But, I Digress

Hey!

2009-07-01T18:17:28Z

I know you're just waiting for my tomatoes to get ripe, aren't you, Mr. Bluejay?

American Politics, a Lamentation

2009-06-26T20:59:23Z

In some ways, the American political system is working as intended: the elite, or at least an elite, is making the decisions, just as the proverbial Founding Fathers designed. Sadly, that elite does not comprise the actual representatives we elect—perhaps a blessing, since our electeds tend to be kind of stupid after all. There's no irony here: candidates are selected by the two parties because they are weak: weak minded and weak-willed. They are therefore more moldable into the electable product. Witness George W. Bush, a blank canvas upon which Karl Rove could paint his masterpiece. Still, a certain level of competence is necessary, as the meltdown of Sarah Palin's candidacy evinced. This is not to say that, had the press actually scrutinized W. the same way that the same thing couldn't have happened to him, but they weren't then in love with Obama, didn't have the evil temptress of Palin to gird up their loins to resist.

But parties are cognizant of the need to kowtow to their masters, the much maligned “special interests,” by which we can read “wealthy businesses interests.” The Right may complain about the Sierra Club or the ACLU, but those entities take to the courts because they can't afford to run candidates; only the really loaded can finance a campaign. The open-secrets of the senators from coal country or the representatives from Boeing wouldn't seem so tired conceptually if they weren't actually just that. In the biggest coup (all puns intended) yet, we have just passed an era in which the president and vice president were wholly owned subsidiaries of the oil and gas industries. This worn path, however, leads us to the gates of our true masters.

By doing so, we follow the money too, and even after the recent collapse, the top 5% still control almost half of all there is. And just as the feudal lords' powers ebbed or flowed depending on their relationship with the Holy See, so too do the current elites see their wealth enhanced or degraded by political patronage. Boeing never missed a major government contract when the powerful triumvirate of Nancy Kassebaum, Bob Dole, and Dan Glickman represented Kansas, where Boeing has a major plant. But when these were replaced by the relatively weak and ineffectual Brownback/Roberts/Tiahrt delegation, Boeing lost a major bid, and to an overseas company to boot.

It doesn't help that this delegation is at least 2/3 intellectually dim either; the downside of being able to control a politician is simply that he or she lacks personal power. In this, George W. Bush seems to have won the day for Big Oil but lost the war, as America's global position was weakened vis-a-vis OPEC, its relationship with Russia shot, and its access to Iraqi oil fields remains doubtful. In the short term, the almost unimaginable boon of oil prices at $120 a barrel last year have come back to haunt a wrecked economy and Venezuela and Russia renationalizing their supply.

The American people, of course, hardly even enter the picture. Even during election years, they are so docile and suggestible, so apathetic, that it's nearly certain they'll fail to surprise. The election of Barack Obama reinforces this idea. He may be black, but he's also unrelentingly centrist, even conservative, in times that call for bold and progressive action. No puns intended, in Obama the electorate did not back a dark horse, as that would have been a Kucinich or a Nader. The American people have failed to riot in the streets or even calmly protest even in the face of eight years of obvious incompetence, a quarter century of declining wages, and complete economic meltdown. George Orwell, it turns out, was wrong about this: the proles need not be poorly educated. In fact, despite increasing numbers of college degrees, we're now less likely to agitate than we were when things were going relatively well. The system that we purportedly love, that we send our kids to die in order to supposedly protect, has broken down, been hijacked by the same people who have cynically outsourced our jobs and dismantled the industry we worked so hard to create, and in order to “show them” we elected a man who packs his group of economic advisors and regulators with them.

It's as if, along with middle-class expectations and middle-class educations, we've also adopted bourgeois conservatism, even if it makes our actual lives less certain, less wealthy, less satisfying overall. The middle class that, in its ascendancy, demanded more freedom is now, in its senility, demanding less.

I suppose we get what we deserve, but it is hardly meaningful politically to exist so, with half of us living up to our expectations to vote one way and half the other and neither way promising actual change. What has happened in this country over the past 30 years is the largest voluntary handover of power in history, with literally a hundred million of us not even participating in any election and tens of millions more not demanding that their parties do better. We fail to question the party lines that, inevitably, fail to improve our lives.

There is something of the mindset of war about this, and much of that egged on by the Right wing media and the Republican Revolutionaries who took over congress in 1994 but whose first major victory was the Reagan-Bush regime from 1980-1992. We still fight on their battlefields; they have long held the high ground in the minds of most Americans and even the mainstream media so often touted as leftist. The latter are all solidly in the realms of the wealthy, after all, and are still more worried about their investments than the plight of the poor. The Right determines the language--”taxpayers” instead of “citizens,”--and projects the power relationships—the supposed control of the “intellectual elite” and the threat to freedom that is the ACLU. The lack of push-back and redefinition from the Democrats is an indication that they, too buy this language to some degree. This is also why universal single-payer health care, the only system that actually makes sense, is an impossibility in this country.

They manage to do this by false dilemmas: the system we have or socialism, the vagaries of the market or the “rationing” of health care, and that feeds into the scorched-earth politics of a two-party state wherein winning is the point, governing is secondary. And the only way to win such costly campaigns is to enlist the power, and thereby pledge fealty to, the rich.

The question history will have to ask, and the answer is not exactly clear, is why such a powerful and hopeful and active people gave up on their democracy, why we decided that solutions that actually work were too ideologically scary to try, why making our public servants actually serve the public was too much to bother with after all.

Writer's Block: I Can Relate

2009-06-24T14:23:59Z

What fictional character do you most identify with?

View other answers

The hanged man in Ambrose Beirce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek."

Meme Whore

2009-06-23T23:25:36Z

1) What author do you own the most books by?

Probably Michael Meyers, who does tons of literary anthologies for Bedord/St.Martin's. I get those free, so he wins by default.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?

JS Mill's On Liberty. For some reason, it was popular with my profs. in college. Either that or Gatsby, again because of the freebies.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

It is something up with which I shall not put.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

Becky Sharp.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?

Probably Gatsby because I read it in high-school and college and taught it a few times in lit. courses. Maybe Conrad's Heart of Darkness for the same reason. I once spent an hour and a half analyzing a single image in Conrad's novella. That was a good (and patient) class.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Wasn't it everyone's?

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?

The Purpose Driven Life. It literally made me physically ill.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?

Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?

Probably Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy since he predicted exactly what has happened to America's economy--and he did it ten years ago. Needless to say, nobody listened.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?

Andrei Codrescu

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

They should just cut out that making books into movies business already.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Finnegan's Wake--oh, wait, somebody already tried.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

I dreamt I had coffee with Amy Tan one time, and we all know that's totally weird because if I actually met her we'd be all doin' it and thangs.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?

The Purpose Driven Life, which I read as research for a satire I wrote for EastWesterly Review. That people find in that book a viable guide to life is utterly terrifying.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?

Probably Kant's Critique of Pure Reason since he seems allergic to examples. It was difficult because it was both fascinating and utterly unable to keep me consistently awake. Kant really, really needed an editor. And yes, I've read both Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. They at least made me laugh.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?

I don't know if I've ever seen a Shakespeare play live outside of the park.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

I respect the French for their wit, the Russians for their tenacity.

18) Roth or Updike?

Updike. Roth is funny, but altogether too cruel, and the whole self-absorbed thing gets old after a while. And Updike is subtly profound, Roth not really profound at all.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

That isn't even a serious question.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

See above.

21) Austen or Eliot?

Eliot.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

Philosophy, but there's so damn much of it!

23) What is your favorite novel?

The Idiot.

24) Play?

I'll take anything Shavian.

25) Poem?

You can't be serious. That's like asking a drunk what his favorite fortified wine is.

26) Essay?

"A Modest Proposal" just because it's such delicious fun to teach.

28) Work of non-fiction?

No such thing as a "work of non-fiction" exists.

29) Who is your favorite writer?

This is an impossible question to answer, but reading Wallace Stevens will make you a better person. If you survive.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

TC Boyle.

31) What is your desert island book?

Complete Works of Emily Dickinson. She knew how to make isolation interesting.

32) And ... what are you reading right now?

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The man was obsessed with corn. Corn and ducatoons.

Cranky Critic

2009-06-19T23:08:01Z

At one time, the worst one could accuse The Iowa Review of being was occasionally boring. But the Winter 2008/2009 issue commits the literary crime of publishing a piece that's downright bad, sloppy and wrong.

Worse yet, they gave Andrew Mortazavi's “Stop Six, Ft. Worth” the annual Iowa Review prize for fiction. Judge Ethan Canin might simply have been having a bad day, or he might simply be clueless, but Mortazavi's short story barely rises to the level of what one might expect in an advanced undergraduate fiction workshop.

I first became alerted that something was amiss when I ran across a glaring usage error. Mortazavi's narrator, Jeremy, refers to the rear lights on his older brother's Cavalier as being “break” lights when they should, by all accounts, be brake lights. Now, I've selected a few imperfect manuscripts for publication, but that was based on the overall quality of the work. After that, I made sure the minor errors got sorted out before the piece went to press. You'd expect a story entered into a contest to be a bit more polished from the get-go.

The narrator is also utterly unconvincing. How Jeremy can simultaneously pull off being a 13 year old, a near drop-out, and someone who prefers to sit at home all day and read is beyond me. I'm sure there are a few people out there like that, but I've never met them. The 13 year old dropouts I knew read comic books if they read at all, but mostly they just played video games and got high. The readers were all in class, probably because they were not intimidated by the classroom, were rewarded because of their linguistic acuity, and admired educated people. Even in the inner-city setting Mortazavi tries to explore, the intellectually curious are welcome in school and tend to advance.

Mortazavi, no doubt, posits this nearly impossible narrator in order to give himself the excuse to write lines like this one: “Pale blue lights shined from both ends of her swimming pool, the surface undulating in the night breeze, casting the backyard and the brick house in an eerie incandescence easier felt than seen.” That's a lovely line, poetic, even. But no 13 year old male would ever think like that, no matter how precocious. He'd be too embarrassed, to begin with, too interested in posing and narrowing his thoughts into some media-driven notion of cool. Problematically, Jeremy actually does a bit of the cool-posing at another point in the story, which comes off as an inconsistency rather than an enrichment of characterization.

Creating an unrealistically literary character is the sort of move that probably resulted from a creative writing workshop, and it has become so common as to be a cliché: need to fit in all of your darling lines but still appear gritty and real? Have your hitman/barkeeper/bouncer/steel mill worker be a former (or budding) English major! Or, worse yet, make your short story/novel/novella about an English professor! I've been around a few of the latter, and I can tell you that, with a few exceptions, they're extraordinarily dull people who lead remarkably boring lives. English majors become writers because they express themselves better in writing, so they're really not all that much fun to hang out with, but they're grand fun in correspondence. Not surprisingly, stories about their lives are either unrealistic or just plain tedious.

I suspect in Mortazavi's case, though, he simply doesn't know well enough how an inner city kid would talk and thus can't really sustain the voice of a 13 year old ghetto kid over the course of a 14 page story. So he finds an excuse to make the kid use a voice very much like his own, in this case making Jeremy actually a middle-class white kid whose broken family falls on hard times and has to go live in a bad neighborhood.

But even that fictional kid would never utter a line like the one above. If anything, he'd be even more sullen and disaffected than a 13 year old bookish black kid who has lived in the 'hood his whole life.

Since the story is past tense, one could argue that Mortazavi's narrator is a literate adult simply reminiscing about an important event of his adolescence. Fair enough. But that would mean that Jeremy-the-near-dropout eventually does turn his life around and become successful, and then what's the point of looking back at this particular time? There's no question of the narrator's fate, and there's no suspense and little to think about. If this interpretation holds, the story falls thematically flat. So perhaps it's really about the other elements in the story: the death of two black twin girls and the cops' indifference to it, the depressing ironies of an inner-city drug trade fueled by the habits of spoiled suburban white kids, the vagaries of economic decline. But if so, then wouldn't it have been more productive to have written the story from the point of view of Jeremy's older, drug-dealing brother, Stanton? Stanton's connection and the father of the dead girls? The father's daughter and the dead girls' older sister, Ciara? The middle-class druggies Kyle and Chelsea? If these are the themes Mortazavi wishes to explore, using Jeremy as a narrator just complicates things and gets in the way of saying anything definitive or even exploring interesting questions about these matters.

But again, none of the other characters would have been capable of noting so wistfully “I now longed for that kind of bland uniformity, a return to safety and assuredness . . . .” And if these other characters had been the focus, Mortazavi would not have had the chance to show off his awesome wordsmithing.

There are a couple of ways Mortazavi could have gotten around this problem of voice, and only one is significantly fraught with peril. The dangerous way would be to actually spend some time in the inner-city listening to people talk. One could live or work there, volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, or even just go hang out in a park or walk the streets to get a feel of the sound and sense, the sight and smell of the rougher parts of town. After awhile, writing like these people think wouldn't be all that much of a challenge, but the traditionally lovely lines might not so readily come to mind. One might just find the beauty and the grace of the language poor, uneducated people use. But perhaps privileging the real voices of the poor and uneducated is slightly threatening to those editors and contest judges who already think they know what's wrong with the world and how to fix it.

Hanging out in the inner-city might have revealed to Mortazavi that, unlike in “Stop Six,” male drug dealers rarely even know their kids, much less live with them. It's typically the mothers who feed and clothe and house the children. He might also have observed that those men in the inner-city who do live with their own teenage children don't give them alcohol, and because they don't, SRS doesn't take the kids away. The character in question, Ciara's father, and father of the twins, must reasonably be in his early thirties at the youngest, even if he started having kids as a teenager himself, in order to have a teenage daughter, Ciara. As a drug dealer, the chances of this character staying alive and out of jail at that advanced age would have mitigated against his allowing a man armed with a sawed-off shotgun to grace his front-yard barbecue, as Mortazavi has him do. Drug dealers who survive past thirty and remain at liberty to cook their own food tend to be low-profile. Maybe this story was so captivating to its judge because it reinforces certain fantasies we have about inner-city life. Perhaps it lets the reader feel “edgy” for reading it, no matter how much it fails to comport with reality.

Another way Mortazavi could have overcome his problem with narrative voice would have been to just make the damn thing third-person. Third person narratives are, as far as I know, still allowed, and then the narrator would not have to have been a realistic character himself and could have waxed as poetic as Mortazavi wished without peaking the ol' bullshit meter. Granted, such a move might have led to some interesting and possibly unintentional postmodern juxtapositions of tone, but that sure as hell beats a failed attempt at realism. A third-person narrator might also have given Mortazavi the option of not so directly researching his subject. He could have boned up on his reading and relied on Google Earth and still come up with something convincing enough for 14 pages.

One final option would have been to simply write a poem with inner-city Ft. Worth as its subject matter, and the problem of a narrator could have been dispensed with entirely, the lovely lines could have been retained, and a mining of the mundane and even dangerous for its beauty and depth could have happened. That is, after all, what a poet does, and he need not encumber himself with pesky characters and their peculiar voices at all.

There are other problems, like the gratuitously disgusting way Ciara eats her barbecue, which makes one wonder if Mortazavi is just trying to gin up the edginess after it got blunted by all the literary soft-focus. That would make the story border on exploitation: Ciara can't just be angry and slightly dissolute; she has to be nasty as well.

But none of this bothers me as much as the failure of Ethan Canin as the judge who awarded this dog of a story a winning prize. Mortazavi can be forgiven for writing a clunky, crappy short story; I've written a zillion of them myself. But what was Canin thinking even publishing this trash, much less giving it first place? The Iowa Review contest's second-place short story, Jacob M. Appel's charming “Helen of Sparta,” presents a pre-teen female narrator who is not only convincing but is at a stage in her life in which the events change her perspective in a more mature direction. The story explores ideas in a way that's thought-provoking and with characters and situations that are realistic, and it doesn't feel the need to be edgy in order to do it. “Helen of Sparta,” in its own quiet, petit-bourgeois way, says more about regular people than “Stop Six” manages to say about anything at all.

In the same issue is Ron Carlson's even better “Victory at Sea” which is not only convincing in its characterization, plot, and setting, it's also poignant, sweet without being sentimental, and also funny. Those are the sorts of qualities a journal like the Iowa Review ought to prize.

At this point, it would be easy to start making suppositions about how these literary contests are actually run, but I think the larger issue is what the academic paradigm is doing to how we approach good writing. MFA programs in Creative Writing as an academic pursuit already privilege largely white and middle-class voices by being university-housed. But beyond that, they tend to blunt aesthetic experimentation and tend to turn us away from the artistic force of the lives we actually lead, no matter how banal. If Emily Dickinson could write head-removing poems while in self-imposed isolation in her father's Amherst home imagine what we could do while suffering through death-defying daily commutes, precipitously collapsing economies, and ecosystem-devastating climate change. Granted, we're not all Emily Dickinson. But we can create writing curricula that enhance our mindfulness and our powers of observation. We can create a literary climate that encourages experimentation and openness to voices not normally heard. We can create, in other words, a literature that hears.

Tilling the Soils of Abortion

2009-06-01T16:07:21Z

Last November, after the election of Barack Obama, I asked my students if they were surprised that a black man had become president. None of them were. Then I asked them if they thought a woman would ever be president in their lifetimes--and note, these students are primarily between the ages of 18 and 20.

They laughed.

As many of you probably know, one of the few doctors in this country who perform(ed) late-term abortions, Dr. George Tiller, was gunned down in his church in Wichita yesterday.

Being not equipped to bear children, I'm not especially qualified to discuss abortion. If more males of the species had that attitude, maybe Dr. Tiller wouldn't be dead. But I can say this: abortion isn't really about "life" or when life begins. It isn't even about "choice," though by being about women and their bodies, this is a convenient way to package the issue.

Abortion is really about social justice, or rather, the lack of social justice for women. If women were finally given the sort of control over their lives and bodies that men have over their own, late term abortions would not be an issue. Hell, even if women earned as much as men, abortion might not be as much of an issue, since, in our culture, money may not bring happiness, but it sure does open up one's options.

When those students laughed at the notion that a woman would be president in their lifetimes, it brought home very quickly that even in their middle-class security, they aren't that far from the poor girls who get pregnant to have someone to love because they're still taught that the only way their lives will have value is if they are pregnant. When those students laughed, they added strength to the glass ceiling. When those students laughed, they made it that much more difficult for single moms to make it in the future that those students will control.

I was in college myself when the so-called "Summer of Mercy" shut Wichita down in 1991. Dr. Tiller was the focus of that protest. At the time, it seemed like an inconvenience to me, but, despite my pro-choice stance, I supported the protesters' right to do it. I still do. However, now I realize that what they were really protesting is a symptom of the ills caused when an entrenched structure of power refuses to change enough to actually make women's lives better. What I know now is that they're more than happy to go to jail for overstepping the bounds of their protest, but they're terrified of spending the money to create the social support structures that would actually help women and their families live empowered lives.

Nobody has been shot for it yet, but the lack of universal health care is another such symptom. It's been killed in the minds of Democrats even before it has had a chance to be discussed. But it, too, demonstrates that as a nation we're much more willing to protect privilege and power than to do what we know is beneficial and right. Perhaps we haven't shot anyone because of it since the victims of our current health care mess just die quietly, and many of them expectedly. Abortion is a flashpoint because we like to believe in the innocence of "new life" and have to believe in the corruption of those "sluts" who get pregnant outside of the exisitng structures of command and control--have to if we want to go on justifying the existence of those structures.

Yesterday, I heard many disingenuous protestations of horror at the assassination of George Tiller from religious fundamentalists. Granted, they don't want their movement to seem violent and thuggish. But where are their voices of horror when others of their ilk preach male "headship" and that a woman's place is in the home? Where are their great energies for protest when girls' choices are curtailed by poverty, misogyny, indifference?

Where were their shouting voices when my students laughed?

Update: Randall Terry, formerly of the Operation Rescue anti-abortion group that organized the 1991 "Summer of Mercy" just called Dr. Tiller a "mass murderer" for the umpteenth time while claiming that his rhetoric had nothing to do with Dr. Tiller's death. Now, let's think about this. If you had run across Hitler or Pol Pot at the height of their powers and had a gun in your hand, wouldn't you be duty bound to kill them?

You can't spend two decades calling a man a mass murderer and then claim your words had nothing to do with the man's assassination. I'll go to bat for Terry's right to say these things, but he has no right to back out of the responsibility that comes with using those words.

But let's take this one step further. If abortion really is murder, then why isn't everyone who disagrees with it out killing doctors who provide it? These same people have no qualms about supporting the pointless and unprovoked war in Iraq, but they haven't got the guts to take care of the "Mengele[s]" they see among us?

Methinks it's because they don't really think that killing a fetus is actually the same as killing a fully-formed human being. It's the idea of innocence they're protecting, not the fact of a full-fledged human life.

To All Appraisers on Antiques Roadshow

2009-05-12T18:28:24Z

For the last freaking time, there are no degrees of uniqueness.

It either is or it isn't.

New Issue of EastWesterly Review

2009-04-12T21:13:23Z

And it's our tenth anniversary!

Read the awesome Sarah Palin sestina, a JX Williams retrospective, brought to our attention by the ever-alert gnostalgia , and a modest proposal for peace in the Holy Land (just in time for Easter)--plus much more!

It's all at http://postmodernvillage.com/eastwest/issue24/index.html. And check out the awesome new fashion colors!

Thanks, also to jenniker for making it happen.

Quote o' the Day

2009-04-10T14:08:53Z

"Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency."

--Sammy, from John Updike's "A&P"

Quote o' the Day

2009-03-13T21:15:19Z

"But a certain dullness of mind seems an almost necessary qualification, if not for every public man, at least for everyone seriously engaged in making money."

--Fyodor Dostoevsky

Idle Morning Thoughts on Darkness

2009-03-10T13:21:11Z

I'm sure it's been said before, but Marlow is Conrad's superego which goes in to find Kurtz, his id. He finds him, but in finding him, kills him, destroys him; the id cannot survive outside its lair in the unconscious, the heart of darkness--Africa to Europe's supergo, to extend the conceit.

Thus, Marlow's narrative within the brief framing story, which is itself a first-person account, is the content of a case study. The first-person narrator, a stand-in for Conrad, is the analysand. Like Conrad himself, Kurtz is a product of many nations: "All of Europe went into making Kurtz." The reader is the analyst.

The death of the id is why we cannot see Marlow; he has disappeared with the death of his necessary Other, and this is why the narrator is so effaced: psychologically, they are both absented by their lack of an id. The text is their account of how they became a psyche incomplete.

Publication Frustration

2009-03-08T22:54:13Z

Where does one publish a poem about Ulrich Zwingli?

Ugh.

2009-03-07T22:29:55Z

I'm sick and tired of all the I-probably-shoulds, but I can't decide if they're better or worse than the it-might-make-sense-tos.

The Prophetic F. Scott

2009-03-01T22:09:55Z

I ran across this passage in Gatsby that I thought was useful in a number of ways:

"I couldn't forgive [Tom Buchanan] or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . ."

Nice resonance. Let's play around with the passage a little:

"I couldn't forgive Dick Cheney or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Cheney and Bush--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . ."

Or this:

"I couldn't forgive the Wall Street investors or like them, but I saw that what they had done was, to them, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, the bankers and investors--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . ."

Et cetera. What Fitzgerald clues in on is true of all the privileged classes, all privileged people, and we see it repeat itself across history, time without end.

Library Humor

2009-02-26T14:13:26Z

From an actual student paper. As we all know, the database referenced is a, um, font of all learning :

"I learned that the EBCSOhose internet database is an invaluable tool when researching a subject, and will take advantage of this database more often."

Metrics

2009-02-19T15:17:00Z

My measure of what's wrong with the world? There are over 86 million Google hits for Britney Spears, but only about 35,500 for Myron Floren (and the second one is his obituary).

Discussion Topic

2009-02-10T14:05:21Z

What is prayer for?

Big Bailout, Bad Mojo

2009-02-01T22:26:45Z

The various schemes proposed by both liberal and conservative forces to try to save the American economy from its swan song are wrongheaded and, ultimately, doomed to fail. What is needed is not a shoring up of the existing system—the one that led to this problem to begin with—but a change in the entire values system that underlies what we currently do. Since this is unlikely, the future looks troubled.

Let's start with the problems. Arch conservatives contend that the Big Banks and the Big Three should just be allowed to fail. The market is the market, and thems the breaks, they say. The Market Almighty has spoken, and He has said that these businesses are dead; redress for redemption is pointless. In this scenario, the layoffs and the suffering of ordinary people who had nothing to do with the fraud and mismanagement that caused the crisis are regrettable, but necessary to keep things The Way They Are. Perhaps, if you're smart, like the guys at Goldman and Citi who still managed to chalk up billions in bonuses despite their incompetence and malfeasance, you'll be reborn into the post-crash New Economy as an exalted being.

The problem with this approach is that it turns an amoral free market system into a positively immoral one. The free market does not work unless those who are responsible for taking unnecessary risks are punished, either financially or through the loss of their positions, or, preferably, some of both. This is why we allow these people to run free even after they do things like this, whereas any small-time confidence man would be thrown in the pokey if he gambled away even a billionth of what the power-brokers on Wall Street evaporated. Instead, the working people are punished with job loss and insolvency for the crime of just showing up and doing their jobs. And woe be to those working people who managed to save a little money in a 401k: they, too, have been forced by the market to place their money into a scheme that aggrandizes the market, not one that gives them a stable return.

If we want to return “trust” to the system, we need to find the people who created collateralized debt obligations full of bad loans, the people who wrote the bad loans in the first place, the people who rated these bad instruments AAA, and the people who headed the companies who did this (and who are therefore ultimately responsible) and put them in jail. Pro-business commentators will argue that this is impossible, but the records these companies kept were necessarily better than those kept by low-level drug dealers, and we manage to jail millions of those. To a halfway competent prosecutor, this shouldn't be much of a problem.

The real reason we don't is that doing so would reveal that the system is sick to begin with, but more about that later.

The problem with most liberal approaches is that they throw money at the current system which is, at its heart, hopelessly flawed. These schemes fail to fix the basic problem. First of all, bailout money even with conditions is not the same as an investment: oversight might help a little, but it won't give the taxpayers anything to own after the current heads of the banks and the auto companies screw it up again, which they inevitably will.

That's too bad, because temporary public investment worked well in a banking crisis in Sweden in the 1990s. The Left won't do this, though, because they're still afraid of Rush Limbaugh calling them socialists.

But even that isn't really a long term solution. A massive bailout might work in the short term to get consumers spending again, but much of that consumer spending is destined to float overseas. Indeed, with 70% of our economy being consumer spending, and with the vast majority of consumer goods made overseas, it doesn't really matter if the bailout is direct in the form of stimulus or indirect in the form of tax breaks; most of it will end up in China. Obama's plan to invest in infrastructure at home will help a little, but when the projects end, the jobs that go with them end, and then we're back to dysfunction as usual.

That dysfunction is exactly what every free market advocate since Reagan has called for. Management decided a long time ago that manufacturing was too expensive to do, primarily because it decided that the American worker was too expensive to employ. Unlike Henry Ford, who had the common sense to realize that if he didn't set a decent wage he wouldn't have many customers for his cars, the current free market perspective dictates that any expense must be cut out of a business for it to run efficiently, even if that means, in the end, gutting the very economy that buys from those businesses. And so steady, good-paying manufacturing jobs were sent overseas where they were cheaper, plants were shut down and opened overseas where they were cheaper. The unemployed found their way into lower-paying and part-time, and often temporary and high-turnover, service industry and retail jobs. Retail space exploded, filled with shiny, new, cheaply-made and highly profitable goods from China.

But the fundamentals weren't there. As Barbara Ehrenreich discovered in the late '90s and wrote about in Nickel and Dimed, those who work at Wal-Mart are not even able to afford to buy the stuff they sell at Wal-Mart. So consumers turned to credit, which Alan Greenspan and others made sure to make readily available and cheap. When the credit ran out, the economy collapsed. That the latest, greatest bubble began in real estate is telling: with all other sources of income tapped out, Americans started drilling into the asset they lived in for that last consumer harrah.

Behind all this is an overriding and dangerous assumption: that profits should, from year-to-year, continue to rise. This expectation, reinforced by market analysts and shareholders alike, is what led businesses to outsource in the first place. Outsourcing drove costs down and profits up in the short term, allowing companies with otherwise flat earnings to show a temporary gain, keeping up, for then, with the expectations that earnings must rise from quarter-to-quarter. That masked the fact that the market for the goods sold were essentially flat.

Consider the insidious effects of our expectations of continual growth. A local business, the airplane manufacturer Cessna, began a series of massive layoffs recently, cutting 30% of its workforce. They did this not because they weren't profitable: indeed, the company is still on track to make over $100 million in 2009. They cut all those jobs because they made almost $300 million the year before. In a financial world in which success is measured by continual growth of profitability, Cessna is in a tailspin, even though the company is still making a decent amount of money and could easily afford to maintain full employment at least through the next fiscal year.

But the investors wouldn't have it, since it would mean that they'd lose their earnings expectations. The company would be in better shape if they didn't have to rehire when the market bounces back; they'd be more solid in the long term, but investors can't have that. It isn't good enough not just because investors are greedy, but because on the whole we invest to keep up. We invest because we must if we wish to retire into a future of inflated prices and increasing uncertainty. Saving at a bank—what was once considered the safest of things to do with one's money—will only return a rate of one or two percent a year. This barely keeps pace with inflation, and in many years falls behind. Savers are punished and investors are rewarded, so we'd be fools not to invest in a 401k to put into the market . . .

. . . which brings us back to the problem to begin with. Free market advocates have created an economic environment that forces us to be investors. This gives Wall Street more money to play with, further cranking up expectations for returns, further pushing purely financial instruments, like CDOs for instance, pushing more outsourcing, and deepening the chasm into which we have fallen. We are all implicated, even if most of us are innocent.

Our situation is absurd. Yet for all the obviousness of this statement, no one who comments on our current financial troubles is willing to say that our values are to blame. No one is willing to say that perhaps we should begin to idle back our expectations of what our economy is supposed to do. I had hoped that the precipitous nature of the downturn would force a little soul-searching on our nation, a little rethinking of the relationships we all have to the system that, as the anthropologists say, is the means a culture uses to exploit its environment to assure its survival. But that does not appear to be the case. Since really fixing our problems involves looking at our values and adjusting those for our realities, and since that is too frightening a prospect for all of those—on the Right and the Left—for whom the system has created disproportionate wealth in the past, we are doomed to ride this bird into the ground. And if not this one, the next, or the one after that. It's a cycle of ever-diminishing returns on a system moribund at birth.

Gaza-a-Go-Go

2009-01-13T00:35:11Z

Ehud Olmert spoke today about the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip as if the Israelis genuinely didn’t want to be there and didn’t want to cause disruption and loss of life, but that it was somehow necessary, and as if he actually believes that his state’s recent acts are going to crush Hamas and thereby solve all of Israel’s troubles.

If he really does believe this, he is utterly deluded. There is nothing in the past forty years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict to suggest that doing it exactly as they’ve always done it is going to somehow lead to a cessation of hostilities—just the opposite. It is certainly possible that he is indeed deluded, of course, as the past eight years of US history show that achieving high office in a democracy is no guarantee of sanity. It is possible that, being at the heart of the conflict, he and the rest of Israel are unable to see anything particularly clearly. But it’s just as likely that the leaders of Israel and Hamas are going after one another for purposes of reinforcing their power among their own constituents as that they really think they’re gaining any ground with one another. Clearly, Hamas rockets won‘t bring down the modern, nuclear-armed, US-backed state of Israel, and just as clearly, violent incursions in the face of an asymmetric opposition just leads to an entrenchment of the opposition, in this case Hamas or some party even more extreme that will form to fill its vacuum. You can’t crush a guerilla opposition short of genocide, or at least extreme and open brutality—public drawing and quartering, heads on stakes, that sort of thing—and Israel has managed not to go so far.

We must take into account, though, that when Olmert claims that Hamas is “an existential threat” to Israel, he’s not entirely wrong. After all, how would a largely secular but ethnically Jewish state define itself if it didn’t have an Other to define itself as not? The Palestinians, despite their current condition, suffer from the same potential problem. Recall what a statement it was for Arafat to don a business suit when he negotiated the Dayton Accords. There would have been no statement had his Westernized sartorial choices not been controversial at home.

Palestinians and Israelis have just as much trouble trying to define themselves as distinct from the other: they eat the same food and ostensibly worship the same god (when they worship) and have many of the same concerns, namely how to make a living in a barren landscape with few natural resources and a history of violence. If we in the West spoke truly, we’d acknowledge that nobody except the locals would be interested in the Israel-Palestine issue if it weren’t the home to the three major monotheistic religions: the area has no oil, no good farmland, few beautiful vistas. If not for the religious significance, the conflict there would be sort of like Sri Lanka’s problem with the Tamil Tigers: a minor sort of tragedy when we hear about it, the hearing of which we follow by an immediate return to the spreadsheet or caramel latte that calls for our immediate attention.

In back of this, there is also the fact that both Israel and Palestine have far right minorities that must be appeased. In Palestine, that is Hamas, and it was only after decades of oppression that the moderates of Palestine decided to give their extremists a chance to govern. Hamas was already acting as a de facto government, building schools and soup kitchens, and taking care of people when the more conciliatory but utterly corrupt Fata was just filling its own pockets with foreign-aid cash. Likewise, moderate governments in Israel are usually only able to govern by making parliamentary coalitions with the ultra-orthodox, whose settlement-building and zero-tolerance fundamentalism pulls the moderates’ puppet-strings if they wish to maintain power, and it is always the first order of business for any political party to gain and keep power.

But for religious moderates, there is always a niggling sense of having compromised one’s core principles for the sake of getting along with Modernity. I have witnessed this with Mennonites, most of whom speak and think of the Amish with reverence, even though they’d never actually wish to live the way the Amish do. Contemporary Mennonites think with one part of their minds that the Amish are somehow more “pure,” closer to the way God intended people to live, even though the Amish lifestyle was one adopted long after the founding of the faith—a faith that developed as a reaction by theologically sophisticated, university educated city-dwellers to the corruption of the existing church. It’s likely the Israelis and Palestinians view their own fundamentalists the same way and kowtow to them not only because of their political power but because, on some level, they think it somehow more “pure” and “godly” to do so.

Seeing the world in terms of a continuum of purity leads to the desire to protect those you think are more pure and destroy those you think are less pure. Since nobody’s position is at either terminus, relatively minor differences take on amplified importance: if I’m much like the Palestinian, and the Palestinian is not pure, I must prove my relative worth by destroying the Palestinian. This also leads to the “existential threat” as outlined above since it is definitional, but we see the phenomenon over and over again, from the “Holy” Land to otherwise reasonable people aggrandizing the small-town “values voter” in the US, even though few of us live in small towns, and even in small towns few, if any, of us ever live by those values we vote to uphold. This was exactly the destructive power unleashed in the witch hunts in Salem and the pogroms in Europe.

Sadly, none of the religions involved in the conflict at issue insist on the kind of purity that drives the current troubles. Judaism has its Jubilee and Christianity its forgiveness. Islam has its jihad—the internal struggle to follow the path the Prophet describes. If we were perfect, we humans wouldn’t need religion at all. The least we could ask of ourselves is that we privilege the moderation of our faiths.

A Brief Analysis

2008-12-19T16:13:56Z

I'm amazed at certain people on both the Left and Right who're upset that Caroline Kennedy might be appointed to Hillary Clinton's senate seat, arguing that she isn't "qualified." Can you name one senator who is? I mean, most senators--most of our elected officials, really, have zero qualifications when they're elected. Lawyers, maybe, as they've dealt one-on-one with the law (and by that measure, Hillary was more qualified than most), but Sam Brownback? The man could be intellectually disassembled by a high-school debater with a hangover. He's got nothing but his ideology to run on, and that's true of most legislators: we elect them because we think they'll fulfill our ideological agenda, our version of the political Promised Land. But what we really want them to do, in the end, is send pork our way. The upshot? If we elected people on their qualifications, Bill Richardson would be selecting his cabinet right now.

Likewise, I can't understand those on the Left who're freaked out that Obama isn't turning out to be the arch-liberal everyone somehow thought he would be. Well, doi: he never ran as a liberal, and that's part of the reason I didn't support him until it came down to only two Democratic contenders, and I didn't support Hillary because I knew she couldn't win a general election. Granted, he's a hell of a lot better than McCain would have been, and a drastic improvement over the last eight years, but he's a centrist at heart and a pragmatist in his head (as, perhaps, times require).

The real liberals in the race were Dennis Kucinich and, to a degree, Ralph Nader. The upshot? If Obama had been a real liberal, he would not have won.

From Actual Student Papers

2008-12-14T00:45:28Z

"When you crab the object it is pretty slick."

"As we here form our grandparents and parents."

And, in a paper on the dangers of genetic engineering:

"What if your child came out with two arms?"

This again, but Slightly Different.

2008-12-13T22:45:33Z

via burkean , who, meme-style, got it from wolodymyr

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Underline *and* italicize the ones you wrote papers for without having read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (I went back and read the unexpurgated version later)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange (I couldn't get Kubrick's movie out of my head as I read and it spoiled it for me.)
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (I can't remember a lick of it, but I do remember reading it.)
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter (I've taught this bitch. It's actually a very easy novel to teach.)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow (I was at a bookstore and just ran out of time to get deep into it, but I'll certainly get back to it.)
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Post-Thanksgiving Thoughts

2008-12-01T00:17:06Z

I don't usually do the whole video thing, as we're super-saturated in it anyway, but this is worth a look. Not work safe, by the way.

Why I Hate Steve Innskeep, Nos. 337.9 and 655.3

2008-11-25T14:24:08Z

I hate Steve Innskeep because he insults the intelligence of his listeners. Yesterday, when he was interviewing Junot Diaz, he interrupted the author after Diaz mentioned Walt Whitman, saying "You mean Walt Whitman, the poet?"

No, you idiot, he meant Walt Whitman the chocolate bar. For crying out loud--NPR listeners have probably heard of Walt Whitman, and if they haven't, chances are they wouldn't really be all that interested in an interview with a contemporary writer anyway.

I hate Steve Innskeep because he doesn't think things through. During one of those humorous little transitions at the bottom of the hour that Morning Edition does, Inskeep mentioned the mysterious discovery of a piano in the woods. Nobody could figure out where it came from or how it got there. So Innskeep's "witty" response to this newslet? To speculate "If a piano plays in the woods, does it make a sound?"

He is, of course, referencing the quasi-philosophical question "If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?" The whole point of that question is to make us think about the nature of subjectivity and the observer-effect: does reality change by our observations? Are our perceptions instrumental in creating reality? That sort of thing. But if a piano is being played, it is, presumably, being observed by she who plays it, and whether or not that is in the woods is immaterial. So, not only is Innskeep's statement stupid and pointless, it isn't even funny.

The Thunderstorm Dream

2008-11-23T23:39:27Z

gnostalgia and I were standing in my parents' back yard, as it appears now, with the fallow field beyond, not as he has ever seen it. We were discussing the career arcs of various members of Modest Mouse when the sky in the west darkened and huge, columnar storm clouds developed. The clouds began spinning, and a distinct serpentine tornado appeared, light gray against the almost black of the clouds.

As the storm tracked north and east, the funnel opened up into a genuine tornado, close enough to scare but distant enough to spare the house and surrounding area*.

When we walked back in for dinner, I noticed the air filled with a swirling, white haze: the diaphanous seeds of a cottonwood tree.

*This was almost exactly the track of the actual tornado that destroyed much of Andover, Kansas in 1991.