Dope
A friend tells us: I sent your post about bias in the press to a conservative friend of mine. He responded that Limited Inc was confusing the issue. And that Limited Inc was in the habit of confusing issues, because Limited Inc lacked a certain, necessary depth.
Now, there you go: my friend's friend has provided an explanation for a problem that has frankly puzzled us: why isn't Limited Inc exercizing world wide influence and being consulted by the powers of the Earth on a daily basis?
More specifically, this has made Limited Inc think about issues qua issues. As in, what are issues, and where do they come from?
The traditional political divisions are usually delineated by showing that, on a given array of issues, x will take this position and y will take that position. What Limited Inc is all about, gentle readers, is disputing the given-ness of the issues themselves. Their shape, their texture, their topical constitution, their implementation, their distribution... The issue machine, if you will. So that the issue of, say, bias in the media, which is usually a tug of war between people who say, hey, there is a liberal bias in the media and those who say hey, there isn't a liberal bias in the media, is recast in other terms: first, as the sociological donnee that any subculture exists and perseveres by enforcing a certain tone upon its members, and by, secondly, taking journalism as merely one of those subcultures, to be compared with the petroleum industry, or the car industry, etc. This way of treating the issue doesn't "solve' the problem of bias, but puts the explanation for bias, (and its inevitability) in terms of the historical determinants that have shaped the composition of those who work in journalism, or car design, or etc. That's a question for another day. We are seeing, in the spread of weblogs, a subculture form that is apparently tilted towards the right. I'm not sure that impression is true, but if it is, the question would be: is there a first mover advantage that would select more and more conservative webloggers? or have we not yet passed that threshhold? is the weblog subculture in a more amorpohous stage in which the population of webloggers is accumulating randomly?
But to return to the fascinating issue of the issue. To make the meta leap, the froggish jump.
The OED defines the primary meaning of issue to mean output of some sort, from the Latin, exire, a thing that goes out. An issue, in this sense, implies, first, a flow, and second, a place the flow comes to, stops at, or passes through. Issue in this sense is an egress, a child, or the expression of energy. I'm not sure how, exactly, this meaning became linked with the meaning of issue as a controversial notion. Here's how the OED defines this:
"A point on the decision of which something depends or is made to rest; a point or matter in contention between two parties; the point at which a matter becomes ripe for decision. Esp. in to put to ([]on, upon, an, the) issue and similar phrases: to bring to a point admitting of decision.
c1566 J. ALDAY tr. Boaystuau's Theat. World Biijb, The battel of this world is so perillous, the yssue so terrible and fearfull. 1613 SHAKES. Hen. VIII, V. i. 178 Now, While 'tis hot, Ile put it to the issue. 1656 BRAMHALL Replic. vi. 279 If he stand to this ground, there are no more controversies between him and me for the future but this one, what is the true Catholick Church, whether the Church of Rome..or the Church of the whole World, Roman, Grecian, Armenian, Abyssene, Russian, Protestant,..I desire no fairer issue between him and me. 1665 GLANVILL Def. Vain Dogm. 20, I am willing to put it upon the issue, whether it be so to any body else but this philosopher. 1748 RICHARDSON Clarissa I. iv. 25, I saw plainly that to have denied myself to his visits..was to bring forward some desperate issue between the two. 1863 TYNDALL Heat vi. 193 The problem I think is thus narrowed to the precise issue on which its solution depends. 1873 BURTON Hist. Scot. VI. lxxii. 290 Look at the issue between England and Scotland as it stood at the moment.
c. A matter or point which remains to be decided; a matter the decision of which involves important consequences.
1836 J. GILBERT Chr. Atonem. v. (1852) 145 Conferring the power of choice, and connecting that choice with most important issues. 1875 JOWETT Plato (ed. 2) III. 133 There is a mighty issue at stake..the good or evil of the human soul. 1898 Westm. Gaz. 22 July 3/2 �We want issues�. In the absence of issues politics become a question of self-interest..to manipulate the tariff for the benefit of trusts and manufacturers."
Limited inc doesn't want to engage in the Heideggerian folly of claiming that the semantic evolution of a term gives us the theodicy of the concept -- but we do think that there is a link between the term's emergence with a certain meaning and the historical situation in which that emergence occurs. Looking at the OED's citations, we notice that the evolution of "issue" is towards the problem/solution framework. An issue arises when there is a problem. Problems are formalized in science, and the OED's citations show that there is a back and forth between the "issue" as a description of a social problem and the 'issue" as a description of a scientific problem. The problem indicates a matter to be decided. So if one confuses an issue, one can: a, be confused about the problem that the issue is about, or that the issue indicates; or b, be confused about the correlating decisions that solve the problem. My friend's friend would probably add one more kind of confusion of issue, c, an intentional blurring of the scope of a problem for sophistical purposes.
Limited Inc's inclination is to say this: the motivation for delineating the issues as they are delineated among the governing classes should be looked at with maximum suspicion. This approach is naturally disconcerting if your politics is about viewing the divisions within the governing class (the liberal vs. conservative divide) as the defining political division. We are trying, in our humble way, to re-draw the problem set, which puts us outside of that kind of politics, even if our sympathies are to one tendency within it. This sometimes makes our points seem tendentious or extra-political. Alas, that's the price we have to pay. And so... at least for this year, it looks like the world leaders aren't going to be turning to us for political advise. But what can we say? such is the burden of greatness.
Thursday, June 13, 2002
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Remora
Because LI has spurned the water of life, and is one of those unfortunates who will be processed on the left hand of our Lord transiting to the eternal gnashing of teeth that reportedly awaits our type, one would think that the abuse being hurled at the Catholic Church by a press that is normally servile to religious groups to a point of intellectual abasement that is hard to stomach would warm our hearts. Well, it doesn't.
Sunday, I was listening to a NPR interview with Alan Cooperman, who with Lena H. Sun wrote a Sunday article for the Washington Post , Hundreds Of Priests Removed Since '60s:
Survey Shows Scope Wider Than Disclosed
The intro grafs tell the story:
"The Roman Catholic Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because of allegations of child sexual abuse, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs, according to a survey of Catholic dioceses across the United States by The Washington Post.
The survey also found that at least 850 U.S. priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since the early 1960s, and that more than 350 of them were removed from ministry before this year."
In the interview on NPR, Limited Inc believes that Alan Cooperman said (we don't have a transcript) that in his research, which took in a forty year period, about 1 percent of the priesthood had probably been involved in some kind of sexual misconduct.
What the interviewer never asked, what no paper is asking, is how this compares with Protestant denominations, or with the secular equivalents of pastoral care: psycho-therapy, self-realization groups, etc. Now, LI's wild guess is that the Catholic church is well within the norm. That is, given the opportunity for sexual misconduct (a term that is pretty opaque) among a group of people who have to do with counseling, "spiritual" advice giving, and other activities that involve a traffic in what Freud called transference, and given the personality types attracted to the role of "helper," a good one percent will use their positions to have sex. However, there's no investigation of Baptist churches, or New Agey groups in Sedona, or of Freudian psycho-analysts, in the papers.
So where's the beef, the j'accuse here? It is this: the more the media piles on the Catholic church, the more the images begin to resonate with the anti-Catholic propoganda endemic in in protestant Europe and protestant America in the nineteenth century. Limited Inc has begun thinking of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a book that was published in the 1830s. That was a decade in which Irish immigration began to bring out anxieties among the Protestant establishment. Two convents were actually attacked, one in Massachussetts, one in South Carolina. Maria Monk alleged that she was unwillingly immured in a convent in Montreal, in which the nuns were treated as sexual tools of priests, who would periodically cull and kill the infants that were the tragic fruit of said priests' lust. In other words, the psycho-pathology of millienarianism, as described by Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millenium. He goes back to classical sources, finding Latin anti-Christian texts that describe the sect as one promoting incest and extreme promiscuity, with baby sacrifices and the whole lot. This constellation of elements pops up again and again in Western history, now directed at the jews, now directed at some cult. In the case of Maria Monk, there was an amusing afterwords to her confessions -- a falling out among her 'ghost-writers." It is as if the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had wanted a piece of the copyright action. The story is told in this essay by Ruth Hughes:
The first thing you have to understand about the Awful Disclosures is that they are not true. The second thing you have to understand is that Maria Monk had very little to do with writing it. Her story is a pathetic one, just not the one she would have you believe. Maria Monk was born to a Protestant family in St. Johns, Quebec in 1816 or 1817. In an affidavit written after the scandal of the Awful Disclosures broke, Maria Monk's mother described her as an uncontrollable child, a fact she attributed to a brain injury suffered when Maria was little more than a toddler: a slate pencil was rammed into her ear, penetrating her skull. From that time on, according to her mother's testimony, Maria was uncontrollable and subject to wild fantasies. Her only known contact with a Catholic institution was as an inmate of the Magdalene asylum in Montreal. When it was discovered that she had become pregnant while resident in the asylum, she was asked to remove herself from that institution. It was then, aged eighteen and pregnant, that she met William K. Hoyte, head of the Canadian Benevolent Society, an organization that combined Protestant missionary work with ardent anti-Catholic activism. Hoyte took Monk as his mistress, and together they traveled to New York. At this late date, we will never know how much of the story originated with Monk's disordered imagination and how much of it was created by the opportunistic Hoyte. Hoyte called upon his fellow nativists, Rev. J. J. Slocum, Rev. George Bourne, Theodore Dwight, and others; collectively they wrote the Awful Disclosures. Maria Monk is believed to have contributed details of the city of Montreal and of the practices she observed in the Magdalene asylum. This much is known because shortly after the publication of the Awful Disclosures, the cabal began to fight amongst themselves over the profits, and several suits and counter-suits were initiated in the New York courts: Slocum was the principal author, Hoyte and Bourne were major contributors, and the others mostly just offered suggestions. Slocum and Maria Monk banded together in suing the others and their publishing house, Harper and Brothers. Maria Monk then left Hoyte to became the companion of Slocum. Monk was still under-age, and Slocum was appointed her guardian.
The first edition of the Awful Disclosures carries the imprint of Howe and Bates. If you look to find other titles put out by that publishing house, you won't find much. Howe and Bates were employees of Harper and Brothers. Harper was worried that their Catholic customers would desert them if they published Maria Monk's book, but they could not deny themselves what looked to be a lucrative enterprise. They created the dummy publishing house of Howe and Bates to insulate themselves from any fallout. Interestingly, the only other work I have found with the imprint of Howe and Bates is a refutation of Monk's claims.
"
LI's point, dear reader, isn't that the accusations of pedophilia in any given case against a priest are untrue -- rather, the point is that the systematic accusation against the Catholic church is beginning to assume a form that seems to be all too consonant with the elements that have legitimated persecution in other eras. And it isn't as if these elements aren't always underfoot in the Barbaric Yawp we call the U.S.A. -- remember the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria of the early 90s.
Because LI has spurned the water of life, and is one of those unfortunates who will be processed on the left hand of our Lord transiting to the eternal gnashing of teeth that reportedly awaits our type, one would think that the abuse being hurled at the Catholic Church by a press that is normally servile to religious groups to a point of intellectual abasement that is hard to stomach would warm our hearts. Well, it doesn't.
Sunday, I was listening to a NPR interview with Alan Cooperman, who with Lena H. Sun wrote a Sunday article for the Washington Post , Hundreds Of Priests Removed Since '60s:
Survey Shows Scope Wider Than Disclosed
The intro grafs tell the story:
"The Roman Catholic Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because of allegations of child sexual abuse, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs, according to a survey of Catholic dioceses across the United States by The Washington Post.
The survey also found that at least 850 U.S. priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since the early 1960s, and that more than 350 of them were removed from ministry before this year."
In the interview on NPR, Limited Inc believes that Alan Cooperman said (we don't have a transcript) that in his research, which took in a forty year period, about 1 percent of the priesthood had probably been involved in some kind of sexual misconduct.
What the interviewer never asked, what no paper is asking, is how this compares with Protestant denominations, or with the secular equivalents of pastoral care: psycho-therapy, self-realization groups, etc. Now, LI's wild guess is that the Catholic church is well within the norm. That is, given the opportunity for sexual misconduct (a term that is pretty opaque) among a group of people who have to do with counseling, "spiritual" advice giving, and other activities that involve a traffic in what Freud called transference, and given the personality types attracted to the role of "helper," a good one percent will use their positions to have sex. However, there's no investigation of Baptist churches, or New Agey groups in Sedona, or of Freudian psycho-analysts, in the papers.
So where's the beef, the j'accuse here? It is this: the more the media piles on the Catholic church, the more the images begin to resonate with the anti-Catholic propoganda endemic in in protestant Europe and protestant America in the nineteenth century. Limited Inc has begun thinking of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a book that was published in the 1830s. That was a decade in which Irish immigration began to bring out anxieties among the Protestant establishment. Two convents were actually attacked, one in Massachussetts, one in South Carolina. Maria Monk alleged that she was unwillingly immured in a convent in Montreal, in which the nuns were treated as sexual tools of priests, who would periodically cull and kill the infants that were the tragic fruit of said priests' lust. In other words, the psycho-pathology of millienarianism, as described by Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millenium. He goes back to classical sources, finding Latin anti-Christian texts that describe the sect as one promoting incest and extreme promiscuity, with baby sacrifices and the whole lot. This constellation of elements pops up again and again in Western history, now directed at the jews, now directed at some cult. In the case of Maria Monk, there was an amusing afterwords to her confessions -- a falling out among her 'ghost-writers." It is as if the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had wanted a piece of the copyright action. The story is told in this essay by Ruth Hughes:
The first thing you have to understand about the Awful Disclosures is that they are not true. The second thing you have to understand is that Maria Monk had very little to do with writing it. Her story is a pathetic one, just not the one she would have you believe. Maria Monk was born to a Protestant family in St. Johns, Quebec in 1816 or 1817. In an affidavit written after the scandal of the Awful Disclosures broke, Maria Monk's mother described her as an uncontrollable child, a fact she attributed to a brain injury suffered when Maria was little more than a toddler: a slate pencil was rammed into her ear, penetrating her skull. From that time on, according to her mother's testimony, Maria was uncontrollable and subject to wild fantasies. Her only known contact with a Catholic institution was as an inmate of the Magdalene asylum in Montreal. When it was discovered that she had become pregnant while resident in the asylum, she was asked to remove herself from that institution. It was then, aged eighteen and pregnant, that she met William K. Hoyte, head of the Canadian Benevolent Society, an organization that combined Protestant missionary work with ardent anti-Catholic activism. Hoyte took Monk as his mistress, and together they traveled to New York. At this late date, we will never know how much of the story originated with Monk's disordered imagination and how much of it was created by the opportunistic Hoyte. Hoyte called upon his fellow nativists, Rev. J. J. Slocum, Rev. George Bourne, Theodore Dwight, and others; collectively they wrote the Awful Disclosures. Maria Monk is believed to have contributed details of the city of Montreal and of the practices she observed in the Magdalene asylum. This much is known because shortly after the publication of the Awful Disclosures, the cabal began to fight amongst themselves over the profits, and several suits and counter-suits were initiated in the New York courts: Slocum was the principal author, Hoyte and Bourne were major contributors, and the others mostly just offered suggestions. Slocum and Maria Monk banded together in suing the others and their publishing house, Harper and Brothers. Maria Monk then left Hoyte to became the companion of Slocum. Monk was still under-age, and Slocum was appointed her guardian.
The first edition of the Awful Disclosures carries the imprint of Howe and Bates. If you look to find other titles put out by that publishing house, you won't find much. Howe and Bates were employees of Harper and Brothers. Harper was worried that their Catholic customers would desert them if they published Maria Monk's book, but they could not deny themselves what looked to be a lucrative enterprise. They created the dummy publishing house of Howe and Bates to insulate themselves from any fallout. Interestingly, the only other work I have found with the imprint of Howe and Bates is a refutation of Monk's claims.
"
LI's point, dear reader, isn't that the accusations of pedophilia in any given case against a priest are untrue -- rather, the point is that the systematic accusation against the Catholic church is beginning to assume a form that seems to be all too consonant with the elements that have legitimated persecution in other eras. And it isn't as if these elements aren't always underfoot in the Barbaric Yawp we call the U.S.A. -- remember the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria of the early 90s.
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Remora
Bias
Limited Inc was thinking that the big story today - which is, of course, Britney Spears new CD, and how it compares with the great works of the past -- was something we should get right on. We should jump on this with both feet, Jim. We should make our own preferences -- for Britney's Blue period, and her experiments in dissonance and the atonal register when she was going out with that N Sync guy -- crystal clear. Of course, we were heavily sedated when these and other thoughts raced through our head...
Instead, we are going to address a less serious issue -- that of liberal bias in the press and the entertainment industry. Housesitting over the weekend, we finally had a chance to take in the O'Reilly report. The report -- we kid you not -- was a shocking expose of LEFT WING BIAS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY! Roll over Walter Winchell, and tell Estelle Parsons the news... Uh, right, where were we? Oh yes, O'Reilly's shocking scoop.
What makes this scoop particularly delicious -- and it is made in a number of venues about the NYT, or news organizations in general -- is that it is always denied, with a sort of prim huffiness, by press guys and gals. And then there's always Eric Alterman to tell us, hey, how about all those right wing bigmouths on Fox TV.
Well, why is it that nobody makes a big deal of, say, the rightwing bias of oil executives? Or how about the male-military bias of car designers (find me a woman who has any sayso in designing an American car, and I will admit, then, that finally, finally, feminism has broken through). In fact, since Comte was a pup, we've all gotten hip to a social fact: in all subcultures, there will be a certain commonality of ideas -- a certain tone that constrains which ideas are expressed. This makes for group cohesion, and for tacit rules that allow expelling members from the group -- and what is the point of a group if you can't expel members? Etc., etc. Anyway, to continue this boring presentation of platitudes, such constraints will act to select people for membership in those subcultures. Try being a born again Christian in the New York Times -- or try being a radical feminist lesbian in Exxon. I am pretty confident that the culture that writes the news in BigMedia, as well as the culture of Hollywood performers (not producers, or owners, or distributors of films) would turn out to be slightly to the left if one polled them about 'social' attitudes. Economic attitudes are a different matter. In the same way, I am pretty confident that the same poll would skew right for Oil Company execs. Now, I have never been sure what the point of this is -- are the O'Reilly's of the world really calling for ideological quotas? I think that might be a good idea, actually. Mixing in a few Florida Christians among the Hollywood set, or watching movies that indicate that God would really, really like those Jewish people to sort of consider taking Jesus Christ into their hearts as their lord and savior, right after wiping out this next set of dusky colored people with 666 tatooed on their foreheads, would be more than offset by El Paso Oil being represented by Sandra Bernhardt in some Senate hearing about the manipulation of power prices. And wouldn't it be nice if GM were forced to recruit for their designers at Ms. Magazine, instead of among retired defense industry apparatchiks?
The defense of focusing on the media or entertainment -- a last ditch defense, I think, and barely worth mentioning, as indeed this whole issue is barely worth mentioning -- is that ideology counts more, in these industries, than it does in energy or building cars. But you have merely to say that sentence to see that it is self-refuting. The decision to make a decent, low priced, low emission automobile is most definitely ideological -- it is about, among other things, how one wants to operate within a whole industrial system that has concretized other decisions about social action. It has to do with whether the corporation is more responsible to its stakeholders or its shareholders. There's nothing more ideological than that.
Bias
Limited Inc was thinking that the big story today - which is, of course, Britney Spears new CD, and how it compares with the great works of the past -- was something we should get right on. We should jump on this with both feet, Jim. We should make our own preferences -- for Britney's Blue period, and her experiments in dissonance and the atonal register when she was going out with that N Sync guy -- crystal clear. Of course, we were heavily sedated when these and other thoughts raced through our head...
Instead, we are going to address a less serious issue -- that of liberal bias in the press and the entertainment industry. Housesitting over the weekend, we finally had a chance to take in the O'Reilly report. The report -- we kid you not -- was a shocking expose of LEFT WING BIAS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY! Roll over Walter Winchell, and tell Estelle Parsons the news... Uh, right, where were we? Oh yes, O'Reilly's shocking scoop.
What makes this scoop particularly delicious -- and it is made in a number of venues about the NYT, or news organizations in general -- is that it is always denied, with a sort of prim huffiness, by press guys and gals. And then there's always Eric Alterman to tell us, hey, how about all those right wing bigmouths on Fox TV.
Well, why is it that nobody makes a big deal of, say, the rightwing bias of oil executives? Or how about the male-military bias of car designers (find me a woman who has any sayso in designing an American car, and I will admit, then, that finally, finally, feminism has broken through). In fact, since Comte was a pup, we've all gotten hip to a social fact: in all subcultures, there will be a certain commonality of ideas -- a certain tone that constrains which ideas are expressed. This makes for group cohesion, and for tacit rules that allow expelling members from the group -- and what is the point of a group if you can't expel members? Etc., etc. Anyway, to continue this boring presentation of platitudes, such constraints will act to select people for membership in those subcultures. Try being a born again Christian in the New York Times -- or try being a radical feminist lesbian in Exxon. I am pretty confident that the culture that writes the news in BigMedia, as well as the culture of Hollywood performers (not producers, or owners, or distributors of films) would turn out to be slightly to the left if one polled them about 'social' attitudes. Economic attitudes are a different matter. In the same way, I am pretty confident that the same poll would skew right for Oil Company execs. Now, I have never been sure what the point of this is -- are the O'Reilly's of the world really calling for ideological quotas? I think that might be a good idea, actually. Mixing in a few Florida Christians among the Hollywood set, or watching movies that indicate that God would really, really like those Jewish people to sort of consider taking Jesus Christ into their hearts as their lord and savior, right after wiping out this next set of dusky colored people with 666 tatooed on their foreheads, would be more than offset by El Paso Oil being represented by Sandra Bernhardt in some Senate hearing about the manipulation of power prices. And wouldn't it be nice if GM were forced to recruit for their designers at Ms. Magazine, instead of among retired defense industry apparatchiks?
The defense of focusing on the media or entertainment -- a last ditch defense, I think, and barely worth mentioning, as indeed this whole issue is barely worth mentioning -- is that ideology counts more, in these industries, than it does in energy or building cars. But you have merely to say that sentence to see that it is self-refuting. The decision to make a decent, low priced, low emission automobile is most definitely ideological -- it is about, among other things, how one wants to operate within a whole industrial system that has concretized other decisions about social action. It has to do with whether the corporation is more responsible to its stakeholders or its shareholders. There's nothing more ideological than that.
Sunday, June 09, 2002
Dope
LI has been crawling out from under our rock and re-connecting with the ten chapters of a crime novel we wrote a couple of years ago. Our inspiration, at the time, was Leonardo Sciascia, the great Italian writer. If you haven't read any of Sciascia's toothpick slim, extremely disorienting novels, let's just say they are not by any means your usual entertainment.
Crime, for Sciascia, is the surface unfolding of an event that, correctly interpreted, can represent the matrix of hidden power relationships. Sciascia's investigators require a hermeneutics of governance as the necessary supplement to the labor of deduction. Now, since the former is a rare thing, his investigators have a tendency to fail. In Sciascia's world, the criminal doesn't explain the crime, even if you catch him: the criminal is a merely the last instance of a chain that extends down, down in the dark. Sciascia's detectives are undone through their naive trust in the detective's unalterable standard, the correspondance theory of truth. That trust makes them vulnerable to the powers that might or might not have condoned the crime, and that might or might not see the advantage in the catching of its perpetrators. The detective, in other words, sees the crime as a problem to be solved, while the powers that be (legitimate and illegitimate) see it as a solution to be manipulated -- a warning, a riddence of an obstacle, a reward, and always, no matter on what side, as a small way of spreading the nihilistic rumor that the dominant power -- the bureaucracy, the Mafia, the party, the church, the cliches of the media - is, eventually, irresistible.
Sciascia, I suppose it goes without saying, was Sicilian. If you come across his small, excoriating book on the Moro affair -- an excellent example of a Sciascian crime that actually happened -- grab it and read it. Aldo Moro was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades, but according to Sciascia, that is only one face of the crime. The other face of this crime was the opportunity, given to Moro's many enemies, to dispose of the man. So both in the suddenly relentless attitude of the state (which, in the Moro case, presented itself as incapable of dealing with criminals -- a noticeable change from the posture of the Christian Democrats when it came to dealing with, say, the Mafia, and a change even from previous dealings with the Red Brigades) and the disjunction of that attitude from the actual police work (which was comically inept even by Italian standards), we have a social phenomenon in which the approach to it that is framed by the idea of finding who did it obscures the more socially charged question of who benefited from it.
For a completely clueless account of the Moro case, by the way, there's an essay by Richard Drake in the New Criterion that is a classic expression of what you might call the logical positivism of the detective. The notion is, briefly, that all crimes are atomic instances that do not add up to a higher level of crime. The conventional conspiracy theorist believes that it is from the higher level of crime that the atomic instances derive. And the Sciascian theory is that atomic instances of crime create a higher level of criminal opportunity from which to retrospectively make use of crime. Uses are many, but from the Sciascian p.o.v., the interesting thing is how the investigation of crime, which is after all monopolized by the state, is pulled into the system of crime. This is the truth encoded in the detective genre, with its free agents -- its detectives -- operating outside the police monopoly; although only Sciascia, as far as I know, takes the Sherlock Holmes genre a step further by turning the detective's mistrust onto the very act of detecting.
Which gets us -- by a leap -- to Marxypoo, as he was known to his friends.
Now that Marx has been freed from his ism, we are able to understand his virtues without falling under the spell of his vices. Well, okay, maybe we aren't - the troubling ism is still out there, even with the economic theory shot full of holes and debunked from Vladivostock to Budapest -- but we should be. In any case, one of his virtues, which prefigured a whole style of journalism we are now familiar with from such writers as Joan Didion, or Norman Mailer, was the inquisitor's gaze he cast upon the common document, the everyday news story, the faits divers. He had what you might call the longitudinal vision -- the ability to collate distant facts, or forgotten incidences, and apply them with devastating effect to the story at hand. His third chapter on the Civil War in France is an excellent example of what I mean. Here he is, uncovering, beneath the most resplendent virtues, the most egregious deviants.:
"Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Milliere, one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, now shot by express orders of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunken resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man, and that, in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. As these dry legal documents were not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse-power, Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his tongue, quietly awaiting the outbreak of the civil war, in order, then, frantically to denounce the people of Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against family, religion, order, and property. This same forger had hardly got into power, after September 4, when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and Taillefer, convicted, even under the empire, of forgery in the scandalous affair of "Etendard". One of these men, taillefer, having dared to return to Paris under the Commune, was at once reinstated in prison; and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of the National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her jailbirds!"
Mr. K.M. then goes on to probe the less reputable side of other ticket-of-leave men, as he describes them, as they saved France from the dangers of the Paris Commune. Marx, as we know, was absolutely wrong about the proletariat -- it turned out they were not history's favorite class, especially when they were represented by the class that claimed they were history's favored class. But Marx might have been right about the Lumpenproletariat. Their upward social mobility, tracked ironically in the 10th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and probed more gravely in the above mentioned piece, showed more than Marx knew. The ticket of leave man's century was about to dawn. The amazing thing about Stalin and Hitler is that these men, and the men around them, were all, recognizably, petty criminals: blackmailers, rapists, thieves. I mean literally: Stalin was an armed robber, Hitler was a petty blackmailer, and such as Beria were, without exageration, rapists. We were reminded of Marx's words by an article in the NYT today concerning one of Limited Inc's favorite topics, CEO compensation packages. With the foresight that characterizes today's ticket-of-leave man, many CEO's negotiate a package in which dismissal or (heavens!) the withdrawl of remuneration is not to be effected by such petty events as, say, conviction for felony:
"There may be only one type of job in which somebody can commit a felony and, after being fired as a result, still receive a severance package worth many years of salary. The job is chief executive of a large corporation."
Journalist David Leonhardt does not, of course, infuse his story with the vinegar that was Marx's stock in trade, but he does have some interesting antecdotes:
"Some contracts have gone so far as to restrict the kind of felony convictions that permit companies to deny executives a severance payment. At Fortune Brands, the maker of Jim Beam bourbon, Master Lock and other consumer products, for example, a felony must result in personal enrichment for Norman H. Wesley, the chief executive, at the expense of the company.At J. C. Penney, a felony conviction would cost Allen I. Questrom his severance only if it involved "theft or moral turpitude." And before LG&E Energy, based in Louisville, Ky., was acquired by a British power company in 2000, it exempted its chief from good-cause dismissal for any felonies "arising from an environmental violation."
"More broadly, executives have asked companies to remove contract clauses that could deny them severance payments, also known as golden parachutes, if they fail to perform their duties. In a sign of how much influence executives have gained over their own compensation, many companies have complied, inserting clauses that restrict dismissible offenses to deliberate misbehavior. "The scope of what constitutes cause has gotten narrower over the last 10 years," said Robert J. Stucker, a lawyer in Chicago who has represented Leo F. Mullin of Delta Air Lines, Robert L. Nardelli of Home Depot and other chief executives during contract negotiations."
Ah -- doesn't it make you want to celebrate the foresight of the Captain of Industry? In the old days, they hightailed it out of town after looting the till -- now they put the right to loot the till in the contract.
And they say there is no progress....
LI has been crawling out from under our rock and re-connecting with the ten chapters of a crime novel we wrote a couple of years ago. Our inspiration, at the time, was Leonardo Sciascia, the great Italian writer. If you haven't read any of Sciascia's toothpick slim, extremely disorienting novels, let's just say they are not by any means your usual entertainment.
Crime, for Sciascia, is the surface unfolding of an event that, correctly interpreted, can represent the matrix of hidden power relationships. Sciascia's investigators require a hermeneutics of governance as the necessary supplement to the labor of deduction. Now, since the former is a rare thing, his investigators have a tendency to fail. In Sciascia's world, the criminal doesn't explain the crime, even if you catch him: the criminal is a merely the last instance of a chain that extends down, down in the dark. Sciascia's detectives are undone through their naive trust in the detective's unalterable standard, the correspondance theory of truth. That trust makes them vulnerable to the powers that might or might not have condoned the crime, and that might or might not see the advantage in the catching of its perpetrators. The detective, in other words, sees the crime as a problem to be solved, while the powers that be (legitimate and illegitimate) see it as a solution to be manipulated -- a warning, a riddence of an obstacle, a reward, and always, no matter on what side, as a small way of spreading the nihilistic rumor that the dominant power -- the bureaucracy, the Mafia, the party, the church, the cliches of the media - is, eventually, irresistible.
Sciascia, I suppose it goes without saying, was Sicilian. If you come across his small, excoriating book on the Moro affair -- an excellent example of a Sciascian crime that actually happened -- grab it and read it. Aldo Moro was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades, but according to Sciascia, that is only one face of the crime. The other face of this crime was the opportunity, given to Moro's many enemies, to dispose of the man. So both in the suddenly relentless attitude of the state (which, in the Moro case, presented itself as incapable of dealing with criminals -- a noticeable change from the posture of the Christian Democrats when it came to dealing with, say, the Mafia, and a change even from previous dealings with the Red Brigades) and the disjunction of that attitude from the actual police work (which was comically inept even by Italian standards), we have a social phenomenon in which the approach to it that is framed by the idea of finding who did it obscures the more socially charged question of who benefited from it.
For a completely clueless account of the Moro case, by the way, there's an essay by Richard Drake in the New Criterion that is a classic expression of what you might call the logical positivism of the detective. The notion is, briefly, that all crimes are atomic instances that do not add up to a higher level of crime. The conventional conspiracy theorist believes that it is from the higher level of crime that the atomic instances derive. And the Sciascian theory is that atomic instances of crime create a higher level of criminal opportunity from which to retrospectively make use of crime. Uses are many, but from the Sciascian p.o.v., the interesting thing is how the investigation of crime, which is after all monopolized by the state, is pulled into the system of crime. This is the truth encoded in the detective genre, with its free agents -- its detectives -- operating outside the police monopoly; although only Sciascia, as far as I know, takes the Sherlock Holmes genre a step further by turning the detective's mistrust onto the very act of detecting.
Which gets us -- by a leap -- to Marxypoo, as he was known to his friends.
Now that Marx has been freed from his ism, we are able to understand his virtues without falling under the spell of his vices. Well, okay, maybe we aren't - the troubling ism is still out there, even with the economic theory shot full of holes and debunked from Vladivostock to Budapest -- but we should be. In any case, one of his virtues, which prefigured a whole style of journalism we are now familiar with from such writers as Joan Didion, or Norman Mailer, was the inquisitor's gaze he cast upon the common document, the everyday news story, the faits divers. He had what you might call the longitudinal vision -- the ability to collate distant facts, or forgotten incidences, and apply them with devastating effect to the story at hand. His third chapter on the Civil War in France is an excellent example of what I mean. Here he is, uncovering, beneath the most resplendent virtues, the most egregious deviants.:
"Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Milliere, one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, now shot by express orders of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunken resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man, and that, in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. As these dry legal documents were not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse-power, Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his tongue, quietly awaiting the outbreak of the civil war, in order, then, frantically to denounce the people of Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against family, religion, order, and property. This same forger had hardly got into power, after September 4, when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and Taillefer, convicted, even under the empire, of forgery in the scandalous affair of "Etendard". One of these men, taillefer, having dared to return to Paris under the Commune, was at once reinstated in prison; and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of the National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her jailbirds!"
Mr. K.M. then goes on to probe the less reputable side of other ticket-of-leave men, as he describes them, as they saved France from the dangers of the Paris Commune. Marx, as we know, was absolutely wrong about the proletariat -- it turned out they were not history's favorite class, especially when they were represented by the class that claimed they were history's favored class. But Marx might have been right about the Lumpenproletariat. Their upward social mobility, tracked ironically in the 10th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and probed more gravely in the above mentioned piece, showed more than Marx knew. The ticket of leave man's century was about to dawn. The amazing thing about Stalin and Hitler is that these men, and the men around them, were all, recognizably, petty criminals: blackmailers, rapists, thieves. I mean literally: Stalin was an armed robber, Hitler was a petty blackmailer, and such as Beria were, without exageration, rapists. We were reminded of Marx's words by an article in the NYT today concerning one of Limited Inc's favorite topics, CEO compensation packages. With the foresight that characterizes today's ticket-of-leave man, many CEO's negotiate a package in which dismissal or (heavens!) the withdrawl of remuneration is not to be effected by such petty events as, say, conviction for felony:
"There may be only one type of job in which somebody can commit a felony and, after being fired as a result, still receive a severance package worth many years of salary. The job is chief executive of a large corporation."
Journalist David Leonhardt does not, of course, infuse his story with the vinegar that was Marx's stock in trade, but he does have some interesting antecdotes:
"Some contracts have gone so far as to restrict the kind of felony convictions that permit companies to deny executives a severance payment. At Fortune Brands, the maker of Jim Beam bourbon, Master Lock and other consumer products, for example, a felony must result in personal enrichment for Norman H. Wesley, the chief executive, at the expense of the company.At J. C. Penney, a felony conviction would cost Allen I. Questrom his severance only if it involved "theft or moral turpitude." And before LG&E Energy, based in Louisville, Ky., was acquired by a British power company in 2000, it exempted its chief from good-cause dismissal for any felonies "arising from an environmental violation."
"More broadly, executives have asked companies to remove contract clauses that could deny them severance payments, also known as golden parachutes, if they fail to perform their duties. In a sign of how much influence executives have gained over their own compensation, many companies have complied, inserting clauses that restrict dismissible offenses to deliberate misbehavior. "The scope of what constitutes cause has gotten narrower over the last 10 years," said Robert J. Stucker, a lawyer in Chicago who has represented Leo F. Mullin of Delta Air Lines, Robert L. Nardelli of Home Depot and other chief executives during contract negotiations."
Ah -- doesn't it make you want to celebrate the foresight of the Captain of Industry? In the old days, they hightailed it out of town after looting the till -- now they put the right to loot the till in the contract.
And they say there is no progress....
Friday, June 07, 2002
Remora
As the Stock Market goes from pit to pit,Business Week surveys the passivity of Washington in the face of the various CEO-gates. And hey, we used the term, stupid as it is, first, understand? Don't tell Limited Inc that you get no value from perusing our humble pages. Anyway, that the Congress is about as competent as the D.C. Police Department is no big news. Why, after all, should we expect the fence to catch the burglar, or the pimp to join the vice squad? Congress, like the Mafia, is mainly a protection racket. It has so operated with regard to regulating the Accounting industry. Paid off, the Congressman's honor and future wealth depends on doing a good job aiding the looting of businesses by the higher managerial levels. Don't look to those eminent suits to bestir themselves anytime soon, unless... well, one should always remember that capital is not a unified thing -- it is a composite of opposing interests. Money might begin to flow from an entirely different direction in this affair. So far, the interest that is represented in Congress has been the accounting interest. But there is big money being lost by big money men, every day. And slowly they are responding. Viz this graf of the BW story:
CAPITALISM "IN PERIL." So far, the business lobby has overpowered proinvestor voices. Consumer groups, the AARP, and Common Cause support reforms. But they either lack muscle or are unwilling to devote resources to fight business. The vacuum has prompted Vanguard Group founder John C. Bogle to start the Federation of Long-Term Investors, a shareholder-rights group that includes Warren E. Buffett and other prominent investors. A strong accounting oversight board is a top priority. "Our capitalistic system is in peril," says Bogle.
While the reform drive in Washington has largely stalled, the private sector is mustering a response to the market's demand for a cleanup. Dozens of corporations have fired consultants affiliated with their audit firm, and at least 18 companies have adopted shareholder proposals to make the split permanent.
Boards, meanwhile, are strengthening their audit and compensation committees with directors who have no ties to management, acting in advance of proposed new stock exchange rules. "We are seeing the beginning of a cultural shift in corporate governance," says William B. Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO's Office of Investment."
That the AFL-CIO is temporarily on the side of the investors is something to note -- after all, it is the meaner, leaner, stockholders are everything companies that are the most prone to lay off workers. While Warren Buffett likes to say the ocassionally shocking thing in public -- for instance, that he is severely undertaxed -- he is no friend of the working stiff. But ... it is little noted how much the pension funds of unions have driven that kind of mentality. In the late seventies, it was Union pension fund managers who started raising holy hell about getting value for their equities. And they were crucial allies of the corporate raiders, who then unloaded workers. If investors seriously organize -- ie start massively bribing the legislature -- the issue of reform just might gain traction again.
As the Stock Market goes from pit to pit,Business Week surveys the passivity of Washington in the face of the various CEO-gates. And hey, we used the term, stupid as it is, first, understand? Don't tell Limited Inc that you get no value from perusing our humble pages. Anyway, that the Congress is about as competent as the D.C. Police Department is no big news. Why, after all, should we expect the fence to catch the burglar, or the pimp to join the vice squad? Congress, like the Mafia, is mainly a protection racket. It has so operated with regard to regulating the Accounting industry. Paid off, the Congressman's honor and future wealth depends on doing a good job aiding the looting of businesses by the higher managerial levels. Don't look to those eminent suits to bestir themselves anytime soon, unless... well, one should always remember that capital is not a unified thing -- it is a composite of opposing interests. Money might begin to flow from an entirely different direction in this affair. So far, the interest that is represented in Congress has been the accounting interest. But there is big money being lost by big money men, every day. And slowly they are responding. Viz this graf of the BW story:
CAPITALISM "IN PERIL." So far, the business lobby has overpowered proinvestor voices. Consumer groups, the AARP, and Common Cause support reforms. But they either lack muscle or are unwilling to devote resources to fight business. The vacuum has prompted Vanguard Group founder John C. Bogle to start the Federation of Long-Term Investors, a shareholder-rights group that includes Warren E. Buffett and other prominent investors. A strong accounting oversight board is a top priority. "Our capitalistic system is in peril," says Bogle.
While the reform drive in Washington has largely stalled, the private sector is mustering a response to the market's demand for a cleanup. Dozens of corporations have fired consultants affiliated with their audit firm, and at least 18 companies have adopted shareholder proposals to make the split permanent.
Boards, meanwhile, are strengthening their audit and compensation committees with directors who have no ties to management, acting in advance of proposed new stock exchange rules. "We are seeing the beginning of a cultural shift in corporate governance," says William B. Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO's Office of Investment."
That the AFL-CIO is temporarily on the side of the investors is something to note -- after all, it is the meaner, leaner, stockholders are everything companies that are the most prone to lay off workers. While Warren Buffett likes to say the ocassionally shocking thing in public -- for instance, that he is severely undertaxed -- he is no friend of the working stiff. But ... it is little noted how much the pension funds of unions have driven that kind of mentality. In the late seventies, it was Union pension fund managers who started raising holy hell about getting value for their equities. And they were crucial allies of the corporate raiders, who then unloaded workers. If investors seriously organize -- ie start massively bribing the legislature -- the issue of reform just might gain traction again.
Remora
The Line, 2
In our last post, we made a few tentative jabs at thinking about the culture implications of a society in which the accumulation of wealth on the one side, and its absence on the other side, produces a gulf greater than that between, say, a Roman master and his slave. This is one of the great unthought ofs -- one of the unconscious features which plays its role in global culture. The promise of democracy is all hollowed out even as it is suavely announced by its spokesmen. For the Enlightenment ideal -- that one should be treated as an adult, and act like one -- depends on one being an adult human. The poor, though, are increasingly not. The suave spokesmen know it.
One of the things that should be noted about this wealth gulf, one of the reasons we are bringing up the tedious Roman reference, is that we'd like you to ponder the historical uniqueness of our status situation. Ours, our time's. Let's count it out: the Roman master could acquire other slaves, a greater amount of food, gorgeous clothing, and civil honor, and was in his way terrible. But in terms of levels of material existence, the master wasn't really going to find a better doctor, or dentist, or find more nutritious food, or even get a better education than the slave. The gulf between master and slave was in 500 a.d. as it was in Hegel's description in 1803 - they were both, in order to get the dialectic started, simply human beings. Hegel didn't talk about master and parakeet, master and deathwatch beetle.
Of course, this isn't true today. The Western dream of the lower species, that racist canard, was not, it turns out, a description, but rather a promise -- this was the vast project of the Western owners, the movers and shakers. if there really isn't an under-race, they would create an underclass. And over time, as the question of who was human became a question of who had the technology to be human, more and more of the poor simply don't have the price for that ticket, or the looks to get into that club. Since Limited Inc is one of this mass -- an ape on the planet of the apes that is being staged under your very windows, every day -- we can talk all about it. We aren't denied human rights anymore -- for human rights aren't really relevant to the non-human. We don't ride, for one thing, in cars. We don't go to dentists and have our toothaches cured. If we get AIDS, malaria, tb, or merely some cancer of a vital area, sleeping sickness, heart disease, the lot, and all our fault, drug or sex related no doubt, or due to living in some cancer gulch, living next to a refinery, living next to one of those old Monsanto chemical factories, living where they've put in all the highways so the humans can speed through the neighborhood, well, what do you expect? There is no cure. Whereas, of course, among human beings, the ardent discussions are about fertility drugs and viagra. The ardent discussions are about psychotherapy, the ardent discussions are about the safety of children. Are they attention deficit disorder children? Bring on the counselors, by all means.
There is a whole sphere not only of goods and services, but of ways of living, that are available to the masters and simply unimaginable to us apes. Of course, we vulgarly imagine it. Or rather, have it imagined for us by the humans. We have tvs -- well, LI doesn't, but that at least is a statement, not simply a factor in our ongoing immiseration -- and rent videos and there they are, the masters all adoringly imagined for us, and their childish antics, the things they blow up, the food they eat, the vehicles in which they chase each other around. This, we say, is what that species must do. Or must think they do. But for us apes, it is all a nature film, a wildlife film. They are different creatures, they move at different speeds, they eat different things, they die of different diseases, they experience their pains through different channels, and they experience their pleasures that way too.
Limited Inc is thinking about this a lot lately. We've just had a bout with the electric company -- owned and operated, supposedly, by the City of Austin -- in which the City of Austin won. Basically, they drained us of our cash. And we still don't have the money to remain in the desolate little efficiency to which we cling for another month. So we spent yesterday and today lamenting the move out to the street, which has gone from being a nightmare to being something we should plan on. We look at those weatherbeaten souls holding up the cardboard signs by the intersection of Lamar and 5th street reading, wer will mich horen, wenn ich schreie, unter dem Engeln Ordnungen, and we wonder about our own future. Although not exactly human, as LI's faithful reader know -- the ape has surely shown through, the rubbery features, the fur, the bulk, the inability to fit into shoes, pants, shirts -- we are still used to certain of the human comforts, and we contemplate their removal with dismay, and more than that, with a sort of animal panic, a paralyzing disarray. We live pretty much on a bushman's salary -- that is, on about six hundred dollars a month in US currency, supplemented by the money we beg, when the bills can no longer be put off, from friends and relatives. Every act of beggary is another descent into animality, so we have a very phased sense of what it means, we've swallowed the time release pill, the one that brings us to this level of poverty, and then to this further level, this murkier level. Descent, descent. And we know that, at forty four, this isn't going to go on forever. There are no jobs for our kind, for one thing; there's no honor in the poverty, for another thing; and neither love, which has long been forgotten, nor health awaits us in the future. The dark corner, another words, and, with our stiff little limbs in the air, being brushed into some dustpan like the cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis.
This is why we have been thinking about Uber die Linie, Ernst Junger's essay on nihilism. The essay takes its readings from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and makes the interesting suggestion that power, in the modern world, is promoted by something Juenger calls the nihilistic rumor -- the rumor that some force out there owns the future, from which one is excluded, and that resistance is futile. It's the No Future of the Sex Pistols, lived as the everyday experience of the apes.
Limited Inc, in other words, is talking about failure. We were moved recently by the New York article on a jazz singer, Susannah McCorkle, who jumped to her death last year from her sixteenth story apartment. But we did find it rather amusing that her death was immediately psychologized. She was, of course, depressed. The secret word -- failure -- never comes up in the article. But failure is a big external thing. It isn't generated as a mood -- it impresses itself upon one, day after day, as a state of affairs. This seeminly can't be admitted in a country that puts such stock in success -- it is as if the polar opposite doesn't exist; as if, magically, an opposition has been abolished. The piece begins with a description of a gathering of friends to honor the singer, then goes on in this graf to explain it all:
"If the gathering was upbeat, the months since McCorkle's suicide have been anything but for her friends, as the complexities of the singer's life and death have grown clearer and more painful. Hers was, in many ways, a quintessential New York story, in both its public triumphs and its private tragedy.Brainy, warm, and funny, McCorkle belonged to an exclusive coterie of American singers: She performed in the best rooms, recorded nineteen albums, and enjoyed more than two decades of acclaim from the jazz press as well as the devotion of fans around the world. But in the months before her death at 55 stunned them all, her record company, Concord, had decided to issue a compilation album instead of a new one, and the Algonquin Hotel had given her precious fall slot at the Oak Room, one of cabaret's most prestigious venues, to a younger singer. McCorkle also felt she was getting nowhere working on a memoir she'd been struggling with for years."
The article is written in the idiom that systematically disguises failure and its consequences. It is as if we were reading the account of the flailing of a woman drowning, and then were told that she the breathlessness she died of was all mental. The brain, not the lungs. I don't think so. But LI hastens to say that this is certainly not the author's fault. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence of the American idiom. That the ape can, one day, grow inside you is not something you tell your nearest and dearest. Far better the word, depression.
The Line, 2
In our last post, we made a few tentative jabs at thinking about the culture implications of a society in which the accumulation of wealth on the one side, and its absence on the other side, produces a gulf greater than that between, say, a Roman master and his slave. This is one of the great unthought ofs -- one of the unconscious features which plays its role in global culture. The promise of democracy is all hollowed out even as it is suavely announced by its spokesmen. For the Enlightenment ideal -- that one should be treated as an adult, and act like one -- depends on one being an adult human. The poor, though, are increasingly not. The suave spokesmen know it.
One of the things that should be noted about this wealth gulf, one of the reasons we are bringing up the tedious Roman reference, is that we'd like you to ponder the historical uniqueness of our status situation. Ours, our time's. Let's count it out: the Roman master could acquire other slaves, a greater amount of food, gorgeous clothing, and civil honor, and was in his way terrible. But in terms of levels of material existence, the master wasn't really going to find a better doctor, or dentist, or find more nutritious food, or even get a better education than the slave. The gulf between master and slave was in 500 a.d. as it was in Hegel's description in 1803 - they were both, in order to get the dialectic started, simply human beings. Hegel didn't talk about master and parakeet, master and deathwatch beetle.
Of course, this isn't true today. The Western dream of the lower species, that racist canard, was not, it turns out, a description, but rather a promise -- this was the vast project of the Western owners, the movers and shakers. if there really isn't an under-race, they would create an underclass. And over time, as the question of who was human became a question of who had the technology to be human, more and more of the poor simply don't have the price for that ticket, or the looks to get into that club. Since Limited Inc is one of this mass -- an ape on the planet of the apes that is being staged under your very windows, every day -- we can talk all about it. We aren't denied human rights anymore -- for human rights aren't really relevant to the non-human. We don't ride, for one thing, in cars. We don't go to dentists and have our toothaches cured. If we get AIDS, malaria, tb, or merely some cancer of a vital area, sleeping sickness, heart disease, the lot, and all our fault, drug or sex related no doubt, or due to living in some cancer gulch, living next to a refinery, living next to one of those old Monsanto chemical factories, living where they've put in all the highways so the humans can speed through the neighborhood, well, what do you expect? There is no cure. Whereas, of course, among human beings, the ardent discussions are about fertility drugs and viagra. The ardent discussions are about psychotherapy, the ardent discussions are about the safety of children. Are they attention deficit disorder children? Bring on the counselors, by all means.
There is a whole sphere not only of goods and services, but of ways of living, that are available to the masters and simply unimaginable to us apes. Of course, we vulgarly imagine it. Or rather, have it imagined for us by the humans. We have tvs -- well, LI doesn't, but that at least is a statement, not simply a factor in our ongoing immiseration -- and rent videos and there they are, the masters all adoringly imagined for us, and their childish antics, the things they blow up, the food they eat, the vehicles in which they chase each other around. This, we say, is what that species must do. Or must think they do. But for us apes, it is all a nature film, a wildlife film. They are different creatures, they move at different speeds, they eat different things, they die of different diseases, they experience their pains through different channels, and they experience their pleasures that way too.
Limited Inc is thinking about this a lot lately. We've just had a bout with the electric company -- owned and operated, supposedly, by the City of Austin -- in which the City of Austin won. Basically, they drained us of our cash. And we still don't have the money to remain in the desolate little efficiency to which we cling for another month. So we spent yesterday and today lamenting the move out to the street, which has gone from being a nightmare to being something we should plan on. We look at those weatherbeaten souls holding up the cardboard signs by the intersection of Lamar and 5th street reading, wer will mich horen, wenn ich schreie, unter dem Engeln Ordnungen, and we wonder about our own future. Although not exactly human, as LI's faithful reader know -- the ape has surely shown through, the rubbery features, the fur, the bulk, the inability to fit into shoes, pants, shirts -- we are still used to certain of the human comforts, and we contemplate their removal with dismay, and more than that, with a sort of animal panic, a paralyzing disarray. We live pretty much on a bushman's salary -- that is, on about six hundred dollars a month in US currency, supplemented by the money we beg, when the bills can no longer be put off, from friends and relatives. Every act of beggary is another descent into animality, so we have a very phased sense of what it means, we've swallowed the time release pill, the one that brings us to this level of poverty, and then to this further level, this murkier level. Descent, descent. And we know that, at forty four, this isn't going to go on forever. There are no jobs for our kind, for one thing; there's no honor in the poverty, for another thing; and neither love, which has long been forgotten, nor health awaits us in the future. The dark corner, another words, and, with our stiff little limbs in the air, being brushed into some dustpan like the cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis.
This is why we have been thinking about Uber die Linie, Ernst Junger's essay on nihilism. The essay takes its readings from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and makes the interesting suggestion that power, in the modern world, is promoted by something Juenger calls the nihilistic rumor -- the rumor that some force out there owns the future, from which one is excluded, and that resistance is futile. It's the No Future of the Sex Pistols, lived as the everyday experience of the apes.
Limited Inc, in other words, is talking about failure. We were moved recently by the New York article on a jazz singer, Susannah McCorkle, who jumped to her death last year from her sixteenth story apartment. But we did find it rather amusing that her death was immediately psychologized. She was, of course, depressed. The secret word -- failure -- never comes up in the article. But failure is a big external thing. It isn't generated as a mood -- it impresses itself upon one, day after day, as a state of affairs. This seeminly can't be admitted in a country that puts such stock in success -- it is as if the polar opposite doesn't exist; as if, magically, an opposition has been abolished. The piece begins with a description of a gathering of friends to honor the singer, then goes on in this graf to explain it all:
"If the gathering was upbeat, the months since McCorkle's suicide have been anything but for her friends, as the complexities of the singer's life and death have grown clearer and more painful. Hers was, in many ways, a quintessential New York story, in both its public triumphs and its private tragedy.Brainy, warm, and funny, McCorkle belonged to an exclusive coterie of American singers: She performed in the best rooms, recorded nineteen albums, and enjoyed more than two decades of acclaim from the jazz press as well as the devotion of fans around the world. But in the months before her death at 55 stunned them all, her record company, Concord, had decided to issue a compilation album instead of a new one, and the Algonquin Hotel had given her precious fall slot at the Oak Room, one of cabaret's most prestigious venues, to a younger singer. McCorkle also felt she was getting nowhere working on a memoir she'd been struggling with for years."
The article is written in the idiom that systematically disguises failure and its consequences. It is as if we were reading the account of the flailing of a woman drowning, and then were told that she the breathlessness she died of was all mental. The brain, not the lungs. I don't think so. But LI hastens to say that this is certainly not the author's fault. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence of the American idiom. That the ape can, one day, grow inside you is not something you tell your nearest and dearest. Far better the word, depression.
Thursday, June 06, 2002
Remora
The line (part 1)
Paul Krugman's column about the compensation packages for top executives at top corporations is a brief but pointed overview of the last twenty five years. From the beginning of the eighties, the post-world war II corporation (best described by Galbraith in New Industrial State) was systematically de-structured. In its place was put the faux entrepeneurial organization of today -- one that rewards the CEO, and the top tier of management, in gross disproportion to their actual value to the company. The rewards include not only outright salary, but, of course, the notorious stock option packages, the loans at no interest, the loans, even, that don't have to be paid back -- as seems to have been the case at Adelphia. Krugman approaches this phenomenon from the standpoint of the economic theory that promoted it -- the standard theory, as taught in business school. After major corporations were loaded with debt in the 80s takeover frenzy, they had no choice but to cut. And the cuts were not made at the top, of course. The result, in the nineties, was supposedly a healthier, a more competitive corporation. The nineties seemed to vindicate the most hard hearted economic theory. Until now -- when the financial pages of major media are staging a mini-Last Judgement, with the books falling open. And what black hearts are so revealed? Well, we know the roll call by now, beginning with Enron. Krugman has a nicely pointed way of putting it:
And in the 1990's corporations put that theory into practice. The predators faded from the scene, because they were no longer needed; corporate America embraced its inner Gekko. Or as Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago's business school put it � approvingly � in 1998: "We are all Henry Kravis now." The new tough-mindedness was enforced, above all, with executive pay packages that offered princely rewards if stock prices rose. And until just a few months ago we thought it was working.
Now, as each day seems to bring a new business scandal, we can see the theory's fatal flaw: a system
that lavishly rewards executives for success tempts those executives, who control much of the information available to outsiders, to fabricate the appearance of success. Aggressive accounting, fictitious transactions that inflate sales, whatever it takes."
It would take an economist to be surprised by all of this.
Kevin Phillips has recently written a book about the economic composition of the New Age -- the age that has chased the goal of equalizing wealth in any way from the stage of history, like the ghost in Hamlet dispersed by the crowing of a cock. But the old mole has a tendency to rumble under the stage. In a WP piece, Phillips throws around some interesting stats:
We have just witnessed, in the spectacular growth of U.S. fortunes over the past two decades, a once-in-a-century phenomenon. Puffed up by the boom in high-technology and finance, a select group of Americans has accumulated an even larger boodle in an even shorter period of time than the titans of the Gilded Age amassed 100 years ago. The numbers almost defy belief.The 30 largest U.S. family and individual fortunes in 1999 were roughly ten times as big as the 30 largest had been in 1982, an increase greater than any comparable peacetime period during the 19th century. In 1999, the single largest U.S. fortune, the $86 billion hoard of Microsoft's Bill Gates, was 1.4 million times greater than the assets of the median U.S. household; that exceeds the ratio attained by John D. Rockefeller, whose early 1900s wealth was 1.25 million times larger than the median household of that time."
Which leads, naturally, to this question:
"If the recent accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few resembles the Gilded Age, what about the politics? The economic concentrations of the Gilded Age had great political consequences in the successive assaults of populism under William Jennings Bryan and the comeuppance meted out to big-business conservatism by the progressive movement under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. What we Republicans have to wonder, given today's parallel excesses, is whether combative reformers will reenact the politics of a century ago. Will modern Republicans be painted as courtiers of the new Robber Baronage? Is a great speculative bubble still popping from the gash of stock market bear claws? Can Sen. John McCain become a second Theodore Roosevelt?"
The answer to the third question is a definite no. As for the first question, one might ask a counter-question: why single out the Republicans? The two parties aren't divided by the question of the just distribution of wealth -- they are merely divided by who, among the wealthy, should be backed by the power of the state. The big drug companies? Hollywood entertainment empires? Is the senator from Merck, or is the senator from Microsoft?
LI wrote a review in the midst of the boom that (we like to think) posed the issue of wealth in terms that are consonant with Phillips, although less informed by American history. Green Magazine, where the review was posted, is no more. So we are going to flesh out this post with a reposting of the thing.
The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work by Joanne B. Ciulla Times Books $25.00
Reviewed by Roger Gathman
The Arnhem Land aborigines studied by the anthropologistMarshall Sahlins forage for their food for about four or five hours a day. Therest of the day they spend in various amusements, among which resting andsleeping definitely hold first place. Sahlins, rather irked at these non-go-getters, suggested that maybe there are other things in life than resting and sleeping - building a culture, for instance. But one of the bushman set him straight: "Why should we plant when there are so many mongomongonuts in the world?"
Hegel himself couldn�t have phrased the great question ofcivilization more succinctly. As JoanneCiulla, a philosophy professor at the University of Richmond, shows in this book, work was never considered such ahot idea until the coming of modernity. Not that the ancients or the medievals valued sloth - but they certainly thought that work was best done by otherpeople, slaves or serfs. The good life of the happy few could be spent in civicpursuits, or philosophical contemplation, or pillaging the infidels, dependingupon the era. Anything but a nine to five job. That concept, in fact isunintelligible in a clockless society. "Clock discipline," as Ciullacalls it, was instilled into the general populace in the 18th century, and wasa pre-requisite for the industrial age.
Although Ciulla doesn�t spend very much time upon popular culture, the wound which the Industrial Revolution dealt to thousands of yearsof conventional wisdom is still visible in our western "dreamtime," saturated as it is with movies and TV. The screen rarely shows labor, unless it involves an emergency room, acourtroom, or an arrest. Our social instinct is to distinguish work, which is "boring," from entertainment, which is fun.
Ciulla�s book moves the historical story along briskly. Sheis really trying to fill in the context, here, so we can have a deeperunderstanding of our current situation. Her analysis of work, and how we feel about it, rests upon two social facts: alienation and inequality.
Ciulla has the wide reading and the mental astuteness that can successfully juggle Aristotle and Tom Peters. She is particularly good at tracing the career of alienation as a sociological theme from Marx to David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd. Ciulla employs the thinking of Riesman, William Whyte (author of The Organization Man), and C. Wright Mills (Author of White Collar), to comment onthe various faddish management theories which have arisen and subsided in the eighties and nineties. She draws attention to the contradiction between the public ideology of corporate spokesman, who inexhaustibly advocate free market solutions (based on the profit motive) for all public policy problems, and the inter-mural, therapeutic culture which is visited, by management, upon their employees. She quotes a study which polled managers about the most efficient incentives for building employee commitment: "The researchers found that most senior managers believed that celebrations and ceremonies and non-cash recognition were the best incentives for non-managers... But for senior managers, they responded that the best incentive was cash rewards tied to quality performance."
Circuses, not bread, for the working class, and both for the managerial meta-level. Is this a big surprise? This gets us to the second force shaping work for the majority of Americans right now: the increasingly skewed distribution of mongomongo nuts. Bill Gates has, by some estimates, maybe 70 billion nuts. To pile up a comparable stash, the average temp custodian who cleans the Microsoft offices would have to work some 70,000 years - and that�s without eating. Throwin some steaks and we are talking about a couple of thousand years extra.
This gives us a rather interstellar distance between high and low in our society not so very different between slave and master in the Roman Empire, or peasant and lord in the ancien regime. The Gini co-efficient, which measures income distribution, has gotten better in the last two years, but not by much. It is no wonder that, scratching the surface of Total Quality Management, one so often meets a corrosive cynicism among the plebes, even if they are more than willing, when the boss is around, to mouth the requisite platitudes.
Ciulla�s virtues, which are her eclecticism and stock of references, are also her flaws. This is a woman who sometimes seems to feel as though no passage is complete until she has cleaned out all her index cards, making for collages of quotes from the experts. This sometimes gives the book the creaky feel of an edifying PBS documentary. Still, this is a minor complaint to make about Ciulla's book, which, with its willingness to take broad views and its nterdisciplinary reach makes not only a righteous impression, but keeps the reader from falling asleep over its virtuous intentions - which is a very rare thing, indeed.
The line (part 1)
Paul Krugman's column about the compensation packages for top executives at top corporations is a brief but pointed overview of the last twenty five years. From the beginning of the eighties, the post-world war II corporation (best described by Galbraith in New Industrial State) was systematically de-structured. In its place was put the faux entrepeneurial organization of today -- one that rewards the CEO, and the top tier of management, in gross disproportion to their actual value to the company. The rewards include not only outright salary, but, of course, the notorious stock option packages, the loans at no interest, the loans, even, that don't have to be paid back -- as seems to have been the case at Adelphia. Krugman approaches this phenomenon from the standpoint of the economic theory that promoted it -- the standard theory, as taught in business school. After major corporations were loaded with debt in the 80s takeover frenzy, they had no choice but to cut. And the cuts were not made at the top, of course. The result, in the nineties, was supposedly a healthier, a more competitive corporation. The nineties seemed to vindicate the most hard hearted economic theory. Until now -- when the financial pages of major media are staging a mini-Last Judgement, with the books falling open. And what black hearts are so revealed? Well, we know the roll call by now, beginning with Enron. Krugman has a nicely pointed way of putting it:
And in the 1990's corporations put that theory into practice. The predators faded from the scene, because they were no longer needed; corporate America embraced its inner Gekko. Or as Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago's business school put it � approvingly � in 1998: "We are all Henry Kravis now." The new tough-mindedness was enforced, above all, with executive pay packages that offered princely rewards if stock prices rose. And until just a few months ago we thought it was working.
Now, as each day seems to bring a new business scandal, we can see the theory's fatal flaw: a system
that lavishly rewards executives for success tempts those executives, who control much of the information available to outsiders, to fabricate the appearance of success. Aggressive accounting, fictitious transactions that inflate sales, whatever it takes."
It would take an economist to be surprised by all of this.
Kevin Phillips has recently written a book about the economic composition of the New Age -- the age that has chased the goal of equalizing wealth in any way from the stage of history, like the ghost in Hamlet dispersed by the crowing of a cock. But the old mole has a tendency to rumble under the stage. In a WP piece, Phillips throws around some interesting stats:
We have just witnessed, in the spectacular growth of U.S. fortunes over the past two decades, a once-in-a-century phenomenon. Puffed up by the boom in high-technology and finance, a select group of Americans has accumulated an even larger boodle in an even shorter period of time than the titans of the Gilded Age amassed 100 years ago. The numbers almost defy belief.The 30 largest U.S. family and individual fortunes in 1999 were roughly ten times as big as the 30 largest had been in 1982, an increase greater than any comparable peacetime period during the 19th century. In 1999, the single largest U.S. fortune, the $86 billion hoard of Microsoft's Bill Gates, was 1.4 million times greater than the assets of the median U.S. household; that exceeds the ratio attained by John D. Rockefeller, whose early 1900s wealth was 1.25 million times larger than the median household of that time."
Which leads, naturally, to this question:
"If the recent accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few resembles the Gilded Age, what about the politics? The economic concentrations of the Gilded Age had great political consequences in the successive assaults of populism under William Jennings Bryan and the comeuppance meted out to big-business conservatism by the progressive movement under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. What we Republicans have to wonder, given today's parallel excesses, is whether combative reformers will reenact the politics of a century ago. Will modern Republicans be painted as courtiers of the new Robber Baronage? Is a great speculative bubble still popping from the gash of stock market bear claws? Can Sen. John McCain become a second Theodore Roosevelt?"
The answer to the third question is a definite no. As for the first question, one might ask a counter-question: why single out the Republicans? The two parties aren't divided by the question of the just distribution of wealth -- they are merely divided by who, among the wealthy, should be backed by the power of the state. The big drug companies? Hollywood entertainment empires? Is the senator from Merck, or is the senator from Microsoft?
LI wrote a review in the midst of the boom that (we like to think) posed the issue of wealth in terms that are consonant with Phillips, although less informed by American history. Green Magazine, where the review was posted, is no more. So we are going to flesh out this post with a reposting of the thing.
The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work by Joanne B. Ciulla Times Books $25.00
Reviewed by Roger Gathman
The Arnhem Land aborigines studied by the anthropologistMarshall Sahlins forage for their food for about four or five hours a day. Therest of the day they spend in various amusements, among which resting andsleeping definitely hold first place. Sahlins, rather irked at these non-go-getters, suggested that maybe there are other things in life than resting and sleeping - building a culture, for instance. But one of the bushman set him straight: "Why should we plant when there are so many mongomongonuts in the world?"
Hegel himself couldn�t have phrased the great question ofcivilization more succinctly. As JoanneCiulla, a philosophy professor at the University of Richmond, shows in this book, work was never considered such ahot idea until the coming of modernity. Not that the ancients or the medievals valued sloth - but they certainly thought that work was best done by otherpeople, slaves or serfs. The good life of the happy few could be spent in civicpursuits, or philosophical contemplation, or pillaging the infidels, dependingupon the era. Anything but a nine to five job. That concept, in fact isunintelligible in a clockless society. "Clock discipline," as Ciullacalls it, was instilled into the general populace in the 18th century, and wasa pre-requisite for the industrial age.
Although Ciulla doesn�t spend very much time upon popular culture, the wound which the Industrial Revolution dealt to thousands of yearsof conventional wisdom is still visible in our western "dreamtime," saturated as it is with movies and TV. The screen rarely shows labor, unless it involves an emergency room, acourtroom, or an arrest. Our social instinct is to distinguish work, which is "boring," from entertainment, which is fun.
Ciulla�s book moves the historical story along briskly. Sheis really trying to fill in the context, here, so we can have a deeperunderstanding of our current situation. Her analysis of work, and how we feel about it, rests upon two social facts: alienation and inequality.
Ciulla has the wide reading and the mental astuteness that can successfully juggle Aristotle and Tom Peters. She is particularly good at tracing the career of alienation as a sociological theme from Marx to David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd. Ciulla employs the thinking of Riesman, William Whyte (author of The Organization Man), and C. Wright Mills (Author of White Collar), to comment onthe various faddish management theories which have arisen and subsided in the eighties and nineties. She draws attention to the contradiction between the public ideology of corporate spokesman, who inexhaustibly advocate free market solutions (based on the profit motive) for all public policy problems, and the inter-mural, therapeutic culture which is visited, by management, upon their employees. She quotes a study which polled managers about the most efficient incentives for building employee commitment: "The researchers found that most senior managers believed that celebrations and ceremonies and non-cash recognition were the best incentives for non-managers... But for senior managers, they responded that the best incentive was cash rewards tied to quality performance."
Circuses, not bread, for the working class, and both for the managerial meta-level. Is this a big surprise? This gets us to the second force shaping work for the majority of Americans right now: the increasingly skewed distribution of mongomongo nuts. Bill Gates has, by some estimates, maybe 70 billion nuts. To pile up a comparable stash, the average temp custodian who cleans the Microsoft offices would have to work some 70,000 years - and that�s without eating. Throwin some steaks and we are talking about a couple of thousand years extra.
This gives us a rather interstellar distance between high and low in our society not so very different between slave and master in the Roman Empire, or peasant and lord in the ancien regime. The Gini co-efficient, which measures income distribution, has gotten better in the last two years, but not by much. It is no wonder that, scratching the surface of Total Quality Management, one so often meets a corrosive cynicism among the plebes, even if they are more than willing, when the boss is around, to mouth the requisite platitudes.
Ciulla�s virtues, which are her eclecticism and stock of references, are also her flaws. This is a woman who sometimes seems to feel as though no passage is complete until she has cleaned out all her index cards, making for collages of quotes from the experts. This sometimes gives the book the creaky feel of an edifying PBS documentary. Still, this is a minor complaint to make about Ciulla's book, which, with its willingness to take broad views and its nterdisciplinary reach makes not only a righteous impression, but keeps the reader from falling asleep over its virtuous intentions - which is a very rare thing, indeed.
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