studs terkel and negative 20 questions liberalism

There’s a party game called twenty questions. One person goes out of the room, and the people in the room then discuss among themselves and choose an object in the room. Then the person is recalled, and he asks the people in the room up to twenty questions – classically, of the kind : is it bigger than a breadbox – in order to guess the object. John Wheeler, the physicist, spun off another game that he claimed was closer to the quantum world, or what at least it meant to investigate the quantum world. The structure of sending a person outside of the room remains constant. What this person doesn’t know, however, is that in this version of the game, all the people in the room pick their objects and don’t speak to each other. When the questioner is called in and asks the questions – for instance, is it bigger than a breadbox – the person who answers changes the object, in as much as his reply makes the other people in the room silently repick their object. So say x has chosen a matchbox and y has chosen a sofa, if the questioner asks x if it is bigger than a breadbox (to which x says no), then y has to quickly chose some other object (which may be the matchbox or may be a match, etc) in order to remain consistent with the line of questioning.

To my mind, conventional wisdom in the 20^th century in America was largely concerned with the orthodox 20 questions game. In this game, identities of race or gender or class were agreed upon tacitly by everyone – or so the conventional wise men, the press guys, the politicos, the influential sociologists and economists, claimed. But we have reached a point that the recent election has made clearer. All the time, we have been playing negative 20 questions. Our assumption, for instance, that women identify with women, is an orthodox 20 questions truth, which is shattered in a negative 20 questions world.  

However, the counter-cultural narrative in America has long been one in which it is obvious that we are a negative 20 questions nation. The most interesting liberals – people like Ralph Ellison or John Kenneth Galbraith or Rachel Carson – saw this clearly. So, in fact, did certain rightwingers, even as they held to a creed that said that the negative 20 question world was the world turned upside down, one without a natural order. The rightwing text par excellence, here, was Eliot’s The Wasteland.

Wheeler claimed that the most common pattern, in negative 20 questions, was for the answering side to break down. Imagine that the answerers are expanded to 3 or more and you can see why. The answerers must not only process new information, but they must perform that rarest of human abilities: logical improvisation.  In our own lives we invariably trade freedom for routine. Humankind seems not able to withstand too many negative 20 questions sessions. And yet, routine isn’t easy. It is based on agreements that we tend to believe are solid, but that can vanish in the space of a lifetime, or even a fashion season.

One of the great decades in the 20^th century – the 60s – seemed, to those most politically or culturally active in it, to be a vast negative 20 questions session. I’ve been thinking about the liberal response then, and now. In particular, I’ve been thinking about Studs Terkel’s Division Street (1967). Terkel began  working on the book at the suggestion of a publisher who had read Jan Myrdal’s Report from a Chinese Village, which consisted of oral accounts of the Cultural Revolution in a Chinese village. Terkel at this time was a well known figure in the Chicago media world. He had a regular radio show. He was a bit afraid that he was too well known, but found out that, fortunately and humblingly, he was not as well known as all that. His plan was to find one street that would go through rich neighborhoods and poor ones, black and white ones, etc. He discovered there was no such street. So, he divided the oral histories up into both the sociological litany of class, race, sex, and the geography of the city of Chicago, wherte there were distinct differences between, say, the South neighborhoods and the North. I’d urge you to generally skip the fast sociology of trumpland now being conducted in the papers and go to Division Street to get ahold of phenomena that have been with us at least since the sixties – the working class Goldwater freak, the activist who came up against liberal blindness when it came to “urban renewal”, etc.  I think I’m going to write at least another post about the book, cause it is of a richness...

studs terkel and negative 20 questions liberalism

There’s a party game called twenty questions. One person goes out of the room, and the people in the room then discuss among themselves and choose an object in the room. Then the person is recalled, and he asks the people in the room up to twenty questions – classically, of the kind : is it bigger than a breadbox – in order to guess the object. John Wheeler, the physicist, spun off another game that he claimed was closer to the quantum world, or what at least it meant to investigate the quantum world. The structure of sending a person outside of the room remains constant. What this person doesn’t know, however, is that in this version of the game, all the people in the room pick their objects and don’t speak to each other. When the questioner is called in and asks the questions – for instance, is it bigger than a breadbox – the person who answers changes the object, in as much as his reply makes the other people in the room silently repick their object. So say x has chosen a matchbox and y has chosen a sofa, if the questioner asks x if it is bigger than a breadbox (to which x says no), then y has to quickly chose some other object (which may be the matchbox or may be a match, etc) in order to remain consistent with the line of questioning.

To my mind, conventional wisdom in the 20^th century in America was largely concerned with the orthodox 20 questions game. In this game, identities of race or gender or class were agreed upon tacitly by everyone – or so the conventional wise men, the press guys, the politicos, the influential sociologists and economists, claimed. But we have reached a point that the recent election has made clearer. All the time, we have been playing negative 20 questions. Our assumption, for instance, that women identify with women, is an orthodox 20 questions truth, which is shattered in a negative 20 questions world.  

However, the counter-cultural narrative in America has long been one in which it is obvious that we are a negative 20 questions nation. The most interesting liberals – people like Ralph Ellison or John Kenneth Galbraith or Rachel Carson – saw this clearly. So, in fact, did certain rightwingers, even as they held to a creed that said that the negative 20 question world was the world turned upside down, one without a natural order. The rightwing text par excellence, here, was Eliot’s The Wasteland.

Wheeler claimed that the most common pattern, in negative 20 questions, was for the answering side to break down. Imagine that the answerers are expanded to 3 or more and you can see why. The answerers must not only process new information, but they must perform that rarest of human abilities: logical improvisation.  In our own lives we invariably trade freedom for routine. Humankind seems not able to withstand too many negative 20 questions sessions. And yet, routine isn’t easy. It is based on agreements that we tend to believe are solid, but that can vanish in the space of a lifetime, or even a fashion season.

One of the great decades in the 20^th century – the 60s – seemed, to those most politically or culturally active in it, to be a vast negative 20 questions session. I’ve been thinking about the liberal response then, and now. In particular, I’ve been thinking about Studs Terkel’s Division Street (1967). Terkel began  working on the book at the suggestion of a publisher who had read Jan Myrdal’s Report from a Chinese Village, which consisted of oral accounts of the Cultural Revolution in a Chinese village. Terkel at this time was a well known figure in the Chicago media world. He had a regular radio show. He was a bit afraid that he was too well known, but found out that, fortunately and humblingly, he was not as well known as all that. His plan was to find one street that would go through rich neighborhoods and poor ones, black and white ones, etc. He discovered there was no such street. So, he divided the oral histories up into both the sociological litany of class, race, sex, and the geography of the city of Chicago, wherte there were distinct differences between, say, the South neighborhoods and the North. I’d urge you to generally skip the fast sociology of trumpland now being conducted in the papers and go to Division Street to get ahold of phenomena that have been with us at least since the sixties – the working class Goldwater freak, the activist who came up against liberal blindness when it came to “urban renewal”, etc.  I think I’m going to write at least another post about the book, cause it is of a richness...

visions of atlanta have now conquered my mind

Back from Atlanta. Something weird was going with Nature so far as we saw it driving from our rental in Decatur to Gwinnett to visit my brothers: although I was assured on all sides that Atlanta was dry as a bone and undergoing a drought; though Stone Mountain park, for the first time in my memory, was banning grills, bringing about a once in a lifetime event of a hotdog and hamburgerless Park; though I’d been told of ominous fires in the forests north and east of the Metro area; the leaves were spectacular. In the Vermont category. Supposedly, leaf color depends on a well watered spring and summer, or so I’ve been told. Nonetheless, everywhere (and I mean everywhere, as Atlanta sometimes seems more like an inhabited forest than a metropolis) trees were flaunting extraordinary yellows and oranges and reds.

I’m not complaining, mind. I loved it. This was planned to be a heavy family week, Thanksgiving and a memorial service for my old man. Both, against the betting, went off splendidly and even – another anomolous event for a Gathmann gathering – with little discussion of politics. I guess it was a case of what’s to discuss, since nobody in my family voted for Trump and even those who voted for third parties expected Trump to lose. But we did discuss our dad, digging up some good memories. And we ate, all too much. It is hard to visit with one’s extended family without every meeting devolving into breakfast, lunch or dinner. I imagine that if there was some large scale that we could have all stood on, we’d judge this family gathering as a fifty pounder, that being how much extra weight all fourteen of us probably put on – or even a hundred. We did make time to go to our fave breakfast place, the Flying Biscuit, which is a little too enamored of its clever way with grits – but they are excellent grits. Adam had a very good time with his uncles and aunts, and entertained them with his one joke, which has to do with the similarity in sound between scrambled eggs and crème brule (you have to hear it as Adam does) by repeating it a hundred times.

Generally, I think Atlanta is a much  better place now  than it was when I was a sullen teen caught in its precincts. And Gwinnett becoming a multyculty democratic voting county does blow my mind. Gwinnett has roads and parks named after Ronald Reagan – a slap at Jimmy Carter – which were so denominated by the GOP dominated County commission. But now that the Dems are on top, it won’t be long until cracker heads are blown by Obama roads and Obama parks.

Remember, Trump is an interval of winter, and not the ice age. 

The Kardashians: one billion sold since 2002!

I did get a smile this morning on the Kanye news front. Ah, those Kardashians! They are to scandal like Ray Kroc was to the hamburger. Kanye, admittedly, spoils it somewhat by having a talent. But as a crooner, he was never going to get flashed on US, People Inclose and numerous others. I've noticed, however, that the K's have peaked - I think probably it was Kim's butt pic, which made her the toast of the Miami-Basel art fair. However, by number of covers or even inset cover stories, I've noticed a really sharp fall in Kardashian stories. Kanye's Trump love might revive the spark for a moment. Maybe it is time for Kim to argue with him, in some swank restaurant, and then the separation, and then the divorce. Of course, they are being overshadowed by the Angelina Brad divorce, and we have to remember that their string is old. The shows canceled, Bruce's sex change is last year, and we have put in power a reality tv guy whose staff and cabinet are looking like an old Jerry Springer special (Neo Nazi bikers and their cheating wives!), I've grown fond of Kim - the other Ks are, lets be frank, pretty minor. On their own, the weight, the divorces, the fashion lines would all flop. Britney Spears, another crooner, was really complexed by the scandals she caused. They dug into her life and she was hurt. The remarkable thing about the Kardashians is that you can dig into their life as much as you like, but you'll find it is pretty numb - in fact, tv and life have merged here.
So, anyway, Kanye has done his bit. It is a reminder that the American carnival is still going strong. It has to be good for our Balance of Trade!

rule by humiliation: whose next to lick Trump's asshole?

The press still doesn't have a clue about our Grand Wizard. Their normalization of Trump is par for the course: the media bends over backwards to power. The kind of court society that La Bruyere anatomized in Louis 14th's day is alive and well in D.C. But the press's impulse is to attribute everything to being right or left, to having a theory. Trump don't play that game. His game is: humiliation. The subgroup of Romney voters who voted for him have long sought this, above all things - to humiliate their opponents. The deal is, the thirst to humiliate your opponents, after a while, becomes a whole politics of humiliation. It isn't enough to humiliate your opponent, you crave humiliation in itself. Thus, whether Ryan gets through his plan to privatize medicare depends less on whether he can convince the Kluxxers about Trump of its benefits, than upon whether Ryan needs another dose of humiliation or not. Christie, for instance, has staked his political life upon Trump. Alas, Trump decided he needed to be humiliated. Without warning, hey presto, he's fired and Pence is put into place as head of the transition team. I wonder if Trump even bothered to call him. It isn't just the Dems, or the nation, that is now Trump's bitch. Its the GOP. There are stories of Huey Long's love of humiliating his allies, and of LBJ. Supposedly, LBJ liked to humiliate Bill Moyers, then his aide, by commanding hims to give a report to LBJ while LBJ sat on a toilet and unloaded his barbecue. Trump is, of course, dumber than shit. LBJ was smart, and concerned with politics, But if you can imagine Trump as calling in all of us, every American, to surround him while he takes a dump - you'd have an accurate image of how the next four years will go, And, due to the spending Trump seems apt to spring, we will at the same time have a boom, which GOP people will point to to say, the Grand Wizard was right! Bush engineered one via the same means. Suck out the credit of the masses, then bust em - that is the game that is going to be played at a faster tempo, especially since they don't have that many assets left. Meanwhile what happens at least on the GOP side will depend on who needs to be humiliated next. I don't see Ryan faring very well in this environment, unless he can make his act of licking Trump's asshole extremely convincing.

election thoughts - on the Clinton campaign

I just have to get this off my chest. I voted for Clinton, and I believed the polls, so I’m shocked. It is worth while playing the tape again so that we can see how we got here. In other words, how did Clinton lose?

The first reaction of the Dem fluffer league was that it must be the evil Green Party. This excuse makes me want to cry. That is like saying that it is all because of the Republican party. If only she ran unopposed, this would never have happened! Guess what? As the Green party has made abundantly clear over the years, it is a party and will go everywhere for votes on election day. If the Clinton campaign people did not know this and plan for it, then it is on the Clinton campaign people. The merest baby knew it. You can deal with it by trying to pursuade people from that tiny party to vote for you, or you can try to get your people in greater numbers to vote for you. If you aim for the former, here’s some advice: don’t think you will get anywhere by shaming. What didn’t work over the last four elections probably isn’t going to work in this one.

I’ve been thinking, to move onto a more serious note, about the fact that 55 percent of white women didn’t vote for Clinton – that is, who voted.

That’s an interesting stat. If 55 percent of African Americans had not voted for Obama, he would never have been president.

So why? What failed here?

I think one thing that failed was that the campaign idea to feature Clinton as a model woman – a mother, a wife, a grandmother – carrying Susan B. Anthony’s torch ignored the fact, was blind to the fact, that one thing about Clinton’s life that we all know is that he husband is very publically unfaithful to her. I can’t imagine anybody in the campaign wanted to confront her on this, but if you are going to run on a personal story, you are going to drag into that personnal story what people know about you. Perhaps in the 50s and 60s, the stand by your man thing would have seemed heroic. In 2016, it just seems weird.  Why would a woman who stands for feminism seemingly never retaliate,  or free herself? Perhaps even so the campaign could have worked if she hadn’t been running against Trump. There was a Saturday night live skit where the Hillary character shows hilarious steeliness about Trump bringing Bill’s ex “mistresses” to the debate. It was funny, but it was funny puzzling. If we are “with her”, what’s the deal with such public humiliation? What kind of her is this?

I am nobody to judge Hillary Clinton. We make all kinds of decisions in our personal life. But you can’t have it both ways – you can’t put up your personal life as a political advertisement and then be simply silent about a very well known fact about it.

Even if this were not the case, Clinton certainly should have torn a page out of Obama’s book and made some speech about what it means to run as a woman. In Obama’s case, it was about the moral grounding of our history and its direction – how white and black could meet finally as equals and partners in a political struggle. It was brilliant. Clinton, foregrounding gender, then sort of let it hang therre, as if it was a given that we all know about. This was not not not good. It was perceived as arrogant, I’m sure, by women who would otherwise have loved to hear about this. And men too. It might have been corny, it might have been the kind of thing that would make my teeth grind, but I think it definitely should have been done. If one of your attractions as a candidate is your gender, you can’t just be all I’m with her, you have to get down to brass tacks. It took Michelle Obama, way too late in the campaign, to address this.

Then there was the odd, in retrospect, idea that the Dems just didn’t have to worry about their base states. Huh? Given the poll numbers, even at the time, it made no sense to concentrate so much on, like, North Carolina. That was fruitless. Clinton didn’t need an overwhelming victory, she needed a victory, and the states she needed she should have hit. Instead, Florida – from what I’ve read about the get out the vote there – was haphazard, and Pennsylvania was an afterthought. Michigan, which she lost to Sanders, was really necessary, but the Clinton campaign seemed oblivious. All the shit about Putin was of concern to a lot of D.C. journalists, but otherwise of no interest to the country at large. But China and the trade deficit and the currency manipulation – now these were areas to plunge into. I have a great fear that the Clinton campaign was sotto voce about trade cause they plannned to do the TPP once in office. I don’t understand that at all. Obama won those Midwest states by taking apart Romney, and sometimes it seems like Clinton was runnig as Romney, spending more time fundraising among the ultrarich than staying on the trail. Just borrow the fucking money shoulda been the motto.

That leads to my final bit. All campaigns have a narcissistic end – the campaign about the campaign. Usually this happens when the whole thing is winding down. But I think the shambles of the DNC and the Podesta organizations were much more focused on their own navels than on what was happening. Every day that Clinton was not in the headlines, and Trump was, was a bad day for Clinton. The strategy seemed to be – let him kill himself. But by the time Trump was nominated, it was obvious this strategy didn’t work. Instead, his domination of the headlines was becoming a sort of Fuehrer thing. That’s why keeping the press at arm’s length was, frankly, insane. Clinton might hate the press, but you gotta make a lotta noise if you are going to keep viable.

In as much as Clinton was part of these decisions, she is to blame. But really, she was paying a lot of money to campaign people whose job was to lead her away from mistakes. Instead, they seemed to participate in them. It was like they thought it was 1996.

It wasn’t. It’s 1984, alas.        

non president hilary clinton and dialectical feminism

The analytic bug... Hmm, it tickles. Anyway, I'm going to give in and say something about sexism that may well reveal my own sexism. I define sexism, by the way, as acting against sexism, no noble feelings rot counts.
During this election, on twitter, I followed Rebecca Traister, a journalist I respect. And I saw in her threads, very often, make statements about what Clinton wasn't "allowed", or couldn't "get to do", because of sexism. For instance, today: "God I wish she were allowed to just cry like the rest of us."  
Now this might seem like it is bashing sexism, being critical of the mass of sexism in the populace, etc. Traister could easily point to people threatening her, physically, using the word bitch or cunt, etc. So she is right, sexism exacts a price from every woman. But to my mind, under the surface, this kind of rhetoric just enables sexism. In fact, one of Clinton's problems as a politician is/ was that I think she hears a lot of this kind of talk. It made her shorten her punches, or not do things because the sexists out there wouldn't "allow" it.
But in fact the only way to blow the sexists out of there is to do precisely that. To show emotion, to cry or laugh, to not be "tough" - these may, or no, will evoke vile sexist comments. But there is no way that the vile sexist commenters are going to be appeased. Seventies feminists - dialectical feminists - saw the bind between criticizing sexism and practically reinforcing its dictums very well.
In fact, Clinton would not be a rich, famous and important woman if she was not always doing things that "aren't allowed". If she allowed her public persona to be governed by a strategy that cedes the right to self imaging to the sexist, she is not only not being "allowed", she is retreating. The scriptedness, the self-imaging along the most conservative lines, takes away the politicians best tool. Trump, an idiot in so many ways, knows people love self-fashioning - at least for a while. 
I am hoping that the next woman to run for president is not surrounded by enablers of sexism. It is ruinous. 
I think, in the end, this goes back to a patriarchal trope that Americans swallow whole: permanent strength. Strength and toughness are always good. Losers and whiners are always bad. We want our women "strong". As in a Hollywood action flick.
I think that's shorthand for fascism.When we are weak, we are "allowed" to be weak. In fact, often it is the appropriate response. The cult of toughness aborts one's feelings until the feelings abort themselves. Fuck that. Obama had his moments, and the one thing I really adored in him was that he was very low on the tough talk scale. He saw sometimes that the better move was to be weak. An unacceptable thought in hypermasculinized DC.