Author: jacobbacharach

Inferior Musicians Giving Great Pleasure to Themselves

Culture, Religion, War and Politics

HBO’s charming mid-aughts cosplay porno, Rome, habitually botched the broad canvas of history, but it did manage some excellent brush strokes, many of them dabbed around the series’ real star, Ian McNeice, who played the forum reader, a wonderfully amoral news anchor who stands in gorgeous fixity amid the whirl of war and upheaval, a pole whose flag is perfectly attuned to the breeze. McNeice gets the character precisely right: gaudy, congenial, sardonic, a little cruel. I remember one particular announcement, a throwaway, really, but an example of the show actually inhabiting its setting rather than dully commenting on it. In the second season, when Herod is scheduled to visit Rome and its squabbling rulers, McNeice casually announces to the forum: “On order of the Triumvirate, during Prince Herod’s residency here, all mockery of Jews and their one god shall be kept to an appropriate minimum.” It’s the way he says “one god,” the slight pause that precedes it, the implied chuckle in the pronunciation . . . It’s very funny, and it’s very good.

Pre-Christian Rome was religiously pluralistic, although it did have a state religion of sorts, and this was of a piece with the ancient world in general. It was accepted as a matter of course that different peoples had different gods, and over the centuries of migrations and conquests, people traded deities like we moderns trade vocabulary, with efforts to keep out popular foreign deities about as effective as the Académie française trying to keep out email. Even the Jews “and their one god” LOL had, in their past, occasionally adopted an idol, and when Adonai finally bothered to write down the bylaws, he admitted the dense population of the numinous world in his commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. The world is awash in divinities, but I am yours. The cheese stands alone.

Anyway, this all brings us by commodious vicus of recirculation back to America, our nova Roma, and the present to-do over gay rights and religious liberty. The general question is whether people of faith—another one of those hilarious taxonomic neologisms that are, I sometimes think, America’s sole remaining political export to the world—should be able, in a private capacity, to deny service to gays based on the religious and moral objections to homosexuality or gay marriage or what have you, or if this constitutes a form of discrimination as odious and intolerable to society as racial discrimination. Does refusing to bake a cake for a queer couple equal refusing to bake a cake for an interracial couple; does refusing to allow a gay parent to adopt amount to turning away black prospective parents at the agency door?

Obviously the general trend is in the direction of yes: yes, it is intolerable discrimination, and it isn’t permissible to raise the banner of free exercise in order to violate equal protection. Hmm, I suppose I find this logic a little weird. Now don’t get too worked up. I find religious objections to same-sex partnership and adoption incoherent; I find the Christian sexual ethics that supposedly stand in opposition to gay sex and gay marriage impossibly inconsistent and weird. The idea that there exists a such thing as “traditional marriage” and that some kind of post-War, pre-Beatles nuclear, two-generation family represents a sacred norm in human history is so laughably, ahistorically bogus as to represent, quite possibly, the dumbest idea in the magisterial history of dumb ideas. And like I said a few days ago, the old adage about reaping what you sow has few better examples than the specter of these people of faith, long perfectly pleased to link their religious institution to the packed list of state-sponsored and state-conferred benefits, now whining that this very same state should keep its muddy nose out of their churchy business. I hate the idea that I might be turned away at the door of a business because of my relationship with a man, but I am very suspicious of this constant appeal to the powers of the state, knowing, as I do, how the worm turns. Not very long ago, the same state that compels the baking of my wedding cake called my intimate life illegal. Or, the state that compels the lunch counter to serve black men also imprisons more than a million of them. What I am saying is, the problem of equality guaranteed by the police is the police.

The uncomfortable truth is that the idea of liberty sits uncomfortably with the free practice of religion. Another bogus idea is that liberty is some kind of natural state, a condition of freedom against which states and their governments set limits—reasonable and limited limits, if the state is properly constituted, yeah? But liberty in practical reality consists of a set of privileges and permissions; it is granted, not innate; it is a charter, not a condition of being, and as such, it is changeable, tradeable, and purchasable. It is not the same as freedom. The trouble with religious liberty as it’s come to be defined is that it asks the state to grant it the privilege to deny to others the permissions that the state has already granted. This is the strange demand: we wish to refuse what you permit.

I am a great believer in allowing many little cultures to flourish, and I think bad things happen when they start balling themselves up into the sorts of vast engines of wealth and authority that build thousands of prisons and stockpile nuclear weapons and invent aerial drones. But if we are to permit cultural peculiarity, and if we’re to permit broader exercises of moral expression, however attractive, however odious they may appear to us, then we must learn to live in a world of alien gods and weird wedding practices. A telling response to my last post was:

First we will deny you permission; then we won’t permit you to leave. This is why people find it so hard to believe that people of faith desire only to be left alone, to be allowed to run their adoption agencies, parochial schools, and sacramental marriage ceremonies without outside interference; live and let live;  à chacun son goût; il faut cultiver notre jardin; um, etc. The plea to be allowed to be particular pairs poorly with an evangelical universalism; the desire to be granted liberty frequently shades into a wish to become its grantor; you shall have no other gods beside me, or before me, becomes rather more ominously, there shall be no other gods.

Ab hoedis me sequestra

Culture, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Religion, War and Politics

I like to describe my politics as anarchist by belief and conservative by temperament. I’m the product of a close, multigenerational family, and most of us still live within twenty miles of where my paternal grandparents were born. Individually, we occupy a wide spectrum of idiosyncratic political beliefs, but, as is the case with many groups bound by old familial ties and economic interdependence, we tend, at least among ourselves, to be broad-minded. The habit of linking clannishness to close-mindedness has its roots in a certain truth, but the countervailing truth is that close kinship permits a tolerance for eccentricity that larger society often does not. At least, that’s my experience. As a moody adolescent very convinced of his own uniquely poetical character, I was very much prepared for my coming out to be my operatic moment contre le monde entier, and I suspect, in retrospect, that I was a little disappointed when no one seemed to care very much. To my extreme mortification, my father bought me condoms.

I was raised Jewish; I’m a bar mitzvah—that was from my mother’s side, per tradition, although my father, despite having been raised Catholic (my grandmother is Italian), is also half Jewish. My paternal grandfather, Fritz, was of German Jewish descent. In fact, we learned through amateur geneaology that his people were not German Jews at all, but Spanish Sephardim who migrated out of the Catholic south to escape various waves of persecution. Well, my grandmother is fond of saying that theirs was a controversial marriage at the time, an Italian Catholic and a German Jew. “But,” she says, “your grandfather married the only Italian woman who can’t cook, and I married the only Jew with no money.”

In the strictest sense of the word, I am an atheist, which is not to say I’m wholly irreligious. I still go to High Holy Day services and still think of myself as a Jew, and I believe in some kind of superphenomenal, if not supernatural, world, despite being a strict non-believer in any sort of deities or controlling intelligences—even dei absconditi strike me as silly, willful anthropomorphizations of the jumbled taxonomies of the limits of human understanding. So, I suppose, I am an unorthodox atheist. I did spend a lot of time in my twenties heckling actual believers for their historical and ontological lacunae, but I find myself, more and more, in a sort of aesthetic sympathy with religious faith. Perhaps it’s only because, as a writer, I must believe in a magical world or else despair of my art.

Over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf took issue with a Slate article that conflated all opposition to gay marriage with hatred, which moved Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber to complain that Friedersdorf was engaged in a game of canny semantics, eliding hatred and bigotry in such a way as to confuse the more fundamental truth that “Principled bigotry is still . . . bigotry,” that “Bigotry derived from religious principles is still bigotry.” Friedersdorf’s reasoning is a little sloppy, but Farrell goes out of his way to ignore or minimize Friedersdorf’s caveats. All of this, in any event, springs from a Ross Douthat article that I’ve been chewing on since it appeared last Sunday. “The Terms of Our Surrender” is the title, although the tone of it is rather Jewel-Voiced: the war situation has not necessarily developed to their advantage. Douthat knows that the juridical apparatus of the United States, a monster of momentum if ever there was one, is presently steaming in the direction of national gay marriage, and nothing is going to turn it around now. He is more gracious than his critics and interlocutors give him credit for:

Christians had plenty of opportunities — thousands of years’ worth — to treat gay people with real charity, and far too often chose intolerance. (And still do, in many instances and places.) So being marginalized, being sued, losing tax-exempt status — this will be uncomfortable, but we should keep perspective and remember our sins, and nobody should call it persecution.

This may be no more than a rhetorical gesture; the other contents of the essay strongly suggest that’s the case. Still, it’s not nothing. “We should . . . remember our sins” is not an insignificant statement from a believing Christian, even if it’s in the service of an otherwise specious argument.

But as to that other argument, I’m really struck by a single line:

Meanwhile, pressure would be brought to bear wherever the religious subculture brushed up against state power.

This is the crux of Douthat’s complaint, not that the popular, cultural advancement of tolerance, acceptance, and understanding has eroded what he and others like to call “traditional” marriage and sexual morality, but that, having at last moved into the winners’ column after a few decades of pitched legal competition, the gay victors will now avail themselves of the coercive power of the state to mandate compliance—that adoption agencies will be forced to accept gay parents or close; that religious schools will find it that much harder to teach that it is wrong for two men to have sex with each other, two women to marry.

I’m not unsympathetic. The coercive power of any government is an extraordinary thing, and the American government is the richest and most powerfully coercive in the world. It compels us all to behaviors we find morally dubious. We are all dragooned into paying for wars and assassinations, for a vast archipelago of incarceration, for corporate welfare and bank bailouts, for dubious public works, for the excesses of legislators, ad inf. There are tens of thousands of laws on the books, and there is a fair case to be made that each of us is, in the strictest terms, a daily felon because of them. It’s bad enough when the municipal government keeps giving you extortionate tickets for alternate-side on-street parking when they don’t even bother to actually sweep the streets in the ostensible fulfilment of the rationale for the regulation; how then must it feel to have the full force and majesty of the state and Federal governments attack the core moral tenets of your faith? However incorrect or retrograde they may appear to outsiders, you still believe.

Yes, but it would all be that much more convincing were it not for all the decades in which precisely that power was used to prop up those tenets, often cruelly, often arbitrarily, and often brutally. And it would be more convincing if this sort of supposed moral traditionalism were not also tied to the rather incoherent economics and cultural nativism of American political conservativism. Let me suggest, as just a couple of minor examples, that actual universal health care and reasonably open borders would ameliorate some of the more dire injustices faced by gay partners denied access to legally recognized marriage. Legal marriage is larded with all sorts of benefits and privileges, and indeed, it was often the very proponents of marriage as a distinct social good who held the larding needle. Married people are a special class of citizen, and that is the crux of the matter. A society used inheritance incentives and insurance benefits to promote a sacrament; now you want complain that the sacred has been subsumed by the economic, the holy spirit swatted aside by the invisible hand. Quantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus!

The easy rejoinder is that conservatives believe in “smaller government” and a less coercive state, but that belief has never been a practical commitment, only a rhetorical strategy. The state grows under conservatives, and it grows under liberals. The difference is only a matter of emphasis, and frequently not even that. The truth is that these marriage traditionalists were perfectly content with state intervention in and support of their sacred institution when it hewed, more or less, to their membership requirements. Only when a bit of money and a bit of politicking rendered it a bit less restrictive, only then did those same agencies of the state become dangerous and a touch tyrannical. Those who play with fire, you know, and those who live by the sword.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Hume Pinsent Consider a Purchase of Scandinavian Furniture

Poetry, The Life of the Mind

It was a lingering winter; all the streets
were melted ice and ash, and two young men
fresh from the matinee of Scriabin
stumbled home to stain their Cambridge sheets
and argue over tonal innovation:
Ludwig denied it; David found it quite
interesting as maths—to stop a fight
he turned the topic to a renovation
of their rooms; a year before, in Norway, they
had seen a form of rigorous design,
like a truth-function formed by Wittgenstein
himself—but neither one of them could say
quite what he meant; they passed into a silence
as necessary as it was immense.

An Angel of the Lord Appears to a Newspaper Columnist

Economy, Media, Poetry

Essentially agnostic, he believes
the moral universe is of a kind
with the bureaucratic and efficient mind.
His is all incentives and reprieves.
He likes the rich. The poor are mostly thieves.
His paradise is just a well-designed
forced savings scheme, a contract signed,
less what the soul deserves than what it achieves.
If, alone, an angel of God most high
appeared to him beside a shallow stream
while on his way, a man in form, but bright
and terrible, he wouldn’t strive; he’d try
to reason the miracle down to just a dream,
the honor modest, the pleasure real, but slight.

Life, Satisfaction, Help, Comfort, Refuge, Healing, Redemption, Forgiveness, Atonement, Relief and Salvation

Art, Culture, Media, Movies, Religion

The mind may sort it out and give it names—
When a man dies he dies trying to say without slurring
The abruptly decaying sounds. It is true
That only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop
For men, cows, dung, for all dead things; and it is good, yes—

But an incarnation is in particular flesh
And the dust that is swirled into a shape
And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape
That was this man. When he is dead the grass
Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead,
And the few who loved him know this until they die.

-Galway Kinnell, from “Freedom, New Hampshire”

The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman has been met in equal parts by deservedly effusive praise for the man’s art and the bizarre, prurient, voyeuristic, and pornographic interest in the particulars of his demise by apparent opiate overdose; heroin remains one of the few real taboos left, one of the few almost unspeakable deviancies, and, as such, some people just can’t stop talking about it. The prolific internet presence, General Gandhi, in his Twitter incarnation, noted maybe the most egregiously awful example, published in Esquire and Elle:

The sentence is pretty astonishingly tasteless on its own, but to appreciate the depth of its stupidity, you have to read it in context and realize that its author, Tom Junod, hasn’t just stumbled into a graceless or infelicitous comparison, but has deliberately and knowingly set up a pair of competing schemas: on the one hand, you have George Clooney and Matt Damon, who “have too much to lose,” and are therefore psychically and spiritually immune to the lure of addiction; on the other, you have Hoffman and Gandolfini, “whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice.” This kind of casual, causal linking of transgressive genius to substance abuse has the fetid scent of an adolescent bedroom. Put down your bongs, guys. This shit’s about to get real.

My brother died in 2009 in similar circumstances—not, as the ghoulish, now-standard description goes, “with a needle in his arm”, but alone in a cheap motel room that our parents had rented for him, because, when they’d allowed him into the house, he’d stolen, and yet by that point, he’d have otherwise been living in his car. But, you have to understand, the last six desperate months of his life were sudden and alien to him, and to us. He was far more Matt Damon than Hoffman: a handsome, athletic man with an unaffected smile and uncanny personal charm; old high-school teachers who’d given him nothing but Cs (when he probably deserved to fail) remembered him as one of their favorite students; old girlfriends never seemed to get angry with him. He bounced from job to job (a signal, in retrospect, but at the time, we saw it as an overly gregarious and under-focused twentysomething’s natural fecklessness and indecision; it would eventually correct itself). Mostly he bartended, and he was an excellent bartender. He was never much of a drinker—mostly wine and beer, and rarely in any quantity. Like a lot of bartenders and other such nocturnal creatures, he dabbled in cocaine. If you’d have asked me a year before he died what his biggest problem was, I’d have told you it was that he partied a little too often, although that, too, seemed like nothing more than the kind of mild, youthful vice that we all, mostly, grow out of.

In fact, my brother had been a daily opiate user for the better part of a decade. He never did finish college, but he spent a few years at West Virginia University, and as a freshman, he’d badly broken his leg during a game of pickup soccer. After the surgery, he’d started on pain killers, and when the prescription ran out, he got them elsewhere—codeine, oxy, and eventually, Fentanyl and heroin. I was anything but naïve about drugs myself; I’d at least tried most of them; my best friend struggled with heroin; my boyfriend at the time was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict—and for all this, I never saw it in my brother, never suspected, never knew until it was too late. He was locked in that motel room, and he was dead. Would Nathan Bacharach ever be found dead with a pile of broken pills hidden in the sock drawer?

I don’t suggest that we turn away from the circumstances of death—the opposite of pornography is a prudish sterility that’s equally awful. But if George Clooney died of prostate cancer, would we take the occasion to make it a reflection on the type of roles he chose? It is one thing to learn to gaze without flinching at the cause of a man’s death, another entirely to treat his illness as a mere foible of his eccentric genius. Hoffman had a family. They knew, or they did not know, the extent and late stage of his disease, but what consolation is it to them, or to anyone who knew him, for a stranger to offer his sickness as a slick metaphor for his professional artistry, a cheap window-dressing on his soul? An actor’s art is doubtlessly informed by his person and his inner being, and Hoffman doubtlessly drew on his own sense and memory of darkness in performing it, but he was a great actor not because of his addiction, but in spite of it, and he did not die because he was a genius, but because he was a man—all of us have our end, but none of us deserves it.

Peyton Manning Reflects upon the Fundamental Unknowability of a Universe Defined by Probability Alone

Poetry, Religion, Science, Sports

What I wanted was a quiet moment when
the faded but still present noise would fill
my conscious concentration, leaving my will
alone; arrayed within my vision, men
like motes moving in liquid, Brownian,
but, to a mind—if sensitized, if skilled—
though arbitrary, apprehensible.
All this—just this—is what I wanted; then
a random error—outcome of measurements
and observation, imprecision, luck,
and deviation, human failing, God—
occurred; the eye and ear are instruments,
each ultimately imprecise, and fuck!—
reveal all sense of order: lies and fraud.

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.