Newsday Spins for Spitzer - Welcome to the Year 1712

An archetypical war of interests which has replayed throughout modernity is and has been raging violently more than usual in the past few years in New York State.

Eliot Spitzer, real estate man, Attorney General, and almost inevitable Governor of the State of New York is, like something out of Highlander, leading the fight in the centuries old battle: It is the clash between landed wealth and liquid wealth.

Sure, Wall St. barons these days own lots of land. Sure, real estate companies are tied to markets. But at the end of the day, a representative of wealth that comes from actual land or "real estate" has been making a name for himself crusading against those that buy/sell/trade pieces of various entities or currencies. Maybe he will make markets more efficient and stop abuse. (In the process, he'll kill New York City's restaurants by ending the expense account.) Perhaps not. At any rate, I'm more concerned about the hundred million new parking spaces being created on Long Island than Dick Grasso's hundred million dollar pay package! (Real Estate interests should be able to make money too, but Grasso is not destroying the environment.)

Digression: In a round about way, we've come back to Britain, circa 1712, when the landed (Tory) interest opposed to financial (Whig) interest. The Whig interest, curiously enough was war-profiteering due to what many saw as an uneccesary war (The War of Spanish Succession). Today, the real estate interest in represented by the "liberal" Spitzer and his enemies, the financial interest, tend to be more conservative. Eventually, the new money needed prestige and titles and since estates weren't the medieval cash cows they once were, the old money needed, well, money - so they all intermarried and lived happily ever after drinking tea and playing croquet.

Now, as for the title of this post, back to I'm sorry I cannot resist Snoozeday. Page A21, July 21, 2006: "Spitzer Pulls in Money on LI". The summary reads "He raises almost $1M from businesses, individuals with ties to the home turf of opponent Suozzi".

This makes it sound like no-executive-experience-having Spitzer is somehow gaining popularity on Long Island while poor Tom Suozzi, the man who only rescued Nassau County from the jaws of oblivion, fails to the wayside. Newsday has a table in the middle of the page which lists 6 out of the ten names it names, all of whom gave between $22, 500 - $63,000 are in real estate. It does not mention that Spitzer is in real estate! If the money did not come from croneydom (or is it croniedom?) then it at least came from a common interest - and interest in glass office parks. A donor by the name of Gherardi is quoted as saying he believes Spitzer would be good for the building industry. Newsday, please can the far fetched sensationalism. Spitzer good for the parking lot industry? Never happen.

The last sentence of the propaganda piece says that "Roger Tilles, a member of the state Board of Regents from Great Neck, gave Spitzer $6,500".

"A member of the state Board of Regents"? Of course I don't doubt that fact, but it might have been more fair to note that Roger Tilles is the biggest real estate developer since William Penn.

Invading Iraq: A Move From the Cuban Missle Playbook?

Nevermind oil or Israel. If the United States were in Iraq solely for one or both of those reasons, perhaps gas would cost 50 cents a gallon and Israel wouldn't feel the need to flatten Lebanon at the moment. (I.e., the U.S. would've done a more careful job in Iraq-re-set-up, and by a long chain of events, Hamas would not have won the election last year. Yes, they are connected due to Shiia emboldenization, etc.) As for WMD... well, whatever. (What more can be said?)

What if the United States-in-Iraq situation from 2003-present is a botched attempt to replay the succesful ending of the Cuban Missle Crisis?

In the Cuban Missle Crisis, the Soviet Union put missles in Cuba because the U.S. had missles in Turkey. Tit-for-tat, and so forth. The Soviet Union, after the brinksmanship rigamarole of the crisis (the hotline messages, the blockcade, and so on) agreed to pull their missles from Cuba. The U.S. quietly agreed to pull its missles out of Turkey, but six months down the road, and because the missles were "obsolete", not because of a trade-off. But it was, of course, a trade-off.

Now, Osama bin Laden wants the U.S. to pull its troops out of Saudi Arabia. That is supposedly his main gripe and reason for jihad, or at least it is his main propaganda point. The U.S., eager to avoid another attack, might have been open to the idea of withdrawal, but only under face saving conditions. But first, it could not very well do so with Saddam Hussein in power. The troops were on the Arabian peninsula in the first place to protect Kuwait (and Saudi Arabia) from Saddam. Hypothetically, someone may have thought, somewhere from 9/01-3/03, that if Saddam could be removed, and a stable democratic government could be put in place in Iraq, then the U.S. could withdraw from Saudi Arabia.

Had it worked out right, this would have been a way of meeting bin Laden's demand to get the infidels away from the holy sites that did not look weak or done out of intimidation. Perhaps the U.S. would not have withdrawn completely from the middle east, but rather reduced troops and relocated them from Saudi Arabia to a friendly Iraq (to appease the Saudi royals and Kuwaities by staying in the neighborhood). I wonder if this would have come to pass (planned from the get go or not) had the post-invasion period not gone disasterously wrong.

A Minute on Turgenev (or is it Turgenieff?)

Yesterday afternoon I was flipping through Hemingway's Selected Letters looking for the letter where he parodies the French revolution. I couldn't find it and gave up. But I did come across a letter to Archibald MacLeish where Hemingway praises Turgenev and his story "The Rattle of the Wheels" from The Sportsman's Sketches.

This extraordinary book of short stories, narrated by a hunting nobleman who goes across Russia with his trusty servant, Ermolai, looking for sport and game and observing the land and the locals, deserves its long-held place among the classics. Aside from stunning evocations of the countryside and the psychological realism expected of 1852, it is also a masterpiece of the master/servant adventure. It's like a naturalistic interlude between Don Quixote/Sancho Panza and Bertie Wooster/Jeeves. I read it some time ago but did not recall the story Hemingway wrote about...probably because I did not read the whole thing! This story is one for all time...

I proceeded to look for it in my edition (Everyman's Library, 1992), which is translated as The Sportsman's Notebook. In here "The Rattle of the Wheels" is translated as "The Knocking". Immediately I thought that sounds too campy and/or too much like Poe but when I actually read the story I found "the knocking" to be a perfect and truly haunting phrase, more abstact and at the same time more evocative than "the rattle of the wheels".

Plot: The nobleman/narrator is on a hunting vacation deep in the middle of nowhere. He hires a local farmer to drive him in his "well-sprung carriage" to the nearest town, at night, to get more shot for the next day's hunt. For a variety of reasons, the nobleman/narrator does not let his faithful but ultimately unreliable servant go in his stead. The wealthy local farmer he hires to drive him seems like something of a simpleton (at first) but ultimately a good enough fellow. They drive on a good road under the moonlight across beautiful wetlands and meadows. The scene is implicitly and explicitly described on bordering on the enchanted.

Then they hear the knocking!, a the slamming of metal in the distance which breaks the spell.

I will not elaborate on the plot further except to say that it is all handled perfectly. It is truly terrifying high drama, deflated with a dash of humor at just the right time to be realistic and to release the tension of the atmosphere. The story ends up having quite fascinating epistemological themes but the question of reading and interpretation is ultimately the main point. It also has class themes worth giving a whirl around the mind (the mystique of the aristocracy / the naivete of the aristocracy / the trustworthiness of servants, etc etc).

I'm still running the reel of the story through my mind the next day. It's probably the best story in a collection of very fine ones and one of the most thrilling I ever read. "The knocking" chasing the heroes in the moonlight turned out to be bandits but it can represent any doom seen (or heard) approaching and narrowly missed, literal or metaphorical. The fright of its approach and relief of its passing are rendered in just the right key. Today I tip my hat to the master, however his name is spelled.

The Digital Clock and the Welfare Bill

Though invented in 1956, it took time for the digital clock to be become a ubiquitous piece of home and office furnishing and thus it took time for it to change the way time was conceived. Time, as Thomas Mann has the character Hans Castorp note in his 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, is measured by space: the way space is broken up on a clock, watch (or sundial) tell the viewer what time it is. When time was measured by space, it was more controllable and perhaps less menacing. Perhaps, it was even considered a little arbitrary (with all the physical labor - the winding of watches) and therefore needed not to be invested with undue power.

The digital clock, perhaps, is to blame for some of the current attitudes toward time and for the Welfare Bill of 1996. When time is separated from space and becomes nothing but ominous red numbers on an alarm clock or black numbers menacingly glaring out of a dashboard, it has become a metaphor of sorts. At first the spaces were collapsed. Now, time is no longer earthbound. On the newest cell phones, the time on the phone is kept accurate by a satellite. (Or so I've heard. My ancient Samsung phone dates from 2004.)

With time no longer controlled by say, a railroad conductor with a pocket watch, it has become something to worship. Time, for the most part, (and especially in those most important clocks: alarm and cell phone) has entered the microscopic regions of electronics and also flies through the darkness of outer space. Time, to a certain extent, has become a ghost; something terrible and invisible.

Therefore, since the advent of the digital clock, a neo-Puritanical time-worship has taken over. Recreation is regarded with more and more suspicion by the get-ahead classes. Work weeks have gotten longer for white collar employees. Productively trying to stay ahead of the
time-ghost is the order of the day. (Why the middling classes were the first to intuit something had changed, I cannot explain.) From a certain point of view this is not necessarily a bad thing. There had to be some sort of correlation between the old three martini lunch and the lethargic movement of capital in the mid-twentieth century. Now that there is a quick lunch or no lunch, money moves faster and more of it is made (sometimes).

But I think there may have been a "moralistic" outcome to the digitization of time: the Welfare Bill of 1996, which overhauled the welfare system. Certainly welfare was imperfect and corrupt, but the heavy rumbling over it in the early 1990s had to come from somewhere else. It was imperfect and corrupt in the 1970s also. Maybe it came from a new fear of time and a tendency to regard those who did not use it productively with suspicion. The Welfare Bill led to the resignations of high-level Department of Health and Human Services functionaries Peter Edelman, Mary Jo Bane and Wendell Primus (see The Washington Post, 9/17/96). They quit because they believed that the bill was going to be hard on the poor. They quit because they believed their liberal convictions were being compromised. But perhaps they also quit becaused they sensed something else afoot. Who knows, I am idly speculating.

I am certainly not advocating laziness, welfare, wasting time, or three martini lunches. I am simply pointing out that the contemporary obsession with productivity might just becoming from a silly place, from a microchip that makes people forget that those blockish numbers are "metaphor" for a clock with hands which is a "metaphor" for a sundial which is a "metaphor" for the movement of the earth around the sun.

The writers of the 1930s tune "Five O'Clock Whistle" (Gannon, Myron, and Irwin) might have figured this out as regards the old factory whistle. The last verse is as follows:

"You ought to hear what my mommy said / When papa came home and sneaked into bed /And told her he worked till half past two / Cause the five o'clock whistle never blew."

Ha!

(The difference between a digital clock and a factory whistle is that most people did not own several factory whistles. The same goes for the church bell. And besides, everyone knew there was a physical bell-ringer, probably watching a sundial, then ringing the bell.)

As for "Five O'Clock Whistle", I prefer the Don Redman arrangement for Count Basie and His Orchestra, recorded November 19, 1940.

India: Museum of Modernities

"Modernity" really begins approximately 50,000 years ago when people started using tools and thinking the way they think now. Essentially, little has changed. But let's take that for granted for a moment and name various gradations in the history of culture, technology, and political thought, "modernities". (Please see the issue of "Dedalus", Winter 2000 if I'm not mistaken, titled "Multiple Modernities".)

Now, let's think about India in 2006. Part of the country is solidly in the "information age" and participating in the global economy at the highest levels. Mr. Singh is no quasi-fascist nut like his predecesor. (Fascism: a failed modernity) Bankers and traders and so on in Mumbai are interacting with their counterparts in Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo and so on, wheeling and dealing, making money and having a grand old time. They are in "Modernity" with a capital M, that unfortunate title for our current moment in the developed post-industrial world. (My personal definition of modernity begins with the assumption of the King of England's debt by the state with the creation of the Bank of England. For purposes of easiness, I date the big m. from 1689. When I mean "Modernity" here I mean "cutting edge contemporanaiety".)

Meanwhile, most man-hole covers in the United States are made of in India. Iron foundaries: how industrial-revolutionish. In the countryside, failed modernities (Maoist rebels and subsistence farmers) are battling it out in a savage, bloody struggle with little or no end or reward in sight. Meanwhile, somewhere in the jungle, India's remaining tribal peoples - those whom the waves of invasions and civilizations passed by - still do their jungle/tribal stone age thing!

India, as you must have learned in high school, was home to the Mohenjo-Daro civilization (though it's ruins are in present-day Pakistan). This was one of the world's first elaborate farming societies. Farming societies create different and more elaborate social hierarchies from hunter-gatherer or herding societies. "Subjugation enters the house through the plow", said the Prophet Muhammad, an observation that was made again a thousand years later by Rousseau. Anyway, the Aryans invaded through the Kyber pass circa 2000 BCE and settled down and established the caste system; an apartheid system that had more relevance to their erstwhile life on the plains than on their new farming life on the Ganges plain. In any case, they adapted it to their surroundings by putting their darker skinned conquerees at the bottom. Also, the horse of the plains warrior gradually became less sacred and was replaced by the cow of the farmer. The last horse sacrifice was performed by a Brahman-general character deep into the era of cow-sacredness and it was regared as a terrifying throwback to a mysterious dark age. (I forget where I read that and wish I could recall it.) None of this is really news or my own insight. It's readily available. Anyway, my point is that this system, though officially outlawed in 1947 is still in place, especially in the countryside. In the gallery of modernities that is contemporary India, the social structuring of steppe-maraudering tribes of horsemen, once a "modernity" in its own right, now is a fossilized modernity occupying a place in the world's largest democracy (the supremely cliched official subtitle of India). And yet, because it is a flourishing parliamentary democracy, that's yet another modernity in it's cap.

Almost every possible way of structuring human society and using technology can be found in India at this moment in 2006. I suppose it's like the rings of a tree or something.