letters to a young plumber

In one of the famous “Letters to a Young Poet “, which Rilke wrote when he was merely 28, he gives this advice:

“You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity…”

I don’t think any poet has ever been so finely, so spiritually, so absolutely one-upped. After Rilke was finished with the job, the poor young poet probably went back to the family haberdashery business and tossed out the ditties.

Now, I wouldn’t dream of putting myself on the same stage with Rilke, but, recently, I was in a similar situation. A young plumber, who knew my reputation with a pair of pliers and couple of cross cleats, sent me the specs for an S trap that he’d recently installed and asked me if I thought his teflon taping technique was any good. He admitted, like the young poet, that he had asked many others, one of whom (a beerish chap who happened to be his boss), had asked him if he was fucking around on the job again. Ah, the vulgarity to which the delicate soul of the dedicated plumber is subject. I, of course, followed Rilke’s lead. Has the proper conduction of detritus and the hydrodynamics of faucet flow,  I asked him, sunk into your dreams, your hopes, and your sex life? In the quietest hour of your quietest night, I asked, have you ever pondered an existence in which, by some tyrant’s order, you were forbidden to use a strap wrench? Would you feel like one of Beckett’s tramps, that you couldn’t go on, or do you think you’d just jerryrig a substitute with an indutrial pair of sheers and the elastic strap wripped from an old pair of BVDs? If the latter, I am afrain I can’t help you: crassness has crept over your soul like aspergillus fumigatus over a damp carpet. If, however, you affirm, with every turn of your locking jaw wrench that I will, I must, I just haveta plumb – then, and only then, my son, have you found the pivot of your service in the construction, maintenance, and sanitation industries! In confirmation of which, I urge you to buy a six pack of Blue Ribbon and drain it on Saturday morning, before breakfast, whilst chanting dithyrambs to the ancient Greek Muse of Plumbing, Drainophene, as is done by all the true plumbers I’ve ever met.

poem

Hell is easy: a blanket will do it

Under which, on hot nights infinite

Lay down a body like mine

And cover the feet closely, against its lifetime habit

– and that is all, my dear. An intolerable discomfort

Dilated to the size of the universe.  So yes

A God that is the master of tortures is conceivable

A God in our own image, habit’s double agent

Who knows that bones crush, that skin is nothing

Against flame, ice, steel, the sharp edge.

But a God beyond our temptations is

A God we can’t imagine.

Only, we can abstract an inch

Beyond the grind and crush of those winged and walking generations –

Something skinless, needless, blessed.

But what would this God be up to?

What’s in it for him

With no root in any image or song?

This is truly a God for atheists.

Surely our sacrifices have not all been in vain?

How to be President of the US for dummies

The qualification kerfluffle between Sanders and Clinton is ripe with meritocratic comedy. Nothing is more important in a guild-oriented plutocracy like the US than "qualification". It is the testing mania raised to a mythological level. Making the presidency something like a brain surgeon's position (or a taxi cab drivers) where there is a vague licencing credential is, I think, expressive of a whole dimension of what is wrong with American politics. In fact, I think I am much more qualified than both of the candidates, since I've seen fire and I've seen rain, I've been poor and now I'm a bourgeois, and I've read several books - including, How to be President of the USA for Dummies - so there is that. Qualification is an especially juicy subject for academics and writers, since holding on to this last privilege is, in the age of ferocious humanities downsizing, about all we have left. But fuck that. Nobody asks if Mark Zuckerberg is qualified to do squat about education - they just give him the school district of Newark like a big christmas gift. Is Bill Gates qualified to do anything except lecture on monopoly and how to exploit it? Nah. But there he is, the man who influences policy countrywide cause of his billions. Like a particularly bad dissertation written by a student the department wants to get rid of, the presidency is awarded not on the basis of qualification, but on the basis of the fatigue of the voters, who want to get the thing over with.

Qualification is a doddle.

prisoners of the campaign

The problem with political campaigns in a democracy is very similar to the problems faced by the Red Faction Army (the group of urban guerrilas that the press labeled the Baader-Meinhof gang). The RFA began attacking industrialists and policemen because they believed Germany was still a proto-Nazi state and they wanted to bring about a revolution. Put off to one side the lunacy of the tactic – this, at least, is what they believed and how they acted. But – as was inevitable – certain of their comrades were captured and imprisoned. A true Red Faction Army would shrug and recruit more. But instead, the RFA turned from militating for Revolution to directing all their efforts to freeing their comrades. Freeing their comrades meant nothing to anybody but the RFA. In the moment they turned to that activity, letting, as it were, the feudal value of group loyalty trump revolutionary activism, they were lost not only as revolutionaries but as anything but another pathological criminal gang.

Brecht’s Three penny opera gets the criminal mindset down – these people are the bulwark of the capitalist system, its truest believers.

Similarly, campaigns start out ostensibly not just to elect person X, but to institute those changes in the lives of the electors that X believes are warrented.

Yet, very soon after the campaign starts, candidates start bickering about the campaign itself, the campaign their opponent is running. This is understandable, but it is also tactically advantageous to the candidate who most wants to stick with the status quo.

This is why, I think, Clinton’s supporters in the press seem much more obsessed with Bernie Bros than with, say, the lead in the water of Flint Michigan. Clinton herself made a very good speech about Flint, and in a debate pledged to get the lead out of water and paint within five years if she was elected. An excellent pledge, and one she should hammer on. But instead of that hammering, Clinton’s followers are still doing the rounds on Bernie Bros, even after polls have shown that in Sanders’s strongest demographic, the 18 – 35 set, women outnumber men by a considerable number. That is according to the latest poll on these things by USA today: “Millennial women now back Sanders by a jaw-dropping 61%-30% while the divide among Millennial men is much closer, 48%-44%.”

In any case, while there are surely thousands of Sanders’ supporters who are all about sexism, Sanders isn’t. And there are millions of Sanders’ supporters who are not about sexism – in fact, these supporters view Sanders the way Gloria Steinem once described him (when he was running for the Senate): as an honorary woman. Trust Steinem to put a sentiment  cringeworthily.

Still, who cares? What matters, obviously, is what Sanders and Clinton propose to do for the vast majority of men and women in the US and – given the onerous presence of the US around the world – in the middle east, South America, Asia, etc. What’s in it for the teacher in my son Adam’s class, or the woman who is on her feet eight hours a day as the cashier at the local Vons? Cause really, that is all I care about. I don’t care about freeing prisoners of the campaign. I care about inverting the structures of oppression and bondage that crush our imagination and emotional capicity every day of our lives in this moment. 

The working class GOP contingent

For once, a decent article in the NYT about the social conditions that have led to the rise of Trump.
Still, it suffers from a flaw that I'd call Frankism, after its most famous advocate, Thomas Frank. The idea, here, is that the "uneducated" - the high school graduates and dropouts of the GOP working class - were led along like stupid zombies by a GOP that used "gods" and "guns" to trick them.

This, I think, is a massive misreading of the strategy of the GOP cohort. They voted for politicians who continually promised to privatize Social Security and cut taxes not because they believed in cutting social security, but because they didn't believe the GOP was serious. They wanted the tax cuts because that was money in their pockets - and they needed that money. Wages have been bad for a long, long time, save for a few years in the nineties. This means that those households needed their discretionary spending. Meanwhile, fica was, due to the rotten deal between the Dems and the Republicans in the 80s, rising as the great Federal tax.

What changed in 2008 and was changing before then was that tax cuts no longer were enough. And now, after having paid more and more for social security and medicare, the GOP seemed more serious about vouchering them into inexistence than about anything else - save tax cuts for the wealthiest.

I think that the working class GOP pursued a strategy as well as the elites. They were willing to grant the elites their plutocratic gains in return for more discretionary income and the "cultural" issues, which were really lifestyle issues, issues of how to have a life on a more and more restricted budget. God, among other things, is cheap - there's no charge for going to church. On the other hand, going to Disneyland is expensive.

I don't want to ignore racism here, which is interwoven with the story of who gets what. The inability of the GOP working class to feel any solidarity with the black working class is certainly the result of a long history of racism in this country. The inability of the elites to even see the landmined life of the black working class is of course due to racism too.

The Sanders movement is going to have to confront that racism, instead of assuming that solidarity will happen if the economic issues are laid out clearly enough.

sure vs. absolutely

Somewhere in Delmore Schwarz’s journals he remarks on the brilliance of the American “sure”.

He doesn’t say anything more, but I’d speculate that Schwarz intuited that certain words are novels – and not just novels, but state of the nation novels, U.S.A. novels.

Like so much in the U.S.A, the word has mutated since the forties. It has become the bogus absolutely. Of course, this mutation is not unrelated to other mutations abroad in the land – for instance, the systematic skinning of the working class, from their place in the popular arts to their dignity to their paychecks. Sure was both the extended hand and a word to be spoken out of the side of the mouth by private dicks and mobsters. Sure was off the farm – as was the population, draining into Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Cleveland, making steel in Youngstown and Pittsburg, waging labor war in Flint. Sure was familiar with numbers runners and the overflowing toilets in neighborhood taverns on Friday night. Sure had all beef hotdogs in its teeth and the ball game on the radio.

Absolutely doesn’t. Absolutely is the fated, that is, planned erosion of the manufacturing sector. Absolutely is the relentless rise of the service sector. Absolutely is waitresses setting out jauntily to make money while going to college and ending up three jobbing it to make payments on the college loan.  Absolutely is the cool music played at starbucks. Absolutely is emotional labor, while emotional surplus value is hauled off to be plasticized in the cultural industries. But absolutely never reaches into the now dominent upper reaches, who invaded every crannie of the popular arts in the U.S.A. and made it a mirror of their own vanity. Absolutely is said to them. They never say it back. Instead, they say things like, I’ll have the Chilean sea bass.

I sure hate absolutely. 

there will be blood - reflections on the present state of the human meat grinder

Jeremy Harding’s long review essay about Angola in the LRB is a fascinating exercise in the history of the Cold war as pursued in one of its side pockets, even if Harding recounts it at a cold blooded jet fighter height, mainly. Clearly, one of the many things Obama could have congratulated Castro for in Cuba was his strong contribution to the end of apartheid. Without Cuban troops and Soviet weapons in Angola in the seventies and eighties, the South African apartheid forces and the Americans would have rolled over Namibia and Angola, and apartheid might still have its leather gloved grip on the region.
I read it with some memory of the events that it went through. However, I found it suprisingly relevant to today’s politics. Reagan’s under-secretary of state, Crocker, was the author of the doctrine of linkage and constructive engagement with South Africa, which meant, generally, supporting the racist regime.Its the same cynical, immoral and ultimately futile policy that Clinton seems to have pursued and to want to pursue with Saudi Arabia. Clinton’s pretense to have made women’s rights a presence on the world stage was undermined by the warm ties and weapons sales that she advocated while Secretary of State. More weapons were sold to the Gulf state, I believe, during the brief period of Clinton’s stay at State than have ever been sold to them before. This, in a period in which the Saudi’s imprisoned numerous immigant workers, mostly female, for sorcery, executed various “sorcerers”, and made only the most cosmetic of attempts to impress the West with civil rights. The West, in the person of a press that is tightly connected, on the corporate level, was always cooperative with the propaganda project. The New Yorker recently published a celebratory article centering on one fabulously wealthy Saudi woman who is bravely going out there and driving herself. This is treated as a blow for human rights on par with the march at Selma. Meanwhile, we pretend that our moral justification in Afghanistan is fighting for the country’s oppressed women, who are treated by the Taliban exactly how the Saudis treat women.
Clinton, like Reagan, has her eyes on the prize: the untrammeled use of American power to promote capitalism and various cherrypicked moral principles – the latter not too closely. It took Obama six years to start quietly undoing a foreign policy founded on brainless toughness and a penchant for doing ‘stupid stuff’. Clinton, by all accounts, wants to undo Obama’s undoing.
I suppose I should say that “Clinton” and “Obama” represent pieces on the chess board, functions more than personalities. Clinton stands in for the longstanding complex of money and military power that has transformed the DC metro area into a real estate agent’s wet dream. This is an old American disease.
And like any disease, there will be blood. There always is. The pundits are hungry for it. O, the wars we have missed! In Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen… oops, not quite Yemen. There we are still pounding the shit out of civilians, and nobody that I know of is selling any t shirt saying Je suis Yemen. No, in Brussels the death of 35 is two days of headlines, while in Aden, another bomb strike, another hundred civilian deaths is a real yawner. And so the pundits, like ticks, cheer for the opening of another jugular somewhere. It will be good for us. It will demonstrate our resolution. We will be tough.
In Angola, maybe a million died. A Cold war story with twists and turns and a nice O.Henry ending: the white apartheid soldiers who did such damage to Angola, and who were ultimately defeated by the Cubans, are now mercenaries defending the once Marxist state, and the “freedom fighters” there, so beloved by Reagan, have been tracked down with the encouragement of the Americans and Total Oil and murdered.
Such is the state of the human meat grinder on the cusp of major global climate change.