The Menomonee Falls Gazette

It would be possible for me to fill up an entire blog just musing about one old comic I pulled out of my collection after another, interspersed with posts on comics I wish I had. For the most part I resist the impulse because it would hover between flaccid analysis and embarrassing self-disclosure, and have all the cachet of regular columns in local Pennysavers entitled 'Dusty Sweepings' or something similar. The word 'Nostalgia' actually means 'pain of the past," and the etymology is true in the sense that, if the exposure is sufficiently sharp and brief, it's invigorating, but is dreadful if it goes on for too long.

Moreover, comics deserve serious treatment that they still don't get, and there's a positive value to not glogging up the Intertubes with idiosyncratic and anecdotal treatment of same.

I'm going to make an exception in this case, though. I just came across a pile of old Menomonee Falls Gazettes, and I've been reading them. The Gazette was a wonderful and a clever idea, a magnificent resource, and a window into a lost world in more ways than one.

The idea behind the Gazette was simple: it was a weekly newspaper that only printed comics. Two big tabloid sections on good white paper. It got the comics the way other newspapers got theirs: by paying the syndicates for them. and Menomonee Falls Wisconsin was a sufficiently small place that no restrictions on not allowing more than one paper to print a strip in an area. It concentrated on adventure and continuity strips: interior pages printed a whole week's worth of dailies and the Sundays were on the covers or the centerfold. Big and in black and white. 75¢, which wasn't exactly cheap in the 1972-77 lifespan, but not too bad.

It had the feel of being an archive, but wasn't: there were some classic strips (Batman, The Spirit, Milton Caniff's Male Call) but was instead a window into an unguessable contemporary world. By the 70's, the adventure/continuity strip was dying or nearly dead, and at the time, unless your local paper carried it, you would , page after page go 'They're still doing that?' Not just Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, but Brick Bradford? You may not have even known there was a comic-strip spin-off to Dr. Kildare, but it had survived the TV show by a decade? And the James Bond comic strip? WTF?

All of this is now 30 years dead ,and two levels of lost wonder is a bit hard to get through, but the Gazette was a revelation. It was also a picture that nobody had, except the folks at the syndicates and the newspaper managing editors who determined what comics their paper would carry. As we get more and more used to the universal access of the Net, it seems more and more incredible that this grreat current of popular culture should be so hidden and partial, the funnies that were so much a part of growing up, should be in a form that, while being produced, was almost completely invisible, filtered out totally except for this curious little venture out of Wisconsin.

It was, for anyone who paid attention, a genre that was being put to death by the newspapers, who had adopted the conventional wisdom that joke-a-day strips were what people wanted, and especially joke-a-day strips done in the clean style of a Mort Walker or a Charles Schulz that could be shrunk almost to nothing and still be readable. Whether or not this was a shift in preference on the readers part, it had been decreed , and, short of screaming angry protests and boycotts of the paper (which happened) it was done. And whether this in turn just alienated the public more and more from their newspapers is hard to determine--but you can probably guess what I think.

But much of this stuff is just splendid, an orgy of beautiful illustrative line work--Tarzan Sunday pages by Russ Manning, the crisp beauties of Leonard Starr's Mary Perkins On Stage, or the elegant modeling of Jorge Luis Salinas, who did the Cisco Kid to such brilliant effect but who was here represented by the soccer (!) strip Gunner. It is true that a daily strip is an uncommonly cramped medium, and by the Seventies it was almost all facial closeups (except for such past masters as Caniff. But these were A-List guys, and they're on their best display here.

They are simply treasures now of a Lost World, but back then they were a window, cobbled together by a bunch of amateurs, to a world which, though almost lost, was till alive and marvelous in its invisibility. 

Things have gotten better:various labors of love have created hardbound archives of the masterworks of the medium, from Winsor McCay to Alex Raymond to MiltonCaniff--and you can find some stuff of just about everybody if you know the names--like everything else on the net. But will we ever get the proper treatments--well-reproduced long blocks of continuiity--of the likes of Elliott Caplin (Al Capp's brother) and Stan Drake's The Heart  of Juliet Jones? Oh, evetually, perhaps, I hope, but until then, these ragged edged folded tabloid papers remain valuable.

There's aclassic tradeoff that is one of the most important aspects of mass culture: that the less attention that gets paid to a medium, and the less respect, the more the aartists have a chance to do something wonderful. It was true in my comics career: being handed books at Marvel that were in danger of cancellation--like the Defenders and Micronauts--that were off in a (relatively) unnoticed cornerwas wonderful in that I could get away with things I couldn't if I were doing highly scrutinized books like Spider-Man or the Avengers. It allowed me to stretch and have a lot more fun--even as my industry clout never got very high on the Industry-Clout-O-Meter, and I left the business where, if I had been more of a golden boy, I might (might) have stayed. 

But the trade off was writ a lot larger with the continuity comic strip: Hollywood and Television are all right in its way, but are far too managed and worried over. For all the focus on serious literature shepherded earnestly by serious publishing houses, some of the most incandescent fiction came out of the Phillip K. Dicks and Algis Budrys's of the SF ghetto. And Alex Raymond with his pen and brush made adventures than rang and shone with beauty and elegance, while a much vaster operation created a clunky hokey movie serial with bored extras in embarrssing costumes and spaceships whose exhausts trailed lazily upward--and whose major-studio epic project managed to make the serial look classy and intelligent.

Ultimately though, the danger is that, despite it all, the strip does get cancelled, the medium doesn't support itself, and some new owner comes in and cleans house and it comes to an end. Sometimes the star tht arises from the margins is bright enough to eclipse everythingelse and complete that sentimental narrative--but when it's not quite as overwhelming, the ending is less glorious. Artists don't always toil in obscurity, and the academic darlings re quite often worth all that scrutiny: LLeo Tolstoy and Thomas Mann really are what they're cracked up to be, and Tennessee Williams really could write a play. No, the only real danger that the critical establishment occurs is when they start accepting and establishing narratives that don't deal with actual works by actual artists: High Art versus Low, or, even better, Art vs. Not-Art. That's when you start losing your way, and walking right by that taboid-sized paper window into a word filled with wonders.

Posted at 05:54 PM     Read More     |

 Socialism and Slavery

 It's a powerful argument: people who work hard should be able to keep what they have earned. There's a great deal of populist resentment behiind it, and it's pretty remarkable how that emotion gets flopped by some into a justification for the very people that resentment was aimed at. Just a little swipe of the chalkboard eraser and--whoop! the phrase 'who work hard' is no longer there!

But the original argument still has weight, and the arguments are not necessarily proof against it, and the arguers know it. It is a position of strength. The way I see it, there are three major arguments against the force of the original--not to refute it, but to challenge what seems to be the corollary, that taxes are unconscionable, and the socialism is just plain wrong.

The first is an argument from utility that a society which is set up without any common property is not society at all. Public roads, public schools, public police protection, public fire protection, public health all have obvious practical merit. The second one is the argument from Christianity, that greed is condemned and sharing with one's fellows a binding principle. The third argument is that a mix of sharing and keeping  actually increases overall wealth much better than dog-eat-dog competition alone. There's a fourth argument, along the lines of 'sez who?'  that simply challenges the principle and says Nature doesn't provide for the right, no legal system establishes it, and most people don't find it an obscenity when they're sober--so who are you to whine about it?

Any sufficiently thick-headed libertarian will assert, though (with what probability it doesn't matter) that a free society would ultimately work just as well--and be in accord with principle. The fact that libertarianism has never been tried on any scale and for any time, which some might consider a drawback, has kept practical failures out of the argument and kept it all in the realm of theory, where Freedom is hard to argue with. The argument from Christianity is contingent on current politics, currently exploiting the current unholy alliance between radical capitalists and radical fundamentalist christians. It's not, therefore, an argument against the primacy of property but an attack on a right-wing agenda that's without coherence. (The specter of Ron Paul being a libertarian and yet against women's reproductive choice is rather mind-boggling in theory, but part of the pact in practice.) None of these arguments, much as they please us, stands a chance of thwarting either the consequencelss moral theorizing or the deeply ingrained possessive resentment on the other side.

It's that resentment, though, that really interests me.

The resentment is based on two separate strands: the feeling of just reward and the feeling of entitlement. The two are not even close to being the same thing, and in some ways (like their class attachments) they are opposites. The first is "I worked hard and I deserve to be compensated," and the second "I'm entitled to keep what I've got." The first is the good old labor theory of value so crucial to Marxism and populism, while the second is a feeling of privilege that is closely attached to the aristocratic landowner's feeling that their property is inseparable from them.

The first, populist resentment, here is oddly divorced from its political roots, which went on to distinguished earned from unearned income, and pitted the bosses against the workers by establishing the moral superiority of the latter. The flaw in this context is that this emotional appeal, as I've said before, is quickly spread from the sweat of one's brow to the return on one's (ore one's parents') investments. And the second , as an appeal to privilege, becomes problematic when generalized. If everybody is entitled to keep what they've gotten, and nobody should be penalized for there success, where does commonality and government come in? (The privilege becomes blatant when, in arguing against progressive income tax, paean's are raised to 'the successful' as a class who deserve to be lauded instead of penalized.)

Behind simple justice, therefore, the money you get both legitimizes your work and your standing, which makes it a horrible thing to derive you of. And the absolutist position is that taxation says your work is worthless, and you are not entitled to own anything.

Of course, even communism believes that you should get compensated for your work, and that you are an owner. The difference is that the scale of compensation is different, your ownership of the means of production is in common with your fellow workers. The bugaboo socialism is of a system not found in in Soviet Russia but in the American South. It's indeed horrible, and it may be why that fear strikes a nerve in America more than in most places.

But it's also why the vehement denial that you are a slave sounds suspiciously like the assertion that you are a slavemaster. And why a the middle seems to be excluded from the argument. And why keeping your money seems, contrary to expectations and the teaching of the Buddha and the Christ, to be associated with freedom.

Of course, though, money is not like owning slaves or being one. Income tax does not remove your reward--just some of it. It does not change your ownership status--it just takes some of your money. The objectors make the absurd point that increasing taxes will cause the Successful not to invest, not to work and everyone to be poor, ignoring the free-market principle that if there is money to be made, someone will try to make it. It's a very peculiar picture they paint, which makes sense once you sketch Tara in in the background.

Their fear is not that of a Bolshevik Revolution--it's of a slave uprising. And their hysteria is uncannily mirrored by the slaveowners horror of acknowledging that there would be any restrictions on ownership, that these human beings would have any legal standing other than as livestock. The position of the rich in society is not imperiled by a rise in taxes--by an extremely simple process of mathematical calculation, they will still have more money than everybody else.  

I'm not sure why this specter is there--it certainly doesn't seem to clank around the descendants of slaves--probably because they know the difference between bullshit symbolism and the real thing. And of course the collegiate free-marketeers are by no means all from the south. It may be a mysterious subtle process by which, whenever the ghost of aristocracy rears its head, it takes that ugly indigenous form, because it's so woven into our history and memory.

On a less psychological level, the best argument against this fear of socialism is that money is a fuzzy thing. It's value changes from day to day, and its societal value changes even more radically. It's relationship to wealth is slippery and its relationship to social status wildly wobbly. Everybody does work they don't get paid for, directly or indirectly; people and corporations invest, whereby money magically blossoms in value or justas magically disappears; and anybody who uses advertising can no longer legitimately talk about sacred value in exchange. Our world is littered with stupid paper streamers, brightly colored brochures and free samples that are given away at great expense and no more guarantee of effect than that of prayer. Adam Smith pointed out that money invested in the country as a whole tends to pay off, and that sometimes the best thing you can do with your money is give it to the government--or give it to the poor.

But it might be better and more important to ask--why are you so scared? 

Posted at 01:40 PM     Read More     |

 Two words for city

 From the Greek. polis, from the Roman, civis.

From the Roman, the powerful, banal, ham-handed, militaristic, republic-loving but empire prone, we get civilization.

From the Greek, the brilliant, poetic, highly cultured, philosophical and sublime, we get politics.

Makes ya think.

Posted at 04:19 PM     Read More     |

 A tree is best measured when it is down

  You want pathetic spectacle? You got pathetic spectacle.

Posted at 06:05 PM     Read More     |

 Gollum's Booke

 OK, here's something to contemplate instead of the rebirth of the Republic and transformationalness of President Barack Hussein Obama, which is a wonderful thing but what everybody else is writing about. In the absence of further developments, a simple 'yee-hah!' will have to stand.

So, Tolkien.

I've gotten in my re-re-read of the Lord of the Rings to probably the most problematic part of the book: after all that wonderful stuff in the first book of the Two Towers--the Ents, the Riders of Rohan, the Battle of Helm's Deep and the confrontation with Saruman--we go from that rich and crowded canvas full of nobility, magic, miracles from the Elder Days, to a spare, ugly depressing drama with only three characters in a horrible dreary landscape. To be sure, the story is advancing onward, but it's as if Tolkien takes all his narrative capital that he builds up in the first part of the book and spends it in the second part. Fans of the book grit their teeth in this section and try to get through it as quickly as possible, and breathe an audible sigh of relief when Faramir shows up. From Shakespeare and Malory and Spenser we seem to have dropped into a Beckett play by the most grisly of mistakes.

It's a peculiar choice, and one which other fantasy writers, who will in general follow Tolkien slavishly, tend to avoid. What is going on in these chapters, that Tolkien should spend so much time on slogging through an industrial waste site?

The answer, of course, is Gollum.

He's altogether a peculiar creation: the only obvious antecedent is Shakespeare's Caliban, but he's not an accessory or a diversion. In fact, if the first three chapters are anything other than getting from point A to point B at a tortuous pace, it's the delineation of Gollum before the eyes of Frodo and Sam.

If I were to ask you what the most interesting character in the Lord of the Rings, you might balk and say Frodo, or Sam, or even Éowyn: but Frodo is not much other than a hero, and Sam the steadfast companion. Éowyn is certainly a contender, but if you don't confuse the issue with being sympathetic, there's no real competition. It's Gollum.

The Lord of the Rings is not what most critics would recognize as a modern novel, and most critics don't get past the magic rings and Black Riders (with significant exceptions like W.H. Auden.) The folks on the fantasy side take the view that the critical criteria honed for Henry James are simply not applicable to the mythic/epic/lyric modes embodied in fantasy. But what if we were to take one of the central criteria bruited about in Intro to the Modern Novel classes--that the core of the novel is the transformation of a character--James's American or George Eliot's Adam Bede or Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary--and apply it to LOTR? It works with Gollum. (Presented for your consideration--the virtue of blogging wherein one can in fact juxtapose Sméagol and Emma Bovary. No English Department to get fired from here!)

But no, it's really not so ludicrous to look, at least for a while, at the Lord of the Rings as the story of Gollum. Certainly its the one thread that stands out from the others, tinged with magic and theological beauty: amid the noble heroes and ferocious monsters you have a half-naked sniveling little junkie. Nor does it really jar, because Tolkien, by the intense byplay between Frodo, Gollum and Sam, that this jarring creature is intimately related to the problem of the Ring, and the problem of evil--of Christian Sin, of Buddhist Attachment, of power and fear. It's no big deal to call the marsh-bound trio, ego, superego and id--but Tolkien makes it increasingly clear that Frodo has a Gollum writhing beneath his skin--that when Frodo acquired the Ring he acquired a shadow that gradually became visible--until in the end, it leaped upon his back, tore at him in the heart of a volcano, bit his finger off, and saved the world. And it's not all that outrageous to deem Gollum's schizoid Slinker-and-Stinker dialogue (so breathtakingly realized in Peter Jackson's movie--maybe the first real piece of CGI high art) as the center of the book--a center with a reflection in the Mirror of Galadriel--where it had an exalted tinge of faery, but which ultimately had nothing nice about it, muttering before the gates of Mordor.

This isn't all that the book is about--because The Lord of the Rings ain't the Modern Novel, and people don't come back to the book over and over again for Gollum. But deprived of good shadows, the rest of Tolkien's great picture would lack depth. The thuggish banality of the Orcs makes the Elves easier to understand; Boromir's failed heroism makes Aragorn's unfailed sort more comprehensible; Théoden's stature is appreciated after Wormtongue; and Aragorn's love for Arwen is given dimension by his shitty treatment of Éowyn. (Calls 'em as I sees 'em, folks.)

The Lord of the Rings was not the first sub-created novel of fantasy: that honor probably goes to the works of William Morris, like The Wood Beyond the World. But if you can get through that genuinely antiquarian, mannered, and shadowless narrative, you'll appreciate just how modern The Lord of the Rings is. Despite what's become standard escapist roadshow elements, you, you don't actually escape much in the pages of the Lord of the Rings. Well, cars and cell phones maybe, but certainly not human ugliness, despair, self-deception and cruelty. It's astounding and earthshaking because it includes more stuff at the other end of the spectrum than we had been used to, and it is that that shook the world and changed more than one generation. But if it ran from modern ugliness, the Light of Valinor would be that much harder to believe in. 

All this makes it no more pleasant to get through, of course, but as the Perfect Ascended Master Mary Poppins once almost taught, a spoonful of medicine helps the sugar go down.

Posted at 11:26 PM     Read More     |

 The United States of Cuba

 It's a sentimental thing, but I've chosen to vote on Election Day. II do this with  certain amount of confidence because I live in a state--Illinois--that has a Democratic Secretary of State and is pretty certain to go for Barack Obama. 

(Where I'm enthusiastic about my vote making a difference is in my still-very-red city, congressional district and state representational district. We have a chance of actually getting a Green Party City councilwoman--a terrific person.)

I can't contemplate tomorrow's election without remembering  2004, and how horrible it felt. I had convinced myself that I was right: that George Bush would be repudiated by the rest of the country. I had gone up to Madison, WI for a mammoth Kerry rally, and got my first taste of live Dave Grohl and live Bruce Springsteen, and I heard John Kerry speak. And I thought it could happen. We can fix this.

It may very well be that the re-election of George W. Bush was a Hinge of Fate moment, and I was unprepared to prognosticate something so big. It might also be that the Ohio vote was stolen, and I was right all along. But it seems more likely now, as it seemed in the aftermath, that history shifted in a big way--and that that election spelled the end of the post-WWII leadership of the United States of America. The rest of the world could understand how W got in--but could not understand how we re-elected him. And we acted not like a leader, but like a thug sitting in the leader's chair. No matter how much the rest of the world respected the American people and all that, there was no longer any assurance that it couldn't happen again. If we again move towards predominance, we will still not be where we were. What ever the 21st Century will be, it will not be an American Century. Not only have these plunderers destroyed trust in the United States, they've lost two wars, bankrupted the economy, and allowed a major city to be destroyed. 

Despite it all, I liked the idea of this great experimental country leading the world--but maybe that's a good thing, and maybe we need it if we're ever going to complete the process of making us a just nation. It felt like seeing the girl you loved with all the passion there was in the world marry a friend of yours, and go home from the wedding and lie on your bed staring up at the ceiling. Four years later, it's just as bad, but you have more of a sense of the way your life has to be.

And it's 'has to be' this time. We can become a second-string nation. How have we prospered as a nation? We killed the Indians and took their lands, and built a railroad or two and a bunch of robber barons to go with them, and that didn't make us great. We became great we accepted the people of the world--the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We started to become powerful when we became Irish--when we became Jews. When we became the world the rest of the world didn't want. We only really became culturally powerful when we accepted the genius of the Africans we brought as slaves--when we repudiated the cotton harvest and reaped Jazz and Rock and Roll. We became everybody's land of dreams when a bunch of Jews built Hollywood. And we were building a people. 

When we accepted the lesser we became greater. When we shared power we became powerful. When we gave away our money we grew rich. And when we admitted our ignorance we grew wise.

Nothing weird about that: any guy on a cross or under a bodhi-tree could tell you as much.

But to to those to whom a paradox is just a couple of physicians, it's all been insane. You're going to pollute america by letting in poor people! You're going to impoverish the nation by taking from the rich! And you're going to destroy our national power by acting like namby-pambies! Barack Obama is going to turn us into the United States of Cuba!

The thing they don't get is that we are the United States of Cuba. And the United States of Slovenia. And Kenya. And Anhwei, and Judaea. And the United States of Kurdistan, and Armenia, and Aztlan.  And it really is amazing how fast people who don't believe that can ruin everything.

All these countries are in peril. Barack Obama may not be enough to save them.

But we are.

Vote.

Posted at 03:32 PM     Read More     |

 The Answer to the Mystery of Life Revealed

 Cryptographer James H. Ellis once told a friend, "I can tell you the secret of the universe, but it's not going to do you any good."

Which is the principle problems of secrets of the universe or answers to the mystery of life. They're inferior to money, sex, or even a really good Schwarzwalderkirschtorte, and they're only guaranteed to make theoretical physicists happy.

Case in point: I came up with this while I was working on something else. It explains why we're here, it makes sense of the development of the universe--and I realize that it wouldn't even make a decent science fiction story.

I've read plenty of sf stories that have tried --and they almost always consist of manuscripts left by suiciding scientists, hard-to-decode messages from dying alien civilizations, and endings consisting of big white explosions or Gauloises and tumblers of vodka. (the SF-knowledgeable might bring up Phillip K. Dick, but that's a mistake: his novels are always precipitated by unlearning something important. The only writer I've read who writes stories driven by philosophical principles is A.E. Van Vogt, and he was just nuts.) (I also exempt the David Lindsay's utterly extraordinary A Voyage to Arcturus--mentioned more than once before here--as equally nuts. But both wonderful.) 

I don't guarantee that I'm never going to figure out a way to put this into a kickass story, so I reserve all rights. I know both my limitations and my lack of same. And with that unnecessary buildup, herewith the answer.

One of the important facts in cosmology is that, while electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force all have attractive and repulsive aspects, gravitation is only attractive. Thus, while everything else can trend more or less to neutrality and equilibrium, gravity has seemed to shape our destiny. If it was powerful enough, we have a Yuga-like pulsating universe, Big Bang followed, eventually by a Big Crunch. If it wasn't strong enough, we had an uninviting spreading puddle of a heat-death universe. 

These days, though, there's a different vision--that of a universe beginning to come apart the seams by something called 'dark energy'. Not very much clue to what it is--whether it's the missing anti-gravity or not. But whatever it is, it isn't coupled to gravity the way EM repulsion is coupled to EM attraction.

We have Dark Energy pulling the universe apart--and an equally undetermined Dark Matter supplying most of the mass of the universe--keeping us together. 

Here's the secret: whenever a decision is made, an alternate flip flop from one or the other--native universe is made--all the myriad ways of possibility. It's been posited that these alternative universes interact gravitationally--and it 's that quantum splitting that creates the dark matter that keeps dark energy from ripping the universe into shreds.

Now consciousness seems to be involved in the collapse of the wave function into one alternative or the other. The unobserved parts of the universe don't necessarily flip flop from one to the other--impossible to know, of course, but we can assume that there isn't a big variation brought about by the vagaries of radioactive decay. No, conscious beings two functions--awareness and deliberate action--both lock in a non-superposed results and create alternatives.

So, as dark energy seeks to tear apart the universe, it's the actions of conscious beings that create more alternate worlds, more mass that interacts darkly and keeps the universe stable. and continuing.

So there you have it. The secret of the universe, and the mysterious purpose of life.

Now, how about some cake?

Posted at 02:48 PM     Read More     |

 Standing on the Verge of Gettin' it on

It's really sort of amazing that the final days have come down to this: Barack Obama speaking to 100,000 person crowds, prominent Republicans endorsing him, while the Republican Party and the McCain campaign respond with personal attacks and indictments of policies in language that makes sense only to them.

Adlai Stevenson once remarked on a plea for a dignified campaign, "So, you promise to stop telling lies about us if we stop telling the truth about you." Just to get in one shot, The party who has a candidate that was born outside the United States accuses the other party's candidate of being born outside the United States.

But all that seems to be irrelevant because of the equation rotated 90˚: The Republicans attack Obama for things in the past while John McCain misbehaves in the present. The financial collapse was deadly for two reasons: it damns Republican governance and philosophy (or lack of same) and they got a fill dress run-through of a presidential crisis, with John McCain posturing and stumbling into the flats and making the wrong speech in the wrong scene and weaving around like an Arthur Miller character thinking he's playing Frank Capra. Running into the spotlight and screwing up. And with Sarah Palin removing all possibility of pathos. 

But I think I'd rather talk about Fortinbras, Marching on Elsinore as the old dynasty falls over itself drowning in its own poison and stab wounds. 

What do we get? 

Everything from just another corporatist running dog who will bomb Iran to a wimpy centrist hamstrung  by the bailout money from doing much of anything--to a transformative figure who will set us on the right track for the future and take us out of our racist divisive past--to a good pragmatic  President who will make major changes to the way we do business simply because that's what's necessary to keep Birnham Wood from trotting up to Dunsinane.

I don't entirely trust Barack Obama--his vote on the FISA bill effectively removes him from the Visionary Hero as far as  I'm concerned. Even taking into account the significant difference in tactics when one is in power, he's neither preternaturally wise nor a political bodhisattva. In a way, I think I as a progressive view his virtues in mainly negative terms: not stupid, not bound by theory, not bound by conventional wisdom, neither afraid of effecting radical change or of letting things be. Someone who sees the far-right madness the way we all have. Nobody I know or have read stands in awe of Barack Obama's insights and analysis: they are scarcely new and scarcely dazzling. If there is a dazzle, it's that he's fearlessly saying what the media have suppressed and clutched pearls at, and the Republican hordes have demonized to no end. Support the middle class; fix the broken health-care system; end our disastrous imperial military adventure and return to a multilateralist model of foreign problem solving. And hopefully deliver u from torture and restore our civil liberties, but that's less certain. By a fair bit.

When you look at the McCain smears of Obama in a slightly different way, it does in fact show where he stands. He stands accused of attending a church where Jeremiah Wright attacked America, and white America, in fierce and even paranoid--and maybe even false--terms. He also associated with developers whom one can easily demonize even if one does not put them in jail. He sits on a board with an ex-sixties radical put together by the best friend of Ronald Reagan. These are all sins against purity--just in different directions. The Right, of course would have you make a scalar sum, bad, bad, bad, bad--equals horribly bad. But the vectors sum up to something mighty peculiar. It's not necessarily good: it can mean as little as a man with no convictions, or a Cosmo Topper Milquetoast who cain't say no. But--even when you include this mythical Muslim vector, it can mean a man who will listen to anybody. It's not inconceivable that a Professor of Constitutional Law could listen to an impassioned black preacher, a veteran who fought for his country and yet attacks its actions, as a person to understand? AS Tony Rezko and the wheeler-dealers should be understood? This isn't always a virtue, in that it can lead to an overwhelming detachment-. It can also be the characteristic of someone secure in their beliefs, looking for the best way to act.

So what do we get, if and when we get a man like that?

We don't necessarily get a transformative figure: you can get a careful academic who makes few mistakes but does no blazingly right thing. You can get a pragmatist who adjusts the deck chairs on the Hindenburg. But I don't think that's what we get here, less due to the nature of Obama than the nature of the problems. Because, after all is said and done, a cliff is not a puzzle. 

The potential for a good President who's also black, though, can indeed have transformative power beyond Senator Obama's own intellectual profile. Could it be a turning point away from racism and towards something closer to our longed-for great national principles? 

The specter of a black man doing a good job of saving our asses might go a long way towards confronting the boogieman and discovering that it's *gasp* Mister Scaife, the banker! And I think it has a good chance of getting rid of something.

But there's more than one kind of racism in America--and I'm not talking about differences in targets. There's the active-culture racism, which lives in people who meet (say) blacks every day, talk to them, do business with them, and hate them. That's the sort of mean, hard, optimism-destroying racism that the South is sadly, still replete with, and lives like a demon in  the breasts of certain folks all over. I've seen that racism and seen it in action, and it has made me credit for the first time that not everybody gets into heaven. (If there is one.)

But there's also the racism that I'll irresponsibly call fanciful racism. It's not nice: it grows bigger with distance, which is dangerous in America. It's racism that infects your dreams rather than your heart. Screwing up your dreams is less obvious an evil than screwing up your heart, but ultimately is just as monstrous.

In America we're lucky to have both. The first kind, the poison of the heart kind, the can't-stand-to-be-in-the-same-room-with-them kind, will take a lot more than Barack Obama to get rid of: it will have to be done one by one, and it might only end when the last of them die out. But the other, who hate blacks because of some made-up reason, who can resent the blacks because slavery and Jim Crow ruin their beautiful picture of America, Or who hate blacks because they imagine that they must be angry and demanding vengeance--the Black as Conscience--or that they just believe What People Say--that can change. It can be slippery: there are folks I know who hate black people--except for every black person they actually know. They, of course, are different. 

The potential exists that, especially after all the wild apocalyptic (that is to say, revelatory) bellowings about Barack Obama, that he governs well, pulls us (eventually) out of this recession and ignominiously brings our troops home in shameful (not to say, ignominious) defeat--whereupon they discover that everything seems the same--then maybe, like the date for the Second Coming passing and the sky's windowshade still comfortably down--maybe some of those dreams will start to seem silly.

Or maybe they'll just think that President Obama is nice and not a bit like, well..

The first thing we do, though, is back away from the cliff. Then we look up.

Posted at 04:07 PM     Read More     |

 A Peculiar Treasure

 I picked the book up at a book sale as much because it was a lovely, well-made book as for its content. It had that gratifying heft and that linen-rich matte paper, and jusicious number of illustration plates. When your library ranges from cheapo paperbacks to handsome early 19th century German black letter tomes, the feel of a good book is an automatic pleasure.

But when in my eeny-meeny-minry-mo-esque reading program my hand rested upon it, I had my misgivings.

Really? The autobiography of Edna Ferber? Isn't that taking eclecticism, not to mention randomness, a little too far?

Well, she was a vastly popular middlebrow American writer, and I have a certain fascination with faded fme. And while I'd never read one of her books, I knew her stuff: she wrote Showboat, for crissake. And Giant. And Cimarron. And then there's that list of plays with George S. Kaufman, who was not a genius every time out, but who has always been a red flag artist for me. (The Royal Family; Dinner at Eight; Stage Door). I really, really like the Richard Dix version of Cimarron, and that's what I wa telling myself as I took the book out of one of my boxes--while knowing that movies give little or no idea of the quality of the underlying book--that Ferber doesn't gets critical mention these days--and that there's a further infinite variability of writers' ability to do autobiography--particularly what one might call working writers.

So with misgivings and trepidation, due to my sacred vow to always finish a book I begin, I cracke the covers.

Well, I've only read the first chapter, but I'm sold.

You might expect to begin with a nice vivid image that will take you back to her childhood, and you get it, but you also get I didn't much relish the errand because the creamery had a curdled smell like that of a baby who has just had a digestive surprise. 

Thank you. 

And as it turns out, she's Jewish, growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin, getting her first job on the local newspaper. She takes her Jewishness seriously. And in a book published in 1939, promises more than just a well-grounded reminisce. She treats of the great division of American life the Great War made, and the strain the Depression has put on the American spirit, and the Nazis, as well as a wry self-appreciation.

And she says this:

America--rather, the United States--seems to me to be the Jew among nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly, quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners;craving entertainment, volatile. The schnuckle among the nations of the world.

I'll readily admit that I've never heard that audacious analysis, and that I resisted it until she convinced me by main force. And it's also something I didn't expect to wrestle with in a chapter that began with a little girl going to the creamery across the railroad tracks.

The last time I was this surprised and this impressed by an autobiography was with Child of the Century by Ben Hecht--another Jewish writer of slightly faded fame from Wisconsin. Which says something, but I don't know what. 

Miss Ferber might settle down to a more modest pitch as she gets into the actual narrative--it's almost inevitable--but I'm no longer apprehensive. I wonder if I can pick up So Big at the next library book sale?

*(Goyische narrs like meinself will probably recognize schnuckle in it's non-diminutive (and therefore less-affectionate ) form schnook. Germanic philology experience strikes again!)

Posted at 05:29 PM     Read More     |

 Limited

 I've come across three pieces that made me laugh, not with a 'that was good" laugh, but with that slightly out-of-control laughter that humbles as it delights. They were, in order of appearance, the movie 20th Century Limited, starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard; a documentary on Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows; and in internet-viral fashion, Avenue Q, specifically the song "The Internet is for Porn."

I'd known about the Broadway play, but never seen the movie--it was Lombard's big break, and it was John Barrymore at the height of his powers. Barrymore was hysterical--but he played a self-aggrandizing, lunatic, manipulative figure who was at the same time really a great actor--something very different from a buffoon, and Lombard portrayed someone explosively similar. And on top of that it's a well-constructed play, with all sorts of wonderfully absurd business going on around the main action, and nice floridly drawn supporting characters. It's full of little surprises.  (neither Howard Hawks nor Ben Hecht hurt it a bit.)

The Caesar documentary was typically done, and well put together--with the difference that the old bits were hysterical. Not all of them, but most of the sketches just pinned me to the mat. I had seen some of them, but even the ones I had seen hit me again.

And as I was led to a really pretty amusing political video (the song 'One More Day' from Les Miserables set in the Obama campaign offices) I saw a a clip entitled The Internet Is For Porn - Harry Potter, which pushed my easily-amused button. The Potter clips were only moderately well synced, but the song was tremendous, leading me to the original, and discovering that the show (done with quasi-Muppets) had won the Tony in 2003.

Three pieces, all emanating, more or less, from the same now-ghostly source, reminding me just how important Broadway was.

Before I discovered Rock and Roll, the musical world was all show tunes. Sure, there were generic kids' songs and moderate exposure to classical pieces, and my older brother had The Kingston Trio, the Smothers Brothers and Johnny Horton, but what my folks had was show tunes and it was what I responded to. 

Growing up north of New York City, one thing I remember whenever I took the train into the city was that the posters on the platform were all (it seemed) for Broadway shows: from Fiddler on the Roof to She Loves Me to Promises, Promises to Tenderloin to  Cabaret to Fiorello! And every year there were 4,5,6 big new shows. We were struggling too much to go to see any of them (and we kids were not to be trusted anyway) but we got the Original Cast Recordings eventually and the sheet music The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd was denied me, but the music was a glamor by itself.

And by the time I was old enough to start writing musicals of my own, it was effectively over.

(That's not what prevented my stellar career: my first two musicals were pretty bad, although the music was decent. Halfway decent.)

Of course, Broadway was much more than musicals, and by the time of 20th Century Limited, Hollywood was inevitably taking over the mantle of glamor as well as the people. And both Broadway and Hollywood were romanticizing the transition. Stage actors were becoming movie stars and playing stage actors;  playwrights were turning into screenwriters adapting plays. It was wonderful.

For all the mass distribution of movies, Broadway was the center. It was not only wit and bravura, it was still glamor. Even though seeing a Broadway show was a simple impossibility for nearly all Americans, it was still the source of entertainment for America, and Hollywood ceaselessly evoked the sparkling dust of Broadway. 

One thing I realized while mulling all this over is that, while the Broadway stage enthusiastically wrote about the Broadway stage, and Hollywood wrote about the Broadway stage, Hollywood very rarely wrote about moviemaking. The life of Hollywood? Incessantly. But focusing on the actual process of the making of movies the way they talked about the physical stage, the curtains, the footlights, the rehearsals? Not really. The only major film that comes to mind that's really about moviemaking is Singin' In The Rain, and that's a weird movie in many ways. When Hollywood treated Hollywood, it was often adapting Broadway's jaundiced treatment of Hollywood with cockeyed enthusiasm. On the other hand, such magnificent movie-star movies as Cover Girl and Down To Earth (which I think of because of my hopeless infatuation with Rita Hayworth) are set on Broadway. When the Muse Terpsichore descends from Mr. Jordan's Heaven to save the day, she doesn't descend to Hollywood but to Broadway.

There's a reason for this, why Hollywood continued to reach to Broadway, both in mythology and substance--and that's because a Broadway show is a cohesive human act, while a Hollywood movie is an abstract technical phenomenon. (Singin' In The Rain was all about that artificiality.) Theater movies are like (ugh) sports movies, because a play performance is a real effort made in real time, that could succeed or fail, and it can end in glory. And almost all the effects of a stage play are human effects, while that's a lot less true for a movie. Ultimately, while the American people clearly prefer movies to plays, they envision most movies as plays. 

Broadway was always more elitist than Hollywood: citified, witty, elegant and sharp by turns--but it was also more grounded, more physical, more humanly active. Broadway was the distant cultural capital of America before America's cultural capital became nowhere--but anybody could do what they did. The distance between Broadway and No Corners , Idaho was that of the erudition and skill of an ancient art, the connection with old learning and current thought--but it was a difference of degree, not of kind. John Barrymore the Broadway Star was somebody you say and heard and therefore met in an attenuated fashion, but John Barrymore the movie star and Rita Hayworth and  Gary Cooper and  Carole Lombard were gods behind the screen. Hollywood was not really a place in California because going to the local Odeon or Lux or Strand or Palace theater put you closer to the movies than going to LA. Close physically but different in concept. And TV made our cultural capital nowhere at all.

It's inevitable that all this made the live theater of the Broadway stage a marginal thing. You know, the domain of snobs, academics, earnest young bohemians and homosexuals. But that's neither fair nor entirely true. To be sure, we've gotten out of the habit of going to live theater as a nation, and there are a lot of theater partisans who espouse it because it's not movies or TV--because it can't be shared. But the mass media still hungers for, and is periodically revived by, the skills that only come by real theater work in real time as part of a real bunch of awed primates huddled under the arch of a dark cave and all participating in the telling of a story. It's my cynical belief that the Broadway theater shrunk and partly died not because of television but because New York became that much less livable. ('Specially for poor actors.) You'll pardon my chauvinism, but theater in Chicago (where you could still live on a waiter's wages) not only flourished (and does yet) but energized the abstract media from Second City (which birthed both SCTV and Saturday Night Live--down to the stars emerging from the Steppenwolf theater company (like Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, Loan Allen and Glenne Headly) and the audacious productions staged by Robert Falls and Frank Galati.) 

We like our democratic ways, and we like our universal access. But if we refuse to go to the theatah or buy into the rarefied self-congratulating romance of the Big Cave, we still need what it does. We still need to be touched by means we recognize, by song and dance and snappy patter and pratfalls and clowning. And that means that Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca can walk in from the Catskills, or John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd barrel in from the stage over Piper's Alley, or a bunch of guys with Muppets start singing about porn and racism, and walk onto the mythic stage where the Barrymores once ruled America, and still be greeted with the applause of a grateful nation.

Posted at 03:36 PM     Read More     |

 Book Length

 You'll pardon me that I never put these two together, but when I read about Sarah Palin believing that Jesus Christ would return in her lifetime, Suddenly I paired that up with young Earth Creationism, and my reaction was visceral.

Jesus Christ, what a piss-poor universe that is.

Now Ms. Shoot-Moose-for-the-love-of-Kali Palin has not come out and said she's a young Earth Creationist, and she may well deny it and have her thuggees accuse us all of sexism once again, so let me speak to the general set of beliefs and leave the topic of Sarah by saying that we can't afford her.

But the idea of a universe that lasts only 6,000 years is just kind of appalling. A hundred million stars in this galaxy, and a hundred million galaxies, and the whole thing to get rolled up like a scroll (real Biblical Simile: Revelation 6:14)? That's not enough time for light to get across one spiral arm. It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for drama that's supposed to teach us not to have deviant sex. In fact, it seems not a little insane.

I'll also confess that one of the principal things that repelled me about the conventional Christian cosmology when I was a sprat was its narrowness. No fun stuff allowed. Heaven, the world and Hell, and at the best, Purgatory. No Asgard, no Dark Dimensions, no pleroma of strange universes of strange creatures and marvelous cities, and a heaven that looked as boring as a suburban church? Quite apart from the problem of actual belief, I heartily preferred with a deep yearning the composite world of Fantasy and Science Fiction to that of Religion. As a protected child of America, the promises of no pain and no misery seemed rather lackluster. (They still do.) And while the wonders of space travel and galactic empires were not explicitly contradicted by religion, they didn't have much to do with each other.

And that was against a Christianity that invoked the immensity of the galaxies as evidence for God's magnificence. 

I have no doubt that these fundies look up at the night sky and see the Glory of God, but really, they seem to be hell-bent on denying it as soon as they stop. They would also not have any problems leadfing through a big coffee-table book of the breathtaking pictures from the Hubble, either. But if Young-Earth Creationism trivializes  the Grand Canyon, how much more does it do to the Veil Nebula? It's not even an illustration of the Flood. Was God just cracking his knuckles when he made all those extrasolar planets 4,000 years ago? And do a hundred million galaxies just get swept up when the scroll is rolled up? Even for the God who sent bears to tear up the kids who made fun of Elijah, that's pretty cavalier.

C.S. Lewis, a man who entered into Christianity but didn't want to leave hiss imagination at the door, revealed, probably semi-consciously, some of the problems with Christianity in his Narnia books. The most important one, I think, is in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where Aslan, in explaining the necessity that he be killed on the Stone Table, invokes "Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time." He thus brings up a colossally problematic question in Christian cosmology, namely who wrote the rule that made it necessary that Jesus Christ die on the cross? There's  no real logic to it, and seems awfully ooga-booga to need a blood sacrifice to save mankind. If God loves us, and we say we're sorry for the bad things we've done and strive to be good, why won't God forgive us and let us into heaven? It certainly seems that it's some magic that God has to go through.

But, more to the point here, it's Narnia's time and space that reflect this whole discomfort. The second-best book in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is a journey full of wonders, and is an allegory on the limits of the physical universe. But the overall impression can also be read that Narnia, a way cooler place to be than our Earth, is better because the sky is just a reasonably big upended bowl a couple of thousand miles wide. And its time from creation to Apocalypse, less than one human's life span. it's a toy universe, and by all of Lewis's imaginative efforts, that seems to be a good thing.

And Sarah Palin's universe (oops, sorry! *wink*) tends to the size and shape of Narnia, though without the fauns and fencing mice--and without the kindness. 

Modern science presented Christianity with a two-pronged challenge. The most obvious and well-trammelled is its tremendous success in increasing human power--but it also presented vastly enlarged vistas, both in size and complexity. For a religion whose divinely inspired writings didn't even take into account North and South America, this was a lot to encompass, and while it could easily be made to redound to the Creator's glory, the rest of the apparatus--Fall, Flood, Exodus, Incarnation, Apocalypse--was made rather distressingly small. So small that one might start to think that God had a few other things on his mind than humanity's moderately botched creation. And one should always remember that, while the Church muzzled Galileo for putting the Sun at the center of the Solar System, they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for making the lights in the sky suns and putting worlds around them.

The ultimate problem with the Young Earth/Apocalypse Now crowd is the problem with the Narnia books. Lewis saw the problem and tried to deal with it in a splendid thrash that the end of this book is the beginning of the real story, and its just the bestest story you ever read, gosh, every page better than the last, and it goes on forever. For all it being terribly hopeful and terribly earnest, it in vain and even faintly ludicrous, and it's just some chin music at the end of the book. In a way the non-ending sums up all of Lewis's limitations as a writer: He's perceptive and clever enough to see the problems and paradoxes (both true and false) in all this divine mess, and wants to resolve them, but isn't deep enough  to accomplish it. The book, despite his best efforts and most magnificent protestations, ends and Narnia does too, ending up as a miniature under a painted bowl, and, ultimately, a small creationthat doesn't redound to the creator's reputation as demiurge.

The Fundie Universe is similarly shrunken down, not to the size of humanity, which is the ordinary and comfortable state of ignorance-as-bliss, but to the size of the book--in this case, the Bible as they understand it. Their belief is not centered around God--for whom trillions of years would not be enough--but around The Story (Told, Greatest Ever). And despite the vast increases in scale complexity and perspective Science (and Science Fiction and Fantasy) has given us, it resolutely stays the same size. 

Might God have created beings in Her image throughout these billions of worlds? Might fall and redemption occur over the billions of years? Might there by planets (as Lewis speculated in Perelandra) where the Fall did not occur?

If your anchor is God, maybe. If your anchor is the story, never. And basing your universe on a story causes the infinities of both God and Man to chafe, and, ultimately, denigrates both.

Posted at 06:23 PM     Read More     |

 The Year of Jubilee

I think I'm not alone in finding witnessing a great financial collapse a bit--how you say--spiritual. All through the mortgage collapse, the steady stream of refi junk mail has changed not a whit. I got junk mail from Washington Mutual this week, and did not treat it like the touching last letter home before the poor dogface bought it on the beach. My mortgage company, after all, is Countrywide, and managed, like one of Robert Heinlein's Martians, to discorporate between one invoice and the next without so much as a tilt to the logo. Lehman Brothers gone?  AIG gone? Merrill Lynch (which I still recall as Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith) resorbed? And the biggest bank failure in American history, and it's kind of hard to tell.

And a lot of people are reacting to that theological aspect to say, why don't we let them fail? And a lot of other people are saying don't be stupid, that things could get a hell of a lot worse. And the others remain unconvinced. 

A lot of this has to do with the extremely spiritual nature of debt. Money to begin with is a dream that we all dream at the same time, but debt doesn't doesn't even require everybody. Credit can be between two parties alone, as can debt--and can vanish with the mere exercise of psychology. Credit and debt can exist without the rest of the world knowing its existence. Governments can (and do) create money out of nothing and destroy it, which tends to upset people who object to the government giving their hard-earned money to poor or bllllllack people. But credit and debt, while it might tend to look like money, is something just about anybody can create. And therein lies danger, and economic growth, and a whole lot in between.

It's possible to argue that these big companies are whining over nothing, since all these loans are secured loans: they now have all this real estate, right? That's the deal, right? So why are they complaining? More interestingly, why are they collapsing?

The stuff still exists; the houses still exist. They have all this real estate. So why, like Carlton Sheets, aren't they prospering? The answer is that the debt/credit part of the process vanished like a piece of flash paper, and with it the semi-miraculous process that turns debt into money. And what really caused them to combust is that they were running around treating the debt like money. And all that flash paper going up lit them up like The Wicker Man.

Financiers treat debt like money all the time, and investments fail all the time. The lesson of the first is that (as I've said before) Financiers have one job. which is to assess risk--and the lesson of the second is that life is tough, and a license to print debt is not a license to print money. And another way of putting that last part is that you are not the nation and, especially, not God.

And so I arrive at the Biblical idea of Jubilee. Every seven years all debts are forgiven, and every fifty land is returned to the original owners. The fifty year stipulation would cause the United States of America simply to vanish, so we'll set that aside for now. But, I ask, looking out my window at the cars going by, what would happen if the Jubilee came?

The reality of it is that it would be bad. And the reason it would be bad is that a grand illusion would be revealed.

The truth that has been covered up is that we as a nation are poorer than we think we are--poorer in money as the world understands it. The middle and lower classes have had their wealth and their prosperity eroded. It's been obscured by a number of changes that didn't look like economic ones: the advancement of technology, the entry of women into the workforce, and most importantly, the rise of unsecured credit.

Around about the sixties, the national economy was reaching its carrying capacity: the money that people were earning was just enough to buy the stuff companies were producing. Companies, due in large part to the expectations of investors, had to, wanted to, continue growing.  There were pretty much two alternatives: start paying the middle and working classes more, or start offering them credit.

Unsecured credit on a national scale is kind of insane if you think about it: just run around lending money to almost everybody with no houses or cars to repossess, or furniture to carry back out of the apartment. The individual process of trust became a general principle. Pretty outrageously optimistic, which was in part why America took to it. We were not only richer, we were more trustworthy! And so America was able to afford the increased production of the corporations without the middle class actually getting rich enough to actually afford it. More money for them, and corporate America kinda sorta looks like it's controlling the money supply--in their favor.

A layer of debt was laid on top of America--and it seemed to work. Certain Jeremiahs and Cato the Censors to the contrary, Americans were by and large not overly greedy, managed their debt, And were surrounded by what felt like the rewards of hard work and benefits of living in The Greatest Country in the World. No, it did work, even if there began to be a disconnect.

However, they couldn't do it again. And that's what made this a peril it would be hard to avoid. When the American middle class began to approach credit carrying capacity, corporate America would really have to start paying middle America more. 

Instead, corporate America kept extracting money from the middle class, making them poorer in money and an ever greater proportion of what passed for wealth in debt. Health care, energy, the costs of job interruptions during business: costs shifted to the middle class. And yet they were expected to support an ever greater output of goods. 

It's a recipe for disaster. Why would corporate America  fuel their engine with a higher and higher proportion of debt? Why cripple the basis from which they derive their wealth? Why sit there and ask for, beg for this conflagration? Did they just go mad with greed? Are they that stupid? what?

There are a lot of  elements, and greed and stupidity are certainly part of it. But there are two reasons , one slightly sane and one slightly mad behind it.

The first is that they managed to seize control of the government. First the Congress and then the Presidency. And the government had the power that corporate America did not. And what they were expecting was what George W. Bush and Henry Paulson tried to give to them, Rumplestiltskin-like: to spin the straw into gold. They would be as risky s they wanted to be, generate crap loans, impoverish the middle class, taking the actual wealth and stuffing the economy with debt--and be bailed out.

But instead the straw caught fire.

The other reason--the mad one--is that this was not just the necessity to get big fat juicy returns on investment. Why not, after all, pour money into the middle class? The Clinton years showed that it worked. It stoked the engine and improved the work force and things got better. Why not set up universal health care, so that companies didn't have it as a drag on their budgets and their HR departments could dissolve their cryptograph sections and their SWAT teams? Why the reluctance to make a proven good investment?

The answer is the deep desire among elements of the wealthy to be an aristocracy. And as I've said before, the great achievement of 20th century America is the development of a genuinely democratic culture. Despite everything, the rich are culturally irrelevant in america. Nobody cares what kind of music Bill Gates likes, or who Warren Buffett's tailor is. There's very little this country produces as cultural product that everybody can't have access to. And finally, the taste of the rich has become indistinguishable from that of the masses. 

What a certain comonent of the rich want, and a larger component want subconsciously, is to be eminent. They want to be in the spotlight, at the center rather than in gated communities out on the periphery. They want to have the cultural position the rich had in William McKinley's time. And that requires not just lots and lots of money, but a subjugated middle class. Giving more wealth to the middle class only throws them further to the margins.

I of course have no idea how prevalent or how conscious this feeling is, but it explains things that simple greed, rapaciousness, or stupidity don't. At the base, they felt they could be stupid and risky and greedy and the Masters of the Universe, and the government would work its magic for them. The war in Iraq proved them right, moreover.

So is this the comeuppance? Should we bring the Jubilee? On the one hand, the people in the system were creating debt by any means feasible, even to the hurt of others, and turned around and represented it as close to money, lied about it, wrecked the system, and in the end expected that it would turn into 700 billion dollars and a dukedom. On  the other hand, the credit that would burn away in a Jubilee would also make up a good deal of what an awful lot of good, decent, hard working people have considered their resources for making a good life. It's hard to tell how much misery there would be--after all, the middle class has been suffering for some time now a lot of the price of this--but misery there would be.

Ultimately, letting it all burn--or simply punishing the Masters of the Universe--will not solve it--and more misery is almost never a good idea. Neither is leaving us poorer. Ultimately, the only way out of this is to make this nation wealthier. And one way to do that is, yes, turn some of that credit-straw into money-gold--because that's what we've been living on. But turning away from this rotten mad arrogant path and toward a healthier relationship between corporate and middle-class America is essntial.

And so is knowing just what's going on.

Posted at 02:38 PM     Read More     |

 The Divine Sarah

 The most perceptive description of the Sarah Palin ruckus came, I think,  from Matt Damon.

Posted at 01:52 PM     Read More     |

 The Golden Calf

 The standard modern narrative--the one that I was taught, and the one that predominates in the history books--is that the Jews invented Monotheism. It's a nice simple progressive story, and made God kind of like the steam engine: a wonderful new discovery that advanced us from darkness into light. And from the modern perspective, the Jews were the Newcomen engine while the Christians discovered the separate condenser and made the world ready for our big celestial railroad.

The problem was, the more I looked into it, the less sense it made. All the ancient traditions-and just about any religious system that rose to the level of theory--believed in a unity behind the diversity. (For the purpose of the standard narrative, duality as in Ahriman/Ahuramazda is practically the same thing as unity.) And pure monotheism seemed to be hard to find, what with angels, saints, the Trinity, and the Mother Of God. (Oh, there's the latecomer, the carefully engineered Islam, but the thrust of our histories is scarcely to point to it as the ne plus ultra of religion, now, is it?)

So monotheism seems to be overrated, both in its exclusivity and its practice. So what's all the emphasis about?

The real invention of the Jews, sez I, was not the idea of one god--but the idea of Divine Law. The one thing the ancient gods, uniplicitous, duplicitous or multiplcitous, never tended to do was tell people how to live. They asked for devotion, sacrifice, adoration, ritual, glorification--but almost never the regulation of everyday life. To once again invoke my high  school American History teacher, David Durfee's powerful distinction, the gods were authoritative but not dictatorial. There were commands you must obey, but outside of that, they were pretty cool. It was entirely possible for any number of vastly scary gods to coexist with elaborate legal systems and minutely reasoned ethical theories. Reciprocally, the gods acted, not systematically, but in great sweeping acts of fate and doom, love and madness. 

What the Jews developed/got given was something different. The idea of a God that shaped everyday life, not just in terms of the appropriate rituals, but in dress, diet, sex, and trade, well that was something new. It wasn't altogether new: priests had, since at least the sinking of Atlantis and probably to the retreat of the Old Ones to sunken R'Lyeh, circumscribed their lives and restricted their diet, dress and behavior, as part of their consecration to their specific God. The idea of extending that practice to an entire people, turning the idea of a covenant from the few to the entire world, that changed the world.

It puts the whole Golden Calf story in better perspective. It's actually a telling story: Moses goes up on Mount Sinai to get guidance from their tribal God; In the meantime , though, is there anything wrong in asking the other gods for a little help? Aaron (Moses's older brother, let's remember) didn't object to the practice. Despite the Cecil B. DeMille version, which has the worship of the Calf as a riotous Hollywood belly-dancing striptease, with a pathetic, embarrassed Aaron waving a censer up and down, there's at least the implication that this was standard procedure--which indeed it was everywhere in the ancient world. The demand for exclusivity and the banning of idols was, after all, still up the slope with Charlton Heston and the incendiary shrubbery. C.B. could view the Golden Calf as a nasty betrayal, but (as with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) they were breaking a law that had not been given to them yet. (One of the numerous things that make the story of Adam and Eve less than trivial, is  that the first crime was committed by beings who didn't know what crime was. And their crime was to find out what crime was.) The imposition of justice was not justly imposed--how could it be?

I have heard and read a bunch of Christian hagiobatics trying to explain the weird and often reprehensible behavior of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who really have a hard time qualifying as moral heroes. They were devoted to their unnamed God, But Abraham was a dope, Isaac was an asshole and Jacob was a gonif. And a whole lot of Christians putting together Bible Stories For Children back and fill an awful lot. "Mommy, tell me the story of Hagar and Ishmael!" But there's one aspect that makes it all interesting: that the Law had not yet been established. Abraham bargained with God--and Jacob's bargain with God was 'do all these things for me, and you will be my God and I will worship you," which is structurally a pagan bargain. It's little different from Achilles--and Jacob is no more fair or honest. With the advent of the law, things change, the tone of the Bible changes, and there's a new model for a human community.

We are so drenched in the idea of divine law that fundamentalist Christians run around asserting that human morality is impossible without a belief in God. Those who oppose them quickly turn to Marcus Aurelius, Cato the Censor and the Stoics. Adherents to the pagan model would find such an assertion insane and completely irrational. And, I submit, so would Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Posted at 02:15 PM     Read More     |

 Face Facts

  I've been listening to a bunch of Alan Watts. He's sprightly but not too, Clear and methodical yet still in love with paradox. Stuffy enough to give, in the middle of telling lots of strange wonderful and hilarious zen stories, to give a straight summary of the historical traditions.  The talks are sprinkled with enough little pieces of wit that it's probably good to listen to it on disc so that one is not too tempted to copy them all down and become insufferable. 

Posted at 06:35 PM     Read More     |