Rivers

The Heraclitians claim

that you don’t step into the same river twice

while all rivers are the same

in the Platonist’s eyes

Let us take a case:

the river of my skin

- a time lapse camera would show

From the body within

the belly of my mother

to the belly of my tomb

the skin flowing like a river

in which I swim.

The flakes, hairs, pores, moles, scratches

acne, scars, rashes, tags

are carried along in snatches

- they appear, they flow, they lag

and it all gathers in wrinkles in the end.

- I said swim? We are drowning in this river

and at every elbow bend

the river is drowning in us.

Being and becoming, the luck of the drowned

by and  by we’ll moulder in the cold, cold ground.

- Karen Chamisso

Making the Dems competitive

I am thinking about what will make the Dems more competitive with orange turd, and in the short term, it is obvious to me: better glasses. Both Warren and Sanders are still stylin the 70s,, 80s look. Come on! I think the presidency is worth splurging a little Both of them would look much chic-er Warren might want to look at the St. Laurent cat's eye style, here: 

Warren would totally rock with this look. I remember the green party candidate who ran for the presidency in france, years ago: Eva Joly. Even those who didn't vote for her had to give her the contest on the glasses: outrageous green and red frames that said: i'm on the next level. Well, that is maybe not the message that Warren wants to send. But the St. Laurent's scream, to me: I'm confident not only that I'm going to turn that Trump into a dump, but that I might literally turn him into a toad by doing a bewitched blink.

Sanders, on the other hand, needs I think something heavier. In my opinion, he could really thrill the masses in these Tom Fords. The glasses he has right now, too often he is obviously looking over the lenses. This is not good! It gives him some tad frantic energy, which is fine when you aren't the frontrunner, but now? I'm not talking the Scorcese "these glasses have invaded my face and now I have to pay them a vig" type glasses. But something heavier and slicker, something that anchors the look and says, I want Medicare for all, and I am cruisin' in these ultra frames, my companeros - for the people, united behind really groovy frames, will never be defeated.

On ACRONYM and the aristocracy of the mediocre

"And we have a situation where as a party if we are the good guys we have to be the good guys — not engaging in this,” Ganapathy told me. “There’s a reason why so many Americans think politics is an elitist plot to make a handful of people wealthier, and it’s kind of true." - see the outline article on ACRONYM and SHADOW - and weep

Ideology is excreted from practice. The practice in the American political establishment, since at least the seventies, is to professionalize it - to make it a source of juicy contracts and positions, with the credentialing done by people who have made those juicy contracts - and not necessarily won an election.

One fights for candidates. Is Sanders better than Warren? Is Biden acceptable? But in the political world, these are just actors in the larger movie, which is not about making the world or the country a better place, but about notches in the CV, leading to tv appearances and quotes in the newspapers, which leads to ever more money. It is a very white world - and a very close knit, insider dealing kind of world. These are people who, themselves, never have fought a campaign as anything so vulgar as a candidate. Rather, they develop "synergies" with candidates, or boast in the press that they are developing state of the art digital platforms to get a progressive - or conservative - message out, which means they have hit the hot spot: "doing well by doing good", as the rich donor class likes to say. Even though they are doing well by undermining good.

Ideology is excreted from practice, The political system in the US, in the 70s, was pathetically easy to buy. And in the next forty years, it was bought at knock down prices and turned a huge profit - with taxes sinking on Capital, the social insurance structure open for scamming healthcare services while being enervated from within, the huge expenditures for the military, and last and least, the campaign industry, where the point is to go to rich donors and canalize a living for yourself, your family and associates while making your services "indispensible" to politicians - who benefit by becoming lobbyists after their defeat or resignation, and whose family members get into the honey from the first. Its an adhoc aristocracy of the mediocre.

The GOP was always an adhoc aristocracy of the mediocre, propped up by the petrochemical industry. The Dems needed their own tycoons to party with, after they had sucked the unions dry. And with finance and tech, they found them.

So it goes on the fall down down down the dark ladder. Americans enter this century as, for the most part, bankrupt pions, fronted by billionaire monsters and celebrity monsters.

I write this as a goof, a mark. I have long thought that somebody like Trump, with his insanely low numbers, would be impossible not to beat. Watching the Dems get fucked up by the D.C. poltical management industry that is among the stupidest group of peeps ever to get an ivy league education and a head start from a trust fund (I omit, here, the Supreme Court - of course, they always win the palm for sheer stupidity), I have the sadness that Charley Brown must feel every time Lucy pulls away the football.

On Free Lunches

I want to cull this from  page 2 of Greg Mankiw’s popular Essentials of Economics – used by hundreds of Econ 101 classes, tucked under the arms of thousands of students, who paid a hefty price for it:

You may have heard the old saying, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Grammar aside, there is much truth to this adage. To get something we like, we usually have to give up something else that we also like.

I like to think of them, those thousands of scions of upper class households, products all of them of years of free lunches, nodding to this crackerbarrel truism. One of the great principles of education is to blind yourself to the self-evident. It is part of one’s self-fashioning, and it is especially useful as these scions go on to get positions in the upper ranks of management, investment, etc., and can look about them and say: I earned this.

By their truisms you shall catch them – this is the rhetorical ratcatcher’s faith. My faith, really. The crack in the neo-classical economics façade – the underpinning of that big neo-other, Neoliberalism – appears here.  If one looks deeply enough, many of the ideological decisions that go into the neoclassical model congregate around the idea that there is no free lunch – or as Mankiw translates it, there are almost always trade-offs.

The first and most important of those decisions is that the local difference between the person who pays for and offers the lunch and the person who eats it, free, is of no concern to economics. Thus, all sociology is given the bum’s rush at this banquet. The economist’s truth stops at the fact that if there is a free lunch, someone is paying for it, and that in the end, we are all someone. And it is true that if x is paying for y’s lunch, if we just move a level upward we can treat them as variables, so that y paying for x’s lunch is the same thing. But what if that move up the level is missing an essential fact – which is that there is always somebody paying for the lunch, and somebody eating it free? And what if there is a whole class of x’s who offer a whole class of y’s free lunch?

Read the rest at Willetts!

In a bar on the rue quincampoix

In a bar on the rue quincampoix

by Karen Chamisso

Cressida, I thought of you

wasting away in Margaritaville

as the hour came on to that gray and blue

moment -click - when it is time for a girl to chill.

Do foxes not have holes? I at least have one

on Rue Quincampoix, where I’m a known quality

where I’ve come to have my fun

where I’ve drunk my quantity.

In the glint of the lounge light there

I set up with a gin and tonic

a notebook opened on the sputtering flair

of a word – the chatter here is trans-Atlantic

the gals are Cally, the guy is German

and the French sociopetally clustered in the corner

eye contact is made by a man determined

to ask me what I’m writing – if he could have the honor

-well he can’t – I’m sorry – as you know

Cress, I too dive into the wreck

- and so many wrecks from long ago

- and so many from last week

- playing phrase and fable solitaire

to  find and wind my lash fine thread

through dead men’s eyes and dead men’s stares

the old old slag, the old old dread

- in particular, tonight: tart. A sweet, a pie

all the endless jar between honey and vinegar

I go to the OED, cause it don’t lie

I go to the Online, for the war

“Everyone wants a piece of the attention pie”

first came the sweet then came the bitter.

Adored the adored, but where incense upward flies

better be careful of the hitter

beneath the embrace. Cherchez la femme fatale

because she materializes suddenly, Cress, you with the bored

drawl,  cig in hand, like Lauren Bacall

that tall drink look - “will you walk in my lord”

and in a rush I see a visionary Gita

from Barbara Stanwyck to Gloria Graham

from Cressida to Nana, from Lana to Rita

from Hollywood Blv. to Iliam

Aaa…nd – and here the poem was interrupted. Just as I was about to put my migraine geometry to work, dot by dot, mapping out a state of exception that has lasted lo these patriarchal millenia, just as the postman always rings twice was going to disturb Cressida and Diomedes in their tent in my scratchin referorama, my friend Marc and his boyfriend (Luc?)  come barreling in the door, bringin in a night that will end I can already see at Cox,  heatseek my table and Marc lifts me up just as “Bonny and Clyde” comes on the P.A. and we dance a two step, and then start singing and the Frenchies join in in freaking out the American girls who haven’t yet experienced the French joy in singing along that sometimes just breaks out, a distant echo of Ça ira secularized, lyed and dyed and finding its objects in the popular song – of long ago.

Marc says, what is the poem about tonight?

“Vous avez lu l'histoire de Jesse James
Comment il vécut, comment il est mort”

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.