the ownership society - now with fifty percent more autism!

“The state doesn’t own your children,” Paul told CNBC’sClosing Bell. “Parents own thechildren, and it is an issue of freedom and public health.”

Rand Paul, who likes to rush in where even Palins fear to tread, has been mocked for this conjunction of “own” and children. Or I should say some have mocked it, while most have let it pass as mere flotsam on the ocean of cretinism in which we all, as Americans, daily float.

However, the word “own” there is doing so much business, stands out so much like a sore thumb, or maybe a freakish fist of sore thumbs, that I have to buzz around it and find a place to bite, like a mosquito whose maxillary palp organs have been rubbed the right way by the delicious aroma of human sweat gland.

One of the many recent bits marked down for deletion in the collective American memory was the glorious slogan, “ownership society”, under which so many financial products were deregulated in the interest of the common man.  Here’s a bit of a flashback from a site run by a rightwing aparatchik named Jim Glassman (who I happened to work for when I was in college, and before he took his jackassery to new levels):

“The greatest political and demographic shift over the past twenty years was not the number of new Spanish speaking residents, but rather the number of individuals who owned shares of stock. In the 1996 elections, pundits spoke of soccer moms as the key demographic. This time around, the 2004 elections will be decided by America's growing investor class.

With this in mind, President Bush spoke directly to the burgeoning investor class at the Republican National Convention by announcing his vision for America becoming an "ownership society." Bush's speech called for a new paradigm in which government policies empower, not inhibit, individuals, so that each person has more choices and control over his healthcare and retirement. Included in the vision are Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Lifetime and Retirement Savings Accounts (LSAs/RSAs), Comp/Flex time, and Social Security Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs). All of these plans have one important theme in common: individual ownership.”

We all like to remember that George Bush was elected in 2000 while losing the popular vote, and we all like to forget that he was authentically elected (no Supreme Court helping) by a healthy margin in 2004. What’s more, he told us exactly what he was going to do.

What did ownership mean? Well, for those of us who combine Marx’s notion that ideology has the quality of reversing the true arrangement of social relations with St. Paul’s maxim that we must read what happens in the World as in a mirror, the meaning was obvious: the ownership society was about appropriating the few assets of the wage class and replacing them with debt. This is exactly what happened. In contrast to Glassman’s claim, the bottom 80 percent of the income scale owns approximately 5 percent of the financial wealth, according to Wolff, an economist who specializes in the composition of wealth in America. In 2007, the median household had assets of around 150 thousand dollars, of which the vast majority, 100, 000 dollars, was invested in a house. Ah, the house! That centerpiece of the ownership society. In 1989, the collected debt of the average household equaled 89 percent of average income – and by 2007, it equaled 141 percent. Now this kind of trend, if put in another situation, say the Soviet Union, would show the total level of expropriation had gone sky high – but in the United States, ownership means that your percentage of what you really own goes sliding merrily down the slope, as you vote for your creditors to turn the screws and call it – freedom.

This, of course, is one shot at the prize of understanding the metastasis of ownership in the American discourse. The idea that the most private and intimate relationship between two humans is one of ownership extends well beyond this, of course. It is a recent and alarming development in public craziness – a severe form of social autism, which is, coincidentally, one of the fears that drives the anti-vaxxers. We watch the social norm become autistic, and we naturally grow fearful for our children – even as we work, in every way, to normalize that autistic way of thinking and speaking.

There’s so much more to say! I’ll stop, here. I apologize for the paradox mongering, which is as easy as skipping stones, I gotta admit. But fun!

cabinet magazine

We went to the art book fair here yesterday. Art book might conjure up visions of the oversized book of impressionist paintings that graced the table in your folks’ living room, accruing over time  a light surface of dust. There weren’t those. These were small press and zine books, with a fair amount of arty and not so arty porn, poetry, artist collaborations, essays, and dozens of mags; among the latter we came upon the table for Cabinet.

Cabinet is, no contest, the best magazine in America. Don’tbelieve me? Check out their archive, which is mostly free.

We decided to increase our media load and buy a year’s subscription. It was a great bargain – less than 30 bucks. Reader, go and do likewise.

The first thing I read in the new issue, which we took home with us, was a wonderful essay with Michael Witmore about his book, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected knowledges in Early Modern England. In spite of the air of solecism around “knowledges” in that title, Witmore is an impressively articulate interviewee. His thesis is that, broadly, the notion of accident changed in the 17^th century. At the beginning of the century, and for centuries past, accident was, in normal, educated circles, an Aristotelian thing:

“… the idea of an accident as an event was essentially the idea that wo independent causal lines could meet in a given place at a given moment and produce something that could not have been foressn by either of those causal agents. So Aristotle’s example would be two people go to the marketplace, one goes to buy olive oil, the other goes to buy grapes, and they meet accidentally in the marketplace and settle a debt on that ocassion. “

As a good little derridean, I hold no example is innocent, and that an example of the accident that sticks in a marketplace and debt is something that can be gone into muchly. But I’ll put a brake on my inner Jacques and go on to Witmore’s sense of how this notion changed in the 17^th century.

“Calvin’s sense is that there is a theater of God’s judgment in the world, that God communicates through theater, and that accidental events – things that just seem to happen – are precisely those sttartling events that get a rise out of the spectator and in fact engage the conscience in unusual and startling ways.”

Now, those origin-mongers out there would probably say that Calvin didn’t just come up with this, and we can go back and back all the way to the Vedas for similar views. Anthropologists used to claim that, universally, all human death is looked upon as murder of some sort in “savage” society. I am not sure that this factoid is still upheld in contemporary anthropology, but it surely did have backing in many societies far away from Calvin’s Geneva (although let me butt in here and say that I don’t think those cultures were all that far away – the idea that the European cultures were different, were civilized, were where the progress was, is a faith-based claim, which any survey of European societies – from Galician peasants in the twentieth century to Parisian voyou – would put to flight. The West is just savages with video games, as far as I can see).

Still, Witmore might be on to something here, some further fracture in the order of things.

Myself, I confess to having a high regard for what Pierce called tychism – the idea that coincidence underlies the physical structure of the universe, and that it is irreducible to physical law. I’ve always found the calculations about the probability of there being a big bang, or there being life on earth, etc., curiously blind to the fact that this probability must also encompass the probability that probability calculations can be made. Tychism, as I see it, means that all things swim, as the accident of that particular moment, in a sea of accidents. From this viewpoint, the extended phenotype of an event – say, the waves in the sea –includes the sound of the waves in a seashell cupped to an infant’s ear. That sound is really, of course, the throbbing of our common blood, but its recognition as the sound of waves is wrapped up with what waves are. Though we can erase the contingent factors around the wave – there could be no seashell, there could be no infant – we cannot erase the possibility of seashells and infants.

Which is another way of saying that we grope in the unknown as variables of that dark element, in all worlds and at world’s end, amen.

a minor apocalypse

Death does tend to jog my memory. When the decease of Konwicki, the Polish writer, was announced in the Times, I thought that now would be a good time to read A Minor Apocalypse. Re-read, except for the fact that when  I read it, I didn’t finish it. This is because… well, it was too good. There are books that make me envious, and then there are books that overwhelm me. Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow obviously belong in the latter category. But the books in the first category are as rare, and a little more difficult to define. They are usually written in a way that I would like to write, or at least one of the ways, but they seem to have completely filled that way of writing up. Thus, the envy. I can read, say, Delillo and know that I can copy Delillo to an extent – that he is working in a quarter of literature that I recognize and could move in myself. But Konwicki seems to have discovered the perfect way to write the kind of novel that usually is pretty bad – the novel about not being able to write the novel. Of course, I take off my hat to Flaubert and Proust for doing it right, but I am talking about a less monumental version of that odd quest – the quest, so to speak, for sterility.

In Konwicki’s book, this old modernist trope is combined with a new one – one that is both contemporary and not: political suicide. In the sixties and up through the eighties, the idea was basically to kill oneself in protest. Thus, the monks in Vietnam burned themselves, as did some anti-Vietnam war protesters. The IRA prisoners starved themselves to death.

Interesting moment, since it has been succeeded by a more militant form of suicide in which one blows oneself and other people up. The one form of suicide seems, at least, highly refined, whereas the other seems barbarous. However, the suicides in the sixties to eighties period were characterized most of all by ineffectuality. Whereas we don’t know what we will see, looking back at the militant form of suicide. I have a feeling it, too, will be ineffectual, plus bloodier.

Konwicki’s book is set… well, it is part of the play of the book that you don’t know when it is set. The narrator can’t get the real date out of anybody. One imagines it is set around the time of General Jarezelski’s coup, in 1981. I wonder how many people remember that coup outside of Poland? It was one of those earthshaking events that has been buried in the general amnesia devoted to the latter half of the Cold war. The narrator, who is having a Konwicki-like crisis over the whole dignity and value of the novel – who is, in other words, perpetually writing third drafts – is visited by representatives of a self-appointed group of dissidents who tell him that it has been decided that he should set fire to himself to protest the oppressiveness of the regime.

Of course, he doesn’t jump at this chance, but objects. The two men who announce the decision to him point out that he doesn’t really write, but that he still has a certain celebrity. When the narrator objects that there are other more celebrated Polish artists, like a certain filmmaker – obviously Wadja – the two reply that this filmmaker is too celebrated, and is still working. No, a dead end like the narrator is best. There is some woody allen like dialogue here:

“After all, you’ve always been obsessed with death,” shipered Hubert hoarsly. “ I never treated your complex as a literary mannerism. You’re intimate with death, you shouldn’t be afraid of it. You have prepared yourself, and us, for your    death most carefully. What were you thinking about before we arrived?”

“Death.”

“You see. It’s at your side. All you have to do is reach out.”

This is an excellent premise for a ramble around Warsaw and around the brain of the narrator.  This is, to me, at the center of the novel world – the ramble. From Don Quixote to Leopold Bloom, it is rambling that really gets the novel’s juices going.

Toddlers in the new world

Everyday is the Renaissance for Adam – everyday it is a new world of words and thoughts. I’ve noticed that it isn’t only Adam – so far, at least, my adoring parental eyes can see. I used to bring Adam to school and deposit him in his classroom and his classmates, when they noticed me, would confine themselves to saying Daddy – this being a generic name for any adult male with infant. Now they all say things, among which is the name Adam.

This is rich talk too, among the richest Adam’s tongue will  ever hoist, since each new word is a new coast,  which one needs to approach with some respect for crosscurrents and possible native arrows – even if if the best strategy is maximum bluster, as if you have been here before. That’s the ticket for  impressing the lurking natives, those grownups who made up this world. For instance, a couple of days ago I was doing what I must love to do, since I do it so often – looking for my fucking cell phone. I am a real talented cell phone loser, a pro, so there I was, putting my hand under the cushions on the sofa, going through the toys in the toybox, etc. While doing this, I asked Adam where my phone was. I wasn’t really asking him for an answer, but more just voicing my frustration. Much to my surprise, he seemed to say behind you, Daddy. And since then, he has used the word behind several times.

Until that moment, I thought Adam’s sole directional concept was up. Up is used a lot around here. Up in the chair, up in the bed, up in the sky is the moon! Look up, see the plane! Down doesn’t figure as often, although get down from the table! Has been uttered on ocassion. However, up and down are still more verb-related than direction-related. Behind, on the other hand, is a leap towards front, back, on the side, over there, here, North South East West left right – our lords and masters, which march us endlessly around as adults. Human adults can be defined not so much as thinking but as sorting animals, and directional words are great and necessary helps.

Being in the true grip of inspiration (whether this comes from his neurons or his neighbors around the table in the classroom is an exercise I leave up to the neuroscientist), Adam doesn’t like being left out of adult conversation, which, in spite of all odds (Adam’s bedtime schedule, our bedtime schedule) still occurs around here, and so, after watching his parents exchange polysyllabic utterance, he will sometimes launch himself into his part of the dialogue. Mostly, this is a simulacra of what his parents have been doing, which contains some eighty percent filler in terms of sounds, a defensive measure to keep from being interrupted. This, of course, he will do, as we all do, for the rest of his um like yeah verbal life, but not so blatantly. In this spill of sounds certain words will stick out, most notably basketball, basketball court, basketball shirt and noisy dinosaurs.

I can see myself in my son. I, too, have never been a minimalist. I’m in the talking game for the glory. I get it.

Andrew Field, in his biography of Djuna Barnes, writes of the discontent of American modernist writers in the 20s with American (read white, upper middle class) talk. It was so flat! I can see where they are coming from. It is still the case that our factories of WASPitude, schools and colleges and universities, teach their products to channel any excess of speech into acceptable channels: feeling speak, uplift, business and political talk, and parties. Later parties will be replaced by other extracurricular material, like babies and vacation. When I am in line at the Whole foods in Santa Monica, here, eavesdropping on what is being said by the presumably well off and educated young folks who are in the line ahead of me, it is amazing how little is said,and with what economy. Compared to the language of the street people, rich (often rancidly so, admittedly, as so much is stewed in the liquor of schizophrenia or addiction), there is a startling lack of color. The modernists were undoubtedly comparing the American custom to the Brits. The first time I ever visited London and, looking for an address I’d been given, asked help from a passerby, the woman pointed to a building and said go in the direction of that building with the unsightly row of chimney pots. I couldn’t imagine an American throwing in the “unsightly”. It just wouldn’t occur. If it did occur, it is a good bet that the American to whom this was said would think: what a weirdo.

I guess in some ways I want Adam to be more rhetorically florid than is the norm in America. But then – I imagine most of his verbal life will be in french. Which is a whole other thing… 

Canetti's fantasy

n a book of aphorisms and little essays entitled All the squandered admiration, Elias Canetti sketches a revenge fantasy, or revolution fantasy, that any person who leans in a certain political direction, the direction that is oddly defined by both anarchy and communism, must have had at one point or another. Here's my translation.

It pains me that there will never be an uprising of the beasts against us, the patient beasts, the cow, the sheep, all the livestock which falls into our hands and cannot escape.
I can imagine how the rebellion breaks out in a slaughterhouse and from there overwhelms a whole city. How men, women, children, the aged are all pitilessly tramplled to death; how the beasts overrun the streets and tracks, break down the gates and doors, and in their anger go whelming up to the very highest floors of houses, just as, underground, the subway cars are crushed by thousands of steers running wild, the sheep with suddenly sharp teeth ripping into us. .
I am somewhat relieved when one particular steer puts to miserable flight that hero, the bullfighter, and the whole bloodthirsty arena too. But an insurgency of the lesser, softer victims, the sheep, the cow, would suit me better. I don’t like to think that this will never happen, and that we will never have to tremble before them, before just these beings.”

the victory in greece

Daniel at Crooked Timber has penned the ultimate City kissoff to the victory of Syriza in Greece. In the course of patronizing the poor thieving Greeks, he also strikes back at the idea that the EU policymakers are stupid - like, they don't know that Greece can never pay back its debt. They know!

Stupidity is always armed with good reasons. The stupidity that plunged the U.S. into Iraq was full of people who said, at the time, the WMD and then later said, nobody believed there was WMD, obviously we were going in for x, y or z reason. Similarly, letting Lehman default was defended at the time as a wonderful warning to the banking system, and afterwards as who knew the international financial system was a ponzi scheme? One of the great stupidities of the EU is the idea that more is better – hence, the acceptance of players who are little more than medium size cities in the real scheme of things, like Latvia. This produces the ultimately stupid organization: too big to fail and too big to manage. We leave the realms of stupid groupthink, here, and enter the realm of truly badly constructed institutional structures. If it were simply a matter of Greece, I’d say that the EU had an overwhelming hand. But it isn’t simply a matter of Greece. If the EU lowers the boom, I don’t think this will say, to the voters in Italy and Spain and Portugal, oh oh, better do as the boss says. I think it will say, we are fucked either way, so why not fuck them back? The Anglo prejudice that all people everywhere will muddle through and settle on the lower rung lifestyle so that the EU project of banks first can keep marching gloriously onward seems to me a misjudgment on every level – here, as always, politics is not separable from economics. Thomas Friedman’s “golden straightjacket” theory, which seems to be what Daniel is endorsing, will, I think not work, and not just cause I don’t want it to work. It won’t work because it doesn’t involve the gradual diminishment of the lifestyle of the vast majority – as in the US – but the sudden and catastrophic diminishment, with no outlet except, as in Latvia, mass migration.

amnesia versus memory as geopolitics

Amnesia versus Memory - chose your marks!

In 2003, just as the US was occupying Iraq, the leftist-with-a-conscience Paul Berman published a small “intellectual history” of Islamic radicalism that traced it all back to the Nazis. Even for Paul Berman, this was hack work of an extraordinary cheapness.  I admit, I love nothing better than  the slagging the ever deserving Paul Berman. I did a little cutwork on him in 2007 that I must quote:

“Berman has accrued a lot of media capital over the years by being a conscience. A conscience is such a great thing to cast yourself as. Especially when you can be the conscience not of the powerful, not of the CEOs, not of the plutocracy, but the conscience of dissent - indeed, he's an old Dissenter dinosaur. Being the conscience of dissent means that you get to whack away at, say, the crimes of the Sandanistas as the Reagan administration arms narco thugs in Honduras. It means that you look out at the old and established mafia of CIA ties and Islamic fundamentalism that drove the cold war in the Middle East and you see - liberal softness for Islamic fundamentalism. A conscience means that you reprove unnamed liberals for beamingly looking on as Moslem fundies surgically remove clits, stone women, and generally tread on our freedom to mock, re the famous cartoons of Mohammed - in the age of Guantanamo, Falluja, and Grozney. The age, to put not too fine a point upon it, of Western countries killing lots and lots of Moslems. And Moslems killing not very many westerners. Liberals, as "Conscience" Berman notes with shock, have even dared to criticize heroic women, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while making poo-pooing sounds at the Bush administration for banning Tariq Ramadan from coming to the U.S. It is amazing what these non-freedom loving liberals will do – up to and including criticizing the U.S. from banning speech by Tariq Ramadan! Freedom of speech means denying freedom of speech for people who secretly don’t believe in freedom of speech. Don’t we all know this? We all know this at TNR. However, those not in that charmed circle of bile and bad faith can only look at these people with amazement.”

I mention him because Berman’s book, Terror and Liberalism and my little pony … oops,  I’m sorry, the my little pony wasn’t part of the title, I don’t know where I get these things. Anyway, this became an ur-text in Project Amnesia – that post 9/11 project in forgetting just what we’ve been up to in the Middle East for the past sixty years. It helped the hawk liberals to embrace the intellectual shambles of Bushism. Unfortunately, so successfully has amnesia been disseminated in the US and Europe that the claims voiced by radical right Islamic leaders are now cited by the “left” as voices of the Muslim community, which insults two things – Muslim and community.
In 2007, Robert Dreyfuss wrote a book that wasn’t an intellectual history – it actually had, like, empirical stuff in it. It was called the Devil’s game, and it romped through Middle Eastern history looking for what the Cold war had wrought.
To give you an example of how project Amnesia has twisted things: at present, we are assured, only namby pamby liberals support Hamas in its endless terroristic project to be terroristic. The sworn enemy of Israel, Israel has always fought it tooth and nail.
Except of course when Israel was aiding it. Cast your mind back to 1968. In those days, a radical secularizing force called Fatah, supported by Egypt’s nationalist, Nasser, was trying to lead the Palestinian refugee community. Israel, the U.S., and the Saudis didn’t like Fatah at all. They saw a weak spot, however: Fatah’s secularism. Perhaps they could play the Islam card.
Dreyfuss quotes the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, who claims that Israel started Hamas. This seems to me to be an exaggeration. There is no exaggeration, however, in the fact that after the 1967 war, when Israel occupied Gaza and the Sinai, they let out of jail the enemies of Nasser, notably the Moslem brotherhood leadership, that they found there. Why? It was a double play – divide the Palestinian community and confound Nasser. As Dreyfuss points out, the Moslem brotherhood in Jordan was firmly on the side of the king and the largest landholders. They were firmly against Nasser’s “communism” and any attempt to upset the traditional economic order.
The Brotherhood was not at all popular in Gaza or on the West Bank precisely because they opposed Nasser’s nationalism. Enter one Ahmed Yassin, who went on to found Hamas officially. He was liberated by the Israelis after the war, and encouraged by Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. What’s not to like? Radical Islam, back then, was Traditional, Freedom loving Islam. This was before the US discovered that it was all about feminism and democracy and Radical Islam was all about nastiness.  Under Israeli occupation, as Dreyfuss points out, the number of mosques in the Gaza rose from 1967 to 1987 from 200 to 600.
This, of course, is history that has now been erased. But the contradictions can’t be erased, they crop up constantly. Thus, the eggsucking obsequy’s in the US press about King Abdullah, the 1000 lashes King – or excuse me, the man of peace, the modernizer. In the US, amnesia is easy. In the Middle East, it has powerful allies too – Hamas doesn’t want to revisit its past, that is for sure. But there are a great many  people in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan who are stubborn as elephants, and continue to remember things even when official policy is that they never happened. In Iraq, after our great and glorious George had Chalabi flown there, to play the role of Charles de Gaulle, he flopped. Polls showed that people actually remembered what Chalabi did in Jordan – that he pulled  off a massive fraud, stealing millions of dollars. For some reason, their eyes didn’t get all glowy at the advent of the liberator.
Amnesia versus memory – this is the real geo-political struggle in the post-Cold War era.