Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
From what I've read so far, Fallows seems to be saying that American
society is strong and resilient, but American government and politics
are a weird skanky mess, getting worse, probably beyond repair. I
agree; that relates to the point I've made about participation. It
seems to me that the only hope to make government functional is for
those outside government to be attentive, and for those who are both
passionate and knowledgeable to be plugged in... rather than deferring
responsibility to broken and dysfunctional political crankery. Sure,
there'll be obnoxious inputs - like the teabaggers, birthers, et al.
All the more reason for the rest of us to be fired up, vocal, engaged.
  

    
You also have to have a consensus that government isn't intrinsically
evil. 

The old Ronald Reagan line about "The nine most terrifying words in
the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to
help.'" was not funny in the context of (for example) Katrina - but it
keeps destroying ability to act on all kinds of pressing needs.
  

    
I don't see how you can have a functional country without a functional
government.  Although to circle back a few posts, the Italians seem to
have been doing their best for generations.

Most seriously, though, what amounts to the nihilism of the
anti-government Reaganite right may well doom us to a societal
collapse.
  

    
Of course, to give idiots their due, looking at the last few decades
of governance it's hard not to feel a bit of nihilism.   The nature of
American corruption has really changed.  Nixon ended up with a few
million, LBJ got his radio/tv empire, again pretty small potatoes. 
Eisenhower got a really swell retirement farm.  But we now have a
degree of connection between really major crooks and government that we
haven't seen in over 100 years.  Of course the irony is that those on
the far right don't understand that their own heroes are among the
worst, but they're not entirely wrong about the disease even if their
idea of a cure is nuts.
  

    
If the basic structure of government is wrong, public participation in
government will amount to many people busily turning a crank that
isn't attached to anything.

And, in the case of California, the basic structure of government is
wrong because a large segment of the public wanted it wrong. They did
participate: they broke the government. 
  

    
What you say is basically true.
  

    
I remember a weekend when the CHP went on strike.  I've never seen cars go
so fast on the Bay Bridge.  One day of that and the strike was over, but
what a day we had.

On all levels it's a cat and mouse game.  We'd like not too many cats when
we're mousing around, not too many mice around our catbird seat.

Lenny Bruce has a riff in the Berkeley Concert on the invention of police.
"I was sleeping and I got a face full of crap!"  Next thing you know, we
gotta have a craphouse.
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http://popup.lala.com/popup/937030201816428413&ei=
KmxHS4SyDYjAsgOJ1t22Aw&sa=X&oi=music_play_track&resnum=2&ct=result&cd=2&ved=0C
AwQ0wQoATAA&usg=AFQjCNE0m6-8bR9p6OSjF2K07ajajopmXA>
  

    
here's a shorter link to that
<http://popup.lala.com/popup/937030201816428413>
  

    
"If anybody throws any crap on us while we are sleeping, they'll get
thrown in the craphouse." "But wait a minute... everybody? What if it's
my mother?" 

He gets a faceful of crap, and says wait a minute, I thought we had a
rule. And they tell him it's a religious holiday, and besides, if he's
going to be indecent and sleeping all day, he deserves a faceful of
crap.

Not too long before Lenny was gone, worn down by his battle for the
freedom to talk about the sort of things onstage that everybody was
doing and talking about, but not openly, not in public. Pretty minor
stuff compared to today's standup routines, but they busted him hard
for it.

Some would really like to reconstitute that oppressive era. They seem
rather quaint, today.

Bruce said he might be offline for a couple of days; we can carry on
without him til he's connected again, or until we form a search party.
Perhaps he's boldly gone where no man has gone before, into the
wormholes. While we wait, feel free to chime in with your own thoughts
about the state of the world.

There's something meaningful, I think, in the fact that Lost fans are
lobbying hard to have the U.S. State of the Union address rescheduled
so they can see the first episode of the last few. Priorities.
  

    

Perhaps they could consider TiVo?
  

    
I think the idea is that the speech would preempt the episode and
delay it another week. And they've been waiting for MONTHS.

And it's probably more real to them than the State of the Union
address. Obama, after all, will address only one dimension of linear
time. He's going to talk about healthcare reform and putting people
back to work, pretty mundane topics, only whimper-level apocalyptic.
Lost fans are after the bang.

Appears it's sinking in with Obama that he can't afford to be cool. He
has to kick some ass with this address, so I personally think it'll be
more interesting than Lost, even if it is fairly fixed in time and
space.
  

    
You can call off the Saint Bernards, I'm here in Belgrade.

Odd, springlike weather here as Arctic snow blankets Britain.  By
Belgrade standards, the town looks terrific. Never seen glum, crumbly
Beograd looking so perky.  It's like last month's dissolution of the
Schengen visa barrier set off a starting gun to turn a Slavic cyberpunk
dystopia into Euro-Disney.  

The population's much better-dressed, new stores are springing up
everywhere, the tabloids are full of harmless busty pin-up chicks and
tennis stars instead of the customary profiteers and war goons... Some
kind of major tourist-promotion effort also seems to be underway.  It's
busily emphasizing all the cuddliest, most Ruritanian aspects of
Serbian society, stuff like eco-tourism, ruined castles, hand-loomed
aprons and elfin leather shoes.

*Locals talk about "the crisis," but mere financial collapse seems
pretty small potatoes compared to the last 20 years of local daily
life.  If you're a 20 year old kid in Belgrade right now, it feels like
someone peeled back the drapes and threw open a window for the first
time in your life.
  

    
That sounds cheery. Maybe we're drifting into the alternate universe
where Mr. Potter loses his bank and all his money, and is tossed into
prison with the likes of Bernie Madoff, while George Bailey creates a
cohousing co-op with an alternative currency and starts planting
community gardens and setting up windmills. And everybody's texting how
great life is, after all.
  

    
I think we have a few discussions hanging, waiting for your filters to
kick in, so I won't bring anything else up at this point. I should
note that Obama assures "Lost" fans that he won't pre-empt their show,
so there's one global crisis averted.
  

    <hidden>
  

    
Worldwatch Insititute has released a preview of State of the World
2010, which you can download for free: http://budurl.com/sow2010

"Amid this flurry of activity, one dimension of our environmental
dilemma remains largely neglected: its cultural roots. As consumerism
has taken root in culture upon culture over the past half-century, it
has become a powerful driver of the inexorable increase in demand for
resources and production of waste that marks our age. Of course,
environmental impacts on this scale would not be possible without an
unprecedented population explosion, rising affluence, and
breakthroughs in science and technology. But consumer cultures support—
and exaggerate—the other forces that have allowed human societies to
outgrow their environmental support systems."
  

    
I enjoy reading Worldwatch, but I'm starting to wonder about the
culture of consumerism.  People who've never had any consumerism around
tend to take it to pretty well (and that still counts for most people
alive on Earth).   But as a way of life, a culture, consumerism seems
to me to be showing its age.

Designers know a whole lot about consumerism... after all, they're
making this seductive stuff and packing in the ol' shelf-appeal.  I
know a lot of designers, but I never met a designer who was a
"consumer."  They're eager collectors of objects, sometimes, but
they're never spotted gleefully hauling cartfuls of consumer goods out
of the Wal-Mart so as to keep up with the Joneses. 

*Designers are not thrifty and abstemious people, or morally opposed
to materialism.  They just don't go for the story there, in much the
same way that guys at the Hershey factory don't glut themselves on
candy bars every morning. 

*The kingpin of "50-year-old consumer culture" is the car.  The car is
the ultimate big-bang consumer item.  Especially young guys with some
disposable income and no kids -- these guys used to have a burning
consumer lust for cars, really unfeigned and enthusiastic and intense. 
It was all about personal power, sex appeal, status, prestige. It
seemed totally natural, at the time.  I really sense a major
disenchantment and a jaded loss of interest there, and not just because
I hang out in Turin and I've seen what's left of Detroit.

*It's not that cars have no modern use for people, but the social
attitudes toward them, the sense of cultural aspiration...  People go
through the motions about cars, but the fierce glee's not there any
more.  Even the car companies don't have it. The promotional machinery
of mass media is gone.  The huge sums spent to build that awareness and
fan those consumer needs is going somewhere else.

*It's rather like people's sudden discovery that they don't like
newspapers.  What, how?  How could people not like newspapers? 
Newspapers are the news.  They're power, politics, business, the
women's pages, the book reviews, the movie schedules, and also
chock-full of car ads... Then it turns out they really existed because
they were grouping information around a narrow channel of supply and
demand which no longer exists.  

*I suspect that rather a lot of consumer goods are in a similar
situation to newspapers... if you weren't repeatedly told that you
wanted this, if there were other methods to accomplish similar aims...
would you want that thing, even if it were free?  Maybe you can get
something else that performs almost as well, over at the Chinese
grocery, and it costs one tenth as much...  Maybe it can be a service
instead of an item... or maybe you're a bottom-feeder, you're living
off Craigslist, not because you're thrifty, but because shopping is
boring to you, it's ungainly and old-fashioned, it's too much trouble
nowadays.
  

    

going back to the beginning of this discussion,
Bruce states (to illustrate the difficulty of planning for
long term financial stability):
 
 You want to give your Dad,
 back in 1974, a coherent picture of what 2010 looks like.  You know,
 something very actionable, lucid and practical, where he can just slap
 the cash on the counter and everything works out great for the family.

If Dad's cash had gone into Chevron shares at $3.00 each, things would
be looking pretty good for the family.  Whether the same is true 
for young dad's of today, I don't know.  But it's a definite possibility. 
  

    

apostrophe error, my bad
  

    
That point about the loss of enthusiasm for the car, for consumer
goods, for really intense marathon shopping experiences... it feels
like a symptom of depression. And maybe that's the difference between
economic depression vs garden variety recession... a real loss of
energy and motivation. I saw it at Christmas - the shoppers didn't
really hit the streets and stores until the last week, and on my few
excursions into mainstream retail environments, everybody I saw seemed
shell-shocked.

I think we're in a real transition, that the world is changed forever.
I don't mean in a dystopian or apocalyptic sense. It's a whimper, not
bang, sort of change. We're confronted with our real limitations.
Resources are not infinite. Our energies ebb and flow. We're mortal
after all. 

Somehow this seems liberating.
  

    
*Chevron stock, is it?  Well, buying into oil has seemed like the big
easy money ever since the Beverly Hillbillies.

*If you own oil wells, people come and kill you for oil.  If you own
financial instruments that represent oil, you're not doing all that
great either.  If you own Exxon-Mobil stock, you're complicit in the
collapse of civilization.  I wouldn't be urging anybody back in the 70s
energy crisis to jump right on top of that stuff.

*There are such things as indexed vice stocks.  Where you invest in
enterprises that are evil, and that everybody knows and says are evil.
Gambling, tobacco, porn...  Vice stocks tend to do pretty well, but
lately, even the vice stocks haven't been doing all that great.  Not
even cynicism pays.

*For porn to lose money is an awesome development.  Porn is the
ultimate hybrid of consumerism and sex.  Bigger than Hollywood, huge. 
Or at least it used to be.  Pr0n got the full-scale disruptive
de-monetization treatment.  You can always say that "men's lustful
needs are eternal, so that lust must have gone somewhere else," but
men's lustful needs for *commercial, consumerized, profitable* lust are
not eternal. They're just a period artifact.  Porn is probably as old
as the Willendorf Venus but mass-produced consumer porn is not much
older than recorded music.

*I just saw somebody's painfully compiled list of porn stars on
Twitter.  Porn stars have a tough line of work, they don't exactly
stand on their dignity, but jeez, to see 'em reduced to Twittering? 
Next somebody's gonna tell 'em that they need to do what broke
musicians have to do and specialize in personal performances.

*Look at this strange thing.  Got it off William Gibson's Twitter
stream.  It's a NAVY SEAL watch called the "Beverly Hills Boutique
Incursion model."

http://bit.ly/5iCdet

*I'm sure that knicknack was designed by some GenXer who's all
chuckling to himself about his edgy postmodern subversiveness, but
that's a consumerist crisis-of-faith thing going on there.  It's like
some parody out of ADBUSTERS, only less self-righteous.  It somehow
reminds me of Soviet red-hot jazz stars or swoony Third Reich movie
divas, guys who were really hep and chicks who were really sexy, but
under hopelessly oxymoronic conditions, just... nowhere to advance to
and nothing left to conserve.
  

    
*You can make an argument that consumers who have lost their taste for
Hershey bars are just plain old.  The planet is aging rapidly.  Old
people aren't building fresh nests, they don't need to stock up on
kitchenware and white goods.

*So the question would be, what are 24-year-olds up to. People 24
years old have income and lack responsible burdens, so they represent
futurity because they're doing things that won't reappear until 20
years later when they're rich grownups.  American 24 year olds are
fighting two land wars in a depression.  I would expect the attitudes
inculcated there to last a while, even if we have some sudden miracle
boom from turning grass into diamonds.
  

    
*I'm very keen on the worst-case scenario, because, as a novelist,
it's the easiest place to find important things that most people aren't
talking about.

*But I also fret about people's lack of a best-case scenario.  People
rarely think hard enough about what to do when their wishes come true. 
They can't take yes for an answer, and that's bad.   When they win the
lottery -- somebody's gonna win it, come on -- they're all bewildered
and dubious and anhedonic.  They don't know how to shape up and accept
the social realities of a massive success; they don't know how to
become respectable, they don't know how to join or maintain a ruling
class; they're jittery and freaky, like mafia dons or rock and roll
idols.

*Confronting a huge success is not the same as greedy daydreaming or
getting jumped-up above your proper station.  The best-case should just
be part of a conceptual toolkit, a mental framework for confronting
possible developments.  We don't prepare people for that; we urge them
to get rich, but once they are rich, they have to depend on pure hokum
folk-wisdom.  

*"Preppies" used to be rich kids in preparatory schools who were
getting ready to join dad's East Coast Establishment.  Today "preppers"
are worried teabag types stocking crowbars and road-flares in the
basement.  Neither one of 'em seem to be prepared for anything that's
particularly plausible.
  

    
Here's a US-centric perspective...

The jobless rate is at 10% and probably growing, but most of the
people I know, many in their twenties and thirties, aren't in those
stats, because they've been coworking and freelancing. Those who were
in traditional jobs and were laid off were really a kind of human
sacrifice - many of those companies showed big profits precisely
because they gutted their workforce. And the financial firms aren't
sweating too much, I just heard that Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase
posted their biggest profits ever. Credit card operations are raking it
in because, absent any regulations to present usury, they've boosted
their rates into loan-shark ranges. (A law was passed to rein them in,
but Congress built in a delay because they "needed it to prepare." I
heard Barney Franks say they'd promised not to go wild raising rates in
the interim, but according to him, they promptly broke that promise.)

Point is that, at the moment, the rich are indeed getting richer and
the poor - and middle-class - is getting poorer.

I'm hearing that companies will have to start hiring again, because
they cut more jobs than they could bear for too long, just to balance
the books and then some. It's smart for Obama to say that jobs are his
new priority, knowing that widespread hiring must resume soon enough.
Or maybe they'll outsource, in which case the freelancing coworkers
will get a boost.

It strikes me that nobody has a handle on any of this, really. I know
conspiracy theorists who have explanations, essentially that shadowy
powerful entities are pulling strings, and none of us can see their
manipulations through the fog of managed media. Social media is just
more, sort of populist, fog. The better investigative journalist
enterprises are starving for money, so reporting will only get worse,
unless people like Jay Rosen, Evan Smith, Dan Gillmor, and Pete Lewis
figure out new funding models and maybe partnerships between
journalists and bloggers.

There's a whole culture of angry right-wing extremists with a very
narrow view of reality. They're pissed off, for instance, about climate
change - they deny that it's happening... it's just a plot cooked up
by - don't know who, exactly. Scientists, to get grant money?
Speculators, to create a new carbon economy? A troll on Twitter tried
to engage me with tweets about Obama, the financial abyss he's supposed
to fix, and climate change as a scam to fleece the world. 

You can feel the anger in his comments - this guy is pissed off and
spoiling for a fight. There's a whole army of those guys, stewing in
the juices of social media echo chambers and mid-media propaganda
machines. Their perception is so distorted, you can't even talk to 'em.
I feel for those guys, they're in a lot of pain. I find myself wishing
that I could engage them in conversation, that they would listen with
fresh, objective ears and think about what's real. I'd have to do that,
too, of course. I have my own conditions and biases and could be just
as wrong as anybody. Nobody really knows.

Last night I was lying in my bed in a deep theta state, and it came to
me that I'm a relatively harmonious aggregate of cells and patterns in
a universe that is beyond my imagining... and my own lame attempts to
find meaning at a cosmic level are laughable. I don't have any idea why
I'm here, why you're here, what any of this means or whether it means
anything. The universe could be random, could be a great conscious
entity with interdependent components struggling at self-definition
moment by moment, it could be a creation of some god-entity whose plan
for it is obscure. I just have no clue. I meditate and can barely get a
handle on my own delusion.

That might have been a moment of kensho - enlightenment - or more
delusion. Whatever it was, it reminded me that human consciousness is a
blind spot.
  

    
I can remember asking Russians what had gone wrong with Soviet
society, and why they were flailing in their Transition, and I used to
get such marvelous answers.  They were rich and much-pondered and
super-detailed, with all kinds of amazing war-stories and out-there
anecdotal evidence, and no two of 'em ever agreed on anything.

That might have been okay, if they'd just worshipped the Almighty
Dollar.  You don't have to fret overly about the deep meanings and the
missed opportunities when everything's available for cash.  Of course,
if that sheet anchor breaks, you're exposed to the same existential
disturbances you had earlier, only more so.

"If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?"  "If all you get is nailed,
everything looks like a hammer."