Journal Entry 1 by livrecache from Hobart, Tasmania Australia on Monday, December 14, 2009

Margaret Atwood talks about the perils of debt -- and imagines a utopian future without greed.
BY LOUIS BAYARD
If nothing else, Margaret Atwood has a gift for timing. Her 1986 futuristic dystopia, "The Handmaid's Tale," arrived at the precise cultural moment when theocracy was starting to look scarier than nuclear holocaust. And her latest work, a book-length essay called "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth," comes just as Wall Street is undergoing a holocaust of its own. While the recent bailouts have come too late to figure in Atwood's analysis, they loom large over anyone reading it, and they impart a sheen of black humor to Atwood's poker-faced thesis: "A great many people are spending more than they're earning. So are a great many national governments."

To put numbers on it: As of 2004, U.S. citizens were carrying, on average, 14 percent more debt than income; as of last month, the U.S. government owed China something on the order of $1.3 trillion; as of, well, now, the total amount of our national debt is more than $10 trillion. So maybe the time has come, as Atwood suggests, to examine "debt as a human construct ... that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force."

In other words, if you're expecting tips from Suze Orman, kindly head for another shelf. "Payback" is a hop-and-skip journey through Atwood's teeming brain, and anyone familiar with the Canadian writer knows this is a lively place to be. Over the course of a couple hundred pages, we jostle against sin eaters and the Code of Hammurabi and Genghis Khan and goddesses of justice and the Antinomian heresy and the spiritual twinship of debtors and lenders.

We also learn quite a lot about the devil, who has been among mankind's busiest creditors, and we get a healthy sampling of Atwood's straight talk express: "Among the first things that people were able to pawn were other people ... Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly ... There are two kinds of taxation systems: ones that are resented, and ones that are really resented ... Taxes are like zebra mussels: once they've been introduced, they're very hard to get rid of."

Oh, sure, anyone can come up with a good aphorism or two, but I can't think of anyone who has explained the subprime mortgage crisis quite as cogently as Atwood: "Some large financial institutions peddled mortgages to people who could not possibly make the monthly rates and then put this snake-oil debt into cardboard boxes with impressive labels on them and sold them to institutions and hedge funds that thought they were worth something."
 

Journal Entry 2 by livrecache at Melbourne, a controlled release -- Controlled Releases on Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Released 2 yrs ago (12/15/2009 UTC) at Melbourne, a controlled release -- Controlled Releases

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

My contribution to your portion of the Southern Cross exchange. I've had it since it came out, and didn't read it, so clearly I wasn't going to to, even though I like Atwood; she's one of my favourite authors. I hope you enjoy it. 

Journal Entry 3 by lmn60 from Spotswood, Victoria Australia on Saturday, December 19, 2009

Oh wow! Thanks so much for this one, livrecache. Never thought I'd actually get to read this one without breaking my (sadly too flexible) rule about not buying new books!

I'll let you know how it goes - eventually!