Vaginal Knitting: Yarn and Yawn

If a man trains himself to thump out a ditty on a piano using his erect penis, we think of it as a joke, a kind of sick gag. YouTube will cut the video soon enough. But if a woman somehow manages to knit using her vagina--well, that's what we call "performance art". It is considered art in part because the reason the woman did it was, as she says, to raise awareness about a shunned and supposedly misunderstood part of female anatomy.

Uh-huh. Cue Casey Jenkins.



Now Casey Jenkins seems like an easygoing and open-minded woman. And she certainly seems earnest about her work here. But I would have to suggest, even so, that she is drowning in a narcissistic craving for attention. And she is perversely exploiting her own sex organs to get this attention.

When last month I read about the poor dope who nailed his scrotum to the pavement on Red Square I thought a new low in attention-grabbing antics had been reached. And I thought this new low might hold for awhile. At least for a year or so.

Russian artist Petr Pavlensky
But I was too hasty in my judgment. Not even a month has passed and this Australian "craftivist" Jenkins comes in and, uh, snatches the trophy away. She gets the trophy because her work, regardless of the earnestness she seems to show, cannot escape being ridiculous--reaching a new level of ridiculous in fact. It is the stuff of humor and scoffing and a vague or even strong sense of aversion. And these emotions are not, contrary to what her ideological statements suggest, because there is anything inherently scoff-worthy in a woman's vagina. No, the humor and scoffing and revulsion are not due to her vagina itself, but to the way she is exploiting it to get attention.

Some consider her work a "brave" feminist statement. Yaaaawwwwnnn. In what is it brave? Is it brave because she is openly courting ridicule by doing something so evidently ridiculous? Jenkins' performance doesn't even subvert any boundaries (unless you consider the boundary between scarf and tampon worth subverting, which I don't). Vaginal motorcycle repair, now that might provoke some thought, but vaginal knitting? C'mon. Muffs and knitting go way back. My grandma knit muffs in her day.

So you see I'm starting to take the humorous end of this yarn and run with it. Ouch. Because I think this is what Jenkins' work calls for.

I can credit Femen with bravery when they do actions in authoritarian states and risk arrest. I can certainly credit Muslim women with bravery when they stand against forces like the Taliban. But a woman in Australia publicly fetishizing her own sex organs is not bravery: it's silly narcissism grasping for the status of art. She knows she's almost certain to make a name for herself among the community of like-minded feminists and "artists". And she risks nothing but being laughed at for her trouble.

While we're on the silly antics of performance artists in rich Western countries, why not try to craft a vaginal art project of our own? I'm neither a woman nor an artist but even I have better ideas how to make political statements with vaginas than Casey Jenkins. If such a sentence as this last one offends and incites feminists to rage, all the better.

"Misogynist asshole! So you think you understands women better than women do, huh? Typical! What a fuckin' jerk!!! We need more women like Casey in the world!!!!"

Thought you'd say something like that.

But in fact I don't think I understand women or vaginas better than women do. I just think I, along with millions of other people, understand the subversive potential of art better than Casey Jenkins does. Even if this art involves employing the vagina.

You doubt it? Consider: We all know our planet is it trouble, and we all know one of the reasons is the unnecessary over-consumption that comes with capitalism. Many people try to link an ethic of environmental protection with the nurturing feminine, claiming that our destruction of the environment is mainly a result of patriarchy. I don't buy it, but no matter. For performance artists it's plausible enough. So here's my plan, my own contribution to snatch art: How about a group of women activists/artists who come forward and pledge that for the duration of a year they will buy nothing from shopping malls that they can't insert and carry out in their vaginas? Now that would constitute a subversive political statement! What's more, if enough women took up the cause, it would actually put a damper on excessive consumption. Just think--a whole year with no high-end bags being sold. Or a fall season without any chic urban trench coats going. Because who's going to be able to buy a new trench coat? If you've ever tried to stuff a whole trench coat in your vagina, you'll know what I mean. Yes, it's true those first-floor cosmetics companies wouldn't really be hurt, given the smooth little canisters they sell, but guys like Louboutin would be in deep trouble.

If my project sounds utterly ridiculous, if it sounds like a joke even as it's being formulated, there's good reason for that. It's because making art with your sex organs is a dubious strategy in any case. But putting the ludic element aside, I would still insist: my project is way more subversive and consciousness-raising than vaginal knitting. And maybe, you might be saying, I should actually start work on this project.

But look: there are two things that keep me from making a name for myself as the creator of Vaginal Shopping: 1) I have a penis and so am disqualified from even proposing the idea; 2) I have a sense of the positive aspects of the mild taboo we in the West still hold in relation to genitals, and so would consider the project degrading.

The one redeeming element I can see in Jenkins' project is that she's knitting just a single long scarf rather than a series of scarves. One long scarf can't be worn, and that's all for the better, I'd say. I shudder to think of her knitting and selling wearable scarves. And so I close with the following:

A FEW WEEKS AFTER CHRISTMAS, MELBOURNE SUBURB
"Mom, why does my scarf smell like . . . ."

"Like fish, dear?"

"Yes."

"That's because that scarf is very special. It was made by a performance artist."

"What is a performance artist?"

"A performance artist is a person who does something obscene or ridiculous to get attention, but claims they're doing it because they care about some social issue."

"Do they really care about the social issue?"

"Maybe a little, honey. But the important thing is for them to get their name to appear in the media."

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"Why do I have to leave this little hair stuck in the scarf?"

"That's like a signature, honey. I paid extra for the scarf because it had that hair. Try not to lose it."

E.M

It's a start, Canada

An open letter to Canadians on the recent happenings in Toronto.
Dear Canadians:

Don't think we Yankees don't know what you're up to. Your Toronto mayor fiasco, which may or may not be finally winding down, has envy written all over it. We your neighbors to the south can see clearly what it's all about. You're trying to be like us.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that we blame you for it. It must be hard sitting up there in the snow watching the superpower beneath your border melt down in such spectacular psychotic dysfunction while you have nothing even remotely exciting to match it with.

While we Americans have our annual school shootings, face-eating zombies, banana republic income disparities, Orwellian spy programs with more funding than God, Koran burners, serial killers, 9/11, Lady Gaga, you have what--Alanis Morissette? Problems with graffiti in Ontario high schools?

We know it's been tough.

So in truth I kind of gotta hand it to you. The Rob Ford scandal shows initiative. And it was pretty well done all around. Of course I know it was all staged; but still, the conception of the thing wasn't bad.

On the one hand you've long wanted a Rush Limbaugh of your own; on the other hand you were really smarting recently from all the global attention Miley Cyrus got with her little atrocity show. So what to do? Why not create a single national figure who combines the best of Limbaugh and Cyrus. A Rush-Miley hybrid. Voila Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford in a city council meeting, November, 2013.
You see I'm onto you, no? It's obvious that your Rob Ford was conceived and hatched as just such a hybrid. He has the Tea Party politics and roly-poly dumb look of Rush Limbaugh; at the same time his skin is smoother and pinker than Limbaugh's, and is actually quite like Miley's. Do I need to even mention the Miley-like drug use?

Ford also clearly channels Miley in his upfront orality: while the singer hyper-extends her tongue as often as possible, the mayor jaws on and on about his diet of cunnilingus. Apparently as he speaks we are meant to imagine him in his living room in Miley-like oral action.

Then there's the mayor's clumsy tackling of city councilor Pam McConnell--who can't see this move for what it is, a subtle Canadian allusion to Miley's graceless twerking on Robin Thicke? But maybe this dramatic touch was a bit too subtle for most Americans, who pride themselves on their thickness. Still it wasn't lost on me. I'm a reader of Leonard Cohen, you know. And Margaret Atwood sometimes.

And just now I realize: isn't the idea of giving your idiotic mayor his own reality show a veiled reference to Sarah Palin and her reality show? At least, unlike us, you can boast the good taste of canceling the show before it even got off the ground.

Since the world is coming to an end soon, you Canadians don't have much time left to catch up to us in this game of large-scale Cultural Pathology. But your Rob Ford scandal is at least a start. I wish you well in any further attempts you may make. And I'll be paying attention to Canada in coming years. Which is something few Americans have ever done. So congratulations.

* * *
Addendum: My friend JS Porter just informed me by email that someone had already Photoshopped Ford's face onto Miley's "Wrecking Ball" video. So I guess I've been scooped. --E.M.

Thomas Pynchon Stalks the 9/11 Attackers

You really need to read The Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon’s latest. Especially if you’ve ever been a devotee of the writer in years past. You need to get your hands on a copy and start in right away.

This time the American master of paranoid inklings focuses his kaleidoscopic vision on New York in the months before and after September 2001, offering up a portrait of our 21st-century selves that is by turns rollicking, poignant, bleak. Bleeding Edge is both a great New York City novel and a far-reaching meditation on the attacks and what they’ve done to us.

Pynchon’s narrative follows disbarred fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow as she struggles to make sense of the financial shenanigans of a handful of Internet startups. The question nags: Are the shoddily disguised money transfers made to the Middle East in recent months by net guru Gabriel Ice in any way linked to the attacks? In the wreckage left by the dot-com bust, Ice is breaking up and buying damaged firms left and right, adding his recently acquired properties to a nascent net empire whose purposes are largely hidden. The money transfers, the secrecy, the unexplained need for Arabic speakers in Ice’s organization--it all begins to prod the otherwise levelheaded Maxine toward grim suspicions, which only deepen with the murder of one of the peripheral players.

Spy thriller, whodunnit, comedy of manners--the genre of this novel is hard to pin down. Thematically speaking, one might do worse than focus on the recently hot topic of the value, positive or negative, of irony in American culture. Following the attacks, as Maxine herself points out, conservatives argued the country had somehow been vulnerable to such large-scale evil because of our "wallowing in postmodern irony"--a cultural state, according to wingnut pundits, that made us unprepared to deal with real evil in the world. To go by the cast of characters in Bleeding Edge, Pynchon, unsurprisingly, is having none of it. Rather, it is the literal-minded among us, those who are too confident in their rightness, that bring about our worst disasters.

Irony always suggests distance, whether it be the distance between what we say and what we mean (verbal irony), the distance between our intentions and a contrary result (situational irony), or distance felt when a reader or an audience member is aware of an outcome characters don't foresee (dramatic irony). This last, of course, is everywhere felt in The Bleeding Edge. As we read, we know the disaster coming on September 11th; Pynchon's characters do not.

Of course ironies of all sorts are crucial to Pynchon’s vision, and the dramatic kind doesn't by any means upstage the usual brilliant array he employs. This is testimony to his art. As ironic trickster, Pynchon has only gotten more wily with years.

Maxine’s revulsion/infatuation for right-wing fixer Windust is ironic, as is the fatal tension between cyberspace and meatspace made so much of here. Also sadly ironic is the way the vaunted freedom of cyberspace will, as Maxine’s father Ernie presciently suggests, lead to a world without freedom, a world where one’s every contact and purchase and movement is monitored, the world we now find ourselves in. In the novel such situational irony reaches its peak when the deep-Web territory DeepArcher is finally invaded and colonized thanks to the drop in randomness in the numbers chain generated by the Princeton Global Consciousness Project, that randomness itself having been compromised by the collective human reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Upshot? The attackers, whoever they are, end up winning on both fronts.

Yes, I’m aware these last sentences can only be nonsense to anyone who hasn’t read the book. I don't want to suggest by them that this book is especially arcane or hard to follow if you aren’t a Web programmer or philosopher. It's true that readers with some knowledge of Internet programming and Web history will doubtless get the most kicks out of the book. But if little old me could tag along through Pynchon's few tech-heavy pages, knowing there were jokes I was missing but still generally keeping up, then anyone who’s read some tech press or kept a blog should be able to manage.

Besides, The Bleeding Edge isn’t just about the Internet and political paranoia. It’s also about adultery, parenting, ethnic squabbling, evil and redemption. And the ever-winking presence of pop culture in the narrative is a Pynchon trademark, this time becoming a hilarious writerly tic. Rather than allusions to Rilke, we get riffs on Journey lyrics, the Monica Lewinsky story, The Brady Bunch, and, of course, The Simpsons. How this book will ever go over in Hungarian or Chinese I can’t imagine. Though the existential questions are deep and global, the cheery detritus of Americana bobs everywhere on the surface.

The Bleeding Edge is infused with a strong lyricism that most would find a hard match for the pop-cultural antics. But Pynchon pulls it off. Light and darkness--city light at various hours of the day or the charged darkness one gazes into at the borders of cyberspace--are especially well served. If you finish the book, go back and reread its first and last pages. Pynchon has framed his one-year narrative with musings on morning light and the overnight blooming of pear trees outside his heroine’s front door.

The writer is now in his mid-seventies. That he writes so well about youth, the Internet boom, hip hop culture and computer games is itself a wonder. Pynchon is seemingly too curious a traveler not to get into everything at once.

A couple early reviewers have doubted that The Bleeding Edge can stand with Pynchon’s major works, one critic comparing it to his relatively flimsy 1990 novel Vineland. I beg to differ. In Bleeding Edge we have one of America’s great writers writing in top form about the defining event of our new millennium. It is not to be missed.

Check out The Bleeding Edge at Amazon.com.

台北101五百年後 -- the grim future of Taipei 101

All empires rise and fall. With very few exceptions, the great architectural monuments civilizations erect end up as ruins. The Egyptians, Romans, Maya, Greeks--most of their greatest constructions are now rubble. Why?

I discussed this problem with my teenage students in Taipei. Most of them agreed with me that the ancient Romans, when looking at their glorious city, could hardly imagine that one day it would nearly all be gone. Cultures build great monuments and imagine that they will last.

I then asked them to consider their own city’s towering monument to cultural pride, Taipei 101. Though Taiwan is not a large country, for several years this building, completed in 2004, was the world’s tallest, finally being outdone by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Still, impressive as Taipei 101 looks now, what will it look like in a century, in five centuries, in five millennia? Will it still be standing? What, if anything, could cause such a massive building to become a ruin?

My students had fifteen minutes of class time to write short essays on the question. What I got showed me much about how Taiwanese teenagers understand the future. I post the pithier essays here. I’ve made slight grammatical corrections, but changed nothing of the content.

Eric

Bryan

I think Taipei 101 will become a ruin because of a terrorist attack. But why do I think the terrorists will attack Taiwan? The answer is that I think Taiwan will belong to America in fifty years. And then some terrorists will attack our landmark Taipei 101 just like they did the Twin Towers.

Another possibility is that Taipei 101 will become a ruin because of an earthquake in five years. Since the 921 earthquake, there hasn’t been another big earthquake in Taiwan. So I think there is going to be a big earthquake in five years and it will destroy Taipei 101.

Kelly

I think there are two possibilities that might cause Taipei 101 to be ruined. First, everyone knows the economy is going down year to year. And the rate for Taipei 101 space may become more and more expensive. Maybe thirty or forty years later, nobody can rent the place to be office or restaurants.

Second, global warming is more and more serious. The climate in different places is becoming strange. Maybe one-hundred years later Taiwan will be too hot for people to live and everyone will need to move to the north.

There will be no people living in Taiwan, so Taipei 101 will be a ruin.

David

Taipei 101 is the tallest building in Taiwan. Because of its height, it may collapse easier than other buildings. Taiwan is a country that has many earthquakes every year, so I think it will happen in two-hundred years.

Sinking into the water is another possible way to make Taipei 101 a ruin. The water level of the ocean is getting higher and higher because the Arctic ice is melting. Maybe just like the move The Day after Tomorrow, the whole city will be underwater, and Taipei 101 will become an ice tower in the center of Taipei. It will probably happen in five-hundred years.

Peggy

Taipei 101 is a symbol for Taiwanese. It means we are strong enough even though our land is pretty small.

I think America will hit Taipei 101, because their economy relies on China now. America knows China always wants to control us. If they destroyed our 101, we would lose our confidence. And there would be only one China in this world.

They would destroy it after fifty years, and China’s industries will become higher quality to help America.

Anthony

History shows that all great buildings eventually become ruins. This will likely happen to Taipei 101 too.

Maybe it’ll be under-sea in about the 22nd century. Because of global warming, the ocean water will become more and more, and at last the water will cover everything. It’ll be like an “Under-sea tour spot” if humans are still living.

Maybe it’ll amaze the world in a different way at around 2150. All the buildings in the world will become taller and taller in the future--100 floors, 200 floors, 300 floors, even even 1,000 floors. Taipei 101 will become the shortest building in the world. People will be amazed by that.

There are many kinds of possibilities in the future, but no one can know what will happen at last.

Lulu

I think in twenty years it will still be there, but after about five-hundred years it may not be so popular because there will be more constructions better than it. Maybe in 1,000 years it will become completely ruins because there won’t be any creatures on the earth except cockroaches.

Yoyo (not ELT Yoyo)

History shows us that all great buildings eventually become ruins. This will likely happen to Taipei 101 too.

The weather is getting hotter now. Maybe in 2513 all the land will be drowned, but Taipei 101 will have just a little top on the ocean, all the ground will be under the ocean, all the humans will be dead too.

Or maybe in 2213 Syria will shoot a missile at Taiwan, and Taiwan will become nothing. All the humans in Taiwan will be dead and Taiwan will become ruins.

Or maybe in 2113 there will be the third World War, and many of Taiwan’s people will go to fight, and Taipei 101 will become a ruin, because no one will buy things there.

Pope Francis on Hope and History: "the time in which we seek God"

Pope Francis poses for a photo with teenagers
on pilgrimage to the Vatican

Pope Francis' extraordinary recent interview with Antonio Spadaro has understandably provoked a whirlwind of commentary from Catholics and others as to what his words mean for the future of the Church under his guidance. Will he be pushing the Church to the "left" or the "right", and on which issues?

For myself the interview has mainly kindled new hope. This man seems too serious about the Gospel, about the radical immediacy of its call, to be bothered with convenient boxes like "conservative" or "liberal". Especially powerful for me (and helpful given my own historical obsessions) are the Pope's words on God's presence in history and in our contemporary, despair-inducing present.

Francis speaks of our projected notions of past or future history and how a focus on these may mislead us to mistake the more "concrete" truth of the present. He speaks of discernment and how it relates to uncertainty--the uncertainty we must always acknowledge if we are to keep ourselves from self-serving delusions. As I understand him, he is stressing discernment and movement as a corrective to (the more comfortable) knowledge and stasis. As he reminds us, gesturing to the biblical accounts, "God is always a surprise".

Below I quote some paragraphs from the interview, as narrated by Spadaro.

E.M.

Francis on Hope and History

At the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis repeatedly declared: “God is real. He manifests himself today. God is everywhere.” These are phrases that echo the Ignatian expression “to seek and find God in all things.” So I ask the pope: “How do you seek and find God in all things?”

“What I said in Rio referred to the time in which we seek God,” he answers. “In fact, there is a temptation to seek God in the past or in a possible future. God is certainly in the past because we can see the footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the ‘concrete’ God, so to speak, is today. For this reason, complaining never helps us find God. The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is – these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defence. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today.

“God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallises them. God is in history, in the processes.

“We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting.

“Finding God in all things is not an ‘empirical eureka.’ When we desire to encounter God, we would like to verify him immediately by an empirical method. But you cannot meet God this way. God is found in the gentle breeze perceived by Elijah. The senses that find God are the ones St. Ignatius called spiritual senses. Ignatius asks us to open our spiritual sensitivity to encounter God beyond a purely empirical approach. A contemplative attitude is necessary: it is the feeling that you are moving along the good path of understanding and affection toward things and situations. Profound peace, spiritual consolation, love of God and love of all things in God – this is the sign that you are on this right path.”

I ask, “So if the encounter with God is not an ‘empirical eureka,’ and if it is a journey that sees with the eyes of history, then we can also make mistakes?”

The pope replies: “Yes, in this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble. Uncertainty is in every true discernment that is open to finding confirmation in spiritual consolation.

“The risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever. Often we seek as if we were blind, as one often reads in the Bible. And this is the experience of the great fathers of the faith, who are our models. We have to re-read the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11. Abraham leaves his home without knowing where he was going, by faith. All of our ancestors in the faith died seeing the good that was promised, but from a distance.... Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing.... We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.

“Because God is first; God is always first and makes the first move. God is a bit like the almond flower of your Sicily, Antonio, which always blooms first. We read it in the Prophets. God is encountered walking, along the path. At this juncture, someone might say that this is relativism. Is it relativism? Yes, if it is misunderstood as a kind of indistinct pantheism. It is not relativism if it is understood in the biblical sense, that God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him. You must, therefore, discern the encounter. Discernment is essential.

“If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”

The pope’s words remind me of some of his past reflections, in which as a cardinal he wrote that God is already living in the city, in the midst of all and united to each. It is another way, in my opinion, to say what St. Ignatius wrote in the Spiritual Exercises, that God “labours and works” in our world. So I ask: “Do we have to be optimistic? What are the signs of hope in today’s world? How can I be optimistic in a world in crisis?”

“I do not like to use the word optimism because that is about a psychological attitude,” the pope says. “I like to use the word hope instead, according to what we read in the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, that I mentioned before. The fathers of the faith kept walking, facing difficulties. And hope does not disappoint, as we read in the Letter to the Romans. Think instead of the first riddle of Puccini’s opera ‘Turandot,’” the pope suggests.

At that moment I recalled more or less by heart the verses of the riddle of the princess in that opera, to which the solution is hope: “In the gloomy night flies an iridescent ghost./ It rises and opens its wings/ on the infinite black humanity./ The whole world invokes it/ and the whole world implores it./ But the ghost disappears with the dawn/ to be reborn in the heart./ And every night it is born/ and every day it dies!”

“See,” says Pope Francis, “Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise.”

Read the interview in full.

On the photo above, see The Telegraph

America's One-Party System

A Facebook post I put up August 31 along with the comment thread:

Many complain about America's two-party system, the limited choice it offers. I think they're getting it wrong. Our politics makes more sense when one recognizes it as a one-party system. Where some see a Democratic Party and a Republican Party, I just see two versions of the Republican Party. One the one hand there's the Republican Party that wants to outlaw abortion, on the other the Republican Party that wants to legalize gay marriage. This is what Americans get to choose from.

CJL: So what would you choose? I'd choose gay marriage if I were an American citizen.

DA: So, oligarchy or plutocracy.

Eric: Exactly, DA.

PR: Better dead than red, Eric Mader.

Eric: As I've said before, PR: They will pry my Che Guevara action figure from my dead frozen fingers.

K: Eric, I think your assessment is accurate, but overly granular. I think there is more value in moving up the so-called zeitgeist totem pole. Even the choices in terms of plutocracy versus oligarchy are actually archaic notions if you ask me. I do understand that my preferred word is not even a word, and is probably already overused too. It is corporatocracy. Spell check never finds this word, so that's how I guess it isn't a word. But, if you look closely at what is wrong with all things "structural" in our times, there is no "one" to blame. Everything is run either by a corporation or other grouped-together, 3rd-party-controlled mechanism (a corporation is run by shareholders) wherein no individual is actually responsible for the corporation's actions. If a corporation knowingly sells a deadly object/chemical/device and it actually kills dozens, or hundreds, or let's just say, millions... there is no one who is actually responsible. No one hangs. Sure you can sue, and force corporations to pay up, but there is no moral responsibility that is imbued into the corporate soul. If a human being were to commit the many sorts of acts that corporations do, they would suffer other than in the wallet. The human version of "personhood" has enormous cultural, and individual, and real expectations. To the contrary, corporations are only legally bound, with the threat of job loss or jail to the CEO, of return on capital to the shareholders. If a company attempts to do long-term thinking, or even provide notional constructions that one might call "moral fortitude" to any decision, the CEO can be fired or jailed. What complicates matters is that our culture is so deeply specialized and individuated that the experts in any given field are the only ones who are qualified to work in government as a watchdog. But if you live long enough in our system, you find out that the price to pay for being a watchdog in your career/profession is much higher to you as an individual. However, the rewards are vast if you are not a watchdog but instead support your professional colleagues' endeavors. In this context, any "political" party is nothing but a bobber on the corporate current. It has no real power, except around the edges. So, I do agree that the USA has a single party, one that provides choices around certain issues, that generates pretend differences, which are, however, of little impact on the actual direction of the consumption and distribution of resources. Gay marriage and abortion are merely issues that generate lots of emotive energy, but change nothing in terms of: Is there too much radiation in the Pacific Ocean? Should we burn all the coal on Earth if we finish burning all the oil? How much insecticide should a corn plant actually ooze from its pores before it is not safe to eat? At what point is the price of war too high when it comes to human deaths? Since these sorts of questions require rethinks on the direction our humanity goes, it's better to argue about unborn humans, and what genitals are suitable for legal contracts to be state recognized. Why are those more suitable issues? Because it is always better to inject the question of what the Invisible Man in the sky, who sees all, knows all, and loves all (except for the millions of specific little situations where he hates and needs to destroy you for all eternity), thinks about these matters. And as we know, only the ballot box can discern the almighty's actual feelings on such matters.

Eric: K: Yes, I agree with some of your points. In fact I would argue that THE main problem the world now faces is the centrality of the profit motive as combined with the nearly total irresponsibility that corporate structure allows for. Corporations privatize profits and (given their almost hand-in-glove collaboration with states) both socialize losses and leave all environmental fallout to the future to swallow as it will. To the degree the corporate model continues to dominate, to the degree our governments continue to dance as its paid puppets, it seems obvious to me that we are headed for extinction or something similar. Our own government has been more or less overthrown by a corporate coup, democracy for us is increasingly window dressing, and there is little chance, given the technologies of control now employed, that our population will be able to right this situation. Yes, I think America is VERY different from what it was through most of the post-war period. Ten more years of drift in the current direction and we will be justified in talking of "soft totalitarianism" Or perhaps not so soft. / I understand why you insist terms like oligarchy aren't really applicable here, but I still think the term has its use. After all, those who benefit from the central place of corporate structure in our society are largely that top 5 percent. And it is largely the needs of corporations that our government is responsive to: again ensuring that top 5 percent always ends up at the top, no matter how their card houses may topple. / The question of the day of course is how the left might begin the work of transforming this Doomsday machine we're riding. I say the left because I think it's only from the left that solutions are going to come--the right is still too busy applauding itself for the fall of the Soviet Union. / In terms of this discussion, the following deserves a careful read. In any case, Ackerman's article addresses the issues that need be addressed if there's any hope capitalism can be transformed before it takes us over the cliff it's heading to. But what kind of social upheaval would be necessary to enforce the kind of reforms he suggests? Is such a coordinated political platform even possible beyond its presence here in article form?

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/

The article is largely on economics. Ackerman argues that the triumphalism of mainstream economics is unjustified given the evidence. For one, the maintenance of a laissez-faire environment is not as relevant to an economy's performance as is often assumed.

And here the discussion ended.

Pope Francis Reacts to Miley Cyrus Performance

A Disassociated Press Report

In a surprise to Vatican watchers, Pope Francis today alluded to an American pop star when he said that God loves all people, "even Miley Cyrus." The Pope, leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, made his remark during Tuesday's homily.

A Vatican spokesman later in the day clarified the Pope's remark, insisting that it should not be interpreted to mean the Pope appreciated Miss Cyrus's VMA performance of August 25th, but that the Catholic Pontiff was simply stating a Catholic teaching.

"The Holy Father meant to stress that God's love was unconditional and available to all," Vatican spokesman Rev. Thomas Rosica said. "If Miley Cyrus can stop twerking long enough to get her wits about her, and if she can put her tongue back in her face where it belongs, then yes, God's love will be there for her too."