Escape to Chengdu

I was reading this passage from “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chodron and it called to mind the 2008 presidential campaign and our celebration (obsession?) with “hoping” for a better future. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dopka. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what’s going on, but that there’s something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world. 

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. 

“I don’t understand how you have no money,” I told her.

“Get me Maureen Orth,” she grumbled, referring to another writer for Vanity Fair. “Have you looked at all the documents Jessica sent you?” I had. For months I had been receiving emails from Jessica LaBrie, a 33-year-old administrative assistant in Vancouver who told me Courtney’s music has “saved my life”; she was then part of the so-called “Twitter Army” of random fans Courtney had asked, via Twitter, to help her investigate… LaBrie had also sent me attachments, including a “Timeline—as per Ms. Love-Cobain’s Dictation,” decorated with lavender highlights.

Courtney Love is crowdsourcing legal research on Twitter among fans. Fans like Jessica LaBrie. This is strange and beautiful and somehow restores my faith in the universe.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am no solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look up at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. 

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity.

The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms—the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty as “il piu nell uno.” Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole.

petersutherland:

ski boot blanket @ still house gallery

(via proper-nouns)

I wonder if the answer to this 1998 question on an AP U.S. History exam has changed since Republicans began revising high school history books:

18. The recession of 1937 was primarily caused by:

a) overextension of easy credit and high inflation.

b) excess business speculation in the rebounding stock market.

c) failure of New Deal programs to effectively lower unemployment and restore faith in the economy.

d) overregulation of key national industries, resulting in massive lay-offs.

e) premature tightening of credit and cutbacks in spending for New Deal programs.

Answer: E) The recession of 1937 stemmed primarily from changes in government policy based upon Roosevelt’s mistaken belief that the Depression had been overcome. Although employment, wage, and production figures had shown steady improvement since the enactment of New Deal legislation in 1933, none of those statistics had yet reached 1929 levels, an indication that despite improvements the economy had still not reached former levels of prosperity. Roosevelt became convinced that the trends started by the New Deal could now sustain themselves, and began cutbacks in New Deal spending which would allow him to restore a balanced federal budget. At the same, the Federal Reserve Board tightened the money supply to curb rising inflation. The double-hit was too much for the nation’s still fragile economy and it began a new collapse. Unemployment rose by another 5 percent, to over 19 percent. Businesses and banks again began to feel the pressure and industrial activity diminished across the nation. Alarmed by the drastic downturn, Roosevelt reversed himself and requested that Congress restore spending cuts in New Deal programs and resume running a federal budget deficit to restore health to the national economy.

Back in 1998, acknowledging that the New Deal was prematurely cut back by anxious politicians and that it lead to another economic collapse wasn’t a controversial position - it was just another part of high school history books. I’m afraid to find out what they’re teaching kids now…

From Ken Burns’ famous 18.5 hour-long “Baseball” documentary series, sportswriter Thomas Boswell:

It’s one of the gentle forms of poetry that runs through our lives, and makes living more bearable.

You need moments that give you pleasure - your children or your hobbies or your games. Life can’t all be big issues and heart surgery. Something has to bring joy into the day.

I’ve always thought that the six months during the baseball season, there was something in the day that wasn’t there the other six months of winter. It was not that you had to listen to the game, but that you could if you needed it.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I think baseball is a game that allows people who watch it to think about nothing else. It allows us to feel connected to a place.

Willkie made his labor speech in Pittsburgh before an audience largely of labor men. I thought it was pretty good. He put himself on the record in favor of the things that labor traditionally wanted, but we would have expected any politician to do that in 1940. Then he worked up to what he would do as President in improving the labor laws and their administration. He was not specific, except on one point. He said, “I will appoint a Secretary of Labor directly from the ranks of organized labor.” This was sure of a big hand, as the labor leaders tended to believe that the post belonged to them. Althought they had, with few exceptions, cooperated with me in my period in office, it was natural for them to believe, as I did, that the post should go to labor. So far so good. But when the cheers had died down in the audience, largely of men, Willkie continued, hoping to get another hand — and he did — “And it will not be a woman either.” 

The President, listening to the speech on the radio, was quick to catch the blunder. Although the audience of men applauded loudly and Willkie undoubtedly left the hall thinking he had made a hit, women in the United States, including Republican women, were pained and insulted.

The President said to me, “That was a boner Willkie pulled. He was all right. He was going good when he said his appointment of a Secretary of Labor would come from labor’s ranks. That was legitimate political talk, but why didn’t he have sense enough to leave well enough alone? Why did he have to insult every woman in the United States? It will make them made, it will lose him votes.”

“You’ll be surprised to know, Mr. President,” I said, “that I already have about 500 telegrams and letters from women, expressing irritation, and more than half of them tell me they are Republican women.”

In the middle of your life

you cast off the brittle flame;

…

So share off the iron shoes

of fame and image and sing

near the dumb branch. Or enter

the pond where the angles swam. 

Aren’t there visions involving everything?

Some animals are warm in paradise;

your little alchemical salamander tericha tarosa

fresh from the being cycles stumbles

over rocks in its lyric outfit—

latestcoolthing:

The desk where George Orwell wrote 1984.  Jura, Scotland.

I’m reading “The Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900-1950” by former Harper’s editor Frederick Lewis Allen. Allen an interesting glimpse into the socio-economic views of 1950’s America. My overall impression is that the middle class felt pretty damn comfortable. So fucking comfortable that, well, I kind of understand why the cooked up the Red Scare.

But the real gems come from Allen’s analysis of early 20th century America, which looks strikingly familiar. 

Yale professor William Graham Sumner, in his book What Social Classes Owe to Eachother, published in 1883, writes, “The yearning after equality is the offspring of envy and covetousnous, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else what rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.” He argued that:

“Instead of endeavoring to redistribute the acquisitions which have been made between the existing classes, our aim should be to increase, multiply, and extend the changes. Such is the work of civilization. Every old error or abuse which is removed opens new chances for development to all the new energy of society. Every improvement in education, science, art or government expands the chances of man on earth. Such expansion is no guarantee of equality.”

Lewis continues:

The irony of the situation lay in the fact that for generations men had been tinkering with economic law to their own advantage, and in the process had produced institutions which were emphatically not God’s work—as most of Sumner’s hearers presumably supposed them to be—but man’s. The corporation, for instance, was not an invention of God’s. It was an invention of man’s. It was a creature of the state: its privileges, its limitations, were defined by legislation…by taking adroit advantage of the legislative acts which defined its privileges, one could play extraordinary tricks with it. Corporate devices could be used to permit A to rob B—or let us say, more charitably, to permit A to drain off all the gravy in sigh and leave none for B. And it was foolish to defend such devices on the ground that one must let economic nature take its course.

It was largely as a result of the discovery of tricks that could be played with corporations, and particularly with their capital stock, that the wealth produced in such a tremendous spate at the turn of the century flowed into a few well-placed hands. 

Henry Clew, a stalwart defender of Wall Street, was awed by the speculative success of the men on Wall Street:

With them, manipulation has ceased to be speculation. Their resources are so vast that they need only to concentrate upon any given property in order to do with it what they please…They are the greatest operators the world has ever seen, and the beauty of their method is the quietness and lack of ostentation with which they carry it on. There are no gallery plays, there are no scare heads in the newspapers, there is no wild scramble or excitement. With them the process is gradual, thorough, and steady, with never a waver or break. How much money this group of men have made is impossible to estimate. That is a sum beside which the gain of the most daring speculator of the past was a mere bagatelle is putting the case mildly. And there is an utter absence of chance that is terrible to contemplate. 

Most businessmen believed in competition—theoretically. But in practice there was a ceaseless search for new ways in which to prevent it, so that rival companies in an industry might all jack up their prices and enlarge their profits. (Sound familiar?)

One of my favorite passages:

What [William Allen] White called “the alliance between government and business for the benefit of business” was an honest love affair to [Mark] Hanna. He felt that if the path were made easy for the great corporations to do as they pleased, the riches they accumulated would filter down to the less fortunate, and that any attempt to change the rules of the game except to give the great corporations even more opportunity to prosper would opent he way to demagoguery, mob rules, and destruction. With others the alliance was not a matter of emotional affinity or of conviction, but of purchase and sale—the prostitution of government bodies for favors and cash. Big corporations advanced their interests not only by making sizable campaign contributions—often to both parties—but also by subsidizing or bribing legislators and even judges. 

…

Senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio received $44,000 from Standard Oil in four successive certificates of deposit sent by Archbold (which Foraker later claimed were retainers); and it showed Archbold subsequently writing Foraker about an “objectionable bill” that “needed to be looked after.” 

Thus, by hints, suggestions, loans, so-called loans that were in fact gifts, and on occasion outright secret bribes, could a big corporation make legislators, elected officials and even judges do its bidding. The Soviet propagandists of the ninteen-fifties are forever talking about “lackeys of Wall Street.” Well, in 1900 the United States government included many men who might aptly, if not quite idiomatically, have been described as lackeys of Wall Street. Moving into public life in those days was like moving into the neighborhood of a million-dollar fruit tree whose fruit could readily be dislodged if one but made the slightest move in its direction. And this was easily done, for no one much seemed to be looking.