A Dream of the Good Old Days Before Juneteenth was a Holiday

Just now, like many of us, I'm holding my breath that Agent Orange won't carry on to drop his COVID nukes in Tulsa. The day after Juneteenth. We celebrate today, for tomorrow we may die. I wish all my black sibs the happiest of Juneteenths, the newest Federal holiday!

I'm also trying just now to restart my entire read-through in Chinese of the Dream of the Red Chamber. This is a book which many Chinese count as their North Star for what it means to be human on the planet. I remember thinking that as well. Like reading Tolstoy, I don't quite remember why. I only know that it changed me.

And I remember very well driving out to Madison, Wisconsin as a grad student of classical Chinese literature. I was going to attend the first-ever international conference on "Redology." That's the term for academic study of this singular Chinese novel. 

Along the way, I dropped off my friend at the University of Iowa where he was attending the renowned writing program. His father, Parker Po-fei Huang, a well-known poet among Chinese, and a low-ranked but highly esteemed "native informant" at Yale, where language instructors were not professors - his father had told my friend that he had no business writing; he hadn't truly lived. I could relate. My own father was stern that way too. 

But we all loved Professor Huang. I guess we all have our less good sides. 

I was allowed to sit in on a class. I don't remember the notorious tear-down masculine ethos that got the program so many celebrated and mostly male authors. I do remember wistfully feeling that I was not of that crowd.

How well I also remember driving north to arrive at the beautiful campus on Lake Mendota at Madison. It was summer, and the coeds (code for women in those days) were sunning themselves on the grass all over campus. A northern and wooded grassy California beach. I was somehow shocked. Never had I seen so much brazen skin. This was not my conception of what 'midwest' means. Not my crowd either, for sure!

The opening reception was held on the panoramic top floor of a circular tower. All the younger westerners were glued to the windows, gazing out over the beautiful campus to hide our social awkwardness. Very few of us were expected, after all, to have some bit of expressive performance queued up for presentation on demand, as all Chinese are. All the senior Chinese scholars were looking inward toward friends, and new acquaintances they had already mostly read. 

In the buffet line for dinner I chatted with David Hawkes, the premier English-language translator of The Dream of the Red Chamber, or as he properly called it, The Story of the Stone. All of us were waiting with 'bated breath for his completion of this life's work. I was a bit star-struck. I chatted up a different professor who was into using computer technology to analyze classical Chinese literature (he confessed that he couldn't really read it himself). That was according to the dictates of the structuralism which was then in vogue. The science of literature. Looking for stable patterns across works. 

But what I wish to write about today is our economy. I'm old enough to remember the 'good old days' when the local hardware store was manned by knowledgeable clerks who raised families on their salaries. Our store stocked everything from model airplane engines to lawnmowers, and all the parts and tools in between.

Milk was delivered in heavy refillable bottles then, and Grandma would sometimes send one of the kids down to the ice cream store with a crock, reminding us to have them pack it tightly so that it wouldn't melt along the walk home. 

Now I buy things from Amazon, and watch the prices creep up to cover the free shipping, while the quality seems increasingly indifferent. Caveat emptor and read the editorial reviews. That old hardware store would never tarnish its good name the way that Walmart always does, or Home Depot, or Amazon, by allowing shoddy goods along their shelves. They couldn't afford to. What happens when all the minimum-age hardware helpers age out?

My friend, a structuralist himself, and brilliant professor of Chinese met us at the conference. He took me - well, I took him since he didn't drive - to visit his old college friend who lived just north of Madison. This was a talented young man who'd forsaken an academic life to start a business. 

He had designed a refined set of mountain climbing chocks, and had set up a very high-tech and sophisticated manufacturing process which he explained to me in detail. The process ended up with nicely anodized pieces which were color-coded for size and usage. They felt wonderful in the hand, and apparently - by virtue of angles, metallic composition and surface treatment - held wonderfully in the field. 

Again, who knows what such a business was doing in Wisconsin, but he enjoyed showing me all the steps, partly because I understood them, and likely mostly because I was so googly-eyed. I especially appreciated the step where the nearly finished pieces were blasted with glass beads to provide golf-ballish micro-divots.

Speaking of which, I've only swung a golf club once in my life, and that time the ball went exactly where I was aiming it, to my absolute horror. It sailed right across the neighbor's long back yard, across the street and over the next lawn right into the "picture window" of the hardware store owner who lived around the corner. This is a sin from which I shall never recover. It taught me to always fess up (which I didn't do that time). I was a natural Zen archer, I guess, as I remember the magnetic pull of window to ball. 

It definitely wasn't my doing, although come to think of it I got three bulls eyes the first time I held a bow and arrow and the first time I fired a .22 rifle. I should have known better. But then I was never able to repeat those feats. Story of my life. 

Anyhow this wonderful climbing hardware manufactory was set to go out of business before it even sold its first chock (I received a bag of them as souvenirs). The poor fellow hadn't realized that even the niche sport of climbing was controlled by the one large manufacturer who determined which products could be stocked on pain of withholding all the others. This was just when even sporting goods stores were turning Big Box, and before distribution channels got disrupted. 

Just as is now the case with movie theaters, R.I.P., it doesn't matter how good the product is if you can't get it on the shelf at eyeball level. Money changes hands, as I learned later in the beer retailing business. Smaller brands have got to cheat to win: You have to brazenly follow the big boys and swap the shelves when no-one's looking.

I hadn't heard of WalMart or maybe it hadn't gotten started yet, but I did get an education from that young entrepreneur near Madison about how "Wall Street Money" will pay to overstock shelves with goods sold at a loss for the sole purpose of forcing competitors out of business. I also learned that such practices were illegal in Germany, say, among other countries. 

Some long time later, circumnavigating the continent in all innocence on my little Harley, I happened into Bentonville, Arkansas, where I took a break in front of what looked like the old five and dime hardware store I grew up with. 

Inside, a very nice old man who looked the part gave me a kind of personal tour. It was a museum disguised as a store. I knew something was amiss when I saw a photo of Gerald Ford shaking Sam Walton's hand. Sam would get the Presidential Medal of Freedom later from George H.W. The same medal that Rush Limbaugh just got.

So we give out medals to those who destroy the very fabric of our society now?? People on Wall Street - investors - make a bet on what will be the next blockbuster. But it's really not a bet. It's a sure deal that an entire industry will be disrupted, which means destroyed, by predatory marketing practices. Along with the industry go unions, local ownership, and knowledge of the sort built up over years of purchasing decisions and getting to know the people. 

Gone now as the cost of doing business is so much else that we once did value. Local eateries. Doctors who make house calls. Packaging that isn't killing the planet. Short hauls from farm to table. Local craft beer. You know, the stuff that's coming back, if you're white and well off. At least we got the wholesalers out of the way. Hmmmm. 

Frankly I think black lives have gotten more and more marginal during my lifetime. Our celebrated progress with civil rights hasn't translated into main street lives simply because those aren't the kinds of businesses that we value anymore. 

When things are created digitally - where there is no marginal cost for each additional widget - mountains of investment will be piled into whoever gets the most eyeballs. The losses equal the mountains upside down until the existing players are fully destroyed to leave a sole monopolist. The monopolist is never guilty of the syndicate-style behaviors which anti-trust regulations were designed for. 

These are all nice and mostly white and mostly male youngsters who want to hit it big. Well sure, sometimes they cut corners and act ruthless. Young blonde women beware. Anyhow, the consumers fall like flies in their belief in falling prices. Those falling prices are themselves a temporary illusion, but life is short. 

And it's not as though Google is providing their services for free! Read Surveillance Capitalism, please! We are not the product. Our behaviors are. We all work for the Man for free now. Click to agree, and Yahoo!!

Eyeballs or ears, it's an easy bet that Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern will get most of them. Pornography powered the Internet. Any hit to our most basic emotional plexus. And this is how we want to engineer our future? Well, I guess it is, now, isn't it?

Plastics, Benjamin, plastics.

You have to imagine a world without plastics to imagine a sustainable future. That's a fact. It's hard, but not impossible, to do. Wooden boats are more fun to own than the plastic sort. And they last longer. But you have to enjoy the actual work to own one. You don't need toxic paints - water based or oil - when you can use linseed oil and so forth.

Plastic bags were invented as a way to support the industry which would otherwise have been too expensive for the car companies. That's a fact. Black lives keep getting reinvented downward from slavery to jail (Watch 13th please!) so that we can have our capitalism and eat it too.

This is no way to live, people. We have to bring our economy back down to earth, and use the digital stuff to compute optimal infrastructures according to the data from our now fully instrumented planet. Sure, we need to have the entertainment side - the plastic baggies - to support that overhead, but it's already a done deal.  We just have it all upside down and backwards again is all.

Digital and plastics are fine in small quantities, so long as we pay up front for all their externalities. Short of that, bakelite is pretty good. Natural rubber and steel. Stuff that requires skilled workers to maintain. Writing on paper.

We will always require good writers. My apologies. I can fix a lot of things, but I don't seem to be able to fix my writing. Sorry!

Stunned Silence

I watch the cat, asleep, the tip of her tail moving like a creepy worm, as though it were a different animal altogether. You won't be reading much here. I'm back to work. I am overwhelmed by too much to read and to digest. I have to dive in to the deep waters of Chinese again. There isn't much time. I'm tired. I can't think through the haze of pain from repetitive stress, or stress, or a pinched nerve, wages of age.

I remember the first time someone showed me his cell phone, and I couldn't believe it. I hadn't realized that it might make sense to distribute the towers such that this radio would always be within reach of one. I hadn't yet worked for the power utility which already had such a system to hand off signals among antennas so that linemen could always be in touch.

I watched an HD movie last night, streaming over the Internet, because I had nothing left in me to do a single thing more. Work is exhausting. It robs me of my mind in just the way that there is no presence among the endless swells of well-crafted writing, mediated by enough capacity to stream high-def video, and probably 3D if I were to care about that. There is no sense in trying to make sense. There's too much.

I care about what David Foster Wallace writes, even if he wasn't around to put it together this tax day. I care about what John Stuart has to show me, and us, and them, about what people are saying in the world around and about me that is so mind-numbingly stupid that all that is required is a context and it speaks for itself.

It's charming, or it would be, how many people hold on so earnestly to opinions and even certainty which make about as much sense as to read the Bible for literal Truth. But they do. And David Wallace didn't care to keep us company, walking off the stage because no one cared anyhow, and the show was what was to each side of each of them and not where the spotlight shone.

Left, right, center, people hold onto beliefs and opinions and certainties like dictators holding onto power in the face of awakening masses of humanity. Which won't be managed until enough of them shut up already about stuff they believe in which makes no sense. Like that regulation of our predations hurts us in the end. That rich people didn't get lucky and shouldn't be taxed for it. That we have to be bankrupt and it isn't our arrangements for modulations of emotions through financial transactions, like how much would you pay for that experience?

And I am a cellphone now, a robot, my power is all distributed and I am just a receiver, and can transmit only as far as the nearest repeater. Sometimes I wish I did have a tail which would wag itself while I sleep. It could signal that I still live.

Anger Making Machinery

The proper response to an Internet search which turns up nothing is anger. The field of expectation has been created that it is worthwhile to go looking for things, without any countervailing road-map about what sorts of things won't be found.

I know it would be silly to go searching for plumbing insights, but it seems more plausible to seek out ways to use Chinese on my smartphone. There are ads, but there are also shortcomings in addition to cost for using fat and cleverly created bits of software. I pay the plumber, though the instructions are trivial to find by searching. The smell is too costly in reality.

I shall persist, but this dissonance between the field created by technologies, and the confusion one faces in attempts to occupy that field, is as old as the written word. It's not just that post-modern defenestration impulse. It's the overall illusion that the word once written can provide the way to ultimate revelation of The Word as handed down from God.

This is precisely the same mistaking of identity for comprehension which informs political anger or the anger of love's betrayal. There is no answer to it other than to depart the field and look for ultimates elsewhere. And investigate only dispassionately those things which reward investigation.

Like, for instance, the written word itself, whose modality for production now is universalized as a keyboard. Gone are styluses and pencils, brushes and ink. Interactions now are all mediated by those same twitching fingers which pull triggers or caress or which shape a ball of clay. But allowing nothing of character through other than by elements of style.

A crumb falls into my keyboard, and the "R" key is disabled. I blow, it moves, and now I can't work the shift key. Crumble. The stylus offered a more certain connection to its output. The calligraphic character I once would have been required to cultivate before I could claim literacy in Chinese is as remote as in my facility with English handwriting. A relic. Quaint.

Once upon a time, in imitation of my older brother whom I idolized in all things, my handwriting was neat, but slanted in the manner of a lefty. A southpaw. Rectification meant the end of neat, and so my character is scrawled and lacking. There was a time.

What happens, though, when Chinese written characters lose their kinetic inform-ation of our consciousness? Will we then become trapped as it seems we are now already believing in some form of human consciousness which is, in fact, as remote as that final Word? That thing for which the absence of interpretation and translation does not denote the actual Word of God, but in fact denotes absolute and ultimate solipsism. An absence, a private without its public.

Enter Watson, the Jeopardy confounding machine. Anger is the proper response. We have already become unconscious. There is no more possibility for human consciousness any more than there is for God's Word unvarnished. I wax poetical, and wane with the keystroke of finality. And yet I cheer him, it, us.

Keyboarding

As I have by now restarted or failed to start so many distinct careers, likening myself - as I must to remain American - to those careers, and thus finding myself a wreck sunken before it was ever launched, I also find occasion to re-read that essay I wrote by virtue of which I was awarded a Bachelor's Degree.

By the evenness of the type's impression on the page, I can tell the machine whose keyboard I pounded was electrified. My own powers of recall would have told me as much. But by the unevenness of the type's line, I can tell that it was the more primitive and by then worn hammer-type machine and not the IBM Selectric I would later use.

There would be daisy wheels and there would be electrostatic machines, but now they're all subsumed beneath virtualized page drawing languages which can be rendered in any number of ways onto literal or virtual sheets of blank approximate whiteness.

They keyboard remains. Sort of. As happens often, I got my hands on a newer smartphone from Google, and right there on its keyboard is an icon for a microphone, and sure enough it will replace your keystrokes with a typographic rendering of your voice. And I watched a friend capturing his notes and a lectures soundtrack electronically by his pen. I don't really know what it is I want anymore.

I know I don't want videos of myself giving lectures. For one thing, I'd have to write them first. And even though I'm still working on a writer's 'voice' I wouldn't trade it - elusive though the writing voice may be - for my literal droning voice (cross-genre resemblance you say?).

Even when I wash a floor, I like to get down on my hands and knees once in a while so that I can see what it is I'm interacting with. When I write English, the letters are near enough to the keyboard, but when I write Chinese they're not. I lose touch with the written forms which are replaced by my ability to recognize them quickly which is not the same as to be able to form them.

To type Chinese is to lose touch with the forms as they are formed, and so, of course, many scholars note that it should be as it must be. And good riddance to needless complexity.

Alongside the typescript of the essay I've just re-read are my handwritten Chinese characters, and they are lame. To protect myself, had it been possible, I would have used a word-processor to hide my handwriting disability, just as I had to render written English.

I'm just now reading a book written by one of my oldest friends. I believe that I would be accurate to say that it treats the history of the introduction of industrial printing to China as synecdoche for a variety of technological and organizational changes in China which occurred as the result of the overall confluence of Chinese and Western traditions, starting from some time after the Gutenberg revolution in the West and still ongoing with the globalization of technologies to reproduce the written word.

I am astounded at the extent to which the machinery of printing in both its development and its form is part and parcel of the machinery of industrialization more generally. But the really interesting part is how, in the case of printing, the output of that production was the actual means for dissemination and ideological persuasion about the process by which it was created; printing machines could seed the globe with schematics to describe the building of more such machines. Printed words could persuade readers of the utility in doing so. And along the way this same technique for the broad-casting of written tracts would expose and transform the social arrangements which had been transformed because of its arrival on the scene; industrial capitalism brutalized workers, and nowhere more markedly than for the workers of printing presses.

There is a kind of ironic feedback loop to the technology for mass producing words. At one and the same time that it accelerates the penetration and acceptance of the underlying print-making technologies, it also accelerates ideological transformations which might and sometimes do counter those very trends.

And no wonder that governments quake now in the face of Facebook or WikiLeaks. Widely dispersed and replicated agencies, microbe style, have always had the collectivized agency to topple centralized institutions of power.

One effective antidote to this kind of threatening infection of the body politic is to flood the field with sound and fury. Captivate attention and signify nothing. A less effective antidote is to try to contain, privatize and control access to what gets published.

But as with plans for nuclear devices, it's not so much the actual material as its context which makes widely disseminated writing so powerful and dangerous. I know from small and insignificant examples that it is mostly the knowledge that it can be done which most often empowers me to do it, whatever the "it" is. I don't always need to be shown the precise means, if I can but know with some assurance that what I might attempt has actually once been done.

But such knowledge can be a demotivator too.  Why would you bother if it's already been done by someone else somewhere else? Why, if you can master only a small part of what the masters have mastered would you essay a long shot on your own? And so we all lose touch with the written word because we no longer even try to write it. We only speak it. We give T.E.D-sized renditions for our friends' consumption in company and let the world take care of itself. We have confidence that someone somewhere will know how to and will have done the work.

What then will be my work? What will I do with hands-on that is not merely to keep the machines humming? Which language is left to be informed once words have proliferated to such an extent that there is no principle which will or can prevent our being lost among them? Or has it already all started its descent once again to nonsense, where the makers can no longer make without machine?

Disconnect

There is, of course, a lovely lightness now, to have liberated myself from any particular machine. I do all my writing ethereally, up in the cloud as they say, and have no worries about lost sectors on some spinning disk, or before that, lost, shuffled or wind-strewn pieces of paper.

The machines are all interchangeable, and apart from the time it takes to boot them up, and sometimes a vicious cycle thrashing from an older computing unit which can't outrace saves to the slowly spinning disk, they're all one to me. So long as the keyboards work, then I truly am indifferent now to operating system or if the machine sits on my lap or under my desk, or even if it's borrowed from someone else.

Even the loading up of a new machine, or newer, meaning if I am granted one from someone else's garbage, is trivially quick and dirty. And all this freedom is granted free, I suppose by the grace of some other gang of fools which will actually pay attention to the advertising which supports this evil monopoly empire.

I pay rather a lot for access on a monthly basis, though the reason I pay more is also so that I might be liberated from plugs or securitized wireless, or coffee shops or more borrowing. I prefer the Macs and Linux machines, because they accept my cellular device without any need to search for the metering software which Windows must deploy, presumably for the same reason - market share - that they are targeted by so much malware.

So, I take my Internet with me too, in the form of a tiny piece of hardware, whose usage costs me more than I can afford, but such is the cost of freedom. Truth be told, I think Internet should be ubiquitous and free, and perhaps it will be, all on the backs of those other foolish people who pay attention to ads. Commercial interest should almost demand it, especially when you consider the unsupportable costs to ship catalogs and mass-mailed come-ons, still, into so many peoples' literal mailboxes.

And I want to know why, given all this freedom, there are still people who want anything. Why would anyone, after the instant of making love to some vision of beauty which comes in to one's life, would one ever want or need or ask or complain about or for anything more, ever, again?

But you know it's not about the machine or the access or the writing. It's also about the place in which you do it, and now here in the lovely fall Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, I am sitting opposite a cheery fire, lit against the rapidly encroaching autumn so that I can remain comfortable, although it isn't cold. The fall which will bring bold colors and tourists to this place I am about to leave.

There are small enough margins for choice in our lives now, once the marketplace has perfected the distance between what we might be worth and what we need to buy, filling the gap with seemingly insatiable desires, each one of which, like my internet access, is calibrated to match the scale of desire in each one of us. Just against our possible illness, we must keep a full-time job, and then the cost of the other baubles is trivial enough to keep it below the decision threshold.

But I do wonder when someone other than myself will notice that in this way, all distinction between software and hardware has gone away. It's just a connection, rather, between what is stored in a kind of frozen-hard state, and what is gotten at in more liquid fashion. These words I can manipulate until I want to fix them. And I really don't care anymore at all about the machinery which makes that possible, until it stops functioning.

But software - a set of instructions - which depends on hardware to be set in motion is itself that hard because it never changes. And the hardware is a perfect analog for imprinted media, with fixed code as represented by the circuits and transistors initially mapped in such fashion that the schematic and the final product resemble one another almost interchangeably. So all that really matters is the change of state, happening now on this machine maybe a million times per second, but happening overall for the meaning of my transcriptions, who could possibly know or even care, since it's all so distributed about the cloud.

So we do still think of transmissions and storage and instructions stepping through and by. But that makes no more sense than to think of Walmart actually selling me a bicycle. They sell a form of crystallized misery is all. Its form, the bicycle's, exists somewhere now in software, as a set of specs. Machines realize these specs, almost apart from human intervention, and in the end there is always slave labor in China to do what hands are still required for.

So first of all, the hardware bicycle can be gotten so cheaply for almost the same reason a computer chip can. Once the design is set, it's like printing books almost. The marginal cost of each additional copy becomes almost nil. Actually, what our market economy now means is that it must be pushed as close to nil as possible, with all margins left for the creator alone. The designer. The one in the room with a view.

The funny thing is that the actual designer doesn't get a whole lot. He's just some middle class slob eager to sell his soul for the company boxer shorts. The one really on the take is the one gaming the logo, managed in trust for the hoards who own its equity. And these equity corporations act just like sociopathic machines, destroying anything small and beautiful on their way to world domination.

What a terrible thing has been accomplished to give these machines the rights of man. They resolve our collective aspirations, just like the gleam in the eye of my daughter, say, when she got her new Walmart bicycle which was all I could afford. We just want our money to grow, just like the value in our houses, so that we can turn it into interchangeable space to be bought and sold.

The resolution of our collective will, betokened only by money which is as interchangeable, precisely, as an identity-less subatomic particle, assures that whoever is custodian of that capital must labor to maximize its value, quite regardless of what gets harmed along the way.

This is the truest law of the jungle. This is the opposite of civilization.

Down Time on Sunday Morning - I Quit! (Manana, Domani,Tomorrow)

 . . . the only time I have to think. I wonder, almost all the time, what is the point to labor. On this day of rest, I struggle to get on top of my reading, and to take some time to compose my thoughts, but today it seems like such a hopeless endeavor. 

God's day of rest, and I remain convinced of two things: first that there is almost no way that I will ever resolve my thinking to the point where it is quite worth reading. I mean that in an economic sense. There are so many many more intelligent, practiced, readable, and most of all more disciplined thinkers than I. To aspire to their ranks would be as foolish as for me to want to sing in public. I've watched such things; charming among children, they become embarrassments for adults.

Trued accomplishment happens over time, as the result of a lifetime's sense of purpose and direction. A lifetime's enthusiasm, or simple joy at the exercise of what might have started as a talent, but which became a passion. For sure, we elevate the stars too high, and leave too many graceful souls ground down, but the proper alternative should never be to lower the bar. Local venues though inspired by, still spiting mass media might provide a good model. So long as the mass is mediated with honest transparency (I just don't want payola shoved down my throat all the time) . . . but wait there's more to tell.

The second thing of which I remain convinced is that this thing I wish to resolve, intelligibly, is both functionally and structurally equivalent to the Jesus message to which my writing - this thing I struggle with - is so opposed. The Jesus message being a short circuit, by enthusiasm alone, to any rational thought at all, apparently. There is so much bloviation and so many lives wasted on what can never change the world again, and might prevent its changing now . . . 

. . . It has shaped our world, this Jesus message now full complete. Not always for the best. And well beyond the cartoon version which it is so trite to skewer, there are still those very disciplined thinkers, on the Jesus side, who could and would and likely should prick the the bubble of my wild thinking, so that its own heated air may escape confinement in my fevered skull. 

Why not just believe, and keep the passion from the rational thought? 'It works for me,' so many claim (though fewer demonstrate).   This Jesus' Passion, internalized to guide and calm and temper our bestial hearts. The story works, though nevermore for me, for whom it promises more intolerance than love; more patriarchal ruin of matriarchal earth.  Too many launchings up and out and away into pure abstract release anymore, well beyond the blood of its formation.

Or is it that we approach just too imperfectly what the message was, still trueing; still to come? And that it is the hollow hulk with Christianity's momentum, hurtling us now against the wall. 

But it has been my lifetime's purpose and winding direction to resolve this thing, though not to discipline my writing. Very much in the way that I troubleshoot computer network issues, I've gathered clues, and paid close attention, especially to what gets held back or slanted as defense against embarrassment or guilt. I've done this all my life, and now as my short term memory shows signs of swift decline - which oddly hasn't affected the network troubleshooting, since I seem to hold those clues in mind much better than my younger peers who lack enough scaffolding I guess - I feel such urgency. Such pressure toward expression.

All gassy metaphors aside, I am, as you might have heard, quite convinced that money earned is no true measure of value given anymore, if it ever was. By any standard. My daily grind, for sure, is quite nearly worthless to the earth, and might even be harmful. But I wonder if there even remains any way to measure fair exchange in monetary terms. There are many many different ways to go at this observation, but let's try just a few:

First of all is the truly bizarre and seemingly terminal final disconnect between money and anything which could rightly be called value. Well beyond my own cranky complaints about Christmas gifting, sale pricing, and the utterly nil marginal dollar cost to produce that next plastic thing or electronic gadget, is the current grotesque disproportion of clear and obvious in your face events. Economic meltdown. 

Top the list with the sheer scope and size of the stimulus package. Even divided into its share for each of us individually, it's a stunning tally. How did the value evaporate, which this spending of new minted money sets out to offset? What could possibly account for so much loss, and how can the value of dollars left behind anymore be set in any way to inspire much confidence or sense?

Next on that list, this reminded from the Corporation documentary, but readily available anywhere, is the minuscule proportion of any modern product represented by dollars and cents (mostly cents) recompense for actual human labor. Even the auto company bailout talk skirts around the truly minuscule proportion of each car which actually represents the labor to put it together; as the unions not only get bashed, but seem willing to bend over and take it. 

Supposing the car to be on one end, and the electronic gadget or athletic shoe on the other, there is still a clear trend toward all the capital being intellectual and concentrated. I don't mean what progressive income taxation might redress, I mean in actual tangible fact, even before any distributions. Let me say this again: by our very system, capital is concentrated even before its representation by money ever gets counted. That's what money means - for proof cash in your credit score.  Money has potential rather than actual value. Conceptual rather than hard content.

Marx not only dead and gone, but the value of his thought quite as ethereal as market capital. Laughable. The labor theory of value would be mockery to defend, except: flip around the facts of the marketplace, and you should see that actual human labor could be valued at, let's be conservative here, say $10 per hour without even beginning to affect the cost of the item produced. 

So great is the disparity between recompense for human inputs and price. It's that middle space where redistribution can and should and must be accomplished. It's that middle ground where want gets defined.  Who doesn't want and doesn't move defines capital. Gravitational mass. (the quote today from Einstein says that "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love." Einstein might be wrong again, though always with a twinkle in his eye)

It's the iron law of markets makes it so, for so long as the alternative remains starvation and misery. Surely it is already clear that it is and always has been a search for this hard wall which capital mindlessly seeks. There must be clear and present misery as alternative to labor's sale, else labor, like coyote, would sing 'fuck you' and go fishing. As with the drug cartels in Mexico, it's not the drugs they want to sell. It's the power their sale affords them. As with the terrorists strapping bombs to their bodies, it's the only kind of want which can't be regulated. It's way too primal, way too raw, and way too deep.

Even our rhetorically people-powered President Obama can't resist the urge to stack his cabinet with Ivy Leaguers, who have by all reports and tests of value, usurped and concentrated there in among elite Universities where the Logo got invented, all the intellectual capital which might have remained distributed across the land, but hasn't. Its value is its brand. Go ahead. Test it.

So, by any measure, value is that thing which signals want. The marketing, pet rock, Steve Jobs Nike hit to the (dopamine?) pleasure centers of consumer hoards. It is not so very far from the drug culture we pretend to war against, and with whose terrorist troops forsaken of all hope we overfill our domestic Gitmos. Measure the want in drugs, and by our prison population you can mirror the greater good.  This is no mistake or shortfall in compassion. It is by very design.

The schematic cleverly worked out, organic oil-derived plastic and silicon heavy metals reproduced, such that there truly is no need for anything like even intellectual labor beyond the peak accomplishment of the designer, or concentrated design team. That's how our economy runs now, baubles mass produced. Carpeting. Chips. Fertilizer. Designer drugs. Organic molecules now patentable for fitting better to our internal chemistry of identity and pleasure. This is not so very complicated, dear reader, though you will resist my conclusions, as well, I'm certain, you should.

The only leverage earth holds in her defense against carcinogenic mankind is that the natural opiates still give a better high. The rare-species derived drugs still match our chemistry better. The cancers naturally occurring fall readily into background noise against those stimulated by our careless industrial leavings. 

Oh please, and I should treat my food as medicine, and exercise, preferably on some treadmill to rehearse the rat race all the hours of my life, and not just on the virtual one while what? Working??? Remind me, which is the fun and which the work, and when did I agree that it's all my personal responsibility as consumer? I protest, terrorist of your soul, body wrapped in fatty bombs, fed carcinogenically because it's all I can spare, of time as well as dollars. Fuck you, oh beautiful personal trainer self as logo accomplished success stories. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

I strap myself with bombs of your making and laugh in your face as my heart blows. But I digress.

Somehow, the system, whatever that might mean, very much wants each of us to work work work, and the harder, by far, the better. Where hard seems to be a measure of the extent to which we've internalized the Logo we work for and add to its value, as measured, yet again, well, by what?  Even economists talk out loud and without apology now, that it's all a confidence game.

So OK, taking it back down to the local, as I was told when I took my first IT job at the University, there were plenty of other non-Ivy educated and perhaps of more richly colored skin who needed and likely deserved the job far more (only at universities, temporarily, are we allowed to think this way). What a concept! I was way on the wrong side of that fence. Good God forgive me for I knew not what I was doing. I did squander those privileges much more than skin deep, and deployed them, from fear and insecurity, against my fellow man. The politically correct were absolutely right, and I should be ashamed. 

I showed myself to be a slave in recompense. I did. Though it must have been my fated journey toward some kind of re-awakening. I can only hope.

So here's the second point. Not only is my labor worthless, but it's theft, since I for sure can do many other things which would put me on the selfsame edge of those whose opportunity I, by virtue - yeah call it that - of my dilettantishness alone usurped. I could use my privilege for something of value. I hope that I still can.

Now I get paid quite well enough though not as much as my work accounts for. I have proven myself over and again to be better than a dilettante and much much more accountable. My Logo is the Church now, how ironic, and the beneficiaries of my designs are Charities which help the dispossessed. But and here's the rub, the thing that would most help their mission is the thing they want me least to do. 

My thinking gets resisted, and I'm not talking cranky thinking here, just common sense principles for better efficiency and more results. And my very efficient labors are wanted to be still more efficient, within their proper confines. That's simply how it is. There is no escaping, except perhaps in certain bureaucratic enclaves of government, this fully now internalized speeding up and franticizing of our lives. I'm made (note passive voice) to fear my unemployment, and fully now have realized that this economic catastrophe perfects what the capitalist system always wanted. The machines have enslaved us. There is no spirit remaining. 

We must hold on, for dear life, to what we've already got, and hoard every bit of what we earn anew, and temper our want. And we must temper our want. Here I am in full agreement with what passive voice does guide me, though I must shout out in protest that we cannot allow our spirit to be destroyed. Not that.

So now, for value added, I should and could and actually do work the intellectual capital side, but that's resisted, I guess by patriarchal hierarchy (this organization perfected that design) since those prerogatives are owned elsewhere, and what's wanted is the sort of thing which can and should be gotten from a cloned replacement for my skills.  This network design and maintenance is pretty well systematized, and its support near fully commoditized. In a room, we all look the same. And, I think, to challenge systems of the Catholic Church is several steps more ridiculous than to challenge city hall.

This sounds like a complaint, I'm sure, but the complaint I'm trying to make is only against myself (yeah, sort of like mental illness is all individual, and so are health matters of any sort, according to the ownership society grand narrative). So, to continue on; I still put dollars in a retirement account, and laugh that this achieves the magic to burn two dollar bills for each one I light afire (counting the rapid decline of the funds already burning). With confidence, I suppose that what I'm getting in return is many more diminutive shares for each dollar spent, which once they're pumped again could make me rich, though you still have to wonder what sense it makes to leave the money already there aflame. 

I guess that's my contribution to the economy. Yet another hidden tax. Like millions of others who delegate their thinking to expert managers elsewhere, it is rather by my neglect than by my strenuous thinking that the stock market hasn't and doesn't plummet further. At least someone is getting and keeping some money to play with. By the neglect of the working class, now deprived of even retirement.

Except that how come in the current distribution of ownership in the capital markets, it all keeps concentrating further?  Well, I think we've covered that, but there's one more thing. The taking out of the capital which can get accomplished when you're paying attention and properly gaming the system, ratchets down the value of my holdings, right? Isn't there a hierarchy of managers too, like that guy at Yale, Swenson, who in admonishments toward his less well endowed comperes in the capital managment business, reminds that you have to be BIG enough to follow the long-term strategy he did, and to focus on illiquid lengthy bets. With amounts large enough, this surely changes the value equation for the rest of us.

Major tektonic shifts of capital keep happening well over my head. And these were already well and long underway when tsunami tidal flows pumped up American real-estate capitalization. That oversmartened packaged and repackaged and derived confidence sure proved overblown, no? But it's hard to rebuff confidence granted. Throw caution to the wind, you've won! We all thought that at least an actual piece of the real American Pie would have some basic worth! Not even!

I know that economists have a kind of faith that the "true" value of the dollar will be found again. that it will settle back to some clear acreage of land or ounce of gold or purchasing power of something which can, statistically, be related back, perhaps to food or hourly work or something fundamental. 

I have absolutely none. The economy, like the earth, has shifted beneath our very feet.

I think, more likely, that there is some near perfect correlation between the growth that is universally regarded as essential to our economy's health, and expenditures of oil's reserves. That almost everything relates, in essence, if not to earth's superficial real-estate, then to her hidden treasure, which was life's capitalization, over eons, of entropy's contest, which game is already foretold by uncontrovertable physical equations, right? Right? Not so simple, it turns out.

So, then. The value of my labor qua labor is reduced to that commodity part of me which is full like any other. That much is clear.  That's what working income means. That's what absracted value amounts to. And the value of my head-work is proven quite literally limitless, provided that it gets shaped by years of goal oriented discipline. Great gamers get rewarded almost without limit. Great singing voices. Great golfers. Great beauty. Great marketing instincts. Even great ideas. That's what identity means. Authenticity. Faces and patentable schemes. Shapes uniquely desireable. Jesus ultimately. Our history is a contest, and let's confess, it's God we lately challenge. I think we must lose that one by definition if not sour grapes.

Subatomic particles, by definition, are all identical. So are dollars.

While there used to be a smooth curve along this incline from Fordist hands (leave home the heart and head) through professional exercise of discipline (teachers, doctors, engineers) to pinnacle success (owners of capital, architects of technology, breakers through of wilderness in thought and in geography), there is now this very sharply steep statistical hump, which leaves so much of humanity immisserated. Not by comparison, but in actual fact compared to whatever measure of brutish that humanity is meant (passive voice please note) to be distinct from.

I made my bargain for head labor pure and simple; to pay the bills I had to stay in the rat race. I'm somewhere in between the Fordist and the professional. For sure, I work the technology which facilitates diminished value for work of hands alone. Making at least ironic the fact that I do it for Charities. Which run in terror from suggestion of union for their workers. As technolgists do from any thought that they too should and must unionize if they wish to have any boundaries around their work.  They don't.

I do, and so I now must quit. And here's my new conviction: That there is no value in trade without enthusiasm. There is no bargain that's fair which asks for human spirit in trade. There is no wealth without confidence, earned or stolen outright.  These phrases all cut both ways, and we collectively must decide what we want. To screw around or to passionately embrace, just for example. A slave or actual colleague?  I mean, fun is good and all, but the game cannot be the whole darned thing. (I'll take mine now and then dear Church, and I'll thank you to not act all holy when I screw around for fun)

I think the Fordist arrangement was made quite fair for so long as unions redressed the inequities in the balance between capital and labor. For so long as handy laborers were able to purchase some leisure and homes to match the American Dream. Now that is gone, and what is wanted, and what will be gotten - for aren't we all exhorted by televangelistic personal financial advisors to make ourselves the very most valuable worker at the office as primary hedge against recession - is our very soul at work.

The margins are reduced by the self-same regimens which work to trim the fat from our fast-food diet. The battle is as absurd. There is no value to our labor, as has been demonstrated over and over again. There is value only for so long as each of us remains unwilling to take from the other what he needs as well. I relinqush my usurpation of other's work, then, and turn to my own enthusiasms. I cannot sit by and listen any longer to colleagues beg for decreases in salary so as not to be viewed with envy. I cannot bear this whittling down of humanity's worth, in trade for oil to power the machinery of our collective destruction.

And I do remain convinced that it need not be this way. 

This Grand Universal Theorem of mine mine mine, comes down to this. Yes there must be particulate physical reality. Yes there must be some medium for exchange, and medium being the message, the particles themselves are their own media, since ether's been disproved as, well, ethereal. They simply get exchanged, these particles. 

Now, speaking of money, so very much depends on which standard gets used for valuation. I suggest the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil for starters. Denominate in that, and all else gets resolved. But hold on, since that would mean that oil cannot be held or owned except in and by the Global Commons, along with air and water and wind.  And let's go one abstraction further, then, to mitigate this denomination in joules of energy, by how much input the earth can take up against how much it can radiate away. That's what computers are good for, so let them do it. Include the greenhouse breathings out and fartings.

We need not, oh please, take control of all the eco-systems of planet earth, but for certain we need to learn how not to interfere with some of the larger more impactful ones, of which the largest must be climactic balance. So any person is worth not only the manual energy output he can produce from inputs he ingests, but also gets a global credit for breathings out on his behalf which he avoids by intelligent deployment of those hands. This carbon tax should get built in, in other words, to the value of everything.  Intelligence is the balancer of want, and it too should get rewarded, extravagantly if need be, but by these corrected tokens.

Now, and here's the kicker. The cosmos, very like the economy writ small, does not run so much on exchange of particles as it does on movements to and fro of the larger more massive aggregations. These depend on forces, once thought fields, which the exchange of particles defines. Up to the very weakest whose attenuations are so fully offset by grandiose mass. Gravity's particles are so very hard to find. Instead, the ground itself gets shaped, in mind alone immeasurably.  

Energy is what passes. Energy is what moves.

But the connection is conceptual by priority and perceptual only looking back. It is emotion which does the drawing first. 

And so it must be my conclusion that without caring about what I do, not only do I add no value, but I move destruction. It is not my soul alone which gets destroyed, but the spirit which is collective. 

And so - this is moral imperative now - I quit.

Yep. You can take this rat race and shove it, because by the time that labor's been revalued down to nil, there will be no human being left to work it. There will be no heart. There will be nothing but ash and a howling void where once stories got told. Where once there was some fire.

Full Stop.