Posted on

2nd order Skullduggery

I used this phrase once at lunch today (sorry, D) but it came back to mind reading this Felix Salmon review of new books by Tim Noah and the Krug-meister:

Each of these books, in its own way, is an attempt to disabuse the rich of precisely that idea — to explain that while they’re doing perfectly well for themselves, an overwhelming majority of the population, the bottom 80 percent to 90 percent of the country, is struggling hard and has tasted none of the fruits that have been showered on the wealthy.

Take the quarter-century from 1980 to 2005, during which markets soared and America got indisputably richer: over that period, Mr. Noah, a columnist for The New Republic, says that fully 80 percent of the nation’s income gains went to just the top 1 percent. Most Americans’ incomes stagnated, with the middle class getting nowhere. Mr. Krugman takes a shorter view, and demonstrates that the same group suffered dreadfully in the financial crisis, and that its plight continues today. Both of them try to inject urgency back into the national debate, spelling out how unacceptable the status quo is, and calling on the government to do something about it as a matter of the highest priority.

It’s class warfare alright, as surely as this phrase is verboten across the airwaves except as an antidote for any talk about income inequity. It takes journalists with the guts to call this what it is, over and over, and Salmon is one of them. He’s hard on Dr. K, too, but he should be – that’s the point of criticism, even if you agree with the work. We’re not critical enough. We don’t call a spade a spade or a crook a crook when we need to, and this is the skullduggery to which I refer. The corruption runs deep, but our own complicity in overlooking and excusing malfeasance and greed is its chief ally.

Posted on

The War on Women

You hear about this, and the very phrase conforms so perfectly to rhetorical excess that it can become misconstrued, misused and made to seem meaningless. But it is real, as this list demonstrates:

1,100

Total number of reproductive rights-related laws introduced by state lawmakers in 2011.

604

Number of abortion and reproductive rights-related provisions introduced at the state level as of June 1.

8.2%

The US unemployment rate.

0

Number of jobs created by wasting time debating hundreds of reproductive rights-restricting laws.

408,425

Number of children who were in the US foster care system at the end of 2010.

96,772

Number of those children with caseworkers who said they were waiting to be adopted.

4,230

Number of adoptable foster children who would not have stadium seats if you tried to put all of them into the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.

25

United States’ ranking on Save the Children’s list of best countries for mothers.

0

Number of podium pounding speeches given by “pro-life” Congressional leaders on how embarrassing it is that the US has the fourth highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation.

Between $2 and $6

Amount of taxpayer money saved for every $1 spent on birth control.

$11 billion

Cost of unplanned pregnancies to the US taxpayer — per year.

$11.2 billion

Amount Broadway musicals contribute to New York City’s economy per year.

Read the entire list. Weep, then wipe your eyes and get real.

Posted on

Define ‘this’

Surely you’ve noticed these Exxonmobile commercials (no link, sorry. Google it) focussing on the state of education in America today, how we’ve fallen behind relative to so many other countries and how we need to support teachers and students to re-establish our dominance. Exxonmobile is concerned. About education.

The cartoon narratives are fancy and well done, but back up a minute. The tag line, ‘Let’s solve this.’ Really? Confident. Serious. First-person plural. Everything else they are involved in is kosher and so now they’re turning their attention to our education problems. Exxonmobile. That is sporting of them. This is has got to be one of the most classic, think-up-something-else-so-we-don’t-talk-about-energy-policy, concerning trolling PR strategies they have dreamed up at least since they embraced, and likely already solved, the ‘go green’ issue – by making it go away. Let’s solve this?

Here’s what’s actually going on in solving education problems today:

Starting this fall, thousands of poor and middle-class kids will get vouchers covering the full cost of tuition at more than 120 private schools across Louisiana, including small, Bible-based church schools.

The following year, students of any income will be eligible for mini-vouchers that they can use to pay a range of private-sector vendors for classes and apprenticeships not offered in traditional public schools. The money can go to industry trade groups, businesses, online schools and tutors, among others.

Every time a student receives a voucher of either type, his local public school will lose a chunk of state funding.

“We are changing the way we deliver education,” said Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican who muscled the plan through the legislature this spring over fierce objections from Democrats and teachers unions. “We are letting parents decide what’s best for their children, not government.”

BIBLE-BASED MATH BOOKS

I’ll stop with that sub-head, just to let it sink in. Let’s solve this. Oy.

Posted on

Of these so lately baptized kinsmen

A quote from James Baldwin that I included in Dark Polska goes something like, “The future of America can only be as bright as that of the black man.” No truer words, Mr. B (though he may have used ‘Negro’ as was his wont), and at times this seems more promising for our country than others. Ahem.

Nonetheless, a great American writer none of us reads enough – thus, instantly qualifying him for another Friday Reading.

This is from the essay “Stranger in the Village” from Notes of a Native Son, Beacon Press, 1955.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. It is of quite considerable significance that black men remain, in the imagination, and in overwhelming numbers in fact, beyond the disciplines of salvation; and this despite the fact that the West has been “buying” African natives for centuries. There is, I should hazard, an instantaneous necessity to be divorced from this so visibly unsaved stranger, in whose heart, moreover , one cannot guess what dreams of vengeance are being nourished; and, at the same time, there are few things on earth more attractive than the idea of the unspeakable liberty which is allowed the unredeemed. When, beneath the black mask, a human being begins to make himself felt one cannot escape a certain awful wonder as to what kind of human being it is. What one’s imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the Master race laws of one’s own personality and it’s one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.

I have said, for example, that I am as much a stranger in this village today as I was the first summer I arrived, but this is not quite true. The villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me. And the fact that their wonder now exists on another level is reflected in their attitudes and in their eyes. There are the children who make those delightful, hilarious, sometimes astonishingly grave overtures of friendship in the unpredictable fashion of children; other children, having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish as I approach. Some of the older women never pass without a friendly greeting, never pass, indeed, if it seems that they will be able to engage me in conversation; other women look down or look away or rather contemptuously smirk. Some of the men drink with me and suggest that I learn how to ski-partly, I gather, because they cannot imagine what I would look like on skis-and want to know if I am married, and ask questions about my metier. But some of the men have accused le sale negre-behind my back-of stealing wood and there is already in the eyes of some of them that peculiar, intent, paranoiac malevolence which one sometimes surprises in the eyes of American white men when, out walking with their Sunday girl, they see a Negro male approach.

There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday-the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But, I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul.

For this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a marketplace and seeing black men for the first time. The shock this spectacle afforded is suggested, surely, by the promptness with which they decided that these black men were not really men but cattle. It is true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World of reconciling their moral assumptions with the fact -and the necessity-of slavery enhanced immensely the charm of this idea, and it is also true that this idea expresses, with a truly American bluntness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all slaves.

Posted on

Hug the Monster

via Romm, an article about a metaphor to change fear into action and extinguish the panic so deadly in a great crisis that seems well, a little too familiar:

“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force trainers to those headed into harm’s way.

The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.

If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost.

But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.

Around the world, a growing number of people are showing signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to be a great crisis facing us all.

See. Toldya. It goes on:

Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective civilization.”

Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.

For many years now, the worlds scientists and economists have depicted  upheavals in security plans, financial networks, and food and water systems due to the rapidity with which annual global temperature is rising as a result of excess carbon emissions.

Read the rest. Transform the crisis, indeed.

Posted on

Eating Real Food

Is now a marketing slogan.

real_medium

I was talking with a friend about some of the possible consequences of the popular appeal of Mad Men, that maybe it could subjectively get us to actually hate and therefore begin to try to resist the power of advertising. But, even as the words passed my lips I knew this was a vain hope. It’s terrific art but the network executives behind it are just as clueless about why people like it – and clued in about what people will watch – as the most cynical characters on the show are. Evidence the appalling reality show that mimics it, follows it, appears to be unwatchable and will probably be some kind of quantifiable cultural phenomenon on its own.

Selling back to us things we should already be doing, making the zeitgeist attractive and appealing, is tricky. Because there are a lot of things people already do that many others should embrace for their own and our collective good, but for the streak anti-authoritarianism that runs deeper than the Mississippi – and which is completely at odds with our vulnerability to corporate thinking. We (remember, there actually is no they) can even get people be against clean air and water. We’re helpless before the slick-o ads that pervade. Even the coming presidential campaign is actually a high-concept design contest, starring people in ads who will say they just want honest conversation about our problems. “Were X’s ads effective?” the headlines will read. Such will be the nature of the political analysis. “Wheels with wheels, man!”

So, yes: eat real. Hey better yet, get real. What does that mean? Hey, now we’re back on track! Not sure we need to put such admonitions on t-shirts – though it does bring to mind Marquez’ One Hundred Years, when everyone in the village forgets the names of everything and they have to go around labeling things like ‘chair’ and ‘table.’ Yes, maybe it’s that. Or this:

Posted on

Gimme (a tax) Shelter

If you want to smell the flowers in the hothouse of selflessness that is your America today, check out this Forbes article supporting fB c0-founder and erstwhile Singaporean tax patriot Ed Saverin:

Saverin’s essential maneuver will at first glance hopefully get Americans thinking once again about our wrongheaded system of taxation. As it stands now, Americans, through taxes levied on income and capital gains, are explicitly forced to “prove” their income to the IRS.

I was at first embarrassed to post this, but we really need to acknowledge that this, THIS, is where we are and the kinds of people we are releasing into the bloodstream of humanity. Not just Saverin but the writer and the many commenters who provide him attaboys, not to mention the many political and business leaders who believe this. He gets savaged by many others in the comments as well, but the appearance of this kind of stupid and graceless whining should remind us that we don’t get to think that we’re just loosening a bunch a Clooneys into the world. We aren’t. Those are rare; these are unfortunately the norm. THIS is what thirty years of government-is-the-problem propaganda has done to people’s minds and their idea of what they should expect: government as a one-way street to provide you all the opportunities of free-enterprise but a thief-in-the-night when it comes to paying your fair share.

And like most cycles, one of these kinds of people is running for president this year. If he, and Obama, don’t get asked about this early and often in the next few months, be appalled. Be very appalled.

Posted on

Like an old plate

If you look around and are underwhelmed with what you see, just know you can actually always be in the presence of whatever presence you want to be.

Here’s our friend, the poet, Scott Fitzgerald, from The Crack-Up, 1936:

Now a man can crack in many ways — can crack in the head, in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others; or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves. William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became a public charge. What led to his alcoholism, or was bound up with it, was a collapse of his nervous system. Though the present writer was not so entangled — having at the time not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months — it was his nervous reflexes that were giving way — too much anger and too many tears.

Moreover, to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive, the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve.

Not long before, I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave sentence. With what, in retrospect, seems some equanimity, I had gone on about my affairs in the city where I was then living, not caring much, not thinking how much had been left undone, or what would become of this and that responsibility, like people do in books; I was well insured and anyhow I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.

But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life — I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved — in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

But now I wanted to be absolutely alone and so arranged a certain insulation from ordinary cares.

It was not an unhappy time. I went away and there were fewer people. I found I was good-and-tired. I could lie around and was glad to, sleeping or dozing sometimes twenty hours a day and in the intervals trying resolutely not to think — instead I made lists — made lists and tore them up, hundreds of lists: of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in and how many suits since I left the army and how many pairs of shoes (I didn’t count the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrank, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried around for years and never wore, because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted). And lists of women I’d liked, and of the times I had let myself be snubbed by people who had not been my betters in character or ability.

— And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.

— And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.

That is the real end of this story. What was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the “womb of time.” Suffice to say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? — when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.