This blog is generally written under the influence, and it shows.
Title, again, via.
Science fiction no more: The perfect city is under construction
Cities as technologically precise as a Formula One race car are being built now. Do we really want to live in them?
This time, for sure!
A.M. Gittlitz, the New Inquiry / Salon:
Punk’s cultural revolution: Pussy Riot’s masked women have become icons of Russia’s anti-Putin movement — and turned the genre on its head
Maybe if we all pray hard enough to the 80s we’ll have another shot at replacing Russians with East Coast bourgeois.
With debt acknowledged to Umberto Eco, a fine wop and no mistake.
He is psychologically privileged. In much of the West, and especially in America, he has a mindset that is adaptive and career-enhancing. Psychopathy and extroversion are marbled through the core of his being. He might be a sociopath, but he always acts like one; he either feels nothing for his fellow human beings or contrives justifications for ignoring those feelings on an instinctive level. The result is the same.
He is not necessarily otherwise privileged. Every other aspect of privilege is a matter of ‘probably’. He’s probably male, probably straight and white, if otherwise probably a very media-friendly kind of queer and/or ethnic. The managerialist workplace is not fundamentally bigoted by intention; it may make instrumental use of bigotry (exploiting any species of bigotry to contrive reasons to hire or fire, or make or remake contracts more favorably to itself) but it is generally willing to accept any charismatic psychopath with a high-school diploma as a manager. To the extent this interacts with social injustice, it is statistical and not intentional: for example, outside of certain major cities it’s essentially impossible for a black male psychopath to attain social success without winding up in prison, so outside of hiring pools including those cities the managerial class will have few and unusual black men.
In fact, the managerialist dream is to transcend cultural privilege with mental privilege. The more progressive elements of management want to see a more diverse executive class that treats the world exactly as they do. Doubtless there’s at least one Boswash-based firm now whose media director is a gay hemiplegic Yemeni transwoman who continuously throws hot coffee on underlings out of spite. Perhaps there’s an Oscar for Meryl Streep in it.
He has risen to the level of his incompetence. He is no longer capable of performing his job without significant input from his underlings, which he doesn’t understand or want. Nevertheless, he has realistic prospects of promotion. He is well-liked and well-connected because of, not despite, his deranged and hostile outlook. (This is not to call his position a travesty; nepotes and cronies tend to succeed because of suction instead of collegiality, and tend to be far more pleasant.) But because of this fundamental incompetence, he has to find a way to excuse away his increasingly poor performance:
He externalizes his failures. Even when he knows it is a lie, to admit his actual mistakes would be weakness. (He may make a propitiatory show of accepting noble failures – wasted effort, professional courtesy.) He is being failed by everyone around him, but mainly and especially his underlings.
He lives the hierarchy. It is right and fitting that there is a great chain of being starting with the boss and ending with his underlings. The general public outranks his underlings and the customers outrank the general public. (The phrase ‘the customer is always right’ arises from a frustrated effort to clarify this rank relationship, not from service courtesy.) A good manager will reflexively side against the people working for him, because:
He sees himself as a frontier outpost of managerial competence, under siege by vandals. The employees seek to tear him down; so internalized is this assumption that he seeks reasons for their behavior, not alternative explanations. Subtypes begin to emerge. The narcissist sees them as jealous of his status and his great work (the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ idea) and punishes them for it continuously. They’re secretly plotting against his legacy; he’s sure of it. The paranoid sees them as playing him and the bosses for a sucker (the ‘moocher’ idea) and constantly scrutinizes their work for signs that they are slacking, malingering, or otherwise gold-bricking. They’re drawing paychecks for nothing; he’s sure of it.
He doesn’t believe in qualified expertise. The narcissist type sees it only in himself and his immediate superiors, and only as a basic quality – the killer instinct, the right stuff; the paranoid considers it a myth perpetuated by parasites. Both attitudes are adaptive in and dovetail with neoliberalism. In any case, anyone who can’t claw their way to his level is worthless, a waste of money and a waste of time, and need to be kept in check and reduced in number. (There’s a reason that layoffs are uniformly greeted with upticks in stock price, even when they don’t serve any conceivable purpose.)
He is Homo Economicus. The assumptions of economics fit him perfectly, and make perfect sense to him. He might be at political variance with freshwater economists, but he understands them as only they understand themselves. He shares their strange social obsessions: the danger of short-changing the elite, the ‘tragedy of the commons’, a simultaneous contempt for professional sociologists and fascination with amateur sociology.
He sees the world the way he is. He can’t conceive of vocation as a concept because his own work is not fundamentally satisfying. (He takes satisfaction from the robustness of his professional contacts, not his actual job.) He struggles similarly with any physical or mental illness or disability he lacks private experience with; he considers malingering much more significant and widespread than it is because it’s his main interaction with sickness behavior.
He always needs more. When he succeeds, he’s earned it. When he fails, he’s being wronged by the universe. He is his own religion, and his own fleeting happiness is a jealous and avenging God. He’s earned everything he wants because he is who he is. In his bones he knows he won’t, shouldn’t, can’t be held back. The arc of the universe bends towards his success, and it had better be short.
Serve him at your peril. He will destroy you for his own gain – and he would consider doing otherwise immoral. Nothing he sucks from the world’s veins will trickle from his greedy mouth. Invite him into your house and he’ll eat your family. Not only will he devour you alive, he will gnaw your bones clean – and he will call himself a hero for filling his belly with your marrow. He will never be satisfied; he will never be content. He is the face of the new order: hungry, angry, petty, proud. A hungry eye and a jealous maw. He wants history and he wants the future, and he wants this world and the next, and it will all vanish forever down his consuming throat, held captive by an asshole too greedy to shit.
Let me get this out of the way: I am here to talk about art.
As far as I’m concerned, art is the glorious act of transmigration from one mind to another: the movement of statements from the artist to the audience. Art, seen in this way, is the main thing distinguishing the heterogenous family of thinking animals from the universe; it is ever-present in human life, and the most important thing in the world. It is what keeps understanding from being a burden, and what makes the solitude of consciousness bearable. And as far as I’m concerned, criticism counts as art.
Criticism is art: the art not just of judgement in a vacuum, but the art of adversarial judgements. In its most basic form it is a firm and reasoned answer – suitable for conveying the fruit of one person’s critical mind to anther – to the question. “Is A or B better?” It grows more complex as the ground multiplies in comparison to the figures:
“Is A better than B?”
“Is A worthy of inclusion in the canon of C, D, E, and F?”
“Is A better than the average of all the 200-some films in genre G?”
“Is A as good as all the 800-some films made this year?”
“Is A better than all of the several thousand films ever made?”
“What can A tell us about the several million surviving works of art in our culture?”
“What can A tell us about all human endeavors?”
Not all criticism aspires to compare the figure of some solitary work with the ground of the whole creative universe, but successful criticism can and has. It need not even focus on the figure at all; the orientation of the ground can tell its own story.
I am a critic, and not a fantastic or a gifted one; I can still read a good line of criticism, and am equipped to be awestruck at its lonely glory. This equipment comes from wading my whole life through a kind of art – critical discussion. One of my hobbies might properly even be called metacritique. I’ve endeavored some years now to understand criticism and make sense of its practice and standards.
If criticism as an artistic discipline needs a defense – and can be defended to people who admit to the existence of verbal arts at all – the best defense I can offer are these ending lines, which I consider to speak for themselves:
~
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
~
~
~
And finally, in their own right some of the finest sentences ever set down in English, and part of an essay which can generally be described in the same terms:
~
Further notes are to follow on the nature, practice, and deficiencies of criticism in its present form.
(Title via.)
Like all men of quality / knights of the realm / etc etc I was right pleased to hear that Angus King, America’s next Maine, plans to never caucus for as long as he lives, cross his heart and hope to die, no homo forever usw.
Certainly he’s going to win: everyone loves this beautiful man and his manful moustaches. I have received reliable intelligences that some in the Maine press have loved his moustache as often as thrice a day, which to man of my advancing age just seems like so much commotion.
I have yet to hear word of Thom Friedman on this potential rival, but I am here to announce with some excitement that I do not need to; having come into several luxurious moustaches and hundreds cash myself, I have taken the liberty of seizing the creative rights he seduced out of the doting old widow de Tocqueville, but a restless ghost these past hundred-some years. By this means he wrote the (bestselling? remaindered? do basic research) That Used To Be Us, a hard-hitting text which brilliantly examines conventional wisdom by putting English words in order such that it appears, in print, and then signing his name on a paycheck.
In this book, which can only be called a scholarly tome, Friedman employs – along with ink, wood pulp, and his devastatingly furry lip – the latter-day words of Alexis de Tocqueville, famous to every high school student as that Frenchman who had something presumably important to say about America from that time they skipped the paragraph in their history textbooks quoting him. I, too, now have the moral right and indeed the journalistic duty to offer up the opinions of Alexis de Tocqueville – the man, I mean, the very count himself. These are not my words but his; this is evinced in their being italics, to suggest their original French character, and by how evident it is that – though we share handsome and in the words of our past lovers “deceptively Jewish” faces – he is not, and I am, enormously fat.
Without further ado, here at last are the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, liberal, scientist, and count of ancient and noble blood, on the subject of Angus King, a select American.
I have been told of this senator and I confess that the main thing on my mind is an intense hunger for a Reuben sandwich. I suffer from what doctors in my country refer to as «need a Reuben now syndrome». By happy chance the saucissier Arby’s offers a «sandwich au Reuben Super» for five dollars and ninety-nine cents cash money. I advise you eat at Arby’s today. It’s good mood food.
What an honor!
A new age of spite and entitlement is dawning in the West, as the haves, confronted by a yawning abyss of their own manufacture, struggle to find a way to so demonize their opposite numbers at the bottom that they need no justification to remain at the top.
It is observed, including by my own perennial favorite Adam Cadre, that a powerful motivator for this sort of behavior is simple spite – that after a certain amount of privilege accrues, one of the main ways of enjoying it is finding ways to wave it under the noses of those without it. We observe this on a daily basis with money – the whole category of Veblen goods could not exist otherwise.
A trans-Atlantic culture of fat snobbery has emerged on similar terms, with people – blessed by the mix of economic and physical privilege such that they do not, by their normal day-to-day- routine, gain or retain large amounts of weight – basically heaping abuse on the disgusting, morally incontinent fat-asses who inexplicably now form a majority in the US and a plurality in the UK. While the temptation, as always within the framework of choice-based liberalism, is to view obesity as a simple consequence of personal choice, a more coherent view emerges if you construct it in the same manner at least some liberals are willing to qualifiedly accept class or wealth.
(Certainly much more coherent than Jamie Oliver flogging up-market delicacies as a substitute for prolefeed with similar caloric content, and treating the choice as one not just of diet but of morality – as though money were no object.)
But these are not subjects I am touching on in detail today. With the 2011 autumn of rage still sputtering along and still making the odd headline, I would only be adding to a vast stream of noise about money to discuss it; and I have already done too much futile speaking for too long on my left approach to obesity, and a man gets discouraged after a while.
What I am interested in now is a new push against the discipline of mental health.
Michael Lind is at it again. Everyone’s favorite incomplete Republican convert is of course haranguing the Occupy protests, insisting that for a variety of reasons only a certain species of racist shit-eater can be truly populist and the Democrat Party is dominated by latte-sipping elites blah blah blah blah blah.
The thing is, this is something that passes for analysis so often in the media that seeing it trotted out here shouldn’t surprise me. I suppose folderol of that specific character going up on Salon is what’s doing it (although the fact that they recently published a non-paid advertisement for a group of pickup artists should have blunted that concern a little).
The thing is, I’m sure I’ve made my background a matter of the public record, but if not, here it is: around 1992, when I was five years old, my parents began working together to get my dad, sick and tired of an unfulfilling career as an electrical engineer, qualified as a medical doctor. He started out wanting to do anesthesia, and has settled into dealing with trauma.
The point is, at around the same time my father started having to take out large amounts of student debt and my mother had to stop working her usual service-industry jobs permanently instead of temporarily to deal with a string of babies being born. The decision knocked us out of the lower middle class and into the student poor.
Lind, of course, doesn’t see any of this as work. Electrical engineering takes a degree and involved mostly freelancing, so it’s the vocation of a decadent sit’n'thinker, and my mom’s eight-hour shifts selling decorative arrangements, flowers, and home furnishings (a trade that required a significant amount of on-the-job training, as the service industry had yet to completely suck the marrow from their workers’ bones) were unanswerable to unionization and besides only sold things that other people made. Besides which, to be wholly blunt, to a man that idealizes “horny-handed sons of toil”, anything my scrawny high-school-only mom could do could hardly qualify, could it?
It’s a species of knock-on to laborism shared by Orwell at his worst – an obsession with sweaty, hard men doing sweaty, hard things and an overriding contempt for anyone who deliberately spurns a life of honest muscular toil, even people who work themselves to the bone doing things outside of the canon of manly labor.
The crucial thing is that it’s an elitist view. Lind is a lifelong political operative and Orwell was a scholarship-educated belle-lettrist; the idea of the honest poor doing honest work for an honest day’s wage is unsustainable by the realities on the factory floor, where compensation has always had more to do with custom and demand than skill or work. In fact, the cruelly arbitrary reality of a system in which some menial workers make enough to buy a car and some make too little to rent a flop is one of the original motive forces of the socialist movement – partially from the bottom, but partially as well from decadent elites, the children of ‘honest toilers’ who made good but never forgot the shit they were born into.
At least in Orwell’s day, though, there was a ‘working man’ to be fetishized in this manner. The industrial product of the first world generally and America especially, through both honest movement of capital to countries with lower productivity (and thus lower wages) and rent-seeking currency, wage, and labor manipulation by ‘tiger’ economies under the approving gaze of financier-dominated US governments , has more or less been shattered. (It doesn’t help that the bipartisan soft-Reaganite movement of mergers, acquisitors, and tech-jobbers deliberately smashed the industrial state for their own profit and were cheered on by the crowned heads of the economic academy.) At every turn, labor has been cut off at the fucking knees by an organized, right-wing political movement and has been encouraged to blame the Dirty Fucking Hippies for every moment of it. It’s bait Lind has eagerly swallowed – not because of his experience with unionized labor, because I’m not sure what if any he actually has. No, he swallowed it because he spent the 80s and 90s being a Reaganaut activist, and can’t bring himself to admit that the people he was dutifully following orders to villify were blameless.
The destruction of the American labor union came from within – it came from bosses servile to a Carterite consensus that political change through electoral politics was a failed model, that Washington was intrinsically instead of sectionally rotten; it came from writers and speakers and publishers willing to buy a bill of goods to strike out at a culture the country hated and feared; and more than anything it came from the pension funds, a little Trojan Horse of managerialist cash-above-all hypercapitalism in the breast of the labor movement.
In short, there’s a reason that the private unions have been largely gutted, and there’s no reasonable way to make that reason the kids in the street in New York and other cities around the country. Like me, most of them were born to parents who stopped getting promotions and raises regularly when they were children, and have never had a stable or useful job. Lind has no fucking idea what it’s like to mature into a country where double-digit joblessness is the new normal. He wouldn’t know what work now means if it jumped up and bit him. And if he were jost an elitist shit, that would be one thing; but no, he’s sure he knows what labor is and wants.
~
The main line of Lind’s articles has generally been that there is a decadent academic latte-sipping creative class that dominates the Democrat party with its identity politics (which all decent white people despise natch) and its ideas about ‘nudging’. (The fact that Lind’s reflexive ‘bipartisanship’ has contributed to an environment in which no one on any side of the political spectrum believes in electoral politics as an engine for change is irrelevant; when Bloomberg and his pals try to ‘transcend’ politics by throwing money at bloodless capitalist automatons and by undermining faith in partisan elections, it’s innovative and hopeful and good; when professional antagonists of public-sector unions suck the blood from their charges with ‘incentives’ transparently intended only to screw people out of promised pay and work, it’s innovative and potentially Messianic; when progressives occasionally take power and use small amounts of taxpayer money to subsidize the adoption of expensive but long-term beneficial changes in consumption patterns, it’s patronizing and elitist.)
But more than that, he’s sure that these people, these gross horrible disgusting mongrels and race-traitors and layabouts, are committing a grave offense against the Working Man by – let’s be honest – not getting their solids via Hungry Man, not getting their clothes via K-Mart, and not getting their news via a Fox affiliate.
This is a view of the poor – that they are desperately loyal to their beloved Walton chain warehouse and horrible big-city elitists are looking to take it away, oh noes – that can only be sustained by someone who has never been poor or even seen poverty up close. This is the view of someone who has gone to the supermarket for cheap bourbon and admired the toily honesty of the sturdy, beat-down men and their fat, prematurely aged wives pushing carts of frozen vegetables and meat.
I might not have come by a childhood of hunger and want the honest way, by my dad’s union bowing to Whip Inflation Now and letting the bosses throw him out on his ass, but I can tell you that nobody who lives through that likes or wants it. Target’s entire business model is substantiated by exactly that – by being a big-box shop with prices and merchandise accessible to people on a budget which doesn’t wipe your nose in the fucking destitution of America’s post-industrial hellscape. If you give those beat-down men or those run-down women a million dollars, they will never darken Wal-Mart’s door again.
I don’t know if they’d shop at Whole Foods. I sure wouldn’t, but never mind that – I think running into a leftist who wasn’t obsessively loyal to what Lind imagines is our core culture of fancy consumption would give him hives – they’d just avoid Lind’s beloved big-box shitholes like the plague.
Here’s a man who believes that the working poor go out and raise credit to buy SUVs because big man like big car hnnngh. Makes sense, if you’re a patronizing shit, but when you only have one car you need to fit your entire family into it and drive them anywhere, and the SUV is a cheap, horrible way of achieving that. The idea that the Common Man is in love with low fuel efficiency or constant fucking engine problems is impossible to believe if you’ve ever met one. If you live in the imaginarium of talk radio, sure, it’s all culture, and that’s Lind’s gimmick.
“The working man loves the owning class fucking him up the ass,” says Lind, “and how dare you get in the way, you horrible decadent faggots”. The idea that when we get money we spend the rest of our lives sleeping on our backs is surely neither here nor there.
Life on Titan? A liberal NASA plot. They say there’s life on Titan, then Obambi and the Democrat congress declare it a wildlife refuge and we can’t drill it for oil!
huh huh hhuuuh
I don’t know how many arms these Titanians have, but I know that each one of them is going to end up holding a Democrat welfare check!!
hhhuuh huuuuuh huh
Maybe they know where Obama’s birth certificate is located!!
hhh hhhuhh [choking sound, heavy clump of body striking floor]
Behold this classy ad for some kind of fascist rally or something being held by Michelle Bachmann:
1) Couldn’t you have found something less lynchy than a lasso, what with race being in the news ex. Jackson Jive, a Georgia peckerwood making and promoting a veiled death threat to a representative from another state, and that entire classy NewsMax coup thing? It’s not like you really ever want to ask your constituents to fantasize about lynching the government, but now is a particularly bad time. Oh, who am I talking to.
2) It took me a few minutes to realize this next thing, and I find that depressing. I hate living in Nevada.
3) Madame Sturmtruppefuhrerin, I know you’re really enthusiastic about Real America stringing the coloreds up high, but if I may: in what conceivable way could you take back reins with a fucking lasso?
1) It was a dark and stormy night, and Pat Boone was depressed about the poor fortunes of his close personal and professional friend Bob Dole. As he prepared to cross the Canadian border and leave this undeserving nation forever, around the corner appeared the surviving Sex Pistols, each erect.
2) 1965: low Earth orbit. Edward White, doomed son of Texas, stepped out of his capsule, his tether carefully spooling him out into the void. While he knew that he could see less this way than he had in the capsule, and that in the grand scheme of things he was still just a high-flying sky-man, his eyes were filled with glory and a hope we know to be forlorn. Today would not be as planned, though: in the corner of his restrained, space-drunk vision he could make out a flash of the different, more beige gray his superiors had warned him of. He mentally reminded himself of his space revolver. He was ready for Leonov. He was ready to kill in orbit, or die in it. What he was not ready for was love.
3)Retirement had been good to President Bush. Nobody made him hang around horses any more, and he got to hang around in Kennebunkport as his station in life demanded instead of slumming it with those lazy-eyed Texan fuckers. He didn’t even have to sit down and shut up when Cheney had something foul to say any more. It had been a good day even before his manservant Sowadjec announced the arrival of today’s guest. Cybernetic boy-jockey in tow, Crown Prince Abdul-Aziz entered the room with a warm greeting, still gloriously toned beneath his assless robes after these long seven years. “Tonight you are the House of Saud’s camel,” continued the conservative heir, offering his hand and a greased velvet glove to his New England colleague.
4) Once again, Lee and John were eager with anticipation, sporting a boner and bonah respectively as the limo streamed into view of the warehouse. But today John’s wife and her Greek lover knew how to keep the safe-word unsaid. Little did either know that they had already begun their last tango in Dallas.
[5] “And thanks to my guests, Ollie North and Bay Buchanan. America salutes you. God bless all of you at home.” Another day, another Hannity’s America, another hundred thousand dollars. But as the swarthy hive took down the set for the night, Sean noticed Colonel North wasn’t leaving — and, as Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch swaggered in with a gleam in their old, wet eyes, Sean realized his endless fidelity was about to be repaid, his love for the GOP consummated. Tonight the Republican Party would make an honest woman of him.
(6) In a sinister dacha in the Crimea, a man in a particularly cruisy wheelchair snickered openly at his own perfidy with his friends Alger Hiss – codename ALES – and Josef Stalin. “Oy,” said Rosenfeldt, “always with the betraying of America’s doughty Aryan allies.” He squealed with girlish delight as he noticed that Stalin’s balls also had tiny, angry moustaches, and then took out his big queer cigarette holder in order to slosh them around in his stupid mouth.
