7:18pm: Doing a few finger stretching exercises so that the transfer of genius from Broun’s live-tweets to your life will happen as quickly as possible.

The Right’s war on the State is more visible than the Left’s. It’s more developed, to the degree it’s incorporated in establishment-level politics. Former Congressman Dick Armey, for instance, is part of the crowd  wanting to make the government so weak he could “drown it in the bathtub.” He’s now CEO, essentially, of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party’s preoccupation with “Constitutional” government is a government which has relegated most of its duties to private corporations. Stuff like elementary schools, to a doctrinaire Tea Partyer, is a concern best left to profit-seeking entities, i.e. corporations. The most devout call elementary schools “government schools,” as a pejorative, to stress their dislike all things state.

The Left’s anti-state position is one of long lineage, but it seems that only now is it becoming pronouncedly hegemonic, in the form of anarchism as the contemporary Marxist ideal. There are still, of course, old-school dogmatists who reminisce that old state socialism remains the way to go. But these theorists become fewer and fewer. What prevails are the theoretical frameworks that most adhere to anarchist ideals.

Unfortunately, we have to take a boring detour of sorts to determine what differentiates the Right’s anarchism from the Left’s anarchism. This is where we have to rely on a couple old books. There’s not an app for it. It goes back to capitalist versus non-capitalist modes of production. This differentiation requires a whole lot more than I’m going to give it—but, essentially, it’s a matter of how power bears on the process of production. Rightist anarchism is stateless, but the model seems to retain very powerful people—stock holders, CEOs, the wealthy—in something of an echo of the previous governmental hierarchy. To a certain extent, the CEO replaces the political leader in the Right’s model. The Left’s anarchism is about decentralized power that operates less arborescently and more rhizomatically—that is, less like a tree and more like grass. Flat instead of hierarchical, with an emphasis on hyper-democratic forms of decision-making.

So to all my young adult readers out there: don’t get any lofty ideas about becoming president when you grow up, aka wasting your time.

http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/jon-landau-growing-young-with-rock-and-roll-1974/

“Ritz serves up all the ingredients for the ultimate summer block party.” This is their new tack to sell crackers.

What’s that? It’s Wyclef Jean and his marching band! Bringing their safely multi-cultural fun to what looks to be a neighborhood of exactly identical houses (am I right?). But I thought he was running for president of Haiti. He really is a boundless talent, that guy.

Wyclef Jean stars in new Ritz spot
Uploaded by multivu. – Full seasons and entire episodes online.

Seriously, this commercial makes me feel bad for Wyclef, for the folks who made the commercial, and for the cracker in general. Why does a cracker have to be anything more than a cracker? A cracker is a carrier of cheese, a soup accoutrement. It’s not cut out to be the gustatory centerpiece of a block party. It’s just a cracker. It doesn’t conjure Wyclef’s shitty marching band. It’s just a cracker.

It’s gotten to where the marketing industry’s impulse to assign incredible characteristics to banal commodities results in something like magical realism. Am I really supposed to believe that eating a cracker offers an approximate experience to Wyclef fucking Jean leading a marching band down my street? It’s a cracker. It’s commercials like this one that make me worry about the fate of us all.

Local craftsmen set up stalls to showcase their wares. Look! It’s a thing to hang up in the kitchen, made entirely of tree bark and chicken wire! I’ve been thinking for a while that what our kitchen needs is more tree bark in it. Right now there’s approximately no tree bark in the kitchen. I’m gonna drop a twenty on this thing.

What’s that, a friendly face crafted out of old Coke cans? With eyes made of bottle caps?! Sold!

I’m gonna mess around and go broke buying things made out of useless shit here at this fair!

Wait a minute. Rewind. Why is tree bark 20 dollars? I’m no expert but I’d figure the tree bark by itself to be worth about—*crunching the numbers*—zero dollars. Unless you’re, I don’t know, a beaver or something.

My point is that bark is all but worthless. Chicken wire can be bought in massive rolls at a hardware store, so the few pieces needed for the bark contraption is almost nothing.

How is it that essentially worthless materials can be sold for 20 dollars?

The answer, of course, is that the labor put into the bark created something worth $20. The guy grabbed a bunch of worthless bark and almost worthless chicken wire and wrestled with it until it was a saleable item. The bark and chicken wire might have only been worth fifty cents or so, but once fashioned into that kitchen hangy thing, the bark and wire became worth $20.

This will seem reasonable to almost anyone who thinks about it. Except for economists. Or, certain types of economists. Adam Smith and David Ricardo understood how labor embedded value in an object. Abraham Lincoln spoke about it. But somewhere along the way, economists decided that labor could not possibly be the basis of value.

Is it any wonder at all that our world looks like it does? Economics governs everything, from who wins elections in the first world to who lives and dies in the third world. The high priests of economics, those who claim to have quantified all of human experience through market logic cannot, to my satisfaction, refute the simple economics of a county fair. They’d yank out a hundred graphs and hyphenated terms and still not explain why bark and chicken wire worth fifty cents (tops) can sell for twenty dollars.

The craftsperson who made it would understand my explanation. In fact, most people would. Just not economists.

Why do we keep them around?

So you’re in a meeting and you’re like, “I should be doing even more stuff right now.” This meeting is sapping only some of my soul and while I’ve got this excess soul lying around I might as well deplete it too.  That’s the cue to whip out your Droid and start pounding away. You’re ‘integrating work email’ and whatnot, scoping some kind of blueprint, typing—all at a pace that suggests you’re either a) a robot or b) on cocaine.

[You're so busy you don't even realize how completely crazy looking your building is. Is it a converted parking deck? Why is everthing made of concrete? How comfy.]

But here’s the Droid’s real selling point. It pretty much allows you to become a work robot. Finally! If you’re like me you’ve been waiting around for like ever for technology to be advanced enough to utilize your entire being for the sake of some huge corporation in a converted parking deck. Every child is born with the well-nigh sacred impulse to use robotic arms for the pursuit of higher quarterly earnings. Pretty sure that’s in the Bible someplace.

And that’s why when Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang says that free market capitalism is turning us into “Matrix drones” (like Matrix the movie) I’m like, tell me something I don’t already know and already think is awesome.

Well-meaning—if completely naive—liberals appear to have fallen victim to the idea that removing the symbols of poverty is to cure poverty itself. Conservative backers of the demolitions relied on the notion that running a fleet of bulldozers over people’s neighborhoods convinces those people to become doctors and lawyers. This notion is based on a bizarrely common misunderstanding that American poverty conditions are somehow a non-stop parade of fantastic moments and that citizens have chosen poverty because it’s so awesome all the time. The conservative logic doesn’t really work without this assumption in place. Whether it’s the housing demolitions or welfare reform, conservative economic initiatives rely on a notion that they (the hard-working productive ones) are slaving away to foot the bill for the poor folks’ pleasure cruise in public housing, living it up on paltry monthly checks and WIC. Ironically, it is quite often a belief held by people who literally avoid “bad parts of town” for fear of being attacked by roving mobs of marauders, which they assume to prowling at all times through the streets. They are terrified of the projects and rough neighborhoods, yet their politics is based on a notion that everyone living there is doing so by choice, because it’s so amazing. And not only do they live there by choice, they remain there by choice, instead of becoming “productive members of society.” So, in total, this notion holds that poverty is quite an attractive way to live and it is achieving success and being ‘productive’ that’s such a bummer, such an awful burden. And that’s why we need to punish welfare recipients—because they’re busy enjoying themselves while we slave away. I have seen some pretty lazy, unimpressive people trot this one out.

This is real-estate-developer-wet-dream grade property, perfect for a super sweet parking deck. Maybe a Burger King.

City officials and real  estate developers (developers, especially) seized upon this conservative notion of civic tough love in order to justify their designs. You see, the Summer Olympics  was coming to Atlanta in 1996 and city bigwigs needed the poor folks gone—they were having company over. Hosting the Olympics is like being asked out on a date by the rest of the world: making a good first impression is how you get screwed. So, in 1994 the city began removing the most visible public housing neighborhoods, like the famed Techwood Homes, which happened to be on some of the most valuable real estate in the downtown  and midtown areas. Thus began the project to cast out all public housing residents, thousands and thousands of families, without any real good idea where they’d end up. In some ways it echoes the dispersion of mostly poor New Orleans residents in the wake of Katrina—both formed a post-industrial urban diaspora, a semi-nomadic population (one guesses, as no one knows for sure) whose homes were literally stolen en masse in the name of progress.

But aside from an article or news report here and there, usually in celebration of the accomplishment, little has been said about those displaced residents. Nobody really knows a whole lot about what happened after the buildings fell. Local media outlets will hyperventilate about an apartment fire or a high-speed police chase, but the massive towers and their erstwhile residents got little attention. The attention that was offered to the destruction was at times shockingly celebratory and naive (or hateful, depending on how you see it). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the city’s only large paper, issued an editorial dripping with venom about the city’s families who happened to live in public housing. On the spectrum of compassionate human expression ranging from a Mel Gibson rant to the Sermon on the Mount, the piece checks in somewhere around Mein Kampf. The residents are despised as “cancerous,” “abject” criminals. They are an affliction, and the only way to help them is to severely hurt them:

…Carver Homes, a public housing complex in southwest Atlanta, once sprawled like a cancerous growth on the surrounding neighborhood. It has since been transformed into a mixed-income community with a new elementary school, athletic fields and upscale amenities.

Further north, the Perry Homes projects, which had been a wasteland of abject poverty, crime and despair, is no more. In its place stands The West Highlands, an oasis of single- family houses, condos and apartments where middle and upper-class professionals live side by side with neighbors whose incomes qualify them for public assistance.

And how are poor families supposed to manage living next to “upper-class professionals?” Think about that for a second: in what deluded utopian fantasy do ‘upper-class professionals’ and middle-class soccer moms all of a sudden get thrilled about living next to poor folks? Have you ever met an ‘upper-class professional’? I have. And I haven’t yet had one tell me about their burning desire to live in a mixed-income neighborhood. What I have heard, however, are the myriad maneuvers they use to bar poor folks (and people of color) from their neighborhoods.

The simplest way to accomplish this is also the one that usually works automatically: property values. The former public housing resident simply will not be able to afford the market rent on the new privately owned units. Families are issued vouchers to supplement their rent payments, but there’s no way the subsidies are sufficient to live in an upscale neighborhood.

So what happened to the people? The upheaval and displacement has received some scholarly, statistic-based attention from researchers like Georgia State University’s Deirdre Oakley, but even that work strains to tell the human story.

A new generation of rappers is beginning to report from the new circumstances. As long as the inner-city is kept foreign and unknown, these rappers can be thought of as almost foreign correspondents reporting from the hood bureau. Late rapper Eazy-E, whose group NWA pioneered unflinching reportage from the hood, announced the reporters’ creed:

“We’re underground reporters. We tell about…the streets and everything that goes on, you know, around in Compton (Los Angeles), our area, what’s going around around us. We don’t know what the fuck’s going around around by you, but frankly we don’t give a fuck, you know. Most kids in Compton don’t give a fuck who the mayor or the president is, you know.  They’re not even interested in voting.”

Atlanta rapper Pill is one of the first rappers to emerge  out of the new desperation. The rising Atlanta star explicitly asserts that his lyrics are to reflect his 21st century Atlanta, echoing Eazy’s use of rap as a means to report from the hood:

“For people who don’t know Atlanta…and ain’t familiar with the way it really was, the way it really is, I want to show them it’s more than nice condos and nice houses and nice cars and strip clubs. So I kind of wanted to expose the people to the other side of Atlanta, instead of just the side you see on TV.”

Having watched the wholesale destruction of his childhood homes and entire neighborhoods, Pill is able to report on the tremendous upheaval and the anger and desperation of the new urban diaspora:

If you look at it, over the last five years, probably the last ten, we done had them knock down every project, every subsidized home; all that shit tore down. It’s like they leave everybody on the outskirts, and they moved everybody else in, people that can afford it. So y’all let us live here for low incomes, you let us live here for this many years, and then just when we think something’s gonna change or y’all fixing to build new homes for us, y’all are already building them for somebody else. And y’all gonna kick us out? It’s kind of crippling.”

In his song “Pain in They Eyes” Pill describes the otherworldliness of Atlanta’s hoods.  There is the city that is presented by officials and business elite, but the conditions for the poor have only gotten worse, despite the city’s ‘beautification’ projects to convince visitors otherwise:

You know they tryin’ to disguise the streets / With beautification projects / Projects gone and we got mouths to feed…I can see the pain in they eyes / They ain’t lovin’ life.

New Orleans natives Lil’ Wayne and Jay Electronica tell a similar story about  the post-Katrina reformation of their city. Jay Electronica grew up in the city’s projects (the renowned Magnolia projects, among others), and has devoted no small amount of lyrical attention to how the hurricane was used to redesign the city according to will of real estate developers and other capital interests—to get rid, or keep rid, of the poor folks.

From Jay Electronica’s Exhibit A:

They Candyman, Candyman spit me a dream / Blow a chunk of the levee out and spit me a stream / Knock a man’s house down and build a casin’ (pronounced caseen—casino) / A two thousand dollar government check from FEM’ (FEMA)

In “The Levees Broke” Jay Elec describes

They closed down all the projects / And all these wicked contractors can’t see us make a profit / Insurance companies fucked us up the ass, nobody stopped it / That’s why I’m yelling ‘fuck the world’ every time I let my Glock spit / My nigga, we ain’t got shit.

Citizens of New Orleans’ public housing found themselves in an accelerated and sudden version of the process wrapping up in Atlanta. Atlanta had been an experiment; New Orleans was now another laboratory—to test how quickly cities could be rearranged for the purpose of increased profit-making.

(Naomi Klein calls it “disaster capitalism,” this new ability of the powerful to exploit disasters for gain. Whereas commerce used to be conceived of as requiring calm and peace, Klein asserts that disaster can be harnessed [or even initiated by shock; think Iraq] to be made profitable. Post-Katrina New Orleans was the first North American disaster capital laboratory.)

Following Atlanta’s lead, four of the New Orleans’ largest public housing neighborhoods have been destroyed and replaced by for-profit rentals. As one would suspect, these typically “mixed-income” neighborhoods that replace the public housing quickly become unaffordable to those who relied on the public housing. This is beginning to become a recurring story, as the experiments in Atlanta and New Orleans are offering the appearance of success.

So, again, where are all the people?

Oh, there they are.

]]> http://mattpulver.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/third-world-america/feed/ 1 Matt WorkHarder slideshow_1115596_TECHWOOD_HOMES_ONE_8709 http://mattpulver.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/hyperbole-and-a-half/ http://mattpulver.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/hyperbole-and-a-half/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:30:20 +0000 Matt http://mattpulver.wordpress.com/?p=1254 ]]> I am so into this blog right now.

Sports need—they require—an evolutionary period. Baseball, for instance, underwent an untold number of modifications between rounders, its progenitor, and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball. My grandfather played “semi-pro” ball (which I think just means that during the Depression you didn’t always get paid, for anything. Doing anything during the Depression was sort of semi-pro) and he would tell stories of balls getting lost underneath oak trees because there was no fence. No fence!? What the hell kind of baseball game has the outfielders thrashing around in the weeds looking for the ball while the runner is rounding third? Answer: a game before baseball had all the kinks worked out, less-than-ultimate baseball.

Take a look at the Knickerbocker Rules from 1845, in which the players had to be reminded that “in no instance is a ball to be thrown at [the baserunner].” Baseball was in such a state of flux that one of only 20 rules had to be QUIT THROWING THE BALL AT EACH OTHER, Y’ALL.

In 1871, a batter could still request the type of pitch he received.

Hell, the forward pass in football wasn’t used extensively until Knute Rockne built his Notre Dame offense around the little known maneuver in the 1910s.

American Football has even undergone changes to create arena football, which is completely ridiculous, but it’s got a futuristic vibe that might make it viable for the kids someday. Who the hell knows what the kids will decide is cool.

I just think think it’s a bit premature to say something is “ultimate,” like, 20 minutes after you came up with it. Where can you go from ultimate? It cements the sport, freezes its development, because it’s already ultimate.

It’s sort of like American exceptionalism for hippies. “Yeah, we’ve perfected it at this point. No need in trying to progress. Shit is ultimate.”

You don’t know that.

You’ve been tossing band names around. Each one has an animal name in it, and each one sounds familiar, a bit too familiar. Because it’s 2010 and someone came up with a rule that every band’s name must contain at least one animal name. Preferably more. (I heard there’s a band in Brooklyn with four. Does it even matter that their music is a hip blend of No Wave and Reggaeton with an artfully palsied theremin player? Does it even matter how tight their jeans are? Not particularly. They’ve got four goddamn animal names in their band’s name.)

So I’ve compiled a list of animal band names that aren’t already taken. I’ve already done the legwork. All you have to do is pick one and start being awesome.

Wolf Leg

Deer Golf

Hawk Breath

A Militia of Worms

Chicken Dog

Prairie Dog Companion

Woodchuck Alley

Animal Farrm (Two R’s makes it cool)

Cobra Daycare

Band of Humans

Fashion Bug

Crab Attack

www.wolf.wolf  (with the “www” secretly standing for “wolf wolf wolf”)

Duck-billed Panther

Tortoise Porpoise

Swine Flew (first album “When Pigs Fly”) Taken

Confederated Squid

And You Will Know us by the Trail of Puffins

Sea Horse Sea Hell

Koala Bear Air Force

Conch Stitches

Eel Faction

Kookaburra Jamboree

Mongoose Squad Patrol

The Lemur Elite

A Loose Network of Armadillos

Deer! Wolves! Shark!

Underwater Buffalo