Seven Red

While I sometimes find Cenk’s commentary a little much, I will admit to loving his comment on capitalist shill Erin Burnett’s summary of the Occupy Wall Street protests. I suppose I’ve already made the utter disdain I feel for the financial and business “news” operation very clear in this post, but Burnett really is one of the worst of the worst, and she’s now been given an even bigger stage than her usual and ludicrous CEO-fawning nonsense on CNBC. It’s an amusing takedown, including the closing line, “Do your job.” As most people looking at this might note, however, Burnett is doing her job, her job being to shill nonstop for corporate thieves as they rob the treasury and suck every dime they can from any program or person they come across.

One of the funnier moments is, to my mind, the comparison of the supposedly weirdo “hippies” of Occupy Wall Street with the truly bizarre get-ups of the Tea Party nuts. I mean, really. What is weirder: the dreads and bongos and nose-rings, or people donning tri-corner hats and Colonial bonnets and carrying around muzzle-loader muskets while hanging bags of tea from their clothing? That’s not fucking weird? At least the “hippies,” for the most part, actually dress like that in their regular lives, perhaps the zombie drummer and Uncle Samta Claus excluded.

Judiciary Committee Republicans, a note. I’m sure it must be very sad to sit in the minority on such an important committee, with nominees coming at you left and right, and nothing to do but grumble and delay. I get it. I think we all sit on non-functional committees at some point, or occupy roles on other committees that simply cannot move an agenda forward. And yes, we all get run over by the opposition from time to time. So I know where you’re coming from.

That said, a piece of advice. I have no doubt that legitimate differences on legal philosophy may exist between you and the late Thurgood Marshall. I have no doubt that legitimate debate could be had with his adherents and admirers about the role of the Federal judiciary, and the conduct of sitting judges, and the criteria for ruling on cases. Have at it, for reals. However, if your intent on any given day is to call Justice Marshall’s judicial conduct into question, it’d probably be a good idea not to place Jeff Sessions (or as Joan Walsh calls him, hilariously, “Jefferson Beauregard Sessions”) at the tip of the spear for that attack. When you’re roughing up the cat that argued Brown v. Board of Ed, you probably don’t want to put the good Senator from Alabama – who looks for all the world like he’s just stepped out of a lodge meeting featuring Bull Conner as the guest speaker – in the lead position. Two cents, people.

“Resistance is born of desertion.” – Antifascist Partisan, Venice 1943 (qtd. in Hardt and Negri, Empire)

If one could condense the whole Empire trilogy into a nice little slogan, it would probably be the epigraph here: resistance is born of desertion. There are, of course, many ways to interpret this slogan (openness being both the benefit and the cost of slogans in general), but it is linked to broader concepts of exit, exodus, and escape. To situate it within the broader history of Negri’s thought, it’s impossible to talk about the role of exit and exodus without talking about the labor and social struggles of the 1970′s: exit from the union structure of the CGIL, and from the party politics that seemed completely compromised. It was not about arguing for better working conditions, but the refusal of work as such, or at least as it functioned in its capitalist and state socialist forms. The very notion of the autonomous social movement is defined by these forms of exodus from conventional (political) structures. Hardt and Negri will then, of course, add additional forms of exit that play key roles in the series, most notably global migration. It is also in this context that something like political apathy – supposedly one of the  primary villains today – takes on a much different appearance, as would the efforts to prevent it. If the other side of exit is engagement, then the current fetish (especially in my field) for “engagement” starts to look very much like a political project to cut off exit routes. On this point, the general form of power and what we generally promote in our classrooms are much the same: you can do everything but exit. Maybe hold on to that for later. But you certainly see thinkers from something like an Autonomia school (it’s not one thing) trying to work through this idea of exit. When Virno discusses kairos and metis, it’s almost always in these narratives of escape, like in the classical image of metis, with the mouse that quickly locates a hole and dodges into it just as the predator is bearing down.

So I’m late to the game on Roger Lowenstein’s widely discussed column from last month “Walk Away from your Mortgage!,” but it strikes me as a new narrative of exit that cashes out the exodus line from the Empire series in interesting ways. Needless to say, Lowenstein is not thinking of 70′s social struggles or Empire or anything of the kind. His argument, in some ways, could be read as quite the opposite. It’s slogan might be “Capitalism for everybody!” The problem, Lowenstein suggests, is that millions of underwater homeowners are required to hold some emotional and moral investment in their debt, while banks and big capitalist institutions are expected to act in a purely rational manner:

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with. But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials.

Lowenstein suggests that people should consider their house purely as an investment, and act according to the same rational calculations that Morgan Stanley does. Clearly, there’s a lot to be skeptical about here, but there’s also a lot to commend in this view. Mid-twentieth century critique generally viewed capital as transforming everything into cold rationality, but Lowenstein is in some sense right that this view was always mistaken. It’s not that contemporary capitalism is too rational; rather, it’s never rational enough. Or, to put it another way, it was always rationality for the capitalists, and emotion-laden moralism for everyone else (indeed, this structural feature explains very tidily why social phenomena that would seem “residual” in Raymond Williams’ sense are not residual at all). It was actually second-wave feminist thought that grasped this problem, though the solution was – too often – to privilege the emotional dimension (and, unfortunately, the moralism). Its diagnosis was correct, but its treatment plan was often wrong. (Certainly, feminist thought was correct to say that the very distinctions between emotion and reason, affect and thought, were themselves the problem, so I’m using them here mainly as shorthand that keys into Lowenstein’s argumentative framework, not as ontological givens). In any case, with that treatment plan, you end up with even more painful conditions,  like Rogerian rhetoric, the joke we call “business ethics,” and similar sorts of projects, all of which are essentially unilateral disarmament, or exit in a bad way. (Negri always talks about exiting with a weapon.) Lowenstein’s solution is the reverse of this treatment plan: let’s see what happens if everyone actually does behave like a capitalist. The stunned blabber that greeted Lowenstein’s piece speaks, I think, to the real threat it presents, even if few are likely to act on his prescription.

Just before the meltdown (ahem…), I noted in this post that “the proverbial cat that is out of the bag is precisely the conceptualization of the house as such,” which is to say, that the mortgage crisis could only happen because the constant shifting we had all been expected to do between the house as concrete lived space (i.e., use value) and the house as abstract investment vehicle (i.e., exchange value) had broken down, or stuck on investment. But I also noted that this wasn’t a breakdown that was likely to be reversed. Lowenstein’s piece adds an interesting new wrinkle here: yes, embrace the house as pure exchange value for the purpose of making financial decisions about it. There is no moral or emotional dimension to it. I have no doubt that Lowenstein’s underlying assumptions could be read as odious at some level, but they do seem to take the logic to an interesting limit. He notes, for example, that “if lenders feared an avalanche of strategic defaults, they would have an incentive to renegotiate loan terms.” The maddening intransigence of the banks on this question would seem to collapse if everyone acted like…a bank. That is to say, if everyone starts practicing techniques of exit, exit itself becomes a weapon.

Several years ago, George Clooney made a very boring movie called Good Night and Good Luck. I’m not particularly interested in rehashing the movie, much less praising it, as I think it was nostalgic and reactionary in many ways. But I do want to comment on its boring quality, which I think was the best thing about it, and tie that to some current events: specifically, Obama’s recent visit to the House Republican Retreat.

So, Good Night and Good Luck was interesting precisely because it was so boring. At times, the film slows down so much that you don’t think it will ever move again: slow, measured dialogue, long pauses between lines, a plot that develops through a series of interruptions. We saw it in the theater in Giant State University Town, and there were literally people around us sleeping halfway through the film. Now, you would think that the major conflict at the heart of the film – Edward R. Murrow’s showdown with Joe McCarthy – would be sufficient to sustain some interest. I don’t know if it is that interesting or not, but I do think Clooney’s handling of the filmic elements push the film beyond this conflict in interesting ways.

Good Night and Good Luck presents itself as a critique of modern journalistic practice, and, specifically, sensationalism in journalism. The nostalgic (and reactionary) point is that journalism had some glorious heyday (represented here by Edward R. Murrow) during which careful assessment of social and political conditions was its stock in trade; for Clooney, this care has devolved into a chase for the latest adrenaline pumping report or nasty political fight. I don’t want to disagree with part of the premise. It’s clear that contemporary journalism, and especially of the teevee variety, is a monumental farce. If we were to read it nostalgically, we would see the Murrow moment, together with some fantasy concocted about Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate in general, as the contemporary ideology of professional journalism, an ideology that’s completely metastasized. Ideology in the Althusserian sense of an imagined form of real relations, and gone straight haywire in some supposed quest for the exposé, combined with some laughable contrivance of conflict with power. (I’ll note, briefly, that the lefties constantly claiming to be “Speaking Truth to Power” are merely another pathetic species of this arrangement – the ease with which the Tea Imbeciles grab hold of the mantra is clear enough). The false image of this relation of power is perhaps best exemplified in the painful stupidity of a Tim Russert (if we may speak negatively of the dead) – the ultimate insider playing at some working class Buffalo persona while pretending to throw “hard questions” at politicians. (This little bit of Sunday morning nonsense has become even more false and, incredibly,  even more stupid in the person of David Gregory, though at least Gregory forgoes the asinine and transparent costume of the white male “blue collar guy” and presents himself perfectly openly for what he is: an utterly cynical bourgeois apologist.)

But to return to Clooney’s nostalgic point, we should see that it is itself partly false, to the extent that contemporary journalistic practice is not at all a departure from the ideal constructed around Murrow (which is to say, the same ideal Clooney celebrates in the film) but rather an intensification of that ideal. It’s the fight with Tailguinner Joe (or Nixon, or whoever) as fight (and all that implies) held up as the desideratum always and everywhere. Indeed, today’s chief emulator of Murrow (Keith Olbermann) shows us precisely how the version of conflict has spread malignantly throughout the social body. His “special comments” – almost always vitriolic hyperbole that sends certain factions of the left into some weird vocabulary-driven ecstasy – are the pure intensification of the classic Murrow speech, and they are (not surprisingly) the most YouTubed and chattered about segments of the show, the parts that leave the left blogosphere panting for more. As intense experience goes, we are not far from the rather sad and babbling mania of a Glenn Beck. Of course, I wouldn’t suggest any equivalency between the two commentators outside the affective; the problem is that this might be the only equivalency that matters. Needless to say, Olbermann ends his special comments with an indignant version of Murrow’s “Good night and good luck.” The sign off ends up being only the most obvious outward sign that the fight as fight is what circulates as the Murrow ideal; Olbermann in fact grasps the very ideal that Clooney promotes at the thematic level, thereby demonstrating all the more thoroughly how wrong Clooney is.

If Clooney misunderstands this relationship at the semantic and thematic level, however, he understands it perfectly at the filmic level. The film is boring precisely because it seeks to de-intensify the viewing experience, a quality that is evident in everything from its slow shots and dialogue to its use of black and white. If you want serious television journalism, the film makes us feel, you have to get used to that feeling, its slowness, its pace and patience. You have to desire this level of boredom, at least visually (it’s still rather easy for the long, researched New York Times story to bore the hell out of anyone, but teevee?). Or rather, you have to develop different attention mechanisms, which is not exactly easy when the particular forms of attention played on by sensationalism are exactly what we need to develop under conditions of information overload (oddly, Al Gore gets this right in The Assault on Reason, though he immediately assigns the whole problem to the sphere of biology). The strange tension in the film thus develops between the ramped up semantic content, presumably centered around just the kind of intense adversarial relations that drive sensationalism today, and the extreme slowness of the filmic elements. For my money, though, the film’s slowness is so rhetorically foreign to our now everyday experience of the visual that it ends up lingering. What we learn, in spite of ourselves, is that we fucking hate the film for it, and would never watch it again. Which is, of course, the clearest exposition of the real problem plaguing contemporary journalism, Murrow’s sign-off notwithstanding.

To return this discussion to the present day, and Obama’s recent successes in several (sensationally) aggressive appearances, then, I’d suggest that a similar sort of tension marks the two Obama’s we’ve grown familiar with, if the pundits are to be believed. Call them the Campaign Obama and the Presiding Obama. If you’ve been paying attention to any of this the last few months, you’ll know that the Presiding Obama is a Big Disappointment relative to the Campaign Obama, largely because he doesn’t “fight back” or even, really, “fight at all.” Now, I hesitate the get into any of this, since it’s pretty easy to drift into what’s coming to be called “Obama apologist” mode, whereby any action at all by Mr. Obama is justifiable for some reason, or is otherwise part of some grander strategy (whether for good or evil, the story switches depending on teller), and etc. We’ve heard it all before. For my part, I think plenty of what the Presiding Obama is doing policy-wise sucks. I also think it’s just a hard goddamn job. So I’ll deny Obama apologetics here and say I’m just floating an analogy. In any case, ever since the State of the Union, the recent energetic townhalls, and the now-legendary Enter the Dragon act Obama did on the House Republicans’ dumbassery in Baltimore, all you hear from the Democratic and liberal sites is that Obama’s got his groove back, and he’s takin’ it to ‘em, and This Is What We Wanted to See All Along.  (And really, House Republicans, when you walk through the garden, you better watch your step…I mean, Baltimore?). But. If I might map the Campaign Obama and the Presiding Obama onto my rough sketch of Good Night and Good Luck, I’d say that the Presiding Obama – the one who doesn’t fight, but goes about the prosaic and tedious business of governing – may be the more interesting. The 2010 campaign is revving up, with the Massachusetts fiasco serving as the wake-up call, I guess, so we could expect to see Campaign Obama return with all the speechifying and electricity. But the Boring-Ass Obama? That’s the guy I want to have a beer with. If we can bracket policy for just a second – always a fraught operation – what’s remarkable about the Presiding Obama is the attempt to circulate a different style or pace. And maybe what we need politically, what precedes policy, is the right metabolism for that kind of slowness, a desire for that level of boredom.

Apologetics and grand strategies aside, I do seem to remember that that’s sorta what the guy was  telling us all along.

So I was watching this guy give a speech today, about like Afghanistan and stuff? Yeah.

Is anyone else just tired of caring about all this? Yes, I know, I have the luxury to be tired of caring, but really. Here’s what I know about Afghanistan: not much. And, quite frankly, meh. It seems to be some face saving way to throw a punch before you get the hell out of there. I’m just tired of it, not in a “Hell no!” way of being sick and tired, but more in a “Do whatever, dude” way of being just fucking exhausted. I did say to she that the only way Obama comes out of this looking good is if – say – sometime in June 2010, he gets to announce that Osama bin Laden has been captured. Of course, that’s fairly minor stuff, in the big scheme of things, but this is all symbolic economy now.

Oh yeah. One other thing I know about Afghanistan: it’s not Vietnam. The usual suspects on the left are coming out of the woodwork with the usual historical analogies. Something else I’m tired of, but I’ve been tired of that for a long time. Their nonsense is always dressed up in some quasi-smart clothing, quoting Santayana about forgetting history and the like. It’s tedious. And usually wrong. The flip side to Santayana is that those who never forget their history are doomed to never see historical difference. The dress-up left, carrying on like a sophomore who half read Thucydides. It’s embarrassing. I was always partial to Marx on this point: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The details are unimportant; what he’s saying is that historical knowledge has to be paired with an capacity for perceiving singularity. It’s a lesson that the Nostalgists of the Gulf of Tonkin would do well to remember.

But really. I’m tired.

OK, I’m going to break my unstated and inconsistent rule about commenting on day-to-day political and media spectacle here to rant a bit about uber-dick Terry Moran, ABC news journalist. The story goes like this: Obama is being interviewed by ABC news, no doubt relating to health care or somesuch, and in an off-the-record moment after the interview is apparently chatting about stuff when he calls Kanye West, of award-show-interrupting fame, a “jackass.” Well, if it was off-the-record, how could we possibly know this? Because Terry Moran, former White House reporter, Bush ass-kisser, and Nightline host decided to tweet this little tidbit to his Twitter account. Three cheers for transparency, right? Oh, he of course added his own very professional snark to the tweet, noting “Now THAT’S Presidential!” (What’s the implication here? That Obama isn’t otherwise “Presidential” – whatever the eff that means – or that Obama is not living up to the gravitas of the office in the very serious manner of Richard “Go-Fuck-Yourself” Cheney?) Needless to say, the principle of off-the-record communications is so crucial even to a cub reporter interviewing the local dog catcher that Moran had to delete the tweet and ABC apologized (did Terry Moran?), and I guess we’re all supposed to pretend that this sniveling right wing tool simply didn’t know how to work that crazy Twitter machine, la di da.

But Terry Moran is very much a guy who demonstrates endless concern for the journalistic profession when outright propagandists and warmongers like Judy Miller and Michael Gordon want to either rev up the war-machine or keep it running, and O Lawd how sacred is the concept of a journalist’s anonymous sources when they are brutal little DC despots seeking revenge on (the non-making-a-fool-of-himself) Joe Wilson for having exposed their sicko prevarications. In this piece, for instance, Terry Moran gets all pomo on the modern-day fetish for journalistic “objectivity,” wondering how-o-how can a journalist not want his or her country to kick ass and take names, and is it really a feasible proposition that Michael Gordon should have to deny his firepower fetish when it’s his job to write news articles informing propagandizing the public about the little war he so loves? Quoth Moran, sounding for all the world like your average pomo theorist: “There is no such thing as a person who is so untethered to any community–national, racial, religious, etc–that she or he is able to gain a truly ‘objective’ view of things. We are all contingent creatures.” This in defense of a snarling jingoist like Michael Gordon, whose kooky theories on Iranian involvement in Iraq made Curtis LeMay sound like John friggin’ Lennon. Oh, the tension inherent in Moran’s profession! One suspects that this philosophical conundrum derives directly from Moran’s tendency to puff up his chest and distinguish himself from all the supposedly “anti-military” journalists who presume that “the American projection of power around the world must be wrong.” I know, I haven’t ever seen one of these exceedingly rare creatures either, but I may have been distracted by Katie Couric crushing on some Navy SEALs or something.

And this guy’s gonna tweet off-the-record statements about Kanye fucking West by the President? And say “oops, my bad?” Come on, now. I’m not all “Oh, let’s respect the Office” and all this other imperial presidency nonsense that so many liberals are now spouting, nor do I find the whole Kanye West thing anything other than a matter of monumental irrelevance and supreme unimportance. But come on, now. The great philosopher of journalistic objectivity in wartime and defender of the sacred character of the anonymous source is printing off-the-record remarks by the President of the fucking United States on his Twitter account?

ABC should fire that fucking guy effective yesterday. Come on, now.

I spent the last weekend out in Davis, CA and environs, doing the Computers & Writing (C&W) conference thing. My colleague JP and I have been going to this conference every year for the last several, and we usually have a good time. Same this year. The new thing at the conference this year was a Twitter feed that displayed various participants tweets (is there a more obnoxious term?), many of them directly from some presentation room or other. So, you’d go into the break/registration room, and you’d supposedly get a sense of what was going on in the panels that you were not then attending. You could also go back to the feed to see what people had to tweet (ugh) about your panel. All of this, of course, ends up being presented as some kind of openness, and presumably we’re supposed to learn something from all that tweeting (yuck!). The question here, I guess, is whether we actually do.

As anyone breathing is now fully aware of, Twitter is now somehow implicated in the events going on in Iran—so much so that otherwise careful commentators have fallen into the whole “Twitter Revolution” rhetoric as if it’s some kind of obvious fact. The supposedly political use of Twitter washing over the infosphere was thus a frequent topic of discussion at the conference, with most people that I saw entering into rather unqualified celebration of whole thing. I should remind you all at this point that the conference was not made up of Iran experts, but—and I hesitate to say this—Twitter experts, or experts in the use of new writing technologies and rhetoric. But this may be the correct group to stand in as an instance of the general phenomenon, since all the twitter about the tweets from Tehran seems to be much more about Twitter than Tehran. In any case, I’d eat my hat in the public square (supposing such a place still exists) if even a small fraction of the people currently celebrating the Twitter revolution know fuck-all about Iranian politics, culture, and history.  But this returns us to the other point.

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Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. – Jean Baudrillard

How could we have all been so blind? Keith, one of the FBI agents, summed everything up very simply: “I’ve never seen a place like this,” he told me. “You were all living in Disneyland!” - Eleanor Squillari, Bernard Madoff’s secretary, in June’s Vanity Fair

In my ongoing morbid curiosity about my former employer, Bernard Madoff, I read the recent Vanity Fair article by Marc Seal, “Bernie Madoff’s Private World.” It’s the companion piece to the April article also written by Seal. The June article, however, is essentially co-written by Madoff’s long-time secretary, Eleanor Squillari, so you really get an insider’s look at the operations over there. Now, you may know that I’ve been basing all my Madoff posts since Bernie got arrested on this post, which I wrote long before any of this mess hit the fan.  Of course, since then I’ve learned that I worked in the heart of the Madoff fraud, probably sending out fraudulent statements to clients/victims. The Vanity Fair article adds another dimension to that, and some – to me – jaw-dropping updates. The article is written in the first-person from the perspective of Squillari, Bernie’s secretary. Here, then, are the relevant portions:

The 17th floor was a different world from where we worked. Whereas the upper two floors were modern, with everything state-of-the-art, on 17 the corporate image didn’t seem to matter. The desks were close together, the computers were antiquated, and the printers were old ink-jet jobs, not the laser printers we had in our offices [tpspn: it's funny that I remembered the main printer in exactly this way, that it impressed itself so clearly on my memory]. …

The two people who ran the floor, Frank DiPascali and Annette Bongiorno, had once lived next door to each other, in Queens. Annette handled Bernie’s seasoned clients and managed her staff on 17. Short, tough, and overweight, she was rigid and guarded at work. [tpspn: compare my description of her in the original post as "She was a completely round woman, maybe 4 foot 8, implausibly round like a circle drawn perfectly by hand. She was an Italian from Brooklyn who had started off as the founder of the firm’s secretary 25 years before, when it was a very small operation indeed. She’d then made the inevitable ascent to office manager and then operations manager, largely behind her tyrannical personality. Some of the impeccably educated full-timers noted bitterly that she’d never been to college. I saw her make at least three of these people cry in the eight weeks I was there."]…[M]uch of her wealth had to have come from Bernie, whom she had worked for since he started his business, in the 1960′s.

Annette’s staff of six were mostly low-level, clerical women, many of them working mothers, who probably made no more than $40,000 a year. They were young and naive, with no background in finance, so they weren’t able to connect the dots. Annette allegedly instructed them to generate tickets showing trades that had never been made, at least two of them reportedly told prosecutors, and they simply did as they were told (Bongiorno has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

I knew these women. Two of them, Winnie Jackson and Semone Anderson, would come up to 19 every day to deliver figures. Whenever I went downstairs, they were always busy doing paperwork while Annette watched them like a hawk. Once, I remember Annette had the phones removed from her employees’ desks after she became concerned that they were making personal calls. She treated them like children. …

In Annette Bongiorno’s area, located across the floor from Frank, were Winnie and Semone and four other women. Every day I would receive a report with all of the figures from Winnie or Semone and another report of wire transfers from the cage.

This is amazing to me because it’s just as I remember it. But more than that. I closed my other piece with the following:

I never really quit that job. I just called the temp agency one Monday and said I wouldn’t do it anymore. The woman at the agency was really upset, since the firm had apparently started speaking to her about hiring me full time, a revelation so absurd that it simply floored me. They hired Tasha instead.

Now here’s the jaw-dropping part. Temp #1, or “Tasha,” in my previous post is Semone Anderson from the Vanity Fair story. She started the same day I did, and they were set, according to the temp agency, to offer me the position that she eventually took. This is curious to me. I get in there and last about 8 weeks before the mind-numbingness of it all finally kicks in, and I just drop it, the whole job. Here’s how that really happened. I was up in Binghamton for the weekend visiting she, who was still in college at the time. I was supposed to take a bus home on Sunday night, but I just said fuck it. We even got to the actual bus station before I decided to stay another day or two. What about Madoff? she asked me. Fuck ‘em, I said. I’ll find something else. I remember calling the agency early Monday morning and telling the rep, who was notably upset, first because I was bailing on a perfectly good revenue stream for the agency (I believe it was called Cross Temps) for no apparent reason, and second because they get some payoff if you’re hired full time. I turned to she when I got off the phone: “I think she’s pissed,” I laughed. Well, they got the payoff for Tasha/Semone. What’s incredible to me is that she stayed there for the remaining damn near 13 years, and is so inextricably mixed up in this now world famous and historical Ponzi scheme that her name is appearing in Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal! For a job that I fairly casually discarded on a whim, and pretty much left behind without ever looking back.

It’s an odd thing to think about, I guess. But it also goes to two points. First, these finance jobs are the route to some kind of bourgeois life for many working class people in urban areas. Tasha/Semone started at Madoff by stapling and folding on the same slushy January day that I did. Thirteen years. It was her career, and would have gone on in that manner no doubt for as long as they’d pay her. Indeed, Madoff himself and DiPascali and Bongiorno (the latter two haven’t been charged with anything, of course – though this shocks me) all have fairly modest upbringings, like all the fraudsters in the last few financial debacles. (I also sense a pattern that might explain why they were going to offer me that job, even though I openly considered it beneath me, as arrogant as I was: the qualifying characteristics for taking care of business on the 17th floor seem to be 1) Queens, and 2) a distinctly Italianate name. And in finance, a double major in history and English might as well be “no college.”). But the second point sort of derives from the first. Certainly, this Madoff fraud is outrageous and historical in scope. But it’s Disneyland, see? But maybe with a twist: Madoff is presented as real in order to make us believe that the rest of the mess on Wall Street is imaginary. It functions as the displacement for the whole Madoffian financial system, in much the same way that my colleague over there  in Japan right now sees the swine flu as a metonymic displacement of globalization anxieties. We’re crazy about Bernie, to put it another way, because we all work for Bernie. And it goes without saying, I should add, that we all have our money with him.

Two of the most perfectly crafted rock/pop songs of the 1980′s, one now a staple on NPR Market Place, the other virtually forgotten outside a rather odd collection of hardcore fans. But still. I was in my favorite bar in Queens over the holidays, and I told my brother that New Order’s “Ceremony” was one of my picks for most brilliant rock songs ever recorded. He made the usual face people make when you say something preposterous. But still. Of course, it was initially written when New Order was still Joy Division and Ian Curtis hadn’t yet fashioned himself a noose, but the New Order version – their first single release – is far better. I read somewhere that Bernard Sumner was still taking voice lessons at the time, learning how to breath while singing, a point that I didn’t know whether to take as mischievously ironic given the former lead singer’s fate. But you can hear the halting ineptitude of it, which is really what makes it perfect. The Ceremony video appearing here, too, some amateur hour film student job, chosen because only slightly better than the other option, the heartwarmingly despicable Kirsten Dunst vehicle Marie Antoinette, the 80′s party girl soundtrack of which was ostensibly meant to signify something: I’ll take cheap film school sentimentality of the (post)industrial structure crashing into the organic over that any day. The second is a favorite of mine that I’m almost embarrassed by, and I think the black screen YouTube is just about right. It’s a radio song, 1987 or thereabouts, written by Stephen Duffy, perhaps the most exquisite craftsmen of the 80′s English rock/pop song, just torn up by class ennui and joyful about it. I thought about it recently after seeing a flyer for a “poetry night commemorating the inauguration of Barack Obama.” Despite my open support of Obama since I announced to my students in October of 2004 that he would be President “one day” (we read his convention speech in honors comp two days after he delivered it – I wonder if they remember…), the flyer made me recoil a bit, left a bad taste, and all that. Certainly, I’m not “opposed” (as if one could be!) of the admixture of poetry and politics, but I do raise an eyebrow at poetry “celebrating” any fixture of the State – Obama or not. By all means, I wish him well in his job – and the notion of McCain/Palin was just too grisly to contemplate. And breakthroughs in something like a collective consciousness are of course wonderful. Yes. But poetry celebrating the elevation to Power? It’s unseemly. And so I was brought back to the lines Duffy used to capture the Event of working class England in shambles, destroyed by the Tory ascension, sure, but far more by a kind of global enthusiasm. It need not go the same way, but this is how many people that I feel far more comfortable with usually experience these “dramatic” social changes:

We’ll face this new England
Like we always have
In a fury of denial
We’ll go out dancing on the tiles
Help me down, but don’t take me back…

That’s perfect to me. Unproductive life, as the sociologist Michel Maffesoli might call it. But here we are now with Reaganism and Thatcherism in smithereens, their underlying economic philosophies exposed as fraud and sham (never once and for all, of course: it can always get worse). But the global enthusiasm lingers, even if mixed with dread. (And we know there was dread then, too. Perhaps the best scene in 24-Hour Party People has Ian Curtis dead-panning the lyrics of Transmission to a bunch of boinking skinheads, as the news of capitalist crisis – unemployment, war, oil shortage – gets spliced into the act; the Joy Division/New Order solution to the Thatcherite darkness was, moreover, much the same as Duffy’s: “we would have a fine time living in the night…so dance dance dance dance dance to the radio.” This response is not without cultural consequences: the dim outlines of a coming techno can be heard in Stephen Morris’ frenetic high hat, even then, the trip from Warsaw to Blue Monday as bound up in the history of neoliberalism as in the technology of the drum machine). So the global enthusiasm lingers, in any case: We’ll face this new America, like we always have, in a fury of denial, we’ll go out dancing on the tiles…