she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room

April 13, 2018 | A major donor with close ties to the White House resigned on Friday as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee after the revelation that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model who became pregnant during an affair. The deal was arranged in the final months of 2017 by President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen. Under the terms of the deal, the Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, would pay the woman in installments over the course of two years, and she would agree to stay silent about their relationship, two people with knowledge of the arrangement told The New York Times. The deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. From The New York Times.

I look at this man--everything that seems visible about him: the insistent PEPPERDINE photo-op backdrop; the poor physical and social health evident in the skin color, the mirthless pools of black that are his eyes, the grimace which at some point forgot to disguise itself as the signal of a pleasure in the world, which is to say, as a smile, rather than the wincing expression of a forbearance of, a steeling against, the world; I look at that "haircut"--I look at this man and I feel sorry for the "Playboy model," who, with those two words, is surgically caricatured into nothingness, into dismissal, as the barely described but overly present sine-qua-non--the that-without-which--pretext for the humiliation, the failure, the weakness, the desire of another, the barely described pretext for the humiliation of a man, who, as we well know, is the only another, the only other, that matters.

I look at this man, and I see the women not on his arm, in this frame or in any other frame: no surplus of disappointed wives or expensive mistresses or disappointed, expensive mothers will ever be enough to make him believe that he is a success, that he is a man, that he is alive, that he is real, that he is a real boy, alive, and not someone else's fantasy of a man, not some father's fantasy of a boy, not some father's fantasy of himself, made of painted wood and string, a fantasy whose lies are forever revealing, forever announcing, the degree to which they arouse him by his shameful erection, which is as clear as the nose on his face. 

It is, of course, the height to which he has risen; the richness of his investment and achievement; the scope and number of his responsibilities; the reputation and the dignity of--the admiration for--his family, both up (parental, ancestral) and down (spousal, childrel: inherital), which is to say, his very name, its currency and value, its reference and intelligibility; his ability, his dependability and responsibility, his ability to influence others, which is to say his word; his respect, his solidity, his fearsomeness, his strength, his resolution, his intensity, his fecundity, his power, which is to say, his maleness, his manhood, his sex, itself, all coming into question; it is the threatened or actual loss--even just the news of the threat of the loss--of these things that makes the story tragic, that gives it any value at all, that makes the story worth knowing or repeating, because the story's very iterability isn't affected at all by it's depressing and clichéed reiteration that it is news if/that/when a man falls from grace by partaking of his association with a [insert any two words here that describe a woman, but in this case:] Playboy Model. Every time, the loss, the tragic fall, the story occurs to, the story is about, an individual, a subject, a person of interest, or notoriety, of value, a person in whom I should be interested if only by dint of the fact that someone has decided to repeat the story of his loss of value to me. In the story, in his story, the (actual/potential) loss of his status--his value or usefulness in politics, industry, finance, faith, or law; his value as a leader or thinker or role-model; his value as a husband, father, son, and man--is presented as though it hadn't just happened to this other asshole yesterday, it is presented as though it were happening for the first time, when, depending on the timing it is only just happening for the first time today. And the lady--all the women, of course, for the most part--but the lady in question is just the stock character of Fallen Woman, just a two-word dismissal as a description, because it doesn't matter who she is, she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, she is not important, except in one way and one way only: as the pretext for the (threatened, perhaps actual) loss of a man's status, family, fortune, word, name. Her presence in his story--because she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, and no one cares about her story, except that there must be some suggestion, some hint, some suggestion to the suggestible, that she's just the least bit tawdry, or a shopgirl, or a divorcee, or an actress, or working class, or a coed, or a latina, or a european, or a prostitute, or a woman--signals his loss and is the cause of his loss. She exists--she serves--merely as a function in his story. She exists to serve. 

Certain kinds of psychoanalysis have a word for this state, which is often translated into English as a state of "abjection": she is abjected--in truth, before the story is told, she is already in an abjected state, always already--humbled and rejected, ejected outside of accepted, acceptable, informed, available, permissible or possible discourse. He is not. He has many more than two words to apply to his highest level of attainment, or any attainment, in the social spheres. He has many more than one sphere, he has many more than one title, many more than one role, and more than one name by which to call him, but his names, titles, roles, and spheres and his ability to move among them, capitalize upon them, and use them to his advantage and others' is damaged by his association with the storyless, abjected lady in question. Her story is unavailable and unimportant because she is abjected, and she is abjected because of some now-unimportant but singular detail of her now-unimportant and abjected story: she has no story, and it is as though his story, he, himself, takes on some contamination, partakes of some contaminating quanta of her abjection, and thus becomes, in some sense, abjected himself. So, gents, beware of Fallen Women.

But if we're really honest with ourselves, it is not difficult to see that the abjection of which Fallen Woman takes is not due to her fallen state, but due to her state as woman, as her hypothesized-but-the-hypothesis-is-enough fallenness is hypothesized on her hypothesized unreliable, unstable, untrustworthy, weak, flighty, fickle, faithless, unteachable, ignorant, dissembling, dangerous, dark, mysterious, unknowable womaness. The hint of falleness is the addition that is not an addition because it serves to call out what we all know women already to be, or be capable of, which is tacitly the same. The Fallen Woman is all women. She doesn't have the same value as a man, and her as-few-details-as-possible story only exists as a non-story to affect the story of a man. Woman is the property of someone else's story. She is property. That is why she is paid less on the dollar than a man for the same job; that is why she doesn't have her own name but has the name of her father or her husband; that is why she is defined most powerfully by her relationship to men, as daughter, wife, mother, mistress, widow; that is why when she is raped it is because of the way she was dressed or because she has had more than one sexual partner or any sexual partner, or because she is a lesbian, or a woman; that is why our vice president does not allow himself to be alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife; that is why when she is beaten by her husband it is because she must have done something to cause it; that is why we have difficulty encouraging or imagining women in physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, law, law enforcement, the military, sports, music composition or in leadership roles in these fields, or any field; that is why she cannot be elected president because she seems cold, seems untrustworthy, seems ambitious, and doesn't smile enough; that is why, in Virginia Woolf's memorable formulation in A Room of One's Own, she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room. 

For her to be acceptable, she must be the paragon of fidelity, fealty, faith, compromise, kindness, supportiveness, selflessness, nonexistent opinions, disregarded thoughts, and uncomplaining labor: In the terms of King Lear, she must only be Cordelia, whose back is a bridge for men, for men and children, for male children, a bridge for men; otherwise she is those monstrous other sisters, Goneril or Regen, it seems, by default. It would be best for everyone if she died in childbirth. For there will always be another woman to marry--as they are interchangeable--who will teach the daughter her place, or beat her into it, because she can be counted on not to love her as her own. Because we must always force women into competition with other women, for everything, but especially for the attention of the Man, who is the hero of the story, the narrator, the author, the publisher, the bookseller, the critic, and the reader. And he has made the notion of Fallen Woman--precisely because there is no real distinction from Woman, precisely because Woman is, at every moment, in danger of submitting to her nature, like a scorpion--to distinguish interchangeable women from one another. If you believe that the purpose of sex is not pleasure, a dimension accorded only to men, but solely for the reproduction of men, sons to carry the name only they may keep and to safeguard the property only they may inherit, upon your body, which is the purpose of your body, by the man you were given to by a man, through the painful labor of your body, which is the only labor you are to be allowed; if you are Cordelia and make an incubator of your body, a bridge of your back, and suffer beautifully with your muted voice and your cramped agency, a jealously restricted purview that is mostly the execution, reinforcement, and extension, as their agent, of someone else's interests, desires, prejudices, and will; if you defer to, maintain, celebrate, supplement, and anticipate those interests without question, because they are, and must be, your own; if your every action and expression is toward keeping things the way they are, then you will be called "respectable"--a precarious high-wire act of a designation--and your origins, your class, your poverty, your ethnicity, your foreignness, your sins, your past, your woman-ness will not be held against you. You will not be fallen.

The World Looks Like This

In the teeny-tiny economy of the baby, the world looks like this:

I get milk.
You get shit.

Think of that overwhelming joy of the infant when it finally is able to give something to The Breast! To give something "back." Indeed, the only object it can give. I made this for you! I love you!

This is why Freud so perceptively equated shit with gifts and money. And, of course, vice versa.

My Problem

Hi. I wanted to explore some of my problems. This won't take up much of your time, but that is my problem.


My Problem


My problem isn't you, my problem is me.


I want you to listen for more then thirty seconds or 250 characters. That's MY problem.


My problem is that I want you to not get bored when it's not about you.


My problem is that I want you to enjoy nuance, difference, difficulty, and long sentences, inclusive of commas and semicolons.


My problem is that you fear the unfamiliar.


MY problem is that you neither know what you want nor have ever explored why you want it.


I don't care why you're overwhelmed by your job, my problem is that you are overwhelmed by the fact that you're overwhelmed by your job, don't have the tools to talk about it, and pretend that you are not and that you do.


My problem is that you are so afraid of the truth about your life that you cling to demonstrably absurd "truths" about your life that hurt and destroy others, daily, rather than consider any alternative.


These are my problems.


What are your problems?

On The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden Mahagonny

Michael White, writing in the NYTimes on March 13, had one entirely accurate thing to say about the new Royal Opera House, Covent Garden production, in English, of Kurt Weill's masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), which I saw yesterday afternoon at Symphony Space as part of the National Theatre (not exactly, but that's perfectly okay) Live broadcast series: "This is a piece whose chronicling of modern life is so exact, it functions more like reportage than reimagining."

I count this as my sixth Mahagonny (eighth, if you include audio recordings). It's an enormously difficult piece to pull off, and reviewers of it, and much of Weill's work (or Brecht's, for that matter), tend toward expressing disappointment that what they're seeing is not the perfect production they seek, it seems. White does the same, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, instead of appreciating how far and how well a production actually gets it right, and thus turns away potential audiences from this hugely important work.

Every performance is different, of course, so I did not see the particular one reviewed here. Former ingenue, von Otter was wonderful, cold, laser-sharp focused, and frightening as the Widow Begbick, foundress of the pleasure town, Mahagonny, and the rest of the cast was quite strong. The production starts small and grows progressively lavish--if "lavish" includes scores of shipping containers stacked to a horizon-obliterating height--with clever, cutting edge projection effects. The first act showed the most exciting--I mean, riveting--account I've ever seen of this opera. But what blew me away the most was how clearly America (and the world) has turned into Mahagonny. "Prescient" doesn't come close to describing the alignment between what late Capitalism has accomplished--and continues to do so--and the savage world-critique, the weltanschauung-critique, Weill and Brecht fashioned, which still seemed bizarre and off-putting to me a handful of years ago, and now reads like an aesthetically-heightened newspaper, with some of the most gorgeous, thrilling music ever composed for an opera stage.

On Watching "The Walking Dead" II

This image is a metaphor for the show. As such. The dream-like nature of the moment did not prevent me from weeping.

They measure you by what they can take from you. By how they can use you to live.

Meanwhile, back at the end of the world in Georgia, a metaphor is being deployed. And that metaphor is explicating the conflict between, what I would call, Love and right-wing Conservative politics and policies and policing.

On the one hand, we have Our Team that we're rooting for, going through it. Like REALLY going through it. Struggling to find ways to maintain community, friendship, family--and therefore Love--and not turn into the others: not the undead, mindless destroyers, but the living ones, who give up on everything that marks civilization, as such--in a bid, not just to survive, but to dominate--secure in the belief that domination and survival are only coextensive and/or co-Terminus, instead of considering the possibility of them being coterminous.

Rick and Carol's incredibly even, often dead-seeming stare not to the contrary--a stare that, in contrast to most of their actions, only marks the success of their struggle to stay human--our team offers a very textured, layered series of responses regarding one's self-identity and one's self-delusion (often the same thing), one's ability to create meaning, one's love for one's sister or brother, whether one is one's sister's keeper, and whether one is responsible for civilization, or not. I hold that we are responsible for all these things. And I hold to this response-ability, not out of some misplaced nostalgia for a better time in the past, but out of a misplaced interest, desire, and demand for the future. In fact, I require it. I require it of me and I require it of you. 

One's ability to create meaning is core to this metaphor, not as the problem of not creating meaning--a problem we don't have--but out of the necessity and the endless human imperative to do so. We cannot not create meaning. What separates us from the animals and insects--from what we presume to call "Nature"--is meaning-production, in all of its ambiguities, vagaries, and lies. This is the essence of language. 

The issue is not that other animals don't have symbol-systems or feelings--of course, they do--it is just that our symbol-system is shot through with a kind of ambiguity and play that I believe is unknown to our animal friends. Cats are the Japanese of animals; Americans are the dogs; yet, for all the richness of the animal symbol-systems, they pale before ours. It's not their fault. The Axial Age marked a simultaneous and gigantic leap "forward" from them, and we don't know why--no, we don't; not exactly; not really--nor whereto and to what end, though some of the more depressing indicators are clear. 

Certainly, animals have their tools, and their feelings, and their language. Notice their industrial revolution. Marvel at their gridlocked, ideology-consumed, plutocrat-run political systems. Look at their nation-states and their wars, their weapons of mass destruction, their hedge markets and stock exchanges; their banks, pharmaceutical companies; their mustard gas and guns and hydrogen ordnance; their drug addictions and world-wide religious affiliations; look at their laws; look at their writing, their theater and symphonic works and dance vocabulary; their poetry and trash fiction; look at their Jim Crow laws and concentration camps; look at their schools; their utopian claims and their dystopic interventions; look at their lawyers, prostitutes, drug dealers, accountants, lobbyists, and markets; behold their polemics and rhetorics, logics and philosophies; their intense and subtle disagreements about these things; witness their drive for nothing but money; witness their money, their lotteries and casinos, their mafia; their shamans, soothsayers, clergy, and holy men; witness their mystics; and grow to appreciate their full-scale dismissal of climate change, which affects them least of all since they live outside: they have no inside, no insulation, no thermostat, and no aeroplane to take them on vacation; they have no vacation; they have no work, no movies, no television, and no internet. They are fundamentally not like us. So, please, stop boring me with your comparisons to the animals and insects; please stop telling me how much we're alike, because we are not. Your statements are only metaphors as justifications for your behavior--and The Walking Dead is shot through with these comparisons from suitably unsuitable characters--yet I've never seen any "natural" thing do what you do. No; we're stuck with each other, you and I, in this world not created by animals, but modified by animals with an awareness of ambiguity but an unshakable need for certainty, most especially when that certainty is the most deadly thing on the planet. 

The Axial provides evidence for humans employing a new facility for tool-use, including language, which is, after all, also a tool, but hardly only a tool--it is a tool like no other: it is an environment: it is the substance and structure of thought itself: we swim in it and it swims in us. One assumes, in comparison to the animals, that the Axial allowed us to leave the pseudo-psychosis of one-to-one correlations and certainty behind, and embrace the inherent ambiguity of large symbol systems, which are not and never have been set and clear, except to the psychotic among us. I say this is no way to impugn the truly psychotic, who rarely participate in the genocidal-level, sociopathic, blood sport that I will attribute to what I am choosing to call the waking dead. And this is what this post is about.

I began this post saying that The Walking Dead details the various choices of Our Team, the dwindling and growing, waxing and waning, group of survivors clustered around Rick Grimes, who by season five, with his beard, has started to look like a hot cross between Jesus and God. There are other choices being detailed as well, in this employment of metaphor, and these, for the most part, do not involve Love. What we witness instead is the spectacle of humans going feral: humans in the wild, not just without civilization to keep them in check, but a demonstrable rejection of civilization. We are speaking of a different kind of discontent. Rather it is a new kind of contentment with savagery, with murder, cannibalism, and pleasure in these things. It is Schadenfreude articulated at the level of an ethos.

Over and over Our Team either comes across people or is come across by people who have made horrible choices--and Our Team has made HORRIBLE choices, too--but these others, the waking dead, only have it in for anyone else who crosses their path, in an Us Against Them, that must always and only end badly, must always end in Evil. Our Team actively resists this conclusion--and it is a conclusion, in every sense of the term--and we, as audience members, yell at the screen, "Kill them!" but they very rarely do. To us, the paranoia of the Zombie Apocalypse puts us more into the camp of the waking dead than Our Team. Their struggle with this question is the problem and the point.

Despite the blood and gore, which has become more intense, even personal, as the series progresses, despite the first two seasons during which the series explored what to do about the zombies--realizing that the zombies are not the text, are only occasionally the subtext of the show, but are the backdrop--the show is about the living, the living who choose to be dead, and the living who choose to not just not be the dead, but who choose to be the living. And for humans, choosing to be the living means always thinking, remembering to feel, and to build bonds based on Love not Death.

Now, the all or nothing, Us Against Them, every-man-for-himself, how-can-your-life-benefit-mine continuation of the destruction of the world of the others, of the waking dead--the very thing that Our Team exists as a site of resistance against, even with all their mistakes--is right-wing, Conservative politics, policies, and policing as we experience it today. It is the coldest, most frightening, death-loving machine the human race has yet produced. It produces the end of civilization and the end of the world without even seeming to believe in either of those things, which is terrifying. And the dreams which are narratives on our television screens and in our comic books--even more remarkable for having been produced by corporations, the great engines of our destruction and political destitution--offer both a critique and an alternative. Must we get to the place on display in The Walking Dead before can realize alternatives are possible?

On Watching "The Walking Dead"

A few years ago, my ex used to be annoyed at how the culture--its films, television, and narratives--had become overrun with vampires and zombies. I don't know what he thinks about it now, because I haven't asked him, but it seems clear that the futile fantasy of beauty, glamour, boredom, and power that is the undead vampire is on the wane (reality television, among other things) and zombies, the mindlessly persistent idea of us, as dead, as relentless consumers of everything, is ascendant--that and the sense of outlaw survivalism against the worst odds that we see in Sons of Anarchy, The Hunger Games, and Divergent, and, of course, The Walking Dead.

Our books, our comic books, our movies, and our television shows are our dreams, as a culture. Read them awake. Awaken.

On Enfranchisement; On Suffrage

enfranchise

verb

en·fran·chise \in-ˈfran-ˌchīz, en-\

Full Definition of ENFRANCHISE
transitive verb

1: to set free (as from slavery)

2: to endow with a franchise: as

a : to admit to the privileges of a citizen and especially to the right of suffrage

b : to admit (a municipality) to political privileges or rights

suffrage

noun
suf·frage \ˈsə-frij, sometimes -fə-rij\

Full Definition of SUFFRAGE
noun

1: a short intercessory prayer usually in a series

2: a vote given in deciding a controverted question or electing a person for an office or trust

3: the right of voting : franchise; also : the exercise of such right


I. On The Law, Marriageability, and The Supreme Court

This begins with a very long sentence, inclusive of serial digressions on the topic:

While I have never had any significant personal interest in getting married and--less topical but still significant--I am critical of the prized, exemplary status accorded marriage culturally, and even more so of the economic and legal advantages awarded by the State to any two adult individuals--formerly white, formerly of the same skin color, and now formerly of differently sexed bodies (is it not interesting how discriminatory animus, as the Law itself, shows its sad obsession with excluding specific bodies from its irregular protections and its unearned patronage in this neat, capsule history?)--who, whether foolish or wise, whether loaded and living it up and leaving it in Las Vegas or sober at St Patrick's, decide, for any reason or no reason, for love or money or loneliness or status or spite, to claim their right to this contract that we call an institution, I nonetheless have never found the curiously overwrought desire in The Law to segregate same-sex adults from this contract (without entertaining even the condescending lip-service of "separate but equal") to be credulous or even intelligible.

I am less perplexed by the impulse two people may have to enunciate a ritual declaration of union between them than I am by the State's longstanding preoccupation with singling out this dual relation for its imprimatur, while other relationships and other adults, paired but unmarried or--Heaven forfend!--single--nearly all by dint of birth not among the 1% that enjoys the wealth of the nation--are effectively punished for their willful failure, or their legal ineligibility, to submit to this contract. And thus this structure makes a demand of the institution, a demand whose call is heard no less by those able to heed it under The Law's latest grudging concession of whom it will accept as a person (even then only under certain conditions and in specific locations) and those still shunned by its embrace and ridiculed by its exceptional promise--a promise it guards jealously in its bosom, as a child does with a secret or rather an old toy, carefully withheld from play by the merest interest from another child.

The value of the Other Body does not derive from the ban placed on its marriageability, rather the Body in question--though unmarked by any outward sign of its intrinsic, alien difference, except, of course, the same difference displayed by nearly everyone: the supposedly unified, immutable sex of the body itself, now cleverly redeployed as the mark of difference, of Cain, by its proximity to another body displaying the same mark--is the very reason for its exclusion from the contract. The spatial dimension, and the arena of the social, are thus conscripted to render the familiar strange, and theorize the discovery of essential difference, of identity, in an otherwise undifferentiatable body. It is through this guilt by association, this conspiracy theory, that the Law discerns the identity that marks this unmarked body. And this is how, as Foucault memorably demonstrated, the action, the crime, the trajectory of the act defines the past and future of the body, becomes an identity, the crime becomes the body itself--becomes the Other Body--or as the Bible clarified so much earlier in the King James, the Strength of Sin is the Law. And in these latter days the struggle for civil rights has effectively removed much of the need for policing, because now we nominate ourselves for the State. The act is eclipsed by the name. And the Law is still catching up to what this means in regard to its strictures, prejudices, and punishments.

But the weakness of the Law in this case is that it is based on the notion of Sin. It is not Sin that determines the Law, and despite the important genealogical relationship between Commandments and Religious Laws and the field of American Law, they in fact are not coextensive, rather they take a very different interest in a series of similar topics and dilemmas. And though under Religion these topics do not represent dilemmas, under the Law, they must.

But let us return to the question of the problematic, intractable, ungovernable Other Body that even though the Law has spent centuries trying to define, detect, dissect, and force into submission, this Other Body keeps slipping away, as the Law realizes and re-realizes that it has never had ethical ground to stand upon in the first place in this matter. The Law of Desire is not subject to the Law of Man. And despite the paucity of reference in history books it is surely as old as the oldest profession, which is not prostitution as the romantics would have us believe, but the profession of love.


II. On Intercession, The Marketplace, Voting Rights, Racism, and The Law

As a kind of late introduction, I should mention that I had always written the first part of this post--which is a repost-of-a-post--as a commentary on the nearly simultaneous release of two Supreme Court rulings, not one: the grudging concession to the unconstitutional status of parts of the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA) and the chronologically precedent evisceration--a much more important and far-reaching and enormously damaging ruling--of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The second always drained any pleasure from the first. I don't care a fig for same-sex marriage when the same week thousands of people are declared second-class citizens, unworthy of the right to vote in racist Southern states, and other places--places put on permanent watch for good reason, as they have shown in this aftermath! As soon as the 1965 law was declared obsolete and unnecessary, the very states in question pursued the exact actions prohibited by the law under which they were formerly bound. This is repugnant and embarrassing to the extreme for all Americans. I feel that today, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches in protest for the right to vote, it is only appropriate that I finally finish this post.

We are watching the fascinating conflict among, and intersection of, a series of Higher Court edicts, Legislative/Executive workarounds, Late Capitalist imperatives, animus-based Religious intractabilities, States vs Federal Rights issues, dilemmas of the Franchise, and Republican-Democratic open questions (not the political parties, I speak here of principles of democratically-elected representatives of a republic: "...and to the Republic for which it stands....") simultaneously coming home to roost. Where will it lead?

Let us begin with a certain kind of franchise, which is the only one anyone seems to care about, which is the business franchise, which allows us to sell to anyone, no matter how depraved they are. This is the foundation of Arizona's gubernatorial veto, which recognized the tacit and provisional LGBTQO "community" as a realistic, even necessary, factor in the marketplace. Yet why is the ability of same-sex couples to marry such a powerful factor in the marketplace of ideas and cash, when the ability of so-called "minority" bodies to participate in the electoral process is not equally or more powerful? I am baffled by this inconsistency. Are gay bodies white and not black? Are gay bodies monied and black bodies negligible? What moronic calculus accounts for this... this unspeakable idiocy? Under what jaundiced optic of The Law are black bodies allowed to marry but not to vote?--an optic that includes one's neighborhood and income bracket?

I realize now why I have taken so long to write about this: it is because my language fails before this pathetic Racism. It is Racism on its face; and The Law should hang its head in shame before this monstrous abdication of its essential role--its protection of fairness--in our society. And let all of you who say there is no Racism in American culture incline your heads in shame as well.

I'll write more later when I've cooled off.

On the Wage Economy: Everything Old Isn't Exactly New Again, but It's a Start

Some people are actually beginning to remember another time when wage-gouging, profit, and the bottom line weren't the handbasket in which we were all riding to Hell. I call the following sensible wage logic "The Great A-Doy, Now." 

From the usually excellent New Yorker Financial Page, this time by James Surowiecki:

"...A substantial body of research suggests that it can make sense to pay above-market wages—economists call them 'efficiency wages.' If you pay people better, they are more likely to stay, which saves money; job turnover was costing Aetna a hundred and twenty million dollars a year. Better-paid employees tend to work harder, too. The most famous example in business history is Henry Ford’s decision, in 1914, to start paying his workers the then handsome sum of five dollars a day. Working on the Model T assembly line was an unpleasant job. Workers had been quitting in huge numbers or simply not showing up for work. Once Ford started paying better, job turnover and absenteeism plummeted, and productivity and profits rose.

"Subsequent research has borne out the wisdom of Ford’s approach. As the authors of a just published study of pay and performance in a hotel chain wrote, 'Increases in wages do, in fact, pay for themselves.' Zeynep Ton, a business-school professor at M.I.T., shows in her recent book, 'The Good Jobs Strategy,' that one of the reasons retailers like Trader Joe’s and Costco have flourished is that, instead of relentlessly cost-cutting, they pay their employees relatively well, invest heavily in training them, and design their operations to encourage employee initiative. Their upfront labor costs may be higher, but, as Ton told me, 'these companies end up with motivated, capable workers, better service, and increased sales.' Bertolini—who, as it happens, once worked on a Ford rear-axle assembly line—makes a similar argument. 'It’s hard for people to be fully engaged with customers when they’re worrying about how to put food on the table,' he told me. 'So I don’t buy the idea that paying people well means sacrificing short-term earnings.'”

Oh! And while we're on the subject, if you happen to run into Trickle-Down Economics (aka "Supply-Side") in your travels, please do it with your car--or please tell it to kindly go fuck itself. It doesn't work; it never worked; it only works for making rich people richer. It doesn't "trickle down" to us peons, rather Trickle-Down Economics (note the disingenuous use of the word "trickle") works like a series of rocket stages, employed to increase individual and corporate wealth only. Moreover, one can't have a supply that works without a viable working-to-middle class to provide the demand, unless you have free-reign--under international trade agreements--to seek low-wage laborers and "off-shore" markets to take the place of a viable American one. But hey, this is about livable wages--what a concept! Jesus is my Economist.

It's a short piece, and you can read the whole thing at NewYorker.com.

On Sondheim: Pacific Overtures II

Today, among other things, we will be continuing our exploration of Jonathan Weidman, Stephen Sondheim, and Hal Prince's 1976 musical-chimera, Pacific Overtures.

Admiral Perry furthered the "opening" of Japan to the West--a traumatizing event for the Japanese--with a letter to the Emperor dated July 7, 1853, which references, then United States President, Franklin Pierce, though the directive was begun by his predecessor, Millard Fillmore:

Many of the large ships-of-war destined to visit Japan have not yet arrived in these seas, though they are hourly expected; and the undersigned, as an evidence of his friendly intentions, has brought but four of the smaller ones, designing, should it become necessary, to return to Edo in the ensuing spring with a much larger force. 

But it is expected that the government of your imperial majesty will render such return unnecessary, by acceding at once to the very reasonable and pacific overtures contained in the President's letter, and which will be further explained by the undersigned on the first fitting occasion.

The title of the piece emanates from this letter. "Pacific," here, has a double meaning, encompassing the ocean separating the United States from Japan and the original understanding of "pacific", which has to to with "peace" and "pacifism." The original application always been inaccurate in both cases, or at least a lie in the second case, as the letter makes quite clear.

In a time of NAFTA and other world-destroying "treaties" securing "markets" and unprotected, nearly-slave "labor" options for corporations, with the always fellow-traveling outcome of the dilution, distortion, or out-right destruction of local culture in the name of "globalism," Pacific Overtures is outrightly prescient--but only if prescience is actually an awareness of the past. Despite its problems and insensitivities, its genre, the piece proves to be most sensitive, indeed. The opening of Japan was always about money and the unforeseen ramifications--including World War Two and unsurpassed instantaneous and continuing atomic death--be damned. Be damned.

"Poems" concerns two Japanese men becoming friends. One, Manjiro, is a fisherman long-ago rescued by an American ship and thus the only one around acquainted with America, with Boston, and with the customs and desires of the Americans, plays a game of poem variation and improvisation with Kayama, who is to be an important player in dealing with this event.

The song displays the exact cultural collision that the musical itself is about, both lyrically and musically.

It also happens to be a gorgeous duet.


KAYAMA
Rain glistening
On the silver birch,
Like my lady's tears.
Your turn.

MANJIRO
Rain gathering,
Winding into streams,
Like the roads to Boston.
Your turn.

KAYAMA
Haze hovering,
Like the whisper of the silk,
As my lady kneels.
Your turn.

MANJIRO
Haze glittering,
Like an echo of the lamps
In the streets of Boston.
Your turn.

KAYAMA
Moon,
I love her like the moon,
Making jewels of the grass
Where my lady walks,
My lady wife.

MANJIRO
Moon,
I love her like the moon,
Washing yesterday away
As my lady does,
America.
Your turn.

KAYAMA
Wind murmuring.
Is she murmuring for me
Through her field of dreams?
Your turn.

MANJIRO
Wind muttering.
Is she quarreling with me?
Does she want me home?
Your turn.

KAYAMA
I am no nightingale,
But she hears the song
I can sing to her,
My lady wife.

MANJIRO
I am no nightingale,
But my song of her
Could outsing the sea.
America.

KAYAMA
Dawn flickering,
Tracing shadows of the pines
On my lady sleeping.
Your turn.

MANJIRO
Dawn brightening
As she opens up her eyes,
But it's I who come awake.
Your turn.

KAYAMA
You go.

MANJIRO
Your turn.

BOTH
Leaves,
I love her like the leaves,
Changing green to pink to gold,
And the change is everything.

Sun,
I see her like the sun
In the center of a pool,
Sending ripples to the shore,
Till my journey's end.

MANJIRO
Your turn.

KAYAMA
Rain.

MANJIRO
Haze.

KAYAMA
Moon.

MANJIRO
Wind.

KAYAMA
Nightingale.

MANJIRO
Dawn.

KAYAMA
Leaves.

MANJIRO
Sun.

BOTH
End.

On Sondheim: Pacific Overtures I

Pacific Overtures is considered a bizarre aberration by some Sondheim enthusiasts. Perhaps it is better understood as a useful midpoint keystone, that gestures both backward toward "Small House of Uncle Thomas" from The King and I--a still astonishing musico-choreographic tour de force, courtesy of Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Robbins--and forward toward the stripped-down exploration found in Sunday in the Park with George.

Pacific Overtures, which examines the forced "opening" of Japan to the West--a Broadway musical theme so fruitful, it was never addressed again--is obsessed with Time and its passing (and, of course, politics), as with the song, "A Bowler Hat," late in the show.

Sidebar: Kodo drummers were incorporated into the pit and improvised every night, leading music director, Paul Gemignani, to comment that the score was never played the same way twice during the whole run. When the Shogun is weak, the tea must be strong.


KAYAMA

(picking up a derby)
It's called a bowler hat.
I have no wife.
The swallow flying through the sky
Is not as swift as I
Am flying through my life.
You pour the milk before the tea.
The Dutch ambassador is no fool.
I must remember that.

I wear a bowler hat.
They send me wine.
The house is far too grand;
I've bought a new umbrella stand;
Today, I visited the church
beside the shrine.
I'm learning English from a book:
Most exciting.
It's called a bowler hat.

(bringing out a watch)
It's called a pocket watch.
I have a wife.
No eagle flies against the sky
As eagerly as I
Have flown against my life.
One smokes American cigars.
The Dutch ambassador was most rude.
I will remember that.

I wind my pocket watch.
We serve white wine.
The house is far too small;
I killed a spider on the wall;
One of the servants thought it was a lucky sign.
I read Spinoza every day:
Formidable.
Where is my bowler hat?

(putting a monocle to his eye)
It's called a monocle.
I've left my wife.
No bird exploring in the sky
Explores as well as I
The corners of my life.
One must keep moving with the times.
The Dutch ambassador is a fool.
He wears a bowler hat.

(putting on a pair of glasses)
They call them spectacles.
I drink much wine.
I have a house up in the hills;
I've hired British architects to redesign.
One must accommodate the times
As one lives them.
One must remember that.

(holding up a tailcoat)
It's called a cutaway....

On the Always-Already of American Racism: Not all black people are criminals. Not all cops are bad.

The text tells us: Not all cops are bad. Not all black people are criminals. Not all white people are racist.

We read this well-meaning text. Of course, we don't want to resort to labeling; of course we don't. But when you think about the news, and perhaps your own limited personal experience, doesn't it seem like the ratio of bad cops to good cops is much higher than the ratio of black criminals to... wait a second, this series of statements is a racist construction to begin with.

The categories offered are cops, black people, and white people, and bad cops, criminals, and racists; and this set-up already contains the subliminal, implicit suggestion that cops aren't black (statistically, this is not even possible, not anymore, but from a macro-perspective, unfortunately, it might as well be true) and--much more insidious--it suggests that blacks are criminals, even while it is trying to say exactly the opposite. If you want to tease this apart on your own--if you even can tease, or tweeze--these awful things apart, try to distinguish the difference between not all criminals are black and not all blacks are criminals. 

Now, to really complicate this even further, if you look at the ratio of the white population, as such, in the United States, to the population of the incarcerated who happen to be white and then look at ratio of the population of black people in the U.S. to the population of those black people incarcerated, you will not only find that most of the incarcerated are black, but that the ratio of black prisoners to white prisoners is much higher than the ratio of white cops to black cops. Does this suggest that black people are naturally, genetically drawn to crime? You are an idiot if you think so. But when the front lines of the criminal justice system proves itself to be mostly white and the actions that are articulated as crimes ensnare and incarcerate mostly those proven to be black, it should give one pause. Unless, of course, all criminals are black, except not all of them are. What a generous designation it is, this not-all....

For the record, I happen to believe that all white people--and I'm speaking primarily of white people in the United States--are racist, but, though the brand of American Racism is special, we certainly aren't unique in the world in this regard. The sinister presence of Racism in our psychological, logical, linguistic, cultural make-up exists in us as individuals through the systemic status and quality of Racism in this country, where it has had a long, complex, and implicit history, and through the signal placement of white people within that structure, within those relations, discourses, possibilities, exclusions, and experiences. It behaves as a trait in a genetic code, not one that codes from our actual chromosomal DNA, but as the codes we absorb from the beginning by being raised in a culture of Racism, both explicit and implicit. This is what accounts for the construction that is ultimately racist in the well-intentioned text quoted at the outset of this post, which could have very easily been written by someone black as by someone white, though I'm banking on the latter, in this case.

This fact of baseline American Racism doesn't meant that Racism--in others, in ourselves, and as it is enacted by The State--cannot be resisted, but I think that the de facto status and placement of white(s) within the environment of American privilege, possibility, and human worth underwrites expectations, investments, and meanings of which we are not even aware because the discourse itself is in us, is us, has always been in us and us, was taught to us, yes, but the discourse is tainted at its essence and has always already been tainted, long before we were immersed in it, by Racism, which exists as sometimes a command, sometimes an enraged explosion, sometimes a feeling of distaste, sometimes a knee-jerk reaction, sometimes an unnoticed current, a subtle drift, an undertow. We are not powerless to resist it, but we have to understand that it is there in order to resist it in the first place, all the same. How can you resist something that you don't believe--or don't know, or don't want to know--exists?

An old friend--her name is Lisa--replies:

I wholeheartedly believe that all people in the U.S. are bigots. I don't think you can be raised in this culture and not be--too many messages bombarding you from your earliest memories. It is incumbent on us to recognize that fact, and consciously try not to be racist. We may not be able to help the thoughts that come into our heads, but we can control how what we do affects other people.

I entirely endorse and agree with this view. 

I agree that if we widen the frame to discuss bigotry and/or prejudice, that view will encompass everyone in the United States. And while I would prefer each individual examine her or his assumptions and real-world, real-time reactions and behaviors with regard to other people, to understand better that and how his or her unreconstructed, unthinking thoughts, words, and deeds do affect others, it seems clear that many enjoy the negative effect they produce in the other, that they seek that effect, as well as that affect. It is not that they don't care if they humiliate or hurt someone else: they do care: they care to do precisely that; they prefer to hurt someone else, and that action, that effect, brings them pleasure, power, and the pleasure that is power. 

This activity, this desire, happens across ethnic groups; it obeys no national boundaries; it seems to be intensified, rather than muted by religious affiliation (though the converse, one would think, should be the case); it crosses time and space, languages, communities, hues of skin tone, hair color and texture, height, weight, gender, sexuality, performativity, age, and any and every possible distinguishing trait or feature that humans can come up with to mark another as the other, as different, weird, foreign, or just not-them, and so reject him--abject him. 

We don't just fear the unfamiliar, we need it. We need the unfamiliar--the not-me, the not-us--for its use-value in order to be ourselves, to differentiate ourselves from the other, and we need it because--and this is the pessimistic view, but I am afraid that it's true--we need it because we like hurting others. 

As my friend, Lisa, says, the test is whether we give in to that desire to mark, distinguish, reject, abject, and hurt the other or not. We don't have to, though in many cases someone is literally trying to make us do just that. 

I would like to distinguish this event and desire from Racism, which belongs to the category of bigotry, though all bigotry is not Racism. 

Racism is not just fear of difference, it is a systematized, large-scale, cultural, historical effort--a national effort--against a particular kind of individual, against a certain group. And about this group the racism has very specific ideas about what should be available--socially, financially, educationally, conceptually, semantically, and materially--to that group and the individuals who have comprised it, and who comprise it, both now, and in the future, and the future of their children. This is not a conspiracy, as such (but, yes, of course, it is; in many cases it is entirely an agreed upon program that doesn't need to be discussed, though it is discussed, here, and there), in which those in power, and especially those not in power, specifically collaborate against the humanity and advancement of a whole group, but it might as well be. Racism is less a program than it is a fucked-up disease of a culture--in a culture--on a scale and pervasiveness bigotry only wishes it could attain. Racism is the child of bigotry. Racism is the perfectest example of bigotry. Racism is the god bigotry prays to.

It's the End of the World as We Know It: I Think I Thought You Were Someone Else

Should we talk about the weather?
Should we talk about the government?
-- R.E.M., "Pop Song 89," GREEN

I am a child of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. It sounds like the call sign for junk, pop radio, doesn't it? In truth, I am, as is everyone of my generation, and the generation before us, and that generation before them, a child--a "product"--of the 19th century. We are all Victorians. We are the new Victorians--"the 'other' Victorians"--as Foucault so memorably described himself, us, and you. 

If you are younger than I am, you, too, perhaps feel unmoored from the 19th century, perhaps do not even know what it is, what that means. I assure you, the only thing that divides me from you is this understanding: We are still living in the 19th century. And we live very much in the 19th century A.D.--"of our Lord," Jesus Christ, though not in any sense he--or even He--would recognize as living during such a time. "We" are "living" it "up"; but we are not living. Friends, we are at the end of days. And it isn't the one indicated to us in Scripture, in the inscription, of The Word--an "in scripture," an inscription, a script, which, as its name clearly indicates, is a writing, a quotation, because all writing is a quotation of something and thus a something subject to misquotation, mistranslation, emendation, animus, amendment, redaction, addition, subtraction. 

No, in fact, the coming apocalypse arrives, at what may be the actual end of the industrial, 19th century, by way of "Science," which is--the public discourse of which is--only another indispensable invention of the 19th century. We are living at the End of Times, during which the agricultural year of dependable, repeating cycles is overtaken by and dissolved into high-speed and the overproduced, entertainment version of high-speed called instant gratification. As the early, seasonal manifestation we are coming to know so well, perhaps even, perversely, getting used to, illustrates; yes, the awkward disturbance in, and disruption of, the seasons, which used to number four, makes so clear--the times of Autumn and Spring are subsumed by Winter and Summer, which then start turning into each other in alternation. Your latest evidence is the Winter of 2014, with snow and freezing temperatures interspersed with 50 degree days, and a Summer in Ohio, traditionally a time of luxuriant, overwhelming humidity and heat, reduced to a bizarre string of 50 degree days and nights during the high summer of July and August, followed by a September heat wave in New York coinciding, exactly, with snow in the Midwest.

Seasonal time is out-of-joint; time is out of joint. And this is just one of the many gifts of the 19th century and its passion for unregulated industry, which has returned to us in the 21st century, a time we live in in name only.

www.peoplesclimate.org

#peoplesclimate, #peoplesclimatemarch, #climatechange, #globalwarming

Labor Day: On the Value of Labor

Today we mark the annual, ritual acknowledgment of labor we fail to find, and fail to remember, in the "celebration" of Labor Day--which is really nothing more than the gateway exit from Summertime.

I closed a recent post with the ironic assertion that one's labor has no value. This notion is, of course, preposterous and vile. Under the non-protective (except to itself and its systems and beneficiaries) aegis of, following the term-setting rubric of, within the immersive environment of Late Capitalism, it is easy to forget that your labor has value.

Your labor has value.

Your labor does not have a price tag.

Your labor is not a commodity. It is not a thing.

The value of your labor is not--and does not derive from and is not defined by--your salary or wage.

Your labor is not defined by your job description, nor does its value proceed from it.

Your labor is a presence and an action.

Your labor is attached to, and emanates from, a person and a personality, a past, a present; a body in space and time.

Your labor is inextricably bound to and in your sleep; your nutrition; your exercise; your lodging; your familiars, friends, family, and dependents; your leisure; your play; your pleasure; your gender; the color of your skin, the perception of your ethnicity, your education, your class; your age; your health; your mental health; your happiness, your anxiety, your depression, your joy; your thought; your ongoing education; your travel time; your time; time.

Never forget your labor has value. Your labor has value. Your labor has value.

You have value.

Happy Labor Day.

What's So Bad About Late Capitalism?

When a well-respected, French economist publishes a heavily-researched, closely-argued book showing the accelerating trajectory of income disparity across the major democracies, he's dismissed as a radical and a Marxist (and, in America, we are nagged, ad nauseam, with a childish, hysterical insistence that Marxism is nothing less than the most unpatriotic, preposterous, yet seductively treacherous Evil since the invention of Satan), but when research economists working for the S & P--the godlike index of that stupid, misunderstood, overesteemed, high-stakes casino game called the stock market, in whose thrall we have remained far too long--release a study exploring the intuitively-correct notion that increasing economic (and by extension, if you have a brain, political) inequality between the infinitesimally small few and every-fucking-body else, is demonstrably bad for the economy, the 99.9%, and the aforementioned, heroic celebrities--the protagonists--of Late Capitalism, suddenly it becomes possible for the mainstream and, much more deliciously, the super-rich, to fathom that the runaway train being driven/not-driven by our wealthiest citizens and corporations--they who are the true constituency of "our," at best, surreally-representative government--that the runaway train we are all riding on, whether we want to or not, is headed directly for a cliff; a cliff which, perhaps, once featured the extended metaphor of an indispensable, infrastructural bridge, a neglected bridge, long-forgotten in the fanatical, ecstatic, free-market pursuit of a bottom-line profit-margin that benefits almost no one, a bridge now-collapsed; a no-bridge, a cliff, an abyss. 

What would be hilarious, if it weren't so tragically, mind-numbingly, willfully, embarrassingly stupid, is that the condition and direction of our economy--whose unregulated, pathetically-mismanaged fate is now so dangerously and inextricably submerged within, subsumed by, symbiotically enmeshed with a global market economy, gloriously stripped of inconvenient-yet-beneficial buffers, boundaries, and brakes guaranteeing that where falls America falls the world--was portended by that paradoxical boogeyman, the disdainfully dismissible, disproven, and ineffectual, yet superstitiously warded-off, Herr Marx, over a century ago. 

The New York Times:

Economists at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services are the authors of the straightforwardly titled “How Increasing Inequality is Dampening U.S. Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide.” The fact that S.&P., an apolitical organization that aims to produce reliable research for bond investors and others, is raising alarms about the risks that emerge from income inequality is a small but important sign of how a debate that has been largely confined to the academic world and left-of-center political circles is becoming more mainstream.

Yes, a specter is haunting the world--it has never ceased haunting us, even if we believed, or wanted to believe, we had forgotten it. Insubstantial and unreal; both absent and present; here, not-here, and everywhere; a phantasm, an irrationality, an illogic; a naive ghost-tale ghost, suitable only for frightening anxious children and the weak-minded, and which the wise "adults"--to their own, condescending amusement--explain away to me, you, and themselves, as only an absurd misapprehension, a night-terror, a trick of the light, a trick of the night, a trick of the fog, nothing but the old pine tree looming indistinctly in the corner of the yard; unscientific, an illusion, a derangement, a disease, a deviation; a heresy; a dangerous dream; this uncanny thing we sometimes almost catch out of the corner of our eyes, only seems to murmur hair-raising, disturbing, fantastic threats and predictions, which we can only try to forget to remember. It is the specter of Capitalism.

Read the whole NYT piece here.

Even the trace of the presence of the global economy affecting a passably local one usually indicates a rise in real estate prices and/or a leveling or drop in wage earnings

A signal piece regarding the Vancouver housing market by James Surowiecki, "Real Estate Goes Global," from The New Yorker's "Financial Page" this week.

Even the trace of the presence of the global economy affecting a passably local one usually indicates a rise in real estate prices and/or a leveling or drop in wage earnings. Alas, I do not invent these ideas, because then they would have the passing fancy of merely unpleasant fictions--or perhaps pleasant ones, if you, gentle reader, number yourself among the extraordinarily wealthy. I, myself, do not. And so, I do not share your enthusiasm for this or that turn of events that benefits you so greatly but continues to make life even more of a challenge for those less privileged than you may be--people such as myself.

I cannot fault myself entirely for my failure to achieve your great fortune. There is only so much to go around, after all, and your teensy percentage of the population seems to be intent on keeping as much of it for yourself as possible. The less you put into any economy, the less that economy grows. This is basic and not of my invention.

No. Rather than invent "statistics" or theorize in some broader, unsupported, sense of the "economic," I prefer to speak of incidences--let us not even raise them to the dignity, the certainty, of causality, of the causal--incidences that seem to keep showing up near each other, either temporally or locally.

And what is this "nearness" of which I speak? Can you see it? Does it happen recently enough for you to notice it, or does its temporal proximity seem to occur repeatedly in relation to a trend you may have noticed in your world--no matter how tiny, personal, local, or global this may be?

I find that most people--and by "most" I mean the larger percentage of the population--tend, most often, to recognize, not even the trends that favor them. Instead, they either recognize the trends that they would like to favor them--some day--or the trends that they believe should favor no one, no matter whether these trends may ever actually apply to them, themselves or their families, or not.

And so, you have people who celebrate the kind of wealth they will never actually ever be able to achieve--not them, not their children. And then you have people who disparage any public support or safety net for the individual, any labor union, wage regulation, fair and even tax code, public healthcare, corporate or environmental standards or regulations, sometimes public education, or anything else that seems to smack of governmental incursion into private property; not privacy--which, of course, has no value--but money, property, children, land and things (because, in case you haven't heard, children are things we invest in) and ownership, as such, and, now, even speech. But in this last place, the government has, through the inverse of freedom, marked its greatest colonization, its greatest mobilization of speech for the few and the greatest silencing of the many.

For you must remember, according to a 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision--clearly a mandate with strong precedent under the law--only the most expensive speech is worth valuing, reproducing, hearing, or discussing. Because, apparently, money IS speech. Money is speech. Think about that, while I say it again: Money is speech. So, the more money you have the more speech you have, and therefore, in a very fucked-up way, the more money you have the more "free" your speech is--more free because free speech is unhampered speech, and the less hampered the speech the freer it is. So, in a very queer sense indeed, the more that any kind of speech circulates, or, at least, finds its audience, the freer that speech is. And so, the freedom of your speech, its ability to reach any audience--much less its intended audience--actually carries a price tag.

So, am I the only one reading this who thinks that access to discourse and an audience; access to a polity for an election; access to speech as a monetary value actually destroys the notion of speech as something "free"? In social media forums, such as Facebook, where we sometimes produce our speech--which we are "free" to do--our speech derives its value from a different kind of payment: that of attention. It's not the number of people who read any post that determines its value and its placement in the, so called, "Newsfeed"; no, it is the popularity contest of liking and commentary that determines its value. And so your free speech, is something no one may never see or ever see, because it is not in fact free to circulate at all in such places. If it is too long, it is not free. If it is too interesting or complicated or critical, it is not free. If it is produced by someone without the organ of a different medium, such as a newspaper, or a lobbyist, or a representative, it is not free. This is a kind of market competition. But as the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money; or rather, to put precisely too fine a point on it: you have to have money to make money. And money is speech. Money is speech.

Late Capitalism has a genius for attaching a price tag to everything. And if it doesn't carry a price tag and a price that can be driven up to increase its value either in the global market of property or the market of ideas, speech, law, and government, it has no value. As your labor has no value. Because your speech has no value.

Labor Day: On the Death of the American Economy

On September 6, 1936, the day before Labor Day, President Roosevelt addressed the country in one of his fireside chats:

[Workers] deserve practical protection in the opportunity to use their labor at a return adequate to support them at a decent and constantly rising standard of living, and to accumulate a margin of security against the inevitable vicissitudes of life.... The Fourth of July commemorates our political freedom -- a freedom which without economic freedom is meaningless indeed. Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.

At a time when our nation's elected office holders (one is loathe to call them "representatives" or "officials") prefer to punish the electorate--not to mention their children and dependents or the nation's very economy itself--by "sequestering" public funds in an extraordinary demonstration of bad faith and political oneupmanship, which is only part of a much larger abdication of civic duty and public interest, this Rooseveltian example from an earlier time not only confirms that we have indeed fallen but begins to suggest how far. 

It is an unspeakable idiocy that those in possession of government office do not comprehend (or perhaps care) that unemployed individuals, who are denied unemployment insurance benefits, are former and potential consumers no longer contributing to the economy or the collection of income taxes, because these "benefits" are understood, after all, as taxable income.

The distinction between "benefits" and "taxable income," in this case, is far from meaningless and verging on the perverse; moreover, to give it another turn of the screw, most unemployed individuals, having been employed taxpaying individuals in the past, have in some sense--and a very real sense indeed--funded the benefits they are--or are no longer--receiving. The unemployed individual is then taxed on this income that is the outcome of his tax burden, in an ever-dwindling eternal return of taxation on taxed income renamed as "benefits." The term "benefits" here is a perjoration suggestive of something wholly unearned--and which is distributed parsimoniously and rebukingly as if it were a handout--which is manifestly not the case. This is only scratching the surface of the nearly systematic dismantling of the American economy by deregulation, the coddling of the financial sector, the movement of jobs overseas, and the abjection of the American consumer. A healthy economy requires consumers to purchase goods and services which allow businesses to stay open and employ individuals who are themselves consumers and taxpayers. Now, re-read the quote from FDR.

[Workers] deserve practical protection in the opportunity to use their labor at a return adequate to support them at a decent and constantly rising standard of living, and to accumulate a margin of security against the inevitable vicissitudes of life.... The Fourth of July commemorates our political freedom -- a freedom which without economic freedom is meaningless indeed. Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.

Happy late Labor Day, everyone.

Labor Day

S.G.C.

What do we celebrate, after all, on Labor Day? 

Grover Cleveland set Labor Day up in the 1880s but placed it at the end of the summer, in September, to keep it far away from May Day, the Communist and labor movement's very European day for honoring The Worker and the hard-won eight-hour work day. That's an easy way to remember the difference between Labor Day and Memorial Day, incidentally: Labor Day can never happen close to May. Anyway, that's how I do it.

That initial reticence of Cleveland's has now blossomed into a full denial of the value of labor and the worker in twenty-first century America. Unions? A joke. A labor movement? What's that? Worker's compensation? Fair wages? Benefits? Insurance? Vacation time? Job security? In the Age of the Corporation, the pursuit of profit has overshadowed everything else. Companies move production and customer support "offshore" (in every possible way, a repellent term), in the pursuit of ever-higher profits. CEOs make salaries many times over lower-ranking employees for the first time in decades. And who suffers in the pursuit of corporate expansion and profit: always the rank and file worker. Always.

How did this happen? Well, the founding fathers put careful strictures on corporations, keeping them within states and denying them the right to buy and own each other, i.e., other corporations. But one day, the Supreme Court allowed--and not even in an actual decision--that corporations were persons, and therefore were granted the right of freedom of speech, ownership, etc. The 1950s, and 60s, especially, marked a backlash against earlier corporate exploitation and indulgence, but with Reagan and deregulation, the backlash against the backlash has increased exponentially. Under the current occupant of the White House it has only gotten worse, as if you needed informing of that with the many scandals of corporate interests and the lobbyists who serve them. Your government serves corporations, not you. Your government does not care about you, your health, your livelihood, your job, your wages, your ability to feed your family, or your safety (remember the mine workers killed recently, none of the many violations reported were investigated. If those violations had been acted upon, those men would be alive today. This is just an FYI.).

But always remember, even if Labor Day is a joke, always remember that your labor has value. Even as you toil in a salaried job for more than the eight-hour work day that was guaranteed over a century ago, I hope your labor has some value to you.

Hey, let's repeal the child labor laws, too!

But don't worry, be happy. There's always a silver lining in every dark cloud. Truest of the dreams is The American Dream. Trust in The American Dream, in a country where anyone can become President. Remember that we live in a society unburdened by class. Trust that progress is the driving engine of our time and that your representatives have your best interests in mind. Don't forget that when God closes a door, he always opens a window. In spite of everything, still believe that people are good at heart. And always remember that murder will out.