Every social order depends on a social mystery. The conservative wants to preserve that mystery. The Marxist wants to expose it. The liberal, like me, wants to palpate it a bit.
There are two mysteries in the current social order. One mystery is rather obvious bunk. The mystery goes like this: although Western economies are getting wealthier and wealthier, in comparison to, say, the economies of the 1950s, we are told that we are too poor to maintain the social welfare programs that we once took for granted. We are, in other words, getting richer and richer only to be collectively poorer and poorer. Now, one doesn’t have to be an ardent Marxist to question this story. Instead, one might ponder how we expect to maintain a social system in which the multiple of greater wealth taken home by upper management versus the average worker has zoomed from 12 times to about 400 times in the U.S. The increase in collective poverty is, of course, relative. Since this mystery has a readily understandable social cause, we should expect that the apologists of the social order – those who would like to see the wealth differential increased – will do their traditional work. Their traditional work is to blame the natural order. In this way, one can keep an exploitative system going … to the dogs. So, it turns out that demographics are the thing to blame for liquidating private and public pension plans, for zooming medical entitlement costs that are locked into a for profit medical and drug system, and so on.
The other mystery is different, but relates to the whole economic system of the West. Why is it that economic power hasn’t transferred much more rapidly and much more completely to the Third World? We will write about that mystery, with reference to Mancur Olson, in tomorrow’s post.
….
The WSJ article about the looming default of Delphi’s pension plan is a sort of map to the way the chattering classes give cover to the investment class’s big lie: the lie of our increasing collective poverty. The beginning is classic bizspeak:
“Delphi Corp.'s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing represents more than just another Midwest metal-bender facing harsh reality. It marks a true reckoning for the traditional auto industry and the end of a 75-year-old way of life in America: that of the highly paid but unskilled worker. It was a noble concept, established largely by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s. But it cannot withstand a global economy that has ended the UAW's labor monopoly in the auto industry, and a consumer body that won't pay more to subsidize costly employee benefits that most consumers themselves don't have.”
This is almost too brazen. In a world in which we’ve gotten used to CEOs taking home hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options, we’ve also gotten use to most consumers operating without a safety net. What this means is: ta ta, more consumers should be operating without a safety net. The logic here is superb.
For the past thirty years, our social order – or at least the economic dimension – has depended on reversing the ductus of the zeitgeist. Where we once read from right to left, from new deal to the social welfare state, we now read from left to right, from the social welfare state to gilded age levels of inequality. In April, LI was saying that the Bush administration’s attempt to loot social security with bogus stats about a crisis in the fund was a diversion from the true pension crisis, which was private. Since then, United has completed its robbery of its workers, Delta is working on a similar plan, and the CEO of Delphi, R.S. "Steve" Miller, is getting huge amounts of love in the business press because he has made tons of money taking companies into bankruptcy and dumping their pension obligations. Every once in a while, the oracles speak, and they reveal the ugly little truth that capitalism is class warfare. Warfare, of course, doesn’t have to be total. In the Keynesian order that lasted until the eighties, the truce that obtained allowed the investment class to accrue an advantage, but a smaller advantage, in the economy. This truce has been destroyed piecemeal since, but the price of that destruction has been delayed. We are going to be seeing what it means at a narrower distance to our own flesh in the coming decade, since the devil’s deal of the Reagan era is essentially unworkable: you cannot make a system in which the top one percent of households own 38 percent of the wealth and expect to continue to provide services based on a time when that upper one percent owned around fifteen percent. Obviously, the upper class knows this, and so its heroes are the innovators who draw the logical conclusion: let the dead bury their own dead, or: we can dump the costs of pensions for the workers on the workers and get away with it, cause nobody is going to call for some kind of giveback of upper management’s compensation packages, circa 1970 – 2000. Miller is a hero among business journalists because he’s up front about his thievery. The job, now, is to translate that thievery into inevitability. That, after all, is why we have a business section in the newspaper.
If I were to pick one image that typifies the ethics of the order that came after Reagan, I think the photo op of Bush, in Parkersburg West Virginia at the Bureau of Public Debt would do. That was the photo op in which he pointed to the “IOU”s accumulated by the Government by borrowing against the Social Security fund and laughingly remarked that they were merely paper. Since this paper had been borrowed against to finance his entire economic policy for the last four years, and since that economic policy consisted of throwing money at Big Pharma, war profiteers, and oil companies, this was a remarkable moment. A moment of truth, even. It told us who made money, how the machinery was designed for them to make money, and how criminally irresponsible that governing class was. It was a deeply moving moment, actually, like a frat house prank in a veteran's graveyard. One must consider the historic resonance: after all, the designers of the Reagan order were all in at the origin of that pile of IOUs, present at the creation, so to speak: Alan Greenspan, Reagan himself, the supply siders, all of them signing off in 1983. But a mere trillion to two trillion dollar rip off is not indicative of the whole splendor of this reactionary era’s deeper sicknesses. One has to really sift among the news of the private pension rip off and the way it is being managed as a p.r. coup to see the deeply sick bent of this order.
Here is the WSJ, making with the saliva about those lucky ducky auto workers:
For starters, the UAW's very success at obtaining job security and healthy pay for its members has put both achievements in mortal danger. Consider the benefits package, now worth some $40 an hour on top of wages, for workers at Delphi, GM and other Detroit car companies.
“The gold-plated medical benefits provide free choice of treatment with virtually no co-pays or deductibles. Retirees also get defined, and generous, pension payments for as long as they live, instead of the 401(k) accounts more typical nowadays. And workers can collect full pensions after 30 years on the job. Thus they can retire around age 50 and collect medical and pension benefits for more years than they actually worked. The contract forbids factory closings, and requires that laid-off workers get close to full pay and benefits while waiting in the "jobs bank" for real work. Delphi is paying out $100 million per quarter to 4,000 idled workers, Mr. Miller says. No wonder it was good while it lasted.”
And here’s something that is still good, and will last as long as the Bush culture can support it. From Money magazine, in 2003 (meaning that the compensation figures are a little short – CEOs get more now):
“While many Americans are cashing their final unemployment checks and wondering how they’ll pay next month’s bills, the top brass at our nation’s biggest companies could hardly pick a better time to be laid off.
Chief executives leaving S&P 500 companies pocketed a cool $16.5 million on average in the past two years on the way out the door. And there's little sign yet that the going rate for executive departure has come down.
That $16.5 million doesn’t even count juicy perks like gold-plated pension plans, rich stock option grants, health benefits, or use of corporate jets and company secretaries. These goodies can bump up the value of the typical executive severance package by an additional 50%. “
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Monday, October 17, 2005
FUNDRAISING
Fund Raising Week, Month, Whatever
Okay, ladies and germs. LI’s official fundraising week is kicking off.
Harry has pretty much told me how to put together LI’s product line and what the contribution thresholds should be. The man has bowled me over with his web canniness.
Here's how this is going to work. I am setting up an account with Cafe Press. I'll put the link to that account up this week. So it will be possible to go directly to the Cafe Press and simply choose your items. Or you can go through me, telling me what you want and where you want your item shipped.
So, here’s the list:
We are offering, to those who fork over 50 bucks, the organic t shirt here:
To those who fork over 30 bucks, the regular t shirt shown on our stunning model, here:
Of course, those who want multiple t shirts for Halloween, Christmas, The feast of the platypus messiah day, etc. – all your favorite Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Sex positive holidays – should tell me.
Those who want the Dopamine Cowboys Movement Logo emblazoned on the back, please send me emails.
If you want to contribute to LI directly, you can either press the handy Paypal button you will find on the sidebar (looking at this page on your internet explorer browser). Or you can mail checks, piggybanks, or whatever to our address:
Roger Gathman
615 Upson, #203
Austin, Texas 78703
The essence of fundraising is to find that discrete equilibrium point between being obnoxious and being too obnoxious and to stand on it with spiked shoes. On a blog, I think that means: I will be putting up please contribute to LI posts, or otherwise adding that to posts, until we are all heartily sick of it and we see if anything comes of it.
Okay, ladies and germs. LI’s official fundraising week is kicking off.
Harry has pretty much told me how to put together LI’s product line and what the contribution thresholds should be. The man has bowled me over with his web canniness.
Here's how this is going to work. I am setting up an account with Cafe Press. I'll put the link to that account up this week. So it will be possible to go directly to the Cafe Press and simply choose your items. Or you can go through me, telling me what you want and where you want your item shipped.
So, here’s the list:
We are offering, to those who fork over 50 bucks, the organic t shirt here:
To those who fork over 30 bucks, the regular t shirt shown on our stunning model, here:
Of course, those who want multiple t shirts for Halloween, Christmas, The feast of the platypus messiah day, etc. – all your favorite Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Sex positive holidays – should tell me.
Those who want the Dopamine Cowboys Movement Logo emblazoned on the back, please send me emails.
If you want to contribute to LI directly, you can either press the handy Paypal button you will find on the sidebar (looking at this page on your internet explorer browser). Or you can mail checks, piggybanks, or whatever to our address:
Roger Gathman
615 Upson, #203
Austin, Texas 78703
The essence of fundraising is to find that discrete equilibrium point between being obnoxious and being too obnoxious and to stand on it with spiked shoes. On a blog, I think that means: I will be putting up please contribute to LI posts, or otherwise adding that to posts, until we are all heartily sick of it and we see if anything comes of it.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
sell or smoke dope, get out of jail free
LI’s recommended read: In the LAT today, there is a piece by the ex police chief of Seattle Washington, Norm Stamper, that lays out the case for legalizing drugs. Not just pot – heroin, meth, etc. Cops aren’t usually this sensible. But occasionally a man comes forward who can add and subtract.
“As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?”
One of the reasons for LI's sporadic crusade to dig the moderate wing of the Republican party out of the grave in which lies buried deep is that there are issues on which moderate Republicans can act as unique brokers. Between Hillary Clinton's It takes a village to jail your ass for vices we don't like and the moral majority Republican party's lets execute drug dealers, a logical drug policy doesn't stand a chance. Only some combination of libertarian thinking and concern about the incredible gulag the U.S. has burdened itself with is going to work, here.
“As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?”
One of the reasons for LI's sporadic crusade to dig the moderate wing of the Republican party out of the grave in which lies buried deep is that there are issues on which moderate Republicans can act as unique brokers. Between Hillary Clinton's It takes a village to jail your ass for vices we don't like and the moral majority Republican party's lets execute drug dealers, a logical drug policy doesn't stand a chance. Only some combination of libertarian thinking and concern about the incredible gulag the U.S. has burdened itself with is going to work, here.
Miller time again
First things first: Guy Baehr is the chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists that is giving Judy Miller a 1st Amendment prize next week. This is his email: gbaehr@spj.org. This is his official address:
Guy Baehr
Assistant Director
Journalism Resources Institute
Rutgers University of New Jersey
4 Huntington St.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071
I’ve written him to tell him that I think that the award stinks. I’d urge others to let Mr. Baehr know what this award says about the standards of professional journalists. Surely there are writers for KBR Techtalk, Haliburton’s inhouse newsletter, more deserving of the prize.
Second: although, as an old fan of closing the CIA down permanently, I have a hard time getting too lathered about betraying CIA assets in Africa – in fact, given the CIA’s record in Angola, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in Tanzania, etc., etc., and I even find it wonderfully inspiriting that the rightwing is adopting the tactics of the Yippies with regard to that poisonous agency – there is no reason to be blind to what Judy Miller is, how she has operated at the NYT, and what it says about the NYT itself.
What Judy Miller is is an advocate. That in itself is not wrong. Any journalist is an advocate for something, some point of view. But there are thresholds between being an advocate and losing your integrity. The trajectory of Miller's agon reminds me the story of the disbarred lawyer who was the subject of Janet Malcolm’s book, The Crime of Sheila McGough. McGough was hired by a man accused of various business frauds. In the course of defending him, he became more than another case to McGough – she became passionately attached to his cause, much to the bewilderment of those around her. And in her passion, she allowed him to use her office as a transit point for cash transactions. Eventually, not only was the client imprisoned, but McGough was too, as an accomplice.
Usually the rap on Miller begins with her outrageously bad reporting on the WMDs. I think it should, instead, begin with her partnership with Laurie Mylroie, with whom she co-authored “Study of Revenge.” This is what Peter Bergen has said about Mylroie:
“It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched Mylroie's quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the chief source of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing". Wolfowitz and his then wife, according to Mylroie, "provided crucial support".
Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon.
The extent of Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." Clarke writes: "I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."
Mylroie vision of Saddam Hussein’s evil sway doesn’t stop with the 1993 bombing:
“She has said that Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City plotters, was in league with Ramzi Yousef, the supposed Iraqi agent. The federal judge who presided over the Oklahoma case ruled this theory inadmissible. Mylroie implicates Iraq in the 1996 bombing of a US military facility in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 servicemen. In 2001, a grand jury indicted members of Saudi Hezbollah, a group with ties to Iran. Mylroie suggests that the attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998 were "the work of Bin Laden and Iraq". An investigation uncovered no connection. Mylroie has written that the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996 was probably an Iraqi plot; a two-year investigation found it was an accident. Saddam is guilty of many crimes, but there is no evidence linking him to any act of anti-US terrorism for a decade, while there is a mountain of evidence against al-Qaida.”
So: the NYT let a woman who has gone on record in a best seller as claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 WTC bombing as well as 9/11 run the story about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. It is odd that they just didn’t turn over the front page to Paul Wolfowitz and get it done with.
If, to use the phrase of the network around Ken Starr, there were “little elves” pushing us into this stupid, misbegotten invasion, one of the little elves is certainly Miller. Her role in trying to blacken Wilson’s name did succeed in one respect: it pretty much paralyzed the NYT’s reporting on the kind of scandal that, once upon a time, the NYT was very good at. According to the NYT itself:
"Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald. In July, Richard W. Stevenson and other reporters in the Washington bureau wrote an article about the role of Mr. Cheney's senior aides, including Mr. Libby, in the leak case. The article, which did not disclose that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source, was not published.
Mr. Stevenson said he was told by his editors that the article did not break enough new ground. "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," he said."
In fact, her 85 days in prison took a nice little chunk out of the news cycle in which it has usually been NYT's role to play a leading part. Taking a bullet for your side is something you do, if you are a believer. That the NYT management has been as close to Miller’s side as the House of the Romanovs was to Rasputin shows that the NYT badly needs a new editor in chief, new blood in the Washington D.C office, and constraints that make sure that star reporters with obvious agendas don't use their paper space to promote these agendas, and their institutional weight to suppress the criticism of these agendas.
Guy Baehr
Assistant Director
Journalism Resources Institute
Rutgers University of New Jersey
4 Huntington St.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071
I’ve written him to tell him that I think that the award stinks. I’d urge others to let Mr. Baehr know what this award says about the standards of professional journalists. Surely there are writers for KBR Techtalk, Haliburton’s inhouse newsletter, more deserving of the prize.
Second: although, as an old fan of closing the CIA down permanently, I have a hard time getting too lathered about betraying CIA assets in Africa – in fact, given the CIA’s record in Angola, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in Tanzania, etc., etc., and I even find it wonderfully inspiriting that the rightwing is adopting the tactics of the Yippies with regard to that poisonous agency – there is no reason to be blind to what Judy Miller is, how she has operated at the NYT, and what it says about the NYT itself.
What Judy Miller is is an advocate. That in itself is not wrong. Any journalist is an advocate for something, some point of view. But there are thresholds between being an advocate and losing your integrity. The trajectory of Miller's agon reminds me the story of the disbarred lawyer who was the subject of Janet Malcolm’s book, The Crime of Sheila McGough. McGough was hired by a man accused of various business frauds. In the course of defending him, he became more than another case to McGough – she became passionately attached to his cause, much to the bewilderment of those around her. And in her passion, she allowed him to use her office as a transit point for cash transactions. Eventually, not only was the client imprisoned, but McGough was too, as an accomplice.
Usually the rap on Miller begins with her outrageously bad reporting on the WMDs. I think it should, instead, begin with her partnership with Laurie Mylroie, with whom she co-authored “Study of Revenge.” This is what Peter Bergen has said about Mylroie:
“It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched Mylroie's quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the chief source of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing". Wolfowitz and his then wife, according to Mylroie, "provided crucial support".
Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon.
The extent of Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." Clarke writes: "I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."
Mylroie vision of Saddam Hussein’s evil sway doesn’t stop with the 1993 bombing:
“She has said that Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City plotters, was in league with Ramzi Yousef, the supposed Iraqi agent. The federal judge who presided over the Oklahoma case ruled this theory inadmissible. Mylroie implicates Iraq in the 1996 bombing of a US military facility in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 servicemen. In 2001, a grand jury indicted members of Saudi Hezbollah, a group with ties to Iran. Mylroie suggests that the attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998 were "the work of Bin Laden and Iraq". An investigation uncovered no connection. Mylroie has written that the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996 was probably an Iraqi plot; a two-year investigation found it was an accident. Saddam is guilty of many crimes, but there is no evidence linking him to any act of anti-US terrorism for a decade, while there is a mountain of evidence against al-Qaida.”
So: the NYT let a woman who has gone on record in a best seller as claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 WTC bombing as well as 9/11 run the story about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. It is odd that they just didn’t turn over the front page to Paul Wolfowitz and get it done with.
If, to use the phrase of the network around Ken Starr, there were “little elves” pushing us into this stupid, misbegotten invasion, one of the little elves is certainly Miller. Her role in trying to blacken Wilson’s name did succeed in one respect: it pretty much paralyzed the NYT’s reporting on the kind of scandal that, once upon a time, the NYT was very good at. According to the NYT itself:
"Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald. In July, Richard W. Stevenson and other reporters in the Washington bureau wrote an article about the role of Mr. Cheney's senior aides, including Mr. Libby, in the leak case. The article, which did not disclose that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source, was not published.
Mr. Stevenson said he was told by his editors that the article did not break enough new ground. "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," he said."
In fact, her 85 days in prison took a nice little chunk out of the news cycle in which it has usually been NYT's role to play a leading part. Taking a bullet for your side is something you do, if you are a believer. That the NYT management has been as close to Miller’s side as the House of the Romanovs was to Rasputin shows that the NYT badly needs a new editor in chief, new blood in the Washington D.C office, and constraints that make sure that star reporters with obvious agendas don't use their paper space to promote these agendas, and their institutional weight to suppress the criticism of these agendas.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
sweet mysteries of life and death
“If you people wouldn’t have drunk it,” Dalitz said thickly, “ I wouldn’t have bootlegged it.” Moe Dalitz before the Kefauver Commission on organized crime, explaining why he sold liquor during the prohibition. From “The Money and the Power” by Sally Denton and Roger Morris.
The second mystery – see my Thursday post -- to which I want to point my showman’s cane (see it tremble in my palsied grip) is that of the developmental lag. I think this mystery complicates any simple conclusions we can make from the first mystery, which, if you will remember, is the mystery of how, as we become richer, we become collectively poorer. If there were only one mystery here, then the answer would be pretty simple. We’d just look to the tradition of class conflict for our answers. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t that simple. Instead, our two mysteries are enjambed, intertwined like two dogs in heat. They form a matrix. It would be nice for me to be able to say, well, Reagan was just an upper class stooge, and that’s how the investor class became dominant in America. Alas, it isn’t that simple. In fact, only by looking at both of the mysteries does one understand the brilliance, albeit limited brilliance, of the American response to the crisis of capitalism in the 1980s, and how that has played out to this day. Those mysteries explain a certain unexpected movement in the conservative revolution. Unlike conservatism in the past, this revolution was not wrapped about savings. Just the opposite. This revolution was about creating an economic culture in which the inclination to saving was systematically dissolved.
The mystery I am talking about is at the heart of globalization and the transformation of the welfare state into the guarantor state.
When I try to figure out how to put this in a simple post, I feel rather like I am trying to spoon out the water in pond with a net: the instrument is wrong and the goal is futile. But of course, this is what we do here at LI.
So-- lets get one thing straight right away. The difference between the economist and the non-economist is that the economist can think in terms of parts and aggregates, but never thinks of values in terms of emergent wholes. To put this in terms of an example: an economist can explain why the efficiencies gained by transferring manufacturing to low paying areas from high paying areas – for instance, from Michigan to the Mexican border – make up for the cost of increased unemployment in Michigan. The economist would have an easy time showing this by a sectorial analysis of the U.S. economy. What the economist does not include in the calculus at all are the intangible values in the blue collar culture of Michigan. It has no instrument to quantify that culture, and what economists can’t quantify, they can’t see. They are equipped with visual sensoria as delicate and peculiar as a fly’s – but they aren’t human. Similarly, the culture the emerges around low paying maquilladoras in Juarez is available, to the economist, only in terms of human capital, and not in terms of such emergent wholes that we can look down at the face of another slaughtered girl on the outskirts of Juarez and understand what is happening here (“ You've been with the professors/ And they’ve all liked your looks/ With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks”).The quality of life, that phrase as tasteless as bubble gum foil, the culture that emerges around long term low pay labor intense areas can’t really be analyzed by the economist, even if they can make attempts to distinguish a frontier from a metropolis. But the culture does have an economic impact. In fact, economics, ideally, serves the culture. Marx thought the fact that the culture had come to serve economics was part of the systematic inversion of values in 19th capitalism that had to be inverted in its turn. Be that as it may, to approach the second mystery, one has to have some respect for the constraints under which these mysteries are communicated.
…
In 1996, Mancur Olson gave a lecture on the stubborn difference between developed and less developed economies entitled “Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations are Rich, and Others Poor.” Olson pushed an institutionalist view of economics. To make his case, he first attempts to take apart the neo-classical view – and its newest additions, via Robert Lucas, that the famous “residual” to which Solow attributed the major role in growth consists of knowledge which, for various reasons, is not a public good. At the end of Olson’s overview, he writes:
“If the countries of the world were on the frontiers of neoclassical production functions, the marginal product of capital would therefore be many times higher in the low-income than in the high-income countries. Robert Lucas (1990) has calculated, albeit in a somewhat different framework,[11] the marginal product of capital that should be expected in the United States and in India. Lucas estimated that if an Indian worker and an American worker supplied the same quantity and quality of labor, the marginal product of capital in India should be 58 times as great as in the United States. Even when Lucas assumed that it took five Indian workers to supply as much labor as one U.S. worker, the predicted return to capital in India would still be a multiple of the return in the United States.”
That paragraph is a little gritty – but I think that is says something that Balzac put, in the form of a metaphor and a parable, a long time before, in Pere Goriot, when Rastignac is pondering an offer he has had from another character in the book, Vautrin. Vautrin, you’ll recall, wants Rastignac to marry an heiress and turn over part of the fortune to Vautrin. In turn, Vautrin will murder the heiress’ brother – an unknown figure, to Rastignac – so that the heiress will inherit all her father’s fortune.
− Where did you get that serious look? the medical student asked him as he took his arm to go walking on the quad.
− I am tormented by evil ideas.
− Of what type? You know, you can be healed of ideas.
− How ?
− By surrendering to them.
− Ah, you are laughing without knowing what this is about. Have you read Rousseau?
− Yeah.
− Remember that passage where he asks his reader what he would do given a case in which he could enrich himself in killing a Chinaman by a simple act of will, an old mandarin, without budging from Paris
− Yes.
− Well ?
− Bah ! I’m already on my thirty first mandarin!
− This isn ‘t a joking matter. Go on. Let’s say you were convinced it were possible and that all you had to do was nod your head. What would you do?
− Is this mandarin of yours an old man? But hell, young or an old paralytic or in health, my goodness! ... Well, no.
− You are a good boy, Bianchet. But if you love a woman enough to turn your soul inside out, and it was absolutely necessary to get money for her toilette, for her carriage, to cut a long story short, for all of her fantasies?
Olson, like many economists, makes the case that the superior political institutions in the West are what gave rise to the enormous wealth here. The other side of that coin is, possibly, that those superior political institutions are oriented to positively hold down 58 Indian workers and 31 mandarins. And that this held true for the era of the great boom in this country – from 1945 to 1980. In fact, Keynes worked, at Bretton Woods, to assure a place for the possibility that a nation could take autonomous economic action in order to make sure that those who were leading the pack – especially the British – would be able to retain the lead in the face of frontiers of neoclassical production functions. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. didn’t see things this way – in fact, one of the goals of the U.S. negotiators was to make sure that the British were never again able to set up a “sterling zone”, as they did in the thirties, blocking U.S. exports.
Mandarins and Indian workers, in the meantime, kept multiplying, and knowledge kept lowering transaction costs. Eventually, the law of comparative advantage was going to erode the institutions of the welfare state in countries that relied upon manufacturing goods that could be more cheaply manufactured elsewhere and, given the dissolution of trade barriers, shipped back to the richest consumer markets which had accumulated wealth precisely in the era in which their production functions were protected.
This mystery requires another post. Which I’ll put up next week.
The second mystery – see my Thursday post -- to which I want to point my showman’s cane (see it tremble in my palsied grip) is that of the developmental lag. I think this mystery complicates any simple conclusions we can make from the first mystery, which, if you will remember, is the mystery of how, as we become richer, we become collectively poorer. If there were only one mystery here, then the answer would be pretty simple. We’d just look to the tradition of class conflict for our answers. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t that simple. Instead, our two mysteries are enjambed, intertwined like two dogs in heat. They form a matrix. It would be nice for me to be able to say, well, Reagan was just an upper class stooge, and that’s how the investor class became dominant in America. Alas, it isn’t that simple. In fact, only by looking at both of the mysteries does one understand the brilliance, albeit limited brilliance, of the American response to the crisis of capitalism in the 1980s, and how that has played out to this day. Those mysteries explain a certain unexpected movement in the conservative revolution. Unlike conservatism in the past, this revolution was not wrapped about savings. Just the opposite. This revolution was about creating an economic culture in which the inclination to saving was systematically dissolved.
The mystery I am talking about is at the heart of globalization and the transformation of the welfare state into the guarantor state.
When I try to figure out how to put this in a simple post, I feel rather like I am trying to spoon out the water in pond with a net: the instrument is wrong and the goal is futile. But of course, this is what we do here at LI.
So-- lets get one thing straight right away. The difference between the economist and the non-economist is that the economist can think in terms of parts and aggregates, but never thinks of values in terms of emergent wholes. To put this in terms of an example: an economist can explain why the efficiencies gained by transferring manufacturing to low paying areas from high paying areas – for instance, from Michigan to the Mexican border – make up for the cost of increased unemployment in Michigan. The economist would have an easy time showing this by a sectorial analysis of the U.S. economy. What the economist does not include in the calculus at all are the intangible values in the blue collar culture of Michigan. It has no instrument to quantify that culture, and what economists can’t quantify, they can’t see. They are equipped with visual sensoria as delicate and peculiar as a fly’s – but they aren’t human. Similarly, the culture the emerges around low paying maquilladoras in Juarez is available, to the economist, only in terms of human capital, and not in terms of such emergent wholes that we can look down at the face of another slaughtered girl on the outskirts of Juarez and understand what is happening here (“ You've been with the professors/ And they’ve all liked your looks/ With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks”).The quality of life, that phrase as tasteless as bubble gum foil, the culture that emerges around long term low pay labor intense areas can’t really be analyzed by the economist, even if they can make attempts to distinguish a frontier from a metropolis. But the culture does have an economic impact. In fact, economics, ideally, serves the culture. Marx thought the fact that the culture had come to serve economics was part of the systematic inversion of values in 19th capitalism that had to be inverted in its turn. Be that as it may, to approach the second mystery, one has to have some respect for the constraints under which these mysteries are communicated.
…
In 1996, Mancur Olson gave a lecture on the stubborn difference between developed and less developed economies entitled “Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations are Rich, and Others Poor.” Olson pushed an institutionalist view of economics. To make his case, he first attempts to take apart the neo-classical view – and its newest additions, via Robert Lucas, that the famous “residual” to which Solow attributed the major role in growth consists of knowledge which, for various reasons, is not a public good. At the end of Olson’s overview, he writes:
“If the countries of the world were on the frontiers of neoclassical production functions, the marginal product of capital would therefore be many times higher in the low-income than in the high-income countries. Robert Lucas (1990) has calculated, albeit in a somewhat different framework,[11] the marginal product of capital that should be expected in the United States and in India. Lucas estimated that if an Indian worker and an American worker supplied the same quantity and quality of labor, the marginal product of capital in India should be 58 times as great as in the United States. Even when Lucas assumed that it took five Indian workers to supply as much labor as one U.S. worker, the predicted return to capital in India would still be a multiple of the return in the United States.”
That paragraph is a little gritty – but I think that is says something that Balzac put, in the form of a metaphor and a parable, a long time before, in Pere Goriot, when Rastignac is pondering an offer he has had from another character in the book, Vautrin. Vautrin, you’ll recall, wants Rastignac to marry an heiress and turn over part of the fortune to Vautrin. In turn, Vautrin will murder the heiress’ brother – an unknown figure, to Rastignac – so that the heiress will inherit all her father’s fortune.
− Where did you get that serious look? the medical student asked him as he took his arm to go walking on the quad.
− I am tormented by evil ideas.
− Of what type? You know, you can be healed of ideas.
− How ?
− By surrendering to them.
− Ah, you are laughing without knowing what this is about. Have you read Rousseau?
− Yeah.
− Remember that passage where he asks his reader what he would do given a case in which he could enrich himself in killing a Chinaman by a simple act of will, an old mandarin, without budging from Paris
− Yes.
− Well ?
− Bah ! I’m already on my thirty first mandarin!
− This isn ‘t a joking matter. Go on. Let’s say you were convinced it were possible and that all you had to do was nod your head. What would you do?
− Is this mandarin of yours an old man? But hell, young or an old paralytic or in health, my goodness! ... Well, no.
− You are a good boy, Bianchet. But if you love a woman enough to turn your soul inside out, and it was absolutely necessary to get money for her toilette, for her carriage, to cut a long story short, for all of her fantasies?
Olson, like many economists, makes the case that the superior political institutions in the West are what gave rise to the enormous wealth here. The other side of that coin is, possibly, that those superior political institutions are oriented to positively hold down 58 Indian workers and 31 mandarins. And that this held true for the era of the great boom in this country – from 1945 to 1980. In fact, Keynes worked, at Bretton Woods, to assure a place for the possibility that a nation could take autonomous economic action in order to make sure that those who were leading the pack – especially the British – would be able to retain the lead in the face of frontiers of neoclassical production functions. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. didn’t see things this way – in fact, one of the goals of the U.S. negotiators was to make sure that the British were never again able to set up a “sterling zone”, as they did in the thirties, blocking U.S. exports.
Mandarins and Indian workers, in the meantime, kept multiplying, and knowledge kept lowering transaction costs. Eventually, the law of comparative advantage was going to erode the institutions of the welfare state in countries that relied upon manufacturing goods that could be more cheaply manufactured elsewhere and, given the dissolution of trade barriers, shipped back to the richest consumer markets which had accumulated wealth precisely in the era in which their production functions were protected.
This mystery requires another post. Which I’ll put up next week.
Friday, October 14, 2005
the story that ran away with the reporter
PS -- Today (Oct. 15) the Times is finally running their explanation of the Judith Miller affair. It is wretched. It is written in the kind of restrained tone that is usually adopted at the dinner table after a fight with your spouse. It threads among the upsetting topics, and doesn't once mention the topic that has been discussed over and over again on the Net -- whether Miller wasn't using her position as a reporter to fight against Wilson. So: no mention of the report that Miller, in the newsroom, was telling people that Wilson was a liar. Surely if that was being said, the crackerjack NYT team that couldn't seem to pry a straight answer out of Ms. Miller could have asked about it. Instead, the NYT team simply preserved the pretence that this was wholly about a reporter doing her job -- although admitting that in this instance, the reporter was, actually, not doing her job. She wasn't reporting on Wilson, and she had information that she wasn't sharing with anybody in the Washington Bureau who was.
Until the NYT faces up to the accusation that Judy Miller was all about pumping and dumping a particular line from a D.C. cabal, it will not be able to disentangle itself from this tarbaby. The portrait of Judy Miller as Nancy Drew, ace reporter can't be maintained by NYT, but alternatives can't be explored, even gingerly.
I meant to write a companion post to yesterday’s. This will take a little longer to compose than I was planning on. Sorry.
Instead, I’ll write about something fashionable: Fitzgerald’s investigation of one of the shapes of the conspiracy that took us into the Iraq war.
It will be one of the ironies, looking back at this, that at the very time Judith Miller’s testimony proved to be highly inconvenient to the notion that she was doing anything compatible with conveying true, or at least probable, information to the citizenry, she is being given a first amendment prize. One of the media claims about its business is that it needs access to sources who are sometimes unwilling to be named in order to fulfill its function. This makes sense to me. But nested in that claim is a dimension that is as important to the designs of the governing class: that class needs the authentication provided by the news to fulfill its task of planning. The convergence of these needs in the run up to the Iraq war produced a pumping mechanism that was formally identical to the mechanism that swelled the bubble market in 1999 – the newspapers would take info from sources allied to a particular viewpoint, and then spokesmen for that particular viewpoint would quote the newspapers. Miller’s reporting made it possible for the pro-war Bush administration to pretty much quote itself to justify its claims. Instead of Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb by citing Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb, how much more convenient to have a story in a supposedly liberal paper built upon an unnamed source ultimately from Cheney’s office tell us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb. This cozy relationship was threatened by Wilson – or the players in it felt themselves to be. In truth, the over-reaction to Wilson is what makes this reminiscent of Watergate: Nixon pretty much approved on a course of skullduggery that was completely unnecessary, given that he was crushing his opponent in the polls.
There was an interesting post on Jay Rosen’s blog about the decline of the NYT. I think Rosen is right: the NYT has been a surprisingly drab paper during the Bush years. This isn’t a matter of ideology – the WP is to the right of the NYT, and supported the insanity of the Iraq adventure with all the hardon fervor of a deacon on the front pew. But the Washington Post has been much more open to disagreement, and much more noticing of disagreement, which has made it a more interesting paper. And it seems more on top of things, with a journalistic crew that is riskier and livelier. Compare, for instance, Dana Milbank and Elizabeth Bumiller, and you'll see what I'm talking about. The liveliest part of the NYT has become its op ed page. That’s rather ridiculous.
Joan Didion, in an essay on Woodward, wrote that reporters generally have a sense of who is ‘running a story.” Any one national story is usually run by a handful of reporters, with the rest coming after them. Obviously, Miller was one of those running the story in the pre-war buildup. Just as obviously, running this story meant running counterfeits, innuendos, misleading analyses, and all of the rest of it. In this case, the story ran Miller. And it is now running the NYT into a cul de sac, in which Miller’s increasingly bizarre testimony (her strange discovery of notes has a very Nixonian overtone), her possible lies before the grand jury, raise the question of the degree of consciousness of the NYT presidium in allowing itself to become the instrument of a foreign policy Ponzi scheme.
…
Harry has come up with the prototype Limited Inc products that we are soon going to be giving out to charitable readers. And that means that we are soon going to insert smarmy please send LI money messages in every post. Like this one. We’ll be posting pics of the shirt and (on Harry’s suggestion) the tote bag soon.
Until the NYT faces up to the accusation that Judy Miller was all about pumping and dumping a particular line from a D.C. cabal, it will not be able to disentangle itself from this tarbaby. The portrait of Judy Miller as Nancy Drew, ace reporter can't be maintained by NYT, but alternatives can't be explored, even gingerly.
I meant to write a companion post to yesterday’s. This will take a little longer to compose than I was planning on. Sorry.
Instead, I’ll write about something fashionable: Fitzgerald’s investigation of one of the shapes of the conspiracy that took us into the Iraq war.
It will be one of the ironies, looking back at this, that at the very time Judith Miller’s testimony proved to be highly inconvenient to the notion that she was doing anything compatible with conveying true, or at least probable, information to the citizenry, she is being given a first amendment prize. One of the media claims about its business is that it needs access to sources who are sometimes unwilling to be named in order to fulfill its function. This makes sense to me. But nested in that claim is a dimension that is as important to the designs of the governing class: that class needs the authentication provided by the news to fulfill its task of planning. The convergence of these needs in the run up to the Iraq war produced a pumping mechanism that was formally identical to the mechanism that swelled the bubble market in 1999 – the newspapers would take info from sources allied to a particular viewpoint, and then spokesmen for that particular viewpoint would quote the newspapers. Miller’s reporting made it possible for the pro-war Bush administration to pretty much quote itself to justify its claims. Instead of Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb by citing Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb, how much more convenient to have a story in a supposedly liberal paper built upon an unnamed source ultimately from Cheney’s office tell us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb. This cozy relationship was threatened by Wilson – or the players in it felt themselves to be. In truth, the over-reaction to Wilson is what makes this reminiscent of Watergate: Nixon pretty much approved on a course of skullduggery that was completely unnecessary, given that he was crushing his opponent in the polls.
There was an interesting post on Jay Rosen’s blog about the decline of the NYT. I think Rosen is right: the NYT has been a surprisingly drab paper during the Bush years. This isn’t a matter of ideology – the WP is to the right of the NYT, and supported the insanity of the Iraq adventure with all the hardon fervor of a deacon on the front pew. But the Washington Post has been much more open to disagreement, and much more noticing of disagreement, which has made it a more interesting paper. And it seems more on top of things, with a journalistic crew that is riskier and livelier. Compare, for instance, Dana Milbank and Elizabeth Bumiller, and you'll see what I'm talking about. The liveliest part of the NYT has become its op ed page. That’s rather ridiculous.
Joan Didion, in an essay on Woodward, wrote that reporters generally have a sense of who is ‘running a story.” Any one national story is usually run by a handful of reporters, with the rest coming after them. Obviously, Miller was one of those running the story in the pre-war buildup. Just as obviously, running this story meant running counterfeits, innuendos, misleading analyses, and all of the rest of it. In this case, the story ran Miller. And it is now running the NYT into a cul de sac, in which Miller’s increasingly bizarre testimony (her strange discovery of notes has a very Nixonian overtone), her possible lies before the grand jury, raise the question of the degree of consciousness of the NYT presidium in allowing itself to become the instrument of a foreign policy Ponzi scheme.
…
Harry has come up with the prototype Limited Inc products that we are soon going to be giving out to charitable readers. And that means that we are soon going to insert smarmy please send LI money messages in every post. Like this one. We’ll be posting pics of the shirt and (on Harry’s suggestion) the tote bag soon.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
the ductus of the zeitgeist
Every social order depends on a social mystery. The conservative wants to preserve that mystery. The Marxist wants to expose it. The liberal, like me, wants to palpate it a bit.
There are two mysteries in the current social order. One mystery is rather obvious bunk. The mystery goes like this: although Western economies are getting wealthier and wealthier, in comparison to, say, the economies of the 1950s, we are told that we are too poor to maintain the social welfare programs that we once took for granted. We are, in other words, getting richer and richer only to be collectively poorer and poorer. Now, one doesn’t have to be an ardent Marxist to question this story. Instead, one might ponder how we expect to maintain a social system in which the multiple of greater wealth taken home by upper management versus the average worker has zoomed from 12 times to about 400 times in the U.S. The increase in collective poverty is, of course, relative. Since this mystery has a readily understandable social cause, we should expect that the apologists of the social order – those who would like to see the wealth differential increased – will do their traditional work. Their traditional work is to blame the natural order. In this way, one can keep an exploitative system going … to the dogs. So, it turns out that demographics are the thing to blame for liquidating private and public pension plans, for zooming medical entitlement costs that are locked into a for profit medical and drug system, and so on.
The other mystery is different, but relates to the whole economic system of the West. Why is it that economic power hasn’t transferred much more rapidly and much more completely to the Third World? We will write about that mystery, with reference to Mancur Olson, in tomorrow’s post.
….
The WSJ article about the looming default of Delphi’s pension plan is a sort of map to the way the chattering classes give cover to the investment class’s big lie: the lie of our increasing collective poverty. The beginning is classic bizspeak:
“Delphi Corp.'s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing represents more than just another Midwest metal-bender facing harsh reality. It marks a true reckoning for the traditional auto industry and the end of a 75-year-old way of life in America: that of the highly paid but unskilled worker. It was a noble concept, established largely by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s. But it cannot withstand a global economy that has ended the UAW's labor monopoly in the auto industry, and a consumer body that won't pay more to subsidize costly employee benefits that most consumers themselves don't have.”
This is almost too brazen. In a world in which we’ve gotten used to CEOs taking home hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options, we’ve also gotten use to most consumers operating without a safety net. What this means is: ta ta, more consumers should be operating without a safety net. The logic here is superb.
For the past thirty years, our social order – or at least the economic dimension – has depended on reversing the ductus of the zeitgeist. Where we once read from right to left, from new deal to the social welfare state, we now read from left to right, from the social welfare state to gilded age levels of inequality. In April, LI was saying that the Bush administration’s attempt to loot social security with bogus stats about a crisis in the fund was a diversion from the true pension crisis, which was private. Since then, United has completed its robbery of its workers, Delta is working on a similar plan, and the CEO of Delphi, R.S. "Steve" Miller, is getting huge amounts of love in the business press because he has made tons of money taking companies into bankruptcy and dumping their pension obligations. Every once in a while, the oracles speak, and they reveal the ugly little truth that capitalism is class warfare. Warfare, of course, doesn’t have to be total. In the Keynesian order that lasted until the eighties, the truce that obtained allowed the investment class to accrue an advantage, but a smaller advantage, in the economy. This truce has been destroyed piecemeal since, but the price of that destruction has been delayed. We are going to be seeing what it means at a narrower distance to our own flesh in the coming decade, since the devil’s deal of the Reagan era is essentially unworkable: you cannot make a system in which the top one percent of households own 38 percent of the wealth and expect to continue to provide services based on a time when that upper one percent owned around fifteen percent. Obviously, the upper class knows this, and so its heroes are the innovators who draw the logical conclusion: let the dead bury their own dead, or: we can dump the costs of pensions for the workers on the workers and get away with it, cause nobody is going to call for some kind of giveback of upper management’s compensation packages, circa 1970 – 2000. Miller is a hero among business journalists because he’s up front about his thievery. The job, now, is to translate that thievery into inevitability. That, after all, is why we have a business section in the newspaper.
If I were to pick one image that typifies the ethics of the order that came after Reagan, I think the photo op of Bush, in Parkersburg West Virginia at the Bureau of Public Debt would do. That was the photo op in which he pointed to the “IOU”s accumulated by the Government by borrowing against the Social Security fund and laughingly remarked that they were merely paper. Since this paper had been borrowed against to finance his entire economic policy for the last four years, and since that economic policy consisted of throwing money at Big Pharma, war profiteers, and oil companies, this was a remarkable moment. A moment of truth, even. It told us who made money, how the machinery was designed for them to make money, and how criminally irresponsible that governing class was. It was a deeply moving moment, actually, like a frat house prank in a veteran's graveyard. One must consider the historic resonance: after all, the designers of the Reagan order were all in at the origin of that pile of IOUs, present at the creation, so to speak: Alan Greenspan, Reagan himself, the supply siders, all of them signing off in 1983. But a mere trillion to two trillion dollar rip off is not indicative of the whole splendor of this reactionary era’s deeper sicknesses. One has to really sift among the news of the private pension rip off and the way it is being managed as a p.r. coup to see the deeply sick bent of this order.
Here is the WSJ, making with the saliva about those lucky ducky auto workers:
For starters, the UAW's very success at obtaining job security and healthy pay for its members has put both achievements in mortal danger. Consider the benefits package, now worth some $40 an hour on top of wages, for workers at Delphi, GM and other Detroit car companies.
“The gold-plated medical benefits provide free choice of treatment with virtually no co-pays or deductibles. Retirees also get defined, and generous, pension payments for as long as they live, instead of the 401(k) accounts more typical nowadays. And workers can collect full pensions after 30 years on the job. Thus they can retire around age 50 and collect medical and pension benefits for more years than they actually worked. The contract forbids factory closings, and requires that laid-off workers get close to full pay and benefits while waiting in the "jobs bank" for real work. Delphi is paying out $100 million per quarter to 4,000 idled workers, Mr. Miller says. No wonder it was good while it lasted.”
And here’s something that is still good, and will last as long as the Bush culture can support it. From Money magazine, in 2003 (meaning that the compensation figures are a little short – CEOs get more now):
“While many Americans are cashing their final unemployment checks and wondering how they’ll pay next month’s bills, the top brass at our nation’s biggest companies could hardly pick a better time to be laid off.
Chief executives leaving S&P 500 companies pocketed a cool $16.5 million on average in the past two years on the way out the door. And there's little sign yet that the going rate for executive departure has come down.
That $16.5 million doesn’t even count juicy perks like gold-plated pension plans, rich stock option grants, health benefits, or use of corporate jets and company secretaries. These goodies can bump up the value of the typical executive severance package by an additional 50%. “
There are two mysteries in the current social order. One mystery is rather obvious bunk. The mystery goes like this: although Western economies are getting wealthier and wealthier, in comparison to, say, the economies of the 1950s, we are told that we are too poor to maintain the social welfare programs that we once took for granted. We are, in other words, getting richer and richer only to be collectively poorer and poorer. Now, one doesn’t have to be an ardent Marxist to question this story. Instead, one might ponder how we expect to maintain a social system in which the multiple of greater wealth taken home by upper management versus the average worker has zoomed from 12 times to about 400 times in the U.S. The increase in collective poverty is, of course, relative. Since this mystery has a readily understandable social cause, we should expect that the apologists of the social order – those who would like to see the wealth differential increased – will do their traditional work. Their traditional work is to blame the natural order. In this way, one can keep an exploitative system going … to the dogs. So, it turns out that demographics are the thing to blame for liquidating private and public pension plans, for zooming medical entitlement costs that are locked into a for profit medical and drug system, and so on.
The other mystery is different, but relates to the whole economic system of the West. Why is it that economic power hasn’t transferred much more rapidly and much more completely to the Third World? We will write about that mystery, with reference to Mancur Olson, in tomorrow’s post.
….
The WSJ article about the looming default of Delphi’s pension plan is a sort of map to the way the chattering classes give cover to the investment class’s big lie: the lie of our increasing collective poverty. The beginning is classic bizspeak:
“Delphi Corp.'s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing represents more than just another Midwest metal-bender facing harsh reality. It marks a true reckoning for the traditional auto industry and the end of a 75-year-old way of life in America: that of the highly paid but unskilled worker. It was a noble concept, established largely by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s. But it cannot withstand a global economy that has ended the UAW's labor monopoly in the auto industry, and a consumer body that won't pay more to subsidize costly employee benefits that most consumers themselves don't have.”
This is almost too brazen. In a world in which we’ve gotten used to CEOs taking home hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options, we’ve also gotten use to most consumers operating without a safety net. What this means is: ta ta, more consumers should be operating without a safety net. The logic here is superb.
For the past thirty years, our social order – or at least the economic dimension – has depended on reversing the ductus of the zeitgeist. Where we once read from right to left, from new deal to the social welfare state, we now read from left to right, from the social welfare state to gilded age levels of inequality. In April, LI was saying that the Bush administration’s attempt to loot social security with bogus stats about a crisis in the fund was a diversion from the true pension crisis, which was private. Since then, United has completed its robbery of its workers, Delta is working on a similar plan, and the CEO of Delphi, R.S. "Steve" Miller, is getting huge amounts of love in the business press because he has made tons of money taking companies into bankruptcy and dumping their pension obligations. Every once in a while, the oracles speak, and they reveal the ugly little truth that capitalism is class warfare. Warfare, of course, doesn’t have to be total. In the Keynesian order that lasted until the eighties, the truce that obtained allowed the investment class to accrue an advantage, but a smaller advantage, in the economy. This truce has been destroyed piecemeal since, but the price of that destruction has been delayed. We are going to be seeing what it means at a narrower distance to our own flesh in the coming decade, since the devil’s deal of the Reagan era is essentially unworkable: you cannot make a system in which the top one percent of households own 38 percent of the wealth and expect to continue to provide services based on a time when that upper one percent owned around fifteen percent. Obviously, the upper class knows this, and so its heroes are the innovators who draw the logical conclusion: let the dead bury their own dead, or: we can dump the costs of pensions for the workers on the workers and get away with it, cause nobody is going to call for some kind of giveback of upper management’s compensation packages, circa 1970 – 2000. Miller is a hero among business journalists because he’s up front about his thievery. The job, now, is to translate that thievery into inevitability. That, after all, is why we have a business section in the newspaper.
If I were to pick one image that typifies the ethics of the order that came after Reagan, I think the photo op of Bush, in Parkersburg West Virginia at the Bureau of Public Debt would do. That was the photo op in which he pointed to the “IOU”s accumulated by the Government by borrowing against the Social Security fund and laughingly remarked that they were merely paper. Since this paper had been borrowed against to finance his entire economic policy for the last four years, and since that economic policy consisted of throwing money at Big Pharma, war profiteers, and oil companies, this was a remarkable moment. A moment of truth, even. It told us who made money, how the machinery was designed for them to make money, and how criminally irresponsible that governing class was. It was a deeply moving moment, actually, like a frat house prank in a veteran's graveyard. One must consider the historic resonance: after all, the designers of the Reagan order were all in at the origin of that pile of IOUs, present at the creation, so to speak: Alan Greenspan, Reagan himself, the supply siders, all of them signing off in 1983. But a mere trillion to two trillion dollar rip off is not indicative of the whole splendor of this reactionary era’s deeper sicknesses. One has to really sift among the news of the private pension rip off and the way it is being managed as a p.r. coup to see the deeply sick bent of this order.
Here is the WSJ, making with the saliva about those lucky ducky auto workers:
For starters, the UAW's very success at obtaining job security and healthy pay for its members has put both achievements in mortal danger. Consider the benefits package, now worth some $40 an hour on top of wages, for workers at Delphi, GM and other Detroit car companies.
“The gold-plated medical benefits provide free choice of treatment with virtually no co-pays or deductibles. Retirees also get defined, and generous, pension payments for as long as they live, instead of the 401(k) accounts more typical nowadays. And workers can collect full pensions after 30 years on the job. Thus they can retire around age 50 and collect medical and pension benefits for more years than they actually worked. The contract forbids factory closings, and requires that laid-off workers get close to full pay and benefits while waiting in the "jobs bank" for real work. Delphi is paying out $100 million per quarter to 4,000 idled workers, Mr. Miller says. No wonder it was good while it lasted.”
And here’s something that is still good, and will last as long as the Bush culture can support it. From Money magazine, in 2003 (meaning that the compensation figures are a little short – CEOs get more now):
“While many Americans are cashing their final unemployment checks and wondering how they’ll pay next month’s bills, the top brass at our nation’s biggest companies could hardly pick a better time to be laid off.
Chief executives leaving S&P 500 companies pocketed a cool $16.5 million on average in the past two years on the way out the door. And there's little sign yet that the going rate for executive departure has come down.
That $16.5 million doesn’t even count juicy perks like gold-plated pension plans, rich stock option grants, health benefits, or use of corporate jets and company secretaries. These goodies can bump up the value of the typical executive severance package by an additional 50%. “
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
the revolt of the extras
In last week’s New Statesman – the one that is dedicated to the proposition that Iraq is a blunder that has metastasized into a cancer – there’s a review of a piece by a video artist named Omer Fast. Fast’s newest work, Godville, consists of interviews with re-enactors at Williamburg contrasted with shots of American suburbia. Before this, Fast made a video in which he interviewed Poles who worked as extras on Schindler’s list.
Fast seems to have latched onto George Saunder’s territory. The insight, to put it crudely, is that we are not in the age of celebrity. We are in the age of the extra. The ontology of extra-hood has yet to find its philosopher, but in Fast and Saunder’s it is finding its poets.
We haven’t seen Godville, but we definitely hope Fast takes it to Austin.
“The war” might mean Operation Desert Storm, today’s Iraq war, or the American war of independence. “Independency” and “occupation” turn inside out and back again: Godville’s hybridised personae,
in their immaculate costumes, exist both as ex-colonial subjects and citizens of an occupying nation. The potential significance of the word “freedom” oscillates wildly: one of Fast’s interviewees (a Baptist
preacher in real life) “lives” in Colonial Williamsburg as a slave.
Another role-plays a moneyed housewife. “I only know this little window of what . . . my family and my children tell me . . . what little bit my husband might share with me of the world of politics and business,” she admits in a bitter tone, noting that “when you think about it, you feel like you’re being property and not human”. Time-wise, this comment becomes even more ambiguous when we see her burst into real tears over her three imaginary sons’ “deaths” in the war against the British. Working in Godville looks like it entails heavy-duty emotional
labour. Fast’s editing conjures a sympathetic but fraught and angry persona from his original material. Courtesy of rapid, nervous jump cuts, his subject’s yellow gloves are on her hands one second and lie in her lap the next. Her hands flash from one gesture to another in an incoherent yet bizarrely expressive semaphore. Sliding
between historical co-ordinates, her discontent cannot be anchored to a concrete cause. How could it be? She is not a “real person” but a (heavily overdetermined) symptom born of collective past and present circumstances.”
A long time ago, in the Moviegoer, Walker Percy noticed the reality deficit at the center of celebrity culture. That was back in the days of Kennedy. Ah, those rank and odious days that have never died, but putrified among us, a big gaseous giant strung out among a nationwide mausoleum of golden oldies and classic rock stations. The problem, though, is always taken up as though it is the celebrities problem. It is what journalism is mostly about. It is what politics is mostly about. It is the national desire. The desire not to be an extra. But LI is so tired of this desire. We’d like to see a revolt of the extras – some throwing off of our parasitism.
Fast seems to have latched onto George Saunder’s territory. The insight, to put it crudely, is that we are not in the age of celebrity. We are in the age of the extra. The ontology of extra-hood has yet to find its philosopher, but in Fast and Saunder’s it is finding its poets.
We haven’t seen Godville, but we definitely hope Fast takes it to Austin.
“The war” might mean Operation Desert Storm, today’s Iraq war, or the American war of independence. “Independency” and “occupation” turn inside out and back again: Godville’s hybridised personae,
in their immaculate costumes, exist both as ex-colonial subjects and citizens of an occupying nation. The potential significance of the word “freedom” oscillates wildly: one of Fast’s interviewees (a Baptist
preacher in real life) “lives” in Colonial Williamsburg as a slave.
Another role-plays a moneyed housewife. “I only know this little window of what . . . my family and my children tell me . . . what little bit my husband might share with me of the world of politics and business,” she admits in a bitter tone, noting that “when you think about it, you feel like you’re being property and not human”. Time-wise, this comment becomes even more ambiguous when we see her burst into real tears over her three imaginary sons’ “deaths” in the war against the British. Working in Godville looks like it entails heavy-duty emotional
labour. Fast’s editing conjures a sympathetic but fraught and angry persona from his original material. Courtesy of rapid, nervous jump cuts, his subject’s yellow gloves are on her hands one second and lie in her lap the next. Her hands flash from one gesture to another in an incoherent yet bizarrely expressive semaphore. Sliding
between historical co-ordinates, her discontent cannot be anchored to a concrete cause. How could it be? She is not a “real person” but a (heavily overdetermined) symptom born of collective past and present circumstances.”
A long time ago, in the Moviegoer, Walker Percy noticed the reality deficit at the center of celebrity culture. That was back in the days of Kennedy. Ah, those rank and odious days that have never died, but putrified among us, a big gaseous giant strung out among a nationwide mausoleum of golden oldies and classic rock stations. The problem, though, is always taken up as though it is the celebrities problem. It is what journalism is mostly about. It is what politics is mostly about. It is the national desire. The desire not to be an extra. But LI is so tired of this desire. We’d like to see a revolt of the extras – some throwing off of our parasitism.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
fundraising and t shirts continued
PS -- after this went to press, Harry informed us that our illustration was a very rough sketch. See his comment for more.
As we said a few days ago, LI is going to make another stab at fundraising a la the public radio way. Our friend Harry from Scratchings sent us the above design for the tshirt. (Sorry if it is a bit blurry). He also told us some stuff about pricing and sizing, suggesting the t shirts go for $30 and over, and that the logo be put either on the back or on the shirt pocket. Actually, we 'd like more comments about this.
The public radio model of fund raising is, we admit, a little bland and smarmy. KUT in Austin raises bucks with a bit about how you should imagine that there was no public radio – such an apocalyptic vision would presumably put you in such a sweat that you’ll be making out checks like mad. Well, LI has no similar grip on the throat of the world spirit. We live on our non-necessity, like a drug habit. We’d like this fund raising bit to be more in line with the Stop Snitchin’ movement, as featured in the NYT the other day:
“The adoration of the outlaw is a durable feature of American culture, giving us romantic images of authority-defying individuals from Billy the Kid to Tony Soprano. And maybe this attraction has something to do with the recent and rather controversial success of a Boston clothier called Antonio Ansaldi, which has sold more than 10,000 T-shirts featuring a big red stop sign and the slogan "Stop Snitchin'."
Stop Snitchin' T-shirts are popular among young men in inner-city neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Jersey City and elsewhere - not just the shirts that Antonio Ansaldi makes but also a host of variations and knockoffs. Snitching, of course, refers to giving information to law enforcement that might result in an arrest for, say, drug dealing or murder. Last year, a DVD that circulated in Baltimore gained nationwide notoriety for showing self-professed drug dealers making explicit threats against snitches. Apparently opposition to cooperating with the police - and, by extension, to the rule of law itself - has a constituency. The Web site for Antonio Ansaldi features a group of unsmiling young African-Americans wearing the shirts under a graffiti-style sign reading, "Stop Snitchin': The Movement."
Unfortunately, the outlaw element of the Dopamine Cowboy Movement has not yet reached the attention of the gendarmerie, so don’t expect any similar, exciting drama from these shirts. No confronting the nightsticks of nativism, no being pulled over and harrassed. Sorry. But we suggest that you wear these shirts with sunglasses and an unsmiling demeanor, just to piss people off.
As for the contributions: you can use the Paypal thing. Or you can send checks to Roger Gathman, 615 Upson, #203 Austin Texas 78703. The main thing is to get your address to us.
Monday, October 10, 2005
goodbye schroeder
LI is pleased with the outcome today in Germany. The SPD’s eight cabinet posts include the foreign ministry, finance and labor. The “reforms” that are routinely urged on Germany – as if recently handed down on Mount Sinai – will surely be instituted with one eye on the one thing this election made clear: unlike NYT’s reporters, the Germans are not enthusiastic about Hobbesian homeopathy in the economy: make it easy to fire workers, make it harder for them to get unemployment, and let the rich aggrandize a larger share of the economic spoils. Firmly putting the brake on this Thatcherite nonsense is a good thing. A better thing is to take reflationary steps to strengthen the German economy, from loosening the credit markets to adopting Greenspan’s easy money policies. It is nice to read that the government is pledging to radically increase government supported R and D. The Germans are also obviously going to have to put a much larger percentage of it kids through college. Alas. Because the German industrial system hasn’t been pissed away, as it has been in the States and in the U.K., there’s an understandable incentive to trade years of education for well paying factory jobs. But it is hard to invent any scenario that would preserve or expand the manufacturing sector at its current level. We think that stuffing children into a system that is so inefficient at teaching them that it takes 22 years is not a good thing in itself – in fact, it is a standing inducement to educate poorly in elementary and high school – but it brings about good things. Most immediately, it soaks up a population that would inevitably increase the unemployment rolls (another American trick for keeping down employment, sending millions of people to jail for frivolous reasons, is not something we’d urge on the Germans). It also lends itself to making the labor markets more flexible.
Schroeder was by no means my ideal chancellor, but he did manage a difficult period in which the most powerful nation in the world was taken over by madmen. He did better on foreign policy than, say, Tony Blair, who chose the strategy of sympathetic lunacy over that of good natured resistance. However, with the SPD at the foreign ministry, Europe is still well guarded.
Schroeder was by no means my ideal chancellor, but he did manage a difficult period in which the most powerful nation in the world was taken over by madmen. He did better on foreign policy than, say, Tony Blair, who chose the strategy of sympathetic lunacy over that of good natured resistance. However, with the SPD at the foreign ministry, Europe is still well guarded.
notes, four pages from chapter five
1. T Shirts. After starting and stopping this a year ago, I am ready to start again on this project. For every 50 dollar contribution to LI, I'll send you a t shirt that reads Dopamine Cowboy Movement on the back, Limited Inc on the front. I'm gonna put some kind of announcement up in the column on the right later this week.
2. The following is four pages from chapter five. Comments are always welcome.
Joan Malcolm’s first New Yorker article was published in 1979, when she was 20, and a junior at Vassar. When she was twenty one, she took a leave of absence to travel to Europe; in another year she was writing for far too many publications to write an essay comparing and contrasting Hobbes and Locke on Government, or a paper on the influence of Japanese prints on Whistler (use examples), or to memorize the dates of the Jurassic and Mesozoic periods and what plant or animal life flourished within each (name three). Then her book came out, My Circus Animals; then there was a gold ring on her finger from leftist journalist Alex Stitching (a B&W of the couple in NME, an announcement in the Vows section of the NYT, and an announcement in the Houston Chronicle – to say the least, a unique constellation of media); then there wasn’t a gold ring in her nostril (Joan, an early adopter of punk fashion, found that it got in the way when she interviewed people); then the coming back to the States to the mingled culture shocks of Reagan and MTV. She did return to Vassar, in 1990, but it was to teach a course on American non-fiction. This was an appellation, incidentally, that she disliked. On her first day she told the class that she was teaching American fact, which was capacious enough to fit fiction in its back pocket, and tough enough to make the angels weep bloody tears. Non-fiction, she added, dourly, was a term used only by narcissists and those unbearable memoirists of upper class heroin addiction that were all the rage in certain circles.
The germ of Malcolm’s ‘79 article had been planted when she flew down to Houston in ’78 to attend a party for the cast of “Urban Cowboy” at her parents’ River Oaks digs. Dr. Bobbie Malcolm, through one of his multiple connections, had secured the official title of Physical Therapist to the production.
It was one of those Houston spring nights, when the atmosphere gets fat and sweats and pants and drinks. You think, you wish, that any minute it will rain. It merely sprinkles at 2 a.m. The raindrops feel dirty. There was a noisy crowd in the back yard, wolfing canapés, drinking up the wine, smoking joints. A lot of sniffing, too, a sound that had become common at all the parties Joan attended that year. And, for that matter, the year after, and the one after that. The great Age of Snow. Traffic of partygoers coming from the yard back into the house was greeted with formidably polar temperatures insinuated into all corners by the very effective central air, which was guided by a new and very expensive sensor system that monitored for different gradients of temperature across the house. A light suet of sweat would quickly form on skins; damp patches appeared under armpits of 100 % cotton shirts and silk blouses; salty beads would dribble down from foreheads into eyes; contact wearers would blink and squint, images becoming briefly aqueous before them. Those who remained in the back yard listened to a band performing on a stage that had been hastily erected back there by workmen earlier in the day, over the spot where the swimming pool had been filled in two years before when a neighbor’s kid drowned in it. The singer was a short man with a pale face and ink black, curly hair that came to a pointy crest in the front. Whenever he hit a high note, he opened his mouth so wide it threatened to split his face. He threw back his head. He pitched the note out. Then he would return to the song with a little bobbing motion, not missing a beat, flashing a white grin that showed an astonishing number of teeth. This was a game. There was too much money to keep fighting about the songlist, plus there were names here, his girlfriend had particularly underlined the names, she'd particularly hinted about lack of bread, squandered opportunity, self-involved musicians, the law student her mother had dug up just dying to go out with her. Some danced in front of the stage, cheek to cheek. Some waited for the high notes and applauded. Some wanted songs from the movie. The singer had been given a list by the party manager. None of the songs were country. There was Hit the Road, Jack, there was My Funny Valentine. The party manager had emphasized, stick with the song list. Lights spilled out of the big house onto the yard; wild, reeling shadows mixed with swaying clusters of partygoers.
Bobbie and Lettie Malcolm were at the summit of their power couple-dom in the spring of 1978. They had rather shocked Houston’s vieux garcons, the Farish and Hobby crowd, by tearing out a room in their 10,000 square foot Staub mansion and having it redesigned as a “Futurist Fitness space” (blue velour sofas and wall matting; a new thing called a personal computer –Bobbie was always an early adopter! – on a C curve, Vermont maple desk unit; five pieces of excruciating-looking exercise equipment, a study in chrome, silver, rubber, plastic which made the human body itself look like a thing that was both miserably designed and constructed of substandard material). Lettie could be seen, draped in a Versace sarong dress, her exquisite shoulders bare, among murders of de la Renta at the fundraiser for the Museum (or the Republican congressman, or Cambodian refugees in Thailand, or the expansion of the Zoo, or the symphony, the opera, green urban spaces, the summer Olympics in 1984 association, etc. etc.), but Lettie wasn’t dense: she knew that was still the poor girl at St. Katherine’s Episcopal School for Girls to River Oaks gentry. She’d heard the rumor that she was a charity girl. Charity my Texas ass, she would say. Bobbie would just look bemused, his large, assertive face above the chicken Cesar salad. Wilson Scholes paid in full so that his daughter could learn art appreciation, the history of Texas, and Shakespeare’s dramatic art at St. Kath’s. Leticia Scholes never starred in one of the drama club productions, she ran for editor of St. Kath’s Gazetteer and lost by a humiliating hundred votes (out of one hundred twenty cast), and as a lady in waiting to the Queen in her last year she was a good ten girls and who knows how many yards of gauze from the central royal personage; but by that time she’d discovered cigarettes, boys, and fast cars, and had staged her own Queen for a day with two boys the weekend before the prom. That led to a discreet visit to a Matmoras doctor two months later, about which the less said, the better.
Unlike Lettie, Doctor Bobbie did not trail family credits and discredits into this or any other Houston party, since Bobbie Malcolm was not from Houston, or New Orleans, or any part of Texas. This fact would be brought up in conversations three weeks from the night of the party, when the newspaper was full of Doctor Bobbie disappearing, a story that receded to the B section three weeks after that when it was reported that he’d fled to Venezuela on a fake passport. Meanwhile, his empire was falling in a ruin of fraudulent accounting and Las Vegas gambling debts around Lettie’s still delectable ears, the whorls of which had first borne the delicate explorations of Bobbie’s tongue so many years ago, and around the 2000 ears of his employees, and, finally, the fifty somewhat hairy and reddish ears of his partners. Once Bobbie reached Latin America he didn’t look back. Joan received five mysterious postcards (Love you, scribbled on the back of a picture of a mountain and a lake, an Indian and his pottery) over the next two years. Lettie claimed to have received a long and involved midnight call, once. Unofficially, the FBI agent on the case in Houston thought this was bullshit. The FBI claimed, two years later, to have tracked the absconding doctor to a small town on the Venezuelan-Colombian border, and to have been shown a badly decaying corpse that had been Gustave William , which was the name on Bobbie’s fake passport. The FBI failed to confirm this ID with extracts of bone, or tooth, or hair, since the body disappeared the next day. Agent L. Howard filed one last report; perhaps the fumbled business with the so called corpus delecti was not unconnected with the Cayman Island bank account Agent Howard opened two months later.
Doctor Bobbie came from the great Midwest, where broad faces and a certain Protestant wryness are dominant traits. The wryness is a bleached, distant remnant of Luther’s doctrine of free will – that torturous negotiation between the all too human heart and God’s insistent omniscience – and it offset, in Bobbie, a surprisingly amoral opportunism, as well as a general happiness in human company. Unlike Lettie, Bobbie was energized by high school – as, in life, he was energized by most things. He was the class president of Herbert Hoover High in Ames, Iowa, and in the speech he gave his fellow graduating seniors he reminded them that the future was before them. It was 1952, and heartland optimism struggled with the general perception that the world would blow up in the next decade. Two of the boys he addressed would go to Korea. One would die there. World events did not interfere with Bobbie, however, who rose, almost effortlessly, upward. As a young man, he inclined to bulkiness. Bulkiness, as every Lutheran knows, leads to fatness, but Bobbie was ahead of the curve on the whole weight issue. He lifted weights, he swam, he ran, he joined the college wrestling team and had his share of victories. No trophies, though. He was a good, reliable brother in his frat, the one who kept the keys at the party and drove the car home at the end of it. His first girlfriend was a banker’s daughter, and with her he experienced the golden delights of sex for the first time. In his junior year, they broke up, and Bobbie spend his golden delight on a series of other fine looking girls. To his credit, he never held the fact that he’d fucked a girl against her. That put him in a distinct psychological minority in his frat house. Bobbie’s idea was simply spread the pleasure. The key to Bobbie’s later exercise empire was that he never regarded exercise as a discipline. He never saw it as a form of punishment. He always saw it as a form of pleasure. He wanted the body to “get off” on it. That was his mantra. Get off on your jogging. Get off on your weights. Get off on the bicycle machine. Bobby never said what “getting off” actually meant, though.
In later years, Bobbie forgot exactly why he chose to pursue medicine at Rice; Rice is located in Houston, and Houston is hot, coastal, touched by Mexico and New Orleans, homicidal, sprawling, greedy. It was not a Herbert Hoover High kind of place, which for urban excitement went to Chicago, and never really ventured below St. Louis on the assumption that the South meant the Negro, and where the Negro agglomerated in too great a number, civilization was impossible. At Rice, Bobbie met an art history student. She wasn’t just Iowa pretty – with that stolid acceptance of the flesh in every working pore, ‘well put together’ as though pretty was just another product of the Protestant work ethic – but sexy. Her dyed blond hair was sexy; the way her miniskirt rode her rump was enough to give a doctor’s stethoscope a hard on; her eyes could suddenly go distant and Hollywood over a steak dinner in the Rice Club; she used her mouth, in their long sessions of lovemaking in Doctor Bobbie’s apartment in the University district, like she immensely enjoyed whatever she put in it; and in short, Lettie Scholes was the best thing since white on rice. Bobbie got a sense that her family was Houston gentry. As he was to learn, however, the doctrine and practice of Houston gentry is a collection of inscrutable clauses almost impossible for the outsider to understand. Bobbie quietly decided it was bullshit. Some nights, he almost convinced Lettie that he was right. It was money that counted, in the end, he told her.
In 1978, Bobbie Malcolm was forty five. His face, arms and legs were well known to that segment of Houston which rose early , due to an exercise show he hosted that came on at 6 a.m on Sundays. He had induced many a fifty year old woman to engage in physical contortions that would, in other circumstances, have given her husband grounds for divorce under Texas State Law, or even a sudden, justifiable blast of buckshot; the Melrose Bid a Wee Home for the aged swore by him, falling into collective frail windmills under his telegenic suggestion. He had a big face, a big neck, a burly chest, admirably solid thighs. His eyebrows were bushy and expressive, his grey eyes bulged slightly, his nose was a thick fleshy foothold, his cheeks were extensive. In season and out, his skin was the rich color of the ripe acorn. His hair was silvering nicely. His company, RYB, Inc., had added two franchises just in the past two months. Since founding the physical therapy service in 1971, Bobbie’s company had jumped from one unit in Houston to twenty, twelve in Houston and the rest across the state. RYB was planning on jumping the border into Louisiana. It was also planning on a unit in Las Vegas and a unit in Los Angeles, for which reason Doctor Bobbie was spending time out there. Lettie and the papers and the police discovered, too late, the gambling debts in Vegas, the phony expenses, the chippy in LA, all set up and (‘classic,” as Lettie liked to say, later) even taking acting classes. Doctor Bobbie was tapping his company, and had been for years. It was almost impossible to understand the accounting. It was almost impossible to track down all the places where the money was hidden. An S & L in Phoenix, a mutual fund out of Montreal, a shell company with headquarters in Panama City, Panama.
2. The following is four pages from chapter five. Comments are always welcome.
Joan Malcolm’s first New Yorker article was published in 1979, when she was 20, and a junior at Vassar. When she was twenty one, she took a leave of absence to travel to Europe; in another year she was writing for far too many publications to write an essay comparing and contrasting Hobbes and Locke on Government, or a paper on the influence of Japanese prints on Whistler (use examples), or to memorize the dates of the Jurassic and Mesozoic periods and what plant or animal life flourished within each (name three). Then her book came out, My Circus Animals; then there was a gold ring on her finger from leftist journalist Alex Stitching (a B&W of the couple in NME, an announcement in the Vows section of the NYT, and an announcement in the Houston Chronicle – to say the least, a unique constellation of media); then there wasn’t a gold ring in her nostril (Joan, an early adopter of punk fashion, found that it got in the way when she interviewed people); then the coming back to the States to the mingled culture shocks of Reagan and MTV. She did return to Vassar, in 1990, but it was to teach a course on American non-fiction. This was an appellation, incidentally, that she disliked. On her first day she told the class that she was teaching American fact, which was capacious enough to fit fiction in its back pocket, and tough enough to make the angels weep bloody tears. Non-fiction, she added, dourly, was a term used only by narcissists and those unbearable memoirists of upper class heroin addiction that were all the rage in certain circles.
The germ of Malcolm’s ‘79 article had been planted when she flew down to Houston in ’78 to attend a party for the cast of “Urban Cowboy” at her parents’ River Oaks digs. Dr. Bobbie Malcolm, through one of his multiple connections, had secured the official title of Physical Therapist to the production.
It was one of those Houston spring nights, when the atmosphere gets fat and sweats and pants and drinks. You think, you wish, that any minute it will rain. It merely sprinkles at 2 a.m. The raindrops feel dirty. There was a noisy crowd in the back yard, wolfing canapés, drinking up the wine, smoking joints. A lot of sniffing, too, a sound that had become common at all the parties Joan attended that year. And, for that matter, the year after, and the one after that. The great Age of Snow. Traffic of partygoers coming from the yard back into the house was greeted with formidably polar temperatures insinuated into all corners by the very effective central air, which was guided by a new and very expensive sensor system that monitored for different gradients of temperature across the house. A light suet of sweat would quickly form on skins; damp patches appeared under armpits of 100 % cotton shirts and silk blouses; salty beads would dribble down from foreheads into eyes; contact wearers would blink and squint, images becoming briefly aqueous before them. Those who remained in the back yard listened to a band performing on a stage that had been hastily erected back there by workmen earlier in the day, over the spot where the swimming pool had been filled in two years before when a neighbor’s kid drowned in it. The singer was a short man with a pale face and ink black, curly hair that came to a pointy crest in the front. Whenever he hit a high note, he opened his mouth so wide it threatened to split his face. He threw back his head. He pitched the note out. Then he would return to the song with a little bobbing motion, not missing a beat, flashing a white grin that showed an astonishing number of teeth. This was a game. There was too much money to keep fighting about the songlist, plus there were names here, his girlfriend had particularly underlined the names, she'd particularly hinted about lack of bread, squandered opportunity, self-involved musicians, the law student her mother had dug up just dying to go out with her. Some danced in front of the stage, cheek to cheek. Some waited for the high notes and applauded. Some wanted songs from the movie. The singer had been given a list by the party manager. None of the songs were country. There was Hit the Road, Jack, there was My Funny Valentine. The party manager had emphasized, stick with the song list. Lights spilled out of the big house onto the yard; wild, reeling shadows mixed with swaying clusters of partygoers.
Bobbie and Lettie Malcolm were at the summit of their power couple-dom in the spring of 1978. They had rather shocked Houston’s vieux garcons, the Farish and Hobby crowd, by tearing out a room in their 10,000 square foot Staub mansion and having it redesigned as a “Futurist Fitness space” (blue velour sofas and wall matting; a new thing called a personal computer –Bobbie was always an early adopter! – on a C curve, Vermont maple desk unit; five pieces of excruciating-looking exercise equipment, a study in chrome, silver, rubber, plastic which made the human body itself look like a thing that was both miserably designed and constructed of substandard material). Lettie could be seen, draped in a Versace sarong dress, her exquisite shoulders bare, among murders of de la Renta at the fundraiser for the Museum (or the Republican congressman, or Cambodian refugees in Thailand, or the expansion of the Zoo, or the symphony, the opera, green urban spaces, the summer Olympics in 1984 association, etc. etc.), but Lettie wasn’t dense: she knew that was still the poor girl at St. Katherine’s Episcopal School for Girls to River Oaks gentry. She’d heard the rumor that she was a charity girl. Charity my Texas ass, she would say. Bobbie would just look bemused, his large, assertive face above the chicken Cesar salad. Wilson Scholes paid in full so that his daughter could learn art appreciation, the history of Texas, and Shakespeare’s dramatic art at St. Kath’s. Leticia Scholes never starred in one of the drama club productions, she ran for editor of St. Kath’s Gazetteer and lost by a humiliating hundred votes (out of one hundred twenty cast), and as a lady in waiting to the Queen in her last year she was a good ten girls and who knows how many yards of gauze from the central royal personage; but by that time she’d discovered cigarettes, boys, and fast cars, and had staged her own Queen for a day with two boys the weekend before the prom. That led to a discreet visit to a Matmoras doctor two months later, about which the less said, the better.
Unlike Lettie, Doctor Bobbie did not trail family credits and discredits into this or any other Houston party, since Bobbie Malcolm was not from Houston, or New Orleans, or any part of Texas. This fact would be brought up in conversations three weeks from the night of the party, when the newspaper was full of Doctor Bobbie disappearing, a story that receded to the B section three weeks after that when it was reported that he’d fled to Venezuela on a fake passport. Meanwhile, his empire was falling in a ruin of fraudulent accounting and Las Vegas gambling debts around Lettie’s still delectable ears, the whorls of which had first borne the delicate explorations of Bobbie’s tongue so many years ago, and around the 2000 ears of his employees, and, finally, the fifty somewhat hairy and reddish ears of his partners. Once Bobbie reached Latin America he didn’t look back. Joan received five mysterious postcards (Love you, scribbled on the back of a picture of a mountain and a lake, an Indian and his pottery) over the next two years. Lettie claimed to have received a long and involved midnight call, once. Unofficially, the FBI agent on the case in Houston thought this was bullshit. The FBI claimed, two years later, to have tracked the absconding doctor to a small town on the Venezuelan-Colombian border, and to have been shown a badly decaying corpse that had been Gustave William , which was the name on Bobbie’s fake passport. The FBI failed to confirm this ID with extracts of bone, or tooth, or hair, since the body disappeared the next day. Agent L. Howard filed one last report; perhaps the fumbled business with the so called corpus delecti was not unconnected with the Cayman Island bank account Agent Howard opened two months later.
Doctor Bobbie came from the great Midwest, where broad faces and a certain Protestant wryness are dominant traits. The wryness is a bleached, distant remnant of Luther’s doctrine of free will – that torturous negotiation between the all too human heart and God’s insistent omniscience – and it offset, in Bobbie, a surprisingly amoral opportunism, as well as a general happiness in human company. Unlike Lettie, Bobbie was energized by high school – as, in life, he was energized by most things. He was the class president of Herbert Hoover High in Ames, Iowa, and in the speech he gave his fellow graduating seniors he reminded them that the future was before them. It was 1952, and heartland optimism struggled with the general perception that the world would blow up in the next decade. Two of the boys he addressed would go to Korea. One would die there. World events did not interfere with Bobbie, however, who rose, almost effortlessly, upward. As a young man, he inclined to bulkiness. Bulkiness, as every Lutheran knows, leads to fatness, but Bobbie was ahead of the curve on the whole weight issue. He lifted weights, he swam, he ran, he joined the college wrestling team and had his share of victories. No trophies, though. He was a good, reliable brother in his frat, the one who kept the keys at the party and drove the car home at the end of it. His first girlfriend was a banker’s daughter, and with her he experienced the golden delights of sex for the first time. In his junior year, they broke up, and Bobbie spend his golden delight on a series of other fine looking girls. To his credit, he never held the fact that he’d fucked a girl against her. That put him in a distinct psychological minority in his frat house. Bobbie’s idea was simply spread the pleasure. The key to Bobbie’s later exercise empire was that he never regarded exercise as a discipline. He never saw it as a form of punishment. He always saw it as a form of pleasure. He wanted the body to “get off” on it. That was his mantra. Get off on your jogging. Get off on your weights. Get off on the bicycle machine. Bobby never said what “getting off” actually meant, though.
In later years, Bobbie forgot exactly why he chose to pursue medicine at Rice; Rice is located in Houston, and Houston is hot, coastal, touched by Mexico and New Orleans, homicidal, sprawling, greedy. It was not a Herbert Hoover High kind of place, which for urban excitement went to Chicago, and never really ventured below St. Louis on the assumption that the South meant the Negro, and where the Negro agglomerated in too great a number, civilization was impossible. At Rice, Bobbie met an art history student. She wasn’t just Iowa pretty – with that stolid acceptance of the flesh in every working pore, ‘well put together’ as though pretty was just another product of the Protestant work ethic – but sexy. Her dyed blond hair was sexy; the way her miniskirt rode her rump was enough to give a doctor’s stethoscope a hard on; her eyes could suddenly go distant and Hollywood over a steak dinner in the Rice Club; she used her mouth, in their long sessions of lovemaking in Doctor Bobbie’s apartment in the University district, like she immensely enjoyed whatever she put in it; and in short, Lettie Scholes was the best thing since white on rice. Bobbie got a sense that her family was Houston gentry. As he was to learn, however, the doctrine and practice of Houston gentry is a collection of inscrutable clauses almost impossible for the outsider to understand. Bobbie quietly decided it was bullshit. Some nights, he almost convinced Lettie that he was right. It was money that counted, in the end, he told her.
In 1978, Bobbie Malcolm was forty five. His face, arms and legs were well known to that segment of Houston which rose early , due to an exercise show he hosted that came on at 6 a.m on Sundays. He had induced many a fifty year old woman to engage in physical contortions that would, in other circumstances, have given her husband grounds for divorce under Texas State Law, or even a sudden, justifiable blast of buckshot; the Melrose Bid a Wee Home for the aged swore by him, falling into collective frail windmills under his telegenic suggestion. He had a big face, a big neck, a burly chest, admirably solid thighs. His eyebrows were bushy and expressive, his grey eyes bulged slightly, his nose was a thick fleshy foothold, his cheeks were extensive. In season and out, his skin was the rich color of the ripe acorn. His hair was silvering nicely. His company, RYB, Inc., had added two franchises just in the past two months. Since founding the physical therapy service in 1971, Bobbie’s company had jumped from one unit in Houston to twenty, twelve in Houston and the rest across the state. RYB was planning on jumping the border into Louisiana. It was also planning on a unit in Las Vegas and a unit in Los Angeles, for which reason Doctor Bobbie was spending time out there. Lettie and the papers and the police discovered, too late, the gambling debts in Vegas, the phony expenses, the chippy in LA, all set up and (‘classic,” as Lettie liked to say, later) even taking acting classes. Doctor Bobbie was tapping his company, and had been for years. It was almost impossible to understand the accounting. It was almost impossible to track down all the places where the money was hidden. An S & L in Phoenix, a mutual fund out of Montreal, a shell company with headquarters in Panama City, Panama.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
perverse sibyl
“One is left with unappeased curiosity about the Sibyl. Wood says the Sibyl in Virgil's Aeneid is "perfectly clear," but that is hardly the case. The Sibyl tells Aeneas that the way down into the underworld is easy and that the hard thing is to get back. In the ensuing narrative Aeneas has great difficulty finding his way down and flits out with the greatest of ease—through the gate
of false dreams (!). The reader is left thinking, "What can she have meant?”
The quote above is from A.D. Nuttall’s review of Michael Wood’s book on oracles, The Road to Delphi.
Over at The Valve they had a discussion, earlier this week, about novels. The discussion attached to Ben Marcus’ attack on Jonathan Franzen’s line about novels – that the types of novels can be divided between contract and status, with contract being those novels that imply a contract with the reader – this is something you will like to read and feel entertained by -- and status being those that are written to make a place in the world of the novel. Franzen’s has pushed his case by making an argument that is, oddly enough, from status – that the novel will retain its status in it fight against other forms of entertainment by fulfilling its contract.
Myself, I think that Franzen is wrong to think that novels are competing with tv or paintball or movies. Cars don’t compete with airplanes, although cars and airplanes are in the same business of transporting people around. I much prefer the novelist as Virgil’s Sibyl, to whom we go for predictions of a sort.
To change the image: I’ve been reading a terrifically depressing memoir of a life among the death camps by Bela Zsolt, Nine Suitcases. Zsolt was caught up in the increasingly mortal sweeps of Hungarian Jews, but escaped death himself. The memoir is collected from notes he wrote. One of those notes recalls a scene in a synagogue, grotesquely crowded with dead and dying Jews awaiting transport to the camps. Zsolt is approached by a girl who has been told she has a chance of stopping the guard from beating her father to death if she will fuck him. She wants Zsolt’s advice. Ultimately, he doesn’t give her any, but it opens up a memory from 1942. He’s been sent out on a detail to the Russian front. The Hungarian government condemned certain Hungarian Jews to do crushing, menial tasks on the front. So Zsolt is in a battalion in the town of Skarzysko in Poland, and he passes by a lot of shacks in which Jewish women intended to service German soldiers were kept. One of the woman rushes to the fence:
“Another girl, in the last stages of pregnancy who was carrying some moldy bread in a music case, asked us: “Have you got any German books? I’ve just finished what I had today. I have a few days left to read a new one if it isn’t too long.” “Why have you only got a few days?” “Because then I’m going to die. Wait a moment…” and she counted on her fingers. “Seventeen or eighteen days. Then I’ll be in labor. Then they are going to take me behind the bushes and… bang. Dort is der Hurenfriedhof.”
That was where they killed and buried the girls, behind the bushes, because they didn’t want them to give birth to mongrels, and also simply because they were Jews. The girls didn’t mind becoming pregnant; they didn’t have the strength to commit suicide and this was the certain death they longed for. Meanwhile, they still enjoyed life, even their helpless bodies were forced to enjoy it – and they hated themselves for it. And sometimes they would even sing, if the soldiers made them drunk. They got the novels from the soldiers. These novels were about blonde German women and U-Boot sailors. They read them avidly, with the unlucky ones being taken away mid-novel and never knowing what happened next to the blonde and the captain. They would snatch a glance at the very end, however, before being loaded into the NSKK truck that disappeared with them behind the bushes.”
Those novels certainly fulfilled the contract to the very end. And War and Peace would certainly have been too long for the death wait. The novelist has a chance to be literally a sibyl, here, since the underworld is tangibly close – it is just in back, in fact, in the bushes. But I can’t help thinking that these sibyls were responsible for fulfilling their contract, and that the antics of the blonde girls and the U-Boat sailors might have been written into the history, the whole jigsaw puzzle of events, that placed the Jewish girls in the camp in Skarzysko. This is why I don’t think you can sign any contract whatsoever with the reader, that Franzen is promoting a false hope and a false dichotomy. Novelists are perverse sibyls, whose predictions, although immediately falsified, eventually take their revenge on life by gradually altering the conditions by which we judge the lifelike and the artificial.
of false dreams (!). The reader is left thinking, "What can she have meant?”
The quote above is from A.D. Nuttall’s review of Michael Wood’s book on oracles, The Road to Delphi.
Over at The Valve they had a discussion, earlier this week, about novels. The discussion attached to Ben Marcus’ attack on Jonathan Franzen’s line about novels – that the types of novels can be divided between contract and status, with contract being those novels that imply a contract with the reader – this is something you will like to read and feel entertained by -- and status being those that are written to make a place in the world of the novel. Franzen’s has pushed his case by making an argument that is, oddly enough, from status – that the novel will retain its status in it fight against other forms of entertainment by fulfilling its contract.
Myself, I think that Franzen is wrong to think that novels are competing with tv or paintball or movies. Cars don’t compete with airplanes, although cars and airplanes are in the same business of transporting people around. I much prefer the novelist as Virgil’s Sibyl, to whom we go for predictions of a sort.
To change the image: I’ve been reading a terrifically depressing memoir of a life among the death camps by Bela Zsolt, Nine Suitcases. Zsolt was caught up in the increasingly mortal sweeps of Hungarian Jews, but escaped death himself. The memoir is collected from notes he wrote. One of those notes recalls a scene in a synagogue, grotesquely crowded with dead and dying Jews awaiting transport to the camps. Zsolt is approached by a girl who has been told she has a chance of stopping the guard from beating her father to death if she will fuck him. She wants Zsolt’s advice. Ultimately, he doesn’t give her any, but it opens up a memory from 1942. He’s been sent out on a detail to the Russian front. The Hungarian government condemned certain Hungarian Jews to do crushing, menial tasks on the front. So Zsolt is in a battalion in the town of Skarzysko in Poland, and he passes by a lot of shacks in which Jewish women intended to service German soldiers were kept. One of the woman rushes to the fence:
“Another girl, in the last stages of pregnancy who was carrying some moldy bread in a music case, asked us: “Have you got any German books? I’ve just finished what I had today. I have a few days left to read a new one if it isn’t too long.” “Why have you only got a few days?” “Because then I’m going to die. Wait a moment…” and she counted on her fingers. “Seventeen or eighteen days. Then I’ll be in labor. Then they are going to take me behind the bushes and… bang. Dort is der Hurenfriedhof.”
That was where they killed and buried the girls, behind the bushes, because they didn’t want them to give birth to mongrels, and also simply because they were Jews. The girls didn’t mind becoming pregnant; they didn’t have the strength to commit suicide and this was the certain death they longed for. Meanwhile, they still enjoyed life, even their helpless bodies were forced to enjoy it – and they hated themselves for it. And sometimes they would even sing, if the soldiers made them drunk. They got the novels from the soldiers. These novels were about blonde German women and U-Boot sailors. They read them avidly, with the unlucky ones being taken away mid-novel and never knowing what happened next to the blonde and the captain. They would snatch a glance at the very end, however, before being loaded into the NSKK truck that disappeared with them behind the bushes.”
Those novels certainly fulfilled the contract to the very end. And War and Peace would certainly have been too long for the death wait. The novelist has a chance to be literally a sibyl, here, since the underworld is tangibly close – it is just in back, in fact, in the bushes. But I can’t help thinking that these sibyls were responsible for fulfilling their contract, and that the antics of the blonde girls and the U-Boat sailors might have been written into the history, the whole jigsaw puzzle of events, that placed the Jewish girls in the camp in Skarzysko. This is why I don’t think you can sign any contract whatsoever with the reader, that Franzen is promoting a false hope and a false dichotomy. Novelists are perverse sibyls, whose predictions, although immediately falsified, eventually take their revenge on life by gradually altering the conditions by which we judge the lifelike and the artificial.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Terrorist plots and me
This is a week the angels unseal the seals, rolls are put into the mouths of prophets, and Bush reveals the terrorist plots that his administration has cleverly foiled. In that spirit, we thought we might list a few terrorist plots LI has foiled:
1. The Little Rock airliner plot: In mid-2003 LI and a partner disrupted a plot to spread airplane glue all over the tarmac of the Little Rock airport, which would not only have stuck aircraft to the ground but given Little Rockians those terrific glue sniffing headaches.
2. The 2003 Karachi plot: In the spring of 2003 LI. and a partner disrupted a plot to draw horns on posters depicting Pakistans biggest patron of democracy and president for life, your friend and mine, runner up for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Medicine, and Peace, General Musharraf in Karachi, Pakistan.
3. The 2004 Oz plot. In the fall of 2004, LI and a scarecrow and a cowardly lion disrupted a plot by a witch to overthrow the president for life of Oz and our very good friend, the Wizard. Mission also saved dog, Toto, from said terrorist witch.
Now, I know many readers wonder whether LI, like our President, gets regular messages from God telling us where the terrorists are hiding and what they are going to do next. But this is a big misunderstanding. According to Scott McClellan, it is absurd to say that God talks to the President. Or, rather, this happened:
“In [a] BBC film, a former Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, says that Mr Bush told a Palestinian delegation in 2003 that God spoke to him and said: "George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan" and also "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq".
During a White House press briefing, Mr McClellan said: "No, that's absurd. He's never made such comments."
Mr McClellan admitted he was not at the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in June 2003 when Mr Bush supposedly revealed the extent of his religious fervour.
However, he said he had checked into the claims and "I stand by what I just said".
McClellan didn’t elaborate, but our sources say that he ran into God at a Heritage Foundation meeting on Averting Terrorist Plots for Fun and Profit. God said that, as far as he remembered, he only told the President that joke about the woman with the pegleg who got married to the one eyed man. God then asked if Mr. McClellan had heard the one about the terrorist who came home and found his wife in bed with the milkman. This is why McClellan hates running into God – he not only looks like LBJ, but he has a pottymouth like LBJ.
In any case … LI urges our readers to reveal to loved ones and strangers, using our comments section if necessary, terrorist plots that you have averted. The president is right: this is no time for modesty or shyness.
1. The Little Rock airliner plot: In mid-2003 LI and a partner disrupted a plot to spread airplane glue all over the tarmac of the Little Rock airport, which would not only have stuck aircraft to the ground but given Little Rockians those terrific glue sniffing headaches.
2. The 2003 Karachi plot: In the spring of 2003 LI. and a partner disrupted a plot to draw horns on posters depicting Pakistans biggest patron of democracy and president for life, your friend and mine, runner up for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Medicine, and Peace, General Musharraf in Karachi, Pakistan.
3. The 2004 Oz plot. In the fall of 2004, LI and a scarecrow and a cowardly lion disrupted a plot by a witch to overthrow the president for life of Oz and our very good friend, the Wizard. Mission also saved dog, Toto, from said terrorist witch.
Now, I know many readers wonder whether LI, like our President, gets regular messages from God telling us where the terrorists are hiding and what they are going to do next. But this is a big misunderstanding. According to Scott McClellan, it is absurd to say that God talks to the President. Or, rather, this happened:
“In [a] BBC film, a former Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, says that Mr Bush told a Palestinian delegation in 2003 that God spoke to him and said: "George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan" and also "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq".
During a White House press briefing, Mr McClellan said: "No, that's absurd. He's never made such comments."
Mr McClellan admitted he was not at the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in June 2003 when Mr Bush supposedly revealed the extent of his religious fervour.
However, he said he had checked into the claims and "I stand by what I just said".
McClellan didn’t elaborate, but our sources say that he ran into God at a Heritage Foundation meeting on Averting Terrorist Plots for Fun and Profit. God said that, as far as he remembered, he only told the President that joke about the woman with the pegleg who got married to the one eyed man. God then asked if Mr. McClellan had heard the one about the terrorist who came home and found his wife in bed with the milkman. This is why McClellan hates running into God – he not only looks like LBJ, but he has a pottymouth like LBJ.
In any case … LI urges our readers to reveal to loved ones and strangers, using our comments section if necessary, terrorist plots that you have averted. The president is right: this is no time for modesty or shyness.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
ps
ps -- we wrote the last post before we went to the Dailywarnews and found the Iraqi PM's response to Blair's tinny warmongering:
"BAGHDAD: Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has denied British claims Iran has been assisting insurgents in Iraq and meddling in its politics.
"Such accusations are baseless and we do not agree with them at all," Jaafari said on Iranian state television Thursday. "Relations between Iran and Iraq are currently very friendly and strong and expanding. We are proud of the situation."
My guess is that this item from the Kerala news will appear in the Washington Post, if at all, on page A16. The truth about our "allies" in Iraq is systematically censored in the press, who are, after all, loyal members of the oligarchy.
PPS -- well, I'm a hundred percent today. The WP story on the incident doesn't mention Jaafari's denial once. The good thing about having a press run as a propaganda machine for the imperialist ambitions of low rent D.C. jingoists is that it is so predictable.
"BAGHDAD: Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has denied British claims Iran has been assisting insurgents in Iraq and meddling in its politics.
"Such accusations are baseless and we do not agree with them at all," Jaafari said on Iranian state television Thursday. "Relations between Iran and Iraq are currently very friendly and strong and expanding. We are proud of the situation."
My guess is that this item from the Kerala news will appear in the Washington Post, if at all, on page A16. The truth about our "allies" in Iraq is systematically censored in the press, who are, after all, loyal members of the oligarchy.
PPS -- well, I'm a hundred percent today. The WP story on the incident doesn't mention Jaafari's denial once. The good thing about having a press run as a propaganda machine for the imperialist ambitions of low rent D.C. jingoists is that it is so predictable.
an evening redness in Iraq
Following up on LI’s last post, about miracles, there is a story in the Guardian today that begins with a sentence that could have been ripped from the Victorian book of prejudices:
“Italy remains a profoundly superstitious country and there was uproar recently when a group of scientists queried a religious rite in Naples in which the dried blood of a saint beheaded in AD305 "miraculously" liquefies.”
Ah, those superstitious Italians, always being fooled by the priestly caste. The superstition in question is the famous transformation of a liquid in two vials in Naples into blood on the Feast of San Gennaro:
“This time, members of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of the Paranormal (Cicap) have said the red-coloured contents are a thixotropic substance, based on iron chloride. This means that it liquefies when stirred or vibrated and returns to solid form when left to stand. According to Cicap, the substance was probably stumbled upon by an alchemist or a painter in medieval times.
Attempts to explode the myth about Naples' much-loved patron saint has however, reignited the debate about science versus faith in Italy.
Members of Cicap, who include Umberto Eco and two winners of the Nobel Prize, have been accused of trying to undermine the religious beliefs of the dwindling numbers of the faithful. They have also been called spoilsports and compared to magicians who reveal their tricks.”
Compare this story (funny foreigners will believe anything!) with the headline story, in which the funny, credulous PM proclaims that Iran is importing weapons into Iraq. Of course, this isn’t superstition – this is merely lying to buttress a shabby imperial venture that is falling apart. The PM’s proclamation comes after a meeting with the favorite Iraqi government official, Jalal Talabani, the for show liberal secularist for foreign consumption. Far more interesting would have been a meeting with Iraq’s PM, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whose first act was to go to Teheran and apologize profusely for the Iraq-Iranian war.
The deep level of the press’s complicity and ignorance regarding the Iraqi debacle is shown by the way in which stories like this are simply shoved down the chute, instead of provoking the question: why would Iran try to destabilize a state headed by a group Iran nurtured for twenty years? Hasn’t the very government that British soldiers are fighting to protect, the “democratically elected” Iraqi government, said over and over again that it wants a military alliance with Iran? What part of that doesn’t the PM get?
As we have repeated ad nauseam, the policy of Double Containment was one of the chief causes that Saddam Hussein retained power in Iraq during the nineties. The policy is being retained by the ever superstitious British, who obviously believe in miracles much more harmful than a little redness showing up in two vials on San Gennaro’s feast day. There’s a whole lotta redness showing up on the streets and fields of Iraq, and no magic wand will transform it into the blood of liberation.
“Italy remains a profoundly superstitious country and there was uproar recently when a group of scientists queried a religious rite in Naples in which the dried blood of a saint beheaded in AD305 "miraculously" liquefies.”
Ah, those superstitious Italians, always being fooled by the priestly caste. The superstition in question is the famous transformation of a liquid in two vials in Naples into blood on the Feast of San Gennaro:
“This time, members of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of the Paranormal (Cicap) have said the red-coloured contents are a thixotropic substance, based on iron chloride. This means that it liquefies when stirred or vibrated and returns to solid form when left to stand. According to Cicap, the substance was probably stumbled upon by an alchemist or a painter in medieval times.
Attempts to explode the myth about Naples' much-loved patron saint has however, reignited the debate about science versus faith in Italy.
Members of Cicap, who include Umberto Eco and two winners of the Nobel Prize, have been accused of trying to undermine the religious beliefs of the dwindling numbers of the faithful. They have also been called spoilsports and compared to magicians who reveal their tricks.”
Compare this story (funny foreigners will believe anything!) with the headline story, in which the funny, credulous PM proclaims that Iran is importing weapons into Iraq. Of course, this isn’t superstition – this is merely lying to buttress a shabby imperial venture that is falling apart. The PM’s proclamation comes after a meeting with the favorite Iraqi government official, Jalal Talabani, the for show liberal secularist for foreign consumption. Far more interesting would have been a meeting with Iraq’s PM, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whose first act was to go to Teheran and apologize profusely for the Iraq-Iranian war.
The deep level of the press’s complicity and ignorance regarding the Iraqi debacle is shown by the way in which stories like this are simply shoved down the chute, instead of provoking the question: why would Iran try to destabilize a state headed by a group Iran nurtured for twenty years? Hasn’t the very government that British soldiers are fighting to protect, the “democratically elected” Iraqi government, said over and over again that it wants a military alliance with Iran? What part of that doesn’t the PM get?
As we have repeated ad nauseam, the policy of Double Containment was one of the chief causes that Saddam Hussein retained power in Iraq during the nineties. The policy is being retained by the ever superstitious British, who obviously believe in miracles much more harmful than a little redness showing up in two vials on San Gennaro’s feast day. There’s a whole lotta redness showing up on the streets and fields of Iraq, and no magic wand will transform it into the blood of liberation.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
suspensio legis naturae
Notes
a. We haven’t thanked the people who have been sending us money for this site. Recently, two readers shuffled LI two hundred and fifteen bucks, which is the equivalent of four NYT special services fees. We are touched. Sorry we took so long to acknowledge your generosity.
b. On the editing front, we’d also like to thank readers who emailed us with suggestions about improving our site. A couple have told us that they will use send our letter to people they know who require editing/writing/translating, etc. We are going to insert that letter, in its various forms, every week on LI, to keep it visual.
c. Finally, a correction. Our last post incorrectly implied that I was the only member of the dopamine cowboy movement. Our correspondent, T., in NYC reminded us he is a dopamine cowboy. Actually, we meant to say that the whole LI collective, with branches in Washoogle,Washington and New York City and Barcelona, are members of the dopamine cowboy movement.
….
The Welt article we wrote about yesterday cited some figure for the revenues of the gambling industry in the U.S.A that was supposed to show that gambling is bigger than the entertainment industry and – I forget, three other sectors. There was no source for the figures, although since they are the same as those in a Time Magazine article this summer (which is similarly unsourced), we presume that they were quietly lifted from the latter.
LI finds it a very ponderable fact that, in the same nation where an arguable majority rejects the idea of Darwinian evolution, so much is spent on games of chance. The argument against Darwinian evolution almost invariably proceeds from the idea that chance can’t explain life. But since this antipathy to chance coexists with the compulsion to stake sums upon it, one wonders how the two impulses are intellectually reconciled.
Which, of course, brings us to Aviezer Tucker’s article, MIRACLES, HISTORICAL TESTIMONIES, AND PROBABILITIES in this season’s History and Memory. Tucker’s thesis is that Hume’s famous essay on miracles, which is usually read in terms of Hume’s philosophy, should be read in terms of Hume’s historiography. Tucker contends that Hume’s essay makes two blunders:
a. Hume gives an anachronistic definition of “miracle.” According to Hume, a miracle is an event that violates physical law. According to Tucker, however, the ancient Greek and Hebrew idea of miracle is something on the order of divine weightlifting.
“Given the absence of a concept of universal law of nature prior to the seventeenth century, Hume’s definition of miracles is clearly anachronistic, ahistorical. A cursory search in the library of rabbinical literature does not divulge any conceptual connection between miracles and scientific laws prior to the twentieth century. A similarly cursory examination of Catholic theology reveals the consideration of miracles as suspensio legis naturae, but only in the twentieth century.
It is extremely unlikely that anybody could have associated miracles with scientific laws prior to the seventeenth century. Perhaps Hume and his eighteenthcentury contemporaries on either side of the debate wanted to say that the world is governed either by God or by natural laws, but not by both, as a metaphysical reflection of the Enlightenment political conflict between religion and science. So if miracles are not divinely produced violations of the laws of nature, what are they? A definition of miracles that fits all the paradigmatic cases mentioned above and the Bible would be something along the line of “divine feats of strength.””
b. Given this idea of the miracle, those miracles in the Bible that Hume examines should not be considered in the light of violations of the laws discovered by the physicists, but rather, in light of the sources of historical fact. What are we to make of testimonies to divine feats of strength (making the sun stand still, for instance, over a battlefield)? Tucker’s example is a little less cosmologically complex:
“Philosophers have been trying to assess the posterior probability of concrete miracle hypotheses, for example, that Moses parted the Red Sea (actually this should be the “Reed Sea,” as the original King James translation had it correctly before a fateful typographical mistake “miraculously” transmuted the shallow Bamboo Sea into a deep Red Sea). Hume and his Bayesian explicators 10 examine the posterior probability of a miracle hypothesis, given the evidence (most notably testimonies), background knowledge, and theories in isolation from alternative competing hypotheses that explain the same scope of evidence.”
Tucker’s program, in this article, is to claim that miracles have a place in historiography insofar as they are attested to by witnesses. But it is here that something goes a little wrong with his argument:
"Likewise, it is not reasonable for people to relinquish their faith in particular miracle hypotheses until better explanations of the evidence are proposed. As Salmon and Sober have argued, it is neither realistic nor interesting to examine one isolated hypothesis, in our case the literal truth of the evidence for a miracle, without comparing it with its alternatives.14
It has been recognized at least since Roman law that multiple independent witnesses increase the posterior probability of what they agree on: testis unis, testis nullus. The reason is the low likelihood of agreement between false independent testimonies. To borrow Laplace’s example, if one number is randomly drawn in
a lottery from the first one hundred numbers, the likelihood of any given number being reported falsely by a deceptive witness is 1:99. If two independent witnesses report the same number, the likelihood of this coincidence given deception is (1:99)2; if three witnesses agree, the probability of deception is (1:99)3;
and so on.”
The problem with this argument, to LI’s mind, is that it turns, below the surface, his argument that miracles are intensional – dependent on a belief of the testifiers – rather than extensional, as Hume mistakenly believed, back to Hume’s own interpretation of miracles. If one clears the space by claiming that miracles are only feats of divine strength, then the historical interest in the claim that a miracle has occurred is what would make the witnesses move to the intensional stance of calling event X a miracle. The probabilities, here, shift to the beliefs of the testifiers (given a random set of Egytians and Hebrews, for instance, how many would be inclined to call the parting of the Reed sea a miracle) rather than the factuality of the thing testified to. In fact, by pursuing the question as though it were a question about the event X rather than belief about the event X, Tucker undermines his notion that Hume’s anachronism consisted in seeing event X as a violation of natural law. Granted, physical law in the Newtonian sense didn’t exist for the ancient Greeks and Romans. However, the idea that a miracle requires many witnesses seems to indicate that the belief about the test of divine strength is itself dependent on beliefs about how events occur.
“The case for multiple independent witnesses of miracles was articulated philosophically by the Spanish-Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi in his twelfth-century, Arabic-language, Platonic-style dialogue The Kuzari. In this dialogue Halevi listed the criteria for independence of evidence for belief in miracles: Miracles, intercourse between God and humans, must take place “in the presence of great multitudes, who saw it distinctly, and did not learn it from reports and traditions. Even then they must examine the matter carefully and repeatedly, so that no suspicion of imagination or magic can enter their minds.”17 Halevi presented the revelation on Mount Sinai as fitting these criteria.”
Now, in one way Tucker’s idea fits in quite nicely with the idea that the revelation at Mount Sinai is evidence of divine strength in competition with other gods. That would explain the first commandment, and Moses’ problem with the dancing about the golden calf. But Tucker can’t help but continue to pick at the idea that a miracle is about the probability of the event. Tucker seems a little blind to the contradiction in his own account, with his ultimate point (that historians operate rationally by including miraculous events in a true historical account, contra Hume) begs the question of his dependent point (showing that miracles are possible, thus acceding to the general lines of the argument as Hume has shaped it). Our point is not to harp on the antinomies in Tucker’s article, but to get back to the beliefs of the set of people who describe certain events as miracles. I imagine that this set of people, in America, would include both those people who subscribe to the divine design theory of the earth and life upon it, and those people who think that certain lottery numbers are lucky, or that they have developed a system for betting at roulette. Luck, in this belief system, can be good or bad. It can also be earned.
From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is extremely anxiety making. The luck of the survivor isn’t ultimately earned – but is a new piece of the old luck, the mutation that simply happens to be advantageous given the circumstances of a certain ecological niche. The luck of the human and the luck of the dodo are the same kinds of luck. One is merely not presently extinct. Living beyond Good and Evil is relatively easy, compared to living beyond good and bad luck.
a. We haven’t thanked the people who have been sending us money for this site. Recently, two readers shuffled LI two hundred and fifteen bucks, which is the equivalent of four NYT special services fees. We are touched. Sorry we took so long to acknowledge your generosity.
b. On the editing front, we’d also like to thank readers who emailed us with suggestions about improving our site. A couple have told us that they will use send our letter to people they know who require editing/writing/translating, etc. We are going to insert that letter, in its various forms, every week on LI, to keep it visual.
c. Finally, a correction. Our last post incorrectly implied that I was the only member of the dopamine cowboy movement. Our correspondent, T., in NYC reminded us he is a dopamine cowboy. Actually, we meant to say that the whole LI collective, with branches in Washoogle,Washington and New York City and Barcelona, are members of the dopamine cowboy movement.
….
The Welt article we wrote about yesterday cited some figure for the revenues of the gambling industry in the U.S.A that was supposed to show that gambling is bigger than the entertainment industry and – I forget, three other sectors. There was no source for the figures, although since they are the same as those in a Time Magazine article this summer (which is similarly unsourced), we presume that they were quietly lifted from the latter.
LI finds it a very ponderable fact that, in the same nation where an arguable majority rejects the idea of Darwinian evolution, so much is spent on games of chance. The argument against Darwinian evolution almost invariably proceeds from the idea that chance can’t explain life. But since this antipathy to chance coexists with the compulsion to stake sums upon it, one wonders how the two impulses are intellectually reconciled.
Which, of course, brings us to Aviezer Tucker’s article, MIRACLES, HISTORICAL TESTIMONIES, AND PROBABILITIES in this season’s History and Memory. Tucker’s thesis is that Hume’s famous essay on miracles, which is usually read in terms of Hume’s philosophy, should be read in terms of Hume’s historiography. Tucker contends that Hume’s essay makes two blunders:
a. Hume gives an anachronistic definition of “miracle.” According to Hume, a miracle is an event that violates physical law. According to Tucker, however, the ancient Greek and Hebrew idea of miracle is something on the order of divine weightlifting.
“Given the absence of a concept of universal law of nature prior to the seventeenth century, Hume’s definition of miracles is clearly anachronistic, ahistorical. A cursory search in the library of rabbinical literature does not divulge any conceptual connection between miracles and scientific laws prior to the twentieth century. A similarly cursory examination of Catholic theology reveals the consideration of miracles as suspensio legis naturae, but only in the twentieth century.
It is extremely unlikely that anybody could have associated miracles with scientific laws prior to the seventeenth century. Perhaps Hume and his eighteenthcentury contemporaries on either side of the debate wanted to say that the world is governed either by God or by natural laws, but not by both, as a metaphysical reflection of the Enlightenment political conflict between religion and science. So if miracles are not divinely produced violations of the laws of nature, what are they? A definition of miracles that fits all the paradigmatic cases mentioned above and the Bible would be something along the line of “divine feats of strength.””
b. Given this idea of the miracle, those miracles in the Bible that Hume examines should not be considered in the light of violations of the laws discovered by the physicists, but rather, in light of the sources of historical fact. What are we to make of testimonies to divine feats of strength (making the sun stand still, for instance, over a battlefield)? Tucker’s example is a little less cosmologically complex:
“Philosophers have been trying to assess the posterior probability of concrete miracle hypotheses, for example, that Moses parted the Red Sea (actually this should be the “Reed Sea,” as the original King James translation had it correctly before a fateful typographical mistake “miraculously” transmuted the shallow Bamboo Sea into a deep Red Sea). Hume and his Bayesian explicators 10 examine the posterior probability of a miracle hypothesis, given the evidence (most notably testimonies), background knowledge, and theories in isolation from alternative competing hypotheses that explain the same scope of evidence.”
Tucker’s program, in this article, is to claim that miracles have a place in historiography insofar as they are attested to by witnesses. But it is here that something goes a little wrong with his argument:
"Likewise, it is not reasonable for people to relinquish their faith in particular miracle hypotheses until better explanations of the evidence are proposed. As Salmon and Sober have argued, it is neither realistic nor interesting to examine one isolated hypothesis, in our case the literal truth of the evidence for a miracle, without comparing it with its alternatives.14
It has been recognized at least since Roman law that multiple independent witnesses increase the posterior probability of what they agree on: testis unis, testis nullus. The reason is the low likelihood of agreement between false independent testimonies. To borrow Laplace’s example, if one number is randomly drawn in
a lottery from the first one hundred numbers, the likelihood of any given number being reported falsely by a deceptive witness is 1:99. If two independent witnesses report the same number, the likelihood of this coincidence given deception is (1:99)2; if three witnesses agree, the probability of deception is (1:99)3;
and so on.”
The problem with this argument, to LI’s mind, is that it turns, below the surface, his argument that miracles are intensional – dependent on a belief of the testifiers – rather than extensional, as Hume mistakenly believed, back to Hume’s own interpretation of miracles. If one clears the space by claiming that miracles are only feats of divine strength, then the historical interest in the claim that a miracle has occurred is what would make the witnesses move to the intensional stance of calling event X a miracle. The probabilities, here, shift to the beliefs of the testifiers (given a random set of Egytians and Hebrews, for instance, how many would be inclined to call the parting of the Reed sea a miracle) rather than the factuality of the thing testified to. In fact, by pursuing the question as though it were a question about the event X rather than belief about the event X, Tucker undermines his notion that Hume’s anachronism consisted in seeing event X as a violation of natural law. Granted, physical law in the Newtonian sense didn’t exist for the ancient Greeks and Romans. However, the idea that a miracle requires many witnesses seems to indicate that the belief about the test of divine strength is itself dependent on beliefs about how events occur.
“The case for multiple independent witnesses of miracles was articulated philosophically by the Spanish-Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi in his twelfth-century, Arabic-language, Platonic-style dialogue The Kuzari. In this dialogue Halevi listed the criteria for independence of evidence for belief in miracles: Miracles, intercourse between God and humans, must take place “in the presence of great multitudes, who saw it distinctly, and did not learn it from reports and traditions. Even then they must examine the matter carefully and repeatedly, so that no suspicion of imagination or magic can enter their minds.”17 Halevi presented the revelation on Mount Sinai as fitting these criteria.”
Now, in one way Tucker’s idea fits in quite nicely with the idea that the revelation at Mount Sinai is evidence of divine strength in competition with other gods. That would explain the first commandment, and Moses’ problem with the dancing about the golden calf. But Tucker can’t help but continue to pick at the idea that a miracle is about the probability of the event. Tucker seems a little blind to the contradiction in his own account, with his ultimate point (that historians operate rationally by including miraculous events in a true historical account, contra Hume) begs the question of his dependent point (showing that miracles are possible, thus acceding to the general lines of the argument as Hume has shaped it). Our point is not to harp on the antinomies in Tucker’s article, but to get back to the beliefs of the set of people who describe certain events as miracles. I imagine that this set of people, in America, would include both those people who subscribe to the divine design theory of the earth and life upon it, and those people who think that certain lottery numbers are lucky, or that they have developed a system for betting at roulette. Luck, in this belief system, can be good or bad. It can also be earned.
From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is extremely anxiety making. The luck of the survivor isn’t ultimately earned – but is a new piece of the old luck, the mutation that simply happens to be advantageous given the circumstances of a certain ecological niche. The luck of the human and the luck of the dodo are the same kinds of luck. One is merely not presently extinct. Living beyond Good and Evil is relatively easy, compared to living beyond good and bad luck.
Monday, October 03, 2005
the dopamine cowboy movement
The “Literary World”, Die Welt’s book supplement, is not a place I’d generally go to find explanations for the particular warp of the American grain at the present moment. So I was surprised to find an explanation for everything, everything that has happened since Reagan was elected president, in the first two paragraphs of review article by Uwe Schmitt:
“Usually the American journal, the Archives of Neurology, only offers the layman news of the obscure impulse inherent in his bankruptcy or obituary. But this summer, when the journal reported that the drug Mirapex, which is used by Parkinson’s patience, can drive those patients to gamble, the readership increased. The study by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota showed abrupt personality changes in a test group: eleven of thirty patients became compulsive gamblers and lost, in half a year, up to 200,000 dollars. The families and heirs of the selected patients were not amused.
Six of eleven patients could not curb their eating, drinking, sex and purchasing. After being taken off the drug, it was “like a light was switched off”, and they became as they had been. All assurances by the professors that these were at most one percent of the hundreds of thousands that have been treated successfully did not stop fantasies from spreading, in a land where, on TV, on the Internet, and in Indian casinos a dizzying intoxication of gambling reigns. You could bet that some novels and screemplays would certainly come out of this tragicomic gambling therapy.”
It is always nice and scientific to narrow the range of suspects to one. The John Birchers always suspected that fluoridating our drinking water was weakening our vital fluids. Saps! They should have been looking for the dark presences that are obviously lurking around our water supply organizations, tossing in the Mirapex. And we thought Rove was just tied up with Diebold.
So we checked on this factoid, to see if anybody else had tripped over it and discovered the key to the kingdom. The fall of the roman empire, as any middlebrow knows, was caused by lead pipes. Since the link between chemically induced dementia and the collapse of imperial borders has already become one of the things you would expect Pecuchet to bring up in conversation, we were a little surprised that nobody has brought up the obvious: the Mayo Clinic chemically concocted an exact replica of American culture.
Perhaps this was behind that plot line in this summer’s Batman. The evidence accumulates!
Actually, a long time ago I decided that, instead of postmodernism, or post structuralism, or any ism, I wanted to belong to the aesthetic and philosophical movement known as the dopamine cowboys. I was, at the time, the only member. I still am. But apparently I had unconsciously struck on something. As Walt Whitman used to say, I am large, I contain multitudes.
“Usually the American journal, the Archives of Neurology, only offers the layman news of the obscure impulse inherent in his bankruptcy or obituary. But this summer, when the journal reported that the drug Mirapex, which is used by Parkinson’s patience, can drive those patients to gamble, the readership increased. The study by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota showed abrupt personality changes in a test group: eleven of thirty patients became compulsive gamblers and lost, in half a year, up to 200,000 dollars. The families and heirs of the selected patients were not amused.
Six of eleven patients could not curb their eating, drinking, sex and purchasing. After being taken off the drug, it was “like a light was switched off”, and they became as they had been. All assurances by the professors that these were at most one percent of the hundreds of thousands that have been treated successfully did not stop fantasies from spreading, in a land where, on TV, on the Internet, and in Indian casinos a dizzying intoxication of gambling reigns. You could bet that some novels and screemplays would certainly come out of this tragicomic gambling therapy.”
It is always nice and scientific to narrow the range of suspects to one. The John Birchers always suspected that fluoridating our drinking water was weakening our vital fluids. Saps! They should have been looking for the dark presences that are obviously lurking around our water supply organizations, tossing in the Mirapex. And we thought Rove was just tied up with Diebold.
So we checked on this factoid, to see if anybody else had tripped over it and discovered the key to the kingdom. The fall of the roman empire, as any middlebrow knows, was caused by lead pipes. Since the link between chemically induced dementia and the collapse of imperial borders has already become one of the things you would expect Pecuchet to bring up in conversation, we were a little surprised that nobody has brought up the obvious: the Mayo Clinic chemically concocted an exact replica of American culture.
Perhaps this was behind that plot line in this summer’s Batman. The evidence accumulates!
Actually, a long time ago I decided that, instead of postmodernism, or post structuralism, or any ism, I wanted to belong to the aesthetic and philosophical movement known as the dopamine cowboys. I was, at the time, the only member. I still am. But apparently I had unconsciously struck on something. As Walt Whitman used to say, I am large, I contain multitudes.
seeing what this looks like
For a long time I’ve meant to put little pieces of my novel on this post, and today is a good day. I’m hoping for comments. The title of this novel has gone through long and elaborate metamorphoses, from Holly’s Folly to The facts in the Sterling Case to The Favorite. I know the first title won’t fly. My latest title is Party of the Jealous God, partly because it sounds echt thriller-ish.
Those of you who have seen versions of this have not seen this version. I’m not sure how much my tinkering has changed the thing. The “thing” – my baby monster, my daydream, my spoiled child, my Holly, my fourteen chapters
The first four pages.
Chapter 1 – Party of the Jealous God
Patrol Officer Candidate Foxton liked rigging up. He liked the squeak of getting off the hot leather seat. He liked the whole ritual of the helmet - not taking it off, lifting the visor just at that spooky little angle, revealing the unprotected shaven chin and lips, a bit of dark moustache, shades on, the unmistakable bluish black of the shirt and the black belt and the pistol making the approach to the standard safety distance, peering in on another householder rolling down the window to ask how fast was I going, as if this was something you had to call out the goon squad to track down. As if the damned car wasn't equipped with a damned speedometer right in the driver's eye-space. You had to get used to the sweat - it was a hotbox job, no two ways about it. But Foxton considered himself a man inured to mere temperature. He'd drilled out there in 110 heat index weather in the Guard, to which he still had a commitment, still had time allotted. So the burn of the day is just going down. Austin summer days, when you could scan the sky for hours and not find one fault in the blue of it. The western sky is still glowing with purple closing to blackish blue and a thin flare of orange on the horizon. That window before the move to turn the car lights on becomes mandatory. Foxton jacked down the kickstand, thrust the bike back, the blue light is making the nice Dragnet background, dancing against the gravel and asphalt and the ditch and the trees, he's approaching the Lexus. There's a wire fence above the ditch, and beyond a little underbrush there's the rough dip of twig and dirt and patchy grass up to the lip of the turf surface which the wise chipper knows will carry to the seventh hole four yards in. Foxton knows this himself, although his swing is, typically, a little too forceful on these kinds of shots. He is always overstroking.
Nothing is emanating from planet Lexus.
Ten miles away, Maury Lockwood is using his police scanner. He's got it hooked up to a tape recorder. Maury is a postal employee. He's not married. He's thirty five. He weighs two hundred fifty pounds, and stands 5 foot 9. He stands, however, as little as he can, sitting on a bar stool at his window. Maury's boss has the forms his doctor filled out in his file ("Mr. Lockwood's gout makes it painful for him to stand for abnormal stretches of time. I strongly recommend an environment in which Mr. Lockwood can support himself without standing. It is recommended that Mr. Lockwood use a chair, if at all possible.") Maury’s boss has shifted his quota of unsuitables for the year, so for the moment, Maury’s position is stable. Maury has some hilarious tapes. Mostly, though, it is bureaucratic chatter, a lot of acronyming, bullshitting, old jokes, positioning. The channel between APD's Sense and Respond Unit (SRU) and sundry jarheads. Heading in, heading off.
Foxton taps on the driver's window, notices a human form lying in the back seat. The window is slightly tinted. Must be sleeping it off. He goes around.
Maury is bored with the fire at the Wildwood Apartments on Braker Lane. Another porch barbecue affair. Early twenties, they get bombed and begin gassing up the charcoal and it happens.
Foxton moves around the Lexus. Notices the license plate. F-I-S-H.
Maury tunes in to this:
AF: SRU, I have a, uh, situation here . I have apparently an unconscious sleeper here, 98 Lexus, let's see ... lying in the back, no reaction to me, I'm tapping on the window, unconscious, back seat. Possible drunk. Possible illegal substance. I'm thinking I might need a car.., over.
SRU: I'm reading you, PC 40, coordinates please, over ...
AF: Oh my god. God. A fucking wagon!
SRU: Where are you, PC40, over
AF: Get an ambulance! A fucking wagon! Lake Austin Boulevard, SRU. Fuck the SRU, this is Donna, right? You remember, Arn? Arn Foxton. You know me. Listen, you gotta help me, Donna. Do something for me. Now now now.
After Donna oriented herself (were you that guy at the rookie party?) and Foxton made some spitting noises (the damn smell, the smell), Foxton revealed a fact that soon made Lake Austin Road a media site:
AF: . Please, just get the murder [division] down here. I'm patrolling the area. Keeping the scene pristine. The plate is F-I-S-H, fish.
SRU: Where are you exactly, PC40? Over.
AF: Breathe in, breathe out. Square it off. So where in the living crap am I, Donna? You know the corner of Exposition and Lake Austin? You know, up towards the student housing? The Colorado River authority?
SRU: Down towards that Tex Mex place?
AF: You mean the Hula Hut. Yeah. Down on that stretch next to the golf course, that's where I am. Over.
Lockwood called up the manager of KXOX. He had dealt with them before, but never had anything of this quality. The manager had given him a home number. The deal was quickly made. F-I-S-H. By June 3, 1998, KXOX owned the tape. Lockwood made a couple of thousand. KXOX made a multiple of that, selling it to its national network.
AF: Jesus, I shouldn't have had that tuna salad sandwich. I can feel the mayonnaise coming up on me. Here it comes!
As soon as the murder team found Foxton and the car, the license plate became an issue. Detective Chuck Reilly left his partner with Foxton and personally made the drive back to HQ, calling Hudson at home on his cell. 'See me at the office," Reilly testified later, "something like that. That's what I told him."
When Lew Hudson got to the scene at 10:00, he'd had his talk with Reilly.
"I just told him that it was the Governor's wife's car. No sir, I didn't tell him we got a bomb on our hands. No, I never used the words bomb, explosion, any of that, to my recollection. No, I don't know why they printed that, sir. I figure they got the wrong end of the stick."
Hudson had put in a call to Greenbriar, the Police Chief, but Greenbriar was in transit to another job in Pennsylvania. It was never clear anymore if he was in town or in Pittsburgh. Greenbriar said, “shit, this is almost not on my watch.”
Hudson said, “I’ll handle it.”
“Keep in touch,” Greenbriar said. Greenbriar seemed to be bitter about something. Hudson got along with him all right. As far as police chiefs go, Hudson’s favorite was Odem, who had been the police chief when Hudson was signed on. Odem’s reign was mythologically long, forty years or something. A monument. Had a problem with the post civil rights era, though. Greenbriar had been brought in with great fanfare as Austin’s first African American police chief. He was a photo op, much liked by the politicos, disliked intensely by the Union. Well, he seemed to wear out. He began to make out of state trips. He photo opped in San Francisco. He photo opped in Seattle. Conferences, a spokesman about a new national drug policy, the name in the rolodex for the news show about the Broken window theory of policing. Just not there. Until photo opping in Pennsylvania, he got a better offer. People later agreed that the APD was in a state of unusual disorganization for this to be dropped into their lap.
Everybody at the scene by 10 p.m. was aware that this was on a Need To Know basis.
Everybody at the scene did not include Foxton, who was being debriefed at HQ. In the three months remaining of Foxton's time on the force, he expressed a few theories of his own. These theories were disregarded by the D.A. His superior called him in, once, to tell him loose lips sink ships. 'What does that mean?" Foxton asked. 'Shut up," his superior explained. His testimony at the trial was tight and short. By that time, Foxton had heard his voice on that damned transmission one hundred times. At his regular spot, The Cedar Door, the bartender never seemed to tire of asking him if he'd had a tuna salad sandwich today. Foxton ceased and desisted going there. “I’m tired of the place,” he told his girlfriend, whose office regularly TGIFed at the Cedar Door. “Give me three good reasons I have to show up to see your manager get shitfaced.” Then Foxton's troubles dominoed: he got into a fight in a bar, he got into an altercation with a neighbor, his girlfriend moved out, and his buds on the force became distinctly glacial to him. So he resigned, picked up stakes, moved elsewhere, leaving his parents' address to forward mail to.
Those of you who have seen versions of this have not seen this version. I’m not sure how much my tinkering has changed the thing. The “thing” – my baby monster, my daydream, my spoiled child, my Holly, my fourteen chapters
The first four pages.
Chapter 1 – Party of the Jealous God
Patrol Officer Candidate Foxton liked rigging up. He liked the squeak of getting off the hot leather seat. He liked the whole ritual of the helmet - not taking it off, lifting the visor just at that spooky little angle, revealing the unprotected shaven chin and lips, a bit of dark moustache, shades on, the unmistakable bluish black of the shirt and the black belt and the pistol making the approach to the standard safety distance, peering in on another householder rolling down the window to ask how fast was I going, as if this was something you had to call out the goon squad to track down. As if the damned car wasn't equipped with a damned speedometer right in the driver's eye-space. You had to get used to the sweat - it was a hotbox job, no two ways about it. But Foxton considered himself a man inured to mere temperature. He'd drilled out there in 110 heat index weather in the Guard, to which he still had a commitment, still had time allotted. So the burn of the day is just going down. Austin summer days, when you could scan the sky for hours and not find one fault in the blue of it. The western sky is still glowing with purple closing to blackish blue and a thin flare of orange on the horizon. That window before the move to turn the car lights on becomes mandatory. Foxton jacked down the kickstand, thrust the bike back, the blue light is making the nice Dragnet background, dancing against the gravel and asphalt and the ditch and the trees, he's approaching the Lexus. There's a wire fence above the ditch, and beyond a little underbrush there's the rough dip of twig and dirt and patchy grass up to the lip of the turf surface which the wise chipper knows will carry to the seventh hole four yards in. Foxton knows this himself, although his swing is, typically, a little too forceful on these kinds of shots. He is always overstroking.
Nothing is emanating from planet Lexus.
Ten miles away, Maury Lockwood is using his police scanner. He's got it hooked up to a tape recorder. Maury is a postal employee. He's not married. He's thirty five. He weighs two hundred fifty pounds, and stands 5 foot 9. He stands, however, as little as he can, sitting on a bar stool at his window. Maury's boss has the forms his doctor filled out in his file ("Mr. Lockwood's gout makes it painful for him to stand for abnormal stretches of time. I strongly recommend an environment in which Mr. Lockwood can support himself without standing. It is recommended that Mr. Lockwood use a chair, if at all possible.") Maury’s boss has shifted his quota of unsuitables for the year, so for the moment, Maury’s position is stable. Maury has some hilarious tapes. Mostly, though, it is bureaucratic chatter, a lot of acronyming, bullshitting, old jokes, positioning. The channel between APD's Sense and Respond Unit (SRU) and sundry jarheads. Heading in, heading off.
Foxton taps on the driver's window, notices a human form lying in the back seat. The window is slightly tinted. Must be sleeping it off. He goes around.
Maury is bored with the fire at the Wildwood Apartments on Braker Lane. Another porch barbecue affair. Early twenties, they get bombed and begin gassing up the charcoal and it happens.
Foxton moves around the Lexus. Notices the license plate. F-I-S-H.
Maury tunes in to this:
AF: SRU, I have a, uh, situation here . I have apparently an unconscious sleeper here, 98 Lexus, let's see ... lying in the back, no reaction to me, I'm tapping on the window, unconscious, back seat. Possible drunk. Possible illegal substance. I'm thinking I might need a car.., over.
SRU: I'm reading you, PC 40, coordinates please, over ...
AF: Oh my god. God. A fucking wagon!
SRU: Where are you, PC40, over
AF: Get an ambulance! A fucking wagon! Lake Austin Boulevard, SRU. Fuck the SRU, this is Donna, right? You remember, Arn? Arn Foxton. You know me. Listen, you gotta help me, Donna. Do something for me. Now now now.
After Donna oriented herself (were you that guy at the rookie party?) and Foxton made some spitting noises (the damn smell, the smell), Foxton revealed a fact that soon made Lake Austin Road a media site:
AF: . Please, just get the murder [division] down here. I'm patrolling the area. Keeping the scene pristine. The plate is F-I-S-H, fish.
SRU: Where are you exactly, PC40? Over.
AF: Breathe in, breathe out. Square it off. So where in the living crap am I, Donna? You know the corner of Exposition and Lake Austin? You know, up towards the student housing? The Colorado River authority?
SRU: Down towards that Tex Mex place?
AF: You mean the Hula Hut. Yeah. Down on that stretch next to the golf course, that's where I am. Over.
Lockwood called up the manager of KXOX. He had dealt with them before, but never had anything of this quality. The manager had given him a home number. The deal was quickly made. F-I-S-H. By June 3, 1998, KXOX owned the tape. Lockwood made a couple of thousand. KXOX made a multiple of that, selling it to its national network.
AF: Jesus, I shouldn't have had that tuna salad sandwich. I can feel the mayonnaise coming up on me. Here it comes!
As soon as the murder team found Foxton and the car, the license plate became an issue. Detective Chuck Reilly left his partner with Foxton and personally made the drive back to HQ, calling Hudson at home on his cell. 'See me at the office," Reilly testified later, "something like that. That's what I told him."
When Lew Hudson got to the scene at 10:00, he'd had his talk with Reilly.
"I just told him that it was the Governor's wife's car. No sir, I didn't tell him we got a bomb on our hands. No, I never used the words bomb, explosion, any of that, to my recollection. No, I don't know why they printed that, sir. I figure they got the wrong end of the stick."
Hudson had put in a call to Greenbriar, the Police Chief, but Greenbriar was in transit to another job in Pennsylvania. It was never clear anymore if he was in town or in Pittsburgh. Greenbriar said, “shit, this is almost not on my watch.”
Hudson said, “I’ll handle it.”
“Keep in touch,” Greenbriar said. Greenbriar seemed to be bitter about something. Hudson got along with him all right. As far as police chiefs go, Hudson’s favorite was Odem, who had been the police chief when Hudson was signed on. Odem’s reign was mythologically long, forty years or something. A monument. Had a problem with the post civil rights era, though. Greenbriar had been brought in with great fanfare as Austin’s first African American police chief. He was a photo op, much liked by the politicos, disliked intensely by the Union. Well, he seemed to wear out. He began to make out of state trips. He photo opped in San Francisco. He photo opped in Seattle. Conferences, a spokesman about a new national drug policy, the name in the rolodex for the news show about the Broken window theory of policing. Just not there. Until photo opping in Pennsylvania, he got a better offer. People later agreed that the APD was in a state of unusual disorganization for this to be dropped into their lap.
Everybody at the scene by 10 p.m. was aware that this was on a Need To Know basis.
Everybody at the scene did not include Foxton, who was being debriefed at HQ. In the three months remaining of Foxton's time on the force, he expressed a few theories of his own. These theories were disregarded by the D.A. His superior called him in, once, to tell him loose lips sink ships. 'What does that mean?" Foxton asked. 'Shut up," his superior explained. His testimony at the trial was tight and short. By that time, Foxton had heard his voice on that damned transmission one hundred times. At his regular spot, The Cedar Door, the bartender never seemed to tire of asking him if he'd had a tuna salad sandwich today. Foxton ceased and desisted going there. “I’m tired of the place,” he told his girlfriend, whose office regularly TGIFed at the Cedar Door. “Give me three good reasons I have to show up to see your manager get shitfaced.” Then Foxton's troubles dominoed: he got into a fight in a bar, he got into an altercation with a neighbor, his girlfriend moved out, and his buds on the force became distinctly glacial to him. So he resigned, picked up stakes, moved elsewhere, leaving his parents' address to forward mail to.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
hell and worse ahead
The NYT Mag has an admiring portrait of the ultimate horror that is Hillary. Oddly, the more hopeful article is about Buckley’s campaign for mayor in 1965. While Buckley exhibited the thinly sheathed bigot in that campaign – in one of those odd, convulsive spasms of coercive moralism to which conservatives are liable he even proposed that drug addicts be quarantined, one of those bizarre notions like tattooing people with AIDS that seem to emerge in the Buckley brain, and of course in the face of real civil morality, ie Martin Luther King, Jr, he was clueless -- he also campaigned to legalize drugs for adults. A simple measure that would have removed infinite misery in the last forty years, and probably even more in the next forty. In a strong sense, that move, if it had caught on, would have retrieved millions of black men from the clutches of the legal system, and would have put states like Alabama (where 30 percent of African American men can’t vote, due to felony convictions) and Florida (ditto) and all over the South into play for much more liberal politicians. Not only in the U.S. would the past forty years have been gentler, but all over the world – for instance, Mexico, where realistically, narco-trafficking is as it should be, an economically sound venture, the repression of which is insane, leading, naturally, to massive corruption, since the only way to produce and market drugs is outside of the law. And of course this diverts the flow of income that could be really be used by average Mexicans into the pockets of the most violent. One can’t say the same about the income flow generated by, say, viagra, which is legal due not for any moral or health reason – hell, viagra is no more safe and no more moral than a joint -- but simply because it was developed by big pharma and marketed by them. I do know that if joints gave you an automatic woody, that would be down on the black list of reasons why it must be banned. Since only in hell is rationality a product manufactured by corporations, and since rationality about drugs seems wholly manufactured by corporations, I think it is evident we live in Hell. I hope that is clear.
The other hopeful thing was Lindsay. An awful mayor, but still -- a genuine powerful liberal Republican. They once existed. They can exist again...
As for Hillary – she represents the worst instincts of the right and the worst instincts of punitive liberalism in a sort of corporate identity of all that is evil -- Newt Gingrich's feminine side. She is so bad that she seems almost destined to lead this Republic as it continues to fall apart. God’s curse is obviously on the land. Luckily, the NYT Magazine is almost always wrong about American politics. I trust my older sister, a feminist since the seventies who tells me, Hillary doesn’t feel right.
The other hopeful thing was Lindsay. An awful mayor, but still -- a genuine powerful liberal Republican. They once existed. They can exist again...
As for Hillary – she represents the worst instincts of the right and the worst instincts of punitive liberalism in a sort of corporate identity of all that is evil -- Newt Gingrich's feminine side. She is so bad that she seems almost destined to lead this Republic as it continues to fall apart. God’s curse is obviously on the land. Luckily, the NYT Magazine is almost always wrong about American politics. I trust my older sister, a feminist since the seventies who tells me, Hillary doesn’t feel right.
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