“Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess”
Charles Dickens – Dombey and Sons
“A little Dickens is good for the soul”
Greg Baker
“It appears to be a lo-on-g. Ti-ime. Such a long, long time, before the dawn”
David Crosby
This one goes out to our second quotation source – Greg Baker. My high school English teacher. The guy who exposed me not only to Dickens but also to Joseph Heller. And Dostoyevsky. And Albert Camus.
Greg died shortly after the dawn of the new millennium, and it took me about that long to realize the wallop he’d given me. He was part of a wave of educators, hired by our free-thinking, free-loving principal, who gave no guidance to his eclectic assortment of instructors other than to shake us up a bit. Some of them (though not Greg) had no education credentials of any kind.
And shake us up they did, especially Greg. But there is a dash of extra pathos/panache in his story. He was a championship swimmer, of such stature that he qualified for the 1968 U.S. Olympic Team, destined to compete in Mexico City. In the lead up to this epic event, he was involved in a horrific automobile accident, the details of which I am unacquainted, save for the unmistakable reality that it rendered him a quadriplegic.
One could still observe the sinewy swimmer’s physique even in ossified forms of withered legs and stiffened, curled up fingers. But he carried on regardless. And left his mark. He even coached a damned competitive swim team. He and I weren’t close (I wasn’t much of a swimmer back in them days), but in the ensuing years it hit me that I owed him something, and even if the only way I can make good on this debt is to honor him in these pages, I think he’d, nonetheless, be pleased.
“A little Dickens is good for the soul” he’d remark to us. And force us to accept this dose of spiritual remediation – even as, to the extent we read at all, we were more interested in the scribblings of William S. Burroughs, Richard Brautigan and Hunter S. Thompson.
Over time, I reckon I’ve waded through about half of the Dickens Cannon, but it had been a long time – coming and gone. Nobody can deny the singular brilliance of “A Tale of Two Cities”, “Great Expectations”, and any number of his other novels, but I have occasionally found him tedious. Some of this is owing, or so I tell myself, to the fact that he published most of his works in serialized periodicals, wherein he was paid by the word. He was thus financially incentivized, for lack of a better way to describe it, to be a bit “wordy”.
I have recently rediscovered him, though, focusing, this time on secondary works such as “Martin Chuzzlewit”, and, of course, “Dombey and Sons”, the latter from which I have sourced this week’s title and quote.
“Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess” sayeth Dickens in Dombey, and if this isn’t true, it certainly ought to be.
But is it? True that is?
A review of history episodically supports the claim. Caesar was ambitions, for his people, who repaid this virtuous vice by doing him on the steps of the Forum.
Robespierre wanted a just constitution but took matters so far that as to cause the heads of tens of thousands to be severed, including, in the end, that of he and all his compatriots.
More recently, when at Harvard, Zuck put together a little computer dashboard, designed with the virtuous objective of placing as many of Cambridge’s nubile young co-eds within his reach as would be possible. Now, a generation later, we are compelled to contend with a monstrosity wherein two billion users assault our senses with pictures of their cats and soon-to-be-consumed vegan omelets.
Perhaps more ambiguously, George W. Bush sent forces into Iraq and Afghanistan, for the virtuous purpose of avenging both the 9/11 attacks and the mean things that Saddam said about his Poppy. More than twenty years later, we departed the latter jurisdiction, leaving our own citizens behind as well as billions of dollars of treasure, and enabling the Taliban to assume fulsome control of that forlorn nation. It made our exit from Vietnam look like the conquering strut of the Hannibal’s Carthaginians across the Alps in the Second Punic War.
In terms of the markets, about 15 years ago, our Central Bank began printing funny money and bailing out banks — in virtuous effort to save our financial system – a stunt that had never been tried in the post WWII era.
One may justifiably question whether said financial system merited this salvation, and I have no quibble with those whose viewpoint shades negative. My own view, though, is that while I hold no brief for the bankers and other shady characters who caused that mess, I think the collateral damage of having not so acted would’ve been brutal, and that the feel-good retribution juice we would’ve rained on the perps would in no way have offset the squeeze we would’ve all felt when our bank deposits were frozen, our loans called in, and our property foreclosed upon.
But then, when we got into that viral trouble a few years, back we redoubled this virtuous strategy. The markets recovered. The economy recovered. Inflation surged but then stabilized at an elevated but far from alarming level. Stock and property holders got fat on excess. Consumers paid more for essentials, and, while jobs were plentiful throughout, many were of dubious quality.
Will this vice come back to bite us? I guess we’ll find out.
A few years ago, some rambunctious cats, led by a bad hombre with the handle Roaring Kitty, took to Reddit to see if they could seek to take down some hedge fund dudes by buying up worthless stocks such as Gamestop (GME) and AMC. They succeeded, so much so that they compelled a heretofore wildly successful fund manager to abandon his enterprise in favor of the lowly and humiliating vocation of NBA team ownership.
Well, now, Roaring Kitty is back. GME is on fire again. Redditt is now a publicly traded company. The hedge fund hoop squad ended the ’24 season with a record of 21-61.
Is this vice born of excessive virtue? Tough to say.
And now, on the threshold of Memorial Day, ushering in, as it does, the summer season, and with most important earnings and macro data in the bag, is as good a time as any to take stock of where we are on the virtue/vice contagium, and to ponder whether it will lead us as the months fly by.
Our equity indices are at or near record levels, having absorbed an extended period of higher interest rates and other annoyances. Long-in-the-tooth General Dow, as one example, closed, for the first time in its storied existence, above 40,000 on Friday. Most of the developed world is in the same configuration.
There’s approximately $6T in money market funds available to pounce on the stock market, and will almost certainly do so if the long anticipated but frustratingly lamented cycle of rate cuts finally commences.
Technological advancement ensues at a breathtaking pace, and not simply in the realms of TMT (though it should be noted that the exalted NVDA has doubled from its ’23 close and accounts for a full quarter of the Gallant 500’s >11% gains thus far this year).
Commodity markets? A mixed bag if ever there was one of late. Consider the acute contrast between the recent paths taken by Copper and Cocoa:
Heavenly Penny Element: Active Ingredient in Cocoa Puffs:
We need ‘em both, but excess consumption of the latter is most certainly a vice, so I’ll take this as good news.
To be sure, and if one cares to look, there are many matters to vex us. The looming presidential election appears to be the most depressing of these affairs as ever we’ve experienced, or, at minimum, since 1856, when the inept James Buchanan defeated the ineffectual Millard Filmore and the unhinged John Freemont, causing, among other effects, the elevation to Vice President one John C. Breckenridge, who went on to become Secretary of War for the Confederates.
The two electoral combatants are scheduled to debate one another next month, the earliest point for such a contest in American History. It should make for compelling theater, but anyone expecting an exchange rising to that of Lincoln/Douglas is likely to be disappointed.
A virtuous act of retributive self-defense on the part of the Israelis morphed, at least in the eyes of much of the world, into a sequence of vicious genocide – so much so, that millions of bystanders have taken to the streets to disrupt the routine of billions who are not thus engaged. Here’s hoping that those moved, somehow to action here do not find themselves to be latter-day Robespierres.
I guess the lesson in all this is that we should embrace our passions, but only to a degree.
I expect the markets to remain strong here, but caution investment enthusiasts to act with a degree of temperance. And this includes you, Roaring Kitty. At some point you’re gonna have to slow your roar, lest you be mauled by an angry bear. Neither GME nor AMC have any business to speak of, and certainly no business rallying energetically – even on this tape. You’ll probably step aside before they crash, but what about all those jabronis that follow you? I fear for their portfolios.
But this note is about Greg. And one more anecdote comes to mind. I hated high school, and on Graduation Night, my last act before exiting the premises for all time was to climb to the science lab at the top of the building and blow a joint there with my buds.
Upon egress, I encountered Greg in the parking lot and garbled out to him “it’s been a long time”. Whereupon, and in sequence, he said, “and a long time gone”. Perhaps thanks to him, I uttered the appropriate response:
“And a long time before the dawn”.
He smiled with satisfaction and rolled away into the night, knowing in his heart that I’d learned something from him after all.
TIMSHEL