Ornaments Off The Tree

Gild Me Gold

2008-09-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

The Signature Grand bills itself a "catering mansion," a multi-room convention hall, decked out in the "opulence" of faux-marble, hacknied Rococo paintings, and dim lighting providing an air of priveledge that reminds me more that the place is possibly haunted. I used to go there every weekend in high school, putting thousands of chair covers and bows onto dining rooms for weddings and corporate events and bar mitzvahs. I never understood why people would want to go there. It's struggle to be a mansion -- think Flagler museum, railroad tycoons, fantasies of European aristocracy, and your cheating young cunt trophy wife, the American dream -- is so gaudy, it comes off as fantastical as a Disney world attraction. Maybe that's the glimmer for people.

I went here, for the first time in 5 years, for a job fair yesterday.

Job fairs are typically the most depressing events in the world and this was no different. You could see the wear on many of the 30something and 40somethings' faces: cracked veins, dry hair, a tightness in the mouth that cannot believe they have to stoop to this, at their ages, that security has not yet found them. The overeager 18-21 group, some fresh out of high school, some fresh out of college, is just depressing. They dress impecabbly well: suits straight as a razor; faces shaved closer than the day they were born; bounces in their walk. And the sales reps recruiting new employees cut into them quicker than anyone, promising commissions of "60 grand" in your first year. A total fucking lie.

I feel I can't really write what a sales job is like for anyone to understand it. You truly have to go through it, the sweatshop-style telemarketing, the slurs, the constant quest for your quota, the sleeplisness if you really do need to keep the job. The sharks who put these kids in their teeth dump them shortly when the impossibility and dispensibility of the industry rears its head and these same kids will be at the next job fair, the one I'm at now as a 23 year old unemployed, college-graduate with a creative writing degree who will go to a Barnes and Noble afterwards and write:

"Can you tell I see skies, their magnificent
sunsets, impressionistic stylings of Monet,
and can only think of cisterns
eating coal never afforded the time
to diamond?"

Negativity everywhere. And a government bailout puts fuel on the fire of my rage.

According to Bloomberg.com:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley may be among the biggest beneficiaries of the $700 billion U.S. plan to buy assets from financial companies while many banks see limited aid, according to Bank of America Corp.

Henry Paulson, the richest member of the Bush Administration, the Treasury Secretary who is the namesake of the Paulson bill, ran these organizations.

RawStory:

Goldman made sizable profits in 2007 from the subprime mortgage sector. It, along with Morgan Stanley, has fared better than investment houses Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, because it has held a more conservative capital base.

We reward people who profited, with our tax dollars, tremendously by essentially lying people into horrible mortgages, and then when we want to get more loans from these people we will be charged interest on our own money: double taxation. We're socializing these banks, for private benefit essentially, as much of the debate about the Paulson bill coming from the Democratic Congress is a cap on these executives salaries. The whole thing reeks of Mark Twain and the Gilded Age.

The best part about the debacle and its continuing debate is whether to blame people who took out loans that they could not afford. The check and balance of a bank asking for your credit score, your income, your job security was not part of the standard operating procedure of this bubble. Since the 1990's there has been tremendous pressure from government and higher ups in banking to put low-income people in homes at all costs, to boost the prices of the housing market, to collect interest, for groundlings in the banking industry to write mortgages with no questions asked, with no money down, to recapture that loss with adjustable rate mortgages.

To blame the people who were told not to worry about their mortgages that they could not afford is a disservice to the intelligence of these people who sought to better themselves. I make the analogy: you slip and fall at your workplace; you go to a lawyer who knows about workplace injury; he represents you in the context of the law, in the context of what you can get as a return to your workplace providing an unsafe place for you. The bank is supposed to represent your interest for the collective good. People shouldn't be slipping and falling at work, but they shouldn't be profiting when there is no cause for stupid error.

Unfortunately, it became the bank's job to represent your case by arguing for the wet floor, instead of against it. If you really want to stimulate the economy, forgive all student loans, all mortgage loans, and watch this consumer industry buy millions of iPods, designer bags, and other fancy gadgets.

It'll keep me from writing like this:

"I walk near the bargain shelf
books stacked high off the floor
and want to roll tucked tight into my belly
over the titles, the edges of hardcovers
sharp on my face.

To continue this self-loathing is not good for my complexion."

Day Off

2008-09-21T16:36:00.000-07:00

i was lying on the grass on sunday morning of last week
indulging in my self defeats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOCRPrEAVxU

Kublah Khan and Rush

2008-09-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal, while stereotypically appearing in popular culture as the companion to morning coffee for vicious self-promoters and vampiric yuppies, actually enjoys a diverse array of clashing political ideology. On immigration, its editorial page calls for open borders for both goods and people; on national security the Journal is squarely neoconservative, supporting Gitmo, the war in Iraq, and Israeli aggression; on the environment, it publishes scientists skeptical of global warming. Opposing what appears to be mostly conservative editorial content, the Journal surprises researchers on media bias when Tim Groseclose of the University of California, Los Angeles and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri, stated that:

One surprise is the Wall Street Journal, which we find as the most liberal of all 20 news outlets [studied]. We should first remind readers that this estimate (as well as all other newspaper estimates) refers only to the news of the Wall Street Journal; we omitted all data that came from its editorial page. If we included data from the editorial page, surely it would appear more conservative. Second, some anecdotal evidence agrees with our result. For instance, Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid (2001) note that "The Journal has had a long-standing separation between its conservative editorial pages and its liberal news pages." Paul Sperry, in an article titled the "Myth of the Conservative Wall Street Journal", notes that the news division of the Journal sometimes calls the editorial division "Nazis." "Fact is", Sperry writes, "the Journal's news and editorial departments are as politically polarized as North and South Korea."

This study was conducted in 2004 before the buyout by News Corp.

And the Journal continued its rightward lean in the editorial box with what is a laughable, albeit unpublishable op-ed from Rush Limbaugh, "Obama is Stoking Racial Antagonism."

Limbaugh fires that Obama, like "the segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s . . . fear monger" by quoting "out-of-context lines" from the radio personality. Two ads aimed at the Latin community charge that McCain and friends on the right like Limbaugh "lie just to get our vote."

The ads then quote Limbaugh as saying of the Latin community that they are ". . . stupid and unskilled Mexicans" and should "shut [their] mouth or . . . get out!"

I feel like it'd be a waste of time to cite all the times that Limbaugh fear mongers through racially insensitive language (ESPN controversy, hard line against illegal immigration, etc.); it'd be a waste of time to cite his hard line against feminism ("Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society," he says); it'd really be a waste of time to do anything but cite the out-of-context quotes he leaves in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which were supposed to support his argument.

He says:

"If you are unskilled and uneducated, your job is going south. Skilled workers, educated people are going to do fine 'cause those are the kinds of jobs Nafta is going to create. If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people, I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do -- let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work."

"Parody" meant to demean "protectionists . . . criticising Nafta," he says. "Which is obvious."

His second sound bite that he supports through in-context quotation:

"And another thing: You don't have the right to protest. You're allowed no demonstrations, no foreign flag waving, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. You're a foreigner: shut your mouth or get out! And if you come here illegally, you're going to jail."

Not only does this man think that people must be citizens of a country to enjoy participation in debate about their human rights, their right to travel across artificial borders won by conquest in the "pursuit of happiness," like our Declaration of Independence so aptly reads, he believes people can only enjoy a right to participation through laws crafted by agents of power, that borders are real, that citizenship is a gauge of a human's ability to act.

Think, for a second, that a boat of Jews escaping Nazi Germany had come to this country illegally. They worked hard in kitchens, and decided to finally get together and protest the United States' business elite's relationship with Hitler. According to Limbaugh, they'd be in the wrong and should go back to their country to starve and die.

Nafta forced many Mexican workers to leave their homeland due to rampant unemployment and find exploitive work in the States to support their families. Limbaugh's quotations put hateful words in the mouths of critics who forsaw exploitation of both American and Mexican citizens and he passed it off as parody. Beyond that, his very own quotations that supposedly support himself as someone who is not racist, paint a man who believe that borders define racial identity and dictate the right to free speech.

Childish arguments and the use of quotations that point to Limbaugh's disdain of Mexicans...publish it, the Wall Street Journal says.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree” (1-2). The end of the third paragraph gives us another close-up view of Kubla. At his home Kublai had, on hand, some ten thousand horses, which he used as a means of displaying his power. Only he and those to whom he gave explicit permission (for committing miscellaneous acts of valour) were allowed to drink their milk. Hence the closing image of “the milk of Paradise.”

UPDATE: The (Not So) Noise of Revolution

2008-09-19T04:31:00.000-07:00

Anonymous, the debately hackactivist group I covered yesterday, had no involvement with the hacking of Sarah Palin's email. Instead, the culprit may have been a frequent visitor of the "/b/" board, or "random" image board on 4chan.org, which is a meeting place for intricate inside jokes and black comedy. Gawker.com's Nick Douglas offers a hilarious summarization of those who troll the deep recesses of the if-you-have-to-ask-you'll-never-know internetspeak group:

A subset of 4chan, technically a "random image board," where completely anonymous — no login, no username — people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other. Encyclopedia Dramatica calls it the asshole of the Internet. It's where LOLcats started as the edgier, funnier Caturdays, in which photos of cats (particularly on Saturday) were posted and captioned with forumspeak, which degenerated into the LOLspeak you now think is so clever.

Customs on /b/ include posts promising photos of personal degradation in return for certain kinds of porn or other helpful information; sarcastically asking for advice on teen romance; sarcastically asking/telling anything; pretending to have insider info or be privy to breaking news; posting image puzzles; and raiding other people's sites.

/b/ has no rules; pretty much the only thing guaranteed to get a user banned is child porn, and even that gets constantly joked about. Reading /b/ will melt your brain, but sometimes you need that. It's like how I can't start a rough draft without a beer, but the analogy works better with heroin mixed with fiberglass.

/b/ is the internet hipster, a conglomeration of multiple sarcastic identities, trying to impress by feigning distraction with a tongue-in-cheek. The only difference between a real hipster and an internet hipster is the real hipster gets to fuck the girl in American Apparel tights, while the internet hipster gets to humilate for a picture of Sasha Grey with a dick in her ass.

And the internet hipster allegedly responsible for the Palin Yahoo account breach: "Rubico," who apparerntly offered a first-person account of the action on the /b/ board:

Rubico allegedly became interested in Palin's e-mail after reading media reports of her using a Yahoo Mail account. He decided to try to access it by resetting her password. "It took seriously 45 minutes on Wikipedia and Google to find the info [needed]," Rubico claimed. "Birthday? 15 seconds on Wikipedia. ZIP code? Well, she had always been from Wasilla, [Alaska], and it only has two ZIP codes (thanks, online postal service!)."
Rubico said it was harder to find the answer to one of the other questions needed for a password recovery: Where had Palin met her husband? After some digging, Rubico determined that the couple first met at Wasilla High School.
He said he used the information to reset Palin's password and go through her e-mail to see for anything incriminating that might "derail her campaign."

According to the characterization of antics on the /b/ board, this entire testimonial should be taken with a grain of salt; Rubico's responsibility could be just another inside joke, or a false media flag.

What's odd is the utter stupidity the supposed hacker exhibits by acting in such a public way:

It was only after finding nothing that the hacker realized how easily he could be caught, since he had used only one proxy to access the account. So he decided to make access to it available to others on the /b/ board by posting Palin's recently reset password. Rubico claimed that he "then promptly deleted everything and unplugged my Internet and just sat there in a comatose state."
However, one of the other members of the bulletin board whom Rubico described as a "White knight f...," saw the thread and used the new password to go back into Palin's account and reset it. That person then sent an e-mail to a "friend of Palin's" informing her of the new password and what had happened, Rubico claimed.

The action is even unplausible. Security researchers offer their skepticism:

"The whole password reset sounds dubious," said Paul Ferguson, a network architect at antivirus vendor Trend Micro Inc. "Yahoo sends a password reset to a secondary e-mail account, so it sounds far-fetched to me that it would be that easy."

Whoever is responsible, and for however stupid or genius the tactics could prove, what strikes as interesting is the insistence that the breach was political: the objective was to "derail her campaign" after hearing that she had a yahoo account. Whether the hacker knew about the ramifications of Palin possibly avoiding public records requests through private email accounts is not known, but the action was still politically motivated.

The direct action has been wildly successful in stealing national attention. Where it fails is, like I said yesterday, no entirely incriminating evidence could be found, even though:

the leaked messages was one between Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, and Alaska's current Lt. Gov., Sean Parnell, who is running for the state's lone congressional seat, and another with a former private investigator that Palin appointed to the Governor's Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in October 2007.

Much of right-wing media is playing the "Poor Palin-Card," wondering why someone would want to attack this woman. Well, people are tired of Bush-esque espionage on U.S. citizens. A government who participates in that sort of behavior should expect this.

And they do.

Unfortunately, it's a government based on preemption, a Bush Doctrine of attack-them-before-they-attack-you, a betrayal of innocent until proven guilty.

And that is something I tried to communicate within my post yesterday. The changing climate of government surveillance, of threats to net-neutrality, of constant assaults on free access, public records, and media deems many of these actions appopriate.

It's unfortunate that debate had to manifest itself with internet hipsters. In any case, internet activists should take this action as a clarion call, however muddled it currently is, to the power their actions can provoke.

This is the Noise of Revolution -- Anonymous Party Program

2008-09-18T03:49:00.000-07:00

Moral outrage brimmed over the edge of the news day last night when television pundits finally began reporting that Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account had been hacked by the shadowy "Anonymous," an internet hacktivist group organized much like the Animal Liberation Front, utlizing leaderless resistance in which the lack of a visible hierarchal structure is replaced by like-minded individuals contributing to the group autonomously to avoid detection by authorities.

Anonymous is popular for its ongoing campaign against the Church of Scientology. In what first appeared to be a joke with its introduction to the mainstream through a cheeky youtube video, the group quickly went on to attack and expose an organization accused of fraud, murder, and censorship. Utilizing typical hacktivist strategies such as denial-of-service attacks, digg.com bumping of articles critical of Scientology, google bombing, and baiting suspected pedophiles, the group is special for going a step further from typical hacktivists and enjoys the activities of traditional activists: masked direct actions throughout the world, sometimes attracting as many as 300 participants, as well as leaking hacked materials to the mainstream media, such as the Tom Cruise Scientology video.

The hacking of Sarah Palin's yahoo account came at a critical time, as the former governor is accused of conducting government business on a private account so as to avoid government transparency mechanisms. While Anonymous did not find too much in regards to incriminating evidence -- it appears the hackers were unexperienced and could not quickly take snapshots of all her emails -- this does appear to be one of the most effective means of conducting direct action in a post-Battle of Seattle climate.

With Department of Homeland Security's militarization of local police forces a la 2004's FTAA protests in Miami and the most recent bloated budets of over $50 million for each respective national convention, adapted means of attack on authority are welcome to expose hypocrisy and assaults on democracy.

The media's disdain and clamoring that Sarah Palin's account had been compromised is especially funny. The likes of Fox and Friends and Greta Van Sustren play dumb by pretending to not understand why someone would want to do such a thing. Beyond the obvious of finding whether Palin is avoiding detection of illegal government dealings through private email -- something these reporters no doubt are familiar with -- the assault can be seen as a reaction to post-9/11 illegal wiretapping, telecom immunity, and unbridled email surveillance of American citizens.

It could be unfortunate that more time could not be put into the hack of Palin's account, so as to take screenshots of all the emails, to learn whether Palin was in fact breaking the law. As a result of the action, Palin's account was deleted and all easily accessible evidence of the account could possibly have vanished with it.

One thing is clear: the shadowy-ness of government backrooms open up through a digital world when any system can be breached by groups of talented hackers. The tactics government have used on its citizens are now being subverting and used by people clamoring for transparency and an adherance to civil rights.

They say telecom immunity, we say democracy. The is the new noise! Anonymous party program!

Mansfield of Dreams

2008-09-17T05:47:00.000-07:00

While Forbes magazine is no darling, serving an audience with the motto "The Capitalist Tool," they recently swung its "Phallic Tool" and sought a return to archaic Reagan-era debates about feminism and identity politics with Harvey Mansfield's commentary "Was Feminism Necessary?" on forbes.com.

Harvey Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard and author of Manliness, a book that attacks a society that deems the English language as "gender-neutral, and manliness, the quality of one gender, or rather, of one sex, seems to describe the essence of the enemy we are [falsely] attacking, the evil we are [falsely] eradicating."

Harvey Mansfield is not stupid. Harvard has exposed Mansfield to the same critical theory I have been exposed to, even if my education came from a chintzy state school in Central Florida. Cixious, Jacques Derrida, bell hooks, and Judith Butler are names a Harvard professor would run into at least once in his life and to posit that "manliness" is something that can be defined in solid terms as more than a socialization of language -- something so fragile, as evidenced by groups constantly struggling to retool dominate definitions to fit their own political purposes i.e. "nigger," "bitch," etc. -- is illusory and he knows better.

Mansfield attacks feminists Betty Freidan, Simone de Bearvoir, and Germaine Greer for taking the same tactic of retooling roles of subordination through language excercise and an understanding of the socialization of dominate hierarchies. While Mansfield does point to modern scientific studies that I do not doubt support his thesis that innate biological realities might influence gender identity and gender role, his research bloats with arguments for capitalist domination.

Mansfield says feminists drew from Marx that manliness meant economic exploitation, and that Nietschche's understanding of an illusory, socialized self taught them to be nihilists. This is a connection that explains that unless societies partake in a vicious grab for resources and a masculine monopolization of production, society would be at a standstill. Manliness, according to Mansfield, is something women can enjoy, like Margaret Thatcher, and is shared by ALL men for their "confidence in a situation of risk, like danger, or when [their] authority is contested." Manliness is a conquistador.

Mansfield's reactionary argument for manliness insults feminists as irrational, hopeless academics who do not know how to tool an economy and ignores women's struggles. The entire feminist argument hinged on life and death matters of rape, access to safe abortion, and domestic violence, as well as economic equality in the argument of equal pay for equal work. Instead of having autonomy and free choice through the deconstructing of your identity, Mansfield believes women in a perfect society should work 1/3 of the time and be at home 2/3 of the time -- vice versa for men. These authoritarian arguments can be shown on the hilarious Colbert Report interview where Mansfield just ain't jokin'.

And now we move to Forbes.com's article, "Was Feminism Necessary?".

The article's motivation is Sarah Palin, whose "performance at the Republican Convention . . . [had the] force of a man and grace of a woman." Palin, according to Mansfield, has no characteristics of the typical feminist because "she spoke proudly of '[her] guy,' grateful to the man who was hers--implying that she needed him, and that any woman needs a guy of her own."

Not only is this wildy homophobic, it also casts feminists as women who hate monogamy and marriage, as women who don't "know what it is to be a woman and enjoy it."

When Mansfield is not trumpeting homophobia and charging that feminists have no attractive value -- "You may be sure that I am not the first one to notice that feminist women are unerotic," he says -- he uses Palin for his own "Manliness" crusade to promote Palin as someone who owes nothing to the feminist movement because, like a Margaret Thatcher-type, "claim[ed] her equal opportunity to a job once held exclusively by men" through conquest, and the avoidance of typical "radical" feminist "adventurism."

What is radical feminist adventurism? According to Mansfield, feminists typically ignore career-oriented equality in favor of Simone de Beuavoir's retooling of female sex drives to show equality to men by "becoming as predatory as the most wolfish man." Mansfield sees this as the need for "fallback assistance of ready abortion in case something should go wrong" and led to a destruction of conventions of marriage -- "single parent families gained respectability" and women conquered the day by choosing to divorce the husbands who no longer whet their appetite and abortions were readily available after fuck fest after fuck fest.

Mansfield fails to see how feminists created room for more women to enter the workforce and demand equal opportunity and pay (something that still does not exist) and that feminism, in all its culmination of waves represents choice. If a woman wants to stick to second wave feminism and retool themselves with 80's-style shoulderpads and pantssuits and perceived frigidity, so be it; if a woman wants to look like Sarah Palin, or a riotgrrl with a miniskirt and a telecaster, or Ally McBeal showing leg and the drive to be a partner but also understands the freedom of choice in sexual endeavors and desires, so be it.

Mansfield's view of feminism is not about economic and job-oriented equality; it is about sexual choice that is a threat to the standard conventions of family, something Sarah Palin betrays with her stand-by-your-man,-raise-five-children,-and-hate-abortion styling.

And that is why feminists should not praise Sarah Palin with Mansfield's argument. The path of Sarah Palin's rise to a potential vice president is trailed by the blood of women, of radical feminists, who fought for equality of choice. Palin made her choices of the lifestyle she has wanted to live, and hopefully, they were choices that underwent the critique of her socializations so she could make as clear a choice as possible.

But when Palin acts with the same authoritarianism of some of her male counterparts by wanting to legislate that even in cases of rape, incest, and health abortion is off the table, one cannot say that feminists should thank her for the supposed equality she represents.

Feminists should not thank her for never commenting on equity pay, or leaving Alaska as one of the most dangerous places for women because of high amounts of sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence and murder.

Feminist should not thank her for the city of Wasilla billing sexual assault victims and their insurance companies for the cost of rape kits and forensic examinations.

Feminists should not thank her for her insistence on abstinence only education.

Feminists should not thank her. And Mansfield should sleep well at night, counting all the money Forbes has given him to write such an offensive article.

Generation Farce

2008-09-16T05:20:00.001-07:00

The saying history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, could not be more aptly correct at this juncture in the economy and college graduates are the butt of the joke. The recovery of the Savings and Loan crisis in the mid-90s, the dot.com bubble, and now our parents' post-9/11 adjustable rate mortgages and their promise to flip houses has some leftover economic treasures, and it's no longer egregious profit. It's all the garbage Millennial kids have lying around their homes: an assortment of iMacintosh products, cut clothing, and boxy cars still bouncing with the breakbeats of their flashy advertisements.

Our thrift shop authenticity and our Wayfaring ventures into the Sunglass Hut are just as ironic as the winks we give our eighties new-wave revival, our Girl Talk mashups, but it seems to me anyway, that the conversations at the Heroin Chic district clubs are straying from aloof who's-dating-who, who's-listening-to-what banter and moving towards our first glimpse of realism with our who's-working-where, who's-living-at-home surveying.

But something odd is out there. With one bubble bursting nearly simultaneously -- the dot.com bubble and the housing market -- the huge swaths of wealth and comfort created weren't quick to disappear. We all still look good, as if it's 2002 and Interpol is just teaching us to be paranoid about post-9/11 urban insecurity while looking unaffected in our suits.

We're living on someone's credit -- who I don't know.

I'm speaking generally, of course, of my peers: most Millennial children born just on the close of Generation X. People's whose parents, like mine, could never afford to own several homes to flip. We're suburban white kids whose lower-middle class parents somehow appropriated baby boomer dreams through lying and cheating and credit and pulled off living beyond their means in a middle-to-upper middle class community, surrounded by people with means to invest. For many people in my community, these privileged people became the lifeblood for home businesses entrepreneurs: landscapers, pool companies, interior designers, party planners, web developers, and graphic designers.

My father's home business started after the dot.com bust when he was laid off and lost his 401k. InnerConx, Inc. enjoyed the Web 2.0 surge, and the housing market helped create the means for people to reinvest and begin advertising new ventures. Now, like my father's, many home businesses have not completely disappeared -- they're readjusting in a market living off credit, the next bubble to burst. People don't pay on time; old contracts leave and go to struggling friends at a cheaper price; investments are held off during a longer summer.

And my baby boomer parents and mid-career Gen X'er friends are too proud to return to a life of cogdom, and the holdout on their lifestyle through credit, loans, and overwork at the home business informed my particular brand of Millennial sensibility.

To call people born between 1982 and 1988 Millennial seems a disservice, though. Many of my elementary years saw the switchover from analog to digital, from the Real World San Francisco dealing with HIV and unemployment to Real World Las Vegas dealing with reality television and stardom through drunken privilege. We blend both DIY ethic and romanticized 80's yuppie-dom, wanting so much to work a job that means something, but to have the salary of someone who is in an office away from our cubicle. We believe in paying our dues by trudging through houses one step from being a squat, but demand a quick out anytime we get tired of our experiment by moving to a condo with a washer-dryer. We should be dubbed Generation ElaXstic, a play on elastic, because we aren't as vapid as our Millennial counterparts who appear to me, to have no gauge on paying one's dues, even as simulated as my generation's due-paying is for the troves of us living in gentrified Williamsburg, Wicker Park, or Capitol Hill.

Generation Farce would be just as apt. Wikipedia:

A farce is a comedy written for the stage or film which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include sexual innuendo and word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases, culminating in an ending which often involves an elaborate chase scene. Farce is also characterized by physical humour, the use of deliberate absurdity or nonsense, and broadly stylized performances.

Do I really need to point to a weekend at Poplife to show the simulation of wealth? Zach Galifianakis and his views on the most independent movie ever made? The entire idea behind the MacBook: an advertising ploy of success for irrelevant graphic designers and nu-goatee wearing coffee drinkers?

The elaborate chase scene is what I think best defines us. The first victims of recessions are college graduates. But our race sees a crowded track -- as Lisa Chamberlain says in "Slackonomics," where many themes are borrowed from heavily in this blogpost -- we've got mid-career Gen X'ers who lost financial "traction" in the dot.com bust and now the housing crisis.

Two solutions look upon us: a radical redistribution of federal money away from war and corporate bailouts which is as realistic as Lindsey Lohan waking up a cup size smaller, or another Greenspan-esque bubble.

With all our leftover wares, we're ornaments off the tree, flickering in the glow of Christmas until the season is over and we're packed away into attics. The coming season looks bleak, and it appears we're all waiting for another bubble, so we can enjoy the flashing lights a little longer. A fucking farce, indeed.

Agents of Status Quo Write Research Papers in England

2008-09-15T04:42:00.000-07:00

Interesting article out of The Guardian concerning voter cynicism and voter turnout:

Cynicism may now represent one of the greatest threats to democracy, according to a research project at the London School of Economics.
Findings indicate that people are more cynical about politics than anything else, and that cynicism is a more important factor than distrust when it comes to whether people vote. Those who think politicians are liars will probably continue to vote, whereas those who are contemptuous of them are less likely to do so.

Far-reaching, albeit dangerous, ramifications emerge from this study. And it isn't the first study to come out like this in recent years.

Much of the debate about voter cynicism has been framed in regards to the youth bloc. A study asked whether "Jon Stewart's Daily Show" was healthy for the political process because it satirizes political and media trickery and hackery to such a level that it deems them unable to perform properly under the influence of corporate monopoly, the power of simulating wedge debates, and a do-nothingness about issues such as the war, the economy, the environment, and immigration that Americans want to see substantial change in.

The real study of cynicism should be who creates it, and the American Politics Research paper "“The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth" missed the point by ignoring the source of the Daily Show's rage: the politicians, the media, and (like the good postmodernist I am) words.

This is where the London School of Economics' research project comes in:

What if politicians could measure the impact that their buzz words were having on the cynicism levels of different groups? The Syntony Research Team at the LSE is trying to develop a 'Cyndex' - a cynicism index. It would measure the emotional responses of cynics according to their age, race, religion, gender and socio-economic backgrounds - from mild frustration to violent anger.

All the evidence shows people are getting more cynical with the messages we get from government, from businesses, from the media,' said Charles Liasides of Syntony, who is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Psychology. 'People are deserting some TV stations because they are becoming cynical about reality TV insulting their intelligence; they turn off from some adverts because they are patronising; and all those wonderful gaffes we have had with the government recently - the U-turns, the backfiring policies - are having an effect. But is it good for democracy?'

What startles me about this study is the Cyndex, something that sounds like it's taken directly out of a Phillip K. Dick novel. The Cyndex would create a template for politicians to act like good marketing executives, to zero in on language and themes that could potentially turn more voters out because they would feel (always an important word when talking about democracies) like the system works and is worth participating in. But who is to say that politicians, or even businessmen, or the media would use the Cyndex to encourage participation?

A strategy the McCain campaign has taken up has been to refuse to talk about policy issues that Americans want to talk about, but to instead force the Obama campaign to respond to accusations that effect nothing but personal characteristics: his relationship with Bill Ayers, charges of sexism in not picking Clinton and critiquing Palin. While Americans want to hear substantive debates about tax policy, foreign policy, immigration, etc., we continue to get the same: untrue attack ads, paid analysts on television repeating soundbites and covering up mistakes we all witnessed, and Lenin-esque repetition.

I'd not be surprised if the tactic taken by the McCain campaign is to induce tiredness and the feeling that Washington will continue to be business as usual. As evidenced in Ohio and Central Florida in the last two elections, this wouldn't be the first time the Republicans kept people from voting.

And one needs not read between the lines of what the Cyndex represents: more power for agents of simulacra.

Samson said the indications were that this was because politicians have a public face, making them more prone to criticism than faceless businessmen. The consequences of such cynicism are vast, the team believes. It can result in people disengaging from politics, turning away from major media, or boycotting products. It could also prompt people to join pressure groups or, in more extreme cases, to resort to direct action or violence. 'This has wide implications in the cohesiveness of society,' said Liasides.

What we are to believe is that the Cyndex is important because we need elected officials to make us feel like everything is OK because if not, we'd take charge of our own wishes and desires and boycott products, sever our ties to politics and media deemed broken. Is it possible that if we broke from these systems, we'd develop our own social organizing and economics?

Of course we would, or there wouldn't be so much worry that we'd commit direct action, hardly a cynical act for it represents the people's most effective means of communicating its desires to the public. The people who conducted this study are the power brokers of the status quo; the London School of Economics' darling children can be read about in Michael Lewis' "Liar's Poker." And this little tidbit in the end points to the real meaning behind the study:

The team is planning a nationwide sample to create the Cyndex, which it intends to develop commercially. 'We believe it will be valuable for all communicators to help them be more credible with the public,' said Liasides.

Cash rules everything around me, get the money, dollar, dollar, bil ya'll. You say simulation, I say simulacra.

It's All Economics

2008-09-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Body shop man styled in Guayabera
Angled face
Brutalist
Feet poured in concrete; his window eyes
sunk deep.

"Not too many people are brave enough to understand poetry, let alone pursue a dying art."
He smiles at me.

Sketched in pencil grays and black,
Sweater vest and woman's skinny jeans, I feign distraction
bobbing my head to white hip hop
puffing on a cigarette like a German, hand
cupped over mouth, filter between ring and pinky:

"I do a lot of things, though. It was just a means to get through college."
He smiles.
"Don't say that; it's great."

The moon splatters onto the floor
and the Miami night club becomes his garage
puddled in oil and grease, rainbows
swimming on the floor.

Hunched over numbers and expenses, he wears Dickies
sweat beading his temples.

I want his life--stains, the knuckles of tools, and commitment--
and he wants mine--underwear only afternoons, lofty art made in place of my lack of work.

We are both unhappy in the daytime.
We pay too much for drinks in the evening.