recalls Stephen King’s novel The Stand.
Back in the spring, Mexico City was closed down by fears of an epidemic, and there are already a number of people who refuse to take public transportation unless they are wearing surgical masks. As the fall progresses, there will undoubtedly be cautious folk who refuse to make out with their lovers.
Depictions of the fears of plague and epidemic have a long a venerable history in art and literature, from Brueghel’s “The Triumph of Death” to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, in which consumption and spiritual sickness are equated.
Richard Dawkins notwithstanding, what compounds the fear in these outbreaks is the residue of irrationalism and superstition that is part of the landscape of human consciousness. Catastrophic thinking is an aspect of imagination, and there is an element of the pathetic fallacy in the hysteria that accompanies the flu epidemic. Is nature mirroring an inner state of corruption?
As if credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages weren’t punishment enough, nature wreaks its vengeance against human frailty with plagues and epidemics. Maybe the first-born will be spared this time around, but the ferocity of our disasters, both real and conjured, seems to be directly proportional to the conspicuous consumption that characterized the boom years.
Shock and sympathy are the first responses when someone is diagnosed with a cancer, followed inevitably with blame. He or she was too stressed out, didn’t eat well, didn’t exercise. It’s hard to accept the impartiality and indifference of the cosmos. If only ailments were the just punishments for crimes. Then there’d be a cure.
Back in the spring, Mexico City was closed down by fears of an epidemic, and there are already a number of people who refuse to take public transportation unless they are wearing surgical masks. As the fall progresses, there will undoubtedly be cautious folk who refuse to make out with their lovers.
Depictions of the fears of plague and epidemic have a long a venerable history in art and literature, from Brueghel’s “The Triumph of Death” to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, in which consumption and spiritual sickness are equated.
Richard Dawkins notwithstanding, what compounds the fear in these outbreaks is the residue of irrationalism and superstition that is part of the landscape of human consciousness. Catastrophic thinking is an aspect of imagination, and there is an element of the pathetic fallacy in the hysteria that accompanies the flu epidemic. Is nature mirroring an inner state of corruption?
As if credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages weren’t punishment enough, nature wreaks its vengeance against human frailty with plagues and epidemics. Maybe the first-born will be spared this time around, but the ferocity of our disasters, both real and conjured, seems to be directly proportional to the conspicuous consumption that characterized the boom years.
Shock and sympathy are the first responses when someone is diagnosed with a cancer, followed inevitably with blame. He or she was too stressed out, didn’t eat well, didn’t exercise. It’s hard to accept the impartiality and indifference of the cosmos. If only ailments were the just punishments for crimes. Then there’d be a cure.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Networking Not Working
Remembrance of Things Past is the ultimate statement about social networking, and perhaps the most profound philosophical meditation on the subject in the canon. But it was written in total solitude. No one was friending Proust when he wrote his famous series of novels in his cork-lined bedroom.
Facebook, the most popular manifestation of the social networking phenomenon, may represent the death of solitude. Facebook is a little like intravenous feeding—its audience is always linked in and hooked up. And while people constantly talk about wanting to get away, to find a little peace and quiet, the lure of the constant party on Facebook, with its incessant friending, is irresistible.
After all, aloneness is anxiety-producing. Humans are born alone and die that way. The only thing differentiating them from animals with similar fates is the consciousness of their predicament.
Facebook thus presents a plethora of philosophical, social and political problems, and potential virtues—the recent Iranian elections proved that social networks can be vehicles for social change. Much of this is addressed in Fortune tech writer David Kirkpatrick’s much anticipated book The Facebook Effect.
On top of the conundrum of solitude, there is the question of identity. Facebook is based on pictures. Could you imagine Proust offering photographs of the real-life characters on which he based Swann or Odette? What does a small thumbnail sized photo tell us about identity? And what of the constant updates about the banal ephemera of every day life? Diarization of the kind found on Facebook and especially Twitter mistakes bathos for honesty. It’s no wonder that Facebook is so popular. It allows the constant feeling of human interaction without the messy consequences of intimacy.
Facebook also removes a sense of place. It’s no longer necessary to go anywhere when you exist in this ubiquitous cybernetic community, with its rules and rituals and mores that so easily replace indigenous culture.
Alain de Botton wrote a book entitled How Proust Can Change Your Life, but he omitted at least one possibility. Just set out to read Remembrance of Things Past and there won’t be any time for Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site.
MySpace or your place? That is the question.
Facebook, the most popular manifestation of the social networking phenomenon, may represent the death of solitude. Facebook is a little like intravenous feeding—its audience is always linked in and hooked up. And while people constantly talk about wanting to get away, to find a little peace and quiet, the lure of the constant party on Facebook, with its incessant friending, is irresistible.
After all, aloneness is anxiety-producing. Humans are born alone and die that way. The only thing differentiating them from animals with similar fates is the consciousness of their predicament.
Facebook thus presents a plethora of philosophical, social and political problems, and potential virtues—the recent Iranian elections proved that social networks can be vehicles for social change. Much of this is addressed in Fortune tech writer David Kirkpatrick’s much anticipated book The Facebook Effect.
On top of the conundrum of solitude, there is the question of identity. Facebook is based on pictures. Could you imagine Proust offering photographs of the real-life characters on which he based Swann or Odette? What does a small thumbnail sized photo tell us about identity? And what of the constant updates about the banal ephemera of every day life? Diarization of the kind found on Facebook and especially Twitter mistakes bathos for honesty. It’s no wonder that Facebook is so popular. It allows the constant feeling of human interaction without the messy consequences of intimacy.
Facebook also removes a sense of place. It’s no longer necessary to go anywhere when you exist in this ubiquitous cybernetic community, with its rules and rituals and mores that so easily replace indigenous culture.
Alain de Botton wrote a book entitled How Proust Can Change Your Life, but he omitted at least one possibility. Just set out to read Remembrance of Things Past and there won’t be any time for Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site.
MySpace or your place? That is the question.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
BJ's for Everyone
The year is 2020. The United States has been foreclosed on by China and the ascendance of discount supermarket clubs is the subject of a U.N. commission report:
“There was a sawing sound coming from behind the meat counter, and every once in a while a cry that sounded like a bleating lamb, but could have been a child. A special all-access pass was necessary to get into the VIP area, where organs were freely traded.
“Many of the Friday-night shoppers had piled their carts with gigantic bags of rolls and the obligatory double-wide family packs of hot dogs. A shipment of Korean-made fuses had just arrived, along with outlet covers, boxes of splints, and cans of blue paint with Cyrillic lettering.
“The ceilings were extremely high but nothing was out of reach. There were no minarets or spires. The architecture radiated space without striving.
“There were darkened flat-screen televisions by the cash registers, obtainable through special promotional programs in which defaulted home mortgages could be traded in for Fun-Bucks. There were also customers who filled their shopping carts with bad loans.
“At the very end of the food court was a small concession where copies of rogue nuclear weapons contracts signed by Abdul Quadeer Khan, the creator of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, were sold alongside vintage copies of The New York Times from the moon landing and 9/11. The stand was like a mutant eBay on steroids, with parcels of unprocessed Uranium and low-grade nuclear weapons snapped up by middle-aged women wheeling boxes of fertility drugs.
“High-level intelligence operatives were travelling incognito, relegated to the lower reaches of the food chain, hunting day and night for black-box trading algorithms. Commodities traders fulfilled contracts for 2,400-packs of Diet Coke, while second- and third-generation ARV’s (antiretroviral drugs) were priced by technicians in hospital whites. Live AIDS viruses had yet to become popular discount items.
“One member of management argued that international slave trading, a necessary evil for which there was great demand, would soon be dominated by the large chains.”
“There was a sawing sound coming from behind the meat counter, and every once in a while a cry that sounded like a bleating lamb, but could have been a child. A special all-access pass was necessary to get into the VIP area, where organs were freely traded.
“Many of the Friday-night shoppers had piled their carts with gigantic bags of rolls and the obligatory double-wide family packs of hot dogs. A shipment of Korean-made fuses had just arrived, along with outlet covers, boxes of splints, and cans of blue paint with Cyrillic lettering.
“The ceilings were extremely high but nothing was out of reach. There were no minarets or spires. The architecture radiated space without striving.
“There were darkened flat-screen televisions by the cash registers, obtainable through special promotional programs in which defaulted home mortgages could be traded in for Fun-Bucks. There were also customers who filled their shopping carts with bad loans.
“At the very end of the food court was a small concession where copies of rogue nuclear weapons contracts signed by Abdul Quadeer Khan, the creator of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, were sold alongside vintage copies of The New York Times from the moon landing and 9/11. The stand was like a mutant eBay on steroids, with parcels of unprocessed Uranium and low-grade nuclear weapons snapped up by middle-aged women wheeling boxes of fertility drugs.
“High-level intelligence operatives were travelling incognito, relegated to the lower reaches of the food chain, hunting day and night for black-box trading algorithms. Commodities traders fulfilled contracts for 2,400-packs of Diet Coke, while second- and third-generation ARV’s (antiretroviral drugs) were priced by technicians in hospital whites. Live AIDS viruses had yet to become popular discount items.
“One member of management argued that international slave trading, a necessary evil for which there was great demand, would soon be dominated by the large chains.”
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