April 2009

Pyramids

"It’s all a giant Ponzi scheme,” Susan said.

We were in Chicago at the annual conference of the AWP, the professional organization of creative writing programs. Susan and I had just met, though like almost everyone else at the conference, it seemed, she had grown up in the same Chicago neighborhood I had.

“Look at all these people.” She gestured at the vast basement room housing the book fair, in which hundreds of writers sat at tables hawking literary journals and other products of the creative writing biz. “The MFA programs turn out students in record numbers, but there are no jobs. What are all these people going to do?”

“Work on Wall Street?” I suggested. We both knew I was kidding.

It was true that the conference was enormous: 8,000 people had gathered at the Michigan Avenue Hilton, site of some of the 1968 Democratic Convention travails, to listen to presentations on a variety of topics of interest only to writers, a group that includes, it would appear, just about everyone in America.

As I fought my way through the throngs, I found myself wondering why so many people are interested in writing. Is it because it pays so handsomely as a profession? Clearly not. Is it because the average person would like nothing more than to talk with Oprah about their work? Maybe. Is it because we’re all convinced we have something important to say? No doubt. But as to why so many people would devote their time and money to MFA programs, in which one kneels at the feet of famous, or not-so-famous, writers to try to learn the secrets of a trade that is in danger of imminent extinction, I admit I was baffled, despite the fact that I, too, had attended an MFA program and knelt at those feet.

For it was clear that Susan was exactly right: it was all a huge Ponzi scheme. For decades, MFA programs had been proliferating, run by people at the top of the profession—by which I mean the profession of “literary” writing, not necessarily the kind that sells; ergo, creative writing celebrities are people of whom the average reader may never have heard—to mentor aspiring writers, using a “workshop” approach to help them hammer their dross into gold. Are these programs effective? Sure. Are they fun? Mostly. Do they serve a purpose to our society? I think so; we’re far better off with a vast army of trained poets than one of trained assassins.

But what are all these people going to do with those MFAs? Who knows. No one—except Susan—seems to have given any thought to that.

As I made my way back from AWP, returning to my real life, in which I teach creative writing to people whose interest in writing ranges from minimal to wanting to be on Oprah, I thought about Ponzi schemes, a concept that has been much in the news of late, thanks to the shenanigans of investment broker Bernard Madoff, who has recently pleaded guilty to a giant scheme to defraud his investors of zillions of dollars. I recalled that recently, the Ponzi family had sued in federal court to prevent the media from using the name “Ponzi” in connection with the Madoff (pronounced, charmingly, “made off”) case. Apparently, in one of those strange ironies that you just can’t make up, the Ponzi family were Madoff investors and lost millions in his giant scheme to defraud everyone whose money he invested—i.e., made off with—by faking returns on their investments.

Yes, creative writing is a Ponzi scheme, as Susan alleges (note to the Ponzi family: sue Susan—I’m just quoting her), but if you think about it, just about everything else in America is, too.

Take real estate. It turns out that our houses are only worth the amount of money people are willing to pay for them; they have no true inherent value. If I buy a house for a hundred bucks and sell it to someone else for two hundred, that’s what the house is worth. If the next person buys is for four hundred, now it’s worth that. As house prices climb higher, the house’s “value” ostensibly increases, and then the final person in the chain, the one who pays $5 million for a hundred-dollar house, is left holding the bag—the deed—when the music stops.

Is that not a Ponzi scheme?

Similarly, let’s look at the stuff we buy. Someone pays a worker in a developing nation two cents to make a shirt. Someone else pays fifty cents for it and sells it to someone else for a dollar, and so on. The shirt ends up in Nordstrom and you, like a big dope (no offense!), pay $150 for it.

Ponzi!

I don’t pretend to understand economics, but it looks to me like the entire American economy is basically a big—let’s use the term “pyramid scheme” to avoid litigation. I create something and sell it to you for a profit. You mark it up and sell it for a profit. Someone else buys it and—the last person in the chain is the one who loses. There is no such thing as a “fair price” for anything; the only value something has is what someone else is willing to pay. Or, in the case of stocks, what someone else thinks someone else thinks someone else is willing to pay. Nothing has any inherent worth at all.

No wonder people want to be writers! At least writing creates the illusion of inherent meaning.

Unfortunately, the whole world was part of this economic pyramid, and it has all just collapsed, and now everyone realizes that all that money they had put on their credit cards to sustain our national illusion of wealth has to be paid back, which is where the rubber meets the road.

(Speaking of the economy, here’s what I don’t get. If the economic crisis was caused by the failure of sub-prime mortgage holders to pay their mortgage, why not just give the bailout money to them so they can pay? Problem solved! Instead, we bail out the people who hold those mortgages so they can do more lending—but they don’t do any lending! Can you say “Ponzi”?)

(I mean “Pyramid”?)

So in all this morass of economic illusion, or delusion, this vast tulip craze in which we have all participated, what is left that is real? The ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids; we built the Pyramid Scheme.

Well, it turns out that what’s real are the things that have always been real—love, family, friends, the natural world (or what’s left of it), and poetry. In the giant Creative Writing scheme, at least we’re creating an army of poets who will be there reciting the great sagas of our age, the stories of our heroes, if we have any, as we gather around the dying embers of our fire.

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