The deathmarch of dweebs

 

Trump’s admiring remark about Arnie Palmer’s dick sent me back to something I wrote in the olden days of Bush. Remember, the Vulcans, Bush the cowboy, all that shit. Here’s what I wrote

One of the things that struck me as remarkable about the transcripts released by Ken Starr back in the impeachment days – the way in which Monica Lewinsky’s telephone conversations with Linda Tripp often included, as a helpful stage direction, the sigh. The whole bizarreness of the Starr crusade was summed up for me in the sighs of Monica. Sighs were never included, that I could see, in the Watergate transcripts. Sighs weren’t part of the Iran-Contra controversy. But sighs, for a person like Starr, go with women. Women sigh. Women don’t like sex. Women are forced to have sex when they have sex – unless of course they are really, really in love. And so on.

But that gendered subtext was never, ever seized in the press – which is an instrument of patriarchy with some concessions around the edges. The sexual subtext of what comes out of D.C. in reporting for the last six years has been quite comic, and quite unremarked. I wrote something a few weeks ago  about Jon Anderson’s New Yorker profile of the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad . There was a lie in that piece that struck me, since I don’t think it is the usual kind of lying that is pointed to when we criticize the press. Anderson describes Khalilzad as having the lope of a basketball player – or ex basketball player. Now, that is obviously not true. From his description, Khalilzad never played basketball, particularly – and he is described as wearing expensive suits and presumably expensive shoes, and his ecological niche involves much footing over hard marble flooring down many a corridor. And he is in his mid fifties. There is no way he has that lope.

But the lie was part of the lie that the press is partly there to produce and preserve. As we all know, powerful men evoke powerful homoerotic feelings from the people who cover them. The male D.C. reporters are continually trying to get us to feel how powerful the men they are reporting on actually are. Now, I am  a sex friendly guy – I’m as happy as the next fella with homoeroticism. But as is well known, homoeroticism in a homophobic atmosphere generally turns ugly.

In the U.S., the upper class, Ivy league educated male has one ideal form in which to sublimate his homoeroticism: fandom. Fans are, as is well known, always on the sexual edge with regard to the heroes they admire, those tough men with the taut pecs. There is a problem, however, with powerful execs, politicians, etc. They aren’t tough at all. How could they be? They might exercise, but generally they don’t’ have time for the sportif. So the lie that the presscorps sets itself is to convey their own infatuation. Thus, the overwhelming reference to sports when one reads profiles of CEOS. One always feels that with a little more prodding we’d get a description of the big fat cocks they possess – they must possess. God forbid that some CEO isn’t ballsy. Doesn’t have a full foot.

The hilarious thing about the lie with the Bush administration is that here, we have a man who we all know was sportif in a certain way. He was a cheerleader. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, if Hillary Clinton had been a cheerleader, there would be a mention of it almost every week. But with GWB, cheerleader is a hole. Nobody credits him with being a good cheerleader, or mentions the word. No, he is bold. He is a cowboy. He is sooooo fit. He is Mr. Mission Accomplished.

The homoerotic subtext controls the way in which our leaders will be leaders. They will be bold. Even though anybody watching Bush knows that he is spastic, not bold, that is something that has to be suppressed, like cheerleading. Sometimes this is riotously funny. Slate’ Political correspondent, at the moment, is a stooge named John Dickerson. His takedown of Fred Barnes' new bio of Bush -- his ‘love letter” to the President -- is a little scene of homoerotic transformations and rivalries. Dickerson is disturbed that Barnes gushes too much over this manly, this bold, this commanding figure. Dickerson begins by defending the professional sycophants, the White house press corps, from the charge that they have been unfair to the President.

“The White House press corps has flaws: a herd mentality, a fixation on who's ahead politically, and difficulty engaging deeply with policy issues. I know, I was one of them. But Barnes has his boot on the scale, inflating the foolishness of the press to make Bush look better. Perhaps with so many books offering cartoon images of Bush as dumb and evil, the shelves need to be balanced out by one that errs in the opposite direction. But Rebel-in-Chief is such a love note that it fails to counteract the negative myths.”

The love note fails! This is heartbreaking for a guy like Dickerson. Maybe his own love notes will be more successful.

I should note that the homoerotic impulse functions in the lefty discourse too, where much time is spent making up images of fellatio and anal sex as signs of submission -- the press being on its knees, or in some indelicate way bending over, etc., etc. Again, this is also a lie – the lie being that one has overcome our homophobic culture while borrowing homophobic tropes. It is what makes comments so often unpleasant from both sides, as if the struggle, the deeper struggle, were about what male body was the most desirable.”

So – the watermark of the presidential penis that the media does its best to convey without making it clear it is conveying it is just put out there by Trump. Trump’s jestering – his senile gibberish – does hook clearly into the system of our politics. Which is the system, as well, of how our politics are “reported on.” Patriarchy at this point in the millenium is a deathmarch of dweebs, which is throwing us all in the ditch. So utterly appalling.

The metaphysics of the lost and found department

 

Why does Dante’s Divine Comedy start with the poet being lost in the middle of a forest?

Or rather, the way is lost:  ché la diritta via era smarrita.

To ask this question, one must ponder the difference between the meaning of loss in “being lost” and the meaning of loss in “the way was lost”. The second lost might imply the first – but the implication skips over the material condition of ways. Roads, objects that are not alive – these cannot be lost in the same way Dante was lost. The way never loses the way. The loss, here, is purely human.

The scholastics like to puzzle over such paradoxes as: can God make a boulder too heavy for him to lift? As far as I know, they did not puzzle over a simpler paradox: can God get lost. It would seem to me, at least, that all the higher creatures can get lost. Not only humans: dogs, birds, giraffes, etc., all things with “territories” can get lost. Fish probably can get lost – surely dolphins can get lost.  Yet God, in the Judeo-Christian sense, seemingly can’t get lost. Nor can the Greek gods get lost.

As a silly old man, I find myself pondering the philological-philosophical frolic of lost-ness – of losing, of being lost, of things that are lost – quite a lot. Even as a silly young man, I found the word “loser” to contain a world. There was something about “being a loser” in America that I found, on the one hand, distressing, and on the other hand, perversely inviting. For certainly, since I was kneehigh to a three volume set of Capital, I’ve been pretty suspicious of winners. There is something about winning, and especially about being born to win, born to winners, that distorts the character. Well, one could say the same about losing, of course. After I was kneehigh – after I expanded my mental lineaments within the unwilled expansion of all my other lineaments – I came across Nietzsche, took to heart the lesson about resentment, and lost – as much as it was possible to lose – my prejudice against happy winners. Although of course neither I nor Nietzsche could shed the slave morality simply by taking thought. It was more a matter of imagining a state I would never really reach.

There is nothing more metaphysical than a lost and found department. I always smile at the phrase.  Another question for God: if he or she or they are never lost, how could they be found? All problems which stem from the idea of a God with self-consciousness. A god without self-consciousness is such a harsh thing that I rather hope there is no such a thing, but a God with self-consciousness poses a lot of questions about divinity.

In 1893, there were a number of stories about the lost and found department at the Chicago Exposition – the fair that inspired Henry Adams’s chapter on the Dynamo, and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. The Scientific American wrote about the array of objects lost and wondered if there was some statistical significance to the great number of umbrellas. The Chicago Tribune wrote about the man who was put in charge of it, Edward Hood. Hood set it up on a scientific basis, creating a record-keeping system On June 19, 1893, the Tribune reported that there were 550 unclaimed items in the department already, and then gave forth with a few Horatio Alger-esque stories about valuable jewelry lost by wealthy women and returned by humble working men to the department.

“People visiting the Fair seem prone to forgetfulness. Mr. Hood is of the opinion that the glories of the Exposition are so overpowering that little things like umbrellas, canes, and wraps are forgotten in the contemplation of novel sights.”

To be overwhelmed is a condition which, at least in my experience, is conducive to getting lost or losing something. As I grow older, I become more like Beckett’s beggar every day, continually checking my pockets for keys, wallet, phone, etc. There Paris police prefecture has long operated a service of objets trouvés. A city, like an elementary school, is full of people rushing about with loads of things on them. Our packs. A dream: to go out naked, unpacked, unencumbered. But the dream always leads to embarrassment. As pack animals, we like and need our packs. The dream of being naked, nakedness itself, and being lost are connected by many unconscious capillaries.

Alex Purves, in Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative, considers such stories of being lost as Homer’s Odyssey and the Anabasis of Xenophon. Dante in the woods could be a reincarnation of Odysseus, who, as Purves acutely notes, is not only a sea captain who has lost his way home through most of the poem, but who also carries a fate predicted by Tiresias in Hades:  

[Tiresias] bid me to go to many cities of men

Holding in my hands a well-fitted oar,

Until I should ccome upon a people who do not know of the sea,

Who do not eat food that has been mixed with salt,

And who know  nothing of peruple-cheeked ships,

Or of well fitted oars, which are the wings of ships.

But he told this cear sign to me that I will not hide from you.

Whenever some other traveler coming across me in the road

Should say that I carry a winnowing shovel upon my gleaming

Shoulder,

Then he told me to fix the well-fitted oar in the earth,

And to carry out auspicious sacrifices to lord Poseidon

A ram and a bull and a boar who mounts sows,

Then to return home, and to accomplish holy hecatombs

To the Immortal gods who hold Olympus

All of them in order. Death will come to me from the sea…

Purves notes that being lost in spatial terms  is one thing, but being lost so that the very signs and conventions one holds are also lost is to be lost indeed. It is only from within that state of extreme loss that Odysseus can make his peace with Poseidon, his old enemy. In a sense, Poseidon as the god of the sea commands loss, or lostness, as his domain.

Purves quotes an essay by architectural critic Mark Wigley: being lost is defined by an “indeterminate sense of immersion, in which the body cannot separate itself from the space it inhabits.” This is Edward Hood’s Chicago Fair observation about the items in his lost and found department all over again. The sense of being overwhelmed is, of course, a moment in Kant’s construction of the sublime. With the addition of something like a divine instance: one’s consciousness of that grandeur – in the flash of which, human intellectual superiority, or the superiority of reason itself, is redeemed.

Lost, losing, things lost and people lost and people gone and myself gone all the way into this concept I can’t really sum up: these moments of failure I shore against the overwhelming madness of American success. Sooner or later, I’ll take up an oar and hoist it on my shoulder and walk some road alone.

Stop in the Name of Love: some reflections

 

“Let not mercy and truth forsake thee; bind them about they neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.”

So we are advised in Proverbs. Good advice. Although I don’t know if I have bound mercy and truth about my neck in all instances. As for the table of my heart, well, upon that table there are certain songs.

Why these songs and not others? I don’t know. I don’t know why certain songs make me perpetually happy and at the same time, by a negation that is not a negation, also make me perpetually blue.

It is a mystery.

For instance, take the Supremes “Stop in the name of Love.” Is life worth living without “Stop in the Name of Love"? Apparently it is, or at least the generations that lived and made love and died before February 8, 1965, the day the song dropped, did not know that they were missing something essential to their salvation, and may have died in their ignorance perfectly content with whatever they experienced – building pyramids or cathedrals or inventing the lightbulb and so forth. But those who have lived past this date have no such excuse: to not love Stop in the Name of Love is to be a pore lone critter, embittered and marooned in the midst of life. A poor excuse for a biological similitude to a human being, a misfit under the music of the spheres.

2.

Of course, the song comes with several pluses. For instance, the Supremes in all their gowned beauty, debuting it in 1965, included, from the very beginning, the dance that is its signature. They sway, they smile, they come to the chorus and arms out, hands up, the eternal gesture of the traffic cop on a Detroit crossroads, but a cop that accompanies the gesture with a sensuous movement of the hips that turns this stop into Cupid’s own arrest. It is not possible, it is not humanly possible, to ever hear the song and see that dance and not want to make that same gesture, dance that same dance, when the song comes on. And if the Elohim have poured out their blessings on your life so that you have been to a disco or club or dancehall and heard this song and poured out with your date or friend or partner or some stranger and hit the floor, you have thrust out your hand to stop, in the name of love, your errant lover.

3.

But to me, the Supreme happiness is not simply the irresistible Motown arrangement, which is, like everything Motown was doing in 1965, the best thing you ever heard – nor is it the choral response of (think it over) that Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard sing back to Diana Ross’s lyrics (although that is, when you see clips of the song being performed, an amazing and complete work of art in itself) – no, the best thing is that moment, a moment that transcends time, space, and my ability to pile exaggeration on exaggeration, that moment when the doublet ending the stanza is: “after I’ve been good to you/after I’ve been sweet to you”.

It is the way Diana Ross sings sweet. She makes of that word, in the beat of turning it on her tongue, into a sound encompassing all honey, all sex, all delight – and she does this by uplifting, by the slightest of note changes, the “sw-“ in sweet. And yet, and here is the miracle that makes one even belief that the word becomes flesh – it is also the saddest of inscriptions on the tombstone of this relationship to a cheating man. That is sweetness the man has turned his back upon. It is the sweetness of Paradise. He has become an outlaw of love. He can never go back to that Paradise. That sweetness as passed, in a lightning flash.

And all of this is blindingly clear by the time the repeat line is sounded for the first time. Already we know that Stop in the name of love is a command that is bound not to be obeyed.

So, in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, “Stop in the name of Love” not only justifies our existence but also explains why justification is never enough. Justification is hollow. Paradise is closed.

Which is why the same double verse in the next stanza, in the repetition of  “after I’ve been sweet to you”, the sweetness has lost some of its savor. The “sw-“ here does not aim at transcendence. It is a resigned sweetness.

Man’s fall is all there. The loss in that note, which we barely register, is infinitesimal and infinite. It is the mystery that makes this song ever-listenable. Bound around my neck with mercy and truth.

Du Bellay meets Hank Williams Sr. in the Coliseum

I like it when a critic pulls some philological razzle dazzle out of his pocket and makes me see a poem I think I know in a whole new light. David Wilbern, in an essay on a poem by Robert Duncan (Murther: the hypocrite and the poet) does this with a famous bit from Baudelaire:

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

It is of course the ending two lines of Baudelaire’s To the Reader, which begins the Flowers of Evil. Wilbern begins his essay by asking a good question: what is the literary critic for? And he pulls out of this poem the word that catches the eye – hypocrite – to answer, provisionally (and how could it be other than provisionally?) his question.

“Yes, I know this reader (c’est moi meme) and my question is, what sort of literary critic does he make? In answer, I’ve derived what I might call the art of hypocriticism. That is the practice of getting a poem under my skin, like a hypodermic injection which magically transforms me into a likeness of the poet: a monstre délicat, a double who lies somewhere between a perfect clone and Mr. Hyde. I become a temporary semblable, or facsimile: “making like” the poem as I read it, re-presenting its words in my own style, pretending that my voice resembles, reassembles, the voice of the poem. As I read the poets written words in my own speech, and feel the poet’s recorded emotions through my own feelings, I become a reader simulating the other: that is, a hypocrite. Yet not solely a usurper of dissembler. The Greek hypokrites was an actor, but more specifically he was an answerer, that other reciprocal voice which created a dialogue…”

Of course, we find such mimetism suspect. This is a game of pretend, and like pretend, it takes us back to the human basis, which is the play ground. Every child discovers, at some point, that answering and mocking are closely associated. Use, for instance, the words that are said to you: say them back. Do this often enough and you will definitely upset the first speaker. Say them back with a comic intonation, or an insulting one. Or, you can just infinitely respond with a non-response. Why is good. Just repeat why to every sentence. This, too, can create a “magical” irritation in the first speaker.

What I am saying here is that the philological dozens played with hypokrites opens a field; it does not provide one particular routine, so that we can say, this is what the literary critic does.

Myself, I often play the translator. And here the hypodermic injection of the poem does not operate as a magic cause, but a very specific linguistic one. A matching, in as much as one can match, of poem to its (dis)semblable, the poem in another language.

So it is with the poem that begins Du Bellay’s Regrets. It must be said that Du Bellay, being a Renaissance poet, lived a long time before Hank Williams, Sr., who was a country balladeer. However, it is not a stretch to think that the Renaissance had its own honky tonk style. Or – it is a stretch but what the hay. After all, a Renaissance poet like Du Bellay thought nothing of boosting his stylings and themes from Horace or Ovid. One of Du Bellay’s modern commentators, M.A. Screech (a last name like something in a Nabokovian fever dream) notices that, like Horace, Du Bellay dares to introduce a “style raboteaux” in his ars poetica: a prickly style, a hickory bark style. Run your hand over it and you are bound to get scratched.

And one could say the same thing about the cheap scotch thrills of M. Williams ballads. His bucket, as is well known, has a hole in it. And through that hole I’ll drop this translation.

I don’t want to be digging in the bosom of nature

I don’t want to be mulling the spiritus mundi

I don’t want to be measuring the abyss under me

Nor, for pretty buildings, exhale some heavenly rapture.

I don’t want to paint with the finest paint my canveses

Nor from high arguments draw out my verse

But from some poky instance take its accidents diverse,

Good or bad, to be writing of my advances.

I’ll put a tear in my lines if I’ve got reason to cry

I’ll laugh with em too, and whisper my why

As if they were taking dictation from my heart.

So: I don’t want a lota curlers and cosmetics

And be making up heroes and heroics.

This will be more a journal where I’ll spill my part.

Okay. Honky-tonk up to a point. And here’s Du Bellay’s poem, for purists.

Je ne veux point fouiller au sein de la nature,

Je ne veux point cercher l’esprit de l’univers,

Je ne veux point sonder les abysmes couvers,

N’y dessigner du ciel la belle architecture.

Je ne peins mes tableaux de si riche peinture,

Et si hauts argumens ne recerche à mes vers :

Mais suivant de ce lieu les accidens divers,

Soit de bien, soit de mal, j’escris à l’adventure.

Je me plains à mes vers, si j’ay quelque regret,

Je me ris avec eux, je leur di mon secret,

Comme estans de mon cœur les plus seurs secretaires.

Aussi ne veux-je tant les peigner et friser,

Et de plus braves noms ne les veux desguiser,

Que de papiers journaux, ou bien de commentaires.

Notes on haunting and being haunted

 In the world of epiphenomena, the haunt is king.

This sentence, believe it or not, forced itself upon me at 6:45 a.m this morning, as I was arising from bed to go empty my bladder. An old man in a dull month, or a dull man with an old prostate – one of those moments.

Well, yesterday I had to finish up some editing work, and in the evening we were scheduled to go to La Rotunde and chow down, but in between times I was thinking about haunting. In particular, haunted houses. Houses in which what happened in the house forms the nucleus of the story.

Haunted houses have been mocked in the cultures that claim to be children of the Roman Empire since Lucian of Samosata was a pup. In fact, Lucian’s dialogue, Philopseudès, or The lover of lies, is one of the great documents of the Hellenic enlightenment, written maybe a decade before Tertullian, in another part of the Empire, began vigorously damning peeps like Lucian. Renan compared Lucian to Voltaire – and Voltaire also compared Lucian to Voltaire. The lover of lies is a dialogue that contains a dialogue, a conversation between philosophers, so called, at gathered around the sick bed of an evidently wealthy man named Eucratès. They commence to talking about miracle cures, phantoms, and other such business, to the disgust of Tykhiadès, who takes the view, sometimes taken by Voltaire and lesser philosophes as well, that superstition is just stupidity. How can anybody be so dumb as to believe in ghosts haunting houses?

This kind of one dimensional positivism is still around. And it has its fragment of veracity: if we believe in something we call “cause”, much of these superstition visions seem to call for explanations rooted in local causes – like fear of the dark – rather than in cosmological causes – like an afterlife from which these phantoms come.

Our anthropological liberalism, too, searches for causes, but not in the stupidity of the credulous, but in cultural practices that we study while withholding our own cultural biases – an epoche that is either tolerant or patronizing.

Haunting, of course, as hauntology and all the rest of it, became a modish object of reflection after the fall of the wall. Helped along by Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the idea of something haunting something else - the way Communism haunted Europe, or the way Hamlet’s dad haunted Hamlet – became a model for thinking about our own neo-liberal ghostliness.

Myself, as a citizen of Paris, think about haunting as a matter of urban history. And certainly Paris is a haunted and hunted city – we walk past old torture chambers and the ghosts of faits divers, here, as we go to Carrefour and get the meat and veggies and wine.

Paris has always been a central place for occultists, sex magic theorists, Gurdjeffians, far right white magic dudes, clairvoyants, and situationists. Yet, in the Paris media, the ghosts and haunted houses are usually somewhere else. There’s a whole mythology of Britain as a ghost-haunted place, and Brittany too. Whereas if such beliefs creep into Saint-Germain, they are intellectualized – its all surrealists and serious searchers in the Kabbalah.

In Southern France, “folk beliefs” are everywhere. Recently there’s been an excellent scandal in a village near Montpellier. The mayor of Agde, Gille D’ettore, felt that he needed a connection on high. He needed God. Or some spirit. So he searched around to contact the big OTHER, and had the misfortune to contact a corrupt clairevoyant, Sophia Martinez. Here’s the story in brief from the Midi Libre:

“Medium and healer, she is alleged to have used a stratagem with the Mayor of Agde and numerous other interlocutors: in using a masculine and raw voice on the telephone, she made them think she was in contact with a supernatural being from the Beyond. This voice incited them to take good care of the voyante, including materially.

Suddenly, she was able to pay, by means of Gilles D’ettore, for a veranda, a jacuzzi, a sumptuous wedding, airplane tickets for herself and her friends, etc.”

Such little things the beyond wants from us! D’ettore was not the only seeker after advise – some real estate broker is suing Martinez because he gave her ten thousand euros to speak to his late mother, which he did on the telephone – although the voice at the other end might, just might have been Martinez’s own.

If corruption there must be, I’m rather happy that it went into making sure a clairevoyante from Agde could soak in a jacuzzi after expending enormous spiritual energy connecting with the beyond. I get it.

Stupid apocalyspo time: and the winner is the Italian fascist! Applause applause!

 For those who think we are living in normal times, I present, as countering evidence, the Atlantic Council. This money suck (it gets a million from the British government) consists of cast-offs from the great anti-communist crusade. The lounge lizards of the Tory party, and others of that sort. So, it makes sense, as we go through the stupid Apocalypse, that the Atlantic Council would give its Global Citizen award to their fave fascist, Giorgia Meloni, and that she would have Elon Musk as her besty at the ceremony, forking over the trophy. Lina Wertmuller was right in the Seven Beauties: Fascism won't be understood if you don't see it as comedy. A comedy drenched in blood. The blood drenching is, of course, all around us. So, in honor of the Meloni award, this song from the beginning of Seven Beauties. One of the greatest openings of a movie ever. They should def played it before Meloni came on stage. Oh yeah! For those who want to look up the words to Quelli che, here they are.

The ones who say follow me to success/ but kill me if I fail, so to speak/ oh yeah

The ones who say, you know what I mean/oh yeah

one year: October 7, 2024

 The commemoration of the Hamas attack on October 7 has been an exhibition of hollow and disgraceful rhetoric, which probes neither the causes and circumstances of the murder of 1,189 Israelis nor the bloody and criminal consequences. The government of Israel is, astonishingly, unchanged. The murder of more than 40,000 Gazans with weapons supplied by the U.S. is unmentioned. The false image of Jewish unity - when it is Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace who have been most prominent in protesting the massacre - is tossed out there as the prevarication of the day. The expansion of the war, via terror tactics, in Lebanon (it is casually mentioned that 2,000 people in Lebanon have already died, but you can bet their will be no anniversary in the news for their deaths) is treated as an understandable gesture, a little irrational, but nothing to withhold bomb shipments over. Discussion here is a hollow mockery. This October 7, 2024, those murdered Israelis are being used in the most unholy way to justify war crimes committed by the very government that utterly failed them. We've seen this before - of course. On 9/11, the US government showed its complete incompetence by failing to stop a much signalled attack staged by a buncha college dropouts and rednecks from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then seized on its failure to fail on a much larger scale.

An event that taught the powers that be absolutely nothing.
How should the NYT, Le Monde, etc., have commemorated the murdered souls of the victims of October 7? By shutting up. By publishing column inch by column inch a blacked out text. By an act of shame - for the news medias in the West have systematically overlooked the fascist tendencies, the irredentism, the corruption, of a government who has put a statement of clear apartheid in the Israeli constitution.
Hamas murdered those people. Israel's government was the silent accessory. And the murdered tens of thousands of Gazans will weight like a nightmare on the state of Israel for decades to come. But lets all forget that with fake mourning.
It is a heartbreaking one year. And it is getting worse.