The easy re-election that wasn't: Trump in the chute

One of the odder things about American politics this year is the missed opportunity: Trump could be cruising to an easy re-election if he had operated early and not acted crazy. I mean, this is not really an ideological issue. When Richard Nixon upset conservatives by, say, going to China, or installing price controls, he did so because he knew he could steamroller the right and extend his power. Trump resembles Nixon in his attitudes, but he is a very limited man, basically a stupid man, and so doesn't have Nixon's artfulness.

If you look at how the governor's have dealt with the plague, the striking thing is that certain Democratic governors, like Cuomo, were criminally late to do anything, whereas certain Republican governors, like the one in Maryland and whatshisname in Ohio, were on the spot, as much as they could be. In other words, the choice of shutting everything down everything early, masking, social distancing, etc. could easily have been taken by Trump without contradicting anything in his politics. But, like other Western leaders - Macron, Gonzalez, [Oops - kind reader in comments corrects me - Sanchez. Gonzalez was prime minister ages ago!] Johnson, etc., - he did nothing because for him, Asia is way over there and how about that there swine flu scare in the seventies? Rightwing governments like Hungary and Slovakia did the lockdown and tailored it into their racist ideologies - but having made his initial, disastrous mistake, Trump did not know how to tack. He did not see that his Dem opponents, having been mostly as ignorant and arrogant, gave him a great opening. So he went down the chute, from pointless hectoring press conferences to lies about chlorox and hydroxychloroquine.

Now, 96,000 deaths and counting later, he has waded too thick in blood to turn back.

Plutocrat's ball - you just live here

In shock discovery, the NYT has peeped behind its daily explainer about the stock market (it is going up because of, uh, reported vaccines! it is going up because oil prices are sorta going up or maybe not!) and gingerly touched on the fact that the Government has basically become the market maker of first resort. Astonishing. Who would think that a plutocracy would evolve so that the state became a guarantor for the wealthiest 10 percent! I'm just flummoxed.

"While the Fed says it does not seek to keep stock prices up, the market has rebounded some 30 percent since the institution began its giant program to pump trillions of dollars into financial markets. It has bought billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasury bonds and government-insured mortgage bonds, keeping the prices of those bonds up and pushing yields, which move in the opposite direction, down.

The Fed also announced recently that it would start to buy exchange-traded funds that hold a diversified portfolio representing large parts of the more than $9 trillion corporate bond market and would move on to buying corporate bonds directly “in the near future.” Since such bonds serve as the basis for new borrowings, this lowers the cost of raising money for corporations tapping the bond markets."

Jotted on a wet napkin

I had a lotta skin in the game of skin.

Being all bone I sat alone.

The night wanted to wrap itself around me tight

maybe choke me like an illmet date, late.

I drew the skin of my teeth too 

From the deck full of Ensor grins.

What are we playing for I asked skin at the door.

Cruelty, adultery, usual stakes

Sez Skin, hurry and draw it will soon be dawn.

- Karen Chamisso

notes of a useful idiot

In the Futurist Manifesto, A slap in the face of public taste, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Burlyuk and Kruchenykh defended these theses concerning the rights of poets:

1 -  To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words.

2-    To feel insuperable hatred for the language that existed before them.

3.      To tear with horror from our proud foreheads the wreath of cheap fame which you have made from bathhouse switches.

4.      To stand on the rock of the word “we” amid the sea of catcalls and outrage.

I at first glance, I am not sure about one, believe strongly that 2 is insane, agree with three, and certainly understand and sympathize with 4. Celebrity now is woven of other materials and immaterials – a Youtube channel, an invite to the Miami Basel Plutocrats of Art fair, etc. And alas, the “we” of  a movement of any kind, determined to undo the long bondage of poetry to banality, has disappeared into a blurbish train of watered CVs and the insuperable tones of the NPR poetry reader- a voice that is like a bullet directed at the heart of poetry itself. I’d like to think the bullet won’t work, and that poetry has the vampirish quality of coming alive in every coffin it is buried in when the moon is right.  You can put it down, but it will be back, swinging an axe and breaking in your door.

One, though: I like the spirit of it. I wonder if this is how Twitter, Tik Tok, blogs and the infinite cesspool of comments on Internet is all, somehow, quicksilver to me. The slang, the acronyms, the rapid erasures of jargon and slogan, I am in love with them beyond any ideological position. I’m pretty sure there are no arbitrary words – I’m too Freudian for that. But there are emergents all the time. I often find myself banging out words that do not exist in a dictionary, but should.

So: I’m no retro-futurist, but I am a useful idiot. That counts for something.  

time of our time: Virilio and the Lockdown

In one of his apocalyptic essays, “Une anthropologie du presentiment”, Paul Virilio (a writer whose lightning stroke provocations are bodyguarded by a certain dark mumbo-jumbo, a logic of the worst case scenario, like a man who had been up all night reading, alternatively, Michel Foucault and St. John of Patmos) quotes a line of Octavio Paz:

 “the instant is an uninhabitable as the future”. 

For Virilio, we have been forced to inhabit that inhabitability – this is the crazy-making effect of the acceleration and massive accumulative power of our system of telecommunications:

“In fact, can we still speak of a contemporary world? Shouldn’t we, rather, speak of the anthropology of a world that is not “intemporal”, but in-temporary, intemporal, if this is even possible? Is an anthropology of the instance conceivable, and can it be llogical without denying, in the same gesture, its fully historical dimension?”

If there ever was a time that a certain apocalyptic strain in French philosophy seems to have found the object it was looking for, it is this plague pause, this breaking apart of the con-temporary, this pandemic that came to us on the wings of globalization. Acceleration, the rat race, the routine of tasks that must be done, has suddenly come to a screeching halt, or perhaps a non-screeching one, as the great metropoles suddenly went quiet. And now, just as suddenly, the halt is lifting. What have we seen in this desert of the real, o Lord? A reed shaken in the wind?

Myself, I am fortunately a family man. Inhabiting an apartment in the Marais, of all places (such is the vagary of my never very consistent life, a three Stooge’s adventure), and looking out at a world of close calls without any one of those calls landing too close – though my hypochondria is always on low in the background – I have an odd sense that, for all the irreality that has rushed in on every front, this pandemic is somehow normal, somehow expected.  

I ventured out on un-lockdown weekend a couple of times, and took a gander at the neighborhood streets. I stood outside in line (so called – the French still, charmingly, object to the American submission to the “line” as a linear thing, preferring to cluster about) outside a bagel shop. I walked the boundaries. I saw many masked people, but this was no Mardi Gras – there were many, many unmasked, as pretty as you please, standing or sitting less than a good sneeze’s distance one from the other. Were these people crazy? Or was I?

A little of both, perhaps. I will get real here: it warmed my heart to see Paris limping back to life. I miss the cafes, the uber-expensive dress shops, the galleries, the life, by God, that flows over the streets every day. Yet I am all informed, too, about second waves, about the way the Spanish Influenza’s second coming, when it got serious, killed ten times more people than its rehearsal wave.

What is time? What is our time? What is personal time? Questions that have lept out of philosophy class and into our laps, be we working class or bougie, this Corona-period. Let’s end on the gothic observation of Virilio, who might be right:

“Duration (durée), all true duration, may have become by the fact of the acceleration of realism an everyday illusion, an absence of duration or more exactly, the duration of the absence which no longer allows us to grasp what is there, no those things that are still there to the advantage of the intempestive characer of what happens ex abrupto, of the Accident that from now on out replaces all events.”

Virilio wrote this at the beginning of the great economic crack-up of 2008. Seems less heated now – seems like pretty much a standard description of the impression we all have of our “time”. Put the 666 on my forehead and test and trace: I'm in!

War and Taxes: Marx plus Pynchon

Marx, in the Grundrisse, makes an interesting remark about war:

War was developmentally prior to peace. The way, through war and armies, etc., certain economic relationships, such as wage labor, machinery etc. are developed earlier than in bourgeois society, Even the relationships of productivity and commerce are particularly visible in the army.

Still, Marx clung to the bourgeois imagining of war as something that is not itself a system: “War is self evidently to be understood as though it were immediately economically the same as though the nation through a part of its capital into the water.”

In other words, Marx ultimately sees war as non-productive – even as he sees that it can be developmentally prior to peace. In his list of war’s innovations, one notices that he does not include credit and taxation. As is well known, Marx did not have a developed sense of credit, which he saw as parasitic on productivity. It is, and it isn’t. A parasitic relationship is not necessarily a subordinate one, after all.

Thomas Pynchon, in the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, has a more acute sense of war as a system. He doesn’t, of course, develop this sense as a “theory”, but it becomes a strong narrative thread in Slothrop’s peregrination through war ravaged Europe.

What was happening on the American home front in World War II has been seen through many lenses: the greatest generation unity of the country, the enormous burst in productivity, the end of the Depression. But the lens that might be most interesting to us right now is that WWII marked a decisive change in the tax structure, which has had an enormous bearing on the peculiar American structure of class feelings – that lack of solidarity and identity of the working class that has determined our politics.

In part, this is simply racism. In as much as the upper class in America has been and continues to be overwhelmingly white, the sentimental outbursts of racism are rarer there. This is why the press, when it looks around for racists, finds plenty wearing baseball caps and having trouble with spelling – and doesn’t look to the almost all white system of prep schools, the Ivy leagues, the boards of corporations, etc.

However, there are other roots of labor’s odd affection for its exploiters.

Which gets us to war and taxes. In WWI, Wilson’s government had a newly established tax system – the internal revenue. Internal revenue was designed as a class tax. Before you had to file a return, you had to make a certain amount of money, far above the average salary. In World War I, this changed – those families with incomes above 2,000 per year, for the first time, had to pay a tax. However, that only added about 3 million to the tax rolls – and eventually that figure rose to 6 million. The government really relied on its hikes on corporations and wealthy individuals. From 13 percent, the tax rate for those making above 2 million rose to 67 percent. Since the major source of federal income before that – the tariff – was, so to speak, in suspension, corporate taxes – billed as taxes on ‘excess war profits” – and borrowing made up the rest of the war expenditure.

The borrowing prevented the Republicans who came in after the war from immediately undoing the taxes on the wealthy.  Mellon, perhaps the most powerful Treasury secretary the U.S. ever had, didn’t really want to abolish the income tax, as the radicals in the Republican party did, and replace it with a sales tax. Rather, he saw the advantages of this kind of revenue, and the advantages that came with tax loopholes – a tool used ever since to nourish one or another wealthy interest.

It was WWII that marked the true transition in the tax regime, however. The income tax remained a “class tax” up to the 40s. The masses didn’t generally pay any income taxes. As Sarah Kreps points out in Taxing War, “At the beginning of World War II, for example, only 3.9 million Americans were paying taxes, compared to 43 million by the end of the war. Income generated through taxes had gone from $2.2 billion in 1939 to $35.1 billion by 1945.² The fiscal sacrifice was enormous, and despite these demands for revenue, public support remained high throughout the war—as did the belief that the system of taxation was appropriate, with individuals stating overwhelmingly that their tax levels were fair.”

In the sixties, leftist critics of the New Deal attacked it as a means to preserve an inherently unequal socio-economic capitalist system. Since the Reagan years, though, the critique has generally vanished. It is now viewed as a gold standard even by lefties. Yet the sixties critics were accurate: the creation of the mass tax turned out to be a great class dissolvent. Both the wealthy and the worker were paying taxes, and sooner or later the wealthy would figure out that a tool had been given to them: that the cry of being taxed too much would echo among the mass of taxpayers, who indeed, one could argue, were being taxed too much, especially in relation to the services provided for them by the government – which, at the same time, were being chipped away by political groups generally working in the service of capital.

Kreps points out that American wars – and pick the year for the last sixty to one hundred years when America wasn’t waging war – used to fall within the liberal framework that claimed that wars were a sacrifice – much like Marx speaking of the nation “throwing” its capital into the water. However, it is not clear that this has ever been so. There is a school – which again was stronger in the sixties – that pointed out the predatory nature of America’s wars. These wars, in short, created the vast geopolitical entity of the United States, with all the resources that went with it. One could say, as well, that the wars undertaken or supported by America since and including World War II have created a world-system on American terms that has been enormously profitable for the American economy. In fact, this perception has long been abroad in American culture: under the official rhetoric about the “sacrifice” of war, there is another that sees war as a solution to economic problems: what we need is a war.

Kreps is right, I think, to see the shift in the way America does war as a symptom of the decline of democracy as an ethos and ideal in the American republic. Not only has conscription gone, allowing American leaders to use their volunteer troops as monarchs used theirs, without fearing any radical public complaint, but the wars are also put on the ticket – taxes are not raised, but even lowered as wars are fought and the war industry grotesquely inflated. Krebs view of democracy is that it requires a certain Pavlovian mechanism – the administration of pain by the governing class should create a response by the governed class. When the pain is anaesthetized, the governing class has a non-democratic leeway, and the governed class feels cheated and baffled.

The governed class is just Slopthrop magnified. Something terrible happened to the child, and the man feels a strange hardon whenever his ESP picks up the presence, or the future presence, of a missile. Pynchon plus Marx: our guide to the present disorder.

x men and america

So I saw an X man movie with Adam. X men: the something something something. It is the one where some group finds a “cure” for the mutants. And Dr. Nematode (I know, not his real name. I joke!) leads a mutant revolt against these here States. Meanwhile, the core of the plot is classic: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy kills girl for her own good. Myth, quoi! Wolverine falls for Rebecca, who conceals two souls within her breast, one of whom is some monster who not only wants to fuck – thus seducing Wolverine – but also doesn’t respect anything. For instance, she psychokinetically destroys a house that, from the look of it, would easily go for 2 million in the hot L.A. real estate market. And incidentally kills kindly Captain Picard, who in this movie is Doctor something or other, the Gandhi of the mutants. Then this Rebecca chick teams up with Captain Nematode and they attack Big Pharma island, costing beaucoup in FX, and then she gets mad, her monster is unleashed, she atomizes a whole army, and Wolverine has to use all his strength to approach her for one more kiss and then stabs her to death in the stomach. Happy ending!

Like most high concept (that is, brilliantly dumb) super hero flicks, the allegory of a “cure” for mutants is meant as clickbait for film critics, i.e. anyone with a Twitter account. Thus, instead of discussing bang bang, which, though fun to watch, is not the kind of thing that sustains controversy, one can discuss, say, the “cure” for same sex desire, or whatever. However, the allegory is pretty clumsy in this one. The premise is that mutants are civil beings, i.e. they have rights. But since the mutants kill each other and wreck property with abandon, and yet seem to face no handcuffs, lawyers, or trials, they are really being treated as political subjects and superheros. Of course, this in a way is more realistic to the way things are in the states, where the superhero class – the upper five percent – has to do something extremely nasty to even get to the arrest stage, and, like Jeffrey Epstein, are jailed, if at all, under remarkably mild conditions. Meanwhile, justice for the peon class in America goes like this: arrest, guilty plea, punishment. Something like 95 percent of the arrested don’t face any goddamn trial in the normal sense – that is, where there’s a fucking jury. That would completely overwhelm the system. In the land of the free, we’ve overcome this problem through the clever use of incentives: those who dare to ask for a trial will be found guilty anyway, but their sentence will punish them for having the audacity to ask for a trial. A perfect system! It gets rid of the whole “trial” ethos at one swoop, so we can jail our less successful contingent without spending an inordinate amount of time handwringing about it.

However, Hollywood and tv still love the trial, because the trial is drama. And so over the practical everyday authoritarianism of American life (worse, of course, on every level if you are an African-American) they have woven a pleasant picture of the law working like it did in the wet dream of the writers of the Constitution (giving a bit too much credit here to the writers of the Constitution, but work with me here).

Occasionally, reality gives fantasy a break and you have something like the Weinstein trial, where a 1 percenter, after a mere thirty year streak of rape, is actually sentenced to prison. Building on this thin wedge, I think the superhero paradigm should try out the trial. Wolverine, for instance – what if the cops actually took him in for murdering Rebecca (or whatever her name was). This would be an excellent high concept premise! You’d get two myths (the myth of justice in America and the classical myth that you gotta kill the chick you love if she’s such a slut that she fucks you) for the price of one.
Marvel universemakers, DC universemakers – try this out!