My first fix

Every addiction starts somewhere: The hot rush from a heroin injection; the elation after cherries line up on a slot machine; the long, first pull of whisky at a dive bar; the after-sex cigarette. For me, it was my father teaching me how to read The New York Times on a crowded subway car. 

First, you fold it in half lengthwise, then over. To advance pages, you open it up, fold it back on itself, and then fold it over again, and so on. I was all of ten years old and hooked. At first, I mostly read the sports pages: Red Smith and Robert Lipsyte were my favorite columnists. The latter – 60 years later – writes for Counterpunch! 

Starting in college, I had a succession of dealers. A kid named Hendrick rode the elevator 22 floors to deliver the paper to my dorm room in a tower at SUNY Albany. A few years later, Marge drove an old Jeep Wrangler down a twisting, dirt road in Cherry Plain, New York to bring the Times each morning to the crumbling cottage I rented. In Altadena, CA – at our midcentury house that burned down in January — José left a Christmas card and empty envelope every year; I returned the latter with 50 bucks inside. In Chicago, it was Charles the doorman who transported the paper the last hundred yards from the lobby of the Art Deco Aquitania to my co-op on the 12^th floor. There, on post-election morning, November 7, 2008, I read the paper, intoxicated by hope.  The buzz didn’t last long. 

Then came the digital age – a woozy blur of phone apps, home pages and subscription details. For five years, from 2019-24, I scored in remote swamps and dry prairies in rural Florida, among mosquitos, alligators, and gopher tortoises. Now, in Norwich, England, I can cop the Times wherever I want –– in a pub with a beer chaser; stealthily in the Cathedral during evensong; in bed in the middle of the night beside Harriet, who kicked her habit soon after Trump’s election last year. I’ve tried to quit. The Guardian was my methadone but that didn’t last. If I’m gonna mainline, it might as well be “the newspaper of record.” 

A really bad week of reporting

Last week’s papers were so bad, I decided to go cold turkey.  It wasn’t because of the Times’ dutiful repetition of Israel’s mendacious claim that Anas-al-Sharif, murdered by the IDF along with three other Al-Jazeera journalists, was operating as a Hamas agent; or its fitful reporting of the ongoing massacres and famine. The Times sees the Middle East as through a camera obscura – upside down and in reverse. Once you understand that, there’s knowledge to be gained from its reporters and columnists. 

It also wasn’t the newspaper’s treatment of Sarah Jessica Parker’s final performance as Carrie Bradshaw in “And Just Like That”, as if it was Maria Callas’s last Tosca.  And it wasn’t the many column inches devoted to the pressing issue: “How Healthy are Zucchinis.”  Previous stories in the series (Pulitzer material, I’m sure) examined sweet potatoes, apples, chickpeas, mangoes, pasta (whole wheat of course) and legumes. They are all healthy. What really moved me to erase my Times phone app was the editorial that ran on August 14^th titled “Crime Keeps Falling. Here’s Why.”  But before presenting the Times’ ingenious elucidation, some preliminaries:

The 40-year decline of the U.S. crime rate — especially the murder rate – is one of the great mysteries of sociology and public health. Lots of explanations have been offered: 

1) An aging population – old people commit fewer crimes. (Is it because they can’t run away fast?) However, it turns out there’s no correlation between crime rate and average age in U.S. states and cities. 

2) More police on the streets. This argument has validity, except where it doesn’t. More cops also means more shootings by cops. 

3) Reduced lead in water. The idea is that exposure to lead causes neuro-cognitive disorders including ADHD, that leads to greater impulsivity, which leads to crime. Unfortunately for this theory, there appears to be an inverse ratio between U.S. states with the most lead pipes, and states with the highest crime rates. Plus, crime is falling while diagnoses of ADHD are increasing.

4) More CCTV. Greater surveillance means fewer crimes, right? The evidence says “yes,” but only for crimes in parking lots. What about crime that happens in front of computer screens or in the board rooms of big buildings next to the parking lots? White collar crime is increasing in the U.S. while arrests and prosecutions – under Trump — are decreasing.

5) Economic growth reduces crime. It’s true that economic expansion in the 1990s corresponded with a rapid decline in crime rates. However, crime continued to fall during the Great Recession, from 2007-9. 

So, given the ongoing mystery of the falling American crime rate, you can imagine my anticipation – accompanied by rapid heart rate and increased salivation — when I started to read the Times editorial. Their explanation – drumroll please — is that the reduction in crime is due to decreasing “anomie.”  Huh?  Is that even a thing? It’s like saying the source of depression is an excess of black bile, or that Covid is caused by miasmas. Anomie? Really?

Anomie

“Anomie” according to the OED, is “a state of alienation from mainstream society characterized by feelings of hopelessness, loss of purpose, and isolation.” The term has a long and tangled history in sociology, starting with Emile Durkheim who introduced it in 1893 in his book The Division of Labor in Society. There he argued that rapid development from “primitive” to advanced industrial society brings on temporary feelings of “anomie” characterized by social and psychological disequilibrium. In those circumstances, crime can occur, the latter being anything “that offends sentiments which are found among all normal individuals of any given society.”  Durkheim, like other “functionalists,” believed it was the responsibility of “society” to establish and maintain institutions – schools, religion, workplaces, governments and families – that instill rule and maintain order.

The New York Times Editorial Board agrees: “In periods of anomie, crime tends to rise. It happened in the 1960s and ’70s, when Americans were angered by the Vietnam War, Watergate, racial inequality, inflation and more.”  By the Times’ logic, everyone would be better off – have less experience of anomie — if they just shut up about war, racism, and inflation. (Note, I’ve submitted the following correction to the Times: The early 1960s was a period of tremendous U.S. prosperity, with high productivity gains, growth rates of nearly 5% per year, low-unemployment and low inflation. A majority of Americans supported the Vietnam War until about 1967.  There should have been little anomie or crime at that time.) 

The editorial writers further argue that the combination of Covid restrictions, conflicts following the murder of George Floyd, and a close presidential election all caused “a loosening of the behavioral norms that govern society….an example of what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called ‘anomie’ — a breakdown in the subtle standards that allow communities to function.”  That’s when crime spiked. After the “reopening of America… crime has largely fallen to pre-pandemic levels.” Crime rates are still falling. The writers don’t draw the obvious conclusion: Donald Trump has “restored behavioral norms” and reduced anomie! 

Anomie redux?

I shouldn’t be completely dismissive of the anomie-causes-crime argument. A generation or so after Durkheim, the American sociologist Robert K. Merton, then just 24 years-old, (he would go on to coin the terms “self-fulfilling prophesy,” “unintended consequences,” and “role-model”) published an influential article titled “Social Structure and Anomie” (1934).  He proposed that when an individual’s desire for success exceeds the institutionally sanctioned means of attaining it, “anomie” ensues. Merton defines anomie as “defeatism, quietism…resignation” and the desire to “escape from the requirements of the society.” 

In some cases, Merton argues however, the conflict between desire and fulfillment is so great, that the person becomes anti-social, criminal or revolutionary. Rather than accede to norms, the individual tries to change them. Here Merton, the child of immigrant Jewish socialists, parted ways with Durkheim, arguing that the American drive for pecuniary success is so great, and the class stricture so constraining, that crime is almost inevitable. “Poverty” he writes, “is not an isolated variable;” it occurs in the “midst of plenty.” That’s when crime increases. 

The lesson Merton’s essay offers for sociologists, criminologists, and Times editorial writers is that it’s not anomie or even poverty that causes spikes in crime; it’s inequality. The post-Covid spike in crime occurred when the division between haves and have-nots was especially stark; the former stayed home and had groceries delivered, while the latter did the delivering. The former retreated to the isolation of the countryside, while the latter suffered among the throngs in the city. The one got through the pandemic just fine while the other got sick and died at much higher rates. The cure for crime is ready to hand; tax the rich, support the poor, regulate capital, and assure the common welfare.

A few days after quitting the Times, I fell off the wagon. In fact, I went on a bender. I read about the “orgasm gap” between men and women, a man rescued after two days behind a California waterfall, how to properly apply eyeliner, and $1.5 million homes for sale in Lake Como, Italy. I carefully considered a Times recipe for steak au poivre (I’m a vegan) and caught up on the latest “genre films” (horror, sci-fi, and action films), which I’d never see in a million years. I read about sports I don’t care about. (There’s no chance of finding the likes of a Robert Lipsyte among the pages of The Athletic, the Times’ independent sports affiliate.)  And I read endless news stories and columns about Trump. I don’t feel good about myself. I blame my father.