A Simple Question, Part III - Don DeLillo

'Against the force of history, so powerful, visible and real, the novelist poses the idiosyncratic self. Here it is, sly, mazed, mercurial, scared half-crazy. It is also free and undivided, the only thing that can match the enormous dimensions of social reality.' - Don DeLillo, "The Power of History"

What is it about Don DeLillo? It could be the humor - wry, assholish, familiar, biting, as in the line in 'The Angel Esmeralda' about the junkies who wear dead men's Reeboks, an observation so precise that it's difficult to stifle a laugh, and if someone asks you what made you laugh, it's even more difficult to admit that Don DeLillo's evocation of the pathetic refugees of the bombed-out Bronx tickled you so. It could be the method by which he alchemizes street speech, formal grammar, the anti-language of bureaucratize and the shorthand patois of marketing, advertising, military banter into that very peculiar dialect of English - American. It could be his obsessions - cities, paranoia as a state of mind and a reaction to the conspiracies that do exist, the circling dance that Art, Capital, Sex, Death perform that, when viewed, passes for culture. Who knows? DeLillo himself doesn't seem to. He has said in interviews that he views his sentences as sculptures periodically, and will rearrange the meaning of the sentence based on the aesthetics of the rise and fall of the letters as the reader progresses. His view of human nature alternates between dim and completely irrelevant. He is the most modern of my favorite living writers, has been hailed as a prophetic novelist who foretold the Age of Terror by critics, yet he rarely participates in the modern world.

When I am feeling particularly good about myself, I like to think that he reminds me of me.

Recently The New Yorker published a review of The Angel Esmeralda, DeLillo's recently released short story collection. Martin Amis, who expands learnedly about DeLillo's interest in Terror, that group Fear so distinct from personal Fear, but the best thought in the whole essay is the first, when Amis says that when we say we love a writer, we really mean that we love about half of that writer's work. Not necessarily half of what we've read, but half of the works. DeLillo hits about .500 with me. I haven't read Americana, End Zone, Ratner's Star, Point Omega. I could stand to have back the time I spent reading Players and Cosmopolis. The Body Artist has fantastic prose wed to plotless noodling while Falling Man puts one of DeLillo's unemotional blankmen through the World Trade Center attacks and though there is some irony in the juxtaposition of the flat, affectless narration and the horror that it details, I don't think irony was DeLillo's intention. Either way, I would file them under Interesting Failures - worth reading, if only to see what happens when certain enjoyable artistic sensibilities overwhelm the contexts that define them as strengths and become weaknesses indulged.

Which leaves us with White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld. Combine them with the Interesting Failures, and I love about half of DeLillo's writing. As individual works, my overwhelming preference is for Underworld. I'll get to a defense of that in a bit, but first I want to unpack why I think the best way to understand and appreciate them is as one colossal text.

White Noise is often held up as DeLillo's best work. I disagree, but I don't think it's germane in any case. Even those who dislike Underworld, and there are plenty of people who find it a turgid, pretentious slog, wouldn't argue that it's DeLillo's magnum opus, and that he intended it as such. White Noise separates into two neat parts: Before the Airbone Toxic Event and After the Airborne Toxic Event. Both parts cover most of the same thematic territory, but the first plays as high satire while the second shows the tragedy that arises because of the weaknesses that are the objects of such fun in the first. It's a smart method of organizing the novel, but I think the comedy plays much better. Here's why: Jack Gladney, the professor of Hitler Studies at an unnamed liberal arts college somewhere in America, is a milquetoast. He is married to Babette, and together they do nothing and raise their kids. Gladney is ensconced in a safe world of classrooms and lecture halls, studying the most dangerous politician in history. He spends hours roaming through the supermarket, where he admires the bounty of freedom and ponders which peanut butter he'll try today. He and Babette stay awake and talk about how their mutual fear of death is a wonderful bond. They are boring. Gladney may be the most useless human being on Earth, and DeLillo skewers him mercilessly. Gladney as an object of satire is ripe. He's inherently funny (one doesn't become the head of Hitler studies without a sense of humor) and he's the sort of person most of us like to see mocked. Once the plot kicks in to gear and Gladney ineptly deals with the fallout of the Airborne Toxic Event and the revelation that Babette is cheating on him, we are exposed to the tragic consequences of Gladney's consumerism, academic detachment and fear of death. Unfortunately, tragic consequences require a tragic hero and Jack Gladney is a shitty hero. White Noise is mainly about consumerism and the pernicious effect of media, but the meandering comic first half is much more effective than the dark, plotty second.

Consumerism: Theme 1.

Some dipshit once said that Libra was an act of bad citizenship. It is a novel that follows the efforts of a researcher with the Central Intelligence Agency who is writing a history of the Kennedy assassination. Every other chapter is devoted to a close-third person narrative that tracks the life of Lee Harvey Oswald as it moves him toward Dallas. The remaining chapters follow completely fictional right-wingers within the national intelligence operations who conceive and execute an assassination of John F. Kennedy with the aid of Oswald, Ruby, Ferrie, Shaw and other real-life characters. DeLillo did massive research for the book, but was inspired to write it because Oswald grew up near DeLillo in The Bronx. That is to say, he imagined the life of a boy not unlike himself, from a similar milieu, whose circumstances eventually diverged in all particulars save that shared upbringing. He used his imagination to concoct a plausible, though fictional, explanation for what happened on November 22, 1963. DeLillo used known facts to create a reality slightly apart from the one that most people inhabit. Which, of course, is what most fiction writers do: alter the details of daily existence to expose truths hidden within the quotidian. All novels are poor history and bad citizenship, given that their whole purpose is to transform our accepted perception of reality.

History: Theme 2.

My suspicion is that Mao II is only interesting within the cycle of novels that begins with White Noise and culminates with Underworld. The characters are thin, constructs that DeLillo uses to explore themes. Action within the novel is scant, and the most interesting event is an affair between two of the thin characters that has few repercussions. The main theme of Mao II is the diminished role of the artist in public life. DeLillo contrasts an aging novelist with a young radical and demonstrates the greater impact that the anonymous would-be terrorist has on the broad consciousness of society than the famed writer. Personally, I think that DeLillo overestimates and romanticizes the capacity of art to shake the world and his thesis that violent young men have displaced educated older men in the public mind falls apart when you examine any historical epoch. It was Odysseus and the Aegeans who razed Troy, after all. Not Homer.

Art: Theme 3.

Underworld brings together the three themes that DeLillo explored separately in White Noise, Libra and Mao II. Its opening sequence, which recounts the experiences of a few people in attendance at the single-game playoff between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers to determine the National League pennant in 1951, is the first and best of Underworld's many great setpieces. Theme 1, consumerism, is everywhere. People pay to attend the game. They purchase hot dogs and peanuts. Advertisements for cigarettes and magazines and grooming products abound. History provides both the backdrop and the foreground action. The game DeLillo portrays actually happened, historical figures like Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover, all of whom he weaves into the narrative, were actually in attendance. Russ Hodges actually called the game. The Soviets did in fact detonate a hydrogen bomb for the first time on the same day. Check for Theme 2. The third theme, Art, is subtly integrated, but definitely present. Hodges is the most obvious example of an artist at work in the historical context. He comments on the action, projecting his own sensibility on the unfolding events, but also narrates the feel of the day and the sound of the crowd for the listeners at home. There is an obvious corollary to the story that DeLillo is constructing. Other than Hodges, and deeper in terms of Underworld’s internal logic, is the painting The Triumph of Death, from which the section takes its title. The Triumph of Death depicts a dark army of skeletons and corpses overrunning revelers and townsfolk in a burned-out landscape. After Bobby Thomson hits the so-called ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’ to win the game for the Giants, fans in the upper decks tear apart newspapers and magazines and send a celebratory rain of confetti down onto the box where Hoover sits next to a puke-covered Gleason, having just been informed of the Soviet bomb. Printed on one of the fluttering pages is The Triumph of Death. Hoover catches the page and contemplates the historical event in which he is participating against the historical event of which he has just been informed. He wonders which will win out. DeLillo spends the remainder of the book depicting artists grappling with the violence, despair and death of the forty years between the game and the present while the mass of the country distracts itself from these forces with goods and consumer culture. More than a few critical assessments of Underworld love the opening and closing sections and discount the meat of the book. While there is some validity to these complaints (the first and last sections are the best parts of the novel), skipping the middle means missing the fantastic, and entirely fictional, Lenny Bruce stand-up sets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, missing the evocation of New York during the summer garbage strike of 1974, missing the advertising executive who takes the last train to Westport, where he is accompanied by men who are bound by nothing, save ‘the evilness of their dreams.’ The themes recur as the population of the novel increases, but this never seems redundant. Rather, DeLillo is positing that we are all bound by the culture we share, and he explicates how that culture is created and destroyed, and how the destruction feeds the creation. Klara Sax, the main artist figure of the novel, collects mothballed B-52 bombers, the deliverers of destruction in the desert for a large art installation. DeLillo is unwinkingly serious about the feedback loop between death and art.

Put a bit more simply, Underworld is the strongest and best of Don DeLillo’s works, and therefore one of the strongest and best books of the last thirty years. To use one of the master metaphors of Underworld, Caro may have a better batting average than DeLillo, but DeLillo, when he connects, hits the ball a lot harder.

A Simple Question, Part II - Robert Caro

"I came to see that I wasn't really interested in writing a biography to tell the story of a famous man. I realized that what I wanted to do was to use biography as a means of illuminating the times and the great forces that shape the times-particularly political power. I was interested in political power because in a democracy, political power shapes all our lives. We were taught in Political Science courses that in a democracy power basically comes from the ballot box, from elections. But Robert Moses was never elected to anything. And yet for almost half a century, forty-four years, he exercised more power in New York City and New York State than any official who was elected-more than any mayor, more than any governor." - Robert Caro

For a guy whose output consists of one-and-three-fifths biographies, Robert Caro sure does get a lot of attention. He has published four books - a one volume life of Robert Moses and three of five proposed studies of the years of Lyndon Johnson - and been awarded the Pulitzer for two of them, along with two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize in History... you get the idea. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York has never been out of print and is required reading for any one interested in the city, its history, and how politics works, for better and for worse, in the daily lives of the citizens who ostensibly are the greatest force in the process of government. Head down to the Strand and you will see it on one of the main display tables, thick as a Peter Luger porterhouse and very nearly as expensive. Why does a biography of a man who built things in New York, written 37 years ago, continue to fascinate?

This is part of a larger question that I want to spend more time thinking about, but is worth posing here: why is the shelf life of non-fiction works generally so much shorter and narrower than that of fiction? Non-fiction outsells fiction and has for as long as those numbers have been tracked. The long tail of successful fiction can be extraordinary - J.D. Salinger famously was able to comfortably live as a recluse for fifty years off the residual checks he received each year for sales of The Catcher in the Rye - while works of non-fiction seem to fade as soon as the author has finished their interview with Jon Stewart. What works of non-fiction have lasted beyond the generation in which they were written? Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (though I know of no one who has actually read the fucking thing), Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Metaphysics, the essays of Montaigne, Walden and Civil Disobedience. If you want to count treatises, throw in Das Kapital, The Wealth of Nations, Utopia, The Federalist Papers. If you want to count fiction, The Bible outsells all these books combined. I don't pretend to know the answer here. Perhaps we aren't curious about old times. Perhaps the prose is clunky or stilted. Perhaps the subjects actually have become irrelevant.

Robert Caro has written four books. One of them is about Robert Moses, a high-ranking bureaucrat in New York City from the early 1920s until the late 1960s. The other three are about Lyndon Johnson, a largely-reviled politician who was active during the same time period. Caro is 76 years old now, and while he plans to finish the last of the Johnson books in the next two to three years, it is very likely that he will die with an oeuvre that consists entirely of life studies of two men whom most Americans either do not or would rather not think about. These facts should make him quixotic or obscure, but instead his works are not only best sellers, but remain vital years after their relevance should have faded. Only David McCullough can rival Caro for long-term interest and success, but McCullough also (ably) writes pretty standard biographies of famous men and events that are notable for the liveliness of the prose but also tend to be borderline fawning. When McCullough writes that Harry Truman used to begin each day with a small, bracing shot of bourbon, he interprets it as evidence of Truman's vitality. When Caro writes about Johnson dictating to his aides while simultaneously moving his bowels, he notes that this is evidence of Johnson's technique of bullying underlings into submission.

Works of non-fiction are true and factual, but there are many artistic and aesthetic conventions that make them feel less real, less alive than fiction. Subjects are often described using the sorts of code words that we use when speaking about the negative traits of loved ones. They are 'stubborn' or 'temperamental' or 'passionate' or 'driven' or 'earthy' rather than 'arrogant, abusive, self-absorbed, ambitious vulgarians.' Nods may be given to how a great man displays the 'attitudes of his time' towards minorities, women, lower classes, but to call such a leader a racist, sexist or classist asshole is just simply not done in the world of biography. Caro, however, trusts the reader enough to put his subjects on display and let the reader see how the ambition that made Robert Moses want to build something like Jones Beach or the Triborough Bridge is deeply entwined with the arrogance that drove him to bulldoze across the South Bronx to construct an expressway that has been congested since the day it was completed. This is different from some sort of journalistic 'show don't tell' type of writing, where the facts are presented and the reader is left to her own judgment. Caro is constantly editorializing and guiding the reaction of the reader, but he is constantly editorializing from both sides - showing us how a vision without power makes no improvement in the lives of the people that the visionary wishes to aid, and how that power to improve, once attained, isolates the visionary from those people he once helped.

In each of Caro's works, there is a single chapter where he goes out of his way to impress the reader. The narrative essentially breaks for a few dozen pages and Caro lays out the themes, his thesis, his research and paints a portrait so effective and complete that the reader is compelled to keep reading, almost like a cliff-hanger in a good piece of genre fiction. In The Power Broker, it's 'One Mile;' 'The Sad Irons' in The Path to Power; Means of Ascent has 'The Story of Coke Stevenson'; for Master of the Senate, there is 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia.' What is fascinating about these episodes, and important in understanding why Caro's work has remained relevant is that the main characters of the biographies don't appear in them at all. 'One Mile' is a portrait of the South Bronx neighborhoods that Robert Moses destroyed when he put in the Cross Bronx Expressway, with special emphasis placed on East Tremont. It establishes the stakes involved for a group of people who were not even aware that they were players on the public stage. It shows what they had, what they lost, and why that mattered, even if such considerations were never important to Moses. It places the consequences of Moses' exercise of power in a context apart from the standard biographical recitation of accomplishments and their cost and size. 'The Sad Irons' spends twenty some-odd pages putting the reader into the daily life of a Texas housewife in the days prior to rural electrification. Caro's thesis in The Path to Power was that to understand Texas was to understand Lyndon Johnson, and in 'The Sad Irons' he makes his case that in order to understand Johnson's importance as an historical figure, you had to understand what he did for ordinary people in Texas. Caro doesn't imply that Johnson was wholly responsible for rural electrification. He gives most of the credit to FDR and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. He does, however, point out how hard Johnson fought for the bill, how much it meant for him during his sad time as a member of the House, and how immediate and vast the improvement was for the lives of the women out in the hinterlands from which Johnson had come. 'The Story of Coke Stevenson' gives the background of Johnson's opponent in the 1948 Senate race in Texas. Blake once described Coke Stevenson as 'what Reagan played on TV,' and that theme animates much of Caro's prose in the chapter. The 1948 election marks one of the first modern political campaigns in Caro's telling. Substance, embodied by Stevenson as a man of principle and accomplishment who is stoic and wishes to run on his record, is overwhelmed by showmanship, as practiced by Johnson in a series of radio jingles, broadcast speeches, helicopter leaflet dumps and other carnival tricks. That Johnson eventually wins the election through outright thievery and then proceeds to the Senate, where he rises to Majority Leader and shepherds the first civil rights bill to completion only adds to the irony. Finally, there is 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia,' which is essentially a mini-biography of Richard Russell. Like 'The Story of Coke Stevenson' in Means of Ascent, 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia' presents us with an historic character that the reader can use to measure Johnson against. If Johnson in Means of Ascent is slimy and amoral, in Master of the Senate, he emerges as the hero. Caro spends sixty or so pages on Russell, who was a clever tactician, an effective Senator, a patriot in the truest sense (his high point comes when he plays Cicero to Douglas MacArthur's Antony and condemns the general as a demagogue bent on dismantling the republic), and a virulent racist. Without this portrait of what a Senator, particularly one from the South, could accomplish, and what he would not lift a finger to attempt, and in fact actively opposed for his entire career, the bravery and wit that Johnson displays during the 1957 fight to pass the first expansion of civil rights since Reconstruction exist without context. By spending so much time on Russell, Caro gives us insight into what Johnson could have become, which makes his eventual repudiation of that role seem transcendent.

There is much more that I could say about Caro's abilities as a writer and as a biographer. I'll settle for just pointing out a couple of things that convince me that he is one of our greatest living writers and that his works will continue to matter long after the BQE is replaced and Johnson's guns and butter economics have faded from the fore of American politics: first, when you read Master of the Senate, pay attention to The Dam - it begins as a metaphor, then becomes a literal thing, which in turn becomes a key bargaining chip to the deal that causes the metaphorical dam to give way and be swept aside by the twin forces of justice and power - the writing is so careful and elegant and fun that you may find yourself laughing out loud as Caro unfolds the tale; second, the announcement that the fourth volume of the Johnson biography would be published during the spring of 2012 has me looking forward to a book with an enthusiasm that I haven't felt since the announcement of The Pale King. I know the books are really long, but you have to trust me people - reading the 1400 pages of The Power Broker is a more valuable way to spend your time than just about any combination of smaller volumes you could finish during the same time period. Besides, the next Johnson book is allegedly going to be only around 700 pages. That's less than two Thomas Friedman tropes on how great everything is in India and could be in the United States if we all obeyed the precepts of Friedman's newest acronym.

One quick note: the quote up top is from an interview of Caro by Vonnegut. It's a long read, but it keeps one warm on cold dark nights.

A Simple Question, Part I

"You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That finally, the door opens... and it opens outward - we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch." - David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed"

Not too long ago, Brett and I were discussing The Pale King and he mentioned how strange it felt to him to not have an easy answer to the question, 'Who is your favorite living author?' This of course set off my listmaking instinct, and I've compiled some candidates for the title of My Favorite Living Author.

Somewhat arbitrarily, I have restricted the list to American authors. Really, though, my favorite author would be American no matter what. I am American. I like to think that I am interested enough in the rest of the world to care about international events and incidents and the authors who chronicle these changes, whether in fiction or no, but as much admiration as I have for Naipaul, Walcott, Coetzee, Heaney, Saramago, I admit that their emotional impact is muted for me because I don't share their cultural sensibility and therefore lack the shorthand necessary to take an intellectual appreciation and turn it into gut-level excitement at the prospect of another book by one of those authors. It's surprising to me how much of what I enjoy in modern literature is rooted in national identity. Cormac McCarthy writes about the American West in a style that is nearly biblical. He says less about modernity than Naipaul, but because I have been to (some of) those places and understand the cultural myths that he is criticizing or outright destroying, the tangled emotions that he causes me to feel are greater and more immediate, despite Naipaul's seemingly more relevant subject matter.

So here are the candidates, in alphabetical order: Robert Caro, Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.

Here's why some of the other heavies of modern American literature aren't on this list: I haven't read enough Neal Stephenson; David Mamet last published something really worth reading and thinking about some 15 years ago; Jhumpa Lahiri is treading water; Jonathan Franzen has talent insufficient to his ambition; Billy Collins writes poetry, which is just about dead as an art form (writes a guy who loves writing poetry); Colson Whitehead has ambition insufficient to his talent; Junot Diaz has only published two books (though both are fantastic); Richard Price kicks a lot of ass but is rarely surprising; I haven't read enough Joan Didion.

What the answer to my simple question will be, I do not know. I suspect that in the writing of my thoughts on their work, the answer will emerge. My basic criteria for deciding on a champion will be those qualities I most loved about David Foster Wallace, as captured in the quote above: language and style, as seen in Wallace's ability to set a simple image and scenario - the door and the frustrated person outside it - and then deliver a mixture of insight, humor and a sort of pathos with just a few sentences, one of which isn't even English; curiosity and breadth of subject matter, as seen in the fact that Wallace is writing not just a paean to Kafka but a rumination on what makes Kafka not only special, but unique, how Kafka's unique sensibility makes him difficult to teach, what the limitations of Wallace's ability to teach Kafka effectively have to say about Wallace, his students and the broader culture, and finally the active moral takeaway from all this ruminating - and all of this in one essay in a collection that includes literary criticism, political commentary, food writing, and a mind-blowingly funny essay/journalistic feature on pornography - and all of this by a writer whose reputation mainly rested on his fiction; and, finally, that intangible connection that our favorite writers are able to establish, where we read their words and feel a moment of recognition, that they have somehow gained access to our thoughts and published them for us, before we realize, with a pang of envy, what a gulf of wit and articulation separates what they wrote from what we like to believe we thought first.

White Alba Truffles, French Playwrights and Participation as a Requirement of Democracy

"All the past history of the world goes to show that continued peace and prosperity produce luxury and idleness, which in turn corrupt the morals and deteriorate the character of the people." - Thomas Mellon, Thomas Mellon and His Times

Truffles are one of those ingredients that every self-professed foodie idealizes past any sense of proportion. You never forget the first time that you smell them in the dining room, the way that the perfume of simultaneous fecundity and decay wafts through a whole section of tables and everyone's head turns toward the table that is luxuriating in that uber-mushroom aroma. The only other foodstuff with a smell of similar transfixing power is a big, old bottle of red wine. Much like big, old bottles of red wine, truffles have become fetish objects in our culture, and much like big, old bottles of red wine, the quality of the truffle bears tangential at best relation to its final cost to a diner.

As recently as last week, the wild white truffles harvested around the town of Alba in northern Italy were selling for just under $5000/lb. Wholesale. Let's unpack this, because it's more than a little mind-boggling that anything that one eats could possibly be so expensive. There are enormous legitimate costs intrinsic to the harvesting of truffles. First, a trufflehunter must either train a dog to seek out the mushroom spores, which grow underground at the bases of certain trees (not just certain types of trees, mind you, certain individual trees) or use a sow, who will be relentlessly attracted to the smell of the truffle because it contains pheromones similar to those found in the saliva of her mate but will also attempt to eat the truffle once she has unearthed it. So spend weeks training a dog or trust in your ability to corral the appetite of a horny hog. Cost #1. Second, as noted, the truffles are only found in the forests surrounding a small town in northern Italy. Even if your well-trained dog or unstoppable sexed-up pig find all the truffles they possibly can, there are only so many out there, and plenty of other trufflehunters looking for the lucrative little bastards. Also, the harvesting season lasts only a few weeks, so it's not like you can show up in May and hope that no one else with a dog or pig is out that day. Cost #2. Third, once unearthed, the truffles begin to decay almost immediately. As with most non-green vegetables, they have a relatively long shelf life, but it's still imperative to get them to market as quickly as possible. Cost #3. Finally, and again as noted before, the white truffles found around Alba are sought out by discerning gourmands the world over, so there are enormous costs related to transport and storage, because even if you can keep your swine from devouring the precious tuber the moment she finds it, she is unlikely to show such restraint during a Trans-Atlantic voyage. Adding to these costs is the fact, to reiterate, that the white truffles found around Alba are in demand across the world. There are only so many truffles in the world and anyone who has been near their enchanting smell can attest what a special treat it is. Scatter enough truffle enthusiasts around the globe and eventually their testimonials increase worldwide demand for this native food, with its inherently limited supply. Limited supply and unlimited demand will always equal outrageous price.

There really is no reason this should be, however. Despite the fact that truffles will not grow at the base of every single sycamore or cypress tree, a sycamore or cypress (or pecan or red maple or whatever) that has produced truffle spores in the past will 1) continue to produce them for a good 30 years and 2) yield nuts or saplings that predictably attract the truffles spores on down through the generations. In other words, the cultivation of truffles would be relatively easy. Of course, ease of cultivation would increase supply and therefore cause the price of white Alba truffles to decrease. Guess how the people who currently make their living hunting/harvesting/distributing/serving white Alba truffles feel about the idea of increasing the supply on the market. A bigger and maybe more important reason that the price of white Alba truffles need not be so outrageous is: they are actually not as rich aromatically or as complex in flavor as their less rarefied (though still plenty expensive) cousins, the black truffle. To beat a dead horse, wild white Alba truffles are found by either well-trained dogs or desperate housewife hogs during a brief period of time in a tiny area of northern Italy, and therefore are rare. Black truffles are more easily and widely cultivated, they keep longer and lose less flavor if they are dried and their harvest season is longer. Once I went to the Museum of Natural History and spent a while in the room with all the gemstones. To my mind, the sapphires were the prettiest and the opals the most interesting. But, of course, the diamonds get the best placement within the room and fetch the highest prices in the jewelers (and in the world of natural history museums, no doubt), but for only one reason that I can discern: they are rarer. So, too, with white truffles. The scent that they blast out in a dining room is unmistakeable and unique, but it is not necessarily that elegant or even appetizing. Where black truffles smell of rich earth with a hint of pepper, white truffles always smell like money congratulating its own existence to me.

Tartuffe, the titular villain of Moliere's most controversial comedy, is a well-perfumed dandy and charlatan who masquerades as a pious holy man in order to relieve the aged and wealthy Orgon of as much of his fortune as possible before the old man dies. Tartuffe has convinced Orgon that it is only with his (Tartuffe's) sage advice that Orgon will stave off ruination and death. By casting himself as the sole supply of that which Orgon most demands (like all of us, Orgon is fixated on not being a dead homeless person), Tartuffe is able to very nearly beggar the old man before the inevitable comic reversal by which Orgon's fortune is saved and Tartuffe's ragamuffinry is exposed.

Hopefully without coming across as too hoity-toity, I will confess that I am deeply suspicious of direct democracy and the capacity of the people to govern themselves. My home state of California provides an object lesson in the dangers of allowing those citizens who have a great interest in the outcomes of governmental action but very little interest in the work (another word for compromise) by which those outcomes are achieved to take control of public policy. Hence California has an incredible system of state universities and parks and prisons (people love schools and nature and hate criminals) but insufficient revenue to actually pay for their operations (people hate taxes even more than criminals). In California, everyone is Orgon, susceptible to the suggestions of Tartuffe, who may take the guise of an environmental lobbying firm or an anti-immigration group but whose underlying message is always "make this decision that I am suggesting that perfectly aligns with your worldview and all will be well." Of course, Orgon is only attractive to Tartuffe because he is such an easy target. Were Orgon hale or less wealthy, there would be no Tartuffe. If Californians were better educated or possessed fewer exploitable natural resources, they might well be more capable of governing themselves well, without the interventions of the various Tartuffes.

Transforming a preference into a fetish requires a psychological leap that is both entirely understandable and clearly defiant of basic logic. To wit: pesto is a food that makes me happy; therefore I will only order pesto when I eat in Italian restaurants, in order that I might find the one that has the finest pesto, so that I can find out where their purveyors source the basil and pine nuts and cheese that composes this pesto, and then I will buy up those farms and brush my pesto-stained teeth with pesto after a long day at the pesto dispensary before I turn in and sleep in my pesto-filled waterbed next to my wife who is constantly scented with pesto perfume. Even my pesto dream makes more sense than the suckers who blow all that cash on white truffles, though. Lots of people like pesto, after all. I could finance my pestotopia by selling whatever excess pesto there was to the masses. White truffles are kept at artificially high prices by people with a vested interest in doing so who are enabled by a class of people who consider themselves to be successful and blessed with good taste simply because they have the means to afford a delicacy so rarefied and refined that the only other creatures who seek it out are, again, trained dogs or sows in heat.

True good taste is defined by questions like: What am I hungry for? Where is the best place to satiate my hunger for that thing? Can I perhaps supply it myself or via the help of friends/neighbors/family? My preference for republican (note the small r) governance rather than democratic lies not in my belief that people are fundamentally incapable of making decisions on their own behalf. Indeed, I am friends almost exclusively with people who know what they want, how to get it, and how best to engage the other interested members of their community in those same issues. Rather, it is my continued observation of masses of people who allow themselves to be deluded into thinking that white truffles are worth more than basically any other legal substance despite the fact that they will shit it out within the day or that 3 Strikes and You're Out is good public policy despite no discernible decrease in felony rates and the bankrupting of the state prison system that makes me suspicious of granting further power to the people. Maybe I would feel differently if our citizens were better educated, but that would probably require additional tax money.

Oh, and in case it wasn't already clear, tartuffe is French for truffle.