My theory, which is mine, which I have, cough cough

Ever since I was knee high to a mockingbird, I’ve been reading about the lamentable state of American innumeracy. Seems like we Americans, unlike Koreans, Finns, and Albanians, just can’t find our way in even the lower mathematics. Many theories have been advanced. Many studies, at great expense, have been launched.

Well, I was sitting out at the playground today, watching Adam and other kids and parents, and it struck me that it might have something to do with the way us parents threaten.  More specifically, the way we say: I’m going to count to five and you better get in your seat, eat your dinner, get off the jungle gym, etc.

Nobody ever says, I’m going to go to “e”.

It is perhaps for this reason that the alphabet really does seem composed of friendly little mountaineers, each with its little hammer, all of them climbing up one after the other the cliff face of language. Whereas numbers always have the whiff of the disciplinarian, as if they all waved rulers at us threateningly.

To prove my theory, I’d only need a couple of million dollars from Zuckerberg or Gates or one of the other billionaires. I would raise three groups of kids, one threatened, traditionally, with numeration, one with the alphabet (I’m going to go to e, and you better be over here: a b c d e) and one raised with varied threats (I’m going to go to mo and you better get over here  -eenie meenie minee mo; or, I’m going to go to paper and you better get off that jungle gym – rock scissors paper). Then we’d overload these children with various repeititive and intrusive tests and find out whether the alphabet menaced read at a lower level than the number menaced, and so on.

I’m getting on the phone to the Ford foundation tomorrow.

It's all your fault! (and Trump is still funny)

Some genius at the AEC, which successfully suppressed its studies of the toxic effects of the radiation produced by above ground nuclear bomb tests (thus giving the lie to those conspiracy theory debunkers who claim that it can’t happen here – yes, Virginia, if you have the judicial power to seal as top secret any papers you feel like, you can mount a conspiracy at the highest levels), wrote a memo in the fifties in which, after considering the bummer of fallout, concluded hopefully that at least it was falling on the “low use segment of the population.” This phrase gives us a sort of x ray of the mindset of our betters – the governing class that extends from the plutocrats to the politicos and the high profile journalists and pundits. The low use segment of the population is regularly hauled out for public beatings whenever the governing class feels threatened, or at low ebb, or needs some sportive relief.
Yet of course all is not bleak for the low user – or loser – crowd. Since, as Jesus H. Christ said, we have them with us always, we can always make use of them by stirring up a little racism here, a little panic over welfare there. While they are riled up, you can clip entitlements, lower taxes on the top rates, and sign your fabuloso trade agreements. This process is of course a bit of hush hush – obfuscation on these things is provided free by the media, so the losers don’t get too nosey.
Sometimes, however, as in this election year, out comes the ugly.
Ugly is spelled Trump this season. There’s been a seachange in the thumbsucker community, and it has been decreed that Trump is no longer funny. My ass – Trump is still funny. Of course, all the GOP candidates were funny. Maybe not Cruz, except in that Hannibal Lector way. The thing about Trump is that, like Falstaff, he is not only funny in himself, but he brings out the funny in others.
Case in point is the latest meme among the thumbsuckers: why don’t the losers move more?
This got started with an article published by someone on the masthead of the National Review. NR has been exasperated by Trump, and finally, to much thunder, excommunicated him. It was powerful stuff, but alas, the next day the editorial staff awakened and found out that they hadn’t been elected pope. Quite the shock. They were, as Trump has show every day, mere pipsqueaks in bowties. In fact, of course, the National Review has long cultivated pipsqueak conservatism, but they also peddle a good line in homoerotic worship of tough, “masculine” leaders. Oh how they love those leaders! From Ronald Reagan to Dick Cheney, their bowties have always stood a little stiffer when saluting minor act of mass murder committed in the name of America.
So it stands in the kingdom of Rightwingia. Since the excommunication didn’t work, the next thing, of course, is to empty the vials on the low use segment – which, as they distantly perceive from the newspapers, is where the unfortunate Trumpmania is located. The lecture, given with the appropriate amount of smirking, is that these fat assed white bluecollar types would do better to rent a U Haul and move, rather than disturbing their betters. Vote for what we tell you to vote for, and get a better job! One imagines the high fives. The bowties were showing their legendary toughness once again!
Of course, what happens on the right quickly migrates to the “left”, in as much as Vox, or Mother Jones, pretends to a liberal sensibility. Of course, the smirks were taken out – this is the great White Euphemism Zone, after all – and the question was asked like some Zen puzzle with a gotcha at the end: why aren’t these low enders moving around like obedient fleas in the flea circus as we stage our wonderful globalization act? Is it some dreadful character flaw – oh surely it is – that keeps the blue collar work force from, well, renting a U Haul!
I mean, we aren’t going to reverse history. Put in the appropriate chuckles here. Haven’t the low use people realized? And truly, if you went to Harvard or any of the real institutions of higher education, if your daddy or mommy had risen above the low enders, well, globalisation has been good for you. The maids are cheaper, the flights to Bangkok exquisite, and your real estate deals get mentioned in the Washingtonian, as well as your start up parties. Etc.
Being neo-liberals, however, these thumbsuckers took the problem of residential mobility as something serious that the application of homo economicus could solve. Moving for them comes down to a transaction cost. Sure there are these costs, but generally, surely, the blue collar factory worker just needs more human capital and a move to, say, Manhattan to become a hedge funder. So surely it is some irrational fetish, like attachment to guns, preventing the intersubstitution in the human capital market to move along as efficiently as always.
Being official explainers doesn’t mean anything so vulgar as research for the thumbsucker, however. Myself, I, like millions of people, have access to JSTOR and EBSCO and can actually look up what sociologists have said about residential mobility, cause and effects. Admittedly, this isn’t as fun as sitting in your chair and imagining some lazy rational choice scenario, but there you are: even cherries have their pits.
Sociologists have long connected some dots. For instance, between residential mobility and divorce. Divorce is both a large driver of residential mobility. It was noted by Larry Long in 1974 that married men over thirty were more residentially stable, and this was often accompanied by the married woman joining the work force outside the house. Long, building on this, claimed that divorce was a driver of residential mobility – work that has been amply confirmed – and that it was also possible that divorce occurred more often among one income families that became two income families, thus showing what I dare say is a dialectical effect, which we will all blush about (dialectic is for Commies!). As for the effectss on the children of the residentially migrant, we also have plenty of sociological literature if we are energetic enough to type some letters into our computer. What has been found is that children – I’m talking of course of the losers, who should just rent a U Haul - are more likely to be negatively effected by moving out of neighborhoods they’ve grown up in. They are likely to be more often engated in violence, and dropping out of school, and if they stay in school, their grades suffer. (Castone McLahan, 1994; Tucker Marx Long, 1998;Pribesh Downey, 1999). In fact, one can speculate on the coincidence that spikes in drug taking and crime came at the same time as a higher rate of residential mobility in the sixties and seventies.
Of course, these sociological findings make it unlikely that the trip, so ardently wished for by the likes of Tyler Cowen or Kevin Drum, in which the unemployed dad and his wife and kids flee the ruins of the city for the glorious pastures of a better lifestyle through trade with our Pacific partners is really going to have that uplifting, Horatio Alger end. That’s the downer. On the other hand, if they do it, we can blame them for divorce, single parenthood, and crime! This is nice. Because the rule for our governor vis a vis the low use segment is: it's all your fault!

hypnosis and description

Flaubert once said that if you gave your full attention to any object for long enough, it would become interesting. In this, Flaubert, whether he knew it or not, was certainly breaking with the old classical vision of the world. For Plato and Aristotle, there was an inherent hierarchy of worth in the world, an ontological as well as ethical hierarchy. The philosopher was he who ignored trivial objects and plastered his attention to worthier ones. Hair, or dirt, or dogs, or the way a candlestick looks on a piano, were unworthy of noting, of memorializing.

Well, while Flaubert was opining, with a rare uplift, about the value of attention, another Frenchman was experimenting with what had once been called mesmerism, and was now being called hypnotism. Charcot was discovering that you could lull a subject into hypnosis by having them fixate their attention on a bright object until they were, as it were, captured by it – entranced, or at least tranced.

Between the attention that increases the value of an object and the fixation of attention that captures the subject lies the description in narrative.

I’ve had ample opportunity to experiment with this, since, every night, after we read to Adam from one book in French and one book, almost always about dinosaurs recently, in English, we turn out the light and tell him a story about himself. Adam generally lays down the rules for the story, like he was ordering from a menu: I want me to be playing basketball and I want X and Y (his friends) to be Ironman and Batman and I want to be Clobberman. Or along that line.

Now, the thing is, whether Adam has been lulled by the books we read him or not, generally A. and I are. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping my eyes open as I read about the stegasaurus, one of the last of the dinosaurs in Adam’s favorite book. So in telling him a story that I make up, I’ve found that by the end of it, I might be wandering far afield. But if I am thinking about the story, I usually try to throw in a lot of description, or at least names of things, in the hope that this will lull Adam to sleep. If he goes down a path in the forest, I try to enumerate all the things he’ll pass: a pine tree, a live oak, a red oak, a maple tree, a willow, a chestnut tree, an elm tree, a redwood, a bramble bush, a sweet gum tree, a beech, a birch tree, a rhododendron, etc., etc. My theory is that the longer I stretch this out, the less Adam’s attention will be fixed on the forest and the more he will be sinking into slumber.

It works, at least, for me.

So I have thought a bit about the relationship between description in a fiction, the ‘world’ that fiction, or at least certain fictions, try to create, and the hypnotic envelopment in which the narrative’s horizon is overtaken. We do feel that certain novels create a world, one that we enter: but is this entrance like discovering a world, or being entranced by a brilliant pocket watch on a chain? 

from nicaragua in 1983 to Libya in 2010 - same story

It is a shame that the Sandinista issue in the debate is proving to be just Clinton's way of calling out to old Reagan-ites and doing her shitty redbaiting, because what happened in Central America in the eighties has a lot of relevance to what is happening today. 
The eighties were the crest of a century of American interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Any quasi-endogenous political structure had to be vetted with the USA, or the USA would simply knock it over. Ditto with economic policy.
However, although the US took the right to intervene as it saw fit, it did not, as other imperialist systems did, take on the responsibility for governing, or for developing these areas in any way. Even the Soviets in Eastern Europe aided the development of industry. Not the US.
In consequence of a hundred years of soft imperialism, the US helped produced a perfect pocket of poor and desperate people. Many of them have, in the past two decades, decided to immigrate, one way or another, to the US. Why not? After all, they have the experience of having their own independence in their own countries overturned by the whim of American power.
This is not, as the snark-fest on twitter treats it, just an old story. It is the story of the pattern of American foreign policy.
To see what Reagan did in Central America is to see what Clinton advocated in North Africa and the Middle East. Intervention without responsibility.
The result is a sort of speeded up picture of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Libya is a perfect example. Intervention ruined the country, and irresponsibility didn't wait around to build it up. The Benghazi crime is not, as the GOP would have it, that Clinton abandoned Benghazi. The crime is that Obama, with CLinton urging him on, performed another immoral act of imperialism on the cheap.
Result? In Central America, the result is not only poverty, but a huge drug economy and states like El Salvador crippled by gangs. In Libya, the result is a state fractured between gangs, and providing a launching point for desperate refugees aiming for Europe.
Unfortunately, there will not be a question in this election campaign that will come close to pointing at this malign syndrome. Nobody will ask the obvious question: why, if we are unwilling to accept millions of immigrants, did we spend a trillion dollars in Afghanistan over the last fourteen years instead of Mexico or Central America? Because the answer is rooted in the same shadow side in the States that produces systematic racism: exploitation without responsibility, and a wholly unearned feeling that the fruits of that exploitation are somehow "earned".

a little monday morning theology

There are books that are planets. One lands oon them, as in some sci-fi flick, and explores the strange ruins, the fantastic phrases that lie about and that seem to have been invented for unknown uses by a mysteriously vanished mental technology.

The Bible, of course, is the most famous of those texts in the West. I like sometimes to play the astronaut among the prophets and the gospels.

Which is how I came upon one of those amazing sentences, a couple of days ago, that seemed to overturn what I thought I know about the book.

Its tucked, appropriately, in one of the books of the Apocrypha – The wisdom of Solomon. In the first chapter:

“For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living.”

Reading this sentence, I did a sort of wiley coyote thing in my head, digging in my heels even as I was sliding over the cliff.

In other religious traditions, the idea of God not making something would not be a big deal. Divine power often operates in a world that exists quite apart from the God. Among the Greeks, there were things in the world that actually encumbered divine power. How the world came to be is often a murkey preface to other stories, and it is the latter that grab the spotlight. But monotheisms are distinguished by the close tie between God and the creator function. So much so, in fact, that it is difficult for people raised in a monotheistic tradition to recognize gods in traditions where no God creates everuthing.

Now, even in monotheism, God’s creating everything does not mean that God is responsible for everuthing. There’s nature, and then there’s the moral order, where man has free will, and sins. Whatever kind of theological curlycues one draws about that fact, it is still endemic to most monotheisms that the moral order is not identical to the natural order.

So one could say, in a sense, that God did not create sin. But death?

Death is, of course, part of the natural order. Or at least the secular view of death puts it with other natural things, such as breathing, eating, sex, etc.

All those natural things are created by God – so how is it that death isn’t? Doesn’t the sentence seem to challenge the power and scope of God?

I can think of two framing interpretations of this statement. In one, death is, indeed, a fragment of the uncreated state  - a sort of emissary of what was before God created everything. I am tempted to call it a floating negation, but only in as much as negation approximates the uncreated. In reality, negation would seem to be dependent as a concept on creation, so death wouldn’t be negation so much as a hole in things, a tear.

The other interpretation, which is more orthodox, is that something besides God created death. In this view, there is a spirit of negation, of some type, that has the power to create on a cosmic scale, but subordinate to God. Thus far orthodoxy would go. Here, the story of the Fall intrudes into the picture. And takes on a Blakean cast. The unorthodox version – the gnostic, or promethean, version – would draw attention to the paradoxes in that story. After all, when God places the tree of knowledge in the Garden and warns man not to eat of its fruit on pain of suffering death, it is a warning that makes no sense if man doesn’t understand what death is. But how can man understand what death is if there is no death? The paradox seems diabolic, and the gnostic way out of it would make the God who issued this warning a demiurge of no very moral type.

The orthodox answer, here, is to ignore this paradox as a mystery, and to go ahead with the rest of the story, removing death from the natural order and inserting it into the moral order.

Augustine, in the City of God, treads this route. Death, he explains, is “good unto none.” Thus, it is a pure negation. Death isn’t even good for martyrs. But martyrs and others can go through dying as a glorious thing.

Since death is good unton none, Augustine continues, it is a punishmment. It bears the mark of punishment in its very essence. Augustine impressed a sort of conflation of the moral and the natural, or, if you like, a sublation of the natural into the moral, upon the Christian mind: existence is positive. Existence bears within it the sign of creation – of the being created. This line, actually, is suggested in the Wisdom of Solomon: “for  he created all things, that they might have their being: and the generations of the world are healthful; and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon earth.”

In our dreamtime – which enfolds most of our waking as well as sleeping moments – this has an intuitive, fairy tale sense. Death is a punishment, and the natural order is the order of health. That’s how our stories work. They all work backwards from death in one way or another.

But I am interested in the first great framing interpretation, which has a less traceable history. I’m interested in how it tugs at the self-evidence of creation itself.

trump shock among our national high school's self appointed cool kids!

The grotesque spectacle of the Trump campaign has two ends: one is the Trump himself, and I am not going to attempt to pile up adjectives here. The  other end is the press corps, suffering under Trumpshock.The press corps has lived in a bubble for decades. One of its grand illusions is that objectivity calls for saying that if the Republicans do it (whatever the craziness of the moment), the Democrats do it to in an opposite and equal way. Underneath this bizarre rhetorical gesture is a larger delusion, which is that there is a mainstream and that the GOP is solidly part of it. In the media’s imagination, Ronald Reagan was a statesman, George HW Bush was honorable down to his very asshole, and would never disgrace the office by getting a blow job in it (in spite of the whispers that Bush had a mistress in D.C. – a rumor that no Starr or WAPO crew checked out) and George W. Bush was an honorable failure, seeking only to promote democracy around the world.

I should say, part of this delusion is that the GOP right and the Democratic Party right make up the only political spectrum in America. But I am dealing here with neurosis, not psychosis, so I’ll skip that issue.

This makes the David Duke scandal particularly funny. The only question ever asked of Trump is whether he disavows Duke. It is never asked, and it will never be asked of a GOP candidate, why a former KKK member would be attracted to the GOP.

I mean, they are all such honorable men.

So let’s return to the late lamented George W. Bush and the election of 2000 – one in which the rumor that McCain had a black mistress was spread in South Carolina by mysterious entities that had no, oh no, no, my gosh no, no connection with the George W. Bush campaign. That campaign, of course, ended up in the Florida quagmire.

What happened in the Florida quagmire? Here we have go to another racist, a man named Don Black, who runs an organization named Stormfront.  Stormfront was very agitated that Bush would be questioned in Florida. And they sent followers to pro-Bush rallies, and to pro-Gore rallies to bully, without the press ever, to my knowledge, asking George to disavow.  Infact, few reported on it. The Village Voice did, though:

 Black, the founder of the Internet's first "hate" site is claiming he'll help lead the rally. Black has been using his site to promote the event to the world from his home in downtown West Palm Beach, two miles from the voting action this week at the Emergency Operations Center. Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, will be there with his 11-year-old son, Derek (the webmaster of Stormfront for Kids.) Both father and son are featured in the HBO documentary Hate.com, airing this week.

The Pat Buchanan supporter—who voted for George W. Bush to keep Al Gore out—said Wednesday that he participated in the Jackson protest Monday, which he insists was more anti-Gore than pro-Bush. "I was right in the middle of things," Black said with a laugh. "Not a single reporter recognized me. My ego was deflated in a way."

That is not entirely surprising. Although Black is a former deputy of KKK leader David Duke's (and actually married Duke's former wife, Chloe), he tries to stay below the media radar in his wife's hometown of West Palm Beach, where they moved in 1987. Likewise, Black said that he is counseling fellow "pro-white" extremists to show up to support Bush, but not to emphasize their controversial stances such as support for the Confederate flag.

Black, apparently, understood how one must be discreet. The press appreciated that and at no time cared a bit that white supremicists were rallying for Bush and disrupting peaceful rallies by Jesse Jackson. I mean, the press had bigger fish to fry, like: Isn’t George Bush the kind of guy you’d love  ta share a beer with in a bar?

Trump is a master of the visceral issue, the issue of what you want your macho man  to be - much like  Georgie, the man in full, who was celebrated in one of the most asslicking bios of all time, written by Fred Barnes, still a member in good standing of the press corps, called, wonderfully, Rebel in Chief (wink wink there with that Rebel, as in confederate, but let’s not talk about it!). Georgie, however, was much more respectable than Trump, so he could amiably lead us from disaster to disaster, at each of which he visibly panicked, and the press was all about how he was macho man numero 1!

In my opinion, Trump will, if he is elected, rule like your standard GOPster. The difference between Romney and Trump is that Trump has a more bizarre tan. But that is it. And yet, you would think Hitler was coming to town from the coverage. Included in it is a mass of info that should make the average reader pause – you mean, Trump thinks the Iraq war was a disaster, and that Bush was on a vacation from reality when he totally ignored info about al qaeda aiming to hit America in 2001? You mean he doesn’t think people should die in the street cause they don’t have insurance? You mean he likes planned parenthood?

All of which is Romney without the dogwhistle. Trump is openly doing what the GOP has done since Goldwater: calling on all white people.

That is what they do.  Get over it.

sadness

It rather pisses me off that Trump took all the attention space from Sanders. That's the breaks, but it is very sad, nevertheless. Clinton needed a good competitive race. It would have moved the ball on the issues Sanders has been raising. Now we are going to go back to ignoring them. Sad.
I must admit, I find it especially funny when commenters bemoan the fact that Clinton has competition because of MONSTER TRUMP. As if you become a champion by being coddled. It is literally a fight, and if the idea is that your fighter will be better for never having practiced, than you don't know fightin'.

dogwhistles, from Reagan to Trump

Last week, the NYT published an oped by Jacob Weisberg, the contrarian liberal - that is, not liberal at all, but for liberal reasons! - which presented a truly funny image of Ronald Reagan as a moderate president. It sorta skipped Iran contra, or Reagan's economics plan, or the tax raises on the bottom 80 percent for fica paralleled by halving the tax rate on the wealthiest. 
But the funniest thing that Weisberg skipped was Reagan on race. Sure, he was friends with Sammy Davis, Jr. But basically, Reagan on race was the guy who went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been killed in 1964, and spoke out straightforwardly for.... state's rights. The same shit Goldwater shoveled when he voted against the Civil Rights bill of 1964 (that's the Goldwater that was Hillary Clinton's first political enthusiasm, by the way), In retrospect, the establishment does not like American presidents to be monsters. It so disturbs the cucumber sandwiches and tea. But of course, Reagan was a very big monster.
Trump playing the dance with the KKK - an organization he apparently never heard of - is just following in the great Ronnie's footsteps. It will be fun hearing establishment GOP types playing the game of walking the razor's edge between overt racism - of which they wholeheartedly disapprove - and covert racism - which they wholeheartedly like to generate. For a moment, though, they have all put down the dogwhistles and gaped: doesn't the Donald know how to play this game?.

the stick

They came and killed the trees today.

Or at least they seriously lop-otomized them. If spring is i-cumen in in Santa Monica, the sap in our trees won’t be rushing to the edge of the foliage to see it, for we aint’got any. More seriously, the sunlight that filters through the leaves as we have breakfast on the patio will now fall on us without intervention.  

Such is the downside.

The upside is that our tree barbers left behind a rain of stick.

Adam soon spotted the sticks including a long, tapered, easy to grasp number, which he promptly seized. And thus he was inducted into the four dimensions of stick-ness.

The four dimensions are, as every child knows: a. the sword; b., the drumstick; c. the gun (or as Adam thinks of it, one of those things that goes pu ew pu ew and shoots out balls, his interpretation of a paint ball gun ad he saw); and d, the poker.

Adam began by flourishing the stick like a  sword, and followed in exactly the above order. Actually, there is a fifth dimension – the cane – but Adam has not figured this out yet. Or perhaps he is not interested. He did have a model in me, when I was hobbling about on crutches all last summer. Maybe Adam, like his Dad, had enough of that nonsense.

I remember the sticks of my youth! To find just the right stick was one of the scouting talents you picked up if your home was anywhere near a stand of trees broad enough to be called a woods or a swamp. Our neighborhood in Georgia was furnished with both the woods and a swamp, and I spent many a happy afternoon in one or the other, building big muddy dams, pacing along trails, climbing trees, and playing the games: hide and seek, treasure hunt, pirates, and other, jungle-themed ones. It seemed that a lot of children’s tv was set in jungle locales back in those days. Inevitably, sticks played a large part in all of these games.

In Northern Georgia, at the time, there was an abundance of pine. I’ve heard that some beetle borne plague is steadily de-conifering Georgia, which is a shame, even though the conifers are surely an invasive species, which came in after the first cutting. Pine sticks usually had rough bark on them, and you had to strip it off. This usually left your fingers sticky with the reisen residue. Sticky fingers and that green coniferous smell form a leitmotif of my spring days in the fifth grade in Georgia, and I imagine it was the same for many another small child.

As well as the scratchy ramble through the underbrush, and the looking for gold nuggets in the creek (we must have seen some film about gold panning in the North Georgia mountains). Also, catching crawfish in jars.  I also remember a long vine which hung above a hillside that descended int o a ravine, which you could, nerving yourself, swing on.

That was the world in which the stick held a great importance. Still, today, when I go hiking, I like a good stick. I keep a watch for them. When I find one big enough, I use it to walk with. Of course, it is not really necessary – I’ve never been on a trail where I had to use a stick to pull me forward. However, it is psychologically necessary. I like the nice familiar feel of the point of the stick coming down on the soil, perhaps indenting it a little. And I like, most of all, the companionship of it. In the stick, I am allied to all of nature.

I rather envy Adam his coming discoveries in the stick department. Although… he is bound to be a Paris boy, and we don’t come by sticks so easily in the streets, there. In the park, yes. And when he is visiting his relatives. At the moment, here in California, this is one of the perks, I guess.

puzzling as an art form

There’s a story Dorothy Parker told about herself in an interview in the Paris Review. It concerns one of her first jobs, working as a theater critic at Vanity Fair, with Robert Benchley:

“Both Mr. Benchley and I subscribed to two undertaking magazines: The Casket and Sunnyside. Steel yourself: Sunnyside had a joke column called “From Grave to Gay.” I cut a picture out of one of them, in color, of how and where to inject embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk until Mr. Crowninshield asked me if I could possibly take it down. Mr. Crowninshield was a lovely man, but puzzled.”

The two parts of this anecdote are perfect. The first part, of course, comes from the undertaking magazine. The picture of the corpse showing how and where to take embalming fluid could be the icon of modernism – it was the patient etherized upon a table taken to the next degree. It replaced piety with a cold and probing curiosity; it looked at our ends, and subtracted the transcendental purpose.

The second part comes from the response. “Mr. Crowninshield was a lovely man, but puzzled.” I think that sums up the critical afterlife suffered by Dottie Parker: a puzzled receptiveness. Such cruelty, or coldness, stemming from a woman. Even today, when there’s been a large shift in gender perceptions, Parker is often dismissed as a woman who refused to grow up. She was witty, we all agree, but in the end too disagreeably puzzling.

Of all effects, the one that irritates the puritan conscious the most is that of ‘puzzling’. We want identity. We want positions. We want the ism and we want it now. Puzzling, which delays the immediacy of intellectual gratification, might be allowed as a start: we have the problem, yes? And we have the solution. But the problem for its own sake? The puzzle as the answer? Forget it.

These reactions depend, of course,on the cultural currents. In the twenties, as consumerism replaced the great American economic force – agriculture – and the cities grew in tandem with the stock market – when the combine of organized crime, forbidden substance, and the expansion of the police became established as  one of the basic forms of governance – writers took up the puzzle, the tease, and the wisecrack as valid responses to life within unclear parameters. Perhaps this is why of all decades, I love the twenties, a miraculous decade for literature across cultures. Parker was alert to all of it. She spotted Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner. She understood the Mencken canon in which Dreiser figured as a great novelist and at the same time as an idiot when it came to general ideas. And in her greatest stories – like Big Blonde – she put in the pick and pumped in embalming fluid, destroying the mirror as the archetypal instrument of realism.

You can never be cold enough if you are going into that line of work. 

suggestions for black history month

I'm thinking that for black history month we should imagine equality among the races. That would mean, for instance, that black median household income would have to triple - triple - to be on parity with white median household income. That means black unemployment would have to drop a whole 5 percent. If white unemployment were at the same level as black unemployment, we would be talking about a depression. That means that at a minimum, of the eleven million people per year who are served with warrents or have to spend a night in jail or make bail or are otherwise processed through the American gulag, only 10 percent, rather than 40 or 50, would be black. Wow, what a picture. America without apartheid. It is only a dream if we don't demand it, speak it, and talk about it 12 months of the year.

so much depends upon

So much depends, in the William Carlos Williams poem, on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water. Lily Briscoe, in To The Lighthouse, thinks “so much depends… upon distance.” The echoes here are arbitrary – and yet not entirely so. These are both modernist promts, both programmatic and surprisingly inside the programmatic space, in the art, which is no longer, if it ever was, innocent of the frame that it knows it will eventually bear. The innocence of the past is, of course, a construct of nostalgia, but it is, as well, a necessary fiction for getting us started, for the project of being contemporary. At some point in that project, retrospectively, we know we will have to dismantle that innocence, expose its never-was. But so much depends upon timing, here.

I’ve been working on my novel this month, trying to finish it up at least to the point of sending it out with a few chapters uninhabited, but planned – and I’ve been immersed in Woolf, from the diaries and letters to the novels and the esssays.  My materials in my novel are Williams, that corruption in the American grain, but certain formal ideas keep going back to Woolf.  For Williams, the poem was a machine made of words. I think Woolf would reject that description, finding it too obscuring, too foreshortened, too denotative. At the same time, she would have appreciated, or at least placed, the gesture, the intended shock. She, too, was out to shock the genteel tradition. Woolf’s sense of the distances that so much depends upon is, I think, to use the vocabulary of the time, more organic than mechanical. This is the scent Wyndham Lewis, that piggish misogynist, picked up.

This isn’t to say that Briscoe’s aesthetic is Woolf’s m.o. So much depends upon what the novel is supposed to do. Woolf is a novelist of networks rather than monuments – of dispersed inspirations, with their elliptical, filamental connections, rather than of focused worldviews, with their concentrated centers, their Blooms always departing and always coming home. For her, I suppose you could say, as much depends on the rain coming down to glaze the red wheelbarrow as on the wagon itself. Distance is a matter of a shift of attention that is both part of the scene and fashions it – it is part of the way, in the current of revelations in which things light up or darken, we capture the state of attention and its exterior referent without ultimately privileging one or the other. She has, accordingly, less time for the crowd – for the voice of the people which flows through Williams – given the fact that the multiple voices can only be handled through an intolerable simplification of their grains and aspects. Complexity, in Wolf’s terms, requires a more simple grouping in order for art not to muddy its insights entirely.  Proximity is achieved, but at the price of completeness.

And yet .. there is the marvelous city scene in Jacob’s Room, which certainly attempts and succeeds in the same way that Joyce’s Wandering Rocks succeeds – in the city as a sort of multi-tasked, alive scene.

That is something, a means, that I want to steal for myself. 

Mr. Fuck Fuck

I haven’t heard Mr. Fuck-Fuck today, but it is still early.

He’s become a part of the neighborhood. There is a colloquialism – “tear” – which means to move forward rapidly. He tore off in the car. When Mr. Fuck-Fuck goes down the street, I think of that word, and how he literally does seem to tear the air as he is avoided by all passerbys. Is it Tourettes syndrom? I’m not sure. The linguistic agenda doesn’t seem to vary as it does, or so I’ve read, with Tourettes. It is always a stream of fuck. Motherfuck Fuck. Sometimes bitch. Fuck that bitch. Then back to Fuck. At the top of his voice. The voice is powerful, especially when you see the scrawny man who emits it.

To judge by his clothes and grooming, Mr. Fuck-Fuck is cared for by someone. He is not dressed in the dumpster rags that the street people wear. He is dressed, even, rather nattily, and his beard has been trimmed. It makes me wonder about his private life. Is it a sister, a brother, a mother, an aunt who takes care of him? Most likely the caregiver is female. And most likely she is in tears part of the day. I would be. But what is she going to do?

As he tears down our sidewalk, he scares Adam. That’s normal. He scares me. It is the violence of the stream of gros mots which emerge from his body. Not just from his mouth or throat. It is as if the words rose from his very heels. He is bent, slightly, under the violence of them.

I have never seen a stronger case of language literally  seizing a person. Perhaps there is even something sacred about it. Doesn’t all poetry aspire to the condition of tourettes syndrom? Inspiration, that much derided concept, seems to me to be amply justified by the data of neurology. It could befall any of us – to take care of such a person. To be such a person. We are all God’s children, and fragile vessels at that. I salute the unknown hand that lays out Mr. Fuck-Fuck’s clothes. It is better, more patient, than mine. 

science tells us clinton was influenced by her wall street money. Class consciousness denies it.

There is really no mystery about influence and money. It has been studied. Here’s a report from the frontlines of study:
“A forthcoming article in Perspectives on Politics by (my former colleague) Martin Gilens and (my sometime collaborator) Benjamin Page marks a notable step in that process. Drawing on the same extensive evidence employed by Gilens in his landmark book “Affluence and Influence,” Gilens and Page analyze 1,779 policy outcomes over a period of more than 20 years. They conclude that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
This being so, I’ve been puzzled that Sanders health care proposals have been exhaustively explained by the explainers – such as the neo-liberals at Vox – while, so far, I’ve seen no policy wonk jump up and say, that it is as likely that Clinton is influenced by the money she has made on Wall Street as it is that humans influence Climate change.
I’m not surprised. Not because the explainers are in Clinton’s camp. Rather, this is an issue of class. Many studies have shown that people in the upper and upper middle class view friendship and gifts differently.
But how do these class norms work? A small part of the answer was provided by Charlotte Linde, who did ethnographic work to find out how identification with a group worked. Interestingly, she found out that it works both in the present and on the way people interpret their past. I’ve written about this before, so I am going to largely quote from my blog.
“Charlotte Linde is a rather brilliant ethnographer broadly within the symbolic interaction school – although not participating in that schools downhill slide into the irrelevance of infinitely coding conversations to make the smallest of small bore points. Rather, she has taken Labov’s idea that a story is a distinguishable discursive unit and researched Life Stories – she wrote the standard book on the subject.

In 2000, she wrote an article about her study of the synbolic dynamics at an insurance firm with the truly great title, “The acquisition of a speaker by a story: how history becomes memory and identity.” Identity, with its columnally Latinate Id seemingly standing for noun in general, has during the course of my lifetime been dipped in the acid of the verbal form, and now little leagurers talk of identifying with their team – their grandparents would, of course, used identify to talk not of a subjective process of belonging, but an objective process of witnessing, as in, can you identify the man who you saw shoot mr x in this courtroom? Conservative hearts break as the columnar Id falls to the ground, but that’s life, kiddo.

Linde’s article introduces a marvelous phrase: narrative induction. “I define narrative induction as the process by which people come to take on an existing set of stories as their own story…” (2000:608)My editor’s eye was pleased and did a little dance all over my face to see that this was the second sentence in the article – getting people to forthrightly state their topic is, surprisingly, one of the hardest things about editing academic papers. Most graduate students have concluded, from experience, that the best way to make a point is to hide it somewhere, perhaps on page 5, and hope that their advisor doesn’t see it for fear of being attacked. The rough and tumble of intellectual debate is the Ur-traumatic experience of the classroom – funny that this hasn’t been investigated, rather than mindlessly celebrated. But alors, avancez, boys and girls!

Narrative induction properly locates story as part of a process of initiation (which, being a “native” thing, or occult, failed to qualify for the verbal place held by identify with). Linde, in this paper, is obviously moving from her concern with stories people tell about themselves – the point of which is to say something significant about the self, and not the world – to stories people tell about the world. Those stories often are about experiences not one’s own. They are non-participant narratives.

Linde divides the NPN process– as she calls it – into three bits: how a person comes to take on someone else’s story; how a person comes to tell their own story in a way shaped by the stories of others; and how that story is heard by others as an instance of a normative pattern.

There is an area, as Linde points out, where work on this has been done: in religious studies. Specifically, the study of metanoia, conversion stories. But there’s metanoia and then there’s metanoia. There’s St. Paul on the way to Damascas, and there’s Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, on the way to the relative wealth of a Toyota Car Dealership, owned by his father-in-law. Linde, not having access to St. Paul, opted to study Midwestern insurance sales people. Like Labov, Linde is interested in class issues. In particular, stories of occupational choice. In her Life Stories book, she presented some evidence that professionals present their occupational choice stories in terms of some vocation or calling, while working class speakers present it, more often, in terms of accident or need for money. Philosophy professors rarely will say, for instance, well, I needed a steady paycheck, looked at the job security of tenure, loved the idea of travel and vacation time, so I went into philosophy. They will give a story rooted in their view of themselves as emotional/cognitive critters. Labov’s work was done in the seventies, and my guess is that there has been some shift. The notion that it is all chance for the blue collar worker, all vocation for the white collar, actually tallies well with the political economists notion that abstract labor is a thing like clay, to mold as you want to: we will train workers over here in the steel producing sector, and take off some here who are growing tomatoes. They won't mind - human products are infinitely re-trainable, and have no feelings about what they do.

But that feeling for abstract labor changes as one goes up the class scale. And it is here that I think we can locate the incredulity and surprise and the suspicion of innuendo when Sanders says that Clinton took a shitload of money from Wall Street and is likely to be influenced in her views as president by that closeness to Wall Street. For to the upper class ear, this sounds like saying Clinton did something low and blue collar like accept money for her views, instead of high and upper class like making the kind of money she deserved (as past secretaries of state and senators, going all the way back to … the eighties have done) as her due.
The knot of money received and the story that one’s life is actually determined by one’s feelings and beliefs and higher vocation – it comes out here.
I would bet that if you took a survey of the highly visible journalists, those who work for the NYT and WAPO and the networks, and you ask them what drove their vocational choice, we would hear all about ideals, and nothing about high salaries. Because high salaries, or large amounts of cultural capital, go with forgetting money, in a sense. It becomes a sort of imaginary friend.
This, of course, has been the premise for many a comedy about some richly salaried person coming abruptly down the ladder in life, where money becomes the overt motive for what you do.

While it would be acceptable - that is, it would conform to our class perceptions - for a truck driver to tell us that he or she was motivated by the excellent pay, a presidential candidate who said the same thing would cause a scandal. We expect instead a different ethos in the best and brightest. Which is why one feels a semiotic jar between Hillary Clinton expressing a certain humility about serving in public office and the same person saying that she made 675,000 dollars for three speeches because "that is what they offered".

the naivete of peace

D.C., as we all know, swims in a culture of impunity. Denizens of the New Republic, who in the Bush years showed such a hawkish appetite for the invasion of Iraq that the jaws of the advocates seemed to be dripping with the blood – let me hasten to say, with the blood of freedom, free enterprise and muscular liberalism – are out in force throwing contempt on Sanders’ lack of foreign policy knowledge and … muscular liberalism.

This article from Business Insider is typical Clinton wants to lead in the Middle East, whereas Sanders idea that there could be a coalition between Iran and Saudi Arabia is just “puzzling”. Indeed it is, since it calls the game: do the Saudis really want to defeat Isis? After all that money from Saudi sources flowed to Isis at the beginning of their revolt against Iraq?

I agree with the criticism that Sanders is a bit naïve about foreign policy, in as much as he hasn’t oriented himself to pounding into the heads of the populace that negotiation is not a sign of weakness, but of humanity. But to see the Clinton camp, unquestioned, tell us Sanders wants to let Iranian soldiers into Syria, on “the very border of Israel”, begs questions of its own.

For instance, here’s one, a lonely one, so far unasked by any reporter that I can see:

What does Clinton think of the fact that the Cia has supervised Saudi training and arming of rebels in Syria in  2013?  Does she  think the Saudis are trying to forge a secular state in Syria?

Ah, but why ask that question – a question that has been answered in the past, with the Mujahedeen in Afganistan, and with Sunni insurgents in Iraq during the occupation, and the Saudi invasion of Bahrain during Clinton’s term of office at State – when it betrays terrible naivete! Why, everything will turn out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. In maybe fifteen years – about the amount of time  the US and all of King Saul’s army has been battling the Taliban in Afghanistan.

I do fault Sanders for not questioning this more. If, as the odds show, Clinton is nominated, there will not  be a chance again to question the utter bankruptcy of hawkish policy in the Middle East.  

quid pro quo culture

The quid pro quo culture

Clinton’s response to the question about being paid 625,000 dollars for giving three speeches to Goldman Sachs stirred up some interest, and a lot of vitriol from Sanders supporters. While I understand the vitriol, I think it is important to broaden the response. Clinton didn’t invent this culture. She simply floats in it.

It is a matter not so much of being bought, but of being cognitively captured – which by easy degrees effects the career arc. Instead of using Clinton as an example, lets use Bernanke.

In 2009, the Fed, along with Treasury, engineered a controversial bailout of AIG. AIG was the party to financial instruments – bets – made, on a tremendous scale, by numerous counterparties. Among those counterparties was Citadel, a Chicago based hedge fund.

Now, Citadel was hit by the meltdown in 2008. According to Bloomberg Business:

“Investors in Citadel Investment Group’s two main hedge funds can take solace in the fact that 2008 has finally come to an end. Of course, that won’t ease the pain of seeing those two porfolios lose about 53% of their value going into the final week of the year.”

Thus, there is every reason to believe that Citadel was on its last legs in 2009. But it survived. One of the bright spots in that year was that AIG, far from dealing with Citadel as a bankrupt insurance firm and thus paying out a penny on the dollar, dealt with Citadel as a company with the infinite resources of the U.S. Government behind it and paid out a dollar on a dollar – 200 million of them.

Thus, Citadel owes its continued existence, in no small part, to the decisions of Ben Bernanke.

And now Ben Bernanke is making a considerable sum – probably in the millions – working for Citadel.

Do I think that Ken Griffen, Citadel’s Daddy Bucks, sat down with Ben B. and said, you get us that 200 million and you have a job with us, wink wink? No, of course not. Rather, in the course of time, as Bernanke was feeling his way to the exit at the Fed, an offer to a highly respected figure in the financial community was perhaps made by some intermediary that led to Bernanke taking his job with Citadel. That’s how the revolving door works.

This is the problem that Sanders is hammering on. Clinton was not bribed to do anything in particular for Goldman Sachs. But it is very likely that Goldman Sachs will get a very respectful hearing when she is president. I expect she will be president, in fact. I am hoping that Sanders shrill denunciations make the relationship between the Clinton administration and the banks much less comfortable. 

morning in santa monica

Morning in Santa Monica. For a long time, now, I have been walking Adam to school and then returning home to work, or to read. I’ve been enclosed in a little capsule of winter routine. Today I decided to walk down to the ocean. The beach was largely empty – meaning, really, that there were few people there. I walked across the expanse of sand to where the bank over where the ocean was lapping up on shore, then loped my way down the beach, heading away from the pier, towards Malibu. I encountered birds, lots of seabirds. One colony of very large pelicans, five of them, with those faces, elongated, brightly colored, somehow reminiscent of an African mask, or of Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon. Slightly frightening, the length of beak. As I passed them I actually glanced back, as if they might be following me.

I came upon a curlew. It was on the edge of the watermark left by the ocean, which at this hour was rumpled by low tide. It had the nice curved beak, not the sandpiper’s straight beak. I stopped. The curlew stopped. I began to think about the curlew’s life. We are told that the beasts of the air and those that creep upon the ground are driven primarily by sex and food. There’s some validity to that p.o.v. – it is one in which we have simply the species and the vehicle of the species, the contingent piece of it. However, what the p.o.v. doesn’t indicate is all the down time in between. This curlew, for instance, stopped perhaps because of me, perhaps because he just stopped. He was evidently having as much of a down time moment as I was myself. First, he waggled his tail, then he strutted a bit, then he stopped. He seemed to be contemplating his bill. If he were a character in a Victorian novel, I would say that he was contemplating his bill with enormous satisfaction.  He also had his head cocked in a certain way, so that he seemed to be listening to the ocean’s eternal laundering. Of course, I am aware that my ocean and my sounds depend entirely on my sensory equipment, which is at setting different from his. Birds, I have read, commonly hear sounds at a higher frequency than humans. If that makes sense. And of course the whole rods n cones arrangement of the eyes is different. The curlew was seeing or processing different pictures than I was. Probably it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to take what we know about bird physiology and fashion some Virtual Reality helmet so that we see and hear on the settings that they see and hear. Yet I don’t think this would get us too near what the bird – what my bird, the curlew – is like, to use Nagel’s phrase. It would be like reading a bad and misleading translation of a book from a foreign language.

The curlew, at rest, stood first on his two legs, then, after a while, on one leg only. I didn’t catch it when he lifted up the other leg. It happened in an instant. I must say that my concentration on the bird was interupted by glances up the beach, and oceanward. I wondered again when we were ever going to visit the Catalina Islands. I wondered about a few things that I decided were distracting me from the beach, like the news. Fuck the news.

Then the curlew was back in a two legged posture, and then it strutted down to the watermark. It stood there and the ocean came up and foamed around its talons. It was indifferent to the water. When the water receded, it started hunting with its curved beak in the sand, and finding things I couldn’t see. The vehicle was seized by the species urge. I bestirred myself and made off in the direction of the pedestrian bridge that is right after the repairs they are making to the entrance to the PCH at California ave.  When I got on the bridge, I saw two men filming a man and a woman. The man, a lanky, older white guy, bald, but with a fringe of somewhat ridiculous long hair, was doing a dance step in synch with a lithe younger black woman. Two steps to one side, two steps to the other side, throw your arms up. I could see the man was the worse dancer. I could tell the dancer from the dance easy enough. I interrupted the session and crossed over the bridge.

Those dancers, I thought. Species or vehicle, vehicle or species.

the solution-suck: Sanders single payer plan and the neo-liberal attack dogs

You will have noticed that Sanders single payer plan has been extensively attacked. It has been dismissed by Paul Krugman and savaged by Vox, which is turning into the 21^st century version of the old New Republic (the Marty Peretz New Republic that marketed its liberal reputation to put across reactionary ideas).

These logic behind these political attacks is pretty simple. Sanders has been hammering on a problem, a massive problem, with healthcare in America. It is fantastically expensive; and, for the majority of people, that is, those who live in households thatmake below around 100 thousand, it is a subject of constant, rational worry, since it is precisely those households for which every rachet upward of the medical machine makes medical care ruinous.  32 million non-elderly Americans are still uninsured, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And even for those who are insured,  According to the Commonwealth Fund:

“New estimates from the Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey, 2014, indicate that 23 percent of 19-to-64-year-old adults who were insured all year—or 31 million people—had such high out-of-pocket costs or deductibles relative to their incomes that they were underinsured. These estimates are statistically unchanged from 2010 and 2012, but nearly double those found in 2003 when the measure was first introduced in the survey. The share of continuously insured adults with high deductibles has tripled, rising from 3 percent in 2003 to 11 percent in 2014. Half (51%) of underinsured adults reported problems with medical bills or debt and more than two of five (44%) reported not getting needed care because of cost. Among adults who were paying off medical bills, half of underinsured adults and 41 percent of privately insured adults with high deductibles had debt loads of $4,000 or more.”

Even this survey doesn’t represent the reality of the medical care burden. Those in the 19 to 64 group are connected by family ties to those in the 64 and above group, and often have to dip into what savings they have for medical expenses that the retirees can’t pay.

This survey received a lot of news coverage. It is relevant to the medical care crisis:

“Approximately 63% of Americans have no emergency savings for things such as a $1,000 emergency room visit or a $500 car repair, according to a survey released Wednesday of 1,000 adults by personal finance website Bankrate.com, up slightly from 62% last year. Faced with an emergency, they say they would raise the money by reducing spending elsewhere (23%), borrowing from family and/or friends (15%) or using credit cards to bridge the gap (15%).”

It is in this environment of economic precarity that we are seeing a rather amazing rise in the cost of medicines: From Business insider:

“Cost trends for prescription drug coverage are projected to increase by 8.6% in 2015 and by 11.3% in 2016 for active plan and retiree plan members under 65, according to a survey released Thursday by benefits, compensation and human resources consulting firm The Segal Group Inc. That compares with an increase of 10.7% in 2014.

New York-based Segal predicts the cost trend rate for specialty and biotechnology drugs, which treat conditions like cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, will hit 19.4% in 2015 and 18.9% in 2016, the survey showed.”

This is of course an impressionistic survey of the medical landscape, but it is enough of one to pose the question: is there a problem here?

This question is not, however, posed by any of the attacks on Sanders so far. What one wants is a comprehensive survey of the costs to the American public of medical care, and then a comparison of the two plans, Clintons and Sanders, which address it. Instead, what we are getting is the well known solution-suck program. One concentrates on the flaws in a solution to the elimination of everything else. In this way, we forget that even if we have no plan, we have a crisis in costs in the US. The difference, of course, is in who is going to pay for it: whether it is going to continue to be on the backs of the working class, or whether the costs are going to be met through some universal medical care system. The second question is whether the costs can be mitigated or even lowered by government action.

What is never said about the later question is that the costs are siginificantly increased by government action. There are three drivers of cost in the US: guilds, monopolies and intermediaries. Guilds are labor forces that are artificially restricted by government required licences. Monopolies are both IP driven and trust driven. And intermediaries are complex interactions that include both insurance companies and health care providers. When I have to go to a doctor to get a prescription to get a drug, I am paying an intermediary premium.

We might well want doctors and nurses to be licenced, and patent protection to work. But this doesn’t mean that we have to have the system we have now. For instance, patents, as Dean Baker has suggested, should better be treated as a premium on licencing products. Instead of the inventors of x drug having a 20 year monopoly on producing it, Baker’s suggestion is that the government auction the design of the drug and give a percentage of the profits of the drug to the inventor from all those who bid to produce it. Thus, we would have both competition and a fair compensation for invention.

In any case, the solution-suck strategy is being pulled on Sanders. The way to fight back is to bring the conversation continually, obsessively back to the problem. Because in reality, the solution-suck strategy is simply neo-liberalism’s way of keeping things the way they are. And the way they are is becoming, increasingly, a horror.

trump and white euphemism culture

In the advent of Donald Trump, I have been thinking, we are seeing both the result and the decline of White Euphemism culture.
White Euphemism culture accompanied the liquidation of traditional liberal-left policies in the post-Cold War era. As the mass incarceration of blacks and hispanics got into high gear, and as the precarious economic gains of black household either stagnate or collapsed, the governing class promoted a politics of linguistic civil rights. Reading the Ferguson Report (a small paperback that nobody included on the "Books we Love" list last year, putting in question, I think, the notion that books should be loved, or that the love of books actually maps the effect of books) one notices that - as Rand Paul, of all people, remarked in the debate - the predominantly black population is not only poor, but is subject to an enormous machinery of fines and petty imprisonments that is exactly the same as the Jim Crow era. And Ferguson is hardly alone. Go to anyplace with similar conditions - a black majority population and a white majority police force or court house or judicial system - and you will find the same thing. This is how America administers its Sowetos.

At the end of 2008, the neo-liberal culture went into overdrive about this wonderful ‘post racial’ nation we had here.
However, anybody who has any acquaintance with the internet (and I’ve had a blog going, continously since 2001, which has made me very aware of Internety things) knows that the forces of misogyny, racism and psychosis were definitely abroad in the land. I’m reminded of this fact reading Joan Walsh’s piece in the Nation about her support for Clinton.

Joan Walsh has been on the Internet for longer than my blog has been up, since Salon's salad days in the Clinton impeachment era. In the article, Walsh justly points out that the smears and the threats that she has received for being for Clinton, and that her daughter has received, go beyond sexist and reach psychotic. She’s 100 percent right. The rape by comment culture is alive and well, and certainly finds expression among some Sanders supporters. But I had one caveat, which is that, as Walsh well knows, no matter what the ideology one supports as a woman on the Internet, the rape by comment people will be there. I have read, on supposedly liberal or left blogs, that Ann Coulter, the far right figure, was a dyke, should be raped, should be shut up with a bullet, should have her body dismembered, was a whore, etc., etc. I am pretty sure that female Sanders supporters get the same treatment.
The hope of the euphemism culture was that, without interference from the state, the private sector would not only pump out growth and prosperity for all, but that it would, with proper nudging, bring about a “post-racial, post-gender” society. Now, it isn’t that there has been no progress. But the progress has not been enough, not nearly enough, in comparison with the older liberal interventionist model.
Trump has torn off the bandage. But what was underneath is not new.

adventures in subpar parenting

While Adam Smith was propounding the elements of capitalist anthropology – that it is in the nature of humans to truck and barter – Rousseau was imagining teaching a child different elements altogether. Rousseau’s Emile might break his furniture and his window – but he must bear the consequences of broken furniture and cold winds. “It is better that he should have a cold”, Rousseau says, “than be crazy.” Fou – by fou Rousseau meant, be like other children of his century.

Notice, though, that there is no substitution here – no trucking and bartering. There is no – if you break your chair, you can’t have dinner. Because this introduces both an equivalence – furniture/dinner – and a mode of thinking in which all objects dissolve into substitutes in an exchange.

Now, myself, I have always been impressed with the idea of ‘deal-less’ childrearing. Although I’m definitely not going to leave a window broken, I do like making it clear that there are natural implications for action, rather than implications that depend upon the whim of the parent.

With these notions, I was naturally setting myself up for failure.

A couple of days ago, I had one of those moments of parental discouragement. Adam did not want to take a bath. He did not want to so much that there were tears and tantrums. He did not want to so much that there was kicking. He did not want to so much that talking wasn’t working – nor a bit of yelling. There was a part of me that admired his stubbornness, I must admit, but mostly, I was getting worn down.

So I bartered. I told him that if he didn’t take a bath, we were going to put him to bed with no stories and with the lights out immediately.

You will notice that there is zero connection between taking a bath and telling a story. That is, until I made it. Until I made a deal.

Adam folded. This was a relief. However, I do feel like I am starting a pattern of easy discipline, of truck and barter, that can’t be good. On the other hand, Emile’s tutor was simply that – he seems to have no other function. While me, as a parent, I do have many other functions. I don’t have infinite patience. I for one thing wanted to start dinner.  I had a schedule I was following that evening.

Well, I know you can’t raise a child against all the social currents that one lives within. But there are moments of … what shall I call it? Moral disarmament in parenting, I guess, that are discouraging. Or at least peal off a bit of the gilding of the little icon you make of yourself as the good parent.