Wish I May

This month has really lived up to its name for me.  At the start of it, I was full of ambition.  I May do this, I May do that.  I'm not sure how successful I was at pushing things from the May to the Did column.  I did finally read Homo Deus by Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari which had been on my list for several months.  The topic of the book is the impending domination and subordination of humanity by an amortal, superiorly engineered successor species to homo sapiens fashioned by the elite members of our current species from themselves.   The trajectory of 50 years or so in which this would occur per Harari seems to me to be optimistic in light of news of the acceleration of global warming (also brought to us courtesy of our elite!) as reported to the world by a panel of 91 climate scientists last fall, making the notion of a cybernetically and genomically superior superspecies as a threat to humanity almost cute in its quaintness.  Good luck with the charred and depleted burning turd ball of a planet we're about to bequeath you, bionic overlords!  You deserve each other!

At the start of the month, after reading a string of exhilarating articles on CurrentAffairs.org, I thought "I may subscribe to this damn thing."  I did.

After several weeks of boiling and pouring water for coffee from a saucepan following the demise of the second cheap tea kettle in 3 years, I thought I'm either going to invest in quality water boiling paraphernalia or give up coffee forever.  I'm still pouring water out of the pan, but I swear I'm going to order a kettle. Maybe in June.

I had several ideas for blog posts that I may or may not ever get to.   (For all that matters, I may finish this one or I may not.  We may never know.)  For instance, I've been flirting with the idea of writing specifically about a commonly discussed notion of some writers / voters / focus group participants / acquaintances that they will be disappointed if the democratic nominee is not a woman.  As a shorthand, I'll call this faction (those who prefer a female nominee) Gender Voters as a particular case of what could be called Identity Voting for those supporting or seeking to support a candidate on any specific demographic or identity-centered basis.  Given that barring a change to the constitution Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will not meet the age requirement for the presidency until 2024, I have to face facts that I am strongly decided on a candidate whose non-womanly status places me in a position of rooting for disappointment for a significant segment of what I hope will be allies by the time of the general election.*  I've touched upon this before, but frankly the predicament this past week of Theresa May (no pun intended) in the UK, who is after all the second woman Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher in the 80's, has reminded me with a great deal of poignancy that gender alone does not automatically confer feminist priorities, compassion, skill or wisdom on a leader.  I don't doubt that May's gender tempered her incumbency-- I could even be persuaded that things would be even worse if she were a man as I'm sure her successor if he's Tory will soon enough amply demonstrate-- but may we be chastened by the actual examples from history against promoting candidates on narrow bases without assurance that their greatest strengths will lead us out of our current predicament and into the light of better days rather than deeper into the mire.  If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, I do not doubt her 2-term presidency would be a success (and most importantly, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch would still be mere gleams in the eyes of the Federalist Society instead of the nails sealing the coffin on Roe v Wade if not this republic's judiciary), but could we or the planet endure 8 more years of neoliberal status quo before daring to dream of a progressive president?   On the other hand, on closer consideration, I've decided I don't want to "mansplain" so I may not write about this topic after all. (Keep in mind: if you hear of any wagering on how long I can go without broaching the topic again, I may want in on the action.)

To complement the Mays, I have a list of Mayn'ts:

• I mayn't yet be over obsessing about presidential politics (to the exclusion of all other categories yet) (a year before the primaries yet), and I mayn't be completely sorry about that.
• I mayn't foster a habit of mindfulness outside of discussions about how I really ought to foster a habit of mindfulness
• I mayn't forgo watching Real Time with Bill Maher on a regular basis even though he appears to have forgotten there's a left to the left of center left in his roster of guests and moreover fully transcended the line into old man crankiness himself.  (It helps to mix it up a little with Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas.)
• I mayn't give up lo-sugar ice cream novelties for dessert.
• I mayn't stop adding to the list of Mays before transferring legacy items to the list of Dids 

To that final point,  even though the hurt of AT&T killing FilmStruck after purchasing Time Warner last year still stings,  I may risk my heart being broken again by subscribing to Criterion Collection before the end of the month.   I understand they are featuring the films of Anna Biller.  Then again the mere thought that I may do it, may in the meantime give me something to live for.

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* I'm sorry but Elizabeth Warren does not go far enough in her policies given current circumstances.  There is an actual progressive running, in case you hadn't noticed.  I'm not ready to settle, but if I must settle after the primaries, she is the one among the likely alternatives that I would hope I'd be settling for. 

It's not Brain Surgery

Retired Neurosurgeon, Failed Presidential Candidate, Treasury looter, Oddly Comatose Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson has difficulty concealing his hostility to questioning by Freshman Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts for his medical opinion about health effects on the residents of Federal Public Housing of the increasingly subhuman conditions therein since his incumbency at the agency*, for which Carson is seeking a budget reduction:

The exchange speaks volumes for itself.  Carson shares with his boss a comically robust (if undeserved) self-regard and a penchant for leaving a trail of bizarreness in his wake, but this episode perfectly captures the arrogance of an incurious man who has milked a hot dogging celebrity for 30 years who now finds himself having to answer for his incompetence (or negligence or dereliction of duty-- it hardly matters which) to someone he would desperately prefer to see as his inferior.  Even his eyes can't be that closed to reality.

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* He could also be grilled on his Christian perspective on the matter.

Amarisi Amari

Perhaps recognizable from Csókolom's recording on the soundtrack of Everything is Illuminated, here is Zidoni performing the Roma tune, Amarisi Amari: 

Amarisi amari
Amari chini borie
Ai, lalala lay lay lay lay lay-lay
Amarisi amari
Amari chini borie
Ai, lalala lay lay lay, laylay
Dooi dooi desha dooi
Tumidou meh lako mui
Ai, lalala lay lay lay lay lay-lay
Dooi dooi desha dooi
Tumidou meh lako mui
Ai, lalala lay lay lay, laylay
(Fiddle solo)
Lako musi rupona
Pushka trubula dinow
Ai, lalala lay lay lay lay lay-lay
Lako musi rupona
Pushka trubula dinow
Kelen savoraleh-drom
Te kelai la puroh rom
Ai, lalala lay lay lay lay lay-lay
Puroh rom te kelelah
Bistayeh je malav-ya
Ai, lalala lay lay lay, laylay
(Fiddle solo)
Hoy! te meraoo
Tena chachi paw phenow
Ai, lalala lay lay lay lay lay-lay
Hoy, te meraoo
Tena chachi paw phenow
Ai, lalala lay lay lay, laylay
Amarisi amari
Amari chini borie
Ai, lalala lay lay lay lay lay-lay
Amarisi amari
Amari chini borie
Ai, lalala lay lay lay, laylay

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/amarisi-amari-she-ours-she-ours.html

She is ours, she is ours
She is ours, she is ours
Our little daughter in law

Two two twelve
I kiss her mouth

Her mouth is made of silver
she has to be shot

Make way children,
let the old man dance

When the old man dances
he taps on for twenty one days.

I’ll slap away at my boot-legs,
That you’ll hear it even in the morning.

Oh let me die
If I don’t tell the truth

She is ours, she is ours
Our little daughter in law

2 options

One choice is compromise.  Reaching across the aisle.  Recognizing that regardless of whether your Senatorial colleagues are Democrat or Republican, all elected representatives are intelligent people who only want what's best. We learned our lesson 40 years ago after the humiliating defeat after only one term of Jimmy Carter (himself no Democratic Socialist while he was in office certainly), followed by 12 years of Reagan and Bush, Sr, the stewards of our current predicament.   The lesson we can't seem to unlearn: For Democrats, the center is where it's at! 

The tragicomic thing about the Democratic virtue of compromise is that it is always offered up front and it is never reciprocated.  The effect has been a shift into a rightist corporatist fantasyland that is markedly removed from government that meets the needs of most people.  But at least someone is compromising.  It has to start somewhere, right?

One question, though:  who asked for it?  What voter truly thinks, you know what's wrong with political life in America: not enough compromise of my position.  (Hint: No one.)  The Republicans control the demand of this commodity; centrist Democrats have a monopoly on the supply.  The effect is compromise in the worst sense. As in the erosion of value.  As in the exposure of venal motivations of those doing the compromising.

The other choice is a blank slate upon which you are invited to project your dreams.  What more could be said about someone you never heard of 3 months ago who explicitly evades questions of specifics on policy and yet somehow manages to threaten to take the nomination.   We almost always tend to be more creative and bolder in our imaginations than these formless candidates turn out to be in practice, and yet the power of these palimpsests of politics (for voters who are happy just to desire) is quite awesome.  You do not come from nowhere with nothing of substance on the table and win a presidential election unless you have been well groomed for such a role by your starting place, by your life choices and career moves and by your donors, and if this is the kind of candidate you are, you never find yourself in this role by accident.

Sometimes the proliferation of options is not enough.  If these two are anywhere near your top picks, it's time to check your priorities.  Is your number one priority global warming?  Is it medicare for all?  Is it cancelling student debt?  Or is it replacing Donald Trump with more of the same?

There are better choices.

No no

For some reason the concept of taboo has been on my mind and I aim to use this opportunity to get to the bottom of it.  I want to spell it tabu for some reason, probably because it's shorter and more exciting.  As it turns out it's more linguistically correct.  The origin of the word is Oceanic -- tapu in Tongan and Maori, tabu in Fijian, kapu in Hawaiian  (verboten in German, trayf in Yiddish, haram in Arabic, right out in Monty Python).  The word and its spelling were brought to the West by James Cook who described it as he observed it being practiced among the Tongans he visited on his South Pacific voyages in 1777 (quoted from the Wikipedia article on the topic):

Not one of them would sit down, or eat a bit of any thing.... On expressing my surprise at this, they were all taboo, as they said; which word has a very comprehensive meaning; but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden.

Ever since Cook we like to think of taboos as being something other and primitive, but taboos abound and indeed proliferate in the West.  Many taboos exist around dietary practices-- abstaining from pork in some traditions, from beef in others, from human flesh almost universally.  From anything animal in many personal taboo systems.  Freud famously identified incest and patricide as behavioral taboos that he supposed were observed everywhere and that formed the basis of society.  He was wrong about this too, but in any case, if there is a universal behavioral practice that forms the basis of civilization it may be the mere establishment of taboos. 

There are historic, anthropological or sociobiological explanations for some taboos.  The taboo against incest is in force, probably naturally, to reduce the proliferation within a population of sometimes lethal recessive traits that are more likely to be passed on in pairings of closely related mates.  Some dietary prohibitions may have been introduced to stop the spread of food borne diseases and encoded into a culture's laws far beyond the time of the threat that inspired them.  Taboos always exist in opposition to choice.  We don't proscribe the impossible, we only prohibit behavior that humans are capable of choosing to engage in.

Most taboos still in force are cultural at the root.  Those that are not proscribed by religion or encoded in law are transmitted by social signals-- modeled in schools, decried by moralizing editorials and PSAs, omitted via censorship,  discouraged by the human resource departments of prospective employers.  We must not kneel for the National Anthem.  We must not be silent about our gratitude for the service of our military personnel or question their cause or recognize the vanity of their deaths in action and of their killings.   We must not wear beige at debates and our sleeves must not be unrolled when we shake hands with the voters.  We must not demur to assert that we are capitalists.

Some taboos seem natural, right and proper, for instance the one that says you can't just come up as close as you like behind someone you don't know, smell her hair and kiss her on the back of her head.  We can't have this.

Other taboos seem rather arbitrary and imposed, often in a presumptuous way.  There is a new taboo especially among younger people against using a third person pronoun not of the choosing of the person referred to.  I don't know how I feel about this one-- it is challenging to understand a justification for a person prescribing how others should refer to them when they are not around-- but given the historic reasoning behind it, I do not want to be the one to violate it, let alone to forbid it from being implemented.

Our president breaks taboos all the time.  He cusses like a fucking sailor in front of crowds.  Not merely shedding but shredding the dignity of the office he calls out his predecessor by name and taunts opponents with belittling nicknames.  He breaks treaties to suit his own poor taste and judgment.  He blurts out state secrets to visiting dignitaries. He has only nice things to say about his autocratic dictator boyfriends and his Nazi fanboys.  There is speculation in some circles that he may not willingly leave office when his time is up.  He is such a cyclone of faux pas that there is no starting point for anyone who would hope to put a lid on it.  The root of his revolution in presidential decorum is ultimately shallow as a dish. There's nothing of substance at the core of it; he's just an empty-headed, poorly raised, selfish boor who doesn't know any better.  You can only watch in fascinated horror, and yet, if you're honest with yourself, you have to admit it's not all bad to have your reflex to recoil-- white gloved hand daintily covering your gasp-- occasionally smashed about the respect due his office.

Without a doubt, some taboos are meant to be broken.  It used to be taboo in the South (too recently for comfort) to drink water from the same fountain-- or to pass it in the same toilet-- as someone from another race.  To question the authority and wisdom of this interdiction was taboo.  It could not be questioned because there was no wisdom at the center of it.  This is the peril of such taboos: their power is only enhanced by the willful ignorance they encourage you to have about them.

The taboos that really gall me are the products of think tanks and marketing departments, such as the one that recently distracted us from the message that Ilhan Omar intended to convey in her tweets about the influence of money in politics.  The story became (conveniently for the targets of her criticism) about her breaking of the taboo.  This was not merely an excess of sanctity on the part of her critics; the intentionally missed point in the context of a violation of a sacred put her life in danger.  Aversion to taboos can be exploited for mischief.  In Afghanistan as recently as 2015, a mullah who was scolded by a woman for selling amulets on the grounds of the mosque falsely accused the woman of destroying a Quran, which inspired the crowd in the mosque in which the incident took place to drag her out of the mosque, stone and beat her to death, run her over with a car, burn her body and throw it into the Kabul River on the spot.  Our president who fanned the flames of outrage over Rep. Omar's audacity is well aware that his most impressionable supporters are no less human than those Afghanis.

Bernie Sanders was recently at the center of another breach of a sacred. During a CNN town hall, Sanders was asked by a Harvard centrist provocateur and future 1%-er whether felons should be allowed to vote while still doing their time.  In spite of the question being posed in Boston and framed with the hypothetical of the Boston Marathon bomber as the potential voter, Sanders forcefully replied yes and elaborated several reasons for his answer (paraphrased below):

• Convicts can already vote while serving their time in Maine and Vermont (and have always had this right).
• Convicts are already being punished (and not always justly) by serving time-- disenfranchisement does not enhance the justice.
• If you believe that voting is everyone's right in a democracy then no one (not even terrible people) should be denied the right.
• Stripping anyone of the right is a slippery slope.  (Experience in the other 48 states bears this out.)

At the suggestion from the CNN anchor that he'd handed his opponents a sound bite, Sanders merely shrugged knowingly. The difference between Sanders' iconoclasm and Trump's is that there is reason and principle behind Sanders', and furthermore, the impulse is to empower not himself,  but -- in spite of the risk of some political harm to himself-- those disempowered by the taboo.

Sanders' increasingly undeniable popularity can be attributed in some degree to his success at purposeful taboo smashing.  For years the conventional wisdom has been that in spite of the prosperity, security, equality and progress that could be attributed to the socialist policies that defeated the Great Depression and Hitler, that embarked on Civil Rights and landed us on the moon by the end of the 1960's, socialism is forbidden.  Our way of life is owed to our capitalist system of economics!  There is nothing that the Invisible Hand of the free market cannot accomplish!  The entrepreneurial class must be kept free to do what they do now and always so that the rest of us can benefit eventually perhaps!  It took a democratic socialist to point out that it is true, our sick way of life can indeed be blamed entirely on capitalism, that capitalism's cyclic epic failures of itself and of us are a feature not a bug, and the cure therefore is not just more capitalism.  After 40 years at least of the imposition of a state religion fetishizing the market, we have been conditioned to start back from heretic challenges to it.  The leader of the opposition party to Trump recently said in an interview about Democrats that "by and large, whatever orientation they came to Congress with, they know that we have to hold the center. That we have to go down the mainstream."  This is not opposition.  This is orthodoxy, the manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome that comes with being held hostage to corporate donors. As Sanders' approach makes clear, the antidote is heterodoxy: telling the truth.

Beyond presidential politics, for decades, the strategy of the right has been to commandeer the reins of state and federal legislatures,  governorships and the presidency, and thereby to stack the judiciary.  At this they have been exceedingly successful, culminating in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last fall.  The upshot of these decades of struggle and expenditure is that for the first time in years, the 3 branches of government are in their hands.  (The unruly congress was won back in a progressive wave last November, but for now they maintain a grip on that absurdly lopsided relic of Hamiltonian aristocratic confederacy, the Senate).  The effort has already borne fruit in the largest tax cuts in generations to the top tenth of a percent, and the enshrinement of Citizen's United which legitimizes whatever contributions corporations would like to make to the candidates and causes of their choice.  They will have their hands on social benefits of government that they are deeply intent on eliminating: Social Security, guaranteed health care, environmental protection, corporate regulation, public education, equal protections under the law.  The rationale for the strategy is predicated on a well established taboo-- that there is such a thing as natural law, and that capturing the flag of the Supreme Court is victory since it necessarily implies capturing the law.  But laws are only paper.  Laws and taboos are observed by choice, and minds can be changed.  It's happened on this soil before: the social contract can be voided by the people, and the power vested in authorities can be rescinded.   But first we must recognize the taboos that keep us in chains.

Adagio from Gayane

The opening of the Jupiter Mission sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: 

The Art of the Squirm

Rep Katie Porter of California, another Freshman congresswoman to watch, poses a math puzzle to JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon concerning a hypothetical single mother with a 6 year old working for Dimon's own bank for a very unhypothetical wage (as advertised on Monster.com), in a hearing of financial executives a decade after the financial crisis of the late aughts:

Yet another Freshman representative, Cindy Axne of Iowa asked Dimon in the same hearing to explain how his bank spent the $3.7 billion tax break the company got in the 2017 Tax cuts, forcing the fellow to admit that of the total, only $100 million, or 2.7% of the cut was reinvested-- the vaunted intent of the cut per the administration and the Republicans who passed it.  The remaining $3.6 billion was used to buy back shares, essentially artificially raising the price of JPMorgan stock, a manipulation that is designed to maximize the compensation of the board and of the company's executives through market shenanigans alone-- not productivity or performance.  As Congresswoman Axne points out, Dimon's compensation is already as much as 350 times the median pay of the company's employees (and more than 880 times that of the Monster.com job used by Rep Porter in her questioning), a fact which undermines the case of the executives for further easing of financial regulations-- a move which would encourage further speculations on spurious causes potentially precipitating if not merely accelerating an even more intense repeat of the previous disaster.

Can you imagine the smell of vetiver and flop sweat permeating that room?  It's a lovely start.