a little dream of nixon

We are traveling in the Boulder Denver area this weekend. Denver has wonderful houses and a lotta rain, and I got sick yesterday. I took some pills, we put Adam to bed, then I lay down to sleep and had this dream.
I was at a comic book festival. I was with three people. The only one in focus was a tall, geeky looking guy – who I began to see was Stephen Merchant, Ricky Gervais’s partner on the Extras. He gave me a computer to write things on, but whatever I wrote appeared on the screen as something different, in Greek or Cyrilac script. I got mad and, like Adam, threw the computer down. Later Stephen told me this was a test, and then he revealed that I was being inducted into the CIA. He introduced me to the man with him – Richard Nixon. Nixon was much shorter than I expected. He had a sour look on his face. He was wearing a sweater that I somehow recognized. It was cream colored with brown braiding, very thick, with a sort of ruff, or turtleneck. It was, in short, the kind of sweater one bought in the seventies. 
I was given a dossier and told my job. I was very happy, because I was sure that the pay was good, and the work sounded easy. It had to do with codes and comic books. But at this point I must have begun waking up, because I began to worry about Nixon. I had shaken his hand! I had called him Mr. Nixon! Wasn’t I opposed to Nixon? At this point I did wake up.
I conclude from this dream that my subconscious has become reactionary, which is potentially embarrassing. On the other hand, it did dress Nixon in the most ridiculous costume and made him short. So the subconscious of my subconscious must know what’s what.

how goethe became a loser, too

"Eckermann – the best prose work of our literature, the highest point reached by the German humanities” – Nietzsche

Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of his Life was an instant nineteenth century classic, mined for quotes not only in Germany, but in England and America. Margaret Fuller, with Emerson’s encouragement, published an English translation, and Emerson incorporated a number of Goethe’s remarks in the book into his essays.

Strangely, I have the impression that, at least in the Anglosphere, it is now rarely read. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is still read, but for us, Boswell is even more in focus than he was in the 18^th century, since we have his papers and letters. In the Life of Johnson, Boswell seems plausible – he teases Johnson, he opposes him, he loves him, but he is very separate from him. Eckermann is a more… ectoplasmic creature. He seems to have been entirely absorbed by his sage. In Avita Ronell’s essay about Eckermann, she makes him out to be another mad German romantic – and indeed, he seems to have spent the last years of his life in a room filled with songbirds, taking dictation from Goethe’s spirit – as the physical husk of the man had died years before. Goethe was very conscious of what Eckermann was doing – as indeed, he had to be, since in the end, Goethe drew up a contract with Eckermann, making him the editor of his collected works. Unlike Boswell, Eckermann was not independently wealthy – which has also made him a more painful subject to remember. The Conversations start with Eckermann’s autobiographical sketches, giving us an impression of him as a sort of sport, an unusual bolt from a peasant marriage. Indeed, the lack of sophistication of the family gives Eckermann a sort of joke to introduce himself with: one day when he was around 12, he discovered he had a talent for drawing. Ther drawings he made eventually came to the attention of the only wealthy man in his small town, who invited the boy to see him and told him that he was willing to finance his training as a painter. His parents were not overjoyed by this news. To them, a painter slapped paint on the façade of a house, like the large houses they were erecting in Hamburg. It was a nasty and dangerous job, and they councilled against it, so Eckermann refused.

Such low hijincks to put beside one of the peaks of European literature! Yet Goethe was not averse to low hijincks himself. Olympian he may have been, but he married an unlettered factory girl, Christiane Vulpius. Eckermann was not unlettered, but he was not credentialled – he was basically self-taught, although he did finally go to art school. He always remained, however, the peasant who had struggled against the enormous inertia of a society that literally didn’t recognize the artist, and he was forever poor.  

Now here’s the reason I bring this up. I consider myself a loser and have a second sense for the tribe of losers in literature. The last shall be first – such is the secret credo and barren hope of this crowd. Mostly, no. The first are first and trample on our faces over and over again. But the losers remember Melville, Pessoa, Kafka – they are pillars of the losers faith, that there is a view of modernity, a terrible view, in which one sees the reverse of things – and that is as close as we can come to the truth.

The uncanny thing about Goethe is that he is not only an Olympian, but – among the multitudes he contains – he is also a loser. Or he understands the loser’s vision on some deep level. That seems rather unfair. This is the guy who was unkind to Lenz in his madness and tried to bar the door to Kleist. This is Mr. Cold Marble. And yet at the end of his life, he is a loser – at least by proxy – through Eckermann. 

Tool news: NYT sponsors an op ed by Yulia Tymoshenko.

Best article about contemporary Ukraine I've read. It makes a mockery of the coverage in the Western press, which is not only propaganda, but ignorant propaganda - the propagandists really have no idea what is going on. 

assassinating the forbes 400 myth, larry summers edition

Everybody is under suspicion
But you don't wanna hear about that...

It is to two economists with the American EnterpriseInstitute, Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, that we owe the meme that the Forbes 400 represents the fruits of social mobility, the rewards of an essentially meritocratic society..

Kaplan and Rauh have divided the individual who find places in the Forbes 400 from 1982 to 2012 into three categories: that that come from wealthy families, those that come from upper middle class families, and those that come from working or middle class families. The claim to discern a distinct change from 1982 to 2012 – the number of individuals coming from wealthy families declines, while those from upper class families increases. Thus, there is churn at the top, due to the meritocratic structure of American capitalism.

Lets go into the ways Kaplan and Rauh are full of hooey.

A.     Granting, for the moment, that the categorization, although a bit fuzzy, does actually represent three different kinds of individuals, we have to trust Kaplan and Rauh on their judgments as to which class individuals fall. They don’t include the list of all individuals on the list – in Peter Bernstein’s book about the list, All the Money in the World, there were 1302 people on the list from 1982 to 2006, which makes it likely that there might have been fifty to one hundred more in the six years after 2006 – but instead give us representative names – which is how we know that they included Bill Gates in the upper middle class group, because his father was a well known lawyer. This tells us a lot about the laziness and bias of the authors. Even a cursory glance at the numerous profiles of Bill Gates over the years would tell you that he was endowed with a million dollar trust fund by his maternal grandfather, who owned a Seattle bank. A million dollars back in the sixties was a figure to reckon with. If one can’t trust the authors about Gates, one of the five names they mention, how are we to trust them about the rest?

B.     Of course, family money is a tricky subject. Carl Icahn definitely came from a middle class family. On the other hand, when Icahn was 32 and wanted to buy a seat on the NYSE, it was certainly convenient that he had an uncle, Elliot Schnall, who was a Palm Beach millionaire and who could loan him the money without questions.

C.     But even granting that there are meritocrats in the purest sense on the 400, like Jeff Bezos, does this prove Kaplan and Rauh’s point? By no means. Because we want to know that wealth is churning in response to meritocratic pressure from below. One of the symptoms of a vigorous churn would be the fact that few 400 figures remain on the list for long. If they do, we have evidence of wealth stratifying in a hierarchical way – wealth is just going to wealth. Go back to Jeff Bezos. He has been on the list since 1999 – giving him a stretch of 15 years. This is not unusual – as is obvious from Bernstein’s appendix in 2006. This fact should lead us to a deeper contextualization about the 400. As almost all economic histories show, between 1932 and 1979, America experienced a great leveling. It wasn’t that the wealthy went away; however, the labor and white collar wage class enjoyed incredible gains in income and opportunity. When you look at the 1982 list, you are looking at dynasts who made it through the leveling period plus that subgroup that benefited ‘meritocratically’ from oil, building, manufacturing, and real estate. In the years since, the list reflects the baby boomer years – year in which, among other things, higher education was relatively cheap and available for the ambitious. We have now reached the period when that group is going into its sixties, and the wealth is definitely settling into place. Along with the perrenial dynasts, there are the long timers  – people who have been on the list 15 years or more – who need to be broken out.

D.     As well, it is unclear from Kaplan and Rauh’s charts if they double count these perennials. If Bezos is counted, each time, as coming from the wage class in their compilation – rather than once, when he entered the list – they are making an elementary error. I suspect they make it. I suspect they know that they are making it. I suspect that they are working for the American Enterprise institute.

E.      However, the larger criticism concerning how well the 400 represents dynastic wealth. In fact, the very framework seems to occlude it. In 1987, CBS news reported that, curiously, there was not a Dupont on the list, even though the Dupont family was worth an estimated 10 billion dollars. CBS resolved this anomoly by pointing out that if each of the 1500 Dupont relatives got a share of that money it would come to 5 million apiece. However, this is a deeply misleading. The Dupont fortune operates as a unified entity through family trusts. As an entity, it is as unified as the ‘Gates’ entity. In a list of individuals going from 1982, sheer mortality and reproduction would naturally diminish the part of the inheritors, but this would not really give us an idea of how much money is under dynastic control. In 1937, a journalist named Lundberg published a book about America’s wealthy dynasties, and the names in it seem foreign to us, who are used to reading about tech barons and hedgefunders. But those families rarely lose their money. The Pitcairns, for instance, who started PPG, have a private family investment fund in which all the family participates. Individually, they would not be on the list, but as an entity, it is a good bet they would be. The same is true for the Weyhaeusers. There are many many families like this.

Forbes recognizes this in other lists – for instance, they simply amalgamate all the Walton wealth into Walton Family on their world billionaires list. But they are very inconsistent about it in the 400 lists. Sometimes children and spouses appear separately, sometimes they don’t.

For all these reasons, Kaplan and Rauh’s 400 proof is a farce. A farce that, I should say, is easily seen through. One doesn’t have to go through some complicated mathematical proof, one simply has to apply elementary social science reasoning. It is the kind of thing that is dogfood for the dogs, rightwing columnists who can wave the paper about and claim to have refuted the socialists and Stalinists once and for all. Only mooks would fall for it.

This is, of course, why it gets an honored place in LarrySummers’ review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital.  Summers, Obama’s favorite economist, the man who design the Clinton era deregulatory architecture – or should I say, instead,  wrecked regulation of the financial markets and helped midwife the depression?  - inserts the following paragraph in gesturing towards other evidence that American wealth is not becoming so unequal:

“A brief look at the Forbes 400 list also provides only limited support for Piketty’s ideas that fortunes are patiently accumulated through reinvestment. When Forbes compared its list of the wealthiest Americans in 1982 and 2012, it found that less than one tenth of the 1982 list was still on the list in 2012, despite the fact that a significant majority of members of the 1982 list would have qualified for the 2012 list if they had accumulated wealth at a real rate of even 4 percent a year. They did not, given pressures to spend, donate, or misinvest their wealth. In a similar vein, the data also indicate, contra Piketty, that the share of the Forbes 400 who inherited their wealth is in sharp decline.”

A brief look here can be defined as the look one gives the index card on which one has copied some “happy facts” to share with the assembled plutocrats at one of Summers $50,000  talks. It is the index card that has the orange sauce from the duck on the corner.

I am not shocked that Summers would publish something this stupid. It is not that Summers is a stupid man – he is, mainly, an “insider” – someone who knows how to “play” in DC, as he famously told Elisabeth Warren.  In the economics profession, Summers is widely regarded as a genius. This says less about the elevation of his intellect than the shallowness of his field – a molehill is an Everest to a herd of aphids.

Like the overwhelming majority of economists, Summers isn’t very good in thinking in broad terms, or understanding the economy and what it is for. He is perpetually like a man standing with his nose three inches from a pointillist painting – he can see all the dots in detail, but he can’t see or imagine the picture. This is fortunate for him – economics is the handmaiden of the plutocrats, and those who step back and begin to see the picture are soon quietly sidelined. 

the democracy team: how to understand American foreign policy

Philosophers have long argued about what democracy really means. Western politicos don’t have that problem – democracy is a team name, like the Rangers. Nobody expects the Rangers to be rangers, and nobody expects the “democratic forces” supported by the krewe of Clinton, Bush, Obama, Blair, Hollande etc. – whatever figurehead is in power - to be democratic. Blair, in one of the comic highpoints of his miserable reign, toured the Gulf states and touted the democratic alliance (of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Mubarrak’s Egypt) against the enemies of democracy, i.e. Iran. Of course, Iran has at least the trappings of a democracy, much like the U.S. and the U.K., while Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most totalitarian country in the world, and showed what it thought of civil protest by invading Bahrain when the Arab Spring threatened the ruling prince. Not that I am defending a country that routinely condones torture and has the highest prison population in the world – but I would still call the U.S. a quasi-democracy. For instance, elections are held in the U.S. so that people have a chance to make their opinions known and have them betrayed by whoever they elected. And Americans are damn proud of this, and call it operation enduring freedom. Or is that when we invade a country illegally?

I get mixed up.

I’ve been thinking about the democratic team with regards to the astonishing smoke and mirrors show being put on about the Ukraine. The NYT has been outstanding in this respect – liberals like to criticize Fox news, but the NYT reporting on Ukraine makes Fox News look like the successor to Edward Morrow and Walter Cronkite. I thought the nadir had been reached in the article that praised the pro-government paramilitaries in Odessa for their good work in squelching the “pro-Russian” side. This, from a newspaper that is, normally, anti-neo Nazi. However, one must remember that the paramilitaries are on the democratic team and it all works out beautifully. Today, the NYT editorialdissed the referendums in Donetsk with language that was almost pure bungalowBill. Here’s how they started

“If there were questions about the legitimacy of the separatist referendums in eastern Ukraine, the farcical names of the entities on which people were asked to vote — the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk or Luhansk — surely answered them. “

‘Surely’ – in the club where the editorialists chuckle about things like those funny Chinese and Negro names – most amusing.  It is a kinda nostalgic, retro opening to a salvo full of the cliches one expects from … well, the NYT.  The funnily named little countries are surely parallel to that standard of the white mostly elite clubs, the funny names Negros give their children. Always a hoot in the cigar room.  But in spite of having lived through the Iraq invasion and knowing how the establishment works, it still made me curiously angry.

Angry enough that I decided to look back at how the talking heads were talking about Russia in the nineties.  In 1993,  Yeltsin’s situation with the parliament was almost  a mirror image of what was happening in Kiev in January of this year. Again, a president seemed to oppose the unanimous opinion of the legislature. In the case of  Yakunovych, the discontent stemmed from his refusal to sign the association agreeement with the EU. In Yeltsin’s case, it occurred because of discontent with Yeltsin’s “shock therapy.” Constitutionally, Yeltsin’s decree power ran out in December 1992. In April, a referendum was scheduled to sort out the deadlock between the executive and the legislature . As Martin Malia tells the story in his article, Soft Coup, for the New Republic (April 19,1993) (all from the standpoint that Yeltsin is the “democracy team), Yeltsin came to believe he would either lose the referendum in April or that the anti-privatization parts of the referendum would go against him. Now, as we all know, the democracy team cannot tolerate democracy if democracy is going to screw up the “liberalization” of the economy. As Malia points out, the opposition actually wanted something like worker’s collectives to take over the major industries. Such poppycock! And then the referendum coming up which might give the wrong, anti-democratic answer to the question, do you want oligarchs to take over your industry and plummet your economic status for the next fifteen years. .So in March Yeltsin sounded out foreign countries, i.e. the US, to see what they would think if he just unconsstitutionally swept aside the power of the legislature and ruled by decree. Amazingly, they were “understanding”. So Yeltsin pretty much did that, and proposed his own referendum.

A recent National Interest story has a capsule version of what happened next. 

“While Yeltsin won majorities expressing confidence in his leadership, supporting reform, and calling for new parliamentary elections, opposition to reform remained high—45% voted against it in the referendum. No less important, a majority favored early presidential elections, meaning that Russia’s voters wanted not only a new parliament, but a chance at a new president and a clean political slate to move beyond the confrontation between Yeltsin and conservative legislators.

Russia’s president was not interested in the latter message, however, and pressed ahead in his conflict with the Supreme Soviet and government by diktat—with the full support of the Clinton administration. (And despite private advice from Richard Nixon, who encouraged Yeltsin to seek a compromise with the parliament in March 1993, only to be told by the Russian leader that U.S. officials were counseling the exact opposite.) When Yeltsin eventually dissolved the parliament in frustration in September, President Bill Clinton stated explicitly that “President Yeltsin has made his choice, and I support him fully.” Ambassador-at-Large for the former Soviet Union Strobe Talbott referred to Yeltsin’s dissolution of parliament as a “noisy squabble.” With this support, Yeltsin sent in the tanks two weeks later, on October 4, and swept the Supreme Soviet into the dustbin of history. It was surely noisy, but rather more than a squabble.”

I rather like the farcical intrusion of Richard Nixon into this story – a man from the past who actually advised, oh, democracy democracy instead of team democracy. Poor Nixon, made obsolete by the zeitgeist that had shifted far to the right of him, with Clinton and the neo-liberals in the lead!

The moral of the Yeltsin story is that the curious reporting about Ukraine – for instance, a New Yorker reporter named Jon Lee Anderson writing that the Maidan protestors swept away a “tyrant” – is not curious once you dispense with the idea of democracy as a process and understand it as a team label. Of course, the democracy team does have to do one thing: it has to privatize. It has to respect “private property” – for instance, the assets of multinational corporations. Otherwise it isn’t the democracy team anymore, but tyranny. And it is in this neat machine that the people of East Ukraine are supposed to be milled to death. For who could support the non-democracy team (the one that holds elections) except devilish souls like Putin, who are not at all democracy team like Boris Yeltsin was.

the breaks

Breakes on a bus, brakes on a carBreaks to make you a superstar

Breaks to win and breaks to lose

But these here breaks will rock your shoes

And these are the breaks

According to Robert Craven’s 1980 article on Pool slang in American speech, breaks – as in good break, bad break, those are the breaks – derives from the American lingo of pool, which is distinct from  British billiard terms. The difference in terminology emerged in the 19^th century, but  he dates the popular use of break (lucky break, bad break, the breaks) to the 20s. I love the idea that this is true, that the Jazz age, the age of American modernity and spectacle, saw the birth of the breaks. If the word indeed evolved from the first shot in pool – when you “break” the pyramid of balls, a usage that seems to have been coined in America in the 19^th century, as against the British term  – then its evolution nicely intersects one of the favored examples in the philosophy of causation, as presented by Hume.

Hume’s work, from the Treatise to the Enquiry, is so punctuated by billiard balls that it might as well have been the metaphysical dream of Minnesota Fats – excuse the anachronism – and it has been assumed, in a rather jolly way in the philosophy literature, that this represents a piece of Hume’s own life, a preference for billiards. However, as some have noted, Hume might have borrowed the billiard ball example from Malebranche – whose work he might have read while composing the Treatise at La Fleche. But even if Hume was struck by Malebranche’s example and borrowed it, the stickiness of the example,  the way billiard balls keep appearing in Hume’s texts, feels to the reader like tacit testimony to Hume’s own enjoyment or interest in  the game. Unfortunately, this detail has not been taken up by his biographers. When we trace the itinerary of Hume as he moved from Scotland to Bristol to London to France, we have to reconstruct ourselves how this journey in the 1730s might have intersected with billiard rooms in spas and public houses. In a schedule of coaches from London to Bristol published in the early 1800s, we read that there is a coach stop at the Swan in St. Clements street, London, on the line that goes to Bristol, and from other sources we know that the Swan was famed for its billiard room. Whether this information applies to a journey made 70 years before, when the game was being banned in public houses by the authorities, is uncertain.  One should also remember that in Hume’s time, billiards was  not played as we now play American pool or snooker. The table and the pockets and the banks were different. So was the cue stick  – , it wasn’t until 1807 that the cue stick was given its felt or india rubber tip, which made it a much more accurate instrument. And of course the balls were hand crafted, and thus not honed to a mechanically precise roundness.

If, however, Hume was a billiard’s man, one wonders what kind he was. His biographer Hunter speaks of the “even flight” of Hume’s prose – he never soars too much. But is this the feint of a hustler? According to one memoirist, Kant, too, was a billiards player  – in fact the memoirist, Heilsberg, claimed it was his “only recreation” – and he obviously thought there was something of a hustle about Hume’s analysis of cause and effect, which is where the breaks come in.

There’s a rather celebrated passage in the abstract of the Treatise in which Hume even conjoins the first man, Adam, and the billiard ball. The passage begins: “Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion.” Hume goes on to describe the reasons we would have for speaking of one ball’s contact causing the other ball to acquire a motion. The question is, does this description get to something naturally inherent in the event?

“Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigour of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause which makes us infer the effect.”

This new man, striding into the billiard room, Hume thinks, would not see as we see, even if he sees what we see. Only when he has seen such things thousands of times will he see as we see: then, “His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience.”

Hume’s Adam is an overdetermined figure. On the one hand, in his reference to Adam’s “science”, there is a hint of the Adam construed by the humanists. Martin Luther claimed that Adam’s vision was perfect, meaning he could see objects hundreds of miles away. Joseph Glanvill, that curiously in-between scholar – defender of the ghost belief and founder of the Royal Society – wrote in the seventeenth century:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”

However, this is not the line that Hume develops. His Adam has our human all too human sensorium, and is no marvel of sensitivity. Rather, he belongs to another line of figures beloved by the Enlightenment philosophes: Condillac’s almost senseles statue, Locke’s Molyneaux, Diderot’s aveugle-né. Here, the human is stripped down to the basics. Adam’s conjunction with the billiard ball, then, gives us a situation like Diderot’s combination of the blind man and the mirror – it’s an event of illuminating estrangement.

It is important that these figures were certainly not invented in the eighteenth century. Rather, they come out of a longer lineage: that of the sage and the fool. Bruno and his ass, Socrates and Diogenes the cynic, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – it is from this family that all these deprived souls in the texts of the philosophes are appropriated and turned into epistemological clockworks.  

Hume’s point is to lift the breaks from off our necks, to break the bonds of necessity – or rather to relocate those bonds. In doing so, he and his billiard balls are reversing the older tendency of atomistic philosophy, which was revived by Gassendi in the 17^th century. Lucretian atoms fall in necessary and pre-determined courses, the only exception being that slight inexplicable swerve when the atoms contact the human – hence our free will. Hume, who had a hard enough time  with Christian miracles, did not, so far as I know, discuss the Lucretian version of things even to the extent of dismissing it.

To be a little over the top, we could say that the eighteenth century thinkers disarmed necessity, exiled Nemesis, and the heavyweight heads of the nineteenth century brought it back with a vengeance, locating it – in a bow to Hume, or the Humean moment – in history. Custom. From this point of view, Hume was part of a project that saw the transfer of power from God and Nature back to Man – although we are now all justly suspicious of such capitalizable terms.

But the breaks survived and flourished. There is a way of telling intellectual history – the way I’ve been doing it – that makes it go on above our heads, instead of in them. It neglects the general populace, the great unwashed. Book speaks to book. To my mind, intellectual history has to embrace and understand folk belief in order to understand the book to book P.A. system.

Which is why we can approach the breaks in another way.

In 1980, I was going to college in Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to classes in the morning, then worked at a general remodeling store from 3 to 10. I worked in the paint department, mostly. At seven, the manager would leave for home, and Henry, the assistant manager, would let us pipe in whatever music we wanted to  - which is how I first heard Kurtis Blow’s These are the Breaks. I also first heard the Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers delight this way, and I still mix them up. I heard both, as well as La Donna and Rick James, at the Florentine, a disco/gay bar that I went to a lot with friends – it was the best place to dance in town. Being a gay bar, it was always receiving bomb threats and such, which made it a bit daring to go there. We went, however, because we could be pretty sure that the music they played would include no country or rock. It was continuously danceable until, inevitably, The Last Dance played.

At the time, I was dabbling a bit in Marx, and thought that I was on the left side of history. At the same time, 1980 was a confusing year for Americans. The ‘malaise’ was everywhere, and nothing seemed to be going right – from the price of oil to the international order. There were supposedly communists in Central America, African countries were turning to the Soviet Union, and of course there was the hangover from the Vietnam War – the fantasy that we could have won that war had not yet achieved mass circulation, so it felt like what it was, a plain defeat.

I imagined, then, that the breaks were falling against a certain capitalist order. In actuality, the left – in its old and new varieties – was vanishing. Or you could say transforming. The long marches were underway – in feminism, from overthrowing patriarchy to today’s “leaning in”; in civil rights, from the riots in Miami to the re-Jim Crowization of America through the clever use of the drug war; and in labor organization, from the union power to strike to the impotence and acceptance that things will really never get better, and all battles are now rearguard.  

My horizons were not vast back then – I didn’t keep up with the news that much, but pondered a buncha books and the words of popular songs. But I knew something was in the air. As it turned out,  Kurtis Blow’s breaks were not going to be kind to my type, the Nowhere people, stranded socially with their eccentric and unconvincing visions. However, after decades of it, I have finally learned to accept what Blow was telling me: these are just the breaks. That is all they are.

You’ll live.

Reporting on the Ukraine - the man in the devil suit did it!

I have this sick, deja vu feeling about the u.s. ukraine reporting:it shares the same vices and mindframe as the reporting on Iraq in 2002-2003.

It is important to be clear about what happened. The former president was deposed - and he was deposed, apparently, by groups that were opposed to him in the previous election. Unfortunately, none of these groups seemed to have any roots in those areas that voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych. This kind of thing happens all the time in countries that have no democratic tradition or institutions - one party, faced with the victory of another party, kicks that party out. It certainly is not an instance of overthrowing tyranny. That both sides are corrupt is pretty much a given in oligarchy ridden Ukraine. One doesn't have to be for I think running away was probably a good way not to get killed.

Unfortunately, the reporting in the NYT, the NYorker (with its pathetic series by Jon Lee  Anderson, the LRB (with its pathetic reporting by James Meek) and the NYRB on Ukraine has pitted good guy Maidan protesters against Putin. as the whole story - when it is a sideshow This is convenient to the American mindset, but it eclipses the reality of what is happening in the Ukraine. The regions that voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych are not being hypnotized by Putin - they are understandably disgusted by a Kiev centered political operation that has negated their political will. Over and over again, you read that they neither want to be part of Russia - nor accept the Kiev government as legitimate. Why is this position - which is pretty simple - simply ignored in this "series of portraits"? Because it inconveniences what Joan Didion once called the "narrative" - the way establishment newsmakers have determined a news story should go, whether it reflects reality or not. In fact, what is being missed is the framework for what is happening. To make it good Kiev versus bad Kremlin is a disservice to American readers. It will lead to Americans not being able to understand events in the Ukraine. It is overwhelmingly reminiscent of American reporting about Iraq, which similarly so mislead readers that the insurgency was wholly unexpected, and the whole unwinding of the occupation was a big enigma. If the press had done its job, that wouldn't have been so much the case.

But the press has long substituted one job - reporting - for another - lobbying - when it comes to foreign news reporting in the U.S. Thus, Ukraine is given to us in two historical periods - it appeared in the 1930s, when a georgian born dictator, Stalin, starved to death its people, and it appears in February 2014, when the Maidan protests gathered steam. However, a less supernatural view of the Ukraine would assume that it also existed in 2013, and 2012, and 2011, and 2010. From this angle, the question is who voted for the party of the Regions and where, A look at the map would show you that the Party of the Regions was extremely popular in the East. Here's the wiki map of the presidential election (the percentages are part of the total of the 48.95 percent that Yanukovych got in the second round of voting). This map indicates pretty strongly where the overthrow of Yanukovych is going arouse unhappiness. You don't need to posit some hypnotic power by Putin. Evidently, the power in Kiev is either going to have to compromise with these areas or occupy them. Or the Ukraine will split. This isn't really that hard to see or understand. The project of not understanding it, of ignoring it, of pretending that 2010 didn't happen, is a strong indicator that what we are getting in the mainstream media and the thought journals about the Ukraine is simply propaganda. Easy to swallow, since after all, Putin is a dick and a war criminal (and also the unexpected result of the last massive U,S. intervention in Russia, when the US aided and dragged Yeltsin to victory in 1995 in Russia). 

But don't believe the man in the devil suit is the main actor here.   

sphinxes

Perhaps Yeats was right, and beggary and poetry appear and disappear together. The argument for their deep connection can be divined in Daniel Tiffany’s argument for the form and function of obscurity in poetry, made in Infidel Poetics (see review here). Or at least I can borrow certain of his images and arguments to support the Yeatsian intuition.

First, however, one has to concede that poetry does something – it in fact does something about the way one thinks about doing things, what that activity if for, the matrix of exchanges in which it is enmeshed. To switch to Hegel-ese for a moment, beggary, outside of traditional society – the ancien regime stretching back to the paleolithic – loses its form, not its substance. It loses its hobo honor. Poetry, another artifact of that regime, is rivaled in modernity by journalism (under which I would include novels) and driven into a corner, where to save its form it has to resort to dodges that begin to displace its substance. Like the beggar, the poet doesn’t do anything for money. Money does something for the beggar and the poet – reward honors their rewarders. All of which collapses for the usual reasons given by the big thinkers.

Climbing down from these often scaled heights – I was struck by this riff on the rhapsode in Tiffany, which provoked the above thought:.

“The submerged affi nities of the rhapsode reach still further into the

well of the anonymous and indigent poet, touching the most ancient

artifact of poetic obscurity, the riddle: Sophocles called the Sphinx a rhapsode,

while Euripides and other commentators called her deadly riddle

a “song.” The Sphinx, who has no proper name, is called a rhapsode

because she was said to wander the streets of Thebes, homeless, reciting

her queer “demaunde” to strangers—habits recalling the vocation of Presocratic

thinkers such as Parmenides, who made his living as an itinerant

philosopher and composed his baffl ing treatise on Being in epic hexameters,

thereby adopting practices associated with the rhapsode.”

What a marvelous hybrid image – this Sphinx! I can definitely see the Sphinx sniffing around the streets not only of Thebes, but of where I currently live in Santa Monica, California.  Santa Monica needs a sphinx: with its definite edge that ocean – and its box of jigsaw puzzle pieces gathered from different puzzles and thrown all together. Here we have the rich, the aspiring techie, the screenwriter, the leisured, the shoppers, the tourists, the aged – often wheeled about with their heads at a disturbing cant and their mouths open, jaws too weak now to resist gravity – and the hobos everywhere – bums under trees in the park, mumbling to themselves on the steps of office buildings, amazingly weathered women sprawled by curbs under some vagary of palm shadow, sign welding white beards, many clothed in their entire wardrobe – I run into them every day as I wheel Adam about in his stroller. The tribe of the sphinx, except that rhapsody had definitely been downshifted, and the Sphinx can no longer riddle even the mere toddler of privilegem much less his pa.

But I do not write off the possibility that chthonic forces will one day emerge again – to put it in Yeatsian terms, the Great Year will not be gainsaid, neither will time stop. 

on being cowed

In the footnotes to his 1780 edition of Johnson’s life of Joseph Addison, John Hawkins took the opportunity to defend his own character sketch of Addison, which had appeared in a book published in 1770, against the accusation that he had besmirched Addison’s character by describing him as "sheepish".  In his defense, Hawkins reported  two anecdotes about Addison's time as the under-secretary of State under Queen Anne. In the first anecdote, the Secretary of State gave Addison the job of writing the official announcement of Queen Anne’s death to  Hanover (George I). Apparently, faced with the idea of announcing something so grave to a personnage so high, Addison agonized over the wording to the extent that he was paralyzed. After a couple of days had passed and he still hadn’t composed the communication, the Secretary of State gave the task to Addison’s secretary, Southwell, who dispatched it with ease. The second anecdote concerns the time Addison was summoned to testify before the Parliament. I imagine the periwig, the papers, the briefcase, the heals of his shoe, the carriage he arrives in, the clopping of horse hooves on the cobblestones of the street. And there he is, and now he arises to speak. Supposedly he looked at the committee, then down at his papers, then looked back at the committee and said – I conceive… And then fell silent. Again he looks at his papers,  again looks up, again says, I conceive, and again falls silent. After a minute one of the wittier members of the committee said Mr. Under-secretary, we agree that you conceive – but will you please now bring forth.

Addison, as Hawkins puts it, was a man who was easily cowed in his personal relations.  I have an image of Addison as one of those stick-in-the-mud writers who tamed the wild and glorious English of the 17^th century and transformed it into polite literature. However, these anecdotes present Addison in another light. He is not here the author of sententious Augustan essays. He is suddenly a character in Kafka.  More than that – he is my brother. For I, too, am a man easily cowed in personal dealings, who suffers, afterwards, with enormous shame and gnashing of teeth over my stupid cowardices.

Here’s a recent instance.

About three weeks ago, I had a strange pain in my left leg. Whenever a pain shows up in my body, I immediately jump to the conclusion that this is it: the hidden chronic disease that I always knew was there is finally showing its hand.  For a while, I decided that this must be some embolism, some cardiac warning, and I was seeing myself keeling over while changing Adam’s diapers. So I went to a doctor who seemed not at all concerned by my story and told me that no doubt the fact that I was intermittently carrying around a twenty three pound toddler had caused the sciatica nerve to act up, on the principle of the neck bone being connected to the back bone, etc. etc. In his opinion, a few exercises would make me as good as new. One hundred dollars please.

Relieved that the death sentence had been lifted, I noticed immediate improvements in the leg until the leg went through the day doing all the things legs do without complaining. Finally, last Monday, I decided to get a massage, thinking that any remnant of a problem would be taken care of by the soothing manipulation of my musculature. I walked up to Montana street, mentally calculating the necesssary tip – it was one of those places where the charge for the massage is cheap, but one is expected to tip the workers handsomely for the massage that one had enjoyed.

My massage, it became immediately evident, was designed to avoid any hint of enjoyment. When I began to explain about the leg, my masseur cut me off immediately, telling me: “I’ve been doing this for forty years.” At that moment I should have got off the table, or at least made a protest. Instead, I turned over and put my head down and let my masseur get to work. It became obvious that at least ten of those forty years were spent in the employ of the CIA at Guantanomo, extracting info from poor Afghan peasant boys. I was ready to give up all I knew, or make up all I knew and give it, in about four minutes. When the pain was too much, I would stop panting and grasp out in a pleading voice, please don’t do that. That was usually two hundred pounds of masseur pressing into my thigh or ankle muscle. I’d paid for an hour, and for an hour I was beat up. The piece de resistance was doing with my legs what I’d done to the legs of baked chickens – pulling them violently outward at a strategic angle. Sometimes, however, the masseur would say things like, tell me when it hurts.

When I limped out of the room, my assailant came out and, assuming a certain air of concern, asked if I was all right. I said I was fine, overtipped, and left.

As I hobbled around the next day and the deep pain in my legs slowly abated, I was bothered by one thing: why didn’t I make that guy stop? What could I have been afraid of that was more painful than being plucked and restrung? Why did I let him cut me off at the very beginning?

Why, in other words, couldn’t Addison simply bring forth?

To be cowed is to be afraid – that seems obvious. But fear, though it may be felt as quickly as touching or heart beat, develops along different lines, and is expressed in different modes. Being cowed is one of those modes in which the sum total of the pain of avoiding the fearful object is greater than the pain which may result from confronting said object. In other words, it is definitionally neurotic. Addison, gnawing his lip and lingering over the wording of his communication (passed away? Ascended to a far larger and better sphere?) was no doubt aware that as time passed, he was becoming ridiculous. He was making a fool of himself. But what if he made a fool of himself positively, by making some mistake? The knowledge that he was losing face didn’t help.

I sometimes take an extraordinarily aggressive tone as a writer; perhaps this is to make up for the extraordinarily cowed stance I take as a man.

The first instance of “cow” in the English language comes in the tragedy of Macbeth. Macbeth, you’ll remember, considers himself invincible, since he can only be brought down, the witches have told him, by a man who is not born of woman.  But as he is battling Macduff, Macduff drops the coin: that he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” This sufficiently fulfills the tricky condition contained in the witch’s prophecy, as Macbeth immediately sees. In response, Macbeth says: “accursed be that tongue that tells me so/for it has cow’d my better part of man.”

This is a pretty rich way for a word to introduce itself into the linguistic corpora. Etymologists are still puzzled about a verb that seems to be derived from an old Norse word, since Mr. Shakespeare, although excellent in many respects, had not only little Latin and less Greek, but surely no old norse at all.

I’m no blabbermouth in Old Norse myself. I associate the verb quite naturally with the noun. I think of this moment of freezing as something cow-like within me, something pasture fed and unable to realize my own weight against heard dogs and coyotes – not to speak of herdsmen and the technicians in the abbatoir. That frozenness is not broken by the application of a stick to my thick hide. On the contrary, I go in the direction that the stick wants me to go.

Yet the cow in being cowed doesn’t quite cover all the case, because to be cowed has definite connections to embarrassment. To be cowed is to come up against an invisible but almost overwhelming barrier. An electrified invisibility – one fears the shock, though one knows, rationally, that there is no calculating the shock. This is a state of being that is surely characteristic of developed countries, where the invisible barriers multiply along with the visible ones, and the taboos once associated with totems are now associated with a certain solitude – a lack of totems, in fact. In such a society, why one does what one does becomes a pressing question, which one has to constantly answer – along with why one doesn’t do what one doesn’t do. And not being able to explain the latter make one ashamed.

It all makes me want to sadly moo in some misty valley in the morning.  

an op ed from a mouse hole

As allegories move towards some threating point

Where fact and magic clutch at your throat

Remember – you don’t get the dynamics of this joint

-        Don’t even think you have a vote.

They call it homeland – cast a firelit glow

Over the dude peeing in his pants

On the corner – he’d been the first to go

When they were downsizing the urban peasants.

Yes, the bottle is now uncapped

But we aren’t stuffing genies back inside it.

You think you’re so special? You’ve just relapsed.

That fucked over feeling, you’ll just have to hide it.

delusions in economics

This week, Ezra Klein reprinted an old speech given by the economist  Thomas Sargent in 2007 under the title: “This graduation speech teaches you everything youneed to know about economics in 297 words.”  Given that Sargent is a “clintonian democrat”, I don’t think Klein meant to mock the man. However, the speech is a disaster, a series of bromides that do tell us a lot about the current intellectually bankrupt state of economics. For political reasons, about 1980, economics began to experience a huge increase in prestige. Although economists have long felt that their discipline was the physics of the social sciences, few other people did. But in the era of Reaganomics, when every big newspaper was adding a business section to the sports news and ‘living’, other people began to take the physics idea seriously. Sargent does us a favor by stripping down economics to the inspirational truisms that make it apparent that this is less about physics than about Babbitry, gussied up with models.

 

I could have an enjoyable time driveby shooting at the inanities in Sargent’s “list of lessons that our beautiful subject teaches. But I’d like to take one item on the list out of line and especially maltreat the thing – no. 3: “ Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.” I’m sure Sargent thinks this is an axiom with no need for proof. In fact, economists have never even tried to prove it. But in other corners of social science, this assumption has long been shown to be wholly fallacious as stated. Our self-assessments, going from the way we remember the past to the way we predict our correctness in the future, is subject to severe cognitive biases that make it the case, generally, that ‘other people’ tend to either overestimate or underestimate their abilities, tend to define their efforts in different, self-defensive ways, tend not to understand their social and economic contexts very well, and certainly tend not to line up their preferences in good transitive order a la the Arrow theorem.

 

Everywhere in the social and cognitive sciences – except in economics – the myth of the unified individual, who can be certain of his thoughts, beliefs, memories, and intentions, has been shown to be insufficient. From Freud to Prospect theory, cognitive biases and theories about the unconscious have been found whenever the laboratory met the social scientist. Sargent, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 1991, has apparently never encountered the work of the winners of the Nobel prize for economics in 2002, Kahneman and Tversky. Rather, he seems here to cling to the musings of Hayek and other ideologues of the cold war period.

 

In economic life, as opposed to economics, people aren’t that stupid. Evey advertiser knows of the parodox of parity products – that blind taste tests often show that people cannot really tell one brand of coffee, wine, or soft drink from another. Yet this doesn’t prevent the formation of ‘preferences’ – which is where advertising comes in. One of the few economists who even considered the effect of advertising was John Kenneth Galbraith, and he was roundly attacked for it.

 

I’ll end this with a quote from a 1988 study of illusion and well being:  

 

Decades of psychological wisdom have established contact with reality as a hallmark of mental health. In this view, the wcU-adjusted person is thought to engage in accurate reality testing, whereas the individual whose vision is clouded by illusion is regarded as vulnerable to, if not already a victim of, mental illness. Despite its plausibility, this viewpoint is increasingly

difficult to maintain (cf. Lazarus, 1983). A substantial amount of research testifies to the prevalence of illusion in normal human cognition (see Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Greenwald, 1980; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Sackeim, 1983; Taylor, 1983). Moreover, these illusions often involve central aspects of the self and the environment and, therefore, cannot be dismissed as inconsequential.”

our Seneca

I know little about Seneca. In the back of my mind, I have the idea that his plays are disgusting and his moral philosophy derivative, although where these judgments come from I cannot tell. I know that he was studied by all the greats – Machievelli, Montaigne, Bacon – but I put this down to an exaggerated enthusiasm for Rome. So I had little reason to plunge into the article about Seneca’s and Nero’s suicides, Dying Every Day, by James Romm, in the winter Yale Review. Yet every once in a while I like to dive into a scholarly topic that I’m really not interested in, in the hope that I’ll broaden my horizons. I am an incorrigible optimist re those horizons, which – being horizons – are probably geographically and mathematically impervious to the broadening motivation. Nevertheless…

Well, Romm’s article is excellent. Of course, I recognize that much of it regurgitates what every historian of the period knows – but it plays the facts to create a kind of Lehrstueck about tyranny and what you could call the trivialization of the sage.

Our sages now roam the popular blogs and newspaper columns and tv opinion shows without, oddly enough, being questioned about their expertise. What in particular does a Tom Friedman or a Christopher Hitchens do? What is the skill set? Usually there is a retreat to the idea of “reporting”  - but they aren’t reporting in the sense that the stringer or the semi-anonymous AP person reports. In most cases, they are opining. Their opinions, moreover, are based on a sort of assumed greater ethical sensibility. Hitchens, for instance, in his declining years, would often fill his columns for Slate or Vanity Fair with opinions in which he triangulate his feelings – his disgust, his righteous joy – to some object in the world, as though he were some moral litmus test.

Long ago, William James, in an excellent, disgruntled essay on the moral philosopher, dispatched the breed, which even then was turning up at Chatauquas and writing for the highfallutin’ quarterlies.

The ancestor of this type is surely Seneca. Although Cicero, too, was a sorta stoic philosopher in his off hours, for Seneca, there was a bond between the prestige he garnered as a sage and his heady position in the world of Roman politics. Having landed the job of tutor to Nero, he milked it for all it was worth.

Romm sets up his story by pointing to the ambiguous reputation of Seneca (who, spookily, willed his imago to his friends – as if his reputation, the image of his life, was some kind of separate creature). On the one hand there is a long tradition that sees Seneca in the terms he created for himself in his treatises and letters – as the moderate in all things Stoic sage, tragically doomed by having as his pupil a sort of armed Id. On the other hand, there was another version of Seneca:

“These are the opposing ways in which Romans of the late first century a.d. regarded Seneca, the most eloquent, enigmatic, and politically engaged man of their times. The first is taken largely from the pages of

Octavia, a historical drama written in the late decades of that century, by whom we do not know. The second is

preserved by Cassius Dio, a Roman chronicler who lived more than a century after Seneca’s death but relied on earlier writers for information. Those writers, it is clear, deeply mistrusted Seneca’s motives. They believed the rumors that gave Seneca a debauched and gluttonous personal life, a Machiavellian political career, and

a central role in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero in  a.d. 65.”

Romm, as the essay develops, doesn’t think that Seneca’s life was debauched, and he thinks that his role in the assassination plot – a role that led to his death – was, as was much in his life, the result of trying to have it both ways. But he does seem to think that there was something Machiavellian about Seneca – that in effect he was like Thyestes, the hero of his most famous play. Thyestes the sage was also, by the will of his father, supposed to share the kingship with his brother Atreus. Rather than do so, he retired to the countryside. Atreus however lured him back with the promise of the throne. Actually, Atreus had in mind the extermination of Thyestes line, and he had a clever way of going about it – he slew and cooked Thyestes children, while getting Thyestes drunk and promising him a feast fit for his new royal function. Thyestes is shown revelling in his vision of power, and mightily enjoying the meal that, it turns out, consists of his children. Romm examines Thyestes as a projection of Seneca – a warning, perhaps, that Seneca issued to himself. And at the same time a reference, via Atreus, to the wicked Nero.

Even so, Seneca had not opposed the wicked Nero when he murdered his mother, or began murdering all the descendents of Augustus that he could find.

There’s something compelling about the duel between the Ubu-esque emperor and the Imperial pontificator. We have no Neros, but we have created a sort of plutocratic Neropolis in the US, with Senecas all over the place – and I kept thinking how mysteriously relevant this story is.  Romm develops a nice little dialectical picture of the two sides of Seneca by contrasting two physical images of Seneca. One is  statue that used to be considered to be of Seneca – a bust  of a man who is “gaunt, haggard, and haunted, its eyes seemingly staring into eternity. Its features had served as a model for painters depicting Seneca’ s death scene on canvas, among them Luca Giordano, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jacques-Louis David.” The other is a bust  dug up in  Rome in 1813: “The bust shows a full-fleshed man, beardless and bald, who bears a bland, self-satisfied mien. It seems the face of a businessman or bourgeois, a man of means who ate at a well-laden table.”

1813 – ah, just in time for the birthpangs of the modern socio-economic world! Seneca, the bourgeois. I can see him in my minds eye, and hear him 24/7 on cable or talk radio.

the paradox of the stone and meg wolitzer

When Flaubert compared the artist to God, it naturally followed – as all who knew what Flaubert was up to understood – that theological ideas and paradoxes would be absorbed and re-oriented in the world of art.

I’ve been reading Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Wife, which is a funny and depressing novel, and thinking of a paradox attirbuted to Aquinas entitled “the paradox of the stone”, or “the paradox of omnipotence.” The popular version goes like this: can God make a stone he can’t lift? Aquinas spoke of whether God could square the circle, and shows that this supposed limit on him omnipotence is no such thing. Others have tried to show the logical emptiness of the stone paradox. Still, for non-logicians, it is a rather compelling idea. Either God can’t make a stone he can’t life, in which case he is not omnipotent, or he can, in which case he is also not omnipotent.

Some paradoxes lead to logically useful devices in the world of logical theory, but I don’t think this one has.

However, in the world of the novel, the paradox is very illuminating. Restated, it would be: can a novelist create a fictional novelist greater than herself?

This question is tickled in various of Balzac’s novels. In many of them he tells us of genious musicians and sculptors, and we can accept these things, because we can accept descriptions of works that we can’t see or hear as part of the novelist’s licence. Things get much harder when we are told of a great writer. Lucien Rubempré is supposed to be a great poet, and Balzac even cites him – but Balzac is no Victor Hugo.

However, Balzac never wrote about a great novelist. Proust did. Proust neatly does an endrun around the omnipotence problem by making Marcel’s becoming a novelist the novel. It is, indeed, a great novel, but the story would not have worked if A la recherche was already completed – if the fictional Marcel was supposed to have written it already. It would be an entirely different novel, and hard to imagine, since we would have no reason to credit Marcel with being a great writer for a novel that remains, for us, unknown and fictitious.

The narrator of Wolitzer’s novel is the wife of a ‘great’ American novelist, Joe Castleman. It being the nature of greatness to attract prizes, the wife is accompanying her husband to Finland to receive some fictitious half a million dollar prize that is a semi-Nobel. The wife’s story, however, is an evil eyed portrait of  Joe – a poor father, a poor lover, a cheat, a slob, and all the rest. Wolitzer’s character has a voice like an Iris Owens character – scathingly funny. But the humor chops Joe down to the point that it is impossible to believe he is a great writer. This is finessed by hints that actually, Joe’s wife ghosts his material.

But it is here that the paradox kicks in, because although this is a good novel, it isn’t a great, Nobel prize winning novel. And in a sense Wolitzer has stuck herself with a narrator who is telling about how her work has won the semi-nobel prize. That is a huge burden to put a novel under. It seems, at the very least, immodest, since the inference is that the writer of the novel is telling us how good she is through her protagonist.

Ulysses nears this paradox too – if we take Stephen Daedalus to be James Joyce. But here’s the thing: Stephan Daedalus could never have written Ulysses. He is much too small. He doesn’t have the degree of imagination that would let him ‘into’ Leopold Bloom.  This is one of the ways out of the paradox, particularizing a character to the point that this character could not exist outside the pages of the novel, gazing in.

I don’t think that the paradox brings down Wolitzer’s novel – but it does put the weight of the book on the particulars instead of the structure. Since, however, Joan Castelman is essentially a comic narrator, she is not only allowed to create a stone that she can’t lift, but allowed to milk as much as she can from that ludicrous routine.

Perhaps this is what God does, too, with the paradox that Aquinas wrapped around his neck.

doctor pangloss writes for the london review of books

It must have seemed natural to the editors of the London Review to ask Thomas Nagel, the author of The View from Nowhere, to review R. Jay Wallace’s The View from Here. The subtitle of Wallace’s book is On affirmation, attachment and the limits of regret, and from the account that Nagel gives of the book, it seems to be a book that does justice to its themes, which are at the intersection of philosophy and literature. It is a meaty subject, this of taking up the moral peculiarity of the line of fate of individuals and nations, and the way these lines are a mixture of the good and the atrocious. Wallace seems to think that it isn’t as though the atrocity could be subtracted from the good, but that they are dialectically interlocked. I happen to share that view. I was raised by white parents in the suburbs in the South in the 60s, when apartheid was beginning to crack, and I have long  realized that these facts in the background – both the apartheid that made enormous room for white people like my folks in the post-war years and the crumbling of apartheid that allowed Northern businesses to move into the south as it became a more normal part of the country – benefited me. So if I retrospectively affirm my life, I am confronted with the problem of what to do about these things, which I don’t want to affirm.  Do I opt for self-condemnation, or do I apologize for Jim Crow?

In a sense (not to be too grand about it), this is the kind of problem faced by Leibniz’s God. On the one hand, his perfection requires that he affirm himself perfectly, but on the other hand, the creation is full of atrocities, and the devil is abroad. To understand how to bridge this moral conundrum, Leibniz revamped the metaphysical discourse on possibility that had been built by the ancients and the medievals. He thought, in other word, that the greatest possible good was built into every appearance of evil, the paradigm case being, of course, the exercise of free will.

For this, he was satirized by Voltaire, who began his career on the side of a certain enlightenment view that claimed that atrocity and virtue could be radically separated, given the right social machinery, and who endit it deciding that, as nature itself was indifferent to human values and civilization was generally systematized brutality, interspersed with a few minuets, virtue, as a social thing, was a sham. In other words, the movement was between believing that we could build a world in which we regret nothing to believing that we could only build, if we were fortunate, tiny nests in which regret was held at bay – otherwise, history was a wash.

It is a little astonishing to me that Nagel’s review of Wallace’s book is written in the spirit of Dr. Pangloss, the character in Candide forever associated with the phrase ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ It is important not to take this phrase too bluntly – it is not, even for Pangloss, true that all is the best, but merely that all serves the best, all is for it.  Voltaire’s satire did not wholly miss Leibniz’s point. To think that all is the best is to turn Pangloss into Babbit, the American booster. Nagel’s review alternates between Pangloss and Babbitry. He refuses to enter into the ‘view from regret’, treating it as an inducement to suicide rather than to reflection. In the spirit of the analytic philosopher, he treats dialectic as an undergraduate logical mistake. And so the interlocked nature of good and atrocity is something he doesn’t even attempt to refute.

Thus, when Wallace writes that his own place of work, the University of California at Berkeley, has benefited (and been complicit in) atrocity, asking whether, in reflecting about his own life, he should regret the existence of the institution, Nagel contradicts him in tones that remind  me of the owner of a used carlot bawling at a  new hire has conceded some fault to a potential buyer:

“Wallace teaches at Berkely, a public institution that makes enormous contributions to knowledge, both theoretical and practical, which benefit not only its members but the society of which it is a part and the world as a whole. To doubt that such institutions would exist in a just world seems to me pathologically pessimistic.”

The babbitry here was, to me, startling. “Society” and “world” are used as though these were not deeply divided entities, but wholes perfectly represented by the successful. It would have interested me what Nagel would have said if Wallace worked at, say, Duke. Would he celebrate Duke medical schools advances in the treatment of cancer, while explaining that this more than makes up for the cancers that were caused by the tobacco fortune upon which the school was founded? Sans doute. If I were to classify Nagel’s response to Wallace, it would be to call it a case of pathological optimism typical of the winners in the neo-liberal world.

Regret, I’d argue, is a politically charged mood, as well as an existential one.

I haven’t resolved the political consequences of the view from regret myself, and doubt I ever will, but I do see regret as an irreplaceable tool to understand how we got to where we are – how our histories unfolded. Without regret, history is dumb.   

the decline of big rock candy mountain

I grew up in a folksinging family. Consequently, my idea of the hobo was very romantic – he was an IWW angel. Big Rock Candy Mountain sounded like a lot more pleasant utopia than the Dictatorship of the Proletariat – and it still does. In folk songs, he was always a canny step ahead of the bulls, all in order to be free.  

However, I’ve noticed something about hobos in the last decade or so: there’s been a political sea change. When you see a bum with a political sign, it is invariably Limbaughdian. I saw, for instance, a man with a white beard a couple of hours ago, with two signs, one the usually begging one (“Help me I’m hungry” or something like that) and the other one, on poster board, a long denunciation of Obama for bringing Naziism to the United States. Santa Monica is, I think, progressive territory, or it once was, which is why the city council is still fairly liberal about letting street people be. I’d be surprised if Obama didn’t rule here during the last elections. Thus, the sign was not a means of sucking up to a potential audience – and besides, the handwriting was too angry for that explanation to float.

He reminded me of a beggar I used to run into in Tarrytown in Austin – another Democratic Party stronghold – whose signs routinely denounced Democrats for being traitors, simps, underminers of our ways, etc.

Now, there is a myth among liberal academics that the uneducated white guy is a strong supporter of the worst Republicans – but in fact, stats show, pretty consistently, that the more educated you are, the more likely you will vote Republican. Here, simple economic interest seems to explain the pattern. College graduates, with their higher salaries, are more inclined to vote for the party that will keep their taxes down. Of course, there are exceptions in this group, and the Third Party Dems have seen in the social liberalism of this group an ace way of stealing a march on the GOP – adopt GOP economic policies and combine them with social liberalism. But that strategy acknowledges the lifestyle interest of the desired constituency.

In the case of the hobo block (and it is probably not a block that goes to the polls), it is hard to see the cultural or economic interest in denouncing the party representing the “handout”. After all, the man with the beard and my friend from Tarrytown are directly demanding a handout! One would think the more handouts the better. This was, in fact, Norman Mailer’s strategy when he ran for Mayor of New York – he actually recruited angry homeless people because these were the people he wanted to appeal to. Norman Mailer was one of a kind.

But that was a long time ago, when the Big Rock Candy Mountain still distantly glimmered. It saddens me that it seems to have gone into permanent decline. The man with the white beard is surely old enough to have been a “child of God/walking along the road” of Joanie’s song – but somewhere along the journey, he absorbed the politics of Ronald Reagan.  It is as though the anti-state views of the old IWW – in which the state and corporation were identified as one monster – have been transformed into simple anti-state views, in which the state is bad cause it keeps down the hardworking billionaire.

This makes me think that American politics are even more hopeless than I already think them. Wow.

a guess at the riddle

I ponder sometimes the fact that Adam, this complex being whose proto-language is so sweet to my ear, whose tricks I laugh at, whose humors I deal with, whose steps I marvel at, will forget all of this. We all emerge from amnesia - it is as if we awaken speaking, walking, eating properly and excreting privately, as though these were things we'd always done. Of course, we have stray memories of what went before, motes of dust in the mind's eye - an image of the shoestring we puzzled over, the feeling of crusty snow on the cheek, a confused vision of trailing down a dark hall. But these memories form no collective whole, no sense of our existence.
There are many theories about the human origin of belief in the gods; I wonder if anyone has traced the line between belief in an agent with supernatural powers and the natural history of our awakening with powers that we cannot account for?An awakening that leaves such a large mark on our subsequent life that it is too large to remember - large enough that we can only venerate it.

the Magic Mountain in Clarkston, Georgia

I’ve been reading the Magic Mountain for much longer than the seven years it took Hans Castorp to climb it and climb down from it. Way back in high school I even finished it – in the now discredited Lowe-Porter translation. I picked it up because I read a high recommendation in a book by the wonderful Will and Ariel Durant, blessed be their names. They were members of the socialist humanism generation of American intellectuals, and their middle brow guides to Western culture were and still are excellent things for high school students, to be supplemented of course by the vast trove of lit and art that we know now was produced by the oppressed – the Atlantic culture of the African diaspora, women, gays, all those edged aside. Although I no longer remember what the couple wrote about Mann, I do remember the experience of reading it. I was sitting in a pew in the Clarkston Baptist church. No doubt it was another Sunday of Reverend Vincent’s endless non-sequitor sermons – the man lacked the charisma of an old piece of gun, so his revivalism had a tendency to fall stillborn on our dead ears. I owe him, though – my first reviews were of his sermons, which I would feistily attack coming home from church in the car with Mom. Ah, the budding critic!

Although at the time I thought I was much more than a budding thumbs up thumbs down man – I felt that I was Clarkston’s sole modernist. In fact, the single person in the damn suburb who knew what the word meant!

Under the Durants tutelage, then, I cracked the book. What I remember is feeling that there was something about the book that made me feel sickly. Then I went on with my reading list, and as the years passed, I learned to look down on T.M. I learned he was hooffooted, pendantic, full of hot air, pseudo-profound. That in fact he was an anti-modernist. I don’t exactly remember how I received this news, but I do know that Nabokov, for instance, always had it in for Mann. And in college I thought Nabokov should know, since he could do anything with prose. Now I have a different view of Nabokov – that his problem with Mann, or Balzac, or Dostoevsky, arose from the fact that Nabokov made up a canon for himself and became its prisoner. In this way, he operated, much like his social realist or psychoanalytic enemies, to squeeze the juice and joy out of literature. In his best works, I think, Nabokov knows this – hence his paragons of good taste, his King of Zembla, his Humbert Humbert, are criminals – in a sense, driven to crime by the same discriminating instinct that they have cultivated in their souls until it hypertrophied and took over the plant.  One knows, for instance, in Lolita, that when H.H. enters the Haze household and spots the “banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s Arlesienne”, he is not only showing his lethal sophistication but, in general, his lethality – his lack of perspective on his superiorities, such as they are. The radical lack of kindness, without which good taste becomes a very cruel game.

To return to my own banal arty middle classness – for a while I swallowed this idea of Mann. There’s an essay by Michael Wood whichelegantly pinpoints the moment Mann fell from grace to become a modernistembarrassment. To understand this, understand that Harry Levin, in the 40s and50s, was an influential apostle of modernism in academia. He used to teach acourse at Harvard entitled Proust, Joyce and Mann. Then, in 1949, Mann’s DoctorFaustus was published. Levin gave it a very hostile review. I think that wasthe year that Time magazine put Mann on its cover, which is like the apotheosisof middle class artiness. And shortly thereafter, Levin renamed his class:Proust, Joyce, and Kafka.

Well, for myself, I am still a Clarkston modernist. I’ve gone as far away from that little suburban burg (and it has gone away from the burg I knew in highschool, becoming one of the centers of the Bosnian refugee influx in America, and now hosting a good number of Somalis, too).  But I still kick around in the precinct of the ideas I had and the artists I admired then. Age has made me think of myself less as a Joycean exile and more as a sample of a certain history I don’t understand. In short, a relic puzzled by his own relicness. In that respect, I am in a Hans Castorp condition – which, pace Levin, is what modernism was all about.

some liberal reforms on the inequality front

The annual thumbsuckers inequality ball is going on in the press. The right, of course, is all at the battlements, decrying envy.  Greed is one of those virtuous sins for the rich, while envy is one of the damned sins that shouldn’t enter the New Jerusalem. Myself, I’ve always been a big fan of the evil eye. And I don’t even have the liberal disdain for greed.

But I do have the liberal-left desire to finish the incomplete task of the French revolution. Equality is up there with liberty on the roster.

Instead of kicking around abstractions, however, I think we should start kicking around ratios. How much more income and wealth than that earned and accrued by the top 20 percentile of income is allowable under the ideal of egalitarianism?

My sense is that if we take 250,000 dollars as our base (I am of course speaking of the US), something like 10 times that is as far aw we can go with inequality of income. Wealth is a trickier subject, but if we put a cap on 25 million dollars per person,  we have a good inequality space to work with.

Expropriative taxes are a clumsy way to enforce equality. Of course, the wealthy are always threatening to quit if they aren’t permitted to make world class booty – but I take those to be the rational cries of the hopelessly addicted. They should stop working, it would certainly benefit the rest of us.  But besides this, I think heeding those plutocratic bellows has landed us in a truly nutty variant of capitalism, with speculation ruling the roost.  This is why deeper and more radical reforms would aim at making the new york stock exchange, or any exchange, look more like the real economy. For instance, at the end of the year, the commerce department should tally up assets and earnings and make sure that the market capitalization of the firm equals the actual capitalization of the firm.

This would revolutionize Wall Street. Facebook would immediately shrink to a much lesser company than, say, Caterpillar Tractor. And so it should – being little more than an internet billboard company on which companies post ads, it is too ridiculous that Facebook is one of the world’s huge corporations.  The rule of speculation is intrinsic to the rule of the plutocrats. This is where rugs need to be pulled.