Monthly Archives: July 2014

American Aristocrat Owen Wister

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Owen WisterOn this day in 1860, American aristocrat Owen Wister was born. He was born on the “storied Belfield estate in Germantown.” His father was a wealthy physician and his mother was the daughter of the famous actor Fanny Kemble. When he wasn’t attending school in Switzerland and England, he would hire poor people to lie in puddles so he never got his shoes wet—shoes made of the skin of poor immigrant children. Okay, that wasn’t actually true. But he was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Of course, being rich, once the Great Depression hit, Wister was totally against the policies of Roesevelt’s cousin, who was President at that time. If you learn one thing from reading me it should be this: bad economic times are great if you had a lot of money. Wister had a lot of money.

So why on this day is the birthday post about just another American aristocrat? Well, partly is is because last year I did Woody Guthrie. And I could have done Ingmar Bergman, but I just don’t feel up to it. It may be a cliche, but he was a great filmmaker, and he deserves a lot of attention. And I think I have a cold. A cold! And it is supposed to be 99° today! My plan is to go back to bed as soon as I’m done with this. Anyway, so we were talking about American aristocrat Owen Wister and how when times got hard for the American people, he was angry that FDR tried to do anything to ameliorate the suffering of millions of Americans.

But the main reason that I’m writing about Owen Wister is because he is considered the father of the Western. He got that name for writing The Virginian in 1902. It’s an episodic novel with pretty much what we have come to expect. The Virginian character is a kind of natural aristocrat, who of course, ends up as an actual aristocrat by the end of the novel. He falls in love and marries a school teacher, Molly Stark Wood. (Wister’s wife’s nickname was Molly.) And generally, he fights for life, liberty, and the American way against the Tramps who are just evil because, well, they aren’t natural aristocrats.

Interestingly, Wister never wrote another western. He did work with diabetic playwright Kirke La Shelle to bring it to the stage. And it has been made into at least six movies. You’ve got to give it to the man though, according to Wikipedia, the book was reprinted fourteen times in eight months. In addition to not writing another western novel, he didn’t much write anything. There was a ten year period where he was writing novels. And had he been struggling financially, he probably would have pumped out other rambling novels about life in Wyoming with noble men and pretty and pure school teachers. But who needs to do that when you can be sipping brandy and soda at The Philadelphia Club?

Wister died in 1938 at the age of 78. He was tragically killed when the four servants carrying him, dropped from exhaustion. I mean, he was tragically crushed to death when a wall made of money collapsed on him. I mean, he died of starvation after his food tester was tragically killed moonlighting as a puddle-coverer for a rich fat man. The truth is, I don’t know how he died. But he was 78. And that’s one good thing you can say about American aristocrats: they eventually die.

Happy birthday American aristocrat Owen Wister, pioneer of the most tedious of American genre fiction!

What Matters in “Ode to Billie Joe”

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Ode to Billie JoeI find myself haunted by “Ode to Billie Joe.” The weird thing about Bobbie Gentry is that she was a very good songwriter. Well, to be honest, her melodies often fell into the same patterns, but they always worked and could be quite original at times. And her lyrics were always quite strong. But nothing compares to “Ode to Billie Joe.” How do you top that? I don’t think people really wanted to hear anything but that song from her and she was right to retire from the business so soon. The irony is she might have had a better career if she hadn’t come out of the gate as she did.

Put simply, “Ode to Billie Joe” is a great work of art. It is a short story in song in the sense that it provides no more information than it has to. It has an introduction and a conclusion, but the meat of the song are the three middle verses that describe the reactions of papa, brother, and mama to the death of Billie Joe. The event affects papa as much as the news that the French were at war in Angola. Brother was acquainted with Billie Joe and is sad to hear the news, but it isn’t going to affect his life in any great way. The mama verse is the crux of the matter because it’s the one that makes clear that the death of Billie Joe is the most important event in the narrator’s entire life.

There are two ways to interpret mama’s verse. Either mama knows or she doesn’t. The way the song is written, the implication is that she doesn’t. But I find it hard to read it that way. She mentions the young preacher, who mama clearly hopes her daughter will marry. And clearly, mama and the preacher spoke about the them “dropping something off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” I imagine a conversation about how the daughter seems to be around Billie Joe a lot and maybe supper isn’t such a great idea. Regardless whether mama knows or not, she’s not saying anything.

The last verse is a year later and both of the men are gone. Brother has married and moved on with his life. Papa has died. So the two women are left distraught over the deaths of the men that they loved. Of course, mama doesn’t want to do anything. She’s probably spent over half her life with papa. There’s no romance in that. It’s just the story of every life. There is no future that she can see—no autumn romance—just marking time until she too dies. The narrator’s story is the more romantic, but she isn’t over her loss any more than her mother is. (A more positive take is to note that papa died in the spring, which means he’s only been dead for a couple of months. So you could see the final verse as showing mama in the early state of shock and grief that the narrator was in at the dinner table that sleepy, dusty Delta day. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because it is the narrator’s story.)

Where the song ends could make a great beginning for a novel about a mother and a daughter and how they deal with their grief. I’m sentimental, so I imagine them growing closer, learning deep truths, and moving on with life. But what is great about the song is that it doesn’t resolve anything. For all we know, even after this year, mama still doesn’t know about the importance of Billie Joe to her daughter and has no idea that she spends a lot of time up on Choctaw Ridge paying tribute to his memory.

I understand why people wanted to make the song concrete. The song provides the emotional core and some tantalizing details. But the reason the song works so well and the film does not is because it doesn’t matter why Billie Joe killed himself; it doesn’t matter what they dropped off the bridge; it doesn’t matter what their relationship was. It matters that the narrator suffers in silence; it matters that her family is unintentionally cruel; it matters that someone—the only one who doesn’t speak—cared about Billie Joe and that he’s dead. To know more is to poison the song’s emotional purity.

Time as a Construct of Consciousness

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Arthur SchopenhauerI’ve kind of given up on calling myself an atheist. This is mostly just because atheists seem to hate it so much. Normally, I’d do it just for the fun of angering them. But I really do qualify. I don’t believe in “God” as some being or thing or process that has any interest in me at all. In fact, I don’t believe in any ideas about cosmic consciousness that might have any interest in anything at all. And I certainly don’t believe that there is anything like life after death. Still, I am a mystic.

Recently, I’ve been thinking that time doesn’t exist. It seems to me that time is nothing more than a construct of consciousness—a way that we perceive reality, which itself is eternal. What we see as past, present, and future are just a thing. It’s like existence is a video and we are only able to see one image at a time. We mistake the image we are currently looking at for “now.” But it isn’t “now.” Every image on the tape is “now.” It exists now and forever. The problem is not the video tape, which is just a bunch of information. The problem is the very limited ways that we have figured out how to experience that information.

The analogy goes further. Video isn’t continuous. In general, it consists of 30 (29.997) frames—individual images—per second. Because of the ways that our brains work, it seems continuous. This is called the “phi phenomenon.” But what we’re interested in is how we don’t notice the nothing between the images. This is called “persistence of vision.” If you look at something and it disappears, your brain will think it is still there for a fraction of a second. So even though the video tape is just a series of static images, it is a representation of something that is more or less continuous. For example: tape me as I walk across the room. Then watch the tape. It looks the same. But it is not. It’s just a trick! In film it is even clearer, because you can see the mechanism: light projects an image, light turns off, next image is moved in place, light is turned on and projects the new image. You just didn’t notice the dark moment when the light turned off.

Thus, I don’t think what we see as reality is continuous. I think we see little snapshots of reality. But unlike persistence of vision, which allows us to disregard the absence of an image for about a 25th of a second, our persistence of reality would be very very small. I figure something like the Planck time:

Planck Time    =    5.4×10-44 s

This would explain to me the great “Why?!” of quantum mechanics: why can we only look so far into reality before it stops being concrete? Why is it we must use statistical tools the way other scientists do when they can’t deal with actual individuals. And I say it is because our perception of reality has those dark spots where the light turns off. But because of our “persistence of reality” we think it is continuous.

You might wonder: does this matter other than to theoretical physicists and other crazy people? On a day to day basis, it doesn’t. For example, I’m about to go and make some baked potatoes, because they are delicious. I’m going to finish writing this article because I enjoy it. I will go on living my life just the same. But it bugs me. Because I am part of reality. And I wonder what happens to me between one bit of reality and the next. And it makes me think that my consciousness is just a trick. And that brings me back to the same place I always end up back at: Schopenhauer.

This is why I no longer fear dying. My existence strikes me as a great big cosmic joke. I like life and baked potatoes and all that. But it’s all so curious. I think Hamlet was wrong when he said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I think there are actually fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. If our dreams exist at all.

Afterword

The ultimate question is whether I believe any of this. A little. What I actually think is a lot more complex and I’m still working on it, as you can probably tell. It’s hard to find the language to talk about this stuff.

Murrieta and Immigrant Hatred

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Murrieta ImmigrantsI have always thought of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a pro-Israel lobbying group. And that’s certainly not an unreasonable way to think of them. They are fiercely supportive of Israel, as I mentioned briefly a couple of days ago. But they are much more than that. I was pleased to come upon an article on their site this week, Longtime Anti-Immigrant Activists Behind Murrieta Protests. It is very interesting reading.

What appears to be happening is that a small group (in the thousands) of mostly children from a few Central American countries have come to the United States seeking asylum. These are not undocumented people and they have (most anyway) not broken any laws. They turned themselves over to the United States government and asked for asylum just as people do all the time. During the Cold War, Americans were proud that Soviet citizens did this. We even had a super-keen word for it: “defecting”! Well, that’s what these kids are doing.

So why the protests? Why is the conservative press presenting this as a huge increase in illegal immigration? What is actually happening should make Americans swell with pride. These mostly young people are in trouble not at all of their own causing and they have come to us for help. I say, “Welcome!” I say, “Thank you for the honor of thinking us so good.” We are supposed to say:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.[1]

The reason for the protests comes down to what I wrote about a year ago, Conservatives Hate All Immigrants. It was after the Boston bombing and how it was causing people to complain about immigrants. I thought it was strange because the Tsarnaev brothers were here legally. And it was only then that I realized that all the talk of “illegal immigration” was really just a cover for the anti-immigration sentiment that has been here in the United States from its very beginning.

Still, I think most people are like me. In that article, I wrote, “I am proud that much of the world would like to come here.” And what I learned from the ADL article is that these protests didn’t just erupt spontaneously. They were a creation by a number of hateful people and groups. There’s conspiracy theorist Patrice Lynes, who thinks that the United Nations is going to destroy US sovereignty. This has long been a belief of the John Birch Society. The anti-immigration group We the People Rising seems to have done much of the organizing and provided most of the signs. The group is related to Lupe Morfin who was quoted by The Los Angeles Times charmingly saying, “They’ve completely taken over our areas and our neighborhoods, which have become Third World countries.” And it seems that the anti-immigration group San Diegans for Secure Borders Coalition has been involved in promoting the protests as well.

Now there is nothing wrong with people organizing events. But I’m afraid that it gives a bunch of marginal groups a lot of undeserved attention. Most Americans have confidence that the government can manage to apply its immigration and asylum laws correctly. But as the ADL concludes, “In Murrieta and Vassar, anti-immigrant activists closely tied to the largest anti-immigrant groups in the country such as FAIR[2] and NumbersUSA are helping to spread their message of bigotry and xenophobia in an attempt to create a climate of fear around this humanitarian crisis.”

Meanwhile, pro-immigration groups are fighting back. And it’s funny. When I look at pictures of the pro-immigrant side, I see America in all its variety. When I look at pictures of the anti-immigrant side, I just see a bunch of angry white people. Of course, this isn’t about skin color or culture. These same fights went on when the Irish came, when the Italians came, when the Chinese came—pretty much when anyone came. There will always be people who use fear and hatred to maintain the status quo. But American history is very clear on this: the immigrants always win.

[1] These are, of course, the words emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty. It is the ending of the sonnet “The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus. Here is the sonnet in its entirety:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

[2] In this sentence, “FAIR” stands for the anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform—a group that explicitly wants to reduce legal immigration as well as illegal immigration. It is not the really great group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which I talk about all the time.

Game Master Stewart Culin

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Stewart CulinOn this day in 1858, the great American ethnographer Stewart Culin was born. Ethnography is the study of cultures from the outside. I have long had a great interest in ethnomusicology, especially as it relates to the music in America. Mack McCormick’s work in the south, for example, found amazing differences just a couple of miles away; for example, in one town everyone played the banjo, but in another close by town, no one did. Culin spent most of his life looking at the games played by various groups, although later in his life he became interested in dress.

He was completely self-taught. It reminds me of a line from the movie Quiz Show where a student asks Mark Van Doren what he is supported to learn from Don Quixote, and the professor responds, “It means: if you want to be a knight, act like a knight.” People waste whole lives waiting for permission to do things. That’s what higher eduction is all about—especially the PhD. More than showing that you’re learned, it is about showing that you are one of the guys.

I was thinking about that last night as I was researching, Inequality Has Been Rising Steadily for 50 Years. The work was relatively simple and I made simplifying assumptions. But I know exactly how to do it as well as any PhD economist. It’s just that it would have taken a lot more time, and I’m not that interested. I got the results I wanted. Now it just so happens that I have a PhD and in a field that is kind of related to economics—physicists and economists are generally bound by their love of differential equations. But the truth is that anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics and an interest could do the same work.

And that was the case with Stewart Culin: he was smart and he was interested. And he managed do an amazing amount of work. He became involved in several ethnographic groups in his twenties. That’s one of the great things about that period of time. There was no television or radio, so people started groups with others of similar interests. It was the great age of the amateur. Now it is the great age of the conspiracy theorist. In this way, we have certainly slipped. But Culin rather quickly became a professional: first as the Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Paleontology and then as the curator of Ethnology at the Institute of Arts and Sciences of the Brooklyn Museum.

His major work was Games of the North American Indians, a 900 page tome that divided the games into those of chance and those of skill. He did much the same with various other cultures, including those in Africa and especially Asia. Although he continued to study ethnic games all his life, he branched out into decorative art, furniture, and fashion. He seems to have worked pretty much to the end, when he died at the age of 70 in 1929.

Happy birthday Stewart Culin!

Why Hard Working Blacks Vote Democratic

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Vote Baby Vote!Ed Kilgore wrote an article over at Talking Points Memo, Mississippi Is Just One Piece of the GOP’s African-American Problem. It’s remarkable for not being at the Washington Monthly, or as I like to think of it, “A megabyte of advertising for a kilobyte of content.” But given that I put up with the really miserable viewing experience at Washington Monthly to read Kilgore most days, I’m only to happy too read him at TPM.

In the article he goes over the history of the the African American community with the Republican Party. He notes, for example, that before the GOP decided they were going to be the conservative party, they got about 30% of the black vote. As I’ve noted before, Martin Luther King Sr was a Republican in those days. But in 1964, after Barry Goldwater voted against the Voting Rights Act, the African American community fled from the Republican Party. They only received 6% of the black vote that year, even though 32% had voted for Nixon in 1960.

This actually brings up something interesting that you hear from conservatives all the time. They say that blacks are just in the habit of voting for the Democrats and that the party doesn’t really do anything for them. The idea is that the Democrats promise them “goodies” but in the end, the inner cities just continue their destruction. But the truth is that black voters have been very responsive in their voting. When the Republican Party has become more reasonable, they’ve voted for it in higher percentages.

Of course, there is a contradiction in the way that Republicans look at the African American community anyway: they complain that blacks should just see that their best interests are with the Republican Party. As Kilgore concluded, “Perhaps it’s more accurate to say… that conservatives want African-Americans to change before they are worthy of outreach.” The problem is that politics doesn’t work that way. And Republicans know that. That’s why Romney and Ryan spent the whole 2012 election telling old people that Obama was taking away their Medicare.

Kilgore also quotes McDaniel’s campaign manager, Melanie Sojourner, “Where I’m from, in rural Mississippi, I grew up knowing lots of God-fearing, hard-working, independent conservative minded African-American families.”[1] This reminds me of a great quote from Ramesh Ponnuru. He was appealing to his fellow conservatives to stop saying, “Hispanics are natural conservatives because they’re hard working, family-oriented, and religious.” He noted that it was condescending to Hispanics and self-congratulatory to conservatives. He summed it up brilliantly, “I suspect most people throughout human history have been hard-working, family-oriented, and religious, without sharing conservative views about limited constitutional government.”

This perhaps more than anything gets to the heart of the Republican Party. The people who really matter—the Ramesh Ponnurus—know that the Republican Party is all about low taxes on the rich and no regulations on corporations. But Republicans themselves—even professional ones like Melanie Sojourner—think it is about cultural signifiers. These kind of people think that if you go to church, you should vote Republican; if you have a job, you should vote Republican; if you’re “independent,” you should vote Republican.

It shows what they think of Democrats: we all a bunch freeloading hedonist followers. But as I’ve noted before, the only real difference between conservative and liberal is how you think the resources of the world should be divided. I find it shocking that the conservative philosophy is that how ever the resources are divided up right now is the way they should be divided up. And ideologically, that’s incoherent because it changes from day to day. There is not acceptance that legal wealth today may be the result of theft and murder yesterday. All that is thrown aside. So it is little wonder that the poor vote Democratic and the rich vote Republican. Because ultimately, the people know which party is on which side. (Although sadly, the Republicans do a much better job for their side than the Democrats do theirs.)

[1] In the article, a couple of “[sic]” additions were added to the quote. My belief is that when it is clear what the writer means, it is better to just fix it. The addition of “[sic]” in this context just makes the person quoting seem small.

Inequality Has Been Rising Steadily for 50 Years

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America: What Went WrongYesterday, I picked up a book, America: What Went Wrong by Donald Barlett and James Steele. The amazing thing about the book is that it was published in 1992 and yet it could have been written this year. And in fact, it is kind of like a user friendly version of Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Except that it deals with a lot of other cool stuff. For example, it shows how deregulating the airline industry caused there to be fewer companies and the cost of travel actually went up.

I haven’t read the whole book and I don’t intend this to be a review of any kind. It is just that the book is 22 years old and it starts with an info-graphic to demonstrate how bad things had gotten. In 1959, the top 4% of Americans made as much as the bottom 35% of Americans. Actually, that number alone strikes me as ridiculously unequal, but of course, those were the “good ol’ days”! Thirty years later, in 1989, the top 4% of Americans made as much as the bottom 51% of Americans. Note also: this is just wage income. By this definition, Mitt Romney, who makes roughly $20 million per year, probably wouldn’t even make it in the top 4%. So this way of looking at inequality really understates the problem.

Well, I couldn’t see that info-graphic without wondering how things had changed. In fact, the authors even say, “If the trend continues, sometime early in the next century the top 4 percent of individuals and families drawing paychecks will earn as much on the job as 60 percent of the rest of American workers.” I love this kind of stuff and I wondered if I could find the current data. As it is, everyone does things about the 1% and the 0.01%. Well, it turns out that the IRS has a treasure trove of data for geeks like me.

It’s not easy, of course. They provide big spreadsheets with numbers that are not at all what I was looking for. So I had to do a bunch of calculating. What’s more, I had to make a few assumptions. But this is important: all the assumptions I made cause the inequality to be understated, not overstated. So I worked out the numbers for 1993. This was kind of a test to make sure that I was doing it correctly, since I already had the 1989 number: 51%. And indeed, my 1993 number looks about right: 53.0%. So I feel pretty confident in this.

The most recent data available from the IRS are back from 2011, and although I’m sure things are worse now, it gives us a good idea of where we’re at. My 2011 number was: 58.7%. Before the crash, it was 56.8%. I think what we are seeing here is the standard narrative. During the Clinton years, inequality kind of flatlined and then during the great leadership and tax cuts of the Bush the Younger administration, it started to increase again. And then, we got the housing bubble bursting and the financial crisis. The government, of course, took care of the financial crisis (the rich), but didn’t do much of anything about the housing bubble (homeowners and construction workers and pretty much everyone). So inequality again shot up.

It’s very interesting I think. Barlett and Steele were right on with their 60% number 22 years ago. It makes me think about the old joke, “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything!” It’s almost exactly the same thing here. In the case of the weather we just can’t do anything about it; that’s the joke. Well, given that we pretty much live in an oligarchy, there is really nothing we can do about inequality. The top 4% of the country are the only ones who our leaders listen to. Half the country has managed to be so focused on fake scandals and a few thousand desperate children fleeing their countries, that they don’t notice that their birthrights have been stolen. And the other half of the nation is too busy just trying to survive to vote most of the time.

You have to ask yourself, “How bad can it get before the people really do rise up?” Well, the rich are figuring that as long as there aren’t bread lines, they are safe. And I think they are right. Still, if I were them, I’d invest in a little insurance by way of reducing inequality. But I’m a careful man. And the rich aren’t careful. The conservatives aren’t careful. So I don’t see change coming. If I live another 50 years, I certainly don’t see that number going below 58.7%. I think the American people will be willing to accept a number well into the 70s. And by then, it may be to late. Maybe it already is.

Don’t Look Back and Sneer

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Schlitz Beer Ad 1950sLast year, I wrote a rather angry article, Michelle Obama and Downton Abbey. It is well known that the First Lady is fond of the show, as I have been. But it allows people to look back at that time and say, “Oh, we are so superior!” You see, we don’t treat gays and former prostitutes quite as badly as we used to. Ain’t we great?! Meanwhile, we allow our own injustices to continue on. And I’m not talking about ones that are so ahead of our time that we don’t even know about them. I’m talking about things like the selective enforcement of cannabis laws that manages to label huge numbers of young black men as felons for the rest of their lives.

So it’s always dangerous to feel too smug about how enlightened you are. I totally agree that it is best that we no longer hang witches in this country. (But don’t consider it enlightened that we didn’t burn them; the Catholic Church made that illegal in 785.) So I was excited to see that Business Insider had published an article, 26 Shockingly Offensive Vintage Ads. Some of them aren’t actually so bad — more simply reflecting the times. There is, for example, a 1940 Plymouth ad that shows a white couple, and attending to them is a uniformed black man carrying suitcases — and very happy in his job! The ad is conflating owning a Plymouth with being rich (that is, having a uniformed black servant). Charles Howard is shown in the movie Seabiscuit as having a black servant, and I don’t recall anyone complaining that it was racist.

But most of the ads are horrible. There is a 1950s Schlitz beer ad (see above) that shows a kitchen. A woman is holding a skillet that has smoke floating out of it; with her other hand, she has a handkerchief up to her eyes. Here husband has his arm around her, smiling and pointing to two bottles of Schlitz on the table. He says, “Anyway, you didn’t burn the Schlitz!”

Van Heusen AdThe best example is a 1950s Van Heusen ad. Now in a certain way, this isn’t really racist. It is highly ethnocentric. And it implies that all Americans are white. And that America is 80% of the planet. But what the ad is saying is that unless you are a tribal chieftain in the jungles of Africa, you wear Van Heusen shirts.

Okay, I was overstating above. The ad is racist. But it isn’t anywhere near as racist as all the photoshopped images of Obama as witch doctor that were so popular among conservatives from pretty much the moment he took office. It is not making a cultural comparison as in the Van Heusen ad; it is saying that our president is a primitive from another continent (and even time).

What was most striking about the Business Insider article is that right after it was, The 20 Most Hilarious And Clever Print Ads Ever. Mostly, I didn’t find them that great. But the two page DHL ad is nothing short of brilliant. However, it is quickly followed by the Bijouteries Natan: The first remote control ad. You’ve got to see this one:

Bijouteries Natan: The first remote control

I suppose I have no reason to complain. I was promised “clever” ads; there was no promise that they wouldn’t be offensive. But here’s the thing: I’m sure that the type of person who reads Business Insider today is the kind of person who would have found the Van Heusen ad “hilarious and clever” in the 1950s. And there is the point for Alyson Shontell and Kim Bhasin and Patricia Laya (the writers of those articles) and Michelle Obama and you and, most of all, me. We haven’t landed anywhere. In 20 years, that Bijouteries Natan ad is going to look totally sexist — unless we decide that sexual relationships are simply going to be pay-to-play. We must look to the future. We have come a long way, but on an infinite trip, that doesn’t mean much. Looking back at how awful we used to be is just a way of ignorantly showing how awful we now are.

Afterword

In 2008, the people of “liberal” California voted to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. That was just six years ago.

Modigliani, the Artists Not the Economist

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Modigliani - Self PortraitTomorrow will be the economist Dean Baker’s 56th birthday. Last year I wrote about that. And I sent him an email telling him. I also noted that he should consider it a great honor because it had been Modigliani the day before. He wrote back and talked about how much he admired his work. It was clear he wasn’t talking about the painter and I thought he was putting me on. But sure enough, he thought I meant Franco Modigliani, the Nobel Prize winning economist. Talk to an economist and see what you get.

But this year, just like last year, I must tell you that on this day in 1884, the great artist Amedeo Modigliani was born. He is one of the artists that I would classify as not terribly creative. That is to say that his style was remarkably consistent. But I might have said the same thing of Picasso had he only lived to be 35. At the same time, I love his work—far more than anything Picasso did.

The story of Modigliani is the stuff of romance. It’s absolutely awful but it is the kind of thing that even I find beautiful in its way. He mostly bartered with his paintings. He lived and died in poverty. He only had a single solo art show, that was shut down by the police within hours because of his “scandalous” nudes. Three years before his death, he met Jeanne Hebuterne, who became his constant companion. Here is one of his many paintings of her:

Jeanne Hebuterne - Modigliani

They had a daughter the following year. But Modigliani was suffering from tubercular meningitis. In January of 1920, after his downstairs neighbors had not heard from him for days, they entered the flat and found him in bed, almost dead holding onto Hebuterne, who was nine months pregnant with their second child. Modigliani was taken to the hospital but there was nothing that could be done. He died on 24 January 1920. Hebuterne was so distraught that she killed herself and her unborn baby the following day.

Modigliani - Elmyr de HoryMany years later, Elmyr de Hory made something of a living forging Modigliani. He did a lot of other people’s work too, but I think his Modiglianis are his best. He was very good. Here’s the only one I could easily find, but you can well see how de Hory fooled so many people for so long—he was good.

With my recent experience at the Antiques Roadhow, it makes me all the more angry. I don’t know exactly what I think of Elmyr de Hory. He was an incredibly talented guy and also a charlatan. But that’s not it. The problem is the whole business of art that is just shameful. This painting would sell for tens of millions of dollars if everyone believed that Modigliani had painted it. But instead, it isn’t. It’s still doubtless worth a lot of money because now Elmyr de Hory is famous. But the professional art world is a pox on society.

Happy birthday Amedeo Modigliani!

Class Is Not Style

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Why Marx Was RightWe have seen already that Marxists have a problem with the idea of utopia. This is one reason why they reject the illusion that, just because chief executives nowadays might sport sneakers, listen to Rage Against the Machine and beseech their employees to call them “Cuddlykins,” social class has been swept from the face of the earth. Marxism does not define class in terms of style, status, income, accent, occupation or whether you have ducks or Degas on the wall. Socialist men and women have not fought and sometimes died over the centuries simply to bring an end to snobbery.

The quaint American concept of “classism” would seem to suggest that class is mostly a question of attitude. The middle class should stop feeling contemptuous of the working class rather as whites should stop feeling superior to African Americans. But Marxism is not a question of attitude. Class for Marxism, rather like virtue for Aristotle, is not a matter of how you are feeling but of what you are doing. It is a question of where you stand within a particular mode of production—whether as a slave, self-employed peasant, agricultural tenant, owner of capital, financier, seller of one’s labour power, petty proprietor and so on. Marxism has not been put out of business because Etonians have started to drop their aitches, princes of the royal household puke in the gutter outside nightclubs, or some more antique forms of class distinction have been blurred by the universal solvent known as money. The fact that the European aristocracy are honoured to hobnob with Mick Jagger has signally failed to usher in the classless society.

—Terry Eagleton
Why Marx Was Right

Revolution at the Public Library

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Public LibraryI was over at the library, just roaming around. That’s the great thing about libraries and used bookstores: you never know what you’ll come upon. That exists online with blogs, but not at, say, Amazon. For one thing, you don’t get to browse older books. And the newer ones where you can “Look inside!” you are limited to what it has decided to show you. You can’t look at the table of contents and think, “Chapter 3 looks interesting, let me take a look at it!” Amazon has told you as much as it thinks maximizes its profits. But as used bookstores drop like flies, libraries continue on.

Have you given much thought to public libraries, though? Imagine we had no history of public libraries. And some person who cared about knowledge and society and the good of all humanity rose up and said, “Let there be public libraries!” What do you think would happen? Well, I know what would happen. The publishers would rush to Congress and get laws made. They would say, “A single book could be read by a thousand people! The writers will stop writing!” You see: it would be all about the writers. It would have nothing to do with the publishers who make far more from books than the writers. Nor would it have anything to do with Amazon that makes a huge amount of money just because they are Amazon. (And note: the fact that they don’t show profits is just because they are buying up everything in sight.)

At the very core of my being, I am a writer. I always have been. I like telling stories whether they are about things that are going on in the world or just bizarre things that are going on in my mind. And yes, I would like to make some money from it—at least enough to pay for the hosting of this site. And I probably will do something along those lines one of these days, throwing up a couple of ads. It would be my wildest dream to actually be able to make a living writing. The thought of making $40,000 a year is just amazing to me. But my writing here, much less what I consider my more serious private (for now) writing has nothing to do with making money.

Do you know what a lot of money does for writers? It turns them into hacks. Consider Jonathan Kellerman. I haven’t read his first book, but it was thought to be pretty good and I’m sure that it was. Since then, he’s pumped out almost three novels for every two years for the last three decades. I reviewed one of his novels, Twisted Stretched. A number of fans have come by to tell me that I’m wrong, but it’s a total piece of garbage. Then there’s Stephen King. I actually think he is a great writer. He’s published 59 novels in four decades. This does not include his numerous novellas, short story collections, screenplays, and non-fiction books. In his case, however, I will admit that he does seem to simply be a madman and he maintains a high level of quality, unlike Jonathan Kellerman or many other writers I could mention. And I think King would write like a madman even if he weren’t making millions.

So money really isn’t the key to causing people to create things whether they be books, hand carved statues, or cool new high tech devices. (On this last issue, my partner and I have been doing this very cool, cutting edge work for a year; and although we do hope to make some money from it, we don’t expect to become millionaires; in fact, we expect only the thrill of doing something totally new.) But the world is not run by the writers and the other creators of things that make life worth living. Today, the world is run by the wealthy who are only really interested in becoming more wealthy, because wealth is what they “create”—even if it in itself is not something that anyone wants.

Roam around your public library—that relic of Enlightenment thinking, which paleoconservatives would destroy if they could. It is a wonderful thing. It will change your mind. As I walked about, I came upon Ann Coulter’s book, Never Trust a Liberal Over 3—Especially a Republican, a common sort of title for conservatives. It rightly implies that the writer is still thinking at that preschool level. She’s going for that hippy slogan (most conservatives have not moved beyond the silliest 1960s revolutionary thinking), “Never trust anyone over 30!”

But right there next to Coulter’s commodity book was Penguin Books’ Greet Ideas series edition, Common Sense. I picked it up. So you see: Ann Coulter isn’t completely useless. And I found that the book was downright subversive. It wasn’t just the one pamphlet. It also included Paine’s far better and more revolutionary Agrarian Justice. But when I checked on Amazon, I noticed no mention of it. It is only if you “Look Inside!” that you will even know that it is included. Out of 204 reader reviews, not one mentioned that it contains the other essay. The top reader review stated simply, “This book should be required reading for every American. It lays out the logic of the founding fathers in separating from England but also lays out the logical and philosophical foundations of freedom. Eye opening and enlightening.” In fact, this is not true at all. It lays out Thomas Paine’s logic for separating from England. The rich guys had their own reasons. What did The Oracle say in The Matrix Reloaded? “What do all men with power want? More power.”

A browser at Amazon would just find the sanitized version of the Revolutionary War. But the browser of the public library found actual revolutionary thought from long after the war. I’ve read it twice before, but I checked it out anyway.

Why Marx Was Right Review

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Why Marx Was RightI just read Terry Eagleton’s newest book, Why Marx Was Right. It’s a fascinating book and the best one that Eagleton has written in a while. It is organized in ten chapters that start with a common argument against Marx. Then he goes on to show that pretty much everything everyone thinks they know about Marx is wrong. The last line of the book is, “Was ever a thinker so travestied?” And after reading the book, it is hard not to answer in the negative, although I can think of a few thinkers who are certainly in contention—most notably Thomas Paine, although in his case the misrepresentation has been done by carefully ignoring almost everything he ever wrote.

Fundamentally, Eagleton argues that Marxism isn’t a thing as in an economic system. It is not communism or socialism. It is quite simply a critique of capitalism—a system that Eagleton rightly notes Marx had glowing things to say about. But the fundamental question is, “Since feudalism gave rise to capitalism, where is capitalism going?” This does not mean that Marx thought that history had a great pathway that it was following. Marx was a very learned man and knew that history goes in all kinds of different and unpredictable directions. But there are natural tendencies that different social systems have.

For much of the 20th century, it was easy enough to dismiss Marx’s contention that capitalism led to more and more inequality. Keynesian economics, the rise of labor unions, and social changes brought on by the sacrifices of World War II all worked to turn the direction of capitalism back. Of course, it wasn’t capitalism itself. The high levels of income inequality of the Gilded Age caused revolution in various places. It was high unemployment and not high inflation that brought the Nazis to power. But the countries that managed to avoid revolution, did it largely by liberalizing their societies—injecting socialist reforms without destroying the capitalist base.

This is an argument I often find myself in with conservatives—libertarians most especially. All modern societies are some mixture of capitalism and socialism. Even libertarians agree that there are certain shared needs like a police force and a legal system to protect people from various forms of harm. So while such people may think they are promoting a kind of pure system, it is anything but. Most conservatives, for example, believe in corporations—the most artificial construct of human partnership ever devised. Thus we are left in liberal democracies to decide what the proper role of the government is.

The libertarian idea is that it is wrong to take money from one group and give it to another. Let’s assume that’s true. Let’s assume that it is wrong to take one penny of the Koch brothers’ inherited wealth to feed a hungry child. In such a libertarian utopia, the poor would rise up. They would not only take the wealth of the Koch brothers; if history is any judge, they would also kill them. So in my mind, libertarians are just people who don’t believe in insurance and that is why it will always be a marginal belief system.

But it is wrong to claim that Marx was in favor of violent revolution. And in fact, although he actually had nothing directly to do with the Bolshevik revolution, it was a fairly peaceful revolution because the vast majority of the people were behind it. As Eagleton notes, Marx also had no problem with marginal improvements. He was a practical man. If he were alive today, he would be like me in supporting Obamacare even though it is suboptimal.

The biggest surprise in the book is that it shows how Marx’s interests have been turned upside down. He wasn’t in favor of uniformity and increased production and everything we associate with Stalin and 1984. What he wanted was a more equitable distribution of resources so that people could do less of the unpleasant work and spend more time doing what they wanted to do. I discussed this to some extent a couple of days ago, Why Americans Don’t Work Less. The truth is that most people hate their jobs. As productivity has gone up, we could use that benefit to work less. Indeed, in countries like Germany and France, this is exactly what people have done. Of course, in the United States, our productivity gains have not been used to allow America workers more leisure. In fact, the gains haven’t even been used to make workers richer. Almost all of it has simply gone to make the already rich even richer. There is nothing natural about this. It is just a matter of public policy.

I didn’t consider myself a Marxist before reading Eagleton’s fascinating book and I don’t consider myself one now. What I now think is that there is no such thing as Marxism. But Karl Marx had a lot of really interesting insights about the failures of the capitalist system. And they are more relevant to modern America than they they were to 19th century England. It’s funny though. Marx was not a utopian. But the one most utopian philosophical movement in the world is libertarianism. Followers think they are the opposite of Marx, and they’re right—just not in the way that they think.

Above all, I think conservatives should read Why Marx Was Right. I don’t say that because they will agree with him about everything. In a fundamental sense, Marx was really just a modern liberal who read a lot more book than any sane man would. But for conservatives, Marx isn’t a man. He is just a symbol of the failure of Stalinism, which really had nothing to do with Marx. (Marx died 34 years before the Russian Revolution; 41 years before Stalinism.) Marx’s name has become a dirty word and nothing more. If you want to understand politics—especially libertarianism—you need to understand what Marx actually said.

“Was ever a thinker so travestied?”