Burczak & Silly Bandz

Burczak's book is a look at some of the fantastic socialist proposals that are floating about in our universities. They are like spores waiting to find a fertile moment in some city, or in the head of some lofty president. They are all bad for business.

The funniest thing in the book was the IFB, I think it was called. Iteration Facilitation Board!

"Like Lange, Albert and Hahnel would abolish private ownership and market exchange of capital goods and create what they call an Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB). The IFB would announce [ANNOUNCE!] prices for all goods and [AND!] services to both producers and consumers. Producers and consumers would use these prices to formulate their respective production and consumption plans" (Burczak 140-141).

If this isn't a planned and totalitarian society, what is?

They would have a police arm, no doubt.

Just as Obama's healthcare plan has necessitated an army of 16,000 new investigators housed within the IRS!


I read the last pages of Burczak as I watched a program on PBS about the STASI control of the East German security apparatus, and how a Lutheran pastor in Leipzig (Christian Fuhrer) brought the whole thing crashing down with a seemingly harmless peace vigil (9th November 1989). GBush1 said, "This is a German moment," and stayed out of it, even though Reagan had started it, with his, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," comment. This freed 40 million people. Even better would be to keep the walls from going up, right? So in that spirit, these comments.

Let's investigate what kinds of things the IFB (which Burczak doesn't necesssarily endorse, but considers worth taking seriously) would "facilitate."

When you think of something like Silly Bandz (which I hope the kids in your neighborhood are gaga over as much as are mine), I don't see how the IFB could foresee the "need" for such an item, or determine how many needed to be made, much less "announce" their pricing. Every store for fifty miles was out of them for two weeks. Even the top distributors couldn't foresee the craziness. My children moped around the house, shut out from the Silly Bandz craze, cursing their existence. I called every store for hours, and finally found some in a boutique called Razzle Dazzle (not in a mall), and off we went, the family's hopes revived.

What are these things? They are outlines of sea creatures using a primary color (red, yellow, blue) and also outlines of musical instruments (guitars, violins, etc.). You wear them on your wrist, or you can trade them. My kids look like African villagers with hundreds of them on each arm, clear up to their elbows. They are made by some company in Toledo, Ohio.

How on earth would an Iteration Facilitation Board prepare for this craze? They would probably slap it down as unnecessary. But probably 99% of what we make is unnecessary. That is, movies, strictly speaking, are unnecessary. Poems are unnecessary. Novels, unnecessary. Hymns, unnecessary. Fashion, unnecessary. All the necessary items are already made in China or India, where very low wages and cheap supplies have made it easier for industry to operate on a cost-effective basis. We do need cars and gasoline, but only in order to go and get Silly Bandz.

Our industrial base has already moved overseas. There is almost no steel production in the northeast now. Man-hole covers (there are 600,000 of them in NYC alone, and each one weighs 50 pounds) are all made in India, and shipped back, because the labor is so much cheaper and less well-organized there that even with the cost of shipping no American-based firm could possibly compete.

If we even wanted to make something as whimsical as Silly Bandz, is there still enough of an industrial base somewhere in America that it could be done? I couldn't figure out exactly where they are made, but I assume the design is outsourced to a production plant in a third-world country.

The last sentence in Burczak's book reads ominously (reach for Orwell!), "Policy experiments to encourage workplace democracy and other capabilities-enhancing forms of asset redistribution or property rights redefinition need not take us anywhere near Hayek's 'road to serfdom'" (146).

"Workplace democracy" simply means that everyone in a workplace will have access to key decisions. Let's imagine this at the smaller level of the creation of a poem. What if everyone at Random House, including the janitor, could revise one of Marianne Moore or W.H. Auden's poems. By the time the last of the secretaries were done, there'd be no poem left.

Imagine if the janitors in the Hollywood studio, and the food production crew, were allowed to write dialogue, or insist that some of their own starred in every motion picture. Imagine if on every NBA team they had to include some of the guys from the ticketing office who either wanted to play, or wanted input into the plays that were being made.

Absurd, right?

Well, imagine this in the military. Let's say every private had the right to know exactly what every general was planning, and had input on every command that went out. Not only would it be time-consuming but also far more readily fall prey to espionage, and to selling secrets to the enemy.

Industrial espionage is also a huge concern for yogurt conglomerates, even down to Mr. Crabs' Crabby Patties on Spongebob (that darned Plankton!).

Similarly, if everyone responsible for Silly Bandz (I don't know who thought the idea up or where they were made, I just know that my kids are crazy about them, and the central office is in Toledo), that is, if everyone who helped to make them, knew about them in advance, and were part of the marketing, and decided for instance, that you had to add black and white (strictly speaking, it is doubtful whether black and white are even colors, according to my kindergartener who learned this in a science class in his last day of school, but if they are, I don't think they would be quite as popular, but let's say there was some ning-nong who insisted those "colors" be added, would they still sell as well?).

Nothing real is made in America any longer. It's all made in China.

But if anything of any quality is done, it's not done by committee. Anyone who has ever served on a committee knows that a committee cannot invent anything. All they can do is say yes or no, and even at best they do this slowly. No committee has ever written a novel, a poem, or designed a beautiful line of fashion.

It just isn't quick enough. Plus, it requires an individual genius.

Even a paper written in a college class is written by an individual. Even if it's not genius, it should be an individual's work.

Golf courses are designed by individuals. Buildings are designed by individuals. Junk is made by committees. All the junk in Wal-Mart comes out of "state capitalist" China. Some of it's needed, I guess. Fake noses, joke books, games of Monopoly, baseball and football cards, plastic footballs and safety baseballs, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of a child's life: all this is needed. Baby dolls, princess tiaras and swim suits with polka dots. All is needed. And all of this stuff can be made in China. So all the regulators and fancypants have already killed our industries with the possible exception of the fine arts (they are working on that, by insisting that the fine arts be politically correct). Burcak never once mentioned the fine arts in his book, so I don't know if they would be affected. Presumably he's talking about the production of ordinary items such as pots and pans and sponges, but America no longer makes these things. They are all made elsewhere, so does he plan to regulate Chinese production?

We do produce things like sports and arts, still, since those cannot be outsourced to crummy communist countries like China (with the exception of Yao Ming we haven't had any Chinese sports stars, and the few arts stars such as Jackie Chan came from capitalist Hong Kong, just before it switched over).

Would I have to have my golf swing checked by the Iteration Facilities Board before I produced a bogie? (Golf is a bigger industry than Hollywood.)

Does Burczak's book offer the idea that we can't import anything from China? or Mexico?

I'd be down with that, especially with regard to Chinese and Mexicans themselves (at least in their illegal variety).

Ok, I read a book that was over my head, and in an area in which I am not a specialist.

I think there was a lot of the use of words like "permission" and "authorize" especially at the end. I couldn't tell if he was summarizing arguments or endorsing them in many cases.

It would be one thing if these ideas were being formulated on the cheap by some frustrated goof like Marx in the blighted section of Cleveland between shifts as a used car salesman or making milkshakes at a drive-in. But these ideas: disallowance of inheritance of stocks, redistribution of all wealth, massive giveaways (a hundred grand) to teens, every notion has to go through many committees composed of the politically correct, a total ban on wages, government coercion and definition of the good, judicial activism, a universal consensus needed before production can be begun (presumably even in the arts), the abolition of private decision-making, (it all added up to a new totalitarianism): these ideas are being formulated by our best and brightest in universities such as Cornell, Chicago, and Denison. (A professor with a fully funded chair w/ the last name of Vanek at Cornell wants to introduce a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT! to ban wage-labor.)

My one hope is that the hoi polloi cannot read this book. The prose is difficult. I could only do about twenty pages in a day, and struggled with the terminology (the author of the book helped me with it in a few cases). With a million copies of Hayek sold in the last two weeks, perhaps there is still time to stop the socialist dream. Burczak's book was produced by the University of Michigan in 2006, has not been widely ballyhooed, and even if it is bought due to my mention here, I doubt if anyone else would read it except me. I actually enjoyed it. It was a white-knuckle ride into the woolliest socialism ever imagined.

When I was done with the book I laid it down, shaking with fear, as if I'd been on the Cyclone at Coney Island, closed my eyes, folded my hands, and said the Lord's Prayer twenty times in a row. I opened my eyes, and saw my kids run past with their Silly Bandz up and down their arms, and thought: is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

DOG TURDS & NEIGHBORLINESS

Every week I mow my lawn. Down by the road is a v-shaped slope, and in that area I generally find one or two dog turds. My kids, and the neighbor kids, play in that area.

Neighbors come and walk their dogs, and the dogs poop there. Some clean it up. They walk around with plastic bags, and scoop. Others don't scoop. Some scoop for the ones who don't scoop. But some don't ever scoop, and are never seen with plastic.

We who don't have dogs, but have children instead, wonder what it would be like if we let our children poop on the yards of the ones with dogs who don't scoop. I'll bet they would adore that.

I talked with the police officers yesterday to see if there was a fine for not scooping. The officer said that in the city it is 125 dollars (he had a great New York accent). The officer said there is a summons in our town, but in his memory, it hadn't been used. A boy who choked a girl on the bus was given a summons yesterday, and it went to arbitration. I'm supposed to call Kathy Fletcher, the code clerk, for details. I don't necessarily want to use the summons form, I just want to know what the law is (in general, I think the law should be reserved for only fairly severe conduct such as that which directly threatens a human life).

So, two days ago I actually caught a woman leaving a turd on my yard. I bagged it, and my wife left it on her porch (double-bagged). I've since been told by other neighbors that that particular woman is the primary source of abandoned dog turds in our neighborhood and some were excited that she had been confronted. The woman in question later claimed that she intended to bag it, but had forgotten to bring plastic. This woman is generally fairly friendly, and has other redeeming characteristics, but also has a large husband, and I have never been in a fight. I'm just wondering if I could outrun him.

At church today I spoke with the pastor who said the college kids next door have animals who poop all over his yard.

As Christians we are supposed to be neighborly. Does being neighborly also mean that we should confront those who aren't neighborly? Dogs slobber with friendliness, but I wouldn't consider this to be neighborly. If someone is leaving a filthy mess in an area where children play, and since children can't defend themselves, do adults have the duty to protect their play area from lazy adults who only care about the ease that not cleaning up after their dogs gives them? How dangerous are dog turds? Could they kill a baby if one decided to eat one? There are no babies at present in our neighborhood, but there are lots of toddlers. If a baby ate a turd that was on my yard, and it killed the baby, but it wasn't our turd, would I still be legally responsible for having the turd on my lawn?

The catechism says that not only should we not kill, but must be the stewards for life in our communities. That is, we should protect others, especially children, from the mindless activities of others.

I'm not a big fan of dogs. Ok, I see no reason for their existence in towns. They create problems by howling at night, and pooping by day, and are either way too friendly (slobbering and licking, or way too unfriendly -- growling and biting). Dogs aren't human, even though people give them human names, and pretend as if they are. They are actually wolves, and belong in the great woods hunting down deer (there are too many deer, and they should all be destroyed, to snap the Lyme chain).

Meanwhile, my apple tree has aphids. Ladybugs obliterate them, but there aren't enough ladybugs. Ladybugs are like wolves to aphids. The guy at the nursery said I should squirt the hose at them, and knock the aphids off the tree, and they wouldn't come back. He had a very nice-looking dog next to him which didn't bark. I thought it was a Corgi, but he said Scottish something. I liked the look of that dog. I wanted to scratch it behind the ears but was afraid it would tear my leg off in a sudden atavistic impulse.

I was showing the nursery guy a weird weed that grows in my backyard. He said it was "burdock." I try to dig it out but it has an immense root (several feet deep in some cases), and if I don't get it all the leaves shoot right back out of the ground. The Chinese make soup out of it. It has a gummy substance on the root that smells nice. The nursery guy (who is also a welding professor at my campus) said to use a product called Roundout, available at the Tractor Supply Store. He said he would use the old-fashioned method with a shovel.

Meanwhile, five little skunks were born on the abandoned property next door, and live underneath the pool. They are out every afternoon shopping for foliage, and chowing down. You have to comb through the phone book to find the animal removal people, and they can only get animals that are on your specific property. Some people have just moved in to that house, and got the pool going, but they are quite busy and haven't called to get the skunks removed. Baby skunks apparently don't spray, and no one sees the mother or father. At one point do the baby skunks start to spray? Already they are having standoffs with the few local dogs whose owners allow them to roam freely without a leash (we also have a summons for non-use of a leash). One local cat also roams freely, and leaves its turds everywhere.

In Massachusetts you are not allowed to disturb or remove animals. So I guess you have to let them poop on your house, and if skunks move in, you just have to move. Plants aren't covered yet, so you can still root up burdock, and eat it. Has anyone ever actually done this? I'm considering it.

Burczak on Legal Remedies for Poverty

Hayek believed that law would protect the poor, but Burczak martials evidence to illustrate that many believe that that is not the case.

Without the millions he spent, OJ would probably have been found guilty the first time.

His ingenious lawyers put the city of Los Angeles on trial, and OJ remained outside of prison until he did another violent crime, and this time he didn't walk.

Joran van der Sloot also walked from the Natalie Holloway murder, and it was only a few murders later that he was finally caught. Money talks, and rich thugs walk.

But are the poor innocent? Should we have empathy for the thugs who have four children and then abandon them, and never pay their child support? Should thugs be able to throw their responsibilities on the polity, and the polity create equalization?

Hayek would say no. Burczak would, I think, say yes. Get this sentence:

"The preceding discussion shows, first, that we may not with confidence accept that a common law system produces a neutral set of rules and, second, that the market process may be systematically biased against the interests of the asset poor" (78).

Poverty is correlated with fatherlessness and with single-parent households.

To leave small children should be considered a crime. If you're not responsible for them, you should die.

But since the laws are so permissive on this front since the 1500s, we have now arrived at a point where the polity steps in to try to create a parity for the abandoned wife and tots.

Burczak writes that notions of equality underwrite all notions of justice.

"As [Amartya] Sen notes, all theories of justice call for the equal (or impartial) treatment of people in some conceptual realm. The claim that people are equal in some way is used to defend the justice of circumstances. For instance, in his defense of a market economy, Hayek appeals to the formal equality of all people under a legal regime that adheres to the rule of law" (72-73).

If equality, as we have long suspected, is in fact the key term in any debate on justice (Lincoln's G-Address), then we have to ask if it is fair that some pick up the tab for abandoned children while others (who created them, and should therefore be responsible for them) walk.

Therefore, those who have children and abandon them should die.

This is only fair, because if they have abandoned their responsibilities they are outside the notion of common laws, and should therefore be killed. That much seems obvious. (Ok, for a long time I was an anomian surrealist, and now that I have brought the law back in I may be a bit primitive in terms of its application, but I'm having a bit of fun here by introducing draconian rules that are probably vaguely out of line with the notion of proportion. Still, something should be DONE to the men who have kids and run off with other women or even in some cases (the Episcopalian Bishop) with other men.)

Any man who has a child and abandons it should die.

If this was the case then the risk a woman is running in a sexual encounter would be EQUALLED by the risk a man was running.

And then there would be parity between them.

Meanwhile, we wouldn't have so many abandoned children. As it is, the laws enable men to leave their children.

What about men who screw around, like Edwards, or Tiger? They, too, should die.

Because they have broken what was meant to be a symmetical relationship based on equality.

If equality is the norm, then anyone who goes against it, should die.

Anyone who holds another person as a slave, should die.

Burczak believes the state should remedy situations of inequality through disbursements of funds that make up for the asset-poor.

I believe that the reason that people are asset-poor is that they come from broken families. Fix the broken families, and you won't have all these asset-poor children running about breaking windows and creating mayhem, scribbling mean words on walls, and acting like they never had a dad to teach them how to behave.

Surrealism was anomian. Lutheranism was an attempt to change the tyrannical church which was unfairly charging people for indulgences, and allowing people to use their income to feed, clothe, and educate their children. The Catholic church became a monstrosity that no longer served its population, or prayed with them, but rather, in all too many cases, preyed on them.

We must have laws that support equality of opportunity, and support families that remain together, and that create the best possible conditions for children. we need churches to do the same.

If you want to ask me what should be done with South America, including Mexico, the answer is simple. Disband the Catholic church, and have everyone turn Lutheran. Overnight, those countries would become beacons of sanity and prosperity, like Lutheran Scandinavia.

If the whole world were to turn Lutheran, there would still be problems, but they would be on the order of -- where did I leave my keys? Rather than, I'm starving.

We might as well face the fact that the problems around the world have entirely to do with inadequate religions. Animism in sub-Saharan Africa or in Haiti is a disaster. Catholicism is a disaster. Islam which relegates half of its population to illiteracy is a disaster. Hinduism which relegates most of its population to lower caste systems, and then allows only one small percentile an artificially inflated place is obviously responsible for the poverty of India. The one functioning area of India is Kerala. No big surprise: there is a large minority of Protestants there. Communism is wrong both in its description of the world's problems and in its prescription (kill the few functioning entrepreneurs and replace them with party boneheads).

I don't know why Burczak is busy reinventing a functioning politics. Shouldn't intelligent people just look at Lutheran Scandinavia and figure a few things out based on an already functional model?

As for the Middle East, the solution is obvious. The Palestinians should drop their religion and become Jewish. This would solve all their immediate problems. However, Judaism is elitist and won't let just anyone join them. This means that they have a problem with their numbers and will always be a tiny minority.

If they were all to become Lutherans, they would no longer have the problems they have. Everybody would be functional.

Even better would be if everyone would become a Lutheran Surrealist. Then at least I would have a few people to read my blog.

Burczak's Hayek, Continued

There are of course all kinds of wealth. Some are born with a funny nose, others with a club foot, some without wit, and others can reduce the table to helpless laughter. Some are cute, some are ugly. Some have a sense of right and wrong, some are criminals down to the bone. This in turn means that some have friends, while others have none. But let's stick with a narrow definition of wealth as dollars in the bank.

Andrew Carnegie thought the wealthy had an obligation to the poor, but that their wealth shouldn't be redistributed by a committee. Instead, the wealthy should themselves redistribute their money (as Bill Gates does).

"Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. ...disposing of surplus wealth ... for the general good"

Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth: Essays and Other Writings, (NY: Penguin, 2006), 12.

Against this, in private conversation, Burczak asked me why we can let the poor and stupid vote, but not partake in financial decisions, or not be shareholders in the great companies and have some general sense of ownership of the means of production.

Authority is something that Carnegie was not willing to dispense with. Wealth itself he was willing to disburse, but not authority.

Personally, I find Carnegie's passage to be offensive insofar as we know some of what he did to amass wealth. Not only union busting with hitmen, but squeezing every last working hour out of his wage-slaves. Something like Scrooge, he then turns around and disburses it in a potlatch-like fashion, to stun the poor with his largesse.

The eight-hour day, sexual harassment laws, laws against discrimination in hiring, are tips of the hat toward equality. The wealthy are nevertheless masters, and the poor nevertheless, slaves.

The autonomy that would be provided by a system in which at least some money was provided for the very poor on setting out into life would help increase general liberty.

To what extent should government interfere in the laissez-faire invisible hand of the market? Hayek provides few guideposts. Those few he offers are analyzed by Burczak.

"For example, he [Hayek] suggests that a wealthy society can assure to everyone 'some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work" Burczak, 39 and Hayek, 120).

Minimum wage, worker's comp, public health hospitals, the law that requires that any hospital take in emergency cases with or without insurance, come out of a notion of the general good. But everything that comes out of the general good acts as a tax on the wealthier members of society whose work and creativity is lessened.

Laws that require taxation, or that keep minimum wages up, are done with a sense of the general good. If those laws squeeze entrepreneurs to the point where they close factories, only to reopen in places like China and Mexico, where fewer laws protect the working class, this does not serve the national good. If, however, the poverty is so extreme in another country that a general lawlessness prevails, that country may have trouble attracting industry.

Baseballs were made in Haiti until Aristide took over and began a nationalization process. Rawlings relocated to Costa Rica. All MLB baseballs are made in a single factory there. 610 assemblers in aggregate make less than a single MLB American baseball player although they work 14 hour days.

Burczak writes, "Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Hayek's legal theory is necessary in order to fashion a practical and persuasive vision of post-Hayekian socialism in which democratic governments would be authorized to alter the rules of the economic game based on socialist notions of justice" (40).

The key word in Burczak's sentence is "authorized." If you change that word to "required," you have a completely different sense, right? Try the sense with the word change.

Authorized or Required? Required would mean that companies lost all their autonomy and were squeezed much as workers formerly were in the 19th century. Now whole companies are are in effect slaves of state-run capitalism.

On one side is total freedom for the entrepreneur. Such conditions prevailed in the nineteenth century and allowed the likes of Andrew Carnegie to amass appalling fortunes at the expense of the many.

On the other side is a state that regulates competition, and enforces draconian taxation.

Under Carnegie, you had factory towns where only one person was making decisions. Under communism, you had only one person making choices (see Kim Jong-Il above, and analyze who's making decisions). It is always authority that is the last thing to be spread.

How do you spread authority?

What if you spread the authority so far that no decisions get made, or if the workers decide they can retire with full benefits after ten years on the job?

(Is this enough for today?)

Ted Burczak's Socialism After Hayek

This is a nifty little volume. I like the type size, I like the cover. It's printed in a series entitled Advances in Heterodox Economics, by U. of Michigan Press.

There are only 145 pages, and I'm on p. 20.

Basically what Burczak does is he finds resources in Hayek to talk about the general good, and runs with them.

On p. 3 he says that we must ban wages, and institute a total redistribution of wealth.

Already I'm thinking this is going to be a white-knuckle ride into the wooliest socialist thicket I've ever been in, but it keeps getting weirder and wilder.

On p. 12 he dismisses fear itself. Don't be afraid. Meanwhile, I'm seeing huge peaks and valleys of a roller-coaster economy in which wages are banned, teenagers are given enormous sums of money (he suggests 100 grand for every late teen, so that they can start a company), and he says that all companies should be cooperatives owned by their workers.

I'm thinking: what's wrong with this picture?

I've met Burczak and he's one of these high-IQ guys who can without effort outthink me on almost any topic. Yet he's polite enough not to rub it in. He probably has 40 IQ points on me. My IQ (I hate math) is something about 140 or 145. I can feed myself, let's say. But Burczak is probably on the order of 180. Way up there. But he grew up in a little town without any commercial joints. Did he ever work?

I thought about my life as described in my novel Temping. In it, a shiftless guy works shifts at jobs he doesn't care about for decades. He likes it that way. Give him a stake in a company and he wouldn't care. Sell it for a cheeseburger, or give it to someone on the street, he'd just as soon watch a ladybug sleep.

Ted Burczak assumes that other people are as smart as he is, and that they care about the world as he does.

They don't. Lots of people are loaded down with tattoos and care only about the moment.

Give them a stake in a company and the company is doomed. It's only when I'm about forty that I started to think about the future.

Someone in a company has to assume the risk, and take -- how can I put this -- ? charge. That is, someone has to have the idea, as Henry Ford had an idea, and then build the apparatus with oversight mechanism to see the cars through the assembly lines and into the show rooms and into people's driveways where they're satisfied with product, and talk it up so others buy it, so the cars can keep rolling.

Almost no one has this kind of genius. Ted Burczak assumes that everyone does.

I'd say it's one in a million. Why socialism doesn't work is that it clogs board rooms with bored party members whose relationship to genius is that of an aphid to an apple tree. They can't produce anything but yesses and wild guesses.

Still, I'm getting a wild overview of market thinking from a cutting edge thinker. He's a real postmodernist, and totally wild. Just thinking about his book I want to hold on to a ring, and scream like heck, as if it's Coney Island, and the visions of the future coming are enough to make a grown man hysterical.

Now I'm going to read another twenty pages. If I end up in the asylum, you'll know why.

Hayek Concluded

Last summer my wife was in Finland with the four kids and I went for a hike with Mark Schneider from Electrical. En route, we walked up over an obscure mountain in the Catskills (he's a marathon runner) and while huffing along to keep up he mentioned that a friend of his named Ted Burczak had written a book entitled Socialism After Hayek.

I had never heard of Hayek, so got the book.

Then last week, Glenn Beck said that Hayek was the most important author in the history of the world. 1.2 million copies sold.

I took it down off the shelf. I stopped last summer on p. 150 (it's boring and says the same thing over and over) and decided I should get to the end of it.

Then, Ted Burczak, who teaches at Denison University in Granville, Ohio (where I once interviewed), came to DeLancey NY in the Catskills, and Mark Schneider threw a party. Schneider knows how to build things and had built a giant tower in his backyard and stretched a zipline 100 feet across his yard. I don't know how to define this contraption. It was a handle you hold on to, and you fly down (gravity because of a slope), and suddenly my kids, Schneider's kids, and all kinds of other kids are going down this zipline in a frenzy of fun.

Nervous, (gravity is a b@#$X) I talked to Burczak about my Marianne Moore project, and how one of the problems was figuring out her economics. She thought, for example, that Roosevelt was "our Hitler." Or that's how she explained Roosevelt to a British correspondent named Bryher.

Hours elapse. Watermelon is eaten. Cookies, muffins, and iced tea. We talk about fastest routes between the Catskills and NYC. A bucket full of water balloons are brought out and children arm themselves, and I am released as the scapegoat, and fly around the lawn, getting hit, and hitting in return.

While I'm running, I think about Hayek. Hayek writes,

"There is at present a great deal of muddleheaded talk about 'planning to equalize standards of life.' It is instructive to consider in a little more detail one of these proposals to see what precisely it involves. The area for which at the present moment our planners are particularly fond of drawing up such schemes is the Danube Basin and southeastern Europe. There can be no doubt about the urgent need for amelioration of economic conditions in this region, from humanitarian and economic considerations as well as in the interest of the future peace of Europe, nor that this can be achieved only in a political setting different from that of the past. But this is not the same thing as to wish to see economic life in this region directed according to a single master-plan, to foster the development of the different industries according to a schedule laid down beforehand in a way which makes the success of local initiative dependent on being approved by the central authority and being incorporated in its plan. One cannot, for example, create a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority for the Danube Basin without thereby determining beforehand for many years to come the relative rate of progress of the different races inhabiting this area or without subordinating all their individual aspirations and wishes to this task" (227-228).

I thought of Bush's plan to somehow dismantle Iraq and Afghanistan and remake them in America's image of a multicultural and feminist state, with voting, and fairness, and how the locals are expected to sign on to this mad plan. And I thought, why not instead try to change Lyme Disease, and use helicopter gunships in Connecticut to clear the state of deer, snapping the chain that can lead to Lyme?

Why not instead go into the Congo and try to make gorillas literate enough to stand for political representation.

The task would be just about as hopeless.

Meanwhile, Deepwater Horizon is leaking millions of gallons of oil all over the Gulf, and should we instead use billions of dollars to increase literacy for women in Afghanistan while Mexicans pour over our borders, kidnap our children, and put them up for ransom?

Where are our priorities?

All kinds of kids went down the zipline. Wife went down, even my four-year-old went down. I don't like speedy stuff.

I got home and ants had attacked an apple tree out back, and so I found tanglefoot, a sticky substance, and pasted it around the base of the tree so that they couldn't go up and down. This freed the tree of ants in the last two days (ants farm aphids on apple trees, getting the aphids to suck juice out of the tree's leaves, and then squeezing sugar out of their rear ends to bring back to the Queen).

Ants are totalitarian socialists, and think nothing of enslaving other whole species in their drive to conquer.

And I thought more about socialism, and how Hayek (Burczak, one wonders, if he was, initially, attracted to Hayek because of the similarity of the last two letters in the name, just as I read Charles Olson because of his namesakeliness), makes us ask about the wars into which we are conscripted.

The war on poverty, the war in Vietnam, the war on ants in the backyard. Hayek says wars utilize and mobilize all our attention on one thing, and sometimes this is necessary, but it shouldn't be the norm. And I thought about how race, gender and class asks us to mobilize toward a war of equality in which all groups are brought to the same level. Why the heck should I care about this? I am a lot more concerned about the wellbeing of bacteria on Mars, for instance, is that necessarily bad?

Even if it could be done, why shouldn't I care instead to rather put up a great wall of China (cups and saucers hundreds of feet high) against the Mexican border, or why not mobilize the whole country toward the eradication of Lyme Disease, in which everyone goes ballistic against the deer and mice population, and we eradicate them all at once with helicopter gunships. Even sending down daisy cutter bombs into herds of Bambis and their moms, blowing their little stripes and polka dots all over the green forests of Abercrombie and Fitch?

Why must all our values coalesce around a single goal?

Why shouldn't some of us just sail down the zipline, while others make cupcakes to order, and others stomp on ants, and yet others throw water balloons, and yet others lament the growth of Lyme Disease to 1% of the American population, and still others worry about what will happen to Lyme bacteria if we commence a war on it, worrying about the lack of bacteriological diversity in American ticks, or how gorillas need to become literate, so that they can commence gorilla theatres in the depths of the Congo, for which they can write to the UN for funds for better costumes?

And why can't others worry about the aesthetic needs of ants, and whether or not they are sufficiently entertained while squeezing the aphids' butts on my apple tree out back?

It is TOTALITARIAN to subordinate all of life to one goal, or set of goals, as determined by a planner.

Hayek argues that the Victorian era was actually more progressive than our own because there was a lot more room for individual eccentricity and smaller areas of concern. He says that when countries like Ruritania are safe in our midst from the bizarre need of powerful countries to improve them according to a fixed schedule, we will all be better off.

His final sentence reads, "The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century" (238).

I don't know why Glenn Beck liked this book. I guess it is anti-socialist. That's good. But it's a far cry from nutty Ayn Rand, which is the other author Beck ballyhoos. Rand is also pro-business, and pro-genius, but doesn't have any touch of tenderness. Hayek is a very tender soul who relishes eccentricity, and is a kind of postmodernist in that he is against any kind of metanarrative seizing the collective imaginary and forcing us down a planned road.

Hayek impliess that James Madison felt the same way as he did in his notes for further reading (at book's end).

Next books up: Burczak's Socialism After Hayek, a book on Madison, another book on Marianne Moore (that accuses her of Orientalism), a book about frivolity (by William Gaddis). Any other suggestions?

The Road to Serfdom, Hayek continued

The chapter on Nazism is the only chapter I've read three times. Each time I read it the thinking in it is refined.

Called "The Socialist Roots of Nazism," Hayek explores how far left and far right in Nazi Germany dovetailed in the years running up to Hitler's takeover.

He probably could not do justice to this complex dovetailing in the 11 pages he allots to the issue, and I can't in turn do justice to his 11 pages.

In addition to Marx there is a prevalent notion that the German nation needed to act as one, and that individualism of every kind needed to be suppressed. Hayek goes so far as to say that the Germans saw the war with England in WWI as a battle between the corporate state, and the individualist state. And they didn't know why they lost, and wanted a rematch.

"Before 1914 all the true German ideals of a heroic life were in deadly danger before the continuous advance of English commercial ideals, English comfort, and English sport. The English people had not only themselves become completely corrupted, every trade-unionist being sunk in the 'morass of comfort,' but they had begun to infect all other peoples. Only the war had helped the Germans to remember that they were really a people of warriors, a people among whom all activities and particularly economic activities were subordinated to military ends. Sombart knew that the Germans were held in contempt by other people because they regard war as sacred -- but he glories in it. To regard war as inhuman and senseless is a product of commercial views" (184).

Hayek goes on to indicate that liberalism itself comes out of a commercial mentality, and that the Germans across the board (with the exception of the educated German bourgeoisie) hated English liberalism, and saw it as their enemy.

Why was this the case?

It seems that a similar hatred of liberalism operates now in American academia in which German thought predominates (Marx, and the Frankfurt school, have now relocated into America, and spread their spores, repopulating their totalitarian ideals throughout the American higher education system).

Many of the socialists who came to America because they were Jews were nevertheless totalitarians in much the same way as Hitler was, Hayek argues, with the sole exception that they had been marked as vermin for their genetic background.

"We should never forget that the anti-Semitism of Hitler has driven from his country, or turned into his enemies, many people who in every respect are confirmed totalitarians of the German type" (196).

This thinking of Hayek's might be condemned as anti-Semitic, except that he consciously draws from other German Jews who were liberals. (Someone named Rathenau is mentioned.)

Hayek argues that for the great majority of German intellectuals across the spectrum of political beliefs totalitarianism had triumphed over any form of individualism.

And those ideas had by then (1944) leaped across the Channel, into English and American thought, and were beginning to reproduce.

Someone named EH Carr, as well as Arnold Toynbee, and others, he says, have begun to believe in the totalitarian model. He cites Carr, "the mass production of opinion is the corollary of the mass production of goods" (198).

Churches had to be dismantled, pastors who didn't obey had, like Bonhoeffer, to be arrested, newspapers had to have friendly editors put in, radio had to be controlled, and uniformity imposed in the universities. Heidegger had to replace Husserl (Husserl was a Jew). The totalitarian system could not brook individuality of opinion. Individualism and individualists had to be destroyed. Humorists had to be destroyed. People from other viewpoints (Jews, gypsies) had to be destroyed. National socialism was just that. Anyone who wasn't part of the final solution had to be considered an ideological enemy and terminated.

It took just six years from the beginning of hostilities (Poland in 1939 until the invasion of Berlin in summer 1945) to roll back this oppressive ideology and begin to replant liberalism within Germany. In the Soviet Union, it took another forty-five years (Christmas 1989) until liberalism began once more to breathe under the name of Glasnost. And yet, Russia under Putin appears to be going back to a form of virulent nationalism, and to the disappearance of journalists, and critics, with very few able to survive liquidation (Garry Kasparov being one of those few, who continues to stand for liberalism).

In America, Fox News is one of the last holdouts of liberalism, and individual opinion, where Christianity is still permitted (Protestant Christianity as the ultimate liberalism, the ultimate individualism, in which each person has access to God, and to revelation, and to total freedom of inquiry). Even at Fox there are no prominent Protestant from the mainstream religions. Hannity and O'Reilly are Catholics, while Greta Van Susteren is a Christian Scientist. Beck is himself a Mormon. On the Supreme Court the last Protestants have been expunged. There are no longer any prominent Protestants on the national scene. The Wall Street Journal is perhaps the last bastion of the free press where individual viewpoints are honored and yet even there one never reads a column by a prominent Protestant thinker. We have been banned. Our churches are still permitted to exist, although many of them have been taken over from within and more and more mirror the socialist zeitgeist in which equality matters more than individualism.

How long will this situation last? It all depends on what happens in November, 2010. If Obama can get his goons to steal elections again, as they almost certainly did in Minnesota with the election of Franken, the situation may worsen for freedom of thought, and for the Protestant spirit of free inquiry.

Hayek argues that free enterprise leads to freedom of opinion. As more and more are on the government payroll however (the totalitarian Germans and Russians wanted everyone on the government payroll), the ability to feed oneself became linked to one's ability to nod at the government and say, "Yes, massa." Anyone who couldn't do this died in the concentration camps, or the Gulags. Solzhenitsyn's Ivan D. arrested and put to eight years of hard labor for making a joke that indicated he was not with the pogrom.

WHY THE WORST GET ON TOP: Friedrich HAYEK CONTINUED

Hayek has an almost mechanical understanding of totalitarianism.

In order to create a totalitarian state, you need to mobilize the passions of the majority against a minority, he says. This is what Stalin did against the Kulaks (lower middle-class farmers, who didn't have much, but had maybe two cows that they wouldn't sunder to the collective). Stalin crushed this group, squeezing out their guts. Hitler used a similar maneuver: he mobilized resentment against the Jews. Hitler obliterated this group, seizing their goods, having the gold picked out of their teeth before their incinerated remains were thrown into mass graves.

Hayek asks, "If the end justifies the means," and the end is genocide, then only the worst will be able to carry it out. This means that the worst will rise to the top.

No morally sane human being could incinerate 7 million Jews, as well as gypsies, homosexuals, and others that had been targeted by the Nazi leadership as defectives.

Therefore, it requires someone with a thoroughly rotten nature. They are the ones who rise to the top in totalitarian systems. They have to be fairly stupid to boot, because if they had an ounce of brains, they would question what they were doing, and the higher-ups would have to crush them in turn.

"Yet while there is little that is likely to induce men who are good by our standards to aspire to leading positions in the totalitarian machine, and much to deter them, there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous. There will be jobs to be done about the badness of which taken by themselves nobody has any doubt, but which have to be done in the service of some higher end, and which have to be executed with the same expertness and efficiency as any others. And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves, and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power. The positions in a totalitarian society in which it is necessary to practice cruelty and intimidation, deliberate deception and spying, are numerous. Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Italian or Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings" (170).

Hayek says that those who rise to the top in a totalitarian state are similar to those who would exercise the post of "whipping master" in a slave plantation.

Hayek is writing in 1944, and the examples before him include Soviet Russia, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, which he in turn compares to the Old South slave plantations of the Confederacy.

If we were to fast-forward through the twentieth century we could see that Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's Cultural Revolution in China, present-day Myanmar or North Korea, would possess essentially the same attributes. People who rise to power in such disturbing situations would have to be sociopaths.

What about Barack Obama's America? Glenn Beck asks us to apply the lessons of Hayek's history to Obama's America, and to see the parallels. So far, I do not see the scapegoating working at the same level. It is true that Obama points out recalcitrant groups such as those "who cling to God and guns" in western Pennsylvania, or he goes after the "stupid Cambridge police" but then he apologizes. He goes after "fat cat bankers" but he also acknowledges he needs them. He says that BP needs to be "kicked in the ass," but a week later he says we need BP.

If we think of feminism, which attempted to scapegoat men in the seventies, we can see that the worst of these never arrived at any real power. Valerie Solanas, who wrote the SCUM Manifesto, and shot brilliant Andy Warhol (she wanted to shoot Maurice Girodias, publisher of Olympia Press, but she couldn't find him that day, so she went and shot Warhol instead). She spent a decade in a psychiatric prison, was released, and died in an obscure flophouse in San Francisco of the common flu.

Why has America been so resilient against the totalitarian presence? It's partially a multi-party state, in which freedom of speech is a guaranteed and sacred right (now rescinded on many campuses, but still essentially intact as an ideal). Even on campuses, it is mostly literature departments that are totalitarian in nature, with the likes of Ward Churchill forming one of the true exemplars of a sociopathic personality (pretending to be Native American, hoping America will be beset by a thousand Mogadishus, faking his dissertation, and cheating in his scholarship, etc.). This is perhaps endemic in the hate studies groups, but even they have to have some brains to get to where they get, where they remain somewhat marginal on campuses, and not well-respected within the larger campus community. Moreover, students don't have to take their courses, for the most part.

Most of the Protestant world held out against the totalitarians.

Only Germany completely plunged into darkness. Hayek accuses the Germans of fostering the authoritarian personality, while America, he says, and Britain, have an anti-authoritarian personality. Not to say that it couldn't happen here. It still might. But for whatever reason the feminists never produced a Hitler. No spellbinding orator arose from their ranks and demanded the offing of the American male. The closest perhaps was Andrea Dworkin. She was a fatso and an ugmo, so nobody listened, because she couldn't get on TV with a frame that large, and a face that disgusting (photo above). Her books sold in the millions, but although she called for lynch mobs to tear suspected-rapists apart in their homes, it never happened.

If Barack Obama -- a good-looking light-skinned black man -- is the best that the new totalitarians can do -- a man who waffles -- who can barely get anything done, but does have totalitarian intentions toward speaking falsely, operating in the dark, and trying to scapegoat groups, are we safe?

Are we safer than Beck seems to want to think?

For now, I think, yes.

What the left needs is an absolutely unscrupulous and monstrous individual with no common feeling. They need a new Stalin, a new Hitler, a new Mussolini.

But they also need a completely helpless and uneducated group to recruit from that will be willing to kill off the rest of us. The left in this country is by and large well-educated, genteel, and humanitarian. Their most ardent faithful are literature professors, and thus, unlikely to want to gas people, even if it included the Bush family.

Could the right, on the other hand, effect a totalitarian state? They have many rednecks at their command. They have the great unwashed that they once commanded in places like Indiana. Men who joined the KKK without a second thought.

But although it is more likely that there will be a nasty rightwing takeover, the chances of that, too, are almost impossibly remote. Even if Fox News wanted it (which they don't), there are too few in this country who are absolutely bone-stupid enough to go about the incineration of the blacks, or the homosexuals, or any other group. Even Charles Manson could only get together a half-dozen jerks from the flotsam and jetsam of California society. The most he could do is off a half-dozen people. This left his rag-tag army in emotional shambles, and full of remorse for decades to come.

I don't know why America is so relatively good. It just seems that we're too decent a people for any of the horrors of history to sweep through us except on the most minor scale. The left worries about Sarah Palin. She is a well-educated woman, who didn't have the heart to abort a retarded child. She has gay friends. Her genealogy is replete with lawyers and doctors and judges. Sure, she talks tough, but I hardly think she is a menace. She doesn't drink heavily, as Stalin did, or take drugs, as Hitler did. If she's ever committed a crime, it would probably be a speeding ticket, for which she feels very sorry.

America, I think, is in pretty good shape. We have two sides who would have us believe differently. We have two sides who whip up lots of emotion about the other side, and say, it's coming, it's happening, now, now, now. But life just goes on here as usual. People taking their dogs for a walk, stopping to chat, eating a few too many cookies before they start the diet tomorrow. Or maybe after church on Sunday. Meanwhile, they get a few tattoos, of Jesus and Mom, and look forward to the NBA Finals. The millions in the east root for Paul Pierce, and the millions in the west root for Kobe Bryant. Al Sharpton will come on after the Finals and accuse us of racism for one reason or another, and we will basically like Al Sharpton, because he's basically likable.

WHY THE WORST GET ON TOP

Friedrich Hayek writes,

"We must now examine a belief from which many who regard the advent of totalitarianism as inevitable derive consolation and which seriously weakens the resistance of many others who would oppose it with all their might if they fully apprehended its nature. It is the belief that the most repellent features of the totalitarian regimes are due to the historical accident that they were established by groups of blackguards and thugs. Surely, it is argued, if in Germany the creation of a totalitarian regime brought the Steichers and Killingers, the Leys and Heines, the Himmlers and Heydrichs to power, this may prove the viciousness of the German character but not that the rise of such people is the necessary consequence of a totalitarian system. Why should it not be possible that the same sort of system, if it be necessary to achieve important ends, be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole?" (157).

[Many of these people are now forgotten, but the footnotes in the book provide a good glossary. Most of us are aware of Himmler, but not Streicher or Killinger. They are all googlable. Suffice it to say that they were abominable stalwarts of Hitler's regime, leaders of the Gestapo, leaders of the SS, major newspaper editors who stumped for the extermination of the Jews, etc.]

So why do such people end up on the top in totalitarian systems? Why has this ALWAYS been the case whether it's in the USSR, in the NAZI period, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? Take a guess.

Answers from Hayek himself tomorrow: he argues that it will ALWAYS be the case that scum rises under totalitarian regimes. What are his reasons for this? Could he be right?

Friedrich Hayek #1!

The other day on the Glen Beck Show, he pulls out Friedrich Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom, and says, "People have died to read this book. In Stalin's Russia, it was passed in a clandestine fashion. If you were caught with it, you died. Later on in the show, we will meet someone who dared to pass it on nevertheless."

Beck went on to talk extensively about the book, before he brought out his honored guest. (It was not Salma Hayek.)

Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is a conservative classic. It was a bestseller when it was published in 1944, and it is currently #1 at Amazon.com (out in front of nine million contenders). But it's not an easy book to read. I started it last summer, and got to page 125. I read another five pages last night. There aren't any jokes. There are few images. It's a book about economic and social policy about how centralized planning kills economy, kills freedom, and kills people.

He wrote it out of duty knowing it would hurt him. In it, Hayek claims that fascism and communism are variants on the same totalitarian schema. Hayek argues that socialism turns us into "industrial animals" (49), is run by ruffians who possess no genius, and that it produces totalitarianism, and nothing else. He argues that socialism is a German phenomenon, and that the English were always individualists.

He wants us to plan FOR competition, rather than against it.

There can be no ONE social goal for a whole society. If there is, this is collectivism, and it silences the individual imagination.

Socialists want their laws to be unrepealable.

A true dictatorship of the proletariat would undo democratic freedom.

These are pretty much truisms here at LS. But Hayek goes further: he argues that the one thing socialism offers: redistribution of wealth, turns out to not be true. It invariably impoverishes society insofar as it crushes individual imagination.

Hayek doesn't understand the role of the individual genius. Raymond Aron offers us this extension to Hayek, paraphrased from his book 18 Lessons on Industrial Society:

The entrepreneur is a kind of poet, only far more rare. The entrepreneur is the goose that lays the golden egg. Many in the enlightenment believe that people are all the same. Even Adam Smith didn't believe in individual genius. He thought that given an education, and free time, anyone could run a business, or be a poet. Marx thought something similar. However, the poet and the industrial entrepreneur are the rarest of beings. Socialism crushes both in the name of the collective.

And let us offer our own extension on Hayek: he doesn't bring up the ten commandments. Socialism, in not believing in God, enshrines sin as the highest of goods, and protects them.

Thus, the commandment against killing is abrogated. Now you have the "right" to abortion.

The commandment against bearing false witness is abrogated. Now you must do "cultural studies" which argues that all cultures are equal, but cultures other than our own are better. Objective truth is dishonored. You must speak the party line rather than what you yourself perceive.

The commandment against theft is abrogated under the notion of "redistribution."

The commandment against envy of others' houses and homes is abrogated, and called class war.

There is no Christian component to Hayek's book (I have 100 pages to go so could be wrong). It could help flesh out the book and show exactly what is wrong with socialism.

When they off God, they bring in Beelzebub, and enshrine his principles as their most sacred.

There can be no true liberty without the eternal laws.

NYC TRIP -- TATTOOS

Driving down to NYC to do a bit of research I flipped on the radio. To my surprise, Glenn Beck came on. Normally I'd switch the channel, but Stu has been angry about Beck, so I thought I would listen. Beck said that the Taliban have been putting HIV infected needles in their bombs. I haven't heard that elsewhere. After about ten minutes of commercials, he came back on and suggested a response. He said the Taliban don't like pork, so we should put live pigs in our bombs, so that pork parts touch the Taliban when they explode. He laughed a lot, and I confess I laughed a lot with him. I think you had to be there.

Then he started to go on about how Friedrich Hayek (an Austrian economist who taught at the U. of Chicago) is the answer and we should all read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. I rather like Hayek. Friday, Beck announced, he was going to do a show about James Monroe, as part of his Founding Fathers series. I rather like the Founding Fathers, so planned to tune in.

I noticed that a lot of young people in NYC have tattoos up to their necks. I do not think people should have tattoos. This seems to be correlated with poor impulse control. When I watch the NBA Finals, it seems to me that the players who are the most heavily tattooed have the least impulse control, or at least get called for the most fouls (Rasheed Wallace is an exemplar).

NYC seemed prosperous. I went into the NY Public Library at 42nd Street and did research on two of Marianne Moore's poems, and visited the sites in which the two poems were set. I talked with people there, and took hundreds of photographs. The middle part of my book gelled.

In Prospect Park is a site where the Revolutionary War broke out in 1776. At the site of an oak tree, the rebels held a pass. The rebels lost 3000 men in the Battle of Brooklyn, but helped Washington to escape, and later most of them escaped to rejoin Washington. I got to see part of the park where they were removing one of Robert Moses' skating rinks and reasserting the Olmsted-Vaux sight-lines out to a pond in the Lullwater. The park was not made until 1872 just after the Civil War. I thought about how each war has clarified our principles and made us a stronger nation except for the war in Vietnam, which muddied our principles, and turned us into a nation of tattooed losers.

I got a cheese sandwich from a diverse deli, walked through the Botanical Museum and saw a Horse Chestnut, then drove southwest on Gowanus Boulevard to 278, went across Staten Island, and then up I-95 toward the Palisades Parkway.

I was thinking about an argument I had with a Columbia University student. She is a fan of feminist Judith Butler. Butler wrote a book called Bodies that Matter, about how people should be able to be sex workers, or change their sex, or have sex with whoever they want. Part of her book is based on a strange film called Paris Is Burning, about a group of black transvestites in Harlem who pretend to be yuppies and Harvard students, and suburbanites. One of them, a young man in the process of becoming a woman, worked as a whore. He is killed. The perpetrator isn't caught, but Venus Xtravaganza, the lad(y) who is killed, is found stuffed under a hotel bed. Butler claims he is killed because he crossed the gender line. I don't know. Why did Joran Van der Sloot kill a woman in Peru? People die in illicit badly supervised sexual encounters more often than we think. I argued that Venus is killed for breaking one of the ten commandments -- the one against adultery. Any time any one engages in an illicit sex act they are bringing tremendous forces to bear without legal or religious sanction. Of course they are liable to die. Bodies Don't Matter, it's the laws that matter! We have to stay inside of the laws, or else our bodies will be destroyed. The student agreed with me, perhaps, if she did, because of her Catholic origins, but maybe she just decided I was a nothing talking about nothing.

Just after a tollbooth on I-95 the traffic crawled. After a half hour of slow movement I passed a gold Plymouth that had hit the dividing wall and crumpled. Men and women were around the car in stretchers having white sheets put over their faces. All I could see is that they had tattoos up to their necks and I assumed they were fooling around inside the car instead of driving properly. Beck was back on talking about James Monroe, Manifest Destiny, and the Monroe Doctrine. I couldn't listen well because trucks were roaring around me, there was a bit of static, and I was afraid to end up like the tattooed specimens on the side of the road. I turned it off. America has changed. We lost over 3000 soldiers in the first battle of the Revolutionary War. At Gettysburg, 30,000 soldiers fell in the course of a 3-day battle. Now, casualty rates are deemed more important than ideas. Bodies matter, and not the principles, or the laws above, which are no longer understood, or thought to not matter. (During the war in Vietnam a popular song went, "What are we fighting for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn." I think a great number of leftists don't think there are any principles aside from making "love." It is the only act of importance in their lives, or in their value system.)

As I watch the 5th game of the NBA Finals this evening I'm going to be watching to see if those players who are more heavily tattooed tend to get more fouls called on them. This could be about impulse control. It could also be that the refs get peeved by the tattoos and call fouls more often on these irritating specimens. It's not the winner that matters to me so much, but the morality of the players. I don't want Kobe Bryant to win because he raped a woman in Colorado. I don't care how good he is as a player. As a man, he's a mess, and so I hope the game will not go his way. Plus, he has tattoos. I want it to go Kevin Garnett's way. Garnett doesn't have any tattoos.

Is it wrong in a Biblical sense to sport a tattoo? What if the tattoo says "I love Jesus," or is a giant cross? I still say it's wrong! We are permitted to have icons, I think, but not embossed on our body.*

* I would grant one exception. If a woman lost a child, she could have a small tattoo of the child's name on her arm.

Research In Prospect Park

I've been doing research in New York City for the last few days. I visited Carnegie Hall, the New York Public Library at Bryant Street, and Central Park. I also went into Prospect Park in Brooklyn and got a tour. This photo is from that tour, and shows a basin that is dry and has 6 children on bicycles supervised by an adult couple. This basin is in the so-called Vale of Cashmere, a very wild area that is used as a gay cruising area in the night. A gay male body was found there a little while ago.

In the daytime you see almost no one in this area. It's quite lush. (Click twice on the photo and it will enlarge, and then you can still zoom in if you want.)

LICHENS: A MUTUAL AID SOCIETY

"Lichens. Many people, upon studying the dependent organisms and their various devices for exploiting living things, become genuinely depressed. To them it appears -- particularly during their vigorous and courageous moments -- that a world in which success is built in large part, upon a 'ruthless' appropriation of the goods and destructions of the lives of other individuals is indeed an unhappy place in which to live. Since our universe is one in which matter and energy are never created but only transformed, the building-up process could not continue (for long) save at the expense of tearing down something else. So destruction of a sort will have to be accepted as a 'law of life.' To call it 'ruthless' is to attribute to other organisms the concept of mercy, which is peculiarly human...

Some comfort, however, may be derived from the realization that destruction is by no means the only law of life. The needs of two organisms are often satisfied by a co-operation in which each is benefited and neither is damaged. A group of forms in which this is strikingly illustrated is the lichens.

A lichen is a compound of an alga and a fungus..."

The Story of the Plant Kingdom, by Merle C. Coulter and Howard J. Dittmer, Third Revised Edition (University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 239-240.

In the middle of this fairly sophisticated biology textbook we suddenly have a moral statement appear that relegates mercy to one species. And then there is the noted exception to the general rule of predation that some species appear to work together to create mutually sustaining lifeforms. The lichens fit into this category.

This, it seems, to me, is the fundamental vision of the socialists, and the anarchists, while the capitalists work on the notion of predation pure and simple. But capitalists object that socialism is really a matter of stealing from the capitalists and redistributing their hard won profits such that it discourages everyone's work ethic, throwing whole nations into unemployment (Zimbabwe is a pure case of this at present, while Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge offers another striking example).

Adam Smith saw The Invisible Hand of Capital as creating a mutually sustaining organism.

Charles Fourier believed that by following one's pleasures -- those who wanted their feet admired, and those who admired feet -- could create a mutually sustaining economy.

With lichens, it is a compound of algae and a fungus. The algae has chlorophyl and attracts sunlight. Not sure what the fungus offers: something about distribution or protection? Have yet to sort that out.

FOOTBALL: AN EVIL SPORT?

At least in boxing you are dealing with someone your own size.

In football, (why is it called football since feet are so small a part of the game?) everything is wrong. Allow me to examine.

First, the line is made of immensely overfed people who collide about a thousand times during the game. I personally don't like collisions. One is one too many. In high school when I weighed 98 pounds, the notion of colliding with a 250-pound clodhopper filled me with dread. On top of it, the 250 pounder can get you by surprise and blindside you, as he did me, on the one play that I played. I laid on the ground for ten minutes, with the wind knocked out of me, while he stood over me, gloating for all the world like a bull in a pasture.

It's not a free for all. You're not allowed to clip someone. To clip someone is to assassinate them in gangster parlance but you don't get a life sentence. You lose yards.

Soccer by comparison has relatively few hits and you never get five guys landing on top of you.

Football is a gangster's game. I played one play in junior high school and thought: it is an evil phenomenon.

The godfather (coach) calls the shots, and everyone runs according to the diabolical diagram. Where's the freedom of inquiry? Is football communist, or at least a state capitalist game, much Like communism?

This is not a Protestant sport where freedom is paramount. You simply get your orders, and carry them out.

Perhaps there's something I'm missing about football. Perhaps there's some other sport that's worse.

I prefer badminton. But if you're going to have a team sport, I think that soccer is preferable to football. There's freedom and beauty in soccer, which means room for individual imagination.

Perhaps injury analysis have been done for the various sports but I imagine that if you did this football would be way up there, and cheap shots would be a big part of the injuries. Badminton is relatively immune to this. You can have a cheap shot in soccer like Zhidane's headbutt, but when it happens it is flagrant. Morals matter in soccer. In football, I'm not sure that people really know what's going on at the line of scrimmage in terms of morals. As for me, I will never be at that line, and I'd never allow my kids to play the sport. I would just as soon hear that they had joined a gang and were out to destroy the little guys in the neighborhood. The sport is simply immoral in its basic beliefs and in what it celebrates.

If people are going to play it, they should at least call it what it is: corporate aggression, or gang-bang, or something more appropriate to what the game actually requests from individuals: communism.

If my kids joined the army I'd be happier. At least there's some chance of coming home alive, and some nod toward the notion of justice.

I don't know what values football celebrates. Big ganging up on small? Food chain berserk? Kill the quarterback? Football brings out the worst in everyone. People have to be drunk to watch it because it's so morally askew.

Helen Thomas Resignation

I didn't realize that Helen Thomas resigned recently due to her having said that the Jews should get out of Palestine.

Obama and everyone else in power turned their back on her. Friendship is now very much based on what convenient and putrid truths people choose to utter.

I think it's rancid.

Thomas' parents are from Lebanon (Orthodox Christians from Tripoli).

Obviously, the introduction of the Jews after WWII caused enormous environmental impact on the region and its shock waves are still felt. Anyone living in that area must have strong feelings. Of course, the Jews have no place to go home to. I'm on the side of the Jews, but I don't see why a 90-year old woman can't flap her lips.

Obama is a pig not to side with her and let her flap her lips. But he won't do it. He's too busy flapping his own lips, while being careful to say absolutely nothing. He just points his finger at other people, like Nero.

What harm has Helen Thomas really done?

Everybody should be able to flap their lips. Everybody should be allowed to think for themselves. People should do more of it. Not only thinking for themselves, but flapping their lips. Until pigs have wings, the best we can flap is our lips.

I admire Helen Thomas for saying what she said, even if I don't think it's at all true. I mean, she's a pig for saying it, but it's time people got over other people being pigs. We're all pigs, and the world is our trough. Belly up, bozos. If you think you're some kind of saint, or are somehow better than Helen Thomas, then you're a genuine hog.

Everyone is a piggy wiggy.

Ah, let the mud fly at Helen!

Enjoy your retirement, Helen Thomas. I for one shall miss you, and feel sorry for what happened to you, dear. You should have learned how not to say anything meaningful in this meaningless country of censorious simpletons. You'd think that at least Hannity and O'Reilly would have stood up for her, but in our country now, everyone is so angry about all the prevailing censorship, that no one is willing to stand up even for a nonagenarian.

We, at Lutheran Surrealism, feel ever so awful that this has happened to Helen Thomas. Maybe now she'll have time to comment at Lutheran Surrealism. Here, Helen, you can say anything you like.

MYSTERIES OF MY LAWN, ETC.

That headline's fairly yawn-inducing: and yet it almost led to a death.

This weekend as I was doing my neighborly bit cutting the lawn, something white jumped from the exhaust and whipped past my elderly neighbor's head. She was talking with another neighbor. The object moved at remarkable speed. It turned out to be a golfball hiding in the deep grass in the gully in front of my house. I don't know who left it there. We don't have golf balls at our house.

The golf ball flew into her garage, but didn't break anything. I turned off the mower and said sorry, and we found it. She wasn't mad.

I used to use a mulcher because I didn't want to kill my neighbors but last summer the mower died because it was so wet that the mulching burned out the engine. I have an acre of hilly lawn, and it's a push-mower with a power-engine.

*

I went to a 3-hour dance marathon yesterday. It wasn't as awful as I had feared. Oneonta Dance Center, where my kids do ballet and hiphop, put it on. These were mostly show numbers. They did bits of Hair, and bits from Grease, and Pink Panther (four late middle-aged men with trench coats tap-dancing to the Henry Mancini lead-in, -- holding magnifying glasses).

My daughter Fia (just turned four) is the smallest in the dance studio that must have about 100 students. She was in a ballet piece where she tried to follow the other kids, picking up the pattern, then losing it, then picking it up again. At one point she moves her fingers as if paint is drying.

*

A police officer who used to live next door sat behind us. A carpenter whose daughter is my 5th grader's best friend sat next to us. The carpenter told us he's writing a novel about a nature poet named Absorbo, who has a fierce enemy literary critic who denounces everything that Absorbo writes.

*

I'm reading Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, his first book. Smith is as bright as Aristotle, and as dry. This is rare. He says that when someone reacts disproportionately: when they cry just because they lost a game of pinochle, or if they laugh just because something seems slightly incongruous, we wonder about them.

He also says that although we have sympathy for strangers, our deepest sympathy goes first to our family members, and secondly to friends. People far away do not elicit as much sympathy, and sometimes none, even if we hear that they died.

*

Flowers discovered in my yard include: chickweed, Black Medick, strawberries, buttercups, clover, forget-me-nots, speedwell, Creeping Charlie, dandelions, Irises.

I have planted cucumbers, watermelon, and pumpkin seeds, in two small planters, and all are coming up. I'm especially excited about the watermelon because I've never seen the flowers.

*

Last night while watching the Celtics sneak past the Lakers on the 8 3-pointers of Ray Allen (an NBA record), I flicked on Fox during the Time-Outs. Hannity was gloating over Obama's inability to handle the Gulf Oil Spill, and splicing between Obama's campaign yatter about Bush and Katrina. Hannity can be too rough, too monotonous. On Greta, Joran Van der Sloot, who had something to do with the disappearance of Natalie Holloway in Aruba, has been arrested in Peru in the death of another young woman.

*

I have to read more Adam Smith now. I don't like opening it, but once I'm in it, it's very good.

Problematic Words: Diversity, Tolerance, Black Medick

The terminology of the new left is rarely questioned from within. And from without, it is only mocked. The church of the new left has a creed but it is only comprehensible to insiders. However, it is such gobbledygook that many like myself have left the left, in an attempt to find something that at least sounds right.

FIRST: What exactly, does diversity mean?

It's become a codeword for racial tolerance, which actually means you have to love everyone of color, even illegal aliens, and you have to love every action they have made, or else you are a racist.

Diversity means something else within ecological discourse. In this instance, it means a diversity of genetic material. But this time there is an intolerance for non-native plants, which are called "invasive."

Plants such as "Black Medick" (growing all over my lawn), and which is called a "nitrogen fixer" is bad, because it's "invasive." We are supposed to prefer native plants. But the Black Medick isn't native born.

And yet, among the same leftists, it's considered "intolerant" to want "illegal" Mexicans who consider themselves by fiat Americans to have to go through customs.

In biology, norms are acceptable. If you depart from the norms, your species will perish, just like most things biological that become abnormal. Tradition means that you are within certain norms.

But fights between species are normal.


I'm suspicious of most thought emerging from Germany whether it's Marx, Heidegger, Hitler, or Nietzsche. On the other hand, I'm generally sympathetic to English thought: Adam Smith, John Locke, Shakespeare, P.G. Wodehouse. As for the French? You have to know them, even if just for laughs. Why am I in solidarity with a German theologian? Luther tried to be simple, clear and practical, which is something rare in theology. William Carlos Williams thought of Luther as his hero.

Black Medick is European. I don't know if it's considered to be associated with France, Germany, or some other country. Most consider the plant beneath notice, since it's just a "weed."

It's beautiful, as are most plants that grow in my lawn. One of my neighbors said the other day, "You should just dig up your whole lawn and start over. It's all weeds."

I'm betting that she votes Democratic.

* Flowers pictured above: Black Medick, which are in the lawn now. I don't know why it's called "Black," since it's yellow. Nor do I know why it's called Medick. Sometimes the terminology of wildflowers seems to have been invented by goofy French utopians.

CHARLES FOURIER POETRY CONTEST

Charles Fourier was a 19th century French social theorist who thought that the oceans would one day be lemonade and that instead of dogs in the future people would lead giraffes around on leashes. He posited a new world of love, in which the only concern people had was their love relationships. He was an enormous inspiration for the surrealists and for many of the utopians involved in May 1968 in Paris. He was also some kind of Christian, who believed that God had told him all these things to come. So, the notion of this contest is to dream a little of the marvels that are, and the marvels to come. Contest closes on Tuesday June 8th, at 4 am. Poems over 30 lines shall be DQ'd, and voting will be done on Tuesday, by entrants (can't vote for your own poem) or by regular contributors, and shall be concluded at 11 pm on Tuesday June 8th. Here's something to initiate the contest:

MEANDERING RIVERS OF MILK

If the mountains were less desolate
The wolves would not return
If the rivers were any flatter
The trains would burn along their routes
If the creameries would one day run dry
The police officers would have their coffee black
If Holsteins were Jerseys
Milk would flow from Delhi to Silver Springs and beyond
Giant crabs would walk the shores
Cars appear naturally with circular tires
Things of nature like the green hydraulic pumps of dinosaurs
If mice wore velvet mittens,
Oreos would roll from NYC to Jodhpur
And for every illness milk would be the cure.

PREDICTION: AMERICAN TEENS GO ISLAMIC TERRORIST

I have a prediction to make: that the war with Islamic terrorists will result in a rising number of American teenagers wanting to become Islamic terrorists.

I base this on several factors.

1. During the war against Japan and later in Vietnam there was a concurrent rise in Buddhists. The contact with other civilizations led our disaffected youth to side with the enemy, and to become more like them (any friend of our enemy is our friend). There are now millions of American youth who think sitting on a pillow and saying om will lead to enlightenment. They never think about Myanmar or the current state of Tibet to see the fruits of such enlightenment.

2. During the long war with the Communists, many American youth turned toward communism. We had the Symbionese Liberation Army, for example. Many young people in Berkeley read Mao, and French Maoists such as Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. When something becomes available via the nightly news, or in any other trough (including poetry) there are those who get funny ideas. They never think about the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to see the fruits of such revolting solutions.

Therefore, I predict that a growing number of disaffected teenagers will want to blow themselves up in malls and high schools, strapping bombs to their backs and heads, taking out a lunch counter here, an H & M there. Thinking through the whole process, and asking: how is blowing up this group of people a positive thing? Kids can't see the whole process without adult intervention. Image precedes and obscures process. They can't see the whole picture, but just want to be on someone's side, and get into the action, get into the newspapers.

We will see young women going about in Burkhas, memorizing the poems of Bin Laden, wanting a clitorectomy, wanting to be part of his harem. Youth want to belong, and if not to their family, or to their nation, who or what will they belong to? In the 1970s it was radical chic terrorist groups like the Bader-Meinhof gang, or Jonestown. There are still ridiculous Hitlerite groups and biker gangs to join. But what's on TV now? Islamic terrorists.

We will see young men reading the Koran, refusing to shave their beards, wanting to go to Pakistan to receive terrorist training from OBL himself.

We have already had a few of these, but I think it's just the beginning of a massive trend.

Many young people see an arresting image: and see nothing else. A rap star might be trafficking in drugs, selling his sister into prostitution, and shooting other rap stars, but because he's intense, it's fine.

Whatever is shown on TV or in any media outlet (including books) will have a few takers. Who would have thought that anyone would find the writing of Jacques Derrida palatable? However, since it became available, along with Jacques Lacan, there were takers. Language Schools formed, which in turn made this "thought" available and marketable. There are now people who actually live for Language poetry, and think that language in some obscure way determines how and what we see, and what we experience, as well. This is loosely based on Marxism, and on its ooky symbiosis with the writings of Ferdinand Saussure (Swiss linguist who separated language and the objective things that language names in order to look at language as a separate field of study).

Who would have thought that after the monstrous police states of the East Bloc that there would still be Marxists? and yet, they exist in growing numbers throughout American academia. Marxism got mixed up with Saussure (they were both available, so naturally, they were mixed and served), and the result was Language Poetry. Trust-fund Marxists exist, too. These are people with gigantic trust-funds and nothing but guilt to show for it. And they want to help.

In addition to class, race and gender studies arose (with the help of wealthy and well-connected youth like Bill Ayers). The notion that everyone was radically equal, but that capitalist constraints pushed some to the bottom, became the driving notion. In fact, some groups were following eternal laws, and this was leading to their prosperity. Jews were doing this, as were Protestants, and even Catholics (though not the Berrigan Catholics). The Amish were doing it. But other ideas created undulating currents in which many were swept from their moorings and joined the Marxist terror cells.

Who would have thought that race, gender, and class would become a rallying cry for American youth who knew nothing of James Madison, or George Washington, or the Gospels, but all about Leon Trotsky?

Who would have thought that people could listen to the music of Marilyn Manson, or the insipid horror of rap music? And yet, the albums sell in the millions. Suburban white kids flash gang signs, and moonwalk on American Idol. These same kids know nothing about Bach, or Beethoven, and do not know The Battle Hymn of the Republic, or, O Sacred Head, Now Wounded, With Grief and Shame Bowed Down.

Given this, I predict homegrown Islamic terrorists.

Because what's on TV is largely what's bad about the world, supply-side thinking will lead our youth into taking up arms against America, because they identify America as their parents, and they want to go to war with their parents. As more parents give way to the sexual revolution, and children are left to drift, and left with the TV as their evil step-parents, they will pick up on the clues the news gives them, and act accordingly.

Can anything reverse this fate?

Programming that permitted children to see decent Muslims who abhor terrorism (we never see them on TV, but they exist), programming that brings children back to the ideas of their American founders as father figures, will help. The most important thing is parents and children talking about ideas, going to churches, and staying involved in one another's lives. It's the disaffected youth who don't know or who hate their parents who are the most easily affected. In some communities this is an 80% rate. This is the case of the Manson family, or poor little rich girls like Patty Hearst. But it's also the case in the inner cities and in trailer parks. Something ought to be done to bring these kids into line with churchly values. It's something the president should be doing. But he's one of the disaffected, and is himself without any kind of moral compass. What can he offer?

Sarah Palin doesn't speak as well as BHO, but she would be a better guide for the lost children. BHO is himself among the lost: he never knew his father, and barely knew his mother. He has no foundation, no sense of home, a very small sense of humor, and he leaves the nation with no hope for real change.