What just happened? I mean, before what just happened happened

Among the best responses to the election as far as I am concerned, the small post by Anna Kornbluh on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/annakornbluh - seemed to be the most sensible, contextualizing the Shithead's election in the context of global inflation and the neolib globalized fallout. Inspired, I wrote out something that makes sense, to me, of this election and its air of farce. Inflation has to be an important factor in the story. But I think there's another part, which begins with COVID, and it is this:

The Covid interval passed like a long nightmare, but strange and miraculous things happened in that nightmare. Among them was the U.S. response, under Trump. For fifty years we have been told that the welfare state is evil morally and economically disastrous. And then, in the space of two months, prodded by the Dems in congress and his treasury, the U.S. expanded its welfare state on a scale and at a speed it had never done before. It was like three great societies all crammed together. I can never get over marvelling at it: the charts are here:

https://www.nytimes.com/.../pandemic-safety-net-medicaid...

Besides which, Trump also signed off on a vacinne project that was, to my mind, as impressive as the Manhattan project.

Given these pluses, Trump should easily have been re-elected in 2020. But here's another kicker, a dialectical joke in the jokefest: Trump ran against his own record. He ran against the vaccine. He ran for school openings and said nothing about the numerous ways in which money flooded in to help working parents. A clever politician, a Richard Nixon, who also shredded GOP verities when it served his interest, woulda done it. But Trump is an entertainer. I don't think he even now knows what he did, titularly. In any case, as Covid closed, so too did the welfare state. Without discussion. In the course of twelve years, we have seen the system totally collapse - in 2008 and 2020 - and the state, which every book says is now on the wane, cause we got us these multinationals and financial capital and everything, the fading state - well, it just opens up shop, pays for everything, and people watch it in awe until the show is over and the bigwigs forget, or keep trying to make us forget. So Trump won his second term because of the things he did in his first term that he still doesn't know he did. I love the vaudeville act of history. Except when it stomps on my face.

On the social utility of fat cats

Since we have just decided to make our unofficial plutocracy official, I thought this essay I wrote in 2019 might be useful.

We need to discuss the social function of rich people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, I see two functions: administration and investment.

The social cost of administration has gone up considerably since corporations changed their nature, breaking the old postwar pact between capital and labor. Here, I am going to put to one side the growth of LBOs and private equity firms that developed new forms of looting corporations in the eighties in order to concentrate on the radical elevation in compensation for the highest levels of management. This took off in the 80s. The explanation for this, from the point of view of intellectual history, is that neoclassical economists provided a model that justified it. Then, as an instititutional addendum, business schools saw in this issue a chance to create an alliance with a trend in corporations that would pay great benefits: expanding its presence both on the campus and in the world of business. Harvard Business school in particular boasted a team of scholars who cheered on the insane compensations of the new class of CEO with arguments having to do with “aligning” the interests of the organization and the management: the famous principle-agent problem, the solution to which was to massively bribe the leader. The rationale for this was paper thin – one had only to compare the compensation for Japanese upper management in the seventies to Americans in the eighties to see that corporate productivity and return on investment did not depend on giving the CEOs carte blanche and stock options.

One must keep in mind, from a political point of view, that the lowering of the marginal tax rate as a result of bills passed in Reagan’s first two years in office was the necessary but not sufficient condition for the subsequent explosion in upper management compensation. The gesture normalized the transgression of the post war pact, which saw the worker in some relation to management. It gave boards of directors a material reason for allowing and even encouraging a practice that, at one time, would have looked like gouging or an exercise in contempt for the stakeholders in the firm. The normalization worked: in the nineties, Clinton Dems showed no inclination to take the punchbowl away from this party, thus cementing the new norm. Rich upper management types – donors! – were now consulted as oracles instead of targeted as moneybags. This, crucially, paid extra dividends once one was out of office. The shadow side of neo-liberalism was the creation of a whole new strata of well paid consultants, lobbyists, and general wheeler dealers. If corporation X could not bribe Senator Y, Senator Y’s children or spouse could perhaps be hired at excellent salaries to lobby, or perhaps to think hard at think tanks, which like business schools experienced a true boom in the eighties. These think tanks were being bankrolled by wealthy philanthropists, who, in time honored fashion, used this instrument to avoid taxes and exert power. As the CEO class became more and more entitled, there was considerable trickle down to the political class, which became abettors and scroungers at the till. Similarly, the CEO model spread to non-profits. College presidents and museum heads were soon being paid astonishing sums to do what previous college presidents and museum heads had done for considerably less. There was no visible increase in the quality of colleges or museums, but this didn’t matter: that standard was obsolete at this point.

Thomas Picketty, who studied changes in the source of wealth along with Emmanuel Saenz, targets the income derived from administration as as a major driver of income and wealth inequality in his book Capital. For a quick rundown of this, I’d recommend Mike Konczal’s excellent essay in the Boston Review in 2014.

Even so, if the exorbitant sums paid to administrators had resulted in a great increase in the pay to the median worker, it might be said that, on some level, it works. But this hasn’t happened. The very wealthy have seen their income growing by about 6 percent per year since the seventies – in fact, the starting point seems to be 1973. The middle has grown, if at all – it flatlined during most of the 00s – by one percent per year. The workers who comprise the lower eighty percent have seen their wealth, in Piketty’s phrase, “collapse”. This reverses the trends from 1945 to 1973, when it was just the opposite, with the wealthiest having less percentage gains than the middle.

The left argues that we have no reason to pay these exorbitant costs for administration. There’s no evidence that these costs have been worth it to the average worker in developed economies. On the contrary, they’ve decisively shifted power away from workers. This power is not just reflected in flatlining wages and increased debt: it is, as well, a matter of expectations, of seeing the future of one’s society as something in which one can expect justice, exert political influence, and enjoy the fruits of our greatly increased national product: making our lives more comfortable, but allowing us, too, to take risks without facing the chance of being kicked out on the street. And so on down the generations, ad gloria mundi.

Along with administration, the wealthy play a positive social role by making investments. The argument here is, it is true, circular – we need to the wealthy to invest, and that investment makes them richer, making us need them more – but it isn’t bogus. Investment means that credit is available to the masses; the making accessible and available credit to workers, beyond the mingy terms of the company store, was one of the great capitalist victories of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union died for many reasons, but one of the unheralded ones was the persistent refusal of the Soviet planners to create an internal source of credit. This devastated the economy that recovered very well from World War II, but that, by the sixties, was in desperate need of credit to renovate and take advantage of the efficiencies offered by technological progress.

So there’s that. One can accept that the sphere of financial circulation is necessary, however, without accepting the premium that is now being paid for investment is necessary or efficient – or accepting the massive shadow banking system that has developed according to a logic of its own. The proliferation of financial instruments whose sole purpose is a quick return – basically, the casino-ization of the banking system – has only been a bad thing. Although it has been an excellent thing for the very rich.

Our tax system mirrors the priorities of the very wealthy – hence, the flat tax on capital gains. This is a scandal, and everytime it is pointed out that it is a scandal, everyone is scandalized, and the moment passes. Here, the wealthy have been very successful at telling a story that is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx told. It is perhaps the most successful propaganda ever to spread in America, if we discount the pseudo-science flogged by cigarette companies to keep regulation from happening in the fifties and sixties. The success of the cig companies can be measured in the obituary columns and the hospitals year after year. The success of the entrepreneur myth can be measured in bankruptcies, debt, and the decline in public investment is occurring not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the developed world save China.

The story made up by Schumpeter, and other conservative economists, went like this: wealth comes about because some risktaker seizes on an idea – a new invention or service, or a common one that can be done more efficiently, etc. – and founds a company. The company hires people, meaning that our risktaker is spreading the wealth. We need this person! And so the richer he is, the more he deserves our gratitude for graciously making such wealth for others.

This fairy tale is very popular on the right, and hardly disputed anymore on the left. Yet it is simply bogus. The wealth of the risktaker depends entirely on the services and commodities produced by the workers. The rightwing tale completely and neatly inverts reality. There’s no Gates, Jobs, or Bezos without the workers that embodied and carried forth the tasks that made them rich. All honor to their ideas – but they are ideas built on the labor, services and ideas of others. The indispensibility of the entrepreneur isn’t even believed by the banker class, which mouths this propaganda. As any glance at the history of the tech industry – where the myth of the wealthmaking wealthy is particularly strong – shows, when the idea of the risktaker becomes an actual company, his funders – those VC angels – in the majority of cases replace him. The VC angels have no sentimentality about the “entrepreneur”. They know he’s a replaceable cog. Unless, of course, it is the man at the top of some Venture Capital company – then he’s an irreplaceable genius.

So, to put it in one sentence: the entrepreneur myth inverts cause and effect, for the malign purpose of justifying an unnecessary premium to the administrator.

But to return to the social function of the wealthy, it is at the convergence of administration and investment that we see the need, such as there is, for a wealthy strata. That need is not, however, for an uber-wealthy strata. We need to allow a premium for investment and for the higher administrative tasks. At least, given the present form of our economic system. But a premium can really be limited, and its limits should be defined empirically, not with an ideological elevator speech about freedom. In the fifties, the wealthiest level of Americans, the top 1 percent, owned 9 percent of the national wealth. They now own 35 percent. The bottom 80 percent own ten percent. This has happened in my lifetime. In my son’s lifetime, if global warming is seriously addressed and there is an America left, we can correct this. In my utopia, the top 1 percent would own five percent of the wealth, and the bottom 80 percent would own at least 50 to 60 percent of the wealth – leaving the next 19 percent with the spoils. That 19 percent is composed of administrators, professionals and people in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors. These people have seen their incomes and wealth grow, but not in proportion to the freakishly wealthy upper 1 percent. That one percent – and even more the .01 percent – dominate the chart.

I’m conceding to the social function of the wealthy much that depends on the current system. That system itself has to adjust in a major way to the catastrophe it has generated and refused to confront – and who can predict just how that adjustment will be accomplished? But it should be pointed out that ecocide is not just a capitalist product – there was no country and system more devoted to ecocide than the U.S.S.R. As long as we refuse to rethink the treadmill of production, we will keep going the way of the Dead Planet. However, the acceleration in ecocide coincides, and not accidentally, with the increase in wealth inequality we have seen around the world. Economists, bizarrely, love to brag that really excessive poverty is decreasing, as if they had anything to do with it. This means, basically, that there are more families living on more than 2 dollars a day. Victory! But one can ask whether the price – a .001 percent that are living on 50 million dollars per day – is worth it. I for one say no. Inequality and the present system of industry are both factors in the same death march. One we can stop. And we can do that without rich people missing a single ten course lunch. The right will always complain it is a choice between the billionaire and the Gulag, but that is a false choice. We can choose to keep the wealthy without creating a wealth aristocracy. That’s the real choice.

The shithead won

 The Dems win all the wrong elections. If Clinton had lost in 1992, we'd have a much better Democratic party. If Biden had lost in 2020, the shithead would be heading out the door. And what in my life would have been worse if the shithead had his second term then? Cannot think of much. Abortion rights lost? Check. Corruption on the Supreme Court allowed to flourish? Check. Gazan systematically murdered in an American abetted genocide? Check.

Still, I voted for KH cause she was young, comparatively, wasn't the Shithead or Biden, and I thought in the end she'd be better in the Middle East.

The Dems ran, once again, as the respectability party. What this means in the neolib era is combining a vague Civil Rights culture with untrammeled plutocracy and financial capitalism. It is a mix that leads to wider and wider wobbles in our politics.

Summing up the Biden disfunction was the popularity of explaining economic discontent with the term vibes. The people only think they know what economics is - it has to be explained to them they never had it so good! That is a joke. Coming off of the COVID interregnum, people got a taste of a truly extended social security net. Money from the gov! That was rolled up, and inflation hit seriously, and where was the Biden people? Well, they were on tv, explaining that we never had it so good. 

In a final twist to the whole false synthesis of neolib economics and civil rights culture, we get it explained that economic malaise vibes is really an excuse for racism. Which I suppose explains the Shithead's success with black voters. Or doesn't. Guess which households have been hit worst by "vibes" -- if you guessed black households, you'd be right. 

Next four years of Shithead being in everyone's mouths makes me tired. I'm tired and old. I want to do something else.

I'll add this, from June. Back then, it was France, but the same system dynamic is at play in the U.S. I have been searching for a term to encompass one of the great features of capitalism – the non-necessary synthesis. I guess I will call it the mock synthesis.

A mock, or synthetic synthesis is the repeated putting together of two sets of concepts that are not necessarily joined together, creating a “discursive” necessity – or what I would call a mock necessity.

The third way, that ghostly nineties thing, corresponds very well to the synthetic synthesis model. A certain neo-classical economics is retrieved from the conservative opposition to social democracy, and is synthesized with an ideology that came out of the class struggles that brought about social democracy: that is, the struggle for civil rights of oppressed subjects in a liberal nation-state. So, for instance, the type of economic policies that favous a great increase in economic inequality, with its deregulation, its guarantees of support for the financial sector, its lower tax rate for the wealthy (in all its parts, including the blind eye turned to offshore money and the whole system of tax avoidance for the wealthy) is joined to an increasing concern with the legal equality of the oppressed subjects.

In the synthetic synthesis, the former left assumption – that class struggle is the shaping force of capitalist modernity – is simply dropped out.

Synthetic synthesis produces a certain type of managerial self. In corporations, in academia, in politics, in journalism this self is encountered over and over again. It is a self that is rhetorically virtuous, but anchored in every way in an economics of exploitation. The synthetic progressive.

That these syntheses are not grounded in necessity – that is, in any approximation of a total view of society – means that these managerial selves can easily adopt attitudes that go violently against the civil rights ideology that legitimates them.

In France, right now, we are seeing in real time how this works, as Macron – an almost ideal managerial self – and the National Front (the RN, but I’m going to refuse to call them their new audience friendly name) are tentatively reaching out to each other. Last year, Le Pen’s party joined the left in its criticism of Macron’s reactionary attacks on Social Democratic institutions, symbolized by the fight over retirement. Symbolized, I should say, by the theft, by the political establishment, of years of the life of the employed classes, from clerks to mid-level managers to every employee of every public service. The last named have long been the target of Macronist contempt, contempt at the deepest level.

On the way to assuming power, the National Front, much like some Marxist caricature of fascism, erased its dispute with Macron over economics. And, indeed, in the turning of these wheels, the fragility of the synthetic synthesis comes into full view: why not attack social democracy and promote racism? It is as necessary, or non-necessary, as its opposite.

One of the great terms that has arisen in the social media is “gaslighting” – and gaslighting is symptomatic in late neoliberalism of the grinding sound at the base, as the money that flowed into the plutocracy due to neoliberal policies starts flowing to the reactionaries and fascists. The billionaire philanthropists, it turns out, are billionaires first, and philanthropists only as it gains them power and tax breaks.

It is hard to get one’s mind around a society that has so amply and fully adopted to synthetic syntheses – as it makes the life-world seem, ultimately, a sort of petty game, where nothing is serious if you don’t have serious money. Democracy can be cast aside because it empowers “non-serious” people. The serious buy their seriousness with serious money.

On singing in the shower

 Who among us is not aware of shower tourism? By this, I do not simply mean the always tentative exploration of hotel bathrooms, with their varying accommodation for the traveler, their little tubes of cheap shampoo and body gel, which one nevertheless pockets, their towels of varying thicknesses, and their surprisingly common problem with retaining water in the shower or shower/tub area – the latter being home to a curious penchant among hoteliers for what is called, in the industry, the “flexible curtain track”, which allows ample space to pull the curtain shut – but which always produces a sizeable puddle at the end of the lustration process. That puddle into which the showerer plunges his feet, with a light grimace, when removing himself from the shower – how well we know it. Unlike our bathroom, however, the puddle is a matter for someone else to clean up. Yes, the hotel bathroom deserves a whole chapter to itself, but at the moment, I am talking of another facet of this micro-world, which consists of using the showers of others – of friends or family with whom one is staying, or who are staying with one. Both aspects are noteworthy – tourism is, in this sense, a transitive property, since if you have guests staying with you, your quarters are, for the length of the stay, going to be somewhat alien to you. In other words, the tourist is a catalytic creature at whose touch the familiar becomes a tourist site. It is this logico-magical property that makes for the tragedy of tourism, as the tourist searches for an authenticity which his very presence destroys.

Myself, I have stayed with many a host. I have entered naked into many a tiled domain in apartment and house, and, testing the water from the shower head or wand, surveyed the various unguents stored there. Sometimes, of course, I have entered carrying my own; sometimes, I confess, I have “borrowed” alien creams, soaps, shampoos and the like. This, you will say, is pretty un-guestly. It is a sort of vice. But it is also part of our everyday novel-writing – since we all engage in living through, or parasiting, other characters now and then. The grocery clerk surveys the line and sees Mrs. X and Mr. Y and that girl who always comes in and buys one item and the old woman who makes you go through endless rolls of curly edged coupons, the auto saleman guesses at the libido of the 20 year old guy, etc., etc. The self comes and goes, it doesn’t preceed self-interest so much as it follows it, becoming at worst a ghostly selfishness, and at best a moral worry.

So it is with conditioners. As we know from Kracauer and Benjamin, the houses and apartments we live in are potentially only repositories of clues for the classic detective. The doilies in the living room may be bought for decorative reasons, but ultimately they serve to soak up the blood from the murder victim, along with the velvety pillow. The shower contains – like the computer and its files – a veritable history of the owner of the shower for those with the eyes to see. Are the hair products bought from the low end? Are they cheap and general? Or are they bought from the high end, and are they expensive and specialized? Is the language on them, by any chance, French? Or English? Do the shower gels refer to milk? To almonds? To glowing skin?

The shower process itself nourishes speculation. We stand under the fierce beating down of warm drops and we think. We ponder the day, the tasks. We make up verses. We make up grocery lists. There are, of course, people who simply shower to get clean. But as every tv ad for shampoo or soap makes clear, cleaning is secondary to the ecstasy of soaping and rinsing, to swinging, fresh hair, to sparkling eyes, to the smell that film is just on the edge of throwing at you if it could – the whole transcends its tawdry utilitarian purpose as much as advertisement’s speedy expensive car transcends that mere metal carapace stuck in traffic jams and hustled into parking lots. Advertisement has a way of changing the purposes of the acts of everyday life. In the case of the shower, it has cinematized our experience.

There is a reason that some sing in the shower. This is my song.

pity for the word "excited"

 

I have lately been feeling pity for the word “excite”. The origin of the word is respectable, and even stuffy – from cite, or move, come forth. Cite appears in English first, as a legal term: a summons. Excite is a summoning too, but one that was connotatively associated with the body. When I learned French in high school, one of the things we were told that made us giggle is not to use “excite” in French, since it was vaguely sexual – a summoning of the libido.

To me, as an American, exciting is associated with more innocent things, or at least libidinously compensatory activities. “Isn’t this exciting” was inevitably ironic, for high schoolers. It was the type of thing the Sunday School teacher said about some dreary game meant to amuse us and edify us biblically.

Exciting still carried that whiff of the bogus, that eyeroll quotation marks, into the eighties. But at some point – perhaps when business schools overtook the humanities as the degree of choice – exciting was revived, a gadget for the new age of Babbitry. It was not only revived, but it started its march towards omnipresence. You could not announce you were taking a dump without saying that you were “very excited by the opportunity to take this dump.” If you were freelancing, and you have, as you must, a twitter account, you must always announce your feeblest initiative by saying how excited you were by it. Trevor Noah, for instance, wants you to know that he is “excited to announce my new 2020 tour dates!” Just to announce the dates! As a tv personality, you would think that he would be a bit blasé, but not Trevor. Bill Gates is “excited” about everything: about Boston Mills new “innovations” in steel production, about technology to “fix” flaws in photosynthesis (a big agro-business moneymaker that is “exciting” because it will, of course, help “poor people”), he’s excited all over the place about innovation. Anybody who has anything to announce nowadays – that they are taking a job or quitting a job, that they are going to school or just that they are one degree above comatose – must be “excited” to announce it. They are never sad, or indifferent; they are never simply announcing, telling, whispering, purring, etc. No, they are always excited. We live in a population that is carbonated on excitement, with bubbles of excitement entering their blood stream every second. You can hardly nail us down – so much are we jumping for joy.

All this excitement leads to a curious letdown feeling, in actuality. It is as if we have exhausted surprise itself, and nothing is exciting, since everything is. I do not deal in predictions, since I am so bad at them, but still, I’m excited to announce that I think excitement is about to take a turn for the less frequent. In the future, people will not be excited to announce anything. They will be, perhaps, ecstatic, orgasmic, or on the edge of their chairs; they will be cool, they will be beady eyed, they will be stoic, they will be anything but excited. This might seem impossible. It might seem like excitement and excited are set in stone, and that the seven habits of highly excitable people will follow us to the flooding of the coastal cities and beyond. But change is possible!

And I’m so excited about it!

The evolution of ghosts: Caspar R us!

It has long been my contention that there is no story about life on earth that does not boil down to an evolutionary story. The creationist version of life on earth has, since the 19th century, made large use of the notion of intelligent design – but anybody who knows anything about design knows that it evolves. The intelligent design argument is a mess, since the standards it uses to critique Darwinism are, of course, entirely absent when it tries to construct the meaning of intelligent design. Just as we can trace the evolution of the design of the watch by the material left behind in its wake – diagrams, tools, etc. – so too, if intelligent design were true, we would be able to see the material left behind in its wake – proto-humans, for instance. At this point, intelligent design simply gives up the intelligent part and opts for supernatural design, a design that defies the same physical laws that, on its critique side, intelligent design uses to try to de-legitimate Darwinian evolution.

Of course, creationists aren’t the only ones to ignore the evolutionary nature of all accounts of design. Philosophers, much to my distress, often assume things like zombies without having any sense that a zombie has to come with an evolutionary story, and that has to be packed into their account that a zombie doesn’t sense like a human being. This simply proves that philosophers are bad intelligent designers – something I think Wittgenstein spotted long ago.

At the same time, not all evolution is Darwinian evolution – that is, the statistical effect of selection, while definitely having some effects at the cultural level, does not play the role it plays in Darwinian evolution. Evolution on the cultural level often takes the form of assemblages that bring together different developmental paths as overlapping associations.

All of which is the wordy and way too wordy intro to what I want to do for a lark: understand the evolution of the ghost shape that one sees, in paper cutouts and cartoons, on Halloween.

Jean-Claude Schmitt, the author of Ghosts in the Middle Ages, lists six ways in which ghosts were depicted in the 13th and 14th century: the Lazarus, or resurrected man; as looking like a living person; as looking like a small, naked child, a common way of depicting the soul; wrapped in a diaphonous shroud; as a decomposing corpse; and as invisible, with the convention here depending on the text. In the last case, the text speaks of the ghost being sensed, but not seen.

It is striking how closely this list corresponds to features one finds in the common, commercial construction paper ghosts that are bought before Halloween in the store and strung up on doors and windows to create the “haunted house”.

However, in the age of drawing, painting and stonework, there were certain possibilities, mixes of the above categories, that were beyond the technological imagination. Clearly ectoplasm, that gross but fascinating presence in much of the spiritualist photography of the 19th and 20th century, is a compromise, a condensation, of the decomposing corpse and the diaphonous shroud. It was diaphonous matter in a state of decomposition. And yet, this decomposition was astonishingly lively – presaging the world of synthetics, the jello world, that came after 1945. Which was incidentally not only the year that the war gave up its ghosts, but also the year Casper the Friendly ghost was launched, a sort of Cold War parable – a friendly presence that was doomed to scare those it wished to greet. An image of American ambition throughout the world, or at least through American eyes, where we came with the noblest intention of helping and only seemed to scare and enrage the people we helped – so that we had to help them through other means, for instance, by bombing them or overthrowing their governments. We were the world’s Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Owen Davies popular history of ghost beliefs, The Haunted, proposes a close relationship between the way corpses were dressed for burial and the appearance of the sheeted ghost. The winding sheet as the last bit of clothing a mortal wears was, in the seventeenth century, supplanted by an increasing use of clothing – and yet still a white robe was often worn. “John Aubrey recounted that the Oxford philologist Henry Jacob, who died on 5 November 1652, appeared a week later to his cousin, the doctor William Jacob, “standing by his Bed, in his Shirt, with a white Capon on his Head”, which was presumably how he was dressed in the coffin.” Here we see an evolutionary fluke: the white sheet takes on a life, or afterlife, of its own with the ghost, as the human corpse is dressed increasingly in other raiment. By the nineteenth century the “bedsheet ghost” image had become standard. Davies thinks that the belief in ghosts, however, liberated itself from the contrivance of the bedsheet due to twentieth century movies. Early comedy silents and talkies extensively used the bedsheet ghost for hilarity. Since ghost belief is usually not about the funnies, but about the unheimlich, ghosts were seen not in sheets, but in their clothes – or sometimes wounded, or bleeding. There was, in the evolution of the ghost costume, this break in “seriousness”, with the children’s bedsheet ghost continuing its iconic run while the real ghost of ghost encounters lost the white sheet entirely.

How racism works

Racism has a double aspect: there is a racism of sentiments and a racism of structure. It is a mistake to think that these aspects are governed by the same dynamic, and will reflect the same “moves.” And yet, they are “aspects” – ultimately, sentiments and structure form a unity.

In a society that has bought into the myth of methodological individualism, the unity becomes ever more mysterious. According to that myth, if we operate on the individual sentiments, we are engaged with the determining cause of racism. If, that is, we could through some process make sure that nobody “feels” racist, then we eliminate racism.

Although intellectually many liberals think that structural racism is semi-autonomous, in some way, in everyday discourse these liberals tend to reflect the hegemonic position that it is sentiments that count. Thus, without considering that, objectively, those who achieve some success in a society that is structurally racist are themselves complicit in racism – or to be less wishy washy, are racist – they will much prefer looking at some other as the bearer of racism – the white redneck or trailer trash being, of course, the popular bugbear.

This is understandable. The relationship between sentiments and structure is a complex one, and not always easy to unentangle.

But even if the source of the racism, the aspect that is the larger factor in a particular instance, must be subject to analysis, one can still spot it pretty easily if we think about it. To give an example off the top of my head: Robert Caro’s analysis of LBJ’s election to the senate in 1948. This is how the NYT chose to summarize it:

“Mr. Caro maintains that although ballot fraud was common in the late 1940's in some parts of Texas, the Johnson campaign of 1948 raised it to a new level. Mr. Caro supports his charge with an interview with Luis Salas, an election judge in Jim Wells County who said he acknowledged his role only after all others involved in the theft had died.

Determined to Win at All Costs

It has been alleged for years that Johnson captured his Senate seat through fraud, but Mr. Caro goes into great detail to tell how the future President overcame a 20,000-vote deficit to achieve his famous 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic runoff primary against a former Governor, Coke Stevenson. A South Texas political boss, George Parr, had manufactured thousands of votes, Mr. Caro found. Johnson died in 1973, Stevenson and Parr in 1975. Mr. Caro says the election showed Johnson's determination to win at all costs as well as his coolness under fire and his ability to select gifted lieutenants, whom he then manipulated.”

One notices that the focus on ballot fraud lightly skips over the fact of real voter suppression in Texas in 1948. According to the Census of 1950, the population of Texas was 12.9 percent black, or 977,458, but until 1944, the state law allowed the Democratic party to exclude at its own will voters in the primary. That law was used to create a so called “white primary.” In one of the most important cases that the Supreme Court has ever decided, Smith v. Allwright, the Court ruled that this was an illegal infringement on African American civil riths. Interestingly, the 1948 senate race was one of the first statewide races after the Supreme Court ruling. So instead of speaking of “ballot stuffing” under the assumption that elections before 1948 were more licit, one should be asking whether lifting the long term illegal suppression of black votes made the 1948 election more democratic. More, I say, since grassroots voter suppression of black votes in Texas was still going on. It is only in the context of this much larger scandal that we can talk, with some historical understanding, about white election irregularities.

But the NYT synopsis of Caro’s research doesn’t touch on this, or even seem aware of the irony of talking about election irregularities in a system founded on a gross, systematic election irregularity. After all, that part of the story is in a separate compartment.