Sol Invictus: From Boom to Doom in the American Southwest


Could it be the that the best hedge against being hit too hard by any present recession is to live in an area that never recovered from previous ones?

I made it. I drove  nearly three thousand miles (Well, I didn’t do the driving, but I was a passenger for every one of those miles!) and am now ensconced in a poolside apartment complete with central air-conditioning and a patio. It’s a veritable paradise compared to what I was living in before (an absolute dump for which I have yet to receive my security deposit. The filching hand of East coast casual criminality strikes again). Nestled at conjugal nexus of two glittering freeways, this apartment made of Chinese plaster and drywall awakens vague memories of middle-class luxury, the first of such memories I’ve had in years.

Despite the boxes scattered everywhere (I didn’t manage to throw away nearly as much of my Scottish woolen skirts and Swiss balance balls as I intended), I feel at home in this shoddy stucco box in the desert in a way that only someone who has given up on the future can. At night the gently aggressive hum of engines of speeding cars lull me to sleep, the vapid giggles of boozy sorority girls home from last-call hookups wake me in the morning. The sun beats mercilessly through my vinyl blinds every day without fail. Towering clouds gather ominously on the horizon but never deliver themselves of cooling rain, being held at bay by a dome of heat that rises from miles upon miles of concrete. Some might call my living situation hellishly empty, but I’m unabashed enough to admit that I haven’t experienced such creature comforts in years. An in-unit washer and dryer can do much to soothe the modern soul. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t Box Me In: On Belonging to Belongings


Does the old saying, “The things we own end up owning us,” have a more solid ring of truth behind it than we unfortunate subjects of consumer culture are willing to admit?

Every five years or so, I move.  And it’s torture. I’m suddenly reminded of how, despite my best efforts, I’m a slave to all those ephemeral impulses that advertising loves to fill us with till we’re fit to burst. I’m surrounded by boxes upon boxes of things I don’t even think I need. It’s going to cost me hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to transport these things, and I ‘m not even sure anymore how half of them came into my possession. Scottish woolen skirts and kettle balls and European board games and Norwegian dictionaries and swim paddles and dutch ovens and bread machines and Laughing Buddha bookends — they all are scattered around my apartment or tossed in a box and I don’t know why.

I suppose at one point I liked the idea of all those things. I liked the idea of wearing Scottish woolen skirts, even though they make me look like a fuzzy hippopotamus. Certainly the swim gloves filled my head with visions of toned upper arms and sun-browned skin, even though I don’t have access to a pool in my dumpy New England town. I wanted to learn Norwegian at one point; hence the dictionary. But that never quite panned out (it could, however … someday). I always thought it would be fun and quirky to develop a passion for European board games; it seemed like the type of hobby a cosmopolitan misanthrope would take up on rainy days. Too bad those games are so dreadfully boring and time consuming. Read the rest of this entry »

“Recovery Summer”–time Blues: Wage Deflation and Peak Opportunity


As the Obama administration’s much-touted “Recovery Summer” reaches its zenith, one is led to ask, At what point does economic recovery become simply a more gently modulated decline?

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most — that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least. — Eugene V. Debs

A heat wave grips New England, making the days downright tropical. Thunderstorms, which come daily, bring no relief, only a kind of steamy weight and closeness. Air becomes almost too heavy to breathe. Everything is obscenely green, bringing to mind those films Werner Herzog made with Klaus Kinski in South America.

Under such estival oppression my mind drifts to — and lingers over — perverse themes. I find myself wishing for something Conradian: a glimpse into the heart of darkness; a confrontation with nature redacted to its essence, stripped of the borrowed finery of civil society.

Whither tarries, I wonder, the “Summer of Rage” predicted for this year, as it was for last? Some malcontents in France seem to have gotten their blood up in a reprise of the riots of 2005 (the 2005 uprising inspired this tract by The Invisible Committee, a collective of ultra-Left Jeremiahs intent on pricking the consciences of complacent bourgeois Ninevites), but nothing so piquant loomed for us stateside. Extreme heat dulls keener emotions and turns even the slightest action into a chore. But wilting under the sun is not just the person cursed to live in a home without air conditioning; opportunity shrivels also, the much touted “Recovery Summer” now appearing more as “Recumbency Summer” as budget crises bring rumors of rolling closures of firehouses in Philadelphia, as well as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s threat to bust state workers down several pay grades. Read the rest of this entry »

Not Fade Away: The Eternal Return of the Lame


At a time when calamities follow one upon the heels of the other, can commentary on them become simply an exhausting superfluity?

I can’t go on, I’ll go on. — Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

So I took a break (as did Rob and Anton). From all the news about finance moguls and oil well caps and dying shrimp and a dying economy. I took a break and tried to focus on things like the stars at night and interpersonal relationships and how, despite all the ugliness, the world is sometimes beautiful and how life is worth living even if you can’t get a job. I thought it would make me smarter and more engaging if I weren’t so doom and gloom all the time, writing about the resurgence of National Socialism and the end of history and all that fun stuff we don’t talk about over the World Cup and cheap beer.

But it didn’t quite work. I couldn’t take a break. Sure, I didn’t write. I neglected to send in my weekly submissions to Generation Bubble. Instead I went for walks in state forests and read German novels about ill-fated love affairs. But I couldn’t stop think about everything that was going on. I went to my futon each night with a head filled with the daily news and stomach full of bile. Cheap Spanish wine didn’t help, and neither did the latest pablum spat out by the usual suspects in the entertainment industry. I tried to shop at the local bonheur des dames, which is slouching toward “dead-mall” status, but even the now seemingly semi-weekly “doorbuster” sales  didn’t fend off the ennui eating at me. I thought if I just ignored the news long enough it would all come tumbling down and there would be something worth reading in The New York Times. But no, life drags on, only just a bit grayer because we are all slightly poorer…. Read the rest of this entry »

Triumph of Brazil: Fashion and Fascism Converge in Rio Grande do Sul


Could it be that the fashion industry, which once rallied under the united colors of Benetton, has fallen in love with the idea of a master race?

When I was eight years old my family traveled to Chile for Christmas. The country was then under Agosto Pinochet’s reign of Friedmanite-directed neoliberal terror. The night of our arrival, we had to evacuate from the Santiago Sheraton because of a bomb scare. The next morning a major subway station experienced a severe explosion. All in all, it was an exciting trip — to say the least.

Two weeks into our Chilean idyll, my family decided to rent a car and head to the northern part of country. We passed through leper colonies, and through towns where most of the residents had tuberculosis. On Christmas Eve, a policeman flagged our truck down to hand us a card on which was written, “Merry Christmas from the police. We are your friend.”

Perhaps one of my strangest memories of that trip across the northern half of Chile was staying in a picturesque inn on a lake run by tuberculosis-stricken refugees from Germany. My mother groaned audibly when they handed my brother and I a bowl of hand-picked cherries in welcome. They were quite happy we had chosen to spend a few days at their humble inn, because we were Austrian, you see, and they, being German, were delighted to be visited by their noble Aryan cousins (that and it was black-fly season, so no person in their right mind would dare rent a cottage during such a pestilence). These Germans weren’t just regular old refugees fleeing mad dictators or the random pogrom, but Nazi sympathizers laying low in Chile until, as they explained in cheerful Hochdeutsch, “the Reich is reestablished and they can return home.” Read the rest of this entry »

Children of the Devolution: Our Era of Neoliberal Narcissists and Tech-Savvy Troglodytes


Could it be that the real affliction gripping people these days is not disease or poverty, but media-induced sociopathy?

I can’t say I was terribly surprised to read the lede, “A three-decade analysis of prior research reveals that American college students are not quite as empathetic as they used to be,” in this May 28, 2010 U.S. News and World Report article. The news hit me with all of the impact of a wet firecracker, to quote the Silkworm song. As someone who spent a decade teaching in universities, I could only react with the bemusement, experienced all too frequently in these modern times, that comes whenever a study is released which simply confirms what you’ve known all along. (“MIT researchers have published the results of a five-year study that has conclusively determined that rain is wet!”)

Still, the fact that I considered this announcement a foregone conclusion didn’t keep me from reading the whole story. I pressed on to see if I could glean any choice nuggets of insight. Statistic-laden details tend to give a certain weight to subjective impressions. Maybe the French philosopher Michel Foucault is right; creatures of an empiricism-dominated episteme find great solace in having their individual judgments bolstered by data. Read the rest of this entry »

The Revolution Will Not Be Amortized: Deleveraging the New Age of Populist Rage


Have conditions ripened to the point where world revolution has become inevitable, or will the global financial elite save their bacon by throwing a few of their own to the angry hordes?

The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two men, whose faces, as their long hair Rapped back when the whirlings of the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung forward over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from the smear of blood. Shouldering one another to get next at the sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes; — eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun. — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The author of a 2004 book on the French Revolution, British historian Simon Schama is well positioned to offer some illuminating commentary on current political and economic conditions in his native United Kingdom, as well as in Europe and the United States, which he does in a piece that appeared in the May 21 edition of The Financial Times. Certainly no alarmist, Schama remains circumspect on the issue of revolution — its potential and likelihood given the present disordered state.

Decorum notwithstanding, one cannot help but think that Schama’s historical comparisons assure his readers of one thing, which is best summed up in a famous statement by Mao Zedong: “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.”

Excellent, of course, if you’re among the put-upon majority who must now offer up a collective pound of flesh to cover the bad bets of a tiny plutocratic elite (whom writer David Rothkopf dubbed the “superclass” in an indispensible 2008 book of the same title); not so much if you happen to be … well … one of the plutocratic elite. Read the rest of this entry »

On Stranger Tides: Booms, Doom and Gloom in the Gulf States


As the cup of wrath poured out in the Gulf of Mexico continues on its path of devastation, one is led to ask: Could it be that the apocalypse so long anticipated is a wholly natural consequence of humankind’s mere existence?

I’m back from my vacation by the Alabama shore, and I can happily report that nary a drop of oil drifted my way. Indeed, rather than tarry balls of bubblin’ crude, toxic clouds of dispersant, or gaggles of besmirched seabirds, naps on the beach, fishing trips and long walks along the shore filled my days. It was a comfortably bourgeois vacation, one where I could pretend all was right with the world if I but avoided the morning paper and nightly news. ¶ Yes it was nice. Very nice. But of course it was impossible to be completely happy. Beach houses standing empty, the only patent evidence of the larger problem bubbling up at sea, gave Gulf Shores a sense melancholy desolation. The beaches were devoid of people, the streets of traffic.

I felt as though I was a character in Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach, an apocalyptic tale that details the lives of everyday Australians as they await the arrival of nuclear fallout from a war waged on the other side the globe. They are the lingering remnant of a ravaged world, the residents of the only continent yet to be blasted by radiation poisoning. Their days are numbered, and they know it. Towns, seascapes, fields and forests take on an otherworldly character in the eyes of those awaiting destruction. Yet the duties of life continue to beckon, even in light of the realization that life itself won’t go on much longer. Read the rest of this entry »

F–k Your Yankee Blue Jeans: The Politics of Consumption East and West


Could it be that consumerism and communism are but two sides of the same ideological coin, one which puts paid to the idea of the existence of a private self?

My attitude toward consumerism was indelibly marked by my having grown up during the cold war, when the conflict between East and West was popularly depicted as a struggle between a deliriously joyous consumerism and a gray life of deprivation and standing in lines to secure soap and crusty bread. Throughout my years in junior high and high school, I can remember hearing repeatedly about how jealous youths in the U.S.S.R. were about Americans owning multiple pairs of blue jeans and how a pair of Levi’s was worth as much as a car over there. The shopping mall was in its ascendancy, commonly touted as an air-conditioned paradise, the architectural triumph of consumerism, offering an ideal civic space for contemporary times that could and should make dangerous urban city centers moribund. Suburban neighborhoods in the U.S. may have been boring and isolating, but it didn’t matter because the mall was where you would go to meet friends, fetishize a panoply of goods, stock daydreams with branded luxuries, cram down junk food and generally become who you really were. ¶ But there were no malls behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, we learned, there were state-run depots from which goods were issued to the demoralized population, who could ask no questions nor offer suggestions about what sort of things they actually wanted. Everyone was forced to have the same stuff, because no one was allowed to be different and it was a crime to think of yourself as an individual.

Hence the portrayal of Russians in cold-war-era films as monotone robots who humorlessly executed the Party’s marching orders. That’s why in 1985, Sting could think to sing the idiotic line, “I hope the Russians love their children too” and have it regarded as a profundity. Obviously if the Russians didn’t believe in God or have malls or let their kids become individuals, they may very well not love them and may be eager to see them all martyred to the nuclear holocaust in order to secure a future where there’s no class system, as well as no ambition, free enterprise, pluck or spirit. Read the rest of this entry »

Appetite for Obstruction: Fattening Resistance to the Mortgage Crisis


Can Americans mount resistance to the depredations of Wall Street bankers simply by doing what they do best — stuffing themselves silly?

Sometimes I’m sad the bubble burst. Fortunately, Americans’ bubble-butts endure. ¶ The age of lenders pushing jumbo mortgages gave rise to eateries pushing jumbo portions — The Cheesecake Factory, as well as Claim Jumper, which I remember fondly from my salad days in Arizona (and when I went I was about the only one eating salad in the place). A California chain famous for its obscene portions and Gold Rush theme, Claim Jumper opened its doors in 1977. Its website promises that “when you step inside a Claim Jumper you will discover an environment that is warm and comfortable.” Which is quite true; patrons are greeted by roaring fireplaces and over-sized booths of  soothing faux mahogany. The lighting is low, and the exposed woodwork makes you feel as though you happened upon some Teutonic hunting lodge nestled deep in a fairytale forest.

The machinic din of masticating mandibles dispels all illusions of comfort and relaxation, however. Dining at Claim Jumper is work. The portions demand the utmost intestinal fortitude — and elasticity. Sandwiches like “The Motherlode” require that you consume pounds of ham, roast turkey, tri-tip, bread, pickles and Thousand Island dressing. The “Honey Blonde Fish and Chips” looks like half the seasonal haul of Portugal. Read the rest of this entry »