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Our first big mistake—we believed that money was rational.
“Real estate. That’s our present-day delusion. More than that: Mortgages. Because a mortgage is never just a mortgage, is it? It’s a promise. A promise that your life can change. A promise that you can be the sort of person who should live in that house no matter how far it is from your real price range. And let’s be truthful, shall we? What is a promise like that but your world-famous American Dream?”
Our second big mistake—we thought that risk could be quantified. Our third big mistake—Alan Greenspan.
“Ole David X-marks-the-spot Li. A Chinese swashbuckler who rode into town and duped the entire American financial system into believing that he could lasso risk.” Kalchefsky turned and wrote on the board: Pr[TA<1, TB<1] = ϕ2(ϕ-1(FA(1)), ϕ-1(FB(1)), γ) Whoa. How did he just reel that off? Impressive. “You know why the dental hygienist got the mortgage for her million-dollar home? Because of this formula. You know why AIG needed a bailout? Because of the ways that Wall Street tried to profit off of that mortgage. You know why Wall Street thought that they could make millions off of the
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America was a great deceptor. Land of Opportunity. Golden Mountain. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But inside those pretty words, between the pretty coasts, was this: Miles and miles of narrow-minded know-nothings who wanted no more out of life than an excuse to cock their AK-47s and take arms against a sea of troubles. A Great Wall? Ha! This country could never build itself anything as epic as that. America wanted to think of itself as a creator, but all it could do was destroy—fortunes, families, lives. Even the railroads needed the Chinese to come and build them.
“Look, I don’t expect everyone to be well versed in Sino-American relations or the history of the Great Leap Forward. I recognize that those are specialized areas of interest, but whatever happened to our shared references and understandings? How can we be a polis when 95 percent of us would rather watch aging housewives bicker on TV than express a well-formed opinion of our own? When I go to a failing strip club in New Orleans and say that I’m at Ozymandias’s pleasure palace, I want everyone to laugh and get depressed.”
They didn’t see the rows of crops that unfolded in different triangulating patterns, creating a moiré effect through the tinted windows; the electrical towers that marched across the plains; the antiabortion billboards; the pro-prayer billboards; the shredded plastic bags caught in cow fences. They didn’t see the chaotic, swirling flight of swallows as they left their nests under the highway overpass en masse, darkening the sky above their car.
Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.
The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.
