We used to say that when the Catholic Church discarded the Latin Mass, they threw out the baby and kept the bathwater. But bathwater would be a major improvement over what passes for acceptable language today among the young. If you can believe it, we heard this song on the radio today, and to the best of our knowledge, no one has gone to jail.
Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit. The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park. As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says. The class will be in the anthropology department and called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” It will be divided between seminars at the Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork.
From the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University:
Hannah Appel earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. With research interests in the daily life of capitalism and the private sector in Africa, in particular, Hannah’s work draws on critical development studies, economic anthropology, and political economy. Her current project — Futures — is baded on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the transnational oil and gas industry in Equatorial Guinea. The project explores the considerable work required to lubricate the passage of oil to market – not only of labor (whether manual, managerial, or domestic,) but also of material infratstructures, contracting regimes, and forms of governance and regulation. What combinations of technopolitics, labor, infrastructure, contracts and subcontracts, corporate enclaves and corporate social responsibility programs are required to convert Equatorial Guinea’s hydrocarbon from subsea deposit to spot price on the New York Mercantile Exchange? And to what effect?
Is this guy, a Columbia grad student, going to help teach the course?
Henry Miller reads from Black Spring. The narrator has been tasked with bringing his Aunt to the asylum:
It always seemed astounding to me how jolly they were in our family despite the calamities that were always threatening. Jolly in spite of everything. There was cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery, mendacity, buggery, incest, paralysis, tapeworms, abortions, triplets, idiots, drunkards, n’er-do-wells, fanatics, sailors, tailors, watchmakers, scarlet fever, whooping cough, meningitis, running ears, chorea, stutterers, jailbirds, dreamers, storytellers, bartenders — and finally there was Uncle George and Tante Melia. The morgue and the insane asylum.
No one knew that Tante Melia was going completely off her nut, that when we reached the corner she would leap forward like a reindeer and bite a piece out of the moon. And nobody could think quick enough to stop it. Just like that it happened. In the twinkle of a star. And now I’m going to tell you what those bastards said to me…
They said — Henry, you take her to the asylum tomorrow. And don’t tell them that we can afford to pay for her. Fine! Always merry and bright! The next morning we boarded the trolley together and we rode out into the country. If Mele asked where we were going I was to say – “to visit Aunt Monica.” But Mele didn’t ask any questions. She sat quietly beside me and pointed to the cows now and then. She saw blue cows and green ones. She knew their names. She asked what happened to the moon in the daytime. And did I have a piece of liverwurst by any chance?
During the journey I wept — I couldn’t help it. When people are too good for this world they have to be put under lock and key. There’s something wrong with people who are too good. It’s true Mele was lazy. She was born lazy. It’s true that she was a poor housekeeper. It’s true she didn’t know how to hold on to a husband when they found her one. When Paul ran off with the woman from Hamburg she just sat in a corner and wept. The others wanted her to do something — put a bullet into him, raise a rumpus, sue for alimony. But Mele sat quiet. She wept. She hung her head. She was like a pair of torn socks that are kicked around here, there, everywhere. Always turning up at the wrong moment.
And now she’s very tranquil and she calls the cows by their first name. The moon fascinates her. She has no fear because I’m with her and she always trusted me. I was her favorite. Even though she was a halfwit she was good to me. The others were more intelligent, but their hearts were bad.
Sometimes when she was fired from a job they used to send me to fetch her. Mele never knew her way home. And I remember how happy she was whenever she saw me coming. She would say innocently that she wanted to stay with us. Why couldn’t she stay with us? I used to ask myself that over and over. Why couldn’t they make a place for her by the fire, let her sit there and dream, if that’s what she wanted to do? Why must everybody work -– even the saints and the angels? Why must halfwits set a good example? I’m thinking now that after all it may be good for Mele where I’m taking her. No more work. Just the same, I’d rather they had made a corner for her somewhere.
Walking down the gravel path toward the big gates Mele becomes uneasy. Even a puppy knows when it is being carried to a pond to be drowned.
Henry Miller was born in 1891. He lived in a far-off age in America when everyone knew farmers and soldiers. He lived through the first part of the greatest economic and industrial transformation in the history of the world. By the time there was news on the radio, he was in his late 20s. Stardust and White Christmas are bookends to the decade in which he wrote Black Spring in Paris.
And here we are today at the end of 2011. Is the country better or worse off? Of course materially much better off — but consider Miller’s first paragraph above. Look at how robust that writing is and how much our discourse has been dumbed down, self-censored, and made purposefully vague today. Here’s to better luck in 2012! HT: MS
Addendum: China is about 100 years behind the USA’s trends in urbanization and agricultural employment. They’re about where we were at the start of WWI, with some notable differences due to technology. Given the vast changes that have taken place and the vast changes that lie ahead, it’s hard to imagine where this country and China will be in another century.
The WSJ in 2009:
the CDC reported that about 40% of American children were born out of wedlock in 2007, more than triple the 11% who were in 1970. This means that more than 1.7 million children were born outside of marriage in 2007. Moreover, the vast majority of these babies — 60%, to be precise — were born not to teenagers but to women in their 20s (only 23% of nonmarital births were to teens). Furthermore, the CDC reports that nonmarital childbearing has been rising much faster among adults than among teenagers.
None of this should come as a surprise, given that a 2003 Gallup Survey found that 64% of young adults age 18 to 29 thought that having a baby out of wedlock was “morally acceptable.” But a number of academics and advocates who track family issues are more than willing to provide intellectual cover to contemporary young adults’ laissez-faire approach to childbearing and marriage. For instance, Stephanie Coontz, the director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, wrote on the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog that “policymakers and researchers need to discard one-size-fits-all generalizations about the causes, consequences, risks and benefits of different family forms. Average outcomes from married and single parenting hide huge variations” in child well-being. Likewise, Silvia Henriquez, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, urged readers to resist the temptation to “present single motherhood as a problem in itself.”
Ultimately, though, the arguments put forward by Ms. Coontz, Ms. Henriquez and other academics and advocates do not have science on their side. For instance, Sara McLanahan at Princeton University and her colleagues have found that boys who are raised by single mothers are twice as likely to end up in prison by age 32, that girls who are born outside of marriage are three times as likely to have a teenage pregnancy, and that teens born outside of marriage are about twice as likely to drop out of high school
It’s amusing when the usual suspects say nonsense: “policymakers and researchers need to discard one-size-fits-all generalizations about the causes, consequences, risks and benefits of different family forms.” Amusing but a 40% illegitimacy rate is no laughing matter. We wonder what contemporary artists think about this. (Haven’t we written this before?) Look no further than here, here, or perhaps most symbolically, here. A serious teaching moment squandered.
1968 was a tumultuous year, really awful in some ways, hardly what you’d call the good old days. Yet it had its moments, including the first human spaceflight to leave the earth’s orbit. Merry Christmas from the three astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission.
A guy spent a few weeks in an African country 25 years ago and wrote about it seven years later, at a time when internet resources were unavailable. His writing resembles that of another author who spent decades in that country. AT:
The other book and African Nights share any number of distinctive words and phrases, many of which are commonly in use in East Africa: Baobab [a tree], bhang [cannabis], boma [an enclosure], samosa [a fried snack], shamba [a farm field], liana [a vine], tilapia [a fish], kanga [a sheet of fabric], shuka [decorative sashes]. It is possible that he remembered these phrases from his few weeks in country, but it is not at all likely. On the fashion front, both books have young women “wrapped” in their kangas and “dressed” in “rags.” The women in both books wear shukas, head shawls, head scarves, and goatskins, and they balance baskets on heads graced with “laughing smiles.” On the animal front, men in both books spearfish in “ink-black” waters and hunt by torchlight. Elephants are “fanning” themselves, birds “trill,” insects “buzz,” weaver birds “nest,” and monkeys “mesmerize.” The books share a veritable Noah’s ark of additional fauna: crickets, crocodiles, starlings, dragonflies, tilapia, cattle, lions, sand crabs, vultures, hyenas, “herds of gazelle,” and leopards that can hold small animals “in their jaws.” On the flora front, the shared references are just as compelling: roadside palms, yellow grass, red bougainvillaea, pink bougainvillaea, fig trees, shady mango trees, thornbrush, banana leaves, Baobab trees, liana vines, tomatoes. The landscape, occasionally “barren,” is rich in “undulating hills” whose “grazing lands” are dotted with the occasional “watering hole.” The “mud and dung” houses feature “thatched roofs” “verandas,” and “vegetable gardens.” People seem to be carrying “straw mats” everywhere. The stars “glint” and people “waltz” underneath them. Eyes “glimmer” in the light of “campfires.” Children sing in “high-pitched” rhythms, and girls endure “barbaric” circumcisions. The narrators of both books travel to the Great Rift Valley and stand at its edge. Both visit the small trading town of Narok.
We omitted some names from the comparison above take away the political element. (After all, Ted Sorensen wrote Profiles in Courage, and we couldn’t care less.) How likely is it that the parallels between the two books above are lucky coincidences? How likely is it that two books tell almost exactly the same anecdote about the same spot in the East River and the Hudson? Just askin’.
Now, via AP:
Occupy Wall Street has a benefit album planned with Jackson Browne, Third Eye Blind, Crosby & Nash, Devo, Lucinda Williams and even some of those drummers who kept an incessant beat at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Participants in the protest movement said Wednesday that “Occupy This Album,” which will be available sometime this winter, will also feature DJ Logic, Ladytron, Warren Haynes, Toots and the Maytals, Mike Limbaud, Aeroplane Pageant, Yo La Tengo and others. Activist filmmaker Michael Moore is also planning to sing…There’s a long history of benefit albums, from George Harrison’s “Concert for Bangla Desh”
Then, via Wikipedia:
The Concert for Bangladesh was the name for two benefit concerts organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, held at noon and at 7 PM on August 1, 1971, playing to a total of 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The concert was organised to fund relief efforts for refugees from East Pakistan following the 1970 Bhola cyclone and atrocities during Bangladesh Liberation War. The event was the first ever benefit concert of such a magnitude. It featured a supergroup of performers that included Ravi Shankar, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Badfinger, and Ringo Starr
The OWS album sounds great. Can’t wait for the film!
The other day we were talking about 1961. Not a bad year. We still hear snippets playing from time to time. “Crest has been shown to be an effective decay preventive dentifrice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.” That of course is a statement from the Council on Dental Therapeutics of the American Dental Association, and a marketing coup for P&G. But what 9 year old remembers things like this?
We know the themes from obscure TV shows like Destry, which aired for less than 3 months, as well as famous themes like that of 77 Sunset Strip (“you meet the highbrow and the hipster, the starlet and the phony tipster). When we took the math SAT in high school the album version of the Doors’ Light my Fire played in the background. We often hear Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra, like this war ditty and other songs from the 40′s and also some tunes from quite a bit earlier as well. And of course there’s a lot of classical music in the mix. We used to hear a lot of Brahms, but lately Beethoven’s 6th symphony has been playing.
Memory is certainly cheaper than buying on iTunes. But our question is this: does everyone have a soundtrack? We know Bob Dylan does.
One, Two, Three is airing on TCM. It stars James Cagney as a Coca Cola executive in Berlin just prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall. It’s hilarious if you are of a certain age, and it caricatures both America and the Soviet bloc well. After about an hour of watching it, we became aware of its shortcoming: the East Germans are all funny. The movie was made in a free country, and it makes light of the terrible reality of living in a the Societ bloc where making such a satire would be punishable by a long prison sentence. The central fact of the movie is that Billy Wilder never could have made it on the wrong side of the Brandenburg Gate.
Representatives from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History are collecting signs and ephemera from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. for potential exhibitions about the movement. And they have plenty to choose from. New images of the already iconic Occupy signs come across the wires every day.
Several decades ago, back when Ugly George roamed Manhattan, there was a homeless fellow whom we’d often see in the vicinity of Broadway and 57th Street. He had a shopping cart with a drum in it. He’d play the drum occasionally and ask for handouts. For some reason, he wore what appeared to be shoe polish on his head outlining the part of the scalp normally covered by hair. We hadn’t thought of him in a long time, but he seems to now have successors galore.
Howard Stern sent his representatives to interview OWS. They capture the seriousness of the moment (warning: part 2 of the interview is pretty gross). Although, as in the 1960′s, the organizers are professional troublemakers, the kids at these demonstrations around the country are nincompoops and worse. It’s pathetic to think that we have elected officials who say: “The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side.” What an embarrassment.
Almost as embarrassing are the mainstream media who pretend these fools have anything of value to add to our current political debates. Perhaps some Howard Stern fans can punk the media as they did in the cases of OJ Simpson on ABC (“Ah see OJay”), or Colin Ferguson on WABC (“de man, he shootin’ everybody, he say bababooey, bababooey”), or Princess Diana on CNN or MSNBC (“it was so horrible, bababooey, bababooey”). It’s a sorry state of affairs when Mr. Stern’s reporting on OWS captures more of what’s going on than do the legacy media.
the bard of Searchlight stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In front of C-SPAN and everybody, he said — and I’m not making this up — “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs are doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers”…Is Harry Reid out of his ever-loving mind?…In the two years Reid and President Obama have controlled Washington, government jobs have increased 13.5% to 2.1 million. During that same time, 2.5 million private-sector jobs were lost. The unemployment rate in Las Vegas is 13.6%. The national unemployment rate hangs at 9.1%. But the unemployment rate for government workers sits at a mere 4.7%
The desperate quality of Reid’s falsehoods and those of others in the administration is interesting. It tends to support the allegation that campaign funds from the public sector unions are in short supply and they will make up any crazy thing at all to remedy that.
Their internal polling must be horrendous, approaching Pauline Kael territory. We don’t think we’ve previously seen political commentary from Charlie Daniels or Hank Williams, Jr, for example.
We didn’t show the first picture from the Return to 1968 Festival in NYC. It kind of sums things up, however. Maybe this does too: “God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” Yeah, good luck with that. How effective? Just watch this scene from Atlanta’s dramatization of Orwell’s Animal Farm:
How creepy is all that chanting in unison? Ginning this up was a terrible idea on the part of those who wanted to create an anti-tea-party. We’d say Go For It! — but there’s something a little scary about the behavior of these mind-numbed robots. HT: Powerline
We probably disagree with Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter on a variety of policy matters, but the 3000 word address he delivered from the pulpit of the Mount Carmel Baptist Church is remarkable. Rich Lowry has a précis.
Here’s a story about Edward Thomas and Robert Frost that took place near Little Iddens, Frost’s cottage in Gloucestershire. Guardian:
In late November 1914, Thomas and Frost were strolling in the woods behind Frost’s cottage when they were intercepted by the local gamekeeper, who challenged their presence and told the men bluntly to clear out. As a resident, Frost believed he was entitled to roam wherever he wished, and he told the keeper as much. The keeper was unimpressed and some sharp words were exchanged, and when the poets emerged on to the road they were challenged once more. Tempers flared and the keeper called Frost “a damned cottager” before raising his shotgun at the two men. Incensed, Frost was on the verge of striking the man, but hesitated when he saw Thomas back off. Heated words continued to be had, with the adversaries goading each other before then finally parting, the poets talking heatedly of the incident as they walked.
Thomas said that the keeper’s aggression was unacceptable and that something should be done about it. Frost’s ire peaked as he listened to Thomas: something would indeed be done and done right now, and if Thomas wanted to follow him he could see it being done. The men turned back, Frost angrily, Thomas hesitantly, but the gamekeeper was no longer on the road. His temper wild, Frost insisted on tracking the man down, which they did, to a small cottage at the edge of a coppice. Frost beat on the door, and left the startled keeper in no doubt as to what would befall him were he ever to threaten him again or bar access to the preserve. Frost repeated his warning for good measure, turned on his heels and prepared to leave. What happened next would be a defining moment in Frost and Thomas’s friendship, and would plague Thomas to his dying days.
The keeper, recovering his wits, reached above the door for his shotgun and came outside, this time heading straight for Thomas who, until then, had not been his primary target. The gun was raised again; instinctively Thomas backed off once more, and the gamekeeper forced the men off his property and back on to the path, where they retreated under the keeper’s watchful aim.
Frost contented himself with the thought that he had given a good account of himself; but not Thomas, who wished that his mettle had not been tested in the presence of his friend. He felt sure that he had shown himself to be cowardly and suspected Frost of thinking the same. Not once but twice had he failed to hold his ground, while his friend had no difficulty standing his. His courage had been found wanting, at a time when friends such as Rupert Brooke had found it in themselves to face genuine danger overseas.
The encounter would leave Thomas haunted, to relive the moment again and again. In his verse and in his letters to Frost – in the week when he left for France, even in the week of his death – he recalled the feeling of fear and cowardice he had experienced in that stand-off with the gamekeeper. He felt mocked by events and possibly even by the most important friend he had ever made, and he vowed that he would never again let himself be faced down. When the moment came he would hold his nerve and face the gunmen. “That’s why he went to war,” said Frost later…
six months after the row with the gamekeeper, Thomas had still to take his fateful decision to enlist…a poem of Frost’s had arrived by post that would dramatically force Thomas’s hand: a poem called “Two Roads”, soon to be rechristened “The Road Not Taken“…He broke the news to Frost…”I am going to enlist on Wednesday”…He was killed on the first day of the battle of Arras, Easter 1917
Poetry kills! Ouch! Frost’s poem remains well known today, but it was M. Scott Peck who really cleaned up, using the phrase The Road Less Traveled for the title of his book, which remained on the NYT bestseller list for 694 weeks.
(BTW, Frost was already 40 years old in 1914, making him 86 when we watched him recite one of his works at JFK’s inauguration; apparently you live longer if you’re the writer, not the reader.)
We last mentioned music the other day, at the birthday of Alison Krauss. Today it’s Hot Tuna. (For fun compare this and this. And remember that you’re paying a good chunk of the bill for the former.)
Glenn Reynolds comes out in favor of tax increases, specifically urging the repeal of a tax break from the fifties:
One of the things that’s been floating around the Web over the past week is a video clip from 1953. It’s a short film produced by the motion picture industry, seeking the end of a 20 percent excise tax on movie theaters’ gross revenues that had been imposed at the end of World War II as a deficit-cutting measure…In the film, figures ranging from industry big shots to humble ticket collectors talk about how the tax is hurting their industry and killing jobs…
I would be agitating to repeal the “Eisenhower tax cut” on the movie industry and restore the excise tax. I think I would also look at imposing similar taxes on sales of DVDs, pay-per-view movies, CDs, downloadable music, and related products. I’d also look at the tax and accounting treatment of these industries to see if they were taking advantage of any special “loopholes” that could be closed as a means of reducing “tax expenditures.”…
I note that FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who approved the Comcast merger, left the commission to take a lucrative job at Comcast…Because much of their value to their employers comes from their prior government service, I think that the taxpayers deserve a share of the return, say in the form of a 50 percent surtax on any earnings by political appointees in excess of their prior government salaries
Gee, maybe the media would form their own tea party. But what then would they say about themselves?
Bill Gross surveys America’s current situation, extrapolates some version of the status quo, and sees 4 “life rafts” for an economic rescue:
Balance the budget/growth –- The current Congressional compromise is but one small step for fiscal solvency. There is no giant leap for mankind anywhere on the horizon. Trillions of further spending cuts, and yes trillions of tax hikes, are necessary to stabilize our “official” debt/GDP ratio of 90% or so. One important detail to keep in mind: projected deficits in 2012 and 2013 of 7-8% of GDP rely on OMB growth estimates of 3%+ in the next few years. Recent trends give pause to these estimates as does PIMCO’s New Normal, which believes 2% not 3% is closer to reality. If so, deficits move right back up to near-double-digit percentages of GDP. Likewise, should interest rates ever rise from current 2% average levels, a 100 basis point increase raises the deficit by 1% and erases any hoped for gains. Sisyphus would be familiar with this seemingly unsolvable dilemma.
Unexpected inflation –- While markets are global these days, figures sometimes lie and policymakers often figure. Focusing investors’ attention on statistics emphasizing “core” or “chain-linked” methodologies can entice investors to stay home, or in the case of foreign nations, to “invest American.” Central bankers, not just in the U.S., but the U.K., have long been arguing for a reversion of headline 3% CPI numbers to the 2% or lower “core” standard expectation. “Patience,” they argue, but “prudence” might be the better watchword. If so, then the expected “unexpected” inflation would mimic the old Roman custom of coin shaving or its substitution with base metals instead of silver or gold. Inflation is the result no matter how you coin it, which puts more money in government coffers to pay their bills and less money in your pocket to pay yours.
Currency depreciation –- High deficits, both fiscal and trade, combined with low interest rates for extended periods of time produce declining currency valuations against more prosperous, and more policy conservative competitor nations. Few Americans are aware that the dollar’s recent 12-month depreciation of over 15% is an explicit tax on their standard of living. Uncle Sam, the government overseer, benefits enormously: one rather clever way for the U.S. to pay its bills to foreign creditors is to pay them in depreciated dollars. The Chinese and other offshore holders wind up getting not only .05% interest on their Treasury Bills, but 12 months later – voila! – their Bills are worth only 85 cents on the dollar in global purchasing power. The Chinese should be reading Shakespeare, not Confucius – especially the second half of “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” when it comes to U.S. dollars.
Financial Repression via low/negative real interest rates –- I have commented on this Carmen Reinhart, commonsensical technique in prior Outlooks. If the Treasury is borrowing money from you or PIMCO at .05% for the next six months and CPI inflation is averaging 3%, then lenders/savers are being shortchanged beyond even rather egregious historical examples. The burden of “sixteen tons” of debt á la Tennessee Ernie Ford is considerably reduced at 5 basis points of annual interest. “Loading” coal or debt in this case at near 0% yields doesn’t make the borrower another day older, nor deeper in debt. Actually it’s a shot of Botox for the borrower, but a shot of lead for the lender. Duck!
By using these four life rafts available to U.S. and other AAA sovereign borrowers, one can almost imagine a half century from now, that they remain solvent
VDH has a somewhat complementary piece focusing on cultural gloom. Our view is a little different. The status quo is unacceptable. The country has no time for the utopian fantasies of the left and the media, rubbish like global warming, green jobs and so forth. Save that stuff for when we’re rich again.
The economy needs fixing, no doubt. To do so, this country needs three things: (1) a weed-wacker; (2) a drill; and (3) the willingness to use them.
(1) The weed-wacker cuts government red tape so that businesses create jobs in the US, not the BRIC countries, etc (maybe we’d put Bernie Marcus and Paul Otellini in charge); (2) the drill exploits every energy resource in the US, which will create a million jobs and cut half a trillion dollars from the balance of payments deficit; (3) the will to do these things — ah, yes, that’s the hard part. But with the insane policies emanating from Washington, maybe even that is getting a little easier to muster.
Would you see this. HT: IHTM