Wave the Bloody Shirt
It’s not hard to find examples of politicians exploiting tragedy for cheap emotional gain. But it’s hard to imagine a more cynical episode than the stunt trump pulled last night during his congressional address.
On January 28, just a week into the trump reign, our Commander in Chief green lighted a military raid in Yemen. By most accounts, the president* took acavalier attitude toward approving the mission. He could not be bothered to attend to the mission in the Situation Room, preferring to stay in the residence and tweet about trivialities. Leadership.
During the raid, CPO William Owen died, and six other SEALs were injured. An estimated 29 civilians died in the raid, including children. A $75M Osprey helicopter was disabled; airstrikes were called in to destroy the aircraft to keep it from falling into enemy hands. No strategic intelligence was attained, no strategic hard target or combatant captured or killed. It was a clusterfuck from start to finish.
This woman, Carryn Owens, lost her husband. Her grief is beyond my imagination. I’m confident in saying that it is also beyond the president’s * imagination. Or interest, really, in anything other than its value as a show biz gambit that allowed him to bask in one minute and forty-four seconds of standing ovation tribute, tribute that may have been intended for Mrs Owens and her late husband, but which he treated as his due. He even made her stand up a second time, this woman consumed in mourning and public grief, reduced to a prop in a sick game to let this sick man believe himself to be a popular leader.
Watch the tape. She wants to go away and hide. Now look at trump: the sick bastard is beaming, smiling, waving thumbs up as though he had just had a protester dragged out of one of his rallies. The world is just a reality show set to him. He could care fuck. all. about human feelings, about suffering, about yearning. Give him an applause line and everything is fine. This is what sociopathy looks like
Trump quoted the Bible. Trump said “Ryan” was looking down from heaven, and “he is very happy because I think he just broke a record” for the ovation. Huzzah.
Now, take a look at the Joint Chiefs of Staff during this revolting spectacle. Ever since the botched mission, trump has swung between claiming everything went great to blaming the failure on Obama. And then a few days ago, he tried to hang it around the necks of the military.
“This was something that was, you know, just — they wanted to do,” Trump said. “ And they came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected.”
“And they lost Ryan,” Trump continued.
Not one of those generals would deny their responsibility for CPO Owens’ death. It’s part of the role of leadership. (And by the way, Don, to you his name is Chief Petty Officer Owens. His friends call him Ryan.) The look of disgust on these faces is telling.
Trump, a pretend leader, is never to blame, never culpable for any failure. When things are going well, it’s all to his credit, just as when an audience is on its feet cheering, it is because of his magnificent greatness.
FWIW, CPO Owens’ father has refused to meet with the president*, claiming that the questions surrounding the approval and execution of the raid make it impossible for him to face trump. He has called for a full investigation, saying, “Don’t hide behind my son’s death to prevent an investigation.”
The schmuck from Queens went one step further. Not only will he hide behind CPO Owens’ death to avoid an investigation, he is waving a good man’s bloody shirt to wrap himself in applause and adoration.
It’s difficult to imagine a more revolting manipulation of genuine grief. Somehow, though, I think we have a long way to go before we hit bottom with this guy. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Night
Soon, it will all be over. Hard to believe, but true.
The end.
Denouement.
Fin.
The end of the arguments, the pitched battles on Facebook and in the comments section of your favorite newspaper, the unbridled anger, the long friendships dashed, families split asunder. The embarrassed glances as your neighbor plants another sign for that person, that idiot fraud who is going to destroy democracy as we know it, that tool of the special interests whose only interest is in undermining your freedom, your very way of life.
But enough about the race for Leon County Property Appraiser
Here’s my humble prediction: no matter who wins, the entirety of our electorate will find themselves in one or the other of these mindsets. The rosy scenario, alas, is possible only if MY preferred candidate wins. Otherwise, all is lost. Naturally.
Tuesday will mark the twelfth consecutive Presidential election that I have followed, dating back to 1972, with an almost clinically-diagnosable degree of obsession. In that time, I have watched every major election return – all the way into the late West Coast returns – and every national party convention. Gavel to gavel. Coast to coast. If recognizing a problem is the first step toward beating it, I’m good.
My name is Rob, and I am a political junkie.
(Faithful followers of the blog [all three of you] have wondered why Your Narrator, of all people, has not written more about the election this year. Short answer: what could I possibly say that hasn’t been said at least 7 times already? Also, too: I’ve had a hard time making any sense of it. It beggars belief, really.)
Anyway, November 8 is a pretty Biden big deal. It is a critical hinge-point in one of the greatest sagas ever told, a day of epic convergences and salient plot development.
I am speaking, of course, about David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan Infinite Jest.
It was Sunday, November 8, that this last and final Eschaton contest of all time, a game that had heretofore been a staid and measured contest of skill and strategy, descended into Lord of the Flies-esque blood-letting, a free-for-all melee in which propriety and acceptance of civilizing norms are discarded in favor of a winner-take-all-damn-the-torpedos orgy of anything-goes savagery in which anger and vengeance seem to be more important than arriving at mutually beneficial outcomes.
Sort of like this fucking election campaign. Damn. Can’t get away.
And it happened on November 8. The Day of Eschaton.
November 8 is also, in the IJ mythos, Interdependence Day, a celebratory occasion that marks the declaration by President Johnny Gentle of the forced union of the US, Mexico, and Canada. Johnny Gentle, a germ-o-phobic lounge crooner cum television star – a man described as having a “pathological inability to deal proactively with any sort of real or imagined rejection” – has defied the odds by winning the Presidency on the platform of, basically, ‘everything is filthy and awful and I’m the only one who can clean it up’. That he has never been bothered by two or more ideas occupying his mind at the same time, or that he has disturbing and obvious sociopathic and authoritarian tendencies, is of no apparent concern to a largely imbecilic American electorate which is anxious to have someone place a firm hand on the wheel.
Forget building a yoooge wall. Johnny Gentle forced Canada to accept a “gift” of a massive swath of land comprising most of Northern New England and New York, a land that will be used as a toxic dump for America’s trash and radioactive waste. The land is quickly rendered uninhabitable for humans, though rumor abounds that giant feral rodents, perhaps descendant of liberated pet hamsters, roam the wilds feasting on garbage hurled by massive catapults from the south.
Also, too: Johnny Gentle dismantles NATO, ostensibly because they won’t carry their own weight, defense-spending wise.
Also, too, also: the mysterious Joelle Van Dyne – aka radio cult personality Madame Psychosis (which we are intended to hear as ‘metempsychosis‘); formerly-aka the Prettiest Girl of All Time (PGOAT), subsequently a victim of a hideous acid- hurled-in-the-face deformity episode, and currently a member of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (UHID) – is admitted into Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House on November 8, YDAU.
Of note: JVD is also the featured performer inThe Entertainment, a video cartridge that is so compellingly mesmerizing and entertaining that anyone who starts watching it will sit transfixed, through episodes of hunger and thirst and bladder/colonic evacuations, until actual death occurs.
Something like this fucking election campaign.
As Pierce noted in a recent post: “Are We Not Entertained?”, both camps have pulled out all the stops to capture our eyeballs, from HRC’s parade of celebrities we love to watch – like the celebrities currently occupying that Big House That Slaves Built on Pennsylvania Avenue, no to mention A-listers like Bey, Katy, Bruce, &c. – to Trump’s parade of Chachi and Ted Nugent and uh, mm, uh…… OK, granted, Trump can’t call down the star-power the way Hils can, but it doesn’t matter…he himself is The Entertainment ne plus ultra of this campaign. He is the can’t-stop-looking train wreck that everybody watches just to see what happens next. Some of us are horrified, some of our neighbors thrilled, at the “authenticity” of his antics. Either way, the folks with the teevee cameras know that if they point at him, a goodly number of us will gawk, perhaps not through embarrassing episodes of defecatory/excretory mishap, but certainly in great enough numbers to keep the camera pointers focused on what we have deemed most important this year.
“So,” you ask Your Rambling Narrator, “the fuck what? I can’t stand this stuff and I never watch/listen to any of this crap.” Indeed. And why should you?
(You just know I’m gonna tell you why. But not yet.)
I recently re-read some Joan Didion essays about the 1988 conventions and election – a moment of relative civility in the recurring preznential drama – and I found myself wondering
Your Narrator is compelled to consider one of i2b’s guiding principles: Reagan Ruined Everything. Perhaps St Ronald was the metaphorical tennis ball to Kittenplan’s skull? Consider Ronnie’s abject demonization of the word “liberal” and the various schemes and machinations of the Reagan campaign, their dickying the Iran hostage crisis and stealing debate books and barely concealed racist appeals. Is this it? Here, after all, was a man careening headlong into dementia, a dim bulb in the chandelier ascending to the presidency, a B- movie contract hack with name recognition largely derived from his silver screen history. Saint Ronnie indeed left a trail of carnage and terrible policies in his wake. But no, Reagan had at least been a Governor, as had many Presidents before him, and despite his anti-towering intellect and retrograde policy inclinations, he was a legitimate choice for President.
I glance back at Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and I find myself amazed that History’s Yard Waste himself looks almost good in comparison. But no, this was not the moment.
We can think about Willie Horton or Al Gore inventing the internet while he wrote Love Story, or the Great Clenis Hunt of the 1990s, or or or….and sure, all these things are contributors to our current debaclish condition, grim harbinger of the degradation to come. But not quite the nadir.
In the end, I think the line drive tennis ball to the nape of our political neck
And really and come on, that was the moment where the “apparatus of the game” got thrown against the rocks and our descent into Gentle Trumpery was ordained. Not that it wouldn’t have happened anyway, eventually, that somebody would see the weakness inherent in the politico/media co-dependency and knife that soft-underbelly with almost Stradivarian skill. But that moment when a reasonably sentient Presidential nominee selected a barely sentient snowbilly in 4-inch Louboutins to stand as second-in-line to the Presidency, when the media broke its own back bending to deal “even handedly” with a person who justly deserved all the mockery we could muster – that was the moment of insemination, the moment the Trump monster was made possible. Because once we treated her as though she were in the least qualified, all bets were off for any future carny act that wanted to play the media like small-town marks in front of a cartload of snake oil.
Compare the amount of coverage of Palin v Obama in 2008. Compare the amount of coverage of Trump v everybody else this past year. The media gazed upon Palin/Trump as do the victims of The Entertainment – they are willing to endure anything because the freak show is so damned compelling. And while we may not be down with soiling ourselves, it’s pretty clear that we will swallow pretty much anything.
Along comes Trump. The shattered apparatus of the game was no match for a guy who couples razor-sharp media instincts with the morality of a Kimodo dragon. When Johnny Gentle emerged:
the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when — somehow even worse — there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.
The GOP was caught flat-footed by Trump, struck dumb by his remorseless manipulations of the very same elements the Party had assumed were their personal playthings, rendered impotent by a stable of so-called contenders who were either utterly content-free, horrifically unlikeable, or both. The Republican party – for all the earnest, very public soul-searching by the very same people who set the table for this Bosch-like feast
One of William F Buckley’s notable quips was “Don’t immanentize the Eschaton”, which was directed at the do-gooder utopians who he accused of attempting to hasten a post- Armageddon kingdom of god. At root, it was just a fancy way of complaining about government intervention in human affairs, but it made the speaker feel all plummy and clever about his (almost always his) disdain for the lily-livered, oatmeal- brained, pusillanimous pukes of the liberal persuasion. I first heard the phrase in an undergrad pol sci class.
But now it seems the equation is flipped. We have the Great Orange Menace casually declaiming “I’ll bomb the shit out of them” and other such expressions of policy, much to the great delight of his devotees who are ready to blow the whole damn thing up out of frustration and anger. We have arrived at the inversion of Buckley’s concern in which the purported conservative candidate – our own Johnny Gentle – is the one calling for a thoroughgoing cleansing.
Fortunately, and unlike the sad picture of the Dems and GOP as hapless doubles partners offered inInfinite Jest, the Democratic Party found itself nominating a candidate with perhaps the greatest set of qualifications and experience in the history of the Republic.
I reckon that within a very short period of time, President Clinton II will disappoint me in some profound ways. In this she will join every other President, including Barack Obama, who I consider the finest President of my lifetime, and one of our all time top 5.
I am damned glad that she is the Democrat who stood in battle with our very own Johnny Gentle. When we wake up on November 9, we better hope (hell, pray if you want to) she took the prize. Anything else is, literally, unthinkable.
Yes or No, But….
How do you solve a problem like The Donald? From my perspective, the answer is simple: turn out the vote and beat that sociopathic charlatan like a tin drum. Send him scurrying back into the fever swamp that spawned him. Be gone, beast.
But for my Republican friends (stop laughing) and relatives, it is a little trickier. Talking to these folks – in a respectful and civil way (why are you laughing? Stop!) – presents an opportunity for us to find a little common ground
Some of them – call them the #EverTrump crowd – see Big Orange as the answer to their prayers, a knight in Cheetos-colored armor. For them, it’s simple. And I got nothing except to say, “Nice weather we’re having.” Common ground enough.
Then there are the folks Josh Marshall tagged as the “Yes, but…” brigade, people who realize Mister Spray Tan is a disaster on legs, but are going to vote for him anyway. Folks like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who daily have to spin like tops to distance themselves from Trump’s latest nonsense, but still, their support remains unwavering. Rubio. Priebus. McCain. The list goes on. Profiles in triangulating cowardice, they want it both ways: principled opposition to the scourge of Gold Star moms everywhere, but a clean heart about withholding their vote for the only living, non-orange person who might actually become President, the Hildebeast. These are the folks who calculate that party over country is a winning bet. For them, I got nothing beyond a suggestion to check out the latest escapades of Mallard Fillmore. And this: history will not be kind to you. Nice weather, by the way.
Then there are those who know el Trumpo is a know-nothing martinet and a fool, but a lifetime of GOP voting leaves them constitutionally incapable of pulling the lever for the pant- suited she-demon. The “No, but…” brigade. JEB!? I’m looking at you. If you’re in this gaggle, stay with me, because I want you to find your way to the fourth possible path, the one less traveled by. Here is where I praise Republicans who realize that a Trump presidency would inflict incalculable damage on our Nation, who cannot imagine having to explain to their descendants how they could have supported – even indirectly – the election of a vulgar grifter. People who know that they are going to take fire from other Republicans, know they’ll hear cries of “Traitor!” People who know they are sacrificing future opportunities in the party they have called home for a lifetime. The #NoButs brigade.
We can also call them Patriots.
I recently struck up a friendship with a long-time member of the conservative GOP establishment. (STOP laughing!) Last time we spoke, X was firmly in the “No, but…’ camp, unable to see how she could overcome a lifetime of Clinton-aversion. But today I discover that she has very publicly and definitively joined the #NoButs brigade, proclaiming that if the race is close, she will vote for Hillary Clinton.
I cannot tell you how much I admire her courage. She could have kept quiet and nobody would have known. Except her. And this was a big splash, a very public conversion driven by conscience and rational analysis. This is what decency looks like. I hope this opens the floodgates.
And I hope those trying to have it both ways realize that, as my Uncle Herschel used to say, “Roll in pig mud, boy, and you get stink on ya.”
I’m not asking that every Republican become a Democrat or vote a straight Dem ticket. I am asking – no, pleading, really – that the people who identify as reasonable Republicans cut the charade of “Yes/No, but…” and take a simple stand. Proclaim your support for Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States. #NoButs
You can vote straight GOP down the ticket from there. You can pledge to do everything you can to ensure that she is a one- term President. As a member of the loyal opposition, you can commit to struggling against any of her policies that strike you as wrong.
What you cannot do – if you want to honestly see yourself as a principled conservative and Patriot – is to sit this out, to let your silence serve as tacit approval of a tiny-fingered, Cheetos-tinted lunatic assuming the power of the Presidency.
Just join the ranks of the sane and repeat after my new pal, who proclaimed, “This is a time when country has to take priority over political parties. Donald Trump cannot be elected president.” Now that’s some common ground we should be able to agree on.
(Out of respect for her reputation, I won’t quote my pal by name. She’s getting grief enough without being pegged as a friend of mine.)
It’s Getting There
Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away Feel like my soul has turned into steel I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal There’s not even room enough to be anywhere It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there — Bob
I’d love to take a cavalier tone here, deliver a wry slice of the buffoonery that is He, Trump
The Writer as Trump, Friend of da Jieuxs — Photo by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee
But mocking Trump is just not enough. Things are just a tad too dire. Face it: one of two people has a non-zero chance of becoming the nation’s 45th president. Neither is named Jill or Gary.
His acceptance speech in Cleveland was … was … well, what the hell was that, anyway? He began by saying this:
Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.
Humble
It was touted ahead of time as hewing to the model of Nixon’s 1968 acceptance. (My favorite Nixon scholar, Rick Perlstein, explains here how badly Trump missed the mark.) Trump knows that his only hope for winning is to amplify and exaggerate our fears, to scare enough people into welcoming authoritarian rule to save us from threats at home and abroad, threats to our “way of life” and “our values”. Like Nixon in ’68, the litany of horror Trump describes is impressively dire. But unlike Nixon’s list, it is largely fictional. A few examples: crime is down, cop killings are down, employment is up, ACA is working well, and so on. Our scorched Thunderdome? He pretty much just made it up.
Fact checkers at work on Trump’s ravings
Even more telling, Nixon understood and acknowledged that these were problems that we would have to solve “together”. Trump had a slightly different perspective:
I ALONE CAN FIX IT.
This theme came around several times, and it is perhaps the most telling component of the whole crazed diatribe. Trump sees himself as a messianic figure, an authoritarian genius who will cure everything that ails us simply by being his awesome self.
On January 20th of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced.
Because right now, and as far as memory can serve, America is a charred hellscape where chaos reigns supreme. And only one man can save us.
More humility, with a hearty dash of spittle-flecked anger
He yelled. He balled his fists. His face contorted and reddened. He started loud and got louder, more angry.
And then he lowered his tone and said this:
I AM YOUR VOICE.
I truly lost my bearings at this point. Is he a con artist, delivering his practiced patter to sting an easy mark? Is it all an act, or does this guy truly believe our world is in the depths of hell and he is the only man who can save us.
It doesn’t really matter. We now have a know-nothing narcissist within hailing distance of the Oval Office. He is clearly unqualified, and unhinged. Whether he’s running a long con or is “just” a demented egomaniac (not that these are mutually exclusive), this is dangerous territory
It’s unlikely, but this tiny fingered schmuck could win. He starts with a reliable ~40% of the vote, people who love them some authoritarianism, along with folks whose tribal affiliation to Republicanism means they just have to vote for him. On the other side, Clinton has a reliable ~40% base who love them some Democratic tribalism. And as always, that leaves the mushy middle of 20 million or so people who are unsure, undecided. These are, for the most part, what the political profession calls low information voters.
A few hours ago, a candidate for state representative knocked on my door.
I asked him if, knowing that Trump is a dangerous nut, and that one of two people was going to be President, and that Florida is a tight state electorally, he didn’t think it was his responsibility to do what he could to keep the nut out of office. He was remarkably open to the idea when phrased that way.
I had the same conversation with my fab daughter this morning, a disappointed Bernster who “just isn’t feeling Hillary”. I get it. It’s her first election, and she wants it to be a righteous experience. And I get that many Bernie supporters are disappointed and feeling left out. Been there.
Much has been said about prominent GOPers refusing to attend the convention. Several big name Republicans have announced that they will absolutely not vote for Trump, but like my new pal and state house candidate, they can’t bring themselves to vote for Clinton. And much is made of their integrity, their principled opposition.
I say bullshit. How bad does it have to get to renounce your party’s presidential nominee? Pretty fucking terrible, that’s how. Yet that’s not terrible enough to actually do something to keep him out of the office you already admit that he is unqualified for? What more do you need?
Republicans have a shitty choice, but it has a silver lining. I’m looking for prominent Republicans – come on JEB! – to take a stand and say, “This guy is dangerous, he does not represent the values of our party or our country, and I am voting for his opponent. In four years, I will campaign hard to re-take the White House from Hillary Clinton, but for now, she is the only viable choice.”
This is the way to rebuild a sober and rational party. I know too many Republicans who acknowledge that the party has become extremist. They want it to change. Here’s their chance to chase to tea partiers, the white supremacists, the obstructionists, the bomb throwers.
For Hillary-averse voters who consider themselves liberal, or progressive, or leftist syndicalist whatevers, it’s time to suck it up and support Clinton. Proclaim loudly that Trump is just too dangerous, but dammit Clinton, we’re gonna bulldog you and hold your feet to the fire. Find another Bernie to primary her in 2020 if she let’s you down too badly.
I get that there are people who really, really, really do not like Hillary Clinton. Personally, I’m fine with her; it feels like a continuation of Obama, and I can’t get too outraged over that. I’m fairly certain she will disappoint and outrage me at some point, just like every other president in my lifetime.
But I’m comfortable with that because I know it is inevitable. For some folks, the idea of voting the lesser of two evils is too much to bear, and a principled purity vote is more emotionally satisfying. Or maybe you’re thinking of staying home, like your crestfallen GOP counterparts who didn’t get they nominee the wanted. Above it all.
Whether you’re a disappointed progressive or an disappointed conservative, let me say with utmost respect:
Fuck your feelings. Use your head.
Trump is a clear danger. We cannot afford to indulge in preening and moral purity this year. The stakes are too high. Vote, goddamit. And don’t waste it.
(Full Disclosure: I voted Bernie in the primary, fwiw. And I like Tim Kaine just fine.)
A Nice Gooey Cluster
It sure is clustery.
I’ve been a gavel-to-gavel convention junkie since 1972. I admit that most of the time it is tedious, pretentious, and a towering load of bullshit. The joke that “politics is show business for ugly people” has been around as long as I can remember, and my enjoyment comes from my uber-geeky obsession with US history and politics. Growing up under the Nixon raj was like living in a Shakespearean tragedy, so I’ve always found it damned entertaining and compelling. Mea culpa.
Conventions are tightly scripted reality shows, a cross between Survivor and those cheesy behind-the-athlete vignettes that have made the Olympics all but unwatchable. Predictable, cliched kitsch with an occasional surprise twist. But sometimes, the machinery breaks down and the mask comes off to reveal the reptile aliens underneath. It happened in ’68 and ’72 with the Democrats, and in ’64 and ’76 for the Republicans. It reveals much about the national id and the undercurrents of tension and conflict that are behind the events that we always scratch our heads over and think, “how could such a thing happen?” here.
This year’s Republican National Convention has been a parade of reptile aliens. It almost beggars analysis.
What can you say when the speaker who displayed the greatest integrity (maybe the only speaker who displayed any integrity) was a charmless theocrat from Texas who frightens his own children? No, Daddy, no! Icky Daddy.
What can you say when the convention attendees act as though they are in a remake of The Crucible?
The delegation from Mississippi. Burn the witch!
I could go on, and I have. I ‘ve twitterized to excess this week, one-liner bon mots flowing like cheap wine. The spectacle is perfect for it. Moose and squirrel. Quisling taint lickers like Walker, Christie, and Little Marco. The weaponization of grief. The cynical intonation of MLK in defense of state’s rights. Rudy Nosferatu. A verb, a noun, 9-11.
What this week’s spectacle does not lend itself to is any kind of extended, coherent analysis. It is simply too fractured, a broken mirror reflection of what at least 40% of our nation perceives as reality, with so many overlapping fault lines as to defy focus. And that, truly, may be the point.
It may be that the splintered, kaleidoscopic texture of the past three nights was intentional. So many shiny objects! So many “did you see that?” diversions! And such a cavalcade of stars! Duck Dynasty! Chachi! GE Smith!
It’s every bit as dazzling as the 4 a.m. shift on the old Jerry Lewis Telethons. Yeah, I watched that, too, every year. Why? Well, it was one night when the electric picture radio box had more than a test pattern after midnight, and it was a holiday, and if you were lucky, some hapless Vegas crooner would lose his toupee mid-song, or Jerry would doze off or start hallucinating and babbling and crying. Just like this year’s RNC. Actual photo of Chris Christie thinking “My god, what have I done?” Jerry Lewis at 4 a.m.
Horrific displays of stiff Caucasian dancing and call-and- response insanity? Stagecraft gone awry? Valium-addled rantings, video screens and microphones misfiring, speakers crying? Messrs. K and H assure the public their production will be second to none. I love it.
When I go to a concert and the wheels start to come off, I get a thrill. How will everybody respond? Sometimes, the recovery takes the performance to a level nobody had imagined, pure magic. Other times, recovery is rough, but respectable. And sometimes, nothing can be done, everybody just has to pretend things are okay, while the band plays Waltzing Matilda. Onward to death and glory!
I’ve pretty much avoided writing about He, Trump, aka The Donald, The Short Fingered Vulgarian, &c. It all pretty much gets written without my help. The rest of the GOP clown car? So much protoplasm, so little substance. The entire campaign was like watching a circus camp for incontinent toddlers, like watching a stubborn remnant refusing to go away no matter how many times you flush. Fascinating, but more than a little revolting. Just not terribly interesting to write about.
Plus, also, too, it’s easy to get distracted by trivialities like i) Natasha’s plagiarized speech or ii) whether a professional gasbag did or did not give a Nazi salute to Trump.
One almost forgets that the reason this shitshow is happening at all is because one of our two choices for president is a litigation happy megalomaniac who lies as easily as most people fart. A grandstander who has no qualifications, a grifter, a phony, a narcissistic horror. He knows nothing of policy, or how governance works, or even the basic facts of America’s role in the world. He’s the drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, the sot at the end of the bar that everybody moves away from. A barking mad street ranter waving pamphlets and yelling “I’ve got evidence!”
You may hate her, and her policies, but Hillary is at least qualified to serve. Lawyer. Senator. Secretary of State. You gotta go back to Madison for that kind of resume cred. Trump? It’s laughable on its face. A sane electorate would not elect this guy King of Cartoons. And the polls say he’s pretty much a snowball in hell.
But it’s not enough to let me sleep soundly. I’ve seen elections go wrong before. It can happen here.
For a generation or three that has grown up with the electric picture machine, Trump is a familiar amalgam of years of iconic representation. He’s Ralph Cramden and Fred Flintstone and Archie and the predators of the reality show circuit. He’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and a towering member of the glitterati club. He’s been in your home, in one form or another, for decades.
Back in the days of Reagan
This, my friends, was Philip K Dick level prognosticating. It’s no accident that a considerable percentage of the convention speakers gained their fame through reality teevee.
These day, celebrity qua celebrity is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Viral videos, reality shows, all that. It means that anybody can be famous, qualifications be damned. And here’s a goodly chunk of the Trump appeal: anybody, by damn, can be president!
“So what that he don’t know NATO from NAFTA…he’s got common sense, dalgurnit, and he’s ain’t beholden. Why, he’s just like me! Now hold my beer and watch me shoot this skeeter offa ma nose!” An actual Trump delegate. No, really.
There is an unmovable base that thinks that what is going on in one of the only two parties that matter
On top of that, there is another significant percentage of people who will stroke their chins thoughtfully and say, oh yes, certainly, that Trump fellow is a bit rough around the edges, but oh my fucking god that Hilary Clinton, at least Trump didn’t {hide emails, smuggle cocaine, kill Vincent Foster, help Bill rape women, &c.} AND SHE IS EVIL AND SHE MUST BE STOPPED. People who, more in sorrow than in anger, will vote to Make America Great Again.
Here’s where shit gets real.
As with the last several elections, it comes down to what are quaintly known as “low information” voters. People of the land. The common clay of America.
You know….morons.
Here’s where it can go all wrong. In 2000, there was the idea going around that Bush would be someone you’d rather have a beer with. He was a regular guy, just like me! Already you can see the effort to cast Trump and his spawn as salt of the earth jes’ folk, with Hilary as the epitome of elitism. Ah, but he’s a businessman. A celebrity businessman. A rich
Give him points: he’s the savviest manipulator of the media monkeys we’ve ever seen. A bona fee-day organ grinder with a chain attached to all their nose rings. He played his opponents and the party grandees like a tent full of chumps at the carnival. The Trump Rollicking Medicine Show rolls on, and we can only hope that enough people will see the con and outnumber the marks. There’s no guarantee, so step right up…
I’ll tune in again tonight, a chump at the edge of my seat waiting to see what kind of weaponized resentments he will offer to a crowd that looks all too ready to roll some tumbrels and pitch some forks. I’ll curse and tweet and go to bed ennervated and distressed, hooked on this year’s reality teevee spectacle. The ratings will be boffo.
Disruptive Sharing Pt. 3 We live in the golden era of consumer bliss.
A few mouse clicks and we can sit back and wait for front-door delivery of everything we never knew we wanted. At a discount. And without the nuisance of having to spend time actually talking to a clerk or salesperson. Eventually, those pesky clerks will experience the joy of excess leisure time as robots assume their non-essential functions and the brick-and- mortar stores die away. Disruption!
We can tap a few ephemeral pixels on our smartphones and, lo and behold, a smiling driver in a late-model car will miraculously materialize to drive us quickly and safely to our destination. Your driver might even offer you a breath mint or some other treat to make your ride more enjoyable as you bask in the redolence of sandalwood-scented air freshening technology. Sharing!
We can find a place to stay in a far-away land, someplace that feels local and may even be/have been an actual residence inhabited by an actual local. Atmosphere! AuthenticityTM! And best of all…you usually get to dodge taxes and fees that a hotel would charge. Disruption AND Sharing!
What’s not to like?
At first glance, not much. But there’s more to these disruptions than meets the eye.
Pretty much everybody understands how Amazon has undermined (sorry) disrupted the standard brick and mortar retail economy. The costs in lost jobs and local economic activity have been enormous. Defenders of disruptive capitalism would point to the epic success and enormous popularity of Amazon as its obvious justification.
That cool flat you rented in New Orleans? Very possibly it used to be the home of a family who eventually had to move because the Return on Investment from renting the place to tourists far outstrips the RoI on renting to a regular citizen. Under the logic of the marketplace, this is a right and just outcome. Never mind that the displaced resident might be the chef or shopkeeper or musician whose work made your trip so delightful (assuming the cafe or retail store has not already closed under pressure from mega-chains…and the musician, playing for tips, watched you listen for 20 minutes and walk away without dropping any coin in the hat) now commutes to New Orleans from somewhere like Houma or Tickfaw or Slidell because real estate values – already stressed by an influx of hipsters, urban pioneers, and (dog love ’em) carpetbagging entrepreneurs – have grown increasingly distorted and unaffordable.
Sure, and ok, but what could possibly be wrong with letting people freely enter into an arrangement whereby an innovative and disruptive company connects them with people who need a ride, that they will pay for, and that allows a go-getting driver to make “up to $75 and hour or more!”? As we saw in part 1 of this trilogy, Uber and Lyft are able to offer lower prices and nicer rides largely through their ability to exempt themselves from governmental regulations and to classify their employees as not-really-employees-at-all.
But even if we could ignore all these factors – which is easy to do so long as the disruption is disrupting someone who is not you – the biggest problem with the Amazons and Ubers and such is that they have achieved such dominating size and power. Again, defenders of the prevailing market paradigm will point to the success and size of these relatively new companies as justification in and of itself, striking the argument that those who create value deserve to enjoy the rewards of their innovation.
All well and good. But perhaps Amazon and Uber and Airbnb and PayPal and such do not actually create any value
What a killjoy. Mea culpa.
Besides, there are plenty of brick and mortar businesses doing really well. Try to deny the success of restaurant mega-chains or superstores. Every time a new chain opens in our town, the lines to try the world’s greatest biscuit or most anodyne Tex- Mex stretch around the block. We like it cheap and fast.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that the regulatory hurdles for opening a small business are extraordinarily difficult for local, independent entrepreneurs. For large chains, teeming with armies of clerical and legal staff, these challenges are about as daunting as a flea fart. In every aspect, their scale offers significant advantage.
And again, the free market evangelist will likely consider a business’s scale, and its attendant market advantages, as examples of the “common sense” dictum that RoI and growth are proof of the value of an enterprise. And given how that Randian worldview has managed to take root, not too many folks bother to question beyond that premise.
Luckily, though, there are some willing to scratch the surface of these arguments. The Summer 2016 issue of The American Prospect features a terrific article called Confronting the Parasite Economy. It’s a hard look at how companies who survive on underpaying their employees are in fact undermining the economic health of the entire system. This might be easy to ignore if it were coming from the usual socialist/leftist critique factory.
Hanauer has founded and funded a progressive think tank with an eye to countering the kind of right-wing chop shops that have proliferated over the past 30-40 years. And he is making a forceful case that the relentless drive to slash prices and suppress wages is going to end with the disappearance of the middle class, with a great divide between people who will have some semblance of discretionary income – which is certainly the most important driver of a healthy capitalist economy – and the people who decide whether to buy food or medicine.
Hanauer is one example of an entrepreneur putting his assets to work confronting what he sees as a social problem. Bill Gates is giving away gazillions of dollars to alleviate disease and “improve” education. Zuckerberg is in on the act, too, establishing a foundation for good works. It’s arguable that the Koch Brothers do the same thing through their donations to arts organizations, public broadcasting, &c.
You got a problem with that?
If not, maybe you should. The very fact that such a small group of people, accountable only to their own whims and desires, have the ability to create such massive disruption in the realms of social policy is more than a little too much like the Gilded Age beneficence of Carnegie and Gould and Morgan and Rockefeller. Further, the outsized influence of, say, the money Gates promises to schools who adopt his vision of what constitutes “better” leads to a headlong rush to get a piece of that action by adopting whatever foolishness is attached. Here again, the remora swarm the stream of cash whether the outcomes are beneficial, harmful, or just another exercise in hand-waving and incantation.
The Cult of the Unicorn Entrepreneur – distinct from actual good work done by real ‘treps – points to the big winners, the Zuckerbergs and the Cubans and the Trumps, as examples of this-could-be-you inspiration, the modern equivalent of the old Ragged Dick bootstrap myths. And yeah, it could be you. But for all the romanticism of a college dropout becoming the richest man in the world, it’s worth remembering that these were guys who dropped out of Harvard and the like, and who started life with a pretty decent pair of boots and straps up with which to pull themselves. This is not to suggest that the circumstances of their birth made it ‘easy’ for them to achieve great wealth; they have worked their tails off. But don’t kid yourself; telling the average kid on lunch program assistance that she can become the next Zuckerberg is not just unlikely, but somewhat cruel.
The Cult of the Unicorn Entrepreneur (CUE!) is not objectionable because it urges people to follow their dreams, or attempt the seemingly impossible against all odds, or to work their asses off to actualize an innovative idea. It is objectionable because it has been pressed into service in the Makers vs. Takers propaganda campaign that leads people to declare “I built that”, to glorify the go-it-alone ethos of the Galtian superhero. Worse: to justify the sufferings of millions because they “just couldn’t cut it”.
The bitterest irony is that progressively greater concentrations of wealth and market power in the hands of a few makes it all the less likely that the small, home-grown ‘trep will succeed. Tech megaliths are legendary for buying up the competition and killing it, and if the plucky small ‘trep won’t sell, well then there are armies of lawyers on staff who will happily drive Mr and Mrs Plucky into the ground through legal action.
Our society lavishes inordinate praise on people who have been lucky enough to accumulate a fortune. Some of these folks have earned it.
Recall the time when Ken Lay was besties with the President and graced the cover of all the popular business mags, which serve as the People and Vogue magazines of the 1% crowd and their acolytic wannabe followers. These fawning peddlers of hagiographic bootstrapper mythology – along with their breathless counterparts at CNBC, FOX Business, &c. – are only too happy to help us understand that entrepreneurial geniuses like Mark Cuban and Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca (and even the inexcusable Carly Fiorina) are role models, icons of greatness.
Anyone who wonders how we find ourselves pondering the very real possibility of a tin-plated grifter like Donald Trump as our next president need look no farther than this insane devotion to the concept that extreme wealth indicates extreme merit.
In the end, Your Narrator holds a strangely optimistic faith that any real improvement in our social and economic relations lies in the hands of entrepreneurs
It will also require a shift in attitude as to the role of government, by citizens and gummit employees alike. Maybe it’s time for government to behave entrepreneurially
Here’s where the pessimism can’t help but gain a toehold. The Gospel of the Free Market has had an impressive run over the past 35 years. Government is bad, you see. It strangles initiative and innovation through excessive taxation and overreaching regulation. These precepts are so internalized into the conventional wisdom, into common sense, as to make anyone who contradicts the scripture appear as a Quixote-ish heretic.
This sacred wisdom is, to turn steal a phrase, all my balls.
How we manage as a society to curb the power of extreme accumulation remains an open question, probably one that we need to improvise on an almost daily basis. Still, there is no basis for believing that a small sliver of very wealthy people are inherently better at establishing policies that govern environmental safety, access to the internet, &c. than are people who work for government at whatever level. I know some incredibly bright, creative, and (yes) entrepreneurial folks who work for government. I also know a few extremely wealthy people who leave me wondering that they still know how to breathe. Vice is versa, also, too. The greatest tragedy of free market evangelism has been the ongoing erosion of the idea that government can be a vehicle for safeguarding the common-wealth while encouraging an ill- founded faith that private enterprise is inherently more pure and effective. Sure, “everybody” “knows” that government is inept and inefficient, and so on. Post office jokes, &c. But really, are we going to look to the realm of insurance companies, cable tv providers, and peddlers of cubic zirconia to deliver something better?
The big difference is that, to some degree or another, the government staffer or official is accountable. It may be difficult, but people get voted out, staffers get fired, lawbreakers are prosecuted. It is in-built into our system of governance that such an outcome is possible. The goal of the Randian Gospel is to exempt a small segment of our society from any such restriction.
Sure, the government is a cauldron of imbecile stew. Five hundred dollar hammers and bridges to nowhere and a fighter plane that nobody wants and it doesn’t work anyway. But private enterprise? West, Texas. Bhopal. Deepwater Horizon.
Comcast!
The gentle reader is now asking, “Fine, Mr Smartass Killjoy McBummer, but what can I do?” Glad you asked.
Resisting the blandishments of the sharing economy’s “benefits” is a good place to start, but not always practical. Find yourself a few drinks over the line and need a ride home? Uber is probably your best bet, and no judgement need follow your decision. The Writer stayed in an Airbnb a few months ago and loved it. And never mind the amount spent on Amazon over the years, especially when we lived in swampy isolation.
Whaddyagonnado?
Well, for one thing, when you have a choice: buy local. If you have a choice between Starbucks and a local coffee roaster, for instance, use the local. Go to your local independent bookstore if you are lucky enough to have one. Find a local farmer’s market for produce, or go to a bar owned by one of your neighbors. (Your average TGI Fridays sucks pond water anyway.) Sure, in reality, there’s only so much an individual can do to make a difference; but as more of us commit to making this difference, it starts to add up.
If you are feeling entrepreneurial, ask yourself: What am I bringing to the game that supports making this kind of difference? Are you creating real opportunities for people? Are you offering something that serves to create a healthier commonwealth? To put it another way: Would you be proud to have your momma see what you’re doing?
Or maybe, just maybe, you might want to take that entrepreneurial spirit into the public sector. As we used to say back in the old days: Change the system from within.
All other issues aside, we absolutely need to bring about a shift in the general mindset that glorifies the money-maker, the caustic “common sense” that gives permission to disregard suffering and misfortune because it is somehow deserved. To somehow, at long last, undermine the Reagan-esque gospel that a person who has a load of money is de facto worthy of respect just because the balance sheet says so.
This is not some communistic preaching that everybody needs to make the same amount of money, or that innovation and risk should not be rewarded. But surely we can agree that the personality cults that cluster around the Zuckerbergs and Cubans and Bezos (and before them the Iacocca’s and Welches) are about as justifiable as taking life lessons from the Kardashians, the Duck Dynasty guys, or Honey Boo Boo’s family. If we rely upon the denizens of Davos to lead us into the promised land we may find ourselves somewhat surprised that our new world doesn’t satisfy our expectations.
But hey, no worries. President Trump will fix everything. He’s an entrepreneur, doncha know.
Disruptive Sharing Pt. 2
A few weeks back we took a look at some of the downsides of our new “sharing” economy. It’s worth taking a look at some of the really positive aspects of the expanding embrace of entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
I know a number of top-cut people who are entrepreneurs. I mean this with absolute sincerity and conviction; these are people who would bail my ass out of a crack without hesitation, people who give back and pay forward as a matter of character and habit. People with greater social compassion and engagement than I have to offer on my best day, and who do it pretty much without a break.
Some of my friends have or will spend their last dime and ounce of energy trying to turn an idea into something real and tangible. This is the core of entrepreneurship: taking an idea from the wisps of neuro-chimera and bringing it into the world in a form that can be seen, felt, heard, touched. Even the most committed democratic socialist can recognize the essential value in being able to take an idea from concept to actuality. Entrepreneurship is about getting things done.
And many of these people have created opportunities for other people to expand their own creative expression, to have jobs that offer both economic return and the chance to make a tangible difference through their work. As someone who spent too many years toiling in large organizations – a constant exercise of pouring from the empty into the void – this is a significant contribution to quality of life in our communities.
And it ain’t easy. Aside from competing entrepreneurs, you have to face a barrage of people telling you, every step of the way, that “that will never work”.
Same thing in the “arts” – I know any number of writers, musicians, visual artists, &c. who have figured out a way to create a product that people are willing to pay for. Let’s go ahead and say that product is a value-neutral term. A Love Supreme is a product. So is a Don DeLilo novel. The Bitter Southerner is an entrepreneurial project. Hell, eventhis bloggy little vineyard is an act of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is not in itself a bad (or even good) thing. It’s a value-neutral mindset, just as likely to result in a cure for cancer or erectile disfunction as it is to bring us a more effective high-capacity semi-automatic weapon or herbicidal agent that happens to also cause birth defects in birds and mammals. But if entrepreneurship per se is value-neutral, its practice is often anything but. Where one ‘trep brings an innovative idea to bear on a long-standing need or problem, too many others use their ingenuity to deliver “disruptions” that are at best merely useless and wasteful; at their worst, too many bright ideas are downright predatory and damaging. (More on this in Part 3.)
It’s a current hot fad to tout entrepreneurship as the silver bullet that will save us from everything that ails us. This is where the whole enterprise opens itself up to the schools of remora who are always ready to swarm the hottest new trend. Worse, the presentation of the “principles” of entrepreneurship are often taught under the guise of value- neutrality despite their inherently value-rich underpinnings.
In Part 1, I linked to an article in Jacobin magazine, “The Entrepreneurship Racket“, a hard look at higher education’s headlong rush into the cult and fad of the entrepreneur. The driving force behind this new branch of academia is a direct outgrowth of decades of free-market propaganda that really took flight under the greed-is-good ethos of the Reagan raj.
To evangelists of free-market doctrine, it is a matter of fundamental faith that our salvation lies in some sort of Randian utopia in which success and happiness depends solely upon the “value neutral” measure of RoI. The extent to which this has become accepted as “common sense”
The prevailing Gospel of Entrepreneurship is about getting things done that make money.
This is not a blanket indictment of the ‘trep spirit. I know too many good people who approach their business activities with sensitivity to environmental and cultural impacts, people who honestly treat their entrepreneurship as central to their commitment to responsible citizenship. Really good folks who are as unlike this smirking shitstain as water is from fire. Possibly the most punchable face in America.
If you get right down to it, the only thing Martin Shkreli did wrong was to rub everyone’s nose in his steaming pile of “success”. His predatory disruptions were right in line with the free-market Gospel of St. Ronald. He’s the poster boy for free-market entrepreneurship. He just forgot to use his indoor voice.
If hair metal is the result of too many people not realizing that Spinal Tap was a joke, the flood of Shkrelis in our midst may be a result of people not recognizing that Gordon Gekko was a villain, not a role model. Given the overwhelming success of free-market evangelism, this outcome should come as no surprise.
That Uber/Lyft or WalMart or Airbnb or Amazon offer products and services that “we” have enthusiastically embraced does not excuse the very real damage that each of these companies have imposed in the course of their disruptive triumph. There was a sign hanging in a guitar repair shop I used to visit that said, “Fast. Good. Cheap. Pick two.” As a society, we have chosen. Cheaper, faster…we love that shit. It’s long since past time to take a look at the ‘good’ we are sacrificing.
Disruptive Sharing Pt 1
A couple of phrases that get tossed around pretty casually these days are sharing economy and market disruption. While these terms have been so overused as to disable any attempt at precise explanation, this same overuse makes it crucial to at least try to scrape some of the barnacles off. Allow me to declare at the outset that though I am likely to fail to penetrate to the hull, I might succeed at knocking away a small part of the encrustation.
Last week, the people of Austin, TX, voted to subject rideshare Leviathans Uber and Lyft tosome of the same regulatory regulations that govern traditional taxi operations. From the coverage I’ve seen, we are to believe that this represents the irrational citizens of Austin flipping Uber/Lyft the electoral finger and “forcing” them to leave the riders of the nation’s 11th largest city stranded and bereft. Talk about disruption!
Forbes magazine has been especially exercised, with headlines like “By Losing Uber, Austin is No Longer a Tech Capital” and “The Misplaced Celebration of Austin’s Victory Over Uber”. The National Review, in its typically sober and reasoned approach, declared that Austin has “…confirmed its status as a second- rate city by effectively banning Uber and Lyft from offering rides.”
In fact, the ballot initiative was sponsored by Uber/Lyft themselves in an attempt to exempt themselves from a regulation that requires drivers to undergo fingerprinting and background checking. Passed last year, this regulation came in response to multiple sexual assault charges against Uber/Lyft drivers. Uber/Lyft placed an exemption initiative on the ballot and spent around $8M on advertising. Their pitch came down to one simple claim: if the regulations stand, we will be “forced” to leave Austin, so give us what we want or fuck you.
The people – presented with epic corporate arrogance – voted the amendment down, decisively. So Uber/Lyft scarpered. Voluntarily. Nobody forced them.
Now it’s easy to see why Uber/Lyft tossed such an insulting ultimatum in the faces of the Austin voters. They’re used to getting their way; much as the Wal-Marts and manufacturing concerns extract massive concessions from local governments for the privilege of having them move to their community, Uber/Lyft muscles local governments for favorable treatments. Woe betide any locality that presumes to question the wisdom of the Leviathan.
I’ve had great luck with Uber. It’s a pretty convenient and affordable way to get around. (I have not used Lyft yet.) It’s easy to understand how it has gotten so popular, so quickly. Yes, taxi cabs are often slow, run down, expensive. Uber provides prompt, economical, and not-necessarily-sincere-yet- reliably cheerful service.
But.
Their success rests upon a couple of less-than-admirable business practices. One is its absolute insistence that Uber/Lyft be exempt from many of the regulatory practices that have, admittedly, made traditional taxi service so problematic. Worth recalling that this regulatory system arose in response to abuses and safety issues of their own as the network of cabs, hacks, and ‘gypsies’ grew without curb. There were very real problems that demanded some kind of remedy.
The other is that Uber/Lyft is profiting greatly by classifying their drivers as independent contractors, thereby evading the basics of employee obligation to its workers. No benefits. No overtime. No job protections. All terms dictated by the employer, upon whom the worker is solely reliant. (Recall as well that labor and employment law has also developed in response to significant abuses and safety issues.) Uber/Lyft claims, more or less accurately, that their drivers enter into this agreement willingly, so it should be up to them and their drivers to sort it out.
This is the sharing economy at work. As with the low, low prices at WalMart that force smaller businesses to the ground, the cheapness/convenience of Uber lies not so much in the inherent genius of the folks at the top as it does with the ongoing knuckling of the little guy at the end of the chain. The guy who accepts his fate “voluntarily”.
Shutting down a hugely profitable operation in Austin simply to avoid a requirement that drivers get a background check seems damn near hysterical, response-wise. Reckon that’ll teach the rubes who’s boss. Just as when compromise boils down to “giving me what I want”, sharing here aligns with a “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine” equation.
Employment law has pretty well devolved to this condition: you are free to work, or not. But if you want to work, the conditions will be set by the employer with no practical limits to the terms that they wish to impose. That this will often be – especially in fields demanding higher levels of education and expertise – characterized in terms that makes it feel less indenturing
That’s sharing.
Uber/Lyft drivers scramble to deliver an awesome experience, often pleading with the customer to go online and rate the worker, which in turn determines whether the worker receives (un)favorable treatment in the future. The key currency in this arrangement is anxiety.
Never mind that Uber/Lyft retain the right to change compensation and rate agreements at any time, without prior notice. The “independent” driver, who is “freely” participating in this out-of-balance arrangement – because jobs and wages have gone to shit – is perfectly free to shove off if she doesn’t like it. Perhaps the dissatisfied Uber driver would like to try her luck in one of the farther-down- the-ladder professions, such as chicken processing.
Many of them said they were forced to urinate or defecate where they stood or leave the line without permission, because no help arrived. At some plants, workers have come to expect no relief, leading them to take embarrassing measures to withstand the conditions.
Any guesses what happens to workers who “leave the line without permission”?
On a related tangent, the NY Times continues its series this weekend on the rampant spread of forced arbitration clauses across our society, in this case its widespread implementation among “startup” companies. The gist is this: an employer or vendor like Google, or Verizon (or your doctor) can require you to sign away your rights to seek redress through due process in the courts in the event you have a “dispute”. Often, this clause is buried within multiple pages of 8 pt. type; in other cases, like with a former doctor of mine, they are right up front about what they are doing, and you are invited to piss off if you don’t like it.
One of the dirty secrets is that the arbitration hearings are conducted by “independent”
You are, of course, “free” to decline to sign, at which point your employer (or doctor) is “free” to tell you to go pound salt. It’s all free choice!
Except of course it isn’t, as any prat can see. The power balance is skewed, making the concept of “freedom” a farce. Won’t sign the arbitration agreement? Take your critical illness elsewhere. Find a job somewhere else.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. – Anatole France
Freedom, bitches!
But there’s always the time-honored option of Bohemianism, of choosing a life of the artist, the writer. Let us embrace the modern-day version of living like Baudelaire or Kerouac, free of the restraints of our perhaps-benevolent overlords.
A terrific essay by artist/critic Hito Steyerl called Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post- Democracy
As with other willing participants in the sharing economy, our creatives come to the enterprise of serving the one percent with gusto, making the best of a bad situation:
Thus, traditional art production may be a role model for the nouveaux riches created by privatization, expropriation, and speculation. But the actual production of art is simultaneously a workshop for many of the nouveaux poor, trying their luck as jpeg virtuosos and conceptual impostors, as gallerinas and overdrive content providers. Because art also means work, more precisely strike work. It is produced as spectacle, on post-Fordist all-you-can-work conveyor belts. Strike or shock work is affective labor at insane speeds, enthusiastic, hyperactive, and deeply compromised.
As long as it pays (a little) or provides the all-important “exposure”, it’s all good. Right?
The phrase “strike work” has its origins in Stalinist efforts to induce a jump in production by bringing in “superproductive and enthusiastic” cadres who will deliver a shock to the enterprise. This accelerated form of artistic production creates punch and glitz, sensation and impact. Its historical origin as format for Stalinist model brigades brings an additional edge to the paradigm of hyperproductivity. Strike workers churn out feelings, perception, and distinction in all possible sizes and variations. Intensity or evacuation, sublime or crap, readymade or readymade reality—strike work supplies consumers with all they never knew they wanted.
“All they never knew they wanted.” And at such low prices.
Steyerl’s invocation of Stalinism as an analogue of current labor conditions is no accident, and represents a vast improvement to the overused, overwrought Overton impulse. (As dense as her prose can be, she offers no shortage of laugh- out-loud relief.) The apropos comparison of latter-day capitalism to the bugaboo of Communist authoritarianism is a telling condemnation of the fantasy of “freedom” in our economic relations.
As with labor in all areas of our economy, the deck is stacked, a situation made worse by the legions of well-meaning and ambitious folks willing to work for little (or nothing) just for the chance to prove their chops, all in the hope that paying work will follow. Alas, the future work is just as likely to go to the next (low cost) ambitious person in the queue. We are all lined up, ready to parade our talents one after the other. We have made a choice, freely. That this condition applies equally to those who choose to string words together, or perfect a performing art, &c., goes without saying. We are all too eager to place our talents in the hands of whatever entity is willing to pay. And we will do so with enthusiastic superproductivity!
Last week, Jacobin magazine published “The Entrepreneurship Racket“, a not very favorable look at the hottest trend in higher education. It’s far too much to summarize here, so give it a read. It is basically an examination of how the buzzwords of the “startup” revolution (and we’re back to “sharing” and “disruptive”) have permeated the programs and curricula of academia, with special emphasis placed on the “entrepreneur”, a mythical creature who is part Edison, part Galt, part Savior and Guru. Is it any accident that the highest attainment possible for one of these creatures is to become a Unicorn?
Many universities are plowing huge sums into creating Entrepreneurship programs that reach across the range of what used to be quaintly known as academic disciplines. Partnerships with corporations and private foundations provide funding, often in return for some degree of control over curriculum and, in some especially grim cases, faculty hiring decisions. Programs will be assessed not just on graduation rates, but on job placements and average earnings. Programs that develop patentable inventions – that the University will own and administer – are especially favored as they create revenues for the institution, thereby making them less reliant on taxpayer funding. It all comes down to the Benjamins.
The dynamics of market economies are well understood, and the incentives of this arrangement can lead to both genius innovations as well as clever-but-benighted ideas that, nonetheless, accrue fantastic profits.
But where we’ve managed to get off track – where this exaltation of the Galtian superhero entrepreneur sends us down a blind alley – is our gradual and all but complete adoption of a market society, wherein all of our relationships and values are subject to the dictates of the market, the tyranny of the spreadsheet.
Our every decision must establish itself on the ground of market-driven logic. That library? A hopeless money sink. A public park where there could be a private, membership driven club that produces revenue? A violation of the government’s duty to optimize taxpayer investments. That museum or small theater operating under grants and subsidies? Sorry, folks, that space could better serve as a venue for Toddlers & Tiaras or a mud-wrestling pit. Hey, the numbers don’t lie.
One of the great degradations of the Reagan years occurred when arts advocates agreed to defend the merits of “the arts” on economic grounds. Once “we” ceded the ground of the debate, the game was up. There’s no way to make, say, an arts facility more impressive on a spreadsheet than a Jimmy John’s or a mattress store. Ergo, the arts are worth less than a cardboardish-drenched-in-mayonaisse-sandwich or a new posture-firm-ortho-tastic dream machine with memory foam and adjustable sleep settings. The numbers are cold and clear. It’s endemic. The calculations underlying the prevailing discourse tilt the game in favor of a gross, libertarian-esque evaluation of our social relations. If someone can afford to buy a state park and demonstrate it’s vitality as a commercial concern, who are we to stand in the way of this creative disruption with our soft bromides about natural beauty or stewardship for future generations? Such talk is, well, it’s downright irresponsible.
And it will be as long as we accept the tyranny of the market as the arbitrator of what we will hold dear as a society.
And fwiw, your angstifying Narrator is no less complicit in the farce than the sharpies who founded Uber or who opened the fifth mattress store on a single city block. I just got less to show for it. YMMV
COMING SOON: Part 2, a further examination of the language of entrepreneurship and some of its more attractive and positive elements. No kidding.
It’s Darker Than You Think
You’ve got to be taught From year to year, It’s got to be drummed In your dear little ear You’ve got to be carefully taught. – Rogers/Hammerstein
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. – Bob Dylan
I recently ordered the book pictured above, a in-depth investigation of how the radical right has gained power over the past 30 years. Alongside the essential trilogy by Rick Perlstein (reviewed favorably by an obscure bloggerhere ), Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right fill in the blanks on one of the pressing questions of our time:
How in sulphuric hell did an utterly discredited economic and social philosophy come to have such a dedicated cadre of fanatical devotees, even though it works directly against the interests of many of its more fanatical followers?
The hell happened?
Set aside the flimsy tissue of melodramatic horseshit that is the scribbling of Ayn Rand. For better or worse (better), not many impressionable youngsters are going to slog through her horrible writing and plotting to have their brains turned to mush and their hearts to stone. And for better or worse (worse), a certain type of bookish youth is always on the lookout for a book that sets them apart as some kind of forward-thinking intellectual.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. – John Rogers
But Rand alone is not enough to explain the spread of the “greed is good” mantra that is driving policy debates over things like health care, taxation, income inequality, campaign finance, &c. Too many people who wouldn’t know Salma Hayek from Friedrich Hayek are parroting the Randian gospel. An Irish pal of mine told me about a great Old Country turn of phrase re: child rearing: “Well, she didn’t pick that up off the floor.”
Nope, they’ve got to be carefully taught. And that’s where Dark Money comes in. Perlstein did a great job of describing who the behind-the-scenes architects of the radical right were, and what they were trying to achieve politically. Mayer digs into the funding and the strategies, which boil down to a long-term effort to re-package ideas from the lunatic fringe and move them into the realm of ‘of-course- that’s-true’ assumptions.
Lunatic fringe? A tad over the top, you say? Nope. Any resemblance between the current radical right movement and the John Birch Society is strictly intentional.
The Koch Brothers are front and center here, but it’s not just those toffs ponying up millions of dollars to change the way America thinks. They have a lot of filthy rich friends, too. But the Kochs are the prime movers, and they have for at least 30 years pursued a strategy of re-branding their policy preferences as something benevolent and compassionate, despite the fact that they are at root a grab bag of fuck-the-poor depravity.
Over the years, the Kochtopus
Nice university you got there; be a real shame if something happened to it.
Here at FSU, the introductory economics course now teaches that “…Keynes was bad, the free market was better, that sweatshop labor wasn’t so bad, and that the hands off regulations in China were better than those in the U.S.”
Some of these tender minds embrace the ideas. Here at last, a way to learn the greed-is-good ethos without slogging through interminable monologues about railroads and steel production that Rand uses the way Barbara Cartland panders heaving breasts and glory-of-his-manhood fantasies. Nope, this is served up in tasty morsels under such names as Well-Being Studies and Economic Liberty. Who could be against well-being? Stupid liberals, that’s who!
Some of these tender minds progress to graduate programs, where they can receive generous financial aid…so long as they understand the bread-buttering equation. And then, the school will teach you how to write op-ed pieces extolling the virtues of greed well-being and liberty, which they will help you place in the local fishwrapper, thereby building your resume as an intellectual on a par with Jonah Goldberg and George Will. But only if you got your mind right. You got your mind right, Luke?
Ah hell, they don’t need the Captain to beat ’em with a stick. Being a water-carrier for the .01% can be a pretty lucrative gig. And I truly believe these propagandists to be sincere in their arguments.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair
The most effective chains are the ones we choose to wear.
I wish I could echo the Captain and say that we’ve witnessed a failure to communicate. But the assembly line has been extremely effective in setting the terms of debate. The puzzle of why Americans vote against their own interests so often isn’t much of a challenge: we’ve been carefully taught, over the years, to believe that lowering taxes on the wealthy benefits the common wealth (it doesn’t); we’ve been taught that environmental regulation is unnecessary, that businesses will preserve the environment out of the goodness of their hearts (they won’t); we’ve learned that the minimum wage and labor solidarity destroy ambition and make people into slaves (ffs). And so on.
Worst: we’ve been taught that if we are not wealthy yet, we could be if only we work hard and bootstrap ourselves into prosperity. The stench of bullshit becomes overwhelming.
Bernie Sanders has been instrumental in bringing this con into focus. The game is indeed rigged, and good on him (and the Occupy Movement) for generating broader awareness of this fundamental truth. Why we have to re-learn this obvious lesson remains a puzzlement. Sinclair nailed this con as early as 1917.
“…the priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man’s. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self- elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets’ Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of interference.” – The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation
In Sinclair’s day, bootstrapping was touted by peddlers of faith-based redemption; even if you did not rise, you were earning god’s blessing. These days, celestial faith is boiled down to a simpler equation: win at all costs, because if you are poor, it’s proof that you have failed to earn god’s favor. The poor deserve their lot. Losers.
A true expression of Libertarian belief would state clearly that it’s every man for himself, maybe a woman here and there, and that if you are dog food it’s because you deserve it. That would be a pretty tough sell, especially in a country where most people are struggling to survive. Better to wrap it up in a pleasing fairy tale, something that rubes and suckers will eat with a spoon. If you need to add a dollop of race hatred and sexism, well, whatevs, broken eggs and omelets, amirite?
Bottom line
UPDATED 11/23: Correcting one grammar error that allows me to add a gratuitous Trump insult; correcting one misplaced footnote that made Gwen Graham look worse than she is; and adding one detail that makes Trump look worse, but not quite all the way as bad as he is.
There be dragons, and they’re coming to get you. Hide! Be afraid!
Many nights I wake up, between 2.30 and 3.30, and endure an hour or so of free floating terror. I’ll never again write a good sentence or play the guitar well. Maybe I’m completely out of ideas. I’ll never get hired again. Or if I am working, they’ll hate what I’m doing and they’ll never hire me again. My children will starve, my wife and I will live in a refrigerator box under a bridge. My dog will die. My dog will get sick, and because I don’t have enough work, I won’t have the money for treatment, and she will die. My kids will….
So you get the idea. After an hour or so, I’m so exhausted with worry and fear that I fall asleep for a couple more hours. Then I wake up, pull on my pants, and set out to find work, do good work, attempt creativity, strive. It’s not that I forget the various terrors that plague me, but I still try. It ain’t over til you quit.
And so, Paris. People are terrified that it will happen here. A reasonable fear, but one that has been ginned up by various actors who stand to profit from our fears.
Be afraid. And CNN/Fox/MSNBC will be here around the clock to be sure you stay that way.
Be afraid. Only the stalwart leadership of {insert name here} can keep you safe. That other guy is going to let the evil- doers kill you in your sleep. Stalwart leader will keep them out! If only he can figure out how to tell the difference between a good guy and a bad guy.
Be afraid. Buy guns, more guns, and carry them everywhere, because you never know when you need to be a good guy with a gun who needs to stop a bad guy with a gun. As long as everyone can figure out how to tell the difference between a good guy and a bad guy.
Be afraid. Go ahead and assume that everyone is a bad guy until proven otherwise. Stand your ground! Ban everyone who looks/thinks/comes-from-somewhere different. Open fire if you feel threatened by someone who fits your idea of what a threat looks like. Sort out the bodies later. You can’t make an omelet…
And so, Paris. They could come here next! They might be here already! You know that they hate us for our freedoms, so how about you give up a bunch of those freedoms so we can keep you safe.
Lock the doors! Pull up the ladder. You can’t give a 100% guarantee that you can screen out evil-doers? Don’t let anyone in. That’ll fix everything.
Some of the pandering is not so extreme. Some of it is “moderate”. Maybe let in only the refugees who can prove they are Christian. That way we’ll be safe, because Christians never use violence to achieve a goal. Or maybe, as one pundit suggested, only let in the women and children. That’s the compassionate approach, to break up families.
But then we hear from Uber Panders who not only think letting women in would be unsafe (they blow themselves up, too!), but that letting in “orphans under the age of five” is also too risky. You can’t be too careful.
Round ’em up and ship ’em back. Build fences. Bomb the whole dang shebang.
Lots of terrible ideas are floating around, and the goatfuckers of ISIS are laughing their asses off.
Paris. Now we are supposed to be afraid of going to a great city, or to Europe overall. Cafes and concerts? Jesus, a guy could get killed there. Swarthy immigrants who may or may not believe in the god of our fathers? Round em up and ship em back. You can’t be too careful, amirite?
Now we are supposed to refuse basic humanitarian considerations, to abandon our purported national ideals and values. We are asked, in the name of fear, to do exactly what the terrorists hope for: overreaction, cruelty, inchoate violence.
We keep hearing about ISIS being an “existential threat”. It’s a stupid phrase, but people who speak it seem to believe it affords gravitas, a seriousness of purpose. But it’s bullshit. There is no threat to our existence from a ragtag army of lunatics. Sure, they can disrupt, sow fear. And then they rely on us to lose our collective shit. If history is any guide, they will not be disappointed.
ISIS cannot destroy our civilization, our “way of life”, much as they might wish otherwise. But we certainly have the means to do it. They need us to do the dirty work of abandoning the very elements of our society that make it worth protecting. On Saturday, “[a]bout a dozen protesters — most carrying long guns, some masked and one with his mother” marched outside a mosque in Irving, TX. Calling themselves the Bureau of American Islamic Relations, these brave protectors of the Fatherland insisted their guns were not to threaten, but merely a means of protecting themselves from the evil musselman within.
Also on Saturday, at a rally in Birmingham for the increasingly inexcusable Donald Trump, Tribble Top declared, “I want surveillance of certain mosques if that’s OK. We’ve had it before.” A week earlier he had called for shutting down mosques, so perhaps this is Trump being ‘moderate’.
We won’t shut ya down, but we’ve got our eyes on you. And maybe a few yahoos with hunting rifles patrolling the perimeter.
(Also at that rally, a Black Lives Matter protester was beaten, knocked down, and kicked as their Fearless Leader shouted, “get him the hell out of here”, followed by Trump mocking the man as “a loser.” Just another conveniently identifiable other.) UPDATE: In a interview the following day, Trump said the guy deserved to “get roughed up”. Very mid- century retro, nein?
The news is full of stories like these. They all have one, or both, of the key ingredients: ill-informed (and perhaps sincere) people engaging in dangerous and counter-productive behaviors and/or the demagogues using the fear to enhance their own personae and power.
As Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
As usual, the things we end up freaking out about (ebola, immigrants from wherever, terrorism, bacon fat) are typically not that big a threat in the scheme of things. We are all more likely to experience injury or death in these United States due to reckless driving (our own or someone else’s) or falls in the bathtub (around 50,000 deaths or hospital-level injuries per year). Texting while driving claims 6000 lives per year. Shit, 450 people die each year from falling out of bed. Even sleeping in you own bed is more likely to do you in than a terrorist attack.
But there’s no political upside in making you afraid to take a shower or a nap.
Last week, the GOP house – the same group of bedwetters who passed a cruel and useless bill to make it harder for refugees to come to America – attached two riders to the new budget bill that would cut the CDC’s anti-smoking budget in half. Nobody
Most of those terror deaths occurred in places like Kenya and Mali and other places that most Americans don’t care about. No demagogue worth his salt is going to try to gin up the rubes over a place like that.
But Paris is different. Western. White. So it’s easy to conflate fear of terrorists with generalized fear of dark skin. It also makes them easy to target, to separate them from the core. It’s why we imprisoned Japanese-Americans during WWII, and not German-Americans and other overt Nazi sympathizers like Charles Lindbergh.
It’s an easy fissure point for a clever communicator like Trump. In the mouths of less-skilled demagogues, maybe not so much; the execrable David Vitter tried to salvage his gubernatorial campaign over the past weeks with blatant fear mongering and lies
Some of our political figures are keeping their heads on straight in all this. Obama is demonstrating an admirable resolve to not let the hysteria drive his policy over the refugees. (The decision to send more troops back into the desert shitshow is more troublesome, as is the flow of arms we keep pumping into the Middle East.) As far as the vote in the House last week to punish refugees – because reasons – I guess I should be happy that only 47 Dems
Locally, our Governor has predictably pandered to his bible banger base of rubes. In response, our Mayor was asked his thoughts on the refugees, and he admirably said that we should welcome them with open arms. This naturally led the comments section of our local fishwrapper to explode in a veritable orgy of fantasy hypotheticals and nativist bigotry more-or- less openly expressed. It is to weep.
This is not going to get better any time soon. Recall post-9/11, how every rumor led to panic led to changes in the color-coded oh-my-god-we’re-fucking-doomed Official Terror Alert system. It’s back. Last time, it led us into a war that has still not ended. And with a dozen-plus power hungry nitwits trying to win the Republican nomination (not to mention all the House/Senate numbnuts up for re-election), the calls for extremist reaction are not going to slow down. Because, as always, they’re only selling what they know people will buy.
I might crawl under the bed myself. It’s not the terrorists that scare me. It’s us.