News from the post-anthropocene era

Another corporate gift to our children: Trump's EPA fires science panel because they were scientists and all. And scientists wildly believe the climate is changing disastrously because of... science! What could be sillier. Instead, believe your stock portfolio. So here is to the people making 2050 such a bad place to live. Thanks, and fuck you throughout all eternity.

11 degrees of shakespeare

Shakespeare he's in the alley

With his pointed shoes and his bells...

The discovery of degrees of separation is supposed to have been a mid-20^th century event. The story goes that Stanley Milgram invented this idea and did a famous experiment to show how many degrees of separation there are between two arbitrarily chosen persons. The experiment involved sending a package through the mail to an arbitrarily chosen person and telling that person that the package was intended for a certain other person. The receiver was to send the package to someone who might know the ultimate recipient.  Milgram published his work in 1967.

All credit to Milgram. In an article on the small world hypothesis, as it is called in The Cut, Thomas Macmillan mentions some of Milgram’s predecessors:  

‘Some thinkers, however, had been quietly wondering if apparently unconnected people might in fact be linked. The idea of six degrees of separation is sometimes traced to a 1929 essay by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy. And Milgram’s work was preceded by some calculations by political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool and mathematician Manfred Kochen who in the 1950s estimated a greater than 50-percent chance that any two people could be linked by two intermediate acquaintances.”

However, I recently came across an essay by Leigh Hunt, written in 1834, which could have been called 6 degrees of William Shakespeare – instead of its real title, Social Geneology. Hunt’s idea is much like Milgrams, save for the fact that it is diachronic:

“It is a curious and pleasant thing to consider, that a link of personal acquaintance can be treaced up from the authors of our own times to those of Shakspeare, and to Shakspeare himself.”

And this is how Hunt diagrams the links:

With some living poets, it is certain. There is Thomas  Moore, for instance, who knew Sheridan. Sheridan knew Johnson, who was the friend of Savage, who knew Steele, who knew Pope. Pope was intimate with Congreve, and Congreve with Dryden. Dryden is said to have visited Milton. Milton is said to have known Davenant ; and to have been saved by him from the revenge of the restored court, in return for having saved Davenant from the revenge of the Commonwealth. But if the link between Dryden and Milton, and Milton and Davenant, is somewhat apocryphal, or rather dependent on tradition (for Richardson, the painter, tells us the latter from Pope, who had it from Betterton the actor, one of Davenant's company), it may be carried at once from Dryden to Davenant, with whom he was unquestionably intimate.  Davenant, then, knew Hobbes, who knew Bacon, who knew Ben Jonson, who was intimate with Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Donne, Drayton, Camden, Selden, Clarendon, Sydney, Raleigh, and perhaps all the great men of Elizabeth's and James's time, the greatest of them all undoubtedly. Thus have we a link of " beamy hands " from our own times up to Shakspeare.

I love this list. Instead of the mystery of influence, which has long served as a linking word between the texts of authors, here we have a recognizable map of degrees of separation.  It is a fun exercise to see how many degrees of separation one has from William Shakespeare. My map would go something like this: I interviewed Carol Muske-Dukes, who told me that she met her late husband at a party held at her friend Jorie Graham’s mother’s house. Jorie Graham’s mother is Beverly Pepper, a sculpture, who knew Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s wife.  Hemingway knew Ford Maddox Ford, whose great aunt, Frances Rossetti, had a brother who was Lord Byron’s secretary. From Byron it is easy to proceed back down the links Leigh Hunt points to: Byron was great friends with Tom Moore, with whom he’d “go a-roving”, for instance. So from this I get 14 degrees from Will Shakespeare. I think I probably could do better than this if I cast a wider net. My grandfather’s father knew Mark Hanna, President McKinley’s eminence gris, due to the fact that he tried to sell the government on his torpedo invention; Hanna was on  the board of directors of a railroad with Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Henry’s brother. Charles remembered John Quincey Adams, his grandfather, who, when merely a teen, worked with his father, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin on diplomatic assignment in Paris during the American Revolution, and met the great whigs, among whom of course there was Sheridan. There are other ways I could do this: undoubtedly John Adam father knew Cotton Mather, whose own father was the child of the second marriage of John Cotton. John Cotton was the great debater and opponent of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. Roger Williams clerked under Sir Edward Coke, Elizabeth’s hardhearted justice, who investigated the Essex rebellion, which was lead by Shakespeare’s patron, and interrogated Shakespeare’s partner with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Augustine Phillips. I imagine Shakespeare at least knew of Coke, and probably met him.  So I can end up anywhere from nine to eleven degrees from Shakespeare.

This is a great game, and if I were a coder, I’d make it into a Facebook quiz and earn a sum that I could retire on. Being merely a sucker, I give it away free and challenge one and all to top my degrees.

Patience and the restless sleeper

There’s a thing about living in France that always amazes some outward suburban zone of my American brain: I go into the store, I get checked out by the cashier, I pull out my credit card, I put it in the little credit card machine, and a word appears on the screen: Patientez.

Be patient. In the United States, when dealing with machines, the signs and recordings are rarely rooted in such a quasi-moral, such a Ciceronian admonition. Rather, they tell you that they are busy processing your information. Or maybe they tell you that all operators are busy and please wait on the line until the next operator is available. But to be asked to wait is a moral degree away from being asked to be patient. Waiting, after all, can be done impatiently – it is all physics, it is all being a body in a place in time. Patience, however, is being a certain kind of subject, having a certain kind of attitude.

I’ve long had a Barthesian revery that if I could just understand the “patientez” sign, I would grasp some larger mythological characteristic of France. See the rest here.

the trouble with the saudis and the trouble with the Americans

If I went to sleep in 2002 and woke up yesterday and read Tom Friedman's non-apology for kissing the ass of Saudi Arabia's young dictator - I would not know that it wasn't still 2002. The Middle Eastern "expert" clique is still morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt, roll over Beethoven and give Grandma the news.

Also relics of 2002 is the cry that the only reason we are allies with, or complicit with, or in bed with, or making passionate love to the Saudis is cause of oil.

This is a half-truth. If you check, you'll notice that the level of American imports of oil from Saudi Arabia are at 1987 levels. We could easily do without that oil - we could substitute oil from Iran in one diplomatic turn, or Venezuela.

But the truth of the chestnut is that, as a result of decades of oil sales, the Saudi royal house and its hangers on had trillions of dollars to invest. Since the seventies, one of the best places to park your money and see it grow has been in the American financial sector. Money followed the usual track, then, which is how Saudi money is mixed up in whatever giant enterprise or IPO is on tap at the moment. The Saudis were notoriously dumb about this in the seventies, and the princes are notoriously lazy, but the had some smart hangers on, and they were able to buy fleets of smart American MBA types, and so the learning curve and American foreign policy bent together. The Saudis definitely made a smart move by investing in American media - at one point, notoriously, al -waleed bin talal owned a hefty piece of Fox News, as well as bits of Times-Warner, et al., which didn't hurt. The money went out, as well, to think tanks, lobbyists, and the ivory towers. Oftentimes, this was touted as some multi-cultural opening to Middle East culture, with the subtext, that the opening would be subservient to Saudi sensibilities, being muted. Sometimes, as recently, it is just your open, convivial corruption, typical of the T-Rump era. As for instance Harvard and MIT's offering of their prestige to Bin Salman in return for a chance to get in on an academic gold rush. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/30/elite-universities-selling-themselves-mit-harvard-saudi-arabia-mohammed-bin-salman

Even these modalities of Saudi influence would not explain the Saudi-American lockstep. To explain that on the political level, it is necessary to look at how the US (and the UK, and France) has used massive arms sales to the Saudis as an offset to the de-manufacturing policies they have generally pursued to keep consumer prices low and the return on investment for the wealthy high. Here, one must doff one's partisan hat: the status of the U.S. as the leading arms seller in the world became policy under Bill Clinton. Since then, it has been sealed in place through all the changes in the white house.

Here's a report from 1995 about the beginning of it all.

"In fiscal years 1993 and 1994, the executive branch (and Congress) signed-off on a staggering $100 billion of government and industry-negotiated arms deals. Moreover, the administration actively assisted industry by subsidizing marketing activities, lobbying foreign officials to "buy American," and financing several billions of dollars of sales.

The "new" guidelines call for business as usual: "the United States continues to view transfers of conventional arms as a legitimate instrument of U.S. foreign policy-deserving U.S. government support when they enable us to help friends and allies deter aggression, promote regional stability, and increase interoperability of U.S. forces and allied forces."

The prosperity of the nineties was the coming together of many streams, and this was definitely a politically fruitful one. Arms sales doubled in Clinton's first four years in office.

One could tell similar stories about other countries. Britain is notorious for sucking up to the Saudis to keep its airplane manufacturing alive. And so on.

Let's round out this little screed with an even more depressing observation. In 2002, Americans accepted, without a qualm or a quiver, the idea that certain weapons were weapons of mass destruction and certain weapons weren't. As the biggest arms dealer in the world, the U.S. was in a moral pickle here, but admirably, through a lack of any analysis of the phrase whatsoever, we were able to thread the needle that allowed the U.S. to sell the jets that could deliver nuclear missiles and even the missiles themselves, but not the atomic warheads - and pat itself on the back for its liberal and democratic way of life. Back in those days, this drove me crazy. Around the time that Libya "gave up" its atom bomb program - in return for contracts with the west that would sell it other weapons - I wrote a little blog column about it all.

268. Why can't my right hand give my left hand money? -- My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand can write a deed of gift and my left hand a receipt. -- But the further practical consequences would not be those of a gift. When the left hand has taken the money from the right, etc., we shall ask: "Well, and what of it?" And the same could be asked if a person had given himself a private definition of a word; I mean, if he has said the word to himself and at the same time has directed his attention to a sensation. – Wittgenstein

The philosopher treats a question like an illness. – Wittgenstein.

The disarmament of Libya is the latest episode in the preposterous policies generated by the bogus classification, “weapons of mass destruction.” The moniker applies, ironically, to weapons that have very rarely been implicated in mass destruction. The Uzi, the tank, the bomber – these very vendable items, of course, aren’t weapons of mass destruction. Rather, with its right hand, the West has stocked every country that could afford it with a supply of such things. That right hand has been busy, as even a cursory look at the arms sales totals could tell you. It is here, especially, that the 9/11 lie – the lie that 9/11 ‘changed everything’ – is stripped of its plausibility. While political factions in America throw charges of lying at each other, they both are comfortable with the structural lie, the one that kept Bush 1 and Clinton in the arms sales business, and that keeps Bush 2 there too. And the Swedes, Brits, French, Germans … let’s not leave out anybody. The Russians, of course, primus inter pares.

Ah, but then we have the sweep of the punitive left hand, disarming rock n roll tyrants like Khaddafi and putting all the editorial writers of the NYT to sleep with sweet dreams.... Libya giving up its laughable nuclear capacity is being taken as a sign of disarmament. We suspect that, long term, this is really a move to re-arm – to buy all the conventional weapons that Khaddafi longs for, and that the EU and the US longs to sell him. It has, after all, been a moneymaker in the past. Libya’s interest is not to regain some international stature – it is to keep up with its neighbors, to which it has been hostile in the past. In fact, recently Khaddafi has been stirring up coups in Mauretania. This, of course, without using the weapons of mass destruction – weapons of conventional destruction will do very nicely, thank you very much. So much for the tie between WMD and aggressive behavior. "

So this is just to say: our problems long long pre-date Trump. We don't need resistance, we need transformation.

Announcing Willett's Magazine

My distinguished pals:
I've been working on creating a magazine that would combine my wit - or witlessness - as I peacock it on this blog with the writings and musings, hopefully, of other peeps who I will pay in cash money - don't get excited, not a lot of cash money, this is me we are talking about - for their contributions. Of course, to pay in cash money I am going to have to beg for donations, which I'm going to do by going to one of those dumb crowdbegging sites and jumping through hoops and, presumably, bothering everybody who ever had the misfortune to link to me with my cup and doffed cap.

The name of the mag is Willetts. It is here.  Please think of sending me, at the paypal on this site, a donation. And those of you with ideas, from memoiring to reviews, or who would like me to commission a review, please drop me a line at rogergathmann@gmail.com

Today's article at Willard's is about the Abe Fortas Case: a lesson for Democrats.

Mother Jones, a magazine that has taken up the mantra of tut-tutting neoliberalism and run with it, has published an article that claims that it is a “liberal fantasy” to think of impeaching Brett Kavanaugh. The writer of the piece is their correspondent for covering the court, Stephanie Mencimer, so presumably she knows what she is talking about. This is her “wake up to the coffee” graf:

It’s never going to happen. If the Democrats can’t stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the Senate, there’s no way they’re going to be able to boot him from the bench after he’s secured his lifetime appointment. No Supreme Court justice has ever been successfully impeached and removed by Congress. The last time Congress even tried was in 1804. 

This, for Mencimer, disposes of the issue. Then she goes on to troll a bit how we don’t appreciate an “independent judiciary” anymore, like the elite slaveholders who founded the U.S. did.

Well, I have many bones to pick with the last part, but it is the first part I would like to direct my vitriol to.

Liberals would do well, at this point, to look to the Republican-directed pressure that was put on justices from the Warren court. One case stands out: Abe Fortas

When Abe Fortas died in 1982, his obituary was featured on the front page of the NYT. Since that time, his story has slipped into the national amnesia, save for that part of the national brain that consists of the Federalist society and its groupies. You could date the rightward shift, and the organization of one of the most powerful but underrated forces in the U.S., conservative legal activism, from the nomination of Abe Fortas by Lyndon Johnson to the post of Chief Justice, after Earl Warren stepped down.

Here’s the obituary thumbnail:

“Mr. Fortas resigned from the Court amid an uproar over disclosures that he had accepted a $20,000 fee from a foundation controlled by Louis E. Wolfson, a friend and former client who at the time of the payment was under Federal investigation for violating securities laws. His resignation ended a stormy three-and-a-half-year tenure on the Court, which included an abortive effort by President Johnson to name him Chief Justice, and made Mr. Fortas the only Justice in the history of the Supreme Court to resign under the pressure of public criticism.”

This happened in 1969, giving Richard Nixon his opportunity to put his impress on the Court.

So how did this happen?

In 1965, when LBJ nominated Abe Fortas, the editors of the New Republic commented:

“When the President nominated his friend Abe Fortas for the Supreme Court, he was rewarding Mr. Fortas' long-held, passionate faith in the statesmanship and liberalism of Lyndon B. Johnson - a faith not widely held or easily maintained in liberal and intellectual circles ten or even five years ago. But the President was able to reward a friend while at the same time appointing one of the ablest lawyers of his generation, and a lawyer who takes an exalted view of the court he is about to join. Little more than a year before his nomination and subsequent confirmation by the Senate, Mr. Fortas wrote of the court while paying tribute, in the Yale Law Journal, to another old friend. Justice William O. Douglas. "A man may live a long and active life - even in the aquarium of public office - without revealing and, indeed, without discovering his essential convictions. There are many hiding places; there are many factors which invite avoidance of this painful confrontation: the pressures of too little time; the exigencies of the moment; the rationalization engineered by the overwhelming virtue of self-preservation; the primacy of the need to accommodate one's views to those of others; the driving need for immediate results.”

Fortas here was worshipping at the idol of the lifetime appointment – the foundation of the “independent judiciary” so beloved by the Mother Jones correspondent. These words seem a little strange to us now: they speak more of a Straussian belief in the white lie, as the rulers nudge us into what they want us to do, then a faith in democratic forces and the wisdom of the crowd.

So what happened when Fortas was nominated to be Chief Justice in 1968 and the aquarium of public office was hurled at his head?

Fortas’s downfall was engineered by two deeply racist Dixiecrats, James Eastland of Mississippi and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. We can follow the story in further New Republic editorials:

Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who after the GOP convention must be reckoned a power in the Republican Party and in the country, told his delegation at one point in Miami Beach that if it held firm for Nixon he (Thurmond) would be mightily encouraged in his battle against the Fortas nomination. Shouts and handclaps greeted his assurance to the Carolinians that "We hope to defeat Mr. Fortas' confirmation" and "If we can defeat this confirmation, in my judgment it will be a turning point in this nation."

Strom was right. The Fortas hearings were all about how buddy-buddy Fortas was with LBJ. This might not seem like a reason to deny him the seat, but it was the excuse for what Eastland and Thurmond really wanted – a thoroughgoing excoriation of the Warren court and all its deeds, the worst of which, for the two racists, was the legal crushing of the idea that blacks were second class citizens forever and ever. But this motive, as always in the South, was merged with the idea that it was all the fault of the communists. As Thurmond said on Meet the Press:

… his decisions have turned loose criminals on technicalities; they have allowed communists to teach in schools and colleges; they have allowed communists to work in defense plants and his decisions have reversed the local communities and the lower courts on the matter of obscenity." And: "We [of the Senate Committee] are not trying him for impeachment but we are trying him (sic) to determine his qualifications to be Chief Justice and we think his decisions on the Court, in the way I have related them, show that he is not qualified to be the Chief Justice. In fact, I don't think he is even qualified to be on the Court."

Evidently the Republicans of Thurmond’s day disagreed with the Collins doctrine that Senators should not look at the ideology of candidates. I think that is a rule that is only evoked for far right wing candidates, anyway.

Abe Fortas remained on the Court after the battle of 1968. His downfall was coming, though, especially when the Thurmondesque president,  Richard Nixon, was elected. I would recommend reading an excellent Washington Post piece dated May 16, 1969, the chronology of Fortas’s downfall was unfolded. It started when William Lambert, a Life Magazine reporter, received a tip from anonymous government official that he should look into the relationship between Fortas and a crooked businessman named Wolfson, recently imprisoned for stock manipulation (yes, Virginia, at one time they actually imprisoned crooked businessmen, instead of bailing them out with huge loans).

Word spread in D.C. The news must have made John Mitchell, the new Attorney General, smile a bit and puff a bit more on his pipe. Mitchell, somehow, didn’t have compunctions about the fantasy of getting rid of a sitting Supreme: he saw how he could catch a rat and went about it. An assistant Attorney General interviewed Lambert.  And the Life news story came out with information about the 20,000 dollars given Fortas by the “charitable” foundation set up by Wolfson.

The Republicans went on the attack in the House, while in the Senate Ted Kennedy said this was a very serious charge. It should be noted that Fortas’s friendship with LBJ would not make him a friend of the Kennedies.

On May 6, Nixon met with the Republican caucus and urged them (to repressed giggles, no doubt) not to make Fortas a partisan matter. One of the attendees asked if there was more on Fortas to be discovered. To which Mitchell gave the one word answer: yes.

On May 10, Mondale was the first Senator to suggest Fortas resign. The Republicans must have been happy about that. In the house, H.R. Gross of Iowa (GOP) called for empaneling a Federal jury to make a sweeping investigation of Fortas. But in the end, Fortas’s resignation brought him relief from the hounds.

This is a story about Democrats running water for the Republicans. There will not be a similar scene if the Dems take the house, and Representative Nadler really investigates Kavanaugh. But Democrats can take some hints from the Fortas affair. Leak to the press. Keep the pressure up. And use the power you have to call for a larger investigation of the Justice. If you don’t get him to resign, you can wound him to the extent that the Supreme Court will definitely start smelling of illegitimacy. Because… the Supreme Court is illegitimate. It is the result of sheer brute political strength, exerted by the GOP. As an arm of the Republican party, the respect one should, theoretically, have for an “independent judiciary” is simply a farcical exercise in swallowing the dictates of the D.C. elite and pretending it is some kind of civic duty. Our civic duty, at this point in time, is the exercise of countervailing power,  civil disobedience, and protest at the Court. Probably for a long, long time.  

  

  

Yeats and spelling

Does it help that Yeats was dyslexic?

The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations. A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to write on and how to write it, and go cave man for real.

I grow old, I grow old. I am too old for emoticons. And graffiti spelling does sometimes assault my sense of the order of things. Yet I am helped by the thought that Yeats was as apt to spell “there” “their” as not. I really am.

on the bezos bill

Senator Sanders so called Bezos bill has caused an interesting backlash. Some liberal economists, like Jared Bernstein, think that the bill will result in unemployment.

In brief, the bill proposes to charge those companies, like Amazon and Walmart, who make a habit of employing workers at such a low wage that they have to depend on foodstamps. Basically, Sanders bill calls this a social cost that the company should shoulder.

Bernstein’s worry is that the workers will be fired, since the company does not want to shoulder that cost. It is an interesting worry, because it depends on the assumption that there is enough slack in the logistical or clerical line that certain workers will be priced out. In other words, X company employs X amount of employees to get a certain task done – stock shelves, load packages onto trucks, etc. But they hire more than they need. Thus, they can fire some without endangering the process by which products are transported, shelved, checked out, etc. However, even if this is so – and in a near full employment situation, this is more plausible than in a less than full employment situation – they are still going to have to pay for the social costs or raise the pay for those employees doing these tasks. They can’t just not do them. So it is not at all clear to me that this argument works. Firstly, at the least slack in demand, these workers will go anyway. Secondly, the incentive to pay workers more, in order to avoid shouldering the government mandated costs, is good for the remaining workers.

Another argument, and frankly, a dumber one, has been presented by Dylan Matthews, at Vox. His argument is pretty much that we rely on big corporations to get the crummy social welfare that we already have. If we do this, who knows but that the corporations will turn against the whole idea of food stamps. As proof of this hitherto unseen altruism lurking in the corporate heart, Matthews adduces Walmart’s contribution to a think tank that leans towards increasing the social welfare net, and he tweets: “Walmart's strong support for food stamps (because it means more poor people can buy food at Walmart) is one of the few non-shit things about America's fucked up political economy, and something that ought to be encouraged rather than assailed.”

A funny thing about that strong support: according to a report in 2014 described on Huffington Post, “59 percent of the Walmart PAC’s contributions to House members who voted on the minimum wage increase went to candidates who opposed the increase, while 95 percent of the Waltons’ contributions went to candidates who opposed the increase.” Now, I know this is takin’ a big leap, but I’d guess, in America’s fucked up political economy, that you could draw a venn diagram of people who support food stamps and those who support restricting food stamps and freezing the level of them and the people who oppose increasing the minimum wage, and you would see a nearly total overlap. We could start with Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who is well known for wanting to squeeze out the number of people getting food stamps with various bureaucratic procedures weeding out those on disability.

So my idea is that no, Walmart’s eyes on the prize do not entail going to the mat about food stamps.

Now, to address what these liberals and neo-liberals don’t: the discouragement built into a system in which work gets you food stamps. The number of men who have opted out of employment over the past 20 years is a pretty significant factor in the Heartland. One of the reasons is that wages are low. You can make equal money by using the social welfare net. Charging corporations for using that social welfare net as a labor cost cutter might actually provide incentives for these men, as the wages rise to avoid the charges entailed by the surcharges created by corporate rentseeking.

This is one possibility, at least, and it is more likely than the possibility that Walmart, stung to its philanthropic core by the Bezos bill, will cease supporting food stamps.

There might well be a model or argument out there that makes a more plausible case for the Bezos bill having a downside. But these arguments surely aren’t it.