July 12, 2008
Post Industry?
Let me take a minute to deconstruct deconstruction. I've heard the term post-industrial thrown around. This is where our problem lies in our postmodern society. There is no such thing as post industry because to say a society is "postindustrial" is to say that a society no longer relies on manufacturing, building, and other industrial pursuits. Engineers are still among the most employable and stable occupations. Public sector industrial work never goes out of style (particularly in PA with the way the weather works the infrastructure. Service industry requires a stable base of industrial development. If I want to open a restaurant, I have to have people come and build a place to host it. Then I need tables, chairs, ovens, kitchen tools, and of course, uniforms, tableware. And after that is done, I will need food products, wines, coffees, etc. Service directly depends on industry. It's just like the transition from agrarian life to mass industry. Believe it or not, there are still farmers in this world. Trees, plants and animals that aren't cats, dogs or ferrets exist. In order to make those crystal glasses, you need a carbon source. Raw materials are still being harvested. What is oil? Post industrial would suggest that we no longer rely on raw materials which would be a complete lie being as our recycling system is, I would argue, inadequate.
What marks the post-industrial age is not the reality, but the focus of society's gaze on reality. Cyber studies, media studies, media ecology, sensation and perception being psychology's next fad. We've merely directed the attention of the culture at large to a growing facet of our society. Industry has not shrunken, but with global capital is indeed, growing. So what seems like a diminishing demand of manufacturing jobs in America is actually a shift in the sectors where the jobs are placed (the outsourcing crisis ring a bell?). So, we should make clear that service depends on industry (every industry needs tools), that demand for industrial jobs has not diminished and that economic growth really does start with industry. What happens is a series of shifts in demand. Specialists are always hired because of the principles of competition that capitalism employs. We want the best candlestick maker, right? But let's say next year, there is an incident with fire that makes buying candles unfavorable and people see a new electric candle that the competitor is selling. Candlestick makers are now out of business and all the time invested in perfecting that trade is thrown out. What if a blight hits the beehives in that area and wax can no longer be collected for that plant? Those are all factors that affect people employed at that plant. Deregulation cannot address those crises and in fact, makes it easier for companies to shift around. The argument that taxes has so much to do with the state of the economy is such a fallacious argument. Yet many people buy this notion and I nearly vomit when I see how many NeoReaganists are out there. The economy is not driven by profits. It is driven by labor, and in particular, industrial labor. The goal of the economy is profit, but profit cannot be achieved without something to generate it.
So take the whole "greed is good" idea for example and let's be completely agnostic to moral, political, and philosophical convictions and ideology. If we loosen the grip on the stock market, banks, and corporate organizations, this creates a surge of money in the upper sectors of money holders and allows for these groups to invest in industry in order to generate more wealth for themselves. The trickle-down effect would be the kind and benevolent rich people bending down to the working class Americans and handing... or more accurately, that letting powerful capitalists off the leash for a while would resurrect industry and open a mass industrial job market to generate more wealth for the rich and rekindle the vague promise of the "American dream." It, even in my very cynical interpretation, sounds very glittering. Here's the catch: you only get half of the story: the macroeconomic perspective. What you get is glittering generalizations to which our culture has, in recent history, been built on. It sounds good. But more jobs does not mean better situation for working class families, does not mean more wealth for the ambiguous benefits of economic growth across the board.
This relies on the assumption that capital drives economic improvement. But, as any economist would know, bigger is not necessarily better. May we say "broken window fallacy?" The problem with these thoughts are they don't change anything really. Raising the standard of living across the board does not eliminate poverty. Poverty is a social condition marked by a disparity between one class of people and another. Being poor is not lacking the things necessary to live, but being of a social status so low one could not be lower. The trouble is the poverty line is very ambiguous and extremely subjective. Where do you draw the line of poverty? People were sent to labor camps in 18th century Europe for stealing food and stealing is socializing in the base classes. What stopped the people in the 18th century from going into the woods and killing animals with their bare hands and eating them? It was more possible then than now. Humans are social creatures and the presence of people is enough to keep people in a unfair situation. So food was not a need, but a desire in 18th century Europe. And a loaf of bread is no different than stealing a television set. Where did this come from? Greed. And from the lower classes to the upper, we are socialized to believe this wad of horse shit. And the greed trickles down. Poverty is the social frustration of desire. Poor people want to be able to have access to the things of rich people because the rich have it easy. And being part of society and all it's assumptions of wants and needs runs deep into the soul of every human being. We want to flaunt our talents and uniqueness and we want to feel special. Willy Loman was certainly special once. But when folks came back from the war and the GI bill put more college grads out there, a salesman became just a salesman. Bernards started replacing Willies and by Christ, look at what something as simple as an image does. Post industry is what happened to Willy Loman. How often do you see a show like Rosanne on TV? Working class people have been eliminated from our social awareness. They exist. It's funny how media, pop culture hype and marketing all play a role in shifting what we believe is reality. Postindustry, cyberculture, social networking are all glittery terms like greed is good, that call us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It's sad. And we all want to be the man, too. Which is more sad.
I have to repeat the words of my Mexican buddy who comes to America and is taken aback by how little we really stop and look at classism. "How much is enough? Is there ever a time when these people [wealthy Americans] say 'I'm satisfied'?" Luxury is disappointing. Just ask kids in the 1950s. Home life may be more tranquil in the suburbs, but building so-called solutions doesn't really solve the fundamental problem that has driven contemporary culture: the problem of society. We should learn from our Latino and Native brothers: how we mingle with others is a part of achieving happiness. And as business continues to grow and deregulation allows business to shift work around to suit the creation of profit and people are constantly competing and searching aimlessly for that "American Dream," we will still feel anxiety and unfulfillment. Free markets can't bring that fulfillment. We learned that in the 1950s as Jack Kerouac watched people wander around at night in their cars. Until we can start building small, stable, localized economies that only function to fill needs and not create them, until we can build actual communities where people help each other through real problems that are now reserved for disinterested professionals, until we can all view each other as a friend, we will all be lost travelers on these long and winding roads, whether in a car or on the roadside hitching for a ride. Please buy local produce, chat a while with people in your neighborhood deli, volunteer at a community arts festival or nursing home, take a look at all the hidden gems your community has to offer. You cannot change the world, or stop large corporations, or completely restructure the economy. But with 4 dollar gas, it might be wise to start the movement. Think locally, act locally. You might be surprised at just how many of the answers are hiding under your nose.
Posted by EvanReynolds at 11:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
March 15, 2008
Bigger Ain't Better - A Manifesto for American Liberals
So how can any good liberal person sit there and support globalization? The new wave of non-profit industry that appears to be sweeping the nation, encompassing anything from global water quality to poverty-stricken villages in Africa and Haiti to international ethnic conflicts, is doing a disservice to the world and to Americans in particular. George Orwell made clear his position about socialism: that bureaucratic socialism further alienated the worker from a sense of purpose and dignity and contributed even more to class antagonisms ("all pigs are created equal, but some pigs are created more equal than others"). This is a point in the venture of our culture where a huge divergence is met and liberals as a group, again can be thrown to the blame. It is the social and economic liberals who must face the harsh indictment of responsibility for times like these. The free market ideology of contemporary Western liberalism allowed for corruption due to the over-inflation of industry. Somewhere along the way, someone had the brilliant idea that larger, more centalized industry could drive down the cost of goods and allow for more employment opportunities (iow: inflation from and out-of-balance and unmanagable supply and demand and lower wages for workers with increased remedial factory work). Did it work? Yes and no. It did what it was designed to do and that is, increase the wealth of nations and elevate the GDP of each nation that adopts such a model. What it didn't do was alter the rates of unemployment. Conservatives who stand against increases in minimum wage are correct in their assumption that wage inceases cut jobs. However, this is a catch-22. Wages are increased based on the cost of living. Minimum wage, in theory, was put in place so that a worker could have the security of a job that allowed that person the base pay for supporting their life. The problem is not with the wage increase, the problem is with the system that will not yield to low-end worker's rights and cut profits to support its employees. Being that there is a lockbox on the profits set aside for investors, who gets shafted? The people that have the money? Or the people that need the money?
So with this heavily-guarded interest, the "risk-taking" investors (hardly a risk when the profits are made, whether legally and ethically or not) are the ones who have the first dibs on the booty 'cause they just put so much on the line for it. This is the context for the next transition in American culture circa 1980 when regionalism started to really die and globalization started kicking in. As Americans became displeased with the disproportion of remedial jobs to skilled labor jobs, large national corporations started making deals with other "developing nations" (note the use of language suggesting that if you don't have capitalism in your area, you are lacking something. areas of the world aren't bad because of war, genocide, pollution and diseases arising from death, decay, and pollution, these areas are bad because they don't have capitalism (you cannot refute that this is not cultural hegemony, because it is). Compare surveys of the state of pre-colonial Africa with similar types of documents highlighting post-colonial Africa and tell me what the great benefit of giving a western structure to Africa was. Jobs that had involved little to no skill were given off to people in other nations with less restrictions on human rights violations. Did this open up jobs here? No. It took away jobs and created a huge push to make a lucrative business out of the technologies that were developed originally for war and corporate communication. Now you have the machines that drove industry through the 70s and 80s sitting on your desk.
There were pros and cons to this. Pros: business machines are cheaper, more opportunity to create local and regional business. Cons: the dot-com boom and bust and the revision of computer marketing strategies. Perhaps regionalism would have had an uprising and grassroots community development would have succeeded if it weren't for Wal-Mart and the rise of shopping malls. If you had the choice of going one place for everything with lower prices or several places for things with the prices of yesterday when a dollar meant something what would you pick? Don't even lie to me, you stupid, rebellious, Lasn-reading hipsters. Your dollar suddenly means less because there is more of it (see the context I established above), you will go and you will be drawn in to the sights, the smells and the sounds and you will have grown up only knowing shopping malls, image, competition, taste, cool, trendy. You will have become the consumer culture. People are cruel with this shit. It may look like a series of arbitrary images, but like money, it becomes a passionate and competitive game to outcool, out-trend and out-spend your opponent. And as companies like Apple computers started making graphical desktop options, the market shifted for computers and consumers want the computers for games and fun and novelty mostly. Again, we have a computer at our house and you don't. And even more, we have an Apple and you don't. Image + competition = brand loyalty.
And about the new wave of regionalism? Down town city spaces became ghost towns because of the dubbed "Wal-Mart effect." Small business is something virtually impossible to keep and would not last long without the intervention of town and state government grants. The very thing conservatives protest (socialism) is the very thing that supports "conservative" values (ie; home, family, community, etc). So as large business ventures go out of hand and the older generation, who had been under the foolish impression that capitalism is virtue because it creates opportunities, moves to make non-profit ventures (or repentent sinners such as Bill Gates move to prove that their wave of capitalism isn't all bad and there are good things it has... is... will do). This is our current crisis. Our culture is caught in the age of ideas, the age of solutions. Businesses start of the premise that they offer "solutions for... [insert clever-sounding piece of bullshit]." Corporations tout in the advertisements "we've created solutions for... [another clever-sounding piece of bullshit]." Global climate change has been an irrefutable problem... ask any PA resident about the weather. And now non-profit ventures see themselves as virtuous and valliant crusaders, giving [insert class, gender, race or nationality of people] [insert virtuous-sounding sollution]." Notice how all these ventures are pure abstractions. There is no specific pitch as to what exactly these entreprises do to what specific, measurable phenomenon of the world.
We are moving from an age of disciplinarianism to an age of interdisciplinarianism and innovation. We just now see how much the inflated economic entreprise affects us and we are trying to find something to work for to fix the problems that were caused by this vehicle which we are using to fix the problems. It's a chaotic viscious cycle. The world is pure abstraction. Poor people don't exist save the ones we see in print, on TV or on the internet. I have seen yuppies all but run over bums begging for a job in Shadyside, the same ones who feel like they are doing a service to society. What is society? Society is chaos. It is mass society. Mass society is people swarming around arbitrarily without the coherance of a movement looking for opportunity. Is there opportunity? Why is there the largest disparity between rich and poor with a quickly-vanishing middle class? Why? Because regionlism is dead. Because we have all lost a sense of place. Community does not exist in a geographical sense. Community is now ideological and ideologies clash. Call me anti-intellectual, I don't care. Intellect is dead. The American culture war is a product of this ideological grouping. More and more people have been forced into unemployment offices, on the phone, on job hunt web pages, onto online social networks. This has altered the social consious of people. Who does this hurt? The poor who are stuck in run-down communities, in the boondocks, in the ghettos. If the jobs go wherever they want, governed only by the arbitrary whims of a mass global society and the demands of the mass global economy, people are forced to constantly move. I will argue that always we are only responsible for what we see. That doesn't mean that we can help the people of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, but what it does mean is that if we want to help them, we should move there and help them without mediation. Funneling money is counterproductive. Non-profit business is not virtuous. It is still business and must be met with every grain of distrust. Teach the people how to build homes, how to live from the land. How to defend the land that is rightfully theirs and form trade unions to secure just trading with buyers.
And for Godsakes, lets also work on America and her problems because the brooding, heartless conservative ideologies that are rising into dominance now are speaking to an oppressed people in America and promising many good things for lower-class Americans. LIBERALS: we know what we base our beliefs on and that is the liberation of humanity. We were opposed to slavery, we were there in the factories with the workers demanding fair treatment, we spoke up about the lynchings in Birmingham, the hate crimes against gays, lesbians and transgendered people, we demanded assylum inmates be treated with dignity and we saw that the death of the regimes of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini would be a reality. A liberal is always with the oppressed even in a physical sense, and the liberal must always guard the underdog from the teeth of his/her oppressor. America must not allow the shallow words of conservative power elites enter the possiblity of popularity.
While there are still communities standing, support your community. Volunteer. Clean up the place. Take pride in your town. Get to know the youth and the elderly and build up regional and community activity. Globalization is not a word in the liberal vocabulary. The chaos can only stop with you - stand firm, be active in local politics. Speak up at church about the real words of Christ and not some decontextualized interpretation. Help solve the problems at home, not with empty, glorious-sounding words but with real action. Bigger ain't better. It is only the small, base and wretched that can save the world.
Posted by EvanReynolds at 4:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 30, 2008
Disinterest, intervention, and "democratic liberation"
Watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9Samvw6Z08&NR=1
Foucalt had taken a very radical and critical look at the history of interventionist institutions of Europe, in Discipline and Punish. Think about the very negative argument that he makes in this book. Modern prisons were not produced by a structural change of the aristocratic system of jails. Prisons were built on the pretext of "reform" and "discipline." The penal courts of Europe were another arbitrary institution, merely carrying out the laws created and defined by the values of the new ruling bourgeois class, without regard to an objective, central definition of civility and just behavior. Within the foundations of the prison system, Foucault points out, there was a strikingly large assumption that the codes of behavior instituted by "common laws" were based on just and ordered behavior. This rings true of the emergence of the American bourgeoisie in the post Reconstruction era with national prohibition declared in the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, supported by the Women's Temperance movement, ironically before women's suffrage. "Civilized" America passed a law to restrict the freedoms of the populace. What does prohibition have to do with temperance? Moderation? Justice? With such narrow, concrete and specific definitions of law, we can see the fundamental alienation of truth from arbitrary law. No. Alcohol consumption has nothing to do with any of those. A national amendment could be seen as the red flag of the nonobjective opinions of the ruling class (consumed with fear, apparently, from the undeveloped and "uncivilized" state of America) being instituted within the administrative structures.
This is widely applicable to much of American law: abortion is a separate term from murder, even though the pretext of making abortion illegal is defining this term with the established definition of murder (trouble is, it is also established as a medical practice, making culpability almost impossible in a courtroom, or at bare minimum, a greater waste of public funds than prosecuting a murder case with the intent of capital punishment); marijuana is a plant that produces high levels of the chemical THC, illegal by the statutes of the US Code, a plant which is part of an existing ecosystem cannot be considered illegal (it would be like saying your dog's fur is illegal for citizens to touch and that Fido can exist, but you cannot touch your doggy) but making a part of the plant with no pretense other than the profound effects on the body (which include the alluring ability to synthesize treatments for Alzheimer's, Dementia, etc, etc); a contrary example would be the household cleaning supplies used to manufacture methamphetamines are legal despite the high concentration of poisonous chemicals and questionable value of their usage, but in synthesis, rather than analysis, they are illegal.
If we wanted to stop drug usage or sexual activity, we would need to change the culture (the age-old evil socialism). Instead, to stop the drug culture from exchanging chemicals, we brand certain specific substances as dangerous (even with the questionable content of cigarettes, colas, and fast food) and declare their usage, possession (which this legal term is justified with preemptive rhetoric of "with intent to ___"), and exchange. Is this disinterest? I would argue it is class indoctrination. Laws of substances have circumstantial connection with justice and order. It's not the profundity of the chemical effects on the body, society, etc, it is the culture that is looked down upon with fear and ignorance, so the due process of law and order is circumvented and preemptive interventionism is carried out. Drug usage has nothing to do with order. People use conscious-altering drugs everyday. If drugs had a causal promotion of crime, chocoholics would all be in prison. Faulty assumptions, again. The leaders of the ruling class call it an "intervention," claiming it is based in disinterest. But how can drugs be defined as a crime if they are a promotion of crime? Money is exchanged so freely that IBM has concretely been linked to economic support of the South African Apartheid regime. But it's more than money here in America. It's fear and ignorance. That is why I can sit here and deconstruct American Law. If a teenage pothead can be held accountable for a little escape from the harsh oppressive world in his/her freetime, then all parties tied to the large corporate exchange of resources to oppressive dictatorships should be held accountable without any extenuating pretense or exception. How is the Law able to permit illegal actions like Enron, yet crack down on a group of reckless teenagers that have indisputably less impact on society? Why target the small, decentralized actions of certain people. That is your answer. Certain people. Antidepressants are distributed like candy. Psychiatry does not know enough nor do the "professionals" invest the time for clearly and accurately diagnosing such problems. You come in feeling the blues, they give you pills you feel happy.
This is a problem because the same antidepressants can increase thoughts of suicide and not just ideations, but plans as well. Here is clear culpability because of the lack of scientific rigor in large-market drugs. But drugs that impair or enhance certain processes of the endocrine and nervous systems to produce the "high" are all lumped into the same category: detrimental to social order. However, if such drugs are against such order, why must there be a "war on drugs" which relies on leads and arrests of recreational users to catch distributors? If drugs promote social disarray, it should be easy to end "the drug problem." But the assumption that certain drugs promote crime in all people is a faulty assumption. Dosage, interaction with other substances, and individual differences in the way each person processes chemicals all come into play with the effects of a drug on behavior. Go back to physiology or neuropsychology. And the issue is social disorder and the promotion of crime, which is a choice. Right-winged political movements can say they promote individual integrity and personal responsibility, but the rhetoric of the drug laws out of the heyday of American conservatism prove otherwise. You will not be held accountable to cause social disorder because we won't even give you the chance is the message. The assumptions lead one to see the oligarchical class interests present in the policies of our institutions. Guns have also been scientifically verified to promote violent thoughts and behaviors instinctively, that is, across cultures, genders, and age groups. If you want to stop social disarray, the best place to start would be the total prohibition of the production of weaponry. Just a thought.
I think people brand Foucault as a skeptic unfairly. Yes, this is skepticism, but also a call to re-evaluate the way we approach topics of justice, to be aware of the difference between justice and rationalization.
Now, what does this all have to do with Chomsky? Simple. Here, with two very contrasting philosophies (Chomsky is a very traditional, "old-skool" rationalist who places a large emphasis on free and objective inquiry), you can see an overlap. Chomsky addresses the same issues as Foucault with careful examination of the policies and going directly to the contradictions, not the gaps. There are both in the oligarchical, indoctrinational policies of American Law and also foreign policy. Prescription drugs are often released before real stability is achieved, and side effects that promote violent, antisocial actions can be observed. What a contradiction! You would think in a world of "free entreprise" that someone could create a meth lab and make a tightly-controlled factory of narcotics. You just have to scratch your head at such "disinterest." Can there be order? If there can be contradiction, I whole-heartedly believe there can be order. Laws, taxes, and other elements of American government privilege the privileged. America, the public institution does not support economic democracy. In fact, the favor is not on the person with a new idea or a better way to organize society. The favor is on the people with money and power to gain more money and power. Our "economic democracy" slipped away like the free citizens of Athens to a state of oligarchy. The top 10% of the economic class spectrum increased salaries by twice as much as the bottom 20% in the last decade. This is not real freedom. This is arbitrary "every man for himself" with hardly any accountability for actions. The social contract has expired. Bigger is the new better. And Reaganomics and deregulation has expanded into corporate welfare. As we can note in the application of social order and substance, it is easy to catch someone down below. Expand police deployment in an area and the amount of criminals caught and persecuted increases, that is the most certain statistic. People can be caught in a regional placement. Can a person with a private jet be caught? Do we deploy police to hospitals rampant with faulty medical practices? To pharmaceutical companies that release drugs before the recommended date by the scientists that make the drugs? Do we listen to the factory worker about whether an increase in production is feasible?
Regional economies work much more effectively because they rely on the presumption that people are capable of doing bad things. In fact, social psychology holds that people are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior if they know they are not being watched. The destructive effects of selfishness and antisocial views of people are easier to address in a smaller, decentralized, and organized grouping of people. The bystander effect increases in magnitude with an increase in bystanders and after a certain point, where there is a mass of people, a crowd, there becomes no noticeable change in this effect and a crowd simply becomes an impersonal crowd. We all don't like much of the Bush administration's actions, left and right alike, but what can we do? The President is so far removed from the people that direct arrest of this person is impossible. And conversely, the president is so far removed, the effects of the agenda set by his network of power elite leaders cannot be seen and comprehended. A CEO cannot ask his workers directly about the conditions, nor does he care. The social structures we cling to objectify the people who work who are the foundation of order and create all the stuff. You are just a number in the grid. War is a video game and soldiers no longer have to carry the burden of a bayonet and kill the enemy directly. Lower class society is placed in a depersonalized machine to produce for the people with the drive and agenda to do whatever they want. Criticize the ruling class and the only thing they can produce is insults, interruptions and rationalizations, as seen in the video where this "American" talks with a pompous, unnecessary, and fake British accent to assert some intelligence that he lacks, while interrupting Chomsky, who remains composed, rational and attentive to each question. Chomsky responds with careful, nuanced analysis to irrelevant metaphor, historical revisionism, and just outright snobbery.
Who can watch the watchmen when they are held in the safety of their penthouse and mansions? If the people below can be held accountable in the eyes of the law, so can the ruling class.
Freedom is the ability to make choices. Liberty is the freedom from being forced to make choices. In America, there are few who have both freedom and liberty. The social contract is not a computer algorithm, it cannot be expanded into infinity. I agree with Chomsky. The American fixation of imposing "democracy" upon the world goes against America's roots in Libertarianism (Classic libertarian. Emphasis is always on liberty and absence of coercion, not right to property. "pursuit of happiness" not "pursuit of financial gain." Conservatism is revisionism). Indoctrination, and policies that border on cultural hegemony are what we are dealing with. I salute Richard Rodriguez for rejecting the myths of both "melting pot" ideology and "multiculturalism." I am incredulous of such metanarratives of American culture. And yes, I am a skeptic. There is no term or image to replace these with. Such issues are frivolous and waste intellectual energy defining a culture that formed out of the Founding Fathers project to end the bullshit of Europe and allow pure liberation to evolve. We have a common history, that is the most important part of American identity. Any indoctrination about who we are, the food(s) we eat, the language(s) we speak are all detractions from the real issues: the promise of liberty and the institutions that corrupted that promise.
Posted by EvanReynolds at 10:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 21, 2008
The Making of America
Read the news - the stock market is wobbling and of course, investors are crying to Uncle Sam for intervention. And being that the government is filled by the same power elites with the similar investments, the government will comply to the requests whole-heartedly. Anticipate tax breaks for large corporations and upper-middle class consumers that buy most of the useless status goods that make our economy go. Do small businesses ever get tax relief in times of economic crisis? Why is this? The majority of jobs (jobs, not occupations or careers) are filled by large corporations. Numbers speak without context in capitalism. Relief happens at the highest level because our paradigm is set to globalization. Regional economies will be extinct after this epoch.
Here's an assignment: research a way to build a co-op or local organic farm with your knowledge and a recent-college-grad budget.
Development happens with a large-scale privilege. Anyone can call paradigms like regionalism, syndicalism and anarchy idealistic. But is it? What is the great benefit of large-scale economic expansionism? Europe exceeded the US economic strength with high productivity and innovative technologies. And Europe is built on regionalized, socialist economies. If there are people that want the laissez-faire capitalism that Rand envisioned, here it is. Consumerism is the most permissive form of laissez-faire possible without chaos and collapse into dictatorship, oligarchy, and fascism.
There is no one in the ruling class that has the intelligence and drive to create a function that can govern international trade. And if such a person existed anywhere, that person would not put forth the effort to create such a system because reason would tell anyone that has even read news articles about scientific research into global climate, global society and global mass development, that globalization is something that cannot happen and should not be attempted. We can play God, but there is no human above another. Charity is not relief, relief is going to the oppressed and exploited people of the world and fixing the collapsing houses, cleaning the water, teaching the people culturally non-invasive practices of farming, house building, cooking, medicine, etc. And while fixing the structural problems of deteriorating areas, lock up the real criminals of the world, the ones that pretend to be the solutions to all the "problems" of the natural order.
The people that rule are not gods. They are not even more intelligent. They are simply powerful. In Greek mythology, gods were not divine and omnibenevolent beings. Gods were simply humans with exaggerated human abilities. What does competition produce? Refined skills. Period. You can produce a large set of great items and become adept at selling them (or simply the latter, in most cases). We got good at creating chemicals from the Earth. Good at building and refining chemicals that can kill with a drop. But wait... we suck at contextualizing. We look at things in a fragmented, blinder-eyed way. Sure, we can perfect killing someone, but...
We should spend more time in fixing our society - a society jaded with over-crowded cities, which are the only place to find a good job anymore. We see problems everywhere but here. Children are starving in Africa, of course. But you cannot help Africa without relocating. I suggest if you feel bad for African children, pay a visit to your local charity organization and demand to create programs for helping the children in Wilkinsburg or East Liberty. Me, I would love to be nostalgic and subscribe to the way it was in the 50s. You go to work and get paid enough to live. But you can't go back. People call me idealistic? We're all scrambling to "advance," to "climb the ladder." Where? Where are you all going? Y'all look like your going insane, to me. We all are. We look at this social organization and don't so much as bat an eyelash. It is more reminiscent of a bunch of people thrown into a tank and scrambling to get above the other one to prevent themselves from drowning.
This is not order with random acts of chaos (a society envisioned by Rousseau). This is chaos with random acts of order (what simply allowing people to do whatever they desire without governance by greater principle). The social contract is not something that cannot be achieved. If you can put all you energies in supporting a global economy, you certainly can make a change in "the way things are" (tm). Thomas Paine held the idea that America could exist without the governance of English nobility and that every generation would be a new opportunity to push for liberty and equality. After the failed Articles of Confederation, do you think the founders of our country were expecting a document that would last this long without extensive revision? (Whatever happened to the idea of reviewing the Constitution every decade?) Democracy cannot statically exist. Ask the ancient Greeks. Paine was right that it is something that should get deeper and richer. Did it?
I am libertarian-socialist in outlook, but I wish more people would stop relying on the large structures to create America. America is not up there, out there, over yonder... America is here. And we still don't have a unified society or a coherent culture. The oligarchies of Europe at least had a sense of collective identity. Now, I shall slip into an acid-dropping Lewis Carrol state and ask:
"WHO ARE YOU???"
I'm not out to rationalize a particular view of American identity. I disagree with both the idea of the "Melting Pot" and "Multiculturalism." "Brown" is a better idea and Richard Rodriguez should be crowned with sprigs of olive branches for that book. But we seriously need to consider what is America because we now have not only transgressed the natural order with pollution and genocide of Native peoples (yes, full genocide. There are only a handful of surviving Native tongues. Native Americans are a culture, not a race. That is the way Native people identify themselves and we killed them more when we forbid their language.), we have transgressed the foundation of American government (right, Mr. Bush?).
The question is not a trick question. We all know what America is, but we can't put it into words. But you don't have to. In fact, it cannot be put into words. It cannot be put into symbols. "These are the times..." right? Keep your eyes open for propaganda. It worked in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11. I think everyone that's lived in America for most of their life knows what it means to be American. The issue is not identity, the issue is organization and right now, I think we should pay more attention to our social order.
Just a thought...
Posted by EvanReynolds at 11:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 7, 2007
Anarchy for the USA
If it looks as if I have been pissed off lately, I have. I am restless. I saw the Rodriguez lecture and that put at least a glimmer of hope in my conscious-laden mind. You see, the very immoral Oklahoma bill HB 1804 has been in effect for exactly one week now. The fascist conservative power elite politicians and companies that run the shithole economy and government now have started to make a move to bring the "privitized charity" that supposedly should replace welfare under the control of the state. If you give an undocumented immigrant so much as a mouthful of bread and a blanket, you are a national criminal. Now, doing the work of Jesus fucking Christ is illegal. The government is going to crucify you. The corporations that are not required to produce documents and become incriminated by them are getting praised like Caesar fucking Augustus.
There is no crime greater than denying another human being the God-given dignity that that person is born with. Your nation, your economy, your society are all depraved, you sick, selfish, bourgeois leaders of everything. This is fucking America. The Constitution issued all of us a check to the funds of liberty, but those funds are dry. The check bounced and it's time to rip it to shreds and start over. This government is so out of touch with the human beings that occupy this part of planet Earth, that we should just smash it. To pieces. A child is not a fucking criminal. A family that is starving and crosses a fucking arbitrary line drawn in this shamed soil is not a traitor. The Monroe Doctrine was set up to keep South America from being under siege by colonizers, but now we are colonizing South America. The FTA, Augusto Pinochet, all the popular uprisings against right-wing dictatorships that were stopped. In the name of Democracy? What a joke. Just like the new Attorney General that has to pause to think about whether he supports the use of torture... "Well, my department will execute extensive investigations to see if these actions violated American law or the Constit..."
What?! Are you serious? It doesn't matter if torture is wrong or inhuman? The Constitution only applies to people that support this fascist regime?! You can throw "unalienable rights" out the window and do some thing in contradiction with it, but don't do it in the name of America. No one is innocent. If you don't so much as throw a brick at an oppressor you are an oppressor. Personal responsibility is only for a stateless, class-free society. If, in protecting your own liberty, you suppress the liberties of others, you are not supporting Libertarianism. Libertarianism is not arbitrary freedom for the few. This new movement of Log-Cabin Conservatism, while a breath of fresh air from the nutjobs in office now, is still conservatism. Sorry, the harsh reality is the Constitution is dead, even more than social security (seventy years as opposed to 250 years to deteriorate?). Get over it. You can't bring a document that has been revised 27 times. You can't keep patching up a document every time something new comes along that no one could account for in the context of history.
I guess my point is... the spirit of the constitution is not dead. Punk is dead, but DIY, anarchy, freedom, youthful rebellion, love without borders, and the future... those are things that you can't destroy. Communism may not have worked in practice... yet, but the past doesn't matter. You have another good fifty years on you... all of you graduating seniors. A future that is yours. Not the government's, not the "American workforce," not society's or tradition's... yours. I keep watching things go to the shithole because of all the panic-mongering, all the fear and loathing, all the trust in corrupt people. Capitalism takes more trust than anything else. I'd sooner put my faith in people who were motivated by the good of humanity and the survival of the species than someone motivated by selfishness. If there is anything I hope everyone believes, it's that their voice matters. Don't hide it in your stuffy little bedroom, while guarding the door with a shotgun. That is where all the problems in America began. Fuck complacency. It's neither my fault nor my problem that stuffy old bastards lose their idealism because of their weak, unmotivated conservative reversions. The future is not for the people who look longingly on the past. Want to go back? Go back. But stay out of the way of the people who want to go forward.
Posted by EvanReynolds at 5:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 16, 2007
Western PA is officially the Asscrack of America
So, I went home a little for break and I was expecting the town to be dead and fully of yuppies, miserable wretches, and a whole bunch of complacent, defeatist, pessimistic thinking... It wasn't. In fact, my little one horse town, with half the population of Greensburg and a college that just turned into a University, was more alive than ever. And as much as people poke fun at Morgantown for being a "sin city party school," the arts and culture scene was more alive than Pittsburgh. People were doing really innovative things, there was more breathing room for creativity. Pittsburgh's the "cultural hub" of the region? Hardly. It's all image. All bottom-line business bullshit. Most of these "great artists" in Pittsburgh aren't even from Pittsburgh, don't even live there.
And the way people drive here... Sorry for the rant, but unless you are very, very gay, get off of my asshole!!! I swear, every car on my way back rode my bumper for ten miles then suddenly decided to pass me. Maybe this region is just stuck in the old money, Horatio Alger, earn-a-living myth and I've forgotten what people coming together with liberal ideas and not connecting it with elitism means. God, West Virginia is not redneck country. It's here. The Greater Pittsburgh region is a dying region. And I think it's because all the big business sucked the life out of it.
Time for an enema, Pittsburgh!
Posted by EvanReynolds at 3:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
March 25, 2007
God Bless Reeves Library
For as much criticism as I give to our university's highly limited library, I am now very excited at the new crop of books to enter the collection. Among these, is one of the latest works of my favorite scholarly authors, Fredric Jameson. I am biased, but I believe absolutely no collection in this current academic climate is complete without at least one publication of Fredric Jameson. While the academic culture war is continuing to polarize thought (postmodern vs. modern), Jameson addresses the paradoxes (and sometimes, contradictions) that are driving this current movement. While staying true to his school of thought, Marxism (particularly the Frankfort School), Jameson does thoughtful Marxist critiques of the rise of Postmodernism.
I absolutely devoured the last book of his I read, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I am so excited that I don't have to make a trip to Barnes and Noble or to log on to Amazon.com to give this one a read. Thank you, Reeves Library and Humanities Division! The new crop of books are great...
Posted by EvanReynolds at 1:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 6, 2006
Aesthetic Anarchy
I have a great idea. Since I am under the impression that we should accept the inevitable relativistic "dethronement" of all authority, why don't we tell our miserable leader that he has no authority! Let's tell all these CEOs and CTOs of corporations that they mean nothing and the economy is just a social construction! Let's tell God that, well sorry to say, but Nietzsche was right, you don't exist, never have and are only an excuse for not living our life to the fullest hedonistic ego-trip possible!
Perhaps we can do this while people starve in the streets, while politicians bastardize our already dastard democracy, while corporations monopolize an already corrupt classist system. Perhaps it's best to debate how to make an egocentrical medium more beautiful rather than more collaborative, just, ethical (??? pick one).
Authority is always bad and people not only have the God-given right to freely exploit knowledge, but also each other. Yes. The future is inevitable. We probably don't even have free will, after all, free will disintegrated when Lyotard, Derrida, and Fouccalt opened their mouths and barked. They aren't any kind of authority, but that's irrelevant because authority doesn't matter anyway. Woof. Woof. Bark.
PS: If you didn't understand any of that, suffice to say Postmodernism is not progression, it's pure destruction. It won't liberate anything. It can't. It doesn't go anywhere. It would be much more productive to bark than to propose any such rubbish.
Posted by EvanReynolds at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 11, 2006
A Critical Reading of "The Line Between Fact and Fiction"
Roy Peter Clark wrote a fantastic essay on the epistemology and ontology of journalism. But he missed a huge chunk of the iceberg, in my opinion...
"The post-modernist might think this all irrelevant, arguing that there are no facts, only points of view, only "takes" on reality, influenced by our personal histories, our cultures, our race and gender, our social class. The best journalists can do in such a world is to offer multiple frames through which events and issues can be seen. Report the truth, they ask. Whose truth?"
-Roy Clark, "The Line Between Fact and Fiction"
I am in no way a postmodernist. There is one reality. There is one truth. I'll even toss in that there is one universal virtue. But, the question remains, what is it? Humans are mediated entities. We can see only what's in front of us. No one individual can possess the truth. (YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!) Why? Because of the limitations of our mediated selves. I would argue that it is not that there is no universals, but that everything we see is subjective, so we will never attain full knowledge of the truth. It's not that it doesn't exist, it's just that it cannot be quantified within one single frame of reference.
Imagine there are three blind men on differing sides of an elephant. One can only touch the tail, but when he does, he instantly recognizes it as an elephant. Another can only touch the trunk, but when he does, he instantly recognizes it as an elephant. Yet another can only touch the ear, but when he does, he instantly recognizes it as an elephant. Which one is correct? You see, truth is multi-faceted, like the elephant. There are many dimensions to truth. Because we carry a lens with a certain set of restrictions, we only see certain facets of the truth.
We are, as I said before, egocentric beings. We only see our side of the story. For example, is the person who treats you like total shit a bad person? If you say yes, I guarantee that you don't treat everyone so mighty fine yourself! Thus, if that statement is true, then we are all bad people. If it were only Adam and Eve and Eve bitchslaps Adam for leaving the toilet seat up, then, yes, maybe Eve was a bad person. We are nice to whom we delight in being nice to and we love to loathe our enemies (even though Jesus told us not to, damn hippie!).
Perhaps if we focused more on the ontology and epistemology of media studies and journalism the world would get closer to the truth. Instead, we focus on the unchallenged classical assumptions of journalistic values. I commend Roy Clark for writing such a thought-provoking piece. He raised some issues in my mind that have been silenced to acceptance by people who study the media. To answer the call that journalists should report the truth, YES! But the question still remains, "where do we begin?"
Posted by EvanReynolds at 3:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
The Id, the Ego and the Photo
Journalism is egocentric. Hell, I'd be willing to bet that all of life is egocentric. We only see what we choose to see. What makes journalists so different? Are they any less human than other workers? No. If you want someone who is not very human, talk to a lawyer. All jokes aside, anything mediated has certain sets of limitations. These limitations, therefore, create a frame of reference. I like to call this frame of reference its ego, simply because I am also a psychology major... You can call it something else if you like. Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum lies the id. The id is the reader, the viewer. He or she is embedded with unconscious desires and biases -- perhaps more so than the reader cares to admit. The problem is the id and the ego don't get along. At all. Their quarrels of ideologies and agendas create a certain amount of alienation. The id and the ego of media are the macrocosm of what goes on inside each and everyone's brain daily. And that is a blatant oversimplification...
To avoid a strict dichotomy, Freud observed that there was a third construct of the brain called the superego. Just like Freud's construct, the superego mediates the desires and biases of the id (reader) with the agendas and biases of the ego (reporter). The superego is my personal hero. What is the superego in terms of media studies? Simple: a critical reading of the news.
Let's take the example of a photograph. Simple, right? How can a photo be biased? Well, remember from earlier, the medium is the message! The limitations of the photo allow the reporter to only take one static image. This limitation may seem irrelevant, but think about it... How can you capture every side or faction of a story with one photograph? You'd have to make a collage of images to capture every side.
Take a look at this simple search for news photos on the immigration issue (via yahoo, what is the immigration issue?). Okay, now you may think this a stretch, but I don't. What is wrong with the results?
Of all the photos of the first five tiers of results, how many Americans do you see advocating immigrant rights? How many Mexican officials to you see protesting the emmigrations from Mexico? You either see poor Mexican workers advocating their rights or a group of blue-collar Americans holding up American flags in protest. Is that unbiased? Is that fair? Is that proportional? Probably proportional, but as you see, the proportionality is lost in the masses upon masses of blatantly dichotomized images. Who looks at every article and every image just to find all the sides and perspectives involved? As the news agencies see it, the fairness is in the fact that they try to portray two sides of an issue in their most positive light. I guess adding complexity and ambiguity would turn off viewers to the news.
You see, from my frame of reference, the news is not about truth. It never was. It's usually about persuasion and money. We are, as said by Susan Sontag, still in Plato's Cave. Capital is America's frame of reference. Because money talks, right? Obviously, the medium is the massage. People don't need to be challenged; they just need to consume the facts and everything will fall into place, right?
News is very egocentric. In this Western world, we live in a bubble. News is never fair, never proportional, never objective. Why? Because of the sole fact that we view everything from a Eurocentric, capitalistic ideological lens. Does this mean I want to go into total anarchy? Perhaps. But, I feel the most quintessential element in journalism is transperancy. We cannot use words such as fair, proportional, objective, and balanced (yes, that goes for Fox news, too!).
How do we remedy this issue? Simple. Transperancy: we must admit the pervasive biases of the media. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for a fair, accurate, proportional, objective and yes, balanced news media, but we should be careful to place these labels on any reporting when they are not completely true. Critical reading: perhaps the most important element in this issue, a critical reading is how we process the biases of both the news reports and ourselves. We must strive to know the reporter's frame of reference, but also strive to know our's. Socrates posed the challenge to "know thyself." Within that short sentence, lies far-reaching implications for media studies. The more we know about our own frame of reference, and the more we know about where others are coming from, the closer we are to the truth.
Posted by EvanReynolds at 2:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)