Numerology
In a few minutes, I will have completed 66 years on this earth. Add another 6 . . .
turn it upside down . . .
and you have the Mark(down) of the Discount Retailer!
Neoteny, or What’s It All About?
Not long ago, my new little girl kitty was absorbed in the pure delight of play for play’s sake. Watching her I thought, “Maybe this is the ultimate aim of life. Maybe all the struggle and passion and toil is about recreating this state of pure play over and over again, since it can’t last.” Like tossing a ball up into the air again and again just for that moment when the sun gilds the ball at its apogee, its moment of freedom from gravity.
And then it falls, its momentum harvested for the next toss.
Kitty, barely legal at 9 or 10 months, is in the agonies of heat for the second time in three weeks. As young men are drafted into the army before they’re even mature, young females are drafted into the army of reproduction before they’ve had more than an eyeblink to enjoy life and discover their powers. Said powers, barely suspected, will be bent to the service of feeding the next generation as it enjoys its brief moment of consummate freedom to play. This is as true of traditional human societies as it is in nature.
It’s easy to understand why this has been necessary. Life is in a race against death and this was the only way not to lose. The second law of thermodynamics is on the side of death; life is an energetic defiance with a high cost. It can afford only the briefest of escapes from the drag of thermodynamic necessity.
This disproportion between the time spent keeping life going and the time spent enjoying it may be natural, but let’s not pretend it’s noble. It’s brutal. Rilke wrote about life’s mystery that too many of us “pass it on like a sealed letter.” Or, at best, we steam it open and steal a glimpse before guiltily gluing it shut again to get it back in the mail to the ever-receding future.
I propose that traditional societies are misguided in glorifying submission to necessity and trying to keep life confined within its strict forms. I propose that the greatest achievement of human beings (which indeed has come at a high cost of extraction of energy from the rest of the living planet) has been to push back death far enough to prolong that time of pure play. Curiosity, creativity, wonder, pleasure, delight—there can’t be too much time for that. There still isn’t enough. Growing up late, having fewer children later and handing them an opened letter, playing one way or another all our lives—call it narcissistic self-indulgence, call it “failure to launch” or “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” call it art, call it witness, call it high praise.
Tree & Me
This young Magnolia grandiflora, planted today on my friend Chris’s land outside Chapel Hill, will incorporate some atoms of Jacques and will eventually grow to be 40 to 50 feet tall.
The Natural State
Promoting this from the comments on the last post—it’s an idea I’ve wanted to inject into the political conversation for ages. It seems to me this is a vital notion and ought to be common knowledge. It helps a great deal in thinking clearly about economics and politics.
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realpc said,
March 2, 2012 at 6:38 am
Capitalism: The Loyal Opposition
Interesting interview with economist Richard Wolff in The Sun magazine. His prescriptions are predictable, but his diagnosis is startling. Even if you do not favor direct government employment of the unemployed, or taxing the rich and corporations at 1960 rates, as Wolff seems to — ain’t gonna happen, so forget about it — he makes some strong points that are hard to answer about the particular ways wealth has been transferred upward.
He talks about how for the first time, after about 1970, there was no labor shortage (because of automation, offshoring, and women in the workplace), so employers no longer had to raise wages to retain workers, while workers had to work longer and harder—and yes, go deep into debt—to maintain or increase their standard of living. Result: productivity and profits increased, but the ones who were doing the producing didn’t share in the proceeds.
it’s been the best thirty years that employers in this country have ever had. More product was being produced, but employers didn’t have to pay workers more.
[The interviewer points out that we in the U.S. equate capitalism with freedom]
Yes, employers are free, in this system, to stop raising workers’ wages. But their exercise of that freedom has deprived the mass of Americans of a rising standard of living to accompany their rising productivity. Employers have kept all the benefits of the productivity increase in the form of profits [which were attributed to the genius of executives]. So one sector of our free economy has deprived another sector of its due.
This too was interesting, on deficits:
Then the government turns around and borrows money. It borrows from foreign governments, but also from banks, insurance companies, large corporations, and rich individuals who purchase Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and securities. In effect corporations and the rich can not only keep more tax dollars; they can then turn around and loan the money they kept to the government and earn interest on it. The interest that must be paid to them comes either from taxes levied upon the mass of Americans or from the savings the government achieves by cutting its payrolls and programs.
I’d love it if you would read and discuss this. I’d love it even more if you did not assume I’m endorsing most of what Wolff says. I don’t favor his prescription, but I did find these two points of diagnosis startling. You know I am economically naïve, and these points may have been obvious to most of you. But go ahead, try to explain them away.
You will say that entrepreneurs are rewarded with profit for risking capital and providing products, services, and work opportunities for others. I’m with you so far. But squeezing ever more work out of fewer employees for the same or less real pay, stressing workers and families to the breaking point? Mind you, Wolff is also critical of the overconsumption and overindebtedness of the average American family — yet that, too, has been one of the engines driving profits until recently. Moral disapproval of that behavior from those who’ve encouraged it and profited from it . . . well, it smells a little.
Can we conceive of a system that would encourage and reward productivity, not just extort and exploit it? And how could that come about (could it?) without empowering the government as enforcer?
One Single Distilled Drop of Oscar Snark
Billy Crystal has started looking like Kim Jong Il.
Love in the Middle Ages
The god of love has one year to prove he’s still relevant. The lovers he’s been assigned as his final exam–two yearning, prickly, battle-scarred, independent middle-aged people, Evan and Eve–aren’t exactly making it easy.
Set in Vermont maple syrup country, NYC, and SF, A Godsend, my buddy Dalma Heyn’s “love story for grownups”—wry, hopeful, sexy—is available today in all e-book formats for only 99 cents — the price of a song. Literally*. What have you got to lose? And if you know somebody else who might like it, please pass it on.
A love story for all of us who are no longer kids; who are hopeful even in changing times, and who know that love can happen in an instant . . . at any age.
*Don’t you love it? When someone says, “You can have it for a song,” now we can put a number to that!
Why Was That Last Post Password-Protected?
It’s a one-time thing. I wanted to share a subscribers-only article with the Feldenkrais mailing list; it was too long to copy into an e-mail. So I did it this way. It’s an interesting enough interview in its own right, but it was highly pertinent to a discussion going on on that mailing list; I couldn’t have directed you to the link, and I couldn’t have posted the whole thing publicly without possibly getting into trouble. (YouTube silenced my video of J’s life, because there were clips from copyrighted songs on the soundtrack.) Anybody who wants the password, just ask.
The Silence of the Blog
Please do not think of the lack of posts here as an absence. Think of it as a presence, a powerful contribution to and comment on the national dialogue. What could be more eloquent, more refreshing, more incisive, more definitive, than silence? Responding to blather with more blather is a defeat. Responding with silence, allowing it to expose its own blatherdom in a suddenly hushed room, is an aikido-like victory.
Ambiance 
The best way to make things fair is to allow competition. The problems we have right now are partly because Wall Street and the US government work together, instead of being in competition. So there is nothing to prevent them from being corrupt.
mockturtle said,
March 2, 2012 at 10:46 am
The problems we have right now are partly because Wall Street and the US government work together, instead of being in competition.
Yep!
amba (Annie Gottlieb) said,
March 2, 2012 at 11:02 am
Double yep!
Although I don’t think the government, by definition, can compete. In practice, that would turn into controlling/regulating. That’s the only kind of adversarial relationship it seems government and private enterprise can have. And deregulation or regulation loopholes then become one kind of favor the government has to sell.
This idea seems really important to me: Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North on “the Natural State.” North says “limited-access” social orders, which we would see as cronyism (capitalist or otherwise) and the monopolizing of power by self-perpetuating elites, seem to be the natural way for large societies to organize themselves, and “open-access” social orders, which allow access by merit and are protected by competition, are a rare achievement. Once you grasp this idea, it becomes very clear how an open society is always tending to almost gravitationally revert back to the natural state. Once you see that inertial trend at work in our own society, you see what amazing tools the founding fathers gave us to fight it, but you also see how much vigilance and ingenuity must be employed in using those institutions to keep open access pried open as the heavy door keeps falling shut.