Villainous Now

I  had a boss once who locked himself in his office half the day and sat on a special cushion (which let’s pray he washed) to meditate. He was not only one of the biggest narcissistic jerks imaginable–the kind who acts like you did something to hurt him personally while he tears you a new one over some premise you can’t quite make out but you go along with hoping you can get out sooner that way–alive.

He said one day, “I don’t believe in hope–the future–or the past–there’s only now.” His favorite books were Ekhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements, and the Tao Te Ching. This is a true believer. Did I mention he was psycho?

Some curious if not precise facts: 

1. Anything you do or say right now your brain has already told you to do–without you even knowing it–about 6 seconds ago.

2. When you look at the mirror, you are never seeing the present you–the real you, if you like. Because of the distance the light travels between your eye to the mirror and back again, even if a millionth of a second, it’s always a past version of yourself, and not you now, that you you’re looking at. (Let’s mention also the obvious fact that it’s a mirror image, your right on your left and vice-versa. And mirrors are treacherous things: dressing room mirrors always make you look fatter than the one you have at home–which one is telling you the truth?)

3. Everything we think we see as it is we don’t. What we perceive through our eyes and ears is processed, whether we know it or not, through a complex algorithm of everything we’ve seen or heard in the past the way someone else has presented it to us. Think about all the movies you’ve seen, for example, and realize they dictate, more often than the other way around, what you think you experience. Or, ever find yourself negotiating with your friend or spouse about what something is or the way it looks? Sometimes it takes a while for us to agree, but once we settle on it, that image of the thing itself will influence our perception. Arguably, we never see the thing itself, but only a weak negotiation.

4. Your brain–the one that told you about 6 seconds ago what you would do “right now”–acts on instinct based on past experiences, in your lifetime but largely in our species’ evolution, to predict future dangers or opportunities and better (mis)direct you. Also, your senses–the ones you don’t know about usually–let you know when and how to react.

Past and future, maybe; present, doubtful

On a 5 star rating system:

Chances of a past: 3 1/2 stars. To get to here, wherever it is here is, we had to pass through past steps, supposedly. But when I discuss my memories of the past with my family, who stepped through this past with me, they deny my memories. Either they say I imagined the whole scenario and scene, or else I am reshaping the memory to suit my selfish perspective. I look at the family photo album and see pictures of me (I was cotton blond then, as opposed to “black” hair and gray-speckled beard now), an album, which by the way my parents jealously guard from me in the third-story locked cedar closet, where all such memories are kept prisoners, and I am ushered back through time to that moment, along with all my childhood emotions surrounding the event, but I remember that no one agreed with my perspective even then. There is a picture–not exactly like Keat’s 1819 poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”–of my older sister, aged 6, carrying a Frisbee over her head which she stole from me and I rush behind her crying after it. My dad took the picture, laughing too, I remember. “No, that’s not the way it happened,” my sister says. “It was like this.” And my father says, “You’re both wrong. It was like this.” (How foolish it all is. I wouldn’t cry now!) There are pictures in my head, not represented by photographs, of me aged merely months, not years, and though I experience such times now even more poignantly now then my present–perhaps this is from the numbing prescription drugs, as it is forbidden nowadays to feel sad or anxious–or perhaps it is because the past simply is more real because it is past and we have had time to think through all of the possible angles and ramifications–but it’s doubtless none of these, because nobody believes me that I can remember that far back–biologically impossible–so it must only be a psychological invention of some sort to cope with my past? Or my present? I’m not sure–but it can’t be real. It is real. It could be as in the beginning of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, the subject half asleep, half dreaming, cutting and pasting together his lonely masterpiece.

Chances of a present: 2 stars. 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Now, I react. It would be hard to say that I act according to any conscious method. My housewife (as opposed to my jobwife or anyotherwife) says, “I cut myself on one of my new sharp knives.” Blood drips from her finger. She is having a calm reaction to a violent act. But the act is over and soon the blood has dried and soon she is dead from other causes–we have hoped old age–but I am also dead and not able to grieve. We create our books and art and monuments and we create our selves–Andy Warhol’s ever-youthful 1,001 blond, choppy wigs. You will experience what I write now as in the present so long as you can keep up with the words that outrun you like the mechanical rabbit on a greyhound racetrack. If you make it to the end of this article, then you will stop, but the rabbit will have slipped into its tunnel to run, as far as you might know, endlessly, if there ever was a rabbit. There is one rabbit after another, and each race is preparation for the next that will never come. After the knife’s incision, I could make a clear judgment about what happened, my own Rashomon, cutting myself in fourths. I might annoyingly beg someone to talk to me to reassure me that I am not alone here in this present, but each person–and even I myself–only talks as if having memorized a script, no improvisation, stopping to ask for a line here and there. We argue like this, perhaps about leaving knives out where they can cut you, but the absurdity of the scene–What’s my line again?–we our viewing ourselves as actors in our own feature film. I suppose when we all get to heaven, we will discuss with the director and the critic and come to some kind of agreement. But for now… for now I see underwater, through goggles.

Chances of a future: 5.0 stars. “The future is now. The future is now. The future is now. The future is now….” We have always believed in a future, but did we ever believe advertising–except now? With each new ecstatic invention, at once futuristic, now démodé, historical costumes and props, there will always be something better we will look forward to in our state of constant disappointment. 1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” That is possibly to say, that, yes love is the greatest thing, but without faith and hope, as the holy trinity, there is no perfect love. And faith and hope are nets we cast into the sea of future lodgings and meals.  Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And, Romans 8:24: “For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” So now, how can we love, if there is no faith in the outcome, if there is no hope? If I am more certain of anything, it is that I am always going forward, never standing still. The waves do not wash over me. I pass through the waves or they carry me off–either way it is the same thing–I am not static. Inertia is a parody of paradox. Ecclesiastes 1:4: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” Revelation 21:1: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”

Ekh*rt T*ll* is full of sh”t

Freud had long ago already chopped us into three: the id, the ego, and the super ego. Mr. Tollbooth has reduced to two, the suffering self and the observing, potential self. Let’s have Freud and him put on the gloves and get in the ring together.

The title bout will be with the eight stages of Erikson. Tag team.

Evil men and women of now

Why do we obsess over Hitler? Because he is safe. He is dead. When he was alive, we did everything we could to ignore him.

Slavoj Zizek has theorized that we westerners have fetishized Buddhism–the so-called Western buddhism–so that now for us, we can do all sorts of unspeakable evil without a shred of guilt, because for us, we know, truly all of this is an illusion and we, the enlightened ones, walk through the veils of illusion and claim the power of now! — This is stylized Zizek a la stylized Nietzsche a la stylized Hitler — A new fable of the Übermensch.

And now back to my former boss

But why? He is stuck in some past now, unable to harm. Either that, or he has been thrown into evolutionary instinct that dictates, try avoiding all future assholes.

The yin and yang of good and evil

They must be in the past and in the future as a cat chasing its tail as in a mythological never-ending villainous present. The strong have devoured the weak, but the weak will devour the strong–more like a serpent than a tail, unless viewed from the other end.

And now for a little less madness

It must be as simple as a parent instructs his or her child:

“If you do this, this will happen. Don’t do this. Do that. I speak from experience. You are a child. I know you can’t see past now, but that’s why I’m here. Someday, you will be telling your child the same thing.”

“And don’t worry. You’re going to be fine.”

Middle classism

We hear so much about the middle class. The rise of the middle class. The fall of the middle class. The hard-working middle class. Upper middle class. Lower middle class. The plight of the middle class. The jeopardy and peril of the middle class. The social unrest of the middle class. Joe Biden’s Middle Class Task Force. For a so-called classless society, somebody cares an awful lot that we all stay right in the middle.

Whether being middle-class is actually a good thing or not for some reason seems to go unasked.

What is the middle class?

Some would say anything above our abysmally low poverty line and below the so-called one-percent. Other sources are more specific and list the middle class as doctors, lawyers, managers, and business owners. That is, not teachers, civil servants, and sales reps. Claire Suddath, writing for Time in 2009 gave what she called a “A Brief History of the Middle Class“:

Our modern image of the middle class comes from the post–World War II era. The 1944 GI Bill provided returning veterans with money for college, businesses and home mortgages. Suddenly, millions of servicemen were able to afford homes of their own for the first time. As a result, residential construction jumped from 114,000 new homes in 1944 to 1.7 million in 1950. In 1947, William Levitt turned 4,000 acres of Long Island, New York, potato farms into the then largest privately planned housing project in American history. With 30 houses built in assembly-line fashion every day — each with a tree in the front yard — the American subdivision was born.

Suddath goes on to talk about Leave It To Beaver, the Civil Rights Movement, home ownership, and credit cards as contributors to the lifestyle, and then remarks, “[Middle-class Americans] have several credit cards each and a lot of luxury goods, but they still believe that others have more than they do.”

It seems to me luxury goods bought on credit is not a sign of wealth. People might be feeling sunk, not jealous. But if she misspoke, Suddath redeems herself in another article, citing a Pew Research study found that 78% of self-described middle-class Americans have trouble maintaining their current standard of living.

“Still,” Suddath wrote, “the middle class may have a better shot at making ends meet than at influencing the Middle Class Task Force. That’s because no member of the Middle Class Task Force is actually middle class.”

Why would you want to be “middle”?

Since just about everybody you know is probably middle class, whether they are or not, then you may better ask yourself, why do you want to be middle? Why do you want to persist in mediocrity? Maybe it’s because you feel that really you are working class, not middle class at all, and so to maintain the illusion of something higher than your proper station is a dream worth cherishing at all costs, particularly the cost of never rising to or beyond mediocrity. The ever-present crisis of the middle class keeps you from ever trying to break out of the safe middle, and the herds of people in the middle with you reassure you.

And if you awoke from this middle class dream, you might be scared out of your wits.

Quotes:

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly. — Lionel Trilling

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality. — George Bernard Shaw

This miserable state is borne by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgs race and without praise. — Dante Alighieri

What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity. — Hermann Hesse

What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary. — Frantz Fanon

Social Security and the middle class

Are you still middle class in the nursing home?

The New York Times this January 28, 2013, ran a piece about social security’s current insolvency problem, showing how the program started in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 2010  “paid out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.” They’ve been writing “hot checks” ever since and no doubt will be way past this current decade.

Even the staunchest middle-class conservative who bashes Medicaid understands the importance of Medicare and that there probably won’t be too many other options besides social security left as we reach that age but the welfare state. No one can afford to question this contradiction.

“There but for the grace of God go I” is the new serenity prayer for every middle-classer with a job. Meanwhile social security taxes are likely to go higher than ever as we are soon forced to buy into “better” coverage.

One of the requisites for tapping into all your tax dollars from a lifetime of work is that you have to trade in anything you have left of value before you can get that wonderful smelly shared room at the nursing home. This is your average middle-class destination if you manage to survive your never-ending working years.

There is no security in social security. Society is never that secure. We’re fools for counting on it.

Bipolar disorder and middle classism

Try to do something great. If you fail, then chances are you might not forgive yourself. Worse yet, your friends and family most likely won’t forgive you either. They may have sympathy for you, but they won’t respect you. They’ll actually think you’re crazy for trying. So will you. You’ll go to the doctor for help and the doctor will tell you you’re crazy too. They have a word now for people who think you ought to try something great in life: “bipolar.”

Jacque Ranciere in his book Proletarian Nights recounts the post-revolutionary France of ten-hour days and all the artists and poets working them that thought they should have been free to pursue their real talents. After so long in the factory, they might just jump off a bridge. They didn’t have a name for it back then, but we do now, thank God. Now we know better. Now instead off jumping off bridges, we hang out in the mental ward till we’ve murdered our delusions and become comfortably numb.

If you’re stuck in the middle

This is not a good thing. And if you’re middle-aged you might feel that you’re in quicksand. There’s no view in the middle seat of a car or airplane, and you’re certainly not driving. None of us was born for mediocrity. So how do we reclaim our own lives?

Well should we be content? We’re not. Then should we keep swallowing pills to make believe we’re content? What if we stopped and failed for once? And then maybe failed again and again. What if it was socially acceptable to be a failure?

If you don’t like the idea of being mediocre but are also pretty sure that greatness in your case is a pipe dream, then maybe aim for the most glorious failure you can think of. If you’re absolutely sure you’ll never reach the top then make the biggest smash at the bottom you can.

Sound crazy? Consider this: Why are we alive? Is it to sit and rust? What difference does it make if we live till 150 if we can’t feel a thing the entire time? And who cares how long we live–does it matter once we’re dead? Maybe a great deal of pain in life is in order. If it’s from trying. And failing. Next time you fail, instead of worrying or taking to your bed in a deep depression, hurry up and fail bigger. Then at least you could say you did something interesting while you were alive.

Money is no longer necessary

What is “Bitcoin” and why should you care?

Bitcoin is an experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is also the name of the open source software which enables the use of this currency. The software is a community-driven open source project, released under the MIT license. (bitcoin.org)

It is the first decentralized digital currency, according to weusecoins.com.

Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party (with representation in the European parliament and has spawned Pirate Parties in more than 50 other countries), says he has invested all of his money saved and borrowed into the currency because 1. “the currency has increased in value one-thousandfold against the US dollar in fourteen months,” 2. “it does away with all bureaucracy, all transaction fees, and perhaps foremost, all transaction delays and gatekeepers in the financial system,” 3. “doing the math, I predict that it has at least another thousandfold increase to go in the coming few years, and that’s counting conservatively.”

Falkvinge also says bitcoin “can’t be seized or frozen by governments and you can transfer any amount anywhere instantly without any authority knowing or interfering.” (falkvinge.net)

Perhaps for these reasons among others, Bitcoin is currently trading at $16.52 dollars and $12.32 euros.

Back in 2o11, Forbes and Wired both did extensive exposes on the fall of the Bitcoin, particularly in face of at least one heist of $500 K and another of about half that, but it has since fairly remarkably rebounded. Hackers can potentially steal the money from your computer, but you can also have your computer trace the funds, so it’s all in all safer. Still, places like Clearcoin and MyBitcoin, while kind of defeating the purpose of a decentralized currency, can make technophobes more at ease.

In true open source movement style, the creator of Bitcoin is the probably pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto (apropos, score one more for the open source movement). You can learn more–maybe–at their website.

I think Falkvinge articulated the case for the new currency well, but let me say it my own way: 1. governments can’t be trusted with my money and 2. banks can’t be trusted with my money. I can trust myself, though, to be as responsible as I choose, and Bitcoin gives everyone the option to do that. So maybe you won’t be responsible. The digital money is still worth more.

We’ve been heading this way for a long time. Dollars aren’t worth anything. Bitcoins are programmed to be mined so that their circulation, unlike dollars, is controlled. And since just about all money exchange is digital now any through ebay’s creation of Paypal (same company) or the evils of Google Wallet, a more desirable means of transaction is naturally worth something.

Most Gen X-ers and younger probably don’t remember a time when dollars were backed by anything. We may know that a certain amount will buy us a gallon of gas or a new Kendrick Lamar album, but we don’t stop to think why, beside deceptively not so clear ideas like inflation and market value or what’s driving it.

David Graeber, in his Debt, the First 5,000 Years, debunks Adam Smith’s notion that in some distant past we used the barter system–15 chickens for a cow, if you like that exchange–until we finally came up with the money system. But hard currency, he argues, was preceded by the notion of debt exchange. Debt, as we know, is a virtual currency, so a digital currency from this way of looking at it is as old as the hills–except it’s not debt. It would seem to discourage debt, but we’re only human.

Ron Paul has a point when he criticizes the Fed, but is slightly off his rocker when he rants about the gold standard. Gold is very limited and heavy. The point is to have a standard. And a well-built computer algorithm, one obviously that maintains long-term trust, could establish that.

Now the term “coin” is just a name. We could call them tokens or points or shells. It doesn’t really matter. It never did. What makes any method of trading so valuable, no matter what its name–dollar, dinar, debt, or doubt–is much you trust it to do its job and make things easier on you. What makes Bitcoin so valuable, apart from its novelty and the MIT minds behind it–ironically–is the little aperture of excitement that lets you see for a split second that money is really no longer necessary.

Let’s go back to Adam Smith’s fable of the chickens and the cow. His rationalization for its impossibility is that back then you’d be unlikely to find anybody who would want your 15 chickens for trade, let alone for a cow. However, in today’s global marketplace, where everybody and anybody can post their goods and services online for exchange, that fable is less like a myth and more like a solid framework. I’m ready for a new Amazon.com that is not based on money at all, but trading. Imagine craigslist but without the ridiculous hindrance of dealing at the local level. A money-less exchange of goods at online trading post. Now I’m not sure they’ve figure out a way to tax even swapping so that might be a kind of dangerous line of business, if you’re forced to call it that. Your second option could be to trade in “e-points”–maybe the closest thing to Bitcoin. But if you had a trading post as big as e-bay or Amazon, ideally shoppers could have the option of trading however they liked, with or without money.

This is not a socialist’s dream, mind you, but a capitalist’s dream, rather than the nightmare we’re currently experiencing. How much more do we have to endure the nauseating inside politics over the debt ceiling before we get to wake up?

In sum, today’s global system of governments and banking–money as we currently know it–is causing more problems than it’s worth. The fact is, there are plenty of better alternatives–a decentralized P2P model being the soundest at the moment–and money being an ill-fashioned crutch we just might not need anymore.

The new topology of Texas

The Texas Enterprise Fund is changing the map of Texas.

Take Paris, for example. Paris, Texas, that is. James Skinner Baking Co. (from Omaha, NE) is going to opening a new factory in Paris, along with 393 jobs and $25 million in capital investment. The state is giving the company $1.8 million through the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) to close the deal.

The company gets to take over the 390,000 sq. ft. multi-million dollar abandoned Sara Lee bakery plant on over 89 acres in the small town two hours northeast of Dallas. The plant was just sitting there vacant, waiting to be filled. So in a way, this was meant to be.

“Food and consumer goods manufacturing and packaging is Paris, Texas,” said Gov. Perry.

The Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) web site boasts that it’s “the largest ‘deal-closing’ fund of its kind in the nation. The fund is a cash grant used as a financial incentive tool for projects that offer significant projected job creation and capital investment and where a single Texas site is competing with another viable out-of-state option.”

Just to be clear, James Skinner Baking Co. is still concocting their exquisite home-baked delights in its hometown of Omaha; it’ll just be packaging them for mass-production in good old Paris, Texas.

Kevin Lynch, the famous MIT urban design theorist, recognized the defining traits of a city were what we think of when we reconstruct that city in our imagination and memory. For Paris, France, it might be the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, or the Left Bank. For Paris, Texas, it’s packing TV dinners.

If Texas Parisians grow despondent at their fate, however, they might do well to look on the bright side: at least they’re not Rusk. Rusk, Texas was identified by Robert Perkinson in his book Texas Tough as the prison capital of the world. And rightly so.

Gov. Rick Perry at groundbreaking for Bell Helicopter’s future global HQ.

Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) may have the history and legend of cattle, but it’s aerospace and aviation that’s bringing the bucks these days with company HQs for Bell Helicopter, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and American Eurocopter, among others.

Houston–no surprise here–has most of the oil and chemical enterprises. The Americas headquarters for BP is here, as are the headquarters for Lyondellbasell, Phillips 66, ExonMobile Chemical, ChevronPhillips Chemical Co., Westlake Chemical, and DOW. Of course the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and U.S. Oncology (“Advancing cancer care in America) are also there. If you’ve never thought of oil refining and chemicals with cancer as a lucrative combination, rest assured, Houston has.

While the big city business hubs are building from a long tradition and their growth may be predictable, the changes to small cities like Paris are much more interesting, as one big move from a TEF-invested company could redefine them.

Gainsville, Texas, thanks to $800,000 awarded through the TEF to Allied Production Solutions, LP, has steel and fiberglass tank manufacturing facilities.

Corsicana, Texas, broke ground on a new 150,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility for Pactiv LLC.

Meanwhile, in Victoria, Texas, Caterpillar Inc.’s new hydraulic excavator manufacturing plant, which has been expanded thanks to a $1.175 million investment from the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) in 2010. Seguin, Texas, got in on the action too. Caterpillar is relocating its engine assembly, paint and testing operations, creating over 1,700 new jobs.

Seguin also got help from the TEF so Continental Automotive Systems Inc. could relocate production of its sensors and actuators from Europe and Asia.

You might have noticed, Perry is pushing manufacturing in many of these small towns. These jobs aren’t the most glamorous, but Texas is no doubt heavily investing in the war against outsourcing.

Even though U.S. Census Bureau shows Texas leading the nation in the number of people without health insurance and the school districts are not anything particularly to brag about (Seguin ranked 683 of Texas schools and Victoria, 686, according to schooldigger.com), it’s apparently hard to argue when our tax money gets diverted into these enterprises and creates great blue-collar jobs that don’t really give resident kids a lot to look forward to besides, “It beats working at Wal-Mart.”

You just may find some cool sexy, though, in George W. Bush’s hometown of Midland. XCOR Aerospace, a company currently leading the charge in space tourism, is establishing their new research and development center on the flight line at Midland International Airport (MAF) in a newly renovated 60,000-square-foot hangar, which will include office space and a test facility. The deal was announced in the fall, and renovation is scheduled to start soon and be completed by the late autumn. Andrew Nelson, chief operating officer, said: “With future suborbital operational sites on the East and West Coasts of the United States and around the world, plus a manufacturing and test facility geographically separate from our R&D facility, Midland will truly be at the heart of XCOR’s innovation engine.”

Still, all this government movement of private industry to define towns begs the question of whether this is really how those people wanted their lives to end up there. Or in this bad economy, are they just supposed to be grateful for any job?

Another question is whether a TEF forced fit can work.

Austin is a good case study of how two very different industries can share the same space. As a music town, it is deservedly called the “live music capitol of the world.” Austin City Limits and SXSW are just two good reasons for that, not to mention that any night of the week you can go see some of the best up-and-coming as well as established music artists around. But Austin also claims to be “Silicon Hills.” The TEF managed to rope in the following tech companies with designated tax-payers’ dollars: Sematech with $40 million tax dollars for 4,000 jobs, Home Depot Inc.’s IT with $8.5 million for 843 jobs, Samsung with $10.8 million for 900 jobs, HelioVolt Corp. with $1 million for 158 jobs, and HP with $5 million for apparently zero jobs. Sadly, poor musicians don’t seem to be benefiting directly from the TEF, though they bring in a large portion of the city’s tourism dollars and cultural atmosphere that attracts innovative companies. Nonetheless, hipsters and techies actually get along pretty well. The South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology pretty much sums up the spirit of collaboration, and Oliver Burkeman from theguardian.com, if glibly, called South by Southwest Interactive “the world’s highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them.” Still, as you might already see, there’s a third wheel here, and that’s the state capitol and other grim state buildings and a legion of state workers. But as you might expect, most state workers seem to like music, films, and video games.

Yet another question is how a neoconservative republican like Perry who preaches limited government can use state power to shape the lives of private people’s hometowns. Not to mention the odd logic of “privatizing” government by contracting with big companies in state affairs, thereby eliminating any sense of real competition. It only takes searching who owns the company who won the state contract and then searching how much that owner donated to Perry’s campaign to see an amazing number of coincidences. Texas Tollways, owned by a Spanish company, which funnels its billing into seemingly a different front company for each toll booth, is also raising a lot of eyebrows when it comes to government ethics–and none of it is transparent so much as utterly opaque.

Even if we speculate that Perry might somehow be pocketing some of this money under the table–and I have no claims that he is–is it not a fair question to ask whether or not he deserves it? Is it corrupt government if everybody benefits?

As Rick Perry himself might say, it’s hard to argue with so much success.

All together the TEF has so far invested over $400 million. “Texas is poised at the brink of a new era of prosperity,” Perry says.

To get a good sense of how the governor’s office is literally mapping out the new Texas, you need to visit the Texas Wide Open for Business Map Room, where you can find the topography broken down into current industries and workforce at different economic hubs, as well as energy, resources, and transportation maps, among others, showing companies considering the move a strategic business cartography. Meantime, here’s some history from the governor’s page:

At Gov. Rick Perry’s request, the 78th Texas Legislature established the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) in 2003 to help attract new jobs and investment to the state. The fund was reauthorized by the Legislature in 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011. As the largest “deal-closing” fund of its kind in the nation, the TEF continues to attract businesses to Texas. The fund is used only as a final incentive tool where a single Texas site is competing with another viable out-of-state option. Additionally, the TEF will only be considered to help close a deal that already has significant local support behind it from a prospective Texas community.

TEF Award Listing – All Projects to Date

Heaven, Hell, Earth and a new Internet

We can no longer think of web pages as “pages.” The metaphor is outdated.

The idea of a house may be a better fit for the Internet right now than a book full of web pages. Since Windows 8 has officially appropriated the navigational capabilities of the tablet, any computer using a mouse seems archaic. And mice don’t belong in homes. Searching the web now feels more like going from room to room. You can descend to the basement, if you want, or go to the attic–or the clouds–and store anything you’re not using. You can push your finger to the screen and even see what’s at the back of the house.

However, while we can borrow this new metaphor, keep in mind, any “Internet house” will be one of many sitting in a vast wide-open world to travel, to sightsee, and to conquer.

Computer games like Sim City and all its variations, World of Warcraft, and Galava (Lunar Wars and Cyber Nations) have all long embraced exploration and colonization, building, mastering, and finally owning. Arguably the strongest iteration so far of this Columbus metaphor is the mega-famous LEGO-like Minecraft, the sandbox indie game by Swedish programmer Markus “Notch” Persson. It’s actually a step back in graphics–with as much grace as an Atari. Unlike Q-Bert or Frogger, though, where the game is played either on one unmoving 2-D screen or by levels, Minecraft players collect materials, assemble them, and build however they want in a vast open world. Including Hell.

That’s the fun side. The not-so-fun side is the hyper-real Internet real estate market of web hosting and resale. Websites such as Hostgator and Dreamhost are virtual real estate marketplaces where you pay so much a month–usually in the hundreds, when the transaction is complete–to rent property to sublet to others for their personal web sites. Sound weird? After all, this isn’t the new frontier, where as with the American West people resorted to trampling on each other to stake their claim in a limited area of land. Web space is technically as big as you want to make it. This begs the question, of course, after the 2008 sub-prime mortgage housing crisis, if we can get into so much trouble in a real estate bubble, what a about virtual estate bubble? A virtual real estate bubble, since its borders are infinitely open, has a lot longer to blow up–maybe as long as a black hole.

In many ways, though, the old idea of a giant ocean to navigate and cast your net might still seem the most appropriate metaphor. After all, this is the new age of many a new Columbus (and we’re exploiting the right Indians this time via outsourcing). Exploring the Internet is not really as cool to me as exploring space or traveling to new continents, but it’s what we have.

Oh, inverted world! When God first created the world, he parted the waters. He made men and women from the dust of the earth. After the expulsion from the garden, when we first started exploring, God spoke to us through a single divine light of inspiration. We looked up into the heavens and found our image in God. Then the Holy Spirit descended on Pentecost like a dove and we all spoke in tongues. In the age of exploration, we set sail and circumnavigated the globe. Our vision turned from upward to the horizons and then all the way around the globe until–having no where else on earth to go–our first vision was inverted into the depths of our subconscious. Freud was the result of having nowhere else to explore but the neighborhood psychotherapist’s office. We wanted to ask God why we were suddenly so bored with ourselves. Then Jung showed us we hadn’t after all lost our spiritual side, and all the little business cubicles we’d crammed ourselves into could actually be transcended. Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious is our modern Pentecost, where, through the deepest mining of our interconnected unconscious, we find ourselves all gathered again in communion. Without ever leaving home this time.

William Blake’s print of God reaching down to earth, his fingers in the shape of a compass, illustrates this exchange. His compass is on the earth, which mankind then circumnavigates to create our own perfect sphere equal to the one that envelopes our white-bearded benefactor. We envelope ourselves in our own bubble because we were made in his image.

And the way back up is down.

Dante said Hell has nine levels. For technophobes, there are at least four in an overlay network: 1. the site layer (the part we see) 2. the optical layer  3. the SONET/SDH layer, and 4. the IP layer.  The Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model has seven layers, stacked (from highest to lowest) this way: 1. Application, 2. Presentation 3. Session 4, Transport 5. Network 6. Data Link and 7. Physical. Developers and designers and cryptologists can travel through these layers and probably find their way back up pretty easily without a Virgil.

Space travel–our ascent to Heaven– limits itself, sadly, mostly to satellites, which mirror back to us our familiar world–and how (virtually) marvelous we look. Google maps show us our own street. We will soon be able to watch ourselves watching ourselves by googling ourselves in an infinite ennui.

What interests me now, however, is the idea of creating a decentralized network that isn’t open to the omnipresent eye of Google. This is difficult, I think, for most people to imagine, but why is the existing Internet our only choice with cybernetically connecting people? Well, it isn’t. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…

INTERNET #2

This could already be happening for all I don’t know–Hacker heaven. But what I imagine is this: any group of friends and family within which each member can connect his or her computer one by one to each other until the group has a substantial network from which they can then build and design a new face for–and without Mark Zuckerberg getting to make the law. Nobody else on the Internet has to know about the other Internet necessarily. It could be like a secret passage in a large house. And this is a house that could have endless secrets–not just another, but many other Internets–not world-wide webs, but family-sized accommodations, which of course you can leave to go visit relatives. If enough private networks had built their own decentralized Internet, they could start connecting with each other’s networks–like visiting a friend’s home. Or they could still meet up on the regular web, like meeting up at the bar or with the kids at the neighborhood park.

So a house is bigger than a book of pages, but as it turns out is still only a small part of this giant universe we live in. I’m getting bugged hanging round the same old supervised social media sites and want to find a new place. But I know that I am only retreating into the inverted infinity of fractal microcosms, each its own open world to settle into. For now, anyway.

——————–

I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

We shall never cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

- T. S. Eliot

Mass-media mourning

“I couldn’t care less about the shooting in Connecticut,” said an acquaintance of mine at a Christmas party last night.

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” said our friend. “What if it were your kid who got shot? Don’t you feel for their families?”

“They’re not my family,” he said. “It wasn’t my kid. I didn’t know them. If it wasn’t plastered all over the news, I wouldn’t even know about any of it. It’s in Connecticut, a thousand miles away from here. Might as well have been on the other side of the world. Am I supposed to feel a bunch of unnecessary grief just cause some stupid news anchor or politician tells me to?”

It’s not the kind of conversation you want to have at a warm and cozy Christmas party. But it did make me wonder. I myself didn’t know what to think. I was feeling stressed about it, I knew that. But could I call it grieving? And should I really expect him to?

One of us was a teacher. She said that her school had to go on lock down all week.

“That’s retarded,” said the acquaintance (he’s not exactly a close friend). “What, you worried bout copy cats? When has that actually ever happened? You know an autistic kid with a mom who stockpiles weapons and subs at your school who watches CNN and is smart enough to copy all that?”

The teacher friend couldn’t handle it. She made a demonstration of going to another room.

“You know what I care about?” he said. I was anxious to hear. “My son has a friend named Jacob. Jacob’s mom just shot herself and his dad is in prison. Now Jacob is going into the foster care system and probably going to get molested by strangers. That’s upsetting to me. Not somebody getting killed I don’t even know. That’s just news. It’s news that’s upsetting my son, though. Which upsets me too.”

My mother-in-law was there and I couldn’t tell how she was reacting. “I agree,” she said. “I remember the day Kennedy died, I didn’t find out about it until much later. The teachers refused to tell us anything about it. There were whispers, you know–’did you here? Somebody shot the president’–but it wasn’t until I got home that night with my parents I found out for sure. You know, there have been studies that show it traumatizes children to hear that over and over again. We should protect them.”

We all went home feeling pretty depressed. Was it the party? Was it the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting? I wasn’t sure about either, so I decided I’d explore the subject in my own way here.

Seeing there ≠ being there

When, in 1837, Samuel Morse, the frustrated American historical painter, gave up painting and conducted the first successful experiment with the single-wire, electrical recording telegraph system, he forever ruptured time and space.

Before, if you had a message to send, your best options were the Pony Express or passenger pigeon–a footed or winged carrier. Of course American Indians had long used the more sophisticated smoke signals, though Morse failed to notice this line-of-sight way of carrying messages until he saw the Parisian semaphore lines, or “optical telegraphy.” Now, you didn’t have to “be there,” or anywhere near there, to get the message.

Photography–an invention Morse discovered in Paris through his friend Louis Daguerre’s “proto-photo,” the daguerreotype–ruptured something else: the unity of the naked eye and its object.

Photographs are very manipulable.You can zoom and isolate a particular detail, add soft focus to obscure, or combine effects to emphasize whatever you want. You can, in effect, cage and tame an object. What you see is what you get, but it is not what was there to begin with.

Now tape your edited pictures together to make a moving picture, counting on psychological effects such as the persistence of vision and beta movement, throw on an optical soundtrack, and voilà, magic. You can now mass produce a film for the viewing pleasure of people world-wide. But you still can’t be there. There never was a “there.”

We’ve come so far with information technology that science fiction cannot keep up. In fact, all mass communications far surpass what science fiction has predicted, while the genre’s predictions for mass transportation are practically nonexistent. Traveling overseas by plane, thanks to Homeland Security, nowadays is a terrifying prospect. Most of us stay home and go by car.

But anybody who has ever ventured on a plane and flown across the Atlantic to Paris can attest, no play-by-play documentary or Google street-map photography can compare with the actual experience of casually walking the Seine and talking with a shop owner–in French–on St. Germain.

There is today a great divide between information and transportation. Seeing there ≠ being there.

Mass production and human emotions

In the room where I write, I can think of only one thing that wasn’t mass-produced–my bookshelf. It came from a specialty shop here in Austin, Texas, a beautiful seven-feet tall, dark-stained pine bookcase. It wasn’t built for me, but it may be the most intimate thing I own. Mountains of identically manufactured cheap objects I’ve steadily acquired sit on that bookcase, and on other surfaces all around my room, threatening to avalanche and swallow me without even stopping to ask me, “Paper or plastic?”

During the 1950s and 60s, Charles and Ray Eames and Mad Men advertisers taught us how to live the good mass-produced life.

Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, wrote that “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway…”–but only halfway. In our time, it appears the most profitable commodity (think IKEA) is a packaged compromise between mechanical reproduction and individualized and sentimentalized objects.

In fact, Ray Eames added this quality of artistic originality to every one of her husband’s mass-produced offerings. The best example might appear in Charles’s slick American propagandist film (“Glimpses of the USA”) shown to Soviets in Moscow. Ray’s addition, at the end of the picture, of the perfectly translatable Forget Me Nots is said to have made Nikita Khrushchev get teary-eyed with emotion.

Can we now mechanically mass produce or manufacture human emotion?

It may be doubtful that films, at least, move us that much anymore. We’ve seen far too many of them. We know the machinery and how it works. If anything, we feign emotion (consciously or unconsciously) from the social compulsion to impress our date.

Factory defect, recall

Well, fine, that’s the movies. What about real-life TV news coverage? Shouldn’t we exhibit some emotional reaction?

Wait. Before you unwrap your prefabricated, pavlovian emotions, be aware, there have been a few factory defects, and the factory has issued a recall.

iMediaEthics (“Media Mess-Ups: Who’s Who of Sandy Hook School Shooting Reporting Errors, Part 1“) shows:

1. wrong killer

-Reported “Ryan Lanza,” corrected to “Adam Lanza,” his brother

-Recalled by CNN, the Associated Press, NBC News , the Daily Record, etc.

2. wrong photos

-Posted photos from Ryan Lanza’s Facebook page, corrected by removal

-Recalled by Huffington Post, CNN, UPI, etc.

3. wrong person killed

-Reported Ryan Lanza dead, corrected, Ryan not dead (and, remember, also not killer)

-Recalled by CNN’s live blog

( iMediaEthics is working on further reports on how the media covered the Connecticut shootings.)

Granted the shooting was a tragedy, it is nonetheless embarrassing to be angry at the wrong killer, to have the appropriate emotional reaction to inappropriately Facebook-lifted photos, to mourn the loss of someone who didn’t actually die.

Dunbar’s number

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar posited there is a limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain stable social contacts. The social networks he was talking about (back in 1992) were relationships in which you know who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

Dunbar said, “This limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size and that this in turn limits group size.”

We, like primates, stay in touch through social grooming. Social animals–who live close to each other–bond and reinforce social structures, family links, and build relationships. Social grooming also is used to reconcile and resolve conflict. Mutual grooming usually happens between two people and usually in the bedroom.

You probably can’t realistically apply this to your X to the Nth power of Facebook friends. First, we often substitute talk, or language, which Dunbar says is a cheap (albeit crucial) form of social grooming. Interestingly, though, social media software often uses Dunbar’s number to help them design their sites. Dunbar himself is helping them.

Dunbar proposed a number–”Dunbar’s number”–between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.

So if all this is true, can we legitimately say that we can achieve any kind of bond with victims we don’t know in another state, even another country, and clearly not in our network of social grooming, upon which to base genuine grief? We obviously do feel something. But what is it exactly, if we are to believe Dunbar’s number? Perhaps the more troubling question: Is it healthy to extend ourselves like this? Can it actually be psychologically debilitating?

Auto accidents and human emotions 

According to Car-accidents.com, “the original social media forum for crash victims worldwide”:

There were an estimated 6,420,000 cars involved in accidents in the US in 2005. The cost of these accidents exceeds 230+ Billion dollars. There were about 2.9 million injury cases and 42,636 car accident deaths. An average of 115 persons die each day in motor vehicle crashes in the United States — one every 13 minutes. According to the World Health Organization about 3000 people die in crashes each day worldwide.

These are staggering numbers amounting to a grand-scale massacre. An unspoken war.

Yet the majority of us probably don’t think about this or grieve on a daily basis for the victims–men, women, and children–and their surviving families, unless, of course, we knew them personally. We tend to rationalize: Cars are here to stay. They come off the line by the minute. They are part of modern life. Walking is of course a much safer way of going places, but it is impracticable and slows progress. Yes, cars could be safer, but it’s not currently economical, and we all have to go to work.

We could blame drunk drivers, except the numbers simply don’t add up. Numerous sources point to a 20-year study, from 1989-2009, which actually indicates that alcohol-related fatalities have drastically plummeted (arrow going way down), while non-alcoholic deaths have risen exponentially (arrow going way up)–much, much higher. Negligentdriving.com argues the following:

The intersection of high-tech, in-car gadgets and busy, sleep-deprived people who speed off to work while multitasking has created a perfect storm of highway risks that is reflected in ever-higher traffic fatalities.

To effectively turn the tide on highway deaths, the nation must view traffic safety within the context of negligent driving. Negligent drivers-whether they are speeding, drunk, distracted, or overly fatigued-put themselves and others at risk, often vastly underestimating the danger posed by their behavior.

There is often a disconnect between the public’s perception of the danger of various actions, and the actual danger correlated with them, resulting in millions of unknowingly negligent drivers cruising the roads at any given moment.

This last phenomenon we might call “Man in the Machine.” Phenomenologically, from an outsider’s viewpoint, during the act of driving, we can easily forget the cars around us even have people in them (it would be sensory overload when we should be focusing on the road–our peripheral vision narrows to near nonexistence) until the man or woman in the car reaches out to give us the finger. In such cases our sympathetic propensity goes literally out the window.

Just maybe it’s not all our fault. All-about-auto-accidents.com says, “Sorting out liability and other key issues is a tough task after any car accident, but it’s all the more challenging when the accident was caused–either wholly or in part–by hazards in the roadway, such as potholes or debris…Sovereign tort immunity can limit the government’s liability considerably, and in many instances the government will still be entirely immune from suit.”

Many auto deaths are likely a direct result of faulty city planning and urban design. It is not mere coincidence that many deaths occur in the same intersection or the same strip of highway, or, as in Austin, to ever-increasing numbers of cyclers and pedestrians. Bogotá, Columbia, has cleverly helped solve this last problem by putting bike lanes between sidewalk parking and sidewalks.

Cause-and-effect aside (every death has its cause), considering Dunbar’s number of 150, once again, is it humanly plausible–or healthy–to grieve sincerely for anybody and everyone? Isn’t it enough stress just keeping ourselves safe? It might arguably be highly perverse to show Americans montages of auto deaths day after day, strap us with personal guilt, and twist factory-made, pressurized social grief? Could there be any reason compelling enough to justify inflicting even one more innocent person with unnecessary pain?

Special providence and gun control

The devout judge and businessman Samuel Sewall and puritan minister Cotton Mather were eating dinner together one night when lighting struck the house breaking the dining window. Both pious men fell straight to their knees, groveling before God’s almighty hand, and begged that he show them their sins which could have brought such a devastating sign.

Are Americans reverting back to our puritan superstitions by imposing upon ourselves some great public sin a random, distant shooting spree? We constantly ask after any natural catastrophe–and a mass shooting by a fellow human being, as a natural phenomenon, can be called a “natural catastrophe”–what did we do wrong? It is the puritanical notion of special providence at work even today. We cannot accept a disaster as merely a disaster. Rather, we by heritage rely still upon a nebulous higher moral power–the State–which, against better evidence, invokes special providence in our modern, liberal, secular age. We have been trained to feel dreadful guilt over a televised tragedy, which whether we like it or not, occurred as naturally and beyond our control as a lighting storm.

Whether or not gun control is a rational answer to mass violence, the idea of calling for mass guilt and an act of contrition over such a random act amounts to a good old fashioned fire-and-brimstone sermon.

Flash mobs and private sympathy

NBCNEWS.com reposted a heart-warming story by PhillyBurbs.com correspondent Dan Perez:

More than 150 people [the bold is mine] took over Shady Brook Farm in Lower Makefield on Sunday to remember the victims of the recent Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. 

Lauren Reed from Falls and Kaitlyn DiSantis from Bristol Township used Facebook to organize a flash mob to spread a positive message and help people in a difficult time.

“We wanted to bring the community together and do something good to honor those people affected by the tragedy in Connecticut,” said 27-year-old Reed.

About 40 adults and children stood in front of a Christmas tree stretching 20 feet in the air and sang the Michael Jackson song “Heal the World” while holding up 26 signs, each bearing the name of one of the victims from the tragedy at Sandy Hook. More than 100 onlookers sang along and some teared up during the rendition. 

I am very sincere when I say this story is heart warming. It is, by all counts, a very appropriate reaction for a local community to mourn and show sympathy in this way. It is here we see clearly the benefits of social media, but also how it truly works. The nation did not show up. This was not a national mass-media mourning. This was a local community network privately honoring their own neighbors. It was Dunbar’s number. We are reading about it via mass media–maybe there is video footage–but we were not there. We were not included in the 150. Nor should we have been.

Straight from the mouth of Lady Grantham

Maybe my friend was right after all, though he didn’t make his point as eloquently as something else I watched on TV, when every major channel (i.e. CBS, NBC, Disney, News Corp) wasn’t focused on the school shooting–an episode from PBS’s Downton Abbey, written by prim Englishman Julian Fellows:

MCGOVERN: (As Lady Grantham) She was very upset by the death of poor Mr. Pamuk.

SMITH: (As Lady Grantham) Why? She didn’t know him. One can’t go to pieces at the death of every foreigner. We’d all be in a state of collapse whenever we opened a newspaper.

————

To support mother and father, to cherish wife and child and to have a simple livelihood; this is the good luck.

– Buddha

The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of their time each day.

– M. Grundler

Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again. 

– William Saroyan

The myth of the 99%:1% ratio

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The mass have to be won by propaganda. –Hannah Arendt

Why this strange ratio?

The ratio says 1% supposedly owns 1/3 (33.3%) of the wealth (not 99%). It implies, however, that somehow 99% of us is getting screwed by the 1%. I’d like to question this idea. And maybe challenge the 99% movement and the rest of us to rethink.

Some trivia about the 1%

Others have done more homework than I have. Here’s what howstuffworks.com says:

First, it’s important to make some distinctions. This statistic is specifically referring to wealth, not income. Income is how much money you earn in a given year. Wealth, also known as net worth, is the cumulative value of all of your assets minus your debts. What qualifies as an asset? Cash in the bank, investments (stock, bonds, CDs, 401(k)s, IRAs, etc.) real estate, jewelry, art, collectibles and anything of tangible value. Debts would include outstanding mortgage debt, student loan debt and credit card balances.

It’s important to make a distinction between income and wealth because income inequality and wealth inequality aren’t equal. According to research originally done by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the top 1 percent of income earners took home 17.67 percent of the total income — less than a fifth — of everyone in the U.S. in 2008.

To qualify as the top 1 percent of earners, you need to make a little more than $500,000 in cash income in 2011.

Wealth inequality is far greater. According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans control 35.6 percent of the total wealth of the country — more than a third.

Even more incredible is that the richest 10 percent of Americans control 75 percent of the wealth, leaving only 25 percent to the other 90 percent of Americans.

What about the 99%?

Why not the slightly more modest “90% movement“?

After all, if we whittle the elite down to 1% (Apples), and admit their mere 35.6% of the wealth (Oranges), this may not stir a mass movement. However, if we hold that the elite is 10%, then even though we reduce our troops from 99% to 90%, still, 75% of the wealth is a much bigger prize.

For my taste, both numbers, 1% and 10%, are too neat. Why not any other ratio set? 2%:98%? Or .5%:99.5%? Or just the same, 11%/89%? Or 9.666…%: 91.333…%? Any figure is a moving target. But if we are going to isolate a group of people to hate, can’t we be more precise?

Math favors precision. Propaganda doesn’t allow it.

Of course, there are those who do look for more precision. This from Wikipedia:

“We are the 99.9%” – by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a New York Times op-ed arguing that the original slogan sets the bar too low when considering recent changes in distribution of income. In particular, Krugman cites a 2005 Congressional Budget Office report indicating that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income for the middle of the income distribution rose 21%, while for the top 0.1% it rose by 400%.

“We are the 53%” – In October 2011, in response to the slogan, conservative RedState.com blogger Erick Erickson (along with Josh Trevino, communications director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and filmmaker Mike Wilson[35]) launched a counter-slogan—”We are the 53%”—referring to the 53% of Americans whose income is high enough to pay federal income taxes.[36]

Even here, economic polemicists can’t decide whether to argue on wealth (Oranges) or income (Pears). It’s clearly about wealth.

The game we’re playing

Just for sport, let’s for a minute forget about the so-called sinfully wealthy–send them to hell, at least in theory. Let’s assume there is no trickle-down effect. Whatever the 1% has (35.6%) doesn’t exist. It’s off the table. Now we’re back to 100% of the wealth.

If we do this, will we achieve peace on earth? Or do we go after the next 1%? It’s of course theoretically possible to keep shaving off the top 1% ad infinitum. We’re going to reach ad nauseam first, and if we’re smart, stop shaving before we slit our own throats. (We might stop at, say, 9%.)

Given the inherent competition in the fight against the 1%, it is common knowledge that we will by instinct keep whittling away the top percent until we reach our adjusted lowest base number–which is not at all the idyllic 99%.

If I wear a suit, it is not an indication of wealth, only that I bought a suit. How I bought the suit is another question–likely on credit to impress my boss in the vain hope of a raise to pay for the suit. If I go into the grocery store after work, the cashier might think, “Oh, he’s one of them.” And why shouldn’t he think this? There is no solidarity between us. Not in this game. Even if I am perceived as even a small fraction ahead of the curve, it is natural that the cashier question the order of things, even secretly despise me for my appearance: I am the 1%.

If you’re not with us, you’re against us

What if I refuse to play this game?

Emerson said, “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance.” He was preaching self-reliance. If nobody will hire me, I will employ myself. I was a cashier. I was a ditch digger. They taught me the desire for something else and gave me mobility to do it. If I cannot find food in the city, where the mob stirs in unrest, I will go to the countryside. I will begin again. What does it matter if one offers me a loan and another forgives it? I will find it in myself to be my own benefactor.

Most fortunes are made within 15 to 25 years–some much sooner. Fortunes mostly die with those who made them. Think of the titans of industry today. Are they what they were a generation ago? How did they supplant the old regime? Just as birth supplants death.

If self-reliance is now supplanted by a mere either/or choice between reliance on the elite or reliance on the mob, if the collective, either way, is to supplant the individual, then I am no longer free.

There is no totality of wealth

To accept that there is one big pie that contains 100% of the wealth, we have to consign our minds to medieval superstition. While it is reasonably arguable that there is a scarcity of natural resources–i.e. “land”–it is clear that the measure of wealth is only limited to our imagination and desire and commitment to work. Wealth, in case we forgot, is not a pie, once eaten, gone. There is no 100% of human ingenuity. The essence of creativity is infinity, not totality. The products of individual creativity are infinite.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake – Auguries of Innocence

Death on the trading floor

While in San Francisco on a business trip, I talked with a bus driver on the way to see the back-then Golden Gate Bridge. He caught my attention because he was listening to and repeating Chinese phrases on the bus’ old tape deck. We got to talking, and he told me that he used to be a stock exchanger on Wall Street. He had lost everything, he said. After that, his wife left him and took the kids and whatever was left. So he moved here.

“You have to expect that when you get into it,” he said. It was a stoic statement, I thought, but this man seemed to have found peace with himself.

He said he had mastered the basics already of a handful of languages just for fun. When he wasn’t doing that, he was learning something else. He was taking night courses after driving the bus all day, paying for them outright. He was about forty years old.

Whenever I see photos or videos of men and women on the Wall Street trading floor, I am baffled. They are working much harder than almost anybody I can think of, but they work in illusion. I can’t help thinking about Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass. The father of Warren Beatty’s character jumps to his death from a hotel window upon hearing he lost his Wall Street fortune in The Crash. While Beatty’s character had ambitions, at the end of the movie he’s a poor farmer–not with the love of his life, Ms. Wood, but still able to feed himself and his family. Not too bad.

When I see the successes of the Occupy movement–and they are successes–buying cheap debt and forgiving the debtor, holding banks responsible for their promises to customers, etc.–I still have the same sinking feeling: What are they up against but illusions? If we know that any day the bottom could drop on stocks and banks, etc, then we can reasonably expect the same might happen for the opposition. After all, they’re both standing on the same trading floor. “Stop fighting fire with fire,” I want to say. “Get out before the house burns on top of all of you.”

A saner way of life

Congress and the president are today in a stalemate, because, as honorable men and women, they want to protect their constituents–be they the 1% or the 99%, or as they say, “struggling small business entrepreneurs” or the “hard-working middle class.” The propaganda machine is in full tilt. So that neither side will lose, they have made it so neither side can win. Nobody gets a tax cut. Our elected officials can be manipulative, greedy little bastards. Or maybe they’ve swallowed their own swill. Personally, I don’t think it’s a question of either/or. As Mark Twain wrote in 1891, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

However, if we decide that the dissenters and revolutionaries become our representatives, then the same might as well be said for them.

Sadly, we are not at the stage we can tell our representatives to be moral, decent, and kind. We carry the fortunate burden of making our own dreams our futures–not one all-encompassing, collective dream, but the dreams you alone have–the dreams I alone have–each night and day.

—————

Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.
― J.M. Bernstein, The Culture Industry

By means of industry and perseverance you will rise higher and higher.
― Robert Schumann

The realities of mistrust

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, by Antonio Canova, in the Louvre, Paris.

What many philosophers circle around like buzzards is the pretense of reality.

It is not the pretense (nor reality) upon which we misguide our actions. It is the mistrust that any and all reality is pretense.

We have been transfixed with the sick feeling that we are prisoner’s in Plato’s Cave. We forget in our delirium that we are in the cave by our own choice.

It is not good enough anymore–nor was it ever good enough–to insist, “Cogito ergo sum.” I can convince myself  I am as I am because I am a thinking mind. Unfortunately that does not rid me of other people who insist on the same thing.

“Cogito ergo sum” varies from one person to another. It separates all others from me. It also does not value one person’s “cogito” over another’s, unless there is, as always, power involved. In this sense, it is simultaneously anti-collective and anti-individualistic.

I go into my dreaded office job and boldly tell my boss, “I have realized, it is okay to be myself.” I have been saying it all morning as a mantra just so I can preserve myself when I step into the monkey cage. (This is my latest metaphor for work: A monkey cage, where you willingly go and lock yourself in for most of your day so that the monkeys, as monkeys do, throw shit on you. At the end of the day, you leave and try to convince yourself that despite this company of monkeys you have subjected yourself to, you are not a monkey at all.) I tell my boss (I am not a monkey; I am a man), “I decided today it’s okay to be myself.” He leans back in his chair. “That’s great to hear. I think other people will like you much more if you can just do that.” But of course he misses the point. I don’t want to depend on whether or not others like me, and being myself is not some holy grail for which I must vainly quest. I am myself all the time. I can’t help it. But this begs the question, why is it important to verbally assert, “It’s okay to be myself,” if I can’t be any other thing but myself? Can I really separate myself from these monkeys?

“Can I separate myself from monkeys?” is actually (for the purpose of this foray) two questions: 1. Can I define myself apart from others? 2. Can I overcome my primal instincts to throw shit at the people around me, especially when they are throwing shit at me? For me, this leads back to the first question about whether it is possible to have a solipsistic definition of individuality.

If I start at the beginning, I am in fact made of two: mother and father. It takes sexual intercourse between two different people to produce me. And it hardly matters whether they get along, as long as they agree to set aside their differences long enough to conceive me and push me out into the world. In my case, I am made from two people who professed love but, as a matter of daily survival, hated each other.

Now it usually happens that these two strange people known as parents want to seal themselves together (in vain) through the child. If the child can believe everything, think everything, all that the parents together would like to believe and think as one, this child might unite them. Unfortunately the attempt fails as the parents realize any union is a pipe dream and is aborted as the child grows into an idea of becoming self-aware.

This is the first reality of mistrust: parents can’t be trusted.

The parents have used the child in a power play to regain what they originally lost upon their own self-awareness, the trust that we can ever truly trust anyone.

If the child goes to college, he will then transfer that need to be known, the need to trust that it is possible to be accepted as oneself–which he has mistaken until now as the role of his parents to fulfill–onto his teachers. Teachers are under the illusion that it pays to be magnanimous, and happen to have large egos out of which flows their magnanimity, so they willingly accept the role. Well, at least till graduation. At which point, the child is completely on his own.

So what does the child do? He marries. He desperately has to believe the union his parents promised him his whole life is real.

He finds out with his first child it isn’t any truer for him as it was for his parents. If he’s any good, he’ll realize it a lot sooner.

But his quest is not over. He goes to work. There are many father and mother figures he can imagine in any manager. Managers are much worse than teachers. Probably because we pay teachers so that one day managers can have the luxury of paying us. Managers are narcissistic sociopaths waiting to explode. Yet they eagerly devour our unwavering trust so they can sleep at night. Work isn’t so important. Why else are we really there? Work is merely a means to feeding a frustrated id. Woe unto him he confuses a boss for a parent. Woe unto him who confuses a parent for a boss. Woe unto him who confuses a boss for a boss. Clearly, a boss is an infant.

This is the second reality of mistrust: Nobody can be trusted.

Now life becomes unbearable. If you can’t trust anyone, how can you be sure you can trust yourself? Other people don’t trust you. Why should you? What if they’re right? What if you’re wrong like they say? And what if you’re really responsible for their mistrust?

This is the third reality of mistrust: You can’t trust yourself. It’s maddening.

In such an environment it is easy to see how in a totalitarian regime a child might give up his parent, a neighbor a fellow neighbor, etc.–all this in the name of self-preservation–all the while you hate even yourself as a possible dissenter.

So let’s go back to Plato’s Cave. It’s much less confusing.

But the cave is simply prefatory. Nowadays we go to the movies. Or stay home for TV. A good crime drama. A political thriller. Government conspiracies. Corporate conspiracies. The lies of J. Edgar Hoover. The lies of Kissinger. The lies of all women and men in love. The boss who is really head of a mafia organization. The coworker or neighbor who turns out to be a cold-blooded killer. The famous line: “Don’t trust anyone.” The implication: “Of course, not even me.” Not even yourself: The Parallax View.

What great calamity would befall us if instead we decided to trust each other?

If I trust that you will do what you say you will do and you do exactly what you said, then I am better off than if, because of mistrust, I never gave you the chance, except to mistrust me in return. If I trust you and you break my trust, then I am hurt, but it is a relatively swift blow compared to the daily torture of unnecessary mistrust. In betting terms, I’d bet on better results and less heartache with trust. If I operate in trust, than it is easier to trust myself that I did the right thing for myself even if I am hurt or taken advantage of.

Now it is the nature of the world that trust engenders trust and mistrust, mistrust. The irony is we mistrust this concept.

The flaw with mistrust is that suffering is constantly prolonged. How many deaths do I die each day out of suspicion that someone is waiting to kill me? Others are not waiting to kill me. They kill me without hesitation or remorse because they mistrust how long they have before I eventually kill them. It is not our intention to kill, but to survive. We kill from our misconception of survival.

Why do we kill our prophets–Jesus (one parent), Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Malcolm X, John Lennon (no parents)–if it is not that they preach what we above all do not trust: unity and peace? Above all, peace with oneself. Unity may never be attainable, but the only thing that stands in the way of peace is mistrust. Our prophets of peace are beautiful. But as Hannah Arendt remarked, “By its very nature beauty is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.”

It is hard to say that there is any reality but mistrust. It is equally difficult to say whether mistrust leads to any sort of firm reality.

If trust is a dream, mistrust is a nightmare. People will gladly die for a dream. Nightmares do not give people the choice to live.

So now maybe our parents were right after all, at least in the beginning. Sex is the physical symbol of inviolable trust. It is in the interconnection of pure physicality that we can set aside our clothes of “rational fears” about one “cogito” usurping the other and possibly only in the physical realm live without fears. Consensual sex may be our purest form of trust; the simultaneous orgasm, our purest form of ecstasy. This is why it is so rare.

Public acknowledgment of sex is forbidden because it violates the realities of mistrust. We have therefore traditionally guarded sex as sacred.

The Fall of Adam and Eve is a story of original mistrust. They are convinced they cannot trust God about the apple. God then is convinced he cannot trust them. Fear enters and Adam and Eve hide and try to find clothes to cover their nakedness, because they don’t trust God will be merciful to them and they feel too exposed. With the bite of the apple of knowledge, rationality has usurped corporeal intuition (“Mens agitat molem”). The couple doesn’t trust each other anymore and they blame each other when God questions them. God no longer walks with them in the Garden in the cool of the evening. He kicks them out. All of this is based on mistrust. “Fine,” God says, “you don’t trust me to take care of you, then take care of yourselves. See how easy it is now.” The first thing they do to find any relief is to bear children. But we find out with Cain and Able, mistrust is here to stay. Cain kills his brother out of mistrust and is then marked (indelibly as a sex-offender) and doomed to a life of fear and mistrust of the entire globe–a punishment greater than death.

Sex is dwindling as the tyranny of rationality overtakes us. Under such tyranny, it is only in its perversions (sadomasochism, fetishism, pornographic substitution, etc.) that we feel we can we approach sex safely. Sex is trust, and by its nature is extremely risky. But it is in risking ourselves when mistrust beleaguers us that we are most free and at peace with ourselves.

The realities of mistrust are such that there is no firm ground. We can so easily lose footing and fall into some unforeseen pit–often of our own making. Mistrust is hell. Trust is the kingdom of heaven, it’s gate narrow, and few enter but as children.

The elusive nature of transparency

I.

Imagine I have X-ray vision. I can see through you.

Unlike any common X-ray, my vision has the power of total transparency. It doesn’t stop at the bone. There is no dark background. I see everything–including everything behind and around you. I can see everything behind and around that. Without end.

There is a catch. For this power to work, you have to allow it. It’s actually no big deal, though. It doesn’t apparently cost you any money. It also has the allure that if everybody grants me the right to use my power in a mutual agreement, you can live in a safer, more honest world with everybody around you. In exchange, I will also allow you total X-ray vision into me.

Oh. You don’t have X-ray vision? Sorry. Too late, you already agreed to let me use mine on you.

Don’t worry too much. Look around, everybody else has given me the right to use my power same as you. The odds are, I won’t have time to pay any attention to you. Don’t be so self-centered and paranoid.

II.

Undocumented immigrant workers have to fight invisibility. The John Hopkins neurosurgeon Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa worked his way from an undocumented farm worker into a community college, into a railroad job where he almost died in a gas car, to UC Berkeley, to Harvard to where he currently practices. Once in school, he had the opportunity to gain citizenship and become visible. In a recent interview with María Hinojosa (no relation) in V-me television, he said that there are countless brilliant minds who never see the light of day as undocumented workers. For him, then, visibility means citizenship.

The late Octavio Paz described the challenge for our millions of undocumented American compatriots as the labyrinth of solitude. Paz describes Los Angeles adolescents, who, upon discovering themselves, decide not to identify with either country but rather self-identify as “Pachucos”–ready to act the clown and irritate any system that would pin them to any national norm–wanting rather, with no definite purpose or success, to stand out. Just across the border, those who defiantly die building their cartels could be the modern version of Luis Buñuel’s “forgotten.”

This is the extreme of what psychologically we all share: the need for recognition–the need to be seen.

III.

In Sao Paolo, Brazil, there is a war against kidnapping. The latest victims are the mothers of famous soccer players. The kidnapper’s reasoning is that they are doing only what the government does–steal. What they are attacking, however, is personal visibility.

The famous soccer players start as children in the street. If you ask any poor barrio kid what they want to do, given the choice of doctor, business man, or any promising career, the answer is soccer. Soccer promises something the other careers cannot: not money as a way of self-improvement so much as unprecedented fame. Obviously in a game like this there will be many losers never seeing the light of day, but to all players, especially the victors, the players who gain national, possibly international, fame, it’s worth it.

The players who get the fame are not proud. They keep contact with their roots. Their mothers stay in their old communities for precisely this reason. But as word gets out, “Hey, isn’t that the mother of so-and-so, the soccer player?” The envy spreads like gossip, and sooner or later someone gets the idea to kidnap the mother. The result is infamy for the kidnapper, inhumane invisibility for the mother, and after over-publicity about the hopeless incident from the press, the retreat into privacy of the famous soccer player.

“The politicians rob with pencil, me with a pistol. It’s a war.” This is the kidnapper’s reasoning. It is a misleading rationalization. It’s questionable whether they are hurting the government or helping build the government’s need and interest to enlarge security measures and increase scrutiny into private lives. There have been dozens of false arrests, while the real criminals play hide and seek, sharing videos of self-glorification–one “superstar” criminal calling himself “Bin Laden”–while remaining physically out of sight.

The victims are clear: public-private citizens. The dream of fame as a means of ascension out of misery now becomes its own nightmare of complete disappearance.

IV.

The honesty of Abe Lincoln or George Washington isn’t good enough anymore as a state moral code. Instead, we must now submit ourselves to be splayed on the operating table and dissected.

Our current global religion, if it can be called one, is the glass church of transparency.

Salvation is granted thus: I can no longer be content to live a quiet, private life. If I am to achieve any worth in this life, even it if is just among family and friends, then I must be visible. The sacraments of such a code are regular Facebook attendance, a prescribed number of our tweets a day, testimonials and edification, and missionary work in the blogosphere. We have canonized our movie, music, and sports icons, to whom we can now pray directly for a sign or at least their blessing.

Heaven is to be recognized and liked by everybody (something Lincoln actually did set out to be, “esteemed of my fellow men” and accomplished so well as to die for it) and Hell is–well, maybe the same as it always was–to be locked up in solitary confinement.

So we bear out our purgatorial existential commitment in a world where likes can be programmed and visibility is an illusion.

There is no such thing as realism

Barbara Ehrenreich says positive thinking is undermining America. I don’t.

I recently watched on Youtube, “RSA Animate – Smile or Die,” in which Ehrenreich gets real-time illustration to a lecture based on her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (Aug 3, 2010).

Ehrenreich says she is against delusional thinking, whether pessimism or optimism, and promotes realism as the only solution to this.

But isn’t it delusional to believe in realism?

Her reason is supposed to be compelling: How can self-help books tell me to smile and see the opportunity in a disaster such as a lay-off. It is natural, first, to be depressed, and this kind of statement would apparently have me take the blame for my misfortune by giving us a platitude such as “buck up.”

Okay. So what is real? Having no job and no means of feeding your family is very real. Hunger, I could say, is something so real it is all consuming. Starvation does not permit very many smiles as its reality demands our total concentration.

In disclosure, I write this on a full stomach. If I were starving, I would not have the concentration; I should be focused on finding myself food. But unfortunately, specialists in survival techniques tell us that starvation can impair judgment. If I were starving, how could I be sure that I could have enough focus to devote against my very real hunger to find nourishment?

To look for nourishment is to believe without seeing that nourishment is somewhere to be found. I could go out into the woods, fashion a makeshift spear, crossbow, or bow and arrow and hunt. Or I could see what I could gather or even scavenge. I could stand on the highway and beg the passing cars for money. I could apply for government assistance. And once the government has jerked me around enough I could take things into my own hands and beg for help from passing cars. I could clean myself up the best I could and walk into a diner and ask for a job (Ehrenreich is familiar with this approach). Any of these could lead to nothing.

Should I then, as Job was tempted to do, curse God and die?

God’s answer to Job is that God is bigger than Job. What Job can experience as real is extremely limited from God’s viewpoint. And it is not hard to extrapolate from this that, even if I don’t believe in God, there are things that outside my understanding of what is real.

The mind, as part of the body, should work with it, but if it should accept Job’s temptation or Ehrenreich’s wisdom (not to say they are the same thing), then the mind can work against the body’s good. The body, for its part, is not cooperating with the mind by impairing its judgment.

So neither the mind or the body has its full faculties of reality to keep alive under the real duress of hunger.

Here we have to admit that reality is not singular but plural. There are at least two realities: the mind-body’s realities with and without hunger. But there are more ways to deprive the mind-body; so then there are more than at least two realities; in fact, a multiplicity.

Of course there always was. And this is not one “evil demon” but legion. I cannot think and therefore be if I am too hungry to think, or too full, too cold or too hot, too thirsty or too tired, or suffering almost any mind-body deprivation. Perhaps the deprivation we most fear is our lack of awareness about anything. As Socrates taught, let’s start by doubting what we know.

I can doubt whether it is really good to be an optimist, or even good to be its counterpoint, a pessimist, and fancy myself a good Aristotelian to have found the so-called golden mean of realism. But this is vanity if I consider for a moment that simply finding the middle road of a dualism is quintessential logic. What if there are other things besides optimism and pessimism to consider as alternative realities?

For example, what if I were to declare myself a “hippopotamus-ist”? This may sound absurd as a possible solution to hunger (especially if you are a hungry, hungry hippopotamus-ist), but it is nonetheless, now that I have said it, a possible way of thinking, and therefore a reality. So now I declare I’ve changed my mind. I now know better and shall from henceforth assert my “antihippotamus-ism.” Of course just contemplating the notion of being an antihippotamus-ist seems more than equally absurd (to be pessmistic about it), so now, let me with all due gravitas declare myself a non-absurdist–which is to say neither hippopotamus-ist nor antihippopotamus-ist. I do not believe that hippos contain the ultimate meaning nor do I think that they don’t–which is to say, of course, absolutely nothing.

We must first, then, eschew dualistic thinking. It is nonsense and a trap. We should spit it out of our mouths.

Too bad. If I had stuck to my guns about being a hippopotamus-ist, I could have shot the hippo, eaten it, and afterwards thought more clearly. I might have more likely imagined something–on my own–however fleeting in the mind, to chase after and eat next. Even a chimera such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s “realism.”

It makes me happy just to think about it. I haven’t eaten chimera in a very long time.

Ehrenreich says she believes in realism. But realism is not reality at all, but rather an intellectually contrived preparation (one of a paltry three at that) for a mind-body reaction to reality. The problem, however, is that true reality is beyond us. A frog or a bat can witness more and less of that reality than we can. When we die, the reality that we have taken part in will continue–changed, but nonetheless real and beyond us–and we will then know yet another side of reality. I claim that it is not so easy to assert the correct reaction to reality when we do not understand what it is we’re reacting to.  Unfortunately, “realism” has that deceptive semantic touch of its root word, “real,” to fool us into believing we can and do understand everything well enough to be a realist.

Realism–as are optimism and pessimism and a plethora of other isms–indeed is a perceptual reaction to something not even the most achieved ascetic can keep a clear head about–that elusive sense of the real.

So what does Ehrenreich want from us? What kind of reaction is realism? It is inaction. If it involves action, then wouldn’t the unpleasant word “opportunism” be much more appropriate?

Are we then to adopt a real-politik for our private lives? As Kissinger has publicly shown us, this too is vanity and striving after the wind. How many of his “real”-politik decisions cost us so very dearly because of their sheer delusion?  Too many to choose from.

So why not pessimism or optimism? What if it turns out that either was the more correct perceptual stance? In that case, wouldn’t it be better to act on the correct perception? Or if we had to choose, since we don’t really know what the correct perception is, wouldn’t it indeed be better to act on optimism, thereby increasing our chances for an optimal result?

I personally opt for optimism. If I’m going to bet, I’d rather bet on winning. (Also, I would rather be happy than miserable.)

The problem here is, if I cannot define what it is I’m reacting to, then just as in the case of realism, any perceptual stance, including optimism, to an elusive reality, once acted upon, might prove fatal. However, a good survivalist will tell us, it is better to look for food than simply to rot angry about not having any. So this being the case, what does it matter what perceptual stance I base my action on, as long as I’m looking for food?

Does Ehrenreich want Americans to look for food, or does she want us merely to be angry at the people who took it from us and resent them for telling us to smile and look for more? I claim that it is not anger or smiling that is important so much as looking for our own food. Ehrenreich, through joining the ranks of the working class for three whole months, didn’t need the change for food, but made a lot of money writing Nickle and Dimed. It can be said she lives off our discontent. It is in her best interest that we buy into her discontent (using, I suppose, the money we saved from not buying positive self-help books, all of which she cavalierly denigrates) so that she can continue to eat well. Does discontent help us find food for ourselves? If we all write books about how discontented we all are, will everybody buy our books? Maybe. But you can’t eat books.

Let’s assume that Ehrenreich doesn’t want us simply to buy her book and stew in our own juices. What she might be doing is a call to action. I cannot help here thinking about Orwell’s warning in Animal Farm.

Orwell says if we listen to pigs (i.e. people who preach mass discontent against the so-called elite), kill the farmer (the so-called elite), and take over the farm, it will be disastrous. Why? Because we never learned to farm and we listened to pigs.

Pigs are undermining America, not positive thinking.