Everyman's Marx: the ripoff

Three years ago, I was contacted out of the blue by  Mark Batty Publishers to do a small book on Marx.  It was part of something called the Everyman series. I thought that this was a terrific idea, although I had never heard of the series or of Mark Batty. So I signed a contract that specified my schedule – I was to do the book in two months time – and that guaranteed me a thousand dollar advance when I completed the book and two thousand dollars when it was published, plus royalty rights. If they didn’t publish it I was to get a spike reward of one thousand dollars.

Well, I did at least get the advance. I have no hope that I will get the kill fee, any more than I have hope that Mark Batty, or his associate, Buzz Poole, will answer my emails. I suppose the fact that this guy calls himself "Buzz" should have been a warning. The one time I talked to Mark Batty, the man told me about horse racing. That should have been another warning. I have never dealt with a gambler and not been ripped off.  Anyway,  I finished the book and sent it off to the black hole that is Mark Batty Publishers. My book designer, Jake Davis, finally sent me a letter yesterday explaining that Mark Batty is a curious kind of fraud – it seems to be more incompetent than dishonesty driven. Or rather, its incompetence drives its dishonesty.

Now, I don’t know whether this was an entirely bad experience, even though I see my name all over the Net attached to a book that has not appeared, and will apparently never appear. This, in one way, makes me look like a fool. But, in another way, I am a fool, no bones about it.

I do have a pdf of a galley of the book. I’ll send it off free to anyone who asks. My email is rgathman@netzero.net.

The Prisoner of Cool 1

I’ve always believed that you will only see a culture in its totality, see it thoroughly, sees its wonders and damage, when you go through the cracks.

I don’t know where this belief comes from. Perhaps it is a vestige of the New Testament I was taught in Sunday School. It severely underestimates the effects of going through the cracks – this I know from experience. Most often, instead of trying to understand the culture you spend that experience counting your pennies and looking for cheap intoxicants,  Going through the cracks is terrifying, and terror is not conducive to collecting the forces of your spirit and understanding the mechanics of the great wheel of fortune that is crushing your bones. Splinter and crack, splinter and crack.

Nevertheless, the theory is not wholly flawed. A culture’s vision of itself is manufactured by those paid to manufacture such visions – follow the money and you will soon find that the mass of our images and understandings attach to the advertisement for reality these people manufacture, often in all sincerity. This is the vision from the gated community, from the Eloi and their children. I only began really paying attention to it in the 00s, the low Bush decade, when it was stuffed down my Morlock throat good and proper.

Politically, we are supposed to believe that these issues can be understood by a simple dualism between left and right. I lost that illusion in the 00s, at least. To understand the culture when you are going through the cracks, your best guide is to follow your instinct and think of the culture as a many-splendored thing, for which you have to make up categories in your own home or hole.

What struck me then, and what continues to strike me in the Bush-lite era of the 10s, is how, instead of a left opposition, in America, you have an opposition that is the prisoner of cool.  Cool has taken the place of ‘respectability’ as the ‘moral civilization’ in which all move in lockstep, even those who have some contempt for the images projected by the Eloi.

It is a long, strange trip for cool. At one point, in the fifties, cool came in a binary: its opposite was square. Square, now, is one of those words that can only be quoted, never said straight. It is all too reference laden with a certain ersatz Hollywood swinging culture – a culture that seems more improbable than the culture of Edwardian England or the fictional Mad Max cultures of the apocalypse.

Square, of course, stood in for the respectable back in the early era of cool – which would make cool its negation. And it is in this vein that the change from respectability was actually interpreted. Robert Erwin, in a 1983 essay, What Happened to Respectability, assessed the changes of the 60s and 70s in terms of a wholesale decline in the forms of the culture that used to add up to respectability, and the triumph of the informal – a dialectic that he captures by contrasting Nixon and Saturday Night Live. Incredibly enough, in 1983 Erwin could plausibly present  the rather pallid vaudeville of Saturday Night Live as a sort of revolutionary symbol of a change in mass behavior.

|”The degree to which the ideal [of respectability] was internalized also indicates its strength. Richard Nixon
seems classic as well as villainous when he wears a suit, pressed and buttoned, to board a private airplane. Elliott Gould seems only show-biz carbonated when, smiling sweetly and wearing a ratty football jersey, he tells a national television audience that he is glad to host  “Saturday Night Live” because the progam, in his words, “has balls.” You cannot imagine, Class of 1975, what a fright, embarrassment and hostility Gould’s breaking of a taboo would have triggered in the heyday of respectability. Millions upon millions of ‘dent’ people in 1860 or 1960 went from one year to the next rarely speaking, hearing or reading such words in the open.”

Erwin, I think, mistakes a shifting of exterior symbols for a change in substance. What he was watching, I think, was the absorption of cool into a new domain of servitude – the servitude inherent in the service economy – rather than a true Bastille moment. Gould’s audience, perhaps, could not imagine a figure like Father Coughlin, in the 30s, casually talking down Jews on national radio time, or the kind of dialect humor that was omnipresent in the Gilded Age and right up to the 1950s. This is not to say that the shifting of terms was insignificant – it is merely to say that in the shift from formal to informal, from an ideal of respectability to an ideal of cool, the contradiction traversed was shallow.

The American Adam

We have to get up at 7 and get down to the American embassy by 9:30. I, naturally, have insomnia, and sleep less than Adam, who has become one of those babies who sleep richly – it is the pure mother’s milk of sleep he will bathe in, his little fists balled, sometimes held up from his chest as though he were boxing. At other times he will make these little shrieking noises in his sleep, and you look at him, and he is laughing. What could he be dreaming about that is funny? Perhaps it is the whole “why is there something rather than nothing” thing that bothers metaphysicians. But myself, I am up at two, swallowing melatonin, trying to talk my brain back into some hypnagogic goggle.  At six, Adam does wake up, and he always wakes up crying with hunger, like a neglected wolf cub. Then it is a bottle and soothing murmers from one of his half asleep parents, in either English or French. I must say, French is the language for comforting babies – English clomps around a bit, and though we have sh words in abundance, and I’ve always thought that the sh words fall slushily down and pile up like snow around a sleeper, what is missing is a certain slant of the tongue, a certain musicality that pulls you irresistibly into sleep.  

At seven, then, there is a general awakening of the pod in our household. Coffee, tea, and milk are the beverages favored, then the anxious count of the documents – do we have the passports? – and Adam is stowed, to his astonishment and momentary resistance, in the carrier seat, and off we go in search of a bus to take us to Place de Concorde, where the huge American complex sits, with all its guards. Time for Adam to get recognized officially by Uncle Sam.

First, however, we have to go through security procedures. They are standard airport fare save for one thing – the guard has Antonia taste the formula powder and the water which we’ve stocked in case we have to feed the baby.

The embassy waiting room is full of babies, but the architecture is stroller unfriendly – there are stairs to get up. Another architectural feature Antonia notices is the door – it is, she says, an ur-American door. In Paris! They had to import it! And it is true, it opens the wrong way, and it has the kind of handle that you see all over America and never here. Anyway, we sit and wait our turn to be called up and hand in our papers. The first woman we see is French. I am determined not to speak French inside the embassy, so Antonia does the communicating. After the forms we have filled out are checked, we are directed down to the cashier, where we pay 200 bucks for Adam to join the U.S. club. Then we go back to another window where a young American with a much different attitude (“first, congratulations! Is the baby letting you all sleep?”) has us take a pledge that we haven’t lied, and then affixes the appropriate stamps.

Adam even as I write this is getting tagged with an American social security and passport number. So he is more of a cosmopolitan figure than I am.  I’m jealous. He, meanwhile, slept like an angel all through it.

Here we are now entertain us

This is a paragraph from an essay Musil wrote about Bela Belazs’s famous book about film, Visible Man:

The observations that I will add in the following concern these contact and luminal surfaces. The question of whether Film is an independent art or not, which is the entering point for Balazs’s effort to make it one, incites other questions that are common to all the arts. In fact film has become the folk art of our time. “Not in the sense, alas, that it arises from the spirit of the folk, but instead in the sense that the spirit of the folk arises from it,’ says Balazs. And as a matter of fact the churches and the cults of all the religions in their millennia have not covered the world with a net as thick as that accomplished by the movies, which did it in three decades.”

As is so often the case with these Viennese intellectuals, Musil is astonishingly sensitive to the changes being wrought by modernity – with the wisdom; of nemesis perched on the apocalyptic battlements. His  reference is shrewdly to religion, rather than to other forms of art – that is, his reference is to the community of souls. The soul as Musil knew was dying out as an intelligible part of modern life. Modernism – or perhaps one should say the industrial system, under the twin aspects of the planned economy and capitalism – operated as a ruthless commissar in the great purge of interiority- and in that purge, killed, as a sort of byproduct, the humanist notion of art. In retrospect, the whole cult of art stood on the shakiest of foundations. What was really coming into being was something else – the entertainment complex. Film’s effect was not some technological accident, but a phenomenon in the social logic that was bringing us to where we are today, when the primary function of the subject is not to think – that antique cogito – but to be entertained. Here we are now, entertain us – Nirvana’s line should have a place of honor next to cogito ergo sum in the history of philosophy, I am entertained, or I am not entertained – these are the fundamental elements of subjectivity. God himself, within these parameters, is nothing other than the first entertainer, world without end.

On Mark Thoma's bad advice from economists post

Mark Thoma has a note on the paper he is giving at the AEA which makes the case that economists can sometimes worsen a situation by giving bad advice - as happened in 2003-2007, apparently. 
It is a nice model, and it is a nice and mildly heterodox paper, but I  think it gives way too much respect to economists. Bad advice sounds so... neutral.

 As the very unprofessional and not nice Matt Tsibbi wrote in Griftopia, one economist in particular, Alan Greenspan, gives us an example not so much of bad as of malign advice. He gave a speech lauding ARMs in 2002 - which he intoned was a good deal if interest rates weren't going up - and then turned around and used all his power as Chairman of the Fed to raise interest rates.

Malign advice wouldn't be mildly heterodox, but would cross the boundaries. So instead of using herding models culled from economics,  I would turn to other models to explain the economists supported Great Moderation cul de sac. It is simply that the counsellors work for the Czar. The economists work for the plutocrats. This clears things up enormously. And instead of turning to complex models generated in economics, we can turn to a model developed practically in another parallel field - the field of confidence games. First you pull the grift. Then you have to "cool the mark out". In February 2008, on my little blog, I sorta predicted what was to come under this aegis, and I don't think I did so bad. This was before Lehman, before Bear Stearns.

"Erving Goffman wrote an often referenced paper in 1952 entitled On Cooling the Mark Out. To understand this election year, LI advises our readers to read it.

The paper begins by describing the confidence game, which involves roping a mark, getting him to invest, financially, in some scheme or game, and clearing him out. At this point, the confidence gang has the option of simply leaving the mark behind. But…

“Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators' point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business. It gives the members of the mob a bad reputation with such police as have not. yet been fixed and with marks who have not yet been taken. In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team﷓mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.”


This pretty much describes the two cases we have before us this election year. The ruinous Bush years involved two con games that were entwined one with the other. We have the con game that keeps us in Iraq, one fully supported by the ropers in – the governing elite – and we have the con game that is now busting, the full fruit of Bush’s economic policy, which involved minimizing regulation of the financial markets while maximizing the amount of money they had to play with. In this way, credit could fill up that hole where compensation from work used to be – and so productivity gains could be appropriated at a much higher rate by the richest, while home equity could be tapped, via mortgages, for the good life by the debtors.

Goffman points out that the mark’s psychology is a tricky one. To an economist, it might just look like utility maximization. But…

“In many cases, especially in America, the mark's image of himself is built up on the belief that he is a pretty shrewd person when it comes to making deals and that he is not the sort of person who is taken in by any thing. The mark’s readiness to participate in a sure thing is based on more than avarice; it is based on a feeling that he will now be able to prove to himself that he is the sort of person who can "turn a﷓fast buck." For many, this capacity for high finance comes near to being a sign of masculinity and a test of fulfilling the male role.”

Warmonger psychology unerringly follows this primitive but powerful gender program. This army of pissants shows all the signs of having had trouble emerging from the sack of their twelve year old selves, when, apparently, the separation anxiety produced by throwing out their G.I. Joe doll became frozen in place. A smaller contingent of this army – much smaller – forms the viewing core of financial porno tv networks, like CNBC. These people actually believe that they are part of the confidence game gang, which is how they came to mouth a rote optimism that had as little relation to reality as your average automobile ad has to how you would really drive an automobile.

“A mark's participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the defences and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defence for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only another easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miser ably lacking in them. This is a process of self﷓destruction of the self. It is no wonder that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss.”

Goffman’s analysis of the mark points us to the form of the presidential election – that Halloween for grownups. Whoever the candidates are, they will represent wings of an established power that has made suckers of the vast majority of the population over the last four … eight… twelve…sixteen years. An established power that has assured America that the costs of running this empire will always be paid by third parties – whether these consist of tropical countries dealing with the forces unleashed by the American appetite for junking up the atmosphere with CO2, or Middle Eastern countries struggling with the yoke of American oppression in a more direct form – the soldier in their face, the mercenary who shoots them for fun in the traffic jam. Of course, this isn’t true. Those costs will come back here. The cost of the Middle East adventure can be seen in the run up of oil prices, a very small intimation of a much larger and connected group of problems that come with running out of prestige and power in a large area of the world while at the same time maximizing the number of people who hate you. As for CO2, it will turn out that melting the glaciers in the west during the drought cycle was not a good idea. The American west, overpopulated, overdeveloped, its water overpromised, is going to learn the lesson of the Hummer, too. This isn’t just something we can sluff off on Bangladesh.

“For the mark, cooling represents a process of adjustment to an impossible situation ﷓﷓ - situation arising from having defined himself in a way which the social facts come to contradict. The mark must therefore be supplied with a new set of apologies for himself, a new framework in which to see himself and judge himself. A process of redefining the self along defensible lines must be instigated and carried along; since the mark himself is frequently in too weakened a condition to do this, the cooler must initially do it for him.

One general way of handling the problem of cooling the mark out is to give the task to someone whose status relative to the mark will serve to ease the situation in some way. In formal organizations, frequently, someone who is two or three levels above the mark in line of command will do the hatchet work, on the assumption that words of consolation and redirection will have a greater power to convince if they come from high places.”


It is going to be an excellent year for spectators."

Economists, on this reading, are not the real makers of the con game - but necessary intermediaries in keeping the mark cool. Their advice will always hurt the majority of a population, sometimes destroying the traditions and lifestyles they have spent lifetimes building, sometimes encouraging exploitable excesses in those lifestyles, etc. At no point and in no way are economists, generally, your friends. Although they are sometimes so self-conned that they think they are. Nor are they your worst enemies. They work for your worst enemies.
So, I suppose, this is their role, give or take an exception or two.

the credentializing society

I like Lorrie Moore’s short stories. That is, I like them enough to read them when they come out in the New Yorker. I admit, I am not one of the world’s big readers of short stories.  If they are not funny, like George Saunders when he was funny, I have a tendency to begin with high hopes and invisible pats on the back (here I am, fulfilling my cultural duty) followed by a tendency to peak ahead at other articles, which engross me in I don’t know, some profile of a forgettable pop singer, some crime story until I shake myself temporarily free of a text that I know, rationally, holds a content as trivial at least as the short story incident I have abandoned and return to characters that I have, in that brief interval, forgotten to the extent that I have to begin over. What I am saying here is that I am unfair to short stories.

But Lorrie Moore’s stories have such an easy flow that they hold me, like a story about some celebrity will hold me – I am bonded to the text by the lesser boredom of the text in contrast with the greater boredom outside the text of other things to read or even, horrors, to do. It is in the balance of boredoms that this little superannuated smartass, this me, shares the Zeitgeist with all other readers of newspapers and magazines. Especially as that balance of boredoms, now, is dispersed among the moronic inferno of the internet, the twenty four seven access to the perpetually trivialized world in which the sensational never really reaches the sensations at all. The consumerist death of the nerve endings, y’all.

Anyway, to resume, so I picked up Lorrie Moore’s novel, A Gate at the Stairs. I am not so far very happy with it. But I notice that Moore sometimes needs to stumble around a bit at the beginning, so perhaps I will persevere. What I want to write about here, though, is the narrator’s curious habit of writing things like this:

“I had come from Dellacrosse Central High, from a small farm on the old Perryville Road, to this university town of Troy, “the Athens of the Midwest,” as if from a cave, like the priest-child of a Colombian tribe I’d read about in Cultural Anthropology…”

Perhaps curious habit is the wrong way to get at what I find curious about this sentence, which is the way that a learned, or least a bit learned allusion has to be credentialed in American writing. You can’t just introduce a metaphor taken from an anthropological text in a novel, apparently, in America without immediately tracking it to its source in a classroom. For on no account are we to think that there are characters out there in the American hinterlands so bold and savage as to read “Cultural Anthropology” on their own, say in one of the public libraries that every urb in America is equipped with.

If this allusion had been to say the Sopranos, there would be no credential tracking required. American characters are permitted to know about car types, sports figures and tv shows without exculpatory information being provided as to just how they know about these things. But of course, the American character doesn’t come equipped, from birth, with knowledge of V-8 engines, the Dallas cowboys, and Kim Kardashian. I think Moore’s gesture here – a gesture I fully recognize, one I see made in numerous American novels – points us to the weather in our ‘meritocracy’. The era of culture has long been liquidated in favor of the era of credentials. There are the odd warriors out there who don’t accept this: for instance, Oprah Winfrey, bless her heart, thought that one could simply pick up a Faulkner novel and read it. Or at least read it in a book club (which mix, rather shamefacedly, the classroom and the card club).

However, the reader of Moore’s novel – Moore evidently thought – is not going to accept the narrator throwing out allusions to Columbian peasants without some explanation – otherwise, she wouldn’t be “real”. That is, she wouldn’t be credentialed as real. In fact, she would be very real – you can go into, say, the Austin library and look at Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, which does indeed contain information about Colombian peasants, and you will surely find out that it has been checked out by people who are not taking courses in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Texas.

I am not taking the piss out of Lorrie Moore here, who only reflects the kind of defensiveness that grows in a credentializing culture about “knowing” high cultural things. What a relief to turn to entertainment, to drop the name Michael Jackson or to crack wise about Metallica instead of, say, Thomas Mann! The relentless tyranny of credentializing there takes the more perverse form of fandom, with all of the secret contempt one has for the obsessive, the attendee of sci fi or comic book cons, those who know all the lines from The Big Lebowski, etc.

Still, I’ve always been more on Ralph Ellison’s side, on the side of the Little Man at Chehaw Station:

“All right,” she said, “ you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there will always be a little man behind the stove.

“A what?|

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradtion, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform.”

Now, we blast a thousand holes through the little man’s heart, we stuff his throat with SATs and grade point averages, we tell him that we got an A in the class, we try to dance on his grave – but that little man behind the stove is, I think, unkillable. Of course, I’m a romantic.