On Mediocrity

Mediocrity inspires a certain exciting familiarity. We (who think ourselves humble) see it and in it recognize something of ourselves. Mistaking the thrill of recognition for brilliance, we glorify our own identities within the mundane. Thus the success of Avatar, American Idol, Sarah Palin, et al.

–Lael Ewy

Wal-Mart, Wall Street, Welfare, and the Senseless Entitlements of Wealth

The common wisdom, probably due to comments Ronald Reagan made in the 1980s about “welfare queens” (and incessantly repeated by Rush Limbaugh), is that the poor have a “sense of entitlement” to their welfare benefits and that the public dole has become a “lifestyle” for the poor. The theory goes further, stating that this results in a large number of people who have no incentive to work and have become lazy and complacent.

There may be an element of truth to this, but with 45 million Americans now qualifying for food assistance, it can’t be all true. This statistic is shored up by the fact that the fastest growing segment of the homeless and of food bank users is comprised of families in which at least one adult works—so clearly the problem isn’t that people receiving assistance don’t want to work.

Receiving welfare is still a matter of deep shame in America, and its rolls are swelled by the economic downturn and the shrinking American wage, not by laziness or a sense among those getting it that welfare is anything other than a last resort that they would gladly give up if given a chance to earn a decent living.

The “sense of entitlement” language is, if anything, a classic case of Freudian projection by the rich onto the poor. For recent evidence of this look no further than Wall Street shaking down Uncle Sam for $700 billion simply because the big Wall Street banks gambled away all their money on risky financial instruments. This sense of entitlement that involves private jets and Fifth Avenue apartments, not a sackful of groceries for this kids and a housing voucher for a run-down Section 8 apartment.

More subtle examples can be drawn from the common practice of major corporations demanding tax breaks for locating in a particular area. In economic development terms this is known as being competitive on a global scale. In mafia terms, this is known as a protection racket. But it derives from a sense by the corporations and the rich people who run them of pure entitlement; they demand special treatment that other, smaller businesses can’t get, and they demand a special status that actual people—versus the corporate “people” a recent Supreme Court decision assured us exist—can never achieve. The promise, of course, is that by locating in a given area, the company will “create jobs” which will then lead to eons of wealth and contentment in that locale. Until, of course, the company finds a better deal elsewhere.

Wal-Mart is well known for these tactics, but its behavior is even worse. Once the titanic retailer does locate in an area, tax incentives assured, it proceeds to undercut local retailers and drive them out of business, monopolizing local retail. It also pays its employees so little that they qualify for government subsidized food and health care benefits. Thus it “double dips” once at the front end, with tax incentives, and once at the back end by sucking on the public teat to keep its employees healthy and alive. Clearly, it feels entitled to this treatment and to these benefits, as it actually coaches its employees about how to get public assistance.

All that is well known. But then there’s this item from the July 9, 2010 edition of Public Radio International’s Marketplace Morning Report. The piece, titled “Rich More Likely to Walk Away from Homes,” has Nancy Marshall Genzer summarizing a New York Times article that shows about one in seven mortgages worth more than a million dollars is in default, as opposed to one in 12 for those worth less than a million. And apparently it isn’t because the rich can no longer afford these homes. Here are Marshall Genzer’s words: “Well, the Times reports that these homeowners just say, look, their houses are not a good investment, and they decided to walk away.” In other words, they’re screwing the banks, and by default the rest of us who use those banks, by going delinquent on mortgages that they don’t like because they aren’t returning the kind of value they want, not because the mortgage holders are out of work or seriously financially strained. Marshall Genzer goes on to explain how they can get away with this: “[T]he Times also says that the wealthy are less susceptible to tactics used by the government and banks to shame them into paying their mortgage.” What she isn’t saying here, possibly in order not to upset the show’s corporate underwriters, is the next obvious thing: that the wealthy have no shame.

Obviously, that isn’t true of all rich people, just as certainly some poor people abuse their welfare benefits. But the actions of the rich here don’t pass ethical muster. If we apply a little Kant, we can see that if what Wall Street, Wal-Mart, and these rich homeowners do were to become universal law, the economy would not merely be damaged as it has been but utterly destroyed. The ever-weakening responsible middle is keeping the boat afloat by working hard amidships with a bucket. Meanwhile the water flows in from our captains continually running aground.

But these examples above require some type of deeper explanation. Why do those at the very top feel like they can bash the hull in and then retire to their deck chairs? We might be able to move in the direction of understanding this if we look again at Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment from the 1960s. In it, he got a majority of subjects to shock another person to the brink of death. He did this simply through the power of the authority of a man in a lab coat standing next to the subjects and giving them orders. No one really got shocked, of course—all but those giving the faux shocks were actors—but the experiment revealed how people can act in unethical and immoral ways if they feel confident in the authority that assures the course of action. The poor and middle class are less likely to walk away from our debts because we view banks and government agencies as authority figures. But also, perhaps, because we view these entities as somehow infused with the power of the public good. Even the much-despised banks, after all, keep money building interest for regular users and loans flowing to locals building homes and small businesses. Or at least they did before the financial meltdown, which was led by the rich and the Wall Street investment firms.

The rich find their authority figures in other rich people and the corporations they run, not in the public, the government, or some penny-ante bank. Evidence supports their view in a sort of feedback loop: they get the entitlements they want from the government; the government is therefore a sucker; the government therefore deserves no respect. This is reinforced by free-market dogma which shores up the authority effect through think-tanks, Ayn Rand novels, and the business departments of colleges and universities. A Marxist would recognize this as reification, but it happens not as a top-down form of control, but peer-to-peer, excusing bad behavior that keeps the rich rich despite the economic damage they create.

An anthropologist would recognize this as a form of intensification, which is necessary for any culture (or in this case sub-culture) to maintain group cohesion. It is clear the rich are doing this better than the rest of us, and it is to the detriment of both the common culture and the common good.

–EW Wilder

An Open Letter to President Barack H. Obama

Dear Mr. President:

If you’re wondering why your party lost Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts, you should stop listening to what Katie Couric has to say about it, or Fox”News” or even NPR. They’re all going to repeat the same old Beltway bromides that your inner-circle of Clintonites (most of whom you should fire) are already telling you. They are going to tell you the same thing that Scott Brown is saying: the Democrats moved too fast on health care, have created too much debt, have gone too far to the left.

They’re all wrong. The problem is exactly the opposite. You and your party did not move nearly fast enough or boldly enough on health care. You let the bill get watered down and become useless. You compromised with the Republicans and the Blue Dogs. The Republicans, of course, are not now nor will they ever negotiate in good faith. Sure, Olympia Snowe might, but the rest of them are going to shoot at you no matter what you do. If you tack right, they will shoot at you. If you tack left, they will shoot at you. They are not interested in solving the nation’s problems because their base, rich people, are doing fine with the status quo, and their populist voters, the so-called Joe-the-Plumbers, have a long and sad history of voting against their own self-interests. The Republicans are about in gaining and keeping power. You should have moved forcefully ahead with real reform without them while you had the chance.

It’s too late now, of course, or almost too late. But this is an object lesson in American governance, and you’d do well to listen if you don’t want to become a lame duck after your first year.
In Washington DC, they think that if you’re not on the left and not on the right, you must be in the middle. This is idiocy. Some independent voters are actually far left: Greens and Naderites like me. Some are far right of various stripes: John Birchers and black-helicopter loonies. Some are well-meaning but utterly misguided libertarians. But the vast majority of independents, the so-called “swing voters,” simply have no strong political commitments whatsoever. How else can you explain the fact that many of these self-same voters voted for candidates as different as you and your immediate predecessor? This isn’t moderation; it’s mindlessness. In Massachusetts, they voted for Scott Brown even though he tapped into every fake-ass populist cliché in the book: the pickup truck, the open collar, the use of the words “shoved down our throats” and “real reform.” This isn’t change you can believe in; this is change you can’t articulate. The fact that swing voters couldn’t see through such flimsy political cladding means that they simply don’t know what they’re doing.

Granted, they think of themselves as moderates, but so does everybody. The fact that they hold few strong political convictions, however, translates into them supporting candidates who do, or who appear to. George W. Bush talked strong, and swing voters liked that: he made them feel definite, part of something stronger and bigger than themselves. He was a remarkably weak leader, of course, befitting his remarkably weak mind, but he had Dick Cheney around to do the heavy lifting for him. I hate to say this to you, Mr. President, as you are an intelligent and well-educated man and an eloquent one, but the swing voters voted for you not because of what you said on the campaign trail but because of how you said it.

If you’re thinking toward fall and the mid-term elections, and I suspect you are, then you ought to be thinking about how you can appear to be strong. And if you don’t want to get your nose dirty, as I suspect you don’t, send out Joe Biden to speak forcefully in public for you, and send out Rahm Emmanuel to break heads in private.
Above all, use language people can believe in and suggest legislation that will actually help. Don’t let conservatives in your own party get in your way; if they aren’t on board, they should be cut off come the next election cycle. That’s party discipline, and it’s another thing the Republicans do better than you Dems do.

Strong liberal leaders are ones who pushed through reforms that seemed drastic but were actually reasonable reactions to drastic times. Think FDR. They created programs that we all now love, like Medicare and Social Security. You may have noticed that times are drastic. You need to act accordingly if you want to solve real problems and leave an FDR-like legacy.

Oh, and if Scott Brown and John McCain want an open debate on the health care bill, give it to them. But use the old high-school debate technique of requiring them to come up with a better solution. When they can’t, be prepared with hard facts about how your bill is better and exactly who it’ll benefit. Most of you are lawyers, for crying out loud, and you can’t even win a debate with the simpletons on the other side? You can’t stop there, though. Congress may be about debate, but winning the public is about marketing. Hammer that message home again and again and again. I want to see and hear about a viable Democratic agenda as often as I saw and heard those damnable “five-dollar footlong” Subway commercials.

This is no time for compromise. The Republicans have had the ball in the right-wing endzone for so long that even a single yard toward actual reform of health care or banking or environmental policy seems like a victory. It’s too late to think incrementally: we need a touchdown, and, at this point, that will only come in the form of a hail-Mary pass.

Sincerely,
T.S. DeHaviland

Cinema and the Cerebrum

It’s not that you can’t reason with the masses; it’s that you can’t reason with the visual media we use to reach them. Visual media, and moving pictures in particular, do not lend themselves to complexity of thought, or, in particular, to thought at all. This is not to say that thought-provoking films and images don’t exist, but they exist in spite of their media, not because of them. Film finds itself better used by the polemicist than the intellectual: Jean-Luc Godard’s tendency toward filling his movies with lectures is a case in point; in opposition we see Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda, which can be understood almost completely without a single word coming into play. Even the seemingly subtle masters of the form are more likely to produce emotional punches than provoke rational discourse: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is frequently noted as asking profound questions, but it asks maybe three or four of those in its almost two-hour running time, and it asks far less of the viewer than the Phillip K. Dick novel upon which it is based. Even Stanley Kubrick failed, by his own admission, to successfully address the issues brought up in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

The intellectual content of movies, at least that which isn’t expressed through the standard narrative techniques familiar from theater, exist in and are created from the juxtaposition of images. Eisenstein recognized this early on: that meaning could be created beyond the juxtaposed images themselves through the act of juxtaposition. Montage does not discount the meaning in the images themselves, but the moving picture doesn’t often allow the kind of interaction with an image that a static picture invites. A still photograph, painting, or sculpture, creates a distinct relationship between the viewer and the work. There is a boundary of surface and space that eventually forces the viewer back into herself, the moment of contemplation. Cinema, with its incessant images in motion, tends to cloy the senses and therefore demands increasing levels of sensation in order to reach its numbed audience. The viewer becomes invaded as much as she invades; contemplation, the movement back into the self, becomes increasingly difficult.

The basic problem of making moving images mean, and not merely emote, can be seen in what television has done to the electoral process. Even if Barack Obama had wanted to discuss complex solutions to difficult issues, he would not have had the chance: there just isn’t time until the next question, the next image, the next segment. Radio, which is slightly more “literary” and certainly more verbal, has become the new medium of the mind, such as it is. And even it is extremely time-sensitive, unable to maintain the close audience/author relationship of text.

All this is well known—nothing I’ve written here hasn’t been observed before. But what is even more interesting is how current trends in visual media are to substitute something even more primeval than emotion into their communications instead of any intellectual content. Orwell approached this idea with the concept of “ducktalk”: ideological blather so devoid of substance that its delivery resembles the quacking of a duck. What we go for now is pure gut-(re)action, the physical movement within of tension, the simple stimulation of some basic vestige of the lizard-brain. We wish, after all, not to feel, as that might make us aware of our actual state. We wish to avoid the subversive possibility of compassion—both our corporate minders wish to avoid this and we ourselves do. All we really ask of our mass media is that they force us to react, that they check to make sure our reflexes are still functioning, like a doctor’s little rubber hammer.

So numb we are in our little felt-walled cubicles and our commutes, our savage layoffs and our abstract wars, that we seek entertainment that elicits only the most simple of reactions. The broad comedy, the slasher flick, the graphic war movie, all circumvent the most problematic human attributes, feeling and thought, and place us back into the cognitive state of the mayfly. Thus atrophied, the two distinguishing sensibilities of higher-order creatures are easily dismissed so that we can more efficaciously ignore the inhumanity and alienation of what we do: obeying idiots, “serving” the customer, eating empty calories out of Styrofoam clamshells.

These media have not really caused the end of a civilization predicated on a literate populace, but they have marked it. For certainly it is possible to create great and thoughtful works both cinematic and televisual. Our lives as led make the lowest and worst of these compelling. Some of the best television consists almost entirely of just two people talking, like what Bill Moyers has done on PBS over the years. But what percentage of the 200 some-odd cable channels provide this? And many of the best movies ever made move slowly enough for the viewer to ask questions—the films of Abbas Kiarostami come to mind—and ask either directly or through the trials of their characters important questions about life, love, morality, jazz. But how many of the movies most people see would have any plot at all if it weren’t blown from place to place by big, orange explosions? The latest Batman movie may be a good movie, but do most people see it for its finer points, or do they just want to gut the dead guy who plays the Joker?

All this may also be why some of the better films and TV shows these days are satires or allegories: we let them exist because they work on a gut level that rarely infects the intellectual level on which they also work. They can be “read” by those who are capable and willing, and the rest can just enjoy the dick and fart jokes.

It’s no surprise, either, that the World Wide Web became popular only when it became the Web, that is, when it became visual. The strings of text that populated BBSs and listservs had a limited appeal, and anyway, it was hard to do hardcore porn in ASCII. Hypertext led the way, of course, by giving people the ability to gut their way through webpages; the destination was always clicking through, not hassling with content. Thus the user has the illusion of control, of exercising judgment, of “interacting.” But what is created in the mind of the user by this is debatable, and real change occurs in the mind when intellectual work is done. Blogging offers some hope, and the numbers who fall away from it every day offer hope as well since those who have something to say and some compulsion to say it may have a chance to be read in the aftermath of the collapse. But it, too, rarely encourages a sustained reading, being more about pith than wit, quirk than commentary.

The best of the moving-image media stick with the viewer not in terms of the trauma of their imagery, but because of their ability to expand, improbably, what the viewer is able to imagine.