The girls are crying the boys are masturbating

I.
We dive down through the ocean of statistics to find, at the bottom, the carte d’amour that has foundered there. Diving into the wreck is a pretty good definition of this history, and LI has been aiming to be one of the deep divers Melville talks about in his famous letter on Emerson:

“Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; -- then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. -- I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -- but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.”

So, with bloodshot eyes from my practice submersions – take me to the river! let me drown in the Deep End, Lord! - LI wants to allude to the last post in which we mentioned the coincidence between the geography of Hajnal’s thesis about the formation of the – in his final version – Northwest European household - and the geography of the happiness culture that we think, at least, we have a hook into, and are raising up inch by painful inch, a true fish tale of continental, or maybe global capture. And if you hook the world and raise the world, where is the world upon which the fisherman sits, or stands or floats in the tale? Whose blood is, after all, at stake here?

As we said, however, Hajnal’s thesis is, to say the least, arguable – and there are too many exceptions to accept his identification of the simple household with modernization. The leaks can’t be stopped, and aren’t these the old, traditional, the West is the Best kind of leakages? Still, we take it that there is a shift in an area of Europe in the sixteenth century that resulted in higher ages of marriage, a consequent prolongation of youth, and simple households around a single married couple. According to Lawrence Stone and André Burguière, the shift in the formation of the household in the sixteenth century corresponds to a wave of ascetism. If we are meeting whales at this depth, they all seem to resemble Max Weber. One keeps bumping into the ascetic thesis. And well you might ask, gentle reader, if this doesn’t completely fuck up LI’s own thesis. Have we got off on the wrong foot, examining the libertines? Shouldn’t we have started with with levelers?


II

I note these as minnow questions that threaten to turn into sharks. But I won’t be pulled away from love. Love and suicide, those were the themes I want to do for a threadwhile longer.

So, let’s think about women.

III


In particular, three women, spaced out over the 18th century. First, Mary Astell, whose book about marriage can be found here. Then Sophie Huber, a not completely untypical writer and bourgeois adventurer – in her own way – who responded to the French Revolution with one of her own, ditching her husband, Georg Forster, the famed German explorer, to live with a mutual friend with whom she was more sexually compatible. And Mme de Stael, naturally.

Tyler Cowen's country club guide to economics: don't tip the caddies!

Bateman takes out his wallet and pulls out a card.

PRICE
(Suddenly enthused)
What's that, a gram?

BATEMAN
New card. What do you think?

McDermott lifts it up and examines the lettering carefully.

McDERMOTT
Whoa. Very nice. Take a look.

He hands it to Van Patten.

BATEMAN
Picked them up from the printers yesterday

VAN PATTEN
Good coloring.

BATEMAN
That's bone. And the lettering is something called
Silian Rail.

McDERMOTT
(Envious)
Silian Rail?

VAN PATTEN
It is very cool, Bateman. But that's nothing.

He pulls a card out of his wallet and slaps it on the
table.

VAN PATTEN
Look at this.

They all lean forward to inspect it.

PRICE
That's really nice.

Bateman clenches his fists beneath the table, trying to
control his anxiety.

VAN PATTEN
Eggshell with Romalian type.
(Turning to Bateman)
What do you think?

BATEMAN
(Barely able to breath, his voice a croak)
Nice.

PRICE
(Holding the card up to the light)
Jesus. This is really super. How'd a nitwit like you get so
tasteful?

Bateman stares at his own card and then enviously at
McDermott's.

BATEMAN (V.O.)
I can't believe that Price prefers McDermott's card to mine.

PRICE
But wait. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

He holds up his own card.

PRICE
Raised lettering, pale nimbus white...

BATEMAN
(Choking with anxiety)
Impressive. Very nice. Let's see Paul Owen's card.

Price pulls a card from an inside coat pocket and holds it
up for their inspection: "PAUL OWEN, PIERCE & PIERCE,
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS." Bateman swallows, speechless.
The sound in the room dies down and all we hear is a faint
heartbeat as Bateman stares at the magnificent card.

BATEMAN (V.O.)
Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness
of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark..." - American Psycho

Tyler Cowen, of whose libertarianism the business page of the NYT is so fond, finds a comfy niche there today to issue some country club warnings to Obama on drawing the wrong lessons from the Great Depression. On the country club circuit, there has been quite a bit of alarm about the whole Roosevelt cult thing, which has definitely disturbed the back to laissez faire thing. We’ve had this temporary bump, don’t you see.

The list of things to do to please rich people is quite amusing. Among them is this sterling piece of malarkey:

“GET THE SMALL THINGS RIGHT It’s not just monetary and fiscal policies that are important. Roosevelt instituted a disastrous legacy of agricultural subsidies and sought to cartelize industry, backed by force of law. Neither policy helped the economy recover.
He also took steps to strengthen unions and to keep real wages high. This helped workers who had jobs, but made it much harder for the unemployed to get back to work. One result was unemployment rates that remained high throughout the New Deal period.
Today, President-elect Barack Obama faces pressures to make unionization easier, but such policies are likely to worsen the recession for many Americans.”
This is, of course, the purest fiction. Price supports for agriculture saved the Middle West – it is only an economist who is lost in the inhumanity of it all that thinks of such things as the “small things”, and in gratitude the farmers there routinely now vote in Republicans who praise small government and vote in vast subsidies for the raising of corn, wheat and cattle. Cowen obviously has no idea how the 2 percent of the population involved in agriculture feed the 98 percent not so involved.
But it is the union smacking that is truly funny.
Conservatives have skipped right over the causes of the Great Depression, because it is so icky looking over the twenties when you can lie about Roosevelt’s unemployment figures – they actually went down considerably until 1937, then rose in the recession of 1938 – which was caused by Roosevelt listening to the orthodox bewailing government expenditure, and cutting back, and then went down again. The structures put in place by Roosevelt – for instance, social security – were the foundation for the relatively high labor flexibility that allowed the American economy in the late 40s up until 1980 to avoid any Depression style drop in unemployment
But more than that – it was, of course, the gross and sustained inequality of income which was a fundamental feature of the 20s economy that magnified the Depression. While productivity rose considerably, salaries and wages didn’t. As Galbraith puts it in his book on the Crash, in relating the causes of the Depression:
1. “The bad distribution of income. In 1929, the rich were indubitably rich. The figures are not entirely satisfactory, but it seems certain that the 5 percent of the population with the highest incomes in that year received approximately one third of all personal income. The proportion of personal income received in the form of interest, dividends and rent – the income, broadly speaking, of the well-to-do – was about twice as great as in the years following the Second World War.
This highly unequal income distribution meant that the economy was dependent ona high level of investment or a high level of luxury consumer spending or both. The rich cannot buy great quantities of bread. If they are to dispose of what they receive it must be on luxuries or by way of investment in new plants and new projects. Both investment and luxury spending are subject, inevitably, to more erratic influences and to wider fluctuations than the bread and rent outlays of the 25 dollar-a-week workman. This highbracket spending and investment was especially susceptible, one may assume, to the crushing news from the stock market in October of 1929.”

Now, of course the libertarian dream is to return to that income structure, and the naughties nearly did it. However, one of the great results of the increase in labor bargaining power is that this structure was broken in the 30s, and didn’t recover as a force of oppression in U.S. society until the 80s – and even then, the open advocacy of impoverishing the blue collar class, which has now become a yahoo standard on the right, was muted. Anybody looking at the Great crash of 2008 would do well to look at the housing bubble that kickstarted it in terms of the fact that, though productivity gains were significant throughout the decade, the profit from those gains was accrued solely by the well-to-do. The middle and working class made up fro the lack of their fair share through the credit that was extended to them in the spirit of amity and greed that made the Bankruptcy act of 2005 such a joy to our hearts. That extension of credit was, of course, fundamentally irrational. Why would one want a system in which, at the same time, the producers gain no more from the increase of their productivity while at the same time they gain a whole new power of credit? One of these things doesn’t go with the other. If you are going to impoverish the mass of the population, you can’t do it by halves. Surely Cowen should recommend that the next time, the population, after getting home from jobs in which union oppression has been lifted and their wages have been joyously cut, should be free to sell their organs at market rates – perhaps they can take out loans on this, too.

LI has a certain faith in reality. Thus, for instance, we are not disturbed that Clinton the hawk is becoming the Secretary of State, since the reality of the U.S. economic condition is the biggest peacemaker there is – in fact, the U.S. can’t support any more enormously popular war-tainment. Iraq was a lot of fun, we all enjoy the victory there, and when you add it up, we can do high fives that 400-600 thou Iraqis died, and our casualties were less than a haircut! But we probably are not going to have so much fun again soon. Reality was what scotched the Bushite desire to bomb bomb bomb Iran. Myself, I don’t think the Obama admin. has the stomach for driving the price of oil up to 165 bucks per barrel again. But given the astonishing, criminal negligence of the Dems in the last days of 2008 – the insane shooting of the auto industry in the head – I am less sanguine about the passage of union friendly legislation than I had been. Obama is listening to the Cowens of the world – the incorrigible and highly disgusting Larry Summers is his economics advisor, and perhaps Obama can get the scoop from him on Robert Scheer’s story in the Nation about how Summers was really the point man who helped free the financial services sector from onerous regulation – and this is going to be bad news for all of us if it continues.

Intimations of Further Fall

Well, now that we have shot a hole in the economy by highhatting the auto companies, a sort of collaboration between the incredible mummies of this ancien regime, the brainless auto barons and the brainless congressional barons (as the zona whips itself into a frenzy outside), and as Paulson’s ass is licked in precise proportion to his ideologically driven incompetence – the Post would have absolutely loved Andrew Mellon! – we hear the creaking of the largest bank collapse in history – oh, just ahead of us. Nothing to worry about. While the terrible, terrible UAW clowns, making their 26 an hour and destroying their economy with their greed, are about to fall into the toilet, our pity goes out, now, to the upper management of Citi, where the per hour is what, 1,000? 2,000? – but only because of the amazing skills they display, on a historic scale. That Ayn Rand could have lived to see her hero caste in all its glory today. Weep a little on her tomb, will ya?

What we are discovering, or rediscovering, is that the private sector is pisspoor at allocating capital and decreasing inequality – the latter is also known as increasing social mobility. The two faults in the private system are interlocked – see the Mangle of Inequality for further details. As is good and fucking obvious, the “investments” of the last eight years, when not going into spec houses, were going into spec houses of cards, otherwise known as securities. It was all insurance. It was all for our good. It was all for the ownership society. It was all about spreading risk. It was all about making us good risktakers. It was all about entrerpreneurship. It was all about aligning the interests of the managers with the companies. It was all about shareholder value. It was all about storing leafs, mud and human feces in huts and performing certain rituals that would turn them into cargo.

Oh, the deadly zona, and it seems, this week, to be blowing on me. My editing business has suddenly gone to shit. And I walk around or ride my bike past restaurants that were filled, three years ago, but are now deadly quiet – past dress shops that seem haunted by the mannequins wearing today’s sale item – and feeling this particular quiet in the streets. It is the quiet after a loud boom. The ear experiences a sort of time hallucination, a confusion between the time of the boom and the time of the silence that rushes in just afterwards. By ear we go down into the depths.


Io sentia gia da la man destra il gorgo
Far sotto noi un orribile scroscio
Per che con li occhi ‘n giu la testa sporgo

Love and territory

In 1965, John Hajnal, published an essay with the very dull title, European Marriage Patterns in Perspective. This essay seems, at first glance, to project a Cold War paradigm back upon the pattern of European demography, as Hajnal proposed that, in essence, starting with the end of the 16th century, you could draw a line from Trieste to St. Petersburgh and allot two different household formations to each side. On the West, you have what Hajnal came to call the simple household formation, in which one and only one married couple were at the center of the household; in the East, you had what he called a joint household formation, in which two or more related married couples formed the household. Hajnal claimed that in the sixteenth century, the Western type of household was new, and characterized by a demographic shift in which marriage occurred significantly later in life. For women, for instance, the average age moves from 20 to 25. Meanwhile, in the East, the marriage age remained very young, and so a married couple of, basically, teenagers remained in a household with an older couple, usually the husband’s family.

Hajnal made several arguable inferences from this pattern, as, for instance, that modernization followed the simple household formation pattern, and that simple households contained fewer members. He did modify the iron curtain that separated one household type from another, as it became evident that Italy, Southern France, and perhaps Spain did not participate in the simple household pattern, and it may be the case that Austria didn’t participate in the joint household pattern. Instead of Western Europe, then, in Hajnal’s schema you had Northwestern Europe.

LI is thinking of this in relation to an email conversation with an old friend, Professor K. K. is very Catholic, and she found the précis I sent her of the Human Limit very Protestant, in a way. Or at least she pointed out that certain of my themes, for instance, the loss of the sacred middle world, and the war on superstition, lend themselves to a Protestant vs. Catholic binary. This depressed me, since I certainly don’t want to re-invent The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

But I think I am not. Rather, it is within the refined confines of Hajnal’s map that my sense of the happiness culture incarnates itself. Beyond the Cold War traces, what Hajnal’s notion does is give us a certain demographic basis for looking at the kind of changes in emotional customs I am trying to trace - it gives us institutional correlates. And it shows an essential stress between the system of the passions and the system of the social - one that opens up certain fissures. For instance, the advance of the age of marriage is also an increase in the age of youth – youth being defined as the period before marriage. This, in turn, sets up other changes in the way the culture imagined itself, or groups within the culture imagined themselves and by inference, the culture as a whole. For instance, the process of setting marriage back seems to have made it the case that more people didn’t get married at all. It is striking that so many figures I’ve referred to – Theophile de Viau, Chamfort, Goethe, Gozzi, Hazlitt, etc. – either never married or married notoriously late in life.

The demographic story is, of course, about emotion, about the passions, and their institutionalization. It is as fundamental as any story about the system of production. The writ of Venus, here, runs as broad and wide as that of Haephestus. If you took Hajnal’s map and you superimposed upon it the happiness culture as it emerges in the 18th century – that is, the culture in which happiness exists as a threefold social phenomena and a norm against which social, political and economic arrangements are judged – you would find the one is almost equal to the other. Similarly, the resistance to the happiness culture, which was massive, a reaction against the wholesale destruction of long entrenched cultural practices, seems to come most vividly from the periphery of the simple household territory and from the joint household territory – for instance, Russia.

How We'll Miss the Golden Years of the Great Fly

LI was thinking that as the Great Fly leaves us something to remember him by – the destruction of the U.S. economy on a Katrina like scale – that it might be nice to go back and pick up comments about Bush by some of the great minds of the past eight years – you know, people like Fred Barnes, whose inspiring work, Rebel in Chief, will be read until the very heavens break, as it is to ass licking what the kamasutra was to gymnastic sex. Then, perhaps, Elizabeth Bumiller, whose analysis of Bush after the election of 2004 was spot on – the brilliance, the oratory that was so, so moving, the ideas. Perhaps scouring the WSJ in 2005, when Bush’s awesome notion that we should destroy social security was giving the country club crowd an estrus overload – in their frenzies there were understandable cases of them beating their caddies and servants, as the idea was that soon we would be reforming all the way back to Alexander II and re-institute serfdom.

But alas, as I looked back for suitable quotes, I got a little sick of the project. I suppose I have surfeiting on pure American shit over the last eight years. I couldn’t eat another mouthful.

But just when I thought sycophancy was dead – would never achieve the summits of 2003-2005, that golden time in which our leader’s words were balm that made each step lighter, and each death in Iraq more, well, fun – I read Pearlstein’s beautifully crafted D.C.-ish piece about the wonders of Hank Paulson. It has the sweep and depth of Barnes on our Rebel in Chief, and it is as contrarian as, say, Kinsley recommending that poor nations use one of their resources, ie the internal organs of their brats, and start selling them to first world nations to light a fire of free enterprise that will lift them out of poverty.

So I broke through my spell of nostalgia, realizing that yesterday's sycophants are still today's pundits! and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - until they've broken the very back of the country that they know, dimly, exists somewhere outside the gated community on a hill. The place the maids disappear to every evening.

the Auto-cracy - who are these suits?

NYT


As pissed as LI is about the refusal of congress to bail out the auto industry from the dragon’s horde of money already committed to the Treasury – a move of unbelievable blindness, which will undoubtedly make this a much, much worse recession – I am as pissed at the Soviet style Auto-cracy, flying on their fucking private planes to make a used car salesman’s pitch. LI supported the 25 billion as a much much better use of money than feeding it to the AIG monster. But ultimately – and the performance of the Auto-cracy shows this – the Government needs to intervene far beyond the usual American capitalist model. The upper management needs to go; the companies need to invest seriously in R and D that would, actually, provide them with a reason for existing – which, at the moment, they don’t have; environment and energy saving concerns can no longer be considered frills to be satisfied at a car show, using the model of a car that no manufacturer has any intention of building.

In fact, the entire fleet of America’s cars could, conceivably, be replaced in the next decade by cars that are much more energy efficient – and that might use different fuels – from diesel to natural gas – and that might require lighter weight chassis. Now, replacing a car that gets 17 miles to the gallon with one that makes 50 makes a lot of sense; it doesn’t make sense to replace it with one that gets 18. But this is the mentality of Detroit, which is where WWII never ended. For the Detroit design and engineering squads are dominated by the military mindset, dominated by a masculine take on driving, dominated by the idea that resources are there for our taking – it’s a gold-rush world, 24/7. What was true in 1957 is not true today.

I’ve read some joking comments on blogs that the government could just buy GM, given its stock price, for 3 billion dollars. That would be a very good idea, actually. As it looks like GM’s healthcare benefit plans are going to revert to the government anyway – one of the results of Chapter 11 – perhaps it is time to take the thing over in order to exert control over an industry that still doesn’t get it. Even if that is an improbable venture – although with the Gov calmly taking 79 percent ownership in a fuckin’ insurance company, I’m not sure why – what needs to be done tout suite is for a policy that includes the whole transportation sphere – the 400 billion in road building and road repairs, the refineries, the gas stations, the cars – and bring much needed, radical reform to it. Unfortunately, the auto industry has a high bar to entry – so if America loses its auto companies, it is not going to get them back. Instead, we are leaning to the Red State model – that is, becoming the parasite on the terminus of the production pipeline. By making huge tax cuts, Red states – who have difficulty generating enterprise because of chronic underinvestment in education, infrastructure, etc., etc. – bring in Japanese and Korean car firms, employ people at below union rates, and usually watch as those companies suck in a management corps from some state that actually gives a shit about education – hence, the phenomena of families originally from the Northeast that sprinkle the suburbs of Sunbelt cities. This isn’t just cause they like the weather – it is because the Sunbelt can’t generate that quality of human capital. If your educational system is pinned to the ever pressing problem of whether the world was created 6,000 years ago and how to coordinate your abstinence classes and your purity balls, you are going to have to find some othe entry point into the first world. When an Alabama senator like Shelby calls American auto companies dinosaurs who couldn’t compete, one has to boggle at the audacity – Alabama, notoriously, pretty much offered to pay Japanese car makers to locate there, providing tax sweeteners of a desperate, third world flavor that put it right next to Mississippi and Kentucky in the socialism for the corporations league. Mississippi, notoriously, passes bonds that it uses to buy buildings for companies it invites to site there. Since, however, all car manufacturers are going to be reeling in the next year, we will definitely see Shelby et al figuring out some way to sweeten the package for their state’s major manufacturer in one way or another.

Getting the poor to bid against each other for the privilege of being prostituted is what, after all, the ownership society is all about.

You can't guillotine the fairies

Vernon Lee was in her early twenties when she wrote her book of essays about 18th century Italy, and among them, a famous – though some say distorting – essay about Carlo Gozzi, the Venetian playwright who took Italian fairy tales and made them into theater. Gozzi did this partly just in order to get up the nose of the enlightened crowd around Goldoni. Gozzi’s plays, notably Love for three Oranges and Turandot, served as the basis for famous operas – and though I looked, I could not find other videos of this seemingly amazing performance of Prokofiev’s L’amour pour trois oranges which, I am betting, the Colonel probably saw
- and are of interest to us here at LI for ending the 18th century on a fairy note – just as it began with Perrault’s fairy tales, those most modern of ancient relics.

Lee tells a story – which is too good to be true – that Gozzi wrote The love for three oranges because he’d been driven crazy by Goldoni’s bragging about his success – and with plays that, in Gozzi’s opinions, were as dull as Diderot’s. Where was the magic? So Gozzi said “I wager that with the masks of the old comedy I will draw a greater audience to hear the story of the Love of the Three Oranges than you can with all your Ircanas and Bettinas and Pamelas!” Which, Lee contextualizes, is like saying you are going to make a theatrical hit out of Jack and the Beanstalk. But Gozzi possessed the key to great comedy- an endless flow of malice. So he wrote the play, which was a great success, drove Goldoni’s realism from the stage – in Lee’s account, at least – and wrote many more Fiabe – fables – for theater.

This is what fascinates me:

“Carlo Gozzi himself was of the opinion that the invisible world obtained some mysterious power over him from the moment of his writing the Love of the Three Oranges, and that the series of persecutions which he relates in his very quaint autobiography were due to the vengeance of the fairy world, which he had dared to bring on to the stage.”

(419)

So – diverting our attention away from the suicide theme I have been pursuing – we know our readers need a break! – let’s look at Gozzi. Whose spirit may well have been astonished by the fact that a Bolshevik artist took over his reactionary play. Although perhaps it isn’t really that surprising, since Schiller had already injected Gozzi into the stream of German romanticism. But LI hopefully has shaken up our reader’s sense that the terms reactionary/progressive, or right/left, are to be taken as rigid designators in the anthropological study of Western politics.

And this is Lee’s excellent description of Gozzi’s struggle with the invisible world:

About 1740 his combat had begun with those invisible enemies who wer to pesecute him throughout his life. Carlo Gozzi manfully determined to break the spell which hung over his family: he went about examining the Gozzi property on terra-firma; he tried to lease part of the premises; he sought for the title-deeds of bonds left by his father; but the goblins met him on all his journeys with flooded roads and broken bridges, with bugs and thieving stewards. They sent to him polyp-like tenants who never paid, scandalized the quarter by their doings, and , when legally ejected, clambered back into their former premises during the night; they inspired the Countess Gasparo Gozzi [wife of his older brother] with the happy thought of selling all the family papers and parchments to a neighboring porkshop. However, Carlo was victorious: he reclaimed the terra-firma property; he finally ejected the non-paying, disreputable tenants; he recovered, among the heaps of cheeses, the rolls of sausages, and the compact rows of ham, the venerable documents of the family; he put his younger brothers into Government offices, his sisters into convents; had the little Gasparo Gozzi swashed and shoed and stockinged; quietly shipped off the resigned philologist Gasparo and his furious poetess wife to Pordenone; and then with a few books and just sequins enough to eat meagerly and dress tidily for the rest of his days, he established himself alone in the haunted palace at S. Canziano, with his Spanish plays and his collections of Arabian and Neapolitan fairy tales. But the goblins did not let him off so easily; they delighted in pulling, pinching, twitching, and tripping him up; they led his silk-stockinged feet into every pool of water; they jolted his coffee-cup out of his hand on to every new pair of satin breeches; they enveloped him in some mysterious cloud which made people mistake him for opera directors, Greek merchants, and astronomers, and give him playful blows intended for other persons; they lost the letters addressed to him and wrote answers of which he knew nothing, so that one evening, returning travel-worn, weary, and ravenous, from Friuli, he found his own house brilliantly lit up and garlanded, filled with cooks and lacqueys, and with a crowd of masked rioters eating, drinking and dancing to celebrate the accession to the patriarchal chair of Monsignor Bragadin, whose flunkeys politely told the astonished owner of the house that he had written to give permission for the momentary annexation of his palace, and that for the three days and nights of Monsignor Bragadin’s festivities he had better retire to the nearest inn.”