Retro ranting

Some fucker of a friend of mine on Facebook put up a vid of Sheena Easton singing that fucking "9 to 5" song because they'd had a flashback to being a kid listening to the Minipops singing it. (Hey, fucker? I can't remember if I told you about this blog, or if you read it, but if it's yes and a yes, you fucking fucker, you have burnt my fucking balls with annoyance over this). Sometimes I worry that the kids these days are getting fed anti-feminist, overly-sexualized narratives and expectations in their pop music, and maybe they are, but I can't think of one more pernicious and disgusting than Sheena Easton's "9 to fucking 5".

Some bint stays at home in a state of zombiefied boredom while her wage-slave meal-ticket goes and pisses his life up the wall at some crappy job for some cunt somewhere controlling the means of production,  and then she only blossoms into something like existence after he commutes home, blows his salary on her material desires, and gives her a good fucking. As if, in real life, a man can consistently work a nine to five job, come home, and be in the mood for blowing his paltry salary on his woman and then maintaining a boner for anything like enough time to actually satisfy her physical needs. And as if, in real life, a woman can spend her days sitting around in a mingled state of utter boredom and high sexual tension without losing her fucking mind or, I don't know, actually going to find something to do that doesn't involve waiting for her nightly ration of pampering and cock.

Honestly, I have never fucking heard a more blantant combination of capitalist and anti-feminist propaganda, in song form or out of it. And then the fucking Minipops singing it. Oh, fuck. I mean adults are dumb enough to buy into that shit; how the fuck were children supposed to figure out that 9 to 5 jobs kill your emotional existence, let alone your sex life, and that women should do things besides waiting around to be spoiled and nailed by a meal-ticket to get some happiness out of life? The 9 to 5 dynamic is evil. It's repugnant. It's exploitative. In fact, it's everything Dolly Parton says it is, in her own, vastly, IMMEASURABLY superior "9 to 5".


PS I mean frankly I can't even fucking BELIEVE that both of these songs qualify as the same category of THING, the fucking Dolly Parton song is so much better that it shouldn't even be from the same planet as Sheena Fucking Easton's song. It seems utterly bizarre to be caught calling them both "songs". That is all.

Parasites and prawns

So. Two things. First, I saw my accountant yesterday and discovered I'd saved more than four times as much as I needed to for my income taxes this year. That was mostly down to my paranoia and I had been pretty sure I was oversaving, but it was still good news. Thrilling news, in fact. But later, something was added to the thrill, as it dawned on me that the figure was really far too low. I ran a quick simulation to see what I'd have to pay if I was an employee instead of a contractor, and realized I would have had to pay twice as much - easily.

And that set me off, of course. I'd had an abstract understanding for some time that tax systems in the Anglo countries serve to wed the interests of the extremely rich to the - what would you call it? Entrepreneurial class?  Sounds too flattering . . . small business class? I'm not sure. I'm sure there's a real word for it somewhere.

In Australia I think it has the effect of sort of uniting the interests of everybody who owns a shop or service with cunts who are really, really rich - fixing things up so we pay very little tax. Which means we - the self-employed, the really really rich - are effectively being subsidized by proportionately higher taxes being paid by poor people and by employees. (Less so by poor people now because the tax-free threshold has just been tripled, this year, to north of $18,000, which is enough to live on, if not live on well in the cities - but of course raising that limit also benefits people making a lot more than $18,000).

I can see the arguments for it in terms of job creation but I think many small businesspeople are like me, with no or else very casual employees, and I can see an argument for it - a very theoretical one - in the breaks being offered for the self-employed to encourage them to get into something a little bit risky. But the thing is, in an Australian context being self-employed isn't really riskier than being an employee. This isn't Europe. Severance pay is poor, notice periods are short, and there's a perfectly adequate public healthcare system - from what I can figure out, all private coverage buys you in Australia is cups of tea when you're in hospital, where you'll still get taken care of by a public-system doctor if there's an emergency. The new mat leave scheme isn't something employers pay into, it's a government handout, and it's as available to the self-employed as it is to employees. Unless you as an individual or you as represented by a union (and unions catch MASSIVE fucking flack in the media here) can negotiate a really great contract with your employer (as does still happen, actually, since there's a labour shortage in so many fields in Australia), there's really no substantial benefit to being an employee.

There is one, actually, again in theory. Superannuation payments. Employers are required to contribute, I think, a figure representing 10% of their employee's base salary into a sort of retirement investment account - the sort of thing that's done in the US and Canada too, a replacement for a decent pension, and the reason why normal people's lives have got completely fucked up by financial markets over the last three years, and the reason why so many things suddenly seem "too big to fail" - if they do, an army of broke, angry pensioners will start voting Commie, or something. And of course nobody pays the self-employed superannuation benefits.

But the thing is, if I was an employee, there's no way by base pay would be this high. When I negotiated my contract, I asked for more money to make up for no super. And when jobs are advertised in my field and pay is mentioned, the super contributions are always part of the ad - you're expected to think of your pay as a combination of the two.

So. In conclusion. I've left the middle classes and joined the parasite classes. And I don't feel bad about it. Well, I do, but not bad enough to not keep the money.

Second thing. To celebrate me joining the parasite classes, we went for a run on the beach in Lennox Head last night, and then out for dinner to the Lennox Thai Garden. And shockingly, it was MARVELLOUS. I whine alot about the poor quality of rural Australian food, but there are three restaurants in L--- that are quite decent - I mustn't knock it too much. But this was the first time that we'd been outside of the big cities here that I'd had a meal where I actually felt that it was proportionately good to how fucking expensive it was. I had this sort of coconut soup and some king prawns in tamarind sauce, and everything was actually fresh - especially the king prawns - they were enormous and delicious. Good lord. I was really shocked. The idea of value for money when it comes to food is really something I didn't think I'd ever experience again in this fucking countryside. Top notch!

Free university

I'm back to enjoying Chinese instead of thinking that learning it is a horrible untenable burden I'm a fool to subject myself to, free university courses or not. In a complete lack of coincidence, it seems I enjoy it more when I have more time to focus on it and actually prepare for class instead of completely ballsing up every time the professor asks me something (which is a lot because there's only two people actually showing up these days) and, oh yeah, when I actually show up for class myself (which I haven't done in weeks due to travel, illness, time zone mix-ups, etc.).

A week ago I'd been toying with the idea of dropping out after this course but now I think I'll persist. I'm finding being back in L--- trying but one thing about this place is there's fuck all to do, which gives me time to run and work out and get back a tummy I haven't had since I was smoking a pack a day in the skinny part of Europe, and it also gives me time to learn Chinese, and once I breed I probably won't have time for either of those things no matter how culturally, erm, calm, I'm finding this place, so carpe diem, right?

Also, I guess I'm having a moment of appreciation for getting free university again. My parents paid for my undergrad. I just worked during the summers to pay off accommodation and stuff like that, but the key issue was that I didn't leave it with any debt and I didn't have to hold down a job and study at the same time, at least not extendedly - I switched majors and did a couple of courses in Toronto during my first summer while I was working, but I was 19 then and could do anything, except talk to boys. And then I did my masters in France, where the tuition was just a couple hundred dollars, and since it was a thesis masters there wasn't a shitload of classes and I managed to work at the same time with only a minor mental crisis or two. Working and writing the thesis at the same time - well, that really sucked.

But it gave me a bit of understanding of how unreasonable or evil the demands on Anglo-land students are now (and would have been in Canada back in the 90's too, including for me if I hadn't had supportive middle-class parents, even though tuition was thousands of dollars cheaper then).  Them leaving university with so much fucking debt, with years or decades of debt slavery ahead of them without even a paid-for house to show for it at the end of it, and being told by wankers "well, just hold down a job while you study", as if that was such a fucking simple proposition, and as if your average undergrad student could get a job that would pay even a fraction of its tuition after covering books and the other necessities of life that we all have to pay for once we don't live with our parents anymore. I mean, if they could make that much money, half of them probably wouldn't be going to university in the first place.

And the other fucking germ of genius I've heard spreading around is to study where you grew up - assumedly continuing to live with your parents - which is a bit of a kick in the arse for your parents, I suppose, and also suggests a misunderstanding of what university is about. I studied modern languages, general humanities, and international relations. Those are three things I couldn't have studied at my local university. Medical schools? Legal departments? Engineering? Teacher's college? I suppose all those people should just stay home in their shitty little podunk towns and study American Lit or forestry instead? Fucking hell, man.Why not just bring back feudalism while you're at it so we all know where we stand?

There's no misunderstanding of anything, though, of course. The transformation of aspirational students into fit young wage slaves is almost certainly a matter of policy. I've been spending a fair amount of time mulling over wage slavery, having signed up for six or seven years of wage slavery myself by buying this house, and putting myself into the situation where it'll be a minor disaster if I lose my job in the next three and a half years. Wage slavery seems to be a necessary condition for economic life as it's understood in Anglo-land, including Australia (noting, though, that this is a place where conditions for citizens going to university are actually pretty great; they haven't quite rolled back all of Gough Whitlam's good work here yet); it keeps salaries down for long hours without having to go to the political trouble of letting too many immigrants in.

It makes me quite bitter, you know. Now that there are all these great ways to grow food and make stuff, in the developed world - hell, in the whole world - we've never been so well equipped to be idle and to be able to pass most our time doing nice things, like learning things or making things or spending time with our families. And instead we live in a society where people work 40 hour weeks as a matter of course, and don't even know what they'd do with themselves if they were idle, and spend their free time watching reality television and fretting about angry young people having peaceful demonstrations about corporate greed and how their student loans are fucking up their lives forever, and other people live with famine and malnutrition.

Sigh.

Anyways, it's making me appreciate someone else (work) paying for my Chinese courses, which aren't expensive, this being Australia and students not being fucked up the ass here yet, but are still more expensive than I'd like to pay for myself. That was my point, several paragraphs ago.

How to over-intellectualize porn

I'm a feminist and a humanist, and that makes my pornography habit a little difficult. I really like watching porn and I think I'm the opposite of alone in that. I am Legion. It's my sincere belief both sexes have both strong exhibitionistic and strong voyeurisitic streaks, and that men have been socially conditioned to subsume their exhibitionistic streaks and women have been conditioned to subsume their voyeuristic streaks, and that these sublimations are at the base of a great deal of the tension inherent in the so-called Sexual Arms Race.

I mean, consider the penis. That thing was made to be looked at by women; it is drama enfleshened. Other great apes display their penis, but only when it's got a boner; men are walking around 24/7 swinging their pipe, even though it'd surely be safer for it to be tucked away in folds of skin like a chimp's. And I don't buy having a constantly-external penis as a spandrel of say, cooler testicles hanging outside the body; the other apes are a lot more fertile as far as the health of their testicular products go.

No: the penis was made to be looked at to help women made reproductive choices. Then we agricultured up as a species and small-penised men who accrued wealth and influence rigged the game by making their gender put on clothes, so their insufficiencies would go unnoticed. And since the small-penised male 'target audience' was the one monopolizing resources, only women got to keep on being exhibitionistic. I'll believe that feminists have 'made it', in terms of post-agricultural Women's resource-accruing equality, on the day it's as easy to see a beautiful peice of male ass in our pop culture as a beautiful peice of female ass. I'm not holding my breath.

Anyways, all of this is an over-intellectualized way to say that I love porn, and that I bet most people in the world would also love it if they were honest with themselves, but with one proviso: it is really difficult to find good porn. Most porn I've seen that's been made in the last 15 years or so I just can't take seriously for several reasons, but notably because of all the excessive hair removal. Considering you're trying to reach an audience of thousands I can understand manicuring things a bit down there, but the now-standard full Brazilians and the landing strips (called ticket de metro in Paris - isn't that cute?) are just weird and gross. And I've noticed that more and more men are getting in on the waxing action and that's just fucking twisted. I don't agree. Ergh. Gross. It's all a real problem for me - there's something paedophilic in the idea that hairless junk is attractive - and I just can't enjoy it.

Which leaves 70's porn. I understand, because Milan Kundera said so and because of stories I've accrued over the years, that for some couples laughter and sexuality are totally incompatible. I completely disagree, which is why I can enjoy 70's porn, which is some of the funniest shit in the universe. But I'll go on about it some other time because now it is time for a run - I'm up to 47 consecutive minutes without feeling like the world is ending, and I'm afraid I'm catching a little cold, so I have to get out now in case I need to take a few days off later.

Terra Promessa

While the F-word and I were in Calabria, of course everybody was interested in talking about Australia. Differently than you might imagine considering many of the people we were speaking to had never set foot beyond the confines of that most insular of non-island provinces. After all, they're a bunch of people who're used to seeing their families go somewhere, ANYWHERE else . . . Canada, Argentina, Germany, Ethiopia and Eritrea back in those dear dead fascisti days . . . Oceania is old hat to them as a destination concept, indeed apparently Adelaide is full of people with my last name, but not my 'sopranome', which is a topic for another time.

Anyways, only one of my cousins made much of the distances involved, concluding her speech with a rather bleak 'voi cercate la terra promessa et non la troverete', a sentiment I decided to ignore, on the basis of it coming from a woman who decided it was okay to marry her first cousin since she's now beyond child-bearing age (seeing him swing between calling his mother-in-law 'zia' and 'mamma' is something that will stay with me for years, despite my goldfish memory).

But she was right, we were looking for the promised land in Australia, and we haven't found it, indeed instead what I've found is the following:

1) There is no promised land

2) I have a personal sense of style.

To elaborate on 1). This country is fucking beautiful and the people are nice, even if they can't shut up about how much they hate Muslims, and I love it here already.

BUT. Outstripping Canada, indeed second to none in my experience, Australia is a land of funny money and a citizenry thrown to the privatization sharks as incredibly corrupt and incompetent state governments cash in. Services are EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE THAN IN NORTHERN EUROPE and inflationary rates are huge because there are no price controls on anything and monopolies are rife.

And the federal authorities are too chickenshit to do what they can to stop it because that would mean jacking up the interest rates so high property prices would fall, and everybody's investments, either in their super-annuation funds or in actual holdings, are in real estate.

The country has become a slave of its own bloated prosperity and if I wasn't being paid an absurd amount of money for my contract here I would insist we turn tail and leave; this isn't a place to scrape by. It has everything Europe doesn't - space, courtesy, natural beauty, pleasing weather (though what with La Nina it's now in the flood part of its flood/drought cycle - god, this is a stupid place for the sort of intensive agriculture they get so knicker-twisted about maintaining - but that's a post for another time) - but also semi-responsible government and attempts, however byzantine and annoying, to protect the common citizen.

Socialism as a concept here has been absolutely stymied over the last 25 years by a labour movement who decided to shut up the potential pinkoes by throwing huge amounts of money at them. It worked. It's really interesting.

To elaborate on 2). I remember when I was on a girly holiday in Dubrovnik, I could relax in an extra-relaxing way because the German tourists lowered the bar so absolutely in terms of personal appearance on the beach. Australia is like being on a beach with German tourists, EVERYWHERE. If you had told me two months ago that I had a personal sense of style and certain standards for how I dressed, I'd probably think you were just trying to get into my pants, or shared my philosophy about always wearing natural fibres so as to forestall the possibility of candida infections. Now I'd have to agree with you without reservation though.

The gamut of female fashion in most of rural Australia only has three points - uncomfortable professional (7%), whore (43%), and slob (50%). I'm fitting nicely into the slob category but this place does make me feel like I pull of 'slob' with a certain panache. For example, my mumus have waist ties.

Yes. Mumus. That's right. I live in the land of fuckin' mumus. That almost makes up for the corruption and pseudo-capitalism gone mad.

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses

So let's say you're the cardinals of the Catholic Church and you have a bunch of high-profile sex scandals in which several priests are revealed to be kiddie-fiddlers who you haven't adequately dissuaded or prevented from kiddie-fiddling. This makes a bunch of people hate you. Then your pope dies and you decide it's time to pick a new one. So then you pick the cardinal who oversaw - at best, at unrealistic best, at a best I'm only willing to admit might possibly exist because I understand there are no limits to human stupidity - the utter, jaw-dropping inadequacy of the reponse to hundreds of priests around the world being kiddie-fiddlers.

What does that make you? It makes that fucking stupid, that's what it makes you.

There are a lot of things that suggest that Catholicism is now, as it always has been, a sort of body corporate or a simple vehicle for the propogation and retention of wealth. You cannot have any familiarity with the history of the church without that being bleedingly obvious. Rather magically, the church has managed to create the illusion that is all a thing of the past, that people who rant and rave about church property and tax breaks and blah blah blah are a bunch of paranoiac nutters like that poor crazy fuck who flew his plane into the IRS building just recently.

But to me, counterintuitively but there you are, the bloody awful decision to put a charmless, cadaverous pitbull who oversaw decades of criminal, damnable institutional incompetence into the Popemobile is a superb demonstration of corporate behaviour, the sort of thing I see at work every day, the sort of thing that makes Carlo Cipolla's analysis of stupidity look less tongue-in-cheek and more simple observation.

Here's the thing. If you put a bunch of people together and employ them to promote the financial well-being of an institution which is not owned by any one person - and you would have to be as naive as a toddler to imagine that promoting the continued existence of a stagnating old leviathan like the Catholic church is in any way independent of promoting its financial well-being - you are grouping, and thus exponentially multiplying their stupidity.

In fact you are giving full rein to their stupidity, because their employment - ensuring the financial well-being of an institution - is an abstract concept involving principles that economists spend years trying and usually failing to learn in academic institutions. Hence they can be relied upon to do retarded things whose single obvious benefit, if they were intelligent, should not have outweighed multiple and equally obvious detriments - like outsourcing core business (which I don't object to in principle, but in reality usually means sacking competent, experienced people and hiring incompetent, inexperienced people whose contracts ensure they won't trouble themselves much to learn competence because it's not in their interest) or electing fucking Ratzinger to be pope because they think they need a tough guy to face down the competition (and maybe all the kids who had got fiddled by priests under his watch are either dead or had already come out about it, right?)

And surely the rest of your life will retain the full benefit of such intelligence as you possess - for the CEOs I deal with on a daily basis, ensuring the prosperity of themselves and their family; for a good priest, his and his parishioners relationship with the divine; for a bad priest, his access to kiddies to fiddle. And compounding the problem, benefits to the rest of your life from your employment supposedly ensuring the financial well-being of an institution (you personally accruing the maximum wealth possible, you personally having the time and the mental space to devote to your flock and the divine and trying not to get caught fucking children) are actually also demeritous to the goal of ensuring the financial well-being of the institution.

I still hate The Corporation for all those reasons I wrote about years ago, and another now. That film, from memory, presented corporations as scary, as a psychotic juggernaut that will destroy us all. One descriptor there is fatally wrong: they aren't psychotic, they are stupid. Massively stupid. They are juggernauts of pooled stupidity that will destroy us all if we fail to address the stupid. And the Catholic church is no exception.

The trough behind the wave

My brain is nearly broken today. Too much stress but good prospects of it easing off, and a trip to Germany planned for the weekend. With more kayaking. Yay! That will make five countries I've kayaked in. Not bad for someone who hardly knows how to fucking kayak. Next summer I'm going to treat myself to some real coursework with rolls and rapids and things like that. For now it's just the pretty.

Reading The Economic Decline of Empires. You know, for fun. I've only read the first one about the late Roman empire and I'm close to following my advice to Sam - chucking my household into a car and driving away like a madwoman, because it's open season for the rich! So us.

This came in the mail yesterday. I have to start paying more attention to TED.

Buck up - never say die! We'll get along

I think I've found my political Messiah . . . pity he's a kiddie-fiddler who's been dead for 32 years. Oh well. There have been dumber ideological choices made, as mine is on the basis of this rather wonderful movie:



What I noticed all through it is that the pacing is superb. No dead space, no holes. It's an extremely well put-together film, aside from the funniness factor - far better than most American films made before the 50's in terms of just being spectacularly well put-together. And it's fucking funny. Particularly for us pinko stoners.

BTW - here's a Guarniad review from 1936 about the film. It must have been strange back in the days when newspaper entertainment section writers were allowed to use the present perfect and words like "undeliberating". Keep on to the end, to the section about how the Nazis banned it, and of course the moustache . . .

How can something so wrong feel so right?

So today at the conference there was a two point five hour session that had nothing to do, even tangentially, with anything I have anything to do with, so I got my first Turkish bath. I made the mistake of reading about them on Wikipedia right before I went in an effort to not commit any massive nude-y faux pas, which left me agonizing while I lay naked on the hot marble slab about using an institution with so many historical associations with the most exploitative kind of sex slavery. I won't say the agony stopped once the attendant came in, took off her clothes, and started exfoliating me all over; in fact in a certain moral sense it got worse when I realized halfway through that I was 75% passively ready for the dirtiest possible scenario in which the situation could go. But it was still a really lovely experience, particularly getting covered with bubbles and massaged.

But do I reccommend it? I don't know. It's causing me the same level, if not the same brand of moral confusion and disturbance the Berlin Zoo did the last time I skipped out of a conference to enjoy myself. In a certain sense I don't think you should be in a position where you should be able to pay someone to wash you for pleasure; it offends my communist sensibilities. And yet my hard-nosed capitalist side says it's my economic duty as a monied person to hire less monied people to do things for me, even things that my cultural upbringing informs me are actually my job, or possibly the F-word's, except our bathroom is too unromantic.

And then the psychoanalyzed side of me informs me it's fucking weird, though obviously completely predictable, that it's such a pleasurable and relaxing experience to be so infantilized by a woman my age (the attendant) taking a role no-one has taken since my mother when I was about three years old. My psychoanalyzed side is also informing me it's wierd I'm caring about being cleaned off by a professional when I've got undressed and massaged by a kajillion different professional therapists without ever questioning anything about anything except that it was awesome.

I don't know. My guess is I'll probably do it again, though not at a five-star hotel, because the stale atmosphere of bourgeois decadence and entitlement is probably what's killing my buzz. The thing is in view of my nut allergy my pleasures are a little limited here - about 3/4 of the food is off limits - so I'm looking for other ways to spoil myself - I guess this is why I've never travelled in Asia. Oh well, there are enough other nice things, I'll just keep eating bananas and watermelon. Maybe it can turn into some awesome new fad diet.

Ways of Being, 2

To continue from yesterday.

Some think that so much of today's art mirrors and thus criticises decadence. Not so. It's just decadent. Full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem.

As I wrote, it's a good point, and it's in the company of a few other good points, like how an overheated art market is transforming desired paintings into super-expensive commodities, and having a horrible impact on public galleries’ ability to collect and show. There's also a suggestion - poorly explored - of how it may be skewing instruction at art schools; something that hit my art-school alumnus boyf as extremely relevant.

BUT what we have building up to this point is an extremely personal, elitist and deeply unpleasant vision of decontextualized art and the response of masses of people to it. We have the messy, badly argued, and unlikely premise running through this documentary that the way working-class and middle-class Americans ‘experienced’ the Mona Lisa on its trip to New York in 1963 and the way they generally see gallery art is by its nature generally deeply inferior to the way Robert Hughes sees it in its proper context. Not just less educated, not just less loving, but by its nature deeply inferior - that the masses experience seeing art, and Robert Hughes looks at it. Or vice versa. Whatever verb makes Robert Hughes sound cleverer and the masses sound more insensible. I think this was a beastly, unfair, and erroneous generalization, and it’s what I hated most about the documentary.

Another thing I hated about it was the idea it presented to us that this perceived deep inferiority of the popular vision is tied to the present overheated, overpriced, and qualitatively poor state of the expensive end of the modern art market – a ridiculous, speculative art market with which only the tiniest percentage of the population has any engagement at all, and which mainly impacts them by baffling them when they go to public galleries to see something else . . .

Hughes’ perspective shows a complete unconsciousness of the importance of all the mighty piles of art vastly aesthetically and intellectually superior to shark-in-formaldehyde, that continue to be accessible and affordable in co-op or community galleries or other points of sale – points of sale that are burgeoning like mushrooms after the rain now that we have the internet. This is predictable, because the man seems incapable not only of appreciating the way the masses may or may not be impacted by art, but incapable of appreciating there may be an artistic world in existence beyond the top end he's covered in Time magazine and a series of admittedly delicious books and documentaries.

But both things I hated about the documentary can be summed up rather more simply in one phrase: Robert Hughes absolutely failed to think outside of himself.

He failed to consider that in all those thousands of people herded by the Mona Lisa in New York in the 60’s, there mightn’t have been a few hundred who saw something in it they deeply needed, making the whole exercise worthwhile; that even the frustration of being herded past something so small, so distant, so quickly could of itself be of huge importance in the artistic consciousness and education of many spectators. He failed to question if the re-contextualization of it could possibly have any value.

And by virtue of the contempt he felt for both, he was happy to put the popular experience of art in the same dependent chain of the events as Damien Fucking Hirst - when the two things are, quite obviously, only linked in antipathy. And he failed to consider that - in terms of what’s available out there in the reams of galleries and art schools and co-ops and communities - we could be living in a time that’s deeply exciting and important for the visual arts, with fine art creation de-centred and widespread as it's never been before in the western tradition. He could only see the expensive end of the market, that he's been involved with throughout his professional career.

Of these two documentaries, it’s only the raving pinko Berger who succeeded at all in exploring the recontextualization of art, not simply wailing over its decontextualization. It’s only Berger who made a real effort to go beyond himself, to leave himself behind, and engage with the perspective of the rest of people standing in front of art. So to answer yesterday's question to myself, this is why I’m left-wing. I think it’s only on this side of the political spectrum that you can think outside of yourself, that you have the framework available to help you think outside of yourself. In a sentence: I’m left-wing because I’m resisting the urge to live up my own asshole.

Anyways. We've gone on watching the rest of the Berger documentary. Episode two was about the female nude, and it was rather lovely to see an actual-real-life man engage in some feminist theorizing. But more on that later. Episode three, rather topically, was about the oil painting as a commodity or as an indicator of wealth. Plus ça change . . . what Berger's history of the oil painting illustrated was that as pissy as Hughes is with the hedge funds, diamond-encrusted skulls, and other fucking massive taste challenges currently buggering up the art world, this isn't the first time artistic time and talent has been wasted on expensive, market-driven curiosities.

Imagine if oil painters over the last 700 years had a real choice of subject, instead of languid women, Jeebus, and decadent still lives for rich clients. Imagine if all those technically superb and yet tediously repetitive academic painters had had the freedom to let their imaginations run riot. They were trained to believe they didn't, and they painted as though they didn't, and only madmen and geniuses, like the geniuses we remember and seek to look at now, managed to think beyond the spirit and market demands of their age, and create something new and eternal, even to the detriment of their pockets. Art endured and endures.

Anyways, worktime.

Sewing up the Christan empire

I don't think I mentioned, but I have more than one resolution going at the moment. Awhile ago I decided that since my office is casual and since I'd managed to find a pair of jeans that won't give me a yeast infection and since I had quite a large collection of socks and had learnt how to darn them in case of need, I would try to go for a full year without buying clothes. Instead, making anything I needed, in a sort of crash course in sewing. Three motives:

1. I'm cheap, and hordeing money like a troll these days

2. I hate clothes shopping. About nine years ago I lost a tonne of weight and suddenly everything fit, which turned shopping from an exercise in humiliation into an exercise in looking in mirrors and geeking on how cute I was. So for a few years shopping was a pleasure, an amusement, just about my favourite thing to do in an afternoon . . . but I'd say over the last three or four years - since I had that job in advertising and got convinced of the inescapable patsyness of Western consumers - almost all the charm has leaked away. I resent shopping now. I resent the processes by which the clothes were made, transported, and then marketed to me. I resent being the victim of the market-driven vagaries of fashion (witness the fucking calvary* I had to go through to get a fucking pair of jeans with no fucking spandex in them). Clothes shopping sucks.

3. There's no other way I'm going to learn to sew unless I go this sort of sink-or-swim route. I've looked for dressmaking classes here and while it's not been completely goose-egg they're all too far away for me to honestly believe I'll take the trouble to go out for lessons once a week. I can hardly drag my sorry ass up to the prison every Wednesday for our tai chi sessions and that's a three-minute walk.

Last weekend was FINALLY the diapers for some peeps in Canada who are fit to erupt their babies (in the mail, Lamie). This weekend I'll be starting on underwear. Underwear for the F-word first - he has a hankering for some silk boxers and I figure he deserves no less. And then another pair of pants and a shoulder bag for a friend who's visiting at the end of the month, whose Tuesday birthday I have forgotten until this very moment. Shit. Why are so many people born in the fucking springtime? A different pants pattern than the ones I've used so far. The F-word needs some walking-around pants and the patterns I've hitherto used are definitely pyjama pants.

*You know what's neat about Calvary, Golgotha, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that Constantine built on top of it? It's a reclaimed temple to Aphrodite, supposedly ferreted out as both Jesus's death and burial place by Constantine's mum, Helena, despite not being anywhere close to where Jesus could have died and been buried according to the Bible. Constantine, remember, is the Roman emperor under whose rule Christianity really kicked off its transformation from a revolutionary lifestyle religion to a political weapon in the struggle to maintain an oppressive and lucrative status quo, and his mum Helena, remember, was his fucking mum; you're not going to get a more useful saint than that when you're trying to establish a new state religion. It was only 10 emperors and 50 years later that Theodosius went wholesale on the suppression of the temples and their replacement with churches. We saw a rather transparently hilarious example of Theodosius's work on our vacation in Syracuse this Christmas - the city's cathedral, seemingly hastily vomited up all over the temple of Minerva:


I sometimes hear of the Christianization of the temples and sacred sites described as some sort of evidence against Christianity (Jeebus never existed! He's a rehabilitated Mithras! etc.) - a very silly, non-apropos argument against a faith-based religion wherein it really doesn't matter if there's no proof of the man's existence and no proof of where he was born, alive, and expiring; the perfectly legitimate Christian retort to arguments like that is it really doesn't matter; I have faith. I think this is what makes the recent noisy dialogues between the faithful and vocal atheists so fucking annoying: to one group faith is great and to another faith isn't anything, so they're arguing with completely seperate rationalities, from different emotional bases, with the end result that each looks like a blithering, incomprehensible idiot to the other.

But what I do feel the Christianization of the temples indicates is that the same standard of people who were willing to wield disproportionate influence over pagan behaviour and profit from it in a very visible and material sense were (and are) also willing to control and profit from Christians - in a way that has very little to do with Christian morality, as the original writings set it out. Christians should be more careful. There are disgusting atrocities, grotesque power structures leaching off their love of God - gargoyles that they would probably find themselves too full of Christian love to support if they had a good grasp of the situation.

Chavs: the scurvy of the limeys

You know what I love? Celebrity gossip. Years ago I wrote about three entries in a blog that would examine celebrity gossip. Almost right away, once I started spending half an hour a day reading celebrity gossip, it made me want to sick. Not because of the celebrities, but because of the obsessively bourgeois preoccupations and yardsticks of the celebrity gossipers. Icky - icky in a way beyond, say, Jade Goody expiring of cancer in front of the camera, which honestly I didn’t think was all that icky; it’s not how I’d choose to expire of cancer, but I was never deprived of anything good as a child and our needs were certainly different . . . but icky in the sense of how celebrity gossipers so uniformly seemed to see the people they were gossiping about as subhuman in a very snobby, iper-pudique way.

That’s not why I dropped the blog (there was just no time for it); that prudery was so complicated and so fascinating that however much it made me want to sick, I still could have spent months looking it over and trying to pull it apart to understand it, because it was so mixed up with a sort of guiltless class-consciousness, capitalist envy, and unconscious but plainly visible feelings of inferiority from the gossipers, all at the same time.

Especially the English gossip. Its tension is different from American gossip’s, more overtly class-based. I have no idea who the people the poms are gossiping about are, because usually they’ve done much less in a professionally artistic sense than American gossip objects have – lots of Page 3 girls and footballer’s wives and reality television stars, whereas in America you usually have to be a singer or actor or something for people to care about you. Fantasy is still important in America - the fantasy that the aging Ciccone bint is Madonna, that sad old sack Terry Bollea is the Hulk, that fat dead narc Elvis, like Jeebus, fucking lives. There's something grimmer, more cynical in England - I'd say more realistic, but sometimes fantasy is more honest than decontextualized reality. Reality television has taken off in a different way there than in America, in a way that some commentators describe as a celebration of mediocrity (a bit rich coming from Paul McCartney, considering his seminal contributions to pop music over the past 30 years, but I'm shooting at clay pigeons with no Wings here so I'll stop.) I’m not trying to be cruel when I say that if their gossip is anything to go by, that's because the English have an obsession with useless people.

I believe this is because of their monarchy and aristocracy – the remnants of a bunch of gluttonous, arriviste armed thugs who burst in from Scandinavia, and then France, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, and then Germany, and monumentally enriched themselves at everyone else’s expense over more than a millenium now. And over the last few hundred years, serving absolutely no function for good or for ill except for being the sort of figureheads who help reinforce the status quo – which is a purpose I find profoundly useless when the status quo has been such shit. There's no real fantasy associated with monarchy or aristocracy, just a decontextualized reality - you don't think, I wish I was a princess because then I'd be a great singer or dancer or football player or actress or politician and I'd be so great everybody would love me - no. People wish they were princesses so that they would be princesses. For the same reasons English people wish they were reality stars - to be rich and famous and influential beyond their talents or intelligence. The difference being that the monarchy and aristocracy managed to enrich themselves and impoverish the other classes so entirely that they became the arbiters of taste instead of its challengers.

And the present breed of gluttonous English arrivistes, while managing to accrue multi-million pound fortunes, haven’t taken over to the degree that they can be the arbiters of taste; they’re very much a fucking taste challenge. They're 'chavs'. Chavs. What a word. You’re not allowed to say proles anymore because we're supposed to be living in some sort of post-Marxist world, and anyways they’ve got too much disposable income, even in that impoverished iniquitous shithole of a pseudo-European nation, to be proles in the way the bourgeois were educated to regard proles. So the bourgeois rename them chavs and don’t have to ask themselves hard questions about their place in the class conflict. They're just celebrity gossiping. About rich chavs. Not proles. No biggie. And all the while this profound fear and disgust and jealousy at the thought of yet more idle, useless barbarians taking over . . .

Actually, I can use the things it don't get, but let's skirt over that for the moment

The confrontationality that had been scheduled for Wednesday is now scheduled for this afternoon. I would have liked it to be before the vacation, because the interesting thing is there can't really be a bad outcome to all this, and I would have liked the time off to either celebrate or process what had happened . . . nervous today nonetheless though. Strange, isn't it? But I'm going to play with this idea that somebody else's fuckups can either be your problem, or theirs. In my case, the most obvious fuckup is that on paper I've got a promotion and big percentages worth of raises since I started working . . . the reality is I'm netting almost exactly a same a month as when I started, due to Belgian taxation laws.

I would be a lousy little worm if I let that be my problem, and the good thing about that is that money is something everybody understands. I can say 'I want to set my own hours, I want to live in a less crappy city, I want to work from home', and all of those things look magnificently concrete and sensible to me, and actually rather more important than money. But they remain subjective, since not everybody thinks about work or Brussels or home that way. However, 'I'm netting exactly what I was netting during my probationary period two years ago despite a promotion, big raises on paper, and record-setting inflation, to which my rent is indexed' is something objective - something anybody with a job anywhere could understand - because it's money.

Money. It's like a code - like a bunch of social symbols for energy - my analyst explained it to me in those terms once when I shuddered at the thought of spending my dead grandfather's legacy. 'This is his energy that he stored up as money and gave to you.' I think that's why our economic system is so obviously objectionable now - money isn't a symbol for effort anymore. A woman can work for thirty years, be informed her factory is closing down, and not even get her severance if she leaves for another job before her employers tell her to, while at the same time those assholes on top of the pile pull in huge bonuses and salaries. And of course I understand there are good reasons for those huge bonuses and salaries - that is, they're good if you accept the absolutely rotten and unproductive framework in which the reasons are good.

If I hadn't been a pinko before the rot started showing with a vengeance, I'd feel a lot stupider now. But let's all get over that and have a revolution. Anyways. Onwards and upwards.

No, seriously, now we're taking Berlin

We watched Battleship Potemkin last night. Just that sort of mood. Sometimes I can't emotionally commit to a film but just want to watch some sort of cultural document. But it turned out it was actually a film, even though it was silent and from 1925. The end made me cry. Goebbels loved it, apparently. He thought it could turn anyone Bolshevik who wasn't already strongly something else. Unsurprisingly it was banned in Nazi Germany; rather more surprisingly, it was also banned in the UK until 1954, at which point it was released with an X rating. A few chocolate-syrup blood scenes aside there's no gore, and there wasn't any move to ban other propaganda films like Triumph of the Will even at the height of the war, or, you know, that American one by Griffiths about how if you fully enfranchised black people they'd uncontrollably rape white women, the poor helpless dears, so I guess we know what that's about.

I wonder how much the working class still scares policy makers and property owners in the UK. Probably not much. The Labour party, who theoretically represented the working class, managed to sweep to a huge electoral victory after publicly castrating itself in the mid-nineties, and the public snobbery about the working class is amazing. But I guess that's the thing. The workers there don't have any impact on the means of production anymore because there are no means of production - they've all been exported, and the working class has turned into the service class. Just insecure retail or service jobs that don't mean a damn thing if you go on strike. It's pretty gross.

According to the Open Veins of Latin America, which I'm hoping to knock off on the plane tonight, because I just got The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson to read in tandem with A Social History of England by Trevelyan just to blow my mind (yes, I'm the world's biggest geek who doesn't understand math or computers) exporting industry wasn't always the British way; their constant push for free trade applied to primary resources for many years while the means of transformation stayed, aggressively, in England. Which was noticed by Ulysses Grant (sweet name) when his country opted to follow the same model for awhile:

For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.

But a point always comes where the workers just get too scary and where protection can no longer offer anything because you've managed to create a big enough consumer class, to the point that it's worth exporting production piecemeal to export-focused economies full of people who remember what it's like to be hungry. Leaving the UK a bit of a shell when it comes to production, and increasingly the US as well. People get so het up about European protectionism in the manufacturing industries, and there is a huge and easily mocked disconnect between what is legally committed to and what is actually done here in trade terms. But there's no doubt French people or people here get more say what their government and their employer do to their lives than do British people. Oh well. Time to get ready for Berlin.

I have confidence in free

Wow, the Open Veins of Latin America is so grim. Or rather what it describes is. I don't know if it was the translator or Galeano or what, but the way the bestiality of the colonial exploitation of Latin America is described is actually almost jokey. Sarcastically and angry, obviously, but it makes the grim reading somehow bearable nonetheless. Or maybe I'm just getting less squeamish about grim reading as I age and as my job forcibly informs me that life is grim so might as well read grim too. I don't know.

One thing I've enjoyed about the first third is his historical economic perspective - not just in the sense of how dreadful the sugar or coffee etc. monocultures, single-minded resource mining, were in the colonies themselves, but also why Spain and Portugal have always been such economic shitholes relative to other major European nations despite such riches being exploited in their overseas property. How they failed to encourage any sort of industrial means of production on their own territory, and how all that money therefore ended up in the pockets of industrially producing countries like the Netherlands and England. In the case of Portugal especially, the country failed to have any protectionism in their policies vis a vis England during the gold rush in Brazil - that lovely old free trade - which meant all the gold went to England, all the produce went to Portugal and Brazil. Which leaves Portugal, eventually, with no gold and lots of worn-out stuff, and England with gold and a working class whose consumer demands can sustain some sort of functioning economy.

It's been a question I've been asking myself for a long time - why are we so fond of free trade? Especially now, as it's costing us jobs as the units of production move to cheap labour countries; and in the beginning, as the lovely Ha-Joon Chang pointed out, the economically powerful countries protected their home industries furiously. And as silly as it sounds, until the last week or so it had never properly sunk in for me that we're so fond of it because we're English, or as North Americans we're culturally English (face it). And it has quite an auspicious history in our culture, that free trade. If you imagine the self-evidently wrong things people have a real spiritual faith in - like, that a man this criminally irresponsible and sociopathic has some authority that the Good Lord Herself gave him - then it makes absolute and perfect sense that the idea of free trade (accessing raw materials and selling finished goods our population had processed), which did make us much richer than most of our trade partners over centuries, would inspire an even more devout and widespread faith.

This is the thing, you know - at work and on the news I'm faced constantly with things that are obviously destructive, environmentally or socially - I'm faced with these incredible iniquities, and this incredibly badly functioning economic system. And I don't think it's because the people involved wish to do evil, or wish to act badly; I don't think they want to harm their fellow man, or harm their planet. I don't even think the prime motivation is to be much richer or much better than their fellow men, although that's there, and it's huge, the animal motivation to be more secure than anybody else . . . I think we're looking at faith in action, at the conviction that there's no other way. That not only that this way of organizing ourselves economically is the best, or the least worst, but that any other way of organizing ourselves economically would lead to a complete fucking disaster.

I think it's a very religious sentiment, or religious faith; that all the horrible things done to Latin American nationalist movements during the 'Cold War', for example, were okay for US policy makers and for US people (because it's not like all those dreadful things were secret) because they had a conviction, a faith that the alternative to an admittedly obviously higly exploitative economic model would have been so much worse. It's something that's been so difficult to argue with, and so many people in the US who did argue with it were condemned with a really religious fervour. There are so many rational arguments against the economic model, but framing the arguments rationally doesn't really match the spirit, I think, in which the economic model is supported. So what to do about that? Maybe it's already changing. I don't know. Latin America is going all lefty now and while there's a lot of bad noise in the media it doesn't sound like they're funding any more Contras.

Flushing a deep commie red

Yes, erm, marketing doesn’t work on me? I watch Benicio del Toro run around the jungle in Che for a few hours, and then suddenly read some of Guavera’s books within a fortnight, and now am stuck in to The Open Veins of Latin America.

I guess all this anti-imperialist literature is much more appealing to me when, instead of some whiny little Yankee Chomksyish 'Democracy Now!' east coast yaaaaaaaawn through the nose voice reading it in my head, there’s the sort of Spanish accent that doesn’t lisp (as they do tend to, here) and that does say things like ‘amorrrrrrrrr’ and 'it makes sex look like church.' I'm starting Spanish lessons after getting my driver's license and I cannot wait to talk like that. I will be so fucking sexy to myself.

The difficulty here, of course, is that I'll almost certainly have a Spanish Spanish teacher, and he or she may be a lispy fucker, and judgemental about my desire to speak like someone from the 'colonies,' as they do tend to think of the new world here, I'm told. No big deal that they think that way. The French and British haven't psychologically relinquished their past 'glories' either - can't expect too much of these European cultures that've peaked and crested - the only thing more shit-headedly ignorant than an invasive power past its prime is an invasive power in its prime. I'll just have to be true to my self and my sense of the sexiness of not lisping and trilling my 'r's, no matter what anachronistic colonialist claptrap is taught to me. 'Amorrrrrrr.' Hot.

My life is turning me into a Communist, I fear. My life, and the sexiness of new-world Hispanic accents. The marketing worked.The Open Veins of Latin America is very engagingly written, though. It would have to be, to get me to keep reading the historiographical equivalent of a snuff film. Poor Latin America. I'd be pissed off and nationalizing everything too.

There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon

Alright, fucking seriously: all this crap about companies getting government aid and then, gasp choke, funding parties or bonuses is getting fucking ridiculous. Let me make something clear that I've learnt through painful and tedious experience over the last three years: a lot of the people involved in a certain level of corporatism have social lives almost completely wrapped up in business events. Unless you count interactions with prostitutes and strippers, which is by no means a completely separate issue. Don't like it? Me neither! But you know what, a single little complete economic meltdown is not going to change that, no matter how angry it makes normal everyday assholes with functioning emotional lives feel. Do you think those fuckin' events are fun? Do you think it's emotionally satisfying for those fat fucks to drink inappropriately and then try to grope the nearest member of the under-represented female sex? But it's the best they've got. Don't take it away from them.

As for the bonuses . . . look, the numbers are opaque, but I have a feeling my company lost money in 2008. Nonetheless if I hadn't got my bonus after working me fingers to the bone all year, I would have screamed to high heaven. Okay, we're not talking seven digits after I oversee the greatest losses in my company's history. But bonuses are part of why people take jobs, and there's no fuckin' reason in the world why some middle-management asshole who busts her ass all year long to make whatever she's in charge of work properly shouldn't get the bonus she's been banking on just because some upper-echelon cunts have decided to equivocate or outright lie about the security of some fund package.

What I'm saying is the money for the parties and conferences and bonuses are drops in the fucking ocean, and what's more, legitimate drops, as far as the ocean is legitimate. There's a reason those drops are dripped. Advertising or marketing drops. HR drops. But they don't make sense to you? They make you angry? Well then, buddy, they're also Chinese water torture drops distracting you from the main fuckin' gushing cataract of an issue: the ideas of growth on which these companies and investment groups are based are completely fucking untenable for the likes of you and me.

We're squealing like dumbfuck little pigs now that things have gone bad, and taxpayer money is bailing out these quagmires, and company people are still giving themselves bonuses. But where were the squeals in the 'good times' when property investment groups were making money with their speculations - when professional couples had to take out 50-year mortgages at extortionate rates if they wanted to live in a decent house in a metropolitan region? Where were the squeals as people with average-to-'good' incomes were pushed out of our capital cities by galloping property prices, while thousands of speculative units stayed empty? Where were the squeals as university tuition shot up, forcing students to take out private loans, again at rates extortionate relative to their income, and then take the first dumbfuck job they could find after graduating so they could start servicing those loans, benefiting fucking no one except the bank's shareholders? Where were the squeals when Western governments stripped down public and private pension schemes, telling us to try our luck in the stock market with private retirement savings instead, thereby massively fuelling the overheated engine of our financial 'organization'?

Were we actually stupid enough to believe that the stock market was just going to get better forever so it was okay to give up the retirement benefits that the labouring classes had fought like devils for over more than a century, or were we just watching too much television to bother protesting? And when the stock market was turning in 12% returns for those of us who bet on the Asians, did we ever sit in our fucking Priuses planning our early retirement and reflecting on what that sort of investment in a series of overheated, under-regulated economies was doing to them socially and ecologically?

And where are the squealers now, when things are bad, and every government initiative to make things 'good' again focuses on rebuilding this shitty, shitty system? I'll tell you where the squealers are, whining themselves hoarse on the idea that everything sucks now because people who work at these companies and banks are greedy, and that the present meltdown has any fucking thing to do with conferences, parties, and bonuses - and not on the absolutely wrong-headed ideas of growth that come from publicly floated companies and from people's retirement savings being forced onto something as fucking bestially stupid, unstable and immoral as the stock market. I tell you it gets my fucking goat. Oh sorry, that's not my goat, it's John Kerry. My fucking mistake.

Smashy smashy

The only big problem with The Life of Charlotte Brontë is that now I want to read Shirley instead of moving on with my life and reading more Eliot or Hardy or something. Oh well. I'm not much of a one for biographies, but Brontë had such a strange life, and Gaskell did a fair job of putting that life in some sort of social and cultural context. She did a better job of being all Gaskell-y as she wrote (effervescent, perspective, though with a tendency to force sainthood on her objects of affection), and she was clever enough to lean heavily on letters; not only as source material but, in places, as the bulk of the text.

What dwells on my mind and what's pushing me to read Shirley is a growing curiosity about the specific social context Brontë and her sisters lived in. One can get swept up in the melodrama of their blockbusters and forget the general melodrama of their times, just as when you hit an Austen book you can get swept up in these narrow, sparsely-populated worlds the women live in, where the Napoleonic wars beating around their island only make vague appearances through the changes in fortune of their men.

But their vague historical contexts were so exciting, not so much from a war-ish point of view as in the flux hitting a rhythm of life that was about a thousand years old . . . Again in Austen it's all left indirect in favour of the development of individual characters. Nicely done all the same through their relationships of course, as in Pride and Prejudice, where every minute division in the privileged classes is mapped out carefully for us - we understand living on Cheapside is something to sneer at, that Elizabeth Bennett can marry Darcy without raising eyebrows beyond those of his aunt, whilst Wickham could marry her sister after an elopement while it was absolutely out of the question to tolerate his suit of Darcy's sister. We get the feeling things have changed over time but again, it's narrow; confined to the privileged classes and its bastards, hangers-on, and orphans.

Now the Luddites . . . there's something else altogether, and something far bigger and more important than which independently wealthy person was allowed to marry which other independently wealthy person (seriously, in Austen, the worst that was going to happen to those women if they didn't score rich husbands was moving to a small cottage or living with cousins - we only get glimpses of those less fortunate, who risk the real poverty that the vast majority of Austen's contemporaries risked). Most of what I know of Luddites is through one single explanation of a single concept that has stuck in my brain - the 'Luddite Fallacy'. That's the idea that increased mechanization or increased production efficiency would mean lower rates of employment. It is a fallacy, the thinking goes, because increases in production efficiency won't lead to the loss of jobs; instead of getting rid of employees, industrial concerns will use ever more employees to produce ever more stuff.

And here we are, nearly two hundred years after mechanization: we can consider the 'Luddite Fallacy' fallacious (sounds dirty!), because if there's one thing we produce a lot of, it's stuff. Far too much stuff. The production of ever more stuff has not abated. We're drowning in stuff and the oceans we once thought infinite are choking with stuff and all of that stuff is produced by a staggering number of people working. That's another story.

Fine - but I think the 'Luddite Fallacy' is one of those half-truths that are worse than a lie. Think of England, poor, fucked up England, where all of my industrial contacts are trying to pull the plug because it's a mess. We see people having jobs, yes - but incredibly crap, incredibly tenuous unskilled jobs in parts of the service sector that are the first to feel the pain when consumers start to worry. We see the benefit of stuff in their professional lives, that great surfeit of stuff with which we're polluting the world: it provides the Inselaffen jobs by having them sell it, not manufacture it. And then we see the Luddite Fallacy isn't a fallacy, but a half-arsed equivocation by the people who use the term.

Sure, English people are employed (though dramatically less so these days), but one kind of employment is not another, and there's nothing more replaceable or sackable than your standard service worker. What would happen if all the sweatshops servicing retailers like the Gap somehow managed to find out where each other was, and hold a co-ordinated strike? Fucking chaos - and they'd get what they wanted. But what would happen if all the salespeople at the Gap went on strike? A bunch of salespeople would get fired and replaced by a bunch of 18 year olds who want staff discounts. Maybe for a couple of days the shirts wouldn't be as nicely folded. Oh noes.

So the question for me: was the mechanization process that began two hundred years ago the beginning of the slow castration of the unprivileged classes in Britain? One part of my brain says no, of course not, the mechanization process turned the unprivileged classes into the working class, and the working class became a political force, and functioned as such until its balls were cut off in the 1970's. Another part of my brain says yes, of course, because mechanization ended the need for artisanal, skilled labourers, which meant you could send the machines to a country full of desperate people who you could bully into dropping tariffs and environmental/labour standards. Of course you'd be a fool not to. But the upshot is I don't know which part of my brain is right, or if neither is right.

And I want to, I want to know far more about how all this happened, and why the country of my mothers - my country, I suppose, though I'm a second-class citizen - is such a shithole now. All of which brings me back to Shirley - I need to know how a thoughtful, gentle and dreadfully conventional woman (as the Life has shown Brontë to be) wrote about the Luddites - how she presented them to her huge fan base down south - how she reconciled the misery of the working class in the West Riding with her need for political and religious continuity. And once it gets personal enough for me, I'm wading into the Luddites.

Marchons, marchons qu'un programme economique impur abreuve nos sillons

Longtime readers of this blog know that I'm a bit of a francophobe. I challenge anyone to spend three years working and studying in Paris without following suit. Since I moved away and started visiting France bit by bit - especially Marseille, where people were beautifully kind - on a rational level I know that Paris is not France, and France in general is a lovely country full of lovely people. On an emotional level - because of that time in Paris, France is a just a big rat-infested city full of snotty assholes who think they're clever because they know a lot but who can't analyze or synthesize their way out of a stubby paper bag. I'm trying to get over that. A few more trips to Marseille would help.

Anyways, emotionally revolted as I am by the French, one thing I will say about them: at least they're not a bunch of snivelling baby pansy-ass motherfuckers who are content to be swept into pauper's graves by the overwhelming tides of history, modern Anglo-Saxon style. "€36bn for the bankers and we get screwed" indeed. Yesterday as I read up on the strike I was sort of passingly impressed by the demands of the unions and bodies staging the strikes and demonstrations - in that it wasn't just a demand for social support, but for business support, in a real concerted effort to make sure labourers, who hadn't contributed to the economic crisis (not even indirectly through their retirement funds in France, as pensions still function as pensions there - they haven't been basculated into throwing all their scrimpings and savings into the stock market through mutual funds, like Ango-Saxons have), aren't the ones who pay for it.

But this morning I was extra-impressed by way of comparison when I read this in the Independent, a 'leftish' British paper, which treated the demonstrators, and the other much more serious and desperate demonstrators in southern Europe and the new EU entrant countries, as recalcitrant, incoherent children complicating an already complicated situation. Honestly, it makes me want to vomit. Let me put it like this: there's a reason that I, a British citizen, chose to work in Belgium, and looked for jobs in France, Germany, anywhere in northern Europe, basically, besides Britain. And it wasn't because I was anxious to fight with banks and utility companies in a language that isn't my first - that was just a fringe benefit. It was because the standard of life in Britain is absolute shit compared to the rest of northern Europe. Job security sucks, benefits suck, public services suck, the cost of living and average salaries are wildly unbalanced, and only rich people can afford to live close to their offices if they work in London; it has execrable wealth distribution even among normalish people.

And there's one reason for this: northern European governments get kept on their toes by their people. Elections don't come frequently enough to communicate effectively with them that way, and northern Europeans know you have to hit the streets when they do something that's not in the people's interest between-times. It's not rocket science - it's the purpose of public sector strike, the purpose of a demonstration: to act against the government in a way that isn't illegal when the government is acting against you in a way that isn't prosecutable. But not in Britain anymore, it seems, and hence their awful quality of life. I wonder why. I think it's because the Thatcher years saw the media managed so well during the strikes in the early 80's - really managed to present the strikers as Britain's problem, rather than the symptom of Britain's problem - and the media is still playing the game even today. That's what happens with you let Rupert Murdoch in. A national assfucking.

Provided that he or she gives notice or pays compensation as prescribed by FUCKING CIVILISED law

Hungover after celebrating San Francisca’s dismissal with her briefly but efficiently on my way home last night. She’s ecstatic - she's been working here more than five years, which means she gets half a year's severance pay instead of the standard three months, and the timing couldn't have been better in terms of her family's move to Amsterdam. Not to mention she’s feeling as though she’s dodged a bullet, having turned down a transfer back to San Francisco a few months back, which would have seen her get handed a box and a fortnight’s pay, instead of half a year, minimum, upwards-ly negotiable . . . Unworthy as it is, I'm having to deal with jealousy issues where she's concerned, not to mention upset because I'm going to miss her so much, but I'm trying to just focus on being happy for her.

I feel a bit sad in an abstract sense* about all the Americans who got canned, though. Here's a box and two weeks pay, merry Christmas, fuck off now. I don't know how Americans, or Canadians for that matter, can bear it . . . those are some of the worst labour laws in the eurocentric world, in a couple of countries that pride themselves on being the best in the eurocentric world, with that sort of ‘we rock, you suck’ nationalism. And now here we are in this crumbling economic edifice we call the 2008 financial year, and thousands of North Americans are learning the hard way that their political and employment structures don't give a shit . . . they can watch middle class assholes who bought more house than they could afford get mortgage holidays so that whole neighbourhoods don’t run to seed and erode general property values, while the unemployed queue at overstretched soup kitchens. If this all gets as bad as I fear it will it’s going to be really dreadful, and the Marxist lizard part of my brain says ‘about fucking time’. I don't know how long I'll still be able to keep hearing that if this downturn touches my friends and family harder than it has, but something has to give, as they say, and people have to see how powerless they are to get their power back.

*BTW, I say 'abstract sense' because out of the nine Americans who got canned, I only knew two personally, and one probably needed canning, and the other apparently did too, despite being a piece of ass. Ho hum.