SURMISE: The illusion of comfort as commodity.

The advent of the current global economic crisis has brought some things into sharper focus, don't you think? One example of this is that as regards the United States and probably also in much of Western Europe, it is difficult to dispute that

• comfort is an illusion, that this illusion is a commodity, and that
  
  
• any commodity is itself an illusion, the purchase of which confers comfort upon its purchaser.

People want to believe that they are comfortable. It's much easier to encourage people to believe that they're comfortable than it is to convince them that they're not.

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States, staunch opponent of labor strikes and noted exponent of laissez faire governance is famous for having said:

The chief business of the American people is business.

Now, the fact is that Coolidge has gotten a bit of a bum rap, because this remark is actually taken from a lengthier piece of speechifying that argued that the generating of wealth and profits is virtuous and useful only insofar as it is applied to the funding of measures that further the public good (like education), and that when wealth is not so applied, it bespeaks nothing more than the selfishness of those who accumulate it.

This caveat notwithstanding, the mythologies concerning the assumed virtuousness of hard work, productivity and profit have been ubiquitous in America since the aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin (as noted specifically by the German sociologist Max Weber, who was the first thinker to expound the Protestant Ethic).

Whatever the origin of this 'ethic', the functions it has served have been manifold. Among the most obvious ones are the legitimation of America's pervasive socioeconomic stratification -- think, everything from the oeuvre of Horatio Alger to the ascent of Social Darwinism. This function of legitimation applies, by the way, both to those at the top of the ladder -- for whom the myth of meritocracy (or a kind of biological determinism, beyond the purview of man) is a bulwark against pangs of guilt about the socioeconomic disparities -- and those at the bottom of the ladder -- for whom the myth of meritocracy encourages them to chalk up their lot in life to their own faults (or those of their families and loved ones) of laziness, stupidity, drunkenness, insufficient religiosity, or just plain old everyday lack of industriousness.

But, let us return to our consideration of the advent of the present global economic crisis, with its various peculiarities, such as the specter of the declining wealth, access to social and cultural capital and education and economic opportunity available to wide swathes of the nation's population, including large parts of the middle class. This is accompanied by the likelihood of a continued sharp decline in upward social mobility, a trend totally unheard of among Baby Boomers and the generation of their parents.

It seems to me that in the bleak geopolitical and global-economic era upon which we are likely embarking, the so-called 'Protestant Ethic' and the corresponding myth of meritocracy perform a function whose salience will supplant those associated with mere legitimation.

This new function is a much more basic one: rootedness within a seemingly fixed structure of social relations. American/Western-capitalist human self-perception will come increasingly to depend for its sustenance upon its ability to perceive itself as being somehow embedded in a framework that provides some semblance -- even if it's chimerical -- of predictability.

In other words, people will -- and have already begun to -- pay huge amounts of treasure (whether it's in the form of cash or in the form of the human soul) for the illusion of comfort. As Crib From This has surmised in the past, the ability to see the world as it is turns not upon your intelligence -- and certainly not in the vulgar/scientistic sense of this overused word/concept -- but upon your bravery.

Most of us -- particularly in the West -- aren't brave.

Voting for Obama as the First Act in a Long Struggle

If there's any issue on which there's near-consensus among Obama's and younger generations, it's that the rights and privileges of citizenship are meaningless unless they are claimed by the citizens. American political discourse (both local and national) has, since the so-called "Reagan revolution," consisted in the main of the systematic instrumentalization of political power to the designs of economic power. This instrumentalization has occurred on every front imaginable: infrastructural, ideological, cultural and psychological. To vote for Barack Obama today is to acknowledge the necessity of reclaiming this political process for the people. It is at once an act of enormous consequence and an act whose promise will only be fulfilled if (and to the extent that) we mean what we're saying.

Barack & Michelle voted this morning in their & my neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago.

If Obama wins the presidency today, it represents the declared reclamation of the ownership of the political process on the part of the nation's citizens. We -- the citizens -- declare our intention to reclaim our citizenship. Simple as that. It's a cause for celebration, and I will breathe a sigh of relief if and when Obama gives his victory speech tonight in Chicago's Grant Park.

It's important for us to remember what this declaration signifies. It doesn't mean that we've bequeathed the power to invent and pursue policy to a unilateral Obama Plan. It also doesn't mean that the wreckage that has been made of our infrastructure and political process is going to be swept away all in one fell....erm....swoop. Most importantly: it doesn't mean that we ourselves no longer bear the scars of a broken meritocratic, Cold War, my-country-right-or-wrong ideal. Our subconscious is littered with the remnants and curios of the past 30 and 50 years of narrow ideological bullshit. Embedded in our very conceptions of self are innumerable contradictions that will at times be painful and at times liberating to work at resolving.

The first step is to recognize it for what it is: to overcome the fear of seeing the shambles for what is. The second step is to declare our intention to repair what's broken.

That's what your vote for Obama means. It's no small thing, but neither is it an end in itself.

Go vote. Paddy, I'm talking to you.

USA as 'classless society', part ∞: education.

The assumption that American society is classless is to mainstream/bourgeois media as hydrogen is to water. But every now and again, while reading a publication such as the online magazine Slate, I'll stumble upon a manifestation of this assumption's embeddedness that I find particularly cloying. Discussions of education that ignore or reflect an author's ignorance of the profound impact of class, racial politics and other historical and current forms of social stratification tend to make me sick to my stomach.

Tell me that Anne Applebaum's recent mouth-breathing rumination All Work and No Play Still Might Not Get Jack Into Harvard doesn't induce nausea in the pit of your tummy. An excerpt:

...[T]he parents of many driven children

Gee, I hate to interrupt so soon, but if "driven children" means anything at all, it refers to children whose means of ordering and comprehending their relationship to the world around them provides for a realizable measure of mastery, competence or autonomy, however construed. Each of these children grow up with either the conviction or the guarantee that there's a piece of the pie with his or her name on it, and it is their task to learn to slice it. So already Applebaum is speaking only of children born into families with a significant social and cultural foothold, a status a child attains only through the good fortune of having been born into the right family in the right place at the right time, and that almost always coincides with preexisting economic wealth.

In other words, Applebaum's "driven children" consists of a tiny, privileged minority. Anyway, she continues, the parents of "many" of these "driven children," who apparently were

raised on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie, retain a kind of nostalgia for a pre-industrial America, one in which childhood involved breaking horses and building rafts, in which "schooling" was optional, and in which dropping out was a romantic option....

Uh, right. And the thing about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie is that they're, uh, works of fiction. They are entertainments. They're also myths -- a perfectly fine thing for them to be, by the way -- that are to a lesser or greater extent themselves constructed from the raw materials of previous myths. The pioneer families of the Great Plains. The provincial Southern Town that may have its troubles, but deep down, there's a Heart of Gold. Applebaum knows that life wasn't really like that, right?

So why is it then that she lets this small minority of privileged parents of privileged children off the hook for -- apparently -- mistaking its own privileged yet workaday childhood for a mythical one that existed only in classic fiction and shitty television series? Could it be because this group is engaged in the same act of self-delusion as Applebaum: failure to see the concept of meritocracy for the myth that it is?

It's notable, this nostalgia, because it isn't necessarily shared by other countries. Certainly not by the British, some of whose children start taking serious, life-changing exams at age 11, nor by the Koreans whose children declare they can't let themselves "waste even a second" during their 15-hours-a-day, seven-days-a week quest to get into college, preferably Harvard. In fact, any country committed to meritocracy has to impose exams on its high-school seniors. Otherwise, university admissions will necessarily depend upon wealth, access, and parental connections.

Applebaum is missing the point. University admissions already depend upon "wealth, access, and parental connections." University admissions have always depended upon these things. What changed was that the myth of the United States as a "country committed to meritocracy" gained popularity, prominence and the support of Social Darwinist intellectuals during the American Gilded Age. It's more than mere coincidence that meritocracy's rise to prominence occurred during the fucking Gilded Age. There was a brief moment in the wake of World War II, driven by public spending on social services like the G.I. Bill, during which the playing field did even out the tiniest bit, but those days are long gone, Applebaum.

More strangely, our nostalgia also clashes oddly with the other important American education narrative, the one that focuses on the 46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the "basic" level in science (only 2 percent qualify as "advanced"), the "Dumbest Generation" of semi-literates glued to their cell phones, and the enormous number of teenagers—a stunning one-third of the total—who fail to graduate from high school on time. Since 38 percent of these teenagers recently told one survey that they dropped out because "I had too much freedom and not enough rules in my life," it's no surprise that solutions to the drop-out crisis often involve the imposition of stricter school regimes, with more organized hours of teaching, more pressure, and, yes, more testing.

This is the part that just makes me want to fucking wretch. Tell me, Anne Applebaum, do you suppose that the "46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the 'basic' level in science" are on a level playing field with your precious "driven children," vying for spots at Harvard?

Thus are our kids both stupider than we were and harder working

Well, let's give Applebaum the benefit of the doubt and suppose that she's describing our shared American narrative of classlessness. She doesn't, of course, take a moment to point out that classlessness itself is the most pernicious myth of all. So, instead of calling her stupid or deluded, let's just call her evil.

—though perhaps this makes sense.

Ermmm, Anne, let's not get ahead of ourselves...

Evoking at once the myopia of a county club mom burdened with arranging schedules for her children's tennis lessons and the self-undermining pro-atomized individualism of a fat, exurban AM radio-listener, Applebaum's self-deception -- be it rhetorical or real -- that we Americans are all on a level playing field is just about the most laughable and disgusting thing I can recall having read in Slate. And considering that the magazine includes contributions from Christopher Hitchens, that's no small thing.