On Free Lunches

I want to cull this from  page 2 of Greg Mankiw’s popular Essentials of Economics – used by hundreds of Econ 101 classes, tucked under the arms of thousands of students, who paid a hefty price for it:

You may have heard the old saying, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Grammar aside, there is much truth to this adage. To get something we like, we usually have to give up something else that we also like.

I like to think of them, those thousands of scions of upper class households, products all of them of years of free lunches, nodding to this crackerbarrel truism. One of the great principles of education is to blind yourself to the self-evident. It is part of one’s self-fashioning, and it is especially useful as these scions go on to get positions in the upper ranks of management, investment, etc., and can look about them and say: I earned this.

By their truisms you shall catch them – this is the rhetorical ratcatcher’s faith. My faith, really. The crack in the neo-classical economics façade – the underpinning of that big neo-other, Neoliberalism – appears here.  If one looks deeply enough, many of the ideological decisions that go into the neoclassical model congregate around the idea that there is no free lunch – or as Mankiw translates it, there are almost always trade-offs.

The first and most important of those decisions is that the local difference between the person who pays for and offers the lunch and the person who eats it, free, is of no concern to economics. Thus, all sociology is given the bum’s rush at this banquet. The economist’s truth stops at the fact that if there is a free lunch, someone is paying for it, and that in the end, we are all someone. And it is true that if x is paying for y’s lunch, if we just move a level upward we can treat them as variables, so that y paying for x’s lunch is the same thing. But what if that move up the level is missing an essential fact – which is that there is always somebody paying for the lunch, and somebody eating it free? And what if there is a whole class of x’s who offer a whole class of y’s free lunch?

Read the rest at Willetts!

In a bar on the rue quincampoix

In a bar on the rue quincampoix

by Karen Chamisso

Cressida, I thought of you

wasting away in Margaritaville

as the hour came on to that gray and blue

moment -click - when it is time for a girl to chill.

Do foxes not have holes? I at least have one

on Rue Quincampoix, where I’m a known quality

where I’ve come to have my fun

where I’ve drunk my quantity.

In the glint of the lounge light there

I set up with a gin and tonic

a notebook opened on the sputtering flair

of a word – the chatter here is trans-Atlantic

the gals are Cally, the guy is German

and the French sociopetally clustered in the corner

eye contact is made by a man determined

to ask me what I’m writing – if he could have the honor

-well he can’t – I’m sorry – as you know

Cress, I too dive into the wreck

- and so many wrecks from long ago

- and so many from last week

- playing phrase and fable solitaire

to  find and wind my lash fine thread

through dead men’s eyes and dead men’s stares

the old old slag, the old old dread

- in particular, tonight: tart. A sweet, a pie

all the endless jar between honey and vinegar

I go to the OED, cause it don’t lie

I go to the Online, for the war

“Everyone wants a piece of the attention pie”

first came the sweet then came the bitter.

Adored the adored, but where incense upward flies

better be careful of the hitter

beneath the embrace. Cherchez la femme fatale

because she materializes suddenly, Cress, you with the bored

drawl,  cig in hand, like Lauren Bacall

that tall drink look - “will you walk in my lord”

and in a rush I see a visionary Gita

from Barbara Stanwyck to Gloria Graham

from Cressida to Nana, from Lana to Rita

from Hollywood Blv. to Iliam

Aaa…nd – and here the poem was interrupted. Just as I was about to put my migraine geometry to work, dot by dot, mapping out a state of exception that has lasted lo these patriarchal millenia, just as the postman always rings twice was going to disturb Cressida and Diomedes in their tent in my scratchin referorama, my friend Marc and his boyfriend (Luc?)  come barreling in the door, bringin in a night that will end I can already see at Cox,  heatseek my table and Marc lifts me up just as “Bonny and Clyde” comes on the P.A. and we dance a two step, and then start singing and the Frenchies join in in freaking out the American girls who haven’t yet experienced the French joy in singing along that sometimes just breaks out, a distant echo of Ça ira secularized, lyed and dyed and finding its objects in the popular song – of long ago.

Marc says, what is the poem about tonight?

“Vous avez lu l'histoire de Jesse James
Comment il vécut, comment il est mort”

party pic

The Party Pic
Karen Chamisso

It is just human nature to stand in a party pic
and gargoyle to the unknowns outside this magic circle
in your Alex McQueen threads while
your blush fails and the flash bounces
                                               off of your forehead.

His hands are comfortably round your waist
this host, not so cute as an octopus,
but coming on all tentacles and tan unattached
once the starter wife is ejected from the copilot seat.

It is just human nature for him
to stand in the middle and tycoon
a picaro of the scandal mags and loose with money
an advisor of sorts: a knower of politicians in their winter.

Your beaming smile on his left and hers on the right
Do you wonder about the captions for this night?

I know already that if I’m in this group of teeth
I will be retouched
since I am all blurs in the flash aftermath
my pic presence running for the exit.

Who's the racist? The tie between economics and racism

From Willettsmag

What is the tie between racism and economics? I watched the NYT video of Sanders explaining his take on it – that economic misery creates the need for an enemy other to explain it. This explanation is in concert with the general American mainstream idea that racism is concentrated in the most ignorant and poorest. Yet, at first glance, one would think that if the economic system is racist, then the people who benefit from it most would be the most racist.

This takes “racism” out of a certain imprisonment in the notion of sentiment, and makes it a socially constructed intersubjective bundle of characteristics. I think that is a better place for beginning this discussion.

With this beginning, we can ask again about economics and racism, with the corollary that the way in which the onus of the racism discussion singles out certain classes as racist and ignores others is, itself, part of the structural racism we are talking about.

In the U.S., recently, the question has been: what is wrong with those white people making below 50 thou per year and voting for Trump? And the answer is that they are voting for white solidarity. Yet here’s a puzzle: how about those same voters voting for Obama in 2012? And how about Romney’s overwhelmingly white voting constituency? In fact, Romney seemed to have cleaned up with the over 50,000 per year white voter. And yet, who spoke, then, about the upper class white sense of entitlement?

I am not saying that the Romney voter was per se racist. I am saying that the correlation between voter and candidate doesn’t give us an absolute x ray of racism in America. It does give us a starting point for talking about white supremacy as it insinuates itself into the symbols of well-being.

Well-being is a word from economics and sociology. I like to think here of an exchange between Nassau, an English liberal economist in 19^th century England, and Tocqueville. Tocqueville wrote, in Democracy in America, that in England, “the good of the poor ended up being sacrificed to that of the rich.” Nassau made the classic move that we see economists regularly make today: he disputed the idea that the salaries of the working class weren’t rising.

Tocqueville wrote back:

You attack me on this point, of which you are certainly a very competent judge. However, you will permit me to disagree with your opinion. Firstly, it seems to me that you give to the phrase “good of the poor” a very restrained interpretation that I hadn’t given it: you translate it by the word wealth which applies particularly to riches. I had wanted to speak, myself, of all the things which could concur in the well being of life – consideration, political rights, the ease of obtaining justice, the enjoyments of the mind and the thousand other things that contribute indirectly to happiness. I think, lacking a contrary proof, that in England the rich have little by little attracted to themselves almost all the advantages that the social state furnishes to men. In taking the question in your narrow way, and in admitting that the poor man gains a momentarily greater profit in cultivating the land of another’s than of his own, do you think there are no other political, moral, intellectual profits attached to the possession of land, and which compensate beyond, and principally in a permanent manner, the disadvantage that you signal?

Tocqueville here asserts the broader sociological claim. It isn’t the claim that Marx might make in exactly this way, but in fact, Marx began his career with a series of newspaper stories about the abolition of certain common forest rights that kept commoners from gleaning in forests – and he recognized, in that seemingly small moment, a central truth – that property is not derived from law, but from forces that shape the law. Property, then, can’t be the sole interest of the working class – because it is an illusory object, one shaped by Capital itself. And in this sense, one could reconcile the left interpretation of Marx with Tocqueville’s, to me, wonderful sense that interest is defined by “all the things that concur in well being”.

In the American system, the white settler self-image was long based on being superior to other races – blacks and indigenous Americans, and later, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. That sense of whiteness was bound up, then, with what Tocqueville calls “consideration”. It was an intricate bind, and persevered after the 1870s, when it should have changed.  It changed enough to eventually assimilate to the vast influx of immigrants in the late 19^th century. But it wasn’t until the Civil Rights era, of course, that the basis of the racist system was attacked.

The upper class in America, which was and is overwhelmingly white. To get a grasp of how the white upper and middle class made its money in a racist system, and how people of color didn’t, there’s a nice article by CityLab here. 

In the Civil Rights era and afterwards, the white upper class did develop its own version of anti-racism. They called it “color blindness.” I won’t go into the critique of color blindness here. I will simply point out that, in the wealthy world, which is full of curated diversity and overwhelming whiteness, color blindness  is the way in which the wealthy have reconciled having such an enlarged measure of well being – so many buckos! – with living in a system that “privileges” them, as they will agree. Privilege is a much pleasanter word than racism, or white supremacy. Profiting off white supremacy seems… ugly. Something we can safely let white blue collar workers do.

This is not to let the peckerwood element off the racist hook. I grew up in working/middle class white Georgia, outside of Atlanta, and I saw and heard enough there to know that Sanders is underestimating how much racism there is among working class whites. At the same time, I’ve seen their kids go to schools that are unimaginable for the upper class set, schools that are sixty percent black, for instance. I’ve seen and heard those kids, and I know that their social lives are full of uncurated diversity.

The direction of the question about economics and racism is, then, wrong. We should be asking about how the colorblind, liberal ethos has substituted for the reality of profiting from the racist economic system. And we should ask about how white supremacy still exists as a major factor in white working class life – and floats especially free for those who have no college education and whose incomes range between  50 thou to 200 thou. This is where Trump and Romney and all the GOP make their votes.  To make anti-racism a factor among those that concur to create well-being is, it seems to me, not a liberal, but a radical goal. 

Don't watch the news

Everybody's got a job to lose

I never watch TV news. We don't have a tv, for one thing, but I don't stream tv news either.

It may be that not watching tv news gives one a different take on politics, beyond ideology. I have my take cause I have certain lefty ideas. But I also have my take because my filter for the news is delayed, and in print.

My impression from everything I have read about the news media is this: that it is dominated by rich white men. They are the decision makers, they edit and report the news, and the picture they make pretty much reflects the world of rich white men. It is also the case that the demographic that goes most strongly for Republicans consists of rich white men.

Perhaps this explains a curious phenomenon among my liberal friends: an exaggerated sense of Trump's political popularity. I ran into this a lot at Christmas dinner this year. Although the last two years have been the worst for the GOP since 2006, the persistant belief is Trump ueber alles.

Obama, it must be said, was terrible for Democrats, and good for himself - thus, during his administration, the Dems lost something like a thousand seats on the state and national level. Trump has had a similar effect on the GOP. When the GOP can't even win the governorships of KY and LA, you know Trump's pull is limited. However, in contrast with Obama, who won quite handily in 2008, Trump won the electoral college by the merest hair in 2016. In the three key states, MI, PA AND WI, he won over HRC by something like 120,000 votes. What that means is that he starts out from an extraordinarily weak position. Still, to credit the big Orange idiot, he also spent half of what HRC spent on the election.

He definitely will outspend the Dems this time. But the configuration is really against him. He hasn't expanded his base. Not an iota. Those who voted for him last time will vote for him this time. If the Dems pursue the illusion they are going to lure Trump voters back, they are going to be in trouble.

But the Dem base is larger. And the potential for getting votes for those who stayed home in 2016 is enormous. Why, then, is this confidence not shared among the Dem elite and my liberal friends?

Frankly, most of my liberal friends are white. And many of them do watch the tv news. Their filter for what is happening is through Trump's most ardent demographic. More, I feel like the division between working class culture and upper middle class culture, which has become enormous under neoliberalism, works to make it the case that few upper class liberals that I know really know any working class people, white or black.

Trump is in it for the excitement. Thus, he allowed Pompeo to put him in an incredibly stupid position. But he also has a very injured sense of being pushed - which is why he got rid of Bolton. I have no idea what will come next, but I am still betting against a war with Iran and that Trump will run within his bubble. I argued against the war with Iran business in 2007, and I still think the argument holds today. Also, I don't think Trump wants to borrow the 400 billion dollars he would need to do this. He wants to run on a great economy.

And racism and misogyny, of course.

In any case, remember: old white guys are grossly overrepresented in the media machine that "reports" on the U.S. Never let that fact fade from your watching life. My two cents for the day.

two chamisso poems

Lucy's the boss

She loomed over my childhood
like a divorcee's vocation:
Lucy says put your hands on your head!

Philistine muse, crabby femme fatale
your schopenhauerian trick with the football
a mean koan.

Later she might have produced a line like:
I am big.
It is the pictures that got small.

Her choric darkness
Snoopy's anarchic daybreak
locked in eternal struggle.

I wrestle with Butler
under the table.
Dog germs! dog germs!

My barbies wait in a box
car crash odalisques
for her summons.

Lucy's the boss! Lucy's the boss!
so when did I stop wearing
my Peanut's gang pyjamas?

Moose agonistes

André Breton and Bullwinkle
set sail on a pea-green sea.
It was all a stunt, set up by a committee
to attract attention to a worthy cause.
Bullwinkle was uncertain. He was into the mob for a certain sum
which is why he took the gig. Usually, he had
a more certain sense of the perimeters,
what was expected of him. The bit with the rabbit
and the hat. The bit with the squirrel.
He and the squirrel hadn’t spoken for years –
it was a legendary quarrel. Supposedly, the squirrel once
even bit Bullwinkle, hard. Credits, money, usual
star vanity bullshit.
Bullwinkle put a poster up
in his dressing room: Beware of rodents!
it said, an X over a squirrel-like silhouette.

Breton, well afterwards everyone said
he’d misread the invitation.
Bullwinkle? he thought it said Bulgakov
an old Troskyist companero from Mexico City.
When the storm struck, the boat in which the camera crew
had set up was parted from
the Bullwinkle boat. The last anybody saw it
was through a fog, a moose silhouette surmounted
by a surrealist, the latter waving his arms.
Rocky, at the memorial service, broke down:
He was my best friend, he wailed.
Was it of the moose he spoke?
- Karen Chamisso

letter to mary shelley

Letter to Mary Shelley

Letters to the dead, or their conversations

No longer thrive among the literati.

We’ve all grown I-bound here, and no other demonstration

Is wanted, but only a sort of lyric potpourri

- which captures our moods and days

And is put quite nicely in quaint sachets.

I’m not complaining – I turn out my quire

And sometime make a little genius patter

Illuminating the soft and hard wires

That make up my neural personal matter

According to all the best popsci bestsellers

Apparently we’re just haunts in genetic cellars.

You were born to the royal anti-royal blood

the little red riding hoods of the revolution

but grew up, Gretel-like, to brood

on the wolf that might solve your family situation.

Then he came, dressed in robes of poesie

- which is how you eloped with the romantic agony.

I should tell you, Mary, we no longer brook

long letters written with that manual drolery

- letters as long as the chapters in your  book

in the tradition of epistolary -

rather we jerk out an email or fifty

under the burden of being short and nifty.

But what is a poet if not an anachronism?

a creature lost among  capitalist feeders

and accused of practicing onanism,

irrelevant,  being at best a loss leader

a prestige item with a hushed voice

on NPR, bloodless and choice. 

In other words, a downer. In other words, a monster.

so you see how much it’s in my line

to stir your shade, to disinter

you from the vaults of the gothic sublime

as you predominate in the culture

that has turned away from the bigwigs of literature.

You’ve had a husband. I’ve had too.

Why do we burn ourselves in the futile quest

to find a mate who is not askew

and will live and love beyond time’s test?

Yours,  his heart consumed in a barbecue

and mine, who I would have liked to have done the same to.

But you are thinking, you woke me up for this?

Couldn’t you bitch to some living friend?

I have other fans, who follow their bliss

by dreaming up quasi-pornographic ends

for me and my creature, a jumble anatomy

all cooked up for fan-fic fuckery.

I dig your objection, or my projection

(shades and shadows, death and the double)

girl – aren’t we the girls who’ve made

our project to cause a lot of trouble

to nitpickers, naggers, and no-nothing butts

who tend to write letters addressed: stupid sluts?

But I have a reason – here we come

Into, technically, the finis of this discourse

this insinuato – for unlike some

I’m keen on rhetorical resource

You, who learned the ancient Latin and Greek

will recognize of what I speak -

Okay, enough, incipit the story:

A friend who is always discovering the bizarre-est

Paris, Fragonard’s ecorchés,

or  sketches by some necrophile symbolist

invited me to the Hôpital St. Louis

where plaster casts from the nineteenth century

are exhibited to the select who ask

for tickets, a dwindling group it seems.

Physicians in training once had the task

of noting horrors that appear as though in dreams

of the worst that can happen to the human skin:

the 19^th century payment for each sin.

The crowding, hovels, debauchery and then some:

Hence the lesion-ridden penis, tumerous nose

adenomas, sarcomas, in a waxy gum

painted then and signed – it’s art I suppose

from which I’m sure that you can learn a bunch

by peering closely – just ask Edvard Munch.

The painter visited here, with some acquaintance

In the 1890s, when  nihilism was the rage

and then painted The Inheritance

where a syphilitic child lies like an open page

on his mother’s lap, diseased to the bone

- it obviously fed Munch’s  misogynistic jones.

The modern Prometheus – we never got it right

did we? In each vitrine a tragedy

 beauty and labeled deformity fight

out the issue of  transcendent agony -

limits imposed by the messes we are

and get into, on this tiny star.

This agony, it isn’t romantic

- these casts do not display the noble body parts

that went into the making of your maniac

a monster science born of the modern arts

mixed with the superstitious  – that was clever!

But these diseases are of another weather.

Frankenstein’s head – via James Whale –

would fit right in here: green skin, thick brow,

forehead scar, the morphine user’s pale

eyelids.

               How

the doctors and the casters would have loved to see

Frankenstein in the clinic for an advisory!

Did you approve from your heavenly perch

The cinematic annexing of your IP?

I’m sure you recognized in the monster’s lurch

through that landscape your demi-divinity

- “so dusk, so obscene and blind”

this untrammeled product of the human mind.  

  

Myself, my head would not fit here

- my fault is beyond this wax, God’s truth -

though I’ve seen diagrams that make clear

that the HOX proteins have failed to induce

the inhibition process that would lend opacity

– undermining the bod’s ombragenous capacity.

Yes, I’m the girl with no shadow. You missed

a subject so subdued to your dyer’s art,

no shadowless girl in some dying fire hissed

its matter into your gothic heart.

A monster me –  and not a faker

writing lit’s greatest monstermaker!

I’ll wrap this up – it has grown quite a size

- just I thought the scene of me here was for you.

I’m sure it has given you a surprise

that out of all of Percy’s crew

You are the studied, the referenced celebrity:

Quite up there with Byron, Keats and Percy.

My friend and I left the hospital grounds

and went for coffee to dissipate

the horrors that made their circus rounds

in my dreams, which I won’t relate:

it’s morning here, time to work, and so

sincerely, Karen Chamisso.