Seven Red

Sweet Little Apostrophe...

From the “That Pretty Much Sums It Up” Department. Please tell me I’m not being Mr. Composition here when I suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, the McCain campaign’s gear for student supporters (supposing such a group exists) should get through the three major words printed on the merchandise without a massive fucking grammatical error. Please? I shit you not.

My very ancient male co-worker came into my office this morning, handed me a Susan B Anthony dollar and said “Happy Anniversary.” How cute is that?

Seven Red will admit to being amused by the class politics of the McCain “Seven Houses” gaffe (who doesn’t despise the word “gaffe” at this point?). It’s really a classic of poor timing, given the spiraling foreclosure crisis that has real estate agents in some communities advising people that they shouldn’t even list their homes if they’re not willing to take the foreclosure value. The New York Times article yesterday on the housing crisis in Merced, California really points up the nonsense that was the Bush economic plan: it’s the Ownership Society in smithereens.  As we now know (and as some of us always knew), the Ownership Society was largely illusory, a nominal “ownership” based on unconscionable loans to “owners” who often declared merely their intent to own, and were thereby given the phantom status of owners despite failing every reasonable test of capacity. You can’t have stagnant wages, ballooning house prices, and sustainable, realizable growth. Any seven year old could tell you this. As the joke goes, somebody get us a goddamn seven year old.

The Ownership Society could be read as the latest attempt to paper over the real effects of class in neoliberal economies, with the ideological apparatus stretching from the bully pulpit of the incoherent Bush press conferences, through the Congress and regulatory agencies, the decision-making rooms of the banks, lenders, and mortgage brokers, and even to the culture industry itself, suddenly and fervently enamored with “remodeling,” “switching,” and “house flipping” entertainment. The cultural transition from This Old House to Flip this House marks the odd if predictable displacement of the “house” from the enclosed and institutional space of the family (itself, of course, imbued with all kinds of nostalgic craft-consciousness) to the open and connected space of the investment vehicle. Bob Villa was, after all, a worker. The man picked up a nail gun from time to time. Jeff Lewis of Flipping Out, on the other hand, is the quintessential entrepreneur, not only directing the lazy and shiftless physical laborers, who would have no vision without him, but lording it over them with a playful wink. Needless to say, we’re meant to shake our heads at his petty and “obsessive compulsive” tyrannies, while remaining hooked into the notion that nothing could happen without him. The relative position of the main characters tells us everything. This Old House was about the house (what we used to call, perhaps, its use-value); Flipping Out is about its value on the market.  The fundamental incoherence of the real estate boom is located in the quick movement between these poles, where most people live the house as a (concrete) use value, but a whole apparatus revved up, asking us to imagine it as pure (abstract) exchange value. It is, of course, like any other commodity, both at once. But where the question of its value was once an intermittent consideration that hovered at the edge of its status as a disciplinary space for family life, it has become continuous, such that rapid cycling between the house as lived space and the house as abstract investment value is constant and pervasive.

McCain’s hilarious Seven Houses routine must be understood in this context. It is not merely that McCain is rich, though he surely is. Nor is it that it puts the lie to the laughable charges of elitism lobbed at anyone who dares contest the manifest failure of Friedmanism to deliver the self-regulation it promises. When you go jetting from condo to compound in your $500 shoes, comparing the relative price of iceberg lettuce and arugula seems a trite sort of argument indeed. That the houses were purchased with the so-called “working class” Budweiser dollars rather than snooty Belgian lambics is only a delicious irony. The elitism charge, in any case, never functioned as merely economic; or rather, it always leveraged homophobia for the purpose of refocusing class resentment – a move not unrelated to the “masculinities” and complex character of Bob Villa and Jeff Lewis on the teevee, one would think. The GOP conceptual flip always involves putting Bob Villa in the position of Jeff Lewis, while retaining the Bob Villa qualities in him. What happens to the qualities of the Jeff Lewis character in such an arrangement is perfectly obvious: they are banished to the margins, good for ridicule and negative comparison.  While it’s easy enough to read the Seven Houses business (or is it Ten? check with my staff…) as pure disconnect with such identity politics, it seems to me more problematic in that it necessarily emphasizes the house as an investment value rather than lived space. And it is precisely this mystification, this swing towards one pole of the house-as-commodity,  that is collapsing in so many places around the country. The pathetic GOP defenses that “some” of the houses are, in fact, investment vehicles (yeah, no shit), or that the alchemical transformation of houses into investment vehicles defines the “American dream” as such only exacerbate the problem. Is there anything more ridiculous than portraying the “house” element of the American dream as a fungible commodity rather than an element defined by its material qualities?

An article in today’s Los Angeles Times points up the policy consequences of this transformation. Apparently, the FBI was able to discern at least the fraud possibilities of this swing towards pure exchange value as early as 2004. I’m a little suspicious of the tendency to criminalize what happened in the mortgage industry; it seems like more of the same “few bad apples” treatment we saw with respect to torture. The out of control lending was not an aberration attributable to criminal actors, but a fundamental element of the legitimized market. That said, the fate of the FBI focus on mortgage fraud is itself revealing, even if we discount the increasingly desperate attempt to paint the catastrophe as resulting from illicit activity rather than the normalization of incoherent practices.

But sources familiar with the FBI budget process, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the growing fraud problem, say that he and other FBI criminal investigators sought additional assistance to take on the mortgage scoundrels.

They ended up with fewer resources, rather than more.

In 2007, the number of agents pursuing mortgage fraud shrank to around 100. By comparison, the FBI had about 1,000 agents deployed on banking fraud during the S&L bust of the 1980s and ’90s, said Anthony Adamski, who oversaw financial crime investigations for the FBI at the time.

So, what happened to the available agents?

That has reflected, in part, the ramp-up in national security and terrorism investigations after the Sept. 11 attacks. But the administration has also put more support behind efforts against illegal immigration and child pornography.

In a way, the mortgage debacle could not have come onto the FBI radar screen at a worse time. Just as Swecker was making his doomsday forecast, the FBI, under pressure from Congress and the White House, was creating a crime-fighting brain drain, transferring hundreds of agents from its criminal investigations unit into its anti-terrorism program. About 2,500 agents doing criminal work — 20% or so of the entire force — were affected.

Even if we elevate the importance of fraud as an element of the mortgage crisis, it becomes clear that the policy priorities of the administration were and had to be focused elsewhere. Almost necessarily, as a matter of its fundamental belief system. Even if there was fraud, the market itself would out it and correct for it; the more dangerous threat for government to deal with always comes from outside the political/market body (that each of the stated priorities is biopolitical should be clear enough). That said,  I don’t really see us going back, even if lending and securities regulations are restored, or if more agents are hot on the trail of mortgage fraudsters. The proverbial cat that is out of the bag is precisely the conceptualization of the house as such, and no increased regulation can reclaim the way its material qualities function in the broader discursive space. We’re all actual or potential entrepreneurs now. If the Ownership Society is in smithereens, it is a temporary, if endlessly repeatable, detour. If it is illusory, that need not impede its operations. As a research project, it might be worthwhile to trace the discourse of “property values” in its various developments and permutations. No doubt this discourse has served all manner of social functions over its lifetime (not least as a stoppage to intergration), but I suspect you’d be able to identify qualitative changes in the way the concept works, especially as it relates to the institution of the family.   Booga Face has some interesting thoughts on this, and it seems like a fruitful and timely avenue of study.

feministing alerts us that a new, sexier Dora the Exlorer may be on the way. Because what little boys and girls really, really need is a sexed up image of, er, little girls. I mean, without them what would little boys do?

God knows what plans they have for the monkey…

Before

After

Wet and wild…

Fascinating article in the NY Times today on the increasing desire of the Iraqi Shiite government to eliminate the Awakening leadership. The most interesting quote:

“The state cannot accept the Awakening,” said Sheik Jalaladeen al-Sagheer, a leading Shiite member of Parliament. “Their days are numbered.”

I argued earlier that the continued existence of the Awakening Movement depends on two conditions: fundamental failure of reconciliation at the level of the Iraqi State, and the continued presence of US troops. The logic is fairly clear. If there was reconciliation at the level of the State, you wouldn’t need armed quasi-state Sunni groups. If you don’t have reconciliation at the level of the State, you need a combination of payoffs and military force to keep the quasi-state group (that is, the Awakening Movement) from asserting itself as an anti-state force, that is, as insurgents. As a means for reducing the violence in Iraq, US financial support for the Awakening Movement has been a marked success, but the success comes at the cost of institutionalizing the Shiite-Sunni conflict (and, of course, huge buckets of US taxpayer money).

What incentive does the Shiite government have for accepting and extending this arrangement? As long as an equilibrium exists between the groups, the incentive is clear: the arrangement reduces chaos while allowing the government to consolidate power. But that consolidation itself destroys the equilibrium; the more the State consolidates power, the less it needs the Awakening to reduce chaos. That’s what we’re seeing unfold now, I think. The Iraqi state apparatus feels increasing comfort with its ability (through the Iraqi Army) to maintain order itself. So the Awakening Movement becomes not only dispensable, but decidedly undesirable, since it always signalled the weakness of the State in the first place, and really constitutes a shadow governement anyway. An Iraqi general puts it more succinctly, if in the chilling biopolitical tropes that almost always precede rampant “ethnic cleansing:”

“These people are like cancer, and we must remove them,” said Brig. Gen. Nassir al-Hiti, commander of the Iraqi Army’s 5,000-strong Muthanna Brigade, which patrols west of Baghdad, said of the Awakening leaders on his list for arrest.

Since theAwakening also depends on continued US presence, it’s likely that initial moves to eliminate the Awakening Movement are connected to any deal for removing US troops by 2011.  It’s not surprising, of course, that the Sahwa was merely a temporary solution to the violence. It could not, structurally, constitute a permanent solution if the Iraqi State hoped to have any legitimacy, and it certainly had no viability without continued American involvement. But the continued failure of reconciliation makes one wonder what will happen to the 100,000 strong Sahwa armed body, much less to the Sunni population that sees the Sahwa movement as the only real state operating in their areas.

LA County to hold taggers’ parents liable for graffiti

Parents will soon be held liable if their children are caught tagging property in Los Angeles County, according to an anti-graffiti ordinance approved Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors.

The ordinance will go into effect Sept. 18 and will allow the county to recover costs of removing graffiti. The county can also recoup unpaid costs by placing a lien on the property belonging to a tagger’s parent.

Awesome…

And, my favorite part:

According to the ordinance, graffiti costs more than $520 to remove, and another $665 to apprehend each culprit.

I want to see the actuarial tables for those calculations!

In the last month, we’ve noticed a marked increase in babygirl’s capacity to dispute our assertions (and, quite frankly, commands). Up until recently, her disputations mostly took the form of a squealing hell-tantrum. Noticing diminishing returns on this strategy, she’s actually started deploying some rhetorical forms. Someday, someone’s going to get really clever and do the rhetorical analysis of the two-year old, probably to prove some Chomskyite point or other. Yes, I know Melanie Klein already did it, but I mean somebody else. So I’ll get ‘em started:

1. The “I’m just…” Strategy: Used when she wants to continue an act she’s just been forbidden from continuing, babygirl’s “I’m just” strategy involves repeating the very thing she was told not to do, but prefacing it with “I’m just…” Presumably, this strategy is designed to minimize the forbidden action, thereby making it more acceptable.

Example
topspun: babygirl, stop bending that cabinet back right now!
babygirl: No, I’m just bending the cabinet back.

2. The Emphatic Need Approach: It’s shocking that one of the standard responses of Western culture is already well embedded at two years six months. When told that action A is off the table, or that action B is the current plan, your interlocutor tells you that he or she really needs to do action A. This has really become babygirl’s go-to move: I need… It is usually stated emphatically at this stage (more experienced users know that the more casually the need is stated, the more it will seem like a real need to the interlocutor), and seems to be paired with both an urgency marker (“right now”) and a drawn out “OK” that turns the whole statement of need into a question.

Example
topspun: babygirl, get your shoes on. It’s time for school.
babygirl: No, but I NEEEED to go on the computer right now, o-kaaaay?

3. I Already Said That: Not so much a disputation as a direct challenge and slicing cut, babygirl uses the “I already said that” to essentially demonstrate her fundamental argumentative superiority. Later on in life, she will use the more common expression, “Fucked if I’d talk to anyone as dumb as you.”

Example
topspun: See the stop sign?
babygirl: No, dop dine.
topspun: Stop sign.
babygirl: Dop dine.
topspun: Stop sign.
babygirl: Dop dine.
topspun: Sssssstop ssssssign.
babygirl: Dop dine.
topspun: Stop sign. It’s an “S.” Ssssssstop sssssssign.
babygirl: I already said stop sign.

…and she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers. – Leonard Cohen, Suzanne

Once when I was taking the train from NYC to Albany, the conductor announced the next stop like this: “In five minutes we will arrive in beautiful Rensselaer, the Pearl of Upstate New York.” Those not in the know stretched their necks to check the windows, hoping for a view of this magical place. Everybody else burst out laughing, knowing full well that Rensselaer had seen better days, and that if this was the Pearl of Upstate New York, one would do well to steer clear of the less valuable jewels.

Yesterday we took a trip to Walmart to pick up some stuff. she and I are strict non-Walmarters, but it is true what they say: in a place like this (rural Upstate about 40 miles west of Albany), you aren’t exactly flush with options. So off we went to Evil Walmart, and truly, without many regrets. Being arugula-eating urban elites, the only time we ever step foot into a Walmart is when we come here. It’s like pre-enlightened anthropology. It is perhaps indicative of the economy up here that we were greeted at the doorway of Walmart by a uniformed corrections officer recruiting for the prison industry. I insisted to she that I had to take a picture of this, since it encapsulates the post-Fordist economy so perfectly for so many rural and formerly industrial areas: giant Walmart, with the only growth industry in the area being the warehousing of “dangerous” sorts from the urban areas, many hundreds of miles off. The population of this area tends to be, moreover, much lighter in complexion than those they house, and so the whole nasty bag of it just drains you of optimism.

I did have a very nice talk with the woman who was staffing the booth. She asked me, as an initial gambit, whether I was interested in a good job. I let her down gently: I work in the other institutional space designed for the less recalcitrant population. It’s a parallel setting, to be sure. We then discussed turnover and conditions, the corrections officer union, my friend who did a stretch in Greene and Wyoming (both NYS medium facilities), and other such matters. It was all very pleasant. She declined to be photographed, and was a little concerned that I would portray the DOC in a negative light, which I hope I’m not really doing. I told her I didn’t blame her for not wanting some mildly bemused citified jerk to take her picture, and we chatted some more, and I commented on the strange double-meaning of a “secure future.” But this was really the selling point of the whole thing. When she was actually recruiting, as I overheard, she always asked “Do you feel like to could provide more for your family? Are you looking for great medical and dental?”

Then we went back to the farm, where the vistas are somewhat more pleasant:

Needless to say, babygirl loves it here, and we’re glad that she gets to see this part of life as well as the frenetic motion of Chicago: