The Second-Cruelest Month

At his worst, George Seferis was a low-rent T.S. Eliot.  You can see that in passages like this:

This is a way of thinking, a way
To begin to speak of things that you confess
uneasily, at times when you can’t hold back, to a friend
who escaped secretly and brings
word from home and from the companions,
and you hurry to open your heart
before exile forestalls you and alters him.

(From Last Stop, Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherard)

But when he wrote his main-event poems, he was much more than that.  This is most apparent where he writes about the landscape of antiquity.  Eliot encountered ancient history in books and museums.  Seferis grew up next to it, in Greek Asia Minor, before he and his family were rausted during the Exchange of Populations.  For Eliot, ruins were something you saw on a shore excursion.  For Seferis, they were his peanut butter and jelly:

Soon now, the sun will stop.
Dawn’s ghosts
have blown into the dry shells;
a bird sang three times, three times only;
the lizard on a white stone
motionless
stares at the parched grass
where a tree snake slithered away.
A black wing makes a deep gash
high in the sky’s blue dome –
Look at it, you’ll see it break open.

Birth-pang of resurrection.

(From Three Secret Poems, Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

April is the cruelest month because it is tax month.  The Treasury does not just take its pound of flesh; it forces us to cut it out ourselves and deliver it to them.  Tax returns are not self-executing.  For people who own real estate, they can be complicated.  You either power through them yourself or you pay someone else to perform your civic duty for you.  Transaction costs are paid in brain-damage or cash.

April also breeds lilacs out of the dead land, whatever that means.  April sucks.

September is a close second.  That is because September is the month when mobile home park leases go out.  Under New York State law, a park owner is required to give residents at least three months’ notice of any change in park rule or change in rent.  Most leases start Jan 1.  That means that new leases need to be delivered before the end of September.

September is a scut-bomb.

For example – assume you own two parks in New York State with a total of a hundred twenty-five lots, ten of which are vacant.  Each September, every resident in your parks needs to get two identical packets.  One packet is delivered by mail; the other is hand-delivered.  Each packet contains a covering memo, two copies of the applicable resident’s lease (one for the resident, one for the owner) and a copy of the updated park regulations.  Each lease is nine pages long, except for the lease-option leases, which are ten pages, and the apartment leases, which are two pages.  The regs are twelve pages long.  The covering memo is one page long.  So, each packet contains a total of thirty-one printed pages, which are divided into four documents, three of which need to be stapled together.  When the documents are stuffed into the packet, they are ordered Covering Memo-Lease-Lease-Regs.

You print out two hundred sixteen mailing labels and stick them on two hundred sixteen large envelopes.  You stuff each envelope with the leases addressed to the applicable resident and the rest of the applicable document stack, and then you sort the envelopes into two buckets.  One bucket goes to the post office.  The other goes into the trunk of your car, is driven up to the parks, and distributed among the residents.

When you take the mailing bucket to the post office, you find that the post office is closed for the annual spelling bee held between the postal workers in your home town and the employees of the manufactured housing division of the DMV. When the office re-opens, you find that they will not meter the envelopes for you, but they will sell you the correct postage. Each envelope takes four stamps.  You peel and affix four stamps to each of the one hundred and eight envelopes in the mailing bucket, dump them through the mailing slot, and feel a wave of relief rush over you.

You question your decision to become a park owner instead of a gastroenterologist.  But you are still grateful that you are not a sex worker, a management consultant, a Canadian, or a lawyer. 

When you hand out the in-person packets in person, residents complain about lot rent increases.  The Nakba law limits lot rent increases to three percent as of right and six percent to cover capital expenses or increases in operating costs.  Lot rents have increased 5.43% over last year’s lot rent, but the year-over-year CPI is 9.2%.  You tell residents that, in real terms, they have received a 3.77% decrease in lot rent, but they grumble.  They say that they are on a fixed income.  You say that their income is not fixed, because the Social Security cost of living adjustment for 2023 will be 9.3%.  Their income keeps pace with inflation; yours does not.

A penny drops, and you perform a thought experiment.

Section 233-B of the NY RPL reads as follows:

Increases in rent shall not exceed a three percent increase above the rent since the current rent became effective. In this section, rent shall mean all costs, including all rent, fees, charges, assessments, and utilities. Notwithstanding the above, a manufactured home park owner is permitted to increase the rent in excess of three percent above the rent since the current rent became effective, due to: (a) Increases in the manufactured home park owner’s operating expenses, (b) Increases in the manufactured home park owner’s property taxes on such park or (c) Increases in costs which are directly related to capital improvements in the park.

In the thought experiment, you imagine that someone has challenged the meaning of the term “rent” in the statute.  Someone (counsel for an industry association, say, or a class-action lawyer) has made the argument that “rent” does not mean “nominal dollar figure”.  Instead, it means “true value”.  For example, if rent in Year 1 is $100 and the rate of inflation is 5%, to keep rent steady in real terms, the property owner would have to charge $105 in Year 2 dollars.  A $3 increase would be a 1.9% reduction in real rent.  An $8.15 increase would be a 3% increase in real value.

You massage the bag full of leases that you have to distribute to your residents and reflect, ‘There is no way a court would draw that subtle of a distinction.  Courts are corrupt, politically driven, and short-sighted’.  And then you hear the voice of the old man, falling into the heart of the day: “And if you condemn me to drink poison,”, he says, “I thank you.  Your law will be my law.  How can I go wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling stone?  I prefer death.  Who’ll come out best only God knows.”  You say,

“That line hasn’t worked for thousands of years.”

The old man is portly and dark-complected, wearing a business suit and a dour expression.  You understand that he studied law before he joined the diplomatic corps.  Poetry was just a hobby for him.  He says, “Well, how about this one?  ‘I was just following orders’?”

“Might get traction in some courts, but you need to couch it in different terms.  It has taken on some nasty associations.”

“’Gentlemen – it is a constitution we are expounding here’?”

“Nope.”

“’The power to tax is the power to destroy’?”

“Could you stick to the topic, please?  We are talking about a court’s ability to distinguish between real and notional value, and whether it should do so when it construes a statute.  ‘Rent’ can mean ‘the value of rent’, or ‘the notional dollar amount of rent’.  How can we get a court to recognize this distinction?”

“Value!  It’s just a few obols!”

“That’s like saying ‘Sex!  It’s just sex!’”

“Sex?  All I see here are fat old men like me.“

“Focus, please.”

“So, you say that rent in Year 1 is $100?”

“Yes.”

“And you use the dollar as a unit of currency instead of drachmas or obols?”

“That is right.”

“And it is only a unit of currency, correct?”

“Yes.”

“It has no value other than in what it can buy?”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever eaten a basis point?”

“No.”

“Have you fed your children with a dollar bill or heated your house with a pip?”

“Never.”

“So, a dollar is only useful for what it can buy?”

“Yes.”

“And is there a difference between two dollar bills?”

“Of course.  I am holding two different dollar bills in my hand now.  One was printed in 2018 and the other was printed in 2020.  One is fresh and smooth and the other is moist and wrinkled.  The serial number on the first starts with-“

“What can you buy with the first dollar bill?”

“A stick of gum.  A little less than a quart of gasoline.  A dollar twenty-eight Canadian.  Maybe some crap from the dollar store.”

“And what can you buy with the second dollar bill?”

“The same.”

“The same things, exactly?”

“Yes, the same things exactly.”

“And can you do anything other than buy things with either dollar bill?”

“For practical purposes, no.”

“So each dollar is only valuable in so far as it can buy things that you can use?”

“Correct.”

“And each can buy the same things that the other can buy?”

“Yes.”

“So – the two dollar bills are the same as each other.”

“We call that fungibility, O Socrates.”

The old man looked at me with his wide-set, frank eyes.  He said, “I shed that name a long time ago.”

“You are in the agora in the middle of the day, not an air conditioned office.  Don’t you want to take that heavy suit off?”

“Let’s take a break now.  I need to buy a few things.”

“There’s a dollar store in the Polish section.”

“They just sell cheap shit from Scythia.  I will see you after lunch.”

The old man wandered up to where some Persian refugees were selling rugs. I found a diner, and then slept until the sun became less hot.

Glaucon, Lysias and Thrasymachus and I met up with the old man at four that afternoon.  The old man asked Glaucon “So – a dollar is only worth what it can buy?”

“Yes.”

Glaucon was in the hot seat now, not me.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  The old man continued.

“And rent is $100 a month?”

“It has gone up to $110 per month.”

“And why is that, O Glaucon?”

“My landlord is a greedy bastard.  He raised the rent $10 this year.”

“And you pay your rent in dollars?”

“Of course.”

“The same dollars that we discussed this morning?”

“The same.”

“And can you eat dollars?”

“I do not believe so.”

“And each dollar is the same as every other dollar?”

“They are fungible.”

“What do you buy with your dollars, O Glaucon?”

“Bread, cheese, oil, wine.”

“And how much is a loaf of bread?”

“$1.15 this year.  It was $1.00 last year.”

“And that money you used to buy the bread – could it have been used for anything else?”

“I could have used it to buy cheese, oil or wine.”

“Assume them away.”

“Then, no.”

“So – last year, a dollar was worth a loaf of bread.  This year, a dollar is worth eighty-seven percent of a loaf of bread?”

“How did you do that without place value?”

“Answer the question.”

“Yes.”

“So, in fact, last year’s rent was worth $87 of this year’s dollars?”

“Correct, Socrates.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“George.”

“With $100, how many loaves of bread could you buy last year?”

“A Hundred, O George.”

“How many loaves can you buy with $100 this year?”

“Eighty-seven.”

“And how many loaves of bread can you buy with $110 this year?”

“Ninety-six”

Lysias whispered in my ear, “Socrates is speaking exceedingly good sense”.  I said, “George”.  The old man continued,

“And a dollar is worthless except for what it can buy?”

“Yes.”

“So, you should compute your rent in bread, instead of dollars, because bread, rather than dollars, is the thing with intrinsic value?”

“Yes.”

“And you paid a hundred loaves of bread for rent last year but ninety-six this year?”

Glaucon looked sweaty and the worse for wear.  All he could manage was a weak “Yes.”

“So your rent went down this year.”

“Yes.”

“Do you still think your landlord is a greedy bastard?”

“I still think so, O George.  I just can’t prove it.”

I patted Glaucon on the back and handed him a wine skin.  I looked at the old man and asked, “Could you get a court to buy the argument you just made?”

“Courts screw up sometimes.  They threw the book at me once for a pecadillo.”

“You were corrupting the youth!”

“Have I corrupted you?”

“I am hardly young.”

“All I can do is try to make sense as best anyone can.”

“What about graft and political pressure?”

“That’s above my pay-grade.”

“I am a member of an industry organization.  Could you represent us, if this issue is ever litigated?”

“Sorry, no.  My schedule is booked clear through to the apocalypse in 2106.  After that, my services will no longer be needed.”