Elatia Harris

One autumn decades ago, my then husband and I drove around France, hunting down art masterpieces. We were young and in no hurry to go home, on a mission to be swept off our feet. And France was very obliging that way.  We should have been happy — did we not live for love and art? I’ll never know how far from happy he was, but I was unhappy in spite of being in love and in France, and that’s pretty unhappy.

We came to Colmar, an Alsatian town of such reproachful quaintness that the locals might as well have wandered about in costume. The idea was to spend the day with the Isenheim Altarpiece, housed in the Musee d’Unterlinden, a modern structure built around the ruins of a Late Gothic convent. I knew the nearly 500 year-old work the way you do from art history class — tiny figures writhing inside churchy frames on a textbook page, 35 mm slides so old they reduced all European painting to a green, amber and russet wash on the pockmarked projection screen of the lecture hall. And I had come to know the painter, Matthias Grunewald — that’s a self-portrait under the title, above right — from his drawings, which had shown me I was in for something intense. You could count on German painting for that, couldn’t you?

Ready, as always, to be overwhelmed by painting, I made my way to the big light vaulted room where the Isenheim Altarpiece had been displayed ever since it narrowly escaped destruction by a mob in the French Revolution. I was geared up for a complex and imposing work about 12 feet across and 10 feet high, oil on huge panels made into hinged wings that opened out to three different views.  It could not possibly be seen all at once, art historians had written. Sometime after World War II, the hinged panels were dismantled and mounted free-standing, allowing you to walk among the three views: the Crucifixion, the Madonna and Child, the Annunciation, the Transfiguration, the concert of angels, the meeting in the desert of Paul the Anchorite and St. Anthony the Great. His demons.

Familiar territory, no? And, oh, had I not studied, believing my time with this work, though long in arriving, was as inevitable as the transit of Venus? I did not then understand that you could over-prepare for experience, grinding to powder your sense of encounter, building in a cosmic letdown as sturdy as a masonry ramp. This would not be the day I found out about that, however, for turning a corner into the big vaulted 700 year-old room in the Musee d’Unterlinden, I came face to face with an image of immeasurable suffering.

It was the Crucifixion, and it may be wrong to post a photo here, where few readers will take it to heart. For a long time, I have wanted to write for readers here about the Isenheim Altarpiece, but have stopped at two obstacles. First, while Internet photography is orders of magnitude better than any photos available to me back in the day, this work of art defies the camera like few others, defies it not like a painting but like an ocean. Second, it is not just religious painting, but passionately religious painting, and readers might be moved to dismiss it on those grounds, aided by photography that fails to draw them into that parallel world of freedom from the usual philosophical constraints.

Art is the direct language of the human condition, cutting through our stupefactions and sophistries with its matchless power to surprise. To do as I did, to go to Colmar and abide with these images, is to put yourself in the way of an infinite work of art, one that will throw you, and then haunt you, forever. It actually operates more like music — it will get you. It will show you the pain beyond naming and the love beyond love, and show you that you already know these things — and feel them, and are made of them — no matter what you think.

Although I am, despite many inhibitions, writing about the work of art that I find more powerful than any other, I am not alone in being superlatively moved by it. I am not alone, either, in appreciating the feebleness of words and photos to give an idea of it. It’s not about ideas — why would I want to give you an idea? For all I know I could be like the street ranter who — merely by quoting from it — gives you the very distinct idea not to read the Bible. There are works of art that are annihilating — blessedly so — to your powers to conjure them, and this is one of them. That annihilation can resolve to extreme curiosity about the painter. If it does, you’ll be almost on your own, out there with others who have been so curious they could find steady ground only in their imaginations. For of Matthias Grunewald — my software won’t make an umlaut over the “u,” but it doesn’t matter, because that’s not his real name — precious little is known.

Compared to Albrecht Durer, his almost exact contemporary, Mathis Gotthart or Nithart has barely a biography. There is no date of birth, and there was no teacher anyone can be sure of, although as a Rhinelander painting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Mathis must have known of Martin Schongauer. The plot of Paul Hindemith’s opera of the mid-1930’s, Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter), is counterfactual — except that it is established that Mathis was in great distress over the Peasants’ War. In the summer of 1525, when Mathis was within several years of the end of his life, 300,000 peasants rose up, from Muhlhausen in the north to Bern in the south. About 100,000 of these insurgents died, and not in battle, for, barely protesting, they were simply cut down. Order was restored, and for a long time after Mathis was known to wear a dark bandage over his face.

W. G. Sebald’s prose poem, After Nature, was published in 2003, shortly after he died, although it was written much earlier. Now, there’s a writer who can show you Mathis. In the first section of After Nature, “…As the Snow on the Alps,” Sebald enters the painter’s mind — I am convinced of it.  First, he quotes Dante.

                      Now go, the will within us being one:

                      You be my guide, Lord, master from this day,

                      I said to him; and when he, moved, led on

                      I entered on the steep wild-wooded way.

It is hard not to understand his use of these lines as both an allusion to the Dantesque themes in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and an invocation of the painter. How many people have summoned the painter to be their guide on the steep wild-wooded way?  They have seen the face of the painter in many presumed self-portraits, usually in St. Paul the Anchorite, below right. Alone in the Theban desert for almost 100 years, clothed and fed by a single palm tree until a raven began flying in with a daily ration of bread, Paul knew the contemplative life, and his grave was dug by lions. Adding decades to the face of the self-portrait drawing under the title, you can see the resemblance — but St. Anthony, too, below left, resembles the painter in a more courtly mode.

Sebald makes much of there being two of Mathis, one wilder than the other, one Grunewald, one Nithart. At the death of Mathis, Sebald tells what he left of wordly goods that were not paint, and then of paint, and then of luxury togs.

                                      lead white and albus,

                       Paris red, cinnabar, slate green,

                       mountain green, alchemy green, blue

                       vitreous pastes and minerals

                       from the Orient. Clothing, too,

                       beautiful, item: a gold-yellow pair of hose,

                       tunics, cinnamon-coloured, the lapels overlaid

                       in purpled velvet with black stitching,

                       a grey atlas doublet, a red slouch hat

                       and much exquisite adornment besides.

                       The estate in truth is that of two men, but

                       whether Grunewald, an inventor of singular

                       hues, shared his departed friend’s liking

                       for such gaudy arrayment

                       we cannot presume to say.

Mathis, painter of extremes, may have sensed a doubleness in his nature — more than most artists do, that is. Much more. In his self-portraits, Durer famously played up a likeness to Christ as most contemporaries would have recognized Him, but Mathis probably gave his own face to Lucifer. If it is Lucifer, blending in — sort of — with the musical angels who serenade the Madonna, sawing away at his instrument more timorously than the others, beringed as others are not, and more extravagantly befeathered than they.

A contemporary scholar, Dr. Ruth Mellinkoff, makes that argument and supports it soundly. I believe her because, although she was writing many, many years later, her interpretation corresponds to my own thinking the day I saw the Isenheim Altarpiece, and I am under no obligation to have better reasons than that for what I hold to be true of art. Is this not the very picture of a fallen angel setting about regaining insider status? Of a painter who is both insider and exile, dandy and damned? To have painted as Mathis did, you have to have known hell — you just don’t have to have ruled over it.

You must also have seen an eclipse, Sebald writes — “a catastrophic incursion of darkness.” In October of 1502, when Mathis was around 30, “the moon’s shadow slid over Eastern Europe,” and Mathis,

                              who repeatedly was in touch

                              with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,

                              will have travelled to see this event of the century,

                              awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,

                              so will have become a witness to

                              the secret sickening away of the world,

This then is how Mathis imagined the state of erosion, after nature, that he painted, the “ruining of life that in the end will consume even the stones.”

Mathis believed in Salvation, so it is possible to see his masterpiece as darker, even, than he can have conceived of it himself or intended it to be seen. Among those tights and doublets and rings, among those glorious colors he left behind — colors reputed to have been different from those of other painters, but they were not: he only used them differently — were found Lutheran tracts. The Isenheim Altarpiece was completed two years before the Reformation got underway, and it was painted for a special purpose. The Antonite friars at Isenheim, whose Abbot commissioned the work from Mathis, were a medical order, tending the sick for whom there were no cures. There was a plague of ergotism in the land, and those who ate milled rye could become fantastically sick, losing their minds and rotting as if with leprosy before, unswiftly, they died.

As there was no cure, so there was no prevention — anyone, at any time, could become ill like that. When they did, they were brought to the chapel at Isenheim to have before them a testament to the redemptive power of suffering. They were lain down there the better to find meaning in torment, to place hope in a distant realm, to believe that the love of God included them still and would bear them up. This is where the enormous winged altarpiece, in those days, fit in.

Michael Blim

“The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying “this is mine” and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race have been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men, “Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.”
–Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”

Two weeks ago (see “Stop the Home Wrecking and Protect America’s Future, 3qd, 11/3/08), I argued that homeowners in trouble should be helped, and that helping them should necessarily trigger a discussion of whether it is wise and just to make homeowning a universal condition in America.

I think we should do both. Most people agree that homeowners in trouble should be helped, though many often carp about how undeserving homeowners will get over on any national solution that helps all. And providing housing has been national policy since the New Deal. The Federal Housing Act of 1934 sought to encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions” as well as “to provide a system of mutual mortgage insurance.” Successive acts of Congress in 1937, 1949, 1968, 1986, and 2008 affirmed and extended the national commitment to what the 1949 act called the national goal of “decent, safe, and sanitary” housing for all.

My column received several thoughtful responses. One I found especially challenging. The writer argued that favoring homeowners discriminated against renters, and that helping people own homes was encouraging the growth of a conservative class of property-rights protectors. To move forward, the writer argued, we need to be free from property, not encumbered and conditioned by it.

As the wonderful quotation from Rousseau suggests, my 3QD respondent’s beliefs find good company in a long political and philosophical tradition fearful of the reactionary effects on the human condition of property-owning. Suffice it to recall that Thomas More in Utopia abolished private property altogether. And though Rousseau’s position on property was in fact contradictory, his attack found voice among anarchists, socialist, and communists – in short, every major radical political movement of the 19th Century. Both the Russian and Chinese revolutions sought immediately to confiscate and collectivize private property at no little cost to its owners, and with few concessions to the masses that might have harbored a bit of desire for a touch of property too.

Today, not only some people on the left still feel that property-owning, in this case homeowning, nourishes the seeds of reaction in the bosom of the body politic, but others, notably on the right politically, resent policies that facilitate homeowning. “Political extortion” by left-wing organizations such as ACORN using the Community Reinvestment Act as their club, Villain Phil in a National Review editorial (September 22, 2008) argues, “’trumped businesses’ normal bottom-line concerns.” People, according to Villain, got mortgages without the requisite income, assets, or credit, and he attributes a reverse racisim, what he sees as the bending of the housing market by the Clinton administration to serve low-income, predominately minority residents of big cities, for the sub-crime crisis.

I would submit that both sides have it wrong.

Both sides need to acknowledge that not only is providing housing a 75-year old national priority, but the policy has supported the acquisition of housing by 70% of all American households. Homeowning is normative. I think it is also very reasonable to assume that homeowning is key to the American outline of the good life. Having a home too helps people support a stable household life and keep their housing costs down, or at least more stable, instead of finding themselves exposed to the much less controllable rental market.

My challenge to both sides then is: who are you to tell a grand majority of Americans whether they should or should not own homes? Do either of you really want to redefine the American Dream to suit your political ends, the latter putatively made to serve the people, without regard to the life choices they have made?

Those on the right might reflect on the fact that conservatives since the Reagan-Thatcher period have championed homeowning as the lynch pin of the ownership society. Even the present President Bush once envisioned it as the cornerstone to his attempts to return to a society in effect without government — a society in which everyone might be property-owners, and thereby solid conservative citizens. Where are these voices from the right now? Why is the Bush administration helping banks instead of homeowners, those new members of the “ownership society?” Explain to me why putting families in homes is not the most important thing a conservative administration can do, given its conservative healing powers.

Those on the left might reflect on their (and our) past. Does revolutionary socialism require that the people be dispossessed of all of their property down to and including their houses for the greater good? Or would justice be better served by extending homeowning to the remaining 30% without homes?

The 20th Century’s two greatest revolutions in terms of size and scope, the Russian and Chinese, committed unspeakable crimes as they confiscated the private property of the masses and created a state in which the people became abject subjects of a tyranny that still visits people’s memories and their children’s dreams. (See my column, My Summer with Stalin, for reflections on this topic). A patch of land, a small flat — these bits of life and their homely but personal accoutrements provide us with shelter for our spirits, some respite from the impressments of authority.

I would suggest to those taken with the revival of anarchist sentiments that while “property is theft,” homeowning provides some precious autonomy from the state. As derivative as the maxim “a man’s home is his castle” is of a certain possessive individualism, it is also the foundation in the Anglo-American world for the right to be left alone, as Justice Douglas put it. How does therefore homeowning not rise above class resentment and serve the greater end of a more just society?

If one must judge in theory, rather than relative to people’s preferences in a relatively democratic society, I would argue Rousseau had it wrong, and his cross-channel colleague Locke had it right. In fact, it was Locke who figured out something important about the relation of property to revolution. The totally dispossessed often lack the resources to mount a revolution, and even if successful are brought up shortly under one tyranny or another. Little property-holders, peasant with their plots, artisans with their workshops, workers with their modest bungalows, are often the one more capable of bringing on salubrious social change of greater as well as lesser intensities.

It is crucial that we re-point our politics toward homeownership — its protection in this perilous moment and its spread to all. This is the goose and gander of the thing for people on both sides of the question.

This is a ruinous time for many, and can get much worse.

If Lincoln is quoted in times of national division, Roosevelt is just the tonic for times of national peril:

“It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

–Franklin Roosevelt
Second Inaugural Speech
1937

by T. K. Armistead

For those that are not familiar with the story of the prodigal son it seemed to have gone this way. A man had two sons, the younger son demanded his share of his inheritance while his father is still living, and went off to a distant country where he “wasted his substance with riotous living”, and eventually had to take work as a swine herder –most likely a low point, because swine are not kosher in Judaism–. There he came to his senses, and decided to return home and threw himself on his father’s mercy, thinking that even if his father decided to disown him, that being one of his servants was still far better than tending pigs. But when he returned home, his father greeted him with open arms, and hardly gave him a chance to express his repentance; he killed a fatted calf to celebrate his return. The older brother becomes jealous at the favored treatment of his faithless brother and upset at the lack of reward for his own faithfulness. But the father responded:

Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. — (Luke 15:32, KJV)

As an expatriate black American living deep in the heart of Western Europe I, like many others had turned my back and dulled my heart to America. After the election of George W. Bush and the subsequent re-election I believed that we, as a country lost its way. I couldn’t identify with any of the new values of the last eight years and felt I was no longer useful to the cause of the country. I stunted my patriotism and began to make a life in Europe with only passing interest and little attention paid to the country I once lived in. I became an American in name only, a blue passport holder, a cynic, a critic to all American interests both foreign and domestic. I became disenchanted with America and its many phrases in hyperbole. “We are the greatest nation on earth” people would exclaim but to outsiders the “greatest” nation on earth brought terror and fear. America seemed hell bent on separating the world into to halves and I felt I had the straddle the two halves surreptitiously.

After 9/11 there was a sense of love for the gentle giant that was wounded unjustly, everyone I met on the streets of Italy rallied around my family. They wanted to hold us and take care of us. We were flooded with stories of how someone’s uncle was rescued from starvation by some American solider or how a friend of a friend got a little money from his American friend and that helped start a business. This was the America they knew and now simply because of my nationality, I was now like family. My landlord, at the time, lived in America for a while and said this me, with tears in his eyes and the thickest Neapolitan accent you could imagine: “America always helps everyone out and now it is time for her to be helped, if you need anything at any time just ask to me”. I never took him up on the offer, because I had no family lost and zero damage to any property I left back in the States. But the sentiment was taken and we moved on.

Some of the patriotism came back after 9/11, I began to watch the news and saw how the people of the Nation rallied around one other. It was beautiful, it was hopeful, I was wrong. By the end of 2001 we not only made some bad decisions but, in my opinion, were set on the wrong track completely. All of the sympathy we earned with 9/11 began to erode into vitriolic attacks on America and conversations, prefaced with: “I know it’s not you but…” I became an unwilling surrogate for all the anger and confusion aimed at the U.S. I retreated further into my apathy being momentarily released from it by 9/11. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.”

Life continued as normal with the regular blunders, hypocrisies and mishaps from the Bush Administration, then on a normal day I happened to turn on the Oprah Winfrey show—through the miracle of satellite television– and caught a glimpse of a fellow by the name of Barrack Obama. I was curious and assumed like most people that he was a bit audacious, hopeful, naïve and kind of cute. I followed politics, but only as a curiosity, I lost all hope in the system and would live as most expat Americans do, quietly praying never to be sent ‘home’. But I have to say as the election drew to a close I began to get on board with the big idea of small change and felt like maybe this could happen. The night of the election I put my children to bed, kissed my husband and prepared for the long night ahead. I watched as the states began stacking up in Barack Obamas favor and grew more positive with each one. When the election was called at 11pm eastern time, 6am my time, I dropped to my knees a wept. I wept for all my relatives who felt fear in believing, I wept for all the men who had to wear the “I am a man” signs in the south, I wept for the WWII vets who came home from relieving oppression only to face it at home, I wept in shame for doubting my country, I wept for the challenge of a hopeful man against the winds of doubt and lastly I wept for the knowledge that the Whitehouse, I visited as a child, will now have a family that resides in it that looks like mine. As a matter of fact I tear up at every mention of President-elect Barack Obama because I am proud, I am on-board with hope, and I am back to loving the country I almost gave up on. Hopefully she welcomes me back…

I would like to end this open letter to America the way I did when I woke my children up the day after the election, please forgive the sentimentality because this really happened, it went like this: Good morning girls, Barack Obama won last night and I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands ONE nation under God INDIVISIBLE with liberty and justice for ALL. It was a little corny but necessary. Oh and there is no need to kill that fatted calf for me because I’m a vegetarian.

Respectfully,

A Former Prodigal Daughter

By Shiban Ganju

Her mouth stretched with a condescending smile and her face reflected scorn. “You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” With this remark Sara Palin achieved a desirable target: she lost more votes.

Her defeat ensures a reprieve–probably temporary–from her contempt for research on other animals: worms, bacteria, fungi, fish, mice, rats, dogs, pigs, guinea pigs, baboons, monkeys, chimpanzees and many others. With their bodies–dead or alive–scientists have investigated physiology, developed drugs, designed instruments and evolved surgical procedures. The experimental use and abuse of these unwilling partners, especially of higher order animals and primates, has provoked ethical controversies, but the bacteria, fungi, worms and fish, have remained outside our ethical dilemma. These experimental organisms have yielded more fundamental knowledge because at genetic and molecular level some mechanisms stay unaltered in evolution from simple to complex organisms.

Fruit fly has hit the headlines but other lowly, yet equally interesting humble organisms – Caenorhabditis elegans (C elegans), Zebra fish, Escherichia coli (E coli) and many others deserve our gratitude. So much is already known about them because of years of work by thousands of investigators that it will be foolish to abandon them for political expedience.

What makes some organisms favorites for biologists?

Several techniques are in practice to study genes. One of them is to remove a gene or disable it partially or completely. The consequential defect in development defines the function of that gene. Another technique deciphers the DNA sequence and matches its sequence with a gene of a different animal or human. (Common ancestry in evolution has ensured similarity of genes or homologs in deferent species.) To draw any conclusion from these experiments requires animals with short life cycles. Investigators prefer those creatures for molecular and genomic research that develop fast, multiply rapidly and are inexpensive to maintain.

Fruit fly is Drosophila melanogaster – a 3mm long insect- that has been studied for a century, the longest period for any organism. Mutants for many of its 12000 genes are available and exposure to radiation and chemical can induce new mutations.It carries three pairs autosomal chromosomes and an X and Y chromosome. Its half-millimeter egg hatches into a larva, pupa and adult fertile insect in about 12 days. As the larva grows, the numbers of cells stay constant but increase in size to accommodate chromosomes, which divide hundreds of times but remain attached at the stands forming massive chromosomes. Small number of chromosomes, and their thickness at larva stage with light and dark bands make them accessible under a microscope.

Caenorhabditis elegans is a round worm, which lives independently in soil and feeds on bacteria and fungi. This multicellular, 1 mm long worm is transparent and is easy to maintain on a feed of E coli. It is a good model to study developmental, behavioral and neurobiology.

C elegans makes embryos in 12 hours and adults develop in 2.5 days. Total life span is over 2 weeks. It has 959 somatic cells and 302 neurons. Biologists have already mapped the development of all somatic cells and also traced all neural synapses, making it the only organism whose complete neural wiring is known, which makes it prime candidate for the study of neurobiology.

It has a relatively small genome and has 5 pairs of autosomal and 1 or 2 X chromosomes. Investigators have already mapped its 23,399 genes and have developed techniques their manipulation. 35% of its genes have human homologs.

Zebra fish or Danio rerio serves well in the study of vertebrate genetics. They grow from egg to larva in 3 days. The embryo is transparent and develops outside the mother, making it accessible for experiments. They can regenerate skin, heart, fins and even the brain in larval stage making them eminently exciting for the study of healing mechanisms after injury.

A pigmentation gene needed for melanin production in the fish has helped in comparative genomics to identify a similar gene in humans. One base pair difference in this gene differentiates European whites and African blacks.

Recently investigators in Children’s hospital in Boston have developed a new variant of this fish, which has a transparent body. This allows direct visualization of internal organs, production of blood cells and spread of cancer cells almost in real time in the live fish.

Escherichia coli is the workhorse in industrial microbiology. Insertion of an external gene into the Ecoli genome has laid the foundation of biotechnology. The technology helps production of therapeutic proteins. One of the first applications of this recombinant technique was the commercial production of insulin.

These are examples of some humble organisms among many that have improved human health. Scientists working on them deserve more support and not derision.

E coli and other poor organisms may be only four years away from Palin’s contempt, if the rumors of her presidential aspirations are true. She, the proponent of intelligent design, should be aware of another myth: the post election discourse among fruit flies. 

What did one fruit fly say to the other? “If SP is creation of any design, surely it cannot be intelligent.”

///
The Hunter
Jim Culleny

I hike up a hill at a clip
just to keep this heart alive.

The Hunter’s over my left shoulder
with arms raised, always
in his almost-never-ending black
place in the sky surrounded by
blazing stars in utter space.

Skirting single Cheryl’s
I wonder again, what is it she does.
In summer her shingled ranch
is ablaze with lilies.
She works them with a goofy hat
stopping now and then to swab sweat.

I watch while beyond the blue
Orion stands with his legs apart.
“I’ll live near forever,” he mocks,
and his belt-stars testify.

I pick the pace up now and feel
the suck of cool air into my lungs.

At the hill’s top, the road’s crown
is the pate of a disturbed
menace standing; straining
beneath asphalt; bending it up.

A cleat-pocked phone pole’s
draped lifeline-wires
disappear into the dark.

An old sugar maple’s there too,
its cleft bark bathed in amber sodium vapor,
bare limbs a wild, strobed lattice
moving at my pace as I pass.

While the Hunter in the background,
knees ever sprung for action
perseverates for years and years,
I whistle past the graveyard popping Lipitor.

///

by Beth Ann Bovino

Two months ago Robin Varghese of 3QD turned the ripe old age of 40 and celebrated with many of his closest friends in Vegas, including me. Robin planned to make his riches at the tables, but success eluded him (and almost everyone else). And while Robin still has a few more years left in him to repair the damage Vegas did to his nest egg, the rest of America is aging and moving close to retirement. Most Americans are not prepared to stop working as they age.  With baby boomers close to retirement, a weakening economy could force many older Americans to stop working earlier than planned, while the weak stock and housing markets could mean that they will have less wealth than they expected. 

David Wyss, of Standard and Poor’s (my boss), wrote that the combination of rapidly approaching retirement and the weak financial markets is adding to Americans’ fears about post-retirement financial security.  But, that hasn’t been enough to induce more saving, as the household saving rate remains near 0%. The lack of saving has helped keep economic growth positive, but it will make it more difficult for older Americans to finance their retirement. (“Older But Not Wiser: Why Americans Remain Dangerously Unprepared For Retirement”).

Most Americans continue to rely on the government to provide for their retirement.  But with everyone unsure about future Medicare and Social Security benefits, including our politicians, Americans are doing little to increase their wealth before retirement. More retirees may seek more post-retirement work to cushion the blow, a so-called bridge job in early retirement. Unfortunately, health and labor market conditions often prevent even those who intend to work from doing so. In addition, in a weakening economy, bridge jobs could be harder to find.

The oldest Baby Boomers turn 62 this year, so these Baby Boomers are about to step into the post-employment world. Based on 2004 data from a recent paper, only 37% have a traditional pension coming from their employer (down from 60% in 1983), with 43% of workers likely to suffer a significant drop in living standards after retirement.  When most Americans finally think about growing old, it’s very hard to play catch-up for a lifetime of not saving.

Job Insecurity

The retirement decision can be shaped by the labor market.  In periods when jobs are less secure, like now, workers might choose an early retirement, either in response to a sweetened retirement offer or under the impression that jobs aren’t available for someone their age. With the Baby Boomers now starting to turn 62, the number of workers near the average retirement age will jump.  A jump in layoffs could convince many of these workers to retire early, either because of buy-out offers or as a result of weak job prospects. A worker laid off at the age of 62 could well decide that it’s better to retire than look for work, in a weak labor market.

The result could be a drop in payroll employment with a much smaller rise in the unemployment rate, with these workers not even counted as “discouraged” by the Labor Department, because they will report themselves as retired. It may also explain why we have recently seen a sharp drop in the number of people employed, while the unemployment rate is relatively low. If they are good health and not ready to stay home, early retirees may find work, likely something part-time. This extended employment may also be necessary for many retirees who haven’t saved enough to live on comfortably. Note that the retirement age was set at 65 in 1933, when life expectancy was 63.

Where Did All The 401ks Go?

The poor performance of the asset markets in recent years is another problem for the near-retired. Down almost 40% from a year ago in October, equity markets still haven’t found a bottom, with the decline in home prices is also eroding wealth. Most retirees live in their homes rather than on them.  Still the wealth in second homes and investment properties is part of retirement assets and will hurt their plans to take that next vacation to Vegas.  In addition, low interest rates mean low incomes for retirees. Stocks aren’t rising, home prices are falling, and bonds aren’t yielding enough to live on. If their asset values are falling, and their savings rates near 0%, the prospects of a comfortable retirement are receding.  It’s another reason to work past retirement, if they can.

No Answers Yet

Americans are worried about retirement. The 2008 Retirement Confidence Survey (Employee Benefit Research Institute, April 2008) showed that only 18% of workers were very confident they will have enough money in retirement, well below the 27% seen a year ago. The picture deteriorated even more for those already in retirement. 

However, the fear isn’t translating into much action. The household saving rate rose to 1.3% in September, but is still very low, with not much current income is going into savings. Only 64% of workers report that they’re saving for retirement now, and only 51% have any nonretirement savings.  The only response seems to be to retire later. Ten years ago, the planned retirement age was 62; current workers plan to retire at 65. Those who express the least confidence in their ability to retire comfortably also report higher planned retirement ages.

The bottom line: We’re in trouble. The average American is worried about retirement but is doing little to provide for it. Maybe working longer is the best answer. After all, the retirement age was set at 65 in 1933, when average life expectancy was 63. With life expectancy today at 78 years, perhaps we should just plan to work until we’re 80.

Notes on Hybridity and Diaspora

Justin E. H. Smith

I.

Perhaps it was the flood of reggae and calypso and Afrobeat videos cheering Obama on in the final weeks. Or perhaps it was the Haitian man I saw in October at the Lake Champlain border crossing just north of Plattsburgh, waiting to have his digital fingerprints taken, along with those of his wife and two small children, by some DHS agents who seemed right at home under the portraits of Bush and Cheney still hanging in that dreary, fluorescently lit place. The Haitian was wearing a brightly colored shirt with an oversized image of Obama’s face on it. The Americans made a point of taking their sweet time.

I could hear them talking about their fishing boats, and could easily imagine eight of them getting together and painting the letters m-a-v-e-r-i-c-k on their flabby bellies, displaying them proudly while shouting at a Palin rally as though it were some kind of sports event. The era of their proud dominance was drawing to a close, and the downtrodden Haitian family appeared to be being punished for it, if only in a mild, bureaucratic way. The Obama t-shirt signalled: however much we depend on you to let us cross the border, however little we fit with your image of America, we, Caribbean blacks, have a shared history with you former colonies, and it’s about to be recognized. 

Obama was just trying to get elected president, but knowingly or not he was making pan-African history.

Haiti was the first black republic, founded in 1804 through the audacious struggle of former slaves, led by François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, against the British who had brought them there as free labor.  Toussaint’s revolution was both an extension and an inversion of the French and American revolutions that immediately preceded it. An extension, insofar as it clearly appropriated the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, and fraternity in rallying the slaves against injustice; an inversion to the extent that no theorist of political equality, not Rousseau, not Kant, not Jefferson, had ever said that equality must needs be extended to unequals.

The Enlightenment was understood to be local, and presupposed a vast surrounding globe of perpetual and unchanging darkness. Thus Kant, once hearing the report of something seemingly reasonable uttered by an African, entertained that possibility for a moment and quickly concluded that the man “was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” In metaphysics Kant was able to produce an a priori deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, but confronted with a potential sign of the intellectual equality of blacks and whites he was unable to avoid a simple non sequitur.

How, one might ask, could a country born of Enlightenment ideals, and built on slavery, be, as Obama has said it is, perfectible?  And why do so many have the sense that he is the one to finally set us along this path, that, as has been grandiosely claimed, the Civil War finally ended on November 4, 2008, and Reconstruction finally began?

II.

My Bulgarian friend said, watching McCain’s dignified concession speech, and then the rousing announcement from Obama that followed: “In the absence of other information, just watching these two speeches, I would have preferred McCain.” I insisted that the waves of rhetoric, the geographical shout-outs, the call-and-response invocation to declare “Yes we can!” in unison, were just Obama tapping into a style, one that extends back through Martin Luther King (“Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado,” etc.), and that is a deep and venerable tradition of preacherly oratory.

I knew what she meant, though. I’ve always hated audience participation of any sort, and would no doubt feel most awkward in a South Side church service, and that for nothing having to do with the color of my skin. This is just not my register of speech. I like irony, and the shading of even the most sincere claims with a hint of detachment. And when I’m speaking in front of a crowd, I certainly don’t want to be interrupted by any enthusiastic shouts of agreement. In this respect, I especially liked McCain’s visible relief at being done with the whole damned thing, and his visible annoyance at having to hear one last round of jeers from the by-now completely marginalized ‘base’.

Yet nothing could have made me happier that night than to hear Obama doing his best to channel MLK to the new base of American politics, a base that can’t possibly share in any of the nativist bullshit of the Palinites because it, unlike so many of us Europeans who find ourselves in the New World, has not forgotten that it is a diaspora.

III.

‘Black’ is not a natural kind, a real subset of homo sapiens, and does not appear to be, in all cultural contexts, even a phenomenally salient kind. That is, there are well-documented cases of interactions between people we would identify as black and white, in which the supposed blackness and whiteness of the different parties do not even seem to have been noticed. 

A quick survey of the history of slavery shows that the 18th century’s preoccupation with supposed racial differences between Europeans and Africans emerges not from the perception of context-free physiological or behavioral differences, but rather as a sort of ad hoc and a posteriori rationalization of an economic institution that could easily have seemed ineliminable, even if in its West African and trans-Atlantic form it had only existed since the 16th century. Prior to that, the majority of slaves bought and sold by Europeans were traded in cities like Venice, Genoa, and Constantinople, and were captured and transported mostly from Eastern Europe.

Slave-traders, then, did not go to Western Africa out of any a priori commitment to the subhuman status of Africans, and thus to their eligibility for a life of slavery. Rather, it seems, an economic necessity compelled the traders to look to Africa for the natural resource that sustained their already deeply entrenched industry, and in consequence, over time, first an Atlantic, and then a global racial order emerged in which the subordination of Africans came to seem written into the natural scheme of things. The people being sold and sent off to the New World were not, at least initially, undifferentiated blacks. Rather, they were simply prisoners, sold like the poor Crimean Slavs before them, by dint of bad luck and according to ancient rules of warfare. Whiteness seems to have been constructed over the course of the 18th century, when slavery was already in full swing, as a side-project of the Enlightenment’s focus upon Europe’s purportedly unique political and moral achievements, a focus which coincided with an unprecedented rise of interest among natural historians in taxonomizing the kinds to which nature gives rise.

Soon enough, it was inevitable that the European would come to be conceived as a kind, like the polar bear, in contrast with the other related but different regional varieties of the same family. It was inevitable also that, in an era of intense anatomical curiosity and experimental precision, the temperamental and intellectual differences between kinds would be conceived not as rooted fundamentally in a difference between souls, but rather as written into the features of the body. Thus from Diderot’s Encyclopédie we learn that “Malpighi, Ruysch, Litre, Sanctorini, Heister and Albinus have conducted curious researches on the skin of negroes.” There was no shortage of treatises bearing titles such as Dissertation sur la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, incorporating the latest discoveries from Newtonian physics and optics in the quest for an answer to this natural enigma. Of all the great Enlightenment thinkers, Johann Gottfried Herder appears to have stood alone when he observed that we might just as well ask after the ‘physical cause’ of our skin’s whiteness, as after the cause of the blackness of theirs.

IV.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi— out of Africa there is always something new. In antiquity this motto was meant to express the widespread belief that Africa, subject to a sort of inversion of normal natural laws, was a place where wanton mating between animals of separate species perpetually gives rise to new and exotic forms. In the ancient world, nothing out of Africa had a fixed essence. It was the land of perpetual flux, where the heat and humidity alone could generate new creatures out of bubbles in the slime of the Nile, where, in stark opposition to static Greece, like must not always beget like.

How many times over the past two years have we been reminded that Obama’s father was black, while his mother was white? Why is this so remarkable? We know that there has been a persistent tendency in natural history to conceive the mixed-race child as a problem, as a curiosity, a rupture in the ordinary course of like’s begetting like. 18th-century natural historians were surprised to hear reported back from the plantations that “mulatto” children, unlike the mules from which they have their name, are in turn able to have children of their own. With mules, nature had ensured by making them sterile that the process of generating monstrosities through hybridization would come to an end after just one generation, whereas human mulattoes were evidently capable of generating infinitely many new combinations of racial types.  New categories had to be invented to try to keep up with these new combinations –quadroons, octoroons, etc.– but eventually our finite minds lose count and we shift the hybrids into one natural category or other.

My copy of the Lehrbuch der Rassenkunde und Rassenhygiene, by some long-dead Herr Professor Doktor, features several pages of color photographs, impressive in their verisimilitude for a book published in 1941, of various faces thought to exemplify various racial types. The pure types enjoy pride of place in the scheme– with few modifications, Nazi racial science continued to offer variations on the theme, already in place with Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa [On the Native Variety of the Human Race] of 1795, of a handful of elementary races (in Blumenbach’s version the European, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay), from which all the other groups that do not quite match the specifications for any of these five may be derived. 

These other groups, the Mischlinge, make a mess of the effort to treat races as kinds analogous to species –again, if there were any real analogy then Obama, among others, would have come out sterile– and with each page of photographic plates, identifying, e.g., the Mongol-Slav Mischling, or the Near-Eastern-Mediterranean Mischling with substantial Alpine admixture, Nazi racial science seems to be creating new Porphyrian epicycles: complications of the system, meant to keep it adequate to the phenomena, but in the end only weighing it down to the point of collapse.

V.

It was moreover inevitable that, by the end of the 19th-century, the descendants of New World slaves would internalize and echo the language of racial difference that a century earlier had served as a naturalization of the global order of racial inequality. Marcus Garvey, and later the early enthusiasts of the Rastafari movement, set out to construct an ancient and naturalized pedigree for pan-African unity. Many adopted the ancient Hellenic habit, resurrected by Blumenbach, of synecdochically making ‘Ethiopia’ stand in for the entire continent (‘Ethiopian’, as used by Aristotle, seems to derive from aithiops— ‘burnt face’). 

Now Ethiopia works well as a synecdoche of Africa for any modern spiritual movement loosely rooted in Abrahamic monotheism, since that distinguished nation is one of the most ancient bastions of Orthodox Christianity, and even has its own holy text, the Kebra Nagast, most widely circulated in Ge’ez but apparently written first in Arabic, dating from the 14th century and explaining how the emperors of Ethiopia descend directly from the Solomonic line. Early translations of this text appear to be the source of the legend in the late middle ages of ‘Prester John’, the great Christian king of a faraway Eastern land.  (In the sundry versions of the legend, it is always Prester John’s ‘Orientalness’, and not his blackness, that is held remarkable.) In a world dominated by Christian powers, it seems a natural tendency among the dominated to seek to understand their history as something unfolding from, and written into, the scripture of the rulers. Everyone wants to be in the Book.

Emperor Haile Selassie managed in 1930 to become the only African ruler of a country not dominated by a European colonial power. This was an impressive stature, and it inspired more than civic, and more than local, loyalty. By mid-century, he was hailed as far away as the Caribbean as the reincarnation of Christ and as ‘the conquering lion of Judah’. Who does not know the story of the emperor’s ecstatic welcome at  Kingston airport by tens of thousands of admirers? It is said that the sky cleared up after months of flooding the very moment he stepped out of the plane.

Some who would like a cult of personality cannot manage to generate one, and some who never ask for it find a cult sprouting up around them quite spontaneously. Bob Avakian, whose Revolutionary Communist Party is just about the only remnant of the unreconstructed Left too surly to catch even a trace of Obama fever, would attest that mass political movements cannot happen without them, so naturally he is working hard at having one constructed around himself. Avakian thinks Mao did the cult-of-personality thing best, and that the Chinese example shows that, if done correctly, the personality at the center can move the masses without having to take recourse to any claims about some magical connection to the divine order beyond this worldly political one.

In the end, in the grip of cruel famine, the massively incompetent and indifferent conquering lion of Judah was routed, in 1974, by Mengistu Haile Mariam, the leader of a communist military junta that would rule until 1987, apparently without any of Mao’s charisma or any perceived need to cultivate it. Rule by force worked just fine, for a while, though today no one smokes any ganja or sings of ‘one love’ in honor of the dreaded Derg.

Obama for his part could not have been elected without a sort of cult of his own. When the Reverend Raphael Warnock of the Ebenezer Baptist Church declares that “Barack Obama stood against the fierce tide of history and achieved the unimaginable. But he did not get here by himself. Give God some credit. He is the Lord,” we may be forgiven for losing track of which name binds which pronoun. Obama is already being cast in a Biblical light, as the fulfillment of something ancient.

All this could perhaps be a cause for some concern for those of us who have in common with Mao and Avakian, if nothing else, the belief that politics is about this world. But Obama certainly could not do any worse than Haile Selassie. The Ethiopian emperor seems to have basked in his unearned glory. Obama, if the early bubblings of such a cult eventually come to full boil, will, one hopes, play the role of a saint malgré lui, depicted on icons and exalted in hymns even as he goes about the ordinary daily business of running a country, an unmoved mover of diasporic fantasies. 

Ethiopia may have been an important node in the premodern, Arab-dominated slave-trade, but it was entirely peripheral to the trans-Atlantic trade that took off in the 16th century under the control of the Spanish, Portuguese, and British. Why then did Jamaicans look to Haile Selassie, as if he had anything to do with their own history, and as if he could offer them any hope for amelioration of their plight?  (At some point, he had to kindly ask them to try to work out their problems at home, rather than to keep their hearts set on what he indulgently referred to as ‘repatriation’). One might just as well ask why a Haitian invests his hope for the future in a half-Kansan, half-Kenyan American. A new community was brought into existence, was forced into existence, by the Enlightenment European invention of race. Obama’s election could be the first time in history that that community has a real leader, and a real reason for hope, if not a promise that that hope will be fulfilled.

The town of Washington DC, where I live, is lilliputian in many ways. There are a few giant Gullivers, surrounded by droves of busy-body Lilliputians. I figure among the diminutive, cause-obsessed lilliputian hordes. We run to and fro with much speed but variable impact, given our small stature. We are disposable and easily replaced; not so the giants whose favor we seek.

The slow-moving Gullivers to whom we cater are the official faces of our body politic. The limited number of giants accentuates their visibility, particularly as they control policy and choose how to spend the assets they obtain from more hordes like me, only further from view.

The reason for my busy-bodyness before these giants is that they dispose of the public funding for which cause-obsessed little people like me must compete. If we win, we use the wealth to assist and rebuild other lands that are at war or are emerging from conflict. The giants grant us these assets with the understanding that they get the credit for any success we achieve through our work. Every act abroad must reflect the grandness of our giants.

Speculation among the hordes

Most of the distant places that benefit from our giants’ largesse are poor, diseased and war-wracked, with little immediate strategic interest to the giants themselves. If one of these places fell off the map today, our giants would not miss it.

Why do the giants spend our public funds on crippled, diseased and impoverished places, far from these shores? How do they use the credits they accrue by doing this? We speculate over this. There is no consensus among giants or nor do they offer explicit rationales for these programs. Giants can differ bitterly between themselves over why, where and how they commit public assets in this way.

On the rare occasion when we are face-to-face with such a giant, we defend our cause. To maintain funding levels, we argue that poorer, unstable lands are in the giants’ interest. We try to be inventive in our reasoning, but in the end we use a standard set of justifications.

A new set of giants is preparing to assume control of our land, our public assets and, possibly, the ways we engage less fortunate, non-strategic lands. In the short term, a handful of distraught and tragic places will continue to consume the majority of our assistance because despite their chaos, they are considered strategic. Our current set of giants believe these lands are strategic because they harbor our enemies. Something local must be done to deter or befriend them. They cannot hate us; they do not know our beneficence.

The continent that wouldn’t go away

A strange twist of fate, the majority of these catastrophic lands with disastrous leaders happen to find themselves in the same neighborhood. Their neighborhood is large, and fills an entire continent. Because this neighborhood is geographically self-contained, it is easily ignored, like a garbage dump outside town. The people on this continent sense their plague and leave in droves. Some manage to arrive at our shores. Their presence here humanizes the pandemonium they leave behind, so strange is it to us. That they survived their ordeal is miraculous, but sheds no light on a solution.

The current set of outgoing giants have done little decisive for this troubled continent, despite having spent more on foreign crises than any previous body politic run by giants. Before the new set of giants settles in, we the cause-obsessed wish to present our strategies for saving the lost continent.

i. No jobs without infrastructure. Without jobs, dependency on foreign assets will continue indefinitely. There is very little electricity or roads on the lost continent. The private sector cannot incubate or grow because indirect costs, owing to absent infrastructure, are prohibitively high. Another land with giants for leaders–China–is bartering road building against access to raw materials (minerals, oil, timber) in these lands. No money exchanges hands, which is good because corrupt leaders would otherwise steal it. It is bad because it infantilizes these leaders, letting them rule while robbing them of genuine responsibility.

ii. No prosperity without stability. For the last eight years, our giants have repeatedly offered this continent all-expenses paid democratic elections. They believed that democracy would solve the continent’s problems. Yet there is almost no clean water, medicine, or personal safety for the people of this continent. Many of the new democracies our leaders purchased are skin deep, or have collapsed. The new set of giants should focus on providing security and infrastructure, because fragile or nascent democracies cannot survive without this basic dual foundation.

iii. No accountable governance without education. We wonder why there are not more revolutions on this continent: there is much bloodshed without political intent. Why do they not overthrow their venal political class? Because they lack an effective, sustained system of education. Without education, manipulation and exploitation meet no resistance, and become the norm. Violence escalates but remains unorganized, absent of strategy or political objective. People kill out of frustration, not for want of change. In other places where the majority is educated, the ruling class is held accountable to common standards. Apolitical violence becomes anomalous.

Lastly, we wish our giants to abandon the grandiosity imperative. Our acts abroad should not reflect our greatness, this world is not a hall of mirrors for the vain. Our acts abroad should meet the immediate needs of the people who must live there. Their political present and future are not our experiments to conduct; their world is not our laboratory.

//
Dear Joe The Plumber,

In E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Emma Goldman explains to character Evelyn Nesbit why Evelyn (having become recently newsworthy) has become such a celebrity:

“I am often asked the question,” says Emma, “how can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them. Carrying his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out in her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich.”

American Games
Jim Culleny

I could be a millionaire!
All I need is some money.

They say having money’s
the best way to be a millionaire.

So maybe I’ll watch a game show
to see how it’s done.

Then I could become a supermillionaire and
get more money so I could become
really fuckin rich

–it’s what life’s all about,
isn’t it?

January 2005

Michael Blim

Perhaps “the great crash,” to borrow the title from John Kenneth Galbraith’s study of the onset of the Great Depression, has been avoided. The seemingly irresistible fall in the American, European, and Japanese stock markets slowed a bit over the last week, and bits of commercial paper passed hands. The panic has spread to banks and stock markets in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and the damage to be done is not yet known. Whether their panics will redound upon the core countries where the troubles began is not clear.

Very uncertain still is how bad the world-wide economic recession will be.

Today, though, let us make a preliminary damage assessment. Supposing for the moment that the worst of the immediate panic has passed, how much damage has it done to the household economies of ordinary Americans? How has the panic affected the little economies of work, savings, and spending upon which each of us relies for our livelihoods and those of our familiars?

Because the panic began in the housing market, the damage is particularly immediate and widespread. Suppose instead that the massive financial speculation had occurred in commodities like gold, silver, oil, or even as in the crisis 1636, tulips. Or that it resulted from mis-allocating monies into new industries such as railroads in the 19th Century or into “dot.com” businesses 20 ago. These crises hit ordinary people as money becomes scarce and expensive, and banks fail. Demand shrinks, unemployment rises, and the misery thus spreads.

Our present crisis, surely the worst since the Great Crash, hits ordinary Americans this time much closer to home, or rather in their homes. It attacks their one key asset, their one great store of wealth — their life-long piggy bank that is their home.

Consider one very important fact: Homes represent one third of the combined net worth of all American households. Seventy percent of American households own homes, and it is thus the most widely distributed asset among households aside from cars and checking accounts. In contrast, though many American watch on in chagrin as their pension fund assets have been washed away in the panic, their financial commitments to retirement funds is only a quarter of the value of their homes. For low-income families, their homes are their only assets. (Brian Bucks et.al., Federal Reserve Bulletin, February, 2006)

The panic has exposed how vulnerable American households are to any economic crisis, but particularly how prolonged financial speculation in the housing markets now threatens their immediate well being as well as their future standard of living. As I have discussed two times before a year or more ago, foreclosure rates, now charted like the price of corn in daily newspapers, have skyrocketed. Today, according to David Leonhardt in The New York Times (October 22, 2008), one and a half million households are in immediate peril of losing their homes. Up to another 5 million could soon find themselves caught up in the same ruinous financial whirlpool. Though the yellow press looks hard for new kinds of “welfare queens” among those who are dispossessed of or walk away from their homes, few housing analysts see much more than financial ruin for those who do.

The panic has put governments around the world at the service of their banks. Even as the banks are saved from insolvency, or sold off quickly when they fail under the good offices of governments, the underlying problem – the housing crisis and the damage it is doing to American households – is receiving less attention.

Perhaps this is because the problem is mountainous – far greater than anything the banks or other financial agents face. As home prices continue to sink, more homeowners find themselves in peril. Leonhardt of The Times makes a back-of-the-envelope calculation that if the government intervenes decisively to help homeowners in trouble, it could find itself with $4 trillion in home mortgaged-related obligations. The sum would be roughly five and a half times what the government has currently allocated to spend on propping up banks.

Last week, the Treasury was reported to be working on a mortgage assistance plan, and J.P. Morgan Chase had committed $70 billion to support its plans for renegotiating mortgages with their customers in trouble.

So, attention is being paid, albeit somewhat belatedly.

At the same time, though, a kind of “just so” story is being concocted about those households that find themselves in peril. Put plainly, the line is: “It serves them right. They speculated with their homes and thus deserve the trouble that comes their way.”

Homeowners are pictured as folk who, if they were not house-flippers, were mortgage-flippers. They refinanced frequently, borrowed on equity, or simply bought houses they shouldn’t have.

People did both borrow and refinance a great deal, as the Federal Reserve report cited above notes. Forty-five percent had refinanced their mortgages between 2001 and 2004, and a third of these households had borrowed more than the then-current value of the house. The median amount of money borrowed in addition to the house value was $20,000; half of those who borrowed extra spent it on renovations, and another third on debt consolidation. Given the advantages of refinancing earlier in the decade, and given the heavy marketing applied to get people to do it, neither the refinancing rate, nor the extra amount of value extracted seems extreme.

From my vantage point, as American households faced stagnant or declining personal incomes, as their savings rates plummeted to compensate for income losses in the slow but steady creep of inflation, reaching into the mortgage “piggy bank” looks pretty rational. Not only were homes the one real asset in their possession, but they were the only things that had gained tremendously in value over the past 20 years. Once again, taking a bit of money off the table when refinancing must have seemed rational at the time, given that funds were needed to cover increased medical and educational expenses whose costs have out-paced inflation now for several decades.

The collapse of housing prices depreciates the single most important asset of America’s households. We cannot know now how much this wealth loss has been lost long-term, and how much of the loss is temporary. We do know that our homes are central to our standard of living and to any savings we might accrue for bad times, old age, or inheritance.

Our homes, thus, are our piggy banks, and in many cases like the big banks, they have been cracked or broken too.

Making banks whole will not make America whole again. If Americans are not fairly protected in their homes, the damage to our way of life, perhaps calculable in trillions of dollars now, will become incalculable in the future.

Given the crash in housing prices, supporting the debt of mortgage holders is less likely to spur new housing inflation. It should foster price recovery instead.

A guarantee of this magnitude, I believe, is more intrinsically valuable over the long run than other bail-outs currently underway. It should also trigger a national commitment to see what can be done to make home ownership a universal condition in America.

by Ram Manikkalingam

Barack Obama is the new Ronald Reagan. He can do for the Democrats what Reagan did for the Republicans. His election can set the stage for fashioning a new coalition of those who are left leaning on either economic or cultural issues, with those who have been traditionally left leaning on both economic and cultural issues. The Democrats (ever since Reagan) have struggled to expand their base beyond this group. Obama’s winning coalition gives them a real opportunity to do so. This could have a profound impact on US domestic politics – allowing for both redistribution (yes spreading the wealth around) and greater freedom domestically – and even on US international politics – permitting US engagement abroad (yes even to help build democracies) relying on diplomacy rather than arms, alone.

Over the past weeks, trolling through the web and watching the political shows on TV, I have been dissatisfied with the political explanations for Obama’s success. There have been many. He has run a great campaign by raising a lot of money, setting up a solid ground operation, and staying on message. His opponents have been in disarray – zig zagging from one message to another or looking erratic. The economy has slid and national security has slipped off the agenda, resulting in more support for Democrats who are traditionally stronger in the former. But even if all these explanations were true, it does not really explain whom he is winning over and why? Obama’s victory on Tuesday November 4th will be the result of Republicans – Obama Republicans.

We have heard a lot about Reagan Democrats. These are working class (they like to say middle class in the US) mostly White Americans who felt the government ought to do more for them economically (without taxing the rich) and interfere less with their freedoms (while banning Gay marriage and abortion). This is not the most stable of positions, and the Republicans held onto this group by emphasising religious belief (if you believe Gay marriage is evil in the eyes of God, then how can you let politicians decide), and counting on Democratic weakness (if you believe that everyone has to agree with you before they vote for you how can you ever win). This group has been with Republicans from 1980, when Reagan pulled them together, until 2008, when George Bush lost them. But those whom Obama gains, in the electorate from Republicans, is not the same group lost by the Democrats to Reagan in 1980 – it is a newer and different group – Obama Republicans not Reagan Democrats. Who exactly are they?

One way of identifying this group is the classic red state-blue state divide. But this is not helpful. It anthropomorphises states, and assumes that the states are monolithic favouring one party over another as a whole, when the reality is different. In most states, one party defeats the other usually by less than ten points and occasionally by 10-20 points. It does not tell us who they are and more importantly what they think about the world.

A simple way to identify Obama Republicans is to use the common division of “economic” and “cultural” issues. If Reagan democrats leaned left on economic issues and right on cultural issues, Obama Republicans lean left on either cultural or economic issues, not necessarily both. This has the potential for being an even larger group than Reagan Democrats.

Consider economic issues. Here we have the US version of the traditional left-right divide. The left-leaning are those who favour greater government assistance to get out of economic difficulty – and a belief that markets do not provide all the answers to social problems created by economic ones. In the US of course you have the peculiar twist of this same group “rejecting higher taxes to help the poor” while calling for programs that require them. But this simply requires re-describing redistribution – “getting government to lend a helping hand to those who are struggling”. The right leaning are those who believe – steadfastly – that the poor are poor because they ought to be, or government interference with the market always makes things worse – irrespective of why you think people are poor.

“Cultural” issues also have its peculiarly US variant. In most parts of the world cultural issues would usually refer to high culture (symphonies, orchestras and ballets) or nationalism, ethnicity, multiculturalism. But in the US it refers to values and views – among other things on fundamental beliefs about god, guns and gays. The right-leaning believe in more god, more guns and fewer rights for gays. The left-leaning believe in less god, fewer guns and more rights for gays. Of course there are other issues that come into identifying US values, such as hostility to government interference or individualism or “small town” values. But these cultural markers are “American” and cut across the US version of the left-right divide.

So if Reagan managed to win over those who were left-leaning economically, but leaning right culturally, Obama has pulled off a bigger coup with these elections. He has managed to win over those who are culturally left and economically right, as well as those who are culturally right and economically left. It is the combination of these two groups who are Obama Republicans. In part Obama won this by appearing to be all things to all people (most successful politicians have an element of this). But he also won it by being Reaganesque.

Ronald Reagan may have had many faults, but he had a remarkable strength. He did not come across as mean, personally. Even if you did not agree with him, and even if his policies may have been wrong or wrong headed, you never felt that he wanted to be mean. And this was partly because he exuded a sunny personality and optimism about the world. This is in stark contrast to the approach and image of the Bush-Cheney administration. Their divergent approaches to the main enemies they were fighting – Reagan’s towards the Soviet Union and Bush’s towards the “Muslim World” illustrates this.

While Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire, accelerated the nuclear arms race and attacked the Soviets in many fora, he never asked the question “why do they hate us?” Instead his approach was “they want to become like us and we must help them do so.” His winning smile and his smooth tongue, made it really hard to dislike him, even if you felt that he was avoiding difficult questions, taking the country towards a right turn and representing a politics that was different from yours. Obama’s successful pulling together of a coalition beyond the traditional left of centre culturally and economically – to include those who are only left culturally or economically – shows this same skill at papering over differences in order to bring people together into a winning campaign.

Whether this will be simply a flash in the pan or long-term part of US politics will on depend on political governance. And those of us who live in the rest of the world – where we have no vote, but are heavily affected by US politics – hope that good governance will follow a good campaign, and lead to redistribution at home and peace abroad.

///
Bread, House, Salt, God —the family of simple monosyllabic words.
–from Another Country, a memoir by Adam Zagajewski;

Bread House Salt God
Jim Culleny

The tsunami scent of yeast flooded our house
in the mornings my mother
baked bread.

Up through floorboards it came;
up the stairwell.  It spread
stirring our dreamselves awake.

Baked bread

A bell for the nose, its smell
shooed the sleep
from somnolent heads.

Broken bread

“Ye are the salt of the earth.”

It was said
as a breeze blew over
a wine jug’s spout
which made a lowing sound
as if a ghost were playing a bass flute
(as if there were such an instrument).
We heard with supersitious ears
and over our shoulders
cast that condiment.

A column of salt

Lot’s wife turned around
sorrowfully, her heart bled.
It beat back her anger
at what God did.

It ached
over the ashes of
each house
over the ashes of
ash Wenesday
over the ashes of
the day before
over smoking coals
glowing with
godjustice.

Un-named she stood
becoming a pillar of
sodium chloride
looking back,

watching tongues of fire
watching pillars of smoke
watching her world burn

condemned
for not keeping her
self hid.
///

The moon’s orbit has been a bit odd as of late, but today brings a floodtide in anticipation of tomorrow’s new moon. Yes, my dear readers, it’s been awhile, the days are growing short, and I’m glad to be back. The full title for today’s Monday Musing is “Monumental Life: Tout bien ou rien.” Both title and subtitle came to me on a recent visit to Baltimore, Maryland. The former appeared in grand gold letters atop a rather imposing insurance company building downtown, and the latter was one of many mural panels commemorating early European and North American publishers, interspersed with printers’ devices, in the Enoch Pratt Free Library just a few blocks away from the first.

While this second idea (roughly translated) that “everything must be [done] well or nothing [done] at all” is admittedly a little severe, these are severe times we’re living in. For me, this past month has proven somewhat cyclical, in many different regards; the uniting thread is that it’s all related to letters and lettering. First, an old colleague and friend who’s a visiting professor at MICA invited me as guest critic for his printing and paper class, and I’d not been to Baltimore in almost seven years, so it was a welcome return. While there, I took some walks to scout out architectural lettering for a New York–based colleague who gives tours and lectures on lettering (more on this later). Second, after three years missing the Frankfurter Buchmesse/Frankfurt Book Fair, my schedule and the recent financial rollercoaster coincided, in an odd way, to help me decided that this was the year to return—who knows what state publishing will be in next year? Third, a return to the Buchmesse meant a return to Mainz and a visit to the Druckladen at the Gutenberg Museum to work with their master hand-typesetter and printer for a day. Finally, on Sunday, this month of eternal (or is it temporary?) returns culminated in a walk around parts of Midtown Manhattan, with my aforementioned colleague and the Society of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome to look at curious lettering, much of which I regularly pass by without much pause. Everything was familiar except the interior of Saint Bartholomew’s, which turns out to be as richly lettered as the exterior, pleasantly anomalous amid all those glass box skyscrapers along Park Avenue.

Never On Sunday

I spent a Monday and Tuesday at MICA and its impressive Dolphin Press. After classes in the studio building were done, I took a walk downtown, past the extreme luxury of the past and the rather more checkered condition of the city’s present. One of the first signs I encountered, after “MONUMENTAL LIFE,” was a corner restaurant/bar called “Never on Sunday.” Not knowing it was a 1960s Greek (now the colors make sense…) movie and song, and without entering, I assumed the place was a dive bar boasting its corrupting talents, luring people in to do everything they’re generally forbidden from doing. Moving on, a few blocks up I encountered several curious bronze statues atop marble bases just before running into the prestigious Peabody Institute. I wandered in to find an elegant spiral staircase, some enticing ephemera from the collections, and an amazing skylight that provided most of the natural light needed by readers in the covered courtyard; another such skylight lit the indoor courtyard of the Pratt Library, and made me think yet again of how much of our contemporary architecture depends upon artificial systems for light, air, and access—all things firmly grounded to the natural environment in former architectures. Not to mention how bare most contemporary architecture is of lettering; when it does make the rare appearance, it’s almost always rather generically spit out of a computer with a few fixed faces and default settings, a far cry from the sensitivity of the professional letterers who used to have a stable spot in architectural firms. From humble bar to grand public library to myriad mansions, the city overflowed with the sort of lettering and signage that New York mostly rid itself of long ago, and continues to clear away today—be it in the name of progress, or perhaps because New York can afford to demolish its more heavily mortared past for a glassier, less lasting present, or any of the many other hypotheses that came to mind.

Publish and Perish

Jumping from Baltimore across the Atlantic to Europe, I come
to the heaviest subject in an otherwise light celebration of letters. Italian author Roberto Saviano made a brief appearance, accompanied by a minimum of three bodyguards, at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The reason for the bodyguards was the fact that he’d received the first death threat of several just a few days before, on 13 October 2008—promising he and his protectors would be dead by year’s end—for his book Gomorra and the movie based upon it. The title is a play on words (though the idea of “play” hardly seems suitable here), with Gomorra being the biblical sister city to Sodom and Camorra being a network of organized crime, the Neapolitan branch of Sicily’s Mafia/Cosa nostra, Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta, and Puglia’s Sacra Corona Unita. Salman Rushdie has suggested Saviano take care because the Casalesi threat is, he claims, worse than any fatwa—and countless Nobel Laureates and others have lined up in his support. While in Frankfurt Saviano finally announced he was considering leaving Italy, and the statement was followed by major reactions internationally, both for and against such a move. You’ll find endless coverage of the case, and I can say little else until I finish the book, so this chapter is left hanging.
    To segue into the next, however, I will note that his exchange of G for C is particularly intriguing and informed, as the alphabet the ancient Romans inherited from the Greeks (via the Etruscans) had no actual g as we know it, just a gamma (velar g) and various pronunciations of what we’d see as c and k; needing a written form to distinguish between palatalized and velar s and c, the g came into being. Had the book been published a couple millennia ago, the wordplay between Gomorra and Camorra would’ve been entirely lost on its readers.

Love That Word

To end on a slightly lighter note, the highlight of this sunny Sunday (yes, letter-gazing is allowed, always, and especially on Sunday) was a walk through midtown; although I found nothing as varied or dense as I did in Baltimore, in terms of block-by-block letter populations, New York nevertheless has a lot to offer. Between stops (the above images are from Saint Vincent Ferrer), I spoke to an alumnae of my own alma mater I’d just met, who confirmed that a course in lettering was part of the core curriculum when she attended, alongside 2-D, 3-D, and drawing. Times have changed, but we can still find ways to follow the encouraging façade inscription—which I’m intentionally taking out of its religious context here—at Saint Bartholomew’s: LOVE THAT WORD.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here. Thanks for reading, and have a great week.

Michael Blim

Don’t let the good news fool you: the United States is bankrupt. We will be spending the next 25 years in a rolling Chapter 11. It will be painful.

Because we are currently the center of the world economy, and our currency is king, we can continue to indebt ourselves by borrowing money from the world, or simply by printing it. Because the dollar is the world’s trade and reserve currency, our neighbors accept it more readily than they would the currency of other bankrupts nations. But debts and money are promises to pay, and short of bombing our creditors into the Stone Age, they will be paid sooner or later.

Before discussing the possible consequences entailed in getting ourselves out of the immediate economic crisis, let’s look at some facts. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (October 15, 2008) reports that financial losses beginning with the sub-prime mortgage debacle are estimated currently by the International Monetary Fund at $1.4 trillion dollars, an amount equivalent to 10% of US gross domestic product. Since Europeans participated in the massive debt pyramiding of the world economy originated by American and British banking houses, the direct hit for the United States thus far equals less than the full 10% loss, though more of the loss surely falls on us than the Europeans.

The United States according to the Treasury Department currently carries another $13.7 trillion dollars in debt, $10 trillion of which is government debt, held in the main by foreign governments, their firms and banks, and by our wealthiest classes via trusts, hedge funds, other investment vehicles. The current collapse is something of a climax as well as acceleration of the larger debt crisis that has been festering for almost two generations. Since the end of the Second World War, the world economy has needed dollars for trade and development, and finally for its enormous economic expansion. With the rise of China in the eighties, the demand for dollars soared, and the Federal Reserve, Treasury and US banks and investment firms obliged by creating the loans, bonds, and finally in the case of the Treasury the species necessary for growth.

Under the terms of the great shell game that is capitalism, as long as the world economy grew, and as long as the United States could lead or at least keep up, political and corporate leaders were free to imagine that the debts of today would be paid by growth tomorrow.

One problem, however, remained: with the world awash in dollars, and their number reaching fantastic proportions with the issuance of new debt and the creation of new debt instruments of the sort discussed by the media these past months, their value began to slip. Those dollar promises became more expensive to pay off, and the promise holders were receiving less in recompense.

Then, as by now everyone knows, people holding sub-prime mortgages began to default on their payments, and panic among bondholders holding securities based on the mortgages ensued, driving down the value of the bonds themselves. Housing prices, having been driven up by a flood of speculative investments, once again dollar-making investments on borrowed money, began to decline. The massive indebtedness of America, governments, citizens, banks, and firms, was exposed, and the panic spread more widely. Like the child’s game of musical chairs, each creditor now is desperately trying to avoid being left standing without a chair.

As the financial storm has hit, the American “debt dam” proved itself to be a New Orleans levee. Debts have poured over and out of it at all points. The balance sheets of US banks, firms, governments and citizens are inundated with debt. Frantic patching is occurring, though the damage caused – especially if the storm brings an economic cold front of recession and unemployment behind it will be massive.

What of the promises the debt and all of those dollars represent? The world, our massive creditor, will doubtless work hard to make us pay. Dollar devaluation and/or high inflation may cheat them of their total sum. But devaluation and/or high inflation will rob us of some significant portion of our standard of living.

And the greater degree to which the crisis, the adjustments, devaluation and/or inflation undermine the American economy, the more likely that we like other great debtor nations will be forced to sell off big chunks of our economic assets to pay off those trillions of dollars of promises.

This is what Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the biggest economy in the world could look like.

People tell me that I dress rather sloppily. I’m not that guy with the crisply ironed trousers and perfectly knotted tie, and it was only when I started to study architecture that I realized why.

Nothing sets me quite on edge as much as things that aspire to be perfect but fall short. Crisp trousers? What about that microscopic fray at the bottom right corner of the left pant? And that tie? The little tail is sticking out just enough to make me want to take a pair of shears to it. The desire to attain perfection inevitably magnifies the ways in which the aspirant falls short, in a kind of asymptotic frustration.

This, for me, was the ultimate failing of modernism in architecture and design. An architecture of purity? Designing with purity in mind in a fundamentally impure world is idiotic. And whether this purity is in concept, form, or physical execution is irrelevant. The best architects understand that we live in a conceptually, formally, and physically messy world.

Architecture requires elasticity, in concept and particularly in materials. Rigidity and singular interpretation detract tremendously from the success of a project, which should be more experiential than psychic.

In his brilliant Mon Oncle (1958), Jacques Tati explores the difficulties in living in a Modernist world, where post-industrial manufacturing and reproduction lead to spaces (he primarily looks to the domestic) that are inhospitable to the charms and lifestyle of the traditional class. The main character, Tati’s signature Monsieur Hulot, is constantly trying to spend time with his nephew, whose upper-middle class, corporate parents are the guardians of a cartoonish Modernist kingdom.

While Hulot, who lives in an old stone building in a typical provincial town center, stumbles about, ever the antediluvian buffoon, it is his sister and her husband that perform the hysteria of partial disorder, running around trying to mediate and tame the increasingly out of control level of minimalism and malfunctioning technology they’ve surrounded themselves by.

The most touching moments of the film occur when their son and Tati are scolded for trying to live, rather than subjugate themselves to their environment. Those scenes remind me of Zaha Hadid’s response to the reception of her Z.Island, a kitchen so obviously meant for the “warm takeout in your spaceship microwave” set that even the designer herself told a roomful of fans and press that she wouldn’t know how functional it was as she doesn’t cook much. Classic. The kitchen itself could have been a prop of the film; in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Mon Oncle was its inspiration.

Now more than ever, evidenced by designers like Hadid, contemporary designers more concerned with the Next Big Thing than with functionality are descendents of Modernists like Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Purity and concept trump usability, and innovation is only thought of in terms of complexity. I recently went to an exhibition of young architects showing new architectural materials that confirmed that this mentality has been unfortunately and effectively passed to the next generation of designers. The materials were slick, and were all derived from synthetic polymers with more syllables than are altogether reasonable. Tellingly, imagining them in terms of application was difficult and disappointing. Like the glass houses and urban plans from the mid-20th century Modernists, these materials would, metaphorically, crumble if they were to crumble. There is no ability to accommodate wear, and any mistakes in detailing are instantly noticeable and cringe-worthy.

Unfortunately, in addition to serving theory, many architects design more for photographers and magazines than the client. Pictures of buildings like Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (pictured at right) or Philip Johnson’s Glass House, or any of the high-gloss enameled and plastic architecture of the present reveal that these buildings perform for the camera. Anyone who has visited any of these sites knows that what you get is quite different, and can be quite disillusioning.

Accepting a certain kind of disorder and natural decay are paramount to good design, particularly in architecture, and it is the concern of an ever-decreasing number of designers. It leads to the kind of buildings that age with grace and evolve with time—not those whose illusion is so easily shattered. It’s sad to see that such obvious and accurate criticisms such as Tati’s, articulated fifty years ago, have fallen on such deaf ears.

The great 20th century novelist William Gaddis once wrote, “That’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight.” Gaddis was born in 1922. He was an unabashed theorist of decline. For him, the novelist’s task was to narrate that decline, all the way until there was nothing left to say, until language itself gave up the ghost and we’d be left with a literature of empty mumbling.

Alas, just when things seemed like they might truly fall apart for Gaddis’ generation, the next comes along and makes sense of the chaos. Human beings are known to adapt. Give each historical catastrophe long enough to settle and the world simply becomes the world again. Thus has the dilemma always been for the apocalyptic mind. It is a mind well suited to show us how bad things really are, but ill-suited to recognize the staying power of that essential badness.

In a funny way, I see Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine as a sequel to the work of William Gaddis. I say that because they describe the same world. It is a world of meaningless work and a language hopelessly diluted into the jargon of commercial transactions and the exchange of goods and services. Baker’s world is as empty as Gaddis ever said it would be. And yet, it is not.

Baker’s protagonist is a man who spends the entirety of the short novel traveling up an escalator to the mezzanine of the corporate building where his office can be found. His job, a nameless one. His relationships, superficial and generally characterized by office chit-chat. The novel spends most of its time following the narrator’s train of thought as his attention wanders from one mundane subject to the next. But Baker manages to show that within this “empty” experience is, in fact, a richness of human subjectivity vast and complicated as to be a wonder.

On page 72 of the Vintage edition of the book, published in 1988, Baker comes as close as he ever does to stating his purpose. Baker’s narrator is musing upon the achievements of mechanical engineering that can be found in the corporate bathroom:

Valves that allow a controlled amount of water to rush into a toilet and no more, shapes of porcelain designed so that the turbulence in them forms almost fixed and decorative (yet highly functional) braids and twists that Hopkins would have liked; a little built-in machine that squirts pink liquefied soap with a special additive that gives it a silvery sheen (also used in shampoo recipes now, I’ve noticed) into the curve of your fingers; and the soap-level indicator, a plastic fish-eye directly into the soap tank, that shows the maintenance man (either Ray or the very one who was now polishing the escalator’s handrail) whether he must unlock the brushed-steel panel that day and replenish the supply ; the beautiful chrome-plated urinal plumbing, a row of four identical states of severe gnarledness, which gives you the impression of walking into a petrochemical plant, with names like Sloan Valve and Delaney Flushboy inscribed on their six-sided half-decorative boltlike caps—names that become completely familiar over the course of your employment even though if asked you couldn’t come up with them.

It’s the reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins that interests me most here. “Look at the world we are given just as Hopkins looked at his,” Baker seems to be saying. And then he goes out and does just that. Hopkins called this way of looking “inscape.” He said, “Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake.” What he meant was simply that poetry had to pay very close attention to the specific complexity that makes each thing unique. Inscape is that inner uniqueness. Baker, contra Gaddis and in a Hopkins frame of mind, suggests that we are not any more or less able to reflect on experience and “inscape” now than at any other time. All that’s required is a touch of enthusiasm. I mean that in the ancient sense of the term, the Greek sense of the term. For the Greeks, enthusiasm was about entheos or being possessed by a God. It was sort of like channeling. It meant that one had become a vehicle to express something beyond oneself. To be entheos is thus to be fully absorbed. This is almost the exact opposite of the stance Gaddis takes toward the world and his prose. Gaddis wants to reproduce the language of his time in order to make the reader aware of its degradation. He wants to be in language just long enough to get outside it and see it as a whole. That’s how he can express the world and condemn it at the same time.

Baker’s enthusiasm goes head over heels in its immersion. It thus has little to say about the world as such, the era, the relative progress or decline of history. Baker’s narrator simply lets himself go, lets himself interrogate every detail and think through every interaction ad nauseam. The result is an estrangement of the world that, paradoxically, brings it ever closer. The more intently one thinks about what it is really like to tie your shoes, the more it seems a wondrous and fantastical activity and the more, then, we are able to see ourselves as that weird combination of happenstance and habit that is so very human. This is what Hopkins wanted to accomplish in his poetry, to concentrate so intently on the details that the divinity would arise therein. Baker operates without the implicit theology. But he does think that the details will illuminate us, capture us, as it were, in the activities that mark us as a specific people at a specific time. The world, our world. If nothing else, it is inexhaustible in its fascination.

///
Two Deaths
Jim Culleny

1. Mirror

Under cover of light the moon disappears;
goes just like that, following my mother;
travelling not by casket, but instead
by memory and dream, alike
as death and birth, so alike
there’s just this mirror between them.

2. Da’s Marker

In a cemetery overlooking what used to be a lake
my father’s stone’s a tiny dot in space
smaller than a muon, darker than black hole,
more final than his fall from grace,
marking what the earth has swallowed,
naming who can’t be replaced.

//

Edward B. Rackley

Thanks to our financial turmoil, radio talk shows can now probe deeper than the usual ‘house of cards’ metaphor when reporting the quakes of late capitalism to economic illiterates like me. Experts of every stripe are sharing their views on a topic long-shrouded in patriotic orthodoxy. How often in public discourse do Americans openly question the omniscience of the Invisible Hand, a modern myth of cosmologic proportions?

So it’s a glorious time in one respect, given the rarity with which governing assumptions are shattered, their hollowness exposed. But if it sounds revolutionary, such hopes are misplaced. There’s nothing Marxist in this crisis, no collective appropriation of Wall Street’s wealth engines underway. What we have seen is the utter confidence game of our unregulated financial system laid bare, a coup of sorts against manufactured consent.

But I know not whereof I speak. I just listen to the talk shows and wonder what it all means. I compare such ripples, cataclysmic for us, to dramatic events in countries I know much better, developing countries typically described as ‘conflict’ or ‘post conflict’. Both here and there, interpretation is everything, the objectivity of the data moot. Where the crowd goes, so goes the country–or market–a dangerous prospect when the crowd goes wild.

Without trust or confidence in a given financial system, no one steps up to place their bets. Look at the lack of foreign investors in the Congo, where lack of regulation is legion, for proof of the clear connection between regulation and confidence in sustaining volatile or fragile markets. There is an invisible hand at work in the Congo; I’ve described it many times in these pages. It’s called ‘gun barrel greed’, and it runs things impeccably well. For a microscopic few.

The Egyptian miracle

Africa’s natural resources extend across many borders but are not equally abundant for all. Take the Nile River and its extensive tributaries in Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania–all sub-Saharan countries. This neighborhood, also known as the Great Lakes region, comprises the Nile River Basin, the multiple sources of a river on whose lives all Egyptians and many Sudanese depend. Water is literally life for the ancient desert societies of Egypt and northern Sudan, and their skill at conserving water and maximizing its agricultural uses far exceeds that found in upstream Nile countries where water is abundant.

Clearly there is something primordial and miraculous–but alas not causal–in the relationship between scarcity and ingenuity. Take the case of Egypt, whose irrigation capacity precedes its invention of written language, both of which are over 2000 years old. This historical fact becomes amazing in the context of the Nile Basin, whose countries are the poorest in the world. Technologically, they are so far behind Egypt that they still depend entirely on rainfall to grow food. In Burundi, for instance, rivers and lakes abound but basic irrigation and animal traction constitute the unthought for farmers there. As a result, during the three-month dry season rural farmers in Burundi go hungry and die. Egypt learned to solve that problem long before the West existed.

The government of Burundi, like its neighbors with recurrent famine, could move to study and adapt Egypt’s example to mitigate dire poverty and end needless hunger related deaths every year. Unfortunately, authorities in many Great Lakes countries find it more relevant to accuse Egypt of ‘stealing the Nile’, while letting their own people languish in pre-modern darkness and lethal living conditions.

So scarcity is no catalyst for invention, as people continue to die of famine and unclean water in Burundi, Tanzania, Ethiopia despite these countries’ natural abundance and fertility. Were the state of scarcity itself a causal trigger for change, people and their leaders would have figured out solutions to poverty long ago. And given that practical solutions already exist in the world’s poorest neighborhood, like the miracle of Egyptian irrigation in a barren desert, one wonders why Egypt’s destitute neighbors continue to look the other way.

Where no man fears to trust

Created in 1999, the Nile Basin Initiative seeks to introduce the notion of ‘common good’ to nine countries for whom the Nile is political hot-potato, conflict trigger, and means of survival rolled into one. Many NBI countries have been at war in the last decade, and the Nile as casus belli is not unthinkable with climate changes already affecting the region. Obviously a lack of trust permeates the region and prevents cooperation on mutually beneficial initiatives, like Nile water management. If successful, then, the NBI would use the Nile to promote development in the poorer countries in a way that facilitates a common approach to solutions and averts conflict.   

Nearing its tenth anniversary, the folks at NBI headquarters in Entebbe were rightfully wondering about their impact in the region, and whether regional thoughtleaders appreciated NBI efforts. A qualitative study of perceptions among civil society, government, academics and media from NBI’s nine member countries was commissioned; results are coming out now.

Perhaps not surprisingly, our panel found that suspicion is high among countries north and south of the Sahara. There is a tacit sense that Egypt ‘controls the Nile’, in the sense that if all countries upstream had hydroelectric capacity and even rudimentary irrigation, by the time it reached Egyptian soil the Nile would be but a trickle. So Egypt’s foreign policy is Nile-centric, aiming to preserve current Nile levels even if this means chronic under-development and recurrent famines upstream. Perfectly natural, respondents from sub-Saharan countries say, we just wish they wouldn’t oppose our efforts to build dams. Cooperation seems a long way off.

The more cynical view is that Egyptian survival requires massive dysfunction and disorganization upstream, as poor governance in sub-Saharan Africa staves off Nile diversion for agriculture and electricity indefinitely. Always looking for evidence to counter the Afro-pessimists, I was heartened to learn that civil society in sub-Saharan countries is exasperated at their leaders’ inability to provide economic development. Predictably, the leaders themselves think they are making great strides.

But with so many heads of impoverished states answering that ‘sovereignty’ is the primary obstacle to improved collaboration around the Nile, obsessions over power continue to trump basic development initiatives–simple improvements that could increase life expectancy, improve living conditions and endear citizens to their leaders. Why these leaders can’t see this (think of Mugabe, Kabila and their many mini-me’s) is the real riddle of the Sphinx.

Justin E. H. Smith

Anyone assessing the strength of Pascal’s wager –that, though there may be an infinitesimally small chance that Christianity is true, the potential punishment for not believing it, or reward for believing it, is infinitely great, and therefore it is rational to believe it– should watch this video before coming to any conclusions:

There is, we must concede, a non-zero, if vanishingly tiny, possibility that the message of Yoke-Up Ministries is correct, that you, as the woman says, will go to hell.

Pascal had supposed that the persuasiveness of his argument to any rational thinker would result in submission to the long-standing authority of the Catholic church.  But the problem is that the argument is no more, and no less, compelling coming from a 17th-century Catholic philosopher defending traditional faith than coming from a couple of rough and unwashed rednecks in Louisiana in defense of a strain of enthusiastic neo-Protestantism that Pascal himself would have deemed diabolical.

The Yoke-Up version of the wager brings to light something that Pascal’s does not. To accept the wager, to go for it ‘just in case’, is not, or not only, to submit to God’s will. It is also to submit to the will of the person who presents to you the wager, and not just as concerns God’s existence, but also as concerns all sorts of tangential cultural matters that God, if he exists, would have to find perfectly irrelevant.

The only way to adequately convince the illiterate truckdriver and his angry ‘ex-gay’ spouse that one has accepted their message would be, one supposes, not just to declare, “Yes, I believe!”, but also to come to care about things like engine repair, to understand certain sports metaphors, to inhabit a world of small and local concerns that can only make sense if one is already a certain kind of working-class white American. In this particular case, one would likely also have to show signs of the ravages of life prior to being born again, perhaps some tribal or Celtic tattoos hidden under the undershirt, teeth worn down to stubs by meth, a threadbare collection of garments announcing that one has ‘no fear’.

As Pascal might have said, these are attributes of a Christian that do not depend on will, or even intellect. They are not up to the individual considering the wager, but are instead constitutive of the white-trash habitus. In this respect, one senses that the Yoke-Up wager is not for everyone: it is not Good News for all the nations of the earth, but only for that extended clan of born-agains and not-yet-born-agains who all, regardless of the eventual fate of their souls, recognize one another as members of the same community.  You, 3QD readers, may consider yourselves exempt.

*

When I was in high school I called myself a ‘communist’. This was the era of perestroika. Gorbachev’s hardline opponents were generally spoken of as if they were the only communists left in the Soviet Union, while the general secretary himself was a ‘reformer’. In addition to my communism, around the same time I was trying to grow dreadlocks, though somehow, I found, resisting the urge to wash and brush was not quite doing the trick. My matted clumps suggested more the coiffure of a homeless white schizophrenic than, say, Peter Tosh.

My suburban punk-rock girlfriend and I used to watch the news together. She would observe the communist hardliners and say: “They don’t have dreadlocks. They don’t have nose-rings. They look like dumpy versions of Ronald Reagan. What do you want to be like them for?” I was hard pressed to come up with an answer, so great had the gap become between the state-socialist gerontocracy of Eastern Europe and the utopian enthusiasm that had inspired both certain strains of 19th-century socialism –such as that of Foucher, who believed that, someday, liberated man will be able to play the piano with his feet– as well as the hairstyle that was to distinguish me from all the complacent bourgeois idiots by whom I found myself surrounded. 

The gerontocracy collapsed, and I cut my hair. I went to university and began writing for the campus Republican newspaper. It was funded by David Horowitz, and was the only student newspaper with anything close to a sense of humor. Once, years before The Onion would develop a similar feature, our paper published fake, man-in-the-street interviews with students on campus, asking them what they thought of the rival Third World Forum. “I think it’s great that the retarded students have their own paper!”, one fake student declared. “I love the big empty spaces on each page!”, said another.  This last comment seems to have pounded into my head once and for all that iron law, of which I am not the discoverer, of the reverse correlation between marginal politics and high production values. 

What I didn’t tell my fellow conservative students is that, at the time, I thought of myself not as a Republican but as a Menshevik. That is to say, like the opponents of the Bolsheviks who believed that Russia would have to pass through a miserable era of capitalism in order to make it to the proper phase of history for the staging of a revolution, I believed that George H. W. Bush was a necessary stage on the path to something far better than what Clinton represented. I didn’t want Bush to win against Clinton because I liked Republicans. I wanted Bush to win because I believed –sincerely and ironically at once– that Bush was marginally worse than Clinton, and that the urgent task of any young utopian was to ‘heighten the contradictions’, as Marxists say, to do what one could to make things as bad as possible, in the hopes that this would precipitate real change faster than the election of a chubby yokel who gave the impression that everything was going to be alright.   

Needless to say I was not perfectly at home with the campus conservatives. It quickly became clear to me that I had gravitated to them only because the campus left of the early 1990s was so stiflingly dull. I blame Stalin, of course, and all the others who made it impossible to belong to an Internationale one could really believe in, thus leading to the fragmentation and decline of would-be internationalism into petty identity politics. I wanted barricades; the campus liberals wanted gender-neutral pronouns.

*

I remain a bit of a Menshevizer, as I think do many who are suspicious of the options presented by a rigidly bipartisan system. A disillusioned Argentine ex-Marxist recently mentioned to me that the Bush fils era has done wonders for the political landscape of Latin America (the praise went mostly to Morales, and not to Chavez), and he worries that an Obama presidency would compromise these gains. I see what he’s saying, but there’s one thing that continues to keep me in line with ‘liberal’ orthodoxy this time around: we’re at a watershed moment in American trash history, when a candidate for high office can appear as if hand-picked by Yoke-Up Ministries.   

I’m talking of course about Sarah Palin, the primitiveness of whose Christianity makes George W. Bush look like a proper, mainline Protestant. Palin remains in that stage of religious fervor, so vividly described by the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, in which the intensity of the belief is to be measured by the degree to which it, presumably through the vehicle of the holy spirit, exercises control over the very motion of the body and of the mouth. Most of us have seen the video of the African preacher laying hands on Palin, so as to drive out demons. But the aim of this sort of exercise is not to gain perfect self-control and rational autonomy once the demons are gone. It is only to ensure that the self be governed by the right kind of daimon, to wit, the holy spirit. The very idea of rational autonomy is one that does not come up.

I have a lingering admiration for old-fashioned Goldwater-style conservatism, of which I take McCain, in certain respects beyond the merely geographical, to be an heir.  Among other things, it laid a heavy stress on individual autonomy and responsibility, and did not maintain that one could get a free pass to radically dissociate oneself from one’s mistake-ridden past simply by announcing that one has been ‘born again’. It left open the possibility for cultivation of moral character, in the laudable sense in which this was understood in antiquity. McCain gets all this, but is forced to cater to the snake-charming, witch-purging, infantile mentality of a large sector of the American population in order to have any hope of winning.

A deep part of many of us might want to see things get bad, in order that they may get better. But no decent person could hope to see things get as bad as they might quickly be if Sarah Palin gains executive power. The Mensheviks only wanted to instigate a period of free trade and economic inequality in order to make reality match up with Marx’s theory of the stages of history. That would have been a step forward, relatively speaking, from miserable serfdom. A Palin presidency –a likely outcome of her vice-presidency, given McCain’s age and evident feebleness– could easily amount to a step way back, to inquisition and persecution, to the serfdom of the soul that preceded the discovery of autonomy, and to a tribal chauvinism that takes one’s own little clapboard church for the sole channeler of divine truth on earth. This is a spectre that trumps any utopian vision of how much better the world might be than what the democrats have yet envisioned, and any concerns as to the absence of real choice in bipartisan elections.

This, and not any lock-step sense of belonging to the liberal orthodoxy, is why I’ve just checked off ‘Obama’ on my useless absentee ballot, and affixed enough Canadian postage to carry it all the way back to the Board of Elections of Hamilton County, Ohio.

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Human innards are noisy: thud of heart valves, hiss of lungs, swish of blood flow, gurgle of intestines; and in disease: the thud muffles into murmur, hiss becomes crackle, swish sharpens to whistle and gurgle falls silent. For about two centuries, medical practitioners have evolved an art to discern these sounds with the help of a simple gadget: stethoscope.

In ancient times, Hippocrates would hold a patient by the shoulders and shake him to produce a splashing ‘succussion’ sound to prove that excess fluid had accumulated around the lungs. He would plant his ear directly to the chest to listen. This practice was common till 1816, when Rene Laennec, a young French physician — who was too diffident to place his ear to the chest of a woman — rolled twenty-four sheets of paper into a tube and placed one end to the woman’s chest and the other end to his ear. He was happy to discover that sounds were clearly audible.

Laennec was also a wood craftsman. In the workshop in his home, he carved a stethoscope from two connecting pieces of wood with hollow bores. He shaped one piece like a funnel to place against the chest and the other straight piece for his ear. He called his instrument ‘Le Cylinder’, but it became popular as stethoscope – a term that originates from two Greek words ‘I see’ and ‘the chest.’ Laennec subsequently refined the stethoscope into a tube twelve inches long and one and half inches in diameter with three-eighth inch uniform bore. He used it to describe various sounds: rales, bruit, bronchophony etc.

In 1819, he published his findings in the classic ‘The Treatise On Mediate Auscultation’. His stethoscope and the book sold together for two Francs. Laennec used his stethoscope to listen to the chest of patients with tuberculosis – the very disease that killed him a few years later.

George P. Cammann, a New York physician, improved its functionality in 1855 by attaching two tubes for both ears and a bi-aural stethoscope became the primary diagnostic tool in the late nineteenth century.

Dr Littman, a cardiologist, described the ideal stethoscope in the Journal Of American Medical Association in 1961. According to him an ideal stethoscope had an “open chest piece for the appreciation of low-pitched sounds, a closed chest piece with a stiff plastic diaphragm to filter out low-pitched sounds, firm tubing with a single lumen bore, the shortest practical overall length, a spring with precise tension to hold the ear tubes apart, and light and convenient to carry and use.” The ‘Littman’ stethoscope became the most popular stethoscope in the USA.

But stethoscope lacks the output that science demands; it does not produce any quantifiable data. The last few decades has seen an explosion of sophisticated diagnostic tools: echocardiographs, ultrasound machines, CAT, MRI and many others, which produce quantifiable, replicable objective information, which has often negated many a subjective diagnosis made by the stethoscope. These superior tools have relegated the stethoscope to a secondary place in diagnostic gadgetry. It has almost become a symbolic necklace.

The rise of this simple gadget saw the rise of the art of medicine. The master practitioners of this art developed extraordinary sensitivity to the sounds of human body and made many a diagnosis with precision. The apprentice students were left in awe and emulated the master diagnosticians. A mere fifteen-inch long tube forced medical caregivers to stoop towards the patient and come closer. Figuratively, it fostered the art of medicine: listening to the patient.

The art of medicine has withered in parallel to vanishing of stethoscope. Both flourished together and now the shriveling art of medicine parallels vanishing of the stethoscope. We medical practitioners, in our pursuit of science have forgotten the art. Now we know more about the disease and less about the patient.

The fear is not new or sudden. Over 150 years ago, Armand Trousseau expressed it in the “Lectures on Clinical Medicine, The New Sydenham Society, 1869”

“Every science touches art at some points every art has its scientific side; the worst man of science is he who is never an artist, and the worst artist is he who is never a man of science. In early times, medicine was an art, which took its place at the side of poetry and painting; today they try to make a science of it, placing it beside mathematics, astronomy, and physics.”

Understanding the unique individuality of the patient with compassion is the art, and treating her with morality and knowledge is the science. A patient, who is vulnerable has an asymmetric relationship with the physician – a relationship based on trust. The patient has implicit faith that humanity of the caregiver will overcome any temporal compulsions that may pollute the encounter.

It has been a long journey from the ancient to modern, from Ayurveda to Medicare. The moral implications of the ancient Ayurvedic tradition of healing expressed, “if science is only followed for money, it is wasted” and that “wealth earned from medical sciences is always contaminated as it comes from the suffering of others, thus it must be practiced with compassion and humility, and without greed or ego.”

It will be wishful thinking that we physicians will ever regain this ancient attitude, when Wall Street sets the benchmarks of success. But we can definitely pull out the stethoscope and stoop to listen to the patient.