Lodestar

Sarah Harmer Lodestar:

 

You might not expect such an intimate song to lend itself to ensemble singing but I can't stop listening to this version by Victoria BC's The Choir:

Collective nouns

A pride of lions.  A pod of whales.  A raft of otters.  A flock of seagulls.  These classifications are second nature to the astute listicle aficionado.  Who decides a mess of beavers is a colony and a cluster of bears is a sloth?  If you are listening may I humbly propose the following:

A squinch of antivaxxers

A beige of accountants

An embarrassment of Clintons

A tuft of poodles

A crow of murders

A persistence of Elizabeth Warrens

An echo of CNN Analysts

A superfluity of pastors

A happening of cats

A stench of spokespersons

A thwart of memories

A glut of lawyers

A gobble of mercenaries

A barge of patriots

A bumble of Bidens

An aggrievement of Republicans

A beta of Democrats

A certainty of Libertarians 

A worriment of Socialists

A figment of Greens

A bother of accelerationists

A perfunction of America's Got Talent contestants

A hangover of flies

A necessary of underpants

An adherence of waffles

A waffle of Senators.

A neener-neener of prisoners

A pucker of wokescolds

A performance of bumperstickers

An abattoir of billionaires

A gabble of astute listicle aficionados.

A suspicion of conspiracy theorists

A conspiracy of shadowy government officials

A clutch of Baptists

A fine mist of unspeakable (as heck) readers

A cringe of contortionists

A spoon of elevator passengers

Thank you for your consideration.

He Ain't Coming Back

Happy Good Friday! 

And also to you.  I was just about to restart my computer to apply some updates.  You caught me in time.  My wife kept talking about Easter and people kept taking time off at work and the public school I pass each day on the way to the metro was closed this week. And I saw an ad for Marshmallow Peeps yesterday (slogan: Jesus died so you could have Marshmallow Peeps!).  And I remember that the last full moon came just before the vernal equinox this year, and I noticed the moonlight was hitting the floor of the sun porch quite fully last night.  And yet I still was somehow surprised by your greeting.  Interesting.  

I learned that it was Pesach just this morning watching a segment about Gilbert Gottfried on the David Feldman Show.  I recommend the segment—it’s between Feldman and a frequent guest of his, Mark Breslin, owner of a chain of comedy clubs throughout Canada and a very lovable chap. Breslin is he from whom I learned about Klyph Nesteroff’s book about First Nation comedians that I read about a year ago, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem.  Anyhoo, the segment is here if you’re interested.   

I’m pretty depressed.  I lost Octordle (Wordle x 8) again for the 4th or 5th time in a row this morning.  It’s the only one of the Wordle*  variants that seems to give me that level of trouble.  That might have set me off, but honestly I’m feeling beaten down by the ownership class again.  Before I even got out of bed come to think of it, I was wondering if resignation to my lot might not be the smartest way to go in light of the overwhelming obstacles to getting a world anyone but the owners could possibly want.  Come to think of it, Stephen Colbert’s monologue about Ukraine was already depressing me before I even got into bed last night.  It's bad enough to get nothing but propaganda for the war machine on the news, but we've got to put up with it in late night monologues now too?  What a frickin’ tool.

Staff Appreciation Week is coming up at work in a couple of weeks.  My inbox has already been peppered with invitations to events for the week.  Staff Appreciation Fondue Feast.  Staff Appreciation 70s Dance Party.  Staff Appreciation Skits and Karaoke.  That's not appreciation, that's torture.  We'll probably also get an Amazon gift card. If this is appreciation, please give me your customary indifference.  

I’m not resigned by the way. I just don’t believe it’s ever going to get better for anyone it's not already better for.  Which is kind of a defeated attitude for a not resigned person to have.  But if you're wondering why I'm not 100% resigned it's because all evidence of the current doomed trajectory of human history aside, I cannot in my heart of hearts let go of my anger at the neglect of the obvious truth that merely 45% of the planet have appropriated 98% of the wealth (nearly half of it lying in the hands of merely 1.1%, and a full 84% of it split roughly in half between the top 1% and the next 11%) and that the engine of this disparity is the primary cause of human and planetary misery. Misery ignored by our leadership, our military-industrial complex and our media who thanks to the mechanics of their own over-compensation prefer to keep us lathered up into a state of pointless perpetual war with a series of conveniently trumped up foes.  And it is misery which could be appeased by equitable redistribution of the booty. The circumstantially privileged rich who are motivated by plunder and not by basic human decency will never give up their spoils willingly, and the rest of us continue for the moment to be too busy individually grabbing merely as close to enough of the dregs for those we love as we have been allowed to get our hands on to rise up as one.  Stupid of me to not be resigned, I know. But I'm not aiming for a mensa membership.  I'm just trying to get a good night's sleep.

From: Visual Capitalist, (Source: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2021) Sept 20, 2021.  Each of the 100 figures in the grid on the right represents about 53 million adults-- a population between that of Colombia and Myanmar. Six and a quarter are roughly the entire population of the US (adult and children).  The top of the graph is top-heavy with individuals mostly of the northern and western hemispheres (but probably not you). If 100 people selected proportionately from each of the 4 buckets were to split $10,000.00 according to their class, the single person in the top bracket would get $4,580.00; the 11 in second bracket would each get $355.45; the 33 in the third bracket would each receive $41.51 while the 55 in the poorest bracket would get $2.36 apiece. †

Chag Sameach!  Ramadan Mubarak!  Blessed be Eostre!

~~~~~

* You know, Wordle.  It's that rip off of Word Master Mind which I already loved as a kid before someone figured out how to capitalize on it in my old age.  The bastards.

† Using a November 2021 report from McKinsey & Company as a guide, the actual wealth of the planet by the end of 2020 was $1,540 trillion in assets and $510 trillion in personal worth for a total of $2,050 trillion, making the actual pie for our 100 representative adults in the chart $38,679,245.28.  Substituting this amount for the $10,000 in our example,  the proportional "shares" for each of our 4 buckets are $17,715,094.34 for the single person in the top bracket; $1,374,871.36 for each of the 11 in the second highest bracket; $160,577.47 for each of the 33 in the next bracket; and for the 55 in the lowest bracket, $9,142.37.  Nine thousand may sound like more than peanuts, but setting aside the obvious fact that that share is in actuality wildly unevenly distributed among the poorest to the extent that the bloat at the very top is actually fueled by negative wealth for far too many in the lower brackets, recall that wealth includes not just access to cash for emergencies and day-to-day living but also possessions and property.   And while the gentleman in the top bracket's share is 45.8 times more than the $386,792.45 that each of the 100 would get if the pie were distributed evenly (and more than 35 times the entire half million dollars that is the combined share of the bottom 55), the $9,142.37 of each member of the bottom bracket is barely more than 2% of it.  As impressive as our representative 1%-er's wealth is in comparison to the 99 others in the sample, his $17 million is barely .006% (that's six thousandths of a percent)  of the wealth of the world's actual reputed wealthiest person, Elon Musk, whose worth in April 2022 has been estimated by Forbes to be $273 Billion.  The discrepancies at the top are comical; the imbalance at the bottom is deadly.

Class Readings

From The Class Matrix by Vivek Chibber (2022)

I have been reading American Idyll, Catherine Liu’s sprawling survey of anti-Elitist strains in American politics, education and culture of late, a conclusion of which might be summarized (with embellishments, extrapolations, unforgivable interpretive shortcuts and misrepresentations courtesy of yours truly of course) in the following way: the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) which should have solidarity with the working class by virtue of their mutual vulnerability to being jerked around by the owner class, have instead been successfully both propped up and tarred by the owners as “the Elite” so successfully that the owners have been able to lure the working class into an alliance with themselves, their own interests be damned, against “The Elite”;  and, being basically unconscious and actually eager to embody the characteristics of an Elite that the masses have come to despise, the PMC are ineffectual and defenseless to do anything about it.  Moreover, Liu seems to indicate that while there is value in expertise,  it is squandered by the current class of experts (i.e., the mainstream left-ish PMC).  

As I was nearing the finish line on this book, I saw a “debate” hosted by Jacobin Magazine between Vivek Chibber and Slavoj Žižek on the usefulness of ideology.  It was more like a discussion as there was little expressed disagreement.  Actually, Chibber did most of the talking and Žižek did most of the agreeing.  I was so interested in what Chibber had to say that I bought his new book The Class Matrix, which occasioned the meeting, and am reading it now.  What he had to say was actually a great deal in keeping with Catherine Liu, albeit a bit more focused on working class priorities and a bit less sympathetic to expertise.  Chibber leaves the PMC out of it,  but I project that there would be agreement on this: the professional, verbal, academic left needs to shut up, stop lecturing the working class and start organizing, which means listening,  for much the same reasons that Catherine Liu discussed; to wit, that the working class is long past openness to the expertise of a class that they feel with good justification has fucked them over with its neoliberal bullshit.  I would say both Liu and Chibber believe the "professional left" such as it is needs to learn how to beat the owners to the punch with workers with true solidarity.  They need to figure out how to channel the energy of the working class’s done-ness with the power structure – the goal needs to be not ideological but numeric – i.e., overcoming the default solitary nature of how individual workers face their lot in this rotten system to build solidarity and mass momentum for change. 

Re the chart, that’s the Class Matrix.  Chibber's thesis is that what sustains the participation of the working class in the capitalist system in spite of a low growth economy and its documented heightened misery (and in contrast to classical Marxist materialist predictions) is low social working class organization due to high individual resignation.  I.e., because there is less and dwindling cohesion of the working class, individuals do not have a vision for a replacement system for capitalism, so they resign themselves to the misery of exploitation because at least it comes with more certainty of survival into tomorrow than the uncertainty of what working class cohesion could mean.  By tomorrow, we are speaking of course not about The Future, but about Tuesday, say, because on Monday, Tuesday is the only future the working class have some control over.  Chibber wants to highlight this resignation—a very logical stance on the part of individuals under this system since alternatives to capitalism are not forthcoming—as the obstacle to overcome in embarking on a socialist future.  There is no escaping exploitation in order to survive, people think, and they think this wherever capitalism has a hold (which is nearly everywhere now) regardless of the local culture.  To Chibber, cohesion of the working class is the essential missing ingredient but it’s not anyone’s fault (other than those who by virtue of monopolizing reproduction deprive us of hope for alternative co-survival systems).  In other words, it does no good to shame or blame the working class for not seeing what Marx saw in terms of the inevitability of class consciousness leading to revolution.  Because Marx didn’t foresee neoliberal post-abundance capitalism at all, let alone for the isolating trap it is for everyone (including the theorists if they would but admit it to themselves) who does not own a piece of it.  Hello! It’s all so clear now!  

The rest of the matrix charts other possibilities/contingencies/actualities.  You’ll note that low growth with high working class cohesion leads to social change through systemic challenge—the goal!  But how to get there in the desert of our current milieu?  (I’m only 60% done with the book so maybe he’ll get to that.)  Gramscian consent is what the much discussed Italian theorist Gramsci* saw as the obstacle to what the classical model predicted.  It’s similarly the idea that when working class cohesion is low but growth (and presumably wages/benefits) are high, individuals consent to their exploitation because capitalists are more inclined to meet them halfway in order to keep the growth going.  Chibber thinks this may have been somewhat true in the middle of the last century at the peak of abundance, but something was not quite right with that model because as soon as capitalists rescinded, workers gave up their gains, including the mediating institutions that were unions, in an effort (in hopes) of minimizing their own individual losses.  It’s really individual resignation to the system that’s the key, Chibber believes.  I’m inclined to concede to his point.

Why do they, the working class. resign themselves to capitalism?  I firmly believe they is us.  It’s to survive.  Chibber talks about a theoretical  Cultural Turn (The Cultural Turn, he calls it) discussed by cultural theorists, which suggests that the problem needs to be attacked via culture/ideology, e.g., through indoctrination, propaganda, proselytization, scolding, admonishing, criticizing, twitter. Chibber rejects this approach on the basis that the problem is not cultural or ideological but economic.  I am not a scholar of any of this but an amateur, a dabbler, a dilettante, but The Cultural Turn, I gather from repeated mentions of it in the book, is the theorized turn that the working class took from the supposedly inevitable path to communism predicted in classical Marxism-- a supposed "observed event" that needs an explanation.  The cultural theorists suggested that something about the culture changed or eluded the model—i.e., that American culture for instance accounts for why the American working class failed to embody the prediction and discarded it at the mere whiff of countercultural conflict.  Chibber I think sees this as a bit of blaming the victim.  Workers understand that they are exploited regardless of the culture they are in. I mean of course you notice them screwing with you—underpaying you; making you come into the office in the middle of a pandemic and forcing you to sit where they put you and not where you want to sit and to do shit they want you to do which is far, far from work that you want to be doing  (oh far far far from it!)  But if they, meaning we, don’t believe in an alternative it isn’t happening.  The Culture is practiced in mocking the very notion that there could be an alternative to what is; but indoctrination aside, with all the striving and surviving going on, who has time to believe?

One more thing because I haven’t talked about #1 in the chart.  Consent through political exchange is exemplified by the strength of unions at the peak of abundance and of working class cohesion.  We as a class consent to be exploited under conditions that we demand (namely, some of the abundant pie)  In spite of this the shortcomings in this model of understanding were exposed in 1968, at perhaps the peak of the peak of union strength when general strikes and unrest broke out throughout the capitalist world, mystifying theorists.  But it was because while capitalists were publicly and in ink conceding to union demands, privately, they were exploiting the shit out of workers.  

One interesting thing Chibber points out is that whereas the working class needs solidarity to make headway, capitalists do not.  They can exploit to their heart’s content individually without the benefit or need of class solidarity.  Low class organization doesn’t seem to impair them. This highlights the tremendous imbalance between the classes.  What I always find fascinating though is why this class which consists of incredibly selfish assholes, who don’t need each other to get by just fine, did coordinate and cooperate and collaborate on the insanely intense oppression we have been undergoing for decades.  Was it just to be sociable?  Why do they never cooperate on behalf of or to the benefit of those they exploit?  Class ties?  Evil strategery?  Why do they succeed even more when they cooperate?   They have leechy personalities and you can never have enough of a good thing like people who require your consent to survive.

~~~~~

* Who I come across in my dabbly scholarly excursions but whom I have not read.  He's on my list.

Around the Zodiac

Aquarius - An unknown friend will secretly do a kind act for someone you don't know.  Remain uninvolved.

Gemini - Revenge is a dish best served cold, but your "refrigerator" is "on the blink."  Time to forget, but not yet to forgive. 

Libra - An episode of whimsy forces a change in travel plans.  A delicate situation is surprisingly defused by wearing mismatched socks.

Capricorn - All signs point to a bad hair month ahead.  Invest in a babushka.

Pisces - It is a propitious week for perspicacity, yet an auspicious time for epicaricacy.  That finely tuned personality of yours stands you in good stead with a former pet.

Taurus - A package arrives for you unexpectedly.  Take it directly to Goodwill without opening.

Leo - Reach out with an apology to that certain someone you have been accidentally implicating in a felony.  Your ambivalence about a business deal turns out to be actual dyspepsia.

Cancer - DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LEAVE THE HOUSE

Virgo - A wise man once said, It is a fool who straps a trout to his head in hopes of soaring with eagles.  Now is not the time to vacillate, but tomorrow could be .

Sagittarius. - Have you considered foot powder?

Aries  - An investment comes due just in the nick of time.  Forfeiture of an asset proves providential in the long run. Heed a wise friend's counsel on the diversity of your portfolio.  An old flame squashes your heart like a bug.

Scorpio - Bipedalism could work in your favor today. Your fingers seek to grasp an intangible but your thumb is opposed.

Community Lip Service

Last year, my firm-- an above average place to work-- added a new item to its menu of benefits.  This one comes in the form of time.  Specifically, it is an optional extra day of paid time off each year.  It comes with a catch: the time must be spent performing some act of community service.  In a recent recap of the kickoff year, some highlighted participant activities included serving lunch at a food bank, sorting diapers for a legal aid initiative, replanting saplings for a boy scout camp and participating in an event to commemorate the sacrifice of war veterans.  One more thing: of course, your supervisor needs to approve your time off.  Not an unreasonable condition of course.  Oh, and of course the committee that regulates the benefit must approve the organization for service activities.  It is noted in the announcement that 65 organizations have been pre-approved.  Should an activity already performed not be approved for this benefit, pay would come out of the employee's own leave.

Service to what community?  The dozen or so that the firm is situated in, naturally, but also in these unprecedented times of work-at-home, the much larger pool of them that comprise the home communities of the firm's employees.  Beyond that, in theory, any community for which service could be provided would almost certainly count.  It's inconceivable to me that an employee who happened to be in, say,  Iran on firm business who chose to take their community service day to help out at an orphanage in Tehran would not be approved.  One could imagine a scenario in which at some point in the future an employee who could be beamed to Mars for a day could get approved for a day terraforming that community.  I don't think it's the community that matters as long as it could in the eyes of the community service committee be viewed as benefiting however modestly from the service.

Could an employee get approved for blocking access to an abortion clinic?  Probably not at my firm.  Would participating in organized actions on behalf of antifa or MOVE be service that could be approved of?  How about painting signs to be carried in protest of the planet destroying activities of one of its many environmentally iffy clients?  These could all be rejected categorically as political activities as distinct from service to the community.  While I would argue that political activities are perhaps among the best service one could give to one's community, as a rule, the firm has made clear that a line exists beyond which the employee whose idea of community service is at odds with the "values of the firm" must surely tread on his own dime.  Consequently there's a built-in anodyne flavor to the type of service for which the firm would be willing to spring for 8 hours. 

Who benefits from this benefit? We presume employees who take advantage of it get the satisfaction of contributing to activities that benefit "the community."*  And for employees who regularly volunteer a portion of their off-hours to acceptable causes anyway, compensating 8 of those hours once a year is perhaps the least the firm could do.  What does the firm get?  The firm gets the better society it is modeling by offering such a benefit to its employees. Ok, now that we've all had a good laugh, of course it gets materially nothing from the pittance of service that it enables in ostentatious dribs and drabs by doling out the redirected labors of an employee for approved public service one day per year at a time-- and neither does society!  What it gets is really all that anyone could be expected to get from it which is the sort of easily conjured false liberal cred for itself that is so common these days among the meritocratic class of obscenely powerful and wealthy people at the helm of successful commercial concerns.  It gets to imagine (and in any case to claim) that it has mitigated to a miniscule degree some of the harm it causes in its normal day-to-day year-to-year pursuit of profit. And not unimportantly, it gets to do this, as it does nearly everything, by the sweat of its employees.  

My firm should not be singled out for hypocrisy. It's not like it's out on a limb paying human resources professionals handsomely to devise pretexts for marshaling its workforce in benign extracurricular activities that accrue to its own glory and wishful image of itself in a way that can plausibly be packaged as a benefit (without really doing anything that would threaten the existing social structure).  Indeed, every firm should be singled out for hypocrisy.  But as any subject of a modern first world neoliberal economy is already aware, hypocrisy is one of the many gears that drive the wheels of society.  It seems to be the sine qua non of participation in it.

~~~~~

* Is it too cynical to think that working 8 hours in a food bank once a year "helps the community" by providing cover for the way that the community is structured in favor of those who partner in firms and who own companies that pay those partners for services that contribute to outcomes that create so many hungry people in need of a meal to begin with?

Sinking Feeling

From Wikipedia: "Ancient Greek lead sling bullets with a winged thunderbolt molded on one side and the inscription "ΔΕΞΑΙ" ("take that" or "catch") on the other side."

___________

It all makes sense now: 

Climate Change Denialism.  The American Health Care System.  Trickle Down Economics.  The Student Loan Crisis.  Criminalization of Gender Affirming Care for Children by State Legislatures.  For Profit Prisons. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  Ayn Rand.  Sean Hannity.  The Clintons.  The Magic Bullet Theory. Glenn Youngkin.  Q.  Dancing with the Stars.  

Let me face it: My Own Sad Life.

It comes down to 2 letters: Pb.  Not peanut butter, Fool!  Plumbum!  For you non-Latin speakers, that's Lead! Civilization tumbling, intelligence sapping Lead.  

From the 1920s to 1996 in the US (slightly earlier or later elsewhere across the planet), lead was a common ingredient in gasoline in the form of Tetraethyllead, an anti-knock and performance enhancing additive whose utility, ready availability and cheapness was discovered, patented, produced and promoted originally by a joint venture of Standard Oil and General Motors but adopted universally by the automotive industry across the globe.  Despite health warnings raised from the very start, its use became standard in fuels around the world.  Regular leaded gasoline was cheaper than unleaded, and as its use in cars and aircraft (above and beyond its use in paint and in plumbing) proliferated, the concentration of lead in the air and soil increased.  Encountering it in the environment became in many parts of the country for an extended period of time inevitable.  

Every schoolchild of the time learned that the downfall of Rome could be attributed to the lead pipes that carried its water, but there's apparently a reason we were too stupid to draw a parallel between Rome and what was happening in our own atmosphere due to the automotive explosion of the last century.  Per a recent study published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) website:

During the peak era of leaded gasoline in the United States, which ran from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the average blood–lead level (BLL) for the general US population was routinely three to five times higher than the current reference value for clinical concern and case management referral (3.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood). Consequently, millions of adults alive today were exposed to high levels of lead as children. While these exposures were deemed harmless at the time, animal studies and epidemiological evidence accrued in the intervening years reveal that such exposures likely disrupted healthy development across multiple organ systems (particularly the brain, bone, and cardiovascular systems), resulting in subtle deficits to important outcomes, such as cognitive ability, fine motor skills, and emotional regulation, that may influence the trajectory of a person’s life (e.g., their educational attainment, health, wealth, and happiness). These deficits largely persist across time and, in some cases, worsen and are now hypothesized to put individuals at risk for difficult-to-treat chronic and age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease and dementia.

 The upshot:

A total of 824,097,690 million IQ points were lost because of childhood lead exposure among the US population by 2015. This number equates to an average of 2.6 IQ point deficit per person.  

According to the study, "More than 90% of those born between 1950 and 1980 experienced BLLs in excess of 5 µg/dL, the threshold considered “safe” for children. The legacy of early life lead exposure will stay in the United States for decades to come."  

I don't put much stock in IQ.  Then again I'm one of those idiots born during the era of peak lead emissions during which an average of as many as 5.9 IQ points per person were lost.  Because of its ubiquity in the air, in the soil, in the infrastructure upon which the nation was built, the banning of lead from gasoline alone was not enough to eradicate its predicted effects for  generations of Americans to come.  As demonstrated by the water crisis of Flint, Michigan* that started in 2014 and is not yet fully resolved, in which austerity impositions on a public works project resulted in lead from ancient piping leaching into the water supply of over 100,000 mostly poor residents causing demonstrable health and cognitive issues in children,  we have not learned anything.  But maybe now we know why we have not learned anything.

 ~~~~~

* The most famous of the many lead incidents since 2000 that have been and will continue to be repeated elsewhere.