the solution-suck: Sanders single payer plan and the neo-liberal attack dogs

You will have noticed that Sanders single payer plan has been extensively attacked. It has been dismissed by Paul Krugman and savaged by Vox, which is turning into the 21^st century version of the old New Republic (the Marty Peretz New Republic that marketed its liberal reputation to put across reactionary ideas).

These logic behind these political attacks is pretty simple. Sanders has been hammering on a problem, a massive problem, with healthcare in America. It is fantastically expensive; and, for the majority of people, that is, those who live in households thatmake below around 100 thousand, it is a subject of constant, rational worry, since it is precisely those households for which every rachet upward of the medical machine makes medical care ruinous.  32 million non-elderly Americans are still uninsured, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And even for those who are insured,  According to the Commonwealth Fund:

“New estimates from the Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey, 2014, indicate that 23 percent of 19-to-64-year-old adults who were insured all year—or 31 million people—had such high out-of-pocket costs or deductibles relative to their incomes that they were underinsured. These estimates are statistically unchanged from 2010 and 2012, but nearly double those found in 2003 when the measure was first introduced in the survey. The share of continuously insured adults with high deductibles has tripled, rising from 3 percent in 2003 to 11 percent in 2014. Half (51%) of underinsured adults reported problems with medical bills or debt and more than two of five (44%) reported not getting needed care because of cost. Among adults who were paying off medical bills, half of underinsured adults and 41 percent of privately insured adults with high deductibles had debt loads of $4,000 or more.”

Even this survey doesn’t represent the reality of the medical care burden. Those in the 19 to 64 group are connected by family ties to those in the 64 and above group, and often have to dip into what savings they have for medical expenses that the retirees can’t pay.

This survey received a lot of news coverage. It is relevant to the medical care crisis:

“Approximately 63% of Americans have no emergency savings for things such as a $1,000 emergency room visit or a $500 car repair, according to a survey released Wednesday of 1,000 adults by personal finance website Bankrate.com, up slightly from 62% last year. Faced with an emergency, they say they would raise the money by reducing spending elsewhere (23%), borrowing from family and/or friends (15%) or using credit cards to bridge the gap (15%).”

It is in this environment of economic precarity that we are seeing a rather amazing rise in the cost of medicines: From Business insider:

“Cost trends for prescription drug coverage are projected to increase by 8.6% in 2015 and by 11.3% in 2016 for active plan and retiree plan members under 65, according to a survey released Thursday by benefits, compensation and human resources consulting firm The Segal Group Inc. That compares with an increase of 10.7% in 2014.

New York-based Segal predicts the cost trend rate for specialty and biotechnology drugs, which treat conditions like cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, will hit 19.4% in 2015 and 18.9% in 2016, the survey showed.”

This is of course an impressionistic survey of the medical landscape, but it is enough of one to pose the question: is there a problem here?

This question is not, however, posed by any of the attacks on Sanders so far. What one wants is a comprehensive survey of the costs to the American public of medical care, and then a comparison of the two plans, Clintons and Sanders, which address it. Instead, what we are getting is the well known solution-suck program. One concentrates on the flaws in a solution to the elimination of everything else. In this way, we forget that even if we have no plan, we have a crisis in costs in the US. The difference, of course, is in who is going to pay for it: whether it is going to continue to be on the backs of the working class, or whether the costs are going to be met through some universal medical care system. The second question is whether the costs can be mitigated or even lowered by government action.

What is never said about the later question is that the costs are siginificantly increased by government action. There are three drivers of cost in the US: guilds, monopolies and intermediaries. Guilds are labor forces that are artificially restricted by government required licences. Monopolies are both IP driven and trust driven. And intermediaries are complex interactions that include both insurance companies and health care providers. When I have to go to a doctor to get a prescription to get a drug, I am paying an intermediary premium.

We might well want doctors and nurses to be licenced, and patent protection to work. But this doesn’t mean that we have to have the system we have now. For instance, patents, as Dean Baker has suggested, should better be treated as a premium on licencing products. Instead of the inventors of x drug having a 20 year monopoly on producing it, Baker’s suggestion is that the government auction the design of the drug and give a percentage of the profits of the drug to the inventor from all those who bid to produce it. Thus, we would have both competition and a fair compensation for invention.

In any case, the solution-suck strategy is being pulled on Sanders. The way to fight back is to bring the conversation continually, obsessively back to the problem. Because in reality, the solution-suck strategy is simply neo-liberalism’s way of keeping things the way they are. And the way they are is becoming, increasingly, a horror.

trump and white euphemism culture

In the advent of Donald Trump, I have been thinking, we are seeing both the result and the decline of White Euphemism culture.
White Euphemism culture accompanied the liquidation of traditional liberal-left policies in the post-Cold War era. As the mass incarceration of blacks and hispanics got into high gear, and as the precarious economic gains of black household either stagnate or collapsed, the governing class promoted a politics of linguistic civil rights. Reading the Ferguson Report (a small paperback that nobody included on the "Books we Love" list last year, putting in question, I think, the notion that books should be loved, or that the love of books actually maps the effect of books) one notices that - as Rand Paul, of all people, remarked in the debate - the predominantly black population is not only poor, but is subject to an enormous machinery of fines and petty imprisonments that is exactly the same as the Jim Crow era. And Ferguson is hardly alone. Go to anyplace with similar conditions - a black majority population and a white majority police force or court house or judicial system - and you will find the same thing. This is how America administers its Sowetos.

At the end of 2008, the neo-liberal culture went into overdrive about this wonderful ‘post racial’ nation we had here.
However, anybody who has any acquaintance with the internet (and I’ve had a blog going, continously since 2001, which has made me very aware of Internety things) knows that the forces of misogyny, racism and psychosis were definitely abroad in the land. I’m reminded of this fact reading Joan Walsh’s piece in the Nation about her support for Clinton.

Joan Walsh has been on the Internet for longer than my blog has been up, since Salon's salad days in the Clinton impeachment era. In the article, Walsh justly points out that the smears and the threats that she has received for being for Clinton, and that her daughter has received, go beyond sexist and reach psychotic. She’s 100 percent right. The rape by comment culture is alive and well, and certainly finds expression among some Sanders supporters. But I had one caveat, which is that, as Walsh well knows, no matter what the ideology one supports as a woman on the Internet, the rape by comment people will be there. I have read, on supposedly liberal or left blogs, that Ann Coulter, the far right figure, was a dyke, should be raped, should be shut up with a bullet, should have her body dismembered, was a whore, etc., etc. I am pretty sure that female Sanders supporters get the same treatment.
The hope of the euphemism culture was that, without interference from the state, the private sector would not only pump out growth and prosperity for all, but that it would, with proper nudging, bring about a “post-racial, post-gender” society. Now, it isn’t that there has been no progress. But the progress has not been enough, not nearly enough, in comparison with the older liberal interventionist model.
Trump has torn off the bandage. But what was underneath is not new.

adventures in subpar parenting

While Adam Smith was propounding the elements of capitalist anthropology – that it is in the nature of humans to truck and barter – Rousseau was imagining teaching a child different elements altogether. Rousseau’s Emile might break his furniture and his window – but he must bear the consequences of broken furniture and cold winds. “It is better that he should have a cold”, Rousseau says, “than be crazy.” Fou – by fou Rousseau meant, be like other children of his century.

Notice, though, that there is no substitution here – no trucking and bartering. There is no – if you break your chair, you can’t have dinner. Because this introduces both an equivalence – furniture/dinner – and a mode of thinking in which all objects dissolve into substitutes in an exchange.

Now, myself, I have always been impressed with the idea of ‘deal-less’ childrearing. Although I’m definitely not going to leave a window broken, I do like making it clear that there are natural implications for action, rather than implications that depend upon the whim of the parent.

With these notions, I was naturally setting myself up for failure.

A couple of days ago, I had one of those moments of parental discouragement. Adam did not want to take a bath. He did not want to so much that there were tears and tantrums. He did not want to so much that there was kicking. He did not want to so much that talking wasn’t working – nor a bit of yelling. There was a part of me that admired his stubbornness, I must admit, but mostly, I was getting worn down.

So I bartered. I told him that if he didn’t take a bath, we were going to put him to bed with no stories and with the lights out immediately.

You will notice that there is zero connection between taking a bath and telling a story. That is, until I made it. Until I made a deal.

Adam folded. This was a relief. However, I do feel like I am starting a pattern of easy discipline, of truck and barter, that can’t be good. On the other hand, Emile’s tutor was simply that – he seems to have no other function. While me, as a parent, I do have many other functions. I don’t have infinite patience. I for one thing wanted to start dinner.  I had a schedule I was following that evening.

Well, I know you can’t raise a child against all the social currents that one lives within. But there are moments of … what shall I call it? Moral disarmament in parenting, I guess, that are discouraging. Or at least peal off a bit of the gilding of the little icon you make of yourself as the good parent. 

The electability argument doesn't say what you think it says, Paul Krugman

I have a strong distrust of electability arguments, because they are usually made by people who are not making an observation, but beating the drums for a cause. In fact, it is a mathematical truth, in the modern American system, that one of the candidates from either the Republican or Democratic party will win the election. It is another truth that the GOP or Dem candidate will have won the majority of the primaries. Is it, however, true that the person who wins the primaries in a party isn't always the most electable in the general? What that means, what that should mean, is not that the candidate who lost the primaries could lose less the general, but that the candidate who lost the primaries could have won the general. Personally, I think this is totally unlikely. The argument of electability is usually manipulated by Democratic centrists, and they usually pick McGovern for their punching bag. The problem is evident, however. For if Mcgovern was a uniquely bad choice, what they are contending is that his opponents - basically, Humphrey and Muskie - were better. But when you go back to the Gallup polls, there's absolutely no evidence for this. Humphrey and Muskie both did worse against Nixon in the polls in May, 1972, than McGovern. Intuitively, it seems more probable that the winner of the primary is probably the most electable candidate that the party has running. This intuition is borne out, partly, by the fact that it is rare (in fact, I can't think of an instance) that a person who lost his party's nomination in one election cycle to a person who lost the general was elected in the next cycle by the party and defeated the incumbent in the general. To give an example that is less muddy: say, Kerry had lost to Gore in 2000, who lost to Bush, and then Kerry won the Dem nomination in 2004 and defeated Bush. In fact, most of the time, those who lose in the primaries never get a chance to be nominated - unless they are VPs. Humphrey lost in the 1960 primary, and did get a chance in the 1968 election. Even so, he lost.
Now, given this, I think it is important to note that the electability argument has been used to promote a buncha egregious losers to the Democratic coronation: Humphrey, Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry. All we were told were electable - in fact, before any substance, this is what they were supposed to be. But they weren't. They were losers.
That said, I do think Clinton is electable, though I am for Sanders in the primary. But she is a bit like Humphrey, which is a bit frightening to me.

Neurath, Krugman and prediction

“Imagine sailors who, far out at sea, transform the shape of their clumsy vessel from a more circular to a more fishlike one. They make use of some drifting timber, besides the timber of the old structure, to modify the skeleton and the hull of their vessel. But they cannot put the ship in dock in order to start from scratch. During their work they stay on the old structure and deal with heavy gales and thundering waves. In transforming their ship they take care that dangerous leakages do not occur. A new ship grows out of the old one, step by step -- and while they are still building, the sailors may already be thinking of a new structure, and they will not always agree with one another. The whole business will go on in a way we cannot even anticipate today. That is our fate.”

This is a famous passage from Otto Neurath, the socialist and logical positivist. It is grounded in Neurath’s sense that prediction is a network effect – that it exists as a hypothesis in a network of other hypotheses, and that we should judge it in terms of that network.

Because we all possess the future tense, we are all prophets. However,  good prophecy – honest prophecy - requires something more than grammar. It requires a certain predictive integrity. That is, it requires that one not make predictions based on the isolation of one hypothesis as if the others did not exist.

Poor prophecy is the rule in politics. Because prophecy is entangled with the very mechanism of advancing political figures and policies, the best we can expect is that some acknowledgement of Neurath’s raft will trail behind the prophet. Some notion, that is, that for x to become true, not only do we have to be right about current mechanisms that would lead to x, but we have to acknowledge the x effect – the fact that it comes true changes the way things are. We can’t transpose one massive change into a background that we assume stays, otherwise, stable. It is like predicting a large earthquake in a locale and assuming that all the buildings and roads will remain the same.

This is what I felt when I read the recent series of Krugman posts criticizing Bernie Sanders. Leaving aside the economic content of the criticism, it is the political content that seems to ignore utterly the context of the predicted event.

Bernie Sanders becoming the nominee of the Democratic party would be a large earthquake. I don’t expect it to happen. But when I imagine it happening, I know that I have to imagine a lot of unanticipated shifts in circumstance. As well, I would have to re-evaluate the present mechanisms that would lead to that event.

Krugman as an economist knows this. But Krugman as a supporter of Clinton has tossed these variables in the garbage. And that isnt good. It puts him at the level of those people, those multitudes of people, who comment or blog on –line with absolute certainty, and absolute lack of intellectual integrity. This is easy to confuse with stupidity, but it is far from stupidity. It is, rather, a moral blindness – a blindness to the fact that thinking has any integrity.

It is one of the expected casualties, I guess, of an election year. However, it really doesn’t do much for Clinton, much as the serious people think it does. People have very good intuitions about moral blindnesses, whether they suppress them or not.   

the Randian tone of Donald Trump

The National review takedown of trump laid an egg, and reminds us that nowadays, Glenn Beck counts as a rightwing intellectual. In the old days, National Review actually did have some intellectual heft. For instance, it poured scorn on Ayn Rand. Here's Whttacker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged. Here's the second graf: The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the “looters.” These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. This,” she is saying in effect, “is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.”

I can't imagine such a graf appearing in today's ever pandering NRO. More's the pity.

 In fact, if the NRO contained any moderately intelligent writers in its stable, they would have gone back to Rand to trace the real geneology of Trumpism. Chambers description of Rand's tone hits, presciently, on Donald Trump's genre of bluster: Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber–go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

for the draft

For the draft

One of the great victories of the antiwar movement in the Vietnam era was the abolition of selective service.

In retrospect, this was a victory for the right. For the left, and for the American people, it was a disaster.

The draft, it turns out, is a dialectical instrument – one in which the affordances impinge on each other. As a political tool, it both mobilized the population to do the bidding of the political establishment and spread mass anxiety that the political establishment had to respond to.  Its abolition has contributed to two trends.

One is the trend to executive office wars. These started out small in the Reagan years, became much bigger under Bush 1, and exploded under Bush 2 and Obama.

The second is the drifting apart of the general population and the guarantor state. That state, built to support the working class, now routinely supports capital against the working class. And it supports war.

If the draft had not been abolished in the seventies, millions of men and women in the fourty years between its abolition and now would have been drafted. They would have been eligible for health benefits across their lifetime. They would have had educational benefits that would have significantly reduced the burden of student debt, perhaps most of it. If the draft had continued, African American men and women, in particular, would have seen their upward social mobility accelerate instead of stagnate and decline. The revenge of Jim Crow, the jailing of the young African American population that is one of the most shameful and horrible things that has happened in my lifetime in this country, would have been halted.

Looking back at the upward social mobility that characterized the post World War two era, it is surprising how much of it was connected to the draft – to the war machine. Millions of Gis received education benefits that landed them in college, the first in their families to ever have that chance. Millions were able to afford housing. Millions, today, rely on medical insurance from the VA.

If you go through the biographies of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, until recently the outstanding data point was how many came from working class families and went through the army or navy or air force, which led them into the path they took upwards.

It was an excellent tactic, in the sixties, to resist the draft. When I call it a dialectical instrument, this is what I mean. The draft personalizes foreign policy. During the sixties, a demonstration had much more symbolic and political power because those demonstrating were potentially draftees – people who had had to deal with the system. Thus, they spread discontent throughout the system.

The demonstration has become a relic precisely to the extent that the establishment no longer needs the population. The million people who came out against the Iraq war weren’t the comrades, or even very connected to, the people who were going to fight it – the mercenaries and volunteers.

As well, the sense of solidarity – the sense that the government is yours, because you have served it – was also a victim of the end of the draft. There is little sense, now, that the taxes taken by the government are more an investment for the vast majority of people. They are, instead, a suck on their marginal existences.

In a stroke, bringing back the draft will make it impossible for the establishment to engage in such things as our endless war in Afghanistan, a sixteen year, trillion and a half dollar enterprise that is being fought to save the establishment’s face. Think, we have spent that money and blood and now Afghanistan is free! Save for the women, the half of the country infested with war lords or the Taliban, and most of the impoverished population.

Don’t you feel the rush?

The draft will also brighten the chances for a less endebted future, and perhaps even a wealthier one, for a whole generation of Americans.  We will once again start asking the question Kennedy got wrong: ask not what you can do for the government, ask what the government can do for you.

Otherwise, you are fucked.

what do you mean we, kemo sabe: the new yorker we

The New Yorker "we"

Renata Adler, in her intemperate book against the new New Yorker of the 90s, Gone, took particular offense at the very person of Adam Gopnik. "I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do." James Wolcott is also a non-fan: “He is avidly talented and spongily absorbent, an earnest little eager beaver whose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until the preciosity simply becomes too much.”

Myself, I have never met the man, and I liked the winsome Paris to the Moon, which was in the fine New Yorker tradition of accounts of an exotic Paris that was at once more civilized and more backwards than the good old USA. I accept the limitations of that vein, and then read Thurber or Flanner or Gopnik (less Flanner, actually – the best Paris correspondent ever) for the humor.
But if the early career of Gopnik seems, at least in the eyes of his colleagues, to have been Gollum-like (I wants the ring, precccioouss!), it is his incarnation as a New Yorker mandarin that bugs me. The pixie dust of the Paris book has fallen away, and the man so revealed does, as Wolcott put it, seem born to annoy me.
Which brings me to his essay about Henry James in the latest New Yorker.

For Gopnik, a book review or essay is not complete if it isn’t also an intellectual fashion report. If it isn’t, that is, aimed at the hip “we” which finds a tight little place in his paragraphs. Thus, the status report on James begins with an implicit we – the we of contemporary readers, a category that Gopnik never quantifies in some dirty way by looking at, say, sales figures or essays in magazines or things like that. Gopnik is his own authority on the contemporary reader, and that reader better be damn proud of it.
“For freshness of voice, firmness of purpose (if a firmness always subject to scruples and second thoughts), and general delight on the page, the memoirs are fully alive to the contemporary reader in a way that James’s late novels may no longer be. Although the sentences are always labyrinthine and sometimes exhausting, the feeling at the end of each chapter is one of clarity rather than of murk: a little piece of memory has been polished bright.”
A little piece of memory? Out of some great gurgling whole of memory? I suppose just saying a memory has been polished bright would expose the dubious, hallmark card proposition in the sentence.
But why have James’s late novels failed our sophisticated contemporary readers? And isn’t there evidence against this? Of the three late masterpieces (Wings of the Dovc, the Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl), the last – GB – was filmed in 2000, and Wings of the Dove in 1995 according to IMBD.. Now, perhaps Gopnik is talking about contemporary readers born in 1995, but I think probably not. Given the regularity with which James is dramatized in tv series and movies, I’m guessing the late novels (besides The Ambassadors, which would be extremely hard to film) will sooner or later be recycled on the wheel, at which point the New Yorker will have some writer on hand to tell us why the late novels are so relevant to the now.
The IMBD list does chart a growth in the industry of bringing James to film, which, I suppose, could probably be used to chart spurts in the buying and reading of his books. Gopnik employs an entirely different method to tell us about James’s relevance – which depends entirely on the New Yorker “we”:

“Certainly, the great cult of the later James, which arose in the propaganda-fearing nineteen-forties and fifties, when he and T. S. Eliot stood above all other writers for sighs and scruples, could use a new infusion of objects. James remains a classic, of course, but a classic is not necessarily a presence. David Foster Wallace, the saint of under-thirty readers, mentions James not at all in his critical writings, and though one might take his qualifications and circlings back as Jamesian, they are employed to discriminate not more finely but to discriminate not at all—to get it in, rather than to pare it down. In a time of linguistic overkill, like the nineteen-forties, we look to literature for a language of emotional caution; in an age of irony, we look for emotional authenticity. Feeling ourselves in a desert of true feeling, we look for a feeling of truth.”

Who, exactly, feels in a desert of true feeling? And, by the way, when did David Foster Wallace become the saint of under-thirty readers? And, third question, how can we expect a new infusion of objects from a dead writer? We might live in the age of raising the level of exploitation, but even capitalism has not yet figured out how to raise the dead. Surely that should be 30-40 year old readers. I am unsure who is the patron saint of under thirty readers, or if they have one, but I do know that the New Yorker we, peering dimly out there towards Dubuque or Brooklyn, probably has decided that it must be DFW, just as they probably decided, in 1978, that all the kids were listening to Bob Dylan. As fashion reports go, the New Yorker is in a position, almost by definition, of being behind the fashions.

Once Gopnik drops his idea that he, we, and the contemporary reader are one and the same, he does same some interesting things about James’s autobiographies. As Wolcott wrote, long ago, Gopnik is decidedly smart – that is, he is smart when he decides to be. I simply wish he would decide to not issue memoranda on what we are reading or thinking or feeling today. The we reminds me of an old children's joke, the one where the lone ranger, holed up in a hut with bad guys outside, tells Tonto that we are in a bad spot, and Tonto says, what do you mean  we, Kemo sabe?

car lots as battlefields, or fair versus market

There are various degrees of hell on earth. One of them, hell-lite, is surely going shopping for a used car. We got an in your face sample of that yesterday from a used car dealership in Inglewood, run on traditional lines: the sleazy boss, the oppressed, near retirement age salesman, the attempt to pump your expressed desire (we'd like a cheap vehicle, please) into their desire (and this nearly new SUV can be yours for 18,000 dollars, cutting the price 30 percent!). And now for the part of the story that I'm not so comfortable with - as I know that those car lots are really parts of a popular culture of haggling that goes back to pre-capitalist days, and intellectually I find them interesting - but then we went to CarMax. Carmax is wonderful, I must say, for the simple reason that they sell cars as though they were commodities no different from aspirin or breakfast cereal, instead of horses being traded between nomadic tribes. So you go in, you say what you want, they show you what is on offer, you go out to see it, and that is that. 21st century, quoi! So, happily, we are replacing our car. Unhappily, the poor Greek salesman with the dyed hair in Inglewood is not getting a commission. We owe him a karmic debt.

There’s more to say about our little adventure from the Marxist point of view.  In the eighteenth century, the physiocrats and economists, as they were newly named, campaigned against the older form of market society centered on the fair – against which they proposed the market. In the fair, the exchanges were defined not simply by barter or the exchange of money for products, but by other social forces as well – tests of masculinity, alliance makinng, sexual adventure, and various non-economic pleasures. A simple way of speaking about this is to say that the products in the fair weren’t fully commoditized. In the ideal market, the products were. Transactions came down to the calculus between the utility of the consumer and the utility of the seller. In a sense, the objects were stripped of everything alien to their exchange nature.

Marx, of course, saw this logic as a social force  that would eventually sweep away all remnants of the older market society – the pre-capitalist society. As it happens, the pre-capitalist world is still all around us, even in the most capitalist of countries. Commodification meets its limits in the very nature of the nexus upon which it depends – that is, in the irresistable sociability that attends all human encouters.

Car sales in the US are strongly fair-like. Updike was shrewd, in his four Rabbit novels, to move his protagonist from a factory figure to a car salesman. Rabbit’s idea of the car lot as a place of seduction and masculine competition plugs into every car lot I’ve ever gone to. A. finds it almost unbearable, the simultaneous brazen pressure to buy and the pressure to prove one’s manhood – as she said about one of the guys we dealt with, he practically pulled down his pants and showed us his big balls. In this forum, the customer who is best adapted to haggle, to negotiate, must know about cars and must exhibit that knowledge in its ideolect. The car lot is a place for victory and defeat, not a market for economically rational transactions.

This is where Carmax is so brilliant and, from a certain perspective, so oppressive. Here, the whole culture of sociability and masculinity assembled around automobiles is calmly tossed into the garbage. There are no negotiations here, there’s no haggling, there are no victories. Just as when I buy an aspirin at the grocery store, a transaction that requires minimum knowledge of chemistry on my part and on the part of the clerk who checks me out, at CarMax, the fair like aspects of the transaction have been minimized. Interestingly, the decorations, size and layout of the place denies this simple, inhuman fact – the car lot looks much more utilitarian, with its assembled jam of cars. As the fair is condemned to death, its emblems are stolen and employed to disguise the death.    

entertainment and art - to be or not to be

Although it is usually the end of the eighteenth century that monopolizes the discussion of aesthetics in philosophy, it is a book from the beginning of the century – Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, etc. – that shaped the terms in which art was discussed by Enlightenment philosophes. In the same sense in which an allergen shapes a sneeze, it is also these terms that shaped the massive rejection under which we still live – that reaction we call modernism, romanticism, postmodernism, etc.

Shaftesbury did not directly talk about entertainment and art, because the concepts and their hostility one to the other had not crystallized in his time. But he does give us some notion about what art was about. Or, rather, he constructs two points of view by which to look at it.

From the first point of view, art is thoroughly social.  Shaftesbury writes of how the poet’s work is an “entertainment for himself and others.” The possibility that it could only be for himself is cast into doubt, however, by the whole structure of his theory of taste.

Our … endeavor, therefore, must appear this: to show that nothing is found charming or delightful in the polite world, nothing which is adopted as pleasure or entertainment of whatever kind can any way be accounted for, supported or established wiouth the pre-establishment or supposition a a certain taste.”

The separation between pleasures and entertainment is about Shaftesbury’s recognition that much of entertainment is about the “foils and contraries” that befall human actors, whether in poetry, or theater, or song, or visuall depiction. However, for Shaftesbury, the moments of degredation, pain, grief and defeat – of, in fact, ugliness, the lineaments of unhappiness - are moments in a larger scheme to depict, in full, the “beauties of the inward soul.”

This gives us our second point of view. Shaftesbury is not a puritan by any means, but he still harks after, or at least is haunted by, the old distinction between the sacred and the profane – which is now transferred to a the duality between outward show and inward beauty. If the artist is always working with the materials of outward show, he is always motivated by the impulse of inward beauty.

The model for inward beauty comes not from art: it comes from the beauty of the human form. And not any human form – rather, the paradigm is the beautiful woman. That beauty, Shaftesbury claims, is always a symbol of inward beauty. Subtract the latter, make the woman an idiot, and the outward beauty flees.

We know how this play of comparisons arises. We’ve seen this number dialed before, over and over again.  Bit by bit, entertainment – like the beauty of women – becomes a threat if it is not moralized, or held to some standard. But for Shaftesbury, entertainment is still, in the end, the kind of outward show that art does not transcend so much as use for a transcendence beyond art – into being a wholly fit member of society.

Shaftesbury’s aesthetics of taste made a good target for those who reject the surrender to taste as an ultimately servile gesture, a relic of the system of patronage. Those, that is, who were contemporary with or came after the French revolution.

It is at this point that the plot thickens; the divide, such as it is, between entertainment and art becomes a modern project. 

entertainment and art

It was in the late sixties, I think, that most American newspapers began hosting a “business” section. Of course, most of the readers of newspapers back then were laborers, but there was never a labor section. Now business sections are universal, and the last surviving labor unions are about to get a stake through their heart as the Supreme Court, that bastion of reaction, prongs them. Those Business sections were, literally, a sign of the Times.

I am not sure when I first noticed that newspapers were putting their movie, book and music reviews in a section called Arts and Entertainment. It is now a pretty standard section heading. It begs the question, or at least I am going to beg the question, of what is meant by that conjunction. What is supposed to be the difference between art on the one side and entertainment on the other?

In the seventeenth century, entertainment was a term that possessed a lot of semantic scope. It held onto its French roots in “tenir”, to hold, and meant hosting, or supporting, or amusing. In John Donne’s sermons, one can see examples of all these things. For instance, in interpreting the passage in Genesis in which Abraham feeds some strangers who turn out to be angels, Donne writes: … the angels of the Gospel come within their distance, but if you will not receive them, they can break open no doors, nor save you against your wil: the angel does, as he that sends him. Stand at the door and knock, if the door be open, he comes in, and sups with him; What gets he by that? This; he brings his dish with him; he  feeds his host, more than his host him. This is true hospitality, and entertaiment of angels, both when thou feedest Christ , in his poor members abroad, or when thouh feedest thine own soul at hom, with the company and conversation of ture and religious Christians at thy table, for these are angels.” “Entertainment” here is not only the provision of food and drink, but also of conversation – l’entretien. It is something more than providing the bare necessities.

On the other hand, Donne can also pluck amusement out of the word. In a Lent Sermon, Donne speaks of the function of the sermon and, in general, of the service. There’s an implicit self reference here, for Donne’s own sermons were pretty well wrought – were, in a word that would not have been used in his time, artistic. He speaks here of “Gods ablest Ministers, indued with the best parts, to be but as music, as a jest, as a song, as an entertainment.”

Now, a sermon is not a secular prose piece. In this respect, the binary is between the sacred and the profane, not art and entertainment. But Donne was, of course, well aware of the fact that poetry could straddle the divide between sacred and profane. Still, he does not insert, after “song”, as poetry. Entertainment, here, is something different from the entertainment of angels. It is already show business.

Is it possible, though, that all of art is show business? Or, less pejoratively, that entertainment is art and art entertainment? And that the journalistic conjunction caters to a popular misconception, an ill-made middle or high brow hierarchy?

This question is, I think, mixed up to an extent with the old division between the sacred and the profane. In particular, the exclusion of some from the Protestant and Catholic notion of the sacred.

An act of 1572, in England, proscribed "common players in interludes and minstrils." Players had to belong to the household of a baron or an honorable personage - hence Shakespeare's membership in the "Queens men." The punishment for being a wandering player ranged from whipping, to having your ears lopped off, to being shipped out of the district.

Entertainers, like Jews and slaves, were outside the bounds of the Holy City - Augustine's City of God, Christian Europe’s millennial long dream. They were, one way or another, under the ban of social death. It wasn’t only the Puritans who objected to the actor. Here’s Bossuet, a French bishop, commenting about Moliere, who - according to legend - died right after acting in La Malade imaginaire: he "passed from the pleasantries of theater, among which he practically drew his last breath, to the judgment seat of him who said: cursed be those who laugh now, for you shall cry." 

I’ve been thinking about these things since the death of David Bowie, wondering about how to characterize him: Entertainer? Artist? Or is there a difference? Does the and stand?

Bowie

“… over in Detroit Bowie’s followers were like something out of Fellini’s Satyricon: full tilt pleasure seekers devoid of anything resemlbing shame, limits, caution and moral scruples. I distinctly remember a local lesbian bike gang riding their bikes into the foyer of the concert hall and revving them loudly just prior to Bowie’s arrival onstage. This had not been pre-arranged.. Meanwhile, the toilets were literally crammed with people either having sex or necking pills. The whole building was like some epic porn film brought to twitching life. “ – Nick Kent, Apathy for the devil

The old guard, who were all in their early thirties when Bowie broke in the early seventies, hated him. Lester Bangs’s contempt for Bowie’s inauthenticity, as he saw it, was never surprised into reconsideration by anything Bowie ever did. Christgau, in a telling phrase, spoke of Bowie’s relationship to rock as “expedient”. In other words, there was always a distance, the distance of a man choosing. Bowie was always a changeling and never a convert. That put a huge bug up their asses. This was considered not the mark of higher artistry, by these guys, but the mark of a phoney. If you trawl through reviews of Bowie from the early seventies, you can come up with astonishing stuff – astonishingly stupid stuff. Martin Amis, for instance, reviewed a Bowie concert in 1973 by channeling his father, Kingsley Amis’s, voice and gags – it makes for painful reading, as though Amis were already the superannuated clubman he has since become. It is as if he listened to the concert through an ear trumpet.

Usually, when a singer dies, one goes through memory’s rolodex: I remembering hearing song x here, or song y there, or this concert, etc. The death of celebrities brings out our own narcissism in spades.

But Bowie was always a master of distances, and I’m not sure an album of fan experiences does him justice. What Kent saw, in Detroit, was a part of the same effect that repulsed the rock critics. In the underhistory of the 70s, where lesbian biker gangs are as important as Oil shocks, Bowie is onof the great monument – similar, in his mastery of the uses to which alienation could be put, to Foucault.  Foucault debated Noam Chomsky in 1971 on a Dutch talk show hosted by an anarchist. Afterwards, Chomsky said of Foucault, “ I’d never met anyone who was so totally amoral.” This, I think, comments on a style of presentation – and in that sense, Foucault and Bowie were on the same wavelength.

Of course, it was a moment, a brief throb. Disorder is all too pitiably subject to order – a sort of reverse or negative entropy. Bowie moved on. The forces unleashed in that historic moment had their effect, but the larger forces that we contend with, now, every day, either confronted and defeated them or poisoned them through all the institutions at the disposal of the establishment. But I like to think about how he had this moment.

And now he’s  shockingly dead and all.

feelings, year 1

This week they are discussing feelings in Adam’s class. Feelings are represented by faces, drawn on the board. One face is labeled sick. Its eyes are closed and its tongue is hanging out. It sticks out from the scale of other feelings in as much as we probably think of being sick as a physiological rather than an emotional feeling. As always, though, emotional talk is fraught with a certain categorial precarity, since, after all, all emotional feelings, we also feel, are physiological states.

Another face shows a gaping mouth, and is labeled surprise. Another shows a frown and a lowering brow, and is labeled anger. Another is a smily face, and is labeled happy. Still another shows tears, and is labeled sad.

The faces are drawn by one of the teachers, who has a knack for caricature. You would say,at first glance, that the faces were boys. But in fact, there are no real clues to the sex of each face, save for the fact that the conventions of showing girls in childworld are absent. No flowing hair.

Adam seems to have taken the lesson here to mean that, just as one recites the alphabet, one rehearses the emotions exemplified in each face. When I came to pick him up yesterday, he decided to represent anger. He told me to “go away”. Taking him home, he continued to bear a frown and to use a lot of negatives, until I asked him if he was angry. Yes, he told me. Why, I asked. I’m mad for me, he replied.

Oh, the onto-genesis of the novelistic impulse! Or at least the thespian one. Adam soon stopped being mad when he got home. “Being” here is, of course, sous rature –playing is more like it. Although playing at some point became being. That point, that cursed point, is forever shifting, forever under disguise, forever a thing that one can’t grasp one’s whole life long, really. 

dickens and virginia woolf

In the twenties, according to V.S. Pritchett, it was fashionable to disparage Charles Dickens, at least among the modernist set. Two disparate writers from that period, Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf, seem to bear Pritchett out. Waugh, famously, employed Dickens work as a tool of torture in Handful of Dust, when the hapless Tony Last is captured by an Amazonian eccentric and forced to read to him from Dickens’ collected works, an unhappy end if there ever was one. In Waugh’s one extended essay on Dickens, a review of the large Life of Dickens published by Edgar Johnson, he had a lot of fun shooting spitballs at the “disgusting hypocrite”. Dickens wishy washy liberalism and complete absense of a sense of original sin put him outside Waugh’s ultramontane disposition. No man is a hero to his letter readers – especially Dickens, whose hypocrisies can be tracked with cruel accuracy. Even in the 1870s, when the first collection of Dickens letters were published, an anonymous writer at the Spectator commented that Dickens’ vaunted radicalism never amounted to much, and certainly didn’t prevent him from supporting the South over the North in the American Civil war, nor from sympathizing ardently with Governer Eyre, the crown’s ruler in Jamaica, who put down a rebellion by randomly hanging black people. For his methods, John Stuart Mill tried ardently to have him imprisoned. He not only failed, but his outraged white constituents voted him out of office.

However, this is Dickens the public figure – and private man. Even Waugh admits that Dickens is a “mesmerist” as a writer – which had become, by the time,  a great cliché of Dickens criticism. It is rooted in some fact: Dickens fancied himself a mesmerist, and even attempted a mesmeric cure on one Madame de la Rue, an acquaintance from Genoa. After Dickens took to spending the night with her, giving her the benefit of his “visual ray”, Dickens’ wife made him break off his ‘cure’ – which Dickens held forever against her. He was a miserable husband. The list of things Dickens held against his wife could fill a three decker novel. Their domestic scene is not a pretty picture.

Virginia Woolf, who is, in most ways, a much more intelligent critic than Evelyn Waugh, was also uneasy with Dickens. Her family had extensive acquaintance with Thackeray, and this may have made set her tribally against Dickens – there was no love lost between the two Victorian novelists. However, one of the best essays about Dickens, Virginia Woolf’s reflections on David Copperfield, is a critical lodestone for me – it so exactly describes my own varied reaction to Dickens writing. She begins the essay with references to seasonal occurences, to the ripening of fruit and to sunshine, as if Dickens were not a writer but a phenomenon of the same sort – which is just what he seems to be, Woolf implies, when read in childhood. But can a Dickens novel survive a second reading? Or are his characters – for Woolf’s idea, ultimately, is that Dickens novels are crowds of characters, that he keeps going in his novels by “throwing another character on the pyre”  – “been attacked by the parching wind which blows about books and, without our reading them, remodelsm them and changes their features while we sleep?” Again, we note the confusion of culture and nature – the kind of thing Roland Barthes loved to disentangle. That parching wind and our sleep are definitely social phenomena, although they do take on the authoritative, irresistable shape of natural forces at play. The closed book does seem to sleep – or we seem to close ourselves up like a book when we sleep.  The parallel is inexhaustible, and rediscoveries aspects of both sleeping and books – or trivializes them.

The next two lines of the essay are often quoted as though they reflected Woolf’s opinion, rather than the opinion of the fashion of her time, to which she is responding: “The rumor about Dickens is to the effect that his sentiment is disgusting and his style commonplace; that in reading him every refinement must be hidden and every sensibility kept under glass; but that with these precaustions and reservations, he is of course Shakespearean; like Scott a born creator; like Balzac prodigious in his fecundity; but, rumor adds, it is strange that while one reads Shakespeare and one reads Scott, the precise moment for reading Dickens seldom comes our way.”

I think we would substitute Austin for Scott now, but with this qualification, what rumor has whispered into Woolf’s ear does not seem far fetched to me. It is against that rumor that Woolf makes – in an act of culture over nature – the choice to take up Dickens, to make this the precise moment for re-reading David Copperfield.

Woolf provides an interesting reading of the ‘rumor’ – Dickens, in her version, has pre-eminently the virtues of the male writer, and also the vices. He has humor, but curiously fumbles the emotional; he has description, but is curiously unable or unwilling to plumb the interior. He is, Woolf thinks, a genius when it comes to movement, but a failure when we need to slow down and reflect. She puts her finger on something that exactly reproduces my experience of Dickens: “Then, indeed, he fails grotesquely, and the pages in which he describes what, to our convention, are the peaks and pinnacles of human life, the explanation of Mrs. Strong, the despair of Mrs. Steerforth, or the anguish of Ham, are of an indescribable unreality – of that uncompfortable complexion which, if we heard Dickens talking so in real life, would either make us blush to the roots of our hair, or dash out of the room to conceal our laughter.”

I think that one can be embarrassed by Dickens in exactly this way. It is why one resists the re-reading. Remembering the almost sickly sweetness of Esther Summerson in Bleak House makes me wary of reading the novel one more time. And Esther is probably his most developed female figure. There are, of course, self suppressing, virtuous women in Balzac, but they show themselves capable of robbery and murder if their passions are lit. They have a sexual life, even if it is on hold, and one feels that they like to have it.

However, what is strange, to me, about Woolf’s assessment of Dickens is that she never comments on what must surely have struck her, especially in David Copperfield: the theme of extreme cruelty to children.

I’m re-reading David Copperfield. It is a striking novel. Like those bridges that are supposedly alluded to in London Bridge is falling down, at the beginning of it we find a sacrificed child. Dickens was a master of the story of cruelty to children, but I think David Copperfield’s betrayal by his mother and his beating and expulsion by the Murdstones is the culminating episode in the series. The equation of the family and the cult is seen all too often in the news. Cults often seem to develop around an initial separation of the child from the family and his or her subjection to extreme violence of one type or another. These are not separate moments, or need not be. In Copperfield’s case, Mr. Murdstone’s control and humiliation of the child, leading up to the scene of David being beaten with a cane and retaliating by biting Murdstone’s hand, is doublesided: it is also a process in which Mrs. Copperfield, now Murdstone’s bride, is completely dominated. Mrs. Copperfield is one of those unfortunate Dickens women. In a conversation with Steerforth – Copperfield’s schoolmate and hero, with whom he accepts a relationship much like that of his mother to Murdstone – there’s a perfect expression of all that is wrong, genderwise, with Dickens:  

 'Good night, young Copperfield,' said Steerforth. 'I'll take care of you.' 'You're very kind,' I gratefully returned. 'I am very much obliged to you.'

'You haven't got a sister, have you?' said Steerforth, yawning.

'No,' I answered.

'That's a pity,' said Steerforth. 'If you had had one, I should think she would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-eyed sort of girl. I should have liked to know her. Good night, young Copperfield.'           

Although Dickens is warning us about Steerforth’s character, through his mouth we get Dickens own compulsively presented heroine. Unlike, say, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, Dickens could never conceive of a woman with a real intellectual life,

Dickens is an artist of exaggeration, and this spirit even visits his restraint. The key to the first part of the book is David Copperfield’s feeling of betrayal by his mother – and the hatred that it generates. That hatred is not expressed in words, but instead, in a strained attempt to continue to love this woman.

But to continue with the cultic undertext: it is interesting that Copperfield’s expulsion from his house is accompanied by a comically treated fasting as the boy makes his way to London. Though he begins with a meal, he doesn’t eat it – the waiter does, keeping up a standard kind of Dickens waiter patter. In fact, he doesn’t eat until he reaches London, right before he is taken to Salem, the deserted school – which, as we will learn, is presided over by the sadistic Creakle – and fitted with a banner: TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE BITES. This is the end of the initiatory period in Copperfield’s life.

This violence and its suppression create such a profound disequilibrium in the story that it becomes political – Copperfield’s sense of Murdstone and Creakle as tyrants tells us something very dirty about the formation of the political father, or the boss. The child and the “timid, bright woman” are brought together as exemplary victims – their vulnerability is their attraction. But, of course, children are not women – in that neurotic equation, the chance to overthrow the political father is lost.

It is this, I think, which makes Dickens sentimentality so disheartening. He comes so far, and then he falls so short.