Dean Baker Should Pay Rent in my Skull

These thoughts are as intimately built into my daily to-and-fro-ing as the records, medicine ball and vertical blinds pictured above:

The size and energy at the anti-health care reform protests last weekend were impressive. While some of the leaders are clearly racist nutballs who can’t accept that an African American is in the White House, many of the tens of thousands who showed up in Washington and elsewhere came out in response to their perception of a government that does not respond to ordinary people.

They have a basis for this complaint. It is hardly a secret that President Obama cut deals with the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and other powerful interest groups. This may have been necessary for him to get a health package through Congress, but it’s hard to blame people for being suspicious.

Many of the protestors were not against the government playing a role in health care. In fact, one of the mostly widely expressed concerns was that the President Obama’s health care plan would worsen the quality of Medicare.

Supporters of reform believe that this reform will be a step forward in providing quality health care for everyone, but how confident can anyone be in this view? If there is no public insurance option, as is likely to be the case, how confident can we be that regulators will prevent the sort of abuses that are currently widespread in the insurance industry?

...

What do we get if the federal government requires people to buy insurance, which quite possibly would be bad insurance, and provides subsidies to do so? By definition this would mean more people have insurance, but it doesn’t mean that people will have good health care. And, in the process, we will have made the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the hospital industry considerably more profitable.

This is an example of what was known in last fall’s presidential campaign as “spreading the wealth around,” but as is generally the case in this country, the direction of redistribution is upward. The government would be taxing ordinary people and/or requiring them to make direct payments to insurers, in order to enrich major corporations and their top executives. Certainly the townhallers have every right to be upset about being forced to give their money to the multi-millionaires running United Health, Cigna, and the rest.

...

It is clear that most of the health care reform protestors don’t have a clear conception of the policy issues. But they do have a real basis for concern that they are about to be ripped off for the benefit of the rich and powerful. It would be nice if those of us who support reform could honestly assure them that this is not the case.

Maybe this call for Dems to "honestly assure" us about upward redistribution is my version of wanting the movement for reform to "keep it simple"? I dunno, but this is the article of the week, so far.

Not That You'd Notice From Democrats' Rhetoric, but...

Poverty Rose, Median Income Declined, and Job-Based Health Insurance Continued to Weaken in 2008 — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

News like this galls me more than 1,000 Tea Parties, to tell you the truth:

The figures reflect the initial effects of the recession. Median household income declined 3.6 percent in 2008 after adjusting for inflation, the largest single-year decline on record, and reached its lowest point since 1997. The poverty rate rose to 13.2 percent, its highest level since 1997. The number of people in poverty hit 39.8 million, the highest level since 1960.

These data include only the early months of the recession. The figures for 2009, a year in which the economy has weakened further and unemployment has climbed substantially, will look considerably worse, and the figures will likely worsen again in 2010 if, as many economic forecasters expect, unemployment continues to rise in that year. (In the last two recessions, the unemployment rate continued rising for 15 to 19 months after the recession officially ended.)

The society is becoming more unequal by the day: read for yourself, check the charts, etc. Now, who here has faith that the sitting administration can/will tinker with the political economy in a serious enough way to alleviate these most acute consequences of Reaganism's 30-year advance, let alone push back against the strucutures-in-dominance which produce them?

A Question?

Is "health insurance reform" failing because the plan "is too complex" or "doesn't make sense"?!

According to Robert Reich, FDR once summed up his unwilligness to pursue national healthcare as part of the New Deal by saying, "I just cannot explain it." Reich believes that (some of) the problems Dems have faced arise as the consequence of the existing plan lacking simple, self-evident entitlements and reforms as well as effective moral/psychological frames for these entitlements and reforms.

My question is, what does this insight actually illuminate? Aren't the institutional (but also individual, emotional) responses against health insurance reform - let alone the tinkering with the foundational architecture of the public/private division of labor in our political economy - pretty much inevitable in our liberal (-capitalist) democracy?

Isn't it a truism of US democracy that the politics of public/private are rife in all of our great debates, but that these politics always end up weirdly refracted through, translated by and spoken in caricature-ish, moralistic terms of nation, race, identity and catastrophe? Wouldn't that happen regardless of whether or not the President's health insurance plan was less than 140 characters?

9/7/2009, Portland Tax Referral Tea Party

Labor Day, 2009 WrapUp;

or, Scavenger Guy 2

You recall the subject of this previous citation sur l'OG? Luckily for us, MaxRedline took the occasion of Labor Day to reflect upon the state of the unions (ahem!) in 2009.

Even the most avowed of laborite, liberal firebrands would do well to consider this reasoned, incisive, intellectually responsible work of social-political cartography. Jeepers creepers, it is 2009.

Obama: All Owe A Debt To Unions

He should have stopped after the first three words. We all owe a huge debt - not to unions, but to the policies that Obama and his fellow Democrats (heavily supported by unions) have managed to ramrod through.

Unions had a place in American history, but their time has come and gone. The most productive states in the USA are all "right to work" states, and the unions have "prgressively" infiltrated the public sector, where they inflict far more damage than good.

Where union membership is entirely voluntary, it may well serve a good purpose: when people come together voluntarily in support of common objectives, they constitute a powerful force. But unions gave up on that approach long ago; thus their heavy push toward making "card check" national policy. Secret ballots are anathema to today's union leadership. They want to force people to "join" so that they can collect ever more "dues".

This is something that they view as "free money", to be used however leadership chooses. Today's unions are all about "organizing" - by force if need be - but not at all about representation, which was the common bond that brought unions into being.

Our armed forces don't rely upon forced conscription, because it was recognized years ago that the best and brightest come from those who choose to serve. Unions, once based upon this principle, have abandoned it in favor of conscription.

Given that it was Democrats who supported slavery, it is hardly surprising to see that their main base of support comes from union bosses today.

Jeepers creepers. We can laugh, but mainstream political "common sense" laughs back at us. On days like today, I fear that Max Redline's worldview resonates more deeply with the popular imaginary - if not the polis itself - then our own political understandings do*.

*(And yes, I realize how unduly overindulged that last bit of "syntax" was, and how microcosm-ish this zero degree 'academic emo' prosody is. And no, I won't write off that falling-short-in-writing as merely sloppy "irony.")

Hi, I'm Lex, and I'm an Enema Addict; or, New Moves

It's amazing how love and happiness can throw off my habitus, my swagger and my wannabe Slint-y, stop/start-y dynamics of irony/earnestness. This week I find myself filled with the kind of happiness I've forever associated with happy people - all sincerity and good cheer, y'know? But nonetheless, yesterday I forged a new path back to my old catholic-leninist cavern. Guess what? I found it bedecked, as always, in my same old, douche-y and definitive swirl of interpallative echoes: Who Do You Think You Are? [henceforth WDYTYA]/How, Then, Shall We Live?/What Is To Be Done?

How the hell are happy people supposed to live? To think? To dress? Who do they think they are, and how do they sleep? What sort of lexicon changes, tonal shifts and assorted other New Moves, accompany this transition into 'Bliss,' 'Innocents Abroad,' and a whole bunch of other Chisel references...

As I tried to tell a roomful of unionists a coupla weekends ago, WDYTYA? is a necessary, generative, and constitutive strategic question for social movements, families and all sorts of other collectives. But WDYTYA? amounts to little more than a moralistic enema kit when we pose it in self-centered terms. As with political philosophies, my self-understanding is at its most insidious when it is subject-centered (i.e., starting from me and my internal monologue, rather than the relays, relations and the reasons for relating from which my monologue and sense of 'me' should ultimately spring.)

It's an insult to love and happiness, receiving these latter two social materials in self-ish terms. These days I feel a sense of intimacy/embededness/security/assuredness I'd given up on years ago, but even that miracle - and even the triumph of 'Two-Beer Lex' over harder-partying days of old - doesn't guarantee a life without hangovers.

Maybe I can't control that part [- hell, maybe all this inward-facing horseshit is part and parcel of the vagaries of catholic school/graduate school/reading too much/thinking too much/ life on the losing side of medium-term political history. - ed] But, to the extent that an ideology of personal responsibility applies [it rarely does! - ed], I should probably accept the fact that most of these behaviors are part and parcel of a life-path I've chosen for myself...Shucks, though, here's my counter-mantra:

I may never totally vanquish these intermittent emo-bursts, but at least I can let them pass without confusing them with referenda on my character (pfft!), or without confusing my character (pfft!) with my life's work.

Doing right by people I love - and doing right by people I don't even know - is probably as close to a worthy undertaking as is to be found, non? It's also an assured ticket out of navel-gazing, moralizing, enamizing,who do I think I am?'-ing.

At some point, any good socialist, and anybody who's ever felt really loved, recognizes that relations of production, and/or relationships-en-generale, are the privileged venues for building a life worth living, an identity worth articulating or, even, a self worth 'finding' (c.f., Teenage Fanclub, 'Your Love is the Place Where I Come From.') I've been writing against the popular-therapeutic concept of 'self' since I was 21 (See the Spring 2001 issue of Southern Anthropologist, par example), and've sought to inoculate my-self with the widest swath of social-psycho-theoretical tinctures on display since long before then. But there still may be no exit, ultimately, from intermittent bouts of self-ishness that, among other things, define a certain strand of post-Old Testament modernity, and reign over these United States with all the self-evidence and goes-without-saying-ness of gun-related deaths and anti-intellectualism.

Either way, blaming my-self further elevates self, soul, essence, and personhood over the solidarity, love, material-being-in-the-world, and public/intimate socialities to which I long ago pledged my oath and faith. That's just dumb. And that's why today is the first day of the second part of the first day of the rest of my life. That's why I'm working out with some New Moves.

p/p, m/f, socialisme ou barbarie

Public/private is a hegemonic border within the political culture of capitalist societies, intended somehow to delineate proper divisions of labor between government and capital, between politics and the economy. The discourse has proven irrepressible, even as these intended distinctions prove themselves impossible at the levels of political economy and everyday life.

Way Beyond Academic Emo: 2009 Self-Inventory

There's nothing like hanging in your childhood home to lead you into deep, obscene feats of regression and recapitulation. Perhaps that's how I've pulled off such adolescent horseshit as mumbling "I don't care what happens to me" recently, and how I came to spend 20-35 seconds of actual, lived life on lamenting how my parents just don't "get" me. (These last episodes are a few days old, btw, and I've since hit the sea-floor and headed surface-way. Is that Ben Gardner's boat?)

Jeepers Creepers, Lex: I know. But circumstances are such that it'd be even stupider to go about mumbling to myself about just how asshole-ish I'd be to continue indulging these sophomoric courses of action and inquiry. Instead, I'll focus on some things that are keeping me on the sunny side, even if I mean to evoke "sunny" in the hollow, haunted sense of stark winter light.

(These're in no specific order, btw. No matter what the format seems to suggest at first glance, you are reading a now-slightly-better-off-than-totally-insane man's blog, not listening to sports-talk radio.)

1. John Hodgman’s Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require. These astonishing works have played a crucial role in helping me maintain the "keep larfing or you will die" dogma that has pretty much defined my internal and external goings-on since mid-12/08. The laughing's running a little thin, actually, but the wannabe Joycean attention to comedy-not-tragedy is both the upside of irish-catholic-ness, and my anti-spiritual skeleton key. What Hodgman knows, and what Lex believes, is that lies beat fiction: 'specially when it comes to larfs! Like the names of twitterers/life-heroes Tompkins, Scharpling and Barry, Hodgman's nom'll be muttered on my death bed when I ponder the 100s of saints who can claim to've at some point saved my life.
2. The District of Columbia. What is this place? Train, train, bomb threat, restaurant, train. When I say, "this is New York City to me," I mean it houses the better-than-sports, better-than-most-making-out politickery that I'm apt for ambling after, autumn after autumn. Now, to find a 'not crap' job therein!
3. Twitter. Listen, maybe this blog-form's imperfect for the rest of you...god knows I don't use Twitter "as directed," which is to say, via my cellphone. My firm commitment to the tweet-form is mostly forged of a formal affinity for the character limit, and a readerly attachment to a cultivated copse of friends'/celebs' banalities and abbreviated asides. If you don't get it, you're not me. (And if you're not me, congrats! That means your face probably isn't twitching.)
4. Cookie Monster.
5. NJ. Let's see, we've got the "lunar landscape" of the turnpike. We've got WFMU, non-crap pizza, and pizzerias whose delivery folks are all over 50. We've got penne vodka on the cheap. And et's not forget the assholes who drive like shit and a ubiquitous affinity for "semi-formal" men's leather jackets. Everybody's gotta be "from" somewhere, I suppose. Is this my "from" place, still?
6. Rules for Turning 30. More on this later. I talk about turning 30 as if I'm very apprehensive about it, but veteran readers'll recognize that I'm actually just arbitrary and vain. I'm taking the approaching birthday as an opportunity to outline an array of advisable/unadvisable life decisions, as well as the usual bombastic pronouncements. Really I'd just like to have my own apartment sometime before this or that equinox. That's my bleeping goal.
7. Le Foosbook. During the trying times of Holiday '08, I hit the Facebook like a bloody-mouthed, hungry lion. Mission Accompished, though! I think I found what I'd needed to find, and am happy to see myself pivoting back towards the blog-realm, be it long-form or be it micro. Now I'm just good pour the occasional status update while awaiting more insane archival Sewanee snaps. (If only I had a scanner, it'd be curtains for you kids.)
8. The Lite-ness of singlehood: have you ever taken LSD-25? I haven’t: not ever, ever, ever. BUT, I’m told that an alternate-universe version of me has done so. Allow me to imagine I'm him for a moment....When I used to dose on LSD (alt. universe 1997-2000) and the shite got thick, I'd contstantly have to put out my hands, slap the floor, and remind myself where my body ended and the rest of the material world began. This fetishistic work of boundary drawing reminded me how small and physical I was, and helped my occasionally heroic conscience semi-soothe me to the tune of "hold it down, hold it down." So, too, do I find myself seeking reassurance these days from things in the world, and from my own frail physique, as I go about demarcating me and everything else. I am small, I am light, I am unassuming, I am passionless. I am not positioned to hurt anybody or myself. But better, I'm on the way to learning how to just maybe "take it lite" with the enemy of my enemy, Lurks Durkinster.
9. My Grandfather. My grandfather's the kinda guy who, when you tell him you gotta go to the can, he says, he says, he says, “mention my name and they’ll give you a good seat.”
10. Prindle 73. Obviously.
11. Wlkmn. I understand how this fascination/affinity might seem weird to some, especially because on the surface these guys just seem like another iteration of the Brooklyn, 2001 rubric that even Pitchfork's starting to get snarky about. My history with this band: includes the legendary Jonathan Fire*Eater; gleefully acknowledges their way longer-running DC roots; but culminates with the non-context-y realization that I like every single sound coming out of their songs. My new Son Volt, le wlkmn? That's not the right comparison yet, not least because they haven't demanded my rabid attention for a decade yet. But there's something happening with me and they. (And by the way, this particular performance of "In the New Year" will forever connote Barack Obama being president for me. Hamilton's vocal performance is fucking commanding, his leather jacket hardly semi-formal.) I really don't care who else "gets it," and I'm perfectly cool with this being just a 'me' thing. There have to be 'me' things, these days, or I'd go the way of a beached whale.
12. Realizations re: Patrick, writer and Patrick, rocker. Okay, look: I can't sing. Even when the bands I've fronted have no-doubt rocked, it's never been cuz I approached my beloved Chiltons, Parsons, Farrars in the throaty pipes dept. I get this now, having made a solo alb where something like "singing" would've helped. You know what else? I can't even not-sing a la my guys Kinsella, Dylan, etc. Front-guy wise, I think I've done best sounding like, well, Lex Dexter, with all his unconsciously embodied Mark E. Smith, Lydon, Chris Leo-isms. Really, I'm fine with that. Especially now that I've decided not to waste my words on my own voice. Because, you see, I like what I write a lot, and I am pleasantly unconcerned about it winning an audience beyond you seven readers, so there's no need to dress it up all suitable-like for the bars. I'm right now happier doing writing-about-music than I am saddling my writings with music. Try to stop me, eh? And when I do sing again it's gonna be Lex Dexter-y rasp time, not falling-short-of-Chilton follies time.
13. MySpace qua Radio. The only reason to've a muhspuss pazh is cuz it allows one to cruise rock bands' mushpuss radio stations. Why didn't I think of this four years ago? I did, but had to cut bait when 225 students wanted up in my back catalogue. No such problems these days.
14. Relative Libidolessness. Can't help cataloging all of my less-ness-es right now, even if it means (non-)sex-nonsense-blogging now. I am seated between a Straw Man and a Blow-Up doll, and it's cold enough to see my breath. There's the sound of children's laughter pumped in from somewhere. I am my own niece. I shall not not not want for anything saltier than a paperback.

15. The State of Michigan (home of l'UAW, Joe Louis Arena, le Bellman,)

Even the Apostles stopped Always Pressing After the Pentecost.

Maybe my imaginary Reuther's better to Virgil me All throughout Anti-Purgatory. Every other year after every other year, there's Always Pickets.

Anti-Popes, After-Parties: Vinnie Johnson, Ron Gettelfinger, Elmore Leonard, Chet Lemon. All Pink wine And Pantlegs.

Fuck bread and roses! We want fixed prices on A lot full of Packards, and we want Awesome Pastels for our nephew and our niece.

Union Security for Dummies: Sure, dues checkoff = AutoPay.

It's gonna take A lotta Patience, Michigan. It's gonna take A lotta Poise.

16. Sam Adams/Two-Beer Patrick. Two-Beer Patrick is an important, prophesied deliberor, coming soon to yawn at you, be yawned at by you, and to go home early... ( Where's the vaign?) Sam Adams has been on my mind for months before I came home to Jersey and started slurping 1.25 of 'em every other evening. It's my new idea of "plain" flavored beer, and darned if it's not delightful having no more than 1.25 of 'em. Out of curiousity, what're you all's submissions to the Plain Beer Survey?
17. Big Black Boook of lists/dreams qua Open-Ended ‘What is to be Done?’ conversation with self. Thank god. 'I've sporadically maintained a big sketchbook (sans sketches) since my second night in Eugene, 2002. Lately I've returned to reading/adding to the retrospective catalog of rock shows, crushes, insane ambitions, dreams, French Trotskyists' speeches and list of girls kissed btw. 1996-2000. Don't you judge! I'm just trying to take it lite, and these days that's hard work, Regis.

alarms

this is the way a world could end.
so help me cripes. if one more shoe drops, i'm moving to Birmingham faster n' you can say 'emo kid.'

Security, Freedom, Choice, etc.

Labor activists have always believed that union security prevents non-members from benefitting unfairly from the sacrifices they make to obtain fair wages and conditions. But union security has always had an even greater relevance for labor leaders because union building in the United States - with its extremely dynamic economy, its divided working class, and its business interests seemingly intransigently opposed to unionization - has made leaders all the more aware of the insecure nature of their organizations. For union officers, the ability to achieve some form of union security protected against employers or non-members undermining wage and labor standards. It also enhanced organizational stability, particularly financial stability; and most importantly, it made the threat of a strike much more potent. By freeing union leaders from these bedeviling problems, union security practices aimed to establish a stable power base for their organizations.

Grounded as it was in a power relationship, the controversy over union security could easily assume expansive conotations. When it did so, the discussion was not really over individual freedom - or the ethics of labor solidarity for that matter. The dispute instead resembled something akin to a debate about the desireable extent of union power in American society. When viewed from this perspective, the volatility of the subject and its keen concern to both unions and employers is easier to understand.

- Gilbert Gall, The Politics of Right to Work

libs. are indivs., too

[A]ttention to individual liberty would prove to be the signal contribution of English liberalism to political thought and an important heritage for its American admirers. In succeeding centuries, "liberal" thought on property would shift and change, but the primacy of individual liberty would remain axiomatic. It was a curious axiom, in an important sense an obstacle to democracy rather than a contribution to it. Liberty could be invoked by the citizen to defy a tyrant - but equally to defy democratic majorities. Furthermore, by promising citizens that they were free to live the life they chose, Locke's conception of liberty challenged the ancient concepts of civic virtue at their roots.

-Clayton Sinyai, Schools of Democracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement

boof-pfft-sllllt. tough news, if yr me.

for me, the hardest thing about trying to question the existence of "God" has always been the, i dunno, "culturally- Catholic" flavor of my own agnosticism. you can take the Boy out of the church, they say, but you can't take the incense-stench out of the subsequent young-goodman's nostrils. thus i grew up to play in bands and do writings that have always retained this weird, mystical, stigmata-ish bunch of motifs, to the point of being kind of an emo cliche.

well, imagine my chagrin. it seems i now have to contend with the revelation that gramsci, of all people, made a deathbed conversion to catholicism. boof!

i remember Fr. Edward Seton taking my (quasi-mandatory) confession, listening to my slew of well-reasoned arguments against teleology, and against sanctity as such. he told me, "you're a Catholic, Pat, you'll always be," and grinned shit-eatingly.

what sort of fate is this?

it's a good thing i just scored Bergman's religious trilogy, eh? thank you, Criterion. they're my primary texts, my vitamins on the "there is no god/yes, wait there is and god is horrible" score.also, i finally got around to seeing There Will Be Blood (n/c!). and i must say, that struck me as the most thoroughly agnostic sort of Horatio Alger/Morality Play thing I've seen since Crimes and Misdemeanors. top shelf!

beyond academic emo: prisonship inventory of sentiments/commodities

one of the things that stinks about giving advice is how platitudinous, catch-all and relatively hollow our hard-earned lessons sound when churned out in sentence-form. thus, you'll understand how i half-grimaced, half-mewed long ago when a certain family member told me earnestly how

things seem like they're going great guns for you, Pat. and that's really great. I'm proud. and you need to really make sure you enjoy these times, Pat. cuz it's sure as shooting that there'll be times when the world rains cats and dogs upon you. enjoy these times, Pat, cuz eventually times'll suck eggs, and, by extension, you'll suck, too.

"sure," i'd thought at the time. sounds reasonable enough - like a paraphrase of a parable from a Randy Newman song, or something. and it is reasonable - shit, it's probably even "true," (i'd thunk.) but that was all before the current conjuncture, when oddly enough, graduate school got hard again. (i know, who'd've thunk it? you could knock me over with a feather.)

now, i have a lot of uncomfortable things in my life, like everybody else: some things - by no means all - that are much more uncomfortable than grad school's sudden difficulty. but grad school is something tuff that is both "personal" and "general" enough as to be appropriate for weblogs (aka, "blogs.") so here we go with a thoroughoing personal inventory in light of this recent, panic-attack-ish element to "school," which once was a padded cell for holding-forth, but which is now a caged structure reminiscent of "Hell in a Cell."
Part 1. Problem Areas

1. Health and welfare? Oh no. I've had some sort of walking plague since I boarded that aeroplane last Weds. Clammy hands, cough, headache, shakes, sniffles, snot, phlegm, etc. All the rest (upset tummy, too!)
   
2. Social Encounters? Nope. Does Election Night count? I barfed.
   
3. Eating Right? More like, "eating out." 'Can't afford it, but also can't seem to stop, or, can't seem to take the time to cook.
   
4. Body/Mind, Work/Life Balance? Oh, p'shaw. My body is a two-legged sack of balloons. My skin is the consistency of a paper shopping bag, but it looks like a potato sack because there are tuffs of hair pasted on to the bag (, which holds balloons of various sizes).

But that's just the downside. See me, I gotta lotta upside in my life. Part 2. Upsides

1. Herself: But that's obvious. We're like the Footprints Prayer over here in the Brown House. Or Smith and Jones, in that Silver Jews number.
   
2. SonicYouth/SonVolt/Slint(/Springsteen?!?): update post soon.
3. Shoegaze: It matches the weather. In particular I've listened to the magnetic morning full-length thrice since I e-music'd it yesterday (even notwithstanding the american apparel-ish alb cover). Do you guys do the emusic? I'd like to, uh, monitor yr playlists and share recommendations with you.
   
4. Over-the-counter cold medicines: this has to stop. Not sure they help at all. I just like the plop-plop, fizz-fizz aesthetic. (Honorable mention: cough drops [not lozenges.] "Honey-lemon" and "eucolyptus," specifically.)
   
5. It's sweater weather: what? This post has 'emo' in its title. Do you need a road map?
6. Cardinology vinyl pack: 'love the t-shirt, 'haven't rocked the bonus 7" yet...comic book is awesome. Lengthy alb review coming soon. Commenter David, among others, received a warped 12". 'Mine has a surface scratch but no audible flaws.
   
7. Crime Novels: crime novels in particular, Ross MacDonald and Lawrence Block in particular. I'm going back to the well, even opting to crack the seal on what may be the last (?!?) of the Matt Scudder novels, certainly the last one I haven't yet read.
8. "Organizing Grievances" and organizing grievances: top-shelf!
   
9. The return of implicitly (not explicitly) lewd texts/emails/voice messages/ground mailings from evil r+b: how long until I start posting poems again, at this rate?
   
10. Chris Matthews: much to a lotta peoples' chagrin(s), including, sometimes, mine.
    
11. French fries: yeah, there's this place just a block away from the Brown House that makes, I think, the best french fries in Eugene. (Better yet, they come with a special "french fry dipping sauce" that features horseradish, but nonetheless reminds me of the famous white sauce" that accompanied the mozzarella sticks back at Shenanigans', where cool kids like evil r + b once glommed underage frat sodas.) Eugenians, which restaurant do you think has the best fries? I'm prepared to get exploratory about starch this Rainy Season.
    

so anyway, there's the nov 2008 catalog. what works for you when "times" are "tuff"?

done

done.

Prisonship Relief Crew: the closers, the night shift

i have returned to the home basin for a closing 1.5-2 hour spell of editorializing. tommorow AM will be a time of horrific feats of copy editing and god knows a tossed-off segue paragraph thrown in here and there.

but i think i'm rounding the top of the dune, at this point. i think the lunar shuttle has found its Wal Mart parking lot, to coin a very popular(, practically ubiquitous) phrase.

thanks to everybody who read along as i loaded brain matter into the slingshot and slung it forth. or - horror! - am i celebrating too soon?

nobody here but me

actually, my new supervisors have come in and out today (Sun.) it's weird to: go somewhere seeking utter silence; get cocky about having it; and then be interrupted and placed into a series of hat-in-hand, earnest-young-lad-style send-ups. one is reminded of Catholic school.

i went out for a plate of eggs a moment ago - something i feel like doing less and less since about 2000. that said, i went to a place that's about the closest thing Eugene has to the Wafflehouse. there's something about academic stress and spray-on butter substitutes that go together in my head like tax cuts and union-busting go together for all the Good-Time-Charlies sur le Right.

otherwise everything's fine here in the prospectus box. we're just sighing, and blogging, as a way of recognizing the passage of time.

and special thanks to minx (a.k.a. 'evil r + b guy," a.k.a. "the Rugged Child") for all of his verbal moral support.

also, looking fwd to an afternoon "express" summit conference w/robes (pic. above, circa 1998) before i unfurl my Research Program, flap it around, then hold it down with tent spikes.

Every day at work, activists and organizers in Oregon’s public-service unions confront two definitive symptoms of neoliberal political life: the privatization of once-public services and the dramatic reduction in overall union membership that have occurred since the 1970s. Theorists of neoliberalism cite privatization and union decline as two key developments within the U.S. political economy that have accompanied the era’s characteristic upward redistribution of wealth and the overall political and ideological “delegitimization of of Keynesian assumptions and policies underlying redistribution” (Baker 2007; Morgen 2008)...

Prisonship Away Game

If my dissertation prospectus marathon were not a marathon, but in fact a four-quarter American Football Derby... Well, I would say we're in the second quarter of an away game: working out of the new workplace, replete with minimal windows, panel lighting and flimsy upholstered conference room chairs. I'm in love, that's right.

I will alternate between a run and shoot offense and a wishbone formation during odd/even quarters. If you read this, please feel free to call in plays from the sidelines.

Night Shift Fodder

1) "The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which the premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that." -F. Jameson

2) Doug Henwood's latest radio broadcast features two political economists from York University - Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin discussing the possibility that this last financial crisis may, in fact, be, the "one" that precipitates a new style of capitalism: a restructuring in the relations of production, you know? So what comes after neoliberalism? There is no reason to be dumbly optimistic about it, whatever it is, as Henwood concludes in a powerful editorial in the new Nation:

Although we're hearing a lot now about how the Reagan era is over and the era of big government is back, an expanded government isn't likely to do much more than rescue a failing financial system (in addition to the more familiar pursuits of waging war and jailing people). Nothing more humane will be pursued without a far more energized populace than we have.

Henwood's is the most timely commentary on the bailout and its long/short-term stakes that I have heard/read. Apparently this is one area where I fall out with Pete De Fazio and Dean Baker, and fall in with Paul Krugman and Barney Frank. Weird. 'Makes me uncomfortable, but so does the ongoing financial collapse, and so do the prospects of the restructuring of the US fiscal/labor/monetary policies that are about to go down under either BHO or the Maverick. I think the consequences of moves made around this bailout and the subsequent restructuring of global finance will be decisive for the long-term prospects of the "working class" at home and "globalization's discontents" abroad, moreso even than election outcomes this year. But obviously the two variables are fatefuly related to one another.

3) Libertarian stalwart and initiative also-ran Howard "Howie" Rich returns to the scene in South Carolina?!?!?

Doctoral Candidacy - Boarding the Lorry!

I dunno how much or how little I'm going to be posting for a few days more, because it's time to close the deal with this crazy proposed doctoral research blah-blah. In the interim my advice to one and all is, watch out for the flame.

The Weeked Comes, The Cycle Hums

The paradox of class at the millennium, in sum, must be understood in these terms. Neoliberalism aspires, in its ideology and practice, to intensify the abstractions inherent in capitalism itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions. While it can never fully succeed, its advance over the "long" twentieth century has profoundly altered, if unevenly in space and time, the phenomenology of being in the world. Formative experiences - like the nature of work and the reproduction of self, culture and community - have shifted. Once-legibile processes - the workings of power, the distribution of wealth, the meaning of politics and national belonging - have become opaque, even spectral. The contours of "society" blur, its organic solidarity disperses. Out of its shadows emerges a more radically individuated sense of personhood, of a subject built up of traits set against a universal backdrop of likeness and difference. In its place, to invert the old Durkheimian telos, arise collectivities erected on a form of mechanical solidarity in which me is generalized into we.

In this vocabulary, it is not just that the personal is political. The personal is the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotioanl valence. By extension, interpersonal relations - above all, sexuality, from the peccadillos of presidents to the global specter of AIDS - come to stand, metonymically, for the incoate forces that threaten the world as we know it. It is in these privatized terms that action is organized, that the experience of inequity and antagonism takes meaningful shape.

- (from) John and Jean Comaroff, 2000 Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture 12(2):291.