Santa Monica 2012

What’s escape to the mapless girl
Lugging earbait on Wiltshire and Fifth
Jilling the edge of tonight’s magnesium splendor?
Disappear, baby, down the convenient alley
To end up in someone’s car.
All that suck n fuck machinery
-- Set in motion to produce this drop?
… as ratcatchers in prowlers come howling to a stop.

- Karen Chamisso

Rachel Kushner's Mars Room take 2

At the dawn of movie-making, there were no stars. Indeed, as film historian Michael Newton writes, the actors were:

“… puppets, mannequins, and not expected to reveal through their external image a complex inner life. Those early bioscope models were anonymous, subordinate to the piece of film itself; indeed, the earliest films were ‘performed by people who were anything but actors’, sometimes literally just folk picked up in a café.³ Erwin Panofsky remarks that the cast of a prestige 1905 production of Faust are ‘characteristically “unknown”’.

“Even then, however, the camera seems to pick out certain people. Newton cites a short story by Rudyard Kipling, Mrs. Bathurst, in which the narrator sees a film that documents a London crowd crossing a bridge and sees someone he knows, Mrs. Bathurst: ‘There was no mistakin’ the walk in a hundred thousand’ and ‘She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture – like – like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle.’ The film transmits the unique ‘blindish look’ she has, preserving in light that something that was hers, while not being her, merely a trace, both a mere picture and a mock-up of the real thing.”

It is a commonplace to say that Mary Pickford was the first star. Newton accords that honor to a French comedian, Max Lindner. It is clarifying,however, to remember 19^th century  theater and opera, for definitely there were divas and “stars”. By the end of the 18^th century, the great actor or actress had even become respectable. Before the 18^th century, theater was, technically, a demi-monde for the Church – both Catholic and Protestant. In one of those moments in the French Revolution that seem to cast shadows down to us, the Assembly debated making actors and executioners full citizens – and ended up adding Jews to that list. Clement-Tonnerre made the speech introducing the civil rights bill.

“Passing to actors, he demonstrated that, in their regard, the prejudice is established on what they are under the dependence of public opinion. “This dependence makes our glory and it flays them,” he cries. “Honest citizens can represent on the stage the chef-d’oeuvres of the human spirit, works filled with the healthy philosophy that, thus put in a position where every human can appreciate it, has prepared, successfully, the revolution that is now in operation, and you tell them: you are Comediens du Roi, you occupy the national theater, and you are criminal (infame)! The law must not let this crime subsist.”” (from Gaston Maugras’ Les comediens hors la lois).

What was the eeriness of the actor about? I’d suggest that we look at a doctrine made famous by Ernst Kantorowicz’s study, The King’s Two Bodies. The Sovereign was invested with a pollical body as well as one of flesh. Similarly, the actor is both the actor and the “part” – an uncomfortable parody, perhaps, of the miracle of the Eucharist. There was a “star system” in the 19^th century, in which opera and theater were the great popular as well as high cultural arts, but it was metaphysically different from what happened with the movies. Though Rachilde [Proust’s composite portrait of the great diva] played the part of Berenice, people did not go to the theater to see Rachilde, they went to see Rachilde play the part of Berenice.

But in the movies, the character – with the character’s name – is swept up in if not identical to the actor. Even as the actor is more than the part. Jake Geddes is different from Jack Nicholson, but it is forgivable if people substitute Jack Nicholson for Geddes when they talk about the movie. A theater part lives on – Hamlet did not die with Garrick, nor with Olivier – but the movie part is a more ambiguous kind of aesthetic creature.

…

I am pulling all this out to try to explain my impression of the cinematic quality of Rachel Kushner’s novels. We still use the old Greek system for thinking of the novel, with the hero or protagonist and the secondary characters – the rounds and the flats, to use E.M. Forster’s terms. The roundedness is supposed to refer to some psychological completeness, some depth that can be evoked but not, if the round effect works, exhaustively shown. Myself, II think it might be more interesting and capture more of the way we read novels – or the way I read novels, given all the cultural syrop I’ve absorbed through every medium – by referencing the star system. I’ve read many novels with round and flat characters, but the novels that mark me with being of my time, so to speak, have stars. Both Reno in The Flamethrowers and Romy Hall (named for a star, Romy Schneider) in The Mars Room are bit parts, extras, but both are written as stars. The seem at once to be perfectly integrated into their parts and to be playing them – a sovereign shuffle. They are unknown celebrities.

I would like to be able to explain this quality by reducing ii to its devices. 

 ....

In The Man Without Qualities, an important Habsburg official, Count Leinsdorf, is shown in relation to Ulrich, the MWQ himself, and Diotima, his cousin, a socialite who is determined to be a “spiritual” force in Austria by holding a salon in which she mingled noteworthies of various types from finance, art, academia, and politics. Count Leinsdorf is the main attraction in the salon; he goes out of friendship, but, as well, because he thinks of Diotima as holding an “office”:

“Every person,” he would say, “performs an office within the state; the worker, the prince, the artisan, are all civil servants.” This was an emanation of his always and under all circumstances impartial way of thinking, ignorant of bias, and in his eyes even the ladies and gentlemen of the highest society performed a significant if not readily definable office when they chatted with learned experts on the Bogazköy inscriptions or the question of lamellibranchiate mollusks, while eyeing the wives of prominent financiers.”

The duality of the person and the office – which is extended here indefinitely – is structurally like the difference between the actor and the part in a movie, or like the “vehicle” and the gene in neo-Darwinism, or like the King in his body and the King as the body politics in early modern theory. There are enormous variations in the signifying of these dualities. For the novelist, there is always the temptation to make the character stand in for the type – to give the character, as it were, an “office within the state”. This way of reading character is mainstream among critics, I think, who suffer from an obscure embarrassment with regard to stories – it seems that the story can’t justify itself, except with children. The story has to be justified by reference to its “office” in the state – to its illustration of ethico-political principles.

There is that. And there is ordinary life, in which people do indeed take characters as role models, but mainly in terms of excitement: it is some taste of existential excitement that ordinary life craves in music, in movies, in novels, in poems.

Movies, I think, long ago became the central aesthetic object in the West due to the way that the part and the actor seem to merge and separate – the dancer could and could not be told apart from the dance, either on the screen or in “real” life, which unrolled like a movie itself, in celebrity-centered media.

The axis of the Mars Room is just this kind of duality: Romy Hall, as a stripper named “Vanessa”, attracts a mook, a fan, who becomes her stalker: Creepy Kennedy, as Hall thinks of him. How can we tell the stripper from the strip? Creepy Kennedy can’t: he can’t understand his own relationship, as stalker, to “Vanessa”.

Reno – another nickname, or star name – in The Flamethrowers takes a job at a film lab as a “China girl” – that is, she is used, filmed, in order to get the fleshtones right for films in something called a “film leader” – all artefacts of analogue film of the period. She is anonymous, her job consisting of looking as “representative” as possible – which means Caucasian and “comely”, in spite of the name of the “official function”.  

“Most people didn’t know China girls existed. The lab technicians knew. The projectionists knew. They had fovorites, faces of obsession, and evn if I liked the idea of my own fleeting by, I knew the technicians looked at the frames more closely, and I liked that, too. I was and was not posing for them. Pieces of film leader were collected and traded like baseball cards. Marvin and Eric preferred a polished look. “The problem with the girl-next-door thing”, Marvin said, “is that with recent Kodachrome its actually the girl next door. Her name is Lauren and we grew up together in Rochester.” The girls, mostly secretaries in film labs, weren’t exactly pinups, but the plainer-looking China girls were traded just as heavily. The allure was partly about speed: run through a projector they flashed by so fast they had to be instantly reconstructed in the mind. “The thing suppressed as an intrusion,” Eric said, “is almost always worth looking at.” Their ordinariness was part of their appeal: real but unreachable women who left no sense of who they were. No clue but a Kodak color bar, which was no clue at all.”

The China girl is the anti-star, the bit player par excellence; at the same time, the China girl, too, has a double existence – shares, on the most miniscule scale, the division between the actor and the part. This is the abyss – molecular, suppressed – which Kushner finds worth looking at, and elevates into a principle of character construction.

As well, into a principle of form. In the Flamethrowers, the form of the monologue – the characters are always telling stories, giving the novel a sort of “All about Eve” feel, without Eve here having any ambition at all – surrounds the substance, which is about an art scene in which film has a central role. The New York art scene of the 70s. In The Mars Room, while there are many movie references, the whole movie motif is absent. This is an underworld, a dangerous classes, novel, split up between the monologue and the quasi-indirect mode of discourse, which Pasolini hailed as an important resource of film. These characters are just the type who do not “fulfill” a state office, who flee from the office – strippers, drug dealers, chiselers, mooks, dopers, uncared for children, careless parents, growing up in the interstices of society and waiting – not to be discovered by Hollywood, but to be discovered by the Incarceration state, as they inevitably will be. 

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room - take one

Emily Rust, in “Hitting the "Vérité Jackpot": The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence” (Cinema Journal 2011) has remarked that:

“… a number of American films from the late 1960s and early 1970s conspicuously employ freeze-frames in scenes of protracted brutality. The documentary In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, 1968) as well as the fiction films Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970), and The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), in addition to the primary subjects of this essay - Gimme Shelter and Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) - are but a few examples.”

Rust, shrewdly, conjoins violence at the highest levels – John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the prototype – to the popularity of this technique. The assassination films – in particular, the Zapruder tape – have been obsessively scanned and stopped, as though an explanation lurked in the absolute stillness imposed by the freeze frame. A stillness that, in good old high modernist fashion, comments on its own medium – since film is, after all, a sort of mirage, the movement being of the strip of film conveying a sense of the seamless jointing of the object. Zeno’s arrow at the boxoffice.

Rust’s makes a useful historical comparison, leaving adrift, however, the question of why violence and the freeze frame waited for the 60s:  “Like the slow motion and superimposition of experimental works of the 1920s, the early use of freeze-frames signaled the transformative power of cinematic vision, which promised to unveil alternatives to conventional perception and experience. Freeze-frames from the late 1960s and early 1970s share this revelatory spirit, but the relationship between photography and cinema that they mobilize also reflects and reaffirms the quest for authenticity that animates the period's preoccupations with ecstatic practices and violence.”

Left out of Rust’s catalogue of freeze frames in narrative film is Truffaut’s famous ending of The 400 Blows. In Truffault’s film the interest is less forensic than narrative – or, to make a distinction that is less confusing, the position of the freeze frame at the end of Truffaut’s film gives it a narrative weight that is absent from a freeze frame that allows us to gaze, say, at Kennedy’s head being blown apart. The motive force that drives the movie resolves itself here by – not resolving itself. The arrow stops, to reflect on the impossibility of its stopping.

All of this freeze frame rap has to do with something that isn’t a film: it is Rachel Kushner’s Mars Room, which I recently finished and am thinking about. As in The Flamethrowers, Kushner’s book ends with a woman going into the mountains and coming to some kind of endpoint to a theme in her life – to, in a sense, her narrative position in the story. All the references I’m making to 60s and 70s films are relevant to Kushner’s practice – her novels are startlingly cinematic, not in the sense that one feels that they are simply props for a future screenplay – which is what most action novels aspire to (I should say used to aspire to – now they aspire to being video games), but in the sense that they are thought through in a cinematic way. Just as the freeze frame in the sixties and seventies films so often meant: there’s nowhere else to go in this society – so, too, the ”freeze frame” that ends The Mars Room means: stories like these have an energy that finds no outlet – just as people like these have an energy that finds no outlet. Spinoza, somewhere, says that if a thrown stone could think, it would think, I'm doing this of my own free will. Imagine that stone having doubts. The story of Romy Hall, the main character in The Mars Room, is a correlative to the society of deaths of despair, which is the epidemic that was occurring, in the States, before our current epidemic.

I’m gonna continue this on another post.

Buddha's parable of the burning house - Brecht

This is a  good time to read Brecht. Here’s a translation of my own of Brecht’s Buddha’s parable of the burning house - Def plaguetime reading

Gotama, the Buddha, taught

the doctrine of the wheel of lust, on which we are broken

and advised the undoing of desire

and going wishless into Nothing, which he called Nirvana.

One day a pupil asked him,

What is this Nothing, Master? We all wish

To

throw off all desire, as  you advice, but tell us

If this Nothing in which we will enter

Is something like being one with all creation when one lies in water, floating, in the afternoon,

Almost without thought, at ease in the water, or like

Falling asleep, hardly knowing one has

Tossed away the blanket, quickly sinking –

Whether this nothing is joyful, a good nothing,

Or whether this nothing of yours is only simply nothing,

cold, empty and meaningless.

The Buddha was silent  for a long while then he said

There is no answer to your question.

But

towards evening when that crowd all went away

The Buddha sat under the fig tree and told the others

Who had not asked a question the following parable:

Recently, I saw a house burning. The flames licked the roof.

I saw

that there were people still inside it.  I stood at the door

And

called them, that it would be best to act quickly and get out because

There was a fire under the roof.  But the people seemed to be in no hurry.

One asked me, while the heat was already singeing his eyebrows,

What

it was like outside, for instance, was it raining or windy?

Was there some other house to go to?

Without answering, I went away.

These, I thought, have to burn before they stop asking questions.

In truth, my friends, to those whom the floor is not so hot

That they would rather exchange it for any other than remain there, to those

I have nothing to say.  

Thus spake Gotama the Buddha.

However, even we ourselves, who are

Not concerned with the art of enduring all things,

But are concerned with the art of not-enduring them

Of offering all kinds of earthly suggestions and teaching people

To

cast off human pain -we too think that

In the face of those who, seeing the bomber squads flying over the capital cities

Are still asking questions like, what do you think, and how are you conceiving this

And what will become of their savings accounts and best clothes

If everything is thrown upside down

We have nothing to say.

Pictures, trophies, America by Karen Chamisso

Description won’t save you Marianne

Playing possum in a still life

“in tolerably good light” drawing what I can

every Popeye with an Olive Oyl wife

is the dollhouse dream. I dream it too

though my skin and bones were built on killing

not on visits to the zoo

or Audubon’s bird book whilst I’m chilling

out in bed after seeing the doctor.

Audubon hired a boy to search out nests and

 “assist in skinning birds” – wh/ wouldn’t have shocked her

haunter of antique shops and

flea markets and amateur of all the freaks

 – I recognize myself, a skinned thing

as freak as any carved out of teak

trailing a disease from my wings

or: “a small spotted bird, standing a little pigeon-toed

with a waiting expression…”

Waking, I find the taxidermist has sewed

my mouth shut, like the last passenger pigeon.

Poems in Prose: what are they?

In times of crisis... as stocks of toilet paper get low... as one realizes that one is in the higher danger age set... one thinks: have I really made my views on prose poetry clear? Which is why I've been writing this, first of two parts.

What is prose poetry? Part 1

Definitions, like stories and songs and jokes and explanations, do play a role in ordinary life. Usually, however, their role is to be enlisted in argument – not argument as per the ideal case of philosophy, where a case is presented for a certain thesis against other theses, but argument as in emotionally fraught disagreement between two or more people. Philosophy and ordinary life overlap: there is always a bit of a case being made in ordinary life, and there is always a bit of an accusatory edge in the philosophic use of definition. Gorgias, that wonderful dialogue, makes this overlap emerge. Out of the pocket of Gorgias, I’d like to say, came the entire existential novel.

But I digress. Say I am asked to define the spoon, fork and knife that I see before me at the table. I’d say something like the spoon is a handle with a scoop at the end, the fork a handle with tines at the end, and the knife a handle with blades at the end – in other words, all are elaborations on the handle. This being ordinary life, I’d probably add what they are used for, even though I’d recognize that you can eat peas with a fork as well as a spoon, and that you can stir sugar in your coffee with a knife blade as well as a scoop, etc. The particular use of spoon, fork and knife have to do, eventually, with their design genealogy: definition at this point spreads out and becomes a portrait, a “biography”.

These might seem like miserly concerns: we all know what a spoon, a knife, and a fork are! Yet in the law definition often becomes a tricky way of gaining advantages one way or another. Take the definition of a truck. We have an idea of what a truck is, as opposed to a car. Yet “we” are not automobile manufacturer lobbyists and executives. This is from the Wikipedia entry on sports utility vehicles:

“In the United States, many government regulations simply have categories for "off-highway vehicles" which are loosely defined and often result in SUVs (along with pick-up trucks and minivans) being classified as light trucks.[3][16] For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations previously included "permit greater cargo-carrying capacity than passenger carrying volume" in the definition for trucks, resulting in SUVs being classified as light trucks.[17]
This classification as trucks allowed SUVs to be regulated less strictly than passenger cars under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act for fuel economy, and the Clean Air Act for emissions.[18] However, from 2004 onwards, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to hold sport utility vehicles to the same tailpipe emissions standards as cars.[19] In 2011 the CAFE regulations were changed to classify small, two-wheel drive SUVs as passenger cars.[20]
However the licensing and traffic enforcement regulations in the United States vary from state to state, and an SUV may be classified as a car in some states but as a truck in others.[21] For industry production statistics, SUVs are counted in the light truck product segment.”

So I hope we can all see, before we get into our SUVs tonight, that definition is more than “mere semantics”. No, definition is part of human life itself. Semantics can be denigrated as you like, its mereness a kind of excommunication from seriousness, but it returns again because – well, I have to use words when I speak to you. And so the definition figures in that image and product of human life itself, literature.

Take this, from Notes from the Underground, which is in the direct line of descent, I’d like to claim, from the Gorgias. Here the Underground man confronts the abstract notion that runs through our ordinary lives, our governance, our place on the planet, our relation to the cosmos: advantage.

“Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of man consists? And what if it so happens that a man's advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think--are there such cases? You laugh; laugh away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man's advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have not been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace--and so on, and so on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine, too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he? But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon up human advantages invariably leave out one?”

The underground man is right to think that definitions often fall into a listing of properties – we even think of definitions, vaguely, as inhabiting that great list, that cultural monument, the dictionary. And he is also right that as we plunge into definitions we come to strange contradictions. As for instance: the prose poem.

Ah, the prose poem, that puzzling platypus of a thing. While Baudelaire was not the first person to write one, I believe that – give or take Gaspard le nuit – he was the first person to write a collection of them, Spleen de Paris (1869). It is a collection that he fronted with a letter to his publisher, where he wrote perhaps the most famous definition, of a sort, of the prose poem:

"Who among us has not, in his days of ambition, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough, bumpy enough that it adapts itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of daydreaming and the summersaults of consciousness?

It is chiefly of the frequenting of enormous cities, the crossing of the innumerable relations that this obsessive ideal is born. You yourself, my friend: haven’t you ever want to translate into song the strident cry of the vitrier, to express in lyric prose all the desolating suggestions that this cry sends up just to the rooftops, high above the level of the street fog? "

In the Petit Parisien of October 29, 1897, a “Jean Frollo” – pseudonym of some of the writers of the paper – wrote an article on street cries that traces them from the thirteenth century to the late 19th through mention in various broadsheets and poems, as well as books of drawings. He reproduces some of the cries – the vender of almonds, the huckster of a bathhouse, etc – and tells this anecdote about two glaziers – vitrier:

On this topic, you know the story about the two vitriers. One, possesses a sonorous organ, threw out his vibrating cry: ohe! Vitriiii!... while the otyher, who followed 15 paces behind him, timidly, profited from the lungs of his comrade by merely saying, softly: me too!”

Baudelaire, one notices, does not give a definition of the prose poem but, rather, gives us a certain atmosphere in which to accept the prose poem – to justify it. That justification is linked to doing it: Baudelaire asks his publisher if he has not himself dreamt of something like a prose poem, had it evoked or provoked in him by the chances of the day, street encounters, the sound of merchant cries, the huckster’s shuffle. The prose poem such as Baudelaire wrote em becomes central to French poetry: Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Max Jacob, Michaux, Ponge, Char, Jacottett, Jabes, all worked in the veins of the prose poem, some exclusively. At the same time as the verse poem disappears from newspapers and magazines, a sort of observing essay, the chronicle, appears there, with features that are indistinguishable from the prose poem. All of which tends to frustrate the searcher for definitions, for the hard and fast, for the base of the argument, the principle of the accusation or the defense.

TBC

Depoliticizing Trump

It is difficult to wipe away our images of things and see the things themselves. Take Trump.

If America was simply a white nation, Trump would have an approval rating in the high fifties. This has an effect on how Trump, whose approval rating has never broken fifty percent and is usually around 45, is seen in the press, which is dominated by white people. And it has an effect on the rump group of whites who are very anti-Trump.
One has to pull back and understand how segregated America is, both by race and income. Take the latter. The collapse of African-American wealth – and to a lesser extent, Latinx wealth – is one of the great stories of our time. And it is pretty uniformly not known to white America.

A 2018 survey found that whites severely underestimate the racial wealth gap. They think that black wealth is about 80% that of whites. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that black wealth is about 7% that of whites.
In 2014, the median net worth of non-Hispanic white households was $130,800. The median net worth of black households was $9,590. It was $17,530 for Hispanic households. Native American wealth has not even been measured since 2000. At that time, their median household net worth was just $5,700.
In seeming contrast, Asian American households have more wealth than white households. But that apparent success story hides a wealth gap within the minority. The richest Asian Americans held 168 times more wealth than the poorest Asian Americans. It’s a greater disparity that white households, where the richest 10% owned 121 times more than the poorest 10%.
The gap is worsening. Between 1983 and 2013, white households saw their wealth increased by 14%. But during the same period, black household wealth declined 75%. Median Hispanic household wealth declined 50%.”

One has to begin here. Segregation in the neoliberal era is performed by the market as much as by redlining banks. It is a world that thrusts together people who share an income band. The forty some percent of white Americans who disapprove of Trump live, for the most part, in a world where that is a minority opinion. In that world, it seems like Trump is a much more powerful figure than he is. You can always place an oped piece in the NYT lamenting that one’s parents now watch Fox and support Trump. These stories are almost always written by white people. It is the rare African-American who has to contend with his or her parents supporting Trump. Outside the Hispanic communities in Southern Florida, it is a rare Latinx writer whose parents are afflicted with the Trump cult mentality.

The racial and economic segregation has an enormous effect on the way politics is reported – how the narrative is woven – in the U.S. In certain subgroups – for instance, in academia – there is a curated diversity that serves, to an extent, to create an image of an America that doesn’t exist – rather like the placement of token African-American actors in Little Women to create an illusion that this isn’t all just about white settler descendants.

The diversity mirage is not an entirely bad thing. There is something utopian about it, something that speaks to how things could be. But it has the pernicious effect of marking itself as real, instead of utopian. In that falsely real world, white pundits can confidently pronounce about the black community as though they know all about it. These pundits rarely pronounce about the Latinx community because they ignore it almost entirely. One thing we do know for sure: when these people go home from work, they do not go home to the houses owned by those with a lifetime accumulation of 9,500 dollars to retire on. They go home to their stocks, bonds, and health insurance. They go home to the residential asset that they will someday sell for half a million to a million.

One of the effects of this segregation is that the hatred of Trump is oddly not political. It is a hatred of Trump’s tweets. It is a hatred of Trump as the tool of Putin, which is simply absurd. In that hatred, everything is about defeating Trump, and little is about the future of the country and how to change it. Frankly, from the viewpoint of those sitting in the over 100 thou range, why change? Meanwhile, the income band of all ethnicities below the 100 thousand range are facing changes that will all go against them. In the neoliberal era of nudgery, the government “helping” lower income people – say with the EIC, an idea that comes out of Milton Friedman – is immediately followed by the government hassling lower income people, as the IRS devotes more resources to auditing the janitor who claimed EIC than the CEO whose tax deferred compensation in ten millions of stock is going to be taxed, if at all, at a laughably low rate by an IRS that has radically retreated from auditing the wealthy.

Once one has a real grasp of how desperate things are for the majority of Americans, and how non-desperate things are for a large minority, the weird de-politicizing of the political starts to make sense. I have read many pro-Hilary Clinton pieces, since her documentary came out, that woozily include laments for Elizabeth Warren, as though the real importance of Warren was being a woman just like Clinton. In a trice, identity here simply erases Warren as a political person, who ran on a raft of proposals that HRC has mocked and derided since she was first elected to the Senate in 2000 up through her post-presidential race career. Warren presented a serious and thorough critique of Bill Clinton’s political economy, up to reversing all the “reforms” Clinton signed off on in 1999-2000. And she proposed a billionaire tax that is anathema to Clinton and her allies. Elizabeth Warren proposed eliminating student debt on her first day in office as president. Yet from the viewpoint of the +100 thousand dollar seats, all that one can see is: Elizabeth Warren is a woman, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Voila.

This de-politicizing move is masked by being ostensibly all about politics, just as Hollywood diversity is ostensibly about reality. But it isn’t.