Wartime Powers
The house passes a bailout for time. Every day
is shortened by two hours. It’s ratified
in the senate; the president, may he die, applauds.
They underpay workers to go around adjusting clocks
so the minute hands can keep up the pace. Watches
go on strike, then grandfather clocks, then phones. We go
back to sundials, and when it rains we hold each other’s
contacts up to our floor lamps (we have so many
floor lamps now) and wherever the spotlight falls
we wait until it turns green. No one assassinates
the president yet. Why depends on where
you’re reading this. There’s a law against spit now.
A city ordinance for limelight. All the op-ed pages
are in agreement about the uselessness of forms,
and in Alabama, we’re told a man had himself declared
legally miraculous. I disagree with the premise.
The alarm clocks have a picket line: they march
in figure eights around city hall, waking everyone up.
Young radicals get tattoos of the hours.
Nothing is done so much lately. There’s talk
of the rich being able to buy themselves another week.
The days are laid off. The seasons tighten their belts.
By Bradley Trumpheller (originally published in The Baffler Nov. 2020)
This issue of Notions & Notes is where I grumble about late-stage capitalism. Sometimes I think the reason we’re not collectively in an uproar about wealth hoarding is because our brains were wired for survival in the wild where there isn’t a billion of anything, let alone the invented concept of money. Elon Musk just bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars. For perspective:
1 second is 1 second
1 million seconds is 12 days (a vacation)
1 billion seconds is 30 years (a career)
It’s hard to wrap your head around how much money that is! Or what else could be done with it. This website does one thing, and that’s put Jeff Bezos’s wealth into context. Unfortunately, it’s an interactive experience and doesn’t fit in my little newsletter, and many of you don’t click on my links anyway, but if you ever click on one thing I recommend, please let it be this, and please don’t give up on scrolling. Nobody should have that much money.
I’m really curious about wealth hoarding from a psychological point of view. Do charts, facts, and figures help wrap our neanderthal minds around it?
Or does historical comparison help? We have a better perspective on the past and have developed and entrenched narratives about different eras. We haven’t had this level of wealth inequality since the Gilded Age. (Thanks a lot, Reaganomics).
Maybe Nice White People don’t want to change the institutions that have protected them from feeling the vast majority of the pain of wealth inequality? (I see this particularly when Nice White People talk about education and frame it for themselves as just wanting the best for their children).
Ok, just one more infographic—this one is amazing. I was in high school in 1998!
Perhaps our problem is a failure of imagination. It requires our imagination to even understand the quantities of billions of dollars owned by a few men. And, importantly, we need to imagine ourselves into a world that is different than this one. When we hear a bombshell report about how the ultrarich benefit from tax loopholes (they pay an average 3.4% federal tax rate compared to the rest of us who pay 14%)—don’t let it get swept under the rug of the most recent cultural noise about Disney or whatever. It’s tempting to look at our Congress, see how a single, somewhat rich man can stop reform that would benefit millions of people, and feel things are irrevocably stuck like this. But that’s a lack of imagination speaking!
Remember Jeff Bezos's wealth? Well, two Black men just unionized one of Amazon’s biggest distribution centers. It’s one of the most inspiring news stories I’ve seen in a good while, and if you don’t mythologize it as David-and-Goliath story or tokenize it, then your imagination envision this story growing, affecting other Amazon centers and other industries and changing the landscape of workers rights. Smalls and Palmer imagined a job where they had a bit more human decency, and then they imagined collective action, and then they worked really hard and these things are now no longer imaginings, but part of their reality.
I’m convinced art plays an important role in raising awareness and anger to our soul-crushing present. So I’ve included in this email several paintings by the artist Josh Keyes, who I love. Much of his work is dystopian imaginings of the human impact on the environment, but his recent work, as in the painting with flamingos “Almost Paradise,” or the one with a fox below, imagines wilderness reclaiming the world we’ve wrecked with our consumption—there’s resilience and beauty there. The natural environment should not be the collateral damage of unbridled capitalism, and Keyes paintings make that truth painfully visible.
Here are some good songs made in the midst of the 80s’ Reaganomics. It was a golden age for catchy hooks and snarky social critique.
Michael Hobbes is becoming one of my favorite unconventional journalists, and he’s particularly brilliant at holding the media accountable. And he makes me laugh. Challenge the logical fallacies that influence the paradigm.
I’m lucky enough to have the author, Lydia Keisling, as an acquaintance, so I’ve been following her writing for a while. Go read her powerful essay in The Baffler, which I’ve been thinking about for months. It should make you pissed that the U.S. paid parental leave policies trail significantly behind every other wealthy nation.
When I think about myself in those days, oozing and losing my mind over a bureaucratic snarl and a lost piece of paper, I cannot stress how much a person in that physical and mental state should not be returning to work. And this is before addressing the basic logistics of leaving an infant in someone else’s care. Most daycares don’t accept infants until they are at least six weeks old, and yet many parents have to go back far sooner. The dance of pumping milk is difficult even in the cushiest workplaces. Non-birthing parents seldom get any leave at all. And so, every day in America, people who are still torn up and bleeding and freaking the fuck out from hormones must leave their babies with a relative, neighbor, or friend, and go in to work, often remaining on their feet all day.
Her essay gets much more graphic about the mental and physical trauma of childbirth and refuses to let you look away. She makes it plain that our country allows employers to prioritize profit and productivity over human bodies, over our humanity.
This Molly Young article is a couple of years old, but it changed how I think about the constant shifts and off-shoots of contemporary language. In it, she talks about “garbage language,” the meaningless jargon that white-collar workplaces churn out and use to obfuscate meaning. “Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.” Even if you haven’t worked in a start-up or office, you’ve heard this garbage language seeping into society. Once she starts examining the lexicon of garbage language, you realize how gross and disturbing it is:
At my own workplaces, the New Age–speak mingled recklessly with aviation metaphors (holding pattern, the concept of discussing something at the 30,000-foot level), verbs and adjectives shoved into nounhood (ask, win, fail, refresh, regroup, creative, sync, touchbase), nouns shoved into verbhood (whiteboard, bucket), and a heap of nonwords that, through force of repetition, became wordlike (complexify, co-execute, replatform, shareability, directionality).
Ultimately, her article helped me see how the language we use to talk about something shapes our experience of it—in this case, workplace language helps us feel that our role in the capitalist economy has a purpose and less like the rats on a wheel that we are.
And yet it should be possible to gaze into this alphabet soup and divine patterns. Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.
I’ve been disturbed by how many of my already-very-privileged students (don’t ask me why it’s only boys, but it is) are obsessed with the speculative frenzy of cryptocurrency. When their eyes light up talking about the crypto club they started at school, I feel a sick lurch in my stomach. I’m careful in my response because I worry I’m the one adult voice of reason in their lives to tell them ‘no, stop now, turn back while you still have a soul.’ I might point them to the very Google-able environmental impact of digital currency, which most people don’t even think of. It’s bad—worse than paper money. But how do I voice the ethical impact? How do I tell them, ‘don’t put your gifts and brilliance into the service of something as gross and destructive as money?’ Then, I stumbled on this Brian Eno interview and it was all the encouragement I needed to keep being a curmudgeon about NFTs and cryptocurrency. The interview is brief and full of incredible zingers, like when Eno calls Ayn Rand “that Nietzsche-for-Teenagers toxin” or when he says artists making NFTs is “just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialisation. How sweet – now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well.”
I am not sure what is being brought into the world that makes any difference to anything other than some strings of numbers moving about in some bank accounts. I want to know what is changing, what is being made different, what is helping, what is moving? I don’t see any answers to that question.
Thank you, Brian Eno. Chef’s kiss.
A Small Needful Fact
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.
By Ross Gay