Friday, June 17, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
John Kenneth Galbraith Essay
I would like to reflect on one of the oldest of human exercises, the process by which over the years, and indeed over the centuries, we have undertaken to get the poor off our conscience.
Rich and poor have lived together, always uncomfortably and sometimes perilously, since the beginning of time. Plutarch was led to say: "An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics." And the problems that arise from the continuing co-existence of affluence and poverty--and particularly the process by which good fortune is justified in the presence of the ill fortune of others--have been an intellectual preoccupation for centuries. They continue to be so in our own time.
One begins with the solution proposed in the Bible: the poor suffer in this world but are wonderfully rewarded in the next. The poverty is a temporary misfortune; if they are poor and also meek they eventually will inherit the earth. This is, in some ways, an admirable solution. It allows the rich to enjoy their wealth while envying the poor their future fortune. [Harry Crews's "Pages from the Life of a Georgia Innocent" discusses the romanticizing of poverty.]
Much, much later, in the twenty or thirty years following the publication in 1776 of The Wealth of Nations--the late dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Britain--the problem and its solution began to take on their modern form.Jeremy Bentham, a near contemporary of Adam Smith, came up with the formula that for perhaps fifty years was extraordinarily influential in British and, to some degree, American thought. This was utilitarianism. "By the principle of utility," Bentham said in 1789, "is meant the principal which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question." Virtue is, indeed must be, self-centered. While there were people with great good fortune and many more with great ill fortune, the social problem was solved as long as, again in Bentham's words, there was "the greatest good for the greatest number." Society did its best for the largest possible number of people; one accepted that the result might be sadly unpleasant for the many whose happiness was not served.
In the 1830's a new formula, influential in no slight degree to this day, became available for getting the poor off the public conscience. This is associated with the names of David Ricardo, a stockbroker, and Thomas Robert Malthus, a divine. The essentials are familiar: the poverty of the poor was the fault of the poor. And it was so because it was a product of their excessive fecundity: their grievously uncontrolled lust caused them to breed up to the full limits of the available subsistence.
Rich and poor have lived together, always uncomfortably and sometimes perilously, since the beginning of time. Plutarch was led to say: "An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics." And the problems that arise from the continuing co-existence of affluence and poverty--and particularly the process by which good fortune is justified in the presence of the ill fortune of others--have been an intellectual preoccupation for centuries. They continue to be so in our own time.
One begins with the solution proposed in the Bible: the poor suffer in this world but are wonderfully rewarded in the next. The poverty is a temporary misfortune; if they are poor and also meek they eventually will inherit the earth. This is, in some ways, an admirable solution. It allows the rich to enjoy their wealth while envying the poor their future fortune. [Harry Crews's "Pages from the Life of a Georgia Innocent" discusses the romanticizing of poverty.]
Much, much later, in the twenty or thirty years following the publication in 1776 of The Wealth of Nations--the late dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Britain--the problem and its solution began to take on their modern form.Jeremy Bentham, a near contemporary of Adam Smith, came up with the formula that for perhaps fifty years was extraordinarily influential in British and, to some degree, American thought. This was utilitarianism. "By the principle of utility," Bentham said in 1789, "is meant the principal which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question." Virtue is, indeed must be, self-centered. While there were people with great good fortune and many more with great ill fortune, the social problem was solved as long as, again in Bentham's words, there was "the greatest good for the greatest number." Society did its best for the largest possible number of people; one accepted that the result might be sadly unpleasant for the many whose happiness was not served.
In the 1830's a new formula, influential in no slight degree to this day, became available for getting the poor off the public conscience. This is associated with the names of David Ricardo, a stockbroker, and Thomas Robert Malthus, a divine. The essentials are familiar: the poverty of the poor was the fault of the poor. And it was so because it was a product of their excessive fecundity: their grievously uncontrolled lust caused them to breed up to the full limits of the available subsistence.
Not Writing
"I should say a little more about this, about not writing. A lot of people ask me about it, and I ask myself. And asking myself why I do not write inevitably leads to another, much more unsettling question: why did I ever write? After all, the normal thing is to read. I have two preferred answers. The first, that my poetry was- without my knowledge- an attempt to create an identity for myself; having created and assumed this identity, I was no longer concerned to throw myself into every poem I set about writing, which is what fascinated me. The other, that it was all a mistake: I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem. And to a degree, an unfortunate degree, I have achieved this; like any reasonably well-crafted poem, I am all need and internal submission to that tormented tyrant, that insomniac, omniscient and ubiquitous Big Brother: Me. Half Caliban, Half Narcissus, I fear him most when I hear him interrogate me, next to an open balcony: "What's a boy of 1950 like you doing in an indifferent year like this?" All the rest is silence."
-Jaime Gil de Biedma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Gil_de_Biedma
-Jaime Gil de Biedma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Gil_de_Biedma
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Perhaps, the Aesthetic Phenomenon
"Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenom."
-Jorge Luis Borges
-Jorge Luis Borges
Life and How to Leave It
"Every author is surprised anew at the way in which his book, as soon as he has sent it out, continues to live a life of its own; it seems to him as if one part of an insect had been cut off and now went on its way. Perhaps he forgets it almost entirely, perhaps he rises above the view expressed therein, perhaps even he understands it no longer, and has lost that impulse upon which he soared at the time he conceived the book; meanwhile it seeks its readers, inflames life, pleases, horrifies, inspires new works, becomes the soul of designs and actions,- in short it lives like a creature endowed with mind and soul, and yet is no human being. The happiest fate is that of an author who, as an old man, is able to say that all there was of him of life-inspiring, strengthening, exalting, enlightening thoughts and feelings still lives on in his writings, and that he himself now only represents the gray ashes, whilst the fire has been kept alive and spread out. And if we consider that every human action, not only a book, is in some way or other the cause of other actions, decisions, and thoughts; that everything that happens is inseparable connected with everything else that is going to happen, we recognize the real immortality, that of movement, -that which has once moved is enclosed and immortalised in the general union of all existence...
...The thinker, as likewise the artist, who has put his best self into his works, feels an almost malicious joy when he sees how mind and body are being slowly damaged and destroyed by time, as if from a dark corner he were spying a thief at his money-chest, knowing all the time that it was empty and his treasures in safety."
-Friedrich Nietzsche- from Human, All-Too-Human
...The thinker, as likewise the artist, who has put his best self into his works, feels an almost malicious joy when he sees how mind and body are being slowly damaged and destroyed by time, as if from a dark corner he were spying a thief at his money-chest, knowing all the time that it was empty and his treasures in safety."
-Friedrich Nietzsche- from Human, All-Too-Human
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Irredeemable Deplorability
Around the time big tobacco introduced its first youth-access programs, anti-tobacco advocates had given up trying to beat the industry at the state and federal levels. These higher levels of government were too tightly controlled by the industry and were no longer very responsive to activists. So anti-tobacco proponents had begun approaching their city council members, who were more responsive and less likely to be swayed by corporate influence. Smoking bans had started to appear in local jurisdictions around the country, and progress had been made in getting smoking out of restaurants and workplaces.
Alarmed by the shift, the tobacco industry realized it was vulnerable. Because it had no similar grassroots networks to oppose these local efforts, it started retailer programs like It's the Law, We Card to defeat them.
Youth programs served the industry on several levels. They gave it cover against the charge that it targeted kids, and they generated goodwill among legislators. But these retailer programs also served another function: They gave the industry an opening to have company representatives conduct personal visits with retailers all over the country. Under the guise of instructing retailers to check for IDs as part of a youth-access program, industry representatives asked retailers to monitor political activity in their towns and paid them to report back to the Tobacco Institute at the first appearance of any problems (like citizens pushing for a smoking ban) so the institute could mobilize.
An institute document made public years later stated, "For monitoring purposes, we fund our allies in the convenience store groups to regularly report on ordinance introductions and assist in campaigns to stop unreasonable measures... Promotion of the Institute's It's the Law program and other industry programs play a helpful role."
Retailers as well as restaurant and bar owners across the country started phoning the Tobacco Institute to let it know about "trouble" in their area, and the industry responded by flying representatives to those towns to generate and coordinate strident opposition- or at least the appearance of strident opposition- to the anti-smoking efforts.
In addition to using youth programs to help fight smoking bans, the industry used them to help fight cigarette taxes and marketing restrictions. The programs also generated goodwill with the governments of some foreign countries and even allowed Philip Morris to partner with foreign health ministries. In 2001 the company announced that it was "actively involved in more than 130 [youth-smoking prevention] programs in more than 70 countries." -from "Deadly Spin" by Wendell Potter
Alarmed by the shift, the tobacco industry realized it was vulnerable. Because it had no similar grassroots networks to oppose these local efforts, it started retailer programs like It's the Law, We Card to defeat them.
Youth programs served the industry on several levels. They gave it cover against the charge that it targeted kids, and they generated goodwill among legislators. But these retailer programs also served another function: They gave the industry an opening to have company representatives conduct personal visits with retailers all over the country. Under the guise of instructing retailers to check for IDs as part of a youth-access program, industry representatives asked retailers to monitor political activity in their towns and paid them to report back to the Tobacco Institute at the first appearance of any problems (like citizens pushing for a smoking ban) so the institute could mobilize.
An institute document made public years later stated, "For monitoring purposes, we fund our allies in the convenience store groups to regularly report on ordinance introductions and assist in campaigns to stop unreasonable measures... Promotion of the Institute's It's the Law program and other industry programs play a helpful role."
Retailers as well as restaurant and bar owners across the country started phoning the Tobacco Institute to let it know about "trouble" in their area, and the industry responded by flying representatives to those towns to generate and coordinate strident opposition- or at least the appearance of strident opposition- to the anti-smoking efforts.
In addition to using youth programs to help fight smoking bans, the industry used them to help fight cigarette taxes and marketing restrictions. The programs also generated goodwill with the governments of some foreign countries and even allowed Philip Morris to partner with foreign health ministries. In 2001 the company announced that it was "actively involved in more than 130 [youth-smoking prevention] programs in more than 70 countries." -from "Deadly Spin" by Wendell Potter
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Coorporate Hypoxia
Colorado Chiller didn't taste as good as the other leading coolers, Bartles and Jaymes and California Cooler. In fact, after just a few minutes in bright light the product turned, in technical brewing terms, "skunky". One Coors executive served the skunky drink at an outdoor barbecue, much to his embarrassment. As he later put it, "The penguins in the ad should say, 'Less Chilling...Tastes like Shit.'"
According to research, wine cooler drinkers in 1985 were young upscale women who were searching for an alternative to drinking beer. Yet when they tried Colorado Chiller they tasted beer not wine. As one Chiller drinker said, "It's as if a beer company tried to pull one over on us, calling it a cooler and then serving beer." Now why would a beer company do something like that?
The company's next foray into the new products arena was another "me too" counterattack product. The ignominious Herman Joseph's was a "super premium", or higher-priced beer, that was supposed to compete with the established and popular Michelob and Lowenbrau, and never did turn a profit.
According to research, wine cooler drinkers in 1985 were young upscale women who were searching for an alternative to drinking beer. Yet when they tried Colorado Chiller they tasted beer not wine. As one Chiller drinker said, "It's as if a beer company tried to pull one over on us, calling it a cooler and then serving beer." Now why would a beer company do something like that?
The company's next foray into the new products arena was another "me too" counterattack product. The ignominious Herman Joseph's was a "super premium", or higher-priced beer, that was supposed to compete with the established and popular Michelob and Lowenbrau, and never did turn a profit.
Contributing to the product's malaise was the odd brand name, which had been chosen to pay homage to a deceased Coors family member. In truth "Herman Joseph's" sounded more like a brand of men's designer clothing...The product's drab bottle, which lacked the distinctiveness and class of Michelob's (a patented tear-drop shape) and Lowenbrau's (which featured gold and silver foil wraps) didn't help either...One final effort was made in 1987 to resuscitate the brand. Attempting to cash in simultaneously on all of the crazes in beer marketing, the company renamed the product "Herman Joseph's Original Draft Light" and expanded distribution to twenty states...
Chuck Yeager had been hired because someone at Coors thought he could provide the inspiration to back Herman Joseph's new advertising theme: Take off with Herman Joseph's Original Draft Light."
The legendary pilot had an unenviable task. To begin with, Yeager, as Big Tim correctly observed, "didn't know a fucking thing about beer". Additionally, aviation heroes, whose piloting of multi-billion dollar planes required excellent hand-eye coordination and split second decision making, weren't exactly the most credible advocates for drinking beer.
Yeager deviated signifigantly from the script on his teleprompter. Most of his speech centered on the difficulty of flying jets, especially when pilots "urinated and defecated in their flight suits when they lost consciousness," or how jet pilots had to "urinate in their flight suits because there was no way to tailor the flight suits to urinating in the cockpit." Finally after a rambling twenty-five minutes, Yeager brought his talk back to beer by concluding, "And I'm sure that you're all going to make Herman Joseph's soar next year"...The cosmetic change to the brand name didn't fool consumers...After almost a decade of testing, the company finally stopped brewing Herman Joseph's in 1989.
-from "Silver Bullets: A Soldiers Story of How Coors Bombed in the Beer Wars" by Robert J. Burgess
The legendary pilot had an unenviable task. To begin with, Yeager, as Big Tim correctly observed, "didn't know a fucking thing about beer". Additionally, aviation heroes, whose piloting of multi-billion dollar planes required excellent hand-eye coordination and split second decision making, weren't exactly the most credible advocates for drinking beer.
Yeager deviated signifigantly from the script on his teleprompter. Most of his speech centered on the difficulty of flying jets, especially when pilots "urinated and defecated in their flight suits when they lost consciousness," or how jet pilots had to "urinate in their flight suits because there was no way to tailor the flight suits to urinating in the cockpit." Finally after a rambling twenty-five minutes, Yeager brought his talk back to beer by concluding, "And I'm sure that you're all going to make Herman Joseph's soar next year"...The cosmetic change to the brand name didn't fool consumers...After almost a decade of testing, the company finally stopped brewing Herman Joseph's in 1989.
-from "Silver Bullets: A Soldiers Story of How Coors Bombed in the Beer Wars" by Robert J. Burgess
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Woody Guthrie Poem
Voice
I don't know how far I'm going to have to go
To see my own self or to hear my own voice
I tuned in on the radio and for hours never heard it
And then I went to the moving pictures show
And never heard it there
I put handsful of coins into machines and watched records turn
But the voice there was no voice of mine
I mean it was not my voice
The words not my words that I hear in my own ears
When I walk along and look at your faces
I set here in a Jewish delicattassen, I order a hot pastrami
Sandwitch on rye bread and I hear the lady ask me
Would you like to have a portion of cole slaw on the side
And I knew when I heard her speak that
She spoke my voice
And I told her I would take my slaw on a side dish
And would like to have a glass of tea with lemon
And she knew that I was speaking her words
And a fellow sat across at a table near my wall
And spoke while he ate his salami and drank his beer
And somehow I had the feeling
As I heard him speak, and he spoke a long time,
But not one word was in my personal language,
And I could tell by the deep sound, by the full tone
Of his voice that he spoke my language
I suppose you may wonder just how he could speak
In a dialect that I could not savvy nor understand
And yet understand every sound that he made
I don't know how far I'm going to have to go
To see my own self or to hear my own voice
I tuned in on the radio and for hours never heard it
And then I went to the moving pictures show
And never heard it there
I put handsful of coins into machines and watched records turn
But the voice there was no voice of mine
I mean it was not my voice
The words not my words that I hear in my own ears
When I walk along and look at your faces
I set here in a Jewish delicattassen, I order a hot pastrami
Sandwitch on rye bread and I hear the lady ask me
Would you like to have a portion of cole slaw on the side
And I knew when I heard her speak that
She spoke my voice
And I told her I would take my slaw on a side dish
And would like to have a glass of tea with lemon
And she knew that I was speaking her words
And a fellow sat across at a table near my wall
And spoke while he ate his salami and drank his beer
And somehow I had the feeling
As I heard him speak, and he spoke a long time,
But not one word was in my personal language,
And I could tell by the deep sound, by the full tone
Of his voice that he spoke my language
I suppose you may wonder just how he could speak
In a dialect that I could not savvy nor understand
And yet understand every sound that he made
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Thomas Bernhard Interview
You're always presented as a kind of loner in the mountains, the man from the farm...
What can you do. You get a name, you're called "Thomas Bernhard", and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.
What can you do. You get a name, you're called "Thomas Bernhard", and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Spanish Bootlicking
"When performers make a slip of some kind, clearly exhibiting a discrepancy between the fostered impression and a disclosed reality, the audience may tactfully 'not see' the slip or readily accept the excuse that is offered for it. And at moments of crisis for the performers, the whole audience may come into tacit collusion with them in order to help them out...and with much delicacy help sustain the quite false impression that they have not absorbed the meaning of what has happened." -Erving Goffman
http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-dylan-thefts.html
http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/2010/06/bob-dylan-carl-sandburg-and-problem.html
http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-dylan-thefts.html
http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/2010/06/bob-dylan-carl-sandburg-and-problem.html
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