In a provocative but flawed Grantland column about the deflated balls controversy currently swirling around Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and the New England Patriots, Charles P. Pierce explains that “as soon as the story broke about the possibility that the Patriots had been up to some shenanigans with the game balls while they were obliterating the Indianapolis Colts, 45-7, in the AFC Championship Game, the country proceeded to lose its freaking mind on the subject.” (http://grantland.com/the-triangle/brady-belichick-and-great-balls-of-fire-a-front-row-seat-for-the-foxborough-farce/) Pierce, here, is exactly right, i.e. there isn’t an ounce of hyperbole in his description of our collective response to “DeflateGate” (a generic and clichéd label for a scandal, yes, but still preferable to the other label being tossed around, “Ballghazi,” which is too uncomfortable in its implicit linkage of professional football, that proxy for war, with the Global War on Terror, that proxy for what Woodrow Wilson once described as “normalcy.”) Case in point, yours truly, who despite moving house this week has devoted approximately 30,000 of my 50,000 thoughts per day to DeflateGate (with another 10,000 reserved for monitoring the chance for snow).
But while Pierce grasps the breadth of this latest scandale du jour, he has no sense of its depth. Ignoring its depth, Pierce writes “The whole thing is flatly hilarious.” (ibid) And while the dramatics are not without their comic elements, the affair’s tragic elements are at least as prominent as the obvious comic surrealism. Although I would note that Pierce’s explanation of what exactly is so funny about all of this is more than a little bit troubling: “The whole thing is flatly hilarious. The way you can be sure of this is that the ladies of The View pronounced themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots on Thursday morning. Rosie O’Donnell wanted them booted from the Super Bowl. (Trolling or insane? Our lines are open.)” If you’ve been listening to sports talk radio all week, as I have, you’ve heard one sports pundit after another pronounce themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots, some of whom have also suggested that the Patriots be disqualified from the Super Bowl. But what almost all of these sports radio personalities have in common is that they’re men. But given that “the ladies of The View” lack the prerequisite equipment between their legs, any opinions they might offer necessarily reduce the discussion to hilarity. Is it mere coincidence that O’Donnell, who famously has no interest in the equipment between men’s legs, is singled out by name? Does Pierce not even realize that a few paragraphs before he dismisses O’Donnell for the audacity of suggesting that the Patriots be disqualified from the Super Bowl, he writes that “Serious people in serious media venues have proposed disqualifying the Patriots from playing in the Super Bowl against the Seattle Seahawks”? Seriously, Charles P. Pierce? In short, Pierce is saying loud and clear that the scandal is reduced to mere “farce” (the exact word used in the title of his column) precisely because women feel entitled to express their own opinions about it. Pierce goes on to say the following: “This is what I think: Once a scandal starts being discussed on The View, it stops being a scandal and becomes a sitcom. I think this should be a rule.” Memo to Charles P. Pierce: The notion that women are not to be taken seriously has been a rule for thousands of years. It’s called patriarchy.
Just as troubling is Pierce’s repeated assertion that the public reaction to the scandal has been so intense “because we are a nation of infantilized yahoos.” Infants, of course, can’t think for themselves. But I would suggest that the “the country proceeded to lose its freaking mind on the subject” because of a very well reasoned, and deeply felt, line of thought. Let me briefly sketch how the thinking goes. The Patriots have had the great good fortune over the last fifteen years, an eternity in pro football, to have arguably the greatest football coach of all time (Belichick) partnered with arguably the greatest quarterback of all time (Brady). And they got there by hiring a guy who got canned from his first gig as an NFL head coach and by drafting a guy in the sixth round, i.e. a quarterback prospect who was just as likely to get cut as he was to make the team. The Patriots essentially hit the football equivalent of the Powerball lottery. Because it turns out that Belichick is one of the maybe three or four authentic football geniuses who ever lived, and Brady is an assassin.
So, when you have the greatest coach of all time and the greatest quarterback of all time you already have every advantage a football team is ever going to need. And everybody knows this. The combination is not unprecedented, having occurred at least once before in the tandem of Bill Walsh and Joe Montana on the great San Francisco 49ers teams that won beaucoup Super Bowls in the 1980s. The interesting thing is that nobody hated the 49ers the way they hate the Patriots. Sure, you might have rooted against the Niners because you were tired of them winning all the time the same way that you might have rooted against Roger Federer when he was winning every time he stepped onto a tennis court, but no one truly hated the Niners or hated Federer because you can only develop so much antipathy towards simple greatness. Greatness might breed a certain amount of envy but it also breeds respect, and there is no respect in the level of animosity we all feel towards the Patriots. Because, beginning with the Spygate scandal in 2007, when the Patriots were first caught cheating red handed, the Patriots have come to represent something altogether different from greatness: gaming the system for an advantage you don’t need. The Patriots, who in the persons of Belichick and Brady have everything, (Belichick’s brains, Brady’s looks, success, wealth, fame, and supermodel wife) are the 1%. The Patriots, like the 1%, embody the paradox of already having everything but still wanting more, and, moreover, trampling the rules that everyone else is expected to follow in order to extract that paradoxical surplus from those who have little to nothing precisely because they follow those very rules. How interesting that on the very same day that the DeflateGate story broke, Oxfam released its report detailing that the 80 richest people on the planet have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion combined, and that by 2016 the richest 1% will have more wealth than all the rest of the 99% combined.
Pierce, then, is dead wrong in labeling us “infantilized yahoos” for “losing (our) freaking mind on the subject” of the New England Patriots’ deflated balls. A more telling critique is to press those, like me, who couldn’t stop thinking and talking about Belichick and Brady gaming the system for an advantage they manifestly don’t need, but who, like me, heard about the Oxfam report on the radio while my sports talk radio station was on commercial break, and quickly forgot about it as soon as ESPN radio’s Mike and Mike in the Morning came back from break to joke about Seinfeld’s “shrinkage” episode in re: deflated balls. If denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, then projection ain’t just how Belichick and Brady watch game film. The problem in projecting everything onto Brady and Belichick, of course, is that at least we get to watch those two squirm during their respective DeflateGate press conferences (which turned out to be little more than exercises in plausible deniability), while the 1% are as hard to find in their piles of money as a needle in a haystack. Note that we have yet to hear about DeflateGate from the real money behind the New England Patriots, team owner Bob Kraft. Perhaps the most important element of being rich these days is that money talks, so you don’t have to. And we only make it easier for them (the 1%) when all we talk about is football, even, as in the case of DeflateGate, when we are really talking about them. This doesn’t make us “infantilized yahoos,” but it does make us unwitting accomplices. Nevertheless, I hope they boot Brady and Belichick from the Super Bowl, i.e. I’m with Rosie O’Donnell.
Showing posts with label critique capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critique capitalism. Show all posts
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Sunday, October 26, 2014
The Wisdom of Leisure
In his provocative 1927 essay, The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud outlines his take on the root source of humanity’s seemingly unflagging suffering, finding it in “the sacrifices which civilization expects… in order to make a communal life possible.” These sacrifices consist, for Freud, in a coerced “suppression of the instincts,” foremost among which instincts are sex and aggression, with a nod to death. But a crucial passage, and as I will argue a crucial error, in the opening pages of The Future of an Illusion points us in an entirely different direction from Freud’s theory of civilization as the ground of an inevitable discontent. And, while not a guarantor of unguarded optimism (our earth is far too close to the brink for anything but the most closely guarded forms of optimism), this opposite direction is, or has the potential to be, hopeful.
The passage reads thusly:
“For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline.”
His near bottomless contributions to our understanding of the human psyche notwithstanding, Freud here has it exactly backwards. Because masses are (quite often individually and without question collectively) so intelligent I would call them wise, and, furthermore, their genius consists precisely in what Freud calls laziness, but what I would describe as the wisdom of leisure.
In short, I am suggesting that the root source of suffering isn’t Freud’s suppression of the instincts (or, for that matter, Buddhism’s desire, or Christianity’s original sin, etc., etc.), but simply the fact that civilization (as we know it) is so much damn work. (There is some irony in the fact that Freud, a self-described “godless Jew,” sounds, in the passage quoted above, like a mouthpiece for the God-subscribing, goyish “Protestant work ethic.”)
While exercising caution that we don’t romanticize hunter-gatherer civilizations as some kind of Garden of Eden, it is nevertheless instructive to consider the relative workloads of our ancient forebears. To do so, we turn to Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity: “Ethnographic studies of isolated Stone Age hunter-gatherers and premodern agriculturalists suggest that ‘primitive’ peoples, far from being driven by anxiety, lived lives of relative leisure and affluence.” Eisenstein then describes anthropologist Richard Lee’s study of the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, which found that, for the !Kung, “an average workweek consisted of approximately twenty hours spent in subsistence activities,” and that “Moreover, much of the ‘work’ spent on these twenty hours of subsistence activity was by no means strenuous or burdensome.” Compare this to the typical forty hour work week, which forty hours is a paltry sum when one considers the hours clocked by anyone with any real aspirations to climb the career ladder. (America is run by workaholics; we know this because they are emailing the rest of us between midnight and 3:00 AM.) Ask yourself also if some or much of the work you perform in your forty-plus hours isn’t “strenuous or burdensome.”
In sum, “premodern” civilizations worked a lot less than us and were also a lot less anxious. Work less, feel better. A simple formula that we, in all our technological glory, just can’t seem to grasp. But, of course, civilization isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Leaving us stuck with Freud’s “love and work,” when what we really need is “love and play.” But the closest we seem to be able to get to the latter, as reported by The Washington Post, are employers (usually outdoorsy activity gear companies) who encourage us to take a half hour break for a hike, or a five day paid vacation to go camping somewhere really pretty, with a nod to the bottom line. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-company-that-profits-as-it-pampers-workers/2014/10/22/d3321b34-4818-11e4-b72e-d60a9229cc10_story.html?hpid=z5) Happy workers make productive workers. Just so, in our civilization, play is always in the service of work (and profits). We will know the revolution has finally come when we can each devote our lives to working really hard on something out of sheer pleasure, i.e. in a spirit of play. As Terry Eagleton says, socialism is about “leisure, not labor.”
Of course, Eagleton is quick to remind us of Oscar Wilde’s wry observation that “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” Wilde’s insight provides much needed ironic distance from the cruel truth that the source of the never-ending tide of strenuous and burdensome work can only be undone by yet more such work, making the dismantling of labor in favor of leisure something of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t proposition. All of which makes going through the automatic motions of showing up for work every day in order to put food on the table a symptom of the paralysis that comes from knowing that the only possible cure for what ails us is more of what ails us. In assessing the depth of this paralysis I would submit that the double bind diagnosed by Wilde has as much if not more to do with the failure of really existing 20th century socialism to displace capitalism than the atrocities propagated by Stalin and his ilk. Whereas the latter marked socialism as a brutal failure in Eastern Europe and Asia, the former made it a non-starter in the west, meaning it was over before it ever even started.
In place of socialism’s cure, perhaps the best we can hope for at this moment in time is a therapy, with at least one eye always watching for the event that will break open the possibility of playful leisure, which is the possibility of the reemergence of the human. We need new words for socialism anyway, given the tragic emptying of the term via unstaunched 20th century bloodletting, and playful leisure just might do. We need words that can never again lead to the gulag and the show trial, but that are still apposite to the soul crushing age in bloom on both sides of where the old Berlin Wall once stood. If the revolution is to succeed, it has to be funny (i.e. playful).
In the meantime, our therapy takes the axiom for our age, “Work less, feel better,” and translates it into a question that can be applied at every last decision point: How much is enough?
The passage reads thusly:
“For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline.”
His near bottomless contributions to our understanding of the human psyche notwithstanding, Freud here has it exactly backwards. Because masses are (quite often individually and without question collectively) so intelligent I would call them wise, and, furthermore, their genius consists precisely in what Freud calls laziness, but what I would describe as the wisdom of leisure.
In short, I am suggesting that the root source of suffering isn’t Freud’s suppression of the instincts (or, for that matter, Buddhism’s desire, or Christianity’s original sin, etc., etc.), but simply the fact that civilization (as we know it) is so much damn work. (There is some irony in the fact that Freud, a self-described “godless Jew,” sounds, in the passage quoted above, like a mouthpiece for the God-subscribing, goyish “Protestant work ethic.”)
While exercising caution that we don’t romanticize hunter-gatherer civilizations as some kind of Garden of Eden, it is nevertheless instructive to consider the relative workloads of our ancient forebears. To do so, we turn to Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity: “Ethnographic studies of isolated Stone Age hunter-gatherers and premodern agriculturalists suggest that ‘primitive’ peoples, far from being driven by anxiety, lived lives of relative leisure and affluence.” Eisenstein then describes anthropologist Richard Lee’s study of the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, which found that, for the !Kung, “an average workweek consisted of approximately twenty hours spent in subsistence activities,” and that “Moreover, much of the ‘work’ spent on these twenty hours of subsistence activity was by no means strenuous or burdensome.” Compare this to the typical forty hour work week, which forty hours is a paltry sum when one considers the hours clocked by anyone with any real aspirations to climb the career ladder. (America is run by workaholics; we know this because they are emailing the rest of us between midnight and 3:00 AM.) Ask yourself also if some or much of the work you perform in your forty-plus hours isn’t “strenuous or burdensome.”
In sum, “premodern” civilizations worked a lot less than us and were also a lot less anxious. Work less, feel better. A simple formula that we, in all our technological glory, just can’t seem to grasp. But, of course, civilization isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Leaving us stuck with Freud’s “love and work,” when what we really need is “love and play.” But the closest we seem to be able to get to the latter, as reported by The Washington Post, are employers (usually outdoorsy activity gear companies) who encourage us to take a half hour break for a hike, or a five day paid vacation to go camping somewhere really pretty, with a nod to the bottom line. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-company-that-profits-as-it-pampers-workers/2014/10/22/d3321b34-4818-11e4-b72e-d60a9229cc10_story.html?hpid=z5) Happy workers make productive workers. Just so, in our civilization, play is always in the service of work (and profits). We will know the revolution has finally come when we can each devote our lives to working really hard on something out of sheer pleasure, i.e. in a spirit of play. As Terry Eagleton says, socialism is about “leisure, not labor.”
Of course, Eagleton is quick to remind us of Oscar Wilde’s wry observation that “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” Wilde’s insight provides much needed ironic distance from the cruel truth that the source of the never-ending tide of strenuous and burdensome work can only be undone by yet more such work, making the dismantling of labor in favor of leisure something of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t proposition. All of which makes going through the automatic motions of showing up for work every day in order to put food on the table a symptom of the paralysis that comes from knowing that the only possible cure for what ails us is more of what ails us. In assessing the depth of this paralysis I would submit that the double bind diagnosed by Wilde has as much if not more to do with the failure of really existing 20th century socialism to displace capitalism than the atrocities propagated by Stalin and his ilk. Whereas the latter marked socialism as a brutal failure in Eastern Europe and Asia, the former made it a non-starter in the west, meaning it was over before it ever even started.
In place of socialism’s cure, perhaps the best we can hope for at this moment in time is a therapy, with at least one eye always watching for the event that will break open the possibility of playful leisure, which is the possibility of the reemergence of the human. We need new words for socialism anyway, given the tragic emptying of the term via unstaunched 20th century bloodletting, and playful leisure just might do. We need words that can never again lead to the gulag and the show trial, but that are still apposite to the soul crushing age in bloom on both sides of where the old Berlin Wall once stood. If the revolution is to succeed, it has to be funny (i.e. playful).
In the meantime, our therapy takes the axiom for our age, “Work less, feel better,” and translates it into a question that can be applied at every last decision point: How much is enough?
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Making the Unpredictable Inevitable
As I make my daily internet check of the news headlines, of which the outbreak of Ebola and the brutal beheadings by ISIS followed by the subsequent renewal of perpetual American bombing are but the latest typical installments, I am now realizing that I can’t even imagine a potential major news event that would qualify unequivocally as good news. The only recent exception, and an exception exactly because its glad tidings were so unexpected, was the announcement by LeBron James that he would be returning to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers after publicly jilting them four years prior in one of the biggest PR blunders of all time, pursuant to infamously “taking (his) talents to South Beach.” Perhaps there were just enough overtones of the Parable of the Prodigal Son to evoke that quintessential book of good news, the gospels. I would also venture that LeBron’s return to Cleveland qualifies as one of Alain Badiou’s events, which are described by Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins in Religion Politics, and the Earth thusly: “when a singular event occurs, it is an event, because there is something completely unpredictable or unforeseen, and it enables people to invent new ways of thinking and living in response.” Just so, LeBron’s return to Northeast Ohio from South Beach contains the radically new (for us) perspective that the best and most important place in the world is wherever one’s soul happens to be rooted. Before LeBron, moving from Northeast Ohio to South Beach and then, voluntarily, back again to Northeast Ohio was as unthinkable as reversing the flow of time. And while LeBron hasn’t reversed time, the event of LeBron’s return to Cleveland has shifted the flow of this particular river of spacetime that we call home in a slightly, but also noticeably better direction.
But outside of LeBron, the daily rundown of news headlines has begun to feel like a countdown to The End, each news item the tick of one more second off the fast expiring clock. When the news media, and the world, is experienced precisely this way, one particular piece of bad news mutates into the exception that proves the rule found in the inverse of “no news is good news,” i.e. all news is bad news. That exception, the bad news which gets translated into good news by the filtering effect of all the other bad news, is, of course, climate change. I know this because when I scan the daily headlines I always click on the articles about climate change in the hopes of hearing the good news that there is more bad news about climate change. And I know this because the people writing these climate change update pieces can barely contain their glee, too. Case in point, a recent Salon article reporting that the oceans are heating up more quickly than previously realized. (http://www.salon.com/2014/10/06/the_oceans_are_heating_up_a_lot_more_quickly_than_we_thought/) The article was subtitled “New data is bad news for anyone who hoped global warming was on hiatus,” but is understood by the Salon readership to actually mean “New data is good news for anyone who feared that global warming was on hiatus.” After explaining how the slowing of global warming is more than offset by a rise in the oceans’ temperatures “about 24 to 58 percent more quickly than models suggested,” the article quotes oceanographers Gregory Johnson and John M. Lyman’s assertion that “One could say that global warming is ocean warming.” (Oceanographers renaming global warming as ocean warming does sound a little bit like a football team’s offensive coordinator exclaiming that “the best defense is a good offense.”) From there, it is short work for article author Lindsay Abrams, whose byline identifies her as “reporting on all things sustainable,” to close by declaring that “In other words it (climate change) isn’t over. It’s just getting started.” Which, like her subtitle, comes off like appropriate handwringing about climate change, if, that is, one ignores the subjective heartbeat thrumming throughout the entire article. Subjectively speaking, Abrams closing thought is, quite simply, ecstatic.
This ecstasy is grounded in the political left’s understanding of climate change as the guarantor of the left’s belief that the future belongs to us. It is a vision grounded in the mythological narrative that the left has conflated with the brute facts of climate change. This mythology pictures climate change as the flames of late capitalism burning itself down, and then, rising from the ashes like a phoenix, voila, a new democratic socialism. Or anarcho-syndicalism, which is fine because it isn’t capitalism. As someone who traffics in this teleological fantasy as often as I scan the news headlines, “It’s just getting started” sounds like a battle cry of freedom. The fantasy hinges on the seemingly commonsensical logic that since it is abundantly obvious that globalized capitalism caused climate change, and since climate change is horrifically bad, then capitalism will at last be seen for the malignant cancer that it is and, at long last, be consigned to the dustbin of history.
The problem with this is that it ignores the first axiom of commonsense, which is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Which makes it highly probable that capitalism will be able to succeed in turning climate change into yet another business opportunity, e.g. by commodifying “sustainability” via a “green economy.” This process is already in full swing at your local Whole Foods and Toyota Prius dealership. Which is not to say that eating organic or conserving energy are bad in and of themselves, but that, like recycling, they not only won’t save us, but will also pave the road to hell with good intentions. (That intention, of course, is a “free market economy” that works for all of us, which is akin to running on a platform of “Elitism for everyone!”, making us the gullible fools who really believe the carnival barker when he says of capitalism, “Step right up, everyone’s a winner!”) This is not to say that climate change won’t ultimately render the earth uninhabitable, but to say that climate change may not present a “limit to growth” until that rendering is a fait accompli. Two metaphors may help. The first is of a giant balloon that keeps expanding right up until the moment it has sucked in the very last drop of air. Or, if you prefer, the Blob, which continues expanding until it has consumed every last molecule.
In short, we should be seeking our own liberation, and hope that in the process we save the earth, as opposed to counting on the death of the earth to save and liberate us. The problem is that just as I can’t imagine any good news other than more climate change, we can’t think of anything we can do to liberate ourselves. Our challenge, then, in imagining our liberation is in thinking the inconceivable. We should ask ourselves, “What is an impossible future?”, and start there. And if we lose our nerve, recall that LeBron is already back in Cleveland. So, because it would only be appropriate to close by putting a paradoxical spin on Badiou’s events with a line inspired by a sports movie, Field of Dreams’ “If you build it, they will come,” I would say this:
If we can think it, the completely unpredictable and unforeseen event is inevitable.
But outside of LeBron, the daily rundown of news headlines has begun to feel like a countdown to The End, each news item the tick of one more second off the fast expiring clock. When the news media, and the world, is experienced precisely this way, one particular piece of bad news mutates into the exception that proves the rule found in the inverse of “no news is good news,” i.e. all news is bad news. That exception, the bad news which gets translated into good news by the filtering effect of all the other bad news, is, of course, climate change. I know this because when I scan the daily headlines I always click on the articles about climate change in the hopes of hearing the good news that there is more bad news about climate change. And I know this because the people writing these climate change update pieces can barely contain their glee, too. Case in point, a recent Salon article reporting that the oceans are heating up more quickly than previously realized. (http://www.salon.com/2014/10/06/the_oceans_are_heating_up_a_lot_more_quickly_than_we_thought/) The article was subtitled “New data is bad news for anyone who hoped global warming was on hiatus,” but is understood by the Salon readership to actually mean “New data is good news for anyone who feared that global warming was on hiatus.” After explaining how the slowing of global warming is more than offset by a rise in the oceans’ temperatures “about 24 to 58 percent more quickly than models suggested,” the article quotes oceanographers Gregory Johnson and John M. Lyman’s assertion that “One could say that global warming is ocean warming.” (Oceanographers renaming global warming as ocean warming does sound a little bit like a football team’s offensive coordinator exclaiming that “the best defense is a good offense.”) From there, it is short work for article author Lindsay Abrams, whose byline identifies her as “reporting on all things sustainable,” to close by declaring that “In other words it (climate change) isn’t over. It’s just getting started.” Which, like her subtitle, comes off like appropriate handwringing about climate change, if, that is, one ignores the subjective heartbeat thrumming throughout the entire article. Subjectively speaking, Abrams closing thought is, quite simply, ecstatic.
This ecstasy is grounded in the political left’s understanding of climate change as the guarantor of the left’s belief that the future belongs to us. It is a vision grounded in the mythological narrative that the left has conflated with the brute facts of climate change. This mythology pictures climate change as the flames of late capitalism burning itself down, and then, rising from the ashes like a phoenix, voila, a new democratic socialism. Or anarcho-syndicalism, which is fine because it isn’t capitalism. As someone who traffics in this teleological fantasy as often as I scan the news headlines, “It’s just getting started” sounds like a battle cry of freedom. The fantasy hinges on the seemingly commonsensical logic that since it is abundantly obvious that globalized capitalism caused climate change, and since climate change is horrifically bad, then capitalism will at last be seen for the malignant cancer that it is and, at long last, be consigned to the dustbin of history.
The problem with this is that it ignores the first axiom of commonsense, which is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Which makes it highly probable that capitalism will be able to succeed in turning climate change into yet another business opportunity, e.g. by commodifying “sustainability” via a “green economy.” This process is already in full swing at your local Whole Foods and Toyota Prius dealership. Which is not to say that eating organic or conserving energy are bad in and of themselves, but that, like recycling, they not only won’t save us, but will also pave the road to hell with good intentions. (That intention, of course, is a “free market economy” that works for all of us, which is akin to running on a platform of “Elitism for everyone!”, making us the gullible fools who really believe the carnival barker when he says of capitalism, “Step right up, everyone’s a winner!”) This is not to say that climate change won’t ultimately render the earth uninhabitable, but to say that climate change may not present a “limit to growth” until that rendering is a fait accompli. Two metaphors may help. The first is of a giant balloon that keeps expanding right up until the moment it has sucked in the very last drop of air. Or, if you prefer, the Blob, which continues expanding until it has consumed every last molecule.
In short, we should be seeking our own liberation, and hope that in the process we save the earth, as opposed to counting on the death of the earth to save and liberate us. The problem is that just as I can’t imagine any good news other than more climate change, we can’t think of anything we can do to liberate ourselves. Our challenge, then, in imagining our liberation is in thinking the inconceivable. We should ask ourselves, “What is an impossible future?”, and start there. And if we lose our nerve, recall that LeBron is already back in Cleveland. So, because it would only be appropriate to close by putting a paradoxical spin on Badiou’s events with a line inspired by a sports movie, Field of Dreams’ “If you build it, they will come,” I would say this:
If we can think it, the completely unpredictable and unforeseen event is inevitable.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
"Welcome to the (food) desert of the real"
It’s official: my wife, Jen, and I don’t like to travel (although it goes without saying that we love seeing the ones we love so much that we travel to see them). Ours is not an aversion born of social conscious, like e.g. the folks I’ve heard tale of who will never again leave Oregon in the hopes of I’m not sure exactly what, but which almost certainly involves undoing the legacy of the Enlightenment while simultaneously forestalling climate change (whereas if I threatened to never again leave Baltimore I’d likely be deported to Canada, spiritual home of all threats related to one’s putative location). No, ours is a red blooded American antipathy grounded in the fact that everything we want and need is right here at home, i.e. this is where we’re comfortable. (Note the obvious irony in the fact that the initials for the old Soviet Union, U.S.S.R, when spelled in Russian letters, C.C.C.P., align precisely with what the initials U.S.A. stand for in 2014: Comfort, Convenience, Cat videos, and Pizza.)
So it was on a recent trip to North Carolina that, save for the fact that one can travel back and forth between Chapel Hill and Durham from La Quinta Inn on Rt. 15/501 without making a single left or right turn, I might as well have been in Rangoon. (GPS was invented for me, as my fear of getting lost is such that e.g. when travelling I typically like to give myself a four hour cushion when trying to find the airport, which makes my lack of any 21st century navigation devices either masochistic or evocative of Joseph Campbell’s observation that “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”) And save for the Kroger grocery store, located just one straight shootin’ mile from La Quinta on 15/501. Dazed by the combined effects of spending 6 hours in the car with my three children, the younger two of whom spend the full 6 hours combining the hijinks of Moe poking Curly in the eyes with weeping and gnashing of teeth, and passing the night in La Quinta Inn with our dog Sy, which felt strangely like sneaking into the girls’ dorm at boarding school (or at least what I imagine that feels like, given that the closest I ever got to the girls’ dorm at St. Andrew’s came during my visits to Ms. Blenkensop’s dorm-abutting apartment for help with my pre-calculus), entering through the Kroger’s automatic doors felt as comforting as checking to see whether I turned the oven off before leaving out of my house.
There is something about grocery stores. I submit that that something is the pinnacle of western civilization. In many ways the secular west is just a grocery store chain with a slogan: “Man cannot live by bread alone, but it’s a damn good start.” The secular west is also in many ways just an army, and armies, as we all know, march on their stomachs. And one cannot walk into a grocery store without feeling, even if just a little bit, that the world is at your fingertips, which feeling is, of course, the whole point of the secular west. The world is your oyster, at $19.99 a pound. And though I was far from home, the Kroger warped space and time with the very same assortment of Little Debbie products available to me in Baltimore, especially the Oatmeal Creme Pies and Star Crunch (which tellingly, like money, is a noun that can’t be made plural). Like Foucault declaring “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” the Kroger assured me that, appearances notwithstanding, “Ceci n’est pas North Carolina.”
But if we are to assert that grocery stores are the pinnacle of western civilization, remapping its coordinates by the logic to be found in “home is where the food is,” then we must go one step further and confront the mystification rendered by that elusive adjective, western. Go west, young man. To which we may reply, like the legendary Bostonian blue blood asked where she would most like to go in all the world, “But darling, I’m already here.” Unless, after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there,” there is no west here.
Case in point is Baltimore City, where you will find tens of thousands of civilized folks enduring sans (western) civilization, where “there’s no place like home” has given way to “there’s no place near home with any food,” a reality that has entered the popular imagination under the moniker of food deserts: “populated areas with little or no food retail provision… where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) This straightforward, intuitive definition can be found on Wikipedia, where, a few paragraphs later we learn that:
• “Remaining food retailers in inner-cities are gas stations, convenience stores, tobacco stores, drugstores, and liquor stores. A diet based on foods from these locations consists primarily of processed foods high in calories, sugars, salt, fat, and artificial ingredients.” (ibid)
• “Fringe food retailers in food deserts can have a 30-60% markup on prices, provide a limited selection of products and a dominant marketing of processed foods.” (ibid)
• “Areas with a majority of convenience stores have a higher prevalence of overweight and obese individuals, compared to areas with only supermarkets.” (ibid)
• “The availability of supermarkets in African American neighborhoods is 52% of their prevalence in white neighborhoods.” (ibid)
I.e. in food deserts you pay more for toxic foods that will make you obese and give you diabetes and heart disease, all because you happen to be Black. Or, as we say in western civilization, “Prevalence of food deserts in poorer neighborhoods is driven by lack of consumer demand, as the poor have less money to spend on healthful, nutritious food. From an economic standpoint, low demand does not justify supply.” (ibid) The logic in that statement, which is the logic of western civilization, boggles the mind: “Low demand does not justify supply” is just to say “You can’t be hungry unless you have money.”
Because you can’t be hungry unless you have money, Wikipedia goes on to suggest that “adding neighborhood supermarkets may have little benefit to diet quality across the income spectrum,” which is a fancy way of saying that food is not the solution to hunger, and that “the study of food deserts requires further research, including longitudinal studies of food environments, to support associations with obesity and to support neighborhood interventions,” which is a fancy way of saying “Let them eat (Hostess) cake.”
Note that “We now know that agriculture first evolved in the world’s harsh, hot, arid deserts, then spread to more temperate climes – not the other way around, as one might expect. All civilizations first took root in the deserts of the world.” (http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/du_peo_ancient.html) I take this to mean that as western civilization fast approaches its zero hour, (“zero hour- noun- the time at which a planned operation, typically a military one, is set to begin”; at this point is there any other possible ending?), we may find the roots of a new way of life in a most unexpected place, where we too might learn to endure in the desert of the real, where the demands of hunger are universal and, necessarily, graciously, so is the food.
So it was on a recent trip to North Carolina that, save for the fact that one can travel back and forth between Chapel Hill and Durham from La Quinta Inn on Rt. 15/501 without making a single left or right turn, I might as well have been in Rangoon. (GPS was invented for me, as my fear of getting lost is such that e.g. when travelling I typically like to give myself a four hour cushion when trying to find the airport, which makes my lack of any 21st century navigation devices either masochistic or evocative of Joseph Campbell’s observation that “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”) And save for the Kroger grocery store, located just one straight shootin’ mile from La Quinta on 15/501. Dazed by the combined effects of spending 6 hours in the car with my three children, the younger two of whom spend the full 6 hours combining the hijinks of Moe poking Curly in the eyes with weeping and gnashing of teeth, and passing the night in La Quinta Inn with our dog Sy, which felt strangely like sneaking into the girls’ dorm at boarding school (or at least what I imagine that feels like, given that the closest I ever got to the girls’ dorm at St. Andrew’s came during my visits to Ms. Blenkensop’s dorm-abutting apartment for help with my pre-calculus), entering through the Kroger’s automatic doors felt as comforting as checking to see whether I turned the oven off before leaving out of my house.
There is something about grocery stores. I submit that that something is the pinnacle of western civilization. In many ways the secular west is just a grocery store chain with a slogan: “Man cannot live by bread alone, but it’s a damn good start.” The secular west is also in many ways just an army, and armies, as we all know, march on their stomachs. And one cannot walk into a grocery store without feeling, even if just a little bit, that the world is at your fingertips, which feeling is, of course, the whole point of the secular west. The world is your oyster, at $19.99 a pound. And though I was far from home, the Kroger warped space and time with the very same assortment of Little Debbie products available to me in Baltimore, especially the Oatmeal Creme Pies and Star Crunch (which tellingly, like money, is a noun that can’t be made plural). Like Foucault declaring “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” the Kroger assured me that, appearances notwithstanding, “Ceci n’est pas North Carolina.”
But if we are to assert that grocery stores are the pinnacle of western civilization, remapping its coordinates by the logic to be found in “home is where the food is,” then we must go one step further and confront the mystification rendered by that elusive adjective, western. Go west, young man. To which we may reply, like the legendary Bostonian blue blood asked where she would most like to go in all the world, “But darling, I’m already here.” Unless, after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there,” there is no west here.
Case in point is Baltimore City, where you will find tens of thousands of civilized folks enduring sans (western) civilization, where “there’s no place like home” has given way to “there’s no place near home with any food,” a reality that has entered the popular imagination under the moniker of food deserts: “populated areas with little or no food retail provision… where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) This straightforward, intuitive definition can be found on Wikipedia, where, a few paragraphs later we learn that:
• “Remaining food retailers in inner-cities are gas stations, convenience stores, tobacco stores, drugstores, and liquor stores. A diet based on foods from these locations consists primarily of processed foods high in calories, sugars, salt, fat, and artificial ingredients.” (ibid)
• “Fringe food retailers in food deserts can have a 30-60% markup on prices, provide a limited selection of products and a dominant marketing of processed foods.” (ibid)
• “Areas with a majority of convenience stores have a higher prevalence of overweight and obese individuals, compared to areas with only supermarkets.” (ibid)
• “The availability of supermarkets in African American neighborhoods is 52% of their prevalence in white neighborhoods.” (ibid)
I.e. in food deserts you pay more for toxic foods that will make you obese and give you diabetes and heart disease, all because you happen to be Black. Or, as we say in western civilization, “Prevalence of food deserts in poorer neighborhoods is driven by lack of consumer demand, as the poor have less money to spend on healthful, nutritious food. From an economic standpoint, low demand does not justify supply.” (ibid) The logic in that statement, which is the logic of western civilization, boggles the mind: “Low demand does not justify supply” is just to say “You can’t be hungry unless you have money.”
Note that “We now know that agriculture first evolved in the world’s harsh, hot, arid deserts, then spread to more temperate climes – not the other way around, as one might expect. All civilizations first took root in the deserts of the world.” (http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/du_peo_ancient.html) I take this to mean that as western civilization fast approaches its zero hour, (“zero hour- noun- the time at which a planned operation, typically a military one, is set to begin”; at this point is there any other possible ending?), we may find the roots of a new way of life in a most unexpected place, where we too might learn to endure in the desert of the real, where the demands of hunger are universal and, necessarily, graciously, so is the food.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
With Folktales, as with Comedy, Timing is Everything
Last week my wife Jen and I took the kids to North Carolina to visit relatives, including the family matriarch, my grandmother Bucky. Knowing my proclivity for east Carolina-style BBQ, which is vinegar-based and the champagne of BBQs, Bucky treated everyone to dinner at Bullock’s, the planet’s best BBQ joint. My younger daughters Sammi and Yael, 6 and 3, respectively, wanted nothing to do with sitting in Bullock’s dining room, so after wolfing down my plate of ridiculous BBQ, competent cole slaw and forgettable French fries (if Bullock’s ever pairs duck-fat fries with the BBQ I will be launching a campaign to convince Jen to move to North Carolina), I soon found myself minding the girls on Bullock’s front patio. The patio had an outdoor speaker, so as the girls alternated grabbing local real estate flyers and Auto Traders with jumping off the four-foot high brick wall that defined the patio’s boundary, I chillaxed to some country music. (Some, including Jen, might say that I am incapable of chillaxing, but how else should one describe obsessively stuffing the real estate flyers back into their bins, extolling Yael not to let the flyer bin door slam shut again because, my goodness, it’s loud, then racing back to the brick wall to prevent an ER visit?)
One of the great things about country music is that you can actually hear the lyrics and follow the arc of the almost unfailingly clear narratives. So when The Farm’s “Be Grateful” came on, I could hear every word:
The other day I caught myself complaining
How my boss has got me working overtime
Then the stranger who was sitting there beside me
Said, I spent all day in the unemployment line
Are there open shifts, are they hiring on
I'll work any hours even all night long
If you could put a good word in for me
Every time you think you've got it bad
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful
We complain about how much it's gonna cost us
To fill our 20 something thousand dollars cars
And living in the land of milk and honey
It's so easy to forget how lucky we are
We can work hard and buy a patch of dirt
And on Sunday morning go to church
And pray for those who don't have it as good as you
Every time you think you've got it bad
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful
(http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/the-farm-inc/be-grateful-36292.html)
“Be Grateful” at first appears to be a retelling of the old Yiddish folktale, It Could Always Be Worse. The folktale tells the story of a poor man so overwhelmed with the chaos and stress of sharing his tiny one-room hut with his wife, their six children, and his mother that he visits his Rabbi in total despair. Counterintuitively, the rabbi instructs him to bring his chickens into the hut with his family. Befuddled, the poor man nevertheless complies. Things, of course, get worse in the hut. Upon returning to the rabbi he is instructed to bring in his goat, which leads to further misery and a third visit when he is told to bring in his cow. Finally, upon the fourth visit the rabbi sends the poor man home to put all the animals back outside. Which, as told in Margot Zemach’s version of the tale, leads to a fifth visit:
“ ‘Holy Rabbi,’ he cried, ‘you have made life so sweet for me. With just my family in the hut, it’s so quiet, so roomy, so peaceful… What a pleasure!’”
In “Be Grateful”’s retelling, the overworked narrator stands in for the poor man as he appears at the beginning of It Could Always Be Worse, with the unemployed, desperate stranger standing in for the chickens, goats and pigs, representing the specter of disastrous misfortune which could just as easily have befallen the narrator. It is as easy as 1,2,3 to imagine the chickens as the gutting of the narrator’s union via “Right to Work” legislation, the goats as the subsequent cut in the narrator’s hours to the precise amount that fails to qualify for benefits, and the cow as the coup de grace: the offshoring of the narrator’s job, rendering him indistinguishable from the hopeless stranger. Staring the annihilation of malignant unemployment in the face, the narrator’s 70 hour per week job suddenly seems so reliable, so doable, …. What a pleasure!
But something in the retelling is more than slightly off, in the same way that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Our first clue is that instead of inhabiting a house full of love like the poor man at the end of It Could Always Be Worse, the narrator is too busy working obligatory overtime to spend any time at home with a loved one who is thusly reduced to an anonymous “someone” who loves him. (In a real, joyful love song it would be “my baby” who loves me, or some such term of endearment.) But our best clue is that the humor of the Yiddish original, a humor found in the great irony that the only way out of suffering is through more suffering, that suffering is likely the very ground of happiness (echoing It Could Always Be Worse, the Buddha himself taught that suffering is at the very least the prior condition to liberation’s happiness), is missing. In fact, the song isn’t really a retelling of It Could Always Be Worse at all, but a cooptation of the old folktale as a decoy. In place of the original’s radical, redemptive existential humor is a thin coating of cloying treacle which tries and fails to cover a putrid core. That core is the song’s unconscious regurgitation of the fear-based message aimed directly at the shrinking middle class from the American oligarchy: If there’s safety in numbers, then you should be very afraid. But the oligarchs’ hubris doesn’t stop there. I used to think that fight or flight were the only two natural responses to fear. In fact, there’s a third option: freeze. Our direct orders are as follows: be very afraid, and keep doing exactly what you’re doing (i.e. freeze). Which is exactly what the song’s narrator does. Granted, he does go to church and pray for the less fortunate, but one gets the feeling that this prayer is rooted as much in the fear of losing what’s his as it is in compassion. In fact, the refrain’s last line, and the song’s title, makes a great deal more sense as “Be Afraid.”
As profound a tale as (the genuine version of) It Could Always Be Worse undeniably is, perhaps it is miscast in this historical moment, too prone to being hijacked by the reigning principalities and powers. In its place I suggest we turn to another story, Bone Button Borscht, a Jewish retelling of Stone Soup, which, just like the opening verse of “Be Grateful,” features a beggar. But instead of inspiring fear to dress up as gratitude, this beggar, in playfully enticing the embittered, frightened townsfolk (that’s us) to contribute their hoarded foodstuffs to the common pot, transforms fear into generosity. If there is a message for our time it is exactly this: Be generous.
One of the great things about country music is that you can actually hear the lyrics and follow the arc of the almost unfailingly clear narratives. So when The Farm’s “Be Grateful” came on, I could hear every word:
The other day I caught myself complaining
How my boss has got me working overtime
Then the stranger who was sitting there beside me
Said, I spent all day in the unemployment line
Are there open shifts, are they hiring on
I'll work any hours even all night long
If you could put a good word in for me
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful
We complain about how much it's gonna cost us
To fill our 20 something thousand dollars cars
And living in the land of milk and honey
It's so easy to forget how lucky we are
We can work hard and buy a patch of dirt
And on Sunday morning go to church
And pray for those who don't have it as good as you
Every time you think you've got it bad
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful
(http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/the-farm-inc/be-grateful-36292.html)
“Be Grateful” at first appears to be a retelling of the old Yiddish folktale, It Could Always Be Worse. The folktale tells the story of a poor man so overwhelmed with the chaos and stress of sharing his tiny one-room hut with his wife, their six children, and his mother that he visits his Rabbi in total despair. Counterintuitively, the rabbi instructs him to bring his chickens into the hut with his family. Befuddled, the poor man nevertheless complies. Things, of course, get worse in the hut. Upon returning to the rabbi he is instructed to bring in his goat, which leads to further misery and a third visit when he is told to bring in his cow. Finally, upon the fourth visit the rabbi sends the poor man home to put all the animals back outside. Which, as told in Margot Zemach’s version of the tale, leads to a fifth visit:
“ ‘Holy Rabbi,’ he cried, ‘you have made life so sweet for me. With just my family in the hut, it’s so quiet, so roomy, so peaceful… What a pleasure!’”
In “Be Grateful”’s retelling, the overworked narrator stands in for the poor man as he appears at the beginning of It Could Always Be Worse, with the unemployed, desperate stranger standing in for the chickens, goats and pigs, representing the specter of disastrous misfortune which could just as easily have befallen the narrator. It is as easy as 1,2,3 to imagine the chickens as the gutting of the narrator’s union via “Right to Work” legislation, the goats as the subsequent cut in the narrator’s hours to the precise amount that fails to qualify for benefits, and the cow as the coup de grace: the offshoring of the narrator’s job, rendering him indistinguishable from the hopeless stranger. Staring the annihilation of malignant unemployment in the face, the narrator’s 70 hour per week job suddenly seems so reliable, so doable, …. What a pleasure!
But something in the retelling is more than slightly off, in the same way that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Our first clue is that instead of inhabiting a house full of love like the poor man at the end of It Could Always Be Worse, the narrator is too busy working obligatory overtime to spend any time at home with a loved one who is thusly reduced to an anonymous “someone” who loves him. (In a real, joyful love song it would be “my baby” who loves me, or some such term of endearment.) But our best clue is that the humor of the Yiddish original, a humor found in the great irony that the only way out of suffering is through more suffering, that suffering is likely the very ground of happiness (echoing It Could Always Be Worse, the Buddha himself taught that suffering is at the very least the prior condition to liberation’s happiness), is missing. In fact, the song isn’t really a retelling of It Could Always Be Worse at all, but a cooptation of the old folktale as a decoy. In place of the original’s radical, redemptive existential humor is a thin coating of cloying treacle which tries and fails to cover a putrid core. That core is the song’s unconscious regurgitation of the fear-based message aimed directly at the shrinking middle class from the American oligarchy: If there’s safety in numbers, then you should be very afraid. But the oligarchs’ hubris doesn’t stop there. I used to think that fight or flight were the only two natural responses to fear. In fact, there’s a third option: freeze. Our direct orders are as follows: be very afraid, and keep doing exactly what you’re doing (i.e. freeze). Which is exactly what the song’s narrator does. Granted, he does go to church and pray for the less fortunate, but one gets the feeling that this prayer is rooted as much in the fear of losing what’s his as it is in compassion. In fact, the refrain’s last line, and the song’s title, makes a great deal more sense as “Be Afraid.”
As profound a tale as (the genuine version of) It Could Always Be Worse undeniably is, perhaps it is miscast in this historical moment, too prone to being hijacked by the reigning principalities and powers. In its place I suggest we turn to another story, Bone Button Borscht, a Jewish retelling of Stone Soup, which, just like the opening verse of “Be Grateful,” features a beggar. But instead of inspiring fear to dress up as gratitude, this beggar, in playfully enticing the embittered, frightened townsfolk (that’s us) to contribute their hoarded foodstuffs to the common pot, transforms fear into generosity. If there is a message for our time it is exactly this: Be generous.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Middle Class, We Hardly Knew Ye
Pope Francis essentially said “Amen!” with his recent Tweet that “Inequality is the root of social evil.”
And while Picketty and the Pope do the heavy intellectual and spiritual lifting, the New York Times runs articles titled “The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World,” reporting the following:
“As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all… Investors have taken notice of the shrinking middle. Shares of Sears and J. C. Penney have fallen more than 50 percent since the end of 2009, even as upper-end stores like Nordstrom and bargain-basement chains like Dollar Tree and Family Dollar Stores have more than doubled in value over the same period.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-is-steadily-eroding-just-ask-the-business-world.html?_r=0)
When French intellectuals, the Pope and corporate America are all in agreement, the game is up; politicians and pundits are, of course, mouthpieces for the burgeoning family dynasties and can, as such, be tuned out when considering whether the truth is not only out there, but, more importantly, ready at hand to, as the saying goes, set us free. So, as long as we are willing to set aside e.g. Newt Gingrich’s appearances on Crossfire on behalf of the oligarchy, in which he lambasts the idea of increasing the minimum wage, we can happily report that the scales are beginning to fall from our eyes, much as they are in regards to climate change. I am reminded of Mr. Beaver’s line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Aslan is on the move.” Except there is no Aslan, just us chickens. We chickens are on the move!
As we move forward, salvaging the middle class as a first step towards, dare I say it, a classless society, we will need to figure out how we allowed all of this to happen in the first place. I believe that it has a great deal to do with the interplay between thought and language. Along these lines, structuralism has elucidated the tendency in thought to mark off the world in pairs of binary opposites. In reconsidering these pairings, e.g. male and female, straight and gay, white and black, much good work has been done in demonstrating that the binary opposites are inevitably coded re: power; in each of the three examples power accrues to the former. But binary opposites do more than establish a rigid hierarchy. Notice that hewing strictly to the listed opposites leaves no intellectual space for, respectively, the transgender, bisexual, and mixed race folk among us. Binary opposites are just as much about exclusion as they are about domination.
This comes into focus when we consider the binary opposites rich and poor. Don’t forget that the emergence of the middle class is a very recent, historically contingent event, and that the American middle class proper only ever truly existed between the twin founding events of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the end of World War II and the beginning of the end with the election of Ronald Reagan. (By “middle class proper” I mean that sliver of time when any American who worked earned a genuine living wage.) The world functioned for millennia based on the binary opposites rich and poor, and without a middle class, and would happily settle right back into that homeostatic groove if left to its own devices. Recall that Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” not “the middle class you will always have with you.”
If we are on the move, if we are going to save the middle class as the first step towards saving the world, we’ll need to pry apart the binary opposites that prevent us from even conceiving of a world minus dominance and exclusion. Perhaps the exclusive nature of binary opposites helps explain Slavoj Zizek’s observation that “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
Movements like this need symbols. And note that binary opposites don’t just rule our minds, they also rule the marketplace. Think Crest/Colgate, Home Depot/Lowe’s, Walmart/Target, and Fed Ex/UPS, pairings which leave precious little space for Aqua Fresh, your local hardware store, Kmart and the US Postal Service, none of which will be in business in a decade. Of course, noticing that each of the listed pairings are actually much closer to clones than opposites leaves one wondering if our cherished freedom of choice is, at bottom, just another version of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous observation that rooting for one’s favorite baseball team is “actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.” Our way of life has come to consist of preferring Crest and Colgate to Aqua Fresh, which means we’ve built an entire civilization out of a Hobson’s choice, i.e. “a free choice in which only one option is offered.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_choice) That said, I’ve always had a soft spot for one particular unwanted third wheel. As we choose to create a world without outcasts, let’s all raise a glass of RC Cola!
Sunday, April 06, 2014
Seven of Ten
In a recent Washington Post article about the most expensive colleges in the country, Catherine Rampell reports that “after subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid at each institution… seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are arts schools or conservatories of some kind.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2014/03/28/the-most-expensive-colleges-in-the-country-are-art-schools-not-ivies/)
It would be easy enough to note the obvious irony in the fact that the profession which pays the least (see “starving artists”) costs the most to pursue, and stop at that. But I am going to propose that everything you need to know about art schools and, by extension, art in America, can be gleaned from that one fact. Before doing so I should note that I know as much about the ins and outs of the art world as I do about the inner workings of the Internal Revenue Service; my art diet consists of books and rock and roll (the beans and rice of the arts). This means that I am either a) free to interpret the cost of art school without the filters and biases of someone submerged in the arts, and, as such, able to see the truth hidden right in plain sight, or b) completely out of my element, and about as likely to succeed as if attempting to design and construct my own rooftop deck. I will, for the purposes of writing, presume the former; the reader is, of course, free to decide for him or herself.
Prohibitively high art school tuition operates on two primary levels, one impacting those who somehow matriculate, and the other affecting those who are essentially excluded. I will begin with the former. Setting aside the narrow sliver of the population whose parents can actually afford to pay full art school tuition, the dream of making art involves the reality of massive student loans. If your retort is “So what, I had to take out student loans, too,” recall that the art student’s loans will necessarily be the highest, and their post-graduate earning power the lowest. If you took out student loans you took out less, and you came away with the power to earn more. This is true for even the financially humble professions of teaching, social work, and nursing, and even more so for law, business, and medicine. Art school students fall prey to a quintessential double bind, their cash flow bringing to mind the old Black Flag Roach Motel tag line, “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.”
This analysis is just a longer version of the obvious irony initially noted above. We don’t really get anywhere unless and until we are willing to stipulate that the price tag on art school is no accident, nor is it because it is just plain more expensive to teach art. Last I checked, pastels and clay don’t cost anymore than books or beakers, art history profs no more than their counterparts in engineering, and the computers used to make graphic designs would seem to carry roughly the same price tag as those used for typing senior theses about Proust. The price of art school doesn’t come into focus without the recognition that art school graduates, saddled with enormous debt, become the vanguard of paying the bills. Seen in this light, art school costs the most precisely because theirs is the most dangerous profession. Dangerous because the bulk of an artist’s raison d’etre is the imagining of other possible worlds, except in those cases when the artist instead exists in order to pay back six figures of debt (plus interest!). Art isn’t inherently revolutionary, just potentially so. Really existing art school exists to quell that potential.
Art school’s suppression of that revolutionary potential is reinforced by its clientele. If you are fortunate enough to attend art school, college loan debt notwithstanding, can you reasonably be expected to turn your art against the very system that upholds your privileges, since these very privileges enable your emergence as an (official) artist? Could you turn your back on the only form of externally granted status that could ever align with your deepest sense of who you are at your core, the only institution that has ever said “Yes, art is important, and yes so are you,”? (All of these things, by the bye, apply in varying degrees to liberal arts higher education, which doesn’t cost quite as much, and which allows you to make a little more, but which doesn’t change the fact that folk like yours truly are implicated by pretty much all of this. It takes one to know one.) Which makes the second level on which art school tuition operates, the exclusion of entire swaths of society from art school, equally as important as the first in the neutering of art. Because those who have the most to gain from social change, from making art that opens up new possible worlds, are those effectively excluded from making professional art. In a society where credentials are everything, art school is the keeper of cred. Street cred may help with sales of your first rap album, but it won’t help you open a gallery in SoHo. For that you need a blurb in the Times, i.e. you need to go to art school.
Many of the teachers and students in art schools would likely describe their work as exactly that imagining of new worlds which I am, a priori, denying them. I would respond that by describing their work as such they are making a sales pitch, that they actually believe it to be the truth and not a sales pitch, and that this in turn makes it a more effective sales pitch. I am, of course, accusing them of inhabiting a false consciousness, which is not in any way a new critique, but is, I would argue, no worse for the wear. Again, the reader is welcome to disagree. But if one disagrees one takes on the burden of explaining how one can make art that is both a commodity and transformational. It says here that the two are mutually exclusive.
I don’t know about your burg, but everyone I’ve ever met in Baltimore who went to MICA (the local art school), now works at MICA. And I would hazard a guess that all the rest of MICA’s alumni work at other art schools. There is an old word for toiling away one’s years in debt bondage: indentured servitude. Art school grads have simply updated it for modern times, making it permanent instead of temporary. (To get a sense of MICA qua institution, consider the following report from the current edition of Baltimore’s weekly City Paper: “In response to efforts of the art school’s adjunct faculty to form a union, outgoing MICA president Fred Lazarus and other administration officials have sent out letters urging adjuncts to vote ‘no’ and consider ‘whether you want to turn over important rights to a union.’” (http://citypaper.com/news/baltimore-city-power-rankings-1.1661057) That these “important rights” are left unspecified is no surprise, given that the only rights the adjuncts could possibly lose in forming a union are the rights to continue giving away all of their power; the aforementioned indentured servitude clearly ain’t just a rhetorical device. But the cover-up is always worse than the crime, and in covering their tracks with a bald faced lie, “The union will hurt you as much if not more than us,” MICA is no longer merely exploiting its workers, it is operating in bad faith. This is an exponentially graver sin.)
My solution: Everyone makes (free) art and no one goes to art school. It’s often said that after the revolution comes, the first thing to do is to empty the prisons. But to start the revolution, let’s try emptying the art schools. And, crucially, filling the streets with art.
Prohibitively high art school tuition operates on two primary levels, one impacting those who somehow matriculate, and the other affecting those who are essentially excluded. I will begin with the former. Setting aside the narrow sliver of the population whose parents can actually afford to pay full art school tuition, the dream of making art involves the reality of massive student loans. If your retort is “So what, I had to take out student loans, too,” recall that the art student’s loans will necessarily be the highest, and their post-graduate earning power the lowest. If you took out student loans you took out less, and you came away with the power to earn more. This is true for even the financially humble professions of teaching, social work, and nursing, and even more so for law, business, and medicine. Art school students fall prey to a quintessential double bind, their cash flow bringing to mind the old Black Flag Roach Motel tag line, “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.”
This analysis is just a longer version of the obvious irony initially noted above. We don’t really get anywhere unless and until we are willing to stipulate that the price tag on art school is no accident, nor is it because it is just plain more expensive to teach art. Last I checked, pastels and clay don’t cost anymore than books or beakers, art history profs no more than their counterparts in engineering, and the computers used to make graphic designs would seem to carry roughly the same price tag as those used for typing senior theses about Proust. The price of art school doesn’t come into focus without the recognition that art school graduates, saddled with enormous debt, become the vanguard of paying the bills. Seen in this light, art school costs the most precisely because theirs is the most dangerous profession. Dangerous because the bulk of an artist’s raison d’etre is the imagining of other possible worlds, except in those cases when the artist instead exists in order to pay back six figures of debt (plus interest!). Art isn’t inherently revolutionary, just potentially so. Really existing art school exists to quell that potential.
Art school’s suppression of that revolutionary potential is reinforced by its clientele. If you are fortunate enough to attend art school, college loan debt notwithstanding, can you reasonably be expected to turn your art against the very system that upholds your privileges, since these very privileges enable your emergence as an (official) artist? Could you turn your back on the only form of externally granted status that could ever align with your deepest sense of who you are at your core, the only institution that has ever said “Yes, art is important, and yes so are you,”? (All of these things, by the bye, apply in varying degrees to liberal arts higher education, which doesn’t cost quite as much, and which allows you to make a little more, but which doesn’t change the fact that folk like yours truly are implicated by pretty much all of this. It takes one to know one.) Which makes the second level on which art school tuition operates, the exclusion of entire swaths of society from art school, equally as important as the first in the neutering of art. Because those who have the most to gain from social change, from making art that opens up new possible worlds, are those effectively excluded from making professional art. In a society where credentials are everything, art school is the keeper of cred. Street cred may help with sales of your first rap album, but it won’t help you open a gallery in SoHo. For that you need a blurb in the Times, i.e. you need to go to art school.
Many of the teachers and students in art schools would likely describe their work as exactly that imagining of new worlds which I am, a priori, denying them. I would respond that by describing their work as such they are making a sales pitch, that they actually believe it to be the truth and not a sales pitch, and that this in turn makes it a more effective sales pitch. I am, of course, accusing them of inhabiting a false consciousness, which is not in any way a new critique, but is, I would argue, no worse for the wear. Again, the reader is welcome to disagree. But if one disagrees one takes on the burden of explaining how one can make art that is both a commodity and transformational. It says here that the two are mutually exclusive.
I don’t know about your burg, but everyone I’ve ever met in Baltimore who went to MICA (the local art school), now works at MICA. And I would hazard a guess that all the rest of MICA’s alumni work at other art schools. There is an old word for toiling away one’s years in debt bondage: indentured servitude. Art school grads have simply updated it for modern times, making it permanent instead of temporary. (To get a sense of MICA qua institution, consider the following report from the current edition of Baltimore’s weekly City Paper: “In response to efforts of the art school’s adjunct faculty to form a union, outgoing MICA president Fred Lazarus and other administration officials have sent out letters urging adjuncts to vote ‘no’ and consider ‘whether you want to turn over important rights to a union.’” (http://citypaper.com/news/baltimore-city-power-rankings-1.1661057) That these “important rights” are left unspecified is no surprise, given that the only rights the adjuncts could possibly lose in forming a union are the rights to continue giving away all of their power; the aforementioned indentured servitude clearly ain’t just a rhetorical device. But the cover-up is always worse than the crime, and in covering their tracks with a bald faced lie, “The union will hurt you as much if not more than us,” MICA is no longer merely exploiting its workers, it is operating in bad faith. This is an exponentially graver sin.)
My solution: Everyone makes (free) art and no one goes to art school. It’s often said that after the revolution comes, the first thing to do is to empty the prisons. But to start the revolution, let’s try emptying the art schools. And, crucially, filling the streets with art.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Discuss Amongst Yourselves
I was struck by the following passage in Will Oremus’ recent Slate article about coffee’s “third wave”:
“Their search for a better cup has given rise to a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious. Stumptown of Portland, Ore.; Intelligentsia of Chicago; and Counter Culture of Durham, N.C., don’t just sell ‘dark roast’ and ‘light roast.’ They sell coffees like Stumptown’s Indonesia Sulawesi Toarco Toraja, which is grown by smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website. The beans come with descriptors like ‘fair-trade,’ ‘single-origin,’ and ‘shade-grown,’ and sport ‘flavor profiles’ that would make Robert Parker blush. They’re roasted and brewed with obsessive attention to details like the extraction rate and brewing ratio, which are separately optimized to bring out the best in each bean.” (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/crosspollination/2014/03/blue_bottle_coffee_vcs_search_for_the_new_starbucks_starts_in_san_francisco.html)
In reading this, I was overcome by two primary emotions, the first of which feelings was surprising in the way that discovering you are bleeding when you aren’t aware of a wound is. I have only recently discovered the pleasures of coffee, having for years believed that “I can’t handle coffee,” which belief ran so deep that I listed it on the “25 Facts About Me” that everyone was filling out on Facebook a few years ago. (In retrospect, the “25 facts” fad was likely a narrative ur-form of the selfie, like novels presaging movies. The book, of course, is always better than the movie, and “25 Facts” trumps the selfie. Making it doubly depressing that if I posted 25 new facts about myself every week on Facebook it would come off as raging narcissism, whereas the posting of selfies as new profile pictures is an easy ticket to 25 “likes” or more. Fortunately, I can embed all the new facts about myself I like in this blog, which is symptomatic of merely mild to moderate narcissism, and therefore well within cultural norms.) But after several slow and steady years of building up caffeine tolerance via Irish and English breakfast teas and cultivating a willingness to endure an afternoon of mild shakes and low grade anxiety (given that I felt that way all the time before giving up gluten, crashing off of coffee is sort of nostalgic), I am a newly minted member of coffee nation. (Note: If you can meaningfully apply the suffix “nation” to a term, as you can with coffee or e.g. the Red Sox, then the group in question has already lost its soul.) But I had no idea I had fallen “truly, madly, deeply” for coffee until I read the quoted passage and felt a wave of sadness as I realized it will never again be possible to simply enjoy a good, or even a very good, cup of coffee.
The Slate article focuses on Blue Bottle, a San Francisco-based purveyor of coffee that has attracted some serious venture capitalist investment. Oremus’s slant is that Blue Bottle might turn out to be Apple to Starbucks’ Microsoft. Massive and rapid growth seems a bit unlikely for a business that handcrafts each cup of coffee, a practice which, if nothing else, puts a natural cap on prospective sales, but growth, of course, is the name of the venture capital game. When pressed for an explanation of how Blue Bottle will survive the natural pitfalls of corporate expansion, Blue Bottle founder James Freeman explains to Oremus “his goal is not to keep quality constant—it’s to keep improving it, even if that means growing more slowly than he could otherwise.” (ibid) The growing slow part of the equation is all well and good, but it is the first part, the part about constantly improving the coffee, which is so sad. Because what Freeman and the entire third wave of coffee have forgotten is that a cup of coffee can only be so good. And, even more importantly, this is good enough.
If there is one cliché at the heart of late capitalism, “When good enough isn’t good enough” may very well be it. Originally intended as an ode to the pursuit of excellence, it has become a diagnosis. The original meaning, the understanding that excellence is always within reach, has been twisted into a forgetting that perfection is always beyond our grasp. “Constantly improving the coffee” is also an echo of constantly growing the economy, the failure to recognize the limits of flavor reminiscent of the failure to recognize the limits of growth. If our great wisdom traditions tell us anything, it is that this very moment, the eternal here and now, is “When good enough is good enough”; see both Tibetan Buddhism’s “Basic Goodness” and the Book of Genesis: “Then God looked over all he had made, and He saw that it was very good.” In reading about third wave coffee, one gets the feeling that on the seventh day, the barista worked straight through the night.
But, as noted, sadness wasn’t the only emotion in play as I read the quoted passage. It also felt awkward, like accidentally walking in on your roommate having kinky sex with his or her partner. In describing “a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious,” Oremus has missed the mark; third wave coffee makers and consumers haven’t found religion so much as they are indulging a fetish. To be clear, this isn’t equivalent to a straightforwardly sexual fetish as exhibited by e.g. New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, whose foot fetish videos, endearingly produced with the full cooperation of his wife cum foot model, found their way onto the internet. Instead, third wave coffee is entangled in the process of sexualized commodity fetishism, a Marxist concept that sounds dense and complex, but is actually rather simple. It is, in a nutshell, an explanation of how we end up desiring consumer goods. And third wave coffee is fraught through and through with this misplaced desire.
Commodity fetishism can sound rather bland, and hardly worthy of the term fetish, until we acknowledge its sexual underpinnings. Note the difference between the two following definitions of the term:
1) “The psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value- other than the value given to it by the producers, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)
Yawn.
And 2) “Marx said that fetishism is ‘the religion of sensuous appetites,’ and that the fantasy of the appetite tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper.” (ibid)
Now we’re getting somewhere! And perhaps, seen in this light, Oremus is correct, and third wave coffee does indeed involve religious reverence. But in aiming for (sexual) self gratification, it is a debased form of religious worship. (This is not to suggest that there is anything debased about Rex Ryan’s conjugal relations with Mrs. Ryan; sexual fetishes are apples to sexualized commodity fetishism’s oranges. And if an apple a day keeps divorce away, bon appétit.) In worshipping commodities like third wave coffee, we have made a graven image out of our own desire. (Full disclosure- I have my own commodity fetishes: automobiles and, of all things, tennis racquets, which I like to justify to myself by imagining them as substitutes for lightsabers. But really.)
The old saying goes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Just so, Eros is as bound up with its opposite, aggression, as yin is with yang. Thus it comes as no surprise that third wave coffee, the new sexualized commodity fetish par excellence, is rife with aggression as much as it is with sex. The clue here is the “smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website.” To interpret the clue, we turn to Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne’s explanation of the turn from commodity fetishism to commodity narcissism:
“Consumers who claim to be ethically concerned about the manufacturing origins of commodities, nonetheless behaved as if ignorant of the exploitative labour conditions under which the workers produced the goods and services, bought by the ‘concerned consumer’; that, within the culture of consumerism, narcissistic men and women have established shopping (economic consumption) as a socially acceptable way to express aggression.” (ibid)
What is most important about both Cluley and Dunne’s description, as well as its glaring example in the form of Stumptown’s smallholder farmers’ faces, is that this is a veiled aggression. Veiled, most of all, to the aggressors themselves, who, in consuming “fair-trade” coffee not only deny their inescapable culpability in the (literal) sins of globalization, but imagine themselves as rebels against the very system that has no better symbol than a $4 cup of coffee. All of which brings to mind the conundrum facing African Americans: would you rather live where the racism is overt (i.e. the American south) or covert (e.g. Boston)? In this case, would you rather live amongst the wolves of Wall Street, or amongst the wolves in sheep’s clothing inhabiting San Francisco cafés (or your local third wave coffee shop)?
Time for decaf, indeed.
“Their search for a better cup has given rise to a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious. Stumptown of Portland, Ore.; Intelligentsia of Chicago; and Counter Culture of Durham, N.C., don’t just sell ‘dark roast’ and ‘light roast.’ They sell coffees like Stumptown’s Indonesia Sulawesi Toarco Toraja, which is grown by smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website. The beans come with descriptors like ‘fair-trade,’ ‘single-origin,’ and ‘shade-grown,’ and sport ‘flavor profiles’ that would make Robert Parker blush. They’re roasted and brewed with obsessive attention to details like the extraction rate and brewing ratio, which are separately optimized to bring out the best in each bean.” (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/crosspollination/2014/03/blue_bottle_coffee_vcs_search_for_the_new_starbucks_starts_in_san_francisco.html)
If there is one cliché at the heart of late capitalism, “When good enough isn’t good enough” may very well be it. Originally intended as an ode to the pursuit of excellence, it has become a diagnosis. The original meaning, the understanding that excellence is always within reach, has been twisted into a forgetting that perfection is always beyond our grasp. “Constantly improving the coffee” is also an echo of constantly growing the economy, the failure to recognize the limits of flavor reminiscent of the failure to recognize the limits of growth. If our great wisdom traditions tell us anything, it is that this very moment, the eternal here and now, is “When good enough is good enough”; see both Tibetan Buddhism’s “Basic Goodness” and the Book of Genesis: “Then God looked over all he had made, and He saw that it was very good.” In reading about third wave coffee, one gets the feeling that on the seventh day, the barista worked straight through the night.
But, as noted, sadness wasn’t the only emotion in play as I read the quoted passage. It also felt awkward, like accidentally walking in on your roommate having kinky sex with his or her partner. In describing “a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious,” Oremus has missed the mark; third wave coffee makers and consumers haven’t found religion so much as they are indulging a fetish. To be clear, this isn’t equivalent to a straightforwardly sexual fetish as exhibited by e.g. New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, whose foot fetish videos, endearingly produced with the full cooperation of his wife cum foot model, found their way onto the internet. Instead, third wave coffee is entangled in the process of sexualized commodity fetishism, a Marxist concept that sounds dense and complex, but is actually rather simple. It is, in a nutshell, an explanation of how we end up desiring consumer goods. And third wave coffee is fraught through and through with this misplaced desire.
Commodity fetishism can sound rather bland, and hardly worthy of the term fetish, until we acknowledge its sexual underpinnings. Note the difference between the two following definitions of the term:
1) “The psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value- other than the value given to it by the producers, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)
Yawn.
And 2) “Marx said that fetishism is ‘the religion of sensuous appetites,’ and that the fantasy of the appetite tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper.” (ibid)
Now we’re getting somewhere! And perhaps, seen in this light, Oremus is correct, and third wave coffee does indeed involve religious reverence. But in aiming for (sexual) self gratification, it is a debased form of religious worship. (This is not to suggest that there is anything debased about Rex Ryan’s conjugal relations with Mrs. Ryan; sexual fetishes are apples to sexualized commodity fetishism’s oranges. And if an apple a day keeps divorce away, bon appétit.) In worshipping commodities like third wave coffee, we have made a graven image out of our own desire. (Full disclosure- I have my own commodity fetishes: automobiles and, of all things, tennis racquets, which I like to justify to myself by imagining them as substitutes for lightsabers. But really.)
The old saying goes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Just so, Eros is as bound up with its opposite, aggression, as yin is with yang. Thus it comes as no surprise that third wave coffee, the new sexualized commodity fetish par excellence, is rife with aggression as much as it is with sex. The clue here is the “smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website.” To interpret the clue, we turn to Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne’s explanation of the turn from commodity fetishism to commodity narcissism:
“Consumers who claim to be ethically concerned about the manufacturing origins of commodities, nonetheless behaved as if ignorant of the exploitative labour conditions under which the workers produced the goods and services, bought by the ‘concerned consumer’; that, within the culture of consumerism, narcissistic men and women have established shopping (economic consumption) as a socially acceptable way to express aggression.” (ibid)
What is most important about both Cluley and Dunne’s description, as well as its glaring example in the form of Stumptown’s smallholder farmers’ faces, is that this is a veiled aggression. Veiled, most of all, to the aggressors themselves, who, in consuming “fair-trade” coffee not only deny their inescapable culpability in the (literal) sins of globalization, but imagine themselves as rebels against the very system that has no better symbol than a $4 cup of coffee. All of which brings to mind the conundrum facing African Americans: would you rather live where the racism is overt (i.e. the American south) or covert (e.g. Boston)? In this case, would you rather live amongst the wolves of Wall Street, or amongst the wolves in sheep’s clothing inhabiting San Francisco cafés (or your local third wave coffee shop)?
Time for decaf, indeed.
Friday, January 10, 2014
When Nothing Falls Apart
What do you do when your spiritual efforts aren’t just in conflict with your politics, but, in fact, in congress with the political opposition? I should back up for a minute and explain that despite, or perhaps partly because of being raised by politically and spiritually progressive Christian parents, the spiritual efforts that I am alluding to frequently come wrapped in eastern philosophical and/or religious packaging. I met my Jewish wife on a Buddhist meditation retreat (she has moved on from her interest in Buddhism, returning to her Jewish roots, but, thankfully, still lets her uptight WASP husband hang around), when I don’t know what to do I consult the I Ching, and on those (thankfully few) occasions when my life feels like it is about to fall apart I read the matriarch of Western Buddhism, Pema Chodron.
However tempting it is to make like the kid in the famous anti-drug commercial from the ‘80’s, (his “I learned it by watching you” achieving the impossible by matching the infant’s cry in both power and vulnerability), my eastward gaze is only partly due to my parents’ explicit endorsement of spiritual pluralism. Because if I had only learned it by watching them I would be consulting the I Ching on my way to church every week. But instead of becoming a Christian by trade and a pluralist by inclination, I have ended up a pluralist by trade and a wannabe eastern sage by inclination. The apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree, but it seems to have rolled in a ditch.
Apparently, I am not alone. Number two on the list of Stuff White People Like is “Religions their parents don’t belong to.” More specifically, “White people will often say they are ‘spiritual’ but not religious. Which usually means that they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus. Popular choices include Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, and, to a lesser extent, Scientology. A few even dip into Islam, but it’s much more rare since you have to give up stuff and actually go to Mosque. Mostly they are into religion that fits really well into their homes or wardrobe and doesn’t require them to do very much.” (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/18/2-religions-that-their-parents-dont-belong-to/) The folks at Stuff White People Like are, on the surface, rather critical of the educated secular white folks they are satirizing. We seem to be nothing more than lazy, vain consumerists caught up in a perpetual adolescent rebellion against our parent’s core beliefs. On one level all that can be said is that the truth hurts.
But an alternate reading destabilizes the satire, recasting our throwaway “spirituality” as something of a cry for help. This reading hinges on the last, most damning words of the critique. Our search for meaning may occur on our tasteful living room couch not because we are so damn shallow, but because we lack the time and energy for absolutely anything else. Like dogs, #53 on the list of Stuff White People Like, our tasteful sofas cater to our needs and ask nothing in return. (Since men are nothing if not selfish, just ask any woman, it is no wonder that dogs are officially Man’s Best Friend. Sofas are a close second.) And, each day spent laboring in late capitalism like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill, when we return home to our fashionable apartments we know the boulder is already rolling back down, leaving us disinclined to give up stuff and go to Mosque (or Church). Because a) why give up stuff when everything is already lost and will be lost afresh again tomorrow, and b) our sofas are much more comfortable than church pews and we at least deserve a break before rolling the boulder back up the hill again tomorrow.
If all this sounds rather maudlin and indulgent of a generational weakness of character, e.g. it wasn’t that fun living through the Great Depression and they didn’t have any paying jobs or fancy apartments to retire to at the end of the day, then we should close the book and let the satirists at Stuff White People Like have the last word: two generations removed from “The Greatest Generation,” we are their complete opposite. They survived the Great Depression and then saved Western Civilization, while we overpay for coffee and are, essentially, decorators. I would only point out that America responded to the Great Depression and WWII with, respectively, the New Deal’s sundry Tennessee Valley Authorities and Rosie the Riveter. Confronting two existential crises, Western Civilization built stuff. Whereas now, Western Civilization is full of Stuff White People Like, none of which we built. We all have jobs making nothing. The verb decorate is defined as “to make something look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.” Just so, we spend our lives making nothing look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.
Note that the fruit of Sisyphus’ efforts is also always nothing. This nothingness at the center of our productive lives has its doppelganger in our spiritual lives in the form of Buddhism and its concept of no-self. As Pema Chodron explains, “’Examine the nature of unborn awareness.’ Who is this ‘I’? Where did it come from? Who is it that’s aware? The slogan points to the transparency of everything, including our beloved identity, this precious M-E. Who is this ME?” (http://lojongmindtraining.com/Commentary.aspx?author=3&proverb=3) While Chodron wants nothing but our liberation, in dissolving the self she has unwittingly cemented a connection as rigid and troubling as the vice grip on our beloved identities. Minus the self, our outward material condition is matched by our deepest inner truth: “there is no there there.” That Chodron would substitute the open space of big mind for the missing identity is completely beside the point; Western Buddhists have already filled that space with discriminating home furnishings.
That is, if they still have a job making nothing (but money). Which is where the second key element of Western Buddhism, groundlessness, comes into play. Again per Chodron, with groundlessness “we are moving further and further away from concretizing and making things so solid and always trying to get some ground underneath our feet. This moving away from comfort and security, the stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky- that’s called enlightenment, liberation.” It’s also called Neoliberalism, which is defined as “a (supposedly) moderate form of liberalism that modifies its traditional government policies, as on labor unions and taxes.” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Neo+liberal) This supposed form of moderation is actually spectacularly radical and explicitly does away with taxes for the wealthy and labor unions for the workers, who find themselves moving away from comfort and security while stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky. And that’s called freedom. (See the Right to Work Acts, which “guarantee” workers the freedom to benefit directly from collective bargaining without contributing to the collective, which taking without giving is the perverse, and, ultimately, mysoginistic fantasy at the core of Neoliberal capitalism. This Freudian reading is that Neoliberals treat their workers like they treat their women, i.e. as means to their own satisfaction, which is exactly why Miley Cyrus is waltzing around semi-nude and exactly why every post-pubescent girl at the summer camp I visited this summer wore jean-shorts that were little more than thongs. With Neoliberal capitalism, workers don’t get to have unions, and women don’t get to wear clothes.)
Slavoj Zizek has noted the congruence between Western Buddhism and neoliberal ideology, describing it thusly in his work On Belief:
“Although ‘Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain an inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement….Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination- one should, instead, ‘let oneself go,’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being…. One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the ‘opium of the people,’ as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while maintaining the appearance of mental sanity.”
So, granting all that, if I am after more than just the appearance of mental sanity why don’t I take after my wife and return to my own religious spawning ground? The answer is found in the second most important line from Stuff White People Like: “they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus.” When exactly the religiously moderate form of Christianity died is open to debate, but I have my suspicions that it died on the same night that truly moderate forms of liberalism died, the night that Ronald Reagan was elected, which was the self-same night that Neoliberalism and evangelical Christianity were born again. Moreover, the death of religiously moderate Christianity spelled the death of religiously moderate religion. For fun, check the rolls of those bastions of religious moderation, the Episcopal Church and the Jewish Conservative Movement, which if you are inclined to religious moderation will either make you wonder what the religious version of threatening to move to Canada is, or leave you mouthing the delusion that “these things go in cycles.” Because the moderates who would have been in the pews or sitting next to their spouse at synagogue are now busy not meditating, i.e. busy not really practicing a religion (Western Buddhism) that isn’t really a religion.
Because it has, since 1980, become impossible to say the word Jesus without feeling like Pat Robertson, Christianity, for the religious moderate, is foreclosed. But since it is impossible to say the word atheism without feeling like Dick Cheney, who, despite being a Methodist, brings to mind a universe absent a supreme being, I am left with Western Buddhism. And since I don’t seem to be able to convince myself that I am not a self no matter how hard I try (Not sure which religion is technically harder- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which require one to believe in the existence of something impossible to believe in, i.e. God (See “I believe because it is absurd,” which I translate as “If it’s too good to be true, it’s probably true”), or Buddhism, which requires one not to believe in the existence of something it is impossible not to believe in, i.e. the self. This leaves us with Neoliberalism- believing in one’s self at the exclusion of all else, making a doctrinal belief in free markets a form of solipsism.), my only option is to redeem the Western Buddhist version of groundlessness.
That redemption takes the form of struggle. We don’t know whether our efforts to finally cut the one constant thread of human history, the war of the powerful few against the huddled masses, will amount to anything whatsoever. There are at least as many reasons for pessimism as there are for optimism. It is a struggle. And, if I may be permitted in a paragraph about groundlessness to reach back over the gap between myself and my faith, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The gap reasserts itself in the shifting ground beneath our feet. No matter how hard we wrestle, we may lose this struggle. And yet we may win. And still we may lose. The gap of groundlessness, for me, is the gap between a victory already won, in an empty tomb, and a battle that yet teeters on the brink.
If the victory is already won, we are on firm ground. In the last speech before his assassination, a speech explicit in its condemnation of economic injustice and its call for unified struggle, Martin Luther King attempts to plant us in that ground:
“Like anybody, I would like to live- a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
He was shot dead the very next day.
Where is this mountain, this protrusion of solid ground? Down here in the lowlands of Western Buddhism, it’s all groundlessness. I hope we win. I will try my very best. I pray that my best, our best, is better than nothing.
Apparently, I am not alone. Number two on the list of Stuff White People Like is “Religions their parents don’t belong to.” More specifically, “White people will often say they are ‘spiritual’ but not religious. Which usually means that they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus. Popular choices include Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, and, to a lesser extent, Scientology. A few even dip into Islam, but it’s much more rare since you have to give up stuff and actually go to Mosque. Mostly they are into religion that fits really well into their homes or wardrobe and doesn’t require them to do very much.” (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/18/2-religions-that-their-parents-dont-belong-to/) The folks at Stuff White People Like are, on the surface, rather critical of the educated secular white folks they are satirizing. We seem to be nothing more than lazy, vain consumerists caught up in a perpetual adolescent rebellion against our parent’s core beliefs. On one level all that can be said is that the truth hurts.
But an alternate reading destabilizes the satire, recasting our throwaway “spirituality” as something of a cry for help. This reading hinges on the last, most damning words of the critique. Our search for meaning may occur on our tasteful living room couch not because we are so damn shallow, but because we lack the time and energy for absolutely anything else. Like dogs, #53 on the list of Stuff White People Like, our tasteful sofas cater to our needs and ask nothing in return. (Since men are nothing if not selfish, just ask any woman, it is no wonder that dogs are officially Man’s Best Friend. Sofas are a close second.) And, each day spent laboring in late capitalism like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill, when we return home to our fashionable apartments we know the boulder is already rolling back down, leaving us disinclined to give up stuff and go to Mosque (or Church). Because a) why give up stuff when everything is already lost and will be lost afresh again tomorrow, and b) our sofas are much more comfortable than church pews and we at least deserve a break before rolling the boulder back up the hill again tomorrow.
If all this sounds rather maudlin and indulgent of a generational weakness of character, e.g. it wasn’t that fun living through the Great Depression and they didn’t have any paying jobs or fancy apartments to retire to at the end of the day, then we should close the book and let the satirists at Stuff White People Like have the last word: two generations removed from “The Greatest Generation,” we are their complete opposite. They survived the Great Depression and then saved Western Civilization, while we overpay for coffee and are, essentially, decorators. I would only point out that America responded to the Great Depression and WWII with, respectively, the New Deal’s sundry Tennessee Valley Authorities and Rosie the Riveter. Confronting two existential crises, Western Civilization built stuff. Whereas now, Western Civilization is full of Stuff White People Like, none of which we built. We all have jobs making nothing. The verb decorate is defined as “to make something look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.” Just so, we spend our lives making nothing look more attractive by adding extra items or images to it.
Note that the fruit of Sisyphus’ efforts is also always nothing. This nothingness at the center of our productive lives has its doppelganger in our spiritual lives in the form of Buddhism and its concept of no-self. As Pema Chodron explains, “’Examine the nature of unborn awareness.’ Who is this ‘I’? Where did it come from? Who is it that’s aware? The slogan points to the transparency of everything, including our beloved identity, this precious M-E. Who is this ME?” (http://lojongmindtraining.com/Commentary.aspx?author=3&proverb=3) While Chodron wants nothing but our liberation, in dissolving the self she has unwittingly cemented a connection as rigid and troubling as the vice grip on our beloved identities. Minus the self, our outward material condition is matched by our deepest inner truth: “there is no there there.” That Chodron would substitute the open space of big mind for the missing identity is completely beside the point; Western Buddhists have already filled that space with discriminating home furnishings.
That is, if they still have a job making nothing (but money). Which is where the second key element of Western Buddhism, groundlessness, comes into play. Again per Chodron, with groundlessness “we are moving further and further away from concretizing and making things so solid and always trying to get some ground underneath our feet. This moving away from comfort and security, the stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky- that’s called enlightenment, liberation.” It’s also called Neoliberalism, which is defined as “a (supposedly) moderate form of liberalism that modifies its traditional government policies, as on labor unions and taxes.” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Neo+liberal) This supposed form of moderation is actually spectacularly radical and explicitly does away with taxes for the wealthy and labor unions for the workers, who find themselves moving away from comfort and security while stepping out into the unknown, uncharted, and shaky. And that’s called freedom. (See the Right to Work Acts, which “guarantee” workers the freedom to benefit directly from collective bargaining without contributing to the collective, which taking without giving is the perverse, and, ultimately, mysoginistic fantasy at the core of Neoliberal capitalism. This Freudian reading is that Neoliberals treat their workers like they treat their women, i.e. as means to their own satisfaction, which is exactly why Miley Cyrus is waltzing around semi-nude and exactly why every post-pubescent girl at the summer camp I visited this summer wore jean-shorts that were little more than thongs. With Neoliberal capitalism, workers don’t get to have unions, and women don’t get to wear clothes.)
Slavoj Zizek has noted the congruence between Western Buddhism and neoliberal ideology, describing it thusly in his work On Belief:
“Although ‘Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain an inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement….Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination- one should, instead, ‘let oneself go,’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being…. One is almost tempted to resuscitate here the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the ‘opium of the people,’ as the imaginary supplement of the terrestrial misery: the ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while maintaining the appearance of mental sanity.”
So, granting all that, if I am after more than just the appearance of mental sanity why don’t I take after my wife and return to my own religious spawning ground? The answer is found in the second most important line from Stuff White People Like: “they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus.” When exactly the religiously moderate form of Christianity died is open to debate, but I have my suspicions that it died on the same night that truly moderate forms of liberalism died, the night that Ronald Reagan was elected, which was the self-same night that Neoliberalism and evangelical Christianity were born again. Moreover, the death of religiously moderate Christianity spelled the death of religiously moderate religion. For fun, check the rolls of those bastions of religious moderation, the Episcopal Church and the Jewish Conservative Movement, which if you are inclined to religious moderation will either make you wonder what the religious version of threatening to move to Canada is, or leave you mouthing the delusion that “these things go in cycles.” Because the moderates who would have been in the pews or sitting next to their spouse at synagogue are now busy not meditating, i.e. busy not really practicing a religion (Western Buddhism) that isn’t really a religion.
That redemption takes the form of struggle. We don’t know whether our efforts to finally cut the one constant thread of human history, the war of the powerful few against the huddled masses, will amount to anything whatsoever. There are at least as many reasons for pessimism as there are for optimism. It is a struggle. And, if I may be permitted in a paragraph about groundlessness to reach back over the gap between myself and my faith, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The gap reasserts itself in the shifting ground beneath our feet. No matter how hard we wrestle, we may lose this struggle. And yet we may win. And still we may lose. The gap of groundlessness, for me, is the gap between a victory already won, in an empty tomb, and a battle that yet teeters on the brink.
If the victory is already won, we are on firm ground. In the last speech before his assassination, a speech explicit in its condemnation of economic injustice and its call for unified struggle, Martin Luther King attempts to plant us in that ground:
He was shot dead the very next day.
Where is this mountain, this protrusion of solid ground? Down here in the lowlands of Western Buddhism, it’s all groundlessness. I hope we win. I will try my very best. I pray that my best, our best, is better than nothing.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
What's in a Name?
In his novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, in the space of less than a half-page, uncloaks the logic behind consecutive Reagan landslides in 1980 and ‘84:
“’In other words we’ll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We’ll have a tyranny of conformist noncomformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it’s so empty makes everyone terrified- they’re small and they’re going to die, after all-‘
‘Christ, the death thing again.’
‘- and whose terror of not really ever existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt.’”
Wallace shows us Reagan as Mobius strip, a surface with only one side; Reagan was never the rebel he played on TV, and everyone knew it, making his outsider persona part and parcel of the “tyranny of conformist noncomformity.” If I am reading Wallace correctly, we elected Reagan because we hated what we wanted, the safety of the herd, and wanted what we hated, commodified dissent. In sum, Reagan made it safe to go shopping. At the end of this passage Wallace, in so many words, reformulates Descartes’ cogito for the world Reagan presided over and which we still inhabit: “I shop, therefore I am.”
Reagan’s Mobius strip was on full display in, of all places, the United States Football League (USFL), a professional football league that operated for three seasons during the peak of the Reagan era from 1983 –’85. Like Reagan, the USFL purported to be one thing, a spring time football league existentially distinct from the National Football League (NFL) by virtue of its seasonal remove, while behaving like the opposite, a direct competitor for the NFL’s star players (e.g. Doug Flutie, Herschel Walker, Steve Young, Jim Kelly, and Reggie White) and its fans’ dollars. Soon after the 1985 season and under the influence of its majordomo franchisee, one Donald Trump, the USFL scrapped its spring football formula and prepared to compete head to head with the NFL in the fall; the league subsequently folded before playing a down of fall football.
The USFL existed as the reverse image of Reagan’s one-sided deception, promising something that people weren’t ready to admit they wanted, spring football, while actually delivering a real rebellion. But when the USFL dropped its charade and owned its rebelliousness, it stepped out of Reagan’s mirror and off the stage of history. With the USFL’s move to the fall serving as an announcement of exactly who and what it was, it was as if the ’84 Reagan re-election campaign had chosen its actual guiding ethos as its campaign slogan: “Greed is good.” Instead, the Gipper went with “Morning Again in America,” continuing the winning gambit of blatant deception, the image of morning sunrise as duplicitous as that of the rebel; everyone knew that Reagan’s morning was when you had to get up to go to work, which was all anyone had time for since, under Reagan, “Real weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers… took a beating, declining even more quickly than they had during the 1970’s. Today, the average real earnings of nonsupervisory workers remain far below those of 30 years ago.” (http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0704miller.html)
“If an ant were to crawl along the length of this (Mobius) strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip… without ever crossing an edge.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip). We are all ants, and, clearly, we are all still walking.
The tension between Reagan’s role as rebel and his function as puppet, which tension held together our “conformist noncomformity,” is illustrated by the USFL’s sundry mascots. There were a total of 19 mascots, and if we set aside the three franchises with animal mascots (Birmingham Stallions, Jacksonville Bulls, and Michigan Panthers), we are left with 16 mascots that can be equally divided into rebel and establishment categories, with the rebels the place holders for Reagan’s fiction, and the establishment teams representing his fact, both in plain sight where the truth is almost always found.
Several members of the USFL’s “rebel alliance,” if you will, took their inspiration from the mythic “wild west,” according to which myth the ultimate freedom may well have been the freedom from government bureaucracy (which is perhaps why Reagan, the ultimate anti-government governor, was a self-styled cowboy who was frequently photographed on horseback). These teams included the Arizona Wranglers, Oklahoma Outlaws (who merged with Arizona to become the Arizona Outlaws, in a kind of proto-Brokeback Mountain-with-gay-marriage moment, which, given that homosexuality is one of the ultimate forms of rebellion, makes perfect sense), San Antonio Gunslingers, Tampa Bay Bandits, Houston Gamblers (in the image of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” a solitary voice of wisdom who brings to mind that ultimate rebel figure, Socrates, not to mention the fact that the establishment is, if nothing else, risk averse, which is why the establishment is the house, and never the gambler, given that the house always wins) and the Orlando Renegades (which Renegades, of course, rebelled against the genocide of their people, which, bizarrely, means that the White team owners were honoring those who rebelled against their (the owners’) people’s efforts to accomplish that very genocide).
Two additional teams rounded out the band of rebels. If you look up the definition of the Memphis Showboats mascot one finds that it is both a) “a river steamboat on which theatrical performances are given,” and b) a “show off.” And while the Memphis franchise had the image of the river steamboat on its helmet, the mascot was really a celebration of “showboating” on the playing field, an act that was both a) Black, and b) outlawed by the NFL after its Black players began taking too many liberties with their end zone touchdown celebrations, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson’s “Funky Chicken” end zone dance proving the point that for rich white men nothing is more frightening than the funky. The Memphis Showboats were a celebration of the freedom inherent to all displays of funkiness. Interestingly, by playing it conservative and putting the river steamboat on their helmets, rather than, say, a picture of James Brown, the Memphis Showboats were amplifying their echo of Reagan’s undisguised misdirection.
Bringing us to the final rebel squad, the Pittsburgh Maulers, whose mascot was the figure of a hard-hatted worker wielding his mauler, i.e. a heavy long-handled hammer used for driving stakes or wedges. The hammer is evocative of nothing other than the hammer and sickle, and the wedge the worker is preparing to drive is between the establishment and the proletariat it seeks to extract its surplus from. This being Reagan’s America, the Maulers only managed to stick around for one season. Pittsburgh was allowed to keep the NFL’s Steelers, but only after agreeing to give up the Steel industry and its jobs, proud blue collar workers being consigned to the fantasy realm of giants and fierce dolphins.
In sync with Reagan’s up-is-not- down universe, the most prominent of the establishment teams were head-rebel Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals, which, of course, represented that signature American institution, the military-industrial complex. The Generals were flanked by the Chicago Blitz, symbolizing the American war machine, and the Oakland Invaders, who echoed Vietnam and presaged Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II. And since war is as much about treasure as it is about blood, the establishment teams included the Denver Gold, who also represented the Reaganite version of the golden rule: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” Joining the Gold were the Los Angeles Express, whose mascot, evoking American Express, was a reminder that a man is no longer as good as his word, but instead as good as his credit rating.
The Washington Federals, like the Showboats, play off of Reagan’s knack for obvious subterfuge, Federals seeming at first glance a repudiation of everything the doyen of smaller federal government stood for. But, of course, Reagan, the “symbolic outsider,” was in truth the ultimate federal insider, his legacy cemented by the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, the second largest federal government building in greater Washington. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Building_and_International_Trade_Center) Governments don’t erect monuments to those who mean them any harm.
The Philadelphia Stars, who later relocated to the DC suburb of College Park but were, nevertheless, renamed the Baltimore Stars, symbolize the mass media, whose job, with apologies to Casey Kasem, is to keep us reaching for the stars while never keeping our feet on the ground; any feet on the ground that aren’t army boots on the ground are at risk of organizing a union and going on strike.
The last of the USFL’s establishment teams, the Breakers, who played one season each in Boston, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon and whose mascot was a wave breaking on the shore, would seem a candidate to join the three neutral animal squads on the sidelines. But, again like the Showboats, the Breakers name had a double meaning, and one that was explicitly linked with the Pittsburgh Maulers. If the Maulers represented labor, Boston, New Orleans, and Portland were each in turn home to the (Strike) Breakers. It is no surprise that the (Strike) Breakers took up consecutive residences in respective American hotbeds of intellectuals (Boston), artists (New Orleans), and progressives (Portland); a (Strike) Breaker always goes where the work is.
I just started my USFL t-shirt collection. As a child of the Reagan years, it is only appropriate that my first t-shirt, purchased from Amazon, which as of December of 2013 had consistently and successfully prevented any of its US workers from unionizing, features one of the rebel teams, the San Antonio Gunslingers.
All hope, however, is not yet lost. Plans for an eight team revival of the USFL in 2014 are afoot. The very first city the new USFL visited was Akron, Ohio. (http://www.cleveland.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/06/akron_could_have_a_team_in_rev.html) Akron is known as the “Rubber Capital of the World,” is still home to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and “is considered the polymer manufacturing center in the country,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akron,_Ohio) meaning they still make stuff there, which, in post-Reagan America, is nothing short of a miracle, making it the perfect place to start a worker’s rebellion, if not a revolution. The stadium is already called the Rubber Bowl, and Akron Rubbers has a nice ring to it for a football team. Just got to be careful with the logo on the helmet. Some blatant deception, a la the Memphis Showboats, may be in order. I’m thinking rubber boots. (I also like the image below, available at http://www.awesomesportslogos.com/Montunos-Del-Interior-Cool-Tshirts-Funny-Tshirts-Awesome-Tshirts-Hilarious-Tshirts-Prodlist.html)
“’In other words we’ll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We’ll have a tyranny of conformist noncomformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it’s so empty makes everyone terrified- they’re small and they’re going to die, after all-‘
‘Christ, the death thing again.’
‘- and whose terror of not really ever existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt.’”
Wallace shows us Reagan as Mobius strip, a surface with only one side; Reagan was never the rebel he played on TV, and everyone knew it, making his outsider persona part and parcel of the “tyranny of conformist noncomformity.” If I am reading Wallace correctly, we elected Reagan because we hated what we wanted, the safety of the herd, and wanted what we hated, commodified dissent. In sum, Reagan made it safe to go shopping. At the end of this passage Wallace, in so many words, reformulates Descartes’ cogito for the world Reagan presided over and which we still inhabit: “I shop, therefore I am.”
Reagan’s Mobius strip was on full display in, of all places, the United States Football League (USFL), a professional football league that operated for three seasons during the peak of the Reagan era from 1983 –’85. Like Reagan, the USFL purported to be one thing, a spring time football league existentially distinct from the National Football League (NFL) by virtue of its seasonal remove, while behaving like the opposite, a direct competitor for the NFL’s star players (e.g. Doug Flutie, Herschel Walker, Steve Young, Jim Kelly, and Reggie White) and its fans’ dollars. Soon after the 1985 season and under the influence of its majordomo franchisee, one Donald Trump, the USFL scrapped its spring football formula and prepared to compete head to head with the NFL in the fall; the league subsequently folded before playing a down of fall football.
The USFL existed as the reverse image of Reagan’s one-sided deception, promising something that people weren’t ready to admit they wanted, spring football, while actually delivering a real rebellion. But when the USFL dropped its charade and owned its rebelliousness, it stepped out of Reagan’s mirror and off the stage of history. With the USFL’s move to the fall serving as an announcement of exactly who and what it was, it was as if the ’84 Reagan re-election campaign had chosen its actual guiding ethos as its campaign slogan: “Greed is good.” Instead, the Gipper went with “Morning Again in America,” continuing the winning gambit of blatant deception, the image of morning sunrise as duplicitous as that of the rebel; everyone knew that Reagan’s morning was when you had to get up to go to work, which was all anyone had time for since, under Reagan, “Real weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers… took a beating, declining even more quickly than they had during the 1970’s. Today, the average real earnings of nonsupervisory workers remain far below those of 30 years ago.” (http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0704miller.html)
The tension between Reagan’s role as rebel and his function as puppet, which tension held together our “conformist noncomformity,” is illustrated by the USFL’s sundry mascots. There were a total of 19 mascots, and if we set aside the three franchises with animal mascots (Birmingham Stallions, Jacksonville Bulls, and Michigan Panthers), we are left with 16 mascots that can be equally divided into rebel and establishment categories, with the rebels the place holders for Reagan’s fiction, and the establishment teams representing his fact, both in plain sight where the truth is almost always found.
Several members of the USFL’s “rebel alliance,” if you will, took their inspiration from the mythic “wild west,” according to which myth the ultimate freedom may well have been the freedom from government bureaucracy (which is perhaps why Reagan, the ultimate anti-government governor, was a self-styled cowboy who was frequently photographed on horseback). These teams included the Arizona Wranglers, Oklahoma Outlaws (who merged with Arizona to become the Arizona Outlaws, in a kind of proto-Brokeback Mountain-with-gay-marriage moment, which, given that homosexuality is one of the ultimate forms of rebellion, makes perfect sense), San Antonio Gunslingers, Tampa Bay Bandits, Houston Gamblers (in the image of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” a solitary voice of wisdom who brings to mind that ultimate rebel figure, Socrates, not to mention the fact that the establishment is, if nothing else, risk averse, which is why the establishment is the house, and never the gambler, given that the house always wins) and the Orlando Renegades (which Renegades, of course, rebelled against the genocide of their people, which, bizarrely, means that the White team owners were honoring those who rebelled against their (the owners’) people’s efforts to accomplish that very genocide).
In sync with Reagan’s up-is-not- down universe, the most prominent of the establishment teams were head-rebel Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals, which, of course, represented that signature American institution, the military-industrial complex. The Generals were flanked by the Chicago Blitz, symbolizing the American war machine, and the Oakland Invaders, who echoed Vietnam and presaged Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II. And since war is as much about treasure as it is about blood, the establishment teams included the Denver Gold, who also represented the Reaganite version of the golden rule: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” Joining the Gold were the Los Angeles Express, whose mascot, evoking American Express, was a reminder that a man is no longer as good as his word, but instead as good as his credit rating.
The Washington Federals, like the Showboats, play off of Reagan’s knack for obvious subterfuge, Federals seeming at first glance a repudiation of everything the doyen of smaller federal government stood for. But, of course, Reagan, the “symbolic outsider,” was in truth the ultimate federal insider, his legacy cemented by the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, the second largest federal government building in greater Washington. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Building_and_International_Trade_Center) Governments don’t erect monuments to those who mean them any harm.
The Philadelphia Stars, who later relocated to the DC suburb of College Park but were, nevertheless, renamed the Baltimore Stars, symbolize the mass media, whose job, with apologies to Casey Kasem, is to keep us reaching for the stars while never keeping our feet on the ground; any feet on the ground that aren’t army boots on the ground are at risk of organizing a union and going on strike.
The last of the USFL’s establishment teams, the Breakers, who played one season each in Boston, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon and whose mascot was a wave breaking on the shore, would seem a candidate to join the three neutral animal squads on the sidelines. But, again like the Showboats, the Breakers name had a double meaning, and one that was explicitly linked with the Pittsburgh Maulers. If the Maulers represented labor, Boston, New Orleans, and Portland were each in turn home to the (Strike) Breakers. It is no surprise that the (Strike) Breakers took up consecutive residences in respective American hotbeds of intellectuals (Boston), artists (New Orleans), and progressives (Portland); a (Strike) Breaker always goes where the work is.
All hope, however, is not yet lost. Plans for an eight team revival of the USFL in 2014 are afoot. The very first city the new USFL visited was Akron, Ohio. (http://www.cleveland.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/06/akron_could_have_a_team_in_rev.html) Akron is known as the “Rubber Capital of the World,” is still home to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and “is considered the polymer manufacturing center in the country,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akron,_Ohio) meaning they still make stuff there, which, in post-Reagan America, is nothing short of a miracle, making it the perfect place to start a worker’s rebellion, if not a revolution. The stadium is already called the Rubber Bowl, and Akron Rubbers has a nice ring to it for a football team. Just got to be careful with the logo on the helmet. Some blatant deception, a la the Memphis Showboats, may be in order. I’m thinking rubber boots. (I also like the image below, available at http://www.awesomesportslogos.com/Montunos-Del-Interior-Cool-Tshirts-Funny-Tshirts-Awesome-Tshirts-Hilarious-Tshirts-Prodlist.html)
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