Author: jacobbacharach

A Spate of Unions

Poetry, War and Politics

That which wasn’t is becoming by
best estimations something we’ll achieve
within what I’m assured’s a reasonable time—
as soon as now, if I can be believed.
The past is past. The future is to come.
Mistakes, if they were made, and let me say,
I can conceive that they were made by some
impatient staffer, unpaid junior aide,
although of course I can’t with certainty
identify what they might be, because,
let me be clear, they were not made by me,
will nonetheless . . . where was I? Let me pause.
To those who’d make us choose between what may
and might never be done, I say, I say.

Imitation of the Human

Culture, Justice

Gordon Brown offered an apology to Alan Turing in 2009. If there’s a certain temporosemantic incoherence in the notion of apologizing to a dead man, then it at least accords with the broad moral norms of repentance and absolution. There’s nothing to be done about the injustice now, but England feels very badly about it. Inadequate, yes, but there’s an appealing modesty to the gesture; it isn’t glib, and it doesn’t gall. There could never be a truly adequate act of contrition, and insufficiency should generally be hemmed in by a wide zone of humility. Apology identifies the correct object of culpability. The government that offered it did wrong. It can’t really do right, but there’s a degree of straightforward sincerity to it all.

Well, shit, the only thing that might have redeemed the Queen’s Christmastime pardon of Turing would have been if she’d addressed it, “From one queen to another.” Obviously there’s an ancient form to these documents, but if there is gross indecency here, it’s in the idea that the figurehead Queen of England, in the form of a hopped-up ecclesiastical potentate, could have the sheer temerity to extend her “Grace and Mercy” in the service of absolving a man who never did anything wrong to begin with. Politeness is always lost on the aristocracy, despite its self-sealed belief to the contrary, but the language and timing here is absurdly rude.

As either a Jew or a non-believer—take your pick—I find the idea of an actual divine representative, a heavenly elect here on earth, to be pretty hilariously idolatrous, though I am willing to give your various Popes and Patriarchs a degree of laisser prier tolerance, but is there a more preposterous representative of Grace on this earth than the Queen of England, a less likely vessel, a more absurd pretender to the seat? Turing doesn’t require your pardon, Lizzy; rather you, his. Some sort of majestic retroactive vacation of the indecency law in its entirety would have been less tone deaf, less insulting, and less presumptuous.

I suppose it’s asking too much to suggest this goofy Wettinian drag show comport itself to the standards of decency expected of its audience, but I, for one, as a gay man, am awfully tired of the self-congratulatory attitude of lousy beneficence as these monarchs and judges and legislators haul themselves toward the glory of delivering their approbation. The proper attitude of the British state to its victims, of whom Turing was just one of the more prominent, is shame. Would it kill ya to show a little?

“I Shall Live”

Culture, Movies

Like so many of their films, Coen Brothers obscure but lovely new period piece, The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug, is both a shaggy dog story and an exercise in inertia, or more properly, a lack thereof. Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch), a renowned figure of indeterminate but impressive background, lives alone, cloistered with a fortune of equally uncertain vintage, uninterested and otherwise withdrawn from the world outside. The “desolation” of the title is a fair portrait of his state of mind; like so many Coen protagonists, he is at once self-involved and depressed—his pomposity cohabits with anomie, and more than anything, he is suffused with an air of melancholy depression.

Indie filmmakers of a more ordinary Sundance-circuit variety might take this as the template for a quirky tale of mild uplift; surely a girl would be introduced, an indiepop score sounded; a homecoming home-come. The Coens, though, have darker interests. As was the case in A Serious Man, where they mischievously combined their own Midwestern Jewish upbringing with a pastiche-retelling of the Book of Job, here too their subject is Jewishness—in this case, they have chosen for their setting England in the mid-Nineteenth Century; indeed, there are startling echoes of Daniel Deronda throughout.

Like Deronda, Smaug is of some vaguely aristocratic extraction, perhaps having been fostered by another wealthy nobleman. His parentage is unclear. In an interesting twist on Eliot’s tale, Smaug’s love interest is not a beautiful young woman, but rather a midget homosexual circus performer, played with charm by an almost unrecognizable Martin Freeman. The two find themselves frequently harried by a phantasmagorical collection of Jewish gargoyles—Zionists with an eye on recapturing a homeland that may or may not have ever existed. The English, meanwhile, are equally grotesque, portrayed as a group of impossibly lovely but thoroughly effete, decadent, and largely closeted inverted racists. What other directors in the relative American mainstream would risk such stylistic outrageousness in this age of $200 million corporate sequels?

Again, as in A Serious Man, the Coens have created an ambiguous ending; and as was the case in Deronda, there is a hint that Smaug intends to “go east” as he departs the comfort of his longtime home. After True Grit, their appealing but relatively insubstantial 2010 Western, The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug represents a real return to form.

The Culture

Culture, Economy, Education, The Life of the Mind

Today, as Summers notes, the economy seems mostly back to normal — but joblessness is still endemic. Growth simply isn’t producing enough jobs. This is a more severe and more urgent problem than inequality. Moreover, fixing it is necessary, though not sufficient, to making real headway against inequality.

Ezra Klein thinks that the American left—bizarrely, he seems to include the Democratic Party in the category, but that is the least of his category errors, so we’ll leave it be—is overly concerned with the problem of income inequality and insufficiently concerned with unemployment. There is a sense in which he is correct. Too much economic discourse focuses on the narrow caste of people who, because they are mentally disordered, deranged, and in deep need of our pity and the best psychiatric treatment that our doctors can yet provide, waste their lives not in the pursuit of human joy and affection and invention and transcendence, but in the weird, obsessive accumulation of hundreds of millions of electronic credits. “Yes Mr. Lebowski, these unfortunate souls cannot love in the true sense of the word.” Marginal efforts to solve all of our ills by sending the taxman to shake a few more rubles from these sad gangsters are indeed doomed to fail. Most of their wealth is illusory, a product of the speculative machinery of the financial markets, soap bubble wealth, one good solar storm from evaporation.

I mention this because these billion-dollar fortunes are part of the same illusion that causes Ezra Klein and Larry summers to wonder “whether the country’s growth machine [is] so fundamentally broken that adequate demand required credit bubbles.” This is a question? Of course demand requires credit bubbles. Also, what is this growth stuff?

When a society financializes its economy as thoroughly as ours has, growth is nothing but a bubble; it is the computerized manipulation of electronic currency to cause numbers to get bigger. Growth in the sense of extracting more resources and making more things and hiring more people as the population increases is like Manifest Destiny, like the frontier. Eventually, you run out of Indians to swindle and massacre, and all the cars and TVs are made by robots. It’s the closing of the frontier, in the Jackson Turnerian turn of phrase. Economists call these phenomena “gains in productivity,” which just means that the fake pile of fake money that is our fake economy is self-inflating fast enough to make it appear that each little still-employed economic ant makes a larger share of the wealth. You take the big pile of money, divide it by some man-hour construct, and suddenly it appears that few workers are making all the wealth quite well, thank you very much. We need fewer people to make all this pretend money. For all the Tom Friedmans who lament the lack of “skills”—and really, has anyone ever managed to mention what any of these skills actually are, I mean, specifically—the larger problem is demand for workers. We just don’t need that many of you guys.

So Klein’s solution, the broad, technocratic consensus on both the left and the right, is that we need to figure out a way to create more jobs. The Democrats want to over-hire more road crews, and the Republicans want companies to use the windfall of reduced taxes to hire more phony middle managers, and then all that unnecessary employment will make it rain like a cash-heavy bar owner at a strip club. Regardless of the mechanism, though, all these jobs have one thing in common. They are fake.

Well, here is a quote from that congenial lunatic, Bucky Fuller, that’s been making the rounds lately:

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

He said this in the seventies, so you can only imagine how true it is today. The increased automation of industrial production has reduced the necessity of employing lots of people. A few of us may invent the internet, or whatever, and be free to make our billions and cackle greedily over them in the lonely attics of our tacky mansions. Meanwhile, per Fuller, we ought to just give most people money to go to school, not so that they can Develop the Skills of Tomorrow Today in order to Win the Future against the Chinese, but so that they can do chemistry experiments or read Russian literature or ponder the mysteries of the Trinity or learn to throw pots. If Ezra Klein can make, say, what, a buck fifty—probably more?—to blog, then why can’t we just agree to pay everyone who takes cute pictures of their cat or makes lists of their favorite recipes fifty or sixty grand a year? Thesis: maintaining an interesting Tumblr is more closely related to labor in the classical sense than writing macros as an “analyst” in a Fortune 1,000 firm.

But really, this gets us back to those accumulators of immense fortunes, both individuals and corporations. Because we are addicted to primitive forms of exchange that are probably necessary to the allocation of goods in an environment of actual material scarcity, there is a sense that, by hoarding so many dollars, the very rich are preventing the poor from getting the currency required to acquire the things that they need. True, but in the long term, the solution is to recognize that we are actually a post-scarcity society; conditions of material deprivation are artificial products of the very economic system that is supposed to allocate goods. Thesis: inequality and poverty are failures of the supply chain. The problem is not the hoarding of money, but the persistent connection of money to things that we can easily produce and distribute to everyone without some conniving Whartonian middleman.

A New Boyfriend Is a Wonder of the Ancient World or Something

Poetry

I would compare you to the ruins of
a lost civilization, even though
you’re not yet twenty-four. The thing is, love
unceasingly surprises; what you know
is never what you know. It’s like, in Rome
what was for many blocks an ordinary
street then turns a bend and, whoa, you’ve come
upon another Rome. The mercenary
past will soldier for imagination,
which is love’s antiquity, its own
preceding architectural creation—
an archaeology that’s dreamed alone
until some ancient god, now bored, creates
from the dream a city, boyfriend, fortune, dates.

Walking with My Dog this Last Thanksgiving in Uniontown, Pennsylvania

Poetry

It may have been the last time that I’d ever
visit the house where I had lived between
eleven years old and something like eighteen.
Beyond the housing plan, the ridges never
seemed a better metaphor or measure
for the inability of things to mean
anything but what they literally mean.
My dog engaged in some houndish endeavor.
There was a hawk. There was a goldfinch, green
with winter. Mom and Dad have bought a place
in the city. I can still remember when
my brother, who is dead, and I would race
through the woods behind the yard. The woods have seen
nothing. The trees are trees and not young men.

Foreigners

Books and Literature, Culture

Jennifer duBois’s second novel, Cartwheel, is an example of psychological realism done right, that is to say, not locked into a desperate schemata designed to make each act of each character a Newtonian inevitability set into elegant motion within the heatless, frictionless word problem of The Way We Live Now; rather, it’s a fraught, cock-eyed rending of minds made ever more inscrutable the deeper we delve into them, a sort of dissection that ends with a pile of catalogued parts that can never again be whole. This is how the mind really works, or I should say instead, how it is, but too much realist writing has never gotten over Freud and sees consciousness as a knot to be untangled into a genealogy. Cartwheel is full of minds that make less sense as the book goes on, less sense to us and less sense to their own fictional selves. Superficially a novel about a notorious murder, it becomes a book about the obscurity and impossibility of motive, about the odd fact that self is as much a conceit as narrative; that as there aren’t actually stories in the world, neither are there selves.

The novel is both loosely and precisely based on the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, or put another way, on the Amanda Knox affair, reset to Argentina, but following the general contours of that case closely. I’d heard about but hadn’t read duBois’s first novel; I should be honest and admit that the descriptions of the thing didn’t especially appeal to me; the setup sounded like the sort of prize-bait I try to avoid. I should maybe give it a chance. But I like lurid literature—I mean, I’m not above rereading Call Me by Your Name for the sex, for instance—and I was slightly fascinated by the Kercher/Knox story, as, I think, any former exchange student must be. So I grabbed Cartwheel from the library as a wild card and figured I’d read it in a night.

In fact, the murder story is a sort of MacGuffin; though the details are changed, it’s almost immediately evident that we’re not going to stray too far from the Knox case. What we get, instead, is a series of chapters that wind in and out of the consciousness of Knox-manquée Lily Hayes, her sort-of boyfriend Sebastien, her father, and Eduardo Campos, the official prosecuting her case. All of them are thoroughly introspective, fully convinced of their own insights into their own motives, and thoroughly, tragically deluded. But—and this is the book’s neat trick, its welcome departure from the norm of American “literary fiction”: their delusions are never that they misapprehend something essential about their own character, that they believe themselves to be altruists, say, when they’re really egoists; that they’ve convinced themselves they’re doing good when in fact they’re just reenacting some evil done to them long ago.

Instead, they keep circling a core of self that isn’t there; they’re not orbiting a star, but a black hole, a well so deep and dense that it approximates solidity through a kind of nonexistence. They’re all reference and no referent; a set of contingencies reflecting only each other. Now, there are some predictable bits; the effect isn’t absolute. Lily and her family are burdened by the loss of an earlier child and sibling; Eduardo, the prosecutor is confounded by a fickle, disastrous marriage. And still, the pervading sadness in Andrew and Maureen Hayes, Lily’s divorced parents, feeds mostly on itself, even as they both—both of them intellectuals—cast back in hopeless hopefulness to the ur-tragedy of losing a child, while Eduardo’s dogged, moralistic pursuit of Lily in the murder case wills itself into a parallel with the flights of Eduardo’s wife rather than being naturally generated by them. Lily is the most obscure of all of them, and we can believe that she both did and did not murder that girl; that if she didn’t, she might have; that if she verifiably did, she might not.

This is a kind of fiction I wish we got more of: subversively resistant to the idea that human beings are a quantity to be known. In it, we are utterly alien to ourselves, and our lives aren’t hemmed in by the conventions of narrative and psychology, but keep messily, insistently transgressing them.

As in, Jerk

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, The Life of the Mind

Dave Eggers’s The Circle has won a lot of critical praise from traditional book-review types and a lot of derisive snorts from those of us—I count myself, somewhat embarrassingly, among them—who have both computers and business degrees for its comic ignorance of how computers function, what the internet is, or how these corporations are created, funded, and managed. But, although it’s easy enough, and fun, to giggle at a book whose near-future information architects say “in the cloud” with the same skittish incomprehension as your mother or your sixtysomething boss; although it’s easy enough, and fun, to plunk Eggers into the dour, self-reverential gentlemen’s club of Twitter-hating Franzens, forever clearing their throats and folding back their broadsheets in the Anglosaxon gloom of a midday liver lunch with the brocade curtains pulled; the less funny, unfortunate truth about The Circle is that it isn’t just an obtuse book, but a bad one: badly written, poorly conceived, and deeply uncharitable.

The main character is a young woman named Mae, freshly rescued from a dull job at a public utility somewhere in the Central Valley and plopped in an entry-level position in the novel’s eponymous Google-manqué. She rises through the company, and although the narrative frequently stops to mete out in actual, numerical detail the various impressive scores she receives on the company’s 100-point internal grading system, our principle experience of Mae via a limited third-person voice that never exits her rather limited head is a skein of never-ending idiocy and incompetence. Eggers clearly set out to write her as a naïf whose unfolding experience and awareness of The Circle both prompts and mirrors our own, but he accidentally wrote her as one of the shallowest dummies you’re likely to encounter this side of a Tom Friedman column; you wonder how she made it out of high school, let alone how she managed to get hired by the choicest tech firm in the world, connections or no.

She wanders around bedazzled by everything, and the prose reads like an unapproved merger of bad Young-Adult writing and SkyMall catalog copy. More skillfully done, this sort of thing might come off as satire, but here it just reads as clumsy writing, and when errors pop up, you can’t quite tell if they’re meant to be mocking Mae’s misunderstandings or if they’re just errors. There’s a particularly odd passage in which, while taking us on one more interminable tour of the company’s campus and all its myriad wonders, we encounter, “Another Circle team [that] was close to dissembling tornadoes as soon as they formed.” Does Eggers mean disassembling? Would that actually make any more sense? Would it be better writing?

Nitpicking copyediting issues is trivial and a little unfair, but there’s a broader problem here, a problem that the giggly eviscerations of Eggers’s internet non-comprehension hint at: the texture is all wrong; The Circle’s ersatzness is . . . ersatz. There are piles of detail—the naming conventions of buildings, the layout of the campus, the many projects that many teams in many departments are working on, etc.—but there’s not the slightest sense that any of these things exist except as convenient ideograms for Big Google Company Doing Big Google Company Things. A really good workplace novel, a really good workplace satire—Then We Came to the End; On the Floor—hauls the essential unreality of working life out of the weird blandness of working life as much as out of the particulars. Eggers famously (notoriously?) bragged that he hadn’t done any research on tech firms when writing this book, which is clearly not true. If anything, the book suggests an unhealthy infatuation with the self-presentation of those very internet companies, all happy-happy people playing ping-pong in the artisanal cafeteria while dreaming up the next disruptive inflection point in human history. Eggers exaggerates all this to a point light-years beyond absurdity, but he never manages to land a convincing blow because his target is itself an illusion.

So a dumb character stumbles through a poorly conceived fictional company until—spoilers—she arrives at her Winston Smith moment and loves Big Brother. Except she always loved Big Brother; her moments of doubt are petty and procedural; she always gets over them, and quickly. She must betray her friend and mentor, Annie, but the betrayal is such a foregone conclusion, so telegraphed, so obvious the moment Annie’s own first doubts emerge that you mostly wonder why it took so long to get there. Mae has already abandoned her family. Oh, and she drives her ex off a cliff, literally. That scene has a quality of slapstick. Intentional? In a book so hasty and thoughtless, it’s hard to tell. Anyway, she loves Big Brother. The Circle has turned—in about a year—into a force of global domination, and Mae is, like, cool with that. Eggers’s ideology appears to lie with her dead ex, but he’s dead, and in any event, his speeches mostly sounded like bad college-paper op-eds. I suppose Eggers made him insufferable in order to make him more complicated, to make the point that unpleasant people and cranks and kooks can be right, too, but the guy mostly comes off as a bozo. And despite living for years now with revelations about government spying and subversion of the online world, about a complex interplay of antagonism and collusion between spy agencies and tech businesses, this is a straight-up evil corporation; the hapless government is just hapless. Mae isn’t manipulated; she isn’t tortured; she isn’t a skeptic converted or corrupted by The Circle’s promise of wealth and power; she’s nothing that would make her interesting, and she doesn’t change. Eggers sets his come-to-Jesus moment in the middle of a megachurch.

But what bugs me the most, and what makes this book worth reviewing as an artifact of an attitude, is the unfair and uncharitable way Eggers writes the rest of us idiots, who appear here only as a vast, unthinking mass eating whatever shit the internet shovels at us out of some desperate, pathetic, mewling, self-worshipping desire to be loved, or something. One of The Circle’s supposed-to-be terrifying slogans is “Privacy is theft.” Well, no. Privacy is respect. But sharing (“Sharing is caring” is another scare-phrase here) is human; the desire to know and to be known is one of the bases of cognition, conscience, and sentience. There’s nothing wrong with lampooning narcissism, and the internet enables plenty of it, but this evident belief that there is something fundamentally disordered about rating your favorite restaurants or poking your friends is a load of snobbish, patrician garbage. If modernity and modernism are the history of human atomization, of the centrifugal forces of technology and economy flinging our communities and families ever farther away from each other, of the dislocation of the human mind and the human soul, then how do we find ourselves in an era when some small part of our old communities—gossipy, yes, and sometimes without secrets, and very judgmental, and yet, because we know them, very often good—can be regained, only to find that many of our writers, who are supposed to be concerned with things like the mind and the soul, hate it, and think that we’re children and fools for wanting it, even if our desire should indeed be tempered with reserve.

I am not a technological utopian. I don’t think that “information wants to be free” is an adequate ideology for the perfection of the human condition. I also don’t think that governments should be in the intellectual property racket, and I think Google and the like ought to be broken up, although I’d probably give them a pass until I got done with the banks. I worry about my privacy, both the privacy that I sign away when I log onto gmail or Amazon and the privacy that’s wrenched from me by the panty-sniffing fear salesmen in the US government. I would gladly eat my own eyeballs before reading another restaurant review on Trip Advisor. I find Instragram slightly upsetting, but I’m willing to admit that’s probably just me getting a little bit old.

But it’s unkind and unperceptive to assume that people’s sometimes ill-considered flight to convenience is a mark of some vast inadequacy. Insofar as we encounter any citizens of the internet in Eggers’s book, they’re a horrifying stampede of gimme-gimme-gimme status-obsessed zomboids who will kill a man through an overabundance of likes. Yeah, well, maybe some of them are just busy moms with long commutes to lousy jobs in a shit economy. Maybe some of them are wannabe reviewers who got one too many rejection notes from McSweeny’s and decided to start their own blogs. Maybe some of them are gay dudes in Russia or activists in Myanmar who find pseudonymity convenient and safe. Maybe some of them just like taking pictures of their fucking food. Maybe some of them were forced to move across the country for work and this is just how they stay in touch. Maybe some of them are uncomfortable with the compromises they make to bank online or e-file their taxes. And maybe some of them are trolls and misogynists and scammers and crooks. But they are, in fact, people, for whom The Circle, in whose sympathies they supposedly lie, hasn’t got any time at all.

Update: I was not the first to this post’s title, or at least, the punchline. Credit and attribution where due.

The Won Percent

Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

Oh, Jesus, you’re already thinking. Another one of those “when I was at Oberlin back in the good ol’ days” stemwinding openers. Fuck you. Get your own blog. When I was a whippety little undergrad at Oberlin College lo this last dragging decade ago, one Larry Summers—you may have heard of him—was invited to speak at Finney Chapel as part of a yearly “Convocation Series”, the sort of series that well-heeled college and university presidents pride themselves on, the kind of convocation in which one is likely to encounter, say, the phrase “thought leader” incarnated in the form of various state functionaries and intellectual popularizers, an ongoing and geographically distributed set of temporary Chautauquas, pace Mencken, a sweaty, Gilbertian landscape of eating, praying, and love, at least, of money.

Summers was Clinton’s Treasury Secretary at the time—this was just before Harvard signed him on waivers. If you want a good example of exquisite mediocrity as the sole unkillable constant in American public life, just look at this guy’s career as he’s careened from one gorgeous scam to another, forever making millions. Anyway, I don’t think we yet knew about his role in the manufactured California Energy Crisis, but those were the waning glory years of gaudy Clintonian neoliberal economic imperialism, and plenty of us were outraged that this towering economic shock doctor was going to be ushered into our sylvan utopia and given a polite public reception. Of course, I was mostly interested in the business end of my bong in those days, and thus unable to rouse myself to any sort of action, but a bunch of campus socialists got themselves into the chapel for the speech, unfurled banners, shook noisemakers, and shouted the greedly little schlub off the stage.

The internet was as-yet inadequate to viralizing this sort of thing into a national scandal, but on campus, recriminations broke along predictable lines. The college administration and that portion of the student body and faculty who believed the purpose of education to be preparation for Congressional internships, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and Teach for America, with subsequent stints at the Kennedy School or Wharton and nice lives in the leafy Maryland suburbs were outraged at this abridgement of Summers’s right to be heard, besides which, it was impolite. The more radical sorts, mostly students and some of the hipper profs, replied, well, shit, our positions are totally unequal; he gets a stage, while we get lines at the microphone for a Q&A; he has a national, an international, forum; we have the letters to the editor in the Oberlin Review. The whole thing eventually blew over. Despite the earnest worries of the Leave Larry Alone faction, he was not irreparably tarnished; he went on bilking millions out of American institutions, and I’m sure he still gets invited to convocations today.

Thirteen years later, Ray Kelly gets shouted down at Brown. In a fully reciprocal, eye-for-eye, digit-for-digit justicial universe, students would have thrown him against a wall, forced his legs apart with their knees, grabbed at his crotch and fingered his anus, all the while laughing and cracking vulgarly wise about the size of his dick and the failures of his race, then publicly claimed it was for his own good. Instead, he suffered the mere indignity of not being able to read the same prepared remarks he’s read a thousand times before. But the internet has matured into a great engine powered by a steady injection of mere indignity, and although the truth is that this was a forgettable incident, a typical confrontation between young people with a burgeoning awareness of the systems of power in America and the sort of asshole that middle-manages those systems, a meeting of unequals in which strength in numbers briefly triumphs before the jerk they’re booing trundles off to a paid sinecure in one of the oligarchical pensioners villages set up by the finance industry for former servants of maintaining the status quo, it all became a great opportunity for national tut-tutting. The President of the University made a pitiful public apology; your cheeks and mine would burn with shame at such personal and professional abasement, but these people are the worst sort of masochists, and they get off on their own humiliation, so long as it’s in the service of someone with a slightly higher rank in the hierarchy. She promised that these students would “face consequences”, and the university has formed the hilariously Soviet “Committee on the Events of October 29th”. No, really.

Divisive, intemperate, ineffective. There’s plenty of scolding to go around, much of it from liberals who ostensibly see themselves as opponents of Ray Kelly. Most of these are reliable party Democrats who forever plead for work within the system. And it’s no coincidence that they call it work. Politics, including its PR arm, the press, is a profession. We can’t have all this shouting in the workplace. Some of us are trying to get something done here. Typical of this attitude and its attendant misunderstandings is Democratic commenter par excellence Katha Pollitt, of The Nation, who writes:

More important, shouting Kelly down shows lack of respect for the audience and for the larger—much larger—number of people who had never given stop-and-frisk much thought. By shutting down the event, activists successfully threw their weight around—all 100 or so of them—but did they persuade anyone that stop-and-frisk was a bad, racist policy? Did they build support for their larger politics and their movement? I don’t think so. I think the only minds that changed that night were of people who felt bewildered and irritated by being prevented from hearing Kelly speak by a bunch of screamers and now think leftists are cynical bullies who use and abandon free-speech arguments as it suits them.

It’s fashionable on the left to mock liberalism as weak tea—and sometimes it is. But you know what is getting rid of stop-and-frisk? Liberalism. A major force in the campaign against stop-and-frisk was the NYCLU, which carries the banner of free speech for all. And Bill de Blasio, who just won the mayoral election by a landslide, has pledged to get rid of the policy and Ray Kelly too. Those victories were not won by a handful of student radicals who stepped in with last-minute theatrics. They were won by people who spent years building a legal case and mobilizing popular support for change.

This is a type of rhetoric much-employed in the polite liberal press, a strategy for being superficially correct through artful misunderstanding. Nothing Pollitt says here is wrong, per se, and yet, if you ask me the proper temperature to roast a chicken and I tell you that the square root of two hundred and twenty-five is fifteen, well, what’s that got to do with the price of milk? You see, the point of shouting Ray Kelly off the dais isn’t to get rid of “stop-and-frisk,” which these students are sophisticated enough to understand as merely symptomatic of greater injustices and inequalities in American life. No, the point is to get rid of Ray Kelly, to make the point that he has nothing to say that’s deserving of public consumption, that he is a wicked fellow who ought to be drummed from public life, his opinions, like those of most of us, to be shared grumpily over beers with no one to listen but the other cranks and kooks drinking in the middle of the day. The point is to shame Brown University—admittedly, a difficult task, since the university in the form of its administration is, as noted, shameless—for inviting the weasely little fascist onto the stage in the first place.

After all, Bill de Blaisio’s presumptive firing of Kelly will not get rid of him, any more than the election of George Bush or the Enron fiasco could get rid of Larry Summers. I think de Blaisio’s comments on NYPD practices have been mostly laudable, and firing Kelly would be correct. But Kelly is going to get a bazillion dollars and a no-responsibility job at JP Morgan (or the like) for his troubles, and for the rest of his life, Brown University (and the like) is going to pay him tens of thousands of dollars a pop to opine sagely on the tradeoffs between the comforts of white people and the brutal oppression of everyone else in the service of an empirically dubious but psychically reassuring notion that this “reduces crime.” Paid public appearances are performances, and booing a bad band or a lousy soprano is not a First Amendment issue. If Kelly doesn’t want to be booed, he should recant and become less odious; otherwise, any effort to make him and his kind publicly unacceptable is a good, clean game.

The Enterprise of Late, State Capitalism Constructs a Sort of Cathedral

Poetry

Construct it out of prayers that you can’t quite
recall with full fidelity; you heard
some rabbi once, and distantly; the words
may not have been in English. Then you’ll write
instructions made of Morse-encoded light
machine-translated into songs by birds
and pleasure-whines of dogs discovering turds.
Then patent, IPO, and copyright.
Like god, it is a conjugation
of the verb, to be, irregular and yet
entirely essential, absolute,
humanity in whole its congregation,
a thing unbounded as an Aleph set.
Oh, frozen? Turn the power off. Reboot.