The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Own Goal

Krugman here on the prisoners of the american dream and the way Bush capitalizes on this in his skewed tax plan and his neo-liberal phantasy of an "ownership society:"

"The political problem with a policy favoring investment returns over wages is that a vast majority of Americans derive their income primarily from wages, and that the bulk of investment income goes to a small elite. How, then, can such a policy be sold? By promising that everyone can join the elite. "

Certainly this is obviously the tactic being used by the Bush, borrowed wholesale by the neoliberals that populate his silly little circle of performative economists. There is a local connection here at GMU, at least to the theory behind his seemingly beautiful "ownership soctiety" wherein, as Bush says, "I understand if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America." The Institute for Humane Studies here at GMU has its own version of this oversimplified illumination of the neo-classical economists, involving cute fuzzy bunnies--which, of course, is something no one should be afraid of, right? The idea, as with Bush's logic, is that people will only keep from squandering natural resources if they are allowed to own them. In the game, you are invited (along with two computerized rival poachers) to play two versions, the first where the bunnies are held in common by the public, the second when they are privately owned.

In the first version, the round only ends when all of the bunnies are gone, thus it is over very quickly and it is in your interest to kill as many as you can b/c if you don't someone else will. And, of course, there are no other social or political factors involved that might restrain you from taking as many as you can.

In the second version, you own a certain number of bunnies. There is not an explanation of how you came to own them or who you might have dispossessed of bunnies in order to do so. You just own them and are invited to see how much better the game goes when you have the incentive to not kill all the bunnies you own because then they will reproduce and you will have an unbelievable bounty of bunnies since each year the remaining bunnies you have will all reproduce (b/c they're bunnies).

In classic classical logic, there is no discussion of how this will play out if you are competing in the sale of your bunnies with a massive corporation who has bought out all of the other bunny owners, has bought up much of the land and is colluding with the mortgage company you have paid for your high-tech bunny raising equipment (which must be used in order to raise the bunnies they want on our modern market). The giant bunny corporation has the power to flood the market or otherwise control the bunny market so that you are pretty much forced to either sell all your bunnies to them or to work for them in some capacity, ending rather quickly, the little utopia of the "ownership society" since, in fact, only a handful of major bunny production corporations control the entry into the market. There is no way for consumers to effectively control this via the elegant and useless mechanism of supply and demand b/c if they want bunnies, there are very few choices and, besides, they only want name brand bunnies anyway because that's what they see on TV. It is, indeed, a fantastic society for the people who are owners; it would just be nice if there were a few more of them. Unfortunately, in such an ownership society, the only role for government is to make sure that the owners qua owners are never threatened. If you used to be an owner, that's your problem and it is your own fault that you sold out and now have to work for Bugs Inc. or whatever the name of that corporation is. And if you had tried, at any point, to join together with the other bunny raisers and keep your culture and lifestyle from being destroyed, you probably would have been branded socialists and, ironically, as enemies of the "ownership society" despite the fact that you were the original owners.

But at least the neo-classical dimwits have a simple way of telling you what you should believe. Along these lines, here is a final "money" quote from Krugmann about the still not dead plan of privatizing social security:

Social Security is, basically, a system in which each generation pays for the previous generation's retirement. If the payroll taxes of younger workers are diverted into private accounts, there will be a gaping financial hole: who will pay benefits to older Americans, who have spent their working lives paying into the current system? Unless you have a way to fill that multitrillion-dollar hole, privatization is an empty slogan, not a real proposal.

In 2001, Mr. Bush's handpicked commission on Social Security was unable to agree on a plan to create private accounts because there was no way to make the arithmetic work. Undaunted, this year the Bush campaign once again insists that privatization will lead to a "permanently strengthened Social Security system, without changing benefits for those now in or near retirement, and without raising payroll taxes on workers." In other words, 2 - 1 = 4.

My favorite part, of course, is the Orwellian reference "2-1=4." The problem is really that these people would like to be able to sum up everything with an equation. As teleological as my own little description is, they would really like to believe that all of economic life can be described in this way. Maybe someday we will be able to, but before that is possible, people should know the likely outcome of their choices over the long term and that is something about which, save the imperative that people save for the future, this economic theory doesn't bother itself.

'Data Quality' Law Is Nemesis Of Regulation (washingtonpost.com)

a short summary/intro from near the beginning of the article on why a pesticide that has possibly caused hermaphrodite frogs is still able to be used:

"Hormone disruption, it read, cannot be considered a "legitimate regulatory endpoint at this time" -- that is, it is not an acceptable reason to restrict a chemical's use -- because the government had not settled on an officially accepted test for measuring such disruption."

It's a tricky thing to do, even if it is true. Who really knows how much genetic mutation is too much? It is a bit goofy, though, coming from a crowd who claims they don't want to go around playing God. Anyway, crazy how a few extra sentences in a regulation can make all the difference. Though I am sure there is more to this story, it is certainly something to be concerned about--and is just one more example of a drastic change slipped in under the post-9/11 radar by the Bush administration in the interest of combatting all those nasty scientists out there who, unfortunately, are more concerned with the possible genetic mutations in frogs (and maybe, even, someday, humans) than with the ever more important goal of making it possible for a pesticide company to make a buck. If only they could get their priorities straight. Why, they are almost as bad as the terrorists!

The New York Times > Opinion > About That Iraq Vote

A very good editorial in the NYT which takes Kerry to task not because he has changed his mind, but because he doesn't seem willing to give us the long version of that story, instead trying to justify earlier positions based on the logic and evidence of the present. My favorite point in the editorial though, which I made in an essay I have yet to type up, is that

"The Republicans have made much of this record; the Kerry campaign is haunted by replays of the theme song from the old TV show "Flipper." Mr. Bush, however, has a far more dangerous pattern of behavior. On issues from tax cuts to foreign policy, the president tends to stick stubbornly to his original course even when changing events cry out for adaptation. His explanations seem to evolve every day, but his thinking never does."

It would be nice to have a leader who was capable of complex thought. He wouldn't have to use it everyday, just in times of crisis or when the future of the country and/or the world relies upon it.

W Ketchup� | All Ketchup is not created equal

Here is the reason that democrats get clobbered: these OCD Republicans think of everything--even marketing a brand of ketchup so that the proceeds from Heinz (i.e. Kerry's wife's company) don't fund "Teresa Heinz and her liberal causes, such as Kerry for President."

My favorite part about this add is the implicit appeal to xenophobia (which is always charming in whatever context): "The leading competitor not only has 57 varieties, but has 57 foreign factories as well. W Ketchup comes in one flavor: American."

It is also really amazing to look at the amount of press it has received.

McSweeney's: The Future Dictionary
of America

Last summer abouth this time, Eggers and Co. seemed to be determined to simply and somewhat quitely blaze their own path in the culture wars. They didn't seem to be consciously remaining nuetral; just attempting to change the entire terms of the debate.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/13/CM280047.DTL

They certainly have effected some changes at the cultural level and now it seems that these changes are being made at a more overtly political level as well. With the release of the "Future Soundtrack for America" and the "Future Soundtrack for America" they are consciously using their cultural capital to move change in a positive direction.

This is, I think, a very exciting development and if I had world enough and time (and more importantly enough money) I would certainly be buying and reading everything they produced. It is reassuring to see this happening. It is energizing to know that we are not alone. Things must change. And I am firmly convinced that if there isn't positive change in this country, whoever ends up sitting in that office on Penn, there will have to be some sort of popular revolt. The ISAs are getting flimsy, new ones are being constituted and unless the state figures out how to match the material reality to the cultural consciousness then it will only be able to retain its control via the fascist RSAs it has waiting in the wings. Or perhaps nothing at all will happen; we will all simply bow again to the powerful, let them go to war as they please.

It is absurd in a way that the problems of the country are so focused on the person in the oval office. Obviously the executive branch has power and that power is most obviously extended since it sprouts from one source. But there was no resistance in congress worth talking about, all the senators and reps approved this ridiculous excuse for a security/?/humanitarian mission. Why no outrage over those elections? Why no discussion of their responsibility and our own culpability in the fantastic re-election of a republican congress at Bush's mid-term? It's laughable and stupid how quickly we forget.

But I digress...the essential thing to stress is that the election, as important it is, is far from the only thing that we have to think about. We need a broad cultural change. And it isn't enough to restate the old diatribes of the past thirty years, to warm over the culture wars that the Republicans think they are fighting.

They want abortion illegal. I understand the principle of fighting this. Its fascist, patriarchal, and an infringement on women's civil liberties in the most fundamental and intimate of ways. But why not introduce and support a bill that makes abortion illegal--that plays to their moral base--but which expands welfare and employment programs, makes sex education programs based on science not ideology, offers day care subsidies and gives universal healthcare coverage to every American? If you're going to be patriarchal, after all, might as well go all the way. If they want to take care of women and tell them what to do with their bodies, they have to go all the way. How will they look when they reject this bill, the bill they have claimed to be fighting for all along, when they say, well, we care about women and we care about their children, but we aren't all that interested in helping them out once we've made them do what we tell them to about their children. Suddenly the wolf is no longer a sheep. HE (because he is a he in this case) is exposed. When they have to turn down the bill based on the complex part of their ideology that says everything else except women's bodies should be governed by the free market, their bleeding heart base will have no choice but to see they've been played.

They want to keep gay marriage from happening. Fine. Just introduce a bill that says the US government will no longer mingle in affairs of the heart or of the church: there will no longer be a category of citizens called "married." It will simply be some sort of cultural activity, sort of like joining a book club: membership migh have its benefits, but none of them will be sanctioned by the state. This certainly will make any benefits accruing to gay couples because there will simply be no way in which married people get any special benefits (this will be helped along by the whole universal health care bill passed above.) This bill will have the same effect as the GOP's pitiful attempt at amending the constitution: it is simply there to affect their base. Only this time, it isn't there to play to the base of the party presenting the bill, but to play to the opposing party's base, to show them that, not only are their representatives far from representing their interests, but that the opposite party isn't beyond compromise: they just aren't going to give something for nothing.

If they want the free market to be the only regulator of prices and the health of corporate entities, that, in the case of national parks, etc., communities should be able to decide what is done with their land and resources, then let them de-regulate every industry in the country, but increase mandatory sentances for any form of corporate fraud to ten year, make any form of tax subsidies or government bailouts illegal (free market, right) and pass anti-lobbying measures whereby anytime a lobbyist is in contact with a politician, an elected representative of a popularly recognized citizen oversight group must be present. They say we should give people in Alaska the right to decide what is done with the wildlife refuge there: fine, lets let them decide. And if the people of Alaska decide to make a withdrawal from their supply of the public wealth of the nation, well lets just make sure that the rest of us are given some sort of reimbursement: any citizen from Alaska that wants to visit any other national park in the country will have to pay a higher price to make up for their deduction. Fair enough, right.

All of that could backfire if it is done wrong, but if you could get enough people behind it and you made, for instance, the restrictions on abortion contingent on the receipt of benefits, i.e. women who might have had an abortion would only be prevented from doing so if they got their health care coverage, then it might be a good tactic for a large strategy of creating revolutionary change and a widespread re-consideration of what the role of the state is. In short, there needs to be a discussion about fundamentals not just culture wars. I feel like, on some level, McSweeney's and Eggers are working towards this goal, even if it is unstated. I also think that all of us would do well to be less polarized about these debates. The truth of the matter is that even if Kerry wins in the fall, we will all have to work very hard--together with the people who didn't vote for him--to carve out a viable future for America. I hope we are all up to the task.

Department of Art & Technology

Homeland Insecurity Advisory System

iraq

possible site for Vis cult class--though I am not quite sure what the nature of it is...

JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyway.com

What to say about this.

Much more to be said about this:

http://www.fthevote.com/process.php

but I'm not going to be the one to say it, at least not today.
What is more interesting to me is the Carbon Defense League, the group that has started FTV, which sounds like some sort of oil company lobby, but is actually a sort of anarchist art ensemble btu with very practical projects. Though it does seem like the feds are still not too happy with the kinds of work they are doing, already arresting a few of the artists under terrorism charges. Yippee! nothing ever changes!

Weather Underground--Main Page

Watched The Weather Underground last night. After the first viewing, my first thought was that it would be a good film to show in class to talk about a variety of issues. It first and foremost provides a less sanitized understanding of both the social situation and the popular(?) response of the 1960s. Normally this era is spoken about with simple platitudes and commonplaces--or not spoken about at all: I am reminded of the student in Unit III last year who, when writing a history research paper on events in the 1960s, claimed that there simply wasn't much written about that time period because "everyone was so drugged out they don't remember anything."

For that, this film at least gives a bit of a greater understanding of what was going on (though I don't actually know what was going on, just trying to piece it together myself 40 years after the fact.) Either way, it seems like a fairly important bit of history, however one feels about it. There are certainly parallels today with other "revolutionaries" like Tim McViegh and his Turner Diary reading National Alliance pals who want to overthrow the overly "colored" government of America, redistribute wealth "back" to the white population. In fact it is sometimes striking to see the way that some of their rhetoric seems to gel fairly well, depite the fact that the latter are overtly racist--even praise racism as a positive attribute--and see Leninism (or Bolshevisim) as another part of a Jewish led conspiracy to take over the world from "white civilization," both of which are tenets exaclty the opposite of those espoused by both the SDS and the "Weatherpeople" (as Todd Gitlin refers to them, in his politically correct way).

But here is where I think the film fails to be anything more than a simple propaganda film for the Weathermen. While it certainly introduces some compelling arguments about a different kind of society and problems with this one, there is this elephant in the room that no one is really talking about. P. Smith always tells me that Americans will readily believe many Marxist ideas as long as you don't call them that. This is almost surely true with most Liberal Americans, and even some of the Neo-liberals, so long as one doesn't see the state as a vehicle for those changes. It is also probably true that you could read many of the tenets of traditional conservatism without callnig it as such and get as many people in agreement. In both cases, however, it seems to do little good to provide the ideologies as if you just came up with them. The film makes only passing references to what the FBI called the Weathermen's "Marxist-Leninist conception of armed struggle." If the goal of the film was to inform people about the movement, to clarify its place in history and not just provide a somewhat redeeming explanation of its actions, this seems like an essential element to include.

By obscuring the Leninist and Maoist background of this movement it really does a disservice to history in a variety of ways. First off, many of the national liberation movements that are discussed in the film as the revolutionary context in which this takes place were motivated by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movements. Of course, if we were all being honest, these ideas wouldn't be a challenge to Modernity and the enlightenment that produced the revolutions in the US, France and elsewhere--the US Revolution being the 0nly revolution in the history of the world that we can use as an example of the "right" kind of revolution. The irony of history is that in the place of these Marxist-Leninist-Maoist traditions which were actually strongly in the western tradition, we are now facing a decidedly anti-modern version of revolution in the Whabbist Islamists. (I'm sure that there is more to it than just being anti-modern, but that is the party line here in the USA.)

Nevertheless, by leaving out this detail, by almost wholly obscuring the communist background of these movements--not only in their theory, but also in the co-presence of many other similar movements--the film removes it from that tradition of struggle, which, for better or worse, seemed to be coming to fruition at that historical moment. It also makes it seem like all of these movements were solely motivated by the historical circumstances that existed at the time. Though this is true to an extent--and the film certainly begins to show the energy of the moment, if only from a certain perspective--it is surely the ideas espoused by "Professional revolutionaries" in almost every country struggling for independence that motivated the particular direction of that struggle.

I understand completely the reason for not highlighting this aspect. And I am ambivalent about the effect that it would have had overall. By not including a discussion of Marxism-Leninism, one therefore doesn't have to go to the trouble of explaining it as an ideology. This, of course, would surely be necessary if the discussion was to be of any value to a contemporary audience. The past century has produced a common sense--both through the ideological apparatuses of capitalism and the astounding repressiveness of much of the communist world-- about Marxism that is so aversive to even considering it as a theory or an idea in itself that to introduce it as something that seemed like a legitimate idea at the time would necessitate another 30 minutes of explanation. This explanation, in order to be effective, would have to include the historical successes and failures of both nominally communist and capitalist nations; it would have to make clear the stakes of the struggle; it would, in effect be an whole other movie. And, as much as the film seems to be giving the Weathermen too fair of a shake, it wouldn inevitably come off as a communist propaganda film to American audiences if it tried to mention Marxism as anything other than the greatest (or now second greatest) evil the world has ever known.

Of course this understanding was also present at the time and would explain much of the FBI's crazed and unlawful (gestapo? dictatorial?) actions in pursuing these dissidents. They somewhat correctly believed that these students had ties to the world communist struggle (though they might have had ideological ties, there don't seem to be any material ties) and, again, ironically, seemed ready to quell dissent in anything other than a "free speech zone" kind of way with surprising amounts of surveillance, suppression and even murder, maknig their difference from the communist police one of only degrees. But pointing out that this group was ostensibly communist and the FBI was operating with a Cold War mentality does much to illuminate why they felt it so necessary to go to these extreme measures. Not only does this help us to understand those actions, but it also serves as a warning to us today when there are already roundups of Muslims and still Daniel Pipes, a widely read columnist and a member of the presidentially-appointed board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, wrote just yesterday (quoting from an article of "late 2001:"

"Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers."
Militant Islam is the enemy; even its slickest adherents need to be viewed as such.

Daniel Pipes. "A Slick Islamist Heads to Jail." New York Sun August 3, 2004

This is the ideological climate that we live in today and it isn't all that different from that in which the weathermen and the black panthers were operating. And it seems that this repression on the part of the FBI had as little to do with the actual ideologies employed by these militants than it was a simple response to their militancy. And this militancy was only a problem in so far as it was gaining popular support. In that regard, it is as much a warning of things to come as it is a document of what was going on in the 1960s and 70s. In other words, I think that, with the proper background, this film could surely be included in one of the weeks of Unit III--perhaps the one on ideology.

Speech made by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba, at the ceremony for the 51st anniversary of the attack on the Moncada: "June 21, at the Anti-imperialist Forum I read Epistle Number Two to the president of the United States, responding to an infamous State Department report on trafficking in human beings, one of those reports the government of that country usually issues, as if it were the supreme moral judge of the world. In that document Cuba is accused of being one of the countries that promotes sexual tourism and child pornography."

This is such a strange document. I've never read anything that castro has written or said, but it is so strange to hear a leader ramble on, quoting from texts and studies. This must be something that is only the privilege of a dictator: he can afford to be boring and underwhelm the television viewers. It is also strange to think of Cuba as anything more than a dictatorship--or to consider it from one polemical view or the other, i.e. as either a vicious dictatorship or a helpless pawn being bandied about by the US. Either way the speech is interesting.

The Democratic Dividend - The stock market prefers Democratic presidents to Republicans. Why? By Carol�Vinzant

I've been a bit absent, working (some) on fields, but mostly grading papers--a fairly instrumental process since it seems that both the students and I are hip to the fact that it's mostly a lot of busy work. But they get credit for it and I get paid so no one's talking.

YellowTimes.org - "America's pathetic liberals: the sequel"

Out of town for a while...the first thing I've read in a few weeks that has really turned my head. I have never felt so awed by being abused and criticized. The author makes some brillint points about the current situation but, of course, leaves no indication of what might be done about it. Typical.

though Jane mag isn't evidently interested in entering the digital age and thus I can't link to the story, the latest issue ("Summer"?) has an article on Dov Charney of American Apparel. The article is provocative and maybe even a bit disturbing from a certain perspective due to the way sex operates in the marketing of his product. In my understanding of the most dominant strain of feminist politics, his playful sexuality which seems to sort of blend sex and work (i.e. he has relationships at work with subordinates). He is also one of the chief photographers of these young girls. While the business is more ethical in terms of labor practices--and it is obvious that not *everyone* who works there is some sort of sleazy fodder for "the boss"--there is certainly a definite political issue with this.

On the other hand, much of the way I feel about this could be some lurking puritanical fantasy about the place for sex in society. It is interesting to consider the way Charney frames it in the article: "I think sex motivates everything [...] It motivates my work, too. You don't want something that's sexually driven, like panties, but then have them made in a horrible sweatshop. Like, I know my workers have a good time. They drink beer, they have relationships, they have girlfriends and boyfriends. [. . . .] It's fun to make money and pay people well."

First of, Charney is certainly not the only clothes manufacturer using sex to sell his wares, the only difference is that he is pointing to the fact that the places where these products are made--these products like the new Gap sundresses with those wildly sexual ads on TV--are made in very unsexy working conditions. Though there is certainly much to be unpacked in the way that sex is so wrapped up with consumerism, it is certainly an important appropriation (even if it is ultimately motivated by market concerns.) On the other hand, sex and consumption are certainly not all that foreign to one another and, according to Weber anyway, they would have been wrapped up with the protestant ethic in the early days of the most successful cultures of capitalism. That they have both become rampant (and interrelated) shouldn't come as a surprise, but it should make us ask how that pattern arose.

Second, the sort of appropriation that he is making--along with the various muses who work for him--seems to be picking up steam. Jane itself this month features a photo of Drew Barrymore with a t-shirt that says "politics is like sex: protect yourself...vote." Not sure how the metaphor (or is that a similie?) works, but this shirt is the subject of another article in the issue. Not very familair with the magazine itself, but it has its own thing going on which I don't really understand. In addition, sites such as http://www.beaverpower.com/ seem to be trying to tap into something like this. Their site features photos of young women wearing their t-shirts and proclaiming BEAVER POWER IS MAKING ENVIRONMENTALISM FUN AND SEXY! The site also features a quote by media and social critic Sut Jhally: "The imperative task for those who want to stress a different set of values is to make the struggle for social change fun and sexy."

To me this is a good idea--and one that is certainly not limited to the politics on the left. Last year when the Lysistrata movement was advocating an end to the war, a popular (in social location not in its mass appeal) right wing group of bloggers started a "f*ck for freedom" movement that was using the same appropriation of sex to sell the war on Iraq. Though I can't seem to find the original poster who created the graphics and started some of the movement, this particular blogger--who even got a couple of bones thrown by Sully at the time--was instrumental in spreading the word
http://www.asparagirl.com/blog/2003_03_02_archives.html
Likewise, aspiragirl launched another obscure artist into the public eye who used a similar sexualized image--this time also including a certain amount of matriachal imagery--to promote a sexy sort of violence that helped create a place for women who didn't identify with the "code pink" stance on the war--a movement which was certainly a bit old fashioned in its gender politics and was a bit overzealous in saying that all women have that peace and love stance. It, in fact, practically asked for this opposing movement.

So, to return to charney, it seems that, despite its blatent appeal to the market--and the fact that it seems the entire company runs in part on his charisma and thus would be hard to duplicate or expand too very far--american apparel is an important alternative to the much more exploitative practices of just about every other clothing manufacturer in the country. I would be interested hearing what a more feminist-minded person might say about this (which is not to say that I don't think about feminism, but that I don't think about it nearly enough to know what current trends of thought are--likewise with race studies, which would also have much to say about this particular case since most of his workforce is latino and many of the women (who also have key roles in running the company--even if they are also models for the ads) are non-white to one degree or another.) Finally, it will be interesting, now that the company is picking up steam, to see how they handle success and how they age: for instance, right now, many of these young women in charge of the company are models as well. As they get older and become both more embedded in the corporate structure and perhaps, less able to represent that young, carefree sexiness of their late 20s, will they simply hire more models giving them little stake in the company? I suppose it is something they will have to decide when they get there.

reading Lukacs "history and class consciousness"

One of the points he makes often in the 1967 preface is the problem that he had early on of having two contradictory strains of thought which he believed and of how to reconcile these--particularly with regard to the division between theory and praxis, that is, he believed something as a theorist, but in his praxis, he could see gaping holes or clear paradoxes that existed. While I sympathize with this--and have a first hand experience with it working in the SOC--I also find myself feeling this way about his theory itself.

Much of what he says about the totality and the method of marxist knowledge production is familiar to me and the way he elucidates it is striking in its clarity and logic. However, underlying all of this is a deep belief that he has in the coming revolution--no doubt inspired by the events of 1917 which were fresh on his mind in the early 20s when he wrote this. Much of what he says here sounds a bit ridiculous in its teleology. I will try to find a good example, but for now let me just present my own paradoxical position: I find the description he gives of a method important. it seems to be a clear predecessor to the position of cultural studies and I can see ways in which it also foretells althusser and the regulationist economists. On the other hand, it seems to be informed or underpinned by this firm belief in the coming upheaval and seems to largely overlook the ideological power of capitalism as a sort of elysian field that draws people to it even as it exploits and alienates them. The promise of capital has been far more powerful a force on people's consciousnesses than history--or any particular understanding of history--has been thus far. Perhaps he is saying more than this, but at this stage I feel like there is this contradiction I am trying to resolve: if this method is based on the assunption that the knowledge produced by the "ruthless criticism of everything existing" qua the totality is both linked to an a causal force in a form of social revolution that seems doomed to fail because it can't form a bulwark against a capitalist world without becoming ruthlessly capitalist itself. In other words, if this theory is rooted in this practice, can I consider one viable even as I think the other somewhat laughable in the form he presents it? This will be the question I seek to answer as I move onward in this text.

ABC news is using coverage commentary to assure americans that the rest of the world is feeling our patriotism with us because they are seeing our ceremony. There are some really money quotes here that are exceptional in their nationalism: that people around the world are watching our state funeral and experiencing our grief with us (qua 9/11) and therefore improving our tarnished image abroad is stunning in its ideological coherence. It is an absurd line of reasoning, but one that they parrot willingly--along with Terry Moran who claims that the affinity people have for the US in eastern europe is the result of reagan's policy. Within just a few minutes, all of the talking heads said just this, over and over. It may have a certain reasonableness in the context, but that doesn't make it any more laughable--especially because they seem to believe it. It is a strange way to reassure people to claim the continued love of America around the world is inspired by someone as controversial as Reagan. On the other hand, he was far less blunt an instrument than the current president. It is odd to think of reagan as nuanced, but I guess everything is relative.

Ambivalence in Former 'Evil Empire' (washingtonpost.com): "But Russia under President Vladimir Putin is hardly the free society that Reagan once envisioned. Instead, it is a country deeply ambivalent about democracy, where many "

Clearly a story that will get lost in all the hubbub. certainly there is more to the collapse of the USSR than the narrative of reagan's life can illuminate. It's kind of absurd to wrap up the disintegration of a country and a culture, a complete transformation of the world as something one guy did. It shows the fetishistic desire of people to have a clearly understandable, manichean vision of history. this is even more clearly illustrated by the fact that people seem to have no idea what is going on in Russia today--the only important point is that we ended it as a communist country. This certainly foretells the way we will think about Afghanistan and Iraq: it ultimately won't matter what happens in those countries after attention is shifted, but what "we" did to end the "evil" inside of them. Another interesting parallel is visible in this quote from the article:

Sergei Karaganov, a foreign policy expert, said that for most Russians, Reagan's name is indelibly associated with his denunciation of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," and "he was not loved for it."

Karaganov added, "At that time people were insulted, they thought it was unfair to them. It was not an empire already, it was an empty shell, so people believed he was insincere, an old-time Cold Warrior. Looking from the other side of the fence, knowing the emptiness of the system and seeing the leader of a powerful country lambasting the Soviet Union as a powerful threat seemed like a bad joke."

this last quote is utterly reminescent of the empty shell of a country we attacked last year--something that was done with some obvious awareness that it would be an easy fight.



watching the funeral...
bush's speech a ridiculous charicature of the story, myth about reagan. Yet it is obvious that he really believes this.

the battle hymn of the republic followed--arranged to sound like some sort of chorale.

then a speech from some minister in which he ties reagan to 9/11--or more says that reagan was already battling that force and saw clearly the threat even then. "a triumph of light," reagan was spreading the freedom qua a gift of god. In this case, Reagan is like jesus or something. Just the kind of thing the country needs to renew its nationalistic, jingoistic pride and its desire to carry on with world domination regardless of the consequences.

followed by "amazing grace"

more prayers, etc.

8 pallbearers each from a different branch of the military doing their thing to some sort of theme that is strangely reminescent of something from a jerry bruckhiemer movie

Here is something that is also interesting from Gorbechev

All of this is followed by a lot of footage with the bells in the background of the coffin going into the hearse, dignitaries trickling out of the national cathedral (such as nancy, the queen and prince of England, etc.) and a lot of really quiet, seamless footage of the cathedral. I can't figure out how they are positioned or where, but there are a lot of semi-aerial shots and many that move from a ground shot of these people leaving to a shot about ten or fifteen feet off the ground to this sort of wierd perspective shot of the cathedral towers (wish I could remember what those are called). There are also all kinds of soldiers and sailors carrying their rifles.

finally everyone if filing out of the cathedral, talking so that occasionally the mike picks up random snippets of conversation--just saw kucinich (is that possible?).

now moved to a silent shot of air force one--which is supposed to carry the coffin from DC back to CA for the interment. It's a rather strange, boring shot to move to, except that we can see the press corps and the Howitzers--both set to go off when the coffin arrives. My sense is that this is one of the only feeds allowed--the government camera or something.

Now a helicoptor arrives presumedly carrying the body which I suppose they transferred from the motorcade--something that only seems necessary if we're concerned with TV time rather than ceremonial time--it wouldn't take more than 15 minutes or so to drive to national but a helicoptor--even with the transfer time, would probably take a third of the time. This concern would probably only happen b/c of TV.

Now the helicoptor has landed and they've let the pleb out onto the tarmac to watch the transfer/create the massive crowd.

Upon second thought, this is probably not national airport but Andrews AFB--maybe making the helicoptor a bit more necessary.

honor guard is out; camera moves to follow them. low drum beat begins; band takes their positions--looks like a very big band--around the doors of the plane. Probably all musicians from Fort Meyer.

10 minutes after helicoptor landed with still no sign of the coffin. perhaps that's not where it was after all.

Now, for some reason, one of the air force one (or two?) 747s is in motion--the one that was closest to the helicoptor that landed. Now it takes off, I guess carrying the body. the cameras follow it into the overcast sky. Then focus in on the howitzers, the soldiers, the crowd, the Honor guard in front of the other plane...everything is quiet except for the sound of the plane engines...notably, it seems like all of the soldiers and musicians are men. Now they are standing almost perfectly still, at attention

more helicoptors seem to be arriving and they look more like the secret service crafts reserved for the president. But the television says that there is definitely a motorcade taking the body so I am not sure who or what took off in AF1 earlier.

TV also having an extensive conversation about Reagan...mostly about his "faith" his religion, etc.

Music For America (MfA)

nice site with some very entertaining MPGs.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: What I Actually Mean When I Say I Love You: Thirty Scenarios

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Teacher Salaries

The Cutting Edge - Why some doctors are moving away from performing surgery on babies of indeterminate gender. By Claudia�Kolker

Welcome to Landscapes of Capital

Comparative Urban Studies Project @ the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

An interesting book (it sounds like) by two world bank folks that presented at the program Karen is working at on Urban Development. The writers are using much of the terminology of cultural studies and sociology--especially of Bourdieu (though it could also be coined somewhere else)-- to talk about some of the problems of international development. Though I am not sure what the true thrust of the work is, this is a much more practical application of these ideas than I usually see. I appreciate this use of the language and ideas and I think it shows an inportant trajectory to follow--especially if it retains a critical edge and doesn't become instrumentalized (though the latter is all but inevitable.)

After a nigth out with Pablo-always a good time--talking about global finance, it occurs to me that another logical project that would have just as much of a connection between the two fields (maybe even more so) would be to talk about the debit card in the US and the way that it and the credit card have been framed in the terms of the millennial discourse of globalization ("it's everywhere you want to be...") they aren't necessarily unique in their use of this marketing, but the global reach of finance capital and the habitus created by these two instruments (both embodied in the ubiquitous "card") which helps to create both a dematerialized notion of money, reifying fictitous capital, and to instill a natural feeling to racking up tremendous debt. Viewing the change over time in advertisements for credit cards vs. the global finance regimes being implanted would be a fairly concrete project. It would also eliminate the need to discuss determination in any causal sense for both would be products of the same producers. There could be a chapter on the way that people use cards and it would be very interesting to see the generational differences between people who opened bank accounts for the first time in the 90s (and hence see debit cards and ATM cards as natural and normal) and those who were mostly writing checks for thirty or more years before that. A very good other option--which would have a much more doable research agenda within the time allowed.

Sean Andrews--Internship advisor, Summer 2004, New Century College

The blog for the internships.

The Village Voice: Features: The Jesus Landing Pad by Rick Perlstein

Here's a story. I am worknig on the adjective to describe it because it would be funny or kooky if these people didn't have so much power; since it is regarding a top Bush administration official (and sort of sleazy Iran Contra guy) it is between scary and disgusting. But I guess all of this is about religion even if it is also about ethnicity. Obviously these things will get worse before they get better.

Z Magazine Online, May 2004 Table of Contents

ashlee says she's reading z-mag. haven't been follownig the pub, but it is interesting enough to keep attention. Hopefully we can tweak that attention so that it is a little more academic of an enthusiasm, but at this point I'm just glad to know that someone in Texas has a conscience and a consciousness of how it should be used. She's also reading Chomsky, who is also a good starting point though often a sort of cartoon version of himself. I would like him more if he admitted the long line of people who have been doing what he is doing in an academic sense, but he is nonetheless useful in blowing the minds of young people who are hungry for that interaction and experience. It would be even more useful if he didn't make most of his arguments on the basis of flimsy moralisms and focused more on the way that, for instance, neo-liberalism undermines itself. However, it is incomparably important to instill a popular understanding of the moral compass of a system in which every socially positive aspect of economic development is basically an externality--i.e. the main goal of all exchange is simply between those two "individuals" (be they corporate or otherwise) and if it results in other more public consequences like quality education, a healthy environment, strong families, modern medical care, or their polar opposites, well then that is just "external" to the exchange. We shouldn't expect any of this from the exchange and neither does capitalism; all of this, if it happens, comprises a vast realm of externalities which the market is almost totally unconcerned with except in so far as they begin to affect the market itself by making more or less educated, healthy workers, etc. Even then, the market isn't concerned with making more or less of them--or with having a more or less clean environment: it is only concerned with the price of those resources as commodities (i.e. people, land, resources.) That these are, as Polanyi calls them, false commodities, is beside the point. Once capital has created the instruments to make them so, everything is for sale. Therefore, to compain about "Profits over people" is in some ways irrelevant and fanciful. However, it certainly flies in the face of all the rhetoric which claims that this system inherently functions to "raise all boats." And, perhaps this is the most useful thing about these popular leftist diatribes: they provide a striking dissonance to the accepted order which generates a critical distance from the status quo and an alternative subject position. If this position can then be developed more fully into a reflexivly nuanced understanding of the ideas being contested, seeing the problems and possibilities of both, understanding the "other side" is equally convinced of their morality and thus unable to be contested on those grounds except in all out ideological warfare (or direct action) in which the goal is basically to have "our side" win. This I see as equally dangerous for democratic participation in the long run, but as the hegemonic forces seem to gather all the cards for themselves, as Paul Smith quotes Baudrillard on 9/11: "It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this retaliation. By seizing all the cards for itself, it forced the Other to change the rules" (p.9). Or, in another context, a more popular voice once claimed:

Those who make peacful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy

Theories of communication--Mattelart and Mattelart

good intro that starts with Adam Smith and Quesnay and moves from there...good breakdown of the field into seven components that might be useful to my field and have a key organizing understanding of the field as being non-chronological, i.e. a circularity of these theories. Nevertheless, they still root all the theories of communication in the sociological theories (and the logic of the social) of the time. A good resource for a bibliography of Communication starting with "the social organism" and coming almost full circle to concepts of the network (perhaps fortelling Armand's later work "networking the world" which links this same sort of intellectual development (qua ideological development) to the technological development of communcation networks.


So far it has helped me to make a distinction between a pragmatist and a funcitonalist approach--which should be completely obvious but which I had not made before. I.e. the pragmatist approach has a certain set of goals it sees as necessary or desirable to accomplish--e.g. Dewey--while the functionalist approach claims to be non-partisan in its development of the facts of communication but, as Elias says at one point, had an implicit set of assumptions in the way that it defined things like a non-function or a disfunction (30).

Ambitious Vehicles: Cultural Studies and/of "The Hummer"

I have struggled a long time with how to frame this paper about the Hummer such that it is definitely a cultural studies project, that it lives up to the high standard that should prevail in a context such as this. The first thing I realize is that I cannot seem to make myself continue on one methodological path for any length of time before I come to the conclusion that there is more to the story. This is, or should be, a fundamental reflex of Cultural Studies. However, it should not only be this reflex, but also a dialectical committment to framing a rigorous method of inquiry whose conclusions can be validated by some sort of claims to the authoritative production of knowledge. The commitment to the former often overshadows the obvious constitution of the latter, which claims to anti-disciplinarity often cover over. In other words, we are always already forming a disciplinary practice even if we never pause long enough to consider the logic of that practice.

This claim is made in the terms of Bourdieu, but it could just as easily be framed in terms of Saussurian linguistics: we tend to deny the langue that structures our prole or the way that our collective prole has indirectly constituted a prole. As Volosinov and Bourdieu point out at various points but in different contexts, it is not possible to examine the langue except through the performance of the prole. The lingustic allusion is pertinent because Cultural Studies has so far been resistant to its constitution in anything more than a performative linguistic sense. I mean performative here in both the sense of performance theory or role analysis of people like Erving Goffman--wherein the self we perform is a reaction to the audience we are performing for and the rules it has set for that performance--and in the sense of J.L. Austin--who talks about performative speech in which words "do something"--such as, in cultural studies, make implicit forms to truth via a certain narrative performance. And when it comes down to it, that is what I am doing here: writing a narrative which is supposed to pretend to be knowledge which will explore the elaborate history and context of the gas guzzling bohemeth that is the Hummer.

The first impulse of the Cultural Studies scholar is often to name the theory that one is going to use and justify its use. Or, in this part of the story, the narrator may substitute a theory that s/he will prove wrong as it interacts with superior logic, alternative interpretations, or a more acceptable set of theories. In the case that the narrator appeals to the elusive foil of emperical evidence, said narrator will also have to provide a reason, theory or interpretation of how that evidence can be accepted as real: this will, of course be the downfall of the entire argument once the post-structuralists unravel it starting at that point.

In my case, I am trying to figure out how to use some combination of Marx, Raymond Williams, Bourdieu, Regulationist economics, with a healthy sprinkling of early Boudrillard, Semiotics a la Hall and basic rhetorical critique while simultaneously avoiding the passionate definistration of everything I have to say in the post-structuralist black hole that rests in the middle of the practice of CS--starting with my primary assumption: the Hummer exists and there is a system of relationships which have evolved over time in both an immediate and a global context which have helped to bring it into material existence. This material existence in our contemporary moment can be seen to have aspects which are cultural, but which we should consider as material nonetheless because of the way that cultural matter exists in our society. I think that the goal of cultural studies should be to first understand these relationships--or start building an understanding of them which can be evolved--and the social determinations and institutions which help to structure them.

I use the term determination here in the fashion of Raymond Williams to mean the limitation of options and the application of pressures. Though I am certain there has been--or maybe should be--an intense critical conversation about this definition of determination, I am accepting it as an analytical concept and have faith that it will be borne out as I move to the concrete object of the study.

(if you've been paying attention, you'll see that I just did most of the things I am supposed to do--including leaving that trace for the deconstructionists to play with. The next part of the paper is where I brilliantly move from abstract to concrete (or from my theory to my object) and show that I can tell a story about my object that proves or is aided by my theory. I think this is an important step to take and I notice most people doing it on one level or another, but I also notice that there is often a bit too close of a fit, such that the object was chosen to prove the theory and the object can do little more than do that. In my view, the reflex of cultural studies should not be to prove a theory or to prove one's knowledge of a theory. Cultural Studies should be its own theory which can illuminate its object (i.e. culture) in as many ways as possible. It should be striving to build an image of the context and the relationships that exist within it and their determinations and it should do so in order to help explain, among other things, how the objects are made to mean and how we are asked to value them. Meanings and values are both highly relative notions--as semiotics and economics like to remind us. That is why it is important that we understand the social and material relations from the very beginning and, as we complexify our image of the context, we add in layers of related meanings and values so that we can see how those relationships work as well. This process should not primarily work the other way around, assuming the subterrainian levels or reading them symptomatically from the object itself, but this is perhaps a way to open up the right questions to ask about those levels so a more rigorous understanding can be developed before returning to the object.

But here I've gotten off track and need to get back in my High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Hummer, or Humvee and move forward with my story. The controversial notion of determinism--clearly a problematic notion when we are talking about determining meanings or even values simply because we should all now realize the unfinished, non-linear and overdetermined relationship that those aspects have. But when I start with the material, political economic relationships which eventually produced the Hummer, I feel confident that determinism is the correct word to use.

This is because, from the beginning, the hummer, or more correctly the series of military and civilian vehicles made by the verious permutations of the corporate entity which eventually produced it, have always been determined AND had a determining effect on the funding and regulation of an entire class of vehicles.

In a much longer version of this discussion, I would go into all the facts of the case--assuming as I do that facts can be named. But in this limited time period I will have to give you the quick, dirty, impressionistic version of the events of the past sixty and more years that have made both the SUV and the HUMMER materially, legally and politically possible. In short, this narrative really begins to at the close of World War I, when the British and American military asked for contractors to come up with a new design for a lightweight, four-wheel drive vehicle that could carry men and a heavy machine gun (6). After some competition from Ford and another company, Willys-Overland came up with the design for the Jeep and won produced “the bulk of the Jeeps made for World War II”—making sure to trademark the name so they could sell the design on the civilian market afterwards.

Promptly after the war, the Jeep was converted to a family vehicle, producing the Jeep Station Wagon in 1946. While still not obviously a marketable property, in 1953 Willys-Overland was bought and renamed Willys Motors by Henry J. Kaiser, an industrialist who made his fortune building ships during World War II. The 1950s saw competition from the Land Rover, Toyota’s Land Cruiser, and the Harvester Scout, but Willys still retained a small consumer market in America in addition to its large military contracts.

Renamed Kaiser Jeep in 1963, it still relied on its military heritage, and had a close relationship with the US military and government, producing trucks, jeeps and delivery vans for the Armed Forces and the Postal service alongside its meager civilian offerings such as the new Jeep Wagoneer.

Thoughout this period, and into the 1970s, Kiaser Jeep enjoyed an ambivalent relationship wherein, its lack of a consumer market was used as an excuse to excuse it from a variety of new governmental regulations being applied to cars. I will address more of these in a moment. I have learned from a few years of experience that this is the best way to do what I am supposed to do, rhetorically, to make my point valid and intelligible within a CS context.

In 1970, Kaiser Jeep was bought by the American Motors Corporation. Under AMC, the civilian and military functions of the organization were partitioned. AMC continued to produce the various civilian versions of the Jeep while a separate division, AM General continued to build vehicles for the US Government along with adding new contracts for transit buses. This arrangement worked well for a few years and AM General was usually in good financial standing. However AMC, its parent company, was in and out of bankruptcy for several years.

In 1981, the Army declared it was retiring the Jeep and publicly asked for companies to compete for a contract which would design its antecedent. AM General had already been designing the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicle for two years, so it had a leg up on the other two corporations that officially competed for the bid. Thus it should come as no surprise that they beat Chrysler and Teldyne for the 5-year, $1.5 billion contract to deliver 55,000 Hummers to the Army. As AM General press releases of the time liked to taut. "It was the “largest multiyear contract for tactical wheeled vehicles ever awarded by the U.S. Army.”

The day after AM General won the contract from the Army, AMC announced that it would be selling the hot new property to LTV—an Aerospace and Defense company from Dallas. AMC used the spoils from that sale to design and market the Jeep Cherokee. This has further cultural implications in terms of the marketing of this vehicle and its success. Again, something I will have to touch on again later. I can't overly interrupt this historical narrative.

Throughout the 1980s, AM General and its parent corporation were almost continuously in Chapter 11 proceedings, but this didn’t hinder their ability to win lucrative government contracts for more Hummers, mail trucks, and personnel and cargo trucks for the US Government. Unfortunately, it did hinder AM General’s ability to keep its plants open and its workers happy. It laid off thousands of workers at various points, rehiring other workers to fill new contracts and renegotiate labor agreements. A more sincerely Marxist perspective would investigate these movements more carefully. I am obviously not sincerely Marxist enough at this moment.

By the end of the decade AM General had stopped building anything other than the Hummer and a few mail trucks. The next big milestone in the life of the company was January 16, 1991, the day the US started its last war on Iraq. While the war coverage itself was its own commercial, solidifying CNN as a news organization as well as making the 24 hour news channel a viable alternative to the networks, the star of that commercial was the Humvee. Although it had already been deployed in Panama and throughout the world in US Military operations and sold—with government permission of course—to other military contractors as well as “friendly foreign nations” for almost a decade, the saturation coverage given to the 20,000 or so Hummers deployed during Desert Shield and Storm raised their profile significantly. Along with Schwarzenegger’s pressure on the company to sell a civilian version (the company custom made one for him before the civilian version was available), AM General officials said that the war raised demand for a civilian version of the Hummer by a factor of 300.

The popularity and status of the Hummer—now, in practice, the name for the civilian version which was opposed to the, in practice, military version, The Humvee—continued to increase throughout the 1990s, but the sales of the vehicle were rarely more than 1000 a year (much like the Jeep of the early 1960s). Nevertheless, the brand had a lot of unexploited cultural capital that General Motors felt it could capitalize on—hence its purchase of the brand name in July 1999.

Here, we have come just about full circle in reviewing the corporate history of the Hummer. I feel that this is an important place to start with an examination of the object, but it doesn’t nearly begin to explore the wider context—or contexts if we are being correctly analytical. For as a commodity the Hummer has an ambivalent history in its relationship to other similar commodities.

A recent Public Affairs book by Keith Bradsher looks at these overlapping histories and pays particularly close attention to the political, economic and cultural background of these large military crossover vehicles. In between the more polemical moments of High and Mighty: SUVs—the World’s Most dangerous Vehicles and How Thy Got That Way, Bradsher reveals some of the seemingly mundane moments in the history of US regulations of the auto industry to point to the determining effect they have had on the development of the SUV as the popular commodity it is today.

He also inadvertently exposes what we might call the shifting vector of the Hummer stretching all the way back to the government contracts awarded to Willys-Overland and its post-war move to the civilian market. Though the commodity is not the same and the name on the corporation is different, the relationship exists—and is proudly displayed on the Corporate History of AM general’s homepage.

In a nutshell, Bradsher’s key point is that the allowances the various government regulatory commissions made on behalf of the manufacturer of the Jeep—from trade agreements and safety standards, to emissions and bumper height—have been exploited in the 1990s to create the vast market for SUVs that the Hummer has entered as the once and future king. Ironically, Bradsher sees this as the government protecting a company with a small, vulnerable market. In a typical passage he says:

American Motors was the smallest and weakest of the Detroit automakers. While it had bright sales staff and an extensive network of dealers, it lacked the financial and engineering resources of its rivals. American Motors struggled even during the 1960s, a golden age for the American automobile industry. When gasoline prices soared, the United States economy stumbled and auto regulations became more stringent in the 1970s. American Motors would barely survive. It would look to Washington for relief again and again. Too often, that relief would take the form of exempting Jeeps from rules aimed at making highways safer, making the air cleaner and making the American economy les dependent on foreign oil.(17)

Bradsher seems correct when he attributes most of the regulatory loopholes to the Hummer vector, but seems to overlook the fairly obvious other connection; the government wasn’t just being interventionist with regard to the market, overlooking the unsightly externalities its policies created in favor of protecting a small company and the small business owners it claimed to serve: it was also giving itself a break. Though American Motors might have been the weakest civilian manufacturer in Detroit, it was, and is, one of the largest contractors of government vehicles. By its own estimate, AM General (in its various permutations) has produced 90% of all Army tactical trucks. Thus, a regulatory loophole would not only save money in terms of designing civilian vehicles, but would also cut down on R&D for government contracts.

Of course there are certainly more issues at play than just economics in keeping standards where they are: as Bradsher contends, “the real secret of the auto industry’s political power lies […] in its vast and well-organized workforce” residing mostly in regions of unusual political influence—especially Michigan and Ohio which have been key “battleground in every presidential election for the last four decades” (60). But regardless of these various social relations or the speculation of what motivated the dearth of regulation on the category of “light truck,” the fact remains that the organization, positioned between the government and the market, which has produced the Hummer or its equivalent has been a unique beneficiary of this process and an important vector which made possible its eventual emergence as a high profile commodity in the early twentieth century in material cultural ways.

These regulatory loopholes, left open for an ostensibly minor player in the auto industry, were exploited to their full potential throughout the 1980s and early nineties, leading to the ubiquitous presence of the Jeep Cherokee and the Dodge Caravan throughout the latter part of that decade. In addition, the government support of AM General through lucrative military contracts was a boon to the development of this industry in that it was the sale of AM General--made possible by the value added to it through the Hummer contract--made possible the design and successful design and marketing of the Jeep Cherokee, which resulted in a revived notion of the Bourgeois frontierism already being proffered by the Militaristic, neo-liberal culture and economics of the early years of Reagan's presidency.

It is here where I am supposed to rationalize my approach and show the way I have proven my evidence has confirmed my theory. However, I have no choice to admit that the problem is ultimately that we have only this rhetorical kind of methodology to underpin our endeavor. For my colleagues more interested in the aesthetic, the argument is or will be made that the current marketing of the Hummer denies even this military industrial history.

What I find interesting is that even the Corporation AM General itself proudly displays this history--though without mention of the various regulatory snafus that have become enshrined as reasonable and rational. Yet without any ability to claim knowledge outside of our own narrow context, that is without a methodology that can claim some sort of truth, without a hegemonic version of CS--which, though it exists, we are unwilling to admit--we can have little effect on the larger culture except by pronouncing already digested truths about the outstanding militarism or monumental excess of the Hummer, truths which are easily dismissed by the dominant culture of neo-liberal, market oriented truth, exemplified by a GM lobbyist who shares the disdain of the SUV, saying, "It just annoys the hell out of me when I get behind one, I can't see anything, but I'd still, like they say about free speech, fight like hell for the right of people to buy one." This is not an outstanding example of free market ideology, but a sincerely hegemonic version of truth which we will be hard pressed to argue with outside of the terms of externalities and the social contract--niether of which are immune from a similar reappropriation.

In other words, though there is obviously a way that Cultural Studies makes a claim to truth as a social science, though we have a wealth of methods which would allow for a clear enunciation of authoritative integrity, we remain unreflexively committed to a pseudo-reflexivity which either refuses to dismiss certain uses of theory as truly banal or is committed to using whatever theory necessary to prove an already digested, pragmatic goal based on a tenuous and ideologically liberal understanding of the world which, as Bourdieu says of any autonomous field of productiondoesn't see any reason to prove itself to anyone other than itself. The fields he discusses most often as autonomous are those of science and art--which, coincidentally are the two fields which most resemble the practice of cultural studies. In niether case is there an absence of claims to truth or beauty but, like in our own field, the claims to truth or beauty promoted are simply ideologically inscribed by the performative authority of the people with the most symbolic capital. Normally, we have obsessed about the latter, stressing always the heretical intervention within our autonomous field--or any field for that matter. But, at the same time, we have come a long way and it is time that we started acting like it and figure out what it is that we are supposed to be doing.

This is, of course, the final necessity of any Cultural Studies project worth its name: one is supposed to attempt to make some sort of intervention in the field. A successful intervention, a way of defining it authoritatively, after all, has become a much more lucrative possibility. As I witness the continued commodification of the field I wonder when we will begin to truly police its borders rather than, as Lawrence Grossberg recently suggested to me, abandoning it altogether and starting all over with the original intervention but with a different name. This seems to be because most people have forgotton where we came from muchless where we were going. To this end, I make a provocation: any cultural study, no matter how fashionably theorized, of the Hummer which doesn't contain an understanding of its cultural, political and economic history, which doesn't consider it in terms of, as Raymond Williams called "Cultural Materialism" in more than an opportunistic way, is not Cultural Studies but something else.

For the paper...A good ending I am thinking about--in terms of the narrative, is to speak some about the Robert Kaplan aticle on "the coming anarchy" (i will have already mentioned this to some extent, but will return to make these final points.) his argument is, roughly, that by looking at the problems in Africa and the way that they are handled, we can see a good example of the way that the world will look in the coming century. I will have already discussed the metaphor of riding in the limo (and the new pattern of its being bulletproofed to protect elites from threats of terror) and his recommendation that we watch nigeria to see what happens there...I will then bring up the recent ruling by the Benue assembly that denied the request of the Akume family for a convoy of bulletproof vehicles after they were attacked by a group of armed rebels. The assembly denied their request, saying: "The Benue State House of Assembly Speaker, Mr Mzenda Iho and the House unanimously agreed that the rising insecurity in the country must be fought through means that could benefit every Nigerian, not a select group. [. . . .] He said that the frequent attacks on top political offices was a manifestation that "the common man on the street has nowhere to run to", and asked the House to pass the resolution of the House that President Olusegun Obasanjo should take measures to protect all Nigerians, saying, "we can't fold our arms and watch sundry criminals place the nation under siege.""

This appeared on the african news service march 7, 2004.

Of course, in following the story further, I find that Akume ended up buying himself one of the bulletproof cars anyway--and the assembly dispassionately approved the purchase after the fact. this makes the scenario a buit more ambiguous, but still and interesting anecdote to note in the context. In this case, Nigeria might be a good example for us in that people were initially concerned that the general lawlessness would not be addressed by the government. and instead the people should be lifted to safety as well.

SuicideGirls > Pin-Up Punk Rock and Goth Girls: Pictures, Journals and Videos.

In looking for military contractors, happened upon this site cmolpetely unrelated to it (from a comment on one of the boards.) Interesting site though. In addition to the regular features of an online community (save the addition of erotic photographs of selected members) they have a touring burlesque show, clothing/merchandise and magazine--along with other celebrity interviews. The members (both men and women--though the women are obviously central) seem to have a diversity of conversations--but most of them seem really tapped into various forms of public life, almost all of which is outside of the mainstream, yet they seem equally involved with pop culture at large. Maybe it is a product of the metropolitan/cosmopolitan location of the site and its photographers (LA, NY) and editors.

Speaking of that, unlike other sites like meta filter or plastic which are basically just community weblogs, this site also has someone pulling some of the strings--an editor or group of editors who arrange some of these outside media events. It is also unique--though I'm not sure how I feel about it--in encouraging women to send them nude/erotic photos--which can then only be viewed by members who have paid a fee to see them. This is simultaneously liberative and exploitative or, more fittingly, it is very commercial, but in a sense quite outside of the mainstream. It also has the effect of creating an air of celebrity to these "ordinary" members so that other members choose their "favorite suicide girls"--presumedly people they've never met but who they might have spoken with over the chat rooms (so it is far more personal than celebrity in the mainstream, but still there is something going on there.) At the same time, one way or another, the women who do this, become more eligible to also take part in offline events--there is a music video on the site which evidently features the "suicide girls" as set dressing. In this sense, becoming a fully invested member is also a sort of alternative resume process (or is presented as such.) To look at this alongside the astronomical explosion of amatuer p-sites--and especially the young ages of these women--I am curious what is going on with sexuality at this time. Then again, to look at the number of hits this site gets (or at least the comments left-- a little under four million) it isn't all that large of a community (though they did get nominated for a webby ward.)

War Profiteers

page from corpwatch (who are often a bit over the top--but then so are appeals to leave the market alone.)

FOXNews.com - Politics - Military Contractors Shoulder Heavy Burden in Iraq

recent fox article on the subject

Windfalls of War - The Center for Public Integrity

more on history of military contractors

Military Contractors

info on some military contractors

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks before NY attack: "Tom Simons, a former US ambassador to Pakistan"

And all of this discussion about the Summer of 2001 has reminded me of some articles that came out immediately after Sept. 11 which were speculating on the nature of some meetings that took place between taliban and US, russian, pakistani and iranian ambassadors. the early story in the guardian claimed that the impetus for the early July meeting was to get the taliban to turn over bin laden. the threat was, basically, turn him over or we're coming after you (keep in mind, this is Mid-July).

Later discussions (e.g.) from even less "legitimate" sources, claim that the actual impetus was actually to get the pipeline through Afghanistan before the Russians. I don't think this makes sense simply because it seems that Russian and Iran were supposedly both at the meeting. Nevertheless there is a very interesting history to this story and it could be something worth thinking about. In any case, whatever the motivation, the US seems to have had some sort of talks with the taliban and made some sort of threat against them. Many of the discussions around this seem to place this as some sort of indirect cause to 9/11, i.e. bin Laden qua Afghanistan was simply trying to beat the US to the punch and hit us before we hit them. This also has little credibility as the operatives that were supposed to carry all of the 9/11 hijackings out most certainly had their orders and had already been in the process of trainign for the attacks well before July 2001.

A more interesting question--especially in regards to the Clarke allegations and the discussion of FBI/CIA activities around this time--is that W supposedly had the FBI call off some of their investigations around bin Laden in order to protect the family. I have little doubt that this is somewhat true--even if he did ask for the 8/6 pdb. After all, the family was allowed to fly out of the US when no other planes were in the air on 9/11. If he did anything of the sort, then it seems that no one is really talking about it (at least right now.) As this would seem to be the best time for evidence of this sort, even that line of inquiry seems a little off. Nevertheless, they provide some interesting leads. I think it would be very interesting to know what Tom Simons said in that July meeting and I think I will try to contact him (after the conference is over this week).

the above also reminds me of this hypothetical piece I read on the New Republic site:

The New Republic Online: Easterbrook

While this writer is totally correct about the political repercussions that woud have ensued had we gone to war with Afghanistan based on the August 6 PDB. What the writer seems to overlook (in his basically hawkish viewpoint--something Russ Baker has pointed out is inherent in this argument over Clarke) is that there might, possibly, be a range of options for how to handle the threat of Al Queda--maybe even a few that were more measured than an all out war and land invasion. In a way, as funny as his little satire is, it points to the utter lack of imagination present in our culture at this time. We are led to believe the basic litmus test for any threat to national security is "can we justify a military bombardment?" and short of bringing down the hammer of American might in all its shock and awe, the next best thing we can do is simply go back to our vacation and wait until we see something spectacular which can justify our power grab. this is a completely cynical and frankly lazy way of viewing our role in the world. If all that we are capable of is brute force--even in the service of rhetorical claims to liberty or freedom--we're not all that different from any dominant world power that came before us and we share a rationality with the "evil" we're supposed to despise.

I usually find these reader commentaries a bit over the top on the Buzzflash site, but this one makes some interesting observations about how we might percieve the war if there were another imperial power invading.

If the Invading Boots Were Not Our Own -- A BuzzFlash Reader Contribution: "If Russia had invaded Iraq last year against the advice of the US, and everything that has happened to the US soldiers had happened to Russian soldiers, I wonder if the US would be as angry with the insurgent Iraqis as we are now? Would we even call them 'insurgents' or would we call them 'Iraqi defenders'? Would the word at the US water coolers be anti Iraqis or anti Russians? Would we hear rumbles that the US should go into Iraq to help the invaded Iraqis? Would we feel sympathy for the Iraqis as the Russian soldiers tore down the doors of Iraqi homes and forced the families out on the street? When tragic events happened in Iraq would we be supportive of the Russians or would we say that they should have seen it coming? If, during all this death and war, we discovered that Putin had lied to his people in order to receive their support for the Iraq invasion, what would we say? Would we say that Putin should be jailed for his deceit? Would we say that he was justified if he lied to his people because Saddam was a corrupt leader? "

Home - - Center for American Progress

a think tank that seems to be picking up steam. Maybe a good place to work someday.

Murder, She Said

Here is one of Tim Shorrock's latest articles. He'll be coming to speak at GMU next thursday, April 1.

Oakland Tribune Online - More Local News

Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism

This is a difficult book to summarize and I am far from being qualified to critique it. The amount of historical research involved in the book is phenomenal (at least from my perspective) and he has done much to periodize these gigantic historical formations. The most important attribute, I suppose, is the method of study itself. He doesn't really have any grand conclusions--in fact he basically ends the book by saying that it is just a prologue to the Lineages book. There is a sort of assertion about the slave mode of production that he makes early on, but it is really just a hypothetical observation that he makes. He basically claims that the slave mode of production--as it existed in Classical Greek civilization and was perfected during Roman Antiquity--has a significant cultural effect. Because work is denigrated (as being something only the lower classes do) and the intensification of labor is usually accomplished by making slaves work harder or getting more of them, the impetus to create labor saving technology is never developed in these time periods. Though he doesn't really spend a lot of energy proving this (although it is always difficult to prove a negative) the assertion is a thumbnail of what the book (and likely the sequal) seems to argue: that there are discernible social and historical forces that cause events to unfold in a particular way. I don't know exactly how to critique this from a historiographic perspective, but the titles of the two books (Lineages and Passages) indicate the most likely critique I can think of: it is a linear narrative of history that proports to explain things in terms of sequential causality. However, as problematic as this might be for some pomo chaos-theory inspired historians, I think it is still an important thing to do. For one thing, most of the time, it seems to work. Certainly there were probably a number of countervailing forces that he doesn't take into account in his sweeping version of history, but he at least draws a broad portrait--both temporally and spatially--of how these societies unfolded.

And he is certainly more rigorous in his descriptions of causality than Marshall McLuhan--who, though I was reading him for the other field, ended up being an interesting foil for the discussion Anderson is having. Unlike McLuhan who basically has two different categories (literate and non-literate) that explain virtually every difference in any society, Anderson is much more careful in considering the determining forces of history, often showing the contradictions that emerge the larger you extend your observation. He is also extremely concerned with particularities and explaining the divergences between different historical developments--calling northern and south eastern europe "control" cases in the study of these historical development. He then goes on to carefully consider why the "far North" (i.e. Scandinavia, esp. Sweden) developed into feudalism despite being left out of the Roman empire and why the area "south of the Danube" (i.e. the balkens, etc.) didn't ever fully develop into feudal economies despite the fact that they were central to late Roman expansion. A good summary of most of the book is available at various places in the last chapters--though he never engages in a total summary--but he is roughly arguing that, in just about every case, there are historical limits to any cobination of social and economic forces (or in the more Marxian terminology, to any mode of production). It would seem that the rather trite cliche "what doesn't kill you will make you stronger" is often reversed for the development of these societies, the new saying being, "what makes you stronger will eventually kill you." This seems to be what he inevitably argues about any conjuncture:

Greek civilization develops into the first radical democracy, where virtually everyone has equal voice--except that the only way this somewhat classless society is able to exist is that it is based on slave labor. In other words, there is actually a large, disenfranchised majority that serves as the sort of class boundary that allows for Greek democracy to flourish. However, the radically democratic structures don't travel well so as Greece tries to expand, there is no way to keep the geographically defined democracy and the empire all at once. Hence there are internal limits to the development of this mode of production. These are overcome by the Roman Empire, but only for a while: and so on and so forth. In the east, there is the same story: the area "south of the danube" is able to survive the fall of Roman Empire, and repelling most of the invaders that helped precipitate its fall. But by doing so, it actually ends up hindering its own development because it is never forced to give up its antiquated (and liminal) mode of production. Hence all it really does is stave off the collapse for a millinea or so--and to create a situation where the collapse is far more total and debilitating than the seemingly creative destruction of the Roman synthesis with its Germanic invaders.

This points to another key theme in the book. Rooted in what seems to be a sort of enlightenment conception of the progress of civilization (despite its starts and stops, failures and success), Anderson seems to argue that there are a set of necessary stages in the course of development and that the test case of proper development is still Western Europe. Furthermore, he seems to believe--probably very much like Marx--that there is a necessary destruction of antiquated modes of production in order to move forward. I don't think he isn't on solid ground here--and couldn't critique him for it historically either way--but I do note that this is a fairly popular interpretation of the course of historical development. It is also the sort of rallying cry of the neoliberals who have little concern for forms of life or cultural heritage (except when they are "ours") and believe strongly that the rest of the world should simply strive to imitate us or quit complaining. This is probably not entirely borne out by Anderson's analysis--and to be sure he is much more interested in the particularities and combinations of social forces that lead to various historical developments than the sort of "democracy and capitalism for everyone" that has been promoted for the past century or so. He just seems to set the stage for that type of reading by assuming a sort of propriety to feudal development. Perhaps some of this will be nuanced in the next book, but for now, I am just noting this similarity.

Another note: along with the stuff on McLuhan I also read some James Carey articles about Harold Innis. I don't know enough about Innis to properly give a set of thoughts on him, but I have read enough to know that I am interested in including some more sustained readings of his work in the larger version of the field statements. He was McLuhan's mentor, but had a much broader understnding of the role of communication in society. He seems to precede people like Mattelart in looking past the medium and considering communication in general and, more importantly, the way that institutions and power relations constrain the development of those media. He is still similar to McLuhan, however, in his discussion of the bias of communication. The distinction between spatially binding and temporally binding media is most commonly referred to. Basically, the temporally binding media tends to not travel as well--either because it is on a bulky substance or it is part of an oral culture that can't guarantee unaltered transmission--so the focus is on the lineage of the history of the society. Thus the binding tends to be a sort of deep cultural heritage, concerned with its continuity through history. The opposite, it would seem, is true of the spatially binding media, which travel better and tend to encourage and enable geographical expansion at the expense of historical perspective. I think these are helpful distinctions if they aren't understood essentially and would like to look into them for the fields.

Reading McLuhan, Understanding Media...

The first half is very literary and historical and sociological. Though the focus is ultimately on technology, he is much more concerned with the way that it functions socially. Communication technology he figures as just another advancement--and, like Mattleart later on, he is also widening the definition of communication so that the wheel is also a communication technology. Unlike other times where a broad definition seems to make the concept itself seem meaningless (simply because it is unclear that the concept, or the word for it, means anything at all once you make it that broad, cf: culture) the inclusion of somewhat unorthodox examples of communication actually make it clearer what he means. I have some reservations about the extended metaphor of "the extension of man" and this desire to have our central nervous system extend outward (presaging Haraway's cyborgs I suppose) is part of the problem to which the electronic media are the solution (along with many other comm technologies before then.) But it does seem that he has accounted for what Polanyi might call a double movement in that, as these new forms of communcation/media/culture are introduced, there is a way that society tries to protect itself--only instead of a counteraction to the social change, he describes a numbness that develops either at the site of the change or generally throughout the social body, which helps dull the convulsive shifts.

The shifts he's decribing aren't just--or even really at all--a reorganization of the social field or the modes of production, consumption, etc. but rather it is a redistribution of the sensory emphases of the subjects of the culture. He compares this to an anaesthetic that would be required for the social surgery of the implementation of a new technology which will drastically reorder the sense rations of the culture. For this discussion, he does some very interesting things, among them, his (I suppose) famous discussion of hot and cold mediums. What I find interesting in this discussion is that, while he says there is a distinction between the two, he also tries to talk about the way they are functioning in society.

"Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or cool culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world."(31)

The distinction he makes here between hot and cool cultures seems arbitrary (of course all these distinctions are). He basically means that a cool culture is more of an oral culture. But the cool media are things like books (usually) which leave something to interpretation (a description that Adorno would probably like). So these could be cool cultures because oral words leave something to the imagination but he counterposes it with the supposedly hot culture of the West which he calls "literate" meaning, it would seem, that it is centered around literature which would make it "cool" as well. To complicate this, he has a bit of a strange discussion about jazz (p.27) where he initially calls it a hot form of music but then says "Cool jazz came in quite naturally after the first impact of radio and movie had been absorbed." In other words, while the medium or form itself might have certain tendencies which might be described as "hot" or "cool" these are only relevant in reference to the context in which they are functioning--both socially and in the "media ecology."

This also means that the distinction he draws between hot and cool cultures is also somewhat nullified. A more significant observation that he makes is that

"Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios and equilibriums among other organs and extensions of the body. There is, for example, no way of refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or sense 'closure' evoked by the TV image. But the effect of the entry of the TV image wil vary from culture to culture in accordance to the existing sense ratios in each culture." (45)

This is a better, more general way of describing this process. Instead of trying to measure the hotness or coolness of the medium or culture it is better to consider the dialectical relationship between them at any given time--realizing that there will be some sort of social effect when a new technology is introduced. However, the rest of the book seems devoted to describing the different mediums--their essences--which would seem to preclude there being a great deal of interaction with the culture or the other media in it. Though I plan to read the last sections closely, I will note that I think the useful aspect of the first part (which would seem to undermine any discussion of the essences of mediums) is his discussion of the way artists are able to use new media to create hybrid forms, changing the earlier media as well as integating the new. Moreover, he seems committed to this line of reasoning saying

"media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interactamong themselves. Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image in the talkies. TV caused drastic changes in radio programming, and in the form of the thing or documentary novel."(53)

Aside from his unfortunate use of the term "talkies," I think most of this makes sense and is a good conceptualization for the way societies take on these forms. He also gives a central role to artists as the people who "show us how to 'ride with the punch,' instead of 'taking it in the chin.' It can only be repeated that human history is a record of 'taking it in the chin.'"(66) All of this is curiously similar to some of the things that Adorno says about culture as well. Here, like Polanyi, he isn't necessarily cautioning the distructive potential of these cultural and technological changes. He simply thinks that being aware of how they will destroy and reorder lives and consciousnesses will help us to better prepare for them.

I recall one of my professors (Dr. Babbili) attending a conference in Canada a few years ago that was discussing what the social impact of the internet would be and how best to channel it. Instead of having this kind of conversation, Americans seem fine with sticking to message: anything is possible, keep the options open, let the corporations--oops I mean "free market" decide what is best. The only reason to intervene is if someone puts free music or naked pictures up: then we can just sue them and everyone will be happy.

It should be said, perhaps, that McLuhan was Canadian.

God Hates Shrimp--yes, yes he does.

MSNBC - Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind

BANG! Here's one for the books--White House kept the "war on terrorism" from catching a terrorist ("Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq") who's now killing our troops in Iraq because they wanted to send our troops to Iraq (and get killed by terrorists) and they thought killing this guy would weaken the case for war. So instead of carrying out any of the plans the Pentagon made (from June 2002 on) to go after this guy in his weapons lab operating in N. Iraq, the White House sat on it and made Saddam into the bad guy. Now we've got Saddam but we're getting killed. I think maybe we went after the wrong guy. Too bad this won't make the headlines.