My theory, which is mine, which I have, cough cough

Ever since I was knee high to a mockingbird, I’ve been reading about the lamentable state of American innumeracy. Seems like we Americans, unlike Koreans, Finns, and Albanians, just can’t find our way in even the lower mathematics. Many theories have been advanced. Many studies, at great expense, have been launched.

Well, I was sitting out at the playground today, watching Adam and other kids and parents, and it struck me that it might have something to do with the way us parents threaten.  More specifically, the way we say: I’m going to count to five and you better get in your seat, eat your dinner, get off the jungle gym, etc.

Nobody ever says, I’m going to go to “e”.

It is perhaps for this reason that the alphabet really does seem composed of friendly little mountaineers, each with its little hammer, all of them climbing up one after the other the cliff face of language. Whereas numbers always have the whiff of the disciplinarian, as if they all waved rulers at us threateningly.

To prove my theory, I’d only need a couple of million dollars from Zuckerberg or Gates or one of the other billionaires. I would raise three groups of kids, one threatened, traditionally, with numeration, one with the alphabet (I’m going to go to e, and you better be over here: a b c d e) and one raised with varied threats (I’m going to go to mo and you better get over here  -eenie meenie minee mo; or, I’m going to go to paper and you better get off that jungle gym – rock scissors paper). Then we’d overload these children with various repeititive and intrusive tests and find out whether the alphabet menaced read at a lower level than the number menaced, and so on.

I’m getting on the phone to the Ford foundation tomorrow.

It's all your fault! (and Trump is still funny)

Some genius at the AEC, which successfully suppressed its studies of the toxic effects of the radiation produced by above ground nuclear bomb tests (thus giving the lie to those conspiracy theory debunkers who claim that it can’t happen here – yes, Virginia, if you have the judicial power to seal as top secret any papers you feel like, you can mount a conspiracy at the highest levels), wrote a memo in the fifties in which, after considering the bummer of fallout, concluded hopefully that at least it was falling on the “low use segment of the population.” This phrase gives us a sort of x ray of the mindset of our betters – the governing class that extends from the plutocrats to the politicos and the high profile journalists and pundits. The low use segment of the population is regularly hauled out for public beatings whenever the governing class feels threatened, or at low ebb, or needs some sportive relief.
Yet of course all is not bleak for the low user – or loser – crowd. Since, as Jesus H. Christ said, we have them with us always, we can always make use of them by stirring up a little racism here, a little panic over welfare there. While they are riled up, you can clip entitlements, lower taxes on the top rates, and sign your fabuloso trade agreements. This process is of course a bit of hush hush – obfuscation on these things is provided free by the media, so the losers don’t get too nosey.
Sometimes, however, as in this election year, out comes the ugly.
Ugly is spelled Trump this season. There’s been a seachange in the thumbsucker community, and it has been decreed that Trump is no longer funny. My ass – Trump is still funny. Of course, all the GOP candidates were funny. Maybe not Cruz, except in that Hannibal Lector way. The thing about Trump is that, like Falstaff, he is not only funny in himself, but he brings out the funny in others.
Case in point is the latest meme among the thumbsuckers: why don’t the losers move more?
This got started with an article published by someone on the masthead of the National Review. NR has been exasperated by Trump, and finally, to much thunder, excommunicated him. It was powerful stuff, but alas, the next day the editorial staff awakened and found out that they hadn’t been elected pope. Quite the shock. They were, as Trump has show every day, mere pipsqueaks in bowties. In fact, of course, the National Review has long cultivated pipsqueak conservatism, but they also peddle a good line in homoerotic worship of tough, “masculine” leaders. Oh how they love those leaders! From Ronald Reagan to Dick Cheney, their bowties have always stood a little stiffer when saluting minor act of mass murder committed in the name of America.
So it stands in the kingdom of Rightwingia. Since the excommunication didn’t work, the next thing, of course, is to empty the vials on the low use segment – which, as they distantly perceive from the newspapers, is where the unfortunate Trumpmania is located. The lecture, given with the appropriate amount of smirking, is that these fat assed white bluecollar types would do better to rent a U Haul and move, rather than disturbing their betters. Vote for what we tell you to vote for, and get a better job! One imagines the high fives. The bowties were showing their legendary toughness once again!
Of course, what happens on the right quickly migrates to the “left”, in as much as Vox, or Mother Jones, pretends to a liberal sensibility. Of course, the smirks were taken out – this is the great White Euphemism Zone, after all – and the question was asked like some Zen puzzle with a gotcha at the end: why aren’t these low enders moving around like obedient fleas in the flea circus as we stage our wonderful globalization act? Is it some dreadful character flaw – oh surely it is – that keeps the blue collar work force from, well, renting a U Haul!
I mean, we aren’t going to reverse history. Put in the appropriate chuckles here. Haven’t the low use people realized? And truly, if you went to Harvard or any of the real institutions of higher education, if your daddy or mommy had risen above the low enders, well, globalisation has been good for you. The maids are cheaper, the flights to Bangkok exquisite, and your real estate deals get mentioned in the Washingtonian, as well as your start up parties. Etc.
Being neo-liberals, however, these thumbsuckers took the problem of residential mobility as something serious that the application of homo economicus could solve. Moving for them comes down to a transaction cost. Sure there are these costs, but generally, surely, the blue collar factory worker just needs more human capital and a move to, say, Manhattan to become a hedge funder. So surely it is some irrational fetish, like attachment to guns, preventing the intersubstitution in the human capital market to move along as efficiently as always.
Being official explainers doesn’t mean anything so vulgar as research for the thumbsucker, however. Myself, I, like millions of people, have access to JSTOR and EBSCO and can actually look up what sociologists have said about residential mobility, cause and effects. Admittedly, this isn’t as fun as sitting in your chair and imagining some lazy rational choice scenario, but there you are: even cherries have their pits.
Sociologists have long connected some dots. For instance, between residential mobility and divorce. Divorce is both a large driver of residential mobility. It was noted by Larry Long in 1974 that married men over thirty were more residentially stable, and this was often accompanied by the married woman joining the work force outside the house. Long, building on this, claimed that divorce was a driver of residential mobility – work that has been amply confirmed – and that it was also possible that divorce occurred more often among one income families that became two income families, thus showing what I dare say is a dialectical effect, which we will all blush about (dialectic is for Commies!). As for the effectss on the children of the residentially migrant, we also have plenty of sociological literature if we are energetic enough to type some letters into our computer. What has been found is that children – I’m talking of course of the losers, who should just rent a U Haul - are more likely to be negatively effected by moving out of neighborhoods they’ve grown up in. They are likely to be more often engated in violence, and dropping out of school, and if they stay in school, their grades suffer. (Castone McLahan, 1994; Tucker Marx Long, 1998;Pribesh Downey, 1999). In fact, one can speculate on the coincidence that spikes in drug taking and crime came at the same time as a higher rate of residential mobility in the sixties and seventies.
Of course, these sociological findings make it unlikely that the trip, so ardently wished for by the likes of Tyler Cowen or Kevin Drum, in which the unemployed dad and his wife and kids flee the ruins of the city for the glorious pastures of a better lifestyle through trade with our Pacific partners is really going to have that uplifting, Horatio Alger end. That’s the downer. On the other hand, if they do it, we can blame them for divorce, single parenthood, and crime! This is nice. Because the rule for our governor vis a vis the low use segment is: it's all your fault!

hypnosis and description

Flaubert once said that if you gave your full attention to any object for long enough, it would become interesting. In this, Flaubert, whether he knew it or not, was certainly breaking with the old classical vision of the world. For Plato and Aristotle, there was an inherent hierarchy of worth in the world, an ontological as well as ethical hierarchy. The philosopher was he who ignored trivial objects and plastered his attention to worthier ones. Hair, or dirt, or dogs, or the way a candlestick looks on a piano, were unworthy of noting, of memorializing.

Well, while Flaubert was opining, with a rare uplift, about the value of attention, another Frenchman was experimenting with what had once been called mesmerism, and was now being called hypnotism. Charcot was discovering that you could lull a subject into hypnosis by having them fixate their attention on a bright object until they were, as it were, captured by it – entranced, or at least tranced.

Between the attention that increases the value of an object and the fixation of attention that captures the subject lies the description in narrative.

I’ve had ample opportunity to experiment with this, since, every night, after we read to Adam from one book in French and one book, almost always about dinosaurs recently, in English, we turn out the light and tell him a story about himself. Adam generally lays down the rules for the story, like he was ordering from a menu: I want me to be playing basketball and I want X and Y (his friends) to be Ironman and Batman and I want to be Clobberman. Or along that line.

Now, the thing is, whether Adam has been lulled by the books we read him or not, generally A. and I are. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping my eyes open as I read about the stegasaurus, one of the last of the dinosaurs in Adam’s favorite book. So in telling him a story that I make up, I’ve found that by the end of it, I might be wandering far afield. But if I am thinking about the story, I usually try to throw in a lot of description, or at least names of things, in the hope that this will lull Adam to sleep. If he goes down a path in the forest, I try to enumerate all the things he’ll pass: a pine tree, a live oak, a red oak, a maple tree, a willow, a chestnut tree, an elm tree, a redwood, a bramble bush, a sweet gum tree, a beech, a birch tree, a rhododendron, etc., etc. My theory is that the longer I stretch this out, the less Adam’s attention will be fixed on the forest and the more he will be sinking into slumber.

It works, at least, for me.

So I have thought a bit about the relationship between description in a fiction, the ‘world’ that fiction, or at least certain fictions, try to create, and the hypnotic envelopment in which the narrative’s horizon is overtaken. We do feel that certain novels create a world, one that we enter: but is this entrance like discovering a world, or being entranced by a brilliant pocket watch on a chain? 

from nicaragua in 1983 to Libya in 2010 - same story

It is a shame that the Sandinista issue in the debate is proving to be just Clinton's way of calling out to old Reagan-ites and doing her shitty redbaiting, because what happened in Central America in the eighties has a lot of relevance to what is happening today. 
The eighties were the crest of a century of American interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Any quasi-endogenous political structure had to be vetted with the USA, or the USA would simply knock it over. Ditto with economic policy.
However, although the US took the right to intervene as it saw fit, it did not, as other imperialist systems did, take on the responsibility for governing, or for developing these areas in any way. Even the Soviets in Eastern Europe aided the development of industry. Not the US.
In consequence of a hundred years of soft imperialism, the US helped produced a perfect pocket of poor and desperate people. Many of them have, in the past two decades, decided to immigrate, one way or another, to the US. Why not? After all, they have the experience of having their own independence in their own countries overturned by the whim of American power.
This is not, as the snark-fest on twitter treats it, just an old story. It is the story of the pattern of American foreign policy.
To see what Reagan did in Central America is to see what Clinton advocated in North Africa and the Middle East. Intervention without responsibility.
The result is a sort of speeded up picture of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Libya is a perfect example. Intervention ruined the country, and irresponsibility didn't wait around to build it up. The Benghazi crime is not, as the GOP would have it, that Clinton abandoned Benghazi. The crime is that Obama, with CLinton urging him on, performed another immoral act of imperialism on the cheap.
Result? In Central America, the result is not only poverty, but a huge drug economy and states like El Salvador crippled by gangs. In Libya, the result is a state fractured between gangs, and providing a launching point for desperate refugees aiming for Europe.
Unfortunately, there will not be a question in this election campaign that will come close to pointing at this malign syndrome. Nobody will ask the obvious question: why, if we are unwilling to accept millions of immigrants, did we spend a trillion dollars in Afghanistan over the last fourteen years instead of Mexico or Central America? Because the answer is rooted in the same shadow side in the States that produces systematic racism: exploitation without responsibility, and a wholly unearned feeling that the fruits of that exploitation are somehow "earned".

a little monday morning theology

There are books that are planets. One lands oon them, as in some sci-fi flick, and explores the strange ruins, the fantastic phrases that lie about and that seem to have been invented for unknown uses by a mysteriously vanished mental technology.

The Bible, of course, is the most famous of those texts in the West. I like sometimes to play the astronaut among the prophets and the gospels.

Which is how I came upon one of those amazing sentences, a couple of days ago, that seemed to overturn what I thought I know about the book.

Its tucked, appropriately, in one of the books of the Apocrypha – The wisdom of Solomon. In the first chapter:

“For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living.”

Reading this sentence, I did a sort of wiley coyote thing in my head, digging in my heels even as I was sliding over the cliff.

In other religious traditions, the idea of God not making something would not be a big deal. Divine power often operates in a world that exists quite apart from the God. Among the Greeks, there were things in the world that actually encumbered divine power. How the world came to be is often a murkey preface to other stories, and it is the latter that grab the spotlight. But monotheisms are distinguished by the close tie between God and the creator function. So much so, in fact, that it is difficult for people raised in a monotheistic tradition to recognize gods in traditions where no God creates everuthing.

Now, even in monotheism, God’s creating everything does not mean that God is responsible for everuthing. There’s nature, and then there’s the moral order, where man has free will, and sins. Whatever kind of theological curlycues one draws about that fact, it is still endemic to most monotheisms that the moral order is not identical to the natural order.

So one could say, in a sense, that God did not create sin. But death?

Death is, of course, part of the natural order. Or at least the secular view of death puts it with other natural things, such as breathing, eating, sex, etc.

All those natural things are created by God – so how is it that death isn’t? Doesn’t the sentence seem to challenge the power and scope of God?

I can think of two framing interpretations of this statement. In one, death is, indeed, a fragment of the uncreated state  - a sort of emissary of what was before God created everything. I am tempted to call it a floating negation, but only in as much as negation approximates the uncreated. In reality, negation would seem to be dependent as a concept on creation, so death wouldn’t be negation so much as a hole in things, a tear.

The other interpretation, which is more orthodox, is that something besides God created death. In this view, there is a spirit of negation, of some type, that has the power to create on a cosmic scale, but subordinate to God. Thus far orthodoxy would go. Here, the story of the Fall intrudes into the picture. And takes on a Blakean cast. The unorthodox version – the gnostic, or promethean, version – would draw attention to the paradoxes in that story. After all, when God places the tree of knowledge in the Garden and warns man not to eat of its fruit on pain of suffering death, it is a warning that makes no sense if man doesn’t understand what death is. But how can man understand what death is if there is no death? The paradox seems diabolic, and the gnostic way out of it would make the God who issued this warning a demiurge of no very moral type.

The orthodox answer, here, is to ignore this paradox as a mystery, and to go ahead with the rest of the story, removing death from the natural order and inserting it into the moral order.

Augustine, in the City of God, treads this route. Death, he explains, is “good unto none.” Thus, it is a pure negation. Death isn’t even good for martyrs. But martyrs and others can go through dying as a glorious thing.

Since death is good unton none, Augustine continues, it is a punishmment. It bears the mark of punishment in its very essence. Augustine impressed a sort of conflation of the moral and the natural, or, if you like, a sublation of the natural into the moral, upon the Christian mind: existence is positive. Existence bears within it the sign of creation – of the being created. This line, actually, is suggested in the Wisdom of Solomon: “for  he created all things, that they might have their being: and the generations of the world are healthful; and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon earth.”

In our dreamtime – which enfolds most of our waking as well as sleeping moments – this has an intuitive, fairy tale sense. Death is a punishment, and the natural order is the order of health. That’s how our stories work. They all work backwards from death in one way or another.

But I am interested in the first great framing interpretation, which has a less traceable history. I’m interested in how it tugs at the self-evidence of creation itself.

trump shock among our national high school's self appointed cool kids!

The grotesque spectacle of the Trump campaign has two ends: one is the Trump himself, and I am not going to attempt to pile up adjectives here. The  other end is the press corps, suffering under Trumpshock.The press corps has lived in a bubble for decades. One of its grand illusions is that objectivity calls for saying that if the Republicans do it (whatever the craziness of the moment), the Democrats do it to in an opposite and equal way. Underneath this bizarre rhetorical gesture is a larger delusion, which is that there is a mainstream and that the GOP is solidly part of it. In the media’s imagination, Ronald Reagan was a statesman, George HW Bush was honorable down to his very asshole, and would never disgrace the office by getting a blow job in it (in spite of the whispers that Bush had a mistress in D.C. – a rumor that no Starr or WAPO crew checked out) and George W. Bush was an honorable failure, seeking only to promote democracy around the world.

I should say, part of this delusion is that the GOP right and the Democratic Party right make up the only political spectrum in America. But I am dealing here with neurosis, not psychosis, so I’ll skip that issue.

This makes the David Duke scandal particularly funny. The only question ever asked of Trump is whether he disavows Duke. It is never asked, and it will never be asked of a GOP candidate, why a former KKK member would be attracted to the GOP.

I mean, they are all such honorable men.

So let’s return to the late lamented George W. Bush and the election of 2000 – one in which the rumor that McCain had a black mistress was spread in South Carolina by mysterious entities that had no, oh no, no, my gosh no, no connection with the George W. Bush campaign. That campaign, of course, ended up in the Florida quagmire.

What happened in the Florida quagmire? Here we have go to another racist, a man named Don Black, who runs an organization named Stormfront.  Stormfront was very agitated that Bush would be questioned in Florida. And they sent followers to pro-Bush rallies, and to pro-Gore rallies to bully, without the press ever, to my knowledge, asking George to disavow.  Infact, few reported on it. The Village Voice did, though:

 Black, the founder of the Internet's first "hate" site is claiming he'll help lead the rally. Black has been using his site to promote the event to the world from his home in downtown West Palm Beach, two miles from the voting action this week at the Emergency Operations Center. Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, will be there with his 11-year-old son, Derek (the webmaster of Stormfront for Kids.) Both father and son are featured in the HBO documentary Hate.com, airing this week.

The Pat Buchanan supporter—who voted for George W. Bush to keep Al Gore out—said Wednesday that he participated in the Jackson protest Monday, which he insists was more anti-Gore than pro-Bush. "I was right in the middle of things," Black said with a laugh. "Not a single reporter recognized me. My ego was deflated in a way."

That is not entirely surprising. Although Black is a former deputy of KKK leader David Duke's (and actually married Duke's former wife, Chloe), he tries to stay below the media radar in his wife's hometown of West Palm Beach, where they moved in 1987. Likewise, Black said that he is counseling fellow "pro-white" extremists to show up to support Bush, but not to emphasize their controversial stances such as support for the Confederate flag.

Black, apparently, understood how one must be discreet. The press appreciated that and at no time cared a bit that white supremicists were rallying for Bush and disrupting peaceful rallies by Jesse Jackson. I mean, the press had bigger fish to fry, like: Isn’t George Bush the kind of guy you’d love  ta share a beer with in a bar?

Trump is a master of the visceral issue, the issue of what you want your macho man  to be - much like  Georgie, the man in full, who was celebrated in one of the most asslicking bios of all time, written by Fred Barnes, still a member in good standing of the press corps, called, wonderfully, Rebel in Chief (wink wink there with that Rebel, as in confederate, but let’s not talk about it!). Georgie, however, was much more respectable than Trump, so he could amiably lead us from disaster to disaster, at each of which he visibly panicked, and the press was all about how he was macho man numero 1!

In my opinion, Trump will, if he is elected, rule like your standard GOPster. The difference between Romney and Trump is that Trump has a more bizarre tan. But that is it. And yet, you would think Hitler was coming to town from the coverage. Included in it is a mass of info that should make the average reader pause – you mean, Trump thinks the Iraq war was a disaster, and that Bush was on a vacation from reality when he totally ignored info about al qaeda aiming to hit America in 2001? You mean he doesn’t think people should die in the street cause they don’t have insurance? You mean he likes planned parenthood?

All of which is Romney without the dogwhistle. Trump is openly doing what the GOP has done since Goldwater: calling on all white people.

That is what they do.  Get over it.

sadness

It rather pisses me off that Trump took all the attention space from Sanders. That's the breaks, but it is very sad, nevertheless. Clinton needed a good competitive race. It would have moved the ball on the issues Sanders has been raising. Now we are going to go back to ignoring them. Sad.
I must admit, I find it especially funny when commenters bemoan the fact that Clinton has competition because of MONSTER TRUMP. As if you become a champion by being coddled. It is literally a fight, and if the idea is that your fighter will be better for never having practiced, than you don't know fightin'.