Seven Red

First Story: You’re getting off the bus with your friend K. at Main Street Flushing. Your friend goes to one of the local Catholic high schools, where he’s developed some beef with a group of kids, call them XYZ. They don’t know you, and they really have no problem with you, but they’re looking for K. off school grounds, and if they see him, he can pretty much count on an ass kicking. So you’re stepping off the bus, and talking, but you don’t notice eight or nine XYZ kids hanging out in the doorway of the old Alexander’s, right where you’re getting off. You see them too late, after you’ve already disembarked. And they see you. Your friend tells you to jet. It’s fairly crowded, so you could walk away easily, just blend in. So K. says “Walk, dude.” He knows it’s coming down on him, but why should you get it, too? You can walk or you can stand, but you can’t really walk. And then they’re on you.

*     *     *

It’s really a simple principle: You don’t leave your friend hanging out to dry. Now, the whole history of ethics, from Aristotle to Spinoza to Kant to Levinas to Irigaray to Peter Singer could be considered a set of variations on this theme, with the major disputes really involving definitional arguments about what constitutes “the friend,” and when and to what extent the friend can be said to have been left hanging out to dry. Certainly, the gang version of the friend and the stranger is the narrowest sort of definition: it mirrors the definitions of the State form almost exactly, but in miniature (everybody learns from the State form). As Nas once said, “Brothers on the block posted up like they own it/ That’s they corner, from New York to California…” So that’s a dead end definitionally speaking, but it teaches you something in practice that is as important as the definitional cues. It teaches you that the definitions stage a formal system that, at best, trains you in a particular mode of “decision.” Some people consider decision to be the essence of ethics, and this is the version that gets trafficked in all the ethical culture industry products of late, which I wrote about elsewhere. What I like about Kant – and this is what Adorno adores about Kant as well, though it infuriates him (see The Problem of Moral Philosophy lectures) – is the notion of the imperative. How do you square the imperative with the decision? This is a hanging out to dry question; the friend is, of course, universal for Kant – not your boys on the corner, but everyone in a formal sense. But it’s what you feel in practice, regardless of circumstance, the moment when you can either walk away or stand, but you can’t really walk away either, even though you can. That’s why Kant says, basically, consequences be damned.

I think people completely misunderstand Aristotle when they fetishize the Golden Mean, some half-assed compromise between walking away and standing, where the first is cowardly, and the second is foolhardy, while some laudable middle path makes up “courage” (what would that compromise be in our case?). It sounds like the description of somebody who’s never felt the force of the imperative, and it usually is. Another reading would say that this “middle path” is nothing but Aristotle registering the idea that you can walk away, but you can’t walk away – a problem of the excluded middle in a formal system that requires non-contradiction. How else to stage the imperative for Aristotle? Invent the middle. It doesn’t exist, of course: the middle participates in both the foolhardy and the cowardly; it involves both, in the technical sense. (Nobody is better at playing this out than Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam stories: everybody learns from the State form).

You can walk away or you can stand, but you can’t walk away. That’s an imperative. And as I see more in life, I see it as an imperative that some have the capacity to sense, and some do not. The problem with the whole discourse of “decision” is that it establishes equivalence, as if everybody feels the situation the same way, and it’s merely a matter of hashing out the “right” decision. I don’t think that’s it. I think you either have the capacity to sense that imperative or you don’t. Where something like ontology meets the everyday, maybe average everydayness even, that point of contact, you either feel that imperative, or you don’t. It has very little to do with decision, and this is what Kant is all torn up about in the second critique. Capacity. We don’t even know what a body can do.

Second Story: That you can feel it doesn’t mean that you can always live up to it. We were cruising around one day, Joe, Sulli, and me. We passed by a big group, maybe 50 kids, up on Francis Lewis. They were guys from The Next Neighborhood Over (TNNO), not particularly friendly, but not enemies. Well, not really. I had a little bit of beef going on with one of them – we’ll call him J. – over some blackbook stuff, nothing major, but you never know how these things develop. But Sulli was dating C., whose sister M. was dating Frank, one of the TNNO guys. And there was Frank and M. out near the curb, so Sulli said “Pull over. I wanna talk to Frank about something.” It’s never a good idea to be three guys walking into a group of 50, especially when there’s some minor blackbook beef going on and it’s 11pm and everybody’s been drinking. “I dunno,” I said. Sulli says “Don’t worry about it,” so I don’t. But, of course, after being there 5 minutes, J.’s friends call me over and they’re all like “You gotta problem with my boy?” blah blah, the usual. So we’re about to get beat down, I figure. But Sulli and Frank step in and try to squash stuff and put me back in the car, and I’m keeping my mouth shut for once because there’s 50 of them, and three of us.

A week later, two of the TNNO guys come by the park where we’re hanging out, and they’re basically talking shit because they thought they got the better of us that night on Francis Lewis, so Sulli tells them in no uncertain terms to beat sand if they want to walk away at all, and suddenly Sulli’s up off the bench he’d been sitting on, and the air gets all silent, and other guys are up off benches and walking towards these two, walking without swinging their arms, which is always the sign, the tense-up, the coil. They get the message, and head back toward their car, but they didn’t take it too kindly. You just knew they were coming back with numbers. But our own numbers dwindled through the night, until there were maybe 12 of us left. I walk away, probably to take a piss or something, and that’s when you see them. About 40 TNNO guys coming up the block on the double, roll up time. What do I do? I’m at a distance from the group. I fucking split. I ditched. Took off. You can walk or you can stand, but you can’t really walk. When I come back, I see Sulli ended up taking a beating, as did four or five other guys. My friends. Who I ditched. Who I stood with every other time, consequences be damned, but not that night. It turns out, J. was walking around with a crowbar asking everybody “Where’s topspun?” So I would have caught a bad one if I stayed. Utilitarian calculus tells me I made a good “decision,” since I didn’t get my head bashed in. But that shit has haunted me since then. You don’t leave your friends hanging out to fucking dry. It’s a simple principle, and hard to live. But it shouldn’t be hard to feel.

*     *     *

So, how does this cash out now? Now that I can walk into my office filled with books, and I’m supposedd to have forgotten about the guys walking around with crowbars, or the brawls on Main Street, Flushing. I see a dim shadow of this principle circulating as the professional creed of “collegiality,” which is apparently all the rage these days. I should be clear that I’m not speaking here about anyone at current Employer Institution. I’m speaking in general terms about this famous “collegiality.” A more piss-poor version of an ethics would be hard to develop. And indeed, in my experience I’ve found that the high priests of collegiality in any institution are usually the ones who will leave you hanging out to dry at the first opportunity. Conversely, the people I’ve met who seem to be most intellectually “aggressive” suddenly appear there standing with you when they could just as easily have left you hanging out to dry. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. So this “collegiality” strikes me as essentially cynicism with a happy face, the discourse of the one who not only walks away, but feels no imperative to stand – a justification for that set of capacities that cannot feel the imperative. It is, of course, pretention to say that everything you needed to know about X you learned at Y. And the examples here are hyper-masculinized, to be sure. But this collegiality business doesn’t sit right with me. There’s something utterly reactive about it.

The spiralling financial crisis hit another benchmark today, as evidenced by the panic of the Lehman Brothers collapse. There’s a very good story in the New York Times detailing the “fear” on Wall Street today – a Sunday. This morning, she showed me a wedding announcement in the Times; the groom’s father was a managing director at Lehman. We hypothesized that perhaps the impending bankruptcy of the fourth largest investment bank may put a damper on the joyous event. Quelle dommage.

Fear and greed are the stuff that Wall Street is made of. But inside the great banking houses, those high temples of capitalism, fear came to the fore this weekend.

As Lehman Brothers, one of oldest names on Wall Street, appeared to unravel on Sunday, anxiety over the bank’s fate — and over what might happen next — gripped the nation’s financial industry. By late afternoon, Merrill Lynch, under mounting pressure, entered into talks to sell itself to Bank of America.

Dinner parties were canceled. Weekend getaways were postponed. All of Wall Street, it seemed, was on high alert.

In skyscrapers across Manhattan, banking executives were holed up inside their headquarters, within cocoons of soft rugs and wood-paneled walls, desperately trying to assess their company’s exposure to the stricken Lehman. It was, by all accounts, a day unlike anything Wall Street had ever seen.

Sounds like a lot of fun. I remember working on election day, 2000. We were closing a deal for Allegheny Power, some selling off of generation assets and releasing of transmission assets under a bond, I don’t really remember the details. It all seemed vaguely pomo to me, that you would get rid of the energy production business and get into the energy movement business. In any case, we were in the conference room and on the phone with the in-house lawyer for Allegheny, and the lawyer I was working with asked “So, who do you like for the election?” The Allegheny guy said “Well, I guess Bush would be good for us in the medium short-term as far as dereg, but…” And then he stopped. The lawyer on our side (a good friend of mine still) just laughed. Yeah, he said. I know. We shook our heads, and could practically hear the Allegheny guy shaking his. And so here you have it. Bear Stearns, vanished. Lehman poised for bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch peddling itself to any taker whatsoever, desperate to fend off the short sellers. What a monumental mess.

But I think back to election day 2000, the World Trade Center still standing less than a quarter mile behind me, doomed the moment later that night when NBC took Florida out of the Gore column, and our view of New York harbor from the conference room, and the lawyer for Allegheny Energy who knew, but couldn’t say, that a Bush-Cheney administration was a deeply, deeply stupid idea. I often say that the American people – whatever that is – got it right that day. Yes, we often forget, but they did get it right, by 500,000 votes. Bush received fewer votes than Gore by a long shot; there’s something striking and fundamentally appropriate about that, something that usually goes unsaid. It kind of hangs in the air with each disaster that has afflicted us since then. People rejected the cruelty and instability of the Bush-Cheney program that day. It’s often forgotten, and bears repeating. But now I also think of all the neo-cons, free marketers, and Friedmanites at Bear and at Lehman who no doubt thought the same: good for us in the medium short-term. Well, the medium short-term is over, and I hope they relished it.

It’s true that schadenfreude is an unattractive posture, especially when the financial services industry is a route to the middle class for many of the people I grew up with, for so many in the Outer Boroughs and the poor neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles. Yes. And as we well know here at Seven Red. It ain’t all fat cats and neo-cons. Like all groups, it is made up mostly of the decent. So schadenfreude is usually unattractive, sure. But only usually. Sometimes, it’s all that’s left.

On edit: The “guy” who was getting married this weekend was not just any guy, but Theodore Roosevelt V (that is, the fifth). His dad, Theodore Roosevelt IV, is the managing director at Lehman.

When Seven Red lived in San Francisco, I worked as a fraud investigator for P——- Bank, a credit card company.  It wasn’t as CSI as it sounds. I basically went to work everyday, where I found a list of about 300 flagged accounts. The accounts had been flagged for a variety of reasons, but it was mostly third party checks and strange large payments on maxed out new accounts. My job was primarily to prevent check kiting, so I would go through the list, calling banks and sometimes the customer or check writer to make sure that the checks were authorized and drew on sufficient funds. About 80% of the checks were fine, somebody’s mother-in-law paying off a large balance, and that sort of thing. It was the other 20% – the fraud cases – that made the job fun.

Of the 20% fraud cases, most were professional check kiters. They committed credit card fraud for a living. These people were ghosts. They would apply for an account under a fake name, run up the balance to the maximum, pay that off with a bad check (usually a stolen “convenience” check either grabbed out of a mailbag or bought on the black market), run up the balance again, and rinse and repeat until the account was shut down. They used post office boxes or Mailboxes Etc, and tried to mask those as apartment buildings. They had cloned cell phones that could not be connected to them personally. They essentially didn’t exist except as accounts. My job wasn’t to “catch” anybody. Rather, I was just there to stop the bleeding on these fraud accounts.I actually enjoyed dealing with the professional kiters, because there was never any bullshit. Sure, they’d try to talk you into accepting the bad check so they could kite the account one more time, but usually they just accepted that that account was dead. Since most of these people had multiple fraud accounts circulating in various banks, they weren’t too concerned when one dried up. It was a volume operation. I even had one guy tell me straight out, “OK, I guess you closed this one. I’ll hit you guys up for another couple thousand next month.” I replied, “Alright, man. Talk to you then.” I admired these guys. They were professionals, and, in a way, so was I. It was a game, and I enjoyed playing it. Needless to say, I didn’t give a good goddamn about P——- Bank or its fraud losses, but the puzzle solving and “competitiveness” aspect of the job meant that I ended up doing well, and stopping a lot of fraud accounts.

One of my favorite stories. When I was a teenager, I had various reasons for wanting to be out all night, as my readers are well aware. I was not, however, allowed to stay out all night. That was a problem. So, we all used to game our parents by telling them that we would be staying at so-and-so’s house that night. Like most parents, my folks insisted that I leave a phone number if I was staying at so-and-so’s house for the night. That’s where the fun starts. In the 718 area code (for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx), there exists some glitch in the phone system. If you dial any real exchange (the first three numbers), and follow that up with the numbers 9970, you get a busy signal. It still works. I just tried. So, for example, 718-539-9970 uses a real exchange (539), and it gets a busy signal. Ditto 359, another real exchange. Go ahead and try it. It will be busy every time. You can, of course, see where this is going. We all used to provide our parents with a phone number of this sort. If they tried to call to verify or location, oops, busy. This was a very useful information tool when you wanted to be out in the city at all hours of the night and up to no fucking good.

So, here I am in San Francisco checking out yet another fraud account, and I look at the address (I always looked at the address first, since Miami, Brooklyn, and Detroit addresses were high prevalence for fraud at the time, and I knew all the Mailboxes Etc locations in those areas). Hey, wattaya know! This guy is listed as living just two blocks from where I grew up in Queens. Huh, here I am all the way across the country, etc. Then I see the phone number listed for the account: 718-461-9970. 9970, I think. No fucking way. That’s a fraud account. Imagine the bad luck of this fraudster to run into me as a fraud checker in San Francisco! I even got to talk to this stooge on his cell phone (cloned), and advised him that I was wise to the trick. He was impressed, but the guy was a pro: talk to you again next month. Maybe, but not with this trick, pal. His account got blocked, and I advised my manager about the old 9970 trick. When they ran a check, they found 32 live accounts using the same dirty home phone. I didn’t get a bonus, but, as you can see, it was kinda a fun job that way.

So now to the small minority of the amateur fraudsters, maybe 5-7% of total. These people I despised. They were uniformly stupid, and always left some trail that led directly back to them, personally. Their stories were often tawdry, kids stealing from their parents or grandparents. People ripping off their employers. One woman worked in the mailroom of a hospital, and tried to kite her account with a check she took right out of the mail in her own station. She  literally crossed out the hospital’s name on the PAY TO line, wrote in P——– Bank, and sent it to us. Third party check, instantly flagged and just as instantly confirmed as fraud when I contacted the account holder and the original payee. This woman used her own real name on her account, so the hospital identified her immediately. It was pathetic, and she went to jail, and I don’t like sending people to jail. I truly hated these fuckers, because they were really bad and really transparent. When you got them on the phone – and you always did – they would spew the worst lies and continue with them even in the face of contrary evidence, which I always took as a personal insult to my intelligence. They’d delay you and dodge you, meaning that their obvious fraud accounts would stay on my daily list of 300 flagged accounts until I could make a solid determination, increasing my work for the day. They made me so mad that I would make it my mission each day to be as rude to them as possible – a posture that was certainly encouraged by management. If you’re going to be a criminal, at least be good at what you do.

Why this long post on my old fraud days? That’s the read I get off this Sarah Palin knucklehead. She’s like a bad fraudster, distasteful and the worst sort of liar. She’s caught out there again and again with her ridiculous lies, and yet keeps on with them, insisting against all reason that the lie holds. It actually makes you respect the form of fraud committed by Bush and Cheney, who are at least good at their lies, like our professional fraudsters at P——- Bank. But this Palin? It’s strictly amateur hour with Palin. Atrios noted earlier this week that repeating the lies in the most obvious way is not a bug but a feature of the Palin candidacy. It’s meant to piss you off, and energizes the GOP base whenever liberals or lefties yelp in outrage over the boldness of her lies. That’s probably right. But still. Could such a cheap seat fraud succeed?

One case I’ll never forget. A secretary was robbing an old dentist in Alabama. She had established two credit card accounts, one at P—— Bank and one at MBNA, and she was just charging the shit out of them, paying each off with the other (MBNA was notorious for accepting all convenience check charges, regardless of obvious illegitimacy). Moreover, it turns out she was in cahoots with the dentist’s wife. That meant that we couldn’t reach the dentist himself either at home or at the office, since the secretary and the wife would block our access to him, knowing full well that he had no clue these accounts even existed in his name. Pure amateur hour fraud. She even had it set up so that the alternate number, supposedly to an accountant, led to another line on her desk. She would literally pretend to be the accountant on that line, though it was obviously her. I remember that she used to say “You betcha!” a lot. You betcha this. You betcha that. It made me furious. Funny story. I had another investigator across from me call the accountant’s line while I was on the phone with the secretary. She was sitting there putting us each on hold to talk to the other. So, she would talk to me as the secretary, then put me on hold, and talk to my colleague as the accountant. Back and forth, back and forth. Then we sprung the trap. I exchanged phones with my colleague in the middle of a hold. She thought she had confused the lines, so the “accountant” started talking to me as the secretary, and my colleague as the “accountant.” What a fucking joke she was. But the “dentist” kept paying the minimum on the MBNA account, and they kept paying us, and we had no confirmation, so we couldn’t close his account.

Finally, after two weeks of this (most cases were closed in two days or less), I managed to get the dentist on the line. He refused to believe that his sweet secretary would try to rob him. I faxed him evidence, I explained the whole fraud in detail, I went over it with him again and again. We got the fraud department at MBNA on the line and they confirmed it as well. He was ten grand in the hole to both banks behind this fraud. He refused to believe it. I faxed this guy checks in his name to an account he didn’t know existed, and he refused to believe it. My manager, equally enraged by this fraud, told him that he either pay the balance in full or press charges against the secretary. He opted to pay the balance. I went out and got drunk. We closed the account down that day.

Could such a cheap fraud succeed? Yes. You betcha.

In that last post, I freely copped to being totally wrong about US electoral politics most of the time. In other words, I can’t make heads or tails of how people vote in this country. It simply makes no sense to me, likely because of my snooty Eastern elitist upbringing and continued devotion to an urban elitist arugula-laden lifestyle. Case in point, of course, would be Governor Palin, who strikes me as a finger-wagging knucklehead at best. she and I were laughing this morning at her scoldiferous outtakes on NPR; I didn’t watch her speech, but the whole thing seems just preposterous. Needless to say, she greatly impressed everyone, including the pundit braintrust in the supposedly “liberal media” who fell all over themselves to mention how fantastical she was after the McCain campaign spent the better part of two days kicking them in  their collective balls. Maybe it’s my Eastern elitist roots cultivated in the snooty confines of outer borough New York City public schools, but where I come from, if somebody calls you a worthless asshole, the appropriate response is generally not made up of compliment and praise. Like I said, I don’t understand how the thing works.

So the unemployment numbers come out today, and it’s pretty brutal: 6.1% unemployment, and eight straight months of job losses, now over 600,000. In another stunning stat, 9.2% of all homeowners are either behind or in foreclosure on their mortgages. The overall numbers are just as bloody: 3.7 million manufacturing jobs up and vanished under the Republican presidency; real wages, as Obama likes to remind listeners, are down $2200 since Bush took office. All of this has much less direct effect on places where the effete urban elite live, of course. The effete urban elite are generally trained in precisely the sort of symbolic analytic work that prepares them well for a variety of positions in the global economy: lawyers, doctors, marketers, teachers, software project managers, derivative traders, and so on (to name the positions of just a few of my friends from college, some of whom are even rabid Bushites). Of these friends, nearly all live either in New York City itself, or in the immediate suburbs, or in major metropolitan areas in New York state . What’s more, none of these people would last two weeks in Wasilla, Alaska – and especially not the Bush fans. I am the only one of them with even an inkling of having lived in something less than a city/suburb for more than a weeklong summer vacation, and that was in Giant State University College Town, not exactly Wasilla, culturally speaking.

But no worries, Ohio! That Sarah Palin’s spunky, and she’s gonna show those city folk how to field dress a ten point buck! Hooo-aahh! I don’t usually go in for the Thomas Frank argument, that these “merely” cultural issues cause people to vote against their economic self-interest. First, I think people usually vote a certain way for good reasons: good reasons for them. Unlike my cohort in the Eastern elitist squad, I don’t buy that people are duped or even stupid. Everyone locks into some affective attachments; it just happens that the liberal affective attachments come with this scientistic mythology about “economic self-interest” being somehow different and superior to all the other  “interests” in life. This is a strange sort of prediliction indeed, since the same people will usually argue against mere social or economic efficiency criteria for, say, the arts. Aren’t the arts “wasteful” in the same way voting merely on abortion issues is “wasteful” for the poor family in Kansas? One would do well to read Bataille on restricted and general economy, and the various functions of wasteful expenditure. Instead, the solution has been to reduce everything to restricted economies, and to thereby import social and economic efficiency into the analysis. The arts are – so this story goes – really efficient after all, first, because they are crucial industries themselves (the culture industry), and second, because they produce positive externalities, etc.

All true, I guess, but ultimately lame. The struggling musician who could do much better writing stupid little commercial jingles “votes” against her economic self-interest everytime she refuses to “sell out,” just as surely as does the struggling mechanic obsessed with semi-automatic rifles. But you don’t see a lot of people writing books about how these people are “duped,” or, if you do (No Logo), it is only because their very “resistance” to efficiency has itself been cycled into production. To take it from a completely opposite direction, nearly everyone who votes at all really votes against economic self-interest if you posit the exploitation of labor as a given. As my three readers know, I do. This leads to the ironic condition whereby voting for your “self-interest” continually ratifies the exploitation of your labor. Of course, self-interest must be laid out on a continuum of possibility. It would always seem better to vote for the pro-union candidate than it is to vote for the anti-union candidate, the pro-choice candidate rather than the anti-choice candidate. But let’s not pretend that economic self-interest is a transparent category. So these arguments don’t really work for me, either way you slice it.

The question would not be “Is this congruent with self-interest?” Rather, we’d have to ask what affective attachments operate in either case. It also doesn’t seem as simple as prattling about “resentment,” as Krugman does in the NY Times today, unless you want to take a stronger Nietzschean version of ressentiment right to the heart of the Subject. Why the left isn’t better at asking these questions remains a mystery to me, since it is much better at managing collective affects in nearly every domain outside of electoral politics. They seem to think that if only people could see through the “cultural” screen to the real effects of economy, the scales would drop, and ta da! That the right has gotten so good at parsing out these attachments is similarly mysterious, since their devotion to the most stupid and reductionary neo-liberal economism generally dominates their analysis of all social life, full stop. But that might be how it works. Once you give up on the silly base-superstructure version of economism, you start to get a better sense of how these affects circulate. The right has completely given up on the distinction: everything is economics for them; it’s the night in which all self-interest is gray, so to speak. Hockey-mommery is as important as job creation: this is what you get when base-superstructure falls by the wayside. Obama, on the other hand, keeps up with this “They’re not talking about economy. They’re not talking about issues” stuff. Will it work with 6.1 % unemployment and a collapsing economic “base.” Maybe, maybe not. What irritates me about Palin, in any case, is not the premise, but the specific affects she promotes and hooks into. Again, I’m usually wrong.

So, after one year in Chicago, I am just a boss parallel parker. I mean, I’m fantastic. I squeeze into impossible spots at the perfect angle, and end up arrow-straight three inches from the curb. Let me reinforce this point: I’m friggin awesome at it. It took some work, since I didn’t do a whole lot of parallel parking in Massive State University College Town, where we had a giant parking lot at our apartment complex. And what really did it here was this past Hell-Winter, a trial by fire (some say by ice), which involved inhuman parking maneuvers through snow-plow walls and over hard-pack – a nightmare. Ah, but it honed my skills, Grasshopper. Sometimes adversity is the best teacher.

So, like, anyway, a few weeks ago, I asked she if I could consider myself a parallel parking guru. Y’know, since I’m so goddamn good at it? she informed me – rather unceremoniously, to my mind – that in order to be a guru, I would need actual followers and, since it didn’t appear likely that I would gain any actual followers for my fucking incredible parallel parking abilities, that I could not be a parallel parking guru, and would have to settle for being a delusional self-congratulator RE: my pizzarking skillz. I thought her assessment ungenerous.  Today I determined that it was also false.

I was coming back from The Target (as babygirl calls it) because yesterday I promised her that she could watch Diego on the computer if only she would cease whatever unbearable tantrum that she was then conducting. Yes, it was a bribe, and one that would require procurement of an actual Diego DVD at some point, but it made sense at the time, largely because it didn’t commit me to any immediate activity. Damned if she didn’t remember it in its exact phrasing this morning, so off I went to The Target, looking for Diego. When I arrive back at The Block, I notice a spot right in front of our place. It’s tight, people. Maybe two feet bigger than the car, maybe less. In other words, it’s perfect. The question is not whether I’ll get into it. That’s obvious. I’m awesome. The question is how many moves will it take? Can I shave some off? I survey the space, check the distance of the two bordering cars from the curb, and pull into place. I check my angle one more time, cut the wheel, reverse. Perfect. Cut the wheel, pull up. Perfect. One last reverse for fine-tuning, and I’m in.  The whole operation takes less than ten seconds. I brush the dust off my shoulders Obama-style, knowing that the small space directly in front of my door couldn’t defeat me, and I exit the car.

Standing there next to the door is Some Guy Hanging Around on the Street, a typical sight. What’s he doing? I don’t know, and I don’t care. But I notice that he’s looking down at the wheels of my car. He looks up at me, and back down at the wheels. He checks my distance from the car behind, and the car in front. Ten inches on either side, maybe. And he says:

“Hey man. That was great parking.”

No lie, G.I.

I nod knowingly, like I know it was great parking, son. You ain’t gah tell me. And I head inside.

But the conclusion here is simple. I appear to have a follower, so that would make me a parallel parking guru, after all. Score: topspun 1, she 0 (if scoring begins today; otherwise: topspun 3, she 2,791).

It’s a Class War, Stupid : Rolling Stone.

Once again, Taibbi cuts through the crap in this incredible Rolling Stone piece, and manages to do so with the usual incredulous humor. How anyone can listen to the so-called analysis coming from packs of pundits who have been nothing but wrong for twenty years is a mystery, but it’s not a mystery without consequence. Taibbi:

This is why you need to pay careful attention when you hear about John McCain claiming that he’s going to “look at entitlement program” waste as a means of solving the budget crisis, or when you tune into the debate about the “death tax.” We are in the midst of a political movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian analysis… well, shit, what can I say? That’s what’s happening. Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010 would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting “entitlement” programs for cuts while continually funneling an ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North Virginia McMansions — this is all part of a conversation we should be having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we’re not going to have that conversation, because we’re going to spend this fall mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about whether or not Michelle Obama’s voice is too annoying, about flag lapel pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.

Yes, it’s an absolute disgrace, but it pushes and pushes at a limit that must either be reinvented or crashed upon:

These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.

Indeed. The whole thing’s worth a read.

So I totally maced this three year-old today.

We have babygirl in a new daycare, since the old one only went up to age two. It’s a better arrangement for us, both cheaper and closer, but she and I seem to have more transition anxiety than babygirl about it. First off, it’s a Montessori daycare. I don’t really know what that means, and I’m not sure I really care to know, but it does seem weirdly obsessed with time structures. When I brought her in last week to get a look at the place, she immediately went for a group of toys placed on a shelf. One of the teachers sprang into action, pulling the toys out of babygirl’s hands and noting that it was currently “free play time,” while those toys were strictly for “work time.” These folks need to catch up on our new economy! Who separates play from work time anymore? During another portion of the day, she explained, they were to sit cross-legged in a circle and demonstrate the functioning of yet another group of toys. She’s two years friggin’ old. But what the hell do I know about early childhood development, really? Not much, truth be told, so I kinda shrug. At least they’re not crazy fundamentalists. I guess.

But back to my macing of the three year-old. Apparently, in the new school, we are not to leave sunblock with the daycare providers, but rather apply it before school. So, the spray-on sunblock that we left in her “cubby” was to be removed from there immediately, and I sorta got that part, because now the kids can get their hands on this stuff in a way they couldn’t at the 15-months to two-year school. Also, it is Montessori doctrine that sunblock can magically last 8 hours on a toddler’s skin if he or she can silently demonstrate the way it works to the other kids. So the teacher, treating me like a complete imbecile for not having fathomed out these intricacies (damned if I even knew she had sunblock), hands me the spray on sunblock, which I immediately attempt to shove in the pocket of my slacks. At precisely this moment, some other kid from the class runs up tugging on my pants for some reason, blabbering something or other. So, I’m pushing down – stupidly, I’ll admit – on the top of the sunblock, and he’s directly in front of me, and suddenly there’s a mist. I maced this kid like a Seattle riot cop. Full on blast to the face with the spray-on sunblock. He grabs his face, staggers back, but then removes his hands and appears to be fine, if a little surprised. Take that, fucker. But the Montessori teachers fly into panic mode, dragging the poor kid into the bathroom for the Defcon 4 eye treatment, which I guess inspired some confidence that they’d take chemical attacks on my own daughter reasonably seriously. Trust me, if they thought I was an imbecile before, my general dumbfuckness is now permanently cemented in their memories. Yeah, that’s the guy who maced little Johnny like he was a kerchiefed environmentalist! Welcome to the fuckin’ Terrordome, Johnny!

As you contemplate my day, some sleepy pics of babygirl. This is usually how we find her at about 10pm, covers thrown off and evidence of significant play prior to falling asleep. Why one shoe? Why?

So, we get her set up again, and hopefully don’t have to deal with her again until morning. Yes. Good sleeper. The insane forty minute tantrums probably help in that regard…

Booga Face’s larger project in his analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness has to do with single parenting, and the peculiar location of single parenting in cultural production. BF explains in a comment below:

Or, if one wanted to continue to rip on Habermas, this is the scene of the private sphere and autonomous, pastoral family time which is perhaps the most public moment in the movie. What seems important here in this social economy is the necessity of privation (or deprivation) in order to be a good networker — the logic of the college frat — which is why the single parent is the perfect image of the new “network-from-home” economic order.

And he further notes on his own page that he’s really trying to get at “the ways identity gets linked to performances of independency and stigmatizations of dependency.” The Pursuit of Happyness thus links these themes: labor as a public act; the family as a private act; performance of autonomy (from the social), together with a corresponding (constituent?) devaluation of social ties. The single parent is a particularly good site for these themes because there’s already an assumed loss of autonomy that would have been provided by the dual parent household (i.e., the caretaking that “frees up” action of the other parent). Barring this classical structure of autonomy (the oikos always holds up the action in the polis), the single parent must combine spheres of activity (political, social, economic, familial) more intensely. And, of course, reach out to social support networks in order to simulate the autonomy created in the dual-parent household. From the perspective of autonomy, these two aspects—intensity of multiple activities (creative autonomy) and dependence on social support networks (simulated or outsourced autonomy)—determine the scene of single parenting, so it would seem strange that cultural productions of the single parent tend to celebrate the first while devaluing the second.

It’s a good place to pick up on the discussion of our Italian Ideologists, and particularly their multiple readings of Hannah Arendt, who was, of course, keyed in precisely on the relationship between the household (reproduction), the social and economic (production), and politics (action). Without rehearsing the details or numerous qualifications, Arendt saw authentic politics (freedom and action) exemplified in the Greek polis, and particularly in its supposedly strict division from the scene of production and reproduction (the household, or oikos). The household/economy is the realm of necessity, the needs of the body, biological life. The agora is the realm of freedom from precisely biological necessity. If the household is structured around the preservation of life as it encounters privation, in other words, the agora is constituted through putting oneself at public risk to create a dynamic and differentiated common. The first is concerned with mortality, while the second is concerned with immortality. But “immortality,” for Arendt, cannot mean simply “fame,” in the way the kiddies say that they want to be famous so that their “name will live on long after they’re gone.” Rather, fame, as a supposed species of immortality, is quite rightly subtitled “I wanna live forever,” which is to say, it is actually a species of the concern for mortality. For Arendt, the immortaliy that becomes the object in the authentic polis is not the immortality of the person (through the name or otherwise), but rather of common structures and affects that can be abstracted from the individual, like, say, democracy or Law. It is in only through their departure from the biological needs of individuals that they become “common” in a political sense. And it is through the reintegration of biology and political action that an authentic common space disintegrates.

(Manifesto Note: Needless to say, Seven Red disagrees with all of this, which is why we don’t have one blog for “academic” writing, another for “politics,” and another for babygirl pictures: it’s all of a piece, playa. We dislike the blogosphere’s silly celebration of the amateur, and the professionals‘ equally silly defense of professionalism. We want “Mommy blogs” that also do vicious takedowns of the culture of childhood! We want foreign policy analysis next to descriptions of last night’s Dora the Explorer episode! We spit at internet marketing advice that insists your blog have a “theme” in order to get more hits and links! Fuck hits. We don’t want a public. We want tempos that twist privatization!)

With the emergence of a particular form of individualism through Christian dogma, this division begins to degrade: the preservation of life (and its attendant efficiencies) spread into the political. The Middle Ages see entire societies governed as if they were households: the pater familias model of the monarchical “state.” In the modern era, the function of the pater familias is distributed in vast administrative bureaucracies; as Foucault would say, the exercise of (bio)power gets lighter, more efficient. But the distance from authentic politics is still there, since the function of the administrative apparatus is increasingly the “care” of the population. While this process is most clearly drawn out in The Human Condition, it runs through all of her works, the stakes of which, of course, are the analysis of totalitarianism.

So, to take the most well-known example, Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is bound up in the distinction between “pure” politics as distinct from life and a political apparatus that administers life (biopolitics could just as easily administer death, flip over into what Esposito and Negri call thanatopolitics, is the point). That Eichmann struck Arendt as a sad little accountant rather than as a sovereign monster—the” banality of evil” thesis—isn’t a biographical point about Eichmann (one suspects that more hair and less horn-rimmed glasses would have pushed up Eichmann’s exceptional evil ratio); rather, it is simply evidence for the degradation of political action once the preservation of life—at one time the domain of oikos alone—infests and infects and invests the political sphere. Indeed, it would seem that exceptionality could not be evil, strictly speaking, in the same way Nietzsche says you cannot reproach the bird of prey for being a bird of prey. Evil is a quality of the bleating lambs; it emerges only when life infects action.

What Booga Face calls the “most public moment” in The Pursuit of Happyness, the networking at the football game, would not be public at all for Arendt, since it is economic activity, idion, idiocy. For Arendt, there is no “political economy,” or rather, it is a contradiction in terms. Similarly, there is no biopolitics; bios cannot qualify (authentic) politics, and vice versa. Our Italian friends find value, problems, and opportunities for strange reversals in this account, but we’ll have to pick that up next time, cuz this body’s shutting down for the night…

I don’t wanna think about those things anymore. – Broken Social Scene, “Superconnected”

So I was going to write a post about some of the reality TV I’ve seen lately, largely about the connection between the house flipping shows and the credit crisis. It was going to be your fairly run-of-the-mill pomo argument collapsing culture and economy. So, Flip this House, the various home redecoration shows, and others of that ilk are themselves operating as a kind of productive base rather than functioning as a cultural superstructure. They don’t – you know what’s coming – “represent” or point to anything outside themselves; rather, they are directly deployed as forces pushing the economic phenomena that led to the mortgage crisis, etc. It’s an easy argument to make, not terribly original, and (of course) true. House flipping reality shows produced the very sorts of speculative relationships operating economically in the US housing markets. Blah.

For some reason, I’m more taken with Supernanny. I’m about to put on my parent cap, but I’ll try not to engage in parental gnosticism, since I know that pisses off booga face, and I don’t want to do that. But this show is really something else. The premise is so absurd that it would constitute an affront to your dignity. A dysfunctional American family residing in a cookie cutter home in some godforsaken treeless suburb of Dallas, Tuscon, Knoxville, or Cincinnati is in desperate need of help. (Indeed, the houses and general appearance of these families are so similar from episode to episode that if you told me the “house” was a set, I’d probably just shrug). The children, usually a brood of kids under 8, are completely out of control, and the parents are weak-kneed imbeciles unable to crack the whip. What to do? Import some foreign labor, of course, in this case, a Cockney accented (Mary Poppins, you know?) “Super Nanny” who will get the situation under control. Yes, you want to cringe. But it’s strangely compelling, for a few reasons.

First, the nanny – called “Nanny Jo,” is goddamn right about 98% of the time. The stuff she comes up with actually works, and makes sense, and fits so lovingly and tenderly into our sense of order, discipline, and control that you want to embrace it with your whole body and soul. If you’ve ever lived through a two-year old’s forty-five minute full out tantrum, you want to run to her, for real. At a very fundamental level, then Supernanny is about carving a sense of order out of a familiar chaotic scene. That it comes with rigorous “time out” policies and an East End sensibility is only gravy.

Second, the show satisfies a deep longing for superiority. The parents are total fuck-ups, so – as a parent – you sit there and shake your head and say stuff like “That type of shit would never happen in my house,” and “What the fuck is wrong with these people?” My usual comment is “My father woulda kicked my ass if I tried to pull that shit.” Also true: he would have.

Supernanny, in this sense, is really like the parents’ answer to the childless twenty-somethings sitting in judgment in restaurants. We still get to judge, see, and we’re probably even worse than the yelpers, because we know what we’re judging. The show teaches you that it really is almost always the parents’ fault, just so long as it’s other parents. In this sense, it’s quite brilliant. Parents of small children still have the residual of their life before kids, and they still have something of that desire to judge, though conditions make it hard. So they judge other parents, and quite ruthlessly. But this makes them feel a little guilty. But if it’s on television, and a whole cultural apparatus and even the Nanny Jo herself has already adjudicated these people terrible and blameworthy, well, then it ain’t so bad. This is broadcast bad conscience in a pure form, and it is well and truly delicious.

Finally, the show is engrossing because at least one of the parents is almost always suffering from what I take to be a fairly serious case of clinical depression, though this is never explicitly mentioned. But it is hinted at, which makes the whole thing at once horrifying and amusing.

Next time, I’ll write about how Top Chef is causing the global rice shortage. Fun stuff.

Now that Part 1 has managed to alienate everyone in my field (as part of my unending quest to begin a second career), it’s time to turn to the Top 20 CCCC Presentation Mistakes, Part 2. Just so you know that I know, this list demonstrates that I am a remarkably ungenerous jackass who probably doesn’t belong in any teaching situation, since the cynicism disease has apparently eaten my nurturing gene. Or something. I get it. And yet, here we go:

11. The Concept Stew – This presentation is usually not bad, and can’t really be characterized as a “mistake.” It just is what it is; I’m just still trying to figure out what it is. The Concept Stew is really a content issue, and goes something like this:

We all know X set of concepts that we usually use to think about Y subject. Definition of concept X1, definition of concept X2, definition of concept X3. These are derived from acknowledged theorists in our field. However, they are actually inadequate for thinking about Y because blah blah blah. Luckily, these other people in a thoroughly unrelated field have developed Z set of concepts that might help us. Definition of concept Z1, definition of concept Z2, definition of concept Z3. Look what happens when we apply concept Z1-3 on Y case study A. We should consider using these Z concepts to think about Y in the future.

There’s something endearing about The Concept Stew, and I’ll admit that I’ve done a bit of stewing myself. It’s even lovely, and often smart, and it’s far better than almost anything else on this list. I guess my only complaint is that it seems pretty easy, and that Z set of concepts often fits so neatly that it seems suspicious, a level of suspicion that generally increases with the distance of rhetoric and writing instruction from the field that produces the Z concepts. I’m quite sure that the economic concept of the information cascade has rhetorical cognates, so to speak, so it’s not clear why we need one and not the other. That and nobody ever follows through on the use of Z concepts but perhaps the presenter, which makes it essentially advertising.

12. The Technophile – I see you there messing around with your brand new MacBook Pro. You’ve got the A/V hook-up working, and you’re testing out the video. You even brought those portable speakers so that we hear the audio clearly. Good. I’m the last person to complain about a little tech stuff at the presentation. But why, why I ask you, must the video be longer than your explanation of why I’m supposed to care about it? Why must it be a video that I could have easily seen by checking my Digg RSS feed last week? What does it tell us about writing, rhetoric, communication, language, or culture? Let me explain something to you, friend. At its very heart, our entire profession is predicated on the notion that the thing does NOT speak for itself. Like, ever. By the “thing,” I mean your video of the guy riding the BMX bike around a city I presume to be Miami while Biggie’s “Juicy” thumps in the background. Prefacing the video by saying “I want to show a video of vernacular literacies” doesn’t help me. You might be awed by the multimodality of it all, but I’m here wondering why Christmas missed us. I’m perfectly happy to see kickass demonstrations of what the MacBook can do. There’s an Apple store on Michigan Avenue. Hell, there’s one in Skokie.

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