Now is the winter of our discontent
I was reading this article over at ABC News and came across this little item:
Bush’s Disapproval Rating Highest in History
Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard Nixon and Harry Truman) than President Bush, and none has had higher disapproval in polls since 1938.
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This is, of course, not news, and certainly not around my house, where Bush’s disapproval ratings have maintained their 100% level for eight years, even among the cats, who are staunch supply-siders. I only mention it because I was reading the article a little too fast and for a moment I thought it said "Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard III and Harry Truman)."
Fairies and Fantasy:The Wizard of Oz part 2
swan_tower , who is smarter than me, and quite bit better educated, writes —
"You should be aware that most folklorists consider Bettelheim’s work to be a load of bunk. He’s terrifyingly reductionist, and wilfully made up psychological anecdotes to support his theories. And that’s before you take a step back to all the critiques of Freudian psychology in general. I wouldn’t recommend using him for the starting point of any analysis of a fantasy story."
Anyway:
Money
[This is a monologue from a very early play of mine, High Strangeness, written in 1988 when I was 27 and knew everything. The action of the scene is that the monologue is being spoken by an idealistic young man who’s trying to impress a comely young woman. The play was produced a couple of times in the early 90s and the monologue was a semi-regular fixture of my one-man shows.]
…and if you needed furniture, you made furniture. If you needed clothes, you made clothes. Everybody had the skills they needed in order to survive. You knew how to grow food, or find food, you knew how to sew, how to spin, how to weave, and if you didn’t, then you knew someone who did. So you worked something out, a bushel of corn for fixing a shirt, I don’t know. But now, but now, what do we have? No one knows how to make anything. Could you make a shirt? I can’t. A toaster? A refrigerator? A car? Bake a loaf of bread? It’s impossible. We can’t conceive of the work that goes into any of those things. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, where did we get them? We traded some pieces of paper and shiny metal for them! Or better still, we showed the shopkeeper our plastic card and got them for nothing! And so we become disassociated from our own possessions. And from our fellow human beings. And from our environment. And from our God. And why? For what? Money. Money is the answer to every question you can ask in this world. What is time? Money. Why do I work? Money. What keeps society from breaking down? Money. Why don’t we grow our own food anymore? Because we can can pay other people to grow it for us. Without money we’d starve. How did buildings get so tall? Because we can pay other people to make them that way. Without money we’d still be having, I don’t know, barn-raisings. Money goes beyond being good or evil, money is simply there. Everywhere. It’s like saying air or fire is good or evil. Money is the fifth element. And it cancels out the original four because it can take their place at any moment! You don’t need to be able to tame fire, you just need to pay your gas bill! You don’t have to douse for water, a buck-fifty will get you a bottle of Perrier on any street corner! Scientists say that everything is a form of energy, but they’re not taking it far enough, everything is really a form of money! The sun isn’t the source of all life, it’s the source of all money! To the Indians, the land was sacred, it was holy! But anyone will tell you today that it’s just capital waiting to be exploited. Everything we do, everything we see, everything we feel, everything that affects us does so because someone is making money off it. No one and nothing escapes. The whole planet is a business: Earth, Inc., assets 48 kazillion dollars! What is that?! Is that a planet?! Is that a race?! Is that a reason for opening your eyelids in the morning? When things get this bad, something always happens. It could be one of a million things: nuclear war, environmental crisis, worldwide depression, all of these…it’s an interesting time to live.
What I know so far.
I’ll say it again: I am not an economist and, unlike a lot of people skulking around the internet at this point in time, I won’t pretend to be one. If there is anyone in my readership who can better illuminate the current economic situation, I would very much like to hear from you.
Hooray for the red, white and blue!
Hey, consolidation of the nation’s wealth into a whole three banks — that can’t be bad for consumers, can it? I can feel my $700 billion dollars growing already, it’s the most awesomely effective bailout ever! I must be sure to forward my thanks to President Pinochet Bush!
And if you wrote to your representatives to stop this bill, why not go ahead and write to them again? If Bush says it’s an emergency, it cannot possibly be an emergency, and if the world economy is doomed to go into the shredder, this $700 billion give-away is not going to prevent it from doing so, and the middle class will end up screwed either way.
And Michael Moore agrees with me, so there. Nyah.
Pinochet approves of the bailout
Teacher, pupil, kid at the back of the room napping.
In an airport in Tulsa yesterday with nothing to read, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine — I had already finished my copy of Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. Little did I know that last year’s bestseller would prove more informative than the morning’s newspapers. The thesis of the book is that certain economic policies can only be imposed in the wake of a shocking event, such as a flood or a coup or a bombing, and that, if these events do not occur on their own, they must be created by the people who wish to impose said policies.
The following I found on pp 105-106:
"The situation was so unstable that Pinochet was forced to do exactly what Allende had done: he nationalized many of these companies.
…
"It’s clear that Chile was never the laboratory of ‘pure’ free markets that its cheerleaders had claimed. Instead, it was a country where a small elite leapt from wealthy to super-rich in extremely short order — a highly profitable formula bankrolled by debt and heavily subsidized (then bailed out) with public funds. When the hype and salesmanship behind the miracle are stripped away, Chile under Pinochet and the Chicago Boys was not a capitalist state featuring a liberated market but a corporatist one…a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage an all-out war on the third power sector — the workers — thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth.
"That war — what many Chileans understandably see as a war of the rich against the poor and middle class — is the real story of Chile’s economic ‘miracle.’ By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent…if that track record qualifies Chile as a miracle for Chicago school economists, perhaps shock treatment [Friedman’s term for his theory] was never really about jolting the the economy into health. Perhaps it was meant to do exactly what it did — hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence."
Royal Alcott 1928-2008
My father Royal died a few weeks ago — that’s why I was away from the computer for a few days.
The story of my family life is, as my brother Eric says, "complicated," too much so to get into here for the time being, but while I was at my father’s house in Eureka Springs, AK the other day I snagged a couple of killer pictures of him that capture him in his prime. The first one was taken in 1947, which would make it probably his senior-year portrait. The second is him at the high-water mark of his Mad Men-era advertising career, late 50s perhaps, early 60s at the latest. He worked for Leo Burnett in Chicago, then for Art Linkletter’s production company in LA, then Foote, Cone and Belding in Chicago later on (I think that’s the order — accurate communication was never a priority in my family). I’ve never watched Mad Men, but now I feel like I should just to get to know what his life was like. The final picture is one I took of him in 1991. I’ve got plenty of things to say about him at some point, but for now let me salute a handsome devil who knew how to rock a three-piece suit.
Paul Newman
I never met Paul Newman, although I am pleased to have appeared in a movie with him.
My wife, however, did meet him, the story of which I would like to relate to you now.
Programming note
I will be out of town through Saturday, sans computer and thus sans blog. I trust nothing particularly interesting is going to happen between then and now.
Fairies and Fantasy: The Wizard of Oz part 1
The Wizard of Oz is the kind of movie that has been so totally absorbed by our culture, seen so many times by everyone from such a young age, that it’s easy to forget that it is, in the end, a movie, created by a team of artisans like any other movie, its basic ingredients — script, cast, costuming, scoring, editing, etc — no more magical or superior than the ingredients of tens of thousands of other movies. And yet, The Wizard of Oz endures like few other movies do, still holds audiences breathless in its narrative grip, despite the changing fashions of filmmaking, despite its stylized overacting, despite its gonzo, surreal production design. Even other tellings of The Wizard of Oz fail to enchant the way this movie does; why is this so?