INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN


Quiet reflection and thrift
deserve to move up on
the scale of priorities.


NEW YORK

Since visiting Cuba a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about the visual assault on our lives. Climb in a New York taxi these days and a TV comes on with its bombardment of news and ads. It’s become passe to gaze out the window, watch the sunlight on a wall, a child’s smile, the city breathing.

In Havana, I’d spent long hours contemplating a single street. Nothing - not a brand, an advertisement or a neon sign - distracted me from the city’s sunlit surrender to time passing. At a colossal price, Fidel Castro’s pursuit of socialism has forged a unique aesthetic, freed from agitation, caught in a haunting equilibrium of stillness and decay.

Such empty spaces, away from the assault of marketing, beyond every form of message (e-mail, text, Twitter), erode in the modern world, to the point that silence provokes forms of why-am-I-notin- demand anxiety. Technology induces ever more subtle forms of addiction, to products, but also to agitation itself.

In a sense, the whole global economic crisis is about addiction: to ever more sophisticated (and opaque) financial instruments designed to leverage everything from a home to a retirement account in the name of the high returns that drove America’s frenzied consumption of recent years.

Such frenzy found horrendous expression over Thanksgiving, a time when Americans give thanks for the nation’s bounty. The holiday has also become high season for discounted shopping. A crowd lured to a Wal-Mart store on Long Island, New York, by offers of cheap TVs and DVD players stormed in before dawn and trampled a temporary worker, Jdimypai (“Jimbo”) Damour, to death.

Imagine the scene: 2,000 chafing shoppers camped out overnight pressing against the glass doors of the store, finally pushing them down just before 5 a.m. and stampeding over a dying man in pursuit of an elusive bargain.

I’m not advocating Cuban solutions: most stores in Havana are empty. But the death of Mr. Damour feels like the epitaph for a spell of United States folly, the last spasm of the now agonizing monster that brought debt so overwhelming that many Americans find themselves in houses worth less than what they owe the bank.

Barack Obama, the president-elect, has assembled a strong economic team. Expertise will abound; enacting a stimulus package based on massive public spending may be one of the first acts of his administration. But I see a long recession. Americans need to relearn husbandry and rethink their priorities. The resulting thrift will not help the economy but may help distinguish flattened human beings from flat-screen TVs.

Nothing is more lethal than the herd. It was herdlike thinking, where the distinction between regulators and the regulated vanished, that repriced risk at zero and brought some of the great names of American banking to their knees. At Wal- Mart, the herd mentality gripped a crowd to the point that a dying man became invisible.

To see, to think independently, requires visual space. Even if Havana is out of reach, retreat for a moment. Turn off the gadgets, the TVs, the hand-held devices. Take a deep breath. Now, in stillness, see if you can imagine what the 34-year-old Mr. Damour saw as the madding crowd bore down on him.

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