David Lynch “Crazy Clown”
Those People
All right, there are 47 percent who are with [Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
“SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters,” David Corn
This is one of those public statements that are so rich with multiple layers of irony that you’d think it was faked by a writing teacher. It’s a rare peek behind the mansion doors. Romney, like all financiers and big business people, has made his living using every government subsidy available, starting with his income tax rate. (Here’s a piece,“Romney’s ‘Crony Capitalism’: Bain’s Big Government Subsidies,” outlining the history of his public dependencies. Never mind the billion dollar government bailout of Romney’s Olympics.)
The irony gets a little nastier when you consider that the economic crash, and so the ongoing need of so many for help ranging from food stamps to unemployment insurance, has its roots in the unwavering Republican passion for deregulation and austerity, despite all evidence that these things hinder economic growth, among other things. It’s also a very deceptive statement; we all pay all sorts of other taxes, from social security to property to sales taxes. The poorer we get the fewer people pay income tax because it’s a progressive tax.
Romney assumes that corporate welfare is beyond reproach and everyone else’s public support suspect. The last irony is that this reveals more about Romney’s class biases and politics than just about anything else in the campaign, with the sole exception of his wife’s comment that, “We’ve given all you people need to know.” This isn’t a politician speaking to citizens, it’s an aristocrat’s habitual complaint about the impossibility of finding a honest servant who will work hard for almost nothing and won’t steal the silverware.
Rahm Emanuel to Teachers Everywhere: Drop Dead!
The Chicago teachers strike is, arguably, the most important labor action to occur in a decade if not longer. At bottom, the issue is simple. Who will pay for the gross mismanagement represented by 30 years of pro-business economics? The Democrats are certainly the lesser of the two evils, but as the major’s intransigence shows, too many conservative Democratic are too willing to try to force teachers to pay for the sins of the fathers, in this case, ironically, that means, among other things, the Chicago school of economics. This is a test of raw political power against sheer ideological pigheadedness.
The theories advocated by Milton Friedman and his gang, with its freakish worship of so-called free markets and its irrational theory of rational choice, brought us to the verge of a second great depression. Thanks to Friedman’s policy grandchildren, now in power in the House, efforts to remedy the economic downturn through stimulus have been stymied. School districts, dependent on property taxes (and other federal, state, and local funding) have been doubly hit, first with the collapse of housing prices and then again with budget balancing economic policies cutting jobs and services.
Emanuel is using contact negotiations to quash union power and push reforms that would link teacher salaries to student evaluation scores. This “value-added” approach has been denounced in a public letter signed by 18 Chicago education researchers. (In such a system, teachers are rewarded for the “value” they add to student learning, whatever that might mean.) The researchers suggest that such a system is “in its infancy” at best, hardly ready for large-scale implementation. The union has a very different set of priorities, all focused on problems and not ideological dreams of privatization.
The teachers’ demands all center around making a start towards correcting the damage created by conservative economic policies and austerity-based budgeting, both in the schools themselves and in the neighborhoods around the schools. “We’ve seen public housing shut down,” union President Karen Lewis says, “public health clinics, public libraries and now public schools. There is an attack on public institutions, many of which serve low-income and working-class families.” I hope that President Obama is reelected but I also hope that the union wins and that, come spring, more unions begin to fight and win these sorts of battles.
What is a Phillip Roth?
I’m not sure why I find this so entertaining, but I just found an article by Phillip Roth, “AN OPEN LETTER TO WIKIPEDIA” in which he complains that he cannot control his own Wikipedia article. “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.” I think the Foucault of “What is an Author”? is spinning in his grave somewhere.
Wikipedia falsely claims, Roth says, that the Human Stain is “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” In fact, Roth says, the novel is based on “an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton…” The Wikipedia article, to make this debate even more post-modern, has already been changed, neatly folding the debate into the text, like egg white in a souffle. Here’s the new entry:
Roth was motivated to explain the inspiration for the book after noticing what he referred to as a “serious misstatement” in the Wikipedia entry on The Human Stain. His request to have the entry amended was prevented by Wikipedia policy because he did not have a secondary source for his inspiration. Roth was responding to comments in the article referring to reviews by Michiko Kakutani, Lorrie Moore, Charles Taylor, and Brent Staples, who had all stated in their reviews that the book was “partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard”, a writer and New York Times literary critic.
It’s a battle between the literary (print) and the collective (digital) forms of authorship and I think Roth is the looser. In traditional terms, the Wikipedia people have good evidence. Even if Roth didn’t consciously draw on Broyard, a handful of smart people see a strong connection that Ross himself could have missed. Ross’s argument is a little silly; he says, roughly, “I knew Tumin much better than I knew Broyard. Since I didn’t know Broyard well, I couldn’t write about him.” That hardly seems conclusive, much less persuasive.
What Roth seems to miss is that Wikipedia has a different model of authority and author. A Wikipedia entry, Foucault might say, “is valorized without any questions about the identity of [its] author.” Unlike a folk-tale or a myth, though, the validity of the entry rests on a institutional rather than historical process. In part, Ross is confusing apples and oranges. “The same types of texts have not always required authors,” Foucault notes, although “literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author.” Not so much, now.