To bail or not to bail

In the Communist Manifesto Karl and Fred Marxnengels famously hypothesized that “the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Like a rip saw this has since proven a powerful tool for rough work and a clumsy one for finer craft. As far as I can see this is true yet again in the case of the current ‘crisis’ of the U.S. finance sector and its political epiphenomena.

To review the broad outlines of the mess we’re in as I understand it from my non-expert perspective: A market economy is enabled or constrained, in part, by the liquidity to buy the goods and services that are produced. Liquidity may come in the form of solid assets or credit, nominally based on assets and functionally based on trust. (Money itself is a form of credit nominally based, nowadays, on the overall productivity of the nation that issues it as i.o.u.’s. You trust the money insofar as you trust the nation.) Economies based solely on the production and exchange of solid assets (barter) are highly constrained by time and space. Credit systems enable a relative transcendence of time and space and therefore, radically enable economic activity and growth.

Although the U.S. economy remains in many respects concretely productive, over the last little while its growth and its position as the consumption engine of the global economy (from which we all benefit, to varying and controversial degrees) have been largely driven by the invention of increasingly sophisticated means of expanding functional liquidity through the creation and manipulation of debt (in the old days called ‘margin’ and currently euphemized as ‘leverage’). Every time a loan is made, functional liquidity is multiplied: the loan money enters the market for use by the debtor, while also being retained with interest by the creditor as a holdable or saleable asset in the form of an i.o.u.. Consumer debt is an obvious example of the invention of liquidity out of thin air. But that’s nothing compared to the creativity that has gone into fabricating profit from the home mortgage market, in the first instance by giving home loans to increasingly risky borrowers, and in the second instance by packaging those loans for resale or as collateral for further loans (‘derivatives‘) – multiplying liquidity each time – in increasingly complicated and intermediated ways.

The limits of reasonable risk in the granting and repackaging of loans are, in the short term, an empirical matter. You try it and see if it works; it may even be statistically probable that it will. The problem is that the whole bloom of liquidity in the mortgage resale market ultimately rests on trust in the value of the concrete real estate asset and its ‘owner’s’ ability to pay it off long-term. As long as real estate holds or increases its value, all is well even if some of the loans default. What has happened now is that real estate has not kept its value, in part because of a feedback loop from all the ’sub-prime’ mortgages in the market; not just the defaulted ones, but severely impaired trust about the value of the undefaulted ones. And because the actual loans have been so cleverly chopped up, repackaged and intermixed with more traditionally-reliable paper, this suddenly ‘toxic’ debt has polluted the good stuff too, resulting in a crisis of confidence and a pervasive unwillingness to lend money based on uncertain collateral. This is the account of things that makes sense of the current bailout plan’s focus on buying out the toxic debt so that the credit markets can get back to work based on renewed trust in the paper that’s left.

No surprises here. “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones…. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.” – Communist Manifesto, ch. 1.

Since everything from parties to payrolls in an advanced economy like ours is financed in the short or long term through the credit markets, none of us is unaffected by this. Failure of credit markets would be catastrophic for everyone who didn’t live on a subsistence farm. Nevertheless, there’s lots of room for disagreement about how to handle the current situation. There are of course the mortal enemies of capitalism, for whom this is a moment of perhaps ironic triumph. There are various strains of outrage and fretting from the sections of the Democratic orchestra, more or less aware of their tunes’ contrapuntal texturing of the opus. But to finally get to my main topic here, what interests me is the fact that Republicans, the party of big business, cannot find a consensus. In fact, ‘they’ seem to be the main opponents of the bailout. What’s that about?

Well, what we’ve been finding out over the last four years, if we didn’t know it already, is that the Republican Party is every bit the motley hodgepodge everyone knows the Democrats to be. As with all collective identities, “Republican” turns out to be a convenient collector of myths and fictions that can sometimes, under the right conditions, be activated and leveraged to bring disparate persons together for a common purpose. This turns out not to be one of those conditions; quite the contrary.

So, for the libertarian fraction of the party, where the free-market fundamentalists hang out, the omnipotent self-regulation of the market is an unquestionable article of faith. Whatever drowning may be involved while we wait for the market to slosh itself back into its channel is a small price to pay compared to the stumbling disruptions of even well-intentioned regulation. And there’s the problem of moral hazard – once you mess with the market by removing the costs of risk, you forever destroy the market’s power to self-regulate risk by inflicting punishment on bad ones. If we’re not careful, we’ll kill the market and be stuck with a planned economy; and big government is bad.

For the social conservatives, rural in sensibility if not residence and already suspicious of rascally city-slickers, radical individual responsibility is a sacred value high enough to make taking down the economy a small price to pay for properly punishing the greedy corporate honchos who got us into this mess. They share the libertarians’ suspicion of big government. Moral hazard is a more tangentially compelling argument to these folks, not because they believe in the free market, but because they believe in sin and damnation.

For the national security/law and order fraction of the party this all starts as an embarrassing sideshow. But once they look deeper, they notice that the bailout money will have to be borrowed by the government, will probably come mostly from China and other foreign powers, and by putting us in their debt therefore further undermines our freedom of movement against whatever foes we may choose.

Not even the pro-business wing of the party, which turns out here definitively to be George W.’s, is entirely on board here. True, they’ll sacrifice the free market when it’s not working for them just as shamelessly as they promoted it when it was. But perhaps we should not be surprised that the representatives of capitalist enterprise would be lukewarm about a massive socialist nationalization of private equity, even if it does work to their short-term benefit. And it’s also worth remembering that it’s the finance sector that’s into trouble here, not business in general (yet); in fact, the finance guys have pretty much screwed things up for everyone else. So I imagine that for the manufacturing and service sectors and their political representatives a certain omerta’ is in tension with a touch of Schadenfreude or even outright vendetta.

Once again, it’s not safe to overlump the ruling class. Which is a good thing from the perspective of change, because as Marx himself knew, if they had their fecal matter entirely aggregated there would be little hope for an alternative.

Different Strokes

Different Strokes: The Lives and Teachings of the Game’s Wisest Women by Mona Vold is a wonderful book I came across during the period when I was reading every golf instruction book on the shelves of the Library. My new school seemed to be dominated by its nationally-recognized Professional Golf Management program, and I wanted to have a feel for that alien world; then I started actually playing golf (it’s free here thanks to that program) and I was hooked.

Even better than Harvey Penick’s folksy notebooks, the women Vold portrays show how attentive devotion to a craft can produce wisdom and serenity. All of the sections are wonderful in their own ways, but I’ve been thinking about Phyllis G. Meekins’ in particular as I read some of the more pessimistic commentary on the current election.

Meekins, a Black woman from Philadelphia, born in 1922, is an LPGA professional and taught Work to Learn golf clinics for many years through her church. “Here everybody’s welcome as long as they learn to respect each other no matter what.” Her ethic is hard, based on effort and accountability:

People look at me and ask all the time, ‘How’d you do it?’ I tell them I learned through a lot of disasters. No didn’t stop me. I kept after it. I was truly interested, and if there was the slightest hint of an opening, I made it my business to walk through the door. I volunteered here, there. I tried and tried. I got on committees so I could learn more.

Golf, a country-club sport, has a history of racial exclusion and gender segregation. Black men in golf have been few, Black women fewer. Yet about her playing career, Meekins remembers:

It’s just like the men, once I finally got on the golf course, they walked around like they thought they owned it, but when you came down to it, they were respectful. Men, real men, love to see women play well.

She is so right.

Yes, there is still racism in the U.S.America and Whites still walk around like we think we own it. Yet, if 12.4% of the population of the U.S. is Black and 68% is non-Hispanic White, and Barack Obama polls around 50% support, that’s a lot of White folks supporting Obama; racist though we may be. Play well, Barack.

Omnivorosity

Courtesy of Alexandre Enkerli at Disparate, whose commentary is typically aromatic, here’s a meme.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.

2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.

3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

So here goes. I will remove some suspense by establishing from the outset that I have a thang about slimy textures. It took me the first five years of my adult life just to teach myself to like raw tomatoes. I’ll also choose savory over sweet most every time. And some of these are pretty transparently reaching for snob appeal. I’m not a collector of experiences just for the sake of checking off an item on a list.

1. Venison (Courtesy of hunter friends. Very tasty; a bit dry, which I like in meat.)
2. Nettle tea (No, but I’ve drunk plenty of flower/leaf/stem/root teas and I’m not clear on why this particular one is the issue.)
3. Huevos rancheros (Yum. Just this weekend.)
4. Steak tartare (Near enough to the edge of slimy to discourage my interest.)
5. Crocodile (No opportunity and not clear why I would seek it out.)
6. Black pudding (Hasn’t come up.)
7. Cheese fondue (Make it myself sometimes, with a touch of port or sherry.)
8. Carp (Not a big fish fan, but if it’s put in front of me I’ll bite.)
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush Eggplant is high on slime but I love the Mediterranean flavors.

Bechdel rule

Thanks first of all to wicked anomie, I’ve caught the Bechdel rule virus. Of course I love that there’s a comic strip called “Dykes to Watch Out For;” and I think the Bechdel rule and its corollaries are good to think with. To refresh the virus here, the rule assesses whether a movie or tv show is worth watching:

* It has to have at least two women in it,
* Who talk to each other,
* About something besides a man.

This doesn’t seem like much to ask for; in real life this sort of conversation happens all the time, as various women commenting on the rule have pointed out. And since all movies/shows aren’t about men (are they?), and conversations between characters about whatever the movie is about are pretty much the norm for plot development, this sort of conversation would also look like it should happen all the time, by accident, in the flow of the flick. Right? So see if it does. Not so much, as I and many others have found.

There are some interesting lines in the commentary on the NPR site. Whether it makes sense to apply dogmatic rules rather than more flexible sorts of quality assessment is one. Another is whether we should expect edification or merely entertainment from movies and tv. And a challenge to the idea that race, gender and ethnic constituencies should prefer identification with characters to a more cosmopolitan celebration of diversity brought stinging ad hominem responses from the aggrieved. Perhaps not surprisingly given the venue, the latter debate failed to attract the usual libertarian wag pointing out that the media in a capitalist economy are not in the social justice business and provide exactly what the various niches of the market are willing and able to pay to see. I missed the customary reflexive retorting poo-storm of outraged moralisms so much, I almost stepped into that character for a moment.

Juvenile instigations aside, for me, with my roots deep in Gramsci, it’s most interesting to note the lag time between developments in high theory and their trickle down into popular culture. So I note that with the current viral popularity of the Bechdel rule, the popular culture of feminism has leapt from the ’50s to the ’70s, from Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949) to (almost) Wittig’s “One is Not Born a Woman” (1981).

For Beauvoir women are women always in reference to men – women are thus the “second sex” – with the feminism derived from (a superficial reading of) her work seeking equal recognition in that relationship. A famous and beloved scene of this retro second sex feminism is the one in “Waiting to Exhale” where Angela Bassett as Bernadine wreaks revenge for her husband’s infidelity by making a bonfire of his possessions. Bernadine’s empowerment makes sense only in relation to her ongoing emotional involvement with him, so although the tables are momentarily turned her dependence on a man to give her actions meaning is not altered.

Wittig, writing from a lesbian perspective of life lived without reference to men, recovered Beauvoir’s full implication that ‘woman’ is a myth: “One is not born, but becomes a woman” only in this optional relation with ‘man’. When the Bechdel rule seeks a fully womanized relationality, it gets much of the way to Wittig by cutting men out of the picture. But it stops short by still embracing the defining category of ‘woman’ and therefore the mirror trap of contested gender power. As Wittig says, “Matriarchy is no less heterosexual than patriarchy: it is only the sex of the oppressor that changes.”

It will take a transformation of the second nature of gender categories in popular culture, still well beyond the horizon as we wiggle our way toward acceptance of a ‘woman’ as a legitimate candidate for top executive power, for us get to the conceptual ’80s. Judith Butler and the ’90s wait in the wings, but their act comes much later in this play.

Ninja reading

I heard this great story about fundamentals a while back that’s been informing my teaching of late. A guy was talking about how he got excited about martial arts and wanted to be like the movie ninjas. He goes to a dojo, gets all the gear, and looks forward to learning the big impressive moves. Instead, all they work on is punch, block, kick. Over and over. Not so exciting.

He’s not a quitter so he keeps going and working on punch, block, kick. Eventually the sensei invites the top beginners to visit a master class, and this guy thinks now he’s going to see the ninja levitation skills. Awesome. So he goes to the master class and sure enough, they spend the whole time working on punch, block, kick. Only it’s at a completely different level of facility, ease, balance, and effectiveness.

I’m working on critical reading and thinking skills with my introductory world history sections. With the martial arts as a metaphor we’ve started with the fundamentals in reading primary source documents. For punch, block, kick I’ve substituted who (wrote this), when, where, and why. These are the fundamentals that establish the authority of a historical document and a solid foundation of understanding.

Today I showed my students how to turn those fundamentals into ninja moves by pushing through them to engage with the text in a series of critical dimensions:

*Text: What it (she, he, they) says and means (fully engaging with authority by adding what to the other w questions)
*Context: the environment or field in which the doc was written – from local to global (another level of where and when)
*Subtext: deeper or alternative meanings, reading between the lines (another level of why).

My example here was going to a used car lot. A guy in a loud plaid jacket runs out and says “I’m so glad to see you. What a good looking man you are.” They had no problem seeing that the text is a greeting and compliment. Interestingly, in each section some guy jumped to a homosexual come-on as the subtext. We used the contrast between a bar and a used car lot as context to disqualify that reading and conclude that the subtext is “give me your money.”

I told them that if they could master this series of analytical moves they’d be educated people who fully earned the higher salary employers are willing to pay to college graduates. Then I showed them the levitating ninja moves, not fully mastered even by many professional academics:

*Intertext: intellectual context, the conversations and networks a text participates in (another level of context and subtext)

*Countertext: I mentioned Derrida here because who knows, that landmind may explode for a few of them later. Reading texts against themselves (‘deconstruction’) because authors are agents of contexts and intertexts (‘discourses’) and do not fully control their materials and meanings. In some sense an ordinary historical insight – how else can texts be seen as ‘representative’ of times and places? We’ll use implied perspectives as the entre’ to this move; I pointed out that we’d already done this by reading a Ming Chinese family’s formal rules, written by elder males, against itself to discover the informal power women had in a system in which all formal power was patriarchal.

I just laid this all out, then had them get together into small groups of 4-5 to work through the full range of readings of an excerpt from the Sadler Report to Parliament on child labor (1832). With absolutely no lecture, background or prompting from me, with only the document, its short editorial introduction, and a general world history text to work with, here are some things they came up with so far, pending further discussion on Thursday:

*Who: A conversation among an official parliamentary investigator, asking leading questions, and various child laborers

*Where: urban England

*When: 1832, but including recollections from up to twenty years earlier

*Why: parliamentary fact-finding; to create public awareness; and create momentum and unassailabilty for politicians in preparation for enacting legislation against entrenched elite interests

*Text: the facts and horrors of long hours and abusive treatment in industrial child labor

*Context: early phases of the Industrial Revolution, transition from subsistence agrarian order in which children worked for families to capitalist order in which families work for industrialists; industrial takeoff leveraged by breakdown of traditional relations and creation of cheap desocialized labor pool

*Subtext: reformer’s moral outrage constructing worker ‘victimhood’ through leading questions about conditions the workers had taken for granted

*Intertext: the intersubjectivity of the interview process itself; debates about conditions of just work and the responsibility of elites to regulate fairly

*Countertext: the implied perspective of the industrialists; the mismatched moralisms of reformers vs. the pragmatic lifeworld of workers.

Not bad for a bunch of mostly freshman non-majors in about half an hour. The thing I liked best was that although not all of the groups clicked and got all the way through the analysis, there was ‘push’ in the assignment so that the ones who would normally have stopped at text developed things to say about context and subtext, and the ones who would normally have felt very clever to see some things about subtext stretched out to develop observations and hypotheses about intertext and countertext.

A couple weeks ago when we were just looking at who/where/when/why several students asked bemusedly if I read like this all the time. I said yeah, but it becomes a habit you do quickly without belaboring it or even thinking hard. I think they’re getting there, so by the time we’ve done this with a dozen documents over a couple of months they’ll be pretty locked in. Plus maybe they’ll know one or two things about world history.

“Communist Manifesto” next.

Six things

Thanks to 7deadlycyns for this personal revelation, which seemed just right to me:

“I almost quit grad school half-way through the second year of my PhD program at UCLA. A professor saved me by telling me very pointedly that it was supposed to be frustrating, that I was meant to struggle, that the transition from student to scholar was always hard, but that I had what it took to get through it.”

This is a life lesson in a school instance. I was lucky enough to get this message much earlier, during my teenage geekdom, and regularly thereafter. I can barely imagine how impossible life must seem to people who never figure this out.

In context this quote was part of a meme to list six things other people probably don’t know about you. (I also totally agree with what she says about whining and babies.) I started agnostic about memes and have only become more so, so I’ll not be tagging anyone with this. But when I find one and it gives me something good, like this one, I’ll try to give back. So here goes:

1. I’m shy. Very shy. That Big Carl persona you see here and in person is a construct I operate to function effectively in social situations. Sort of like Balok’s puppet in the original Star Trek.

2. Yet, people and sociability are very important to me.

3. I love the Teletubbies. Especially the Tubby Custard machine (they pronounce it ‘tubby tustahd’) with all its little farty noises.

4. If I had to choose between wine and cheese, I’d choose cheese. Maybe that’s because I can afford good cheese better than I can afford good wine. But if I don’t have to choose there’s nothing better than a little snack of cheese, olives, chewy bread and a good red wine.

5. When I was a kid my family used to collect insects. We had a friend who was an entymologist, and we’d go tromping around in other people’s fields combing the vegetation for specimens. I’ve picked hundreds of ticks off myself from those fields, so I’m probably not as wary of Lyme disease as I should be. Our equipment was nets and ‘killing jars’ that were pickle jars with some plaster in the bottom for ethyl acetate to soak into (that was the killing part) and newspaper strips to keep the bugs from sticking to the bottle and each other. There was a tricky little operation to get the bug from the net to the jar; stakes were highest when they could sting or they were really delicate. Then we’d take the dead bugs home and stick them on pins with labels of what they were, where and when we found them, and we’d put them in cigar boxes with cardboard liners we cut out. (Real insect collecting boxes are wicked expensive.)

Once when we were on vacation our boxes were stolen from the roofrack of our car. Sort of sad to lose all those nice bugs, but really the collecting was the fun part and we couldn’t stop laughing about the thieves’ faces when they opened those boxes and saw what they’d gotten. In Venice one time I came across a guy in a tiny little shop who was blowing incredible glass insects exact in size and detail. I sat and talked with him for hours.

6. I’m lazy, and a procrastinator. But when something climbs into my head and fascinates me, I forget to eat and sleep.

The wonders of college

It’s that time of year in the halls of academe when hope springs and experience pings, when we imagine the sweet epiphanies we will share with excited and eager students, while remembering years past’s slow boring of hard boards.

Mikhail has some thoughts about the first year experience, I am teaching a class explicitly designed to frame the first year experience, each of us has memories of those rosy days, so this is probably a good time to recall Tim Clydesdale’s sociological work on teens in the first year of college. There’s a nice short review in the Chronicle, titled “The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment.”

He finds that students in their first year are perhaps uniquely resistant to the kind of deeply transformative experience we imagine is the real payoff of college, and indeed are busy just figuring out how to get along away from home. In the meantime they put the very core values we’d like to get them to question into an “identity lockbox” for safekeeping.

Clydesdale notes that “Only a handful of students on each campus find a liberal-arts education to be deeply meaningful and important, and most of those end up becoming college professors themselves…. And so the liberal-arts paradigm perpetuates itself, while remaining out of sync with the vast majority of college students.” Yup.

Practically, Clydesdale recommends several shifts of emphasis: from content inculcation to skills development; from lectures students will soon forget to class discussion of issues, perspectives and interpretations; and from grand goals about moral awakening to modest goals about competence.

Mikhail is quite right that our young charges “will have to get used to the idea that life is full of situations in which you have to learn something, even if it looks like a completely useless subject – remember, [they're] not old enough or experienced enough to be the judge of what is or isn’t useless.” And the first year is part of that process. But as a matter of practical pedagogy in the face of brute sociological facts, much of what we can accomplish in the first year is to not so thoroughly turn them off with our sanctimonious attempts to jam goodness into their heads that they’ll never recover and will remain sullen anti-intellectuals for the rest of their lives.

Illusions

To be disillusioned one must first have illusions. In another of his terrific posts reflecting on political engagement, Timothy Burke quotes Doris Lessing on African liberation:

To be in love with a country or a political regime is a tricky business. You get your heart broken even more surely than by being in love with a person. You may even lose your life. I knew a woman political activist in the old days–in this case, the 1950s. She spent her days and her nights working to undo the white regime in South Africa. Needing a rest, she went to visit Nigeria, to see her dream made flesh, found it was run by human beings, and committed suicide. Everyone who has been involved with idealistic, rhetorical politics knows a thousand versions of this story, from all over the world. African Laughter (1988)

Or a dreamy candidate. Gramsci described the politics of charisma as a condition of permanent spasm leading to exhaustion and reactionary backlash. Despite all the handwringing each election cycle brings about the terrible perils of a victory by the other side, the U.S. political system is pretty well flywheeled against extremes. Even so, I’m a little worried about the longer-term effects of Barack Obama’s campaign. He really doesn’t have anything very exciting to say at the level of policy – again, our system is flywheeled against extremes – nor as President would he have unilateral power to carry out any agenda. He can probably do some nice little things, but as he says himself, it’s mostly up to us to carry our own weight.

Spiffy as he may be, there’s only so much the guy can do. I don’t see how the dreams he’s selling, or that have been attached to him, can survive the human realities of office. Yay Barack, hope on, but in the meantime let’s start hiding the sleeping pills just in case.