party pic

The Party Pic
Karen Chamisso

It is just human nature to stand in a party pic
and gargoyle to the unknowns outside this magic circle
in your Alex McQueen threads while
your blush fails and the flash bounces
                                               off of your forehead.

His hands are comfortably round your waist
this host, not so cute as an octopus,
but coming on all tentacles and tan unattached
once the starter wife is ejected from the copilot seat.

It is just human nature for him
to stand in the middle and tycoon
a picaro of the scandal mags and loose with money
an advisor of sorts: a knower of politicians in their winter.

Your beaming smile on his left and hers on the right
Do you wonder about the captions for this night?

I know already that if I’m in this group of teeth
I will be retouched
since I am all blurs in the flash aftermath
my pic presence running for the exit.

Who's the racist? The tie between economics and racism

From Willettsmag

What is the tie between racism and economics? I watched the NYT video of Sanders explaining his take on it – that economic misery creates the need for an enemy other to explain it. This explanation is in concert with the general American mainstream idea that racism is concentrated in the most ignorant and poorest. Yet, at first glance, one would think that if the economic system is racist, then the people who benefit from it most would be the most racist.

This takes “racism” out of a certain imprisonment in the notion of sentiment, and makes it a socially constructed intersubjective bundle of characteristics. I think that is a better place for beginning this discussion.

With this beginning, we can ask again about economics and racism, with the corollary that the way in which the onus of the racism discussion singles out certain classes as racist and ignores others is, itself, part of the structural racism we are talking about.

In the U.S., recently, the question has been: what is wrong with those white people making below 50 thou per year and voting for Trump? And the answer is that they are voting for white solidarity. Yet here’s a puzzle: how about those same voters voting for Obama in 2012? And how about Romney’s overwhelmingly white voting constituency? In fact, Romney seemed to have cleaned up with the over 50,000 per year white voter. And yet, who spoke, then, about the upper class white sense of entitlement?

I am not saying that the Romney voter was per se racist. I am saying that the correlation between voter and candidate doesn’t give us an absolute x ray of racism in America. It does give us a starting point for talking about white supremacy as it insinuates itself into the symbols of well-being.

Well-being is a word from economics and sociology. I like to think here of an exchange between Nassau, an English liberal economist in 19^th century England, and Tocqueville. Tocqueville wrote, in Democracy in America, that in England, “the good of the poor ended up being sacrificed to that of the rich.” Nassau made the classic move that we see economists regularly make today: he disputed the idea that the salaries of the working class weren’t rising.

Tocqueville wrote back:

You attack me on this point, of which you are certainly a very competent judge. However, you will permit me to disagree with your opinion. Firstly, it seems to me that you give to the phrase “good of the poor” a very restrained interpretation that I hadn’t given it: you translate it by the word wealth which applies particularly to riches. I had wanted to speak, myself, of all the things which could concur in the well being of life – consideration, political rights, the ease of obtaining justice, the enjoyments of the mind and the thousand other things that contribute indirectly to happiness. I think, lacking a contrary proof, that in England the rich have little by little attracted to themselves almost all the advantages that the social state furnishes to men. In taking the question in your narrow way, and in admitting that the poor man gains a momentarily greater profit in cultivating the land of another’s than of his own, do you think there are no other political, moral, intellectual profits attached to the possession of land, and which compensate beyond, and principally in a permanent manner, the disadvantage that you signal?

Tocqueville here asserts the broader sociological claim. It isn’t the claim that Marx might make in exactly this way, but in fact, Marx began his career with a series of newspaper stories about the abolition of certain common forest rights that kept commoners from gleaning in forests – and he recognized, in that seemingly small moment, a central truth – that property is not derived from law, but from forces that shape the law. Property, then, can’t be the sole interest of the working class – because it is an illusory object, one shaped by Capital itself. And in this sense, one could reconcile the left interpretation of Marx with Tocqueville’s, to me, wonderful sense that interest is defined by “all the things that concur in well being”.

In the American system, the white settler self-image was long based on being superior to other races – blacks and indigenous Americans, and later, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. That sense of whiteness was bound up, then, with what Tocqueville calls “consideration”. It was an intricate bind, and persevered after the 1870s, when it should have changed.  It changed enough to eventually assimilate to the vast influx of immigrants in the late 19^th century. But it wasn’t until the Civil Rights era, of course, that the basis of the racist system was attacked.

The upper class in America, which was and is overwhelmingly white. To get a grasp of how the white upper and middle class made its money in a racist system, and how people of color didn’t, there’s a nice article by CityLab here. 

In the Civil Rights era and afterwards, the white upper class did develop its own version of anti-racism. They called it “color blindness.” I won’t go into the critique of color blindness here. I will simply point out that, in the wealthy world, which is full of curated diversity and overwhelming whiteness, color blindness  is the way in which the wealthy have reconciled having such an enlarged measure of well being – so many buckos! – with living in a system that “privileges” them, as they will agree. Privilege is a much pleasanter word than racism, or white supremacy. Profiting off white supremacy seems… ugly. Something we can safely let white blue collar workers do.

This is not to let the peckerwood element off the racist hook. I grew up in working/middle class white Georgia, outside of Atlanta, and I saw and heard enough there to know that Sanders is underestimating how much racism there is among working class whites. At the same time, I’ve seen their kids go to schools that are unimaginable for the upper class set, schools that are sixty percent black, for instance. I’ve seen and heard those kids, and I know that their social lives are full of uncurated diversity.

The direction of the question about economics and racism is, then, wrong. We should be asking about how the colorblind, liberal ethos has substituted for the reality of profiting from the racist economic system. And we should ask about how white supremacy still exists as a major factor in white working class life – and floats especially free for those who have no college education and whose incomes range between  50 thou to 200 thou. This is where Trump and Romney and all the GOP make their votes.  To make anti-racism a factor among those that concur to create well-being is, it seems to me, not a liberal, but a radical goal. 

Don't watch the news

Everybody's got a job to lose

I never watch TV news. We don't have a tv, for one thing, but I don't stream tv news either.

It may be that not watching tv news gives one a different take on politics, beyond ideology. I have my take cause I have certain lefty ideas. But I also have my take because my filter for the news is delayed, and in print.

My impression from everything I have read about the news media is this: that it is dominated by rich white men. They are the decision makers, they edit and report the news, and the picture they make pretty much reflects the world of rich white men. It is also the case that the demographic that goes most strongly for Republicans consists of rich white men.

Perhaps this explains a curious phenomenon among my liberal friends: an exaggerated sense of Trump's political popularity. I ran into this a lot at Christmas dinner this year. Although the last two years have been the worst for the GOP since 2006, the persistant belief is Trump ueber alles.

Obama, it must be said, was terrible for Democrats, and good for himself - thus, during his administration, the Dems lost something like a thousand seats on the state and national level. Trump has had a similar effect on the GOP. When the GOP can't even win the governorships of KY and LA, you know Trump's pull is limited. However, in contrast with Obama, who won quite handily in 2008, Trump won the electoral college by the merest hair in 2016. In the three key states, MI, PA AND WI, he won over HRC by something like 120,000 votes. What that means is that he starts out from an extraordinarily weak position. Still, to credit the big Orange idiot, he also spent half of what HRC spent on the election.

He definitely will outspend the Dems this time. But the configuration is really against him. He hasn't expanded his base. Not an iota. Those who voted for him last time will vote for him this time. If the Dems pursue the illusion they are going to lure Trump voters back, they are going to be in trouble.

But the Dem base is larger. And the potential for getting votes for those who stayed home in 2016 is enormous. Why, then, is this confidence not shared among the Dem elite and my liberal friends?

Frankly, most of my liberal friends are white. And many of them do watch the tv news. Their filter for what is happening is through Trump's most ardent demographic. More, I feel like the division between working class culture and upper middle class culture, which has become enormous under neoliberalism, works to make it the case that few upper class liberals that I know really know any working class people, white or black.

Trump is in it for the excitement. Thus, he allowed Pompeo to put him in an incredibly stupid position. But he also has a very injured sense of being pushed - which is why he got rid of Bolton. I have no idea what will come next, but I am still betting against a war with Iran and that Trump will run within his bubble. I argued against the war with Iran business in 2007, and I still think the argument holds today. Also, I don't think Trump wants to borrow the 400 billion dollars he would need to do this. He wants to run on a great economy.

And racism and misogyny, of course.

In any case, remember: old white guys are grossly overrepresented in the media machine that "reports" on the U.S. Never let that fact fade from your watching life. My two cents for the day.

two chamisso poems

Lucy's the boss

She loomed over my childhood
like a divorcee's vocation:
Lucy says put your hands on your head!

Philistine muse, crabby femme fatale
your schopenhauerian trick with the football
a mean koan.

Later she might have produced a line like:
I am big.
It is the pictures that got small.

Her choric darkness
Snoopy's anarchic daybreak
locked in eternal struggle.

I wrestle with Butler
under the table.
Dog germs! dog germs!

My barbies wait in a box
car crash odalisques
for her summons.

Lucy's the boss! Lucy's the boss!
so when did I stop wearing
my Peanut's gang pyjamas?

Moose agonistes

André Breton and Bullwinkle
set sail on a pea-green sea.
It was all a stunt, set up by a committee
to attract attention to a worthy cause.
Bullwinkle was uncertain. He was into the mob for a certain sum
which is why he took the gig. Usually, he had
a more certain sense of the perimeters,
what was expected of him. The bit with the rabbit
and the hat. The bit with the squirrel.
He and the squirrel hadn’t spoken for years –
it was a legendary quarrel. Supposedly, the squirrel once
even bit Bullwinkle, hard. Credits, money, usual
star vanity bullshit.
Bullwinkle put a poster up
in his dressing room: Beware of rodents!
it said, an X over a squirrel-like silhouette.

Breton, well afterwards everyone said
he’d misread the invitation.
Bullwinkle? he thought it said Bulgakov
an old Troskyist companero from Mexico City.
When the storm struck, the boat in which the camera crew
had set up was parted from
the Bullwinkle boat. The last anybody saw it
was through a fog, a moose silhouette surmounted
by a surrealist, the latter waving his arms.
Rocky, at the memorial service, broke down:
He was my best friend, he wailed.
Was it of the moose he spoke?
- Karen Chamisso

letter to mary shelley

Letter to Mary Shelley

Letters to the dead, or their conversations

No longer thrive among the literati.

We’ve all grown I-bound here, and no other demonstration

Is wanted, but only a sort of lyric potpourri

- which captures our moods and days

And is put quite nicely in quaint sachets.

I’m not complaining – I turn out my quire

And sometime make a little genius patter

Illuminating the soft and hard wires

That make up my neural personal matter

According to all the best popsci bestsellers

Apparently we’re just haunts in genetic cellars.

You were born to the royal anti-royal blood

the little red riding hoods of the revolution

but grew up, Gretel-like, to brood

on the wolf that might solve your family situation.

Then he came, dressed in robes of poesie

- which is how you eloped with the romantic agony.

I should tell you, Mary, we no longer brook

long letters written with that manual drolery

- letters as long as the chapters in your  book

in the tradition of epistolary -

rather we jerk out an email or fifty

under the burden of being short and nifty.

But what is a poet if not an anachronism?

a creature lost among  capitalist feeders

and accused of practicing onanism,

irrelevant,  being at best a loss leader

a prestige item with a hushed voice

on NPR, bloodless and choice. 

In other words, a downer. In other words, a monster.

so you see how much it’s in my line

to stir your shade, to disinter

you from the vaults of the gothic sublime

as you predominate in the culture

that has turned away from the bigwigs of literature.

You’ve had a husband. I’ve had too.

Why do we burn ourselves in the futile quest

to find a mate who is not askew

and will live and love beyond time’s test?

Yours,  his heart consumed in a barbecue

and mine, who I would have liked to have done the same to.

But you are thinking, you woke me up for this?

Couldn’t you bitch to some living friend?

I have other fans, who follow their bliss

by dreaming up quasi-pornographic ends

for me and my creature, a jumble anatomy

all cooked up for fan-fic fuckery.

I dig your objection, or my projection

(shades and shadows, death and the double)

girl – aren’t we the girls who’ve made

our project to cause a lot of trouble

to nitpickers, naggers, and no-nothing butts

who tend to write letters addressed: stupid sluts?

But I have a reason – here we come

Into, technically, the finis of this discourse

this insinuato – for unlike some

I’m keen on rhetorical resource

You, who learned the ancient Latin and Greek

will recognize of what I speak -

Okay, enough, incipit the story:

A friend who is always discovering the bizarre-est

Paris, Fragonard’s ecorchés,

or  sketches by some necrophile symbolist

invited me to the Hôpital St. Louis

where plaster casts from the nineteenth century

are exhibited to the select who ask

for tickets, a dwindling group it seems.

Physicians in training once had the task

of noting horrors that appear as though in dreams

of the worst that can happen to the human skin:

the 19^th century payment for each sin.

The crowding, hovels, debauchery and then some:

Hence the lesion-ridden penis, tumerous nose

adenomas, sarcomas, in a waxy gum

painted then and signed – it’s art I suppose

from which I’m sure that you can learn a bunch

by peering closely – just ask Edvard Munch.

The painter visited here, with some acquaintance

In the 1890s, when  nihilism was the rage

and then painted The Inheritance

where a syphilitic child lies like an open page

on his mother’s lap, diseased to the bone

- it obviously fed Munch’s  misogynistic jones.

The modern Prometheus – we never got it right

did we? In each vitrine a tragedy

 beauty and labeled deformity fight

out the issue of  transcendent agony -

limits imposed by the messes we are

and get into, on this tiny star.

This agony, it isn’t romantic

- these casts do not display the noble body parts

that went into the making of your maniac

a monster science born of the modern arts

mixed with the superstitious  – that was clever!

But these diseases are of another weather.

Frankenstein’s head – via James Whale –

would fit right in here: green skin, thick brow,

forehead scar, the morphine user’s pale

eyelids.

               How

the doctors and the casters would have loved to see

Frankenstein in the clinic for an advisory!

Did you approve from your heavenly perch

The cinematic annexing of your IP?

I’m sure you recognized in the monster’s lurch

through that landscape your demi-divinity

- “so dusk, so obscene and blind”

this untrammeled product of the human mind.  

  

Myself, my head would not fit here

- my fault is beyond this wax, God’s truth -

though I’ve seen diagrams that make clear

that the HOX proteins have failed to induce

the inhibition process that would lend opacity

– undermining the bod’s ombragenous capacity.

Yes, I’m the girl with no shadow. You missed

a subject so subdued to your dyer’s art,

no shadowless girl in some dying fire hissed

its matter into your gothic heart.

A monster me –  and not a faker

writing lit’s greatest monstermaker!

I’ll wrap this up – it has grown quite a size

- just I thought the scene of me here was for you.

I’m sure it has given you a surprise

that out of all of Percy’s crew

You are the studied, the referenced celebrity:

Quite up there with Byron, Keats and Percy.

My friend and I left the hospital grounds

and went for coffee to dissipate

the horrors that made their circus rounds

in my dreams, which I won’t relate:

it’s morning here, time to work, and so

sincerely, Karen Chamisso.

analogy fallacy

The analogies between the UK election and the upcoming American one remind me of the analogies that used to be tossed around in 2003 between occupying Germany after ww2 and occupying Iraq. They are analogies that simply ignore all the salient factors. In the UK, there is a genuine grievance among Labour's working class constituency about how the EU works, which led to Labour having the impossible task of trying to straddle a fundamental issue, becoming a house divided against itself, running against a flamingo fascist who had been in office all of two months by having to run on the flamingo fascist's chief issue.

In the U.S., on the other hand, there is no Brexit. There is an impeachment that lays out Trump's corruption, which - destined to defeat in the Senate - can provide delightful issues to hammer the Republicans indefinitely. There's the fact that, after four years in office, Trump appeals, massively, to Republicans, and not very much or at all to anybody else. Bush was re-elected with a very respectable 35 percent Hispanic vote, according to exit polls. I doubt Trump gets 20. The local elections earlier this year prefigured Labour's massive defeat, while the local elections this year are a clear signal that the electorate is riled up, and will vote against the Dems - as happened in the Governors' races in KY and LA, and in the Democratic triumph in Virginia, among other races.

The elites in the press have long turned into neolib fanboys. Culturally, this means they really, really despise workers. And fear them - this is a meme that goes way back in the history of capitalism. The neolib trick is to try to meld together, say, LBGT issues and NAFTA, or an economic policy favoring the plutocrats in all things with a cultural shift to the "left" allowing trans-"transgressive" artists space in the Style section. It turns favored marginals into entertainment objects which are mulled over by the kinds of people that worry, otherwise, that the Democrats are getting too "radical". In France, the same chemistry is at work - the "deuxieme" gauche, which isn't gauche at all - the type of "lefties" who accepted minister positions with Sarkozy and now fight to please Macron - has broadly the same op-ed beliefs.

Anyway, given the media peeps that try to "run" the narrative in America (all singing the same, Trump is uniquely awful real Americans love him! song), the Johnson analogy will come out heavily over the next media cycle, but I don't think it will make too much of a difference. The disconnect between the political establishment and the grassroots in both parties is deep and getting deeper. My advice: don't believe the hype!

Here's what I wrote in November, 2003

Historical analogies cannot take the place of historical analysis - Leon Trotsky

Jay Bergman, in an fascinating article on Trotsky published two decades ago in the Journal of the History of Ideas, noted Trotsky's borrowing of terms and phrases from the French revolution, and the way the neurotic recapitulation of this reference misshaped and ultimately falsified his analysis of Stalin. It is Bergman's thesis that one of the intellectual causes of Trotsky's failure on the level of practical politics was his habit of casting the contemporary history in terms of the French Revolution. Marx had already mocked the French revolutionists habit of clothing their every act in the language of Republican Rome, as if they could exchange their button up trousers for togas. Bergman has some fun in showing how the scare-word 'Thermidor' was thrown around in the early years of the Russian Revolution. The Mensheviks, in exile, poked at Lenin's NEP as a pernicious backsliding to capitalist norms. For them, here's the proof that Bolshevism was descending into its Thermidor. When Trotsky was still close to the center of power, he dismissed the analogy out of hand. However, once he was clawed out of the center of power, the old black magic of analogy appealed to his mind like that last pipeful to a pothead. Suddenly, the the Thermidor analogy seemed golden. This was a product of the fateful historical experience of the counter-revolution, i.e. Trotsky's being kicked out on his can, in the Soviet Union. One should always ask, when an historical analogy is offered, who benefits -- for usually it aggrandizes the image of its maker in some way. In any case, as out of Thermidor grew the context in which Napoleon emerged, so too, in Russia, out of the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic forces within the Bolshevik party grew the context in which the Soviet Bonaparte, Stalin, emerged.

There are serious problems with treating Stalin as a species of Bonaparte. Stalin himself thought he was a species of Ivan the Terrible. What is most interesting about the analogy, perhaps, is that both Bonaparte and Stalin came from peripheral cultural zones - Corsica and Georgia - to dominate the hegemonic center. So did Hitler, for that matter. But such insights into historical states of affairs afforded by analogies have to shuck off the analogic form in order to become serious. In other words, suggestion has to cede to hypothesis, and hypotheses are brutal.

Bergman is damningly succinct about Trotsky's problem.

"Trotsky, desperately seeking for something from the past that would make sense of the present and promise vindication in the future, failed to recognize (except on rare occasions) that historical analogies, especially inappropriate ones, can often obscure more than they clarify, particularly when the object of one's analysis - in Trotsky's case, Stalinism - proves to be far more rooted in a nation's history and culture than any transnational comparison or analogy might suggest. Indeed, the categories Trotsky borrowed from the French Revolution - Jacobinism, Thermidor and Bonapartism - were too much the product of one historical epoch and national history to be useful in explaining, or even in helping to explain, the evolution of another."

Given the way in which analogies are usually imperfect or completely fallacious guides to the future, their use as a justification for strategic choices is where the metal hits the road and buckles, crashing the plane into the schoolbus. Bremer, in Iraq, famously disbanded the Iraqi military under the premise that it was exactly like the occupation authorities in Germany disbanding the Nazi army. The insanity of this kind of justification will, I am sure, run rampant in the shop offices of the D.C. election consulting firms. We'll see what Democratic candidate suddenly decides to revamp according to the formula that Trump, like Johnson, is the heavy favorite. 

macronery overreaches!

From Willetts: http://willettsmag.net/macron-overreaches/

From a strategic pov, the Macron/Eduard Philippe proposals are curious. After all, the points system seems both so blurry and so technocratic that its real meaning – the gradual abolition of state support for the retirement of most of the working class, and the debauching of public service (conservative governments make th

eir case against government by the slice and dice method – they underfund state services, the services go to crap, then they say, justly, look at how crappy government is) could be achieved, and then they could creep towards the goal of raising the retirement age, and voila. But no: they decided to front and center what Philippe, comically, called “working just a little bit longer”. Hence, the crossing of the “red line” – the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 – and the turn of the moderate union, the CFDT – against Macronery. According to Le Monde, the house journal of Macronery, this has “shook up” Macron’s party – all of them, apparently, are pacing around their 800 thousand euro apartments in the 5th and 6th arrondissements going, we thought we had an understanding with the servants!

Historically, when a President of France is going to take a big dump on the population, he sorta disappears in Olympian fog, and his Prime Minister appears as the big target. This happened when Chirac tried this shit with Juppe, and it is happening now with Philippe. I suppose what is in it for the pm is that he gets a shot, latter on, as the candidate for president. But in fact, it is rarely a good position to be in. Juppe never recovered from the disaster of 1995. Philippe is now the face of “work just a little bit longer” – a phrase that will hang around his neck, I think, for the resgt of his career. Now that the Macronists have created an undreamt of unity – among the unions – in opposition to their quest to make France like Thatcher’s UK, what happens next is very uncertain. If the miners union under Thatcher had been able to leverage support from other unions and bring on a true general strike, who knows if Thatcherism would have recovered from the blow? But the Thatcherites were smart, and stuck to a divide and conquer policy.

The Macronists aren’t that smart.