Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Fisking the physics of whack...

This is from the new edition of the Bloodhound Home Marketing Group Newsletter. I'm showing this off because it's blogworthy and fun:

There's a certain kind of newspaper article we take great delight in ridiculing. It follows this basic format: "Sam and Janet Evening didn't know what they were getting themselves into when they did something that is temporarily newsworthy, but now they're suffering the awful, unforeseen consequences." You can fill in the blanks any way you want, because none of it matters. Sam and Janet are there because they're only too willing to moan and groan in public about the unhappy consequences of their own free choices, and whatever it is they're whining about will be forgotten by everyone – excepting, perhaps, grandstanding politicians – before our fancies have lightly turned to thoughts of lunch.

Just this week, the Arizona Republic sought to incite our pity for a couple who bought a 3,100sf home in tony Paradise Valley and are now having trouble paying for the gas for their his-and-her Hummers (okay, we made up the part about the Hummers). You are supposed to be so swept up in your pity that you forget that the pitiable couple live in a million-dollar home. The horror!

The name for this kind of light-hearted, heavy-handed analysis of the news is Fisking, after journalist Robert Fisk. Here's another example, also from the Republic:

"Sellers are getting greedy, and buyers are getting desperate," said Jay Butler, director of the Arizona Real Estate Center at Arizona State University's Polytechnic campus. "If too many Valley homes aren't appraising for their sales prices, it's a sign the housing market is out of whack." [...]

Recently at a party, Butler said a real estate agent told him about nine deals he had lost because the appraisals didn't come in high enough.

You may have been absent from Physics class when they discussed the science of whack. It's measured in intestinal rumblings. It goes without saying that nowhere in the article is "too many" quantified, but we are not completely out of luck. Dr. Butler is a scientist, after all, even if only of whack science. He thoughtfully provides us with at least one number, rather than just a collection of presumably horrifying anecdotes.

What is that number? Nine. Nine contracts that fell apart because the houses failed to appraise. Nine failed transactions from one Realtor who confided in Dr. Butler at one party. You don't have to be a whack scientist to know that this foretells an epidemic. It's a simple extrapolation: All those Realtors. All those parties. All those failed transactions, dashed on the rocks of bad appraisals. All those buyers and sellers, eternally lost in a universe that no longer makes sense, a universe that is – perpetually and irredeemably – out of whack... What could be more presumably horrifying than that?

Of course, no one ever exaggerated at a party. No one ever had one drink too many and inflated a number to draw attention to himself. Particularly not to an academic who is quoted in the newspaper all the time, always stoutly engirdled by only the most rigorously analyzed of intestinal rumblings.

And, of course, only the very finest of Realtors are so outrageously wrong about the market value of homes that their houses not only fail to appraise, they fail so badly that there is no bridging the unfathomable gap between asked and offered, no way to negotiate past the impasse, nothing for it but to abandon the deal and all hope with it. Only the most noteworthy and quoteworthy of Realtors are this wildly wrong so many times in a very short span of time. It is utterly beyond comprehension that a Realtor could be so perfect as to massively misjudge his stock in trade ten times. This perfection is reserved for the gods alone.

Please...

We have been wrong about appraisals. Twice, in fact. Once this week, embarrassingly enough. But a Realtor who is wildly wrong nine times in rapid succession is in the wrong line of work. Fortunately for students of the science of whack, Dr. Butler is ideally situated, his ear firmly pressed to the belly of the marketplace...

posted by Greg Swann at 9:37 PM

 
SplendorQuest: The art of country song-writing...

Just now on Country Music Television, they played Trisha Yearwood's video of the Hugh Prestwood song, The Song Remembers When. This is the single best country song in the history of country music, and it kicks my teeth in every time I hear it. Coming on eight years ago, I wrote about this song and a bunch of others I think are exemplary works. Thanks to the miracle of Google, I dug up that text:

: Art, dammit. Talk about the fuel for the
: human spirit for once, if you have two shreds
: of Rand-woven esthetic fire left.

I don't know how I fit into the "Rand-woven esthetic". I like to make work that inspires in my serious things, I like to rap people upside the head in Willie stories and I like things that are brutally true in other people's work. We talked about this before, and since then I'd add to my list with "Twelve Monkeys" and "Phenomenon", not much progress in 15 months. A few weeks ago I wrote about country music and I'll amend myself somewhat as my contribution to this thread.

What Willie said was: "I hate everything about country music except for the things that I love. Like everything else, it's almost always desperately about nothing. But unlike everything else, sometimes it's desperately about something. I like art that's about something. That's all I like in art, I guess."

This is an example of a country song that's universal. It's devastatingly simple, almost stupidly self-depracating, but I can't think of anything that's more about rising above despair.

"I'm No Stranger To The Rain"
performed by Keith Whitley
written by Sonny Curtis/Ron Hellard

I'm no stranger to the rain
I'm a friend of thunder
Friend, is it any wonder lightning strikes me?
I've fought with the devil
Got down on his level
But I never gave in, so he gave up on me

I'm no stranger to the rain
I can spot bad weather
And I'm good at finding shelter in a downpour
I've been sacrificed by brothers
Crucified by lovers
But through it all I withstood the pain
I'm no stranger to the rain

But when I get that foggy feeling
When I'm feeling down
If I don't keep my head up, I may drown
But it's hard to keep believing
I'll even come out even
While the rain beats your hope in the ground
And tonight it's really coming down

I'm no stranger to the rain
But there'll always be tomorrow
And I'll beg, steal, or borrow a little sunshine
And I'll put this cloud behind me
That's how the man designed me
To ride the wind and dance in a hurricane
I'm no stranger to the rain

I'm no stranger to the rain
I'm a friend of thunder
Friend, is it any wonder lightning strikes me?
But I'll put this cloud behind me
That's how the man designed me
To ride the wind and dance in a hurricane
I'm no stranger to the rain
Oh no, I'm no stranger to the rain

Keith Whitley was a remarkably talented vocalist who killed himself like a country star, with liquor. This next song is a signature piece for him, and it was later covered by Allison Krauss, who has the most remarkably pure bluegrass voice since Dolly Parton. I like this song because it beautifully illustrates the distinction I make (in clumsy fathertongue) between mothertongue and fathertongue.

When You Say Nothing At All
by Don Schlitz and Paul Overstreet

It's amazing how you can speak right to my heart
Without saying a word you can light up the dark
Try as I may I could never explain
What I hear when you don't say a thing

The smile on your face lets me know that you need me
There's a truth in your eyes saying you'll never leave me
The touch of you hand says you'll catch me if ever I fall
You say it best when you say nothing at all

All day long I can hear people talking out loud
But when you hold me near you drown out the crowd
Old Mister Webster could never define
What's being said between your heart and mine

The smile on your face lets me know that you need me
There's a truth in your eyes saying you'll never leave me
The touch of you hand says you'll catch me if ever I fall
You say it best when you say nothing at all

This is all just so simple, so direct, so unaffected. The worst of country music is stone obvious word play, a drunken malapropism repeated nine times with a rimshot. The very best country music tells stories, usually very sad stories, and it tells them in a way that's unforgetable.

Walkaway Joe
performed by Trisha Yearwood with Don Henley
written by Vince Melamed and Greg Barnhill

Momma told her baby, girl take it real slow
Girl told her momma hey I really gotta go
He's waitin' in the car
Momma said girl you won't get far
Thus are the dreams of an average Jane
Ninety miles an hour down a lovers lane
On a tank of dreams
Oh if she could've only seen
But fate's got cards that it don't want to show
And that boy's just

A walkaway Joe
Born to be a leaver
Tell you from the word go, destined to deceive her
He's a wrong kinda paradise
She's gonna know it in a matter of time
That boy's just a walkaway Joe

Now just a little while into Abilene
Pulls into a station and he robs it clean
She's waitin' in the car
Underneath the Texaco star
She only wanted love didn't bargain for this
She can't help but love him for the way he is
She's only seventeen
And there ain't no reasoning
So she'll ride this ride as far as it can go
Cause that boy's just

A walkaway Joe
Born to be a leaver
Tell you from the word go, destined to deceive her
He's a wrong kinda paradise
She's gonna know it in a matter of time
That boy's just a walkaway Joe

Somewhere in a roadside motel room
Alone in the silence she wakes up too soon
And reaches for his arm
But she'll just keep reachin' on
For the cold hard truth revealed what it had known
That boy's just

A walkaway Joe
Born to be a leaver
Tell you from the word go, destined to deceive her
He's a wrong kinda paradise
She's gonna know it in a matter of time
That boy's just a walkaway Joe

With the exception of Keith Whitley and Colin Raye, I don't care for male acts at all. Clint Black has a nice attitude and the defunct bands Shenendoah and Pirates of the Mississippi were both serious and starving. But the rest of testiculated Nashville is gutlessly safe and normally offensively stupid. This is mostly true for the women, too, but all of contry music is redeemed by singers like Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, Matraca Berg and, lately, the incredible Lee Ann Womack. Part of this is material, of course, but part of it also is the raw honesty of the performance. "I will always love you" is not an unforgetable song, but Dolly Parton's haunting performance of it is ineradicable. This song is doubly excellent, a great song delivered by a great performer.

"The Song Remembers When"
performed by Trisha Yearwood
written by Hugh Prestwood

I was standing at the counter
I was waiting for the change
When I heard that old familiar music start
It was like a lighted match
Had been tossed into my soul
It was like a dam had broken in my heart

After taking every detour
Getting lost and losing track
So that even if I wanted
I could not find my way back
After driving out the memory
Of the way things might have been
After I'd forgotten all about us
The song remembers when

We were rolling through the Rockies
We were up above the clouds
When a station out of Jackson played that song
And it seemed to fit the moment
And the moment seemed to freeze
When we turned the music up and sang along

And there was a God in Heaven
And the world made perfect sense
We were young and were in love
And we were easy to convince
We were headed straight for Eden
It was just around the bend
And though I have forgotten all about it
The song remembers when

I guess something must have happened
And we must have said goodbye
And my heart must have been broken
Though I can't recall just why
The song remembers when

Well, for all the miles between us
And for all the time that's passed
You would think I haven't gotten very far
And I hope my hasty heart
Will forgive me just this once
If I stop to wonder how on Earth you are

But that's just a lot of water
Underneath a bridge I burned
And there's no use in backtracking
Around corners I have turned
Still I guess some things we bury
Are just bound to rise again
For even if the whole world has forgotten
The song remembers when
Yeah, and even if the whole world has forgotten
The song remembers when

This is something very subtle. The song is "Feed Jake" and at first glance it sounds like it would be very stupid: I'm just a shitkicker and all's I love is my dawg. In fact this is an AIDS song, and it will kick your teeth right in if you let it.

Feed Jake
by The Pirates of the Mississippi

I'm standing at the crossroads in life, and I don't know where to go.
You know you've got my heart babe, but my music's got my soul.
Let me play it one more time, I'll tell the truth and make it rhyme,
And hope they understand me.

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake, feed Jake. He's been a good dog,
My best friend right through it all. If I die before I wake,
Feed Jake

Now Broadway's like a sewer, bums and hookers everywhere.
Wino's passed out on the side walk, doesn't anybody care?
Some say he's worthless, just let him be.
But I for one would have to disagree.
And so would his mama.

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake, feed Jake. He's been a good dog,
My best friend right through it all. If I die before I wake,
Feed Jake

If you get an ear pierced, some will call you gay.
But if you drive a pick-up, they'll say 'No, he must be straight.'
What we are and what we ain't, what we can and what we can't,
Does it really matter?

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake, feed Jake. He's been a good dog,
My best friend right through it all. If I die before I wake,
Feed Jake

I end up knowing quite a lot about the canon of country music songwriting, and it's a canon that is rarely betrayed--in stark contrast to rock 'n' roll. All country songs are expected to tell stories--beginning, middle and end--and they are expected to serve some didactic purpose no matter how minor or trite. "Walkaway Joe" uses the very traditional form of verses and choruses to tell a literal, straight-line story in song. "The Song Remembers When" is a bridge song, and, while the story bounds can be looser (in that song we have present, backstory, present), a bridge song is expected to reinterpret the refrain every time it is repeated. I don't even believe the actual bridge ("though I can't recall just why"), but Prestwood is doing it that way in order to imply that the song does recall just why--which is metaphorical, to shut down the dysimaginated in advance. This is a verse/chorus song that does something unique: It tells the story from both sides.

You Don't Even Know Who I Am
Performed by Patty Loveless
Written by Gretchen Peters

She left the car in the driveway
She left the key in the door
She left the kids at her mama's
And the laundry piled up on the floor
She left her ring on the pillow
Right where it wouldn't be missed
She left a note in the kitchen
Next to the grocery list

It said, you don't even know who I am
You left me a long time ago
You don't even know who I am
So what do you care if I go

He left the ring on the pillow
He left the clothes on the floor
And he called her to say he was sorry
But he couldn't remember what for
So he said I've been doing some thinking
I've been thinking that maybe you're right
I go to work every morning
And I come home to you every night

And you don't even know who I am
You left me a long time ago
You don't even know who I am
So what do I care if you go
You don't even know who I am
So what do I care if you go

Nashville is crawling with people I think the world of who can't get a break to save their lives. Lyle Lovett, who is simply amazing, can't get country station airplay. The whole Austin scene is a counter-reaction to the polished fraudulence of Music Row. Steve Earle, an extremely powerful singer and songwriter, can't get a deal. And John Prine, more country than all the blow-dried pretty-boys on TNN, has been recording on his own label for years. I love this song. I know this woman inside and out. There's nothing admirable about her and there's nothing inspiring in what she does. But this is the brutal truth, unshaded, unexpurgated, unashamed. And that's what I love in country music.

Angel from Montgomery
by John Prine

I am an old woman
Named after my mother
My old man is another
Child who's grown old
If dreams were thunder
And lightning were desire
This old house would have burned down
A long time ago

Make me an angel
That rides from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold onto
To believe in this living
Is just a hard way to go

When I was a young girl
I had me a cowboy
He weren't much to look at
Just a free ramblin' man
But that was a long time
And no matter how I try
The years just flow by
Like a broken down dam

Make me an angel
That rides from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold onto
To believe in this living
Is just a hard way to go

There's flies in the kitchen
I can hear 'em there buzzin'
And I ain't done nothin'
Since I woke up today
How the hell can a person
Go to work in the morning
Come home in the evening
And have nothing to say?

Make me an angel
That rides from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold onto
To believe in this living
Is just a hard way to go

posted by Greg Swann at 7:48 PM

 
A bubble bursts in the bayou...

You might not have noticed it, but the dire predictions of imminent doom in the residential real estate market – the supposedly inevitable bursting of the housing "bubble" – have been absent from the public prints lately. We've all been preoccupied with the wrath of Hurricane Katrina, horrified by the totality of the destruction. But the absence of all that sky-is-falling rhetoric is not a coincidence. We have not stooped so low as to gloat at the misfortune of others, but everybody who works in or writes about the real estate industry knows that the aftermath of Katrina is going to be very, very good for business.

Not good for every business, of course. Destruction does not create wealth. But there are tens of thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of people left homeless by the storm. The short term consequence will be a bidding up of the value of available housing stock, an accelerated run-up in prices. This has already happened in a huge way in Houston. The long term consequence will be a massive building boom, whether or not New Orleans is rebuilt.

Metropolitan Phoenix should be a long-term beneficiary of migration from the soggy south, even among people whose homes survived the hurricane. We are the safest, sunniest, most family-oriented city in the United States, and we always appeal to people fleeing weather catastrophes elsewhere.

But there is another interesting facet to the self-silencing of the lamenters. For the total destruction of New Orleans provides an object lesson in the actual complete deflation of housing values in an entire metropolitan real estate market. There for all to see, by the miracle of television, is a bubble that has burst. Again and again, people who should know better insist that the current run-up in real estate values resembles the dot.com boom. But the only way for housing values to drop to zero, like a dopey internet stock issue ten reckless months after its triumphant IPO, is for people to cease entirely to value that housing. Even in half-empty towns in the Rust Belt, homes still have a value. But in New Orleans, homes are worthless, value-less, priced at zero with no takers.
posted by Greg Swann at 8:29 PM

 
Ophelia

by Robbie Robertson

Boards on the window, mail by the door
Why would anybody leave so quickly for
Ophelia
Where have you gone?

The old neighborhood just ain't the same
Nobody knows just what became
Of Ophelia
Tell me, what went wrong

Was it somethin' that somebody said?
Mama, I know we broke the rules
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know I'd die for you

Ashes of laughter
The ghost is clear
Why do the best things always disappear
Like Ophelia
Please darken my door

Was it somethin' that somebody said?
Honey, you know we broke the rules
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know I'd die for you

They got your number
Scared and runnin'
But I'm still waitin' for the second comin'
Of Ophelia
Come back home
posted by Greg Swann at 8:43 AM

 
SqualorFest: New Orleans as an artifact of the Welfare State

My friend Mike Arst cited this to me, from The Intellectual Activist:

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them--this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

I said as much to Cathy when the reports of looting started coming out of the Big Easy. It put me in mind of this article from The City Journal, also cited by Mike:

Last week, for example, to the amazement of a doctor recently arrived from Madras, a woman in her late twenties entered our hospital with the most common condition that brings patients to us: a deliberate overdose. At first she would say nothing more than that she wanted to depart this world, that she had had enough of it.

I inquired further. Just before she took the overdose, her ex-boyfriend, the father of her eight-month-old youngest child (now staying with her ex-boyfriend's mother), had broken into her apartment by smashing down the front door. He wrecked the apartment's contents, broke every window, stole $110 in cash, and ripped out her telephone.

"He's very violent, doctor." She told me that he had broken her thumb, her ribs, and her jaw during the four years she was with him, and her face had needed stitching many times. "Last year I had to have the police out to him."

"What happened?"

"I dropped the charges. His mother said he would change."

Another of her problems was that she was now five weeks pregnant and she didn't want the baby.

"I want to get rid of it, doctor."

"Who's the father?"

It was her violent ex-boyfriend, of course.

"Did he rape you, then?"

"No."

"So you agreed to have sex with him?"

"I was drunk; there was no love in it. This baby is like a bolt out of the blue: I don't know how it happened."

I asked her if she thought it was a good idea to have sex with a man who had repeatedly beaten her up, and from whom she said she wished to separate.

"It's complicated, doctor. That's the way life goes sometimes."

What had she known of this man before she took up with him? She met him in a club; he moved in at once, because he had nowhere else to stay. He had a child by another woman, neither of whom he supported. He had been in prison for burglary. He took drugs. He had never worked, except for cash on the side. Of course he never gave her any of his money, instead running up her telephone bills vertiginously.

She had never married, but had two other children. The first, a daughter aged eight, still lived with her. The father was a man whom she left because she found he was having sex with 12-year-old girls. Her second child was a son, whose father was "an idiot" with whom she had slept one night. That child, now six, lived with the "idiot," and she never saw him.

What had her experience taught her?

"I don't want to think about it. The Housing'll charge me for the damage, and I ain't got the money. I'm depressed, doctor; I'm not happy. I want to move away, to get away from him."

Later in the day, feeling a little lonely, she telephoned her ex-boyfriend, and he visited her.

I discussed the case with the doctor who had recently arrived from Madras, and who felt he had entered an insane world. Not in his wildest dreams had he imagined it could be like this. There was nothing to compare with it in Madras. He asked me what would happen next to the happy couple.

"They'll find her a new flat. They'll buy her new furniture, television, and refrigerator, because it's unacceptable poverty in this day and age to live without them. They'll charge her nothing for the damage to her old flat, because she can't pay anyway, and it wasn't she who did it. He will get away scot-free. Once she's installed in her new flat to escape from him, she'll invite him there, he'll smash it up again, and then they'll find her somewhere else to live. There is, in fact, nothing she can do that will deprive her of the state's obligation to house, feed, and entertain her."

I asked the doctor from Madras if poverty was the word he would use to describe this woman's situation. He said it was not: that her problem was that she accepted no limits to her own behavior, that she did not fear the possibility of hunger, the condemnation of her own parents or neighbors, or God. In other words, the squalor of England was not economic but spiritual, moral, and cultural.

I often take my doctors from the Third World on the short walk from the hospital to the prison nearby. It is a most instructive 800 yards. On a good day--good for didactic purposes, that is--there are seven or eight puddles of glass shattered into fragments lying in the gutter en route (there are never none, except during the most inclement weather, when even those most addicted to car theft control their impulses).

"Each of these little piles of smashed glass represents a car that has been broken into," I tell them. "There will be more tomorrow, weather permitting." The houses along the way are, as public housing goes, quite decent. The local authorities have at last accepted that herding people into giant, featureless, Le Corbusian concrete blocks was a mistake, and they have switched to the construction of individual houses. Only a few of their windows are boarded up. Certainly by comparison with housing for the poor in Bombay, Madras, or Manila they are spacious and luxurious indeed. Each has a little front yard of grass, surrounded by a hedge, and a much larger back yard; about half have satellite dishes. Unfortunately, the yards are almost as full of litter as municipal garbage dumps.

I tell my doctors that in nearly nine years of taking this walk four times a week, I have never seen a single instance of anyone attempting to clean his yard. But I have seen much litter dropped; on a good day, I can even watch someone standing at the bus stop dropping something on the ground no farther than two feet from the bin.

"Why don't they tidy up their gardens?" asks a doctor from Bombay.

A good question: after all, most of the houses contain at least one person with time on his or her hands. Whenever I have been able to ask the question, however, the answer has always been the same: I've told the council [the local government] about it, but they haven't come. As tenants, they feel it is the landlord's responsibility to keep their yards clean, and they are not prepared to do the council's work for it, even if it means wading through garbage--as it quite literally does. On the one hand, authority cannot tell them what to do; on the other, it has an infinitude of responsibilities towards them.

I ask my Third World doctors to examine the litter closely. It gives them the impression that no Briton is able to walk farther than ten yards or so without consuming junk food. Every bush, every lawn, even every tree, is festooned with chocolate wrappers or fast- food packaging. Empty cans of beer and soft drinks lie in the gutter, on the flower beds, or on top of the hedges. Again, on a good day we actually see someone toss aside the can whose contents he has just consumed, as a Russian vodka drinker throws down his glass.

Apart from the antisocial disregard of the common good that each little such act of littering implies (hundreds a week in the space of 800 yards alone), the vast quantity of food consumed in the street has deeper implications. I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I've made hundreds, never--not once--have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity--unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along be counted as social.

This is not to say that I haven't seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedience to impulse. Needless to say, the opportunity for conversation or sociality that a meal taken together provides is lost. English meals are thus solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I ask the doctors to compare the shops in areas inhabited by poor whites and those where poor Indian immigrants live. It is an instructive comparison. The shops the Indians frequent are piled high with all kinds of attractive fresh produce that, by supermarket standards, is astonishingly cheap. The women take immense trouble over their purchases and make subtle discriminations. There are no pre-cooked meals for them. By contrast, a shop that poor whites patronize offers a restricted choice, largely of relatively expensive prepared foods that at most require only the addition of hot water.

The difference between the two groups cannot be explained by differences in income, for they are insignificant. Poverty isn't the issue. And the willingness of Indians to take trouble over what they eat and to treat meals as important social occasions that impose obligations and at times require the subordination of personal desire is indicative of an entire attitude to life that often permits them, despite their current low incomes, to advance up the social scale. Alarmingly, though, the natural urge of the children of immigrants to belong to the predominant local culture is beginning to create an Indian underclass (at least among young males): and the taste for fast food and all that such a taste implies is swiftly developing among them.

When such slovenliness about food extends to all other spheres of life, when people satisfy every appetite with the same minimal effort and commitment, no wonder they trap themselves in squalor. I have little trouble showing my doctors from India and the Philippines that most of our patients take a fast-food approach to all their pleasures, obtaining them no less fleetingly and unstrenuously. They have no cultural activity they can call their own, and their lives seem, even to them, empty of purpose. In the welfare state, mere survival is not the achievement that it is, say, in the cities of Africa, and therefore it cannot confer the self-respect that is the precondition of self-improvement.

By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidized apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They come to realize that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial egotism. The spiritual impoverishment of the population seems to them worse than anything they have ever known in their own countries. And what they see is all the worse, of course, because it should be so much better. The wealth that enables everyone effortlessly to have enough food should be liberating, not imprisoning. Instead, it has created a large caste of people for whom life is, in effect, a limbo in which they have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is a life emptied of meaning.

"On the whole," said one Filipino doctor to me, "life is preferable in the slums of Manila." He said it without any illusions as to the quality of life in Manila.

The whole thing--the unwillingness to act in one's own behalf in a disaster, the looting, the petulant whining for handuts, the recriminations that it's never enough, the resentment at being held accountable--every bit of it was baked in the cake. The plaint that America didn't deserve what happened in New Orleans is specious. We got exactly what we paid for...
posted by Greg Swann at 7:01 AM

 
Splendor and Labor Day...

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uniterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own--to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an effective counterpoint to my entire way of life. My world is where the Splendor is, no alternatives, no substitutions, no adulterations, no crybaby excuses:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger--over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded alive--deprive you of all of the rest of your values. This is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self.

One of my favorite memories is of a Labor Day years ago. My son and I were out riding our bikes and we rode to a CompUSA to see all the latest software. The store was packed. Middle managers poring over the PERT packages, programmers pawing through hefty manuals, yuppie couples testing eduware with their little yuppiekinder. Labor Day is a holiday established by people who hate human productivity, who hate the human mind. It is a day set aside on the calendar to celebrate and sanctify indolence--and violence. And there in the CompUSA were the men and women of values. The people who know that to be more and have more, you must learn more and do more.

Those are my people. I love them better than any other people I meet. I work with them, laugh with them on the phone, transact business with them. I love to write about them. There are no villains, none more significant than bugs. But there are heroes. For the most part, they can't defend their beliefs the way I can. But they live those beliefs, every day.

I think it is hypocrisy to say, "I will cooperate with the state when I shower, when I drive, when I don't want a landfill behind my house, but I will pretend to rebel with respect to this one of the hundreds of taxes, all the rest of which I will pay without batting any eye." But that notwithstanding, to deliberately frustrate your own self-adoration, to deliberately circumscribe your own self-actualization, to deliberately forbid yourself to live to the fullest of your capacity--that is a tax that could only be self-inflicted. No tyrant could be that diabolical. Behaving this way is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self.

The time from the birth of human awareness, age four or so, to its death, closely correspondent to your corporeal demise, is all the life you have as a human being. To deny yourself all you can have, because it is not all you otherwise might have had, is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self. The people in the West who are most free of the bonds of other people are not the tax scofflaws or the libertarians or the imaginary prudent predators. They're the people crowding every cultural equivalent of CompUSA, working assiduously to figure out how to achieve the most and the best of all of their values, from first to last.

I think this is where true human freedom starts.

posted by Greg Swann at 10:49 PM

 
Rehnquist

Thomas.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:01 AM

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