dogwhistles, from Reagan to Trump

Last week, the NYT published an oped by Jacob Weisberg, the contrarian liberal - that is, not liberal at all, but for liberal reasons! - which presented a truly funny image of Ronald Reagan as a moderate president. It sorta skipped Iran contra, or Reagan's economics plan, or the tax raises on the bottom 80 percent for fica paralleled by halving the tax rate on the wealthiest. 
But the funniest thing that Weisberg skipped was Reagan on race. Sure, he was friends with Sammy Davis, Jr. But basically, Reagan on race was the guy who went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been killed in 1964, and spoke out straightforwardly for.... state's rights. The same shit Goldwater shoveled when he voted against the Civil Rights bill of 1964 (that's the Goldwater that was Hillary Clinton's first political enthusiasm, by the way), In retrospect, the establishment does not like American presidents to be monsters. It so disturbs the cucumber sandwiches and tea. But of course, Reagan was a very big monster.
Trump playing the dance with the KKK - an organization he apparently never heard of - is just following in the great Ronnie's footsteps. It will be fun hearing establishment GOP types playing the game of walking the razor's edge between overt racism - of which they wholeheartedly disapprove - and covert racism - which they wholeheartedly like to generate. For a moment, though, they have all put down the dogwhistles and gaped: doesn't the Donald know how to play this game?.

the stick

They came and killed the trees today.

Or at least they seriously lop-otomized them. If spring is i-cumen in in Santa Monica, the sap in our trees won’t be rushing to the edge of the foliage to see it, for we aint’got any. More seriously, the sunlight that filters through the leaves as we have breakfast on the patio will now fall on us without intervention.  

Such is the downside.

The upside is that our tree barbers left behind a rain of stick.

Adam soon spotted the sticks including a long, tapered, easy to grasp number, which he promptly seized. And thus he was inducted into the four dimensions of stick-ness.

The four dimensions are, as every child knows: a. the sword; b., the drumstick; c. the gun (or as Adam thinks of it, one of those things that goes pu ew pu ew and shoots out balls, his interpretation of a paint ball gun ad he saw); and d, the poker.

Adam began by flourishing the stick like a  sword, and followed in exactly the above order. Actually, there is a fifth dimension – the cane – but Adam has not figured this out yet. Or perhaps he is not interested. He did have a model in me, when I was hobbling about on crutches all last summer. Maybe Adam, like his Dad, had enough of that nonsense.

I remember the sticks of my youth! To find just the right stick was one of the scouting talents you picked up if your home was anywhere near a stand of trees broad enough to be called a woods or a swamp. Our neighborhood in Georgia was furnished with both the woods and a swamp, and I spent many a happy afternoon in one or the other, building big muddy dams, pacing along trails, climbing trees, and playing the games: hide and seek, treasure hunt, pirates, and other, jungle-themed ones. It seemed that a lot of children’s tv was set in jungle locales back in those days. Inevitably, sticks played a large part in all of these games.

In Northern Georgia, at the time, there was an abundance of pine. I’ve heard that some beetle borne plague is steadily de-conifering Georgia, which is a shame, even though the conifers are surely an invasive species, which came in after the first cutting. Pine sticks usually had rough bark on them, and you had to strip it off. This usually left your fingers sticky with the reisen residue. Sticky fingers and that green coniferous smell form a leitmotif of my spring days in the fifth grade in Georgia, and I imagine it was the same for many another small child.

As well as the scratchy ramble through the underbrush, and the looking for gold nuggets in the creek (we must have seen some film about gold panning in the North Georgia mountains). Also, catching crawfish in jars.  I also remember a long vine which hung above a hillside that descended int o a ravine, which you could, nerving yourself, swing on.

That was the world in which the stick held a great importance. Still, today, when I go hiking, I like a good stick. I keep a watch for them. When I find one big enough, I use it to walk with. Of course, it is not really necessary – I’ve never been on a trail where I had to use a stick to pull me forward. However, it is psychologically necessary. I like the nice familiar feel of the point of the stick coming down on the soil, perhaps indenting it a little. And I like, most of all, the companionship of it. In the stick, I am allied to all of nature.

I rather envy Adam his coming discoveries in the stick department. Although… he is bound to be a Paris boy, and we don’t come by sticks so easily in the streets, there. In the park, yes. And when he is visiting his relatives. At the moment, here in California, this is one of the perks, I guess.

puzzling as an art form

There’s a story Dorothy Parker told about herself in an interview in the Paris Review. It concerns one of her first jobs, working as a theater critic at Vanity Fair, with Robert Benchley:

“Both Mr. Benchley and I subscribed to two undertaking magazines: The Casket and Sunnyside. Steel yourself: Sunnyside had a joke column called “From Grave to Gay.” I cut a picture out of one of them, in color, of how and where to inject embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk until Mr. Crowninshield asked me if I could possibly take it down. Mr. Crowninshield was a lovely man, but puzzled.”

The two parts of this anecdote are perfect. The first part, of course, comes from the undertaking magazine. The picture of the corpse showing how and where to take embalming fluid could be the icon of modernism – it was the patient etherized upon a table taken to the next degree. It replaced piety with a cold and probing curiosity; it looked at our ends, and subtracted the transcendental purpose.

The second part comes from the response. “Mr. Crowninshield was a lovely man, but puzzled.” I think that sums up the critical afterlife suffered by Dottie Parker: a puzzled receptiveness. Such cruelty, or coldness, stemming from a woman. Even today, when there’s been a large shift in gender perceptions, Parker is often dismissed as a woman who refused to grow up. She was witty, we all agree, but in the end too disagreeably puzzling.

Of all effects, the one that irritates the puritan conscious the most is that of ‘puzzling’. We want identity. We want positions. We want the ism and we want it now. Puzzling, which delays the immediacy of intellectual gratification, might be allowed as a start: we have the problem, yes? And we have the solution. But the problem for its own sake? The puzzle as the answer? Forget it.

These reactions depend, of course,on the cultural currents. In the twenties, as consumerism replaced the great American economic force – agriculture – and the cities grew in tandem with the stock market – when the combine of organized crime, forbidden substance, and the expansion of the police became established as  one of the basic forms of governance – writers took up the puzzle, the tease, and the wisecrack as valid responses to life within unclear parameters. Perhaps this is why of all decades, I love the twenties, a miraculous decade for literature across cultures. Parker was alert to all of it. She spotted Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner. She understood the Mencken canon in which Dreiser figured as a great novelist and at the same time as an idiot when it came to general ideas. And in her greatest stories – like Big Blonde – she put in the pick and pumped in embalming fluid, destroying the mirror as the archetypal instrument of realism.

You can never be cold enough if you are going into that line of work. 

suggestions for black history month

I'm thinking that for black history month we should imagine equality among the races. That would mean, for instance, that black median household income would have to triple - triple - to be on parity with white median household income. That means black unemployment would have to drop a whole 5 percent. If white unemployment were at the same level as black unemployment, we would be talking about a depression. That means that at a minimum, of the eleven million people per year who are served with warrents or have to spend a night in jail or make bail or are otherwise processed through the American gulag, only 10 percent, rather than 40 or 50, would be black. Wow, what a picture. America without apartheid. It is only a dream if we don't demand it, speak it, and talk about it 12 months of the year.

so much depends upon

So much depends, in the William Carlos Williams poem, on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water. Lily Briscoe, in To The Lighthouse, thinks “so much depends… upon distance.” The echoes here are arbitrary – and yet not entirely so. These are both modernist promts, both programmatic and surprisingly inside the programmatic space, in the art, which is no longer, if it ever was, innocent of the frame that it knows it will eventually bear. The innocence of the past is, of course, a construct of nostalgia, but it is, as well, a necessary fiction for getting us started, for the project of being contemporary. At some point in that project, retrospectively, we know we will have to dismantle that innocence, expose its never-was. But so much depends upon timing, here.

I’ve been working on my novel this month, trying to finish it up at least to the point of sending it out with a few chapters uninhabited, but planned – and I’ve been immersed in Woolf, from the diaries and letters to the novels and the esssays.  My materials in my novel are Williams, that corruption in the American grain, but certain formal ideas keep going back to Woolf.  For Williams, the poem was a machine made of words. I think Woolf would reject that description, finding it too obscuring, too foreshortened, too denotative. At the same time, she would have appreciated, or at least placed, the gesture, the intended shock. She, too, was out to shock the genteel tradition. Woolf’s sense of the distances that so much depends upon is, I think, to use the vocabulary of the time, more organic than mechanical. This is the scent Wyndham Lewis, that piggish misogynist, picked up.

This isn’t to say that Briscoe’s aesthetic is Woolf’s m.o. So much depends upon what the novel is supposed to do. Woolf is a novelist of networks rather than monuments – of dispersed inspirations, with their elliptical, filamental connections, rather than of focused worldviews, with their concentrated centers, their Blooms always departing and always coming home. For her, I suppose you could say, as much depends on the rain coming down to glaze the red wheelbarrow as on the wagon itself. Distance is a matter of a shift of attention that is both part of the scene and fashions it – it is part of the way, in the current of revelations in which things light up or darken, we capture the state of attention and its exterior referent without ultimately privileging one or the other. She has, accordingly, less time for the crowd – for the voice of the people which flows through Williams – given the fact that the multiple voices can only be handled through an intolerable simplification of their grains and aspects. Complexity, in Wolf’s terms, requires a more simple grouping in order for art not to muddy its insights entirely.  Proximity is achieved, but at the price of completeness.

And yet .. there is the marvelous city scene in Jacob’s Room, which certainly attempts and succeeds in the same way that Joyce’s Wandering Rocks succeeds – in the city as a sort of multi-tasked, alive scene.

That is something, a means, that I want to steal for myself. 

Mr. Fuck Fuck

I haven’t heard Mr. Fuck-Fuck today, but it is still early.

He’s become a part of the neighborhood. There is a colloquialism – “tear” – which means to move forward rapidly. He tore off in the car. When Mr. Fuck-Fuck goes down the street, I think of that word, and how he literally does seem to tear the air as he is avoided by all passerbys. Is it Tourettes syndrom? I’m not sure. The linguistic agenda doesn’t seem to vary as it does, or so I’ve read, with Tourettes. It is always a stream of fuck. Motherfuck Fuck. Sometimes bitch. Fuck that bitch. Then back to Fuck. At the top of his voice. The voice is powerful, especially when you see the scrawny man who emits it.

To judge by his clothes and grooming, Mr. Fuck-Fuck is cared for by someone. He is not dressed in the dumpster rags that the street people wear. He is dressed, even, rather nattily, and his beard has been trimmed. It makes me wonder about his private life. Is it a sister, a brother, a mother, an aunt who takes care of him? Most likely the caregiver is female. And most likely she is in tears part of the day. I would be. But what is she going to do?

As he tears down our sidewalk, he scares Adam. That’s normal. He scares me. It is the violence of the stream of gros mots which emerge from his body. Not just from his mouth or throat. It is as if the words rose from his very heels. He is bent, slightly, under the violence of them.

I have never seen a stronger case of language literally  seizing a person. Perhaps there is even something sacred about it. Doesn’t all poetry aspire to the condition of tourettes syndrom? Inspiration, that much derided concept, seems to me to be amply justified by the data of neurology. It could befall any of us – to take care of such a person. To be such a person. We are all God’s children, and fragile vessels at that. I salute the unknown hand that lays out Mr. Fuck-Fuck’s clothes. It is better, more patient, than mine. 

science tells us clinton was influenced by her wall street money. Class consciousness denies it.

There is really no mystery about influence and money. It has been studied. Here’s a report from the frontlines of study:
“A forthcoming article in Perspectives on Politics by (my former colleague) Martin Gilens and (my sometime collaborator) Benjamin Page marks a notable step in that process. Drawing on the same extensive evidence employed by Gilens in his landmark book “Affluence and Influence,” Gilens and Page analyze 1,779 policy outcomes over a period of more than 20 years. They conclude that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
This being so, I’ve been puzzled that Sanders health care proposals have been exhaustively explained by the explainers – such as the neo-liberals at Vox – while, so far, I’ve seen no policy wonk jump up and say, that it is as likely that Clinton is influenced by the money she has made on Wall Street as it is that humans influence Climate change.
I’m not surprised. Not because the explainers are in Clinton’s camp. Rather, this is an issue of class. Many studies have shown that people in the upper and upper middle class view friendship and gifts differently.
But how do these class norms work? A small part of the answer was provided by Charlotte Linde, who did ethnographic work to find out how identification with a group worked. Interestingly, she found out that it works both in the present and on the way people interpret their past. I’ve written about this before, so I am going to largely quote from my blog.
“Charlotte Linde is a rather brilliant ethnographer broadly within the symbolic interaction school – although not participating in that schools downhill slide into the irrelevance of infinitely coding conversations to make the smallest of small bore points. Rather, she has taken Labov’s idea that a story is a distinguishable discursive unit and researched Life Stories – she wrote the standard book on the subject.

In 2000, she wrote an article about her study of the synbolic dynamics at an insurance firm with the truly great title, “The acquisition of a speaker by a story: how history becomes memory and identity.” Identity, with its columnally Latinate Id seemingly standing for noun in general, has during the course of my lifetime been dipped in the acid of the verbal form, and now little leagurers talk of identifying with their team – their grandparents would, of course, used identify to talk not of a subjective process of belonging, but an objective process of witnessing, as in, can you identify the man who you saw shoot mr x in this courtroom? Conservative hearts break as the columnar Id falls to the ground, but that’s life, kiddo.

Linde’s article introduces a marvelous phrase: narrative induction. “I define narrative induction as the process by which people come to take on an existing set of stories as their own story…” (2000:608)My editor’s eye was pleased and did a little dance all over my face to see that this was the second sentence in the article – getting people to forthrightly state their topic is, surprisingly, one of the hardest things about editing academic papers. Most graduate students have concluded, from experience, that the best way to make a point is to hide it somewhere, perhaps on page 5, and hope that their advisor doesn’t see it for fear of being attacked. The rough and tumble of intellectual debate is the Ur-traumatic experience of the classroom – funny that this hasn’t been investigated, rather than mindlessly celebrated. But alors, avancez, boys and girls!

Narrative induction properly locates story as part of a process of initiation (which, being a “native” thing, or occult, failed to qualify for the verbal place held by identify with). Linde, in this paper, is obviously moving from her concern with stories people tell about themselves – the point of which is to say something significant about the self, and not the world – to stories people tell about the world. Those stories often are about experiences not one’s own. They are non-participant narratives.

Linde divides the NPN process– as she calls it – into three bits: how a person comes to take on someone else’s story; how a person comes to tell their own story in a way shaped by the stories of others; and how that story is heard by others as an instance of a normative pattern.

There is an area, as Linde points out, where work on this has been done: in religious studies. Specifically, the study of metanoia, conversion stories. But there’s metanoia and then there’s metanoia. There’s St. Paul on the way to Damascas, and there’s Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, on the way to the relative wealth of a Toyota Car Dealership, owned by his father-in-law. Linde, not having access to St. Paul, opted to study Midwestern insurance sales people. Like Labov, Linde is interested in class issues. In particular, stories of occupational choice. In her Life Stories book, she presented some evidence that professionals present their occupational choice stories in terms of some vocation or calling, while working class speakers present it, more often, in terms of accident or need for money. Philosophy professors rarely will say, for instance, well, I needed a steady paycheck, looked at the job security of tenure, loved the idea of travel and vacation time, so I went into philosophy. They will give a story rooted in their view of themselves as emotional/cognitive critters. Labov’s work was done in the seventies, and my guess is that there has been some shift. The notion that it is all chance for the blue collar worker, all vocation for the white collar, actually tallies well with the political economists notion that abstract labor is a thing like clay, to mold as you want to: we will train workers over here in the steel producing sector, and take off some here who are growing tomatoes. They won't mind - human products are infinitely re-trainable, and have no feelings about what they do.

But that feeling for abstract labor changes as one goes up the class scale. And it is here that I think we can locate the incredulity and surprise and the suspicion of innuendo when Sanders says that Clinton took a shitload of money from Wall Street and is likely to be influenced in her views as president by that closeness to Wall Street. For to the upper class ear, this sounds like saying Clinton did something low and blue collar like accept money for her views, instead of high and upper class like making the kind of money she deserved (as past secretaries of state and senators, going all the way back to … the eighties have done) as her due.
The knot of money received and the story that one’s life is actually determined by one’s feelings and beliefs and higher vocation – it comes out here.
I would bet that if you took a survey of the highly visible journalists, those who work for the NYT and WAPO and the networks, and you ask them what drove their vocational choice, we would hear all about ideals, and nothing about high salaries. Because high salaries, or large amounts of cultural capital, go with forgetting money, in a sense. It becomes a sort of imaginary friend.
This, of course, has been the premise for many a comedy about some richly salaried person coming abruptly down the ladder in life, where money becomes the overt motive for what you do.

While it would be acceptable - that is, it would conform to our class perceptions - for a truck driver to tell us that he or she was motivated by the excellent pay, a presidential candidate who said the same thing would cause a scandal. We expect instead a different ethos in the best and brightest. Which is why one feels a semiotic jar between Hillary Clinton expressing a certain humility about serving in public office and the same person saying that she made 675,000 dollars for three speeches because "that is what they offered".

the naivete of peace

D.C., as we all know, swims in a culture of impunity. Denizens of the New Republic, who in the Bush years showed such a hawkish appetite for the invasion of Iraq that the jaws of the advocates seemed to be dripping with the blood – let me hasten to say, with the blood of freedom, free enterprise and muscular liberalism – are out in force throwing contempt on Sanders’ lack of foreign policy knowledge and … muscular liberalism.

This article from Business Insider is typical Clinton wants to lead in the Middle East, whereas Sanders idea that there could be a coalition between Iran and Saudi Arabia is just “puzzling”. Indeed it is, since it calls the game: do the Saudis really want to defeat Isis? After all that money from Saudi sources flowed to Isis at the beginning of their revolt against Iraq?

I agree with the criticism that Sanders is a bit naïve about foreign policy, in as much as he hasn’t oriented himself to pounding into the heads of the populace that negotiation is not a sign of weakness, but of humanity. But to see the Clinton camp, unquestioned, tell us Sanders wants to let Iranian soldiers into Syria, on “the very border of Israel”, begs questions of its own.

For instance, here’s one, a lonely one, so far unasked by any reporter that I can see:

What does Clinton think of the fact that the Cia has supervised Saudi training and arming of rebels in Syria in  2013?  Does she  think the Saudis are trying to forge a secular state in Syria?

Ah, but why ask that question – a question that has been answered in the past, with the Mujahedeen in Afganistan, and with Sunni insurgents in Iraq during the occupation, and the Saudi invasion of Bahrain during Clinton’s term of office at State – when it betrays terrible naivete! Why, everything will turn out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. In maybe fifteen years – about the amount of time  the US and all of King Saul’s army has been battling the Taliban in Afghanistan.

I do fault Sanders for not questioning this more. If, as the odds show, Clinton is nominated, there will not  be a chance again to question the utter bankruptcy of hawkish policy in the Middle East.  

quid pro quo culture

The quid pro quo culture

Clinton’s response to the question about being paid 625,000 dollars for giving three speeches to Goldman Sachs stirred up some interest, and a lot of vitriol from Sanders supporters. While I understand the vitriol, I think it is important to broaden the response. Clinton didn’t invent this culture. She simply floats in it.

It is a matter not so much of being bought, but of being cognitively captured – which by easy degrees effects the career arc. Instead of using Clinton as an example, lets use Bernanke.

In 2009, the Fed, along with Treasury, engineered a controversial bailout of AIG. AIG was the party to financial instruments – bets – made, on a tremendous scale, by numerous counterparties. Among those counterparties was Citadel, a Chicago based hedge fund.

Now, Citadel was hit by the meltdown in 2008. According to Bloomberg Business:

“Investors in Citadel Investment Group’s two main hedge funds can take solace in the fact that 2008 has finally come to an end. Of course, that won’t ease the pain of seeing those two porfolios lose about 53% of their value going into the final week of the year.”

Thus, there is every reason to believe that Citadel was on its last legs in 2009. But it survived. One of the bright spots in that year was that AIG, far from dealing with Citadel as a bankrupt insurance firm and thus paying out a penny on the dollar, dealt with Citadel as a company with the infinite resources of the U.S. Government behind it and paid out a dollar on a dollar – 200 million of them.

Thus, Citadel owes its continued existence, in no small part, to the decisions of Ben Bernanke.

And now Ben Bernanke is making a considerable sum – probably in the millions – working for Citadel.

Do I think that Ken Griffen, Citadel’s Daddy Bucks, sat down with Ben B. and said, you get us that 200 million and you have a job with us, wink wink? No, of course not. Rather, in the course of time, as Bernanke was feeling his way to the exit at the Fed, an offer to a highly respected figure in the financial community was perhaps made by some intermediary that led to Bernanke taking his job with Citadel. That’s how the revolving door works.

This is the problem that Sanders is hammering on. Clinton was not bribed to do anything in particular for Goldman Sachs. But it is very likely that Goldman Sachs will get a very respectful hearing when she is president. I expect she will be president, in fact. I am hoping that Sanders shrill denunciations make the relationship between the Clinton administration and the banks much less comfortable. 

morning in santa monica

Morning in Santa Monica. For a long time, now, I have been walking Adam to school and then returning home to work, or to read. I’ve been enclosed in a little capsule of winter routine. Today I decided to walk down to the ocean. The beach was largely empty – meaning, really, that there were few people there. I walked across the expanse of sand to where the bank over where the ocean was lapping up on shore, then loped my way down the beach, heading away from the pier, towards Malibu. I encountered birds, lots of seabirds. One colony of very large pelicans, five of them, with those faces, elongated, brightly colored, somehow reminiscent of an African mask, or of Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon. Slightly frightening, the length of beak. As I passed them I actually glanced back, as if they might be following me.

I came upon a curlew. It was on the edge of the watermark left by the ocean, which at this hour was rumpled by low tide. It had the nice curved beak, not the sandpiper’s straight beak. I stopped. The curlew stopped. I began to think about the curlew’s life. We are told that the beasts of the air and those that creep upon the ground are driven primarily by sex and food. There’s some validity to that p.o.v. – it is one in which we have simply the species and the vehicle of the species, the contingent piece of it. However, what the p.o.v. doesn’t indicate is all the down time in between. This curlew, for instance, stopped perhaps because of me, perhaps because he just stopped. He was evidently having as much of a down time moment as I was myself. First, he waggled his tail, then he strutted a bit, then he stopped. He seemed to be contemplating his bill. If he were a character in a Victorian novel, I would say that he was contemplating his bill with enormous satisfaction.  He also had his head cocked in a certain way, so that he seemed to be listening to the ocean’s eternal laundering. Of course, I am aware that my ocean and my sounds depend entirely on my sensory equipment, which is at setting different from his. Birds, I have read, commonly hear sounds at a higher frequency than humans. If that makes sense. And of course the whole rods n cones arrangement of the eyes is different. The curlew was seeing or processing different pictures than I was. Probably it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to take what we know about bird physiology and fashion some Virtual Reality helmet so that we see and hear on the settings that they see and hear. Yet I don’t think this would get us too near what the bird – what my bird, the curlew – is like, to use Nagel’s phrase. It would be like reading a bad and misleading translation of a book from a foreign language.

The curlew, at rest, stood first on his two legs, then, after a while, on one leg only. I didn’t catch it when he lifted up the other leg. It happened in an instant. I must say that my concentration on the bird was interupted by glances up the beach, and oceanward. I wondered again when we were ever going to visit the Catalina Islands. I wondered about a few things that I decided were distracting me from the beach, like the news. Fuck the news.

Then the curlew was back in a two legged posture, and then it strutted down to the watermark. It stood there and the ocean came up and foamed around its talons. It was indifferent to the water. When the water receded, it started hunting with its curved beak in the sand, and finding things I couldn’t see. The vehicle was seized by the species urge. I bestirred myself and made off in the direction of the pedestrian bridge that is right after the repairs they are making to the entrance to the PCH at California ave.  When I got on the bridge, I saw two men filming a man and a woman. The man, a lanky, older white guy, bald, but with a fringe of somewhat ridiculous long hair, was doing a dance step in synch with a lithe younger black woman. Two steps to one side, two steps to the other side, throw your arms up. I could see the man was the worse dancer. I could tell the dancer from the dance easy enough. I interrupted the session and crossed over the bridge.

Those dancers, I thought. Species or vehicle, vehicle or species.