popsicle sticks

 

I have been falling asleep, the last week or two, thinking about popsicle sticks. The last week or two is an exaggeration, okay, the last two weeks it pops into my head, one night or another, that I should think about popsicle sticks. About how many popsicle sticks in the course of my life I have discarded, after the popsicle, or the ice cream, has melted in my mouth, been licked off by my tongue. After my hands have been stickied.

Stickied. A complicated thing for me. Is my discomfort with sticky hands somehow related to some old tabu about masturbation? The Freudian in me has always made that association, and, as is the nature of things Freudian, once the association is made, how could it not be true? However, it is also true that stickiness and the vaguely repulsive, the vaguely dirty feeling of stickiness – from the sugar ice dripping down the popsicle stick, or the honey that creeps up the spoon handle, or the glaze that comes off the glazed cinnamon roll – makes me want, neurotically, to go to the bathroom and clean my hands. What Dostoevsky character – was it Raskolnikov? – had the neurotic compulsion to clean his hands. Of course, Raskolnikov was not dealing with a grape ice – more pawnbroker’s blood. Still.

The thing that impresses me, nights, about the ghosts of popsicle sticks past, is the idea of the vast number of them – the forests, literally, cut down to provide those thin sticks, rounded at the ends, which serve such a small purpose that, in light of the sawmilled wilderness, one wants to ask: is this worth it? Was the spotted owl and the Carolina Parakeet driven to extinction so that American children, on hot summer days, clustered around swimming pools, could unwrap flavored ice water molded in the shape of dollhouse tombstones and suck them into their mouths, guiding them with the grip given by the popsicle stick? And of course that moment when you bite the stick itself, when the wooden taste comes through the melting last remnant of the ice. That taste associated with sweets, in my memory, American sweets – the industrial signature. The chemical signature, the signature of the wooden tongue depressor, itself moulded out of sawdust – most probably. I’ve never been in the factory where all the popsicle sticks are manufactured. No doubt there are many such factories. No doubt they were incountry when I was a kid, and are now in Southeast Asia, or Mexico. I can imagine fleets of these sticks meeting up with myriads of ice molds, somewhere, and once the conjunction was made, then came the plasticized paper wrap, printed with the company’s name.

Popsicle Industries of Edgewood NJ was the major producer of popsicles in the sixties, when I was a boy who ate popsicles,  or whatever the verb for devouring of this kind is, hidden in the vast OED no doubt. In 1986, the New York Times noted in a small human interest story that the company was phasing out its double stick popsicle. “The lost cultural icon in this case is the two-stick Popsicle, the sticky confection of syrup and ice that never quite split down the middle but always seemed just right on days when the sidewalks were so hot they could fry a set of toes through a pair of sneakers.”

There was more to the popsicle stick than its tag team toss – first the paper wrapping, than the wood – into the garbage. Popsicle sticks  took their  outlaw affordance and made little popsicle crafts – protolego cabins, for instance.  There were popsicle stick puppets. There were popsicle stick flowers. There were books on popsicle stick crafts. The schoolroom and the rec room were sites of popsicle stick construction.

On the sites where popsicles were constructed in actuality, popsicle sticks were involved in the struggle between labor and capital. In 1940, the Maine unemployment bureau had to consider the case of a middle aged woman, X,  who was employed as a “winder” at a popsicle stick plant. Her job was to pick out defective sticks as they went down the assembly line via a moving belt. She claimed that, after spending approximately 13 hours at her job, she began to suffer severe headaches and vertigo as she watched the endless rows of sticks go past her. She quit and applied for reinstatement of her  unemployment benefits, and the state of Maine had to decide if her excuse was justified. Should she sacrifice her health to the popsicle belt?

The state of Maine gave her a dispensation. A small victory for worker’s rights. Maine, at the time, hosted many “veneer” factories – this is where sugar maple, beech and yellow birch wood went to be made into toothpicks and popsicle sticks. And high quality plywood. All of which connected to the decentralized frozen novelty industry of my boyish days. I missed the big changes that occurred in the 80s – the great age of leveraged buyouts and squeezing profit margins, destroying local providers of popsicles and making them uniform, rewrapping them, adding vitamin C and new flavors, and launching advertising campaigns to compete against General Foods muscular attempt to monopolize the frozen novelty sector.

This all happened behind my back. My consumption of popsicles in the great summer heat of New Orleans and Austin in the 80s contributed less than ten dollars, I’d guess, to the frozen novelty sector revenue stream. Like X, I’d moved on to other ways of cooling my insides under the hot Dixie sun: namely, beer. The popsicle stick was not entirely removed from my material life: one summer I had a job, under my brother, in the maintenance crew of an apartment complex in Atlanta, and among my duties was emptying the garbage cans around the swimming pool. There, the popsicle stick competed with the coke can, the cigarette butt, the beer and liquor bottle, the wadded up newspaper, the discarded tanning oil tube, and other relicts of the animated life of the pool. Including the occasional roach (marijuana, not insect). The smell of old beer and cigarette ash overcame any vestigial nostalgia I might have felt on seeing the popsicle stick. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn.

And yet here I am, in bed in Paris, thinking that these veneer products were a clue to the great conspiracy of material life in twentieth century America. Where have you gone, Mrs. Robinson?

the romance of hatred

 

The romance of hatred is a real thing. But though we all recognize it, few take it to be a “romance” – a narrative of repulsion that is also about the attraction of the repulsed. To draw it out in dance diagram form, there are three positions, here, roughly: hating – being hated – being hated for hating. To be hateful is, in a sense, to be embarked upon a mission of destruction whose ultimate victim is the self. To rescue the self from its own hatred – that is the moral duty of politics, I think.

Hatred is used, fliply, by the journalist and pundit: back in the 00s, Americans were always learning that they were “hated” for their freedoms, and thus could hate back with their weapons. Weapons that by happy chance liberated their enemies – like the wound that heals, enemies would be turned into friends by seeing their loved ones killed by air bombardment.

 Richard Bessel, in his artlcle:  Hatred after War: Emotion and the Postwar history of East Germany, theorized that in the aftermath of shattering events – like World War II -  hatred had  a foundational, legitimating effect.

“This essay is a brief, admittedly speculative, attempt to suggest that examining hatred after war, and viewing public and political behavior as an expression of that hatred, may offer insights into what occurred in both the public and the private spheres in post-1945 East Germany. The suggestion is that hatred, arising from the violence and brutality of war and Nazism, was a major factor motivating both the leaders and the led in East Germany after World War II. Not just their rational calculations of how to deal with the challenges they faced and the political commitment that framed their actions, but also their emotional responses to what had occurred determined how Germans behaved in the physical and psychological rubble left behind by war and Nazism. This essay, therefore, is a tentative attempt to approach the history of Germany after World War II as a history of sentiments and emotions.”

Bessel’s essay was published in 2005, and since then there has been a massive affective turn in the humanities and social sciences. The anthropology of the detestable, the abject, the untouchable: who has not felt touched at least by great waves of hatred that have swept us about in the last twenty years? The apocalypse or the end of things – the great Planetary suicide – is firmly lodged on our entertainment menu. The horror story  is edging towards the aesthetic center, the defining position, rousting the tragedy and the comedy from their traditional places.

We do live in the post Cold War world.

Bessel fastens on the wave of mass suicides in Germany after the Nazi defeat. This was massive.

It is part of the racist code in which our history is given to us that it was not just  Japan – the Oriental enemy – that  was swept by mass suicide. The suicide of the hostile Other is very much a part of our political  dreamlife. The suicide bombers in Iraq, in France, the suicide hijackers of 9/11. We don’t of course think of ourselves as anything but the victims of these crazies. This thought disguises  the fact that the defense posture of the U.S., during the Cold War and after, depends on our own  suicide bombers. . SAC pilots and crews, parodied in Dr. Stangelove,  knew that they had little chance to survive delivering to their targets. In essence, they were asked to be suicide bombers on a much bigger scale than any kamikaze attack we can imagine. . The risk of dropping an bomb on Moscow is undoubtedly close to the risk of being killed delivering a rigged car to be exploded in front of an embassy. But while we can rally warm feelings in the patriotic homeland base by the idea of the suicide mission, the suicide bomber is a sort of ideogram of hatred, hatred taken to its logical conclusion: the annihilation of the self and other.

 

 “One of the most remarkable features of the collapse of Nazi Germany is the huge wave of suicides that accompanied it. This surge of suicides included not only much of the regime’s political leadership—Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Thierack and Ley—but also dozens of Wehrmacht generals and many lesser Nazis and lower-level functionaries, as well as thousands of civilians who killed themselves as Allied forces pushed their way into Germany and occupied the country. Already in early 1945, as the roof was caving in on the Third Reich, many Germans contemplated killing themselves; according to a report of the German security service about popular morale in the dying days of Nazi Germany, “many are getting used to the idea of making an end of it all. Everywhere there is great demand for poison, for a pistol and other means for ending one’s life. Suicides due to genuine depression about the catastrophe which certainly is expected are an everyday occurrence.”10 The gruesome sight that greeted American soldiers when they arrived at the Neues Rathaus in Leipzig—littered with the bodies of Nazi officials who had killed themselves and their families— was but a spectacular example of a widespread phenomenon.”

And:

“After the German military collapse, the atmosphere in entire communities was colored by such events, as suicide became almost a mass phenomenon. A particularly extreme example is that of the Pomeranian district town of Demmin, where roughly five percent of the entire population killed themselves in 1945;13 when the Landrat, who had been installed by the Soviet authorities in May 1945, surveyed conditions in Demmin in a report for the Interior Administration of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in November 1945, he noted: “365 houses, roughly 70 percent of the city, lay in ruins, over 700 inhabitants had ended their lives through suicide.” In Teterow, a town in Mecklenburg numbering fewer than ten thousand inhabitants in 1946, the burial register included a “Continuation of the Appendix for the Suicide Period (Selbstmordperiode) Early May 1945,” containing details of 120 suicide cases, listing how the act had been carried out: people shot themselves, hanged themselves, drowned themselves, poisoned themselves; frequent reports noted how fathers killed their entire families and then themselves. After years when they had been able to aim massive violence against other people, Germans now turned violence on themselves.”

 Bessel’s notion is that we should pay more attention to the literal truth Goebbels enunciated:

“Germany’s war was fought, as Goebbels boasted in a radio speech on 28 February 1945, not long before his own suicide, “with a hatred that knows no bounds.””

Simmel, in his Sociology, modeled sociological processes on what he took to be the fundamental elements of society – on the one hand, the individual, and on the other hand, the universal. In some ways, this is a dubious translation of medieval logic, that eternal game of the particular and the universal. One wants some meso-level between the I and the community. In Simmel’s schema, however, the third entity is conflict. It is neither a quality of the individual or a property of the universal, but a third thing – a socializing process. The thirdness of violence has been taken up by other thinkers – notably, Rene Girard – and given other directions. The important thing is that it lifts hatred out of its supposedly privileged and limited place as a wholly private and interior affair. Unlike Girard, however, I don’t think the endpoint of the logic of hatred is Christ on the Cross, but the Werewolf – the wolf as the hunter of men becoming inhabited by a man.

Bessel talks about the violent intention encoded in suicide, its use as an instrument to hurt “the important other.” This is an old cliché – and it covers up how the other is already eaten by the suicide. The suicide eating his victim, the wolf eating the man, the werewolf living in and on the wolf that lives on people. The soldier of any army, the partisan of any side,  almost instinctively drifts to the imago of the predator.

The romance of hatred dreams of monsters instead of heroes, the undead instead of the resurrection. Perhaps this is why we are so close to Frankenstein and Dracula. Who absorbed the hatred they inspired as a life force, purged of love.

Liminal figures. Against which we have to pit all we know about reality. I’m with Lucretius. You cannot purge life, you cannot purge the universe, of love.  Frankenstein and Dracula included.

 

abolishing jaywalking

 

On December 1, 1915, the New York Sun published a rousing letter from a Mr. Clarence John Davis, which ended like this:

I think it is time for pedestrians to assert themselves and to prevent the issuing of ukases from certain czars who are appointed to represent and protect and not tyrannize over those who by their votes were foolist enough to aid in appointing them to office. I will “jaywalk” the same as before, and I defy the Police Commissioner or any other civil officer to prevent me.”

The quote marks over “jaywalk” were proof of its uncertain distinction as a dictionary recognized word. The sentiment marks the decade in which city streets first became car streets. The mixed use of streets, between pedestrian and horse, was ceding to the automobile. Pedestrian rights were being sacrificed on the altar of civic safety. Although there was a struggle. Even the president of the United States – at least, the President Calvin Coolidge – was a jaywalker, according to journalist Harry B. Hunt’s Washington Letter of April 30, 1924:

“Brakes squealed and horns honked as drivers swerved or slowed up to avoid collision. But Cal flanked right and left by a secret service man held his course. In the middle of the street he had to pause to let a stream of vehicles pass. At the first opening, however, he plunged in again and made the other curb.”

Walking jay became a convenient devil for the newspaper editorialists, all of course on the side of the harried policeman and driver. The word itself was hyphenated in Mencken’s The American Language, but seems, in newspaper usage, to have settled early into a compound. Walking jay, according to some sources, comes from jay meaning a country bumpkin – a clown, a collonus, a plebe from the country. However, the OED also lists jay as meaning a flamboyantly dressed woman “of light character”. The streetwalker, in other words. Words, like roads, are multi-use items, where everything crosses and runs.

Jaywalking, according to legend, became a legal offense first in California. According to my research, it was already an offense in New Jersey. No matter, the abolition  of the jaywalking law, which was signed five days ago by Governor Newsom, is being celebrated as a blow against the car-centric vision that has weighed like a nightmare on the bent shoulders of the pedestrian for nearly a hundred years. Although not just any pedestrian. Jaywalking laws are used by the cops to single out an persecute the usual suspects: blacks, protestors, leftwingers, Hispanics, and whoever is on the chart at the police station.   

“In the state of New York, a 2019 study shows that 90% of jaywalking tickets were issued to Black and Hispanic Americans even though they represent 55% of the population.”

One spirit that is looking down and smiling at the change in the California law is Michael Brown, the most famous victim of jaywalking. In Ferguson Missouri, where he was murdered, a study found that 95 percent of the people cited for jaywalking were black. Jaywalking, which was promoted as an offense by car companies in the 20s, fits in very well with the growth of policing in the 20^th century.

So, a small victory for better streets, California!  We’ll see how long it lasts.

 

 

 

the individual, the solitary, the stone

 

In Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which he published in 1856), there is this paragraph about individualism:

“Our fathers did not have the word individualism, which we have forged for our use, because, in their times, there was not, in fact, an individual who did not belong to a group and who could consider himself absolutely alone; but each of the thousand little groups that composed French society only thought of themselves. Thus it was, if I may so express myself, a sort of collective individualism, which prepared souls for the true individualism which which we are acquainted.

And what is the most strange is that all of these men who hold themselves so apart one from another became so similar to each other that it was enough to make them change places to no longer recognize them.”

Tocqueville is no random witness to individualism, since he was perhaps the first to use the term in a sociologically sophisticated way in Democracy in America. The United States even then had the reputation of being an individualistic country.

Tocqueville’s notion of distance, of being apart,  of being alone seems, then, to be part of what individualism is. The beat, here, falls upon the individual apart from his social ties.

Yet there are a number of paradoxes here.

In the United States, one of the commonest severe punishment that one can inflict on a prisoner is solitary. In solitary, the individual fills his cell in complete solitude. The individual is all- and that all is his punishment. This should help us see that individualism, with its logical stress on the private and the lone person, is, at the same time, not solitudinarianism – the individual is not primarily conceived under invidualism as solitary. This semantic fact is often washed away when we try to grasp invidualism from a quantitative point of view, as though it were about individual atoms. If the individual and the solitary were synonymous, this would be an uncontroversial move. But one has to merely dip into the rich semantic flow of ordinary language to see that the solitary is the negative projection of the individual. “He is a loner” is not a compliment in American speech. “He is a self-made man” is a compliment in American speech.

The path of solitude and the path of the individual are not the same path; yet they can be confused due to the conjoined meanings of alone and lonely – the individual, like Robinson Crusoe, is envisioned as ultimately acting alone, even if we project him into corporate headquarters.  But he is not envisioned as being alone – because then he could never get into corporate headquarters. He wouldn’t want to.

Is individualism a philosophy? Is it a code about the way people think in modernity, or are thought for, thought for that is by institutions and organizations and the people who put up signs and the people who say, fill out this form? Does it describe a society centered around markets? Or is it a theory that helps us understand societies that center around markets, if there are any?

There is a theory, put forward by Jacques Bos, that the character writing of the seventeenth century can be seen as a stage in the making of individualism – the character that the character writers are concerned with is all external show and symptom, “a representation of a certain category of human beings…” Following Bos, we would see the moraliste writers of the seventeenth century as filling a space between literature and sociology – a space later filled by the novel and the lyric poem, on one end, and the newspaper pundit on the other.   

Bos’s notion of the the problem fits in with a broader sense of the way the ‘civilizing process’ in the West has gone. The individual and individualism are contrasted with an earlier communalism, out of which, for good and ill, the Western Paleface has broken.

But I’m a bit of an individualism sceptic. The usual gesture, in neoclassical economics, and in philosophy, etc., is that the individual is the basic level. We reduce collectives and find individuals, just as we reduce metals and gases and liquids to molecules, and then to atoms.

I find this a curious fiction. We evidently start out as embryos, and we are evidently the result of coitus. All of our affordances depend on others. To take chemistry as a model for understanding society is so evidently mad that it registers as an anthropological clue. Something has happened to make modern societies not only accept this model, but try to enforce it. Imagine a society in which the economists all believed in astrology, and developed models of business cycles based on the zodiac. It could, of course, work. Foundations, even fictional foundations, have a certain causal neutrality – the model of the individual as the final unit doesn’t “cause” individualism.

Spinoza’s riff on freedom is well known. It is found in his correspondence. The passage goes:

“For instance, a stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause, a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after the impulsion given by the external cause has ceased. The permanence of the stone's motion is constrained, not necessary, because it must be defined by the impulsion of an external cause. What is true of the stone is true of any individual, however complicated its nature, or varied its functions, inasmuch as every individual thing is necessarily determined by some external cause to exist and operate in a fixed and determinate manner.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess …”

Spinoza’s stone is, to all intents and purposes, homo oeconomicus. The sovereign consumer.

We are not stones, but under the impress of individualism, we think we are. Spinoza’s gloss on the stone is that it is traveling under an illusion. But his gloss undermines, of course, his point. For a stone that could imagine it was free is different from any stone we know of. 

How we came to be the creatures who imagine they are stones imagining they are free is one way to put the anthropological question.

Achilles in Mississippi

I wonder if classical scholars crosspollinate their reading with scholarship about American ballads from Dixie? There’s a wonderful little essay by Eric McHenry on the origins of Mississippi John Hurt’s murder ballad that goes through fragments and traditions to get to the story of Louis Collins, subject of Hurt’s ballad with the refrain: “angels laid him away.” It is a songline where poetry, fact and misprision intermingle, and isn't this how how the Trojan war became a subject of the two enduring Greek epics? And American epics seem drawn to the Mississippi?

I think the Cohn brothers, with their knowledge of folk song, saw this: which is why O Brother where art thou is far more successful than any peplum flick at getting the Homeric impulse down. Same counts of course for James Joyce, who understood something about how to graft the Irish crooner lyric onto the Odyssey.

What is an epic, after all, than a murder ballad writ large?

The McHenry essay, The Bully in the Ballad, is here.

Never too vile

The Andrew Tate – Greta Thurnberg exchange was all the richer for me in that I had never heard of Andrew Tate, and got to read all about his clammy influencer gig. That hundreds of rightwing dickheads came out in support of Tate made me think that the NYT, though I make fun of it, may not be totally incorrect that Trump marked a new moment on the right.

Trump, after all, had cameo roles in a softcore Playboy movie of the type that the conservatives were once all about banning. No longer, of course. The media, sunk in the type of sexism that would require a barrel of dynamite to blast them out of, never headlined or even noticed Trump’s cameo role in Playboy Video Centerfold 2000, although I’d be my bottom dollar that if Hilary Clinton had a cameo role in Playboy Video Centerfold 2000, we woulda, um, read all about it.

Now, I am all for sex workers. But that is an opinion that used to make the evangelical right and rightthinking righties stand on their hind legs and howl. But that is so yesterday.

In as much as both evangelical and Patriot Boy loved Trump’s shock jock side, the line was crossed. Country Club Republican met Aryan Nation Convict, and since then, the rightwing style is all about: never too vile. The defense of Andrew Tate, who makes his living inducing barely legal girls to do sex cam videos, and who is probably making money on the pimping side, is the latest thing.

Some obscure Brit turd named Julia Hartley-Brewer, who apparently interviews people on tv shown on that sinking island, wrote: I'd choose Andrew Tate's life *every single time* over the life of a half-educated, doom-mongering eco-cultist. And the only car I own is a diesel Tiguan.” As was pointed out on various tweets, this woman is the mother of a sixteen year old girl, so she is presumably down with pimping her out when she is eighteen.

The evangelical right has long perverted the Good News into the Bad News, a cult of rich people where the first are first and get to shit on the last, who are losers anyway. However I never thought they would be down with a sexual revolution led by the Aryan Nation. I’m wrong! Never vile enough is the motto, and choosing the life of a sex trafficker rather than that of an ecologist who “believes” in climate change (and that the world is round and that the planets revolve around the sun) is what they are all about.