LI’s recommended read: In the LAT today, there is a piece by the ex police chief of Seattle Washington, Norm Stamper, that lays out the case for legalizing drugs. Not just pot – heroin, meth, etc. Cops aren’t usually this sensible. But occasionally a man comes forward who can add and subtract.
“As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?”
One of the reasons for LI's sporadic crusade to dig the moderate wing of the Republican party out of the grave in which lies buried deep is that there are issues on which moderate Republicans can act as unique brokers. Between Hillary Clinton's It takes a village to jail your ass for vices we don't like and the moral majority Republican party's lets execute drug dealers, a logical drug policy doesn't stand a chance. Only some combination of libertarian thinking and concern about the incredible gulag the U.S. has burdened itself with is going to work, here.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Miller time again
First things first: Guy Baehr is the chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists that is giving Judy Miller a 1st Amendment prize next week. This is his email: gbaehr@spj.org. This is his official address:
Guy Baehr
Assistant Director
Journalism Resources Institute
Rutgers University of New Jersey
4 Huntington St.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071
I’ve written him to tell him that I think that the award stinks. I’d urge others to let Mr. Baehr know what this award says about the standards of professional journalists. Surely there are writers for KBR Techtalk, Haliburton’s inhouse newsletter, more deserving of the prize.
Second: although, as an old fan of closing the CIA down permanently, I have a hard time getting too lathered about betraying CIA assets in Africa – in fact, given the CIA’s record in Angola, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in Tanzania, etc., etc., and I even find it wonderfully inspiriting that the rightwing is adopting the tactics of the Yippies with regard to that poisonous agency – there is no reason to be blind to what Judy Miller is, how she has operated at the NYT, and what it says about the NYT itself.
What Judy Miller is is an advocate. That in itself is not wrong. Any journalist is an advocate for something, some point of view. But there are thresholds between being an advocate and losing your integrity. The trajectory of Miller's agon reminds me the story of the disbarred lawyer who was the subject of Janet Malcolm’s book, The Crime of Sheila McGough. McGough was hired by a man accused of various business frauds. In the course of defending him, he became more than another case to McGough – she became passionately attached to his cause, much to the bewilderment of those around her. And in her passion, she allowed him to use her office as a transit point for cash transactions. Eventually, not only was the client imprisoned, but McGough was too, as an accomplice.
Usually the rap on Miller begins with her outrageously bad reporting on the WMDs. I think it should, instead, begin with her partnership with Laurie Mylroie, with whom she co-authored “Study of Revenge.” This is what Peter Bergen has said about Mylroie:
“It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched Mylroie's quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the chief source of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing". Wolfowitz and his then wife, according to Mylroie, "provided crucial support".
Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon.
The extent of Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." Clarke writes: "I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."
Mylroie vision of Saddam Hussein’s evil sway doesn’t stop with the 1993 bombing:
“She has said that Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City plotters, was in league with Ramzi Yousef, the supposed Iraqi agent. The federal judge who presided over the Oklahoma case ruled this theory inadmissible. Mylroie implicates Iraq in the 1996 bombing of a US military facility in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 servicemen. In 2001, a grand jury indicted members of Saudi Hezbollah, a group with ties to Iran. Mylroie suggests that the attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998 were "the work of Bin Laden and Iraq". An investigation uncovered no connection. Mylroie has written that the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996 was probably an Iraqi plot; a two-year investigation found it was an accident. Saddam is guilty of many crimes, but there is no evidence linking him to any act of anti-US terrorism for a decade, while there is a mountain of evidence against al-Qaida.”
So: the NYT let a woman who has gone on record in a best seller as claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 WTC bombing as well as 9/11 run the story about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. It is odd that they just didn’t turn over the front page to Paul Wolfowitz and get it done with.
If, to use the phrase of the network around Ken Starr, there were “little elves” pushing us into this stupid, misbegotten invasion, one of the little elves is certainly Miller. Her role in trying to blacken Wilson’s name did succeed in one respect: it pretty much paralyzed the NYT’s reporting on the kind of scandal that, once upon a time, the NYT was very good at. According to the NYT itself:
"Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald. In July, Richard W. Stevenson and other reporters in the Washington bureau wrote an article about the role of Mr. Cheney's senior aides, including Mr. Libby, in the leak case. The article, which did not disclose that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source, was not published.
Mr. Stevenson said he was told by his editors that the article did not break enough new ground. "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," he said."
In fact, her 85 days in prison took a nice little chunk out of the news cycle in which it has usually been NYT's role to play a leading part. Taking a bullet for your side is something you do, if you are a believer. That the NYT management has been as close to Miller’s side as the House of the Romanovs was to Rasputin shows that the NYT badly needs a new editor in chief, new blood in the Washington D.C office, and constraints that make sure that star reporters with obvious agendas don't use their paper space to promote these agendas, and their institutional weight to suppress the criticism of these agendas.
Guy Baehr
Assistant Director
Journalism Resources Institute
Rutgers University of New Jersey
4 Huntington St.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071
I’ve written him to tell him that I think that the award stinks. I’d urge others to let Mr. Baehr know what this award says about the standards of professional journalists. Surely there are writers for KBR Techtalk, Haliburton’s inhouse newsletter, more deserving of the prize.
Second: although, as an old fan of closing the CIA down permanently, I have a hard time getting too lathered about betraying CIA assets in Africa – in fact, given the CIA’s record in Angola, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in Tanzania, etc., etc., and I even find it wonderfully inspiriting that the rightwing is adopting the tactics of the Yippies with regard to that poisonous agency – there is no reason to be blind to what Judy Miller is, how she has operated at the NYT, and what it says about the NYT itself.
What Judy Miller is is an advocate. That in itself is not wrong. Any journalist is an advocate for something, some point of view. But there are thresholds between being an advocate and losing your integrity. The trajectory of Miller's agon reminds me the story of the disbarred lawyer who was the subject of Janet Malcolm’s book, The Crime of Sheila McGough. McGough was hired by a man accused of various business frauds. In the course of defending him, he became more than another case to McGough – she became passionately attached to his cause, much to the bewilderment of those around her. And in her passion, she allowed him to use her office as a transit point for cash transactions. Eventually, not only was the client imprisoned, but McGough was too, as an accomplice.
Usually the rap on Miller begins with her outrageously bad reporting on the WMDs. I think it should, instead, begin with her partnership with Laurie Mylroie, with whom she co-authored “Study of Revenge.” This is what Peter Bergen has said about Mylroie:
“It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched Mylroie's quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the chief source of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing". Wolfowitz and his then wife, according to Mylroie, "provided crucial support".
Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon.
The extent of Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." Clarke writes: "I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."
Mylroie vision of Saddam Hussein’s evil sway doesn’t stop with the 1993 bombing:
“She has said that Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City plotters, was in league with Ramzi Yousef, the supposed Iraqi agent. The federal judge who presided over the Oklahoma case ruled this theory inadmissible. Mylroie implicates Iraq in the 1996 bombing of a US military facility in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 servicemen. In 2001, a grand jury indicted members of Saudi Hezbollah, a group with ties to Iran. Mylroie suggests that the attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998 were "the work of Bin Laden and Iraq". An investigation uncovered no connection. Mylroie has written that the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996 was probably an Iraqi plot; a two-year investigation found it was an accident. Saddam is guilty of many crimes, but there is no evidence linking him to any act of anti-US terrorism for a decade, while there is a mountain of evidence against al-Qaida.”
So: the NYT let a woman who has gone on record in a best seller as claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 WTC bombing as well as 9/11 run the story about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. It is odd that they just didn’t turn over the front page to Paul Wolfowitz and get it done with.
If, to use the phrase of the network around Ken Starr, there were “little elves” pushing us into this stupid, misbegotten invasion, one of the little elves is certainly Miller. Her role in trying to blacken Wilson’s name did succeed in one respect: it pretty much paralyzed the NYT’s reporting on the kind of scandal that, once upon a time, the NYT was very good at. According to the NYT itself:
"Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald. In July, Richard W. Stevenson and other reporters in the Washington bureau wrote an article about the role of Mr. Cheney's senior aides, including Mr. Libby, in the leak case. The article, which did not disclose that Mr. Libby was Ms. Miller's source, was not published.
Mr. Stevenson said he was told by his editors that the article did not break enough new ground. "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation," he said."
In fact, her 85 days in prison took a nice little chunk out of the news cycle in which it has usually been NYT's role to play a leading part. Taking a bullet for your side is something you do, if you are a believer. That the NYT management has been as close to Miller’s side as the House of the Romanovs was to Rasputin shows that the NYT badly needs a new editor in chief, new blood in the Washington D.C office, and constraints that make sure that star reporters with obvious agendas don't use their paper space to promote these agendas, and their institutional weight to suppress the criticism of these agendas.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
sweet mysteries of life and death
“If you people wouldn’t have drunk it,” Dalitz said thickly, “ I wouldn’t have bootlegged it.” Moe Dalitz before the Kefauver Commission on organized crime, explaining why he sold liquor during the prohibition. From “The Money and the Power” by Sally Denton and Roger Morris.
The second mystery – see my Thursday post -- to which I want to point my showman’s cane (see it tremble in my palsied grip) is that of the developmental lag. I think this mystery complicates any simple conclusions we can make from the first mystery, which, if you will remember, is the mystery of how, as we become richer, we become collectively poorer. If there were only one mystery here, then the answer would be pretty simple. We’d just look to the tradition of class conflict for our answers. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t that simple. Instead, our two mysteries are enjambed, intertwined like two dogs in heat. They form a matrix. It would be nice for me to be able to say, well, Reagan was just an upper class stooge, and that’s how the investor class became dominant in America. Alas, it isn’t that simple. In fact, only by looking at both of the mysteries does one understand the brilliance, albeit limited brilliance, of the American response to the crisis of capitalism in the 1980s, and how that has played out to this day. Those mysteries explain a certain unexpected movement in the conservative revolution. Unlike conservatism in the past, this revolution was not wrapped about savings. Just the opposite. This revolution was about creating an economic culture in which the inclination to saving was systematically dissolved.
The mystery I am talking about is at the heart of globalization and the transformation of the welfare state into the guarantor state.
When I try to figure out how to put this in a simple post, I feel rather like I am trying to spoon out the water in pond with a net: the instrument is wrong and the goal is futile. But of course, this is what we do here at LI.
So-- lets get one thing straight right away. The difference between the economist and the non-economist is that the economist can think in terms of parts and aggregates, but never thinks of values in terms of emergent wholes. To put this in terms of an example: an economist can explain why the efficiencies gained by transferring manufacturing to low paying areas from high paying areas – for instance, from Michigan to the Mexican border – make up for the cost of increased unemployment in Michigan. The economist would have an easy time showing this by a sectorial analysis of the U.S. economy. What the economist does not include in the calculus at all are the intangible values in the blue collar culture of Michigan. It has no instrument to quantify that culture, and what economists can’t quantify, they can’t see. They are equipped with visual sensoria as delicate and peculiar as a fly’s – but they aren’t human. Similarly, the culture the emerges around low paying maquilladoras in Juarez is available, to the economist, only in terms of human capital, and not in terms of such emergent wholes that we can look down at the face of another slaughtered girl on the outskirts of Juarez and understand what is happening here (“ You've been with the professors/ And they’ve all liked your looks/ With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks”).The quality of life, that phrase as tasteless as bubble gum foil, the culture that emerges around long term low pay labor intense areas can’t really be analyzed by the economist, even if they can make attempts to distinguish a frontier from a metropolis. But the culture does have an economic impact. In fact, economics, ideally, serves the culture. Marx thought the fact that the culture had come to serve economics was part of the systematic inversion of values in 19th capitalism that had to be inverted in its turn. Be that as it may, to approach the second mystery, one has to have some respect for the constraints under which these mysteries are communicated.
…
In 1996, Mancur Olson gave a lecture on the stubborn difference between developed and less developed economies entitled “Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations are Rich, and Others Poor.” Olson pushed an institutionalist view of economics. To make his case, he first attempts to take apart the neo-classical view – and its newest additions, via Robert Lucas, that the famous “residual” to which Solow attributed the major role in growth consists of knowledge which, for various reasons, is not a public good. At the end of Olson’s overview, he writes:
“If the countries of the world were on the frontiers of neoclassical production functions, the marginal product of capital would therefore be many times higher in the low-income than in the high-income countries. Robert Lucas (1990) has calculated, albeit in a somewhat different framework,[11] the marginal product of capital that should be expected in the United States and in India. Lucas estimated that if an Indian worker and an American worker supplied the same quantity and quality of labor, the marginal product of capital in India should be 58 times as great as in the United States. Even when Lucas assumed that it took five Indian workers to supply as much labor as one U.S. worker, the predicted return to capital in India would still be a multiple of the return in the United States.”
That paragraph is a little gritty – but I think that is says something that Balzac put, in the form of a metaphor and a parable, a long time before, in Pere Goriot, when Rastignac is pondering an offer he has had from another character in the book, Vautrin. Vautrin, you’ll recall, wants Rastignac to marry an heiress and turn over part of the fortune to Vautrin. In turn, Vautrin will murder the heiress’ brother – an unknown figure, to Rastignac – so that the heiress will inherit all her father’s fortune.
− Where did you get that serious look? the medical student asked him as he took his arm to go walking on the quad.
− I am tormented by evil ideas.
− Of what type? You know, you can be healed of ideas.
− How ?
− By surrendering to them.
− Ah, you are laughing without knowing what this is about. Have you read Rousseau?
− Yeah.
− Remember that passage where he asks his reader what he would do given a case in which he could enrich himself in killing a Chinaman by a simple act of will, an old mandarin, without budging from Paris
− Yes.
− Well ?
− Bah ! I’m already on my thirty first mandarin!
− This isn ‘t a joking matter. Go on. Let’s say you were convinced it were possible and that all you had to do was nod your head. What would you do?
− Is this mandarin of yours an old man? But hell, young or an old paralytic or in health, my goodness! ... Well, no.
− You are a good boy, Bianchet. But if you love a woman enough to turn your soul inside out, and it was absolutely necessary to get money for her toilette, for her carriage, to cut a long story short, for all of her fantasies?
Olson, like many economists, makes the case that the superior political institutions in the West are what gave rise to the enormous wealth here. The other side of that coin is, possibly, that those superior political institutions are oriented to positively hold down 58 Indian workers and 31 mandarins. And that this held true for the era of the great boom in this country – from 1945 to 1980. In fact, Keynes worked, at Bretton Woods, to assure a place for the possibility that a nation could take autonomous economic action in order to make sure that those who were leading the pack – especially the British – would be able to retain the lead in the face of frontiers of neoclassical production functions. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. didn’t see things this way – in fact, one of the goals of the U.S. negotiators was to make sure that the British were never again able to set up a “sterling zone”, as they did in the thirties, blocking U.S. exports.
Mandarins and Indian workers, in the meantime, kept multiplying, and knowledge kept lowering transaction costs. Eventually, the law of comparative advantage was going to erode the institutions of the welfare state in countries that relied upon manufacturing goods that could be more cheaply manufactured elsewhere and, given the dissolution of trade barriers, shipped back to the richest consumer markets which had accumulated wealth precisely in the era in which their production functions were protected.
This mystery requires another post. Which I’ll put up next week.
The second mystery – see my Thursday post -- to which I want to point my showman’s cane (see it tremble in my palsied grip) is that of the developmental lag. I think this mystery complicates any simple conclusions we can make from the first mystery, which, if you will remember, is the mystery of how, as we become richer, we become collectively poorer. If there were only one mystery here, then the answer would be pretty simple. We’d just look to the tradition of class conflict for our answers. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t that simple. Instead, our two mysteries are enjambed, intertwined like two dogs in heat. They form a matrix. It would be nice for me to be able to say, well, Reagan was just an upper class stooge, and that’s how the investor class became dominant in America. Alas, it isn’t that simple. In fact, only by looking at both of the mysteries does one understand the brilliance, albeit limited brilliance, of the American response to the crisis of capitalism in the 1980s, and how that has played out to this day. Those mysteries explain a certain unexpected movement in the conservative revolution. Unlike conservatism in the past, this revolution was not wrapped about savings. Just the opposite. This revolution was about creating an economic culture in which the inclination to saving was systematically dissolved.
The mystery I am talking about is at the heart of globalization and the transformation of the welfare state into the guarantor state.
When I try to figure out how to put this in a simple post, I feel rather like I am trying to spoon out the water in pond with a net: the instrument is wrong and the goal is futile. But of course, this is what we do here at LI.
So-- lets get one thing straight right away. The difference between the economist and the non-economist is that the economist can think in terms of parts and aggregates, but never thinks of values in terms of emergent wholes. To put this in terms of an example: an economist can explain why the efficiencies gained by transferring manufacturing to low paying areas from high paying areas – for instance, from Michigan to the Mexican border – make up for the cost of increased unemployment in Michigan. The economist would have an easy time showing this by a sectorial analysis of the U.S. economy. What the economist does not include in the calculus at all are the intangible values in the blue collar culture of Michigan. It has no instrument to quantify that culture, and what economists can’t quantify, they can’t see. They are equipped with visual sensoria as delicate and peculiar as a fly’s – but they aren’t human. Similarly, the culture the emerges around low paying maquilladoras in Juarez is available, to the economist, only in terms of human capital, and not in terms of such emergent wholes that we can look down at the face of another slaughtered girl on the outskirts of Juarez and understand what is happening here (“ You've been with the professors/ And they’ve all liked your looks/ With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks”).The quality of life, that phrase as tasteless as bubble gum foil, the culture that emerges around long term low pay labor intense areas can’t really be analyzed by the economist, even if they can make attempts to distinguish a frontier from a metropolis. But the culture does have an economic impact. In fact, economics, ideally, serves the culture. Marx thought the fact that the culture had come to serve economics was part of the systematic inversion of values in 19th capitalism that had to be inverted in its turn. Be that as it may, to approach the second mystery, one has to have some respect for the constraints under which these mysteries are communicated.
…
In 1996, Mancur Olson gave a lecture on the stubborn difference between developed and less developed economies entitled “Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations are Rich, and Others Poor.” Olson pushed an institutionalist view of economics. To make his case, he first attempts to take apart the neo-classical view – and its newest additions, via Robert Lucas, that the famous “residual” to which Solow attributed the major role in growth consists of knowledge which, for various reasons, is not a public good. At the end of Olson’s overview, he writes:
“If the countries of the world were on the frontiers of neoclassical production functions, the marginal product of capital would therefore be many times higher in the low-income than in the high-income countries. Robert Lucas (1990) has calculated, albeit in a somewhat different framework,[11] the marginal product of capital that should be expected in the United States and in India. Lucas estimated that if an Indian worker and an American worker supplied the same quantity and quality of labor, the marginal product of capital in India should be 58 times as great as in the United States. Even when Lucas assumed that it took five Indian workers to supply as much labor as one U.S. worker, the predicted return to capital in India would still be a multiple of the return in the United States.”
That paragraph is a little gritty – but I think that is says something that Balzac put, in the form of a metaphor and a parable, a long time before, in Pere Goriot, when Rastignac is pondering an offer he has had from another character in the book, Vautrin. Vautrin, you’ll recall, wants Rastignac to marry an heiress and turn over part of the fortune to Vautrin. In turn, Vautrin will murder the heiress’ brother – an unknown figure, to Rastignac – so that the heiress will inherit all her father’s fortune.
− Where did you get that serious look? the medical student asked him as he took his arm to go walking on the quad.
− I am tormented by evil ideas.
− Of what type? You know, you can be healed of ideas.
− How ?
− By surrendering to them.
− Ah, you are laughing without knowing what this is about. Have you read Rousseau?
− Yeah.
− Remember that passage where he asks his reader what he would do given a case in which he could enrich himself in killing a Chinaman by a simple act of will, an old mandarin, without budging from Paris
− Yes.
− Well ?
− Bah ! I’m already on my thirty first mandarin!
− This isn ‘t a joking matter. Go on. Let’s say you were convinced it were possible and that all you had to do was nod your head. What would you do?
− Is this mandarin of yours an old man? But hell, young or an old paralytic or in health, my goodness! ... Well, no.
− You are a good boy, Bianchet. But if you love a woman enough to turn your soul inside out, and it was absolutely necessary to get money for her toilette, for her carriage, to cut a long story short, for all of her fantasies?
Olson, like many economists, makes the case that the superior political institutions in the West are what gave rise to the enormous wealth here. The other side of that coin is, possibly, that those superior political institutions are oriented to positively hold down 58 Indian workers and 31 mandarins. And that this held true for the era of the great boom in this country – from 1945 to 1980. In fact, Keynes worked, at Bretton Woods, to assure a place for the possibility that a nation could take autonomous economic action in order to make sure that those who were leading the pack – especially the British – would be able to retain the lead in the face of frontiers of neoclassical production functions. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. didn’t see things this way – in fact, one of the goals of the U.S. negotiators was to make sure that the British were never again able to set up a “sterling zone”, as they did in the thirties, blocking U.S. exports.
Mandarins and Indian workers, in the meantime, kept multiplying, and knowledge kept lowering transaction costs. Eventually, the law of comparative advantage was going to erode the institutions of the welfare state in countries that relied upon manufacturing goods that could be more cheaply manufactured elsewhere and, given the dissolution of trade barriers, shipped back to the richest consumer markets which had accumulated wealth precisely in the era in which their production functions were protected.
This mystery requires another post. Which I’ll put up next week.
Friday, October 14, 2005
the story that ran away with the reporter
PS -- Today (Oct. 15) the Times is finally running their explanation of the Judith Miller affair. It is wretched. It is written in the kind of restrained tone that is usually adopted at the dinner table after a fight with your spouse. It threads among the upsetting topics, and doesn't once mention the topic that has been discussed over and over again on the Net -- whether Miller wasn't using her position as a reporter to fight against Wilson. So: no mention of the report that Miller, in the newsroom, was telling people that Wilson was a liar. Surely if that was being said, the crackerjack NYT team that couldn't seem to pry a straight answer out of Ms. Miller could have asked about it. Instead, the NYT team simply preserved the pretence that this was wholly about a reporter doing her job -- although admitting that in this instance, the reporter was, actually, not doing her job. She wasn't reporting on Wilson, and she had information that she wasn't sharing with anybody in the Washington Bureau who was.
Until the NYT faces up to the accusation that Judy Miller was all about pumping and dumping a particular line from a D.C. cabal, it will not be able to disentangle itself from this tarbaby. The portrait of Judy Miller as Nancy Drew, ace reporter can't be maintained by NYT, but alternatives can't be explored, even gingerly.
I meant to write a companion post to yesterday’s. This will take a little longer to compose than I was planning on. Sorry.
Instead, I’ll write about something fashionable: Fitzgerald’s investigation of one of the shapes of the conspiracy that took us into the Iraq war.
It will be one of the ironies, looking back at this, that at the very time Judith Miller’s testimony proved to be highly inconvenient to the notion that she was doing anything compatible with conveying true, or at least probable, information to the citizenry, she is being given a first amendment prize. One of the media claims about its business is that it needs access to sources who are sometimes unwilling to be named in order to fulfill its function. This makes sense to me. But nested in that claim is a dimension that is as important to the designs of the governing class: that class needs the authentication provided by the news to fulfill its task of planning. The convergence of these needs in the run up to the Iraq war produced a pumping mechanism that was formally identical to the mechanism that swelled the bubble market in 1999 – the newspapers would take info from sources allied to a particular viewpoint, and then spokesmen for that particular viewpoint would quote the newspapers. Miller’s reporting made it possible for the pro-war Bush administration to pretty much quote itself to justify its claims. Instead of Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb by citing Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb, how much more convenient to have a story in a supposedly liberal paper built upon an unnamed source ultimately from Cheney’s office tell us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb. This cozy relationship was threatened by Wilson – or the players in it felt themselves to be. In truth, the over-reaction to Wilson is what makes this reminiscent of Watergate: Nixon pretty much approved on a course of skullduggery that was completely unnecessary, given that he was crushing his opponent in the polls.
There was an interesting post on Jay Rosen’s blog about the decline of the NYT. I think Rosen is right: the NYT has been a surprisingly drab paper during the Bush years. This isn’t a matter of ideology – the WP is to the right of the NYT, and supported the insanity of the Iraq adventure with all the hardon fervor of a deacon on the front pew. But the Washington Post has been much more open to disagreement, and much more noticing of disagreement, which has made it a more interesting paper. And it seems more on top of things, with a journalistic crew that is riskier and livelier. Compare, for instance, Dana Milbank and Elizabeth Bumiller, and you'll see what I'm talking about. The liveliest part of the NYT has become its op ed page. That’s rather ridiculous.
Joan Didion, in an essay on Woodward, wrote that reporters generally have a sense of who is ‘running a story.” Any one national story is usually run by a handful of reporters, with the rest coming after them. Obviously, Miller was one of those running the story in the pre-war buildup. Just as obviously, running this story meant running counterfeits, innuendos, misleading analyses, and all of the rest of it. In this case, the story ran Miller. And it is now running the NYT into a cul de sac, in which Miller’s increasingly bizarre testimony (her strange discovery of notes has a very Nixonian overtone), her possible lies before the grand jury, raise the question of the degree of consciousness of the NYT presidium in allowing itself to become the instrument of a foreign policy Ponzi scheme.
…
Harry has come up with the prototype Limited Inc products that we are soon going to be giving out to charitable readers. And that means that we are soon going to insert smarmy please send LI money messages in every post. Like this one. We’ll be posting pics of the shirt and (on Harry’s suggestion) the tote bag soon.
Until the NYT faces up to the accusation that Judy Miller was all about pumping and dumping a particular line from a D.C. cabal, it will not be able to disentangle itself from this tarbaby. The portrait of Judy Miller as Nancy Drew, ace reporter can't be maintained by NYT, but alternatives can't be explored, even gingerly.
I meant to write a companion post to yesterday’s. This will take a little longer to compose than I was planning on. Sorry.
Instead, I’ll write about something fashionable: Fitzgerald’s investigation of one of the shapes of the conspiracy that took us into the Iraq war.
It will be one of the ironies, looking back at this, that at the very time Judith Miller’s testimony proved to be highly inconvenient to the notion that she was doing anything compatible with conveying true, or at least probable, information to the citizenry, she is being given a first amendment prize. One of the media claims about its business is that it needs access to sources who are sometimes unwilling to be named in order to fulfill its function. This makes sense to me. But nested in that claim is a dimension that is as important to the designs of the governing class: that class needs the authentication provided by the news to fulfill its task of planning. The convergence of these needs in the run up to the Iraq war produced a pumping mechanism that was formally identical to the mechanism that swelled the bubble market in 1999 – the newspapers would take info from sources allied to a particular viewpoint, and then spokesmen for that particular viewpoint would quote the newspapers. Miller’s reporting made it possible for the pro-war Bush administration to pretty much quote itself to justify its claims. Instead of Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb by citing Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb, how much more convenient to have a story in a supposedly liberal paper built upon an unnamed source ultimately from Cheney’s office tell us that Saddam Hussein was close to building an atom bomb. This cozy relationship was threatened by Wilson – or the players in it felt themselves to be. In truth, the over-reaction to Wilson is what makes this reminiscent of Watergate: Nixon pretty much approved on a course of skullduggery that was completely unnecessary, given that he was crushing his opponent in the polls.
There was an interesting post on Jay Rosen’s blog about the decline of the NYT. I think Rosen is right: the NYT has been a surprisingly drab paper during the Bush years. This isn’t a matter of ideology – the WP is to the right of the NYT, and supported the insanity of the Iraq adventure with all the hardon fervor of a deacon on the front pew. But the Washington Post has been much more open to disagreement, and much more noticing of disagreement, which has made it a more interesting paper. And it seems more on top of things, with a journalistic crew that is riskier and livelier. Compare, for instance, Dana Milbank and Elizabeth Bumiller, and you'll see what I'm talking about. The liveliest part of the NYT has become its op ed page. That’s rather ridiculous.
Joan Didion, in an essay on Woodward, wrote that reporters generally have a sense of who is ‘running a story.” Any one national story is usually run by a handful of reporters, with the rest coming after them. Obviously, Miller was one of those running the story in the pre-war buildup. Just as obviously, running this story meant running counterfeits, innuendos, misleading analyses, and all of the rest of it. In this case, the story ran Miller. And it is now running the NYT into a cul de sac, in which Miller’s increasingly bizarre testimony (her strange discovery of notes has a very Nixonian overtone), her possible lies before the grand jury, raise the question of the degree of consciousness of the NYT presidium in allowing itself to become the instrument of a foreign policy Ponzi scheme.
…
Harry has come up with the prototype Limited Inc products that we are soon going to be giving out to charitable readers. And that means that we are soon going to insert smarmy please send LI money messages in every post. Like this one. We’ll be posting pics of the shirt and (on Harry’s suggestion) the tote bag soon.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
the ductus of the zeitgeist
Every social order depends on a social mystery. The conservative wants to preserve that mystery. The Marxist wants to expose it. The liberal, like me, wants to palpate it a bit.
There are two mysteries in the current social order. One mystery is rather obvious bunk. The mystery goes like this: although Western economies are getting wealthier and wealthier, in comparison to, say, the economies of the 1950s, we are told that we are too poor to maintain the social welfare programs that we once took for granted. We are, in other words, getting richer and richer only to be collectively poorer and poorer. Now, one doesn’t have to be an ardent Marxist to question this story. Instead, one might ponder how we expect to maintain a social system in which the multiple of greater wealth taken home by upper management versus the average worker has zoomed from 12 times to about 400 times in the U.S. The increase in collective poverty is, of course, relative. Since this mystery has a readily understandable social cause, we should expect that the apologists of the social order – those who would like to see the wealth differential increased – will do their traditional work. Their traditional work is to blame the natural order. In this way, one can keep an exploitative system going … to the dogs. So, it turns out that demographics are the thing to blame for liquidating private and public pension plans, for zooming medical entitlement costs that are locked into a for profit medical and drug system, and so on.
The other mystery is different, but relates to the whole economic system of the West. Why is it that economic power hasn’t transferred much more rapidly and much more completely to the Third World? We will write about that mystery, with reference to Mancur Olson, in tomorrow’s post.
….
The WSJ article about the looming default of Delphi’s pension plan is a sort of map to the way the chattering classes give cover to the investment class’s big lie: the lie of our increasing collective poverty. The beginning is classic bizspeak:
“Delphi Corp.'s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing represents more than just another Midwest metal-bender facing harsh reality. It marks a true reckoning for the traditional auto industry and the end of a 75-year-old way of life in America: that of the highly paid but unskilled worker. It was a noble concept, established largely by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s. But it cannot withstand a global economy that has ended the UAW's labor monopoly in the auto industry, and a consumer body that won't pay more to subsidize costly employee benefits that most consumers themselves don't have.”
This is almost too brazen. In a world in which we’ve gotten used to CEOs taking home hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options, we’ve also gotten use to most consumers operating without a safety net. What this means is: ta ta, more consumers should be operating without a safety net. The logic here is superb.
For the past thirty years, our social order – or at least the economic dimension – has depended on reversing the ductus of the zeitgeist. Where we once read from right to left, from new deal to the social welfare state, we now read from left to right, from the social welfare state to gilded age levels of inequality. In April, LI was saying that the Bush administration’s attempt to loot social security with bogus stats about a crisis in the fund was a diversion from the true pension crisis, which was private. Since then, United has completed its robbery of its workers, Delta is working on a similar plan, and the CEO of Delphi, R.S. "Steve" Miller, is getting huge amounts of love in the business press because he has made tons of money taking companies into bankruptcy and dumping their pension obligations. Every once in a while, the oracles speak, and they reveal the ugly little truth that capitalism is class warfare. Warfare, of course, doesn’t have to be total. In the Keynesian order that lasted until the eighties, the truce that obtained allowed the investment class to accrue an advantage, but a smaller advantage, in the economy. This truce has been destroyed piecemeal since, but the price of that destruction has been delayed. We are going to be seeing what it means at a narrower distance to our own flesh in the coming decade, since the devil’s deal of the Reagan era is essentially unworkable: you cannot make a system in which the top one percent of households own 38 percent of the wealth and expect to continue to provide services based on a time when that upper one percent owned around fifteen percent. Obviously, the upper class knows this, and so its heroes are the innovators who draw the logical conclusion: let the dead bury their own dead, or: we can dump the costs of pensions for the workers on the workers and get away with it, cause nobody is going to call for some kind of giveback of upper management’s compensation packages, circa 1970 – 2000. Miller is a hero among business journalists because he’s up front about his thievery. The job, now, is to translate that thievery into inevitability. That, after all, is why we have a business section in the newspaper.
If I were to pick one image that typifies the ethics of the order that came after Reagan, I think the photo op of Bush, in Parkersburg West Virginia at the Bureau of Public Debt would do. That was the photo op in which he pointed to the “IOU”s accumulated by the Government by borrowing against the Social Security fund and laughingly remarked that they were merely paper. Since this paper had been borrowed against to finance his entire economic policy for the last four years, and since that economic policy consisted of throwing money at Big Pharma, war profiteers, and oil companies, this was a remarkable moment. A moment of truth, even. It told us who made money, how the machinery was designed for them to make money, and how criminally irresponsible that governing class was. It was a deeply moving moment, actually, like a frat house prank in a veteran's graveyard. One must consider the historic resonance: after all, the designers of the Reagan order were all in at the origin of that pile of IOUs, present at the creation, so to speak: Alan Greenspan, Reagan himself, the supply siders, all of them signing off in 1983. But a mere trillion to two trillion dollar rip off is not indicative of the whole splendor of this reactionary era’s deeper sicknesses. One has to really sift among the news of the private pension rip off and the way it is being managed as a p.r. coup to see the deeply sick bent of this order.
Here is the WSJ, making with the saliva about those lucky ducky auto workers:
For starters, the UAW's very success at obtaining job security and healthy pay for its members has put both achievements in mortal danger. Consider the benefits package, now worth some $40 an hour on top of wages, for workers at Delphi, GM and other Detroit car companies.
“The gold-plated medical benefits provide free choice of treatment with virtually no co-pays or deductibles. Retirees also get defined, and generous, pension payments for as long as they live, instead of the 401(k) accounts more typical nowadays. And workers can collect full pensions after 30 years on the job. Thus they can retire around age 50 and collect medical and pension benefits for more years than they actually worked. The contract forbids factory closings, and requires that laid-off workers get close to full pay and benefits while waiting in the "jobs bank" for real work. Delphi is paying out $100 million per quarter to 4,000 idled workers, Mr. Miller says. No wonder it was good while it lasted.”
And here’s something that is still good, and will last as long as the Bush culture can support it. From Money magazine, in 2003 (meaning that the compensation figures are a little short – CEOs get more now):
“While many Americans are cashing their final unemployment checks and wondering how they’ll pay next month’s bills, the top brass at our nation’s biggest companies could hardly pick a better time to be laid off.
Chief executives leaving S&P 500 companies pocketed a cool $16.5 million on average in the past two years on the way out the door. And there's little sign yet that the going rate for executive departure has come down.
That $16.5 million doesn’t even count juicy perks like gold-plated pension plans, rich stock option grants, health benefits, or use of corporate jets and company secretaries. These goodies can bump up the value of the typical executive severance package by an additional 50%. “
There are two mysteries in the current social order. One mystery is rather obvious bunk. The mystery goes like this: although Western economies are getting wealthier and wealthier, in comparison to, say, the economies of the 1950s, we are told that we are too poor to maintain the social welfare programs that we once took for granted. We are, in other words, getting richer and richer only to be collectively poorer and poorer. Now, one doesn’t have to be an ardent Marxist to question this story. Instead, one might ponder how we expect to maintain a social system in which the multiple of greater wealth taken home by upper management versus the average worker has zoomed from 12 times to about 400 times in the U.S. The increase in collective poverty is, of course, relative. Since this mystery has a readily understandable social cause, we should expect that the apologists of the social order – those who would like to see the wealth differential increased – will do their traditional work. Their traditional work is to blame the natural order. In this way, one can keep an exploitative system going … to the dogs. So, it turns out that demographics are the thing to blame for liquidating private and public pension plans, for zooming medical entitlement costs that are locked into a for profit medical and drug system, and so on.
The other mystery is different, but relates to the whole economic system of the West. Why is it that economic power hasn’t transferred much more rapidly and much more completely to the Third World? We will write about that mystery, with reference to Mancur Olson, in tomorrow’s post.
….
The WSJ article about the looming default of Delphi’s pension plan is a sort of map to the way the chattering classes give cover to the investment class’s big lie: the lie of our increasing collective poverty. The beginning is classic bizspeak:
“Delphi Corp.'s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing represents more than just another Midwest metal-bender facing harsh reality. It marks a true reckoning for the traditional auto industry and the end of a 75-year-old way of life in America: that of the highly paid but unskilled worker. It was a noble concept, established largely by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s. But it cannot withstand a global economy that has ended the UAW's labor monopoly in the auto industry, and a consumer body that won't pay more to subsidize costly employee benefits that most consumers themselves don't have.”
This is almost too brazen. In a world in which we’ve gotten used to CEOs taking home hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options, we’ve also gotten use to most consumers operating without a safety net. What this means is: ta ta, more consumers should be operating without a safety net. The logic here is superb.
For the past thirty years, our social order – or at least the economic dimension – has depended on reversing the ductus of the zeitgeist. Where we once read from right to left, from new deal to the social welfare state, we now read from left to right, from the social welfare state to gilded age levels of inequality. In April, LI was saying that the Bush administration’s attempt to loot social security with bogus stats about a crisis in the fund was a diversion from the true pension crisis, which was private. Since then, United has completed its robbery of its workers, Delta is working on a similar plan, and the CEO of Delphi, R.S. "Steve" Miller, is getting huge amounts of love in the business press because he has made tons of money taking companies into bankruptcy and dumping their pension obligations. Every once in a while, the oracles speak, and they reveal the ugly little truth that capitalism is class warfare. Warfare, of course, doesn’t have to be total. In the Keynesian order that lasted until the eighties, the truce that obtained allowed the investment class to accrue an advantage, but a smaller advantage, in the economy. This truce has been destroyed piecemeal since, but the price of that destruction has been delayed. We are going to be seeing what it means at a narrower distance to our own flesh in the coming decade, since the devil’s deal of the Reagan era is essentially unworkable: you cannot make a system in which the top one percent of households own 38 percent of the wealth and expect to continue to provide services based on a time when that upper one percent owned around fifteen percent. Obviously, the upper class knows this, and so its heroes are the innovators who draw the logical conclusion: let the dead bury their own dead, or: we can dump the costs of pensions for the workers on the workers and get away with it, cause nobody is going to call for some kind of giveback of upper management’s compensation packages, circa 1970 – 2000. Miller is a hero among business journalists because he’s up front about his thievery. The job, now, is to translate that thievery into inevitability. That, after all, is why we have a business section in the newspaper.
If I were to pick one image that typifies the ethics of the order that came after Reagan, I think the photo op of Bush, in Parkersburg West Virginia at the Bureau of Public Debt would do. That was the photo op in which he pointed to the “IOU”s accumulated by the Government by borrowing against the Social Security fund and laughingly remarked that they were merely paper. Since this paper had been borrowed against to finance his entire economic policy for the last four years, and since that economic policy consisted of throwing money at Big Pharma, war profiteers, and oil companies, this was a remarkable moment. A moment of truth, even. It told us who made money, how the machinery was designed for them to make money, and how criminally irresponsible that governing class was. It was a deeply moving moment, actually, like a frat house prank in a veteran's graveyard. One must consider the historic resonance: after all, the designers of the Reagan order were all in at the origin of that pile of IOUs, present at the creation, so to speak: Alan Greenspan, Reagan himself, the supply siders, all of them signing off in 1983. But a mere trillion to two trillion dollar rip off is not indicative of the whole splendor of this reactionary era’s deeper sicknesses. One has to really sift among the news of the private pension rip off and the way it is being managed as a p.r. coup to see the deeply sick bent of this order.
Here is the WSJ, making with the saliva about those lucky ducky auto workers:
For starters, the UAW's very success at obtaining job security and healthy pay for its members has put both achievements in mortal danger. Consider the benefits package, now worth some $40 an hour on top of wages, for workers at Delphi, GM and other Detroit car companies.
“The gold-plated medical benefits provide free choice of treatment with virtually no co-pays or deductibles. Retirees also get defined, and generous, pension payments for as long as they live, instead of the 401(k) accounts more typical nowadays. And workers can collect full pensions after 30 years on the job. Thus they can retire around age 50 and collect medical and pension benefits for more years than they actually worked. The contract forbids factory closings, and requires that laid-off workers get close to full pay and benefits while waiting in the "jobs bank" for real work. Delphi is paying out $100 million per quarter to 4,000 idled workers, Mr. Miller says. No wonder it was good while it lasted.”
And here’s something that is still good, and will last as long as the Bush culture can support it. From Money magazine, in 2003 (meaning that the compensation figures are a little short – CEOs get more now):
“While many Americans are cashing their final unemployment checks and wondering how they’ll pay next month’s bills, the top brass at our nation’s biggest companies could hardly pick a better time to be laid off.
Chief executives leaving S&P 500 companies pocketed a cool $16.5 million on average in the past two years on the way out the door. And there's little sign yet that the going rate for executive departure has come down.
That $16.5 million doesn’t even count juicy perks like gold-plated pension plans, rich stock option grants, health benefits, or use of corporate jets and company secretaries. These goodies can bump up the value of the typical executive severance package by an additional 50%. “
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
the revolt of the extras
In last week’s New Statesman – the one that is dedicated to the proposition that Iraq is a blunder that has metastasized into a cancer – there’s a review of a piece by a video artist named Omer Fast. Fast’s newest work, Godville, consists of interviews with re-enactors at Williamburg contrasted with shots of American suburbia. Before this, Fast made a video in which he interviewed Poles who worked as extras on Schindler’s list.
Fast seems to have latched onto George Saunder’s territory. The insight, to put it crudely, is that we are not in the age of celebrity. We are in the age of the extra. The ontology of extra-hood has yet to find its philosopher, but in Fast and Saunder’s it is finding its poets.
We haven’t seen Godville, but we definitely hope Fast takes it to Austin.
“The war” might mean Operation Desert Storm, today’s Iraq war, or the American war of independence. “Independency” and “occupation” turn inside out and back again: Godville’s hybridised personae,
in their immaculate costumes, exist both as ex-colonial subjects and citizens of an occupying nation. The potential significance of the word “freedom” oscillates wildly: one of Fast’s interviewees (a Baptist
preacher in real life) “lives” in Colonial Williamsburg as a slave.
Another role-plays a moneyed housewife. “I only know this little window of what . . . my family and my children tell me . . . what little bit my husband might share with me of the world of politics and business,” she admits in a bitter tone, noting that “when you think about it, you feel like you’re being property and not human”. Time-wise, this comment becomes even more ambiguous when we see her burst into real tears over her three imaginary sons’ “deaths” in the war against the British. Working in Godville looks like it entails heavy-duty emotional
labour. Fast’s editing conjures a sympathetic but fraught and angry persona from his original material. Courtesy of rapid, nervous jump cuts, his subject’s yellow gloves are on her hands one second and lie in her lap the next. Her hands flash from one gesture to another in an incoherent yet bizarrely expressive semaphore. Sliding
between historical co-ordinates, her discontent cannot be anchored to a concrete cause. How could it be? She is not a “real person” but a (heavily overdetermined) symptom born of collective past and present circumstances.”
A long time ago, in the Moviegoer, Walker Percy noticed the reality deficit at the center of celebrity culture. That was back in the days of Kennedy. Ah, those rank and odious days that have never died, but putrified among us, a big gaseous giant strung out among a nationwide mausoleum of golden oldies and classic rock stations. The problem, though, is always taken up as though it is the celebrities problem. It is what journalism is mostly about. It is what politics is mostly about. It is the national desire. The desire not to be an extra. But LI is so tired of this desire. We’d like to see a revolt of the extras – some throwing off of our parasitism.
Fast seems to have latched onto George Saunder’s territory. The insight, to put it crudely, is that we are not in the age of celebrity. We are in the age of the extra. The ontology of extra-hood has yet to find its philosopher, but in Fast and Saunder’s it is finding its poets.
We haven’t seen Godville, but we definitely hope Fast takes it to Austin.
“The war” might mean Operation Desert Storm, today’s Iraq war, or the American war of independence. “Independency” and “occupation” turn inside out and back again: Godville’s hybridised personae,
in their immaculate costumes, exist both as ex-colonial subjects and citizens of an occupying nation. The potential significance of the word “freedom” oscillates wildly: one of Fast’s interviewees (a Baptist
preacher in real life) “lives” in Colonial Williamsburg as a slave.
Another role-plays a moneyed housewife. “I only know this little window of what . . . my family and my children tell me . . . what little bit my husband might share with me of the world of politics and business,” she admits in a bitter tone, noting that “when you think about it, you feel like you’re being property and not human”. Time-wise, this comment becomes even more ambiguous when we see her burst into real tears over her three imaginary sons’ “deaths” in the war against the British. Working in Godville looks like it entails heavy-duty emotional
labour. Fast’s editing conjures a sympathetic but fraught and angry persona from his original material. Courtesy of rapid, nervous jump cuts, his subject’s yellow gloves are on her hands one second and lie in her lap the next. Her hands flash from one gesture to another in an incoherent yet bizarrely expressive semaphore. Sliding
between historical co-ordinates, her discontent cannot be anchored to a concrete cause. How could it be? She is not a “real person” but a (heavily overdetermined) symptom born of collective past and present circumstances.”
A long time ago, in the Moviegoer, Walker Percy noticed the reality deficit at the center of celebrity culture. That was back in the days of Kennedy. Ah, those rank and odious days that have never died, but putrified among us, a big gaseous giant strung out among a nationwide mausoleum of golden oldies and classic rock stations. The problem, though, is always taken up as though it is the celebrities problem. It is what journalism is mostly about. It is what politics is mostly about. It is the national desire. The desire not to be an extra. But LI is so tired of this desire. We’d like to see a revolt of the extras – some throwing off of our parasitism.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
fundraising and t shirts continued
PS -- after this went to press, Harry informed us that our illustration was a very rough sketch. See his comment for more.
As we said a few days ago, LI is going to make another stab at fundraising a la the public radio way. Our friend Harry from Scratchings sent us the above design for the tshirt. (Sorry if it is a bit blurry). He also told us some stuff about pricing and sizing, suggesting the t shirts go for $30 and over, and that the logo be put either on the back or on the shirt pocket. Actually, we 'd like more comments about this.
The public radio model of fund raising is, we admit, a little bland and smarmy. KUT in Austin raises bucks with a bit about how you should imagine that there was no public radio – such an apocalyptic vision would presumably put you in such a sweat that you’ll be making out checks like mad. Well, LI has no similar grip on the throat of the world spirit. We live on our non-necessity, like a drug habit. We’d like this fund raising bit to be more in line with the Stop Snitchin’ movement, as featured in the NYT the other day:
“The adoration of the outlaw is a durable feature of American culture, giving us romantic images of authority-defying individuals from Billy the Kid to Tony Soprano. And maybe this attraction has something to do with the recent and rather controversial success of a Boston clothier called Antonio Ansaldi, which has sold more than 10,000 T-shirts featuring a big red stop sign and the slogan "Stop Snitchin'."
Stop Snitchin' T-shirts are popular among young men in inner-city neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Jersey City and elsewhere - not just the shirts that Antonio Ansaldi makes but also a host of variations and knockoffs. Snitching, of course, refers to giving information to law enforcement that might result in an arrest for, say, drug dealing or murder. Last year, a DVD that circulated in Baltimore gained nationwide notoriety for showing self-professed drug dealers making explicit threats against snitches. Apparently opposition to cooperating with the police - and, by extension, to the rule of law itself - has a constituency. The Web site for Antonio Ansaldi features a group of unsmiling young African-Americans wearing the shirts under a graffiti-style sign reading, "Stop Snitchin': The Movement."
Unfortunately, the outlaw element of the Dopamine Cowboy Movement has not yet reached the attention of the gendarmerie, so don’t expect any similar, exciting drama from these shirts. No confronting the nightsticks of nativism, no being pulled over and harrassed. Sorry. But we suggest that you wear these shirts with sunglasses and an unsmiling demeanor, just to piss people off.
As for the contributions: you can use the Paypal thing. Or you can send checks to Roger Gathman, 615 Upson, #203 Austin Texas 78703. The main thing is to get your address to us.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
A vanishing act: repressive desublimation and the NYT
We are in the depths of the era of “repressive desublimation” – Angela Carter’s genius tossoff of a phrase – and Trump’s shit video is a m...
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...