the lost classics

There is a subculture of neglected or lost books, of which I am a member. I am a frequent visitor at the neglected books blog, which keeps lists put out at various times by journals like Anteaus and American Scholar. Typically, these lists are compiled from the responses of authors who are asked to name a book that deserves more recognition.

While I was travelling back from Paris a couple of days ago, I read a book, Lost Classics, which consisted of little essays extolling neglected books, lost books, childhood favorites, and the like. The essays were built on the format of the personal essay, the dominant form in our time. I’m not against personal essays, but I do find that context sorta gets whacked in favor of a rather uncritical self report.

I thought, naturally, about what I’d include in a list. And then I thought I’d write my own little essays about writers who have not gotten a fair shake in the American culture I know.

But before I do that: what does it mean, in a book’s career, to be lost? Or, more broadly, to be rediscovered?

The rediscovery of, for instance, the Bible during the 16^th and 17^th century was not an event of merely antiquarian interest, but was of vast importance to the  formation of a literate public, and to the formation of pre-modern culture. It was not the only cause of the religious wars, but it played a very important role in them. The New Model Army of Cromwell may have been the first to supply its soldiers with books – specifically, the Soldier’s Pocket Bible.

The Renaissance is also inextricably tied to the “new learning”. Although historians now tend to dissolve the Renaissance into an epiphenomenon or a retrospective illusion about the 14^th and 15^th century, I am true to my education and like to think of Gemistos Plethon sailing from Byzantium to Italy with a boatload of manuscripts in 1438. This is the Gemistos celebrated in Pound’s Cantos. Whoever the agent,it seems that there was a rage for manuscripts in Florence in the early fifteenth century, and that Plato was finally released into the European mainstream by translators and commentors like Ficino. Whitehead’s remark that all philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato is a bit too magisterial – Plato was teleported into Europe in various stages. Still, Whitehead’s remark is a good measure for scaling the importance, in the posthumous life of an author, of rediscovery.

That said, I’m going to list a few of my discoveries.

curiosity cabinets

A detached page…

Visit to the Muséum d’histoire naturelle yesterday on Rue Buffon. I am fond or, to be Frenchy, J’adore this little piece of Paris, between the Austerlitz station and that Hammam-mosque on St. Hilaire that boasts a little salon de the. First, I, with Adam in tow (or, more precisely, en avant, since I was pushing Adam in  his stroller) met Francois at the Luxembourg Park, where we strolled about under a grey sky that was determined to make the Park look ordinary or even dreary. And succeeded: the Park did look dreary, as we walked down dreary paths among dreary, locked up amusement areas for the kids, past the dreary tennis courts where two ardent but very wet players were batting around an increasingly soppy ball, and past the rain bedraggled flowering bushes, and past the dreary orangery into the coven of streets near Saint Sulpice, wet and grey, and into an American style lunch place. It was American style down to the menu, which advertised bagels and lox and various super burgers. Francois and I discussed the dreary state of American and especially French politics (I said that if it was between Juppé and Hollande, I’d be for Juppé, and Francois said Juppe was making an effort to get the bobo vote, like mine). Adam, after eating his bagel with cream cheese, quietly imagined that a red plastic lego piece he was carrying was Spiderman and had it fight with various other objects, all of which were, for the moment, supervillains and superheros. Finally it was time for coffee and I noticed how patient Adam had been and proposed going to the Muséum, where I thought we would find dinosaur skeletons.

In fact, I had never visited the Muséum’s exhibition space. In 2010, I have a very sweet memory of strolling the flourishing garden on an Autumn day with A. I was new in Paris then. I also remember, in 2012, visiting a seminar room in the complex of buildings with M., where we listened to lectures on the history of taxidermy,  M. being a great fan of taxidermy.

In any case (a trick of language, this “in any case”, like a dreary usher inviting the guests in to see the cosmetized corpse of a transition), there we were, entering the vast first floor hall, gazing at the cadenced, suspended skeletons of whales under what dim artificial light there was, with the outside light barely filtering through the colored windows far above us: this gave the whole the aspect of being a vast, antiquated acquarium. Adam was hesitant and frankly afraid of some of the stuffed animals. This was not just due to the Muséum’s intention, but an echo of yesterday’s disastrous decision to visit the Musée Grevin: a wax museum on Boulevard Montmartre. It was raining yesterday – rain was always strumming its fingers on the roof when we were in Paris  – and so I had looked up things to do for kids in Paris when it rains. A. was off to a business meeting. After navigating the Metro with the stroller and  Adam, we plunked down our Euros and plunged into an atmosphere of grotesque entertainment. Adam was not amused. In fact, he immediately felt something was not right at the Grevin when we went into the hoaky antechamber, a mirrored room, and were entertained by various cheap light and sound tricks. This, he decided, was definitely a monster haunted place, which who in their right mind would want to visit? The wax figures were even worse: they were too lifelike and at the same time unlifelike – had that zombie-ish glitter of in-between. Soon he was crying, and soon I was rushing through the many many chambers of that combination of chamber of horrors and celebration of celebrity with a sobbing little boy in my arms. However, the Muséum d’histoire naturelle was not out to frighten, but to edify, and Adam realized this. The rather kitsch tableaux at the Grevin charm me (I like these lefthand descendents of curiosity cabinets). The taxidermist’s dream of herds of Sub-Saharan beasts in the Muséum are charming in a different way (these are the true, lineal descendents of the curiosity cabinet – I could draw up a family tree, and show you the affects of unnatural selection). All the skins are genuine – they belong to beasts that died long ago – and the point is to learn about them close up. Or the ostensive point. The closest we came to the Grevin was the Salle des disparues et presque-disparues. It was a long, shadowy gallery, practically unlit, on the top floor. A glass case with a giant stuffed dodo is the first thing to greet the visitor, providing the motif for the effigies within. Dodoes are, legitimately, the monarchs of the kingdom of the extinct – or extinguished, as the French say. It is a tour, in brief, of man’s inhumanity, or perhaps better, surplus humanity, to beasts, braining them, plucking them, eating them or wasting them, and leaving mounds of bones upon the shore. It was so dark in there that I couldn’t read the notices on all of the glass cages, and am not sure if the snowy egret is extinct or nearly extinct – or was that the whooping crane?

Emerging from the end of the world, we descended to the ground floor again and went out to look at the Garden. The Garden was wet. Still, I like the tall plane trees that line the big peripheral paths, which led us to the gates at the bottom. In the area near the gate, there’s a large statue of the “discoverer” of evolution (a little French bragging here – the statue is of Lamarck). Tucked in a corner towards the left was a lonely ice cream stand, which we headed to. Adam ate  a double chocolate ice cream at a table from which we’d wiped away the puddles of water; after this,  Francois headed out to photograph the Seine cresting under the Pont d’Austerlitz while Adam went back to the statue and climbed onto the plinth. Then he started skipping around the statue singing London Bridge is falling down. I watched him, and allowed the spirit of some old poet to wander around inside me, looking for the symbol here. Surely I was being given a Baudelarian correspondance, and what was I going to do with it?

The day grew drearier.

Later, in the news, there were reports of flooding in Northern France. 

the thumbsuckers' gentlemen's agreement

Shakespeare makes it easy for the audience by having his villains – his Gloucester, his scheming Edmund – rehearse, in soliloquy, both the evil of their intentions and the strategy of deception by which they pursue them. Deception becomes not only an instrument but a major pleasure as well, a proof of the superiority of the evil character to the good ones.

In  our era, the soliloquy is pretty much dead. The strategy of deception more often deceives the deceivers, who think not that they are beyond good and evil, but that they are experts in nudgery, technocrats and meritocrats, and will the good. Their true intentions are estranged from them, and a whole code disguises the source of their advantages.

This is what makes the current freakout of the media over Trump such an interesting phenomenon. At least for the critics. For this freakout has made the norm of strategic dissimulation, usually denied, float to the surface as a thing defended.

What I mean is this: the word on Donald Trump is that he has “crossed a line.” Where other GOP politicians have dogwhistled on race, never openly encouraging racism, Trump has openly encouraged racism.

Here’s the deal. There is no line. Dogwhistling on race is racism. Implicit appeals to racism that wear a cast of deniability are not some degree removed from racism, but the very expression of racism in a period when it operates under a code of plausible denial.

In other words, the press has long been operating under a “gentlemen’s agreement”- much like the tacit quotas on Jews that were common in universities and social associations early in the twentieth century. Except this is an agreement not to call out the dogwhistler as racist. In this way, racism found its pocket of tolerance among those who pretended to be socially liberal. It was a good deal – by pretending to find racism abhorrent, the class of elite thumbsuckers, the editors of the great papers, the tv correspondents, could comfortably inhabit the most segegated income level in America – the top one percent – without looking around and asking why it was so very, very white.

Of course, I am sure that the thumbsuckers will go on freaking out about Trump’s racism without understanding that they have revealed their own. But with the gentlemen’s agreement getting some airing, it is going to be that much harder to keep up the strategy of deception.

the page is not for turning

There seems to be a rule among old literary dogs that we all have to moan and groan about the internet and computers. I do share the prevailing angst about the extinction of the book store. Book stores civilize cities, as do parks, sidewalks, statuary, and a level of crime high enough to scare away gentrifying urban professionals.

The book, too, it is said, is on its way out. First they came for the snow leopard, then the hardback version of War and Peace. I think this exaggerates the book or in general paper media situation. However, it is true that one of the defining physical characteristics of the book – a page that must be turned – is on the way to minority status.

In the past fifteen years, I have read perhaps as many texts on computers, on pdf, epub and djvu, as I have in the media that was current when I was a lad. I am not unhappy about this.

Its deeper effect on my reading is, perhaps, to replace the unconscious expectation that is given to a reader by the mechanism of using his finger to turn the page. Epub, which I read on Ipad, cleverly reconstructs that experience, so that it doesn’t disappear altogether into a vague nostalgia, like the feel of squeezing your finger into a hole on the rotary dial to make a call on a phone. This, like turning a page, was one of the affordances of the index finger. However, the epub experience does not completely materialize the older reading experience, any more than a three d movie really makes you feel like you are moving in space.  The older experience links us to a world of vegetation that pre-existed our very species, which our ancestors scrambled down in the long morning of the Holocene.  In other words, even with the epub, our monkeyness is thwarted.

Perhaps that monkeyness is what is engaged in the page-turner – a hand-eye activity like scooting through the branches in a tree. Of course, there is the desire to know what is next. But perhaps the satisfaction of the primate self and the satisfaction of our curiosity are interlinked. And perhaps in reading a pdf, there’s a bit of a shock deep down, a dull thud among us vieux garcons, as our monkeyness falls out of the tree for real.

This, though, ignores the hand’s participation in scrolling. So far, we don’t have voice commands for it – rather, it is a carpal activity. Scrolling does, however, rather unmoor the page-trained reader. The page as a unit is no longer viable. The scroll takes in half a page or a page and a half. It may preserve the old space between one page and another, but it is a space that is no longer validated by a turn. The passages in a book leap out in a different way than they do on a page by page basis.

I recently reread Chesteron’s The Man Who was Thursday on the computer. I used both a pdf version and an epub. The pdf was digitalized for the Internet Archive and was missing some pages. The epub I got somewhere else.

Chesterton dealt in the page – turner genre, the mystery or thriller, but one doesn’t chase his puzzles like one chases, say, the puzzles of H.G. Wells or John Buchan, even.As Chesterton himself said, the MWWT is a bad novel, if one judges by the conventions of the novel, but it is an excellent surface upon which Chesterton mounted his beautiful paradoxes and an allegorical poem, of sorts. Chesterton warns the reader in the subtitle: a Nightmare. It is more like an allegorical vision, however, except much funnier than Piers Plowman. But the fabula, to use the Russian formalist term, is much more tedious than the syuzhet. The plot device of an anarchist conspiracy in which all the anarchists are really secret policemen is good – it makes for a fine farce – but Chesterton is not interested enough in the mechanics of revelation to remove the tediousness from the exposure, one after the other, of the anarchs as cops.  Chesterton never absorbed a single lesson from the master, Henry James. Wells, who has a similar allegorical bent, did. Chesterton’s master was the fairy tale, but his sensibility was shrank too much from the sadistic side of H C Anderson and the Grimms. His fairy tale model was Victorian, a matter that was sieved through the middle class morality of Andrew Lang.

To get back to my thesis, what this means is that Chesterton’s words often hang on the page as unturnable wholes. We don’t feel these words are engaged in a chase, but rather, the frieze portraying a chase. In that sense, TMWWT is as unturnable as The Gay Science (a comparison that Chesterton would have loathed).

It is a matter of various kinds of turns, really. Chesterton chose the turn of the phrase over the turn of the page. The turn of the phrase, in turn, overturns the inversions characteristic of Wildean paradox. It is as if Chesterton came upon the back, or shadow, side of the commonplaces that Wilde was always showing up. But in doing this in a narrative, he mader the page a heavier business.

Still, it was the business Chesterton knew. When the page form floats away, it makes the story part of the book even more of an irritant. On the other hand, the beautiful passages, which are what one remembers of Chesterton, stand out, although they still feel like they have not been roughed up by experience.  The famous passage at the end, for instance.

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

"I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. 

I began this meaning to protest against the old dog growling about the sin and shame of reading on computers, but I see that, by now, I have varied the bark but barked nevertheless. Well… I am an old man. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each, but I do not think that they will sing to me.

Gender equality - plus d'effort!

When, last year, the Washington Examiner claimed that Clinton’s Senate office paid women less than men, Clinton responded by claiming that the Examiner figures  only included median salaries among full-time, year-round employees. Among all employees, however, median salaries were equal. This devolved into a tit for tat about Clinton, and the larger point was lost.

The larger point shouldn’t be. The careers of women are much more subject to interruption than the careers of men. The reason? The responsibility for child care is still thrown for the most part on women. This is aggravated by the lack of a national pre-k child care program, and the way in which parental leave is largely unmandated in the US. The scandinavian countries have put in place pre-k child care programs, as well as instituting generous parental leave programs for both sexes. This is, paradoxically, important for the equality measure that takes in the whole career path. Men in Norway, for instance, can’t transfer their leave to women, and are under some pressure to take the leave. 68 percent of males do. This means that men also interrupt their career paths.

As this happens, career paths start accomodating this life style change, instead of the life style having to accommodate the career path.

As World Watch put it about the Norwegian example:

“Then there are the childcare services – the guaranteed service to all families with children between one year and school age is seen an important enabler of gender equality. Even though a large number of women work part-time, 77% of Norwegian children between three years old and school age are in childcare for 30 or more hours per week, and 35% of children below three years of age are receiving the same amount, or more, of care. This number has increased significantly in the last six years, rising 25% between 2005 and 2011.”

http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/audit-assurance/corporate-reporting/world-watch/norway-gender-gaps-persist.html

These institutional supports still have not produced gender compensation equality. More women are part time, less men take their paternal leave (although the numbers on the latter keep rising), and the quota system that has tried to promote more women in management positions has still not cracked the hegemony of males in top executive positions.

The US will never reach parity between male and female compensation without a Norway style guarantee of childcare service for pre-K children and, incidentally, Kindergarten.

This issue reached into Clinton’s senate office, into Walmart and Goldman Sachs, and, really, everyplace in the labor market.

If Clinton is going to press on the symbolic value of having, at last, a female president, then let’s turn that symbolic power into real changes in the gender status quo.

journalists and prediction 2

Prediction 2

In the sciences, the ideal of prediction is given by a test. A guess – a hypothesis – is made about a situation. The situation is tested in some way and the prediction about the results of the test are based on assumptions about the causal compositon of the situation, what factors are in play, and whether one has assigned them a correct value. Naturally, there are levels of causal consistency. Two factors can, separately, have different effects than they do when combined.

In journalism, there is definitely a reference to science, but more for the prestige than the method. More important in the shaping of public opinion is to make predictions that exclude any radical change in the current order. In other words, predictions are instruments for making the order seem inevitable.

This is correctly intuited by the citizenry. For some, this is reassuring. Often the majority will prefer inertia to the risk of change, even if the order itself is changing in such a way that they are exposed to more and more risks anyway. Journalism at the national level is conducted by people who, at least officially, suffer from none of the woes that they often go out and describe. They officially have insurance. They officially have savings. They officially are not addicted to drugs. They officially are not dodging debt collectors or relying on high interest credit cards to get by on a weekly basis. In actuality, none of this is necessarily true. Neal Gabler, a high profile writer, recently published a piece about his poor financial state. The only point of the piece was to say that one of the top ranked non-fiction writers was not in the official state. It was shocking to the extent that the code is mostly kept. The comments to his article were what you expect, people rushing in blaming him for his plight. The blamers don’t attach their own credit card statements or savings account data to show us what state they are in, but they feel pretty free to heckle, since otherwise, it might turn out that it is not an individual’s fault, but the fault of a system that cannot control life style costs like education or healthcare, and that uses technology not to spread wealth and leisure more equally, but to concentrate it ever more at the top.

The code among journalists, which comes out in their careless us of the “we” word, is that they are on the side of the successful. Radical change, of course, challenges the very canons of success.

That kind of change is what predictionis made, implicitly, against.

The deeper level of this use of prediction is to annex, journalistically, the future to the temporal dimention of the news – the contemporary. It is to press an image of a faux eternity on the forehead of the leviathan who represents our current power arrangements.

The critics of the newspaper recognized that the news “thins” life out – it undermines temporal depth by creating a sort of depthless contemporaneity. From this perspective, we can see not only why the press likes to predict, but why it is so naïve about the motives  for the impulse to predict. 

journalists and prediction 1

On Prediction 1

Obama, at his last roast, said – on a serious note that was quasi-bogus – that the press should seek for the truth (although of course not too hard – Obama’s Justice department, which has sought more injunctions against the press than any since the Nixon administration, will see to that).

Obama’s statement is in the true grain of American piety. We are always being told that the truth, objectively, is seeking the truth. Although the majority of the population doesn’t believe that at all. As David Bowie sang in Five Years about the newscaster who said the world was ending

“News guy wept when he told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying.”

Of course, this was before we had an inkling that the ice cap in the Antarctic was likely to diminish by half within our lifetimes. News guys have ceased reporting on this news – it is too depressing, so they leave it to NOVA.

In any case, the self-image of the media – that they are truth seekers – is curiously empty when it comes to what the “truth” means and how to find it. This feeds back into the lack of a definition of journalism. What is it exactly? A science? An art? Is it like the courtroom, a forum for competing versions of events? The courtroom, of course, is not constructed to arrive at the truth, but to arrive at a verdict of guilty or not guilty. But the news guys hesitate before embracing that construct. A newspaper that proclaimed that it would sort the guilty out from the innocent would immediately call down a lot of derision upon its head, and make itself liable for losses in court.

And after all, the news doesn’t quite fall into the categories of guilty/not guilty, although a subset of it does.

There aren’t many books that examine this question. Emil Loebl’s Kulture und Presse, written in 1904 and never, to my knowledge, translated into English, is one of the few to venture into the deeper questions of what the media does and how it does it without falling into banality. Myself, I think one way through this sticky labyrinth is to address the place of prediction in the political press. It is of a queerness…

Prediction, like truth, is a manufactured process. In the financial sector, pediction – “expectations” – plays a distinct role not only in reporting, but on the reported on. Every announcement of quarterly earnings is heralded by predictions of quarterly earnings, and when these predictions are exceeded, or ‘disappointed’, the price of the stock changes accordingly. Or sometimes not. In truth, it is a price change that effects only one day of change, although it can inaugurate longer term change – but one has to remember that the flow of prices are effected by a host of opinions, and probably can’t be traced to a single cause – there are times that the exceeded earnings report actually leads to a decrease in stock price as, retrospectively, expectations are adjusted.

Prediction in the political press is also about expectation. But expectation requires a reference groups – after all, whose expectation is it? I have no expectation at all about Air Liquide’s next quarterly earnings report – but there are people who work in banks and stockbroker firms who specialize in just such things. The people whose expectations count in the political press are similarly insiders, narrative creators. The narrative they create determines what is plausible and what is implausible to the journalists. And self-consciously realizing this power, both the journalists and the administrators in the political image industry are continually shifting what is plausible and what isn’t according to standards that are not defined by what is popular among the electorate, or among the broader mix of the electorate and non-electorate. For instance, it is perennially popular, in these insider circles, to insist that we need to cut social security benefits, although outside those circles, this has zero support. So the only plausible stances on social security is the radical one of preserving it as it is or the more popular one of cutting it. Expanding it isn’t even on the plausibilty scale. The notion, of course, is that after the politically accredited have done their work, the political image makers will do theirs, and like Pavlov’s dogs, we will salivate on cue.

Still, even if we grant that plausibility in political circles – circles that include politicians, lobbyists, think tankers, and journalists – takes this shape, it is still not clear why journalists feel the need to predict. Or what constitutes the basis of their predictions.

Prediction has long been coupled to truth in the sciences, although the nexus is metaphysically obscure, since it has to do with that most knotty of issues, induction. Prediction and prophecy have a distinct family tree, and an ancient social function that was not controlled by a  philosophically credible theory of truth. Prediction was, and is, partly magical, just as the future is partly magical. Our subjectivity, I think, will always cause the future to be partly magical, to seem to bend towards our wishes or prejudices. I can’t go on I’ll go on is not a truth many of us can bear – we were not born to be Beckett characters, for good and ill. Magic has a prestige that is lent to prediction. In, say, economics, this becomes a justification for the whole discipline – at least of the mainstream, where Milton Friedman’s flatheaded positivism is still the ghost below the boards. Oddly, economists are notoriously bad at forecasting. It is a standard joke in the business world to compare the forecasts economists make at the beginning of the year with the national data collected at the end of the year.

However, economists at least have models. Journalists rarely do. This is all the more true with the explanationist, the current crop of hip journalists who have spread out over the face of the land, from Slate to Vox to Upshot (on the new york times) to Politico. These places are manned by second order men – and it is a heavily male phenomenon, which perhaps explains the way explanationists often seem to be mansplaining on a more industrial scale – and their explanations are not so much research heavy as tone heavy. Although any journalist at these places should have access to the universe of scholarly journals at JSTOR or EBSCO, one rarely feels that the explanatory pieces are well researched. In fact, the explanationists are the heirs of the previous decades contrarians. The craze for contrarians rose and fell with the reputation of Christopher Hitchens, and his deep support for the Iraq war. Myself, I felt like Hitchens, during the decade of his celebrity, traded in his rather elegant prose style for the kind of programmed barking that conservative American columnists perfected in the sixties – the sound emitted by James Kirkpatrick whenever the name Martin Luther King Jr. was uttered.

Contrarianism lost its luster, but its moves were taken up, with less barking, by the explanationists, who form a sort of core prophecy group in American journalism.

I’m going to continue this reflection tomorrow. 

250 years after the slaveholder's republic was founded, the pundits discover racism in high places

One of the ironies in Donald Trump’s elevation to something more than presidential candidate – to a veritable Trumpope – is that he was the best of the 17 guys vying for the nomination.

It is easy not to see this under the impression of misogyny and racism that he naturally projects. But compare him to his rivals, and it soon becomes apparent.

As Cruz astutely put it (in tones that would have made Uriah Heep blush), Trump has long been a Democrat on the issues that tickle the cold dead heart of the usual GOP constituency. Trump will be, in public, a horrible misogynist, treating women the way, well, Cruz’s elbow treats his wife. But on policy issues, Trump is actually much better for women than his rivals. His opposition to abortion is a conversion of convenience; where his rivals talked of shutting down Planned Parenthood and maybe lynching the people who work for it, Trump doesn’t care.

On race, of course, Trump has shown himself to be the most overtly racist candidate since George Wallace. But again, his rivals, the mealymouthed Minis, whilst giving lip service to white Euphemism culture, have long been fully on board the vote suppression policy. It is not Trump, but GOP governors, who have been wildly promoting IDs for voters and cutting funds for voting. We already know how Jeb Bush handled the voter issue when he was governor of Florida – with exemplary corruption.

On immigration, Trump’s hallmark issue, he is of course a fascist. But the temper of the fascism of his rivals can be measured by how quickly they picked up on his proposals – from the Rubio who turned his back on his only (little) achievement in Congress to Cruz, they have all pledged to be hunters of the immigrant, expellers of the immigrant, and sworn enemy of “anchor babies”.

Trump’s penchant for turning a dog whistle into a Bronx cheer has turned the heads of the pundits, put them in a sweat. Many have written that Trump represents a never before seen white nativist political phenomenon.

Hmm. I’ve actually seen this white nativist political phenomenon before. It was both parties before 1965. And it has been the standard and pundit accepted factor in GOP victories since 1968.

It is this that makes me think that Trump is playing a part not in some Shakespeare comedy, but in an Ibsen melodrama, in which the community’s repressed but vigorously pursued life is suddenly put on display, for all to see. Ghosts. The GOP and a goodly portion of the Dems have been racist and sexist for years – in fact, all those years trickling back to the foundation of this slaveholding republic.

We can’t pretend, at the moment, that this ain’t so, hence the weird media panic. Which is, it should be noted, a very white panic. This has not been a secret to African Americans, with the exception of Judge Thomas.

So I am relieved that Clinton’s opponent, on the off chance that she loses, is going to be Trump. Cruz or Rubio would really have been alarming.  

revery of the catalogue

Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,
L'univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah ! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes !
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit !

I was that child, a maniac for maps (although less interested in prints). In place of prints, there were catalogues. My memory just touches on my earliest conscious self, the one that couldn’t get enough of catalogues – behind that it is all white noise. I was told by my parents that they could quiet me in my crib by giving me a Sears catalog. I still have a sensual memory of the little insets of tractors (it was a farming catalogue – at one point in its corporate existence, Sears had a strong rural presence, more about which anon). For some reason, there was something incredibly alluring about the array of things that one could get. Not of course that I had any infant inkling of the cash nexus. But I had an early inkling that the charm in life was that the diverse things that constitute it exist each in their own picture in a catalogue.

I’ve always preferred the catalogue image to the real thing – it is a form of consumer perversion that, I think, I share with many. We live now in the hypotrophy of catalogues, from QVC channel to the internet, catalogues fill our cribs, and it is evident to me that a special form of scopophilia is the name of the game. We don’t desire to see our neighbor nude, we desire to see our neighbor’s things, especially if our neighbor lives in a gated community and we suspect that he has a marvelous and very expensive kitchen with one of those granite table islands.

“Catalogue”,  the OED tells us, derives from the Greek, kata, down, and legein, to sort or choose or pick. Down, the direction of the list. Pick or choose, the function of the finger. At least, down as the direction of the list impinges on the logocentric west, where the alphabet is a hybrid of image and musical note. The finger marks the page, descends from one item to the other, while the eye scans – such, at least, is the hieroglyph in the catalogue.

Lists have attracted a good deal of anthropological attention. Jack Goody wrote an exemplary essay on the list, which he believed were one of the great cognitive tools invented in the ancient world – in either Mesopotamia or Egypt.  Goody’s list thesis was published in the 70s; in the last ten years, the study of lists has become hot. A whole issue of Isis, the history of science journal, was recently dedicated to “listmania”. Umberto Eco curated a sort of list exhibit, for which he wrote the catalogue essay, An infinity of lists. A catalogue is, of course, a variety of list, which gives us a list of lists.

Goody’s thesis is that the list is primarily a graphic tool. Listing happens orally – in fact, Adam gives  vent to Homeric lists quite often, of his friends, of superheros, of figures printed on his tee shirt, etc. Goody, who did field studies in, I believe, Madagascar, encountered people who could list a whole geneology.  Still, Goody wants us to understand that the affordance of the list to fix, in graphic form, an enumeration of object references, is uniquely tied to the written. The written word begins as a listing device. In fact, most of the archaeological textual finds of such ancient past cultures as Assyria is concerned with  listing items. It is with the list, Goody thinks, that the world and the word begin to separate. Here’s the wheat. Here’s the sheep. Here’s the slaves. And here are their representations, and number. It’s all a book of numbers, ultimately.

Yet the utilitarian provenance of the list cannot exhaust the list’s linguistic force. It’s romance, so to speak. That wheat, those sheep, those slaves tend to migrate into grander narratives. And this is the basis of that ‘love’ for maps and prints that the Baudelairian child experiences. It is not only a matter of the specific item, but of the possibility of plentitude, of items unknown, that links the catalogue to the voyage.

In the American context, the primal catalogue, the legendary catalogue, is not one listing the ships bound for Troy, but the one listing bonnets, plows, and plates – the Sears catalogue. Sears now has an antediluvian ring – there are American children who will grow up and never enter a Sears store or see a Sears catalogue. The towers of Illium, or at least of the Sears building, have, metaphorically, fallen.  However, in the early twentieth century, Sears – and certain rivals, such as Montgomery Ward – were powers in the land. Certain of Sears’s yearly catalogues have been published in their own right – for instance, the 1897 Sears catalogue was published in 1968 with an introduction by S J Perelman.

Sears was not the first companny to bring advanced urban consumerism to the outlying territories. That honor belongs to Singer Sewing company, which sent its salesmen through the entire Republic and sold its machine on the monthly payment plan, introducing credit into the heart of the American family. But it was Sears – and its rivals – that made consumerism part of the dreamlife. They combined the sale of the essentials – the plow, the hammer, the sewing machine – with the sale of domestic non-essentials, like Chutney, or curtains. Singer’s sewing machine could be justified both as a source of peripheral income and as a product that would save on the cost of clothing, in as much as one could now repair clothing in a professional manner, or make it. But chutney or curtains – curtains. Curtains were outside the circuit of durables; curtains were ornament. Already, windows were a sign of bourgeois aspiration (an overdetermined sign, granted). But curtains, which modified or negated the function of the window, from the inside – curtains made the inside something different, gave the inside a vaguely theatrical cast. We jump, with curtains, to another semiotic level. One strand of this is waste – since to close the curtains is a kind of potlatch, a deliberate destruction of the view, and of light itself.

This form of potlach loses its celebratory nature in today’s American suburbs. The wanderer at midday in the housing estates outside, say, Clarkston Georgia will pass street after street of houses turning a blind, curtain wearing eye to the world. The shades are down, the curtains drawn, and the house exists, there, in a sort of magic fortress mentality. The thief, rapist or murderer – for who else would have time and inclination to wander down a suburban street at midday? – will not be able to peer in.

To return, however, to the catalogue. Adam has now reached the age when his “vast appetite” realizes itsle in coyly making requests, most often of things having to do with superheros – the spiderman mask, the Captain America shirt, the Batman shoes. The requests are made deliberately enticing by being put in the vague future – someday could you get me Batman shoes? After I pick Adam up at school, we often walk the stretch on Wilshire between Whole Foods and our house, and the whole continuous reel of the street is broken apart by a sort of primitive commodification. The bus, the yogurt smoothie, the basketball, the scooter – anything can be picked out for such a request. These requests pepper our entretien, which otherwise concerns songs, tales of who pushed who on the playground, and, if I press very hard, info from the week’s lessons. Last week, all the lessons were derived from Earth Day, which is how the kids received a very instructive reading about earthworms from Miss I. Among the amazing facts about earthworms is that some types have up to five hearts. This has translated in Adam’s head as the fact that he – Adam – has up to five hearts. Usually he has three. He proves this, whenever I disagree, by counting on his fingers – one two three. This feat of logical dissociation, I should point out, is still of a markedly higher intellectual caliber than anything offered in the 16 GOP presidential debates we all had to suffer from this spring.

Although Adam has been present at hundreds, maybe a thousand, buying transactions, he is still too little to grasp the meaning of money. Of course, I myself am uncertain in my own graps of the meaning of money. Its many meanings. But he does associate it with adult power. Although that power is more than countered, when he is in full imaginative flight, by superpower. Super power works by crushing things. Money works by facilitating the non-crushing of things. And this is the state of our semiotic balance of powers, here in Santa Monica in the Spring of 2016.

political novels

Since I am writing a novel that uses, among other things, politics, I’ve been thinking about the use of politics in fiction. There are critics who think that political fiction is fiction with a politician in it, just as a wedding cake is a cake topped with little bride and groom figurines. But that’s a narrow view of politics and even wedding cakes. In fact, it is a typically D.C., top down view of politics. A broader view would take in, say, Bellows, or Updike’s Rabbit novels. 

There is a wonderful instance of the perils of politics for the novelist in Rabbit Redux, Updike’s reckoning with the sixties. Or, rather, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s reckoning with the sixties. It is interesting to me that the overtly political things in that novel – for instance, Rabbit’s argument with his wife Janice’s lover about Vietnam – are oddly clunky, while the social stuff, the medium in which politics lives, is done in a thousand-fold scatter of brilliant nuances. Here is Harry in typical pro-war mode about Vietnam, arguing with his wife’s lover, Stavros:

“We’d turn it into another Japan if they’d let us. That’s all we want to do, make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations. Poor old LBJ, Jesus with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-first fucking state of the Union if they’d just stop throwing bombs. We’re begging them to rig up some election, any elections, and they’d rather throw bombs. What more can we do? We’re trying to give ourselves away, really, that’s all our foreign policy is, is trying to give ourselves away to make little yellow people happy, and guys like you sit around in restaurants moaning, ‘Jesus, we’re rotten.’ 
“I thought it was us and not them throwing the bombs.”
“We stopped, we stopped like all you liberals were marching for and what did it get us?” He leans forward to pronounce the answer clearly. “Not shit.”

Eventually, Stavros pronounces his opinion that Harry is “a good hearted imperialist racist.” Stavros, mind you, is a small town, middle aged car dealer. Updike needs a foil for Harry, and Stavros, such as he is, is it. 

In this novel, at least – Stavros reappears in the next Rabbit novel - there is a certain fraudulence about Stavros, a pretence on Updike's part that one makes one feel, beyond the fiction itself, the upsurge of a preemptive need that goes beyond the rules of novel's game. This is not something we feel about his other characters. 

Updike is always technically aware of what he is doing. So it is a fair question to ask if the clunkiness of the overt political parts is intentional. In Self-Consciousness, Updike writes about his own obsession with Vietnam, which, we can see, is echoed in Harry's speeches. The war and the protests against the war made him feel excluded from the club of writers, the majority of whom took an anti-Vietnam war tilt. On Updike’s own account, he would go to parties and dominate discussions with defenses of the war. It wasn’t that he planned to dominate the discussion, or knew he was doing it – he simply couldn’t shut up, and he couldn’t sense, while he was speaking, time going by or attention being strained. I’ve known that feeling myself. His wife would point this out to him. Philip Roth once pointed this out to him. But Updike kept doing it. 

Updike felt that there was a connection between defending the war and his very language – or rather, the way he spoke. The way he stuttered. The helplessness of knowing he was right and not being able to convince people he was right, not even his wife, reproduced the more intimate feeling of not being able to speak because speech itself is the obstacle. To lie there in the dark coffin, one’s tongue paralyzed, is the writer’s nightmare, maybe the nightmare out of which a certain kind of writer emerges. And we all know that out of this dilemma of being right, of being obviously right, and being surrounded by people who are obviously wrong, and who preen themselves on their erroneous opinions, there arises a familiar pattern: first the feeling of righteousness is coupled with the feeling of impotence, then the feeling that one is being held back, unfairly, generates an image of those enemies all around whose fault it is that one is being unfairly held back, then a politics that is fueled by denunciation of those who are unfairly holding one back becomes wholly shaped by denunciation until denunciation is self-justifying – all of which leads to talk radio politics. Rabbit’s speech about Vietnam, the defensiveness of it, the use of caricatures of the kind of speech he feels is being attributed to him by opponents unknown, those ghost quotes that clog his speech, the talk of the enemy, the snobbishness of the enemy, it eerily echoes the kind of talk radio style that appeared, fifteen years latter. Updike catches a genuine something in the air. The genealogy of this style would take us through Rabbit, through Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh, through the thrombosis of that rotten egg laid by the new left, Identity politics, all the way up to the default political blogger style of perpetual mutually armed destruction, nuclear exchanges every day. 

There is a way of talking about fiction that assumes that fiction is just about getting a reflection, that it does not intervene on reality, that it exists in an oddly self-erased space. Myself, I like to think of a comment of Proust’s to the effect that Balzac’s nobility, unreal when he created it, was realized after Balzac died – the sum total of his Human Comedy was to create the template upon which the Second Empire’s nobility modeled itself. Style, in other words, has an effect on history. This is why you have to break the mirror writing fiction, shift the joys of mimesis, realize that description is an act. And a particularly prideful act, too – boosting your world upon the world. Updike is famous for rendering and noticing the stuff that surrounds us. He likes to get things right, he likes to know about the light, about the way eyes shift in a face, about the way a man leans on a bar to drink a beer and how the beer comes out of the can and how blunt fingers can peel off the label while the man struggles with the usual territorial barriers to saying something intimate, about what the obsolescence of a technology does to an industry that makes that technology and the people who work in that industry who make the technology – in the case of Rabbit Redux, the technology is printing, and the obsolescence is in the use of the eye to make printing adjustments, something Harry does expertly, as he once played baseball. And something we know Harry won’t be able to do for much longer. Rather, Harry is going to have to move into the talentless economy of service, of auto sales, to switch positions with Stavros. Harry’s resistance to this makes him conservative, although his actual political position is a product of the culture of the New Deal, the hegemony of the Democratic economy of the fifties and sixties; his real conservatism, though he doesn’t exactly know it, has been bypassed by all sides, including the conservative side. There’s a quiet moment in the novel when Harry is talking with his father-in-law. The guy owns a car lot. He sells cars for a living. And Harry thinks: “How timid, really, people who live by people must be. Earl Angstrom was right about that at least: better make your deals with things.”

Don’t trade the alienation you do know for the one you don’t know. Well, it is already too late in 1969. Harry’s fierce, instinctive loyalty is to Earl’s America, but that country is slipping out from under him. That country was entering the phase of making its deals with deals, making the art of the deal the national pastime and obsession. The politics of making deals with things isn’t just conservative; it is the recipe for downward mobility. 

Updike’s problems as a novelist with what to do about politics are interesting because he is torn between the most common solution – the author inserts his own politics in the fiction, devises a hero to represent his opinion, and devises villains to represent the opposite – and the more indirect solutions that respond to, well, the history of the novel as a vehicle for intelligence since James. I’ve reviewed enough of the first solution, and generally dread reading it. I usually share the usually lefty opinions of the author, but I usually do not share the idea that a novel is a clumsy megaphone through which to trumpet irredeemably crude opinions, attaching them to laughably virtuous heroes and heroines.. The most dreadful of this kind of novel usually goes back in time on a life guard’s mission to save this or that character from history, showering the chosen object with a bunch of contemporary biases and feelings: ah, the feminist heroine of the Revolutionary war! The gay black scientist working in New Orleans, circa 1865! In order to give their characters potentia – the ability to act – these novels inevitably operate in a reactionary way, by distorting the real system of exploitation. You can’t have lefty politics, history, and a Hollywood happy end without producing utter pap. To distort the past the writer and his or her audience is a product of in order to produce a satisfying fantasy about the present is the worst kind of bourgeois mystification, since it presents a history ultimately without conflict. We are products of conflict, which marks our every gesture. One of the pre-socratics – Democritus? – claimed that fire was the primal element out of which all things came. I don’t recall whether he named the mysterious stylistic principle differentiating one thing from the other; I do know that the political novelist operates on the same unifying principle,  seeing all gestures eventually swept up in struggle, which marks the most intimate as well as the most public spheres. Contentment, that is, escape from struggle, or play, accepting the terms of struggle but not its seriousness,  mark the limits of the political novel’s utopian aspiration

How to get there, though…

  

give me corks or give me death

M F K Fisher was a great observer of the rituals that gather around meals. Here she is about drinking wine in France, which she first encountered in 1929: “Drawing the cork is a great ceremony--waiters cluster around the wine-master, and the man who has ordered it listens anxiously to see if the pop sounds right. Then the cork is waved under his nose, and he sniffs it loudly. Finally the wine is poured, still in the cradle, into his glass, and he sips it slowly and with the most amazing noises. The waiters and the wine-master watch his face to see if he likes it, and finally go away.”

This is funny and ethnographically accurate, for its time.

The funny part, of course, for Americans, is the fuss. At the time, and even now, the middle class American norm is to separate food and drink – which is good or bad, and served in large or small quantities – from how it is delivered. Yet oddly, no people on earth have ever devoted more ingenuity to packaging and photographing food. Incredibly threatening blown up pictures of, say, hamburgers are a standard part of the American visual ecology. I’ve never heard anybody remark on how gross this is, but I assume that my feeling, when confronted with a picture of a sloppy taco that is ten times the size of an actual taco – which is that anorexia is not such a bad option after all – is not uncommon. Americans are bombarded with films of meat frying, of fruit being crunched at orchestral sound levels, and of fizzy drinks being poured, deluge like, over ice cubes like small icebergs, and we shrug it off. But when it comes to the activity of the meal, manners and customs are as rigidly separated from the substances the meal aims at as cookbooks are from etiquette books.
In spite of this, eating is not, I’d contend, a rational, calory maximizing consumer activity that has accidentally spawned a few ignorable spinoff behaviors. To my mind, taste and the pleasures of taste are inseparable from context. By which I mean, corks count.
The cork, as we all know, is being replaced, little by little, by the plastic bottle cap, suitably geeked. And wine geeks are all about this, since, chemically, they assure us that these caps can allow us to assert more control over oxydation and all the chemical processes that go on when the juice from a cask is syphoned into a bottle. I’m confident that this may be true.
I don’t care, though. I like it that a dry cork alerts me, immediately, that the wine is probably suckworthy. But I like even more that the cork, the normal, healthy cork, has to be taken out of the bottle before I can get into it. That friendly cork, that bit of a tree grown, as I vaguely imagine, in Portugal, accompanies the whole wine imbibation. The plastic top does not. The plastic cap is not about trees in the hot Meditteranean sun, but about a factory in East Baton Rouge converting petroleum to the polyurethral products that are inexorably junking up our world.

Taste. Taste is association. This just isn’t some Proust effect. The meals you eat and the people you eat them with wrap themselves around the meals you will eat.
But what can I say? The world goes downhill on all fronts, and I need a sign to hang around my neck so I can parade around 3rd street in Santa Monica, warning of doom.

the case against Clinton for beginners

I, too, find the Clinton supporters puzzling.

They are very, hyper-conscious of the incidents in the campaign, and yet surprisingly blank about what they want from Clinton as president. For instance, what kind of foreign policy do Clinton supporters want? Clinton’s experience – which is often touted as, simply, experience – is best exemplified here, as far as I can tell. As a senator from 2000 to 2008, I don’t see a lot of leadership on the issues of that dirty time. She seems to have been a standard Daschle democrat, and Daschle was one of the most feckless dem politicians ever to grace the national stage. Her stamp, however, seems very strong on the foreign policy of the Obama administration in its first three years. I think she is very proud of what she did. She’s proud of the overthrow of Qaddafi, she’s proud of the weapon sales to the Gulf states, and she’s proud of trying to push Obama to do a Libya like intervention in Syria – as she pointed out in the last debate. She is, in short, on the hawk wing of the D party, with an ideology that is pretty much like Joe Lieberman’s. She even defended the coup in Honduras, which is pretty amazing.

On domestic policy, she’s more to the left. For instance, it was pretty great that she made a deal out of the lack of questions about abortion. And yet, the Clintonian line on abortion – that it should be legal and “rare” – has been a disaster for abortion rights. If you really think it is the gov’s business to make it rare, it is hard to argue against the slew of laws that force women to view films, or get “therapeutic” advice, etc., before they get abortions. Jessica Valenti made this point in 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/09/hillary-clinton-abortion-legal-but-rare

As for health care, raising social security benefits, and government action to reduce wealth and income inequality – I haven’t any firm sense that she, on her own, has any ideas here. Rather, she seems to be pushed into ideas – for instance, she seemed to be pushed into opposing the TPP, even though she lobbied for it as a sec state, and she seems to be pushed into opposing fracking, though she, again, facilitated fracking around the world when she was sec state. She opposes Keystone, now, although she has close campaign associates, like Jeffrey Berman, who lobbied for it. To an extent, that she is pushable is a good thing – politicians, in a democracy, should be the pawns of an aroused populace. But her actions as sec state, and as a Clinton foundation something – what does or did she do for them? – and as a speaker, seem to indicate that she can be pretty easily pushed the other way.

The argument of Clinton’s supporters is that this is irrelevant. But I’m not sure why we are editing her experience while at the same time arguing that she is the most experienced candidate, and that this is a big plus over haplesss Sanders.

So, the bottom line is: what is in it for me? If I’m a member of a black household where the unemployment rate is still in the depression era digits and the median household wealth is five times less than a white household’s – is there going to be any change? If I’m a woman with two small kids and I’m not breaking glass ceilings but working as a cashier and uber driver, is there going to be a push for national child care? Is there going to be a strong push to overturn abortion restrictions popping up all over the place? Is the pledge to rid the water supplies of all american cities of lead in the next five years going to go down memory hole?

The argument against Sanders is that, though I’d benefit from what he advocates, he can’t pass what he advocates. But the argument against Clinton is surely that she seems not to advocate anything but stasis, baby steps in the style of the Clinton presidency in the 90s. That, to me, is a promise to waste the next four years,, or cede them to the ever more radical right.

letters to a young plumber

In one of the famous “Letters to a Young Poet “, which Rilke wrote when he was merely 28, he gives this advice:

“You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity…”

I don’t think any poet has ever been so finely, so spiritually, so absolutely one-upped. After Rilke was finished with the job, the poor young poet probably went back to the family haberdashery business and tossed out the ditties.

Now, I wouldn’t dream of putting myself on the same stage with Rilke, but, recently, I was in a similar situation. A young plumber, who knew my reputation with a pair of pliers and couple of cross cleats, sent me the specs for an S trap that he’d recently installed and asked me if I thought his teflon taping technique was any good. He admitted, like the young poet, that he had asked many others, one of whom (a beerish chap who happened to be his boss), had asked him if he was fucking around on the job again. Ah, the vulgarity to which the delicate soul of the dedicated plumber is subject. I, of course, followed Rilke’s lead. Has the proper conduction of detritus and the hydrodynamics of faucet flow,  I asked him, sunk into your dreams, your hopes, and your sex life? In the quietest hour of your quietest night, I asked, have you ever pondered an existence in which, by some tyrant’s order, you were forbidden to use a strap wrench? Would you feel like one of Beckett’s tramps, that you couldn’t go on, or do you think you’d just jerryrig a substitute with an indutrial pair of sheers and the elastic strap wripped from an old pair of BVDs? If the latter, I am afrain I can’t help you: crassness has crept over your soul like aspergillus fumigatus over a damp carpet. If, however, you affirm, with every turn of your locking jaw wrench that I will, I must, I just haveta plumb – then, and only then, my son, have you found the pivot of your service in the construction, maintenance, and sanitation industries! In confirmation of which, I urge you to buy a six pack of Blue Ribbon and drain it on Saturday morning, before breakfast, whilst chanting dithyrambs to the ancient Greek Muse of Plumbing, Drainophene, as is done by all the true plumbers I’ve ever met.

poem

Hell is easy: a blanket will do it

Under which, on hot nights infinite

Lay down a body like mine

And cover the feet closely, against its lifetime habit

– and that is all, my dear. An intolerable discomfort

Dilated to the size of the universe.  So yes

A God that is the master of tortures is conceivable

A God in our own image, habit’s double agent

Who knows that bones crush, that skin is nothing

Against flame, ice, steel, the sharp edge.

But a God beyond our temptations is

A God we can’t imagine.

Only, we can abstract an inch

Beyond the grind and crush of those winged and walking generations –

Something skinless, needless, blessed.

But what would this God be up to?

What’s in it for him

With no root in any image or song?

This is truly a God for atheists.

Surely our sacrifices have not all been in vain?

How to be President of the US for dummies

The qualification kerfluffle between Sanders and Clinton is ripe with meritocratic comedy. Nothing is more important in a guild-oriented plutocracy like the US than "qualification". It is the testing mania raised to a mythological level. Making the presidency something like a brain surgeon's position (or a taxi cab drivers) where there is a vague licencing credential is, I think, expressive of a whole dimension of what is wrong with American politics. In fact, I think I am much more qualified than both of the candidates, since I've seen fire and I've seen rain, I've been poor and now I'm a bourgeois, and I've read several books - including, How to be President of the USA for Dummies - so there is that. Qualification is an especially juicy subject for academics and writers, since holding on to this last privilege is, in the age of ferocious humanities downsizing, about all we have left. But fuck that. Nobody asks if Mark Zuckerberg is qualified to do squat about education - they just give him the school district of Newark like a big christmas gift. Is Bill Gates qualified to do anything except lecture on monopoly and how to exploit it? Nah. But there he is, the man who influences policy countrywide cause of his billions. Like a particularly bad dissertation written by a student the department wants to get rid of, the presidency is awarded not on the basis of qualification, but on the basis of the fatigue of the voters, who want to get the thing over with.

Qualification is a doddle.

prisoners of the campaign

The problem with political campaigns in a democracy is very similar to the problems faced by the Red Faction Army (the group of urban guerrilas that the press labeled the Baader-Meinhof gang). The RFA began attacking industrialists and policemen because they believed Germany was still a proto-Nazi state and they wanted to bring about a revolution. Put off to one side the lunacy of the tactic – this, at least, is what they believed and how they acted. But – as was inevitable – certain of their comrades were captured and imprisoned. A true Red Faction Army would shrug and recruit more. But instead, the RFA turned from militating for Revolution to directing all their efforts to freeing their comrades. Freeing their comrades meant nothing to anybody but the RFA. In the moment they turned to that activity, letting, as it were, the feudal value of group loyalty trump revolutionary activism, they were lost not only as revolutionaries but as anything but another pathological criminal gang.

Brecht’s Three penny opera gets the criminal mindset down – these people are the bulwark of the capitalist system, its truest believers.

Similarly, campaigns start out ostensibly not just to elect person X, but to institute those changes in the lives of the electors that X believes are warrented.

Yet, very soon after the campaign starts, candidates start bickering about the campaign itself, the campaign their opponent is running. This is understandable, but it is also tactically advantageous to the candidate who most wants to stick with the status quo.

This is why, I think, Clinton’s supporters in the press seem much more obsessed with Bernie Bros than with, say, the lead in the water of Flint Michigan. Clinton herself made a very good speech about Flint, and in a debate pledged to get the lead out of water and paint within five years if she was elected. An excellent pledge, and one she should hammer on. But instead of that hammering, Clinton’s followers are still doing the rounds on Bernie Bros, even after polls have shown that in Sanders’s strongest demographic, the 18 – 35 set, women outnumber men by a considerable number. That is according to the latest poll on these things by USA today: “Millennial women now back Sanders by a jaw-dropping 61%-30% while the divide among Millennial men is much closer, 48%-44%.”

In any case, while there are surely thousands of Sanders’ supporters who are all about sexism, Sanders isn’t. And there are millions of Sanders’ supporters who are not about sexism – in fact, these supporters view Sanders the way Gloria Steinem once described him (when he was running for the Senate): as an honorary woman. Trust Steinem to put a sentiment  cringeworthily.

Still, who cares? What matters, obviously, is what Sanders and Clinton propose to do for the vast majority of men and women in the US and – given the onerous presence of the US around the world – in the middle east, South America, Asia, etc. What’s in it for the teacher in my son Adam’s class, or the woman who is on her feet eight hours a day as the cashier at the local Vons? Cause really, that is all I care about. I don’t care about freeing prisoners of the campaign. I care about inverting the structures of oppression and bondage that crush our imagination and emotional capicity every day of our lives in this moment. 

The working class GOP contingent

For once, a decent article in the NYT about the social conditions that have led to the rise of Trump.
Still, it suffers from a flaw that I'd call Frankism, after its most famous advocate, Thomas Frank. The idea, here, is that the "uneducated" - the high school graduates and dropouts of the GOP working class - were led along like stupid zombies by a GOP that used "gods" and "guns" to trick them.

This, I think, is a massive misreading of the strategy of the GOP cohort. They voted for politicians who continually promised to privatize Social Security and cut taxes not because they believed in cutting social security, but because they didn't believe the GOP was serious. They wanted the tax cuts because that was money in their pockets - and they needed that money. Wages have been bad for a long, long time, save for a few years in the nineties. This means that those households needed their discretionary spending. Meanwhile, fica was, due to the rotten deal between the Dems and the Republicans in the 80s, rising as the great Federal tax.

What changed in 2008 and was changing before then was that tax cuts no longer were enough. And now, after having paid more and more for social security and medicare, the GOP seemed more serious about vouchering them into inexistence than about anything else - save tax cuts for the wealthiest.

I think that the working class GOP pursued a strategy as well as the elites. They were willing to grant the elites their plutocratic gains in return for more discretionary income and the "cultural" issues, which were really lifestyle issues, issues of how to have a life on a more and more restricted budget. God, among other things, is cheap - there's no charge for going to church. On the other hand, going to Disneyland is expensive.

I don't want to ignore racism here, which is interwoven with the story of who gets what. The inability of the GOP working class to feel any solidarity with the black working class is certainly the result of a long history of racism in this country. The inability of the elites to even see the landmined life of the black working class is of course due to racism too.

The Sanders movement is going to have to confront that racism, instead of assuming that solidarity will happen if the economic issues are laid out clearly enough.

sure vs. absolutely

Somewhere in Delmore Schwarz’s journals he remarks on the brilliance of the American “sure”.

He doesn’t say anything more, but I’d speculate that Schwarz intuited that certain words are novels – and not just novels, but state of the nation novels, U.S.A. novels.

Like so much in the U.S.A, the word has mutated since the forties. It has become the bogus absolutely. Of course, this mutation is not unrelated to other mutations abroad in the land – for instance, the systematic skinning of the working class, from their place in the popular arts to their dignity to their paychecks. Sure was both the extended hand and a word to be spoken out of the side of the mouth by private dicks and mobsters. Sure was off the farm – as was the population, draining into Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Cleveland, making steel in Youngstown and Pittsburg, waging labor war in Flint. Sure was familiar with numbers runners and the overflowing toilets in neighborhood taverns on Friday night. Sure had all beef hotdogs in its teeth and the ball game on the radio.

Absolutely doesn’t. Absolutely is the fated, that is, planned erosion of the manufacturing sector. Absolutely is the relentless rise of the service sector. Absolutely is waitresses setting out jauntily to make money while going to college and ending up three jobbing it to make payments on the college loan.  Absolutely is the cool music played at starbucks. Absolutely is emotional labor, while emotional surplus value is hauled off to be plasticized in the cultural industries. But absolutely never reaches into the now dominent upper reaches, who invaded every crannie of the popular arts in the U.S.A. and made it a mirror of their own vanity. Absolutely is said to them. They never say it back. Instead, they say things like, I’ll have the Chilean sea bass.

I sure hate absolutely. 

there will be blood - reflections on the present state of the human meat grinder

Jeremy Harding’s long review essay about Angola in the LRB is a fascinating exercise in the history of the Cold war as pursued in one of its side pockets, even if Harding recounts it at a cold blooded jet fighter height, mainly. Clearly, one of the many things Obama could have congratulated Castro for in Cuba was his strong contribution to the end of apartheid. Without Cuban troops and Soviet weapons in Angola in the seventies and eighties, the South African apartheid forces and the Americans would have rolled over Namibia and Angola, and apartheid might still have its leather gloved grip on the region.
I read it with some memory of the events that it went through. However, I found it suprisingly relevant to today’s politics. Reagan’s under-secretary of state, Crocker, was the author of the doctrine of linkage and constructive engagement with South Africa, which meant, generally, supporting the racist regime.Its the same cynical, immoral and ultimately futile policy that Clinton seems to have pursued and to want to pursue with Saudi Arabia. Clinton’s pretense to have made women’s rights a presence on the world stage was undermined by the warm ties and weapons sales that she advocated while Secretary of State. More weapons were sold to the Gulf state, I believe, during the brief period of Clinton’s stay at State than have ever been sold to them before. This, in a period in which the Saudi’s imprisoned numerous immigant workers, mostly female, for sorcery, executed various “sorcerers”, and made only the most cosmetic of attempts to impress the West with civil rights. The West, in the person of a press that is tightly connected, on the corporate level, was always cooperative with the propaganda project. The New Yorker recently published a celebratory article centering on one fabulously wealthy Saudi woman who is bravely going out there and driving herself. This is treated as a blow for human rights on par with the march at Selma. Meanwhile, we pretend that our moral justification in Afghanistan is fighting for the country’s oppressed women, who are treated by the Taliban exactly how the Saudis treat women.
Clinton, like Reagan, has her eyes on the prize: the untrammeled use of American power to promote capitalism and various cherrypicked moral principles – the latter not too closely. It took Obama six years to start quietly undoing a foreign policy founded on brainless toughness and a penchant for doing ‘stupid stuff’. Clinton, by all accounts, wants to undo Obama’s undoing.
I suppose I should say that “Clinton” and “Obama” represent pieces on the chess board, functions more than personalities. Clinton stands in for the longstanding complex of money and military power that has transformed the DC metro area into a real estate agent’s wet dream. This is an old American disease.
And like any disease, there will be blood. There always is. The pundits are hungry for it. O, the wars we have missed! In Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen… oops, not quite Yemen. There we are still pounding the shit out of civilians, and nobody that I know of is selling any t shirt saying Je suis Yemen. No, in Brussels the death of 35 is two days of headlines, while in Aden, another bomb strike, another hundred civilian deaths is a real yawner. And so the pundits, like ticks, cheer for the opening of another jugular somewhere. It will be good for us. It will demonstrate our resolution. We will be tough.
In Angola, maybe a million died. A Cold war story with twists and turns and a nice O.Henry ending: the white apartheid soldiers who did such damage to Angola, and who were ultimately defeated by the Cubans, are now mercenaries defending the once Marxist state, and the “freedom fighters” there, so beloved by Reagan, have been tracked down with the encouragement of the Americans and Total Oil and murdered.
Such is the state of the human meat grinder on the cusp of major global climate change.

rom com imperialism

A and I set out to enjoy a fun, forgettable movie last night. The movie we chose, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, will, eventually, be forgettable, but its not-funness was very wrapped up in memory: the memory of that corrupt and vile decade, the 00s in these here United States. The overwhelming Orientalist stereoptypes, from Gunga Din to Savage to Wise Native; the political blankness (this is a movie that locates one of its first scenes at the Bagram Airforce base in 2002, which is famous for containing a torture chamber in  which at least two Afghan civilians were tortured to death by American interrogators, without pausing to allude to it)); the ridiculous intrusion of a sort of lean-in feminism as our moral justification for being in Afghanistan (real feminism was introduced by the Communists under the PDPA in 1978, which began a revolt that was stifled by Soviet soldiers. The US then funded the mujahedin freedom fighters, as Reagan called them, who put the subordination of women at the top of their list of complaints, and, in power, quickly purged the hospitals  of women doctors and the schools of women students); and the unquestioning subordination of the press to the military and the Bush narrative (although the movie carefully never mentions George Bush), created, for me, an hour andd fifty minute time trip back to the America of that decade.

Hollywood, of course, with a small deviation in the seventies, has always kissed the ass of the Pentagon, recognizing the Defense department as another smoke and mirrors laboratory, covering itself in the rhetoric of uplift as it goes about accruing money and power.  In this movie, the soldiers are all polite as pie, the generals crusty. No rapists here. No commander as bad as Richard Myers, who missed Osama bin Laden riding away on his little pony – apparently, they could bomb the peasants around the base of Tora Bora to their hearts content, but they couldn’t bomb the paths out of Tora Bora and through the mountains because they might hurt some innocent shepherds.  The American government here, so well intentioned that it positively squeaked, could never have countenanced the airlift of Taliban leaders and fighters and ISI commandos from Kunduz  to Pakistan. No, they were much too busy doing, in their clumsy, loveable way, good to the country.  In this Afghanistan war, the Taliban are the ultimate evil. The Northern Alliance, the warlords the US teamed up with, are only obliquely mentioned in a scene that hints at what they were famous for – kidnapping and raping boys.

The end of this thing was in the same spirit as the rest of it.. A cheerful vet, his legs blown off but not at all bitter about it, expresses the view that nobody is responsible for the war in Afghanistan. Its causes are too far back in history to even think about. The unsuccessful, 14 year, trillion and a half dollar war was just one of those things, like a mountain or a bad case of diarrhea. So sweet! For if nobody is to blame, why, we can do it all over again!

Oh, and on a final note: the movie is advertised as a rom-com. Cause of the Tina Fey main character and such.

In a sense, this does express the American self image about its imperialism. Big, brutish but ulitimately sweet Uncle Sam meets demure, backwards Middle Eastern country and in a hilarious and romantic courtship, bombs the shit out of it and introduces it to the cell phone and dating! Loveable hijinx for the whole family.