Pottersville Blues → Against Hanukkah* → Diamond Dogs

Hey Neighbor. German companies are splashing out on “Sick Leave Detectives” as white-collar professionals find creative excuses to avoid the office. With more American companies installing monitoring software on employees’ computers and implementing back to work mandates, a similar cottage industry looks set to spring up stateside.

Sure, it’s an iffy approach to management, but it’s a fantastic movie premise.

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→ Elon Musk spent his Christmas break fighting with hardline anti-immigration MAGAs about H1-B visa programs, which allow tech firms to sponsor talented foreign workers. Though the H1-B program is highly flawed – H1-Bs are awarded via lotteries easily gamed by IT staffing firms – Musk insisted (colorfully?) that it remains vital because American workers are (at least according to current Musk ally Vivek Ramaswamy) mediocre and lazy. Notably, Musk didn’t mention the O-1 “Extraordinary Ability” Visa program, which allows skilled workers to stay in the country without corporate sponsorship. What the O-1 visa program does not do is give employers additional leverage over workers or a way suppress the wages of their best paid individual contributors. (READ MORE)

→ The Wall Street Journal reports that young doctors now get offended when their profession is described as a “calling.” Why? The term implies their passion makes them easier to underpay. And that does seem to be the case. Doctors wages have stagnated and fewer GPs are entering private practice due to high insurance premiums. Young doctors seem to be learning a lesson rarely taught in medical schools: You can’t eat prestige [1]. (READ MORE)

→ Efforts to restore the American Chestnut are faltering due to resistance from anti-GMO environmentalists. All but wiped out in the first half of the 20th century when a blight fungus (likely from a Japanese nursery stock) infected four billion trees along the eastern seaboard, the Chestnut once lined the most desirable streets in hundreds of upscale communities. As of 2014, there were still 3785 Chestnut Streets and Chestnut Roads in America, but few trees to line them. There’s a plausible way to change that, but arboreal activists think it’s shady. (READ MORE)

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It’s a Wonderful Life was a warning. No one listened until it was too late.

It’s a Wonderful Life is not a Christmas movie. The film, which flopped at the box office in 1946 and got popular in the mid-1970s when a lapsed copyright made it free to air, comes wrapped in tinsel, but that’s a misdirect. It’s dark prophecy – barely concealed and since born out – foretelling the end of the Upper Middle’s benevolent hold on small-town American life.

Almost every character in It’s a Wonderful Life (George Bailey, Ma Bailey, Mr. Gower, Guiseppe Martini, Ernie Bishop, Sam Wainwright) owns a business and most employ people who own homes in Bailey Park, the proto-suburb financed by the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan. These financially interconnected members of the Bedford Falls elite protect their town from Mr. Potter, a greedy, rent-seeking plutocrat. When the Building & Loan is threatened, they close ranks behind George Bailey to save it.

It’s a Wonderful Life is a financialized fable with a seemingly self-contradictory lesson: Only business people can protect towns from business people.

The movie’s weird mixture of overt Marxism with faith in the free market is a product of its production. Director Frank Capra, an anti-FDR reactionary, rewrote previous drafts of the film by by, among other, Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets. Victims of the Red Scare Trumbo and Odets had authored a “Commie Draft” including the Pottersville alternate reality sequence. Capra didn’t want to toss great work by great writers – Trumbo wrote Spartacus, Odets wrote Sweet Smell of Success – so he instead attempted to obscure their message.

Capra reimagined George Bailey, originally a local politician, as a civic-minded capitalist.

At the time, Capra’s twist was both clever and relevant. Housing starts were spiking as veterans settled down and mortgages financed by local building and loans were paid off by purchases of shares in those same building and loans, aligning borrowers’ and lenders’ incentives. Capra’s story made sense, but it also made George Bailey an even more tortured figure, a man self-immolating while fighting with fire with fire.

In the first scene of the Pottersville sequence, George, who Clarence has granted his wish to have never been born, wanders into Nick’s Bar. When Clarence tries to order a “flaming rum punch,” [2] Nick threatens to hit him.

“What’s the matter with him?” George wonders aloud. “I’ve never saw Nick act like that before…”

There’s a simple answer. Nick is a “warped, frustrated young man.” [3] Without the support of the bourgeoisie George helped empower, he’s on his own – abandoned by both his peers and his better angels. He’s confusing to George for the same reason he’s totally legible to a modern audience: He exists in a reality with no George Baileys.

That’s our reality.

In a sense, the George Baileys of the world did kill themselves. The loans they made in places like Bedford Falls to people like Mr. Gower and Guiseppe Martini – not to mention the G.I. Bill-educated residents of Bailey Park – got McDonald’s, Talbots , Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Dairy Queen off the ground. When those chains went national in the late 1940s and early 1950s, local businesses owners got crushed – and their lenders with them. By the 1980s, building and loans (and savings and loans) were imploding so frequently congress passed legislation allowing national banks to buy them out.

In 2022, the median per family income in Seneca Falls, the New York town on which Bedford Falls is based, was $50,714, less that 68% of the national average. In national elections, the city now votes for Republicans vowing to cut holes in the social safety net and cut taxes for large corporations.

Yes, It’s a Wonderful Life is about the triumph of bourgeois might – capital wrapped in virtue – over plutocratic greed (and working class folly). But in presenting that victory as a miracle, Capra allowed the writers he didn’t want to acknowledge to turn his tribute to small business loans into a warning: There won’t always be a George Bailey to come to the rescue.

It was too hard to hear over the bells.

→ Among the genres touted in this year’s Spotify wrapped was “Pink Pilates Princess,” a description popularized on TikTok as shorthand for a certain kind of well-hydrated, athleisurely woman. What makes the category more interesting than, say, “Strut Pop” or “Goblincore” is that it acknowledges and advertises that music can be used categorize consumers by taste. Brands are definitely going start serving ads against listens. It looks like Spotify is betting on it. (READ MORE)

→ Struggling pharmacies (read: pharmacies) have found that pre-packing prescriptions saves time and money. That means more and more prescriptions, particularly common ones like Zoloft and Celexa, are not being dispensed in traditional pill bottles. This will make going through other peoples’ medicine cabinets during dinner parties suspiciously time consuming. (READ MORE)

→ The price of diamonds is now the lowest it has been in a century. Your friend’s gauche four-carat princess cut – the one you were obligated to coo over at the top of the market in 2011 – is now a rapidly depreciating asset. Hard to feel bad about that.

Hanukkah is a bizarre, but meaningful holiday. It celebrates a miracle, which didn’t happen, that saved a group of innocent Jews, who were war criminals. Still, the holiday is as comforting as it is confounding for the suburban doctors and lawyers who still celebrate.

The story: In 137 BCE, the Greeks, who had already outlawed Judaism, defaced the Second Temple in Jerusalem, prompting the Jewish freedom fighter Judah Maccabee (Judas Maccabeus) to launch an insurgency. After retaking the temple, Maccabee built a new altar and rededicated it by lighting a menorah. Though the oil in the menorah should have lasted just one day, it burned for eight crazy nights. 


The reality: Having lived under Greek rule since being conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, many Jews in Jerusalem had stopped getting circumsized. This offended the Maccabbees, a group of militant religious fundamentalists, who seized the city in 137 BCE, slaughtered many of fellow Jews and circumcising others against their will. Almost a millennia later, the Hanukkah story, was plucked out of Catholic apocrypha – not the Talmud – by European Jews in want of a solstice celebration.

Which is all to say that Hanukkah lacks not only religious significance, but also a non-religious ethos. There is no Hanukkah equivalent to the Christmas spirit – “peace on Earth and good will toward men” – though “God’s will on Earth and pieces of men” is arguably close. The holiday is just tradition. Nothing else.

Except that’s not really true.

Hanukkah matters because it’s the most public of the innumerable, unpronounceable Jewish celebrations and because Goyim largely treat it with respect [4]. That respect is paradoxically and ironically (given the history) more meaningful for assimilated American and European Jews precisely because the holiday is otherwise so meaningless.

The real miracle isn’t the menorah burning in the temple. It’s the inflatable menorah lit up on Main Street. It’s the opportunity to assimilate and remain Jewish – to defy the Maccabees.

→ New data from SpotGamma shows a massive boom in zero-day option trades, which represented half of all trading in Nvidia and Tesla options. Zero-day option trades are very short-term (same day, it’s right there in the name) bets on price fluctuations that are unlikely to be driven by fundamentals. In other words, compulsive traders have engineered a slot machine for themselves. The finance bros, god bless ‘em, may need to touch grass. (READ MORE)

→ Home prices in San Francisco have plummeted 14.7% since May 2022 and now sit at 2015 levels. According to Wolf Street a condo in the vaunted Millennium Tower that sold for $1.1M a decade ago went for $615K in September. The crash is being blamed on tech layoffs, but a compounding factor might be that San Francisco is, according to at least one former resident (this one), the least fun major city in America. (READ MORE)

[2] The Flaming Rum Punch thing is odd. Rum Punches are very good and very underrated. They are also traditionally served in tea cups in Irish Bars. It’s a bit unclear whether or not Nick hates Clarence merely because he’s a kook or if there’s some anti-Irish sentiment there as well. I mean… look at the guy. Also, this is the scene where Dalton Trumbo invents the whole Deadpool multiverse concept.

[3] As has been observed elsewhere, this is particularly odd given that Nick is more successful in Pottersville than he is in Bedford Falls. But w/e.

[4] I don’t want to give the goyim too much credit here. Jews are still the minority most likely to be the targeted with a hate crime and some dude named Landry Miller ([email protected]) sent me an email the other day calling me a “fucking jew,” which… I wish, right?