contra, reluctantly, david foster wallace

Geoff Dyer recently wrote an essay about how one has an allergic reaction to certain writers. Dyer’s allergy is to David Foster Wallace. Now, Dyer is by no means my favorite essayist; and it makes sense that a writer as encyclopedic as Wallace could repulse an essayist who once wrote about his “reader’s block” – his struggle with reading new material, aka books, which had come upon him counted myself in middle age. Myself, I have very fine memories of reading Infinite Jest lying in bed in New Haven one winter. I wanted the book to go on and on – and in that sense it was, for a long book, not long enough.

However, perhaps something in my tastes has shifted. I recently checked out Consider the Lobster, DFW’s essay collection, to dip into essays that I remembered as being the most hilarious and clever things ever – and I felt something different about them this time. I felt, well, that they were lazy and not so good.

This surprised me.

It was the first essay in the collection, Big Red Son, which is about the Las vegas adult movie awards, that I was beset with doubts.  I was stopped by the sixth paragraph:

“Though the sub-line vagaries of entertainment accounting are

legendary, it is universally acknowledged that the US adult-film

industry, at $35—41 billion in annual sales, rentals, cable charges,

and video-masturbation-booth revenues, is an even larger and

more efficient moneymaking machine than legitimate mainstream

American cinema (the latter’s annual gross commonly estimated at $22.5 billion). The US adult industry is centered in LA’s San Fer-

nando Valley, just over the mountains from Hollywood.1 Some

insiders like to refer to the adult industry as Hollywood‘s Evil Twin,

others as the mainstream’s Big Red Son.”

I was rather dumbstruck that I didn’t remember this, because one thing sticks out a mile, here: this is complete and utter bullshit. I mean, just on the surface, it smelled of cop statistics – the fearmongering exaggeration that one expects from cops announcing the latest drugbust. The universal acknowledgement here was DFW’s way, in an essay in which he employed the famous style of multiple notes, not to note one thing that should be noted.

Granted, at the time Big Red Son was written, the internet was not the automatic equalizer it has since become, but still, just being conscious of what he was seeing, he should have doubted the whole idea that the industry was making 45 billion a year.

So I did a little elementary research myself, to track down these bogus figures. Luckily, someone had been there before me: Dan Ackman, in an article published in Forbes in 2001. Ackman traces the ridiculous exagerations in the size of the porn industry through an ill researched article by Frank Rich in the NYT that estimated it at 10 billion to 14 billion per year through AVN – the industry that sponsored the very awards ceremony that DFW was reporting on – which claimed, again with no source, that the adult video industry grossed 4 billion dollars annually.

As Ackman, acting like someone who understood what references are all about, soon discovers, there are estimates of the porn industry, or aspects of it – which, contra the ‘universality” of DFW’s claim, diminish radically the size of the industry. I am not being  just a factchecking dick here: the very name of the article signifies one of DFW’s major points about the place of porn in America. It was a point too important to research. But Ackman easily cut through the bullshit of what is “universally acknowledged”:

“The 1998 Forrester report pegs the online adult content market at $750 million to $1 billion, which was an increase from its initial estimate of $150 million. When a study admits that its initial result was off by at least 80%, it’s hard to be confident in the new result. In any event, Tom Rhinelander, a Forrester research director, says they have given up trying to put a price on porn–either on the Internet or otherwise.”

Ackman’s article is not a work of art, but it has its funny moments, which sort of squash the funny moments in Big red son:

“Its rival research outfit, Net Ratings , tracks the number of visitors to porn Web sites. It says that in April 2001, there were 22.9 million unique visitors to porn sites. This says nothing about how long each visitor stayed or whether they spent a dime. In any event, the number of visitors is less than the number who visited news sites (41.1 million), finance sites (34.2 million) or greeting card sites (25.5 million). When was the last time you heard anyone talk about how greeting card sites dominate the Net?”

The gullibility  DFW  displays in this, one of his premier essays, is symptomatic of a certain blinding conservatism in his work. It’s the acceptance of the cop side of things. I won’t mention the hero worshipping essay about McCain’s run for the presidency in 2000 – in 2000, all of America was temporarily hallucinating. Still, to make a hero of a man whose job was to bomb civilians in North Vietnam and who, even then, was transparent about his mad warmongering personality, is too depressing for me to contemplate.

I couldn’t finish the collection, which I once read with true delight. This saddened me. I haven’t developed an allergy to DFW, but something in me, something provoked by the last decade, has shifted.

St. Paul on Edward Snowden

St. Paul said that now we see as in a glass, darkly. I find this an excellent prescription for reading the news. For instance, the news about Snowden’s revelations. According to the papers and the Bush – I’m sorry, the Obama, my mistake, sometimes it is so hard to tell one from the other – administration, Snowden’s revelations have harmed the security of the American people, which is protected by the intelligence services. Now, by the simple method of inversing this often repeated phrase, we get to the truth. Did Snowden arm the taliban and the Islamic mercenaries that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s? No, the CIA did. Did Snowden create the international network of paths through which Islamicists were able to spread globally? No, the CIA did. Did Snowden give a visa to Omar Abdel Rahmen, the organizer of the first attack on the WTC in 1994? No, that was an employee of the American embassy in Sudan who, all things considered, was probably bowing to a CIA suggestion, as the so called Blind Mullah had been a collaborter in the great freedom fight in Afghanistan waged by the CIA.Did Snowden distribute pamphlets and give training sessions on how to slip into a superpower to blow up things and cause havoc?  No, that was the CIA, the superpower was the Soviet Union, and the CIA training was about how easy it was to make weapons of mass destruction from scratch to make the superpower suffer.  The CIA was a necessary condition to the attack on 9.11.

But there is so much more! Did Snowden help to overthrow Qasim in Iraq in the Ramadan Revolution of 1963 – an excellent year for the assassination of foreign leaders - and install the Ba’athist party there? No, that was the CIA. Did Snowden help overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, thus paving the way for the return of the Nazi loving Pahlavi family and turning the Iranian population into one that mistrusted and despised Americans? No, that was the CIA.  

This is an easy game to play. Snowden has played no part in putting American lives at risk. He has played no part in creating a permanent war state in the US. One can neither blame, to speak in purely American terms, one of the deaths on 9.11 or one of the casualties of American forces in Afghanistan or Iraq on Snowden. A good case can be made that they are all, absolutely all, traceable to intelligence activity that was secret and vetted by our supposed leaders.

Obviously, the sensible thing to do is to pardon Snowden and imprison our intelligence services. That is, if the real purpose is the security of the American people. But I strongly suspect that the leadership considers the American people to be a “low use” population, as the AEC used to put it about people who were in the path of high amounts of radiation that followed  above ground tests of atomic bombs in Nevada.

That isn’t the purpose, though. Their games are made for their organizations.  Our leaders are in it for themselves, with the same moral credo that any neighborhood Mafia capo would recognize. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Admiral this, General that – all are essentially bound up in the ethics of that capo.

Don’t follow leaders, watch parking meters.

the evolution of ghosts

It has long been my contention that there is no story about life on earth that does not boil down to an evolutionary story. The creationist version of life on earth has, since the 19^th century, made large use of the notion of intelligent design – but anybody who knows anything about design knows that it evolves. The intelligent design argument is a mess, since the standards it uses to critique Darwinism are, of course, entirely absent when it tries to construct the meaning of intelligent design. Just as we can trace the evolution of the design of the watch by the material left behind in its wake – diagrams, tools, etc. – so too, if intelligent design were true, we would be able to see the material left behind in its wake – proto-humans, for instance. At this point, intelligent design simply gives up the intelligent part and opts for supernatural design, a design that defies the same physical laws that, on its critique side, intelligent design uses to try to de-legitimate Darwinian evolution.

Of course, creationists aren’t the only ones to ignore the evolutionary nature of all accounts of design. Philosophers, much to my distress, often assume things like zombies without having any sense that a zombie has to come with an evolutionary story, and that has to be packed into their account that a zombie doesn’t sense like a human being. This simply proves that philosophers are bad intelligent designers – something I think Wittgenstein spotted long ago.

At the same time, not all evolution is Darwinian evolution – that is, the statistical effect of selection, while definitely having some effects at the cultural level, does not play the role it plays in Darwinian evolution.  Evolution on the cultural level often takes the form of assemblages that bring together different developmental paths as overlapping associations.

All of which is the wordy and way too wordy intro to what I want to do for a lark: understand the evolution of the ghost shape that one sees, in paper cutouts and cartoons, on Halloween.

the morality of splashing water

When I was toiling away, learning philosophy back in Grad school, I pretty much focused on Western philosophy. That’s a vast amount of material there, bucko, and I figured that if – by the time I was doddering on the lip of the grave – I understood some of it, that would be enough of an achievement. 

But such projects belong to the long ago of academia. Since the, I’ve become a pirate intellectual – or, less boldly, a dilettante eclectist – or perhaps even less boldly, an an anonymous reader between the lines – I’ve come to operate under the proud slogan: fuck the context, show me the beef. Or something like that. 

Which brings me to Mencius’ marvelous question, which is quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan’s Dominance and Affection: the making of pets: “Mencisu asked, “Is it right to force water to leap up?” He was taking the position that human nature is inclined to act in certain ways and not others, using the movement of water as an analogy. “Water,” he said, “will flow indifferently to east or west, but it will not flow indifferently up and down.” Now of course, he added, “by striking water you can make it leap up over your forehead and by damming and leading it you may force it up a hill, but do such movements accord with the nature of water?”

It is one index of the fundamental disposition of modernity, over the last three hundred years, that this question simply has no discursive space in which it can be uttered. The discovery of the nature of water is a project we can all recognize, as part of science. But the idea of respecting the nature of water thus discovered forms no part of the world of ideas and actions we inhabit.

Water, I should say, has other ideas and tends, when forced to traverse deserts to grow crops, to leach up noxious metals, and when acidified, to kill fish and encourage jellyfish. But we don’t think of this as water thinking, or asserting its rights.

For us,  Mencius’ question is simply weird. We have so little sense that there might be a nature to be respected, there, that we can only view the question as an analogy for the one nature we do respect, human nature, as Yi-Fu Tuan says. Although – context alert -  the Sayings of Mencius make it clear that even Mencius considered his question a little weird and quickly analogized it to human nature. Rember, it was the Chinese invented the prototype of industrial power. 

Here’s the entire quote:

Kao Tzu said, ‘Human nature is like whirling water. Give it an outlet in the east and it will flow east; give it an outlet in the west and it will flow west. Human nature does not show any preference for either good or bad just as water does not show any preference for either east or west.’

‘It certainly is the case,’ said Mencius, ‘that water does not show any preference for wither east or west, but does it show the same indifference to high and low? Human nature is good just as water seeks low ground. There is no man who is not good; there is no water that does not flow downwards.

‘Now in the case of water, by splashing it one can make it shoot up higher than one’s forehead, and by forcing it one can make it stay on a hill. How can that be the nature of water? It is the circumstances being what they are. That man can be made bad shows that his nature is no different from that of water in this respect.’

dreary days

Virginia Woolf once began a diary entry by saying that the day had been dreary and that nothing happened. Then she reproached herself: this was no way for a writer to treat even a day on which nothing seemed to happen. She compared such days to trees in winter. The glory of the tree, the leaves, have fallen, and all that is left are bare branches and the trunk. One tends not to see the tree, then. And yet it is in this state that you can most see the tree, its growth against the damage of insect, lightning strike, impoverished soil,  and weather – in short, what it had become.

I think that is a rather brilliant comparison, even though writing for others is all about brilliant and hyperreal days, where the criminal is escaping the police, where the adulterous love affair begins to germinate at the party, where Madame Bovary takes poison and spontaneous cumbustion claims the ragman. But the forest in which these events take place is vast, and consists of dreary or happy days where nothing happened, and nobody looked.

I like the fact that Woolf knew that is exactly where she should look.

for price controls: a solution to healthcare costs in America

Like many a crank before me, I am unhealthily attracted to arguments about economics.

This last week there has been a lot of fun activity in the blogosphere around that perpetually arousing topic, is economics a science or not? Science, here, doesn’t mean a social science. The problem with economics, I think, is that there is an impulse within the discipline to understand it as something more like a natural science – a science like physics.

This is, I think, a bogus credentialing move with serious consequences for the way economists think and advice.

Being held prisoner by a bunch of assumptions both about what science is and about what the economy is about, economists all too often end up leading those who listen to them into dead ends.

A good case in point is the matter of price controls.

Economists now, whether chicago school or MIT school, show the same horror for price controls as the Victorians showed for the  mention of sex. It just shouldn’t be done! Economics decorum is a bit different than Victorian manners, but they both start with assumptions that are highly fictitious. In the Victorian case, all the speakers were, actually, products of sex – and in the economics case, all the speakers are actually products of highly non-competitive non-markets.

But as we get out of the asphyxiating world of the economists assumptions, we often find “markets” that would be well served by price controls. For instance: the American healthcare market.

At the moment, there is much handwringing over the fact that the cost of American healthcare is way out of synch with healthcare costs elsewhere. This handwringing has resulted in many a clever suggestion about rearranging market arrangements for healthcare. These suggestions, however, turn a blind eye to the fact that the healthcare market is shaped by two government backed monopolies – on the one hand, the monopoly granted to medical device and pharmacy companies from the out of control patent and ip laws – and on the other hand, the various guild monopolies granted to the pool of labor, from doctors to dentists to nurses to pharmacists, enforced by the government.

This, then, is a market in which price controls that are heavily government influenced are already in place. The laws, for instance, that require a patient to get a doctor’s prescription to gain access to prescription drugs makes a mockery of any notion that the healthcare “market” is “free”.

In such situations, price controls can be imposed rather easily.  The room for black markets, here, is pretty narrow. Add this to the fact that the medical device and pharma industries count on the government protecting them from competition – for instance, from foreign drug marketers – and you have set up a situation which would respond perfectly well to price controls.

Don’t expect, however, anybody anywhere to point these things out or discuss a price control policy. That would violate the sensitivities of mainstream economists.