Vic Socotra

15 March 2009

House Arrest

(South Lodge Hotel, near Horsham, West Sussex, Home of the G20 Ministers)

I had the best of intentions this morning. One of them was to lay abed and not think. Another was to do something with the second half of a book I wrote years ago, and found completely by chance late yesterday.

The gentle readers have demonstrated concern of late, with the mail-bag increasingly filled with notes inquiring if “I was OK,” and others gently chiding me on the inability to count to a trillion in Roman Numerals.

Of course I am OK. I just have a little trouble counting. The medication that has made the arthritis pain go away may have contributed to that, and there is a case to be made that all the prescription drugs that were awash on Wall Street after 9/11 may have been a contributing factor, all those brokers high as kites.

That is why I was excited to find the second half of the book. Twenty years ago to the weekend- the Ides of March- I was wandering around the Holy Land, and it seemed like a swell way to get out of today and into the past where things were safe.

I don’t want to get locked into the miasma of the present, but it grabs at me, like it seems to be tugging at everyone. A pal sent along a column written by the very articulate Peggy Noonan, who crafted some of Ronald Regan’s better speeches.

Today she sees something abroad in the land that looks like fear. She said:
“One friend looks for small farms in distressed rural areas. Another logs on late at night looking for a house to buy in a small town out West, or down South, or in the Deep South. She is moving all around America in her imagination…She's not looking for a new place, she's looking for the old days.”

That is why revisiting the Intifada of 1990 seemed appealing to me, in a perverse way. Like Ms Noonan, I think “People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions.”

The assumptions came up yesterday in some sensitive negotiations with Ahmed, my Hubris dealer. He would like me to purchase a new Hubrismobile, and there are some incredible deals on them at the moment. He contacted me to tell me all about the opportunities, and being ever the optimist, I stopped by to talk to him in his little office cubby next to the shiny Mars-red CLK convertible at the showroom.

That was the other thing about revisiting the old days: Ahmed is a West Bank Palestinian, and has a life story that reflects the old American dream. I met him on the premium used car lot several years ago, both of us hoping for something better, and now he is on the new vehicle team, where the fat profits would be.

If he could move the cars, that is. God, they are cool. They almost think for you.

I am not sure what I was thinking, beyond the fact that it is a buyer’s market for just about everything except guns, and it is possible to get a deal on them, too, if you talk to the right people.

What I found when we ran the numbers was that what I have is worth a lot less than what I thought, and a new Hubrismobile would represent essentially a completely new contract with the future, one based on the confidence that I will have a job for the next few years.

There is no rational reason not to believe that, I know. But still…I don’t believe it.

I returned to Tunnel Eight with the knowledge that frivolity is not the answer. The distressing reality is that throwing a lot of money at something not worth what it was, in the hope that in the time to come, it will at least provide a place of comfort in which to live.

It is a sort of house arrest that a lot of people are walking away from, and not all by choice.

So maybe the twin stories of the morning dragged me out of the Holy Land, twenty years ago, to discover that the oily bastard Nawaz Sharif, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, refused to stay under house arrest at his place in Model Town, just outside Lahore proper.

He was surrounded by police for three days, but left his house determined to address protesters later today, joining an anti-government "long march" by lawyers and opposition activists. They are pushing for the restoration of judges deposed by former despot and Army Chief of Staff Pervez Musharraf.

If there is anything more alarming than a march by angry lawyers, I have yet to see it. Remember, the Taliban, awful as they are, have no nuclear weapons. This disturbance has the promise to put them in the hands of people who do not like us, and has vaulted Pakistan over Afghanistan as the number one problem for the new Administration.

I heard someone use the term “Moderate Taliban” the other day, so you know that priorities have changed.

Secretary Clinton is said to have called to try to call things down, and based on the number of time zones involved, this is the first of those three-am calls that were so famous in the campaign. She talked to both men about resolving the three-week old crisis.

I hope she did well, but apparently could not convince Nawaz to stay home.

The Model City is one of the better places to be under house arrest in Lahore. Established in 1921, the “model” city was supposed to demonstrate values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity in a cooperative environment.

It is one of those curious ironies that the ethos of the Model City was derived from the thoughts of George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906), a social reformer responsible for the term “secularism” and the last man convicted of blasphemy in England, possibly because of it.

It is the self-same philosopher whose ideas spurred the Garden Apartment movement that is represented in brick all around Big Pink, so I have a certain grudging kinship with Nawaz.

If I could get out, I would, though I have no idea where I would go. A little farm down south?

I think Secretary of the Treasury Tim Giethner has the same feeling, but at least he can leave the cottage where he has been staying. Although Tim does not directly control any nuclear weapons, he is certainly sitting on a powder keg of his own, and he has been under de facto house arrest at the South Lodge Hotel in the lovely Sussex County, south of London.

He was at the Group of 20 (G20) ministerial meeting over the weekend, and essentially locked down at the five star resort, which had started life as a private home of a prominent Victorian of the mercantile persuasion in 1883.
Such a lavish lifestyle became untenable as the Imperial bubble broke after the First War, and the Socialist revolution that accompanied the end of the Second.

It was unsustainable as a private residence, given the times, and helps you to understand that these things happen in the course of human affairs with sad regularity.

There are ninety-three acres of lush parkland surrounding the hotel, covered with hundreds of varieties of rhododendrons, camellias and azaleas, the same colorful sort that will be blooming here in Virginia soon.

The Ministers were housed in more than forty exquisitely furnished suites, some with romantic four poster-beds, and others with bubbling Jacuzzis that offer stunning views over the Downs.

I don’t begrudge the ministers a little luxury, if it helps them stay focused on the problem. This started as an American crisis, but I suspect that the Secretary got pride of place in the Bothy House, a separate cottage on the hotel grounds that offers “absolute privacy and security” with five bedrooms.

He is going to wish he had something like that when he gets back to Washington. The Washington Post broke the story that $165 million bucks was going to be paid out to the executives at AIG, which has already received billions in bail out money. The Government is stuck, and apparently can’t stop it.

Even the Justice Department says the bonus money is obligated by legal contracts that pre-exist the crisis.

Imagine how this looks to all concerned. The executives who oversaw this disaster in derivative instruments are going to be rewarded for their performance and retention. Performance and retention!

I have been hearing the first whispers around town that Geithner was not the man for the Treasury job. I suspect they started with Larry Summers, who is sitting in the White House, closer to the President, and was right there to be among the first to comment on the American Insurance Group bonus payout.

It makes you blink when you consider that it has taken $11 trillion dollars in household value in the States alone. That is not just the people who are a little underwater like me, and who can probably bail themselves out if there is world enough and time.

It is money taken from everyone who owns a home just about everywhere in the world. It is an arresting development indeed.

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