Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, written in 1947, performed here by Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra with Maria Valdes, soprano recorded in Santa Monica in November 2016.

 The words are adapted from a deliberately improvisational reminiscence by James Agee, an impressionistic remembrance of his life the summer before the death of his father in an automobile accident when he was six.

The tragicomedy of eating

Tom and Greg have a meal of ortolans on HBO's Succession.

Food.  It's what's for dinner.    

Sitting at my desk the other day engrossed in one of the many intractable problems put before me all day by my fellow sequestered colleagues, I became conscious of the unmistakeable cling-clang-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch of our dog, Argos, at his food dish in the kitchen.  The way in which the domestic now dwells within the workaday is one of the most salient aspects of this new life of remote work for me.  I could get used to being reminded throughout the day that life goes on beyond the glow of my laptop.  But nothing more poignantly breaks the work bubble for me than the sound effects of an animal eating.  The image formed in my mind was of him lowering his neck like a crane to get his face in the mixture of a paste of chicken parts and crunchy nuggets of which he clamps as much in his mouth as he can, then the retraction, and my favorite part of it, the scoping of the room as he pulverizes the mélange into a swallowable mush with his choppers.  The surroundings that he scans are his cereal box-- something to do with himself while his mouth is straightforwardly engaged in his survival.  If I'm in the surroundings, it's me he's vacantly reading.  If he could speak, I'm pretty sure what he'd say would be, "Ehhhh, what's up, Doc?"  

I can't seem to forget the utter dependence he has on me for food.  When I am hungry I get to browse the cupboards for a suitable snack.  When he is hungry, he has to wait for me to catch on.  I feel guilty about the imbalance, and confess I spoil him and his kitty brother and sister as well more than society deems proper.  But perhaps I am confusing empathy toward the survival plight of the domesticated critter with the projection of my own hangups about eating onto my pets' interest in food.

Pursuit of sustenance and the avoidance of famine is a perpetual human condition-- a driver of human technology and conquest-- but there is something perverse about it in American culture.  In a land of plenty, people still starve.  The wealthiest starve themselves on purpose as a demonstration of their fitness for their position on top.  Concern about food seems to be part of the American psyche.  As prevalent as asceticism is, it is no match for its counterpart -- indulgence. 

When George Carlin was good no one was better.  Because of this, there's a tendency of many to treat his words as oracular.  But as close as he comes to infallibility, it's not out of keeping with his talent for cutting through the shit of what passes as sacred that when he was bad, he was Sebastian Maniscalco bad.  He was never worse than when riffing about how fat and stupid Americans are (although he comes close with his dismissal of environmentalism on the basis of how obnoxious some environmentalists can be).  On the topic of obesity, it is evident: Americans are fat.  I am an example of it.  It is surely a sign of something about the American condition.  Carlin equates it with American greed and laziness and the hollowness of American mall culture.  For someone as sharply observant about the pathologies that truly make America exceptional, it's disappointing that Carlin milks easy laughs out of the topic by blaming fatness on the fat.  

I am fat ladies and gentlemen for the same reason that George Carlin was stoned so much of the time.  To dull the pain.  It's not just the pain of our culture's hostility to poverty and to the suffering of others.  There is genuine pain to be found in the slow torturous drip of American relentless intolerance of the unhomogenized.  It's the pressure to homogenize that screams at you in a monotone from your TV and out the windows of your car as you drive American streets. Many Americans succumb to it.  But I am convinced that the same drive that fills our grocery shelves with fattening junk and compels so many of us, wittingly or not, to obligingly pursue the comfort of the greasy, nutty, chocolaty, cheesy, spicy, velvety goodness of a mouthful of non-nutritious processed taste is on some level a reaction to the oppressive blandness that is required of American lifestyles in order to avoid hassle and shame and blame for the effect that your own slice of the massive American inequality will have on your psyche.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not exonerating anyone for the compulsion to choose little sips of delight over the austerity of good, lean health as if selective self-denial were a prerequisite for vacuous prosperity.  But who can blame us?      

February Miscellany

National Transportation Safety Board 

 

I have the February blahs folks.  My problem, not yours.  But it's a short month, so I hear, which does mean that in order to feed the beast of public clamor for my words, I must heed any and every inkling of inspiration that graces my attention span.  Ergo, the ensuing listicle of items.

1) I've seen a couple of videos recently rebutting this fellow, Rick Beato, a musician by education and avocation and a YouTuber of some renown, on his speculation about the threat that Gen Z poses to the future of music and his critique of the use of autotune as a musical flavoring.  Rick Beato is years younger than me chronologically according to wikipedia, but let's just say, in terms of musical preferences, he's my elder.   The heroes of the music he adulates -- rock, jazz, country-- were already long in the tooth when he came of age in the 80s.   He had the misfortune I had of coming up between revolutions. I enjoyed a few of his takes on specific songs when I first came across his channel not long ago, but  when I saw the title of the Gen Z video I got strong uh-oh feelings.  I didn't watch the video and cooled on the rest of his offerings because of it, but sight unseen, I still preferred to give a musical expert the benefit of the doubt that he would probably offer a bit more than crotchetiness in considering the music of the succeeding generation in spite of the click bait title.  Apparently my gut instinct was more correct than my generosity of spirit.  It's really nothing special that old people don't care for their grandkid's music.  Rick Beato's grandparents hated his progressive rock collection too.  Musical snobbery in my long experience is a declaration of the limits of one's taste, appetite and imagination-- I don't care how many degrees you have in it.  It's old, buddy.  And kind of sad.

2) Another YouTube experience that excited my synapses concerned Rebecca Watson's studiously antiseptic take on insinuations of underreporting about the  derailment of  50 cars on a 141 car train near East Palestine, Ohio, releasing a cloud of a growing list of toxins-- including vinyl chloride, "butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, isobutylene, combustible liquids, and benzene residue"--  that are causing health issues in the area.  In spite of an otherwise reasoned account, Watson minimized reported damage, failing to mention documented deaths of pets, fish and frogs in the affected area. Watson  also minimized the heavy-handed arrest of a reporter at Gov Mike DeWine's news conference on  the crisis.  She also dismissed concern that the topic was being shut out by the ongoing China balloon saga, the latest mass shooting, Russia's latest aggressions in Ukraine, the latest lies of George Santos, frankly cherry picking a reddit critic to mock the source of the criticism.  Watson in general can be counted on to do stellar work on the topics she covers,  and in spite of the pressure of her thumb on the scale to disappear any hint of impropriety on the part of the mainstream media or Ohio officials as a way of refuting sensational accusations of conspiracy from alternative media critics and skeptics, this video was no exception.  Yet-- while she acknowledged the obvious advantage that the freight company, Norfolk Southern, is likely to take from their vast financial resources to downplay the tragedy and kill every threat of consequence they are apt to face for the role of their negligence in causing the incident (to say nothing of the negligence of the Biden administration in not restoring regulations removed by the Trump administration that permit trains of toxic chemicals of extreme length as a cost and labor saving measure on the part of these companies), and she did touch upon one of the most egregious examples of it in the company's exploitation of its employees to a lethal extent--  in her dispassionate appeal against passion, why could I not shake a desire to issue a warning -- "Don't turn into Steven Pinker!"  

3) In retrospect, ladies and gentlemen, in my zeal to own up to my own lameness as a revolutionary, I was remiss in my discussion of Revolutionary Blackout Network's takedown of Nina Turner and David Sirota last month in neglecting to defend them from attack.  A commenter to the video encouraged the hosts to "keep punching up" which I readily personalized as referring to my direction.  While I am certain I'm on nowhere near the same plane as Nina Turner and David Sirota and while no one is theoretically above reproach, it does occur to me, that someone who thinks that Turner and Sirota are up is really misdirecting their punch.  If you think the two Bernie Sanders warriors are up, you are not punching nearly up enough.  In fact, what is wrong with you?  I accept without reservation that as miserable as I am because of the same forces that oppress and immiserate the hosts and listeners of Revolutionary Blackout Network, I could personally always use some smacking upside the head-- I have it coming.  Nina Turner and David Sirota on the other hand-- famous and yes, even more comfortable than I am-- are fighting for your ass, motherfuckers.  What are you doing?  Focus your anger and your righteousness where it really belongs and you'll find so many more people with you.  Including me.  And we need people.  You need people, people. Come on!

Blue Collar Blues

In an article at Jacobin, Matt Karp reminds us that whereas Joe Biden won voters of higher income brackets by 13 percentage points in the 2020 election-- compared with Barack Obama's 2012 performance in which he lost the same group by 10-- with Blue Collar voters, who Biden also won by 9 points, his performance represented a decided step down from the halcyon days when Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012 by 22 points among the working class.  Obama's success in that group came after 40 years in the wilderness marked by open Democratic hostility to workers, never more than the NAFTA pushing Clintons in the 90s. Obama's was the Democrats' best showing since  Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976 by 24 points among the working class. (Obama's hostility was less in the open, and it was overshadowed by the disconcertingly non-human Romney being caught on tape openly disparaging workers to a roomful of wealthy donors.).  In contrast, Carter lost to Ford among higher income voters by 24 points.  In this light, Biden's 2020 performance with both groups, while decisive in the election, strongly reflects 2 long term trends -- the shift toward Democrats of the wealthy and toward Republicans of the working class.  

As Karp notes: 

. . . however you slice it, the essential trade-off comes down to the same constituencies Chuck Schumer called out in his famous dictum: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.” 

Attitudes like Schumer's-- along with fondness for trade deals, a predilection for hobnobbing with billionaires at Davos and Silicon Valley TED Talks, deadly effectiveness at promoting austerity while mouthing platitudes about education and innovation-- have driven Blue Collar voters into the ranks of the Republicans who are the only party that seem to get how obnoxious woke identity politics in the boardroom, virtue hoarding, and the fetishization of exotic causes are to those who actually work for a living in this country.  Meanwhile, with their growing (yet-- importantly-- increasingly atomized) base of lower income workers, Republicans are free to implement policies even deadlier than the benignly neglectful policies of the democrats for this expanding segment of their constituency.

What is to be done?

One could always do nothing, which seems to be the strategy of Democrats, who have been courting higher income voters for decades while actively as a matter of faith taking their lower income constituency for granted. However even the staunchest most centrist Democratic strategists must concede that in terms of electoral politics in this economy, the Rich are a minimal growth quadrant of the electorate.  Without working class and lower income voters, no party can expect to remain at the top forever. Nevertheless, in the current environment of Democratic politics, the ability to wield politics that do not alienate workers, let alone those that rally them to the cause, has atrophied for 40 years to the point where it is no longer second nature.  If working class politics is music, the current crop of Democratic strategists have tin ears.

It seems that in order to begin to get political outcomes to the benefit of the majority of Americans who are not in the highest income brackets, it will remain to the Left to mobilize Blue Collar workers and allies into a movement.  Separately at Jacobin, Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty editors of 2021's Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities emphasize the importance of economic issues to the Blue Collar vote.  The way to fight anti-woke, anti-elitist messages is with anti-austerity, pro-worker politics according to the authors.  Of course it is!  But the left itself, being centered increasingly among higher income, higher education, lower muscle professionals and academics has lost touch with its working class roots and needs its own seat of the pants mobilization.  If you've been reading between the lines at this very site this fact cannot have escaped your attention.

I repeat, What is to be done?

Clearly the answer will come from a leftist economic movement of some kind, regardless of its origin and center of momentum.  Will it be based in an upstart wing of the Democratic Party?  It has certainly been tried, promisingly, by the 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns of Bernie Sanders.  Unfortunately, the Democrats-- with their minions in the mainstream press-- have become practiced at squelching it.  What about a third party?  Setting aside the Green Party-- the ever stagnant, ever frivolous and futile outlet for the disgruntled who feel they must still vote--  what hope do we have for building a working people's party that is serious about winning and stands a chance of success at the polls?  That is the question that many on the left are hopefully asking themselves.

But there is another possibility that I modestly hope some out there are giving their consideration.  What if the upstart movement originated where working voters increasingly are-- within the Republican Party itself?  What if, having been driven together under the republican tent by a mass fatigue at the pointless rich people problems of the Democratic elites, some within the tent began the call for economic reforms that actually benefit working people?  What if a contingent of leftists strategically and subversively-- but without subterfuge or compromising principles-- joined Republican ranks* en masse (preferably without alienating others in the process).  What if subversive candidates across the country ran as Republicans to push such reforms as Medicare for All, the end of anti-worker Trade Agreements, higher wages, an end to corporate welfare and a renaissance of pro-Union policies.  What if it became a thing for Republican anti-candidates to forgo the anti-woke talk in favor of pro-worker policy?  Would the Republican Machiavellis who had the foresight to harness blue collar blues have the power to stop the monster of their own making?

~~~~~

* And, who knows, sizable numbers of willing left-identifiers were moved to re-locate their lives to the beautiful lands between the coasts where Red State politics are dominant, even to the point of helping to reverse the demographic hollowing out that 40 years of neoliberal policies have engendered there.