What Lies Beneath the Pavement?

Revolution requires acts of imagination. In order to turn away from the world as-it-is, one must be able to envision, even if only in an inchoate way, that another world is possible and that this potentiality is, in and of itself, worth fighting for.

During the 1968 Paris uprising, a popular spray-can dictum asserted "Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking." Another, more poetic, and ultimately more powerful, had it: "Beneath the pavement, the beach!" The sand--revealed by pulling up the paving stones to use as projectiles--suggested either another world, or another dimension to this one.

If creativity is firepower in the contest of imagination, however, the first victory has gone not to the dissidents but to the bankers. For our current decade and its predicaments, we could update the slogan quoted above to: "Beneath the wheat, the banks!" It is the bankers--by which I mean any of the technocrats that constitute the financial sector--who have successfully re-imagined the world. They have effectively invented a new reality in which finance is separate from the actual economy (even commodities futures are now merely abstract financial instruments) and politics separate from the people (in a technocracy, the elected government is obsolete if not irrelevant).

To win this contest it is necessary to turn again, to revolt against the bankers' revolution. We must be even more imaginative, even more inventive. Those that can dream the future will take power in the present. "Occupation" is a good start--to give significance again to everyday space and thereby everyday life--but it is only a beginning. We must demand of ourselves total acts of imagination and unprecedented poetry: works of living, feats of being. We must transform the very world, inside and out, with breathless displays of daredevil creativity.

This creativity need not be bounded by works of art, even those that are situational, relational, or activist as the case may be. Acts in and of themselves can be creative. Every step, conceived and executed correctly, can be poetry. The street is a blank slate and our every movement can be a phoneme in a new language that will describe a new reality.

Occupy the pavement and then dig deeper. The city is thin and its skin is penetrable. There is water underground.

Maggie's Partially Buried Wood Farm

Image: from Part One of Partially Buried in Three Parts, by Renee Green, courtesy Renee Green

"'History is thorough, and passes through many stages when she carries a worn-out form to burial. The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy. The gods of Greece, who had already been mortally wounded in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, had to yet die again--this time a comic death--in the dialogues of Lucian. Why does history follow this course? So that mankind may take leave of its past gaily.' Karl Marx Der historiche Materialismus: Die Fruhschriften, ed. Landshut and Mayer (Leipzig), vol. 1, pp. 268 ("Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie"). Surrealism is the death of the nineteenth century in comedy." Walter Benjamin. Arcades Project. [N5, a2] trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin, 1999.

Bob Dylan is the death of Marxism as comedy.



"But you see, the Dadaists, they're setting up their own religion. They think that everything's corrupted by commercialism and industry and bourgeois attitudes. I think it's time that we realize that there's no point in trying to transcend those realms. Industry, commercialism and the bourgeois are very much with us. This whole notion of trying to form a cult that transcends all this strikes me as a kind of religion-in-drag, you might say. I'm just bored with it, frankly. I think it's a desperate attempt. And then they try to transcend their own movements and all this sort of thing. So there's this kind of latent spiritualism at work in just about all of modernism. Each sect is claiming a higher transcendence, and they're all warring with each other in some sort of world. The art world is a world alienated from the larger world because it disdains its own work. There's this guilt even about being an artist. At the bottom, I see Duchamp basically as a kind of priest of a certain sort, who's turning urinals into baptismal fonts... "

...

"Communism doesn't interest me. Eventually China will become bourgeois."

--Robert Smithson in conversation with Moira Roth, 1973

Roth, Moira. "An Interview with Robert Smithson." Robert Smithson. Eds. Butler, Cornelia and Tsai, Eugenie. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.

Cracked Looking Glass

Fox News recently impugned the NEA and by extension the entire stimulus plan for allowing $25,000 (out of more than $750 billion) to fund an art theater in San Francisco. It is not entirely clear from their report whether Fox is offended by the work the theater shows or the fact that it is in San Francisco:
http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/25551964/perverts-put-out.htm

The theater in question, the San Francisco Cinematheque, is one of the longest running and most well respected venues for experimental film in the country. The list of people involved with the Cinematheque over the years is a virtual who's who of West Coast experimental film: it's founding members, Bruce Baillie and the late Chick Strand, are widely considered two of the most important experimental filmmakers in California and former directors have gone on to head the cinema departments at major American universities and art schools. Likewise, the Cinemathque's exhibition history covers nearly every major American experimental filmmaker. In 1998, the Cinematheque collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art in New York on an unprecedented exhibition called Big As Life--50 programs of small gauge cinema (8mm and super-8) from the American avant-garde.

Below, you can hear the soundtrack that Fox News described as "so offensive... we could barely find anything in the trailer that was suitable to put on TV and we definitely cannot air the audio."

Tormenting The Poor

Barbara Ehrenreich's Sunday column for this week's edition of The New York Times is an absolute must-read. Like her groundbreaking and controversial Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich simply and eloquently describes how cruelly the deck is stacked against the poor in this country, from minor drug violations that are exacerbated by lack of proper legal council to struggling to pay rents on minimum wage.

This column, however, explains how new laws, such as forbidding the feeding of homeless in public places, creates an atmosphere of intolerance to those not only without basic human needs, but to charitable causes which may help alleviate the problem. Where trillions of dollars bail out insolvent banks, gravely irresponsible insurance companies, and investment companies which haven't even thanked the American people for saving their trade, the poor, without sufficient work, shelter, food, or dignity are forgotten. The most damning revelation is in this short paragraph:

Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive “overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety,” like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons.

It never amazes how the poor, brought down by excessive debts, which sometimes just go to basic services like rent or (what is treated like an essential but is billed as a luxury) education are the last to rebound. and pay the biggest price for inequalities that the ruling class perpetuates. Then they're punished with "zero tolerance" laws passed by those who pretend poverty and inequality are nonexistent. If anything, this recession exposed one thing: how woefully unaware and unprepared the middle and upper classes are for the living conditions that most Americans call Everyday Life.

The above photo, titled Pan, is by esteemed photographer and friend Brian Carroll, from his Flickr photo stream.

Sign Of The Times (Part 3)

Sign Of The Times (Part 2)

Nation Instinctively Forms Breadline (from the good folks at The Onion).

Sign Of The Times (Part 1)

We're all Keynesians now

The above track, John Maynard Keynes, is available on Jeff Stambovsky's children's album, What Do You Know, Kid?, which is available here.

American Protectionism

This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed Obama's 800 billion dollar stimulus package. As part of this bill, they included a clause that would require all infrastructure projects funded by the stimulus money to be made with domestic steel. There are indications that the senate will uphold this 'American-made' clause, and possibly expand it to require that all materials be of U.S. origin.

World leaders, including Stephen Harper, Canada's Prime Minister, have cried foul play. It is against international trade laws to practice what is known as protectionism. The raising of tariffs and banning of imports is thought to have contributed to the intensity of the Great Depression. In Bush's last economic meeting with world leaders, he concurred with other countries that the only way out of the global crisis was to rigorously guard against protectionism.

Now Obama is being called on to strike down the 'American-made' clause in the stimulus bill. He has not yet made a commitment to leave it in, or delete it. His considerations are complex. Tax payers are already reeling from the recent news that Wall Street tycoons walked away with over $18 billion in bonuses in a year when they relied heavily on government money to prevent collapse. Many tax payers are not interested in seeing any of the $800 billion spent overseas as our own unemployment numbers swell. On the other hand, protectionism works both ways. If we begin to refuse other country's products, they can wipe out their markets for ours.

I propose that in light of this complicated conflict, rather than deciding whether to use a right or left hook, that we side step the whole issue. Well, admittedly it won't be possible to completely ignore the problem, but investing in a key area of need would go a long way towards helping our own economy without breaking any laws.

While the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Canada are clamoring for us to avoid protectionism, they are not dealing with domestic populations at the same risk that Americans are. Unlike those countries, when Americans lose jobs, they lose health insurance. There are provisions in the stimulus package for expanding medicaid coverage and subsidizing COBRA expenses, but we could go much further.

As Paul Krugman argues, a major shift in the economy is a perfect time to enact a new social contract, like providing health insurance for all. In 2006 Massachusetts passed legislation that paved the way to providing universal health insurance in the state. To date it is the only state to provide this level of coverage. Three years later, it is instructive to analyze how their system is functioning.

While overall it is receiving support, the main problem for people has been accessing a primary care physician. There simply aren't enough of them working in the state to keep up with the new demand. If the entire U.S. were to be covered for health insurance, it is reasonable to assume that we'd experience the same bottleneck.

However, far from being a problem, this is a golden opportunity for us to stimulate our economy. Not only does a healthier work force translate into a more productive one, but health care is a non-exportable industry that currently accounts for 15-18% of GDP. Estimates for future costs show that it will continue to rise. Many people use this as an argument for why we shouldn't provide universal insurance. But what better way to keep our dollars at home, without breaking international law?

My proposal is this. There are millions of people out of work. Hundreds of thousands of them would be happy to train as primary care physicians. The stimulus package should include a huge sum for this retraining program, so cost isn't an issue for students. More of the stimulus package should go towards extending health coverage everyone. We could phase this coverage in to coincide with the graduation of our new physicians. More clinics and hospitals should be built right away (and granted, this may require us to spend money on imports, but at least the wages would stay here), of course with the blessing of stimulus money.

In this way, when we finally start climbing out of the recession, we will have a newly trained, non-exportable work force, healthy workers in all industries, and enough clinics to serve our country's needs. Then next time an economic disaster hits (and it will, we have alarmingly short memories), we'll at least be on an even playing field with other wealthy nations.

When the Job Market Changes