silver lining and an opportunity

There's a silver lining and an opportunity in what has been happening in Congress.

The big steal effected by the GOP necessitated blowing up the obsolete protocols of the Senate and the House. You remember those protocols from 2009, when we were all told that we couldn't have a nice public option and a much more extensive ACA cause we needed sixty votes to do it in the Senate. As the GOP has shown, if you have the majority, you make the rules. When the Dems are the majority in the House and the Senate, or even just one chamber, they will no longer be able to toss the progressive promises that put them there out cause of 'bi-partisanship", or some fuckwad rule made up in 1980. The GOP has accidentally liberated Congress and made it more democratic. This is a definite huge advance.

The opportunity is for the Dems to get rid of their Herbert Hoover complex. Until the 90s, the one D. advantage was that they understood the business cycle. The GOP, having a religious faith in the market, can't admit to market failure. The D.'s then were the adult party. As adults, they realized that the question about the deficit is when we should have one and what it should do. Among the many "problems" with the Clinton administration was the way it hustled fifty years of experience out there door, passing de-regulatory legislation that was implicitly founded on the impossibility of market failure (hence that piece of TNT, sponsored by Phil Gramm and endorsed by Bill C., called the Commodities Modernization Act of 2000, which basically primed the depression of 2008) and by fetishizing deficit reduction. The latter resulted in the idiotic politics of 2000 - an election year in which the signals were that a recession was here - in which the Clinton policiy of protecting the budget surplus turned into the politics of putting an "iron box" around social security, which was what happens when you lose the justification for a policy and you pick one ad hoc. Bush, proving that a stopped clock is right twice a day, actually addressed the oncoming recession by proposing a tax cut. It was an awful tax cut, and the deficit it caused was a very distant stimulus, but at least it recognized that a stimulus was necessary.

In 2009, Christine Romer, Obama's economic advisor, told him that the stimulus should be twice as big - about 800 billion dollars bigger - to really lift the country out of the depression. There has been talk about whether Larry Summers cut that figure in half, or whether Obama just rejected it - in any case, Obama, taking up the Herbert Hoover cross, allowed the Fed to loan the banks and Wall street much much more than that 800 billion while he introduced and the Congress passed a stimulus of around a trillion dollars. If Romer's advice had been followed, we would have had a much quicker recovery, and we would not have witness wage stagnation for six years for the majority of the working class. In combination with an ACA that was much more like the one O. promised in his presidential campaign, there's a good chance we would have seen D.'s triumph in 2010, instead of failing epically. 

By coincidence, the deficit proposed by the GOP is equivalent to Romer's proposal eight years ago. But it is a deficit that is being unloaded at a time when the economy is near full employment. And it is going to the least likely sector when it comes to economic stimulus. These are the points I am hoping the D.s press. If they press the "deficit! horrors!" button, they really have learned nothing.

The Yokels - part one

It used to be the case that journalists from NYC only went out to the boonies to report on crimes. If the crime or scandal was big enough, they’d be there. For all other cases, there was the news services. It was the New Yorker (and, to an extent, Mencken’s magazine, the American Mercury) which first started sending writers out to take the temperature, so to speak, of the boonies. The New Yorker established the U.S. Journal format, with its man on the courthouse steps or in the coffeehouse interviews to establish the temperament of the burg that the reporter was passing through. At the same time, the scandal and crime driven impulse was also, understandably, cultivated. A merger of the two types takes place in the essays that Calvin Trillin collected under the title, Killings. The book came out in 1984; it has recently been reprinted, to some well deserved hoopla. The pieces cover the period from the late sixties to the early eighties. Not all of the pieces are from small towns – in fact, most of the venues where this or that person was dispatched were mid sized cities: Knoxville, Savannah, Riverside, etc. However, during this period Trillin could have stayed in NYC and written about any variety of homicide you care to ponder. These killings have an interest beyond the events that brought together victim and perpetrator, and that interest is very much the social setting – the different cultures of the provinces. They are, as it were, litmus tests of the spirit of the age, as it was bottled in these places.

The New Yorker also sponsored the project of another writer at about the same time, which ended up in the book Special Places: In search of small town America. This was penned by Berton Roueché, who was better known as the New Yorker’s medical writer. Roueché went and spent time in various small towns – towns of less than 20,000 people – in a swathe of America that included the Midwest and Texas. His travels (which bear the title of a search, instead of, say, an investigation, or a survey – a search being less prosecutorial and more open-ended) took in the towns of Stapleton, Nebraska, Welch, West Virginia, Hermann, Missouri, Crystal City, Texas, Corydon, Indiana, Pella, Iowa, and Hope, Arkansas. In other words, his search brought him to small towns in Anglo America. The partial exceptions are Crystal City and Hope, Arkansas, but Roueché never traveled to a small town that was mostly black. The overwhelming whiteness of his search is not something Roueché, or his editor, William Shawn, who prefaced his book, thought about.

The book has never, to my knowledge, been reprinted. It has no reputation, unlike Killings. But to my mind it is a counterpart to the more famous book. It encodes a way of reporting on what we see, now, as Red America, that huge transcontinental swamp of GOP voters, where the lines are about inauthenticity and urban formlessness that still rules the narrative. Even though it is now the NYT rather than the New Yorker that now supports this kind of thing, the archetype of small town America still weighs us down. It is white, it is mannered, the flowers bloom there and everybody meets and eats brunch at the Pancake house on Sunday. And of TV, and its pervasive influence, there is nary a whisper.

In the list of towns that dot Roueché’s “search”, the one that stands out today is Hope, Arkansas, which is now famous as the town where Bill Clinton was born. But when Roueché visited, in 1982, Clinton was not a name to reckon with or recognize. He was just another southern Democratic governor, apt to drop an aw shucks or a gosh when showing emotion, who’d been removed in the last election. The most interesting politician in town for Roueché was the vice-mayor, Floyd Young, who was black.  Roueché interviewed him, which is almost as far as Roueché went on the politics of the small town places he was searching – evidently, he was not in the business of finding politics. It found him, though, in the sermon he attends in the Hope Baptist Church, where the minister defends war and capital punishment on an Old Testament basis. And then there is a comment that resonates retrospectively, made by a rather slick businessman he interviewed – Vincent Foster, still kicking at that time – who confides that he knows where to get liquor in this dry town, and it doesn’t involve driving to Texarkana, either: “All I got to do is pick up the phone over there and dial a certain number. And I’m not talking about moonshine.” Thus spoke the voice of Clintonism avant le lettre. It is all about pull, man.

Roueché’s reporting style is of a dense descriptiveness that was favored during Shawn’s tenure at the New Yorker. There is not a store on a main street in the towns he stays in that remains unnamed: in Welch, West Virginia, he observes six automobile agencies including  Hall Chevrolet-Oldsmobile, he stays at the Carter Hotel and eats at the Mountaineer Restaurant. He notes that Herman, Missouri has two funeral homes and registers them for the reader (Toedtmann and Grosse and Herman Blumer). He tells us that there are four chief business streets in Corydon, Indiana, and that the Corydon State Bank, the Town and Country Shop, Nolan L. Hottell insurance, the Corydon (weekly) Democrat, the sherrif’s office and the county jail, and the Corydon Dollar store are all on one of them.  Roueché specializes in the approaches to a town – he favors towns that have rolling hills on the outskirts, have a river, are found in a pleasant valley, and are attached to the life of the land. To give him his due, when he pretty good at giving  vent to the stray rhapsodic sigh, in the great American tradition:

“I spent the better part of a month in deep southwestern Arkansas – in Hope (pop, 10,290), the seat of Hempstead County – and the sun shone every day of my stay but one, and the nights were mild, and many of them were moonlit, and almost every night I fell asleep to the long, slow faraway whistle of a freight train. I arrived in mid-March, in the first full rush of spring, and the day I left, in the second week of April, the pell-mell Southern summer had begun. I saw the jonquils bloom and fade, and the azaleas and the yellow bells and tulip trees, the wisteria and the redbuds, the peach trees and the apples, and I watched the big willow oaks that line the streets burst almost visibly into shading leaf.”

Those “ands” come from Hemingway, who took them from Twain, who took them from the common speech, who took them from the Bible. That affection for the flowers, that landscaper’s inventory, is strewn about the discovery literature – every “searcher” of the American landscape falls for the flowers and the fruits. And why not? I do myself. In fact, while Roueché was in Hope, I, unconscious of his very existence, was very probably working on my part time job for a landscaping company one hundred twenty miles South of him in Shreveport, strewing grass seed. Nature, remade, is what we are about, we Americans, we invasive species.

It is interesting, or irresistible, do a where are they now? with Roueché’s towns – to note, for instance, that the country of which Welch, West Virginia, is the county seat has the distinction of having the highest drug overdose mortality rate in the country at the moment. Roueché, in his quest for small town life, was too good a human to ask the question I always ask when passing through East Texas and country Louisiana and the rest of it: aren’t these people bored? Too good a human – but certainly lacking something as a reporter if this question never came up.

It comes up in Trillin’s book.

  

a history without dates

There’s a certain magical attachment in the histories we read in books – or the magazines, or the newspapers, doing their own kind of fashion work, articulating the spirit of the age as the well to do see it - to years. A year serves not only as an organizing principle, but also as a spell – it gathers around itself a host of connotations, and soon comes to stand for those connotations. Yet, what would history be like if you knocked out the years, days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In one sense, philosophical history does just that – it rejects the mathematical symbols of chronology as accidents of historical structure. These are the crutches of the historian, according to the philosophical historian. Instead, a philosophical history will find its before-after structure in the actual substance of history. In the case of the most famous philosophical history, Hegel’s, a before and after, a movement, is only given by the conceptual figures that arise and interact in themselves. To introduce a date, here, is to introduce a limit on the movement of the absolute. A limit which, moreover, from the side of the absolute, seems to be merely a superstition, the result of a ceremony of labeling founded on the arbitrary, and ultimately, on the fear of time itself, that deathdealer.

The NYT really does suck: the problem with the "Nazi sweety pies we love" article.

In a scoriating essay on the NORC survey of sexual behavior issued in 1995, Richard Lewontin goes after the social sciences both for their manufacture of categories that segment their surveys and for their naïve notion that people generally report the truth about themselves on fraught issues like sex and racial attitudes to interviewers.
“It is frightening to think that social science is in the hands of professionals who are so deaf to human nuance that they believe that people do not lie to themselves about the most freighted aspects of their own lives, and that they have no interest in manipulating the impression that strangers have of them. Only such deafness can account for their acceptance, without the academic equivalent of a snicker, of the result of a NORC survey reporting that 45 percent of men between the ages of eighty and eighty-four still have sex with a partner.”
I have been thinking about the social sciences – with their faulty methodologies – and journalists – with apparently no methodology at all – lately. The latest lately is the NYT’s incredible malversation of newspaper reporting in their article about the “Nazi Sympathizer Next Door.” The article is better viewed through the parody of it published in the Atlantic, here: https://www.theatlantic.com/…/2017/11/a-nazi-cooks-…/546737/
Today, an editor of the NYT – who should be bodily prevented from writing anything for the newspaper – intervened on the “controversy” (Nazis – good or bad?) to apologize/non apologize for offending readers. Obviously, pansy readers just aren’t tough enough to read about “extremists” (not racists, mind you, or not people dreaming of building gas chambers to eliminate blacks and Jews, but “extremists”) with the sang froid of one of the Times “smartest thinkers and best writers”.
Obviously, the NYT doesn’t get it. 

The “it” here, though, is a whole work style of reporting. “It” includes the unquestioned testimony of “experts” that often season NYT’s articles, as well as the “we tell your story” stories. The problem with both is the methodological assumption that expertise answers the methodological question posed in Lewontin’s article, “How do you know it?” That it never occurs to a reporter who is “one of the smartest thinkers” at the NYT, or his editor, that a man who thinks Hitler is cool might also have other vices in the veracity department points to the fact that the smartest thinking in the NYT doesn’t go very far.

In fact, it doesn’t even go so far as to search through the NYT’s own archive and stumble on the last time American Nazis were really in the news. That period was the early sixties, the period of the civil rights movement. And the person who represented that movement was a man named George Lincoln Rockwell.

Frederick Simonelli, Rockwell’s biographer, had a longer deadline time than the NYT-er, but as a “smart thinker” one would think that the reporter would read the book and other materials about “extremists” – especially people who end up believing in a not so coded call to violence. The questions that they could ask would accordingly search out past patterns, and the story could be about the continuance or the difference with those patterns. This is not a do it yourself kind of thing.

So you think: perhaps such people have some violence in their past? Perhaps the way to know about it is to interview friends? Acquaintances, employers, teachers? Cops? Check out harassment in the town the Nazi lives in. Ask at the local temple. Ask maybe oh, some black guys about it.

Of course, for the NYT, black guys are "no angels" - for as was pointed out on twitter by many, the NYT reporting on the black victims of police shooting has been harsher than their reporting on Nazis.

I’m intentionally not linking to the idiot story itself – it is easy enough to find – but in tracing the development of the little Nazi’s political “thought”, the reporter seems uninteresting in asking whether what he has done in the world, besides putting up friendly picks of Nazis on facebook. He quotes from one of the town’s politicians about how disgusting the Nazi is, but that is it as far as the town is concerned. He quotes from one of the Nazi’s bandmates, but that is it as far as checking out the Nazi’s story is concerned. It is like one of the “sharpest thinkers” at the NYT has the reporting skills of a fourteen year old. When your story is about a guy who went to an armed rally of Nazis at Charlottesville, probably it is a good idea to start by asking about the arms he owns, not the few books you can take a picture of. It all goes downhill from the faux novel lede graf.

The best thing about the NYT is the archive. In the past, the NYT was an amazing paper. This article, written by one of the elite Timesmen, shows why that isn’t the case anymore.

spinoza and the american predicament

There have been innumerable searches for the roots of the American predicament that resulted in the election of Donald Trump. I came across this passage from Spinoza that provides a general framework for the racism, ignorance, stubbornness and despair that goes into giving your heart to a senile bully:

“Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident, and vain.”

The rules, of course, that once governed at least certain circumstances in the capitalist world – rules that countervailed the rule of the richest and the most powerful – were long ago re-constituted in the U.S. by both the Dems and the Republicans. They called it de-regulation, or privatization, and what they were really doing was abolishing rules that limited the behavior of the great holders of private power. Meanwhile, fortune’s greedily coveted favors – which is the real name of “being competitive internationally” or whatever flavor of bullshit is being put out by the Harvard Business School this season – were what the working class, the creators of value, were encouraged to strive for – a sort of clientelism that destroyed all the long built up solidarity and substituted an ethos of dog eat dog. The end result was, as Spinoza well saw in circumstances of similar reaction, a visible increase in credulity.

Political superstition, at least, comes about when the conditions that support superstition are put in place. They have been in place for decades. We are now seeing what this leads us, Gadarene swine that we are. 

Reviving the ostinato genatalia - not a good idea!

Years ago, the art historian Leo Steinberg wrote a book about the sexuality of Christ in renaissance paintings, in which he pointed out that the ostinato genitalia was at the center of many paintings of the Baby Jesus. This was consistent with the culture of this late medieval, early modern period.

Who knew that digital phone cameras and the internet would democratize the ostinato genitalia, so that any freaking Senator, movie producer, magazine writer or talk show host would be on it like mustard on a hotdog? To the Charley Roses, the Weiners, the Louis CKs, the Rep. Joe Bartons - buddy, the late middle ages were a long time ago! Put your rocket back in your pocket, please. And also, resign?

Happy Thanksgiving!

The black and white world - the soul of the banal

The central trauma of cinema, for many writers, was the transition to sound.

For me, though, it was the transition from black and white to color.

This is a matter, partly, of my age. Being born in 1957, I well remember black and white television sets. And I remember how common black and white photos were. Color television came well after color in the movies, but during the era of black and white televisions, black and white movies from the thirties to the sixties were common fare.

Frankly, I haven’t owned a television in years, so I don’t know what the lineup is, but I imagine the spate of black and white films that I was fed from the 30s and 40s has slowed to a trickle.

The effect of black and white film and photography on me has been profound. Firstly, it has taught me the insufficiency of color words – black and white have been used so variously, the tonal scale creates such differences between one black and white picture or film and another, that our color language seems primitive, a relic that we are using to explain a cultural product that surpasses or transcends our culture.

But secondly, it has given me a very childish view of history.

In this naïve view of history, everything in the nineteenth century and everything in the first half of the twentieth century happened in black and white – or at best, sepia. The Civil War, World War I and II, were all fought in black and white. The cities – New York, London, Paris – were black and white. Nudes were black and white.

Then came the second half of the twentieth century up to now. The long present is in color. It is as if colors were invented in 1950. I know, there was color photography and film before then, but it was not dominant. And with color came a loss of depth.

Black and white images seem, to me, to somehow find, in the banality of the world, the grain or soul that escapes that banality, whereas color simply floods the zone with banality, makes it inescapable. This is ontological nonsense, of course, yet it certainly makes an epiphenomenal sense. After all, we know that, for instance, Greek statues were painted, but the way we view them, and the way they were viewed in the Renaissance, and the way they have leaked into our sense of what a statue is, is uncolored. The restoration of the statues of the ancient world always stops with putting the pieces together; we never paint them.

Similarly, we can “restore” color to the black and white portrait Nadar made of Baudelaire – in fact, I think it has been done. I’ve noticed more and more color versions of photos that were originally shot in black and white. But to me, there is something deeply wrong with this. Instead of bringing Baudelaire closer, it seems, instead, to zombify him, to take him out of that world of canonical black and white and string Vegas-y Christmas lights on him.  

The black and white world is one that I dream in; I only live in the world of color.