austere debauch

"an advertisement in my sunday paper sets forth in the form of a picture the four things that are needed for a successful christmas. at the top of the picture is a roast turkey, below that a christmas pudding, below that a dish of mince pies; and below that a tin of_...'s liver salt...implied in the above-mentioned advertisement is the notion that a good meal means a meal at which you over-eat yourself. in principle i agree. i would only add in passing that when we gorge ourselves at christmas, if we do get the chance to gorge ourselves, it is worth giving a thought to the thousand million human beings or thereabouts who will be doing no such thing. for in the long run our christmas dinners would be safer if we could make sure that everyone else had a christmas dinner as well...a deliberately austere christmas would be an absurdity. thew whole point of christmas is that it is a debauch-as it was probably long before the birth of christ was arbitrarily fixed on that date..."
george orwell. as i please 66, london tribune 20 december 1946


certainly my sunday paper carries on the tradition of the christmas debauch...there have been full page color ads running in it since before thanksgiving and today's christmas edition of the new york times has ads for after christams sales at sak's fifth avenue, lord and taylor, macy's, kia, at&t wireless...on and on...retailers competing to come out on top in the commercial contests at the end of the year...well...i ate at mom's today along with my kids, sons in law, and extended kin...and i didn't stuff myself...we drew names and set a spending limit...and sat and ate and talked...took photos...said our goodbyes...and went on our separate ways...no-one felt cheated because we didn't engender unrealistic expectations the way advertisers and politicians do...we set limits and stuck to them...christmas may well have been an end of harvest/beginning of winter festival intended to utilize the foodstuffs that would not keep through the winter in an orgy of eating ... understandable when it was a matter of use it or lose it but i don't have to do that...i usually find myself in agreement with george on most things he chose to write about...he was wary of intellectuals and utopian teleologies...me too...and he had serious issues with the way politicians behaved and mangled the language to serve their deceptive ends...same page here...but not on the need to debauch at the end of the year...i don't have the religion and this isn't an evangelical rant...if it's a rant it's a rant about limits and how capitalists and their economist flunkies think we don't have any...fools and idiots...and that's on a good day...i suppose only some sort of trauma will bring that point home...you'd think the last three or four years would have left them with some inkling...seems not...happy holidays.

7:03 p.m. 25 december 2011
sak's fifth avenue even had a full page ad in the sports section...just saying

havel and a derelict

"thanks to the apparent disadvantage of coming form a bourgeois background and growing up in a communist state i had the opportunity, right from the start, of seeing the world form below."
vacalv havel. open letters

"i would tend to favor an economic system based on the maximum possible plurality of many decentralized, structurally varied, and preferably small enterprises that respect the specific nature of different localities and different traditions and that resist the pressures of uniformity by maintaining a plurality of forms of ownership and economic decision-making."
vaclav havel. disturbing the peace.


"my co-workers should probably learn multitasking: they should be interchangeable, they should take turns; and those that have already been somewhere should provide exhaustive written information to all the others so that the sum of acquired experience becomes the property of all."
vaclav havel. to the castle and back.

i was never a big fan of vaclav's...largo desolato reads like a reworked version of kafka's book "the trial" and his quotes sound like a small-time ceo and bureaucrat...anointed a "dissident" by the cold warriors he was really a frustrated capitalist longing for the life of his father and grandfather...he might not have torn the castle down but he would have parked euro-disney next to it if he could have...lionized by the sodding mouthpiece of armed reaction ronald reagan...and friend of the miserable clintons and goddamned maddie albrecht i won't be missing him much...his books and plays go into the bottom file box.

i was sitting in the truck in the wiseway parking lot waiting for mom today when a derelict guy who looked to be in his twenties somewhere walked across ridge road and into the parking lot wearing worn jeans, sneakers that flopped on his feet like flip-flops because the shanks were broken out, and holding his coat closed because the zipper had failed...he inopportuned no-one for anything and didn't speak...just walked across the lot with his head down to the ashtrays located outside the doors...he scavenged some likely looking butts...lit one up...and exited the way he entered...one of the 13 million "officially unemployed"? ( or the more like 20 odd million if you discount the politically expedient government figures and count those who have flat given up) humans may have started out as egalitarian bands of foragers but the neolithic revolution and its attendant social stratification burned that right out of us...the industrial revolution and the unfortunate rise of capitalism with its resultant consumerist utopia has isolated us in mounds of stuff to the extent that those with very little become invisible behind the heaps...merry christmas...a "false and commercial festival" if ever there was one...organized religion is never up to any good but their rites have been hijacked by something even more foul.

who's jobs...at what cost?

how much longer will this lame shit go on? isn't the federal government bankrupt in all but name? yet this whore of a congressman can use my tax dollar to mail me propaganda about what a staunch defender of american jobs he is and how he is fighting in washington to bring home dollars for local communities to invest in sustainable energy projects...tapping into the methane generated by munster's landfill and converting it to electricity is laudable...no question...i have to ask how large the landfill is and how long it will produce methane in quantities large enough to prove useful...but someone has already looked into that...right? the inside of this mailing deals mainly with pete's efforts to provide tax incentives to corporations to move into his district...when the whores use the magic word "jobs' that's usually what they're really talking about...supporting corp[orate entities with federal cash and rationalizing it with the creation of "jobs" that won't make any substantive impact on regional unemployment much less the politically expediently cooked numbers that come out of the bureau of labor statistics...$9.5 million to create 512 jobs...that's about $18,554 a job...the federal debt clock pegs the "official" unemployed at just over 13,000,000 so...$241,202,000,000 is all the feds have to spend to end unemployment forever...a bargain compared to some of the stupid things they're up to now...where's that job program at? as a counterpoint to the "green" project on the front, the back sports a photo of the expansion going on at bp/ammoco ( pete's biggest single donor) to process canadian tar sands...a filthy process that will foul the air and dump toxic, carcinogenic waste into lake michigan ( a key reason for pete's resistance to the american clean energy and safety act)...fuck these people.

my union right or wrong

i got a lovely lime green postcard from the folks at the head office in indianapolis today...more "important information"... at least from a viewpoint of the financial health of the union anyway...it would seem that a goodly number of my union brothers are being suspended for non-payment of dues ( the company i work for has a dues check-off agreement with local 20 so my dues are paid even if the local doesn't get the cash on time...i said it could be deducted from my check so my hands are clean...if they try to suspend me for non payment while i'm working it's off to the nlrb and some nasty recriminations about "failure to represent" and any other ulp i can come up with) lay-offs in the construction industry are still running above the national average and the unemployed seem to be using their dues as a cost-cutting measure to make ends meet...this impairs the union's cash flow so in an effort to goad the unemployed into forking over their ( admittedly reduced) non-working dues the union has layered on a surcharge to be added onto arrears dues when a member seeks reinstatement...$100 for the first suspension...$200 for the second and so on to infinity of yankee bucks for the duration of the euphemistically termed "slump" ( wait til the euro implodes...just because leadership endorses treaty changes doesn't mean they won't get their nuts ripped off at home...the backlash is building...nick and angie's days are numbered)...this was done on may 14th, 2011 to take effect on january 1st 2012 by the action of local 20's executive board and "concurrence form the membership"...which membership, i wonder, was that? the boards? once again the union is putting the interests of the organization ahead of those it purports to represent...a special interest to the core run like a business and leaving union leadership closer to management in philosophy than with rank-and-file...thorstein veblen's "leisure class" has made inroads everywhere...ask the fucking democrats

a niche economy

"the abolishing of royalty, the extinguishment of patronage and dependencies attached tot hat form of government, were the exalted motives of many revolutionists and these were the improvements meant by them to be made...These ends and none other were publicly avowed, and all our constitutions and public acts were formed in this spirit. yet there was not wanting a party whose motives were different. they wished for the loaves and fishes of government, and cared for nothing else but a translation of the diadem and scepter from london to boston, new york, or philadelphia; or, in other words, the creation of a new monarchy in america, and to form niches for themselves in the temple of royalty."
william maclays journals 1789-1791 1 may 1789

well...with the counter-revolution embodied in the constitution they succeeded in transplanting an aristocracy and the "patronage and dependencies" as they legislated themselves money from the public purse...james madison (hereafter known as "his littleness") and "that damned ass hamilton" (evil bastard and a combination of martin borman, joe geobbles, and what lenin would have been if he had been a monarchist...and always an ass) created a government by and for special interest to diffuse the political will of and "interested and overbearing majority"[his littleness]...by refusing to seriously address issues brought to them by anything other than an interest group the framers of the constitution subverted energy that might have been applied in a direct confrontation with government by directing it into the confines of an interest group where it was harmlessly expended ( from the ruling elite's perspective) inside those groups as they hashed out their agenda...the ensuing proliferation of interest groups was a conscious strategy to make the political process somewhat predictable...by dividing the polity against itself they set in motion a host of bureaucratic and budgetary nightmares and they did it to protect and expand their position of economic advantage...nothing if not capitalists...we are where we are because they were what they were...the system aint broke, it's functioning as the designers intended...it disenfranchises the masses from any meaningful input into what the elite do to foster their wealth on a daily basis...until the polity gets its collective head out of high school civics...where it was placed by the benign impact of a "free" public education...the whores will continue to have things entirely too much their own way...where's daniel shay's when you need him? pressure needs to be applied from outside the system.