stalactites versus stalagmites at the end of history

There was a fad, in the eighties, for comparing the French Revolution unfavorably to the American Revolution. In that illwind of a decade, the reasoning was reliably coldwar-ish: the French Revolution led straight to the Gulag, whereas the American revolution led to: America!

In hindsight, and even then, one could see what was bogus about this judgment. For instance, its in your face racism. Black people simply didn’t count for the Francois Furet kind of historian. For another thing, the genocide necessary to create a white nation on the North American continent didn’t count. And finally, the judgment was really not about the Gulag, but about the great countervailing egalitarianism of the post-war years. It was that egalitarian that the cold war historians were particularly eager to dismantle.

Of course, this dismantling was never put so crudely. In fact, a synthesis between in-egalitarianism and egalitarianism was established, under the aegis of neo-liberalism. Here, the destruction of egalitarianism as a force in the political economy was coupled with egalitarianism as a civil matter. To put it in the class terms that were such a taboo in the Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand years, the upper class – which was almost entirely white, but was also a compound of people with different sexual desires and genders – accepted a certain kind of feminism and a certain kind of gay rights; both denuded of their original, grass-roots connection with larger issues of class. This meant that feminism was reshaped to consist of “breaking the glass ceiling” for upper class women, and not at all of paying for housework, or extending socialized childcare to all reaches and pockets of society.

The civil egalitarianism borrowed the mythology of the civil rights movement, but – in a gesture of true cultural expropriation – did not borrow the color the skins involved. In 1960, in the U.S., there were almost no rich African-Americans. In 2015, according to a study produced by the Federal Reserve in St. Louis,  rich African Americans – defined as the upper one percent – made up a grand total of 1.7% of the whole.

The best model for the political economy – and the politics that has driven it - of the last forty years is that of a stalactite. Small drops have created a large pointy structure. When I was a kid, the idea was that we were in the midst of a stalagmite change – the drops were mounting from the bottom. The switch from one to the other has sort of defined my life, and billions of other lives.

This is worth thinking about when the next headline catastrophe announces itself: the union busting, rightwing Justice Kennedy resigning; children put in cages and left in the Texas heat; trillion dollar giveaways to the wealthy; the gutting of labor unions. It is trivial, but symbolically large, that the official opposition to rightwing plutocrats is very, very, very concerned that we all stay “civil”. The official opposition is almost surely in or connected to the upper 1 percent.

The overwhelming “feeling” of the last forty years has been one of “not being able to afford things.” For instance, medicare for all is a huge “budget-buster”. Which begs the question: how is it that in a society that is at least ten times as wealthy as it was in 1950, or 1960, when large social insurance scheme were put in place, we have run out of money? The answer is pretty simple: since then, the working class – in fact, every household that makes less than 250 thou a year – has run out of money. All the money is packed in the upper 10 percent, and in the upper 10 percent, it is packed in the upper 1 percent. The inequality is staggering: it is, really, ancien regime, as though the French Revolution had never happened. The experiment is running its course: a political economy in which the cultural expectation of egalitarianism are systematically attacked is one that will, eventually, have to take down even the mask of democratic practices. The idea that abortion rights are being threatened because one farty old man on the Court resigns shows a terrifying blindness to what has happened in state after state for twenty years. It is easier to get an abortion in Ireland than it is in, say, Texas or Mississippi. For working class women, abortion rights – not to speak of the vast vast array of healthcare rights – are a sort of ghost. They are dead, but they still haunt us.

I’m a verbal, even a garrulous, even a graphomaniacal guy. But this Youtube video about wealth in the U.S. should be your absolute guideas to what has, what is, and what will be happening in the U.S.

Homo Economicus, perspectivism, and Blake

 I have two theses about modernity and economics. Here they are. The first is that there is a multiplicity of matrixes of exchange even within modernity – and that the seeming hegemony of the money matrix, to the extent that it even defines the economic as opposed to the non-economic, is a phenomena that has certainly penetrated other matrixes – such as the complex gift and barter relationships of family, friendship and alliance – without fundamentally ‘commoditizing’ them. In one sense, my whole thesis is that there is a dialectic structure that governs the degree to which the hegemony of money, as reflected in the character of homo economicus, can actually dispense with other matrixes, since its survival is threatened by its monopoly of all spaces of exchange. 
The other thesis is that rationality, as the economists define it, is linked to a realism that denies perspectives as anything other than representatives of ‘parts of reality’. Myself, I am a perspectivist of the ‘hard; variety – that is, I see no reason to put up with the idea that the parts of reality make up one reality. Reality, here, becomes a substitute for the God’s eye perspective – that point at which we can see the whole universe. Perspectivism denies that perspective can be constructed. It does not deny, it should be said, that certain processes might be shared among perspectives – say, a process for correlating statement and fact. Or even a process for ordering preferences. It simply denies that this formal characteristic has any substance. In other words, rationality within a perspective refers to the norms of the perspective, not to processes that transcend perspectives. Hard perspectivism contends that there is information in a given perspective – something that can be defined by simple axioms – that does not exist in other perspectives. In the clash of perspectives – which is the dynamic by which perspectives are made – this information can be completely lost – the way a passenger pigeon saw an oak tree no longer exists, for instance. I would not go so far as to say that 

different matrixes of exchange form completely different perspectives, but something similar might well hold – that is, that there is information in a barter exchange that can’t be transformed or translated into the money exchange. Etc. 

In other words, I want to build a theory about economics based on this phrase of Blake’s:
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

materialism and superstition

The positivist line in the history of the sciences can always be distinguished by one general assumption, which is that the present state of the sciences represents some kind of natural division of labor. In other words, the sciences as now constituted really do cut at the joints, so that we have clearcut, naturally founded divisions that are entailed by the subjects that the sciences study: astronomy is the result of studying the stars, economics is the result of studying exchange, psychology is the result of studying the mind, etc. Given this viewpoint, there is a certain teleology that organizes the whole narrative: astrology is the predecessor of astronomy, alchemy the predecessor of chemistry, etc.

Against this idea, the non-positivist looks at the sciences as defined by their social environment. Instead of looking at astrology as the study of the stars, it looks at astrology as a compound of the study of the stars, the study of the temperaments, and the study of governance. Instead of looking at alchemy as the study of the rocks or the molecules, it sees alchemy as operating as the study of treasure, the study of cryptography, the study of natural symbolism, etc. In other words, there is less joint here, and more tentacle.

The consequence of the non-positivist line is that we work outward from what the discipline said about itself at time x, and what was assumed about it at time x, instead of working inward from an exterior view about what we know, now, at time y, about the supposed contents of the science. The advantage of the first view is that we can catch in our net many, many connections that have been pruned away as the dominant episteme changed. And we become more aware that the conceptual oppositions that are assumed in positivism are products of a teleology rather than of an immersive reading of the sources.

Take, for instance, materialism.

It is often assumed that a great leap forward in the sciences occurred in the 17^th and 18^th century as a materialist program was organized to delimit and define acceptable explanations of natural phenomena. In opposition, there was a supernatural program that looked around to transcend the mere causal schema.

In fact, this view of the materialist program is very much a product of late nineteenth century positivism. The oppositions, in the eighteenth century, was much mushier than this. One of the problems that thinkers – the zemstvo, the intellectuals in the field, the doctors, lawyers, notaries, teachers, as well as writers – faced was that they grew up in a world of certain beliefs that seemed not to be absolutely unfounded. Their grandparents believed that certain people could, through sacrifice to the devil, transform themselves into beasts – and their parents definitely believed that certain people had the gift of finding water or treasure using a kind of cleft stick. They knew their parents, and some of them knew their grandparents, and they weren’t insane. They weren’t even stupid. So what was going on?

Materialism, far from opposing these beliefs, helped to explain them. Of course, certain superstitions were rejected – the belief in werewolves for instance or vampires required a very complex explanation, and usually the thought was: this is the delusion of ignorant peasants. But certain superstitions, properly understood, revealed a primitive grasp of material connections. Just as the sun’s gravity – that invisible force – explained the rotation of planets around it, so, too, astrology, properly considered, was all about cosmic forces that were material things, and could be discovered empirically.   

Or, to put a point on this: the demystification of superstition did not lead to the rejection of those things we might think of as “superstition”, but rather their re-enactment in other terms.

the extempore monument

“It sounds a peculiarly Romantic theme—a man's genius goes into notes and extempores and sketches towards some classical monument, which in the end turns out to be superfluous.” – Eric Rhodes

This is from a review of a rather obscure work by Humphrey Jennings, a British filmmaker, one of the co-founders of Mass Observation, and poet: Pandaemonium: 1660-1886 The coming of the Machine as seen by contemporary observers. It was written, as it were, in the thirties, at the same time that Benjamin was collecting his notes for the Passages work. Although Jennings didn’t, I think, know Benjamin, they were both moved by a strong Marxist impulse to understand the formation of class structure under capitalism by creating a vast citational structure – bringing, as it were, the production of the imagination, its collective factory of images, connections, and types, to the surface.

I think Rhodes is right that this is a very romantic theme: in fact, one could think of it as a conjunction of Novalis’s notion of the ultimate Encyclopedia with the Marxist notion of a witness that would probe, to the very depths, the history of obscure. But the paradox in both cases is that the witness has to come from sources, and those sources were, inevitably, literate and emplaced in the structures of literature in the broadest sense – natural philosophy, the newspapers, poetry, medicine, etc. The romantic impulse is to find, at some moment, the perfect conjunction of the immediate and the mediate: a private language that can be publicly understood. But the bingo of all the old Marxist boys lies, forever, around the next book.

In the preface he intended to write for the book he never completed (like the Passages work, Pandaemonium was always in process), Jennings wrote:

“In this book I present the imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution. Neither the political history, nor the mechanical history, nor the social history nor the economic history, but the imaginative history.

I say 'present', not describe or analyse, because the Imagination is a function of man whose traces are more delicate to handle than the facts and events and ideas of which history is usually constructed. This function I believe is found active in the areas of the arts, of poetry and of religion – but is not necessarily confined to them or present in all their manifestations. I prefer not to try to define its hmits at the moment but to leave the reader to agree or not with the evidence which I shall place before him. I present it by means of what I call Images.”

This was one of the lovelier dreams of Modernism. Jennings, even, takes an image from Apollinaire that is cognate to Benjamin’s idea of the angel of history flying backwards: In a radio broadcast, he “spoke of Apollinaire who said that the poet must stand with his back to the future because he was unable to see it: it was in the past that he would discover who he was and how he had come to be.”

One day someone – me – should dig around the roots of Benjamin’s image of the angel of history flying backwards. An essay on the lines of Carlo Ginzburg’s investigation of the roots of the image of atrocity at a distance, summed up in the story of the Chinese mandarin in Balzac. For these roots are not dead, oh son (or daughter) of man.

the NYT in the "I DONT CARE. DO U?" era, Yemen atrocity edition

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the cretinization process: The President is Missing, exhibit 1 million

No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home
Gang of Four

Poor Anthony Lane, the NY-er movie critic. He used to be an interesting mind to take to the movies. But I've noticed in the last couple of years definite signs of burnout - which have now flashed red with his spineless review of the Clinton-Patterson powerwank fiesta, The President is Missing. Itis written as though by a Clintonite who was still overawed by Bill Clinton'swankitude - Rolling Stones, 1992 - rather than appalled by Bill Clinton'slifestyle, friends, vanity, etc., etc. Lane is one of those people - probably alarge segment of the New Yorker readership - who actually bought Clinton'sautobiography. One born every second, as someone said.

Compare this very cool essay on the site, Fellow Travelers, a lefty foreign policy blog by Greg Mercer.

It is precisely 100 times better than the Lane tossoff.

Lane could have done with this kind of research:

"In a recent paper for International Studies Quarterly, J. Furman Daniel, III, and Paul Musgrave examine the genuine impact that military fiction can have on policymakers and military leaders. This is a somewhat controversial approach—Daniel and Musgrave note that a sizable portion of the political science field is devoted to “respectable” sources: scholarly writing, certainly not fiction. When examining political actors’ motivations, those in this school argue, resources like pop history and fiction have far less explanatory power than journal articles and vetted reports. This is a comforting idea. After all, we’d like to believe that the secretary of defense puts more faith in intelligence reports than paperback novels. Popular fiction in political science is mostly relegated to serving as a mirror of culture, not an explanatory factor. The technothriller, however, enjoys the position of being frequently cited by pundits and military influencers alongside policy papers and live reporting."

You cannot understand American foreign policy if you don't understand the enormous influence of Tom Clancy. It would be like trying to understand Athens without knowing about the Greek myths. To understand the thinking of right-center Dems like Lieberman, who was pathetically influential in the 00s, you have to go to the story - reported somewhere, I'll look it up later - in a portrait of the mook which depicted his excitement coming out of an action movie, one of those in which Arabs are casually blasted into the smithereens they deserve, since they are all evil.

Or there is this, from Mercer's article:

"Daniel and Musgrave present some well-known examples. Bill Clinton became interested in bioterrorism not from dry briefings but after reading Richard Preston’s The Cobra Event. While experts have decried to bioterrorism scenario in the novel as highly unrealistic, Clinton’s interest was nonetheless piqued. He ordered the government to invest more in bioterrorism preparedness. Ronald Reagan famously inquired about American strategic cybersecurity after watching WarGames, in which Matthew Broderick hacks into NORAD and narrowly averts a nuclear war."

Myself, I think this genre has had a sort of epidemic effect in that it has been a carrier of the mass cultural illiteracy that effects college educated white males. Historians will miss a trick if they don't examine the cretinizing process in the U.S., circa 1980 - 2018. Patterson and Clinton could be faces on the totem pole commemorating that cretinization.

something on Marx

I resist the teleological interpretation of Marx – that all of Marx is there in every text, and if a text seems to say something that contradicts all-of-Marx, then we just have to either categorize Marx’s works to shunt it to the side – it was polemical! – or decide that it was an unfortunate collateral gesture. On the other hand, I’m not sure that my idea of Marx as constructing his all-of-Marx-ness in his text really purges the teleological impulse completely. Take the issue of the notebook, or the draft. We have these things. They were preserved. But the facile notion that Marx, too, having these things, goes back over them suffers both from lack of proof and automatic assumptions about research and writing that I have found, both in my personal experience and as an editor of others, to be false. I have found, instead, that one’s vital discoveries tend to fade and change and be renewed – that old intentions get submerged by new ones. Yet characteristic themes and inclinations will assert themselves, and the repressed will return.

This is why I favor the problem-based approach to reading monumental texts. For any theme or thesis carries with it both the problems it responds to and the new problems it creates. A problem is as much a token of memory as a thesis. Stripping a writer of his problems – translating his text into something like a list of answers such as you can find in the back of the math textbook - trivializes him.

This returns us to the thesis of necessity and revolution, a combo with a high visibility career in Marxism and twentieth century communism.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx gives the impression that the proletariat will inevitably overthrow the capitalist social order. In a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852, Marx seems to affirm that interpretation: 

“Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [dass der Klassenkampf notwendig zur Diktatur des Proletariats fuehrt] 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition [Aufhebung] of all classes and to a classless society. Ignorant louts such as Heinzen, who deny not only the struggle but the very existence of classes, only demonstrate that, for all their bloodthirsty, mock-humanist yelping, they regard the social conditions in which the bourgeoisie is dominant as the final product, the non plus ultra of history, and that they themselves are simply the servants of the bourgeoisie, a servitude which is the more revolting, the less capable are the louts of grasping the very greatness and transient necessity of the bourgeois regime itself.”[Translation from MECW Volume 39, p. 58]

The dictatorship of the proletariat has, of course, a different coloration for readers in 2010, who are distant both from the experience of the 19th century and who are conscious that Stalinism and Maoism were formed under that slogan, among others. In Marx’s time, he could look around the world and see no society that allowed women to vote, no society in which blacks were allowed to vote, and few societies in which there was anything close to democracy in any real sense. Until 1913, in the U.S., the Senate consisted of white men appointed by state legislators. In the UK, the percentage of eligible voters out of the total population put the country on the level of a free medieval German town. According to Frank Thackeray, only about 15 percent of British males were eligible to vote up until the reforms of 1867, after which only one in three males - and all women - were excluded from the vote.In France, before 1848, suffrage was limited to about a quarter of a million voters - out of a population of 34 million. I am, of course, outlining democracy according to its thinnest definition. In the U.S., as is well known, anti-democratic measures were inscribed in the constitution - some of which, like the electoral college, are sill valid. Suffrage was more extensive for white males there, though. Never, until the dissolution of the empire, did Britain’s colonial subjects have any right to vote in Britain’s elections. In 1852, of course, the four hundred million people of India were held, by main force, in the clutches of an old British monopoly, the East India company, which existed as a quite open Mafia, a protection racket. Given this reality, the projection back into the England of Marx’s time of ‘representative institutions’ – such as delight the late Cold Warriors and those who, like Francois Furet, represented some kind of new "anti-Marxist left' in France – will always turn out to be the purest charlatanism, projecting the hard won virtues - such as they are - of the modern state back through its history - as though the Civil Rights marches of 1965-1968 are a good description of the state of ‘civil rights” of Dixie in 1848. Here one sees ideology at its most pathetic. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was the literal truth of Marx's time; of course, Marx and the worker's movements had a lot to do with destroying that state of affairs. That the Western "democracies" owe this to Marx does make the ideologues grumble and moan, since, essentially, they are the ardent workers for bourgeois dictatorship. 

Given these cardinal points, the dictatorship of the proletariat would, of course, have been more democratic, even in the 2 percent milk sense of ‘democratic’, than the political arrangements of Marx’s day. If there was a specter haunting Europe in 1852, it was not that the dictatorship of the proletariat would lead to totalitarianism, but that it would upset the system of monarchs, upper bourgoisie and great landowners whose power was woven out of a complex of rotten boroughs, slavery, a bribed press, a servile judiciary operating as an instrument of the executive, and the hocus pocus system of colonial administrators oppressing the great mass of mankind on the ‘periphery’. Capitalism would not have survived real democracy – a point that was clear to all observers, who tended to call real democracy ‘anarchy’ or ‘communism’. 

However, I am more interested in necessity as it appears in the Weydemeyer letter. What is ‘necessary’ in history? And what is the relation between revolution – the overthrow of the current system in response to its level of unbearability – and historical necessity? As we know, these questions found their political correlate in the 1880s, as the Socialist party in Bismark’s Germany organized itself as a parliamentary party. Doesn’t necessity find its own instruments? If the new society choses the path of reform to overturn the old society, do we need revolution? Isn’t revolution an outmoded cult, worshipping the past – particularly the French revolution – with the same pathetic vigor Marx skewers in the 18th Brumaire, when he observes that revolutionaries in the past donned the masks of some chosen predecessor and its dead language in order to perform their work? 

Guizot, one of the French historians Marx read attentively, produced a theory of civilization based on a primitive bi-polar dialectic. This dialectic captured the positivist sense of what was meant by ‘progress’ in the first half of the 19th century. In the lectures collected in ‘The history of civilization in France”, (1828-1830) Guizot writes:

“I researched what ideas attached to this word [civilization] in the good common sense of people. It appeared to me that in the general opinion, civilization consisted essentially in two facts: the development of the social state (l’état social) and of the intellectual state (l’état intellectuel); the development of exterior conditions in general, and that of the interior, personal development of man; in a word, the perfectioning of society and humanity.” 

Perfectioning was still the preferred verb among the liberals in 1828, like some last unexploded bomb from the French revolution. Progress – that ameliorating word, that half and half word that the God of Revelations would surely have spewed from his mouth – just as Marx spewed it from his – had not replaced the icy utopian glitter of the perfect with the tradesman’s bonhomie of profits accrued, year by year.

white collar crime 2: "Moving barrels at a chemical plant"

Now I have to admit something. I have rather extended Sutherland’s original point. Sutherland really believed that criminal behavior is taught – one thief teaches another. My more fuzzy interpretation is that within a group, what is taught is one’s identity as not the kind of person who commits crimes. It is this which is often the preface to corporate crime, as well as to the judicial and legislative response to crime.

I’d like to mix this take from Sutherland with Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death”, which is the way in which Patterson wants us to think about slavery. I think that if we think of a social hierarchy as a matter of apportioning social death – of identities being created, in the eyes of judges and legislators, out of some fraction of social death – we have a sense of what inequality, the fundamental inequality that practically grounds law and order in the “democracies” that arose in the 18^th and 19^thcenturies, is about.

That inequality is lied about – in fact, massively lied about. The one place equality supposedly rules is before the law. Nobody is above the law. All are equal before the law. Etc. This is all, frankly, bullshit. Bullshit, in journalistic and pundit-speak, is called an “ideal”. We fall short of the ideal, from this p.o.v., but we keep striving. In fact, though, we don’t fall short of the ideal, the ideal is kicked to the curb in our practical socio-economic life as an impediment to order, and is clubbed to death by the cops if it gets up on its hind legs and protests.

White collar crime, I’d argue, takes white collar enablers.

Let’s use an example, a plain vanilla example. Let’s use Allied Signal. Here’s a Dead Kennedys song about the Kepone Factory case, whichfills in the basic facts.

Allied Chemical made a contracting arrangement with a company named (amazingly) Life Sciences Products. As you would expect, when a corporation names something life sciences, it is all about producing deadly toxins -and so it was with this small factory in Hopewell, Virginia. It made kepone, an insecticide used on fire ants. The toxic ingredient in kepone is chlordecone. It is a very water soluble substance, meaning that it is rapidly spread throughout the organic body. It is a neurotoxin, and one of the rare pesticides which, apparently, exhibits in rodents like it exhibits in humans. Here’s a list of what overexposure can do to humans: nervousness, tremors, chest pains, weight loss, blurred vision, deterioration of fine motor skills. The children of pregnant women exposed to it also experience motor skills deterioration which seems to persist. It is left as an exercise to the reader to compare these effects to crack, which so shocked our legislatures in the 80s that they instituted a witchhunt against (African-American) women who smoked crack.

Life Sciences Products set up their factory and produced the world’s kepone, on a contract from Allied Chemical, from 1974 to 1975. Here’s a description of what was going on in the kepone factory:

“There were usually about 20 men a day working for about $3.75 an hour at the Life Sciences plant over the busy two shifts. Overtime pay was easy to come by, and turnover was high, probably because of the health problems. The workers talked among themselves about their symptoms — including involuntary shaking, vision problems and joint pain — suspicious that the chemical was causing it. But the factory owners were almost never there, so there was no one to ask about it. Most of Life Sciences’ workers weren’t college-educated and had families to support — the job paid too much to quit.”

The men were not equipped with any protection from the kepone – no respirators, no gloves. None were, of course, required.

“Doctors and others accused the men of being drunks. “They thought we was alcoholics,” Dykes [a worker there] remembers. “You know how somebody [goes] into DTs? They accused us of that, said we were nothing but alcoholics. Then the state … pulled those blood tests and found those high levels of Kepone in us.”

All good and profitable things come to an end. Life Sciences made about 3 million pounds of the stuff, and about 200,000 pounds got into the surrounding environment, including the James River.

“After quick meetings with a state deputy attorney general, the next day, July 24, 1975, the Life Sciences plant was closed by order of the state Health Department. At around the same time, the Hopewell sewer system malfunctioned, sending raw sewage into the James River. Some mystery chemical was preventing solid waste from breaking down in the sewage systems’ digesters, special tanks that accelerated decomposition of solid waste. The situation was later thought to be caused by excess Kepone being dumped down drains by Life Science. State Water Control Board officials had already found massive amounts of Kepone in the Hopewell sewage system in winter 1974, but nothing was done about it. (Besides dumping excess Kepone into the sewage system, Life Sciences workers also disposed of it by dumping it in a big hole in a nearby field, Dykes says.)”

Of course, closing down the James River, preventing fishing, and poking around the neighborhood of Hopewell, looking for shakers, was bad for business. Even worse, this being the seventies, the government even prosecuted the company.

So what is a company like Allied Chemical to do?

Well, it had to operate on two fronts. Technically, in the courts, it had to make sure that it wasn’t charged with anything criminal – the way an individual who poisoned his neighbors would be charged with something criminal. And it had to make the fines it would be assessed go down. On the other front, it had to find scientists to pooh pooh the toxicity of kepone. That was the easier task. Any scientist who wants to live the good life – in academia and out – had best accommodate pesticide companies. Otherwise, your grants tend to get the shakes – like a person poisoned by kepone – and wither away.

In the first stage of the court spectacle, a “respected judge”, Robert R. Merhige Jr. , finally assessed a fine of 13.2 million dollars. This was considered a wickedly high sum. In the second stage of the court spectacle, Judge Merhige ruled that two Allied execs charged with felony (a conspiracy to disguise what was going on) were innocent of the charges. He allowed Allied to plead no contest to 1000 charges against them.

There was a conference about the case twenty years afterwards, and the Judge talked rather frankly about the whole thing. It is a fascinating document, especially given the theory that crime involves a group that learns to commit crime through a complicated exchange of symbols and setting of expectations. This is what Merhige said:

“I explained to the people (who didn't need explanation) it was a corporation that we had and that it was tantamount to a guilty plea. In any event, they were found guilty of 940 counts. Then I got a presentence report, as I was supposed to do. It turned out that Allied, and I said this from the bench, had been a pretty good corporate citizen in Virginia. They had done a lot of good. They were not bad people, but there were a couple of people there who took short cuts and were throwing all this dirt like they owned the James River and they poisoned it. At the same time the state had some kind of a claim against them. While I was waiting for the presentence report, other suits were developing, about fifteen or sixteen of them. We thought the original group of people who had been allegedly injured were horribly injured. There were reports that their reproductive capacity had gone. In any event, the case was settled well before we realized or got the reports from the doctors that the injuries were nowhere near as bad as we had first anticipated, thank God. That was one of the happy things.”

The pretty good citizen part is crucial. It is unexplained, but we can sort of suss it out: they had executives in the Virginia area who were white, who paid their taxes and sent their kids to good schools, and probably – some of them – coached little league.

To use Aaron Persky’s invaluable phrase: to jail people like that or throw them out of work would have a “severe impact” on them. And, after all, the workers at the factory where all this dirt was being produced made 3.25 per hour, and surely did not suffer too much if they went through a modest period of blindness, shakes, pain and the like. Might have been unable to find work, but those kind of people – well, that is where you find your alcoholics and freeloaders.

In the event, the 13.2 million was for the suckers. Merhige eventually cut it down to 5 million. And to keep that money from going to Washington, and to benefit the James River fishermen, Allied set up a trust. With the finest people on board!

“I asked Mr. Cummings to get on because I knew he was thoroughly familiar with the case, and I didn't want any of the funds used to help Allied buy off their civil liabilities. He accepted. As I recall, I appointed Judge Henry McKenzie, who was an avid sportsman and very much interested in our environment; Admiral Ross P. Bullard, who was the Coast Guard Admiral in charge of the navigable waters around the Chesapeake Bay and the James River, so he was thoroughly familiar. Then I was fortunate enough to get Sydney and Frances Lewis, whose name may be familiar to you, who knew how to spend money from what I read in the paper. Then finally a banker. I thought we needed a banker. George Yowell accepted it. They were a great board.”

As a p.s. to this story: the 8 million dollars Allied donated to the environmental trust was not an entirely bad deal for Allied, as they took a 4 million dollar tax deduction for it. All is well that ends well in the world of white collar crime.

The man who coined the term "white collar criminal": Edwin H. Sutherland

Like Karl Marx, contemplating wood theft in Germany in 1846 and being struck by the fact that the crime was invented, in contradistinction from the way he was taught law operated, Edwin H. Sutherland was a criminologist/sociologist who, in the 1930s, began looking at crimes committed by people other than the urban marginals and degenerates who were the usual object of criminological interest, and he was struck by the inability of theory to capture either their practices or motives. 

Marx, of course, began to understand class out of the invention of crime, and soon went on to devise a vast theory about the way class conflict was shaping the society of capital. Sutherland did not go so far. But where he went is of interest.

The reason Sutherland started investigating “white collar crime” (indeed, he coined the phrase) had to do with his Deweyian theory that crime was a learned activity. The criminological paradigms of the 30s, inherited from the 19^th century, attributed crime to inheritance, degeneration, poverty, broken homes, or individual viciousness. Sutherland’s theory, which he called differential association, was that crime was learned through the symbols and uses of groups. Not gangs, not groups that are composed of people personally acquainted with each other – although these, too, are groups – but groups in the larger sense of members who identify with some collective. It is in these groups that the inhibition or disinhibition to crime evolves.

Here’s an example, from the recent past. In 2016, Brock Turner, a Stanford University athlete, was actually caught physically raping a passed out woman. He was convicted of this rape. The sentence handed down by Judge Aaron Persky was six months. Three months was shaved off, as time already served. In his statement about the punishment, Persky said that sentencing Turner to prison for a long time could have a “severe impact” on him.

That phrase “severe impact” reveals an abyss of assumptions about class in the U.S. – and, in particular, the assumption that certain members of the group of the affluent and educated have “futures” that must be preserved. Persky, to use Sutherland’s phrase, was differentially associated with Turner.  Certain crimes that would be severely repressed by certain members of certain groups – for whom the “severe impact” of the penitentiary is designed – are treated much more softly when committed by members of other groups. This is not simply a statistical fact, but a passed around piece of knowledge – in the group, this is known. Impunity is a social bond.

Sutherland, however, is not concerned so much with class as with his theory, which, remember, is in opposition to the ruling criminological theories of the time – and of now. Criminology has not changed that much, and if Hilary Clinton was comfortable talking about “super predators” in the 90s, and the NYT opinion page is a reliable source for talk about the “underclass” now, it is due to this paradigm.

Sutherland, thus, turned to the upperclass. He compiled a list of the seventy largest publicly traded corporations, and went over 45 years of court records. Here’s what he found:

This tabulation of the crimes of the seventy largest corporations in the United States gives a total of 980 adverse decisions. Every one of the seventy corporations has a decision against it, and the average number of decisions is 14.0. Of these seventy corporations, 98 percent are recidivists; that is, they have two or more adverse decisions. Several states have enacted habitual crimlnal laws, which define an habitual criminal as a person who has been convicted four times of felonies. If we use this number and do no limit the convictions to felonies, 90 percent of the seventy largest corporations in the IUnited States are habitual criminals.”

Aye, but the kicker for some of Sutherland’s opponents was the conditional phrase, “if we do not limit the convictions to felonies.” Which gets us more into the question of class and power.

To be continued.

angels do dance on the heads of pins

Egon Friedell is perhaps less famous for his writing than for having committed suicide as the SS pushed in his door in Vienna in 1938. He was a feullitonist - which we now call "creative non-fiction", a term which sounds like it was made up by a bored bureaucrat - and a generalist, a flaneur philosopher, an amateur. How I love amateurs! He did take on a huge task – writing the history of the Neuzeit, of modernity itself - that makes him hard to, well, encompass. I confess I haven't read the five volumes of this. But he was also one of the Viennese wits – the greatest of whom was Karl Kraus - who understood that the secret of language was flair. Although Kraus would probably thrown heaps of scorn on that notion - for him, the secret of language was ethics.

The flavor of that kind of wit is shown in this aphorism.

“Materialism. I once wrote the following: Man is an eternal God-seeker. Whatever else one may say about him is secondary. Everything that he does and undertakes flows out of this source.

But the printer printed this: Man is an eternal Gold-seeker… This error was really and truly from the devil; and not only the devil, but the special devil who controls not only printing but the writing, and not only the writing but the brain of the writer, and not only the brain but the soul, but the whole world. In brief, the tragedy of this erratum was – that it wasn’t one.”

Isn’t that lovely? In fact, this erratum crystalizes the whole of that Marxism that Walter Benjamin (and myself, the merest pipsqueak next to Walter, but still), Ernst Bloch, and a not insignificant segment of the interwar Left proposed with the appropriate indirection. The sentence as written and the erratum as printed are both, in this view, true. And yet, of course, they negate each other.

How very very Viennese to make this point, this juncture of negative theology and dialectical materialism, come down to one letter interjected by the printer’s devil! For angels really do dance on the heads of pins – it is the whole point of angels to do so.

A Pisgah view of Marianne Moore

Elizabeth Bishop summed up a deal of poetry when she wrote this sentence in an essay about Marianne Moore: “It is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things, even though there seems to be no help for it.”
Tapping into that annoyance – playing with it, exasperating it, flaunting it, exhausting it – seems like the modernist project. Or maybe it seems like the project of Marianne Moore, who was a modernist as well as an eccentric. Or perhaps she would claim she was centric, had a sense of centers in a world that was full of the cockeyed and the unbalanced, a world of people who would neither properly see what they made nor what they destroyed, but was given to interminable futzing around.
I’ve been going through Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems, and, shamefully perhaps, I’m finding I like her first versions of her poems better than her second versions. She was a notorious suppressor and changer.
It pleases me that Marianne Moore, in contrast with the bigots who are the big names of American 20th century poetry – Eliot, Pound, Stevens – did not throw in her lot with bigotry. At least as much as one could refrain from throwing in one’s lot with bigotry when bigotry has built so much that we live and move among, when it butters the pathway of every white American middle class life still. So in her Virginia Brittanica poem, I was pleased to meet these lines:

The slowmoving glossy, tall
quick cavalcade
of buckeye-brown surprising
jumpers, the contrasting work-mule and
show-mule & witch-cross door & “strong sweet prison”
are part of what
has come about, in the Black
idiom, from advancing backward
in a circle; from taking The Potomac
cowbirdlike; and on
The Chickahominy
establishing the Negro, opportunely brought, to strength-
en protest against
tyranny.”

Of course, Moore’s preserved faith in Lincoln’s Republican Party ethos has its twists. The phrase “opportunely brought” for instance, which surely refers to the recruitment of black soldiers in the Civil War, has a backreference to the original bringing that leaves an ambiguity in the mouth. Opportunely for whom? To be fair, this is the central moral problem around which the poem, with all its beauty, stalks. And what is this “cowbirdlike”? Yet I like best the reference to advancing backwards in a circle. Because the poem itself is about that advance that is also retreat, that invasion that is also native. There’s a delicate footing between plants – Moore’s sort of inhabited observation, as Elizabeth Bishop noticed, makes description a sort of narration, a sort of biography in miniature – and peoples, between natives and invaders, between those who colonized and those brought over to make the colony, as the naturals are driven back, taken from. Moore is very good at this kind of thing, but I find I really have to read her poems twice just to know where I was going – and that of course is what writing is, for a poet, it is going somewhere, even if that means advancing backwards in a circle.
I love this sly stanza – or not exactly a stanza, borrowing out of poetics the words for Moore’s units is a way of wrong-footing yourself – that tells so much about the South I know.
Terrapin
meat and crested spoon
feed the mistress of French
plum-and-turquoise-piped chaise-longue;
of brass-knobbed slat front-door and
everywhere open
shaded house on Indian-
named Virginian
streams, in counties named for English lords.

“Indian named Virginian steams, in counties named for English lords” – such is the balance, or lack of balance, in this hard country with the soft accent, the meanness and the courtesy.

Unamuno's nervous tic

Deleuze missed a trick in his book, The Fold. 

Although ultra appreciative of the philosophical anecdote, Deleuze apparently did not know about Unamuno.

Unamuno was an inveterate folder of paper. Here's an anecdote from one of his obituaries:
In the course of a visit that Andre Corthis made to Unamuno in Salamanca, she saw, perched on the edge of the bottle of ink on his desk, a vulture made of paper that was so finely folded with such delicate art that she couldn't withhold her admiration. 

"I made that," he said.

And Miguel de Unamuno explained that he had a mania for folding things, it was his favorite distraction. While siting in his chair giving his courses, his fingers never ceased making little objects or animals out of paper. A science that he humorously called cocotology."

I like to think that Unamuno, the committed anti-fascist, the man who was expelled from Spain in a military plane under one dictator and who denouced Franco at the end of his life, made a specialty of folding small bits of paper. There is something very... sweet about that. I would like to think that Paul Valery had, as well, some very cute nervous tic.