Thanks to the Millennium Art Academy High School in the Bronx for inviting me to speak at the Career Day event on Wednesday. My co=presenter Kathleen Cushman spoke about being a writer. Thanks very much to my old friends and new friends of friends who donated magazines to be distributed to the students attending the session: Bob Love of The Week; Belinda Luscombe of Time; Jess Cagle of Entertainment Weekly; Matt DeMazza and Ken Derry of Yankees Magazine; Ryan D’Agostino and Lauren Drucker of Hearst magazines; and Frank Rich and Lauren Starke of New York magazine.

Last year, Mike Bloomberg was my hero. The way he stood up to the opponents of the lower Manhattan Islamic cultural center was eloquent, and courageous, and in the greatest traditions of New York and America. But this year, Bloomie is blowing it. His annoyed, prickly, dismissive, contentious treatment of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park seems almost personal, and is exposing the plutocrat that the billionaire probably is at heart.

“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” he said the other day.“It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.”

Well that’s just silly. Anyone who has read Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, or All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera knows that Congressional policy played a role, as did the policy of the Clinton and Bush administrations, as did the corrupt and foolish practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as did the wholly dishonest and completely negligent practices of the ratings agencies. But to downplay or soft-peddle the role of the banks? Come on, Mike! The whole thing blew up because of the alchemical financial innovations that purported to turn crap loans into AAA-rated securities. And the banks are the ones who turned around and peddled hundreds and millions of dollars worth of that worthless paper to pension funds and retirement programs.

Mike obviously needs Wall Street, needs the jobs it provides and the taxes it pays in order to keep the city’s streets cleaned and its police on the beat and its teachers in the classroom. A little home town protection is in order. But Bloomberg should take a page from Vikram Pandit, the chairman of Citicorp, who has offered a statesmanlike response. Calling Occupy Wall Street’s complaints “completely understandable,” Pandit accepted the responsibility for the crisis. “I would also corroborate that trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S. and that it’s Wall Street’s job to reach out to Main Street and rebuild that trust. . . .They should hold Citi and the financial institutions accountable for practicing responsible finance.”

Bloomberg needs to remember that he’s the protesters’ mayor, too.

In his very good new book The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire, former Forbes editor Stewart Pinkerton describes the decline of the publication’s significance, and along the way champions the noble tradition of magazine journalism. “There’s an important distinction between one hundred people using their cell phones to record an event and real journalism, calcified as some of its traditions and procedures may be,’’ he says. “What’s missing from the raw footage . . . is the authoritative voice, the result of years of source cultivation, the building up of levels of trust that allow a reporter to put something into context. It’s something only established news outlets can do . . . .Most people need an expert to filter, prioritize, and context information. A fire hose of information without that is useless.’’ To rad my review of Pinkerton’s book in The Washington Monthly, click here.

Nothing in John Brown’s life more became him than the way he took leave of it. One of the strangest and most challenging figures in American history, a combination of practical fiasco and undiminished confidence, Brown was a failed tanner, a failed farmer, and in narrow terms, a failed insurrectionist. As much as anybody, he put the blood in Bleeding Kansas; his activities there in the mid-1850s were crowned with the cold-blooded midnight murder and dismemberment at Pottawatomie Creek of four unarmed men who had the misfortune of having a different point of view than the country’s most driven abolitionist.

Brown was a terrorist in the cause of God’s will, no less than Mohammad Atta. Terror was the only thing he was good at, and murderous, bloody terror was what he intended to ignite when he and his platoon of twenty-one true believers seized the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859. The raid was a dismal botch, and within forty-eight hours, Brown and his men had been easily vanquished, ten of them killed in action. Brown himself was bludgeoned into unconsciousness in the final assault on his stronghold in the armory by a marine lieutenant named Israel Green, but only after had attempted to kill him with his sword. Hastily mustered the night before, Green had brought a light ceremonial sword instead of a battle sabre, and when he stabbed Brown, the blade bent in half. Had he successfully killed Brown, it is unlikely that the raid would have inflamed the country as it did, and the incident would eventually have become eclipsed in memory, overcome by other events.

Instead, Brown survived, and in ensuing six weeks, became a most eloquent champion of ending slavery. “I believe that to have interfered as I have done — as I have always freely admitted I have done — in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right,’’ said Brown at his trial. “ Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments– I submit; so let it be done!’’

Throughout the north, and in Europe as well, Brown’s noble attitude elevated him to the status of martyr, and stirred the anti-slavery feelings that in most of the population had been largely latent. Emerson and Thoreau applauded him, John Greenleaf Whittier celebrated him in poetry, and Victor Hugo honored him from abroad. “Living, he made life beautiful,” Louisa May Alcott wrote on the day he died, “Dying, made death divine.” Feelings were stirred in the South, too; the whites of the South were rightly alarmed that a blow had been struck, however ineptly, at their slaveocracy, and were entirely shocked that their northern cousins were far more sympathetic than outraged. Brown may have failed to incite a rebellion, but he had polarized the country, and made the continuation of a country half-slave and half-free an impossibility.

In his excellent new book Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, Tony Horwitz has done a terrific job in explaining the raid and its effects. More than anything, he has restored Brown’s humanity. Long portrayed as a fiery-eyed zealot, Brown here is portrayed as a man defined by a willingness to act on his convictions. If slavery was immoral, then acting to end it could not be. Prior to his capture, Brown could be defined by all the things that he wasn’t—a successful farmer, a successful businessman, a shrewd strategist. After his capture, he became the thing he was at his core: a man who saw evil and could not countenance its continuation. Not two years after his execution, as his countrymen took arms against the slaveholder, they went into battle singing that his truth was marching on.

Writing in The New York Times today, Martin Feldstein, who was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan, argued for “permanently reducing the mortgage debt hanging over America.” Failure to do so, he writes, “ means that further declines in home prices will continue, preventing the rise in consumer spending needed for recovery. As costly as it will be to permanently write down mortgages, it will be even costlier to do nothing and run the risk of another recession.” In taking this position, Feldstein puts himself in at least one-third agreement with Nouriel Roubini, Daniel Alpert and Robert Hockett, authors of The Way Forward: Moving From the Post-Bubble, Post-Bust Economy to Renewed Growth and Competitiveness, a white paper commissioned by the New America Foundation that has been getting a lot of attention. Predicting dire consequences for the economy if their prescription is not followed, the trio calls for massive restructuring of mortgage debt, huge investments in infrastructure, and a “global rebalancing” between creditor and debtor nations.

It all sounds good to me, particularly the part about the mortgage restructuring. To put it another way, what these experts are advocating is that the losses suffered in the subprime mortgage bubble have to be swallowed, and they all can’t be swallowed by the home owners alone. The lenders have to take a hit, and so does the public, through the government (which, given the number of mortgages guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is already on the hook.)

But anyone who has read Ben Tarnoff‘s recent book The Moneymakers, which I had the pleasure of reviewing for The Washington Monthly earlier this year. The Moneymakers tells the story of three counterfeiters from 18th and 19th century America, and what the three have in common is that they thrived during eras of financial innovation and loose (or non-existent) regulation. What we also learn–which is something we already kind of knew–is that the only way to cure the assault that is posed on sound money by counterfeit currency is to get it out of circulation. Authorities have to buy it out or yank it out, and force the poor farmer or the poor tavern owner or the poor banker who in this game of monetary musical chairs ended up holding the bill when the music stopped to swallow the loss–because that is the only way the overall health of the system can be restored.

What we have been suffering these last few years has been an attack by counterfeiters. Not counterfeiters of currency, which has meant less in the scheme of things since the US left the gold standard, but counterfeiters of credit–the mortgage writers who gave credit to unworthy customers, the banks who ignored their standards, the ratings agencies who abdicated responsibility, and the investment bankers who kept underwriting and leveraging the crooked practices. Our economy became awash in counterfeit credit, and even now we have not reached the bottom.

The mortgage restructuring that Feldstein and Roubini et al are calling for is simply a new way to perform the old time cleansing exercise that got counterfeit money out of circulation. But until we undertake the hard business of swallowing the loss, we’ll can’t get back to a fundamental sense of value.

For a long time now I’ve been saying that the readers of the world have to step up and defend the value of the written word. Don’t be didactic, but by all means, be a little bit elitist. When your friends start talking about Dancing with the Stars, talk about a book or magazine article that you’ve read. I see John Waters is of exactly the same opinion, although he seems to draw his line at a somewhat later point in the relationship. (I shouldn’t say that–maybe for him it’s not later.)

In The Atlantic, Jared Keller has assembled a rather brainy slide show–a collection of literary references in The Simpsons. Many of my favorites are here, including Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chambon, George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, Robert Caro, The New Yorker, Tom Wolfe, The Economist, and William L. Shirer.Somehow Keller missed the episde in which Lisa mentioned the end of Spy.

According to an article in today’s Guardian, newly released records show that the light and fluffy British novelist P.G. Wodehouse was questioned by MI5 as a suspected German collaborator for broadcasting from Berlin during World War II. A shocked Wodehouse denied the accusation.

Wodehouse was 59 years old and living in France when war broke out. He was taken prisoner when Germany invaded and sent to an internment camp in the German town of Tost, Upper Silesia. He described how, “as he was playing in a cricket match” on 21 June 1941, he was moved to Berlin. Installed at the posh Adlon hotel, and was paid to make a series of broadcasts, mainly for American listeners, describing his life as an internee. He claimed he was motivated by gratitude over letters sent by fans from the US. Afterwards, he and his wife were relocated to Paris, where they lived in the Bristol Hotel until liberation of Paris.

In his statement for MI5 to Wesley Stout, Wodehouse said his broadcasts simply reflected the “flippant, cheerful attitude of all British prisoners. It was a point of honour with us not to whine. . . . .I thought that people, hearing the talks, would admire me for having kept cheerful under difficult conditions.” In one of his jokes, he wrot: “If this is Upper Silesia, what on earth must Lower Silesia be like?”

Wodehouse said that, while interned at Tost, he completed his novel Joy in the Morning, and wrote Full Moon, Spring Fever, and Uncle Dynamite. The writer told MI5: “I would like to conclude by saying that I never had any intention of assisting the enemy and that I have suffered a great deal of mental pain as the result of my action.” MI5 decided that the broadcasts were not pro-German and had been unlikely to assist the enemy, and decided against prosecution. M15 later changed its mind, and said that if Wodehouse ever returns to Britain–he had moved to the United States, and lived there until his death in 1975–he should be prosecuted.”

I had the great pleasure of talking about And the War Came with Jim Fuller and his friend Bill Walker on WOUB radio in Athens, Ohio. Jim and Bill are very knowledgeable about the Civil War, and it was very rewarding to talk with people who are so well informed and so thoughtful about the issues that surrounded the conflict. I am very grateful that I was invited onto the program. Anyone who wishes to hear the broadcast can listen to it here. Thanks, guys!

For the past few months I’ve been very fortunate to be working with Henry Bushkin, an attorney from Los Angeles who for nearly two decades represented the peerless Johnny Carson. (Yes, Henry is the famous `Bombastic Bushkin’ who showed up in Johnny’s monologues with some frequency.) Henry and I do not get to talk face-to-face very often, but last Thursday he was in New York for a case he’s working on in federal court, and I had the pleasure of lunching at Amarath on East 62nd Street with him and his tres chic companion, Jackie Jordan. We had a great time, and I look forward to meeting again soon.