Puritanism and flirting: American women rock the world

 

It became a commonplace in the American culture of the 20s to decry “puritanism”.

Twenties culture was heavily influenced by Mencken, who played a role similar to Emerson’s (a writer he despised) in the 1840s and 1850s – he somehow became the impresario of American culture. The anti-puritan note came from Mencken. Puritanism was associated with democracy, socialism, progressivism, and all the things that Mencken found laughable.

In the Smart Set essays of 1913-15, collected by S.T. Joshi, Mencken made his most extensive attack on the products of puritanism. In considering what makes the American different, Mencken bumps into puritanism:

“That further explanation is to be found, I believe, in the continued survival of a dominating taint of Puritanism in the American character—a survival no less real and corrupting because many of its outward evidences have been concealed by time. Since the very dawn of his separate history, the American has been ruled by what may be called a moral conception of life. He has thought of all things as either right or wrong, and of the greater number of them, perhaps, as wrong. He has ever tended, apparently irresistibly, to reduce all questions of politics, of industrial organization, of art, of education, and even of fashion and social etiquette, to questions of ethics. Every one of his great political movements has been a moral movement; in almost every line of his literature there is what Nietzsche used to call moralic acid; he never thinks of great men and common men, of valuable men and useless men, but only of good men and bad men. And to this moral way of thinking he adds a moral way of acting. That is to say, he feels that he is bound to make an active war upon whatever is bad, that his silence is equivalent to his consent, that he will be held personally responsible, by a sharp-eyed, long-nosed God, for all the deviltry that goes on around him. The result, on the one hand, is a ceaseless buzzing and slobbering over moral issues, many of them wholly artificial and ridiculous, and on the other hand, an incessant snouting into private conduct, in the hope of bringing new issues to light. In brief, the result is Puritanism.”

This is both Mencken at his best and Mencken at his worst. We recognize our American cultural politics here – from puritanism to political correctness. But we also notice elements that are treated as given – right and wrong, bad and good – that point to something Mencken always lacked: any sense of dialectic. He could see that the American was, as he put it, a mongrel, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the basics on which he was brought up in urban America: hence, the racism, the mistaken idea that traits are immutable, the misconceived Darwinism.  This, too, is recognizable today. We see it all around us and label it “fascism”, when it precedes fascism in the Mussolini sense and was “American common sense” among the movers, shakers and thinkers, from the halls of Harvard to the pages of the Baltimore Sun.

In 1915, as Mencken was creating his vision of American cultural politics, Freud published an essay, Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod – Contemporary observations about war and death, to give an awkward translation. In this essay about the pleasure principle gone mad, so to speak, there is a throwaway observation around which has grown a little subliterature, It occurs in a passage in which Freud is talking about the way death, the fact of death

Our stance with relation to death has a strong effect on our life. Life is impoverished, it loses interest, when the highest stake in the game of life – life itself – cannot be wagered. It becomes as shallow, as without substance, as an American flirt, with which it is presupposed that nothing will come of it in distinction from a continental love affair, with which both partners must continually remain aware of the serious consequences.”

This is quite the comparison.

I see Mencken as primarily operating as a misogynist. A sexist, by cliché and convention, sees a woman as an object – a misogynist sees a woman as an enemy. The identification of women with puritanism was one of the presupposed syntheses in the modernist struggle against puritanism. In that struggle, I think, there is a long misinterpretation of the uniqueness of American female culture, of what that creole, mongrel crisscrossing was all about. Freud, I think, was also writing here as a misogynist, but with a vision of that crisscross culture that helps us understand both the misogyny and the sexism.

That women’s place in the great national division of emotional labor was to come at the world ethically was a programmatic truth for Mencken; in this, he was reflecting a long and even trans-Atlantic tradition. His own contribution was to given this a name, puritanism, and a carnivalesque role: the joykiller. Freud, though, saw something else – saw the joy in the realm of flirting that posed a true threat to the mandarin thinker, to the thinker’s prestige in general. For without the thinker, what is life worth? By succedaneum (for the thinker is usually elsewhere when the battle is waged), the thinker thinks about life and death issues and thus puts into the balance his own life.

I myself have played the role, here, of seeing through Mencken and Freud; that’s a bit of impudence on my part. I read both Mencken and Freud with pleasure, with my hat off, in admiration. But I think they cast up screens that make it hard to see one of the truly unique contributions of American culture to world culture, which was a very different form of women’s culture that was neither the joykiller nor the serious thinker’s muse. From Daisy Miller to Josephine Baker, there was a different set of co-ordinates, a different orientation that made the “flirt” possible.

 

 

 

Robert Burns and the NOTORIOUS B.I.G.

 

There is too little notice given to the similarities between Robert Burns and The Notorious B.I.G.

So I thought I’d contribute to the literature.


Burns is, for one thing, a big cocksman, and proud of it – although the most recent biographer of Burns, Robert Crawford, whose book came out at the same time as the biopic of Biggie’s life,  Notorious, is too apologetic about it to look at it. Burns had perhaps six, seven bastards by various women, which on the one hand is a great curse on the women, and not excusable even back then – contraception was by no means unknown in the highlands. On the other hand, lets not pretend that in the cauld cauld age of patriarchy, there was an infinite difference in the treatment the married woman and the single mother could expect, or that the children who'd been routed into this world through the good and proper channel of a Calvinistic blind poke on the marriage bed were infinitely a different matter. Burns raised some of the children - or his poor wife Jean did – and some were raised by girlfriends who got married themselves.

Jean Armour, Robert Louis Stevenson thought, informed by some rumor, never loved Robert. This is probably not so. She definitely bore with him, and definitely lay with him right willingly. She had three of his children before they got married, and he did miss his “sweet armload” even when he was cavorting with a higher class of people. Most biographers have stumbled and been quite horrified about a letter he wrote to his friend Ainslie about her on the eve of her giving birth to twins – before he married her:

'Jean I found banished like a martyr — forlorn, destitute and friendless; all for the good old cause: I have reconciled her to her fate: I have reconciled her to her mother: I have taken her a room: I have taken her to my arms: I have given her a mahogany bed: I have given her a guinea; and I have f---d her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But — as I always am on every occasion — I have been prudent and cautious to an astounding degree; I swore her, privately and solemnly, never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl, and I took the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones. Oh, what a peacemaker is a guid, weel-willy pintle ! It is the mediator, the guarantee, the umpire, the bond of union, the solemn league and covenant, the plenipotentiary, the Aaron's rod, the Jacob's staff, the prophet Elisha's pot of oil, the Ahasuerus' Sceptre, the sword of mercy, the philosopher's stone, the Horn of Plenty, and Tree of Life between Man and Woman. »

Myself, I don’t take this as the literal truth of the matter. That Burns could get it up for two big fucks while Jean, nine months pregnant, was being electrified by his thundering scalade – I sense a joke, here. It wasn’t, however, a joke that Burnsians have appreciated – in Victorian times, this letter was heavily edited, and now, in our politically correct times, my biographer opines that maybe Jean was in pain from the application of the Aaron’s rod.

Burns was a great believer in fucking, and recommended it as the remedy against war in his political poems, as in:

“Some cry Constitution
Some cry Revolution
And Politics kick up a Row:
But Prince and Republic
Agree on the subject
No treason is in a good mowe”

(mowe is the Scots for fuck.)
–
Burns, in fact, was a lot more happy about cunt – or cunthappy - than Biggie, who was much more sentimental and responsible in many ways:

What do you do
When your bitch is untrue?


This wasn’t such a problem for Burns, who had a looser sense indeed about untrue and not. My biographer claims that there is some evidence of Burns corresponding with Mary Wollstonecraft – I do wonder, if this is true, what could have been in those letters? But unlike a cocksman like, say, Henry Miller, Burns loved to look through the eyes of the very women he ‘seduced’. As Raymond Bentman has pointed out in his edition of the Collected Poems, no male eighteenth century poet, and perhaps no other comparable English poet, wrote as many poems in the female voice. His poem, Wha’ll mow me now? Is about the predicament he left many in – for instance, Jenny Clow in Edinburgh, who he seemed to have fucked primarily because she was the maid of an upper class woman he was obsessed with (Burns always fucked maids and peasants of his own class, and was always falling in love with upper class women). In this case, the woman is a prostitute:

Wha’’ll mow me now, my joe
An wha’ll mow me now
A sodger with his bandeleers
Has banged my belly fu’.

Now I maun stole the scornfu’ sneer
O mony a saucy quine
When, curse upon her godly face!
Her cunt’s as merry’s mine.

Biggie, too, mixes sex and class:

“The rap slayer the hooker layer
Muthafucka say your prayers
(Hail Mary full of grace)
Smack the bitch in her face
Take her Gucci bag and the North Face off her back
Jab her if she act
Funny wit the money
Oh you got me mistakin honey
I don't wanna rape ya
I just want the paper”

It is an old story, now, among the tracers of music, that the Scots song mixed in the south with African song, especially Fon and Yoruba songs. There were similar clan systems, similar raiding cultures, similar codes of honor and ecstasy. That some of Robert Burns has made its stealthy way into Biggie Smalls music should be no surprise. Burns was, as well, Walt Whitman’s model – a poet of the people, a literal ploughman poet, with little Latin, no Greek – but an early training in the schools that his father, a tenant farmer, could send him to. Like Biggie, Robert Burns early on found flash his way out of a society he felt was too small for him. This is Robert Louis Stevenson’s shrewd appraisal:

“Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete character--a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy of notice; in his own phrase "panting after distinction," and in his brother's "cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or of more consequence than himself:" with all this, he was emphatically of the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner round his shoulders." Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake. This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter; and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and remark.”

Just as Biggie was by no means conventionally handsome, neither was Burns – every observer says he was too “dark” to be handsome. No milk white skin enveloped our poet, and his seductions had to be conducted by boldness and a gifted, supremely gifted tongue. Nelly Miller, who was a Mauchline neighbor, recalled that he “na to ca a bonie man: dark and strong; but uncommon invitin’ in his speech – uncommon! Ye could na hae cracket wi him for ae minute, but ya wad hae studen four or five.”

Even more than his flash, though, what disturbed the Victorians was his politics. The letter that he sent Ainslie about fucking Jean was repressed by Burnsians – the poem, The Liberty Tree, was disavowed as something that certainly couldn’t be by the author of Auld Lang Syne! With its cracking verse:

King Loui’ thought to cut it down
When it was unco sma’, man
For this the watchman cracked his crown
Cut off his head and a man.

Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, who drew back from the excesses of the French Revolution, Burns, who knew men were hanged for theft and women were transported for prostitution (a trade that he had some kindness for, except when it came to Marie Antoinette), was not disturbed by the murder of the royalty. “What is there in delivering a perjured blockhead and an unprincipled prostitute to the hands of the hangman.” Given the fact that it was awful easy, in 1793, for a man to get thrown into the hulks for Burns’ sentiments, he was pretty open about what he thought. But by 1793 he had seven kids and debts and was working as a cop – the equivalent, I suppose, of working as a Drug Enforcement agent. He was an exciseman, policing the district of Dumfries and capturing smugglers. This was a job that he had serious doubts about – after all, Burns’ favorite literary character was Satan in Paradise Lost. To keep himself in his job, he wrote the occasional servile poem of loyalty – but in all of them he would put in sly jabs at the King.

Biggie’s songs about drugs have the outlaw flavor of Burns’ own sentiments about politics. Supposedly, from the proceeds of one of his snatches, Burns bought some cannons and had them shipped to the French revolutionaries in 1792 – a pretty outrageous gesture.

Alas, Youtube does not contain any recording of Burns’ voice, for he died decades before Edison discovered that needle, wax and groove combination.  But you can here Biggie singing this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QW-V8O6f-U


“When I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell
Cause Im a piece of shit, it aint hard to fuckin tell
It dont make sense, goin to heaven wit the goodie-goodies
Dressed in white, I like black tims and black hoodies
God will probably have me on some real strict shit
No sleepin all day, no gettin my dick licked
Hangin with the goodie-goodies loungin in paradise
Fuck that shit, I wanna tote guns and shoot dice
All my life I been considered as the worst
Lyin to my mother, even stealin out her purse
Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion
I know my mother wished she got a fuckin abortion
She dont even love me like she did when I was younger
Suckin on her chest just to stop my fuckin hunger
I wonder if I died, would tears come to her eyes?
Forgive me for my disrespect, forgive me for my lies”

On sleep related erections

 

It is funny how much of the continent of human biology can be overlooked.

Here’s an example. Men, even brain damaged men, have erections during REM sleep. Women have engorged clitorises and vaginal lubrication during REM sleep. But as Peter Martin puts it in his book on sleep science, Counting Sheep, this fact about our sleep life was not noted by scientists for a “disgracefully long time.” Martin claims that the first observation in a scientific journal about this was published in German in 1941 in an article by Ohlmeyer, Brilmayer and Huelstrung, entitled, banally, Periodische Vorgaenger im Schlaf, Periodic Processes in Sleep.  OB and H did not know, I should say, that the tumescence was connected to REM sleep because REM sleep was only discriminated in 1953. Indeed, the continent of sleep, from the scientific point of view, was not really mapped until the late twentieth century. Interestingly, just as the American continents were discovered and explored by Europeans who were fundamentally contemptuous and murderous of and in regard to the indigenous inhabitants, sleep has mostly been investigated under the aegis that we need to figure out how to do with less of it. After all, work work work is what we should be doing until we drop. Along of course with buy buy buy and fun fun fun.

My own utopia would be one designed to fit our real biologies, so that the people who want 9 hours of sleep – in one form or another – would get nine hours of sleep. In the dysutopia we live in, children soon learn that they must go to be early so they can get up early, since early is when they have to absorb large portions of the corpus of all things to learn. Even your average dog knows this is the wrong way to go about things.

How could the arousal of our members have escaped scientific notice until then? Or even folkloric notice? In Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,   A. R. Ekirch cites a part of Pepys diary:
“Leering husbands, spouses suspected, committed adultery without once leaving their sides. Such visions Pepys cherished all the more dearly during the height of London's Great Plague in 1665. After dreaming of a liaison with Lady Castlemaine ("the best that ever was dreamed"-"all the dalliance I desired with her"), he reflected: "What a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves ... we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this." "Then," he added, "We should not need to be so fearful of death as we are this plague-time. So suspicious of his visions was Pepys's wife that she took to feeling his penis whi'le he slept for signs of an erection.”
I have my doubts that that suspicion of Pepys’ wet dreams was the sole motive for Pepys’ long suffering wife, but she surely came upon the thing itself, if not asleep herself, while Pepys was REMing. In Sleep Related Erections Throughout the Ages, Mels F. van Driel contends that our history is distorted. However, van Driel has a very expansive sense of evidence. Plato, for instance, is quoted as saying “in males the nature of the genital organs is disobedient and self willed, like a creature that is deaf to reason”, not exactly conclusive grounds for the assertion that SREs – sleep related erections – were studied or known to the Athenians. Much of the article has to do with the knowledge of erectile dysfunction, and erections during sleep, not the invariability of erections and vaginal arousal during sleep – a much different thing.
Neurologists have traced the control of male and female SRE to the same part of the brain that controls yawning: the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus where, like the officials in Kafka’s Castle, the neural bureaucrats are continually dealing with stimulus and output as the paper piles up on their desks and they themselves fall asleep or wonder about how they got there and where they are going, pushing buttons all day, the frontal lobe, now that is where its at, those neurons have it so easy, where is the secretary and who is the boss and are they all going to see God someday – to give you some idea of what is going on in there.
Myself, I am interested in the fact that “sleep-related” seems to grammatically subordinate sleep to sex. But what if the direction of subordination is the other way, and sex, that waking pleasure, is really a form of sleep? And all of us are simply vehicles for the Great Sleep – or to quote Schopenhauer: 'It is Maya, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller from afar takes to be water; or the stray piece of rope he takes for a snake'.
All those stray pieces of rope, all the sleepers in bed, or outside of bed, joined in the universal hypothalamus, sleeper cells all of us, reproducing to expand the kingdom of sleep, not that we  know it – this is at least as plausible as any waking explanation of universal ends.
 
 

Emily's Guns

The prudent with a revolver

The loaded rifle by the door

The violent chambers

Of old New England wars

Make me think of Uncle Samuel’s guns

That lined the walls of his hunting lodge

Though I little thought Uncle Sam himself

prowled the corridors of his own brain

like Emily D. prowled hers

Looking for the relics: out of the New England rain.

A nullified wilderness long time gone

a narrative of captivity on the ottoman

the gun she’d finger in her mind

when her brother’s girlfriend came around.

Uncle Sam’s girlfriend found him

on his cedar plank floor

In the gun room where he finished up his own war..

Who has not thought with all the vengeance

Of a child confined to her room

Ot taking a mighty gun

And making the house a tomb.

- Karen Chamisso

Nietzsche's umbrella, Lenin's laugh

 

There is a story, jotted down by Lydia Fotieva in her book, Pages from Lenin’s life, about a visit Vladimir Ilyitch made to Paris 1905. He  spoke at a conference with Jaures. The International was alert: Russia was in revolt. Lenin had been in Paris before. He liked the city. In 1910, when he lived for a couple of years in an apartment on 4, Rue Rose Marie, he liked to bike around the city on weekends. He was a fanatic biker, one who knew all about fixing the gears, oiling the chain, keeping his bike in tip top order.

But on June 1^st – or 6^th, the dates differ, Lenin was in the mood for amusement. He’d been to the Opera the night before. Now, Lydia and a comrade took him with them to the Folies Bergere. At that time, the theatre was not just a high class stripper heaven. It was burlesque. Fotieva remembered one vaudeville routine Lenin loved:

“They were showing short scenes of a light genre. I remember one called “the legs of Paris.” The curtain was raised knee-high, showing the legs of people of different walks of life and social standing moving across the stage. There was a workingman, a street-light man, a grisette, a priest, a policeman, a small shopkeeper, a Paris dandy, and many others. The legs were so emphatically typical that there was no mistaking their owners, and you could easily picture the person they belonged to. It was very amusing. Vladimir Ilyich laughed as infectiously as he alone knew how, and he really enjoyed himself that evening.”

The half lowered curtain, the pants legs and bare legs and soutaned legs, the people above them hidden, the guessing as to what legs belonged to what type, and Lenin laughing at the show like any schoolboy. Does history here ball itself into an allegory, or is this just another night on the town?

Derrida, to the disgust of all good positivist philosophers, wrote an essay on Nietzsche that asks us some questions on a philological philosophical matter:

“’I have forgotten my umbrella.”

“I have forgotten my umbrella”

Among the fragments of Nietzsche’s unpublished work, we find these words, all alone, between quotation marks.

Perhaps a citation.

Perhaps it was something taken from (prelevee) some other part.

Perhaps putting it here or there would make it understandable.

Perhaps it was a note to begin some phrase that he meant to write here or there.

We have no infallible means to know where the taking of the phrase took place, on what it could have been grafted later on. We will never be assured that we know what Nietzsche meant to do or say in noting these words. Nor even what he wanted. In supposing that there is no doubt on his autograph, that it was his handwriting, and that one knows what we put under the concept of an autograph and the form of a signature [seing – as in blank check, blanc-seing].”

Derrida is making a serious point non-seriously, or a non-serious point seriously, here. We make large metaphysical and epistemological decisions when we go through the papers of an author, or even through texts in general: our list of procedures,  very much in the line of Gricean implicature, escapE, somehow, the attention of philosophical questioning. Derrida speaks of “hermeneutic somnambulism”.

And then we have the texts of people’s lives, their biographies, their life writing.

I could see classifying Lenin at the Folies-Bergere with Nietzsche’s umbrella – if it was his, if he was the person who lost it – as barely worth comment.

Yet it has attracted comment, both from the anti-communist professionals (while the revolutionaries were suffering in 1905, there was Lenin, laughing diabolically in the lap of bourgeois comfort) and the communist professionals (Comrade Lenin, as well, sometimes enjoyed the people’s humor. Or to generalize this with Stalin’s phrase: "Life has become better, life has become happier").

“Its transparence spreads out without a fold,” Derrida writes, “without reserve. Its appears to consist of a more than flat intelligibility. Everyone knows what “I have forgotten my umbrella” means.”

Lenin’s laughter at the Legs of Paris also seems to be nothing special.

And yet, there is something different about thinking of Lenin at the Folies-Bergere. Rather like thinking of Ho Chi Mihn going to a burlesque house in San Francisco – which he well might have done.

So: there is this anecdote. And there is the person who tells it, who originally wrote it down. Lydiia Fotieva. In 1920, Le Miroir, a French newspaper, took a picture of the Russian leadership in a meeting, and helpfully numbered and named the bigwigs – one of which was Fotieva. Of course, this photograph to us now shows those who are going to die – as Stalin got rid of those who did not die naturally in the next 10 to 20 years. Almost all. Not Fotieva.

Fotieva was associated, at that point, with Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, whose secretary she’d been in the pre-revolutionary years in Paris and then in Switzerland. Back then, she’d been toughened by prison terms in Czarist jails. Perhaps that had taken some of the puritanism out of her, enough so that she could enjoy a good vaudeville act. After the revolution, she was Lenin’s secretary, and was a witness to, or a part of the quarrel between Krupskaya and Stalin that figures into numerous stories about Lenin breaking with Georgian before he died.

If these stories are true, why was Fotieva spared a bullet in the neck? Some have called Fotieva an informer for Stalin. Certainly she had good relations with Stalin, even as members of Lenin’s circle began to suspect that he was not good for the revolution. Stalin, according to Robert Conquest, found Krupskaya a problem in the 30s, when he took full command, and even thought about denying that she was Lenin’s final wife – or real wife. He might have meant to nominate Fotieva for that position. In the end, though, this wasn’t necessary. It would have been a bit too messy.

It was a bit messy, too, that Fotieva had been the boss of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda. There might well have been a friendship between the two such that Nadezhda spoke up for Lydia. In any case, during the purge and war years, Fotieva hid like a mouse in the bureaucracy of the Lenin Museum, a demotion but not torture or death in some courtyard or digging in subzero weather.

It had all come out wrong. She must have thought, sometimes. But after Stalin died, she resurfaced, still communist, and when she died the obituary in Tass was signed by Brezhnev and some others.

The Paris of 1905 was a long way away on that September day in 1975 when Fotieva’s body was put in the ground. The legs had long since withered and died, for the most part, during the wars and massacres of the century. The legs of Paris is not a routine, or tableau, noted by the papers at the time. Even books on the Folies-Bergere mention simply tableau put together by Victor de Cottens, the theatre’s art director at the time. One wonders what Lenin made of Mado Minty, one of the stars of the ensemble that year, “la magnifique, la merveilleuse a la superbe pointrine”?

As he and his comrades filed out of the door, into the still luminous night, hailed a cab, and left for the more serious footsteps that would eventually take them to the Finland Station.

What just happened? I mean, before what just happened happened

Among the best responses to the election as far as I am concerned, the small post by Anna Kornbluh on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/annakornbluh - seemed to be the most sensible, contextualizing the Shithead's election in the context of global inflation and the neolib globalized fallout. Inspired, I wrote out something that makes sense, to me, of this election and its air of farce. Inflation has to be an important factor in the story. But I think there's another part, which begins with COVID, and it is this:

The Covid interval passed like a long nightmare, but strange and miraculous things happened in that nightmare. Among them was the U.S. response, under Trump. For fifty years we have been told that the welfare state is evil morally and economically disastrous. And then, in the space of two months, prodded by the Dems in congress and his treasury, the U.S. expanded its welfare state on a scale and at a speed it had never done before. It was like three great societies all crammed together. I can never get over marvelling at it: the charts are here:

https://www.nytimes.com/.../pandemic-safety-net-medicaid...

Besides which, Trump also signed off on a vacinne project that was, to my mind, as impressive as the Manhattan project.

Given these pluses, Trump should easily have been re-elected in 2020. But here's another kicker, a dialectical joke in the jokefest: Trump ran against his own record. He ran against the vaccine. He ran for school openings and said nothing about the numerous ways in which money flooded in to help working parents. A clever politician, a Richard Nixon, who also shredded GOP verities when it served his interest, woulda done it. But Trump is an entertainer. I don't think he even now knows what he did, titularly. In any case, as Covid closed, so too did the welfare state. Without discussion. In the course of twelve years, we have seen the system totally collapse - in 2008 and 2020 - and the state, which every book says is now on the wane, cause we got us these multinationals and financial capital and everything, the fading state - well, it just opens up shop, pays for everything, and people watch it in awe until the show is over and the bigwigs forget, or keep trying to make us forget. So Trump won his second term because of the things he did in his first term that he still doesn't know he did. I love the vaudeville act of history. Except when it stomps on my face.

On the social utility of fat cats

Since we have just decided to make our unofficial plutocracy official, I thought this essay I wrote in 2019 might be useful.

We need to discuss the social function of rich people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, I see two functions: administration and investment.

The social cost of administration has gone up considerably since corporations changed their nature, breaking the old postwar pact between capital and labor. Here, I am going to put to one side the growth of LBOs and private equity firms that developed new forms of looting corporations in the eighties in order to concentrate on the radical elevation in compensation for the highest levels of management. This took off in the 80s. The explanation for this, from the point of view of intellectual history, is that neoclassical economists provided a model that justified it. Then, as an instititutional addendum, business schools saw in this issue a chance to create an alliance with a trend in corporations that would pay great benefits: expanding its presence both on the campus and in the world of business. Harvard Business school in particular boasted a team of scholars who cheered on the insane compensations of the new class of CEO with arguments having to do with “aligning” the interests of the organization and the management: the famous principle-agent problem, the solution to which was to massively bribe the leader. The rationale for this was paper thin – one had only to compare the compensation for Japanese upper management in the seventies to Americans in the eighties to see that corporate productivity and return on investment did not depend on giving the CEOs carte blanche and stock options.

One must keep in mind, from a political point of view, that the lowering of the marginal tax rate as a result of bills passed in Reagan’s first two years in office was the necessary but not sufficient condition for the subsequent explosion in upper management compensation. The gesture normalized the transgression of the post war pact, which saw the worker in some relation to management. It gave boards of directors a material reason for allowing and even encouraging a practice that, at one time, would have looked like gouging or an exercise in contempt for the stakeholders in the firm. The normalization worked: in the nineties, Clinton Dems showed no inclination to take the punchbowl away from this party, thus cementing the new norm. Rich upper management types – donors! – were now consulted as oracles instead of targeted as moneybags. This, crucially, paid extra dividends once one was out of office. The shadow side of neo-liberalism was the creation of a whole new strata of well paid consultants, lobbyists, and general wheeler dealers. If corporation X could not bribe Senator Y, Senator Y’s children or spouse could perhaps be hired at excellent salaries to lobby, or perhaps to think hard at think tanks, which like business schools experienced a true boom in the eighties. These think tanks were being bankrolled by wealthy philanthropists, who, in time honored fashion, used this instrument to avoid taxes and exert power. As the CEO class became more and more entitled, there was considerable trickle down to the political class, which became abettors and scroungers at the till. Similarly, the CEO model spread to non-profits. College presidents and museum heads were soon being paid astonishing sums to do what previous college presidents and museum heads had done for considerably less. There was no visible increase in the quality of colleges or museums, but this didn’t matter: that standard was obsolete at this point.

Thomas Picketty, who studied changes in the source of wealth along with Emmanuel Saenz, targets the income derived from administration as as a major driver of income and wealth inequality in his book Capital. For a quick rundown of this, I’d recommend Mike Konczal’s excellent essay in the Boston Review in 2014.

Even so, if the exorbitant sums paid to administrators had resulted in a great increase in the pay to the median worker, it might be said that, on some level, it works. But this hasn’t happened. The very wealthy have seen their income growing by about 6 percent per year since the seventies – in fact, the starting point seems to be 1973. The middle has grown, if at all – it flatlined during most of the 00s – by one percent per year. The workers who comprise the lower eighty percent have seen their wealth, in Piketty’s phrase, “collapse”. This reverses the trends from 1945 to 1973, when it was just the opposite, with the wealthiest having less percentage gains than the middle.

The left argues that we have no reason to pay these exorbitant costs for administration. There’s no evidence that these costs have been worth it to the average worker in developed economies. On the contrary, they’ve decisively shifted power away from workers. This power is not just reflected in flatlining wages and increased debt: it is, as well, a matter of expectations, of seeing the future of one’s society as something in which one can expect justice, exert political influence, and enjoy the fruits of our greatly increased national product: making our lives more comfortable, but allowing us, too, to take risks without facing the chance of being kicked out on the street. And so on down the generations, ad gloria mundi.

Along with administration, the wealthy play a positive social role by making investments. The argument here is, it is true, circular – we need to the wealthy to invest, and that investment makes them richer, making us need them more – but it isn’t bogus. Investment means that credit is available to the masses; the making accessible and available credit to workers, beyond the mingy terms of the company store, was one of the great capitalist victories of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union died for many reasons, but one of the unheralded ones was the persistent refusal of the Soviet planners to create an internal source of credit. This devastated the economy that recovered very well from World War II, but that, by the sixties, was in desperate need of credit to renovate and take advantage of the efficiencies offered by technological progress.

So there’s that. One can accept that the sphere of financial circulation is necessary, however, without accepting the premium that is now being paid for investment is necessary or efficient – or accepting the massive shadow banking system that has developed according to a logic of its own. The proliferation of financial instruments whose sole purpose is a quick return – basically, the casino-ization of the banking system – has only been a bad thing. Although it has been an excellent thing for the very rich.

Our tax system mirrors the priorities of the very wealthy – hence, the flat tax on capital gains. This is a scandal, and everytime it is pointed out that it is a scandal, everyone is scandalized, and the moment passes. Here, the wealthy have been very successful at telling a story that is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx told. It is perhaps the most successful propaganda ever to spread in America, if we discount the pseudo-science flogged by cigarette companies to keep regulation from happening in the fifties and sixties. The success of the cig companies can be measured in the obituary columns and the hospitals year after year. The success of the entrepreneur myth can be measured in bankruptcies, debt, and the decline in public investment is occurring not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the developed world save China.

The story made up by Schumpeter, and other conservative economists, went like this: wealth comes about because some risktaker seizes on an idea – a new invention or service, or a common one that can be done more efficiently, etc. – and founds a company. The company hires people, meaning that our risktaker is spreading the wealth. We need this person! And so the richer he is, the more he deserves our gratitude for graciously making such wealth for others.

This fairy tale is very popular on the right, and hardly disputed anymore on the left. Yet it is simply bogus. The wealth of the risktaker depends entirely on the services and commodities produced by the workers. The rightwing tale completely and neatly inverts reality. There’s no Gates, Jobs, or Bezos without the workers that embodied and carried forth the tasks that made them rich. All honor to their ideas – but they are ideas built on the labor, services and ideas of others. The indispensibility of the entrepreneur isn’t even believed by the banker class, which mouths this propaganda. As any glance at the history of the tech industry – where the myth of the wealthmaking wealthy is particularly strong – shows, when the idea of the risktaker becomes an actual company, his funders – those VC angels – in the majority of cases replace him. The VC angels have no sentimentality about the “entrepreneur”. They know he’s a replaceable cog. Unless, of course, it is the man at the top of some Venture Capital company – then he’s an irreplaceable genius.

So, to put it in one sentence: the entrepreneur myth inverts cause and effect, for the malign purpose of justifying an unnecessary premium to the administrator.

But to return to the social function of the wealthy, it is at the convergence of administration and investment that we see the need, such as there is, for a wealthy strata. That need is not, however, for an uber-wealthy strata. We need to allow a premium for investment and for the higher administrative tasks. At least, given the present form of our economic system. But a premium can really be limited, and its limits should be defined empirically, not with an ideological elevator speech about freedom. In the fifties, the wealthiest level of Americans, the top 1 percent, owned 9 percent of the national wealth. They now own 35 percent. The bottom 80 percent own ten percent. This has happened in my lifetime. In my son’s lifetime, if global warming is seriously addressed and there is an America left, we can correct this. In my utopia, the top 1 percent would own five percent of the wealth, and the bottom 80 percent would own at least 50 to 60 percent of the wealth – leaving the next 19 percent with the spoils. That 19 percent is composed of administrators, professionals and people in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors. These people have seen their incomes and wealth grow, but not in proportion to the freakishly wealthy upper 1 percent. That one percent – and even more the .01 percent – dominate the chart.

I’m conceding to the social function of the wealthy much that depends on the current system. That system itself has to adjust in a major way to the catastrophe it has generated and refused to confront – and who can predict just how that adjustment will be accomplished? But it should be pointed out that ecocide is not just a capitalist product – there was no country and system more devoted to ecocide than the U.S.S.R. As long as we refuse to rethink the treadmill of production, we will keep going the way of the Dead Planet. However, the acceleration in ecocide coincides, and not accidentally, with the increase in wealth inequality we have seen around the world. Economists, bizarrely, love to brag that really excessive poverty is decreasing, as if they had anything to do with it. This means, basically, that there are more families living on more than 2 dollars a day. Victory! But one can ask whether the price – a .001 percent that are living on 50 million dollars per day – is worth it. I for one say no. Inequality and the present system of industry are both factors in the same death march. One we can stop. And we can do that without rich people missing a single ten course lunch. The right will always complain it is a choice between the billionaire and the Gulag, but that is a false choice. We can choose to keep the wealthy without creating a wealth aristocracy. That’s the real choice.