by Hillary Hardcore and EW Wilder
1.Lo-Cajun
2.Astronomical Brindle Tarts
3.Spud Handle
4.Kredit-Müncher
5.Cranberry Battleship
6.Nip-Slip Weekend
7.Tabloid Brainphärt
8.The Dongle Kitties
9.Rogue’s Collar
10.Smugbanquer
11.damndirtyape
12.The Fluffycake Conspiracy
13.Mustard N?z
14.Paralegalz Nite Out
15.Simonize ur Sister
16.The Gland Bellies
17.Blood Muffin
18.Turnip Transit
19.Tinkül Balle
20.Tinker-Tron
21.Buck Sandwich
22.Butane Overcoat
23.Klesmer vs. Cthulu
24.The Tinsel-Fanciers
25.Glass Nickel
26.Bourgeois Pencil-Sharpener
27.Slaw Coaster
28.Dastardly Digital
29.Rick Ray Ban
30.Frosted Kumquat
31.Freez-R-Bürn
32.Necro-Klüster
33.The Drool-Mobsters
34.Kill Button
35.Kraken Charmer
36.B?n-Spindle
37.Jizz Mönkie
38.Thümbreth
39.Stürm Dancer
40.Lobster Bris
41.The Insect Crescendo
42.Hotpants Conspiracy
43.The Violation
44.Fistluvur
45.The Fur Dancers
46.Drooling Privileges
47.Scröt Candy
48.Strepto-Scrötus
49.Sizzle-Puppy
50.Loose Snooze
51.Spider Bucket
52.The Slender Whistle
53.Blat-tasm
54.Roar-Gasm
55.Gunny Snak
56.Scroatia
57.The Fur Burglars
by EW Wilder
You hear a lot about how America has a “jobs” problem, and sometimes hear about how it has a “competitiveness gap” with the rest of the world and occasionally about how it has an “education gap,” and far too often about how it spends more than it takes in.
None of this is terribly accurate. Here’s why:
The US economy is not exactly capitalist, and it hasn’t been for quite some time. It is an industrial economy of the supply-side type. It has used a system of capital investment combined with government incentive and government-subsidized access to resources to create and fuel the industrial base of that supply-side system.
Access to forests, coal, oil, copper, aluminum, and other natural resources has always been underwritten and incentivized by Washington because these resources were abundant in the United States and because easy and cheap access to them made the creation of products out of them cheap and therefore profitable. One ancillary effect was the creation of massive oversupply: factories made more stuff than there was a ready market for. For a long time, that was okay: the creation of millions of factory jobs was another ancillary effect of industrialized capital, and it allowed for excess wages, which the magic of marketing then turned into demand for the massive oversupply.
But excess wages required relatively well-paid factory workers, a situation created by widespread unionization and the early model of Henry Ford, who paid his workers enough to buy his cars, thus creating a market from his very workforce.
A few generations of this and you have consumerism, the merits and demerits of which we won’t go into here, but suffice it to say, the culture of excess wage and excess production made for material comfort for the masses and massive wealth for the capitalists. Among capitalists, though, it also created the expectation of continual growth: if we know our level of success through how well we dispense with oversupply, the only way to measure our success against our competitors is in how much more profit we make from that oversupply than our competitors do. Thus mere profit is not enough; success must be measured in the continual growth of profit quarter-to-quarter, fiscal-year-to-fiscal year.
Investors’ expectations of continual growth eventually ran up against the realities of the consumer market: while there are always new things to buy, once an established pattern of buying develops, and once a population becomes saturated with consumer products—the situation of a so-called “mature” market—growth slows down to something resembling the overall growth in population. And middle-class, consumer people have few children: their futures are supplied by their own retirement benefits and government-run social security.
This was the case in the US in the 1970s, and it was exacerbated by the realization that natural resources were in fact limited, a realization brought on when the US reached peak oil production in 1970 and then our supplies from the Arab world were interrupted.
Traditional, industrial-based supply-side economics are difficult under these circumstances. How were investors’ expectations to be met? This is when American businesses became more clever than wise. They realized that their major expense was labor (remember the well-paid factory workers from above?) and so the quickest, easiest way to show growth in profitability was to get rid of the biggest-cost item, namely the workforce. And outsourcing, downsizing, “rightsizing,” and “efficiencies” through automation were rewarded not only by CEOs but by investors as well: a good way to get your stock price to rise in the ’80s and ’90s was to lay a bunch of people off.
In the ’90s this was packaged as a brave new world of being “information” workers instead of brute, blue-collar laborers. We were going to educate our way to a new era with a kinder, gentler, smarter workforce. It didn’t turn out that way, of course: first of all, automation quickly took over many information jobs industry promised, and the rest were outsourced to the increasingly well-educated populations of India and China. But there’s another, more important reason this didn’t work: having just gotten rid of an expensive industrial workforce, American companies were not going to risk the cost of hiring them all back at even more costly white-collar wages. Besides, the oversupply of goods were now even cheaper than before, flooding in from China and India and Mexico; we needed even more people to sell goods than before. Thus retail exploded, and industrial workers found their way to the sales floors of Home Depot instead of the factory floors of Ford and GM.
Sadly, these retail jobs had traditionally paid considerably less than factory work, and they continued to do so. But, by training and necessity, we were still consumers; we were making less than we used to, but we still needed to buy to live and believe ourselves successful, especially to live out that American Dream we had grown up pursuing. In order to keep that dream going, the Fed and financial institutions drastically slashed interest rates; we went from being a nation of producer-consumers to being a nation of seller-borrowers. And the last place we found to squeeze credit from was our homes.
When banks and financial institutions found this last, great well of American equity, people’s homes, they went after it with a vengeance, upselling home equity loans, pushing mortgages on people who could never afford them, and packaging these in collateralized debt obligations—all in the pursuit of that one value they still retained: the need for continual growth.
Hopefully, I need not recount how that worked out. I assume that the readers of this blog will, unlike most Americans, recall the years since 2008.
And so we’re faced with a situation in which our supply-side system is stressed on the bottom end by lack of excess wages for workers and on the top end by dwindling resources, by two political parties that fail to understand this relationship, and by investors and corporations that have managed, through bailouts and complex financial instruments, to finally fire not merely the vast majority of the workforce, but the vast majority of actual business investments: as long as they have stock to play with, they can make money. As long as they can make more money betting on the market than the next guy, they can maintain the illusion of continual growth. As long as they can obtain and market somebody’s resources, even if they have to waste the nation’s blood and treasure to do it, they can tell themselves that this is how capitalism is supposed to work and this is how markets stay “free.”
First and foremost, we need to stop thinking in terms of overproduction. Our world is finite, and we need some mechanism, market-based or governmental or cultural or some combination of these, to bring demand in line with actual supply.
Second, we need to abandon the virtue of continual growth. Metastasis will kill the host.
Last, we need to rethink the relationship between wages, human value, and a dignified life. Excess wages and consumerism make us believe that we are more successful if we can buy more stuff. But, really, in the end, do we miss our loved ones who have passed on any more for having had more things, or do we miss them more for having been better people?
There are a few ways this can happen—and it will happen; the availability of resources will dictate that. These ways all fall into two broad categories: one is relatively easy and relatively planned. It involves cooperation between The People and the employers, between the citizen and her government. The other is hard and chaotic. It involves carrying on like we have until the crash that reduces us to a world of pre-industrialism, perhaps even of pre-history.
Which would you choose?
Poems and plays and novels and films must be culturally powerful, that is to say they must have the potential to change culture by changing people, or they would not exist.
Artists may create for very limited audiences—even just for ourselves—but do so for some reason having to do with real change in the real world. I am a First Amendment extremist not because I take the “what’s the harm?” attitude but because I believe the exact opposite: words and images and music can cause great good or great harm, and, under circumstances when great harm is called for, they must be asked to do just that.
Documents as problematic and small as the Declaration of Independence, novels as flawed as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or polemics as wrongheaded as Mein Kampf, can cause actual shooting wars. This is why our ability to survive the onslaught of ideas must be developed with the same attitude the Spartans took toward combat. Our problem with free speech in this country arises because of our intellectual unpreparedness: we have not trained to deal with the realities of ideas, and therefore we are slaves to weak and preposterous ones.
We are being ruled by idiots because we have shown by our lack of intellectual strength that we deserve to be.
Because words are dangerous and should be dangerous, their use in public requires great responsibility: both in the sense of being held accountable for their misuse and also in the sense of a duty to use them when we need to. We ought to take Sarah Palin to task for her inane non-sequiturs. We ought to hold Obama responsible for not speaking with the kind of force and conviction this moment in history calls for. We ought to ridicule John Boehner for the abject disingenuousness of his pronouncements. We ought to call a lie a lie and we should reveal it as such, loudly, publicly, mercilessly.
The press has failed in this across the board. It has confused bipartisanship with objectivity and fairness with frivolity. It can’t distinguish between tactics and strategy, rhetoric and reality. Its obsession with opinion polls is the simulacrum of democratic thought, and those in the press are too desperate of avoid real controversy to realize their role in fulfilling the prophecy of the pollsters.
The weakness of our professional political communicators is amplified by an educational system that rewards rote learning and punishes analysis and critique. It is enhanced by workplaces that quash creativity and incentivize compliance and acquiescence. It melds with a consumer marketplace that infantalizes people into ids and an entertainment regime that never passed the seventh grade. The result is culture artificially flavored, art popped to froth and fizz, ideas the equivalent of cognitive Twinkies.
We have to push ourselves back from the table and venture out beyond the pre-packaged, harvest the produce of our culture the old fashioned way. If we do, we’ll be made hearty by its nutritive value, but also shocked at its succulence.
–EW Wilder
By EW Wilder
Every 4th of July I get this feeling: patriotic stirrings combined with irritation and a little bit o’ malaise.
You see, for all there is to be proud of in this experiment in self-government, there’s also a lot to regret, many ways in which it’s a failure. More accurately, we’ve failed the nation, failed to live up to the promise that Jefferson so fervently thought we’d rise to, so insightfully worried we’d not be educated enough to pursue.
I feel this even more keenly schmoozing into a new election year, with the polls showing the popularity of candidates who are little more than what the Soviets would have called “useful idiots,” figures selected more for ideological loyalty than any kind of ability, wisdom, or smarts. I actually find it quite disturbing that I can completely eviscerate the arguments of even the politicians considered too dangerously intellectual to be elected. When middling minds like mine can out-think the smart ones, and the smart ones are rare, why are we surprised when things go so consistently wrong so much of the time?
As products of the Age of Reason, our much-worshiped “founding fathers” had in mind that The People, while themselves ill-educated and prone to folly, would, when given a chance to elect representatives, choose people who were smarter and wiser than they. This we have not done. Instead, we buy into the idea that “representative” means “somebody who represents how we actually think,” not “someone who will better represent our interests than we could.” We elect “just folks” with whom we’d like to have a beer, not those whose talents for leadership and forward-thinking are clearly beyond our own.
Perhaps it’s our narcissism, our myth of each being somehow individually capable of Taming the West, that leads us to this behavior. Perhaps it’s our own vast ignorance of what we do not know, what more there is to know.
For Jefferson, the latter might have been a more compelling argument. His tombstone reads: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.” Nothing about the presidency is written there, but the founding of a university is. Take what you will of the good faith of his argument that he refused to free his slaves for fear that they would not be educated enough to conduct themselves well in a state of liberty, but the fact is he made that argument, and it applies to the rest of us as well.
By embracing liberty but not embracing education as a lifelong passion, as a continual pursuit, we make ourselves ignorant of what good leadership looks like, and we make ourselves incapable of the liberty our constitution guarantees and that our declaration helped secure. Doing this is the height of irresponsibility.
If you’re active in a political party, encourage those who are intellectually beyond you to run. If you’re considering an existing candidate, ask yourself if you really trust someone whose followers feel compelled to change Wikipedia to comply with her historical gaffes. If you’re thinking about what qualities you’d like to see in a candidate, don’t think of someone with whom you’d like to have a beer; think of someone from whom you’d like to take a class.
Above all, educate yourself genuinely, deeply. Close the clamshell of your laptop and go the library (yes, the public library), and check out the primary sources: don’t just read the Constitution, read Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention. Read the Federalist Papers. Read actual histories from real scholars and see where and why they disagree.
But don’t stop there: the fiction and poetry this nation has produced, the European philosophical underpinnings of our founding political thought, the contemporary concerns of our scholars and writers—all these inform what we know about who we are.
On this July 4th, make the pledge that you’ll live up to the promise this nation represents, the real pledge of allegiance, not to a flag, but “to which it stands,” the content, now, and not the form.