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I have been thinking that the Occupy Wall Streeters are risking the pool of money that supports the system they are trying to save, since the 1% pay 40% of the taxes in this country. I told one of my friends my fear that unless we get buy-in from those who have money they will simply take their money and leave, as they have already done with jobs in a post-Cold War world in which (for the first time in history) we live in a world in which producers of value have choices of where they want to do business. He said (and I quote) “Let ‘em go.”

I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution, as it would destroy the longed-for solution. In order to avoid that, you have to take their money before casting them on the sands. That would require an executive order, since you and I both know that the Congress will pass a Constitutional amendment that would make it okay (and I hope, my friend Adam, that you wouldn’t want that).

The globalization of the American economic model makes a huge difference in our approach to our once local problems.

First, in a global economy in which everyone wants what we have, countries will increasingly realize that it is the principle of unlimited freedom to experiment that has made this country produce the telephone, the automobile, jazz, the television, the transistor, the rocket ship, and the personal computer. These inventions have made fortunes for those who were the first to market, and it has been the historical role of government to put the brakes on corporations by standing in the way of untrammeled greed. But they have tilted our economy away from our egalitarian ideals, held by the Founding Fathers on both sides of the aisle (Jefferson and Hamilton both held to egalitarian ideals) and towards the inequitable distribution of incomes. The Occupy Wall Street movement is geared towards rectifying such imbalances based in our more egalitarian nature.

That sense of balance has been maintained in the 20th century (before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) by government, who stood for equity in a world governed by selfish greed AND we were one of the few countries in the world who took seriously freedom to the extent that we enshrined it into the Constitution in the First Amendment. It was this freedom to innovate that has propelled America to the top of the societal heap, as people were content to develop useless things like Pet Rocks to sell to other people (or suckers, as we called them when I was a kid).

But at the same time, it’s important to remember that most producers fail (99%?), but a very few produce outsized incomes (like Steve Jobs’) on the basis of their unique insight into how the world actually works, as opposed to how the majority of people think it works. Rather than inventing another outsized innovation ourselves, the rest of us then invest in their companies, so all boats rise, although at different rates.

This is how America spreads its wealth to the innovators and not to the permanent political class, as happened in the Soviet Union. This is the subject of the chapter “Reykavík” in my work of Poker Tales, where I problematize American culture and attempt to solve American problems on their own terms rather than running to France, as so many academics have done (a notion that I take up in the chapter entitled “Four Parisians”). I fail, but my work stands as an invitation to try a solution based in America rather than France, which has its own problems with cultural integration but being far away such problems are not as apparent to Americans as they are to those who live within French culture itself.

This is also a huge difference that made us unique during the American century, when IN THEORY most countries were following a more democratic model of communist distribution (including my childhood hero, Jean Paul Sartre). We were developing not just a different system, but a more efficient system of distributing resources that did not get clogged up in government but circulated more freely. The byproduct of the American form of organization was the creation of unequal wealth for individuals but also of the wealth that has driven even Communist China to imitate our path to riches and to abandon their communist colleagues, the Soviets, who had seemed to all but a few to be winning right up to the moment when they capitulated.

This was, of course, another instance of the few triumphing over the many that made America great in the first place. I realize that this will make me appear as an apologist for American exceptionalism in Adam’s eyes, but I’m not advocating any such position. The world has changed, and changed drastically, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. China is taking our jobs away, because they are not bound by the rules of what Jameson called late-stage capitalism. The Chinese can raise the income of their people a lot by paying them what would be a low wage in America. So they do. That means that producers of value (including Steve Jobs, who played a key role in building our narcissistic culture in the first place) have a choice of where they want to make their products that they did not have when America was involved in the Cold War.

Both parties in the current debate are looking at the world through Cold War eyes. The conservatives are looking through the lens of having been excluded from the debate in which the baby boomer were claiming they represented everyone in the world (or at least those who mattered; this ended up giving us a culture of “beautiful people by the end of the 70s), while the conservatives have now been given a voice by Rush Limbaugh, who continues to be mocked by the old-line media. This continues the Cold War process by continuing with its old-line models long after the Cold War has ended.

The same is true of the Left, which has looked backwards to the turn of the 20th century for a Progressive model that had guided America through the Cold War. In their quest, academics (the branch of the left that I am most familiar with) have embraced a French-style deconstruction that levels out inequalities as the result of a limited scientific mind that people with “higher” consciousness (you know, the ones who do not suffer like Liu Shaoqi from false consciousness). His makes the academic left so sure that they are smarter than the idiot right that they can easily give up looking at the world for the way it actually works because they know how it works. Their only goal is to make it conform to their preconceptions. This forces the left into an “us” or “them” position that I outline in another blog post (but let’s be honest, who’d want to?).

In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, that was a great model, but history moves forward and often in unforeseen directions (again, see my post on Steve Jobs). We do not now live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt, and so the key to the future is not to take pride in our a priori belief in our knowledge of the historical past that has brought us to this moment, as both Limbaugh and Obama do, but to study the present for clues to where the market is headed and then place your bets and hope and pray that you had enough information to make the correct choice. There are no absolutely correct choices in the American cultural model, only better and worse choices. Adverting to France won’t change that, either. It will just make you an inflexible member of a society in which prizes go to the nimble.

So nothing changes in the world in which deconstructionists tell us that there is no ontology to our rhetoric and by this we can create any life we want for ourselves (and which I, as a writer who does not have to toe the party line like those samizdat authors in the Soviet Union had to, appreciate). This should tell the deconstructionists that there is something wrong with their system of belief (but once again, they baffle me and continue to launch attacks at their enemies from a firm ground that they would deny to anyone else; what is the nature of this ground, I continue to ask, except that nothing has ground, in which case why do we need to be attacking others who have as much right to their opinions as anyone else (that is, none at all)?).

In the world we live in today, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and a host of other nations are competing with us for a share of pie that for all but the last decade of the 20th century we had to ourselves. That fact has put the two strains of American culture, which sat side by side throughout our history, into higher relief: capitalist inequality by which our nation got to be the richest nation in the world which other cultures still follow and our Constitution’s guarantee of liberty got to be the model for the United Nations Charter in spite of us being mocked every year, month, and day of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The change in our position from laughingstock to the leader of the free world has meant that our culture, which not only we in America but the French have had serious reservations about following ever since its founding, will be followed, while the French, masters of Europe from the Age of Charlemagne has fallen by the wayside (the exact date was June 22, 1940 when Paris officially fell to the Nazis). Rather than going back to France for old ideas, the Chinese will suffer the same fate as we in America have, as well as gaining the same rewards. We as progressive Americans need to rethink the American social compact on its own terms to take into account global competition that has opened up such a breach in our culture that had remained in an uneasy compact government and capitalism for most of our history.

Without such an insight into our true place in the world (unmediated by French and German thought) I truly fear that America could lose our richest people to an-as-yet-not-present nation that has the wherewithal to invite our most innovative (and so wealthiest) citizens with the prospect of unlimited freedom, low taxes and easy corporate culture that does not make war on its most successful members.

But so far, all I see in Occupy Wall Street is anger, albeit entirely justified anger, without a plan of action. That doesn’t mean I don’t support them; nor does it mean that they won’t get a plan of action. But it does mean that without a plan of action, their project will fail, as it has taken hold of only one of the two pillars (equality) that have made American society the envy of the world, while leaving those (capitalists) with the most liquid assets free to seek a rent-free life where they can be included in the conversation about their fate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrP7-1q6Nao

Jobs became famous for wanting to change the world, and he did so many times, marketing a scientific innovation invention by made by others that he had seen at Xerox PARC, the graphics based computer, with its mouse and its more intuitive design, to the masses. But that’s what happens to those who are business innovators. They take ideas from others and market them better than anyone else. Then, after their innovation is followed by others, they claim credit for the innovation itself. This is why, after Bill Gates copied Steve Jobs’ copying of Xerox PARC ideas, Jobs claimed that his invention had been stolen by his lifelong rival, Bill Gates: “Bill is basically unimaginative,” he said, “and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”.

But Gates took Jobs’ idea for the graphical user interface marketed to the masses, leaving Jobs’ company as a niche company which charged higher prices for the premium of owning an Apple computer. As the company settled into a state in which the company dominated only 5% of the market, Steve Jobs got fired as CEO. He went on to found NeXT Computers, as well as giving a small company called Pixar some startup capital which will with which they experimented and eventually produced the first all digital film, Toy Story.

These things would’ve been enough to secure his legacy as one of the great technology leaders at the turn-of-the-century, and yet his greatest contributions to technology were still to come. After Apple failed to win its share of the mass market, Jobs was invited back as CEO. He quickly got the company into the black and then with his experience designing high end graphics workstations gleaned from NeXT Computers invented the iMac, followed by the iPod, still the most popular MP3 player in the world. He changed the distribution system of music from record stores to an online based music distribution system with iTunes. He changed retailing, by opening up a line of Apple Stores, a store that has the highest sales per foot of floor space of any company in the world. Then, he finally got the recipe right for a shift away from the personal computer to a cheaper computer that people had been trying to invent for years with only limited success when he introduced the iPad.

As he did so, his company, which he had rescued from being in the red and so from potential oblivion, became briefly the most valuable company in terms of market capitalization in the world.

Me and Jobs as Products of the 60s

Steve Jobs is only seven years older than I am, but he and I are both the products of the 60s. We both went to college; we both dropped out. When he was in college, he took a class in calligraphy, which he later credited with his obsession with fonts in his Mac OS. I, too, took a class in calligraphy (it was called paleography when I took it) when I was in graduate school, but have nothing to show for in except for a story that no one wants to hear about how I learned to instantly determine which font (of 30 – 40) I was looking at through a decision tree that I made in class. As a result, Steve Jobs died infinitely wealthier than I ever hope to be.

I can’t decide whether this matters. Nobody pays any attention to blog, but I write it without any expectation that anyone will be interested in what I am writing, being more interested in expressing my thoughts on what matters to me. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was a cultural leader. When he spoke, people listened, because he was an oracle of the future. Listening to what Jobs had to say gave people insights into their own future that they lacked on their own. This is how a community is built, whereas my approach to my blog involves me in quite of selfish blowharding that is not reflected in the larger culture. This thought was on my mind when I took off blogging for the summer. Unlike Steve Jobs, I have no desire to make money with my blog or my writing. I write my books because I want to read them and no one else in the culture is writing what I want to read.

My success as an author cannot be measured in monetary terms; and although I often have to explain to others the selfish philosophy that governs my life as a writer, I don’t regret the course my non-remunerative life has taken. I live happily with my wife, and she and my kids are all that has ever mattered to me. I spent my youth chasing idealist dreams, and I pursued them into graduate school. My life after graduate school meant learning about how business works, and it turns out is not at all how they told me that the world works was in graduate school. As a result, I went to work as a minor cog in the world dominated by people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and companies like Wal-Mart, who had mastered the way the world in actuality.

I originally decided to go into academia because I wanted a quiet life or I could be in control of my destiny. When I realized that academia and I have different sets of values, it and I parted ways, as I turned to entrepreneurship, which I learned about when I was reading my hundred books on business, marketing, finance, etc. I was happier doing this that I ever was in academia, which put limits on my ability to think outside the box despite their belief that they (academics) were the only people who could think outside boxes. I learned a great deal when I was reading about business, including my insight (derived from Pareto, but like Jobs I’ll be happy to claim invention) of the basic inequality of nature, which contradicted everything they had taught me in graduate school. I took a job as a temp, got hired full-time as a secretary, got promoted based on my skills as a programmer to market analyst, quit that job for a job in the field I got my promotion for (which I rightly perceived as my skill as a computer programmer, not for my remedial skill as a marketer), and eventually went to work for myself as an independent contractor. There, I was happier than I had ever been in grad school, where people had attempted to keep me in line by constantly testing my political allegiances. I would still be an entrepreneur if not for my having had a stroke in 2004. So I changed my profession again. I founded a company, and I now view myself as an entrepreneur of ideas gleaned from my own attempt to integrate my academic experience with my business experience, which I package in my books.

On the basis of the difference in outcomes between myself and Steve Jobs, it might seem unfair for me to poke holes in the thoughts of a man who is among the last great American entrepreneurs (so far), but this is exactly my intention in this post.

Going Back to School

The chief difference between myself and Steve Jobs (in my humble opinion) is that he went to work after dropping out of college, whereas I felt that work was less fulfilling. I read incessantly when I was out of college, and when I went back I found that I was better read than almost all my classmates. But what I was missing, and the reason I went back to college, was a sense that I had not been able to give myself a well-rounded education when I was out of college. I had encountered Joseph Campbell, who was the first of many comprehensive thinkers about the world when I was out of school; but Campbell left me with some deep questions about how I could resolve the world I lived in with the world of “the word behind the words,” which he pointed to as having answers that words themselves could not get to. This seemed to me to take me out of my independent and individual self and impose upon me a requirement that I alienate myself from myself an instead grasp a new set of principles based in our common inheritance with no guarantee that I would ever be able to get back from the division-less area in space back to my individual self. The whole thing requires that I believe that the “higher” construction is real and not a delightful but impossible fiction. Unfortunately, I could not believe this, and I went back to college looking for answers to what appeared to me to be unresolvable questions. I was sure that someone knew.

It turned out when I went to grad school that others had discovered a similar gap between words and what they refer to as soon as I got into graduate school. Derrida’s work fascinated me, and I attempted to work it into the knowledge that I built up over two years working in a local bank. It turned out that I came to a different conclusion than my academic colleagues, many of whom had never had any business experience. For them, going into business meant simply a capitulation to greed; and more than once I had a conversation with academics who believed that they could have gone into business and made money, but they had pursued a “higher” calling whose point of pride was that they had made a conscious decision to turn away from making money altogether.

I’ve always been very wary of such professions. In my own life, I’ve attempted to learn about business, because my parents told me that I should learn enough to follow all of the things they reported on in the news. This involves a smattering of national and local politics, sports, weather, and of course, business. When I was young I never really cared much for sports, and weather was something, as Mark Twain once said, there’s not much you can do about changing. Politics and business, on the other hand, require a good memory for past behavior and the inability to predict future behavior based on your deeper knowledge of the past. This makes both politics and business appropriate for intellectual inquiry.

In the 1990s, when I was in graduate school, New Criticism, with its sense that aesthetic objects were to be counted for as “autotelic” objects without reference to culture or any other external factors, was waning. In its place came a New Historicism, which made culture the static metaphysical object in the universe and the individual as being in negotiation with something larger than themselves. But with the switch from autotelia to negotiationata, I still perceived a problem in the resulting configuration; for it seemed to me that this same problem existed with culture has had existed with the metaphysical individual at the center of the aesthetic universe. No one could say what the boundaries were for culture anymore than they could say what the boundaries of the individual were.

Being a new idea competing with an older idea, people in academia were sure that they had finally reached the Promised Land. Having gotten there, there was no more reason to explore the world for cracks in their own configuration the world; all that remained do was to cleanse the academic world of those who did not believe as everyone in the academic world believed. So this demotion of the individual played out in the world of politics, where two opposing points of view were posited, and through election one won out. Academics secured the election which had taken place within their ivory tower by declaring within that ivory tower a state of permanent revolution, and only one side (the left) could perceive the “truth.” This made it very difficult for me to ask questions about things that had already been decided on; and it made me into a creature of the right within academia, because only someone on the right could ask questions that involved the resurgence of an idea as old as individual liberty without negotiation with larger collective forces. And within the medieval period, which sported more conservative scholars, I was thought to be too liberal in my desire to throw open all things medieval to the forces of Derrida’s corrupting vision of society. I was firmly on the left, as far as most of my medieval professors were concerned.

I find it endlessly fascinating what happened in academia in the 90s. Rather than looking within their ranks for cracks in their system, academics started to displace the frustrations they had with their own “perfect” system onto business people, excluding them, who in turn had dismissed academic thought as a useless pursuit and who (according to my academic colleagues) were more concerned with their own greedy point of view than with collective action. This placed “them” by definition far from the “truth.” But, at the same time as my academic colleagues were making the case for the absolute exclusion of business people from the universe of wisdom, even a cursory reading of the logic of definition would convince anyone that definitions are relative, not absolute. In my opinion, my academic colleagues had made an unacknowledged switch, which I am in the habit of calling the Absolute-Relative Switch. In such a switch, you reserve relative constructions to your party (this can be done on the left and the right), while maintaining that the other party means what they say absolutely. This is the stuff that radio partisans thrive on, but academics and those on the left are not immune to such a fallacy.

Now in my world, businesses always been excluded from liberal arts on the basis of the study of business not fitting in with the standard configuration of the universe given to us by academia. In academia, some people have knowledge, while other people don’t. This is the way that classrooms work: teachers have knowledge, while students are (or should be) in class to learn what their teachers have spent a lifetime learning. This makes it possible for academics to congratulate themselves on pursuing a higher calling, while demonizing their students, who are not thought to be as serious about the “higher” calling of the life of the mind as their professors are. But this is only true if a professor has a secure position in the world and not one of many relative positions that one could take. This would destroy the classroom setting by making the distinction between teacher and student a completely arbitrary thing, so my academic colleagues maintain their absolute positions on some things (like the importance of knowledge and of the importance of teachers who pass on the accumulated knowledge to their students) in an otherwise arbitrary universe in and on which business people operate.
I just didn’t think that my academic colleagues, who had walled themselves off from society by relying on a firm (read: absolute) boundary between themselves and the world that they judged without wanting to be judged, were correct in their assessment of how easy would be to make money in the world should they have chosen the path that they dismissed as only the path of greed. I found them to be as greedy (not more or less so) than their fellow men who stood outside their arbitrarily constructed walls.

My experience with business has been that business is organized on different principles altogether. Whereas academics can elevate themselves up to a higher world while dismissing the lower world as being one of “greed” in a bit of what we academics used to like to call a synchronic analysis, business people have a more diachronic analysis of their position in the universe.

And here’s the rub. If you follow my link under diachronic analysis, you will find that it leads to the notion of “historical analysis.” Looked at from this academic point of view, it appears that business people are shallow thinkers who think in “lower” terms, while academics pursue a set of “higher” values. This accords with Aristotle, who said in Part IX of his Poetics that “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” This, too, reflects the academic position that the first thing one needs to do to seek the “truth” is to abandon one’s attachment to one’s individual life and instead tend to a “higher” truth. According to this model, the business person has no notion that there is a “higher” world that could be pursued if only they would give up their base and debasing focus on themselves at the expense of their betters, who have turned away from selfish greed.

In many senses, my academic colleagues are correct. [See my the first point in my article on Rush Limbaugh, who dismisses Darwin as one of the two worst thinkers in the history in favor of a (presumably static world in which things don’t change beyond a certain point).] But that is beside the point. The academic view point is limited to thinking about the past, as the indication of diachronic linguistics reference to “historical linguistics” ought to tell us. In such a universe, there is no room for thinking about the future. As a result, academics tend to believe that the future will come out of present experience, as I note here, and the disallow all other changes and ideas that do not pass through their hands.

But there is another problem with the academic construction of the problem: the problem is that such a “higher” truth based in “historical linguistics” might be a fictional construction. And here I perceive the difference between academic thinkers and business people. Academics spend a great deal of time thinking about the historical past but cannot tell with certainty what the future will hold except that it must of necessity come out of the historical experience that only academics have fully grasped. Business people, despite not being very good academic thinkers, spend a lot more time thinking about the future than academics do, because success in business involves having a new vision that has never been thought of in the past. So the past is a deep and detailed record of things that have happened; but I learned in my year of 100 books that it is useless to concentrate on the rise of railroads except as a model of the past. New ideas come from thinking outside the box, which academics are all for; but only to the extent that they are included in the final box that thinkers end up with. If not, they, like all dictators before them, will stand in the way of progress.

In my Poker Tales, I note some serious limitations of this model, which seem more appropriate to a European sensibility than to an American one. In particular, I noted the difference between European and American models of culture in my chapter on “Reykjavík” and later in my chapter on the “Four Parisians” who come to America with some high-minded ideals but who get taken to the cleaners by the absolute fool “Belcher” Owens because they are not looking at the world as it is, but as they would like it to be. America works because we have a model of how the world works that is more efficient than older European models because it does not hold on to any residual metaphysical constructs but allows prices to run free on the basis of two cooperating people involved in a transaction without any metaphysical guide that would prohibit setting of the (not a) just price. It was my aim in writing Poker Tales to rehabilitate aesthetic culture on the American model, which (like my point in graduate school) is built on no solid foundation whatsoever but only on the basis of someone’s being at the forefront of something so obvious while being at the same time so brand new that no one has ever seen it before.

On the Cutting Edge

In that respect, Steve Jobs is on the cutting edge of societal evolution. He has stepped outside the box and sees a world that other people can only follow once he has seen the way forward. In that respect, he is the upper 1% of the 1%. He’s a leader who was able to adapt because he dropped out of school and went his own way. On his death, he has been hailed as a hero, the latest (and everyone hopes not the last) innovator in a world of followers. This is the basis of his belief that collective behavior is not responsible for new ideas; it is only a brilliant mind that can see farther than others can: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” he once said.

Occupy Wall Street

At the moment that Jobs died, we had reached reached a pivotal moment in American history. As wealth has grown, the difference between the wealthy and the poor have grown. This has given us Barack Obama, who wants to redistribute wealth on more equitable lines. I am all for this, as huge relative differences in wealth lead to different interests in each party and a lack of social cohesion around common goals (this is why I voted for him). But Obama has attempted to redress the problem by using the academic viewpoint of Saul Alinsky, a man who is for the “real” people as opposed to the abstractions of big corporations. This continues the historical and so academically respectable position of excluding big business from the more noble goals of fighting for the little people. So deeply ingrained is this way of thinking that all of my friends on Facebook with few exceptions are clamoring to support Occupy Wall Street this week.

That’s fine, but it is in their surety that the past will dictate the future that I find troubling. Three of my friends have ignored my warnings about their misunderstandings of the business mind that they wish to exclude from the conversation on account of their being greedy SOBs who are not thinking about the collective good. Rather than take heed to my warnings, they stop communicating with me (I am sure they are thinking that there’s something wrong with me and are too embarrassed on account of my having evil (not just different) views on the subject; but that is perhaps my own paranoia talking, and I can’t really know this). Although they won’t say it to me personally on account of their having grown up in a gentler age, I am convinced that each of them is thinking “he’s one of them,” the “other,” whom the Occupy Wall Street folks continue to (very selectively) target. This indicates to me that their targets are more political than philosophical, but when I attempt to engage them on their to my mind errant philosophy, they either shut down, or they confuse their public professions of loyalty as being no more than private expressions of their own preferences and ask me to shut my pie hole, because they was just expressing their thoughts. This makes me the bad guy who is stepping on the untrammeled right of free speech; it is only when I stop objecting to their misconstrual of the philosophy that underlies their protests that free speech can again take center stage. Objections themselves have become reasons to support what “us” have always supported and to label as “them” what “them” object to, securing the “us”‘s position from ever being subject to a philosophical challenge. “Us” knows what “us” knows, and we like it that way.

As I say, I don’t have a problem with anyone’s public expressions of their view, but I do have a problem if you express your views but do not allow others to disagree or question you on your views. This was what happened to me in graduate school; and while I could have maintained my position as an outsider on the inside, I thought it would have been more work than it was worth to me personally. I, like the Old-Timer in my Poker Tales, went away and did my own thing without regards to the consequences to the collective needs of a society that had made it perfectly clear that my services (being so definitively “other” in the world of ‘us-or-them’) were unwelcome. I, like Steve Jobs, dropped out of college once more and went to work in the private sector, where I had no other obligation than to meet the needs of my customers through my superior knowledge of obscure things.

Steve Jobs as Master in the World of Niche Marketing

My desire to pursue my own goals at the expense of the collective goals is parallel with Steve Jobs’ individual goal that made him a leader among economic producers in this economy. Jobs has been the most successful exploiter of niche markets in which the consumer stands still, while the producers have got to be nimble marketers in order to meet the consumer’s changing needs. I trace the development of a divide between producers and consumers in my essay on Wal-Mart economy in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing, where I point out to the young consumer who wants a job in the productive society that writing is important in the world of production, but that it also requires a very different skill set than is required of you as a consumer of products marketed to you.

And to be clear I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Steve Jobs. But there is something wrong with Steve Jobs as a producer of metaphysical value. Metaphysics has been the principal on which we have hung our collective notion of art and aesthetic value. We see people all the time posting their thoughts on poetry and art, and in almost every instance people are trying to peer through and beyond reason to a whole and complete thoughts on which they can hang their whole and complete person. At the same time, people tend to find flaws in their whole and complete personae. In this, I thought, was the lesson I’ve learned from Derrida and his followers. There is no center at the center of ourselves. We will always be looking to maintain our sense of ourselves, while knowing that if we ever stop and find the center, that we’ve made some sort of mistake. This is the point I made a long time ago talking about Nina Hagen.

It is in the middle space, between extremes, that I find the approximation to the “truth.” Such is the nature of “truth” that it must be passed through imaginative re-creation in our minds before we can get to the truth. And the universal nature of imaginative interference means that we can never (never, never, never, never, never, never, never) get back to the ontology of truth. No one, not Joni Mitchell or Rush Limbaugh, has found it as it in in its ontological perfection. It is, in my opinion, the weakness of both sides that they think they have come to the end of the road of “truth.” This is a too-easy solution in which “us” are in possession of “truth” and it is only “them” that stands in the way of forming a more perfect society. This seems to me to be the product of a specialist society in which no one knows the truth but in which at the same time everyone thinks that someone else knows the truth.

Limbaugh’s hero, William Buckley once wrote “Someone somewhere remarked that Erasmus was probably the last man on earth about whom it could more or less safely be generalized that he knew everything there was to know.” He then goes on to qualify his remark: “By ‘everything’ was meant everything in the Western canon.” This leaves out all the “other” cultures that didn’t participate in Western culture. And it was in precisely those “other” cultures that Steve Jobs placed his emphasis. But he, too, thought that there was an “end” to human problems when he contracted cancer. Like Steve McQueen before him, he chose to undergo more experimental treatments that were aligned with his own mind’s orientation to the world than more traditional Western treatments. Jobs apparently believed his doctor when he told him that “he was either going to be one of the first ‘to outrun a cancer like this’ or be among the last ‘to die from it.’” He, like Limbaugh’s hero, was an idealist who thought that it was possible ever to have known everything. Buckley had displaces “all-knowing” into the past. Jobs, being a business person, placed it into the immediate future, perhaps just out of reach but still graspable.

The reality of both positions is far grimmer. Sometimes perfectly good people (like me) are fine, and then they fall over, having had a stroke at 7:00AM, right in the middle of a semester in which I was doing what I thought was good work of teaching people an introductory class in writing at a local community college, rather than a class at an Ivy League school on the works of allegory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (my academic specialty). Such things are random, and would be completely unnecessary in a rational world. But the world is not rational. How we deal with that fact tells us a lot about ourselves and our culture. In America, we tend to displace the faults of the world onto “other’s” in order to maintain our sense of ourselves as whole and complete persons. It is for this reason that Steve Jobs, despite all his brilliance, could not surrender his body to be opened up by others, and so (perhaps) died sooner than he would have had he followed a more scientific route to health.

Some folks surrender themselves to God, who is thought to be all-powerful. Others scapegoat “others,” rich people, or poor people, or blacks, or whites, or people who believe in ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ causes. But nobody, apparently, has decided that there always will be room for improvement in our relation to an evanescent “truth” that flits away each time you attempt to grasp it. My “middle way” is my attempt to keep open the avenues of truth in a universe where everybody has their version of the “truth,” and that having their own private verion of “the truth” is good enough for them. But such a system rapidly becomes one of autonomous and private monads who do not grasp themselves but only others as in any way limited. When I or anyone else attempts to challenge their most intimate and personal ideas, they can do no more than object to my bad faith.

I don’t resent Steve Jobs’ vision of the universe; his is one of many. But he made his money appealing to consumers who took him at his word and believed that they can have things delivered to them without having to look at the universe themselves for new ways to make money on their own. This consumer orientation is responsible for the utterly irresponsible demands of those members of Occuy Wall Street who are demanding a free college education that will continue the academic policies that make it possible in the first place for students not to understand how the producer end of the supply and demand chain actually works differently from the consumer end. Such a position will inevitably lead to a decline in productive workers (as it already has in the Jobs generation, as model producers are being freshly minted in China and the other BRIC countries but not in America itself) in favor of consumers who take no care for the very different skill sets required to make them into productive workers.

Like my experience in academia, I conceive of the problem differently, and I get frustrated sometimes by my lifelong friends’ inability to see things as I do. I put them down to having been raised in a “culture” that Steve Jobs is largely responsible for. But as I have said before, “culture” is a choice as much as it is a metaphysical boundary of experience. And I, like Steve Jobs, have no obligation to participate in it but to transform it from a different (not necessarily a better) position. But, unlike Steve Jobs, I recognize that there can be enormous consequences to taking personal choice too far. At some point, our rhetoric runs up against reality, and when that happens, something’s got to give. In every case in recorded history, unknowable reality trumps the knowledge of the wisest among us, no matter how shallow or deep the knowledge that each of us carries around with us on a daily basis.

That makes it doubly or trebly or infinitely more important that we don’t lose ourselves in our own conceptions of how we want the world to be and try to transform it in our own image, but instead concentrate on how the world is and then react after the fact. This is the lesson that education should teach us. It is at that point, when we get so full of ourselves, that we should remember our forefather, Socrates, who said that his wisdom consisted of his knowing nothing. Sadly, however, the lesson of Socrates has been attacked by Nietzsche, who hated Socrates for his position that he knew nothing; and by his modern predecessor, Rousseau, who thought, like the Occupy Wall Streeters still think, that is only the consequence of mankind’s having fallen out of alignment with our original natures, which were once at one with nature’s equitable distribution of resources.

Such a position only makes sense if it is true. And the “truth” is not for Occupy Wall Street crowds to know without a conversation with those who think differently (as I do) than they do. As I note in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing, conversations take place in the “middle space” between two people who have firm opinions on how the world works. When they disagree, each should go back to their corner and rethink their position in relation to the different position that the other has taken. After considering one’s position, one should go back to the “middle space” and try to make their case again, taking in all the points that their opponents have made that seem good to them and dismissing with carefully wrought arguments those that do not measure up.

This is precisely what is not happening in American “culture” today. Both sides come to the table with their positions set in stone and expect the “other” position to budge. When they do not, each side is assured that their position is more secure, while the position of the “other” is not just different but “evil.” Holding such atomic (monadic) positions, moreover, requires no education. Instead, it is the sort of “instant intellectualism” that is available to everybody of all classes (as Descartes says, everyone knows that there is nothing wrong with their own thought).

In my universe, nature is not equal in the first place. It seeks to eliminate the strong and eliminate the weak, as Darwin (who Limbaugh dismisses as one of the two worst thinkers in history) was the first to discern, and which Pareto first noted as a systematic feature of the natural universe. If I am right about Pareto’s having a better vision of the universe than Rousseau, then people like Obama and his college-educated followers in Occupy Wall Street are wrong to attempt to build a human society along the lines of nature in the first place.

Conservatives abandoned education after they couldn’t get heard in the 1990s during the PC decade. Steve Jobs, too, abandoned education after he found that it was too constraining. The reaction I would have expected to this was for academics to rethink their positions in terms of their shrinking manifest. I stuck it out, because I have always believed that the better-educated mind was the superior mind but with the reservation that no one knows what the future holds.

I managed to make it through graduate school to the end, but only by ignoring people who demanded my submission to their political construction of the universe but who were not really interested in much more than my submission to their power. Having passed through an environment that others find so toxic relatively unscathed, I have not lost my enthusiasm for education. But I think that my experience has changed my opinion of the world. I do not believe that politics is important at all. I do believe that philosophy is more important than ever. And I believe that both of these positions have no place in the world of American culture as it is currently configured.

I hope to change that through my art. But, then, as I have often asked on these pages: Who am I to be saying any of this when so many famous people in the past and the present have achieved fame saying different things, while I rest content in my suburban home, poor and far away from New York, Washington, and LA, where the real work of building “culture” takes place?

My Facebook friends are constantly reminding me that Twitter is nothing but short status updates. While that is true, Twitter allows me more control over the flow of information to me than the limitation that Facebook places on me of having to personally know someone before they will allow me to follow them. I don’t personally know many poets or artists, so I can’t friend them on Facebook; but on Twitter I can search for poets and artists and I can follow them. And I do. This makes my engagement with the world of poetry much more balanced and complete than my engagement with my limited supply of people that I know personally.

This fits in with my notion of how I should engage the world. I should be able to take in all sorts of points of view and I should be able to expand of discard them based on my own experience.

But Is It News?

This brings up the question of whether Twitter is serious forum for journalism or whether it is simply, as many believe, a vehicle of personal perspective without the intermediary of any sort of editorial control. This was the subject of a Business Week forum recently. In their forum, aptly entitled “Twitter Isn’t Journalism,” Michael De Monte took the pro-position (that it wasn’t), while Brian Solis took the position of con (that it is).

De Monte writes of “Russell Williams, a former Canadian Air Force colonel”:

How did a respected base commander manage to live a double life as a sexual predator?

This question can’t be answered in 140-character chunks.

I couldn’t agree more. But even as De Monte poses the question as one of 140 characters not being enough to do the ‘full story’ of the sexually predatory base commander, he doesn’t address the role of editorial decision making in the skewing of the news away from its stated goal of being ‘objective.’

I for one don’t think that we can have a perfectly (or even fairly) objective media. I learned this from Nietzsche, who talked about all positions in the universe being motivated by interested interpreters, though I am sure that others had thought of it before and certainly since. It is one of the reasons that, though I don’t always agree with him, I respect Limbaugh for his early adoption of the principle of targeted knowledge in the age of journalistic objectivity. And it’s why I can’t agree with Rockefeller’s calls for a return to ‘fair and balanced’ news under the guise of a return to the Fairness Doctrine.

De Monte frames the question in terms of editors who come between the raw facts, which are just one person’s ‘subjective’ response to a single event, and the shaping of a story into ‘unbiased’ news story by editors and writers who collect all sorts of information from many sources. I don’t believe that any editor or writer is furnished with an unbiased mind. I wonder what he would say if I was there to ask him a question about journalistic bias. I’ll bet he would say (although I can’t possibly know) that editors and writers have been trained to put bias out of their minds. I wonder what he would say when I start laughing for ten minutes at his thoroughly naïve response. I can’t know that, either, I suppose.

I want to be clear here. Editorial bias is okay with me, because I trust myself to make my own judgments through my own (biased) mind. My mind has been trained to look for bias in myself and others and to put information on a firmer (though not completely firm) basis through gathering news from as many sources as possible. I also have been trained to be skeptical when someone tells me to trust them implicitly because they are completely honest. That may be so, but I prefer to be more cautious.

Brian Solis responds that

If we define journalism as the reporting of news, then yes, it qualifies as a new form of journalism. With every new iterative update, social graphs transform into a highly organized information distribution system that resembles an Amber Alert network for the social Web—with far greater speed, reach, impact, and resonance. To deny it is to deny the voice of humanity.

Is it merely a recitation of the facts? Only after news media catch up with the news that had already trended for at least an hour before they could respond. I call this the information divide, the time between a news event, when it breaks on Twitter, and when the news media finally reports it. This is why news teams are now monitoring Twitter streams much in the same way medical professionals monitor the pulse in the ER.

So he thinks that Tweets are matters of ‘fact’ which breaks on Twitter and the news reporters who gather and digest the news. Just the other day I had the experience of posting a Tweet on the death of Elizabeth Taylor minutes before the Chicago Tribune reported it to me. But I’m not sure that even that experience makes the Twitter universe one of facts alone.

The reason I like Twitter better than other news sources if that I can avoid the editorial processes that have come to dominate the news since the advent of Limbaugh. The problem with the news these days is that everyone of ‘us’ is following the objective truth and everyone feels that it is up to ‘us’ to defend ‘the truth’ from the depredations of ‘them’ who are not in full and complete and whole possession of ‘the truth.’ I understand that this doesn’t sound silly and foolish to others, but I gotta tell ya, it sounds bat-crazy to me. I’m with Augustine who hungered after the truth but could only find that truth through the experience of faith (not reason) in the inimitable miracle of Jesus Christ. I don’t believe in the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus (I wasn’t there so I can’t know whether it was true anymore than St. Paul or Jesus can know; that’s why they put so much faith in faith), but I am a little disturbed when someone tells me to put my faith in them rather than the experience of my own eyes.

Why I Prefer Twitter to Mainstream News Sources

I actually prefer to think of myself in the world in terms of art and poetry, which holds out the possibility of complete humanity, and not in terms of the world of politics, which points its adherents to vaunt the politics of ‘us’ as whole and complete and to decry the politics of ‘them’ as wholly wrong and possibly (probably) evil.

Having said that, I’m not sure that art holds out the possibility of announcing the future to the rest of us before we have arrived there, as the vestiges of the avant-garde of the 60s and 70s thought. Instead, art has stood on its laurels as new ideas have come without being absorbed by the art world. Such a posture makes artists of the select group that accepts the premises of the art world(s) while excluding those who do not agree. The basis of exclusion of some people—and believe me, many people don’t agree with the sometimes ridiculous conclusions of art-world insiders—turns art-world insiders from inclusive people who want more folks to appreciate art on any terms into a group of purists who declare themselves as arbiters of taste for ‘us’ who may determine matters of taste for the rest of ‘them’s like me.

This exclusion has happened to me more I would like to (or can) remember in grad school. Then, I used to couch my language in ‘politically correct’ terms. After I got out of academia, it just makes me crazy. I had also learned that there is not much you can to when you are faced with people who know they are right and that you (in this case me) are wrong. I also had learned that their opinions don’t really matter much and can easily be ignored.

The same thing has been happening with mainstream news sources who, after the arrival of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have been adamant in their insistence that ‘us’ are the ‘real’ news and that ‘them’ are not news at all. That may be but, how could you prove it except by a petitio principii (look it up here) by which you rely on your own premises. The game’s changed since I was young and there were only five English language channels on television. If you are still using principles that held true when I was a young man, then I would advise you to look more closely at your fundamental premises. They may not (I would say they aren’t) the same now as when I grew up.

I like Twitter because it allows me to move back to the center of a universe that has been decentered of self as a guiding principle. Sure, I know that Tweets are lowly pieces of unfiltered interpretations of events, but I don’t believe in uninterpreted information. I certainly don’t trust the news media to draw out the ‘truth’ through a lengthy intermediary editorial process (is it just me who finds that notion absurd?).

More likely, I feel that the New York Times will use that intermediate editorial time to align their take on the news with the liberal slant, just as Fox News will align their take on events with the conservative slant. That doesn’t make me want to give up watching either Fox News or reading the New York Times. Both have feeds that I use to monitor the news. But both are extremely focused on relatively narrow areas of life. They are centered on politics almost exclusively and that only on three coastal cities (Washington, New York, and LA). The rest of ‘them’ who have not flown from ‘flyover’ country to the coastal cities where ‘authentic being’ is available don’t get a voice in the national conversation.

That’s too bad, but ‘that’s the way it is.’

My father also told me how to watch the news when I was young. He told me that I should be able to know about all the things they covered on the news. This involved knowing a little bit about politics, a little about economics, and a little bit about current events, a little bit about the weather, a little about sports. That, too, seemed like good advice.

I am long past getting my news from television. I get my news from Google News and I weigh the importance of stories on my own. I still follow my father’s advice; however, I have added more areas of interest based on my having grown in a different direction than the mainstream news which, since the advent of Limbaugh, has become far too partisan to be a good provider of objective news.

Here is how I think of the news.

Sports and Weather

My education prepared me unequally for the task of watching the news. Knowing something about the weather is not all that hard. Knowing about sports requires me to keep track of several teams. Neither of these particularly difficult. That is probably why most of the conversations I have in public are about the weather and sports. They are easy and uncontroversial.

Current Events

I’ve given up on current events at the local level. The local news dedicates itself to murders and old ladies who get burned up in their apartments or who die and are not found for six months, and horrifying medical news (‘up next, are your children at risk for these common flesh-eating viruses?’). Such stories are intended to gain viewers through their fear that they (or their children) could be subject to the sways of fortune, despite the patent unlikelihood that such things will happen to any individual, which are equivalent of winning the lottery or the (more likely) chance that they will be hit by lightning.

They are not always true, or if they are true, they usually have a half-life, so that one month we are supposed to avoid caffeine and the next month it turns out that coffee is good for us (in moderation). Ditto alcohol and cholesterol. My wife and I were wondering the other day when the new ‘superfoods’ that we are supposed to eat will cause us to develop ‘face cancer.’

I determined long ago that the local news was more interested in raising viewership by raising passion than they were in actually offering a balanced picture of the world we live in. When I was a Boy Scout, I was told to ‘be prepared,’ but that was because I was adventuring in the world. I needed to be prepared, but I also had to weigh the likelihood that the satellite I was laying in the peaceful grass watching pass overhead would suddenly turn from its steady orbit and crash into me (as happened to Skylab while I was a Boy Scout in 1979). Sure, it could happen, but I determined that such an occurrence was (extremely) unlikely, and I decided not to worry about it.

In contrast to my reasonable and measured view of events by which I conduct my life, the news would have me too terrified to leave the house (which is convenient, because it leaves more time for watching the news and getting more paranoid). I stopped watching the local news altogether over 15 years ago.

Politics

I was prepared to think about politics even before the push to reduce all human behavior to political motivations that I encountered in graduate school. Watergate and the 1960s had raised the consciousness of reporters to their own role in the political environment. They clung to their increasingly partisan view of the role of young people like Joni Mitchell who had discovered what her (and their) elders had not.

This shift away from a balanced view of ‘what is happening’ to partisan politics was taken advantage of by Rush Limbaugh, who finally put an end to any notion of nonpartisanship in the news after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed.

I prefer not to engage in politics at all after having had such a terrible experience in grad school where I had to avoid taking solid political positions, though I could not avoid be perceived by others as having taken the political position of ‘them.’ I learned through my experience in grad school that politics is a dead end.

Now, I can imagine that many of my readers will ask me ‘How can I say that there is no political motivation to human action?’ to which I would reply ‘I didn’t say that. How can you reduce all behavior to political motivation? I defy you to tell me what my political motivations are.’ You will have to rely of your assumptions about the world and my position in it, because I will continue to tell you that I am more interested in art and aesthetics than I am in politics, which I will tell you quite frankly I find extremely limiting. Politics involves reaching the end of inquiry before reaching the end of the problem you have set for yourself. The way that politics closes the circle is to end debate with others who disagree with you. That sort of thing is not for me.

I don’t believe that the news was ever as partisan as Limbaugh says it now is, nor as unpartisan as Walter Cronkite says it used to be.

Economics

The one area where I wish I’d had more of an education was in the area of economics. By the lack of integration of economics into a general education curriculum, I believe we can see the limits of the general education curriculum. Gen Ed is usually based on the humanist construction that emerged in the Renaissance.

The emergence of that school involved several factors. The first was the disintegration of confidence in the stability of language and reason to penetrate beyond the scope of itself to peer into Heaven. The second was a revitalization of the humanist constructions most notably found in Cicero’s ‘studia humanistica.’

According to this article, the ‘studia humanistica ‘ referred

to poetry and those subjects that have affinities with it, namely grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and history—a list which is linked both etymologically and in substance to the modern concept of the humanities. In Renaissance Latin the term humanista designated one who taught these five subjects, in Latin and often in Greek, and it is on this term that the meaning of the word ‘humanism’, in its Renaissance sense, is based. Petrarch’s and the humanists’ preference for these subjects also implied a rejection of those associated with Aristotelian Scholasticism: logic, physics, and metaphysics.

This was derived from a latent idealism that made the pursuit of money evil, while the pursuit of physics and logic were nothing more than dead ends. Metaphysics, however, was saved (particularly after the Enlightenment’s attempt to define all sciences according to the principles derived from Descartes). Poetry was transferred from the limited point of view described by Petrarch to the unlimited point of view that could open up the closed universe once again.

Recently (especially since 1960), this opening up of closed logic through symbol has come under attack. Derrida has applied deconstruction to constructed texts and has shown that deconstruction is the only way to maintain the metaphysical orientation of art.

But this leaves out the science of economics out of the mix. According to the metaphysical principles that I was taught in school, economics serves in the construction of unequal relationships which are out of whack with the dream of nature as the well that holds all in equality. We, as human beings, have gotten out of step with nature, having built up property boundaries and then enshrining them in law, thus securing the distance of our social code from the propriety of nature.

In such a universe, business is run by specialists who don’t know their true selves but are living in an artificial universe propped up through artificial means. Corporations are even words. They are legal ‘fictions’ that grant them the same standing before the law as individuals, despite the fact that they have far more power and resources than any individual (except the super rich like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) ever could.

Because of this, our obligation as educators is to deconstruct property rights in order to get back to our original natural oneness with the universe in which no one has more than another.

My Pareto Universe

I don’t think this construction of the universe is correct. Look at it this way. America is an exceptional nation insofar as we have made good choices with our resources. Russia has an qual amount of resources, but they made (and continue to make) poor choices with their use of resources. They still operate on the principle that income should be distributed equally; and yet, when corporations were privatized and people were given slips of scrip for ownership of formerly state-owned companies in equal parts, some people didn’t understand capitalism and sold their share, while others bought. This brought great wealth on the risk-takers who chose well—for not all scrip paid off equally well and not all who bought were paid off with equal wealth—and kept most of the sellers in poverty. This is an instance of Pareto inequality.

But my point is that by continuing to sideline economics, which relies on choosing which of many options to take in a competitive natural environment, in order to maintain ‘natural’ order. I maintain that such an order is the product of fiction itself (see my discussion of ‘Rousseau’s Debt to Ovid’ in his construction of his universe here).

In a Pareto universe, America has won over people who have relied on lesser forms of government. This has always been the case. Once, Hammurabi had the most advanced code of government, but anyone who wants to set up a city state around a ziggurat in the modern day is welcome to try it; but I suspect nobody would because society and social theories of social organization have progressed.

And this is why America won the Cold War. It is not that we had found the best system ever conceived; it is that we had found the best system conceived so far in history. It is no accident that the United Nations charter begins with “We the Peoples,” the same language that graces the Preamble to the United States Constitution. We have won (for now). In a Pareto universe, losers follow winners or get left behind.

This is the message of the 1998 book, The Commanding Heights : The Battle for the World Economy, which traces the rise of fresh water economics in the world and its role in making America the victor in the Cold War. Bolivia was suffering from hyperinflation until Jeffrey Sacks went down and brought with him the economic doctrines he had learned from Milton Friedman and other freshwater economists. He brought ‘shock therapy’ to the Bolivian economy. This cured inflation rather quickly, though not without cost to the Bolivian economy.

After Sachs’ plan was implemented, inflation fell from 20,000% per year to 11%, though according to critics, left the country worse off than before due to a rise in unemployment, a fall in industrial output, and a fall in per capita GDP. (Wikipedia)

Because of the shocks brought about by ‘shock therapy,’ the ‘native’ (not my term) people of Bolivia elected one of their own, the ‘native’ Evo Morales. Evo may be a great guy, but he’s running the Bolivian government inefficiently in a world in which the United States, which has mastered the Pareto universe better than any other nation of earth, exists; and so they are losing out on the benefits of a better (but by no means perfect) organizational system. That system is in no way ‘natural’; it must be learned.

And make no mistake: I do not judge America to be a great place because we have the most advanced capitalist market in the world. I foresee serious problems with income disparity that results from capitalism’s ability to provide a flood of resources to those who take risks. But my point is that my liberal friends like Evo Morales and Michael Moore, whose universe is based on righting the ‘natural’ inequality through the use of redistribution of wealth, are fools if they think that people will use those resources more efficiently than those who made correct (and often very hard) choices after a process of trial and error. Such as system trades the products of and often hard-won education for the ‘natural’ ease of having resources come to you unbidden.

Causes of Ignoring What ‘Them’ Know for What ‘Us’ Know

In a Pareto universe, not all economic solutions are equal. Making poor choices will result in your country falling behind in the race for limited resources for which nations are fighting. But, whether on the left or on the right, people who decide to stop looking at the universe and trying to make their efforts last forever will always be making a mistake. Always. The constructed universe changes, and with change come new ideas for grappling with new wrinkles. By this we drive ourselves forward in an effort to keep up. This is not natural at all. It comes from knowing that even if we quit, our neighbors will still be competing for resources.

Look at the position of America in 2011 versus its position in 1957. In 1957, we had more jobs, largely because we working in a non-competitive environment. The Europeans had had their cities destroyed by war. The Soviets were experimenting with a natural state of equality. In 2011, our jobs have been shipped overseas by corporations who find cheaper labor in a world of competition.

But educators have held on too long to the 1960s idealism which says that money is bad, m’kay, and needs to be excluded from consideration in the fullness of humanity. Therefore, the humanities departments that I have worked in have remained committed to purifying the world of those who have been devoted to the pursuit of selfish wealth. It is in the university environment, with its long view of the past and its detailed knowledge of the subtleties of Plato and Aristotle and their philosophical successors, that we get the class of people that I see on C-Span who sit quietly in their slightly-disheveled-but-still-nice suits taking notes on the subtleties of past so they can so that they can manage the (apparently inevitable) decline of Western civilization.

But to my mind, such a historical process of looking at the past for a vision of the future shares the problem of ancient Rome’s reliance on Livy’s flowing report of the past as a guide to the future and not on , say, a realistic set of expectations (see here for my discussion of this process in full).

What [Livy’s assumptions about the past] involved is a claim that it is both desirable and possible to erect a future upon the basis of an idealized past. Such a claim is, however, utterly unrealistic. In the first place it ignores the truth that history does not repeat itself; that ever-changing situations constitute a perpetual challenge to the ingenuity and endurance of mankind. In the second, it presupposes that men are in fact at liberty to choose between perfectly arbitrary and abstract alternatives of ‘vice’ ‘and virtue’; in other words, that there is nothing to prevent them, should they so desire, from living the life of their own grandfathers, the ‘valiant men of old’. But this presupposition is wholly fallacious; since it implies that human beings stand in no essential or intrinsic relationship to social reality which, in point of fact, they themselves actually constitute. These effects are not accidental. On the contrary, they are the direct and inevitable outcome of a logic which, by ignoring this relationship, grossly misconceived nature of the ‘law’ operator in human society. The logic in question is, of course, that of classical idealism. (91-92)

Game theory, not the idealistic politics of Plato and Aristotle, gives us tools for thinking about our future in competitive world. Von Neumann and Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame) are more important than reading Kant, Hegel, or Marx to position a limited rational human being (or their culture) in the world.

The Artists’ Response

This has not been the artists’ response to the failure of the 60s idealism. Instead of accepting that the 60s were not as complete as we once thought they were, they have circled their wagons, erecting (false) barriers between themselves and those on the outside (‘us’ versus ‘them). ‘Us’ are holding on to what André says (completely without irony) is the ‘the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished.’ ‘Them’ who remain on the outside are so foolish that they cannot even see what is so clear to ‘us.’ There is no possibility that they could be wrong.

My Post-Artistic Response to the News

The scientific view of the world would be to weigh our assumptions about the world against what the world is actually telling us about its composition and direction and to change our assumptions accordingly. In the 1960s, I think it was liberating to be using drugs; in the teens of the next millennium, we have (or should have) learned more about the negative consequences of drug use. When circumstances change, we change.

This means that I cannot watch the news the same way as I watched it in the 1960s, where they said (and I believed) that they were presenting me with ‘objective’ news. Limbaugh has pointed out just how much bias there was in the news media, and now I can’t look at a news program the same way again. So here’s how I look at the news today.

I divide the news into news about the past, present, and future.

Present

The easiest things to look at in the present as still Sports and Weather, so I have have a Sports headline feed on my page (though not a Weather headline, since they don’t offer one; I have the Weather Channel feed on my sidebar instead).

In my desire to understand the present world I live in, I look at the news of the world, the news of the U.S., the news from China, and the news from Illinois, the state where I currently reside. This makes a lot of sense, since positioning myself within the world has to do with the state of the world.

Past

But to be honest with you, focusing on the present alone does not get me anywhere on its own. I need to educate myself about the past, as well. This is the product of my education. And this is why I have on my personal news page some of my deepest interests: History, Art Knowledge News, Archaeology, and English language.

These subjects are not exhaustive, but Google only allows me so many areas on my customized page, and I want to leave room for my thought about the future. Of these subjects, English language surprises me, because I was raised to think about English as a conspectiscope of the past, present, and future. It was the reason I always (or at least from the time I was 17) had no other thought than to major in English. But in Google News, I find stories that are focused on the past alone and how we should feel as text messaging is destroying the once secure English language with bastardizations like OMG, LOL, and <3. English Language news feed is extremely conservative, but I love it nevertheless, having studied it for 12 years in school and for 15 years after.

Art Knowledge is the most disappointing to me by far. I was raised to believe that art could show us our future, but when I look at the Google News feed, I find that Art is concerned with erecting artificial barriers of all sorts. Art is better than logic; art is emotional; it is the way we as human beings can get back to ‘nature.’ So ‘us’ within the art world exclude ‘them’ who don’t buy into the art world’s notion of the future. (I’ve talked about this recently and at length in the section on “Science and Limits of Art in My Work”, so I won’t do over it again here).

I can look at art all day, and the reason I do not have a weekly section on ‘What I Am Looking At This Week’ is that I don’t want to burden you with my thoughts about the past only. Music will help me tell the story about the limits of mind in relationship to the past just as well as an art feature can. Unlike music, which continues to thrive in spite of some distribution challenges that have come acout in the age of digital downloading, art has been shrinking in its purview in the face increasing pressure from new ideas in order to preserve its status as holders of the metaphysical truth that has been the standard since the discovery of ‘emotion’ in the face of Enlightenment ‘reason.’ See my consideration of the ‘art’ of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger here. Is it art? Yes. Does it tell me anything about the world except that the world is corrupt and that I should leave it alone and go to a perfect place that stands outside of time, an imaginative world that exists only in the mind of a few, select individuals? No.

And that is the problem I have with art. Art is supposed to be inclusive of all, not just a select few of ‘us.’ It is not so, however. It is limited (and becoming more so) and yet on account of its metaphysical status, the art world cannot admit that it is limited in any way without forgoing its status as unlimited. My art work is an attempt to reconfigure art to take advantage of all the things that must be left out of a work of art in order to maintain its status as metaphysically perfect. This involves putting limits on art with the resulting liberation of art from its too-narrow bounds of an increasingly shrinking ‘us’ to open art up to an increasingly growing population of ‘them.’

The thing that art is lacking—on account of its historicism, combined with a revolutionary posture that wishes to tear down tyrants in order to build government back of the ‘natural manure’ on the basis that art imitates (or should) nature rather than acknowledging the gains we have made, shedding our losses, and moving on from there—is its lack of ideas for the future.

Future

In my reading of the news for the future, I reserve the Science and Technology section, as well as a sections on Mathematics and Statistics (Statistics is a little disappointing, and I’m thinking of switching to another source ). I also look at Business, Economy – World Emerging Markets, and Finance sections (again, I would have more, but Google limits my choices). Business has to look forward; because, as Bill Gates knows, in business resting on your past accomplishments will serve no purpose if someone else comes along with a better mousetrap.

The Insufficiency of the Artistic Response to the Future

My academic colleagues have peered deeper into the past than most have, and insofar as they have I applaud them; but insofar as they have shut out logic (on account of the limitations first noticed during the attempt of the Enlightenment attempts to subsume art and literature to a rational framework) and business (too bourgeois) from the methodological conspectiscope available to them. In doing so, they have weakened the case that art is for all of us and not just the shrinking few of ‘us’ who are still naïve enough to believe what we were told in our own naïve youth.

Oh well, live and learn.

We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion.

I disagree. In a world in which Barack Obama is talking one moment about the need for civil political dialog when he perceives his party under attack from the right but sides with Micheal Moore; current Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, Bruce Dethlefsen; and the rabble rousing left when their side is on attacked from the right. Dethlefsen’s call to the crowd bespeaks an anti-rational bias that should be corrected, not bought into:

“Fifty-thousand strong
we stand up and scream to save
sitting down to talk.”

That is not the way to have a civil conversation ‘that heals rather than wounds.’ In my view, the role of reasonable middle ground is under attack. It will not do us any good to explore more of the root emotions of the emotional crowd. Instead, we would do well to ask about the lopsidedness of the left’s response. This is the work of reason, not of an elusive base of vaguely-defined emotional response.

Left and Right in the Absence of a Middle

Regular readers of my blog will recognize (I hope) that I share the left’s concern over their loss of what they perceive of as their rights. But I also believe that the left has lost sight of their reason on account of their having won so great a victory in the 60s and 70s. They have been coasting ever since on the new ground that they have conquered previously unconquered ground . Unfortunately, as Frank Rizzo knew, the right consists of former liberals ‘who got mugged the night before.’ This puts both parties on the same side of the argument. The war is a war for ownership of the common ground.

In the war between liberals and conservatives, people like Rush Limbaugh and Joni Mitchell are fighting over the ‘natural’ inheritance, Limbaugh for the ‘natural’ law given to mankind by God, Joni searching after the ‘natural’ world which has been abused by corporations who would pave paradise to put up parking lots. Both sides have points, but they make their points as if ‘the other side’ of the argument is so stupid that those of ‘the right side’ of the argument don’t even have to listen to those on the ‘wrong side.’ (look here for my post of the fate of the Iranian singer Googoosh for my thoughts on why the Enlightenment ‘us versus them’ argument falls to the ground)

The Historical Legacy of David Brook’s Thought

Brooks’ thought is infected by his having bought into the Enlightenment model of civilization in much the same way as Neil Postman had in his Amusing Ourselves to Death. Both think that the ‘natural’ reason, which they have in abundance, has been taken over in others (it’s always the others, isn’t it) by a concentration of falsehoods and lies. This, I believe, is the product of an Enlightenment education but not the product of Brooks’ (of Limbaugh’s or Moore’s) contact with the actual ‘truth.’

This was the experience of people like Herder and Goethe, who got tired of hearing about how people like Kant and Voltaire were using Cartesian reason to order everything. They exploded out of the by-then-constricting bounds of reason for a brighter future based in symbol. Only now, in the later stages of aesthetic thought spurned on by Herder and Goethe (and others), people on the cutting edge of symbolic criticism no longer believe that they can cross the bridge by means of symbol which they had discovered they could not cross through reason.

In America, we have retreated from reason to our individual selves, which we still think hold water after our boat of reason has been poked through with holes. But I’m not sure that emotional beings who forgo the organizational power of reason for a vaguely-defined emotional argument are correct in their estimation of their true situation. It seems to me that in their configuration of the universe that they are willing to exchange their specialized and granular knowledge of their situation for a more vague assessment of their situation in the same way that I felt Jon Stewart was discounting Jim Cramer’s expertise for his more certain moral position in my post on Cramer v Stewart.

In grasping onto the unknown without deciding to defend his position, David Brooks has joined Limbaugh and Joni Mitchell in their (misconstrued) positions as defenders of the true, the just, the fair, etc. Sure, Brooks has a bunch of terms which he attaches to these ‘deeper levels’ of emotions, words like attunement, equipoise, metis, sympathy, and limerence (presumably the ability to make limericks out of our experience). But these words are intended to illuminate through reason the formerly dark world of emotional experience, bringing them to light for the first time ever. This was the same thing that Descartes was doing 350 years ago when he founded modern philosophy and the Enlightenment project of subordinating all disciplines to reason.

This configuration ot ‘the truth’ satisfies him.

My Answer to the Brooks Problem

It does not satisfy me. As I say in the blog introduction to my latest book, this is the fault of a diminution of reason in assessing the role of imagination in our lives. Between ‘the truth,’ which Limbaugh on the right, Moore on the left, and Brooks in the middle, affect to be telling us, comes an inexorable imagination which both Limbaugh, Moore, and Brooks believe they have overcome. They are both wrong. ‘The truth’ comes to us mediated through our ability to imagine ourselves in a universe of unknowns (I made this point on my blog this last week; search for ‘atoms’) without being able to touch the unknown as it actually is.

It seems to me that Brooks is grasping after the unknown because this is the human condition. But his metaphors are tortured, and what he ‘knows’ is too hard to explain through simple reason. In this, Brooks is a bit too muck like the dilettantes he anatomizes so well in his Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Rather than digging deep to find the deeper truth which reason can organize for him as far as possible, he punts the ball away hoping to win the game with a Hail Mary (terrible metaphor!; should be a pass). My advice to him would be to dig a little deeper using some of the not-so-simple mathematical and economicmodels that are on the true cutting edge (the avant-garde, for the artists among you) of scientific thought on scientific problems.

In his declaration that he’s ‘come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature,’ David Brooks is not, in fact, anatomizing ‘an overly simplistic view of human nature.’ He is in fact anatomizing the limits of his own mind’s ability to organize the larger experience of a larger world based on his too narrow view of human reason. He should embrace reason, not flee from it.

I know that all of you have seen this film, which is the best of the ‘people on the run in an automobile’ movies. This movie is so much better than its more famous ancestor, Bonnie and Clyde, that it beggars comparison. But just in case you haven’t (as if that’s even possible; but if you haven’t, rent it from Netflix today), here’s a short preview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QiDBFqKgDA

You gotta love Peggy Cummings as the psychopathic Annie Laurie Starr, don’t you?

They’re gradually catching on. When I was in the hospital in 2004 after suffering a stroke, Dick Clark had a stroke, and news people were saying the same sorts of things: he looks great; it wasn’t so bad, etc. Have you seen Dick Clark lately? It was worse than the news people said. Have you heard a news story apologizing that their optimistic projections were wrong? No, you haven’t. The same is true of the coverage of Gabrielle Giffords. News people are making it seem as though she will be out soon and that all that is left is a few arduous months of rehab.

This guy gives a brave performance after he got shot above his right eye. He survived and so, he says, can she.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oyxO_eHwPc

But what he actually says shows just how much damage putting a bullet in your skull can do. She will probably have to fight off depression, though I was spared that. But the entire time is was in in-patient and out-patient rehab they asked me every single day how I was feeling to make sure I wasn’t succumbing. It is extremely common, they tell me.

He urges patience, so he says she should not think about walking but should think about sitting up for 5 seconds (SECONDS!!!), or ‘today I’m going to eat a whole thing of fries and keep it down.’ But he is confident (based of no experience with her or her injury) that she is strong and she can do it. But I think to myself that she can’t even speak yet.

If she does it, he’s talking about things like running down the hallway and being able to balance on one leg, but 6 years after I had my stroke I still cannot do either of those things. None of those things are guaranteed. I truly hope that he is correct.

It’s too soon to be giving people hope, just as it was wrong to put the blame on Palin with no evidence except the indifference of politically-oriented news peopleto what is actually happening in the world as it is and focusing on their petty concerns.

What happened to her is horrific. Horrific! She will probably have to endure months of therapy, she may never get her speech back (I don’t know this, and she probably will; my speech therapists were miracle workers). The sad fact is that she will never fully recover.

It sickens me (and sickens is the right word) that anyone has to go through this ever, and this is why I can’t follow the news coverage of her story. It hits too close to home, while at the same time hitting too far afield. But I wish her and her family all the luck in the world. And she can have some of mine. She’ll need it.

My liberal friends are just ashamed of me. They have dubbed him an ‘entertainer,’ not a ‘serious’ newsperson,’ and an ill-informed one at that, and they would rather have nine inch nails thrust into their eyes than listen to him.

And I have to admit that he sometimes tests my patience, as when, on the day after I conceived this post, he attacked Darwin as one of the two worst thinkers of all time; the other was Freud (Really? Not Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?). Darwin is one of my intellectual heroes, and it baffles me how the man who considers himself to be on the ‘on the cutting edge of societal evolution’ can be serious about hating Darwin.

My harshest critic on the Limbaugh front is my wife, a committed liberal feminist who hasn’t listened to Limbaugh since 1991 or so. But my wife and I haven’t discussed political issues since 1994, when we were both watching Michael Moore’s TV Nation. When I bring up politics, she is kind enough to change the subject for me. We live in peace because our relationship is built on stronger stuff than politics.

Yet I listen to Rush Limbaugh, and if you want to know what’s going on in America you should too.

The Most Under-Rated News Story of My Lifetime

I have always thought the most under-reported stories in my lifetime has been Limbaugh’s rise to prominence. This is not because I am political and need to make the case that Rush is ‘better’ than liberal alternatives. Because I am not political, I listen to publicly-funded NPR, Al Franken, and Rush Limbaugh. On TV I watch MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News.

I listen to Limbaugh because I think he’s funny, and because he is one of the most astute political commentator in a media world filled with political commentators. But from the very beginning, the news media has accused him of being only an ‘entertainer’ on account of his mixing his partisan commentary with humor. The ‘entertainer’ moniker solved one of the problems of how to cover Limbaugh in the serious news media. He was a rival, and so covering his show as a source of news was never easy. But, from the very beginning, Limbaugh’s show was different.

The Culture of Counter-Dissent

The left has always had its share of dissenters, and they had reasons. During the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy unleashed a reign of terror that made martyrs out of people like Dalton Trumbo (who wrote Gun Crazy, one of my favorite film noirs). This caused leftist political philosophers to write books like Anti-Intellectualism in American Life which railed against the unthinking and unjust attacks of conservatives.

As a result, in the 1960s America had spawned a generation of kids thinking that it was their duty to rebel by becoming intellectuals themselves. So successful were they that they flexed their new-found muscle over the Watergate break-in and the ensuing scandal. Watergate gave the new generation purpose and direction. They, unlike their conservative parents, would ‘do the right thing’ and not cloud their goals with ancient ‘traditions.’

But President Nixon fought back. He coined the term ‘silent majority’ to refer to his base. These were voters who were not particularly motivated to participate in politics. As the sociologist Herbert J. Gans says in his Democracy and the News , most people who watch the news are not politically engaged citizens (21).

They began to awake as an organized force in 1979, with the founding of the Moral Majority. This, in turn, fed into a long-standing culture war between conservative forces and more liberal forces. The American culture wars that broke out in in the 80s and 90s were characterized by rise of critics of the left’s cornering of the academic marketplace. The culture warriors were given a presence on the national stage by the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Members of the religious right often criticized academics and artists, and their works, in a fight against what they considered indecent, subversive, and blasphemous. They often accused their political opponents of undermining tradition, Western civilization and family values. (Wikipedia)

The Fairness Doctrine

Limbaugh, then, didn’t create his audience; he took up the threads that had been built for him by others. But he was the first person to benefit from President Reagan’s decision to drop The Fairness Doctrine in 1987.

The Fairness Doctrine was intended to ensure both sides of an issue would be covered by providing ‘equal time’ for airing both sides of an issue. The reality of life under the Fairness Doctrine was that both sides were not always covered fairly. In fact, Limbaugh would argue (and I would agree with him on this point) that the Fairness Doctrine hid the truth of the natural imbalances, not only from the public—who apparently thought enough of Walter Cronkite to name him ‘the most trusted man in America’—but from those in the media itself.

They were not ‘balanced,’ as they said. In the wake of Watergate, the new forces of good, true, and right thought that they had put to flight forever the forces of tradition. So the ‘new media’ of the 1970s and 80s didn’t think twice about calling Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan (and see Sarah Palin for the next person to be so underestimated) ‘stupid.’

It is my contention that the news was never as ‘balanced’ as it made itself out to be. Into this new environment came Rush Limbaugh. He took the reins of the politically indifferent ‘silent majority’ and Moral Majority and got them even more organized as a new line of defense in the Culture of Dissent.

Limbaugh’s Models

There are at least three sources from the entertainment world that have influence Limbaugh. All of them are famous for their mass appeal.

The first is fairly obvious: he channels the voice, mannerisms, and political bias of William Buckley’s Firing Line. Limbaugh has a better sense of humor that Buckley, however.

He largely acknowledges Howard Cosell—who you can still hear him imitating on a daily basis—as one of his chief influences. He uses Cosell as his model of an entertainer from the ‘classic age’ of television.

Limbaugh models his public behavior on the work of Dale Carnegie. He uses his Carnegie-derived optimism to spur others to believe in America at moments when others are in despair. That is no small thing and is one of the chief reasons that he has managed to hold on to the top spot on radio for all these years.

These three models gives him the air of authority (derived from Buckley), exuberance (derived from Cosell), and optimism (derived from Carnegie) that allows him to portray himself as a ‘harmless little fuzzball’ while launching partisan attacks on his ‘enemies.’

Limbaugh’s War On the Unfunny

But by far the most important thing about Limbaugh’s program is his reintroduction of humor into the political sphere. Sure, there had been people like Mark Russell on publicly-funded PBS who had entertained us with their politics. But Limbaugh raised Russell’s gentle satire to an art form.

His reliance of satire is one of the main reasons that ‘serious’ news people rail against his as an entertainer. During the 1960s, some comedians had become painfully aware that they were being lied to by the media. Sure, there were ‘funny’ comedians like Henny Youngman, but ‘serious’ people listened to ‘unfunny comedians like George Carlin and Lenny Bruce.

Lenny Bruce’s ‘The Truth’ is a short dissertation on (what else) ‘the truth’:

The truth is what is, and what should be is a fantasy, a terrible, terrible lie that someone gave the people long ago.

The goal of ‘serious people’ was to tear away the veil of lies built up over time to get to ‘the truth.’ [Saul Alinsky, for instance, follows this model.]

In the movie of Lenny’s life, Dustin Hoffman portrays the serious comedian, who dissertates on ‘truth’ thusly:

You see the problem is that we all live in a happy-ending culture, a what-should-be culture instead of a what-is culture. We’re all taught that fantasy: that if we were taught, this is what is.

Dustin (as Lenny) then goes on to show ‘the truth’ of ‘what is’ that underlies what we have been told in images of Jackie Kennedy’s terrified flight from the bullets that were riddling her husband. Dustin (as Lenny) reads the ‘official story,’ which he terms ‘bullshit,’ that Jackie was trying to go get help.

The rise of unfunny comedians in the decade of political slaughter was a (justified) concern with not being lied to. Comedians like Henny Youngman were clowns who hid the truth from the people, and they faded away in favor of ‘serious’ comedians who broke boundaries rather than supporting ‘the lie.’

When Rush came on the scene, he, too, was lumped in with the non-serious clowns who hid ‘the truth’ from us rather than putting it on display for us. ‘Serious’ thinkers dismissed his tacky and backwards references to mass entertainers like Howard Cosell as a sign that he was an oddball who wasn’t serious about ‘the truth’ but was only interested in promoting himself and his oddball, out-of-the-mainstream views. As such, he could safely be ignored.

That, I have always thought, was (and continues to be) the media’s biggest mistake. The media’s reaction hangs on whether there is a ‘truth’ available behind the ‘fiction,’ or whether (as Derrida and I think) this was simply an illusion of a logocentric (and demonstrably false) stability reached through an artificial stop placed on our thought, not by nature, but by men.

Using nature in place of the judgment of men, Derrida (following Rousseau) concludes that nature is balanced and that what it does can be undone with impunity by the clear-eyed. This is where I disagree with Derrida (but who am I?). I find nature to favor one set of values over another, as Pareto noticed. This is why Hitler has been suppressed and even the revolutionary talents of Derrida will not bring back from permanent suppression. (see his response to the question of Paul de Man’s being discovered to have been a Nazi collaborator).

The Question of ‘Balance’ in the World of News

If I am right (and I am right on this at least) and there was never as much ‘balance’ in the natural universe of news as those who practice the presentation of news would have us believe, then there is a problem in the media’s quest to ‘rebalance’ news coverage. To make my point, let’s take a look at two images from the cover of one of the ‘old media’ staples, Time Magazine.

Rush first graced the cover of Time on January 23, 1995 as part of a larger story on the ‘electronic revolution’ in media. In typical fashion, Time positioned themselves as the arbiters of good taste in democracy (and all else).

The editors ask, Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?’ They don’t wait for an answer. Instead, they provide one in the subtitle: ‘Talk radio is only the beginning. Electronic populism threatens to derail representative democracy.’

Limbaugh complained at the time of the mainstream bias of Time magazine. And that may explain why, when Time featured Michael Moore on their July 12, 2004, they asked the same question: ‘Michael Moore heats up the election year with a new kind of political weapon. Is this good for America?’

This, it seems to me, comes from Time’s sense that they were the carriers of ‘balance’ in the world of ‘representative democracy.’ They had learned the lesson taught them by Lenny Bruce when he accused them (justly, I think) of propagating propaganda rather than ‘the truth’ about the Kennedy assassination. But there are other unlearned lessons there, as well, and these started to come out when Rush Limbaugh appeared first on the stage. He was an ‘unbalanced’ provider of news. The same was true 9 years later of Michael Moore. The only available response was to retreat from bias back to ‘balance’ and to rise above the fray.

Winners and Losers in an Unbalanced World

All that is only valid if the universe of nature is beckoning us to its own sense of internal balance. But in actuality I have come to believe, not from my university experience but from my experience in the business world, that the Pareto model provides a better model of nature than the modern model that leads from Rousseau to Derrida. And the lessons I have learned from the news media’s quest to ‘rebalance’ the news are not working because thy can’t work. Instead, the structure of the whole argument rests on a priori premises that can be shown, if not to be altogether false, at least open to question.

Limbaugh in not the intellectual type, but he seems to agree that the resources of the world travel to the first person to take advantage of new opportunities. He has succeeded and, although Michael Moore in rich by any American standard, he’s not as rich as Limbaugh, who has signed a deal that will net him (reportedly) $400 million dollars.

In this environment, he mocks the losing strategy of his blind competitors. For instance, on a recent show he put up a CNN ad for mockery. Fox News was too conservative. MSNBC was too liberal. But CNN was ‘just right,’ balanced between both as the dispenser of ‘both sides.’ Limbaugh mocks them, not on the basis that their model is wrong, but on the basis that they are not in fact ‘balanced’ at all.

Let’s read a bit of what he has to say on that:

I got a huge, a huge list — if I printed this out, it would be ten pages — of CNN employees. They’re called “journalists” on here. Not all the names you’d recognize, but they’re field producers, human resources people, behind the scenes employees at CNN, and the people they donate to are exclusively Democrats. And they want to try to tell us that they are centrist, that they are not MSNBC?

A little further down, he contrasts his view of his job with the approach of CNN, who he says is hiding behind a veneer of objectivity but is no such thing.

If this program lost 20% of the audience I’d be gone. I would take myself away. Well, I may not take myself away but I’d certainly say, “What am I doing wrong?” I wouldn’t blame you. I wouldn’t blame the audience. I wouldn’t say, “Boy, my audience has gotten stupid.” But that’s what CNN does. Or they blame Fox, they blame Roger Ailes, or they blame MSNBC. Everything I’ve known about the competitive nature of this business seems not to exist on the left-wing side of it. It’s a place where failure is rewarded, failure is triumphed, failure is heralded. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Pinning Our Hopes on Our Sleeves

The ‘mainstream’ media has gone along with Time magazine’s retreat from bias to ‘balance,’ but their failure to achieve it can be seen this in the response to 9-11. The flag was being flown all over, and newscasters could achieve the good graces of their viewers by sporting one themselves. But this partisan activity was at odds with the news’ portrayal of themselves as ‘objective’ observers, and some newscasters after 9-11 refused to wear a flag pin on their lapel. It was Jackie’s flight all over again (if you haven’t watched the Lenny Bruce clip, watch it now or you won’t understand my point).

This was a silly thing, but it brought an enormous reaction from the public. Limbaugh was on the air telling his viewers that news people were a bunch of Commie pinkos who wouldn’t stand up for American values. The mainstream press had to decide where they stood on the question. Most wore the pins, but some remained adamant and would not. The same thing happened with Obama, who had a non-flag wearing moment of his own in 2008. He tried to maintain his ‘balance,’ but eventually he too caved.

The impact of such a minor thing as whether a newscaster does or doesn’t wear a pin on his lapel reflects the importance of the difficulty of maintaining ‘balance’ in the universe of news. Most newscasters caved because the cost of a lowly pin—what did they cost, a dollar?—was not worth the cost to the network, which could run into the millions. Obama caved because the uphill battle increased the tension to the point where is was endangering his chance of getting elected.

The bifurcated position on something as insignificant as wearing a flag pin ($1:$millions) reflects the enormous impact of small things to make an enormous (and I would say out-sized) difference in the universe of discourse. And this is why I listen to Limbaugh. Whether you of I like it, Limbaugh is driving the debate into new territory. People like Michael Moore are followers of Limbaugh’s model. If you want to know which direction the country is heading, you can ignore Michael Moore, who is just one of a hoard of gnats who follow the leader. That doesn’t mean I think you should like him (that would be too much to ask, wouldn’t it), but leaders in all fields have always made people uncomfortable. To miss him is to miss a lot.

I want to make myself clear here. I don’t listen to Rush because he has come up with the more correct model of the universe (he hasn’t). I listen to him because he acts on his knowledge of the way the world works better than the (perhaps far smarter) people at CNN or those who hold the power of government to regulate what they cannot control do. For instance, Senator Jay Rockefeller has recently (and shamefully in my opinion) called for the abolition of both Fox News and MSNBC on account of their lacking ‘balance.’ This could be a call for ‘balance’ in news coverage, but this is only true if the news coverage was ever ‘balanced’ in the first place. And the assertion by MSNBC star anchor Keith Olbermann that Senator Rockefeller had ‘personally told him that he is a fan of “Countdown”‘ would argue that the Senator is using the ‘balance’ to cover up (glozing for the medievalists among you) the ‘truth,’ which is that he is a fan of one (not both) set of biases.

Limbaugh drives the debate despite not have a firm grasp of the issues that drive him. The same thing that holds for Limbaugh holds for the President, who it seems to me to have built his system on a firmer system than he has a right to. By insisting that his system is fine and that people have simply been slow to grasp his ‘higher’ system, the President of the United States is making a huge mistake.

There is a structural problem with both thinkers thought that will not be corrected by making more impassioned speeches. We live in an environment of natural inequality. If you’re wrong in your premise (the a priori in Aristotle) about your individual beliefs in the ‘balance’ of nature, then it isn’t going to matter what you build on top of your faulty premise (the a posteriori in Aristotle). All that one has to do to undermine your a priori constructions is to undermine all the a postriori constructions you have built on top of your permises.

Trend Lines in ‘Fair and Balanced’ News

Now here’s some good news for the last liberals. Ironically, the President’s ‘enemies’ share his belief in the natural balance of nature. After Reagan dropped the Fairness Doctrine and Limbaugh came on the air, all pretense that anyone ever was or could be ‘balanced’ went out the window. Limbaugh proposed, before he had any followers as he has today, that ‘I am equal time.’

This is surely the origin of Roger Ailes’ Fox News, which purports to be ‘fair and balanced.’

Now whether they are or not is up to you to decide. Fox even says so in another tagline: ‘We report. You decide.’ From the static academic position, both sides are equal and the case is to be decided on this issue of whether Fox (or CNN) really is ‘fair and balanced.’

Looked at in terms of overall viewership, the rise of Fox News is still small in comparison with the overall viewership. This ‘point-in-time’ strategy is the one underlying CNN’s advertising, which purports to tell ‘the whole truth,’ while Fox News’ lies.

But having a model that measures a point in time is not the only thing that matters. The element of time (which I talked about in my review of Alinsky’s work) is important in decision making, even among those who propose to ‘rise above it all’ and report the news without bias. The fact of the matter is that people have been deciding in favor of Fox News to the point that political types watched Fox more than any one of the three networks (though it should be kept in mind that the ratings were close and that collectively the Big Three networks gathered 2-3 times more ratings than Fox).

As a trend line, the rise to domination of Fox News over its competitors has been astonishing. They have wiped out the viewership of CNN, who continue to crow that their coverage of the news is really the ‘fair and balanced’ one.

The rise of Fox News should soon be (if it isn’t already) a cause for concern to the still more powerful Big Three. Look at the disturbing trends for network news on this page. Viewership is declining, while the average audience age is increasing. That does not code well for anyone but Fox News.

The decision makers in the boardrooms of the cable and broadcast networks must be looking at these numbers and despairing. Fox is coming up, while other networks cannot compete. Alongside the disturbing trend of Fox News, more and more Americans are reporting that they are conservative, while less and less of them report that they are liberal. Limbaugh is winning the war, and the press has followed its old, tired, and perhaps irrelevant position that the world can be ‘balanced’ if only they hire really smart, academically-trained, Harvard types. This is the sort of backwards-looking strategy that had left more empires than one in despair.

The temptation in newsrooms is to despair by retreating away from the world of time into the protected corners guarded by an Ivory Curtain. After all, the news people hired by CNN are the smartest guys in every room they enter. Limbaugh and the people who run Fox (and perhaps MSNBC) are partisans who fail to give people ‘whole truth’ but simply the (‘stupid sheep’ or ‘brilliant in-crowd’ depending on your point of view) people what they want to hear. By positioning themselves between two opposed camps, the anchors at CNN intend to win back viewers. But that is only true if the world is indeed balanced between two opposing forces.

Clearly the editors and anchors at CNN think it is, and they disdain to throw their hat into such a ring. Instead, like the quoted Nietzsche on page 50 of Alinsky’s book, they turn away from ‘the Tartuffery of words’ towards ‘truth.’ ‘Others’ are playing loose with ‘the truth’—and the worst of these is (according to the liberal left) Limbaugh—while the good folks at CNN are fighting the good fight, and although their ship is sinking they can sink with dignity.

Perhaps the time has come to give up on the now lost position of ‘balance’ altogether and look for a position that accords with the way the world actually works.

Differences of Vision

The difference of vision is not one of right and wrong. It is on approach to nature as the end and guarantor of our knowledge of the world. Over time the liberal element has come to realize that the simple prospect of Lenny and other Bruce’s was philosophically problematic.

As a result, they have retreated from the world to the firm position from which the world still makes sense. This position is called ‘catascopia’ in Joel Relihan’s Ancient Menippean Satire). Relihan believes that this position problemetizes the easy answers that modern thinkers find in the works of the ancients. He attacks this new position head-on through reason rather than recognizing the position and turning back to he known-but-out-dated position which has the weight of centuries of criticism behind it. He is, in my opinion, right to do so, but the critical community has been slow to follow him down a new path.

In any case, the people at CNN, as well as those who follow Alinsky, feel that the natural world in ‘balanced,’ and when they find out it doesn’t work out exactly like they thought it should, they, too, retreat from the world back to a position where it still makes sense to their educated minds.

This is what happens to me when I look at the works of Plato and Aristotle from a sufficient distance. Both can be made to agree with each other, but this change of focus doesn’t do away with the shredding of clean and pure divisions in the works of Aristotle. It merely masks them from thinkers who are not as educated as someone like me (the Roman de la Rose calls this process ‘glozing’). By concentrating only on the ‘surface’ without understand the ‘depths,’ the ‘field producers, human resources people, behind the scenes employees at CNN’ trade their depth of knowledge for a superficial understanding of things. This is why they rely on experts.

This is a complaint I have with the news media in general and it is why I don’t watch much news. The news media tends to value superficial understanding over depth of understanding (see my post on Cramer v Stewart where I contend that Cramer is a expert but Stewart is a generalist and his conclusion is to value his generalist knowledge over Cramer’s expertise). And this is how I can have a deep relation with my liberal wife despite our serious political differences. Politics doesn’t matter much in our house.

Limbaugh’s Hoards of Cash

Rush has a different perspective on knowledge. On the surface, he seems to have the view of ‘balance’ in the universe of the news. But he acts in terms of his desire to win out over his competitors in the field of news.

His success has broad him a hoard of cash, and this will disturb the idealists among you. But I am not an idealist. I believe that money is just a shortcut in a universe that runs, not on a principle of ‘balance,’ but on ‘exchange’ (see the chapters on ‘Why You Need To Write’ and ‘Why Fido Can’t Drive in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing: A Book for the Rest of Us for a detailed explanation of this idea).

In my universe, people with a better view of the way the universe actually works will get more credit than followers, and resources will flow their way. This is why Michael Moore is rich but not nearly as rich as Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh was first to take advantage of the Fairness Doctrine. But being first is not in itself enough. He has been able to maintain his status, despite being called a racist and getting blamed for the Timothy McVeigh bombing in the 90s by no less a figure than Bill Clinton. In a ‘balanced’ universe, such things would have done in a lesser man (look at Don Imus’ treatment by MSNBC). But since the whole universe that Clinton was operating on was mis-configured, the charges rolled off Limbaugh’s back.

This should have given President Obama pause when he followed the same strategy when he came into office, but it didn’t. And there, I think, hangs a tale. Obama is operating on the same principles as Bill Clinton did in 1996. Continuing to do so might (but not necessarily will) spell the premature end of his Presidency.

The point that liberals who feel that they are better educated than Limbaugh should take away from this discussion is that they are not all that far away from being able to take on Limbaugh. They have better knowledge of the way things work. But their premise is wrong. Rather than running back to ‘balanced’ nature, they should find out how to compete with Limbaugh on his own terms. This means turning into the wind and facing Limbaugh, arguing with him directly rather than looking for softball interviews on The View and Larry King Live.

This is what others, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, have done. They have foregone ‘balance’ for ‘point-of-view’ on the news. They, too, follow Limbaugh with a more up-to-date and modern (or postmodern) humor than Rush’s sometimes lamer humor based in popular movies and television shows like Hogan’s Heroes and Driving Miss Daisy.

Such an approach is an implicit guarantee of the success of the Limbaugh model, which has spawned hoards of followers who now think nothing of using comedy in their presentation of the news. Moreover, Limbaugh’s approach works for the younger viewer, who regularly report that they get more of their news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report than they do from more ‘serious’ providers of non-comical news. I think it is worth thinking about why that is.

Prediction of the Future as the Driver of News

Limbaugh has found his niche in the universe he was the first to explore, but since he was the first to explore it he may be worth listening to still. But, as I said above, being first does not necessarily mean being the best. Limbaugh maintains his primacy over all others in the media by his ability to predict the future. This is a lesson that even his more clever followers like Jon Stewart have been slow to pick up on.

There is a huge difference between looking at the past in the full knowledge of events and looking at the dimly-perceived future (this a point I made here). He who correctly predicts wins (see the ‘Reykjavík’ chapter of my Poker Tales for a further explanation of this idea). Limbaugh’s talent as a political prognosticator is second to none. That doesn’t mean he’s always right (he’s not), but in the relative universe of thought about the future he does better than everyone else.

And make no mistake. Limbaugh, with his backward ideas about the past (including my poor hero Darwin), has not got the last word on the way forward. But I am certain that the backwards (I would say too traditional) ideas of Senator Rockefeller who wishes to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine are not the way forward. Rockefeller’s ideas are the last gasp of a dying idea.

The Cost of Turning Away From Limbaugh

In the beginning, Limbaugh was an anomaly, an opinionated person in a world which purported to be ‘balanced’ but was not. This gave him license to propose that he represented ‘equal time.’ As people have gotten the hint and poured into AM radio (which I remind the reader he saved singlehandedly), into comedy news (which he popularized), and into opinion news (of which he was the first), he no longer has to propose that he is equal time. He has now won. He now proposes a distinction between ‘old media,’ who resist his dominance, and ‘new media,’ who accept his leadership in the field of media.

The old media is wedded to their notion of ‘balance,’ and as they crow their ship is sinking. The new media has some awfully odd ideas, but since they have a better grasp on the future, their stock is rising.

But here’s my point. By turning away from Limbaugh, both sides of the Congress have allowed him to reign supreme. The Republicans won their first victory in 40 years in 1994. After inaugurating Limbaugh as an honorary member of the House in 1994. But they were slow to react to the new configuration that he represented. The House would use the votes he brought them, but he was not to be taken seriously. They continued along as though nothing had changed. As a result, they were handed a defeat in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Their latest victory (this November) has come only because Limbaugh has learned the lessons of 1992, when Ross Perot split the Republican vote ensuring that Bill Clinton got elected with a scant 43% of the vote. He has stuck with the GOP. Had he not, the Republicans could never have regained power so quickly.

This will be a concern for newly-elected GOP leaders. Rush has hinted (on the basis of the timeless principle of ‘fool me once more fool me’) that he will leave the GOP and found a third party if GOP leaders don’t heed his advice this time He claims that the resulting party would doom the GOP forever. I can’t help but agree. To be fair, he appears to be uneasy with this claim. I think he has the (conservative) sense that a party in place is a better bet than an entirely new party. He wants to take over the GOP through successive elections. So far, he is succeeding.

But he may not have the last word on this subject. Sarah Palin, the darling of the recently-formed Tea Party which came seeming out on nowhere—in fact they came out of liberals having used Limbaugh as no more than an Alinsky punching bag for an entire generation rather heeding the warning that the terms of debate had shifted, as they has shifted in the 1960s, once again—is not so shy. She has declared her intention to form a third party if the GOP doesn’t do right by their newly-elected minority. She, unlike Limbaugh, has real power, and she’s not afraid to use it. Rush is her biggest booster, and with Limbaugh’s endorsement the President who ran as a man who could bring people together but governed on a strictly partisan basis, she should not be counted out.

Advice to Obama

I warn Obama about following the model that Clinton followed in the 90s. It may have worked in the 90s when the GOP had been energized by cultural issues and people like Dinesh D’Souza could be put to flight on Buckley’s Firing Line with the notion that he had not even read Derrida (couldn’d find a clip but I saw it happen).

Culture issues drew me briefly to Limbaugh of conservativism in the early 90s, but I soon realized that conservatives had no message for moving forward and I abandoned them by 1994. But this last election was not about ‘culture war’ issues. It was about money, and that is something that the President doesn’t know enough about. He still thinks that the pursuit of money is a bad thing (and not an out-sized measure of success in an ever changing world), and his idealistic followers in the media agree. On this issue, Limbaugh knows more about how money actually works than the President, who still follows the static model of Alinsky.

I heard Dick Morris, the architect of Clinton’s ‘triangulation’ strategy, somewhere saying that the problem with triangulating toward the center would be a problem for Obama because he said that ‘there is no center’ anymore. Things have come down to two opposing and irreconcilable notions. One is the Alinsky-Obama strategy of putting the ‘unbalanced’ universe back into balanced order. While this strategy has won the President a Nobel Peace Prix on the mere hope that he can restore order (he can’t), in the universe as it actually exists following that strategy is the quickest way to defeat.

The current situation of the nation does not mean we are at the The End of History and that sheepish ‘last men’ will be in charge forever. It means that Limbaugh has changed the game forever from ‘balanced’ universe to one of ‘imbalance.’ In that universe, he is winning. If this wasn’t apparent in the beginning (in 1994, for instance), it should be now. The cost of turning away from Limbaugh in this environment is very high.

My Wife’s Take on This

I was talking about this post with my wife, and I told her that in it I was going to advise the President on my views. I told her that I thought that rather than running away from Limbaugh, he should turn in and face him down on his own turf. This will require, of course, that he modify his views on money as the source of evil in the world that will be remedied by can be remedied by taking a position behind an Ivory Curtain. That position has only served to cede ground to his opponents.

She said, ‘Well that’s never going to happen.’ For once, she and I agree. She changed the subject, and with that we went back to our perfectly happy, non-political life.

Leading feminist author Camille Paglia, 63, has hit out at the singer’s flamboyant, racy image – insisting her over-the-top sexuality is actually ‘stripped of genuine eroticism’.

This is interesting (to me), because Paglia thinks that sex and body are the most important aspects of Lady Gaga’s work. But I think that Gaga is passing through the costume phases of her predecessors and de-emphasizing the role of the body within the dialectal framework established by her Enlightenment models. Instead, she’s concentrating on exactly that which Paglia thinks is so important as to be definitive in the dialectic of the feminist experience. There is no room in her dialectic for anything but more and better and cleverer explorations of the body, which has been the centerpiece of the feminist contribution to art.

Paglia’s Failing Feminism

In my reading of feminism, men were explorers of the mental universe, which by 1950 (or thereabouts) had failed to secure the final promise of human history to end once and for all the questions that pro-modern thinkers (like Cicero and Homer, for instance) had failed to answer. We were told (and some people believed) that modern man finally had the tools that his primitive ancestors had not the wherewithal to have conceived.

Women had a different perspective on the vertical male orientation of the universe (imagine an erect penis if you will). Women’s perspective was more of a circular round opening (imagine…oh, you know what I was going to say). This was the generative idea that the male perspective had gotten away from in order to pursue a

This is like the marital debate between Shelley and his wife (not actually his wife), the author of Frankenstein. Shelley had a vertical orientation towards the truth. He didn’t need women around to conceive. They were merely the vehicles of horizontal (and useless) generation. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mary conceives of the tower pointing up at the sky and drawing down the powers of the heavens to create a life without the nurturing capacity of women to be something of a sin. Shelley’s dream of giving life succeeds, but the creature he conceives turns into a monster that hunts his creator (man, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that household).

Beginning in the 1960s, this idea began to take over the masculine ideal that individuals alone had the capacity to create as God had (see Flaubert on the artist-God connection and Joyce on artists as fingernail parers). Henceforth, and gradually, the idea that it takes a village supplanted the notion of the artist as man standing alone.

I have always maintained that Hilary’s defense of Bill Clinton in the 90s killed classic phase of feminism by driving feminism into a political posture rather than a position taken on principle alone. Even Paglia herself had problems with Hilary’s defense of her husband at the time.

Paglia’s claim to fame is her having written a book entitled Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson in which she makes the (then controversial) claim that (and here I am quoting for a Chicago Tribune review) “It said (more or less) that men are animals but they build good bridges; women hold the real power (sex!) but they can’t build a bridge for beans. Deal with it.”

Twenty Years Later

It’s been twenty years since Paglia published her book, and a lot can change in that amount of time. Paglia, once so on the outs with the in-crowd who jumped ship to support their candidate in the 90s (in this article they declare her to be a “professional anti-feminist” for her disagreements about Hilary’s wisdom in this and other affairs) is now a member of the once-radical-thinking-now-domesticated in-crowd.

Paglia feels that Gaga, unlike Madonna, has gotten away from pushing the boundaries of sex (which in my opinion had been pushed to their limit in art by Madonna’s Sex book and by Larry Flint’s (or was it Bob Guccione?) announcement that women who appeared in his magazine would have to be willing to urinate on camera. Where else is there to go with sex except to put a camera into the body cavity itself? The body has been explored to the full by better artists than Gaga and there is nowhere else to go except to exploit the work that others have done before her.

Part of Paglia’s problem is that she’s old enough to have seen all of Lady Gaga’s costume’s before, and she has a good enough memory to draw the young waifs who have no memory of Marlene Dietrich’s sexualized performance in Blue Angel (a fabulous film, by the way, but one which to a modern young waif also lacks the sexuality of seeing Madonna’s bare boobs in their prime).

History is not a sure guide to future performance (I think I read that on Charles Schwab’s website), and in this case Paglia has missed the mark. Madonna did indeed capture the hearts of the millions and Camille Paglia captured her image for the intelligentsia. But Lady Gaga’s de-emphasizing of sexuality makes her model that much more intriguing to the young and unwise waifs that are more familiar with Gaga’s work than old Camille.

Paglia–and this shocks me as an old guy who knew Madonna in the 80s and Paglia in the 90s–thinks that she can strip off the ‘contrivance’ of her ‘scripted’ performances and show the reader ‘the real’ Gaga (whose name, we are informed by the catty caption writer is not Gaga at all, but Stefani Germanotta). Last I looked, Madonna’s name was Madonna Louise Ciccone. I grant Camille that she only shortened her given name, but if names were all that we needed to secure our knowledge of a person then Madonna would have a claim to relevance. But c’mon. No one thinks that. Especially not the venerable Camille.

Art and Nature in Paglia

This has more to do with Paglia’s latent feeling that somehow art was imitating nature (as in my Frankenstein model). Madonna had been bold enough to have found her ‘natural’ expression in her body, while Lady Gaga’s works was contrived because it didn’t reconnect her to her nature, where mind and object meet. Gaga is, in Camille’s mind, neglecting the source of her power. She is an imitator of her betters and nothing but and imitator.

But I think she has missed the larger point about Gaga’s art. She wishes to work in an artificial environment created by David Bowie in his Aladdin Sane cover, which our too-clever-for-her-own-good caption writer labels in the article as: “Familiar: Lady Gaga’s lightning bolt chic appeared to be borrowed from the cover of David Bowie’s 1973 album Aladdin Sane.” (See here for my experience with Aladdin Sane).

In my opinion, Lady Gaga wishes to detach herself from her sexuality to become a creature of her own making, and not determined by her body. She’s Carolee Schneeemann without the body. All fashion all the time. Even meat is expressed externalized as fashion. There is no body underneath, at least no sexual body. She is supposed to be all construction/constructed. That, I think, is the purpose of her comment to Barbara Walters in this interview, where she declares that she is bisexual, although she admits to only having been in love with men. Apparently, a woman’s body is for pleasure only, and as such can be enjoyed. But (and I truly hope that this is what Lady Gaga is saying, if only because I believe it myself) there is more to life than the pursuit of sex (look what happened to Britney for an object lesson of that lesson).

That, she goes on to say, is what her song Poker Face was about.

A Plug for the Old Guy

This was the point that I was trying in my own way to make about American culture in my book Poker Tales. Americans live in a wholly constructed universe with no foundation in (and often with no reference to) nature. I think, therefore, that it’s important to help Lady Gaga make her point.

Not that she needs help from me. As I often ask, Who am I?

That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

That’s fine. Indeed, that’s why I voted for Obama. Under George Bush, the rich had gotten richer. The poor got richer, as well; but as I was explaining to my father last spring the income disparity widened considerably during the 25 year period (1983-2008) in which conservative/capitalist policies had taken root in the American mind during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era. I thought that Obama had a plan for dealing with the issue of income disparity.

It turns out that he did not. Or rather his plan was to allow the slide in income to continue while promoting more fairness in the distribution of income.

Reich’s article bespeaks the poverty of solutions offered by the left. The Obama administration has no other plan for bending income back to a more equitable curve than to take income from people who create jobs (those earning over $250K) and redistributing it to the rest of the country.

This will inevitably kill job growth, which will depress the economic power of the consumer, leaving more control of the economy in the hands of the wealthy.

That’s not what I voted for in 2008, and neither did the independents, who have quickly shifted to the Tea Party (they still deeply distrust the Republicans, who squandered their 1994 election victory). The Tea Party is made up of a healthy contingent of people who are pushing for permanent tax cuts for the wealthy, because they now represent the last hope for the struggling economy in the face of diminishing income for the middle class.

That is not the only solution to the problems we face as Americans, but it is in my opinion a better solution than Reich offers. Education in America is hopelessly left-leaning and liberal. That’s why I got out. Pouring more resources to education appeals to Obama’s base (and to his past; Bill Clinton also shared the idea of extending education to everyone with Obama; as I think about it every President has a good education; there are no more self-taught Presidents like Lincoln), but it leaves out the entrepreneur, the people who have to learn business on their own because economics is not taught as part of the general education curriculum.

Offering insurance plans to ease the burden of income loss–another expense that Reich places on the consumer and which he proposes on the basis that it won’t cause the government to spend any money–without a plan for generating income is a terrible solution to a continuing problem of diminishing economic returns.

In the absence of a better solution from the Obama White House–and there is no reason to believe that they will offer one in time to save the midterm election from a historic defeat–the Tea Partiers seem to have the upper hand. That makes me sad, but Robert Reich will have to come up with a better plan if he wants me to go along with him on his plans for economic redistribution of a diminishing supply of wealth.