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.

Michael Blim

For me, summer reading choices have always been something of the voice of the unconscious speaking. If I am lucky, I figure out why I devoted my summer to one topic or another before the next summer rolls around.

Last year, as some of you may remember from a fall column, I spent the summer with Hitler – or rather reading accounts of his life and regime. It didn’t seem an odd choice. In the small town library I was using over the summer, non-fiction choices came down to three – or two and a half – topics: Hitler and the Second World War or the American Civil War. Their only rival was the children’s section, which prompted the wicked in me to wonder if tales of gruesome wars and a venomous dictator are in practice children’s books for adults.

This summer it was Stalin. In comparison to Hitler, he has inspired no universal obsession, no midnight reading in the garden of evil. As in the case of Mao, you might say that Stalin’s accomplishments are still vastly under-appreciated in relation to those of Hitler. Perhaps as the body counts under their regimes rise, Stalin and Mao may yet achieve admission into the pantheon of great 20th Century evil-doers. Hitler may yet find his peers.

Yet will Stalin’s admission be whole-hearted? Look around us: nothing draws universal outrage and dramatic protests as quickly and easily as the neo-Nazi movements that pop up in Europe and America.

By contrast, Vladimir Putin has made Stalin and Stalinism fashionable in Russia again. In Putin’s Russia, state authority is unitary and inviolate. The state develops Russia’s economy and dictates the terms of life and labor for the Russian people. When force and violence are necessary to defeat anti-state forces, they will be used, and the use will be held accountable only by the agents of the state itself. In other words, Stalinism without the millions dead.

Communism’s kulaks have won. The Soviet state class has not only survived the empire’s collapse, but has parlayed its prior advantage into a new system of privilege. The stakes are no longer two cows and a plow, but access to enormous wealth and power held once more via the state.

Stalinism is not in style in the West, but indifference to its effects, save in the survival of the new satellites the West has acquired, is palpable. If the Russian state creates something of a neo-Stalinist hell for its people, the West appears only vaguely interested in their fate.

Then too, the West has seemed to treat Stalinism as the lesser of two evils when compared with Hitlerism. Perhaps it was a matter of their priorities rather than ours. Hitler had no use for creating Nazis. He had all he needed to rule the world, and for him, the rest of us were low-life mongrels useful only in murderous domination. Revolutionary Stalin was a universalist: he sent out Communists of all nationalities to convert and revolutionize their own. Consequently, no European country since the Thirties has lived without some home-grown Stalinists in their midst. Even the United States has had its Stalinists, or what’s a Gus Hall for? R.I.P.

Perhaps the presence of home-grown Stalinists for three generations in the West humanized Stalin’s Stalinism in ways that Hitler, save for Mel Brooks’ The Producers, has never found.

Still, the monstrous facts of Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union have been known for generations. Khrushchev’s 1956 finally not so “secret” speech to the 20th Soviet Union Communist Party Congress put Stalin’s crimes into circulation throughout the socialist world and into the hands of the West’s spymasters and anti-Communist intellectuals and policy advisors. George Kennan, 20th Century America’s master foreign policy intellectual had published extensive accounts in the sixties of the costs of the Soviet Union’s brutal journey to world economic and political power.

The obituaries commemorating Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death short weeks ago are also reminders that accounts of Stalin and his deeds still circulate widely in the public domain.

No one can pretend ignorance of Stalin’s record as one of the supreme killers in the 20th Century.

But it is not only Putin that is propelling Stalin back into style. The decade-long thaw that occurred in Russia immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union enabled researchers to finally get their hands on documents in archives that had long been sequestered, or whose very existence had heretofore been unknown. We have a better chance now at understanding Stalin and Stalinism in its historical context.

The thaw and the newly opened archives have fueled accounts of two kinds. One is the re-exploration of Stalin’s life and character, as well as his relation to the Soviet regime. The other focuses on the impact of state terror on the everyday lives of citizens caught up in the chaos and upheavals of post-revolutionary Soviet society.

Regarding Stalin, well surely it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy, and that’s nothing new. But the vast amount of new material available has enabled historians to take a closer look at Stalin’s character. The result is: complexity, thy name is Stalin.

I rely on Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar for providing me some of the facts from which I derive my impressions.

I’ve gotten to know another Stalin. Malice, murder, and mayhem there are in requisite abundance for satisfying one’s earlier stereotype. But Montefiore in spite of himself as well finds a Stalin possessed of vast intelligence and a cultural literacy that would easily surpass that possessed by any American president in the 20th Century:

“’He worked very hard to improve himself,” said Molotov. His library consisted of 20,000 well-used volumes. Svetlana (Stalin’s daughter – MB) found books there from the Life of Jesus to the novels of Galsworthy, Wilde, Maupassant and later Steinbeck and Hemingway. His granddaughter later noticed him reading Gogol, Chekhov, Hugo, Thackeray and Balzac. In old age, he was still discovering Goethe. He “’worshipped Zola.’” (2003: 97)

According to Montefiore, Stalin “adored the Last of the Mohicans, amazing a young translator whom he greeted in faux-Red Indian: ‘Big chief greets paleface!’”

Stalin experienced enormous love and friendship. He inspired devotion as well as fear among his closest associates. As for Sergei Kirov, the fabled Leningrad party chief as his only likely successor, one will never know if Stalin’s love for him was faux, or Kirov’s end at Stalin’s hands was like Otello’s parting kiss.

No one would ever say that Stalin was not the author of his crimes. He signed tens of thousands of death warrants personally, occasionally with comments appended such as “make him really suffer.” He rendered pitch-perfect the endless propaganda campaigns against enemies of the people that exposed people to torture, exile, and death by privation or execution, and in the millions. The mandates given his henchmen were explicit, as were the body counts sent back to Stalin at the Kremlin.

The henchmen too lived in a state of frenzied activity on behalf of the regime while at the same time possessed of abject fear that they too, or their loved ones, would be caught up as victims of the terrors. In one of the strangest tales from this schizoid world, Stalin imprisoned Molotov’s wife for associating with Jewish nationalist even as Molotov was helping Stalin keep Hitler at bay via the 1939 non-aggression pact. Molotov’s wife would go to prison a second time after World War II; her husband would remain loyal to Stalin until the latter’s death.

Stalin, in my view, was no madman. He was possessed of the Manichean worldview of a revolutionary caught up in a violent struggle for power who believed it virtuous to transform Soviet society by any means necessary. But the more he succeeded in subjecting Soviet society to his demands, force and violence became ends in themselves. They became the normal tools in perfecting and finishing the task of revolution.

As with Molotov, so too with so many of the millions of real victims of Stalin’s regime. New scholarship, access to archives and frank oral histories, reveal something even more fascinating to recount than the extraordinary career of Stalin. Several new books allow us a glimpse of how Soviet citizens were reformed or reformed themselves in the caldron of post-revolutionary terrors. Some citizens hid their characters and beliefs from the state, hoping to avoid death or social annihilation. Others sought to change and perfect new characters that would be at one with the revolution’s mission and final triumph in a truly transformed, just, communist society.

Orlando Figes, eminent scholar of the revolution and of the post-revolutionary period, argues for his part that many people resisted “conversion” to a Soviet-ophile character through concealment, the creation of false identities, the aid of kin, and even the occasional kindness of strangers. In The Whisperers (2007), Figes also relates the stories of people’s whose beliefs and characters had been colonized by the Stalinist state. Bolsheviks languished in prisons still believing in the cause. Others might not have believed that their accused father, for instance, was an enemy of the people, but this is in no way diminished their belief in enemies of the people. Still others believed that if their father were accused, he must be guilty.

In Figes, we have an exemplary account of the power of fear. In Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (2006), we see the workings of desire, as he shows how people worked to transform themselves into instruments of revolution and a new communist society. His discovery and recounting of diaries written by ordinary persons during the terrors reveals how people worked on their basic characters to create revolutionary subjects. For society to hurl itself into the new world, so must its devoted citizens. Their diaries were the account books for their change.

There are those who work with rapture daily to be one with the proletarian revolutionary movement represented in the party. There are others for whom the pain of denunciation redoubles their efforts to become worthy Soviet citizens. There are still others who recount their psychic battles to contain or destroy the bourgeois impulses of the past.

The greatest impression left by my summer with Stalin is that Stalin, save as a subject for “big-man” history, is not finally the source of useful knowledge that the study of life under his regime is.

Why? Because we live in times no less subject to mass persuasion, coercion by force, and state violence. What lives do we fashion, re-fashion, under their influence?

Of the heroic tales we tell ourselves, can the strength of character as a human absolute be the biggest whopper of them all? In the story of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, Stalin hardened his character into a violent force of nature. Ordinary Soviet citizens discovered how fragile, how plastic, and how friable were theirs.

And so might we.

Did you have a good summer? And what did you learn?

///

Death is the least we have to fear.
We are all in the hands of God,
Whatever happens happens by His Will.
             —Attention Please, by Peter Porter

Until the Sacred Cows Come Home
Jim Culleny

Vishnu reclines and sleeps
dreaming up the world.

He lounges upon a coiled snake
in the image of ananta shayana
floating on a raft
upon an ocean of milk
pacifying the characters of his dreams,
protecting his turf: his realm of
pleasure and pain; concocting
his improbable dream of a universe,
making it up as he goes.

Here and there Vishnu floats
in the logic of dreams
sailing his ship of tales
–at sea but ever in sight of land;
mything point after point
he goes dreaming on,
sailing and sinking simultaneously;
doing and undoing his work at once
within the same thought;
bobbing on waves of light
while flinging its particles
into black holes.

But he’s never fickle.
Vishnu can never be fickle
because he’s divine.

Any ordinary Joe or Ananda
would be ridiculed for insisting yes
and no in the same breath,
but not Vishnu.

All gods may contradict themselves
without flaw,
say men,
who always give their God
the benefit of a doubt
in any argument.

Faults may never be divine
(not earthquake nor plague,
and especially not
the death-rattle of love).

So Vishnu will sail on
upon his coiled snake,
upon his raft,
upon his ocean of milk,
with his sidekicks Brahma and Shiva
manning the staysail and jib,
dreaming, thinking, uttering
without pause,

forever,
or until the sacred cows come home
and the last man disappears,
whichever comes first.

///

By P D Smith

“the point is…this is exactly what happened in Vietnam…a technological solution to a human problem…”

– Joe Penhall, Landscape with Weapon (2007)

If you were a physicist in the 1920s and 30s, all roads led to Copenhagen’s Blegdamsvej 15. This was where Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics was located. The Ukrainian-born physicist George Gamow recalled that “the Institute buzzed with young theoretical physicists and new ideas about atoms, atomic nuclei, and the quantum theory in general”. [1]

He was a superb footballer and had played to near professional level as a young man. But in physics the tall, softly-spoken Niels Bohr was in a league of his own. German physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker said after meeting Bohr: “I have seen a physicist for the first time. He suffers as he thinks.” [2] Together with Ernest Rutherford, Bohr had mapped the structure of the atom, and later, in the 1920s, he helped shape the quantum revolution, despite strong resistance from its founder, the former patent officer from Bern – Albert Einstein. Einstein’s debates in the late 1920s with Bohr on quantum theory were like a scientific clash of the Titans. Einstein could never accept the indeterministic quantum mechanics that grew out of his own 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.

Bohr’s annual conference, to which he invited about thirty physicists, was the highlight of the physics’ year. From the 3rd to 13th April 1932, the brightest minds in physics gathered together in Copenhagen. In a few years’ time, many of these same physicists would be working on the atomic bomb. But for now, they still had time for a little light-hearted play acting.

Each year the conference ended with what George Gamow called a “stunt pertaining to recent developments in physics”. [3] The year before, Gamow had rounded up proceedings with a cartoon history of quantum mechanics, starring Mickey Mouse in the lead role. [4] In 1932, as it was the centenary of Goethe’s death, they decided to stage a version of the German writer’s greatest play, Faust.

Written when the industrial revolution was transforming Germany, Goethe’s Faust raises key questions regarding science and technology, questions such as what is the purpose of knowledge, and how can we have progress without increasing human suffering?

Goethe’s Faust is a proto-scientist (the word ‘scientist’ was not coined until 1834), whose desire to know nature’s deepest secrets, leads him to strike a fateful bargain with Mephistopheles. In the sixteenth century, the story of Faust had been used by the Church to frighten people about the dangers of forbidden (i.e. non-Christian) knowledge. Goethe’s play re-works the classic theme for the modern age. His Faust celebrates the spirit of inquiry, while highlighting the dangers of misapplied knowledge. True scientific understanding, Goethe suggests, is life-affirming and creative, not destructive and exploitative.

The 1932 Faust was re-written and, of course, greatly abridged by the younger scientists at Bohr’s conference. Their literary skills were no doubt boosted by the products of Copenhagen’s other claim to fame – the Carlsberg Brewery, which also happened to be one of Danish science’s most generous benefactors. Max Delbrück, who would later become a central figure in the post-war revolution in molecular biology, did most of the writing.

The play is re-worked into what is essentially a humorous skit at the expense of the leading physicists of the day. Goethe’s characters were replaced with contemporary physicists, their younger colleagues donning masks to play them on stage. Mephistopheles became the irascible Austrian Wolfgang Pauli, while Faust became Paul Ehrenfest, a close friend of Einstein. The role of God was reserved, appropriately enough, for their host, Niels Bohr.

Wolfgang Pauli’s rudeness was legendary. In the play he bluntly tells the painfully polite Niels Bohr (aka God) that his latest theory is “Crap”. [5] But their gentlemanly host, Niels Bohr, is also gently mocked. His almost pathological fear of being too critical becomes the motto of the play, emblazoned on the text’s cover: “Nicht um zu kritisieren” (Not to criticize). Even Einstein doesn’t escape unscathed. His flawed unified field theory, which had created a media storm of interest when it was published in 1929, is lampooned by his young colleagues as the son of a flea.

Faust is depicted as a proud, even vain, figure, one who is deeply dissatisfied by what he has learnt and what physics can offer. Mephistopheles tries to tempt Faust by convincing him to accept one of the more outlandish theories in quantum physics – Pauli’s own idea of the neutrino, a particle without mass or charge. If once he can make Faust say to such a theory “Verweile doch! Du bis so schön!” (Stay! You are so beautiful!) then he has won his wager with God.

At times the play is anarchic, even Dadaist, in its celebration of the bizarre world of quantum theory. But in the 1930s the new physics was itself full of weird and wonderful notions. Niels Bohr once greeted one of Pauli’s theories with the comment: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question, which divides us, is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” [6]

The physicists transform Faust’s death scene at the end of Goethe’s play into a moment of supreme bathos. Mephistopheles ushers a press photographer on stage and it is this that is Faust’s undoing. Paul Ehrenfest utters Faust’s famous dying words, just as he is about to be immortalized by the photographer:

“Faust (highly excited, he takes a pose for the press photographer)

To this fair moment let me say:

‘You are so beautiful – Oh, stay!’

A trace of me will linger ’mongst the Great,

Within the annals of The Fourth Estate.

Anticipating fortune so benign,

I now enjoy the moment that is mine!” [7]

Although humour was the last thing in Goethe’s mind as he penned this poignant scene, in the physicists’ version of Faust it becomes a wonderfully witty moment, albeit with serious undertones. The younger physicists are making fun of their colleagues’ vanity and self-importance. Indeed, by highlighting the theme of fame, they were making an important point: in the coming years nuclear physicists would indeed enter the public eye and feature ever more frequently in the media.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by the new scientific superweapon, the public would come to view scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer with both respect and fear. Eventually, as they were drawn ever closer to the government and the military, the price physicists would pay for their Faustian bargain was to be immortalized as Dr Strangelove, the ultimate doomsday man.

At the end of the play, a physicist who had entered the media spotlight in 1932 made a brief appearance as Faust’s over-ambitious famulus, Wagner. James Chadwick is portrayed by his fellow physicists as “a personification of the ideal experimentalist”. He walks on stage after Faust’s death scene wearing the scientist’s trade-mark lab coat and balancing a black ball on one finger.

This rather sinister looking figure announces an extraordinary discovery, one of which Faust himself would have been proud. James Chadwick had found one of the basic constituents of matter: the third elementary particle after protons and electrons, the neutron.

The discovery of the neutron, just before the Copenhagen conference, was a seminal achievement for modern nuclear physics. Its discovery made possible Leo Szilard’s idea in the following year of a self-sustaining chain reaction. Indeed there are Faustian echoes here too. For in 1932 Szilard read HG Wells’s novel The World Set Free about a Faustian scientist discovering how to release the energy locked in the heart of the atom. [8] Szilard’s discovery helped open the door to the atomic bomb.

1932 was an important year as regards the science of the superweapon. Wernher von Braun was hired by the German army to design rocket engines, the first step on the path towards ICBMs. In the same year Harold Urey announced the discovery of a new hydrogen isotope known as deuterium. This would become the fuel for the hydrogen bomb. These are powerful reminders that the tragedy of Goethe’s Faust was about to be played out on a world stage. Clearly, the lessons of the play and of Goethe’s science were still profoundly relevant.

In Part II, Act 2 of Goethe’s Faust, Wagner (Chadwick in the 1932 performance) uses alchemy to create not a neutron but a homunculus, a miniature man. In this scene Goethe criticizes what he considered to be a misguided approach to science. Wagner’s alchemistic attempt to create the homunculus combines allusions to both Paracelsian recipes and contemporary advances in chemistry, such as Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesising of urea in 1828. [9] But significantly Wagner only succeeds because Mephistopheles is present. Goethe highlights the fact that Wagner’s approach to science is flawed and supernatural intervention is required to make it work.

Faust has turned his back on alchemy and the knowledge of books at the beginning of the play. As Faust discovers, neither words, books nor instruments alone lead to true knowledge. His passionate desire to grasp ‘the inmost force / That bonds the very universe’ (ll.382-3, “was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammenhält”) is a scientific and philosophical goal Faust pursues tirelessly throughout his life, regardless of the cost to himself or others around him. [10] But he too has much to learn about science and knowledge. For Goethe, one of the most important lessons was that the route to scientific knowledge and self-knowledge was a parallel process. As he wrote in 1823: “The human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the world; he perceives the world only in himself, and himself only in the world.” [11]

At the end of the play Goethe highlights the dangers of the misapplication of scientific knowledge. Thanks to the temptations of Mephistopheles, Faust has lost touch with the insights he has gained into both nature and himself. His overambitious attempt to reclaim land from the sea, a hasty and hubristic act which results in the deaths of the old couple, Baucis and Philemon, represents Goethe’s fears about the misuse of science and technology. It is one thing to understand the laws of nature – the forces that bind the universe – and to be able to control these laws. It is something else entirely to be able to use this power wisely.

By performing Faust in 1932, the physicists created some intriguing parallels between Wagner and Chadwick, as well as the neutron and the homunculus. Goethe used the scene in Wagner’s laboratory both to belittle alchemy’s supposed achievements and to criticize mechanistic science for its hubristic attempts to play god. What, one wonders, would Goethe have made of Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron?

Goethe’s notion that scientific knowledge and self-knowledge should evolve hand-in-hand, is a deeply suggestive theme when one looks at the history of twentieth-century science. What is the point of knowing nature’s deepest secrets, Goethe asks, if humankind never attains self-knowledge? The Faustian physicist might control the forces of nature but he does not understand, let alone control, himself.

It is fascinating that the atomic physicists gathered at Bohr’s Institute in spring 1932 chose to perform Goethe’s play at this pivotal moment in the history of science. Six years later, one of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights began a work that would raise profound questions about the purpose of science in the atomic age. After many revisions, the final version of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo was first performed in 1955. By then, as Oppenheimer said, the scientists had known sin and the world was living in fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust. This hugely influential play reflected the widely-held view that twentieth-century science was in crisis.

Brecht’s Galileo is a Faustian character, who initially boasts that he would happily live out his life in a dark, windowless prison if he could but discover the secret of light. But at the end of his life, under house arrest and – like the aged Faust – nearly blind, Galileo has realised that science is about more than describing the laws of nature.

Brecht believed that, as a human activity, science had a moral dimension that was increasingly ignored. In the midst of the cold war, as the superpowers and their scientists transformed the laws of nature into ever more terrible weapons of mass destruction, Brecht called for a more human-centred science, a point he makes by paraphrasing Galileo’s contemporary Francis Bacon: “I believe that the sole objective of science consists in reducing the drudgery of human existence.” According to Brecht, the alternative is that each advance in scientific knowledge results in “progress away from humanity”. The scientists’ shrieks of Eureka! will one day be greeted by “a universal cry of horror” because of the ever more lethal technologies their discoveries make possible. [12]

Goethe would no doubt have been flattered that a century after his death some of the world’s most gifted physicists performed a version of his greatest play. He would, however, have been appalled to discover that soon scientists such as these would create weapons that could incinerate tens of thousands of people in an instant. Would he have been surprised though? I doubt it.

Today, despite the myriad distractions of an increasingly technologized culture, the lessons of Goethe’s Faust remain profoundly relevant to us all. As Brecht so eloquently put it in the final scene of Galileo:

“May you now guard science’s light

Kindle it and use it right

Lest it be a flame to fall

Downward to consume us all.

Yes, us all.” [13]

References

The issues surrounding the physicists’ Faust are discussed at greater length in my book, Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, and in an article for the current issue of the Publications of the English Goethe Society, available to download on my website, Kafka’s mouse.

1. George Gamow, Thirty Years That Shook Physics, 1966; repr Mineola, N.Y., 1985, 51.

2. Cited in Richard P. Feynman, Don’t You Have time to Think?, London, 2005, xii.

3. Gamow, 167.

4. John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics and the First Atomic Bombs, Madison, 2000, 268, n.

5. The Blegdamsvej Faust is on microfilm 66 of the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (American Philosophical Society). An English version, together with the illustrations, is in Gamow, 165-218.

6. Bohr cited in Robert Ehrlich, Eight Preposterous Propositions, Princeton, 2005, 5.

7. Gamow, 210.

8. H.G. Wells, The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind, 1914; repr. as The Last War, Lincoln, 2001.

9. P.D. Smith, ‘Scientific Themes in Goethe’s Faust’, in Paul Bishop, ed., A Companion to Goethe’s Faust, Rochester, N.Y., 2001, 198-99.

10. See ibid., 194–220.

11. “Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird. Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf.” Goethe, “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges Geistreiches Wort” (1823), Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, 1981, vol 13, 38; tr. Douglas Miller: Goethe, Scientific Studies, Princeton, 1995, 39.

12. On Brecht and Bacon see P.D. Smith, Metaphor & Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science 1780-1955 (Oxford, 2000), 304; all quotes in this paragraph from Brecht, Life of Galileo, scene 14.

13. Life of Galileo, Scene 15; tr. Charles Laughton (Penguin, 2008).

“Hütet nun ihr der Wissenschaften Licht

Nutzt es und mißbraucht es nicht

Daß es nicht, ein Feuerfall

Einst verzehre noch uns all

Ja, uns all.”

“Moscow waited for almost 24 hours, during which Georgian artillery and planes were sending the capital of South Ossetia to ruins. Almost 1600 people were killed in the shelling. Now it is being presented by the mainstream media exclusively as Russia’s intervention and expansionist policy.” –Centre for Humanitarian Programmes, Republic of Abkhazia

American news coverage of the US-Georgia-Russia conflict continues to be appalling–blindingly biased and simplistic, and yet my knowledge of the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is scant.
On August 12, I received an e-mail from a humanitarian organization in Abkhazia describing events as they had unfolded on the ground in South Ossetia. I wrote directly to them. What is below is the e-mail response I received from Liana Kvarchelia. She has kindly given me permission to post it on 3quarksdaily.

September 2, 2008

Dear Laray,

I am glad that there are people who are interested to hear the other side of the story. Indeed I was told by friends in the US that the coverage there is extremely one-sided. I do not know if you read Russian. If so, I can recommend you a website www.apsny.com. Apart from that you can find some information on our country and the situation in www.circussianworld.com. There are some articles there including mine. I have also written about the conflict for the Accord series published by “Conciliation Resources”, based in London.
On the whole I must say that we have found ourselves (not without some doze of surprise) in the epicenter of global conflict. It is clear to many people that there is power struggle going on between the US and Russia, with EU trying to accommodate their own interests, that not always compliment each member states’ vision. However our conflict with Georgia has a much longer history that the EU, and definitely longer than Georgia’s plans for NATO accession.
When at the end of the 19th century many Abkhazians having lost to the Russian Empire fled to Turkey and further, other ethnic groups were competing in resettling the vacated territories. Later when the Bolsheviks came, Abkhazia as well as Georgia became union states with an equal status within the USSR. But Jozef Stalin, Georgian by origin, reduced the status of Abkhazia to an autonomy within Georgia in 1931.
The Abkhazian language was banned, it was substituted by Georgian. Since the ’30-40s the second wave of Georgian settlers came to Abkhazia. This process continued throughout our existence in the USSR as a Georgian autonomy. That’s how we ended up a minority on our land. The 1990s was the time when Georgian nationalism was at its peak. “Georgia for Georgians” was a popular slogan. All non-Georgians were announced to be “hosts on Georgian land.” Not many people even in the USSR knew that Abkhazians protested against being within Georgia even in the Soviet times, every decade. But in the ’90s these protests became known to the world.
On 14 August 1992 when the Abkhazian Parliament was discussing a draft proposal for a Federation with Georgia, the Georgian bombs started falling on our heads, and the Georgian tanks attacked our towns and villages. It was a bloody war, with crimes committed first by Georgians and then by Abkhazians. The Georgians purposefully burnt down our State Archives and our Institute of Literature, History and Culture. It was quite symbolic. You can read about all this in the UNPO report that organized a fact finding mission to Abkhazia in 1992.
You can also read about it in Tom de Waal’s article specifically devoted to the State Archives. Georgia lost the war, but tried to use its anti-Russian position to mobilize (quite successfully) Western support for its so-called “territorial integrity.”
I respect the people of Georgia, and I respect their desire to be independent, but I also want them to respect my people’s desire to be independent too. Not long ago I was interviewed by a US public TV company. You can find the interview on their website “>“NATO rapid-response unit proposed to address fears about Russia,” LA Times, 19 September 2008

Noam Chomsky,

“>“The Militarisation of the Eastern Mediterranean: Israel’s Stake in the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline,” Global Research, 23 May 2006

Laray Polk lives in Dallas, Texas. She can be contacted at laraypolk@earthlink.net

///
What is Mind?  No matter.  What is Matter?  Never mind.
–Bishop Berkley

A Meating of Mind
Jim Culleny

If my brain
does not tell my arm what to do
nothing much will happen.
Without a brain my arm is
not much smarter than
a leg of lamb

In fact, meat
without mind
is never going to get
much done, while
mind without meat
wouldn’t have any
point in space/time

but when they mate
-when Mind and Meat meet,
when they kiss and make love
things fecund soon become
and run the gamut from
dumb-and-dumber
right on up to the sublime:
from Rush Limbaugh to
Albert Einstein

It’s just the way it is with
sentient being:
Mind needs Meat
to do its work
and Meat needs Mind to
have the inclination to do
anything

but Mind-meets-Meat
is a crap shoot

sometimes it’s a match made in heaven
sometimes it’s a hell of a thing

///