slave and free according to paul....
As Murphy's law would have it, after I got laid off and we lost our health insurance my wife and I have had a number of health issues arise that have cost us in the tens of thousands of dollars, and we have a number of things, especially dental, that we are just not dealing with until we have insurance and more income again. Such is more than just a pain in the ass.
There was a time before kids when we talked about leaving the U.S. We wish to God we had now. Our friends in the UK have a level of economic stability we will never have here, in large part because medical conditions are not something which will lead them to bankruptcy so easily as here.
Part of this experience has involved both of us making use of the local "Church Health Center" which has solidified in my mind what a God awful nightmare it would be to have to rely on Christian charity to get healthcare. The services there have rarely risen above the level of useless, and we still have to pay for them, though we have learned that it is almost always more cost effective to put a few hundred dollars on a credit card for real health care, not knowing how we will pay it off, than it is to spend 40 or 80 bucks or whatever they charge us sliding scale that week for the charity health care.
Some thoughts:
1. If a "right" to health care requires slavery, then quite obviously a "right" to having police, and interstates, and a military, and state parks, and state funded medical research, and a trademark office, and many such other things also requires slavery. The Paulies will of course assert that there is this magically immutable piece of paper ratified 224 years ago which leaves the state with the right to sometimes take things away from me to suit its ends in a few situations, which in those cases presumably is not slavery, but does not give it the right to do so in other situations. Uh, how this in any way relates to a meaningful use of the term slavery is beyond me. If the government may kick my door down when I refuse to move in a case of immanent domain, I can't see how this is any less slavery in this loosey goosey use of the term than forced universal health care is. I did not choose to be born into a society with a magical immutable document which grants the state the right to enforce immanent domain rulings. I wish the hyper free market libertarian people who call me a hypocrite for being a communist who uses a computer and the internet would go the route of the old Catholic Worker hero Eamonn Hennessey and stop using roads.
2. A curious thing. A number of libertarian folks I know expressed contentment at me receiving unemployment when I was laid off because I had (or rather my employers had for me) paid into unemployment insurance for many years. Thus I was getting a return on money I had put in. But when these same folks found out I took government grants to go to school, there was the usual libertarian disgust. Again, do these people not drive on government roads? But aside from roads we might focus on the incredibly sophomoric view of "what is mine" or "what I have coming to me" involved in the sort of assumptions typically made by libertarians on these issues.
Behind the assertions made by libertarians there is the underlying conviction that there are clear delineations to be made with regard to what is mine, what I have rightly earned, and what is rightly due me in our finance/credit driven late capitalism. Rubbish.
I have worked for 3 large corporations in my lifetime, one among the 200 largest privately owned businesses in the country, one a publicly traded Fortune 100 company, the other publicly traded and in the Fortune 500. At all three of those corporations any observer of average intellect could quickly observe that pay did not at all correspond to performance or quality of work, especially in management positions. In one company I worked for a department head was promoted to a vice president position because of work that had been done by two staff members under him (neither of which was me, by the way), both of whom he did not hire but had inherited from his predecessor. He took enough credit for the work to get the promotion, the people who actually did the work got nothing - no increased wage, no increased Christmas bonus.
That sort of story happens over and over and over again in American business life. The people who succeed at making the most money are generally not the brightest or the most talented or the most productive. Generally speaking, they are the most ruthless and ambitious and are among those with the prettiest faces and most practiced in the arts of corporatist charm. I worked in the mail room of a large corporation (the private one) and all of the managers in the engineering department went golfing each Friday afternoon (weather permitting) with their VP (when the weather was bad they went to an indoor computer golf range place with a bar). When the VP there was being moved to take over a sister company and he needed to be replaced, his replacement (which he picked), was the manager who was his long time golf partner in the Friday afternoon games. Everyone in the department, as well as people out of the department who had no reason to be jealous, remarked that the new VP was the dumbest and least productive of the managers in the department, but he was the best golfer. This sort of thing is how business in America works at almost every level. If you think otherwise you are fooling yourself.
I have also worked, indeed spent most of my adult like working, for small family owned businesses. You know - the sort of businesses that often have to actually pay taxes because they don't have as much means to shelter their money from taxation in the manner large corporations do. The one I worked fulltime at here in Memphis before my layoff, and now work partime at, is typical - the business was started by a man with a utility job he worked during the day. At night he came home and made chandeliers, literally bending brass tubing over his knee. He was hardworking and talented. His wife then sold the lights out of their living room during the day. Nice story of American entrepreneurial spirit, right? Uh, yeah, but it ain't the whole story. The man who did the knee bending came from Southern aristocracy, but his family had lost everything after the Civil War and had been poor for three generations. Still, in the South coming from a "good family" means you can marry into another one, even if your "good family" has no money and hers does. Hers did. Memphis elite of the highest caliber.
So when our hardworking man is spending his nights making lights, daddy-in-law is telling all of his elite friends and associates they have to go buy some for their homes and businesses. In keeping with the rules of Memphis society they do so. And the lighting business takes off. But to say it took off because of hard work is only part of the story. It came to be worth many millions because of a social connection that most people have no access to. And in not a long period of time some of those same lights would be made in sweat shop conditions in Memphis (the rest made in sweat shop conditions elsewhere). When the knee bender dies, his wife would have to come in and sign checks and she would literally break down crying the first time she did it, upon seeing how little her employees made. Everybody got a couple dollar an hour raise - which wasn't bad in the 90s, but brought a lot of folks up to just a little past minimum wage. It would take the founder's grandson to fight with his father to get wages at all comparable to what one might make in a non union Toyota plant in Mississippi or somesuch. The second generation of this company revealed little business talent, certainly no skill at making or designing or selling lights beyond the means to do those things which he inherited, but the company continued to grow because by the time the founder of the company died it was an establishment among wealthy people in Memphis. If you have money in Memphis, you go buy your lights there.
Another small business I worked for had an owner who was adept at business, and pulled himself away from almost certain business demise a number of times by securing deals which brought in needed income at the last second. But this man married a lady who grew up on Martha's Vineyard, and her father, of east coast old money, had to bail out my boss several times over the years, and, again, had it had not been for this father-in-law I never would have worked at that business as it would not have existed. While this same man (the owner) was able to charm people into seemingly implausible deals from time to time, he had no sense whatsoever when it came to many practical things. For instance, he always insisted that we take the company van to the Ford dealership the company had bought it from. We put a lot of miles on the van, and it was in the shop all the time. Eventually some of us noticed that the van seemed to be going back to the shop for the sames things over and over again. Finally one of the managers got out all of the receipts from van repairs for the previous 3 years, and discovered that in 3 years time the company had paid more in repairs than they had paid for the van itself. Considerably more.
In the companies I have worked for, taken as a whole with the occasional exception, I believe I can say without hyperbole or exaggeration that I have contributed far more to the company than the wage I earned - I made a lot of money for them. I worked hard to make mediocre men, whether owners or managers/execs, richer, while I got very little in the way of financial security or a means to provide for myself long term. In most cases, the owners or managers/execs I worked for provided the company/corporation little in terms of real net gain. They have mostly been window dressing.
I realize that this is all anecdote, but I have been fortunate in my life to have worked in a number of settings which brought me into contact with a lot of working people outside of my own workplaces, whether travelling to institutions to buy books, or dealing with designers, retail sales folks, and other shop foremen when I was foreman of a small metal shop. Perhaps my own workplace experiences and the vast majority of workplaces I have visited are anomalous, but I am inclined to think that my experiences are rather typical. Having read a lot of American labor history in recent years only increases the strength of this inclination.
Thus when someone talks about it being stealing or "slavery" to tax people like these owners, managers, and execs I describe above in order to pay for health care for folks like me, I can't but scratch my head. I would not in that case be stealing, nor would anyone or any agency be stealing on my behalf. I am getting what is due me. I've spent the bulk of my life working for these and their kind, allowing them to live lives of comfort and ease in return for little more on their part than polished social skills and a pretty face. And while my caricature of the contemporary man of business may not apply to all - anyone who makes income on the financial markets, or "secures" their wealth on the financial markets, is making or securing wealth via means which necessarily result in wealth distribution not correspondent to skill and productivity. This means that virtually everyone in America today who has considerable wealth has made it and/or secures it through means which involve doing what has been done unto me - taking the labor of the little guy in order to fill the pockets of people who don't earn what they make by way of a labor that in any meaningful way corresponds to their wealth. Of course there are exceptions, and the aggregate of those exceptions tends toward the smaller of entrepreneurs. Thus it would seem an appropriate tax scheme might be one which hits the CEO of Goldman Sachs a hell of a lot harder than, say, my friend Henry who sells books out of his home. But current tax structures are not so ordered.
Aside from the moral equations either side wants to use, in the end it is about the securing of interests. As Buffet put it, it is class war and his side is winning. The Rand Pauls of our social order are working to secure the interests of a minority whose wealth and ease is secured because of the work of a majority. Naturally, I am concerned with the interests of my own family, and the families of my friends, and the interests of those folks requires conflict with the interests of those for whom Rand Paul is an operative.
In this sense, there is one level of discourse I am comfortable with in the language of the libertarian. There is scarcity in the world. There are limited resources. Because of this reality, economic dispossession will always be with us. The question is who is going to be gaining from the dispossession. In the current neo-liberal order we see clearly where the lines of dispossession are occurring throughout the world, if we bother to look. Those with my economic convictions want to see dispossession occur for a decidedly different set of people. And let's face it - most people endorse a given approach to economic life for reasons that have to do with what they will believe to be best for them and their families. Find me a person who embraces an economic ordo that they believe will hurt them. In prior ages we had aristocratic Fabians, but such persons are harder and harder to find as mass capitalism plays out its hand. Yes, one sees many working class folks in America embracing Rush Limbaugh nonsense, but this is only because they have drunk the kool aid which has convinced them of such lies as tickle down economics still bringing about good jobs and the like.
3. When talking to Christians who are libertarians, there is an unfortunate moral/spiritual line of thought which enters the discussion. Namely, that when the state acts as the redistributor of wealth, the opportunity for charity is diminished. Again this strikes me as specious in the same manner of my roads above. If we want to be childish in our embrace of truisms, we should note that by providing a military to protect me, the state denies my neighbor some potential opportunities to lay down his life defending me from the attack of a foreign army. And there is no greater love than laying down your life for a friend, right?
If I were again to sink into anecdote I would note that in my experience in countries with universal health care, local Christian charity work involves less collecting of money than American Christian charities do, but more in the way of volunteering of time, but that is just a tangent. Another thought that comes to mind is that this is another arena in which the libertarian irrationally asserts that large government efforts are somehow always and of necessity more inhuman than large nonprofit or forprofit efforts. I wish some of these folks could experience health care at both my local public health clinic here in Memphis and then at the local large charity clinic so as to note the difference in quality of care. Such an experience might incline them to change their minds on the government always worse regurgitations, though I doubt many libertarians have minds capable of change.
The truism about the loss of potential charity is an assertion with some huge blinders on. No doubt certain opportunities for individual volitional charity are lost, but then again, opportunities for individual self-righteousness increase exponentially when government redistribution is gone. The Church Health Center here in Memphis never ceases to miss an opportunity to assert its self-importance and to treat its clients in a condescending manner in which they are informed of how wonderfully Christian the folks providing them "help" are and how wonderful the donors are. Having lived and worked in a homeless shelter for a year and grown up involved in Christian charities of all sorts I think this rather the norm. Christians who give the sort of money it takes to keep such formal charities running tend be very assertive about their giving and seemingly incapable of not letting the right hand know what the left it doing.
When the state taxes you in order to provide health care for others, you can know that some of your hard work goes to provide medical care for others. But you are not special in this manner, as everyone else who works is giving in the same manner. No one is singling you out for your charity, no one is giving you a pat on the back. You don't get that good feeling you get when you spend one afternoon every 3 months at a soup kitchen providing for the poor. And never mind that a single payer health care system could potentially be much better run and much more efficient than a bunch of various and sundry Christian charity programs if such a government program could ever exist free from corporate domination (such as we see with Obamacare) and be allowed to flex government muscle against corporate interests. Never mind that when you get outside the arena of homeless sheltering and rehab programs and the like and start dealing with issues pertaining to long term support for the working poor Christian charities often have a notorious reputation among other nonprofits dealing with those groups.
Charity seeks what is best for others. It does not concern itself with the contribution/role it plays in bringing about that best for others outside of a concern for the other person. But this whole "denial of potential charity" line seems to assume that all human interaction takes place in some sort of anti-human vacuum of social exchange. As if I don't have the opportunity of being charitable if the government is coordinating charitable acts. Come with me to the VA hospital sometime and let us watch the different nurses there in action. The nurses working on a given floor are all making in the same ballpark in terms of salary. They are all working for the government. But the degree to which charity is involved in their work varies considerably. Somehow I think the capacity of humans to have charity toward others would survive a single payer health care system just fine. I have never noticed a decided poverty of charity among practicing British Christians in comparison to practicing American Christians.
To be continued...
The 36-foot white sculpture is a hand without fingers except that vulgar one, pointing away from Milan's stock market. It was made by Italy's most famous contemporary artist, Maurizio Cattelan, who donated it to the city last year on the condition that it grace Piazza Affari, or Business Square, where the bourse has its headquarters.
- from here. HT Orthodox Baldwin.
steiner does dallas, well ok, it turns out it was tulsa. what a way to take your bow.
An interesting little article - All the Frogs Croak Before the Storm: Dostoevsky Versus Tolstoy on Humanitarian Interventions. It seems Solzhenitsyn sided with Tolstoy.
Those many literati who read this blog will recognize the little Tolstoy or Dostoevsky image to the right of that text as a cropped image from the cover of George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism.
When I think of Steiner these days, I think of two things - the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, which I have in the past attended in order to sell books, and the widespread use of Viagra in nursing homes.
In a recent nursing school rotation I had in a nursing home, pretty much every male who could move was on Viagra or an equivalent, and as there were considerably more women than men in this nursing home, the men who were able often serviced more than one woman. We were prepared for this phenomenon by the staff before we began our work there. We were told this is the way of things now, indeed the phenomena was praised as a means of providing elderly persons with social and physical comfort - a reason to live in an otherwise dismal situation, if you will. One hears of the exponential increases in HIV, gonorrhea, and syphilis in retirement homes these days, though I didn't see any of that. Perhaps at the nursing home I was at the old duffs used condoms.
At another rotation I was at after that one I was working with primarily men in their mid-50s or older in a medsurg setting and every single one of them I worked with had "sexual dysfunction" among their diagnoses and either had been or were currently taking an erectile dysfunction med. It seems it is now commonplace to have very ill men insist on having the ability to engage in coitus and being provided the pharmacological means to do so. You might be in late liver failure, with ascites extending your abdomen, and your scrotum the size of an eggplant due to edema, but dammit you are going to get a lay before you take the long nap. I have to admit at times when in the room with a given chain smoking, verbally abusive, chronic alcoholic with staples down his front and an ostomy or ileostomy bag needing emptied, now asking about when he can resume sexual activity, I'd catch myself looking at the wife or significant other and think "seriously?" But, of course, I played along as I had been taught, all tolerant and using my dope on a rope "therapeutic language."
At the Medieval Congress there was a dance each year I went. It was a sight to behold. Medievalists and experts in related fields (including patristics, mind you), typically in their 50s and male, would be witnessed in the most unabashed and downright embarrassing attempts to hook up with TA's (usually female) two or three decades younger than them. There was a lot of alcohol involved, and one could watch apparent "successes" occur which seemed altogether unlikely. One year my buddy Danny and I watched from outside, smoking Drummies and drinking Laphroaig out of the bottle, and we placed bets as to whether or not a given attempt to score would work, one of us paying the other as a given middle aged overweight bald nerd either walked out of the dance and toward a car with an attractive young TA, or moved on to the next attempt.
All of this reminds me of Steiner because the book of his I have read most recently is his My Unwritten Books, specifically his essay Tongues of Eros. In it Steiner uses his commanding rhetorical skills and wit to describe the glories of polyphonic sex, as well as to compare, in something of a linguistic-ethnographic manner, the language and correspondent activity of lovemaking among speakers of German, French, Italian, and English. His motivation for writing is thus:
But where it is loved freely, love and its sexual fulfillment emancipate the human spirit and bring it home to the enigma of the human body, of the body's determinant yet enigmatic weight in the realization of the self. No other phenomenality in our means can match or surpass this enfranchisement. Liberté, liberté chérie, proclaims the national anthem in a loving, amorous flourish. As sexual potency withers with age, as anxious onamism returns to substitute for coitus, freedom regresses. In this exact sense, old age is serfdom. Yet even here, remembrance can liberate. Those "snows of yesteryear" still gleam. The man, the woman who have known sex at its most various and unashamed retain the taste of freedom even to the end. One night in Paris, as I entered C., I heard the soft but meteoric laughter of liberty itself. It stays with me.
The essay lists many examples of erotic language in each of the languages, and in the process, Steiner lists to the reader quite more than a few of his sexual exploits. Some of it remains at least behind the thin veil of Steiner's many (and usual, for those of you who have read him) plays on words and complicated rhetorical constructs, but some of it is rather explicitly pornographic, even if cleverly so. I suppose an esteemed scholar who has often been accused of being obtuse and boring might be inclined to play provocateur at the end. Not that the material isn't fascinating. I find it interesting, anyway, that French lovers use vous and not tu with each other when making love, or at least did so until very recently. Steiner predictably praises this formality. He considers the invasion of anglo-american informality into the erotic language of other tongues to be vulgar.
Given that Steiner fairly early in the essay seems to appreciate in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio "a determinant Catholic ambivalence as to guilt and sensuality, as to the corporeal and the transcedent" and the eloquence which can arise from this "uneasy synthesis" I am not quite sure about Steiner's rather unrestrained disdain for Christianity (his more urbane and refined Dawkinsly hostility to Christianity is most overt in the next essay in the book, Zion, which concerns his impressions of Judaism). It seems he finds Christianity quite useful, as he often resorts to the Christian faith as a medium of sexual imagery. An example:
When nearing climax, she would cry out, though in a muted register, the name "Sankt Nepomuk the Lesser." A dim personage in the church calendar, this early medieval sanctified soul had this shrine in a lost corner near the Tyrolean border. Carved in limewood, the saint brandished a memorably elongated finger. Invoking him, in either thanks or propitiation, Ch. called up memories of fantastications centered on that appendage. These had been shared during onamism with a coven of friends in her convent school dormitory. Fervently imagined and mimed, Sankt Nepomuk's finger pointed the way to solitary yet also communal bliss.
Here is an image I found online of poor St. John of Nepomuk, though I don't notice anything remarkable about the pointed finger, perhaps this stone is something like the limewood carving so abused by a former lover of the anglo-Jewish literary aristocracy:
Though Steiner has long tried to sell himself as boldly out of step with the times ("an essay in the old criticism", etc.), this essay in question strikes me as a very frustrated reflection on the passing of a sexual-cultural ethos that seems to have been the pinnacle of meaning in Steiner's life. Perhaps this quality is what Steiner is after - he views the passing of the promise of European free love of the 60s with the frustration of the octogenarian onamist. But there is more than a hint of bitterness in the reflection that presents itself as thankful, something like a Newt Gingrich speech, only in Steiner's case with an urbane and masterful vocabulary and rhetorical prowess. I am inclined to think it uncontroversial to say that in works like Real Presences and Tolstoy or Dostoevsky Steiner has been rather flamboyant in his fetishization of language. Reading this essay only solidifies my impression of the Steiner corpus. He definitely infers that the act of sex is somehow more meaningful to a person who is able to articulate the experience with a wider and fuller vocabulary. There is a truism there, but where on earth one takes it is beyond me. The project leaves this reader with a bad taste of rather pedantic elitism in his mouth, but, of course, you don't begin to read Steiner without expecting as much.
As always, he does have his acutely perceptive moment. Early in the essay he regrets the influence of technocratic sexualizations on our contemporary lovemaking:
The erotic and sexual phraseology of the media, the amorous jargon of film and television, the tidal declamation of advertisement and the mass market, stylize, conventionalize the rhythm, the pace, the discursive components of millions of partners. In the developed world, with its corrosive pornography, countless lovers, particularly among the young, "program" their lovemaking, whether consciously or not, along prepackaged semiotic lines. What should be the most spontaneously anarchic, individually exploratory and inventive of human encounters, is to a very large degree scripted. The last freedom, the final authenticity may indeed be that of the deaf-mute. We do not know.
I had to chuckle throughout reading this essay for this reason - the people that first got me reading Steiner wanted me to be formed by Real Presences and Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, hoping to bring some sense to what they perceived to be my overly secularized mind. Those friends were certainly not the sort who would ever choose to read or encourage another to read essays in which the author describes different ways in which lovers across cultures have invited the author into the act of sodomy. Perhaps I should have given up on Steiner years ago. Then again, nah, I read all those boring bits, so I've earned a few dozen pages of titillation.
If nothing else, after reading a text by Steiner there is the lingering of thought on this or that turn he took which one did not expect. This essay was the furthest thing from an exception in that regard.
Those many literati who read this blog will recognize the little Tolstoy or Dostoevsky image to the right of that text as a cropped image from the cover of George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism.
When I think of Steiner these days, I think of two things - the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, which I have in the past attended in order to sell books, and the widespread use of Viagra in nursing homes.
In a recent nursing school rotation I had in a nursing home, pretty much every male who could move was on Viagra or an equivalent, and as there were considerably more women than men in this nursing home, the men who were able often serviced more than one woman. We were prepared for this phenomenon by the staff before we began our work there. We were told this is the way of things now, indeed the phenomena was praised as a means of providing elderly persons with social and physical comfort - a reason to live in an otherwise dismal situation, if you will. One hears of the exponential increases in HIV, gonorrhea, and syphilis in retirement homes these days, though I didn't see any of that. Perhaps at the nursing home I was at the old duffs used condoms.
At another rotation I was at after that one I was working with primarily men in their mid-50s or older in a medsurg setting and every single one of them I worked with had "sexual dysfunction" among their diagnoses and either had been or were currently taking an erectile dysfunction med. It seems it is now commonplace to have very ill men insist on having the ability to engage in coitus and being provided the pharmacological means to do so. You might be in late liver failure, with ascites extending your abdomen, and your scrotum the size of an eggplant due to edema, but dammit you are going to get a lay before you take the long nap. I have to admit at times when in the room with a given chain smoking, verbally abusive, chronic alcoholic with staples down his front and an ostomy or ileostomy bag needing emptied, now asking about when he can resume sexual activity, I'd catch myself looking at the wife or significant other and think "seriously?" But, of course, I played along as I had been taught, all tolerant and using my dope on a rope "therapeutic language."
At the Medieval Congress there was a dance each year I went. It was a sight to behold. Medievalists and experts in related fields (including patristics, mind you), typically in their 50s and male, would be witnessed in the most unabashed and downright embarrassing attempts to hook up with TA's (usually female) two or three decades younger than them. There was a lot of alcohol involved, and one could watch apparent "successes" occur which seemed altogether unlikely. One year my buddy Danny and I watched from outside, smoking Drummies and drinking Laphroaig out of the bottle, and we placed bets as to whether or not a given attempt to score would work, one of us paying the other as a given middle aged overweight bald nerd either walked out of the dance and toward a car with an attractive young TA, or moved on to the next attempt.
All of this reminds me of Steiner because the book of his I have read most recently is his My Unwritten Books, specifically his essay Tongues of Eros. In it Steiner uses his commanding rhetorical skills and wit to describe the glories of polyphonic sex, as well as to compare, in something of a linguistic-ethnographic manner, the language and correspondent activity of lovemaking among speakers of German, French, Italian, and English. His motivation for writing is thus:
But where it is loved freely, love and its sexual fulfillment emancipate the human spirit and bring it home to the enigma of the human body, of the body's determinant yet enigmatic weight in the realization of the self. No other phenomenality in our means can match or surpass this enfranchisement. Liberté, liberté chérie, proclaims the national anthem in a loving, amorous flourish. As sexual potency withers with age, as anxious onamism returns to substitute for coitus, freedom regresses. In this exact sense, old age is serfdom. Yet even here, remembrance can liberate. Those "snows of yesteryear" still gleam. The man, the woman who have known sex at its most various and unashamed retain the taste of freedom even to the end. One night in Paris, as I entered C., I heard the soft but meteoric laughter of liberty itself. It stays with me.
The essay lists many examples of erotic language in each of the languages, and in the process, Steiner lists to the reader quite more than a few of his sexual exploits. Some of it remains at least behind the thin veil of Steiner's many (and usual, for those of you who have read him) plays on words and complicated rhetorical constructs, but some of it is rather explicitly pornographic, even if cleverly so. I suppose an esteemed scholar who has often been accused of being obtuse and boring might be inclined to play provocateur at the end. Not that the material isn't fascinating. I find it interesting, anyway, that French lovers use vous and not tu with each other when making love, or at least did so until very recently. Steiner predictably praises this formality. He considers the invasion of anglo-american informality into the erotic language of other tongues to be vulgar.
Given that Steiner fairly early in the essay seems to appreciate in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio "a determinant Catholic ambivalence as to guilt and sensuality, as to the corporeal and the transcedent" and the eloquence which can arise from this "uneasy synthesis" I am not quite sure about Steiner's rather unrestrained disdain for Christianity (his more urbane and refined Dawkinsly hostility to Christianity is most overt in the next essay in the book, Zion, which concerns his impressions of Judaism). It seems he finds Christianity quite useful, as he often resorts to the Christian faith as a medium of sexual imagery. An example:
When nearing climax, she would cry out, though in a muted register, the name "Sankt Nepomuk the Lesser." A dim personage in the church calendar, this early medieval sanctified soul had this shrine in a lost corner near the Tyrolean border. Carved in limewood, the saint brandished a memorably elongated finger. Invoking him, in either thanks or propitiation, Ch. called up memories of fantastications centered on that appendage. These had been shared during onamism with a coven of friends in her convent school dormitory. Fervently imagined and mimed, Sankt Nepomuk's finger pointed the way to solitary yet also communal bliss.
Here is an image I found online of poor St. John of Nepomuk, though I don't notice anything remarkable about the pointed finger, perhaps this stone is something like the limewood carving so abused by a former lover of the anglo-Jewish literary aristocracy:
Though Steiner has long tried to sell himself as boldly out of step with the times ("an essay in the old criticism", etc.), this essay in question strikes me as a very frustrated reflection on the passing of a sexual-cultural ethos that seems to have been the pinnacle of meaning in Steiner's life. Perhaps this quality is what Steiner is after - he views the passing of the promise of European free love of the 60s with the frustration of the octogenarian onamist. But there is more than a hint of bitterness in the reflection that presents itself as thankful, something like a Newt Gingrich speech, only in Steiner's case with an urbane and masterful vocabulary and rhetorical prowess. I am inclined to think it uncontroversial to say that in works like Real Presences and Tolstoy or Dostoevsky Steiner has been rather flamboyant in his fetishization of language. Reading this essay only solidifies my impression of the Steiner corpus. He definitely infers that the act of sex is somehow more meaningful to a person who is able to articulate the experience with a wider and fuller vocabulary. There is a truism there, but where on earth one takes it is beyond me. The project leaves this reader with a bad taste of rather pedantic elitism in his mouth, but, of course, you don't begin to read Steiner without expecting as much.
As always, he does have his acutely perceptive moment. Early in the essay he regrets the influence of technocratic sexualizations on our contemporary lovemaking:
The erotic and sexual phraseology of the media, the amorous jargon of film and television, the tidal declamation of advertisement and the mass market, stylize, conventionalize the rhythm, the pace, the discursive components of millions of partners. In the developed world, with its corrosive pornography, countless lovers, particularly among the young, "program" their lovemaking, whether consciously or not, along prepackaged semiotic lines. What should be the most spontaneously anarchic, individually exploratory and inventive of human encounters, is to a very large degree scripted. The last freedom, the final authenticity may indeed be that of the deaf-mute. We do not know.
I had to chuckle throughout reading this essay for this reason - the people that first got me reading Steiner wanted me to be formed by Real Presences and Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, hoping to bring some sense to what they perceived to be my overly secularized mind. Those friends were certainly not the sort who would ever choose to read or encourage another to read essays in which the author describes different ways in which lovers across cultures have invited the author into the act of sodomy. Perhaps I should have given up on Steiner years ago. Then again, nah, I read all those boring bits, so I've earned a few dozen pages of titillation.
If nothing else, after reading a text by Steiner there is the lingering of thought on this or that turn he took which one did not expect. This essay was the furthest thing from an exception in that regard.
Took the kids to their doctor on Mud Island today and got to drive on a road with a recently erected levee just to the side. This resulted in the Mississippi being notably higher than the road right next to it. The kids thought it was pretty neat. Can't say I'm too sad about the trendy new urbanist Disneyland homes getting wet on Mud Island, but the owners will make out alright as their kind nearly always do.
Me da writes a wee bit about the Memphis floodmageddon at PW.
The Human Fold
Here penned within the human fold
No longer now we shake the bars,
Although the ever-moving stars
Night after night in order rolled
Rebuke this stationary farce.
There’s no alternative here but love,
So far as genuine love can be
Where there’s no genuine liberty
To give or take, to lose or have,
And having rots with wrong, and loss
Itself has no security
Except in the well-managed grave,
And all we do is done to prove
Content and discontent both are gross.
Yet sometimes here we still can see
The dragon with his tears of gold,
The bat-browed sphinx
Shake loose her wings
That have no hold and fan no air,
All struck dead by her stare.
Hell shoots its avalanche at our feet,
In heaven the souls go up and down,
And we can see from this our seat
The heavenly and hellish town,
The green cross growing in a wood
Close by old Eden’s crumbling wall,
And God Himself in full manhood
Riding against the Fall.
All this; but here our sight is bound
By ten dull faces in a round,
Each with a made-to-measure glance
That is in misery till it’s found.
Yet looking at each countenance
I read this burden in them all:
‘I lean my cheek from eternity
For time to slap, for time to slap.
I gather my bones from the bottomless clay
To lay my head in the light’s lap.’
By what long way, by what dark way,
From what unpredetermined place,
Did we creep severally to this hole
And bring no memory and no grace
To furnish evidence of the soul,
Though come of an ancient race?
All gone, where now we cannot say,
Altar and shrine and boundary stone,
And of the legends of our day
This one remains alone:
‘They loved and might have loved for ever,
But public trouble and private care
Faith and hope and love can sever
And strip the bed and the altar bare’.
Forward our towering shadows fall
Upon the naked nicheless wall,
And all we see is that shadow-dance.
Yet looking at each countenance
I read this burden in them all:
“I lean my cheek from eternity
For time to slap, for time to slap.
I gather my bones from the bottomless clay
To lay my head in the light’s lap’.
-Edwin Muir, from his Collected Poems.
That overtime is beyond the normal 12 hour day shift. Daily wage is a little more than $11 per day. From here.
labor.
I go back to work tomorrow at the shop after a month off to concentrate on school. I'll be working a lot more hours this summer than I have been since I was rehired back part time. Here's a couple of lights which I make:
I have one like the one on the bottom in my youngest daughter's room. It's supposed to be an outdoor light but it suits me fine inside.
If I could do anything in metal I would do exclusively foundry work. I took some foundry classes at the National Ornamental Metal Museum here in Memphis and we used to do sandcasting at my shop though that has all been outsourced now.
This is the work a guy I met at the metal museum does at his shop in Ireland:
I know most shops of any size have finishers who do all the finishing and foundry men that do all the foundry work. Usually the foundry men get paid a lot more which is a crock of shit as the real talent lies in the finishing work, but that's an old story. Anyway, there are very few manual labors I enjoy more in this life than casting an object and then finishing it myself. You don't really understand foundry work until you have made objects from start to finish over and over again in that manner. But good luck finding a place which allows a craftsman to do this other than in a backyard foundry setting, or at a little foundry like they have at the Metal Museum, or at a very small shop. I keep thinking about getting my own backyard foundry up and running, but it would take years of steady employment to get the funds needed to get all the toys involved with backyard/garage foundry work. Maybe someday, like everything else.
I have one like the one on the bottom in my youngest daughter's room. It's supposed to be an outdoor light but it suits me fine inside.
If I could do anything in metal I would do exclusively foundry work. I took some foundry classes at the National Ornamental Metal Museum here in Memphis and we used to do sandcasting at my shop though that has all been outsourced now.
This is the work a guy I met at the metal museum does at his shop in Ireland:
I know most shops of any size have finishers who do all the finishing and foundry men that do all the foundry work. Usually the foundry men get paid a lot more which is a crock of shit as the real talent lies in the finishing work, but that's an old story. Anyway, there are very few manual labors I enjoy more in this life than casting an object and then finishing it myself. You don't really understand foundry work until you have made objects from start to finish over and over again in that manner. But good luck finding a place which allows a craftsman to do this other than in a backyard foundry setting, or at a little foundry like they have at the Metal Museum, or at a very small shop. I keep thinking about getting my own backyard foundry up and running, but it would take years of steady employment to get the funds needed to get all the toys involved with backyard/garage foundry work. Maybe someday, like everything else.
I believe that philosophy is part of literature, and not the reverse. Writing is not possible without images. Yet, images don't have to be descriptive; they can be concepts, and Deleuze and I often discuss this point. Concepts are mental images.
- from Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio.
- from Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio.
extra value royals...
With the recent wedding blogdom has been full of conversation about monarchy. One conservative friend, John, linked to this post defending the monarchy as an explicitly reactionary act. I've never understood how intelligent conservative friends would take this Taki site seriously but never mind that. They almost certainly don't understand why I read some of the things I read.
The post in question gives the usual simplistic attack against vague notions of progress painted ever so heinous, and offers a smug defense of what is asserted to be a reactionary posture.
But the entire premise here is absolute bunk. Here is why: the self-proclaimed reactionaries are not reacting against some sort of 'progress' they don't like in a vacuum. To choose against their disdained 'progress' does not result in the conservation of anything. Why? Well read Marx on the nature of capital again. Nothing gets conserved in the end in a capitalist schema. At least not actually preserved. You might still have castles and princesses, but they will all be the Disneyland sort soon enough, until Disneyland is replaced by something more economically expedient, which usually does not take long.
Case in point. I read an article last week in which the reporter was quoting some figure representing the Royal Family talking about what value the Royal Family was to the U.K. He specifically stated that they were not trying to 'offer' the cheapest Royal Family, but to offer a Royalty that 'provided the greatest value.' In other words, he was defending why the, say, corporation that is the UK, would keep the brand that is the Royal Family. His language and argument were blatant and unapologetic in its affirmation of the legitimacy of the monarchy based on its economic value. I went to find this article to link to it and I could not find it. Before you get suspicious, let me assure you that the reason I could not find it is because there are so many articles out there making the same exact argument. Just google "royal family good value" or "monarchy good value" sometime. You will see that since the 90s this has been the line of official Royal Family spokespersons. This article is typical and shows that the exact language used last week was being used in 2005.
What this means, of course, is that progress has occurred. The Royal Family used to exist and be defended on the basis of a concept of divine right. Later in modernity that changed to a monarchy that was maintained because of human traditions and a social utilitarianism - the belief that the Royals provide a civic stability to the commonwealth. But this notion has now transitioned into the Royals as a brand which offers the nation great value. The people invest 37 million quid in the Royals, and in return British corporations get hundreds of millions in 'profits' made from tourism (some of which is supposed to trickle down in the fanciful world of Friedman economics) and perhaps there is some economic benefit from what moderate social stability might come from having a monarchy. If I might be a tad simplistic here, the change went from the people serving the monarchy, to the monarchy serving the nation-state, to the monarchy unapologetically serving the interests of global Capital.
The tradition that is being reinforced here - the sense of identity being fostered, is that human worth and even human tradition are subject to market valuation. That is what modern monarchies have become. And until contemporary monarchists see this, their 'reaction' will be nothing more than a progression toward the means and ends of global capital. It's not a question of change or no change. It is a question of this: in the midst of inevitable change, whose side are you on? To be a monarchist in such a setting is simply to be one who supports global capital via the royal brand you happen to be fond of.
The post in question gives the usual simplistic attack against vague notions of progress painted ever so heinous, and offers a smug defense of what is asserted to be a reactionary posture.
But the entire premise here is absolute bunk. Here is why: the self-proclaimed reactionaries are not reacting against some sort of 'progress' they don't like in a vacuum. To choose against their disdained 'progress' does not result in the conservation of anything. Why? Well read Marx on the nature of capital again. Nothing gets conserved in the end in a capitalist schema. At least not actually preserved. You might still have castles and princesses, but they will all be the Disneyland sort soon enough, until Disneyland is replaced by something more economically expedient, which usually does not take long.
Case in point. I read an article last week in which the reporter was quoting some figure representing the Royal Family talking about what value the Royal Family was to the U.K. He specifically stated that they were not trying to 'offer' the cheapest Royal Family, but to offer a Royalty that 'provided the greatest value.' In other words, he was defending why the, say, corporation that is the UK, would keep the brand that is the Royal Family. His language and argument were blatant and unapologetic in its affirmation of the legitimacy of the monarchy based on its economic value. I went to find this article to link to it and I could not find it. Before you get suspicious, let me assure you that the reason I could not find it is because there are so many articles out there making the same exact argument. Just google "royal family good value" or "monarchy good value" sometime. You will see that since the 90s this has been the line of official Royal Family spokespersons. This article is typical and shows that the exact language used last week was being used in 2005.
What this means, of course, is that progress has occurred. The Royal Family used to exist and be defended on the basis of a concept of divine right. Later in modernity that changed to a monarchy that was maintained because of human traditions and a social utilitarianism - the belief that the Royals provide a civic stability to the commonwealth. But this notion has now transitioned into the Royals as a brand which offers the nation great value. The people invest 37 million quid in the Royals, and in return British corporations get hundreds of millions in 'profits' made from tourism (some of which is supposed to trickle down in the fanciful world of Friedman economics) and perhaps there is some economic benefit from what moderate social stability might come from having a monarchy. If I might be a tad simplistic here, the change went from the people serving the monarchy, to the monarchy serving the nation-state, to the monarchy unapologetically serving the interests of global Capital.
The tradition that is being reinforced here - the sense of identity being fostered, is that human worth and even human tradition are subject to market valuation. That is what modern monarchies have become. And until contemporary monarchists see this, their 'reaction' will be nothing more than a progression toward the means and ends of global capital. It's not a question of change or no change. It is a question of this: in the midst of inevitable change, whose side are you on? To be a monarchist in such a setting is simply to be one who supports global capital via the royal brand you happen to be fond of.
may day music
On April 29, 1934, the Workers Music League and Composers Collective organized the Second American Workers Music Olympiad, which featured the premiere performance of Copland’s setting of “Into the Streets May First”, performed by an 800-voice chorus, comprised of all of the revolutionary choruses at the event and in the New York City
Into the streets May First!
Into the roaring Square!
Shake the midtown towers!
Shatter the downtown air!
Come with a storm of banners,
Come with an earthquake tread,
Bells, hurl out of your belfries,
Red flag, leap out your red!
Out of the shops and factories,
Up with the sickle and hammer,
Comrades, these are our tools,
A song and a banner!
Roll song, from the sea of our hearts,
Banner, leap and be free;
Song and banner together,
Down with the bourgeoisie!
Sweep the big city, march forward,
The day is a barricade;
We hurl the bright bomb of the sun,
The moon like a hand grenade.
Pour forth like a second flood!
Thunder the alps of the air!
Subways are roaring our milllons--
Comrades, into the square!
Into the roaring Square!
Shake the midtown towers!
Shatter the downtown air!
Come with a storm of banners,
Come with an earthquake tread,
Bells, hurl out of your belfries,
Red flag, leap out your red!
Out of the shops and factories,
Up with the sickle and hammer,
Comrades, these are our tools,
A song and a banner!
Roll song, from the sea of our hearts,
Banner, leap and be free;
Song and banner together,
Down with the bourgeoisie!
Sweep the big city, march forward,
The day is a barricade;
We hurl the bright bomb of the sun,
The moon like a hand grenade.
Pour forth like a second flood!
Thunder the alps of the air!
Subways are roaring our milllons--
Comrades, into the square!
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