Not Watching the Super Bowl

Thinking about how many people tonight are riding money a football game.

In my sleepy cotton town, the bookie joint was like an Elk's Lodge. Situated in the alley behind the row of cotton factors and brokers, you could walk in and hang out all day long, have a coke, crack open some whiskey, make a bet, read the paper, watch sports, talk shit.

My father enjoyed taking me there just to see the characters drawl on. They were an assortment of cotton factors, farmers, cops, lawyers, and two-bit county politicians. There was a stove, a counter, four tables, and a coke machine. The whole room was no more than 30' x 30'. The mayor of the village nearby would drop by and make deer sausage with cheese grits.

Stacey, the bookie, would be updating the point spread as the day went on, and joke around with the characters. You could bet on anything ten dollars and up, straight bets, teasers, round robins. I watched a card game once when I was in there with my father- I was maybe twelve- where a fellow lost a hundred acres of prime land on a single hand. I've never been tempted to gamble.

A short open letter to the Atlantic, HuffPo, NYT, and the rest of the east coast media establishment:

A short open letter to the Atlantic, HuffPo, NYT, and the rest of the east coast media establishment:
Please, get out of your offices some. Please, take a deep breath. Leave your urban outlets. Put down that cappuchino. Get out of your parochial environment, and go meet people with bloodstreams. Get out to flyover country some, however distasteful that may be. Get to know your Saidian "Other". Stop coming up with ridiculous rewrites of your master's thesis in sociology. Stop imagining that bowling leagues are precursors to Nazi rallies, or that beards are signifiers of the power structure. Please burst that bubble. Develop a sense of humor. If you do this, your articles will look less like Onion parodies.

Non-intervention: Learning to Look the Other Way

Folks I know seem to really appreciate countries like Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and  the Czech Republic.  In our hemisphere, Chile and Argentina often get a shout out.  What’s something that these places have in common?  One thing is that they usually aren’t on the imperialist running dog list of foreign intervention.  That means that they prefer diplomacy to boots on the ground, and can in most cases spend what would be a military budget on social welfare programs.  In other words, when some wild and crazy civil war breaks out in the latest failed state, they largely look the other way.

As does China, Japan, and all the other Asian Tigers.  As does most of the world.  For when it’s UN Humanitarian Intervention time, anything passing above the token contingent is often the same players, France, Britain, often Canada, and of course the US.   All but Canada are old hands at empire, though the US never got into the colonial aspect of it, instead preferring bombs and briefcases of cash.  Complexity and nuance are not America’s strong suits.  

The problem with modern imperialism is that it doesn’t resemble that of, say, Genghis Khan’s Mongols, who erased any moral qualms they might have had by annihilating and enslaving its victims. For us, it’s always a mixture of brute calculation and naïve idealism.  Bombing people into modernity and liberal democracy is the peculiar heritage of our Jacobin era.  And guilt, guilt, guilt. 

So, let’s close those bases.  Let’s withdraw those troops.  Tell those petty dictators, no more briefcases or bitcoins: we’re out of the empire business.  

But can “we” do it?  Can you do it?  Can you look the other way?  Can we mind our own business? 

Our own business. Is there really any such thing anymore?  With all that global, interconnectedness, this neo-feudal web of obligations and ties.  Not very sexy is it, isolationism.

Of course, we can’t.  Part of Jacobin morality is, “you break it, you own it.”

Bachelor of Barista?

Today, a friend of mine posted this question: “Education for the new economy...Bachelors of Barista?” 

Good question.  Heck, why not?  You see all these twentysomethings these days pour coffee after ringing up five and six-figure debt getting some fatuous degree. 

Bud Light actually had a tribute to them on the radio a few years back:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyEvTDurudw

Another friend who did a couple of years in Asheville told me that he was blown away when he first moved there by how all the sweatiest jobs like picking up rubbish and trimming hedges were done by dudes with degrees. Places like Asheville, though, have tuned into keeping their people's self-esteem high, so they've invented professions like Artisan Plumbing.  That’s a college town for you, but you’re starting to see that more and more in average towns as economic downturn dovetailing with market saturation for liberal arts majors begins to take its toll.  

There’s this dude in my town whose hook is that he delivers his hand-roasted, micro-batch coffee by bicycle.  Well, why not?  Somebody should do it.  If delivering arugula by wheelbarrow pays the bills (you are free to steal this idea), go for it.  There’s a lot of folks who tingle at the idea of an urban scene filled with the kind of street hawkers and micro markets that they pay to look at on vacations to Europe, and they revere it accordingly, much like the way the EU government gets worked up in debates about the terroir.  I don’t blame them.  When my son and I went to the Euro outpost of Quebec, my gluttonous self was in nirvana at all the fromageries and fruiteries I saw, with not a one of their storefronts more than twenty feet wide.  Micro indeed.

One way today’s young deal with finding out their true market value is to get an internship at an organic farm or "institute".  You could be swinging a hoe all day, but if the dirt’s organic and the payoff includes smoking a bowl  at the end of the day, then you are interning.  I’ve seen one place not only hire interns rather than “laborers”, but even charge folks for the experience of feeding their goats and spreading mud on a daub hut. When I was a kid reading Tom Sawyer, I thought it was nuts that boys were lining up to pay Tom to whitewash his fence for him, but now I know that he was just clever at marketing.

Meanwhile, there’s other proletarian work out there that pays a whole lot more, though it’s short on cool.  If you’ve got the stones to work with 84,000 volts of alternating current, the International Brotherhood of ElectricalWorkers might be for you.  $74,200 Transgender Studies bill? Heck,  my friend Cary will clear that and then some this year as he hooks himself to a high voltage cable that delivers the power that’s running my laptop right now.  It’s enough to make an ironic moustache curl even harder.   It takes serious delayed gratification, with a five year apprenticeship program, and has some genuine safety hazards, but the pay and benefits are good, and the IBEW is better at organizing than your affinity group is.  

Universalism

Universalism is the pantheist neo-Gnostic creed of the era, where the children of speed and telecommunications find techno-rapture in the illusion that they can be anywhere, anything, at anytime- a kind of simulacra of the singularity. Far from marking them the sophisticates that they imagine being, their disdain for the parochial is the inverse of the nation-state that they imagine they are transcending. Instead of the slavishisness of nationalism, there is a petty narcissism, a Whitmanian "Song of Myself" that imagines that they can love everyone, and by extension, everyone should love them.

Housing Startups

Using housing startups as a marker of economic health is a kind of American cargo cult.


When I was 19, I was wandering around a Western city, and stumbled into a neighborhood that was essentially unfinished.  You know the kind:  Peach Orchard Street, Peach Orchard Lane, Peach Orchard Circle.  There's probably now some software for developers that churns out this stuff, but then it was a revelation.  Coming from an "undynamic" area, I'd never seen this kind of stuff.  And it had never been occupied, save by an unlucky few who already had signs out.  I'll spare the suburban cul-de-sac inferno culture critique.  The area was in a downturn, I guess, and there were acres and acres of unmet success all around me.

Creative destruction is the spin: if  a city isn't growing, it's dying.  That's probably true, as we just don't have any other economic model.

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

liberals and libertarians

The libertarian says that no one is my neighbor, while the liberal wishes to make the whole world my neighbor.  The former operates from an atheistic impulse, the latter’s is pantheistic.  Both converge to deny a nation or a culture, since they see either as traps.  From this, they toss around the word “fascist” like discursive chump change.

The liberal’s currency is indeed “change”, where research, white papers, reform programs, facilitators, and consultants thrive.   Due to their overrepresentation in academia, nonprofits, and the media, perfectly useless retoolings of education, social programs, and institutions form their cottage industry.  Think of it as a white-collar WPA. 

Libertarians aren’t immune to the change mantra, either.  There is the techno-rapture faction that imagines The Market as something between a Jedi Force and a kind of divine judge. 

In place of the social, both offer abstractions.  Liberals, the majority of whom are uncomfortable with prole-ish social institutions, offer an amorphous “community”, since that term lies everywhere and nowhere.  Theirs is the world of the affinity group, the ad-hoc collective, the on-line, “solidarity”, and above all, anything that generates grant money.   Libertarians have backed themselves into an ideological corner, where the commons is a prison, and the flow of capital constitutes grace.  Underlying both groups is a snarky sense of being above the customs and norms of society that you used to learn about in school, but no longer do without inflection. 

The libertarian believes in a Hobbesian state of nature, while the liberal has “evolved” to believe that there is no such thing as human nature.

They both love blank slates and zero-sum games, a fundamentally infantile obsession with the pure.  When you talk to either, you wonder if there are any adults left in the room. 

Liberals have embraced a narcissistic “all roads lead to us” historiography that castigates ancestors and hides descendants.  You, the past, are just an unenlightened preamble to me, the present. 

History for the libertarian is either a fetish or source material for a conspiracy theory.  They have no patience for the ebb and flow of events, as those detours distract from their ideology.

Liberals are the descendants of the Puritans, and are Baudrillard’s “True Latter-Day Saints of the Easy Does It Apocalypse”.  Nothing is personal anymore.  Everything- your thoughts, what food goes through your digestive system, your friendships-are political acts that damn you forever, or are markers for status whoring. 

Libertarians are frontiersmen, stripping away culture, society, moral obligations, and benevolence to some endpoint that lies over the horizon, where they will have the ultimate freedom to further defeat imaginary demons and oppressors, and like Ozymandias, erect monuments to themselves.