It's been one of those days .....

No longer a liberal. Still brain dead.

I know that David Mamet's vacuous political musings in the Village Voice are a bit old-news now, but they've been nagging at me ever since I had the misfortune to waste my time reading them.

In 'Why I am no longer a "brain-dead liberal"', the acclaimed playwright managed to assemble such an enormous army of zombie strawmen than the result was not only a seriously flawed argument but also a genuine fire hazard.

I am glad to see that Erich Shulte at Ruthless Reviews has taken the effort to subject Mamet's screed to the more detailed mockery that it deserves. (Via LG&M)

If you haven't read Mamet's piece yet, it will be a less painful experience when accompanied by Shulte's interpolations.

Now, I'm far from thinking that the left side of the political spectrum doesn't require some vigorous critique (and even a good kicking). Furthermore, loads of people are actually making those necessary critiques with a great deal more intelligence and real-world relevance than Mamet's vaporous mutterings.

A few of them can be found among the blogroll to your right. Peter Ryley is one of the best, and he discussed the issue of critiquing-the-left v. leaving-the-left with great insight recently.

Judging by the number of keys that have been stroked in recent weeks about liberal/left 'defectors', changing political teams seems to be seen as an important topic at the moment. However, if his essay is any insight into Mamet's 'liberal' beliefs, then I think it suffices to say that -- if he ever actually was a liberal -- Mamet will be among the least missed of the supposed apostates.

He may have an ear for vulgar dialogue, but as to political thought...well, let's just say he's not a closer on that score.

I'll confine myself to a few selected points in his article and then I plan to leave this sorry mess behind me.

I thought it was clear that Mamet began going off the rails right near the beginning of his essay (after the somewhat long-winded and pretentious opening) when, in explaining his rejection of liberalism, he says:

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

Patently absurd as a statement of liberalism, this utterance is even more preposterous as an justification for Mamet's move to the right.

It doesn't seem to me, for instance, that conservative parties anywhere (least of all in the American case) are suffused with a feeling of quiet contentment about the state of the world. I'm not sure what kind of conservatives Mamet's been hanging around with, but pretty much all of those I've had any interaction with (whether via the internet or across my family's kitchen table) are quite fully convinced that everything is always wrong. (Indeed, this could be the motto for any nation's variety of right-wing populism. It would even make an ideal slogan for Fox News or The Daily Mail.)

How American conservatives have managed to hold this point of view while simultaneously dominating the country's political institutions is, of course, a strange little paradox all its own. But if your criteria for determining your political allegiance is the extent of bitching and moaning about the world and you wish to avoid same, becoming a conservative is a rather odd choice.

There is also a lot of murmuring in Mamet's article about how he no longer thinks that people are essentially good. He now seems to think that they are basically self-interested swine.

Curiously, though, he argues that no institutional form for regulating and working out the inevitable differences that emerge among said venal pigs is necessary. Instead, they'll work it all out themselves in some mysterious way.

His evidence is very solid, coming as it does from his own imagination:

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

Well, excellent, I guess that's proven that. 'They work it out'. How nice.
Seeing that he just pulled this description of things out of his...imagination, I could well imagine a similar scenario that ends differently, in something that looks a bit more like Mad Max and involves cannibalism. I mean, while we're imagining, we might as well have some fun.
However, it never seems to occur to Mamet that the 'new-formed community' (ah, such a lovely, soothing, sedative word that is) might, say, institutionalise exploitation.
Such as the early settler communities that his offhand historical reference points to. Remember? Those real-historical communities where various forms of unfree labour (from indentured servitude to slavery) were deemed acceptable, indeed, even essential to social life. Mamet, however, seems to see American history solely as the almost supernatural unfolding of constitutional wisdom.

See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with. (Emphasis, most emphatically, added.)

I haven't had the pleasure of serving on a jury -- though I've always wanted to. However, I have heard from enough people who have done so and spent a bit of time examining some of that very ambiguous institution's history (this book is a good place to look if you can manage to get a copy).
Thus, I can safely say that Mamet's argument is -- not to put too fine a point on it -- bullshit.
Each brings 'nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices'? Ah, that must be OK then. Since prejudice can't be all that important, historically speaking. On juries.

And I suppose, just to take one example, that he suggests here that the treatment by white juries of blacks in much of American history was not all that significant (we wouldn't want to say that something in the world was 'all wrong' would we?) It was certainly 'acceptable to the community', David, but only someone with as retarded a notion of 'community' such as yourself would nod in complacent agreement with the (strangely panglossian) notion that things just work out for the best.

I have no doubt that people do -- as Mamet suggests -- have inherent abilities that allow them to form and maintain social relationships. We are a social species. However, even a fairly glancing familiarity with psychology, history and anthropology should suggest to you that this doesn't always work out in ways that are acceptable or just.

Like many on the American right, however, Mamet seems to think of 'government' as some strange alien institution imposed from without, rather than being one of the ways that people 'work things out'. Governments are there to monitor, regulate and rebalance social relationships according to the will of the governed.

Obviously, Mamet must in some way know this, so what I presume Mamet is actually objecting to is Big Government, the one that was supposedly dropped on us from an oppressive race from beyond the stars rather than the one created by elected representatives over time and which presumably at least a good number of people in 'the community' support.

I'd like to think he was being funny here, but Mamet quips:

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow. (Emphasis added.)

How about helping to end segregation, you stupid fuck. Or was that an illegitimate intervention on the ways that the 'communities' you so adore had found a solution 'they could live with' via a system of apartheid?

Of course, I see the very clever caveat you have made here. Obviously this is something that is not among 'those things which affect' you or which you have 'observed'.

It does seem a tiny and very cramped little world you inhabit, David, really it does. It makes me suspect that your reputation for having insight into the human condition is undeserved, since it is obvious that you can't see past your own nose into the world as the rest of us live in it.

The GI Bill? Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid? Workplace safety regulation? State universities? (Ah, our David was privately educated. That also presumably doesn't affect him, allowing him not to have to mix in his tender years with the great unwashed.) Environmental protection laws? The roads you drive on? The police? Firefighting?

Not that 'government' is the 'solution' to 'everything' (whatever a meaningless statement like that would mean), but, really: 'Hard pressed'? Nothing much 'beyond sorrow'?

Put down the fucking Thomas Sowell, David, and read something serious. (Mamet refers to Sowell as 'our greatest living philosopher'. I don't know much about his work to be honest, but you may wish to peruse this Great Mind at work here at the National Review. Profound. Definitely.)

Finally, I was struck by the curious provincialism of Mamet's essay.

I mean: Here's a world-renowned playwright writing for a newspaper in one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities and he seems to not realise that there are societies out there in the rest of the big wide world which have different relationships between government and people and differently calibrated varieties of capitalism that might be worth considering.

Thus come pronouncements like the following:

Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.

Stirring stuff. Someday, when we finally overthrow our feudal overlords and free ourselves from serfdom, I hope, too, to help create such a wondrous society. Oh, if the revolution would only come...

Unfortunately, for all his bluster, Mamet's vision seems a bit clouded. At least, it appears that social mobility is not necessarily any better in the US than it is in other countries. And it may be worse.

Last year, I cited a comment from the New York Times on an OECD survey of research on the topic. A brief, but relevant, extract:

One study found that mobility between generations — people doing better or worse than their parents — is weaker in America than in Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain and France. In America, there is more than a 40 percent chance that if a father is in the bottom fifth of the earnings’ distribution, his son will end up there, too. In Denmark, the equivalent odds are under 25 percent, and they are less than 30 percent in Britain.

Life is far from utopian in the borders of our humble European Union, I'd agree, but when I run across supposedly weighty commentary about How Society Should Be Run that replaces thinking with blinkered nationalist cheerleading -- especially when the home team isn't doing so well right now -- I tend to think that the commentator in question is not worth taking seriously.

By all means, David, extol the virtues of markets and democracy if you will, but please come over for a visit sometime -- no really, come on by, we have a spare room -- and we can take a tour of a country that has exported more goods than any other in the world over the last few years (and where people are healthier and where there are far fewer murders) while having a great deal more of that Big Government that you deem so poisonous.

Mamet's obviously an imaginative fellow, and he may just prefer to stay locked away in his little theatrical fantasy land (and his privileged life) where he can create characters representing the simplistic little manichaean ideological struggle he seems to get so worked up about.

As far as I'm concerned, he can play with his puppet show all he wants. I just hope he leaves the rest of us out of it in the future.

Put that fucking coffee down, David. Coffee's for closers only.

There but for fortune

At the Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich has a short article ('Smashing Capitalism') whose satire falls a bit flat but which makes a good overall point and links to a couple of things worth reading.

Taking her cue from the recent shudder that went through the world's stock markets due partly to the unfolding 'sub-prime' mortgage crisis in the US as well as from disappointing sales figures at Wal-Mart, Ehrenreich comments:

Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.

Even meant satirically, I think Ehrenreich takes a good point rather too far: it seems to me that the recent market turbulence--as far as I can understand it--is rather more complex.

(Not to mention that the system is nowhere near being smashed: Ehrenreich knows this, which makes her somewhat flamboyant rhetoric all the more silly. I say this as an admirer of some of her work, such as her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.)

But one of her conclusions is on target...

But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis.

...particularly since said system is extracting more than that last cent.

On that point, far more striking than Ehrenreich's sledgehammer rhetoric (in this instance) is an article to which she links from the radical lefties over at Business Week: 'The Poverty Business'.

The main topic can be summed up thusly:

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Along with many interesting and useful facts like that, the article profiles the human side of this situation, presenting stories of poor people who--in one way or another--have found themselves trapped in poverty and victimised by the purveyors of expensive--but oh-so-tempting--credit.

I found myself torn by conflicting emotions when reading some of these stories: certainly there was anger at the greed of companies whose business plans seem to consist entirely of taking advantage of people in the most outrageous ways. I was moved by the plight of individuals who don't sound at all that much different than people I have known.

There was also a certain amount of frustration with some individuals themselves, like 'Luisa' who owes creditors $169,585 and says: "I don't read things. I just sign them."

Comments like this send a certain part of my political brain--the one that is convinced concepts such as 'individual responsibility' should not simply be abandoned to the right-wing--into fits of screaming incomprehension.

However, there are many different ways of being working-poor, and, as is clear, if, say, you need a car to get a job (not at all that rare in the US) and you lack ready cash and good credit, your choices are limited and buying the used Saturn from the local bloodsuckers at 25% interest starts to look like an opportunity rather than a disaster.

This is even more the case when the extent of economic illiteracy (or maybe just basic innumeracy) is taken into account. Niall Ferguson is a condescending bastard, but he points to a real problem:

In 2006, the British Financial Services Authority carried out a survey of public financial literacy. It revealed that one person in five had no idea what effect an inflation rate of 5 per cent and an interest rate of 3 per cent would have on the purchasing power of their savings. One in 10 did not know which was a better discount for a television originally priced at £250: £30 or 10 per cent.

It makes you want to weep, doesn't it?

Of course, it has always been this way, and some people have always made bad choices. (And, though I can manage rather better than the people Ferguson cites, please do not ask me to explain the finer points of my mortgage to you...). Human psychology with regard to economic behaviour is a complex and often irrational thing.

But what does seem to be new is the fact that there is an entire industry devoted to taking advantage of those weaknesses in grand style. The point seems not to provide credit to assist the borrower in succeeding, but to count on the fact that they will fail.

Hence, the 'NINJA' loan for those with 'No Income, No Job and No Assets'.

And I think there is another antidote to the open contempt for the working poor that seems to roll so easily off the tongue of many commentators to the articles at the Nation, the Telegraph and Business Week: the 'There but for fortune' principle.

I have been very fortunate in life, but having worked (and borrowed) my own way through my (extended) education--and having known enough people who were living lives on the margins or who faced setbacks that were not of their own making--it is not easy to look down upon people who, for whatever reason, have found themselves in trouble.

And, unless you come from an extraordinarily sheltered background (in which case, you have nothing useful to add anyway), I imagine you'd have to admit the same.

Which is an excuse to offer this song, which I've always liked very much.

The end (at least of the semester)

A guest post, from The Wife.

**

Finished, finito, Schluß .... The semester is (finally) over. But just as there are still a few things that I need to get off my desk before I start thinking some serious thoughts, I need to get some things off me chest before I can settle down to recharge my batteries. So, this is just a brief cathartic rant about the last few frustrating weeks – after which I shall hold my tongue. Ignore at leisure.

Why rant if you have a cushy job with a semester’s sabbatical ahead of you? Because the institution in which I work is undergoing a Kafkaesque metamorphosis from which it will never recover and which has altered the profession I initially “went into” (back in those innocent days when it still seemed desirable) beyond recognition in a way that makes me weep. Don’t worry, I won’t go into the details of the current intellectual Gleichschaltung of German academia, other people have done that much more eloquently than me.

I just want to ventilate the lingering frustration of the past months (for the sake of above-mentioned catharsis). And I want to take this opportunity to emphasise how painful it is when, as you are trying to merely survive on less than six hours sleep a night for weeks on end (including weekends), a well-meaning colleague – though in the nicest and kindest possible way – tells you off for not showing up at a conference warming on the one single day that provided an opportunity to write a lecture during normal daytime hours rather than as part of yet another endless-seeming nightshift. And this, after telling me in her preceding sentence that I need to 'take some time out'.

So which advice should I follow. Or should I, at best, do both simultaneously?

Apparently these days, NOT to be schizophrenic is considered undesirable. Go, split up in as many selves as you can come up with to increase your bloody availability. I am, in fact, tired of being available and doing seven things at the same time. I too would like to be able – like apparently most men – to cultivate the old tunnel vision and FOCUS.

In the face of these demands, which are at complete odds with what academia was suppose to be at one point in my imagination (a safe ecological niche for misanthropic bookworms such as me) I’m getting increasingly exasperated by overeager students setting out on their GACs (Grand Academic Careers – herewith copyrighted) in their second semester (without anybody ever suggesting to them that they should).

Say no more – especially since Zadie Smith hits the nail on the head in the following description in On Beauty:

Zora was on her way to Dean French’s office to empty her hypothetical future into his lap. She was particularly concerned about her failure to get into Claire Malcolm’s poetry class last semester. She hadn’t yet seen the boards, but if it happened again then that could have a very adverse effect on her future, which needed to be discussed, along with many other troubling aspects of her future in all its futurity. This was the first of seven meetings that she had taken it upon herself to schedule for the initial week of the semester. Zora was extremely fond of scheduling meetings with important people for whom her future was not really a top priority (140).

No comment.

I have an odd relationship with Zadie Smith, whose books I tend to give a wide berth (because the wrong kind of people seem to like her for the wrong kinds of reasons) until some specific reason compels me to read them, typically with the effect that I then enjoy them so much that I wonder why the heck I hadn’t looked at them before. This was the case with White Teeth, which I’ve reread several times and set for classes.

On Beauty, too, is already a couple of years old, but maybe because of the title I feared an unfunny, clever-clever tract about art and lies à la Jeanette Winterson.

As usual with Smith I’m disconcerted by her humour, which strikes me as facetious and potentially unkind (and hence is embarrassingly close to my own). Yet ever so often she comes across as sane and clever – like in the following passage (featuring aforementioned Zora and Claire, about whom the former goes to complain to Dean French):

The food arrived. Claire was still speaking about the land. Zora, who had been clearly brooding on something, now spoke up. “But how do you avoid falling into pastoral fallacy – I mean, isn’t it a depoliticized reification, all this beauty stuff about landscape? Virgil, Pope, the Romantics. Why idealize?”
“Idealize?” repeated Claire uncertainly. “I’m not sure I really … You know, what I’ve always felt is, well, for instance, in The Georgics –“
“The what?”
“Virgil … In The Georgics, nature and the pleasures of the pastoral are essential to any …” began Claire, but Zora had already stopped listening. Claire’s kind of learning was tiresome to her. Claire didn’t know anything about theorists, or ideas, or the latest thinking. Sometimes Zora suspected her of being barely intellectual. With her, it was always “in Plato” or “in Baudelaire” or “in Rimbaud”, as if we all had time to sit around reading whatever we fancied. Zora blinked impatiently, visibly tracking Claire’s sentence, waiting for a period or, failing that, a semicolon in which to insert herself again.
“But after Foucault,” she said, seeing her chance, “where is there to go with that stuff” (218-19).

Reading this, I felt uncannily reminded of a conversation I had had with a student a few weeks previously – an unusually bright student, I have to add, whose optimism and enthusiasm I should applaud rather than ridicule – who in the course of this conversation suggested that I should “make more gender trouble”.

Not that I haven’t read Ms Butler (which the student implied, probably finding me “barely intellectual”) – actually, I did read her about 10 years ago, the well-thumbed and heavily annotated version of Gender Trouble in my office upstairs is testimony to that – but this day and age, with my need for sleep extending proportionally to my going grey, I can’t see the point in all this anymore. I wouldn’t even know how to make gender trouble (and didn’t know then). I don’t think the student knew either – but then Ms Butler remains completely abstract about the whole concept herself (unless what she means is being some kind of academic Melissa Etheridge without make-up and a propensity for garbled writing).

This makes the passage from Smith’s novel all the more disconcerting. On the one hand and from my momentary perspective, I identify completely with 53-year-old Claire. Although well over a decade away from that age I have developed a very mature appreciation of humble animals (oh, our hedgehog!) and plants (one of the greatest successes of the year, my tomatoes. I now have become the kind of person who hands out freezer bags with home-grown produce ….) as well as a penchant for weeding.

On the other hand, Zora is exactly what I was like not too long ago: madly into subversion and anything needlessly complicated. But since my halcyon days of postmodern transcendentalism are over, I have developed a new appreciation for people who say intelligent things about complicated things in a clear and straightforward manner (audio file).

Anyway, against the schizophrenia and fucking aging process, here’s some music:




Watch out for the great line: “Our earthly pleasures distract us against our will.” Dig this, Judith Butler! And then of course the wonderful question: “Are you hopeful or just gullible?” – which reminds me of, oh, several professional acquaintances.

Cheers and happy weekend!