September - October 2003

I have been moving, it seems, for the last few months. Unsettled. I want to be settled so I can focus again.

I’m beginning to wonder, watching friends and family struggle with computers, if, for most people, having a home computer is just a fad. For me it’s indispensable. But if you don’t write anything, and I guess most people don’t, and you’re not interested in the Internet or email, why exactly do you need a home computer? You certainly don’t need it to balance your checkbook.

Computers are inescapable at work, where so much data needs to be recorded and shuffled. But as someone said years ago, there really isn’t that much data in the home.

You probably do need a computer at home if you have kids. They need to use one a lot to prepare for future work. One reason I bought a computer was to train myself for office work.

My sister uses her home computer mainly to play Solitaire. A deck of cards would be a lot cheaper.

And I may be part of the problem, because I’m always encouraging people to learn how to use their computers. As they say, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Keep in mind here that any computer on the internet for any length of time will experience multiple intrusion attempts every day. Crackers (people who try to intrude on other peoples' computers, not "hackers" who are merely people who are good programmers) or "Script Kiddies" (young folk who don't have real computer skills, but just use cracking scripts other people have written and posted to the net) are continually rattling the metaphorical doorknobs of random computers on the net to find one that would be easy to break into. If you have intrusion attempts, it is most likely from them. – Portland IndyMedia website

Columnist Ellen Goodman writes that “In 2002, 37 percent of all the state legislative seats in the country went uncontested.” An even higher number are nominally contested but noncompetitive. Democrats and Republicans have split up the country between them, drawing legislative district lines so that one of the major parties will have a clear majority of votes in as many districts as possible. So in effect we have a lot of one-party districts. Much like what the Soviet Union did, when it allowed only Communist Party nominees to run in elections.

Waves of anarchic warfare in the developing world are at least party the result of saddling third world governments with debt through the imposition of neo-liberal credit policies. The fall of the Yugoslavian government and the ethnic wars that resulted, was similarly at least partly the result of the shock therapy administered by the IMF. And other Eastern European governments were undermined by the spread of a consumer culture which fueled popular discontent with state provision. (The Eastern European revolutions, says Benjamin R. Barber, were less over the right to vote than the right to shop.) – Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, The Breaking of the American Social Compact, 1995

Parts of this book are academic and slow reading, but much of it is enlightening.

In one of my college sociology textbooks I read that leadership is situational, not an inherent quality in a particular person. So are good an evil.

… organized labor is on its back, its membership at 11 percent of the private sector labor force, down from 30 percent only two decades ago. – Piven & Cloward

The Redneck Manifesto, by Jim Goad, is about how U.S. culture puts down poor whites. He says that “poor white trash” is the last minority in America which it is publicly acceptable to regard as inferior.  The book is well-written and he makes a compelling case, going back to the early days of the American colonies, when he says that poor whites, brought over as indentured servants, were treated much like black slaves. My impression is that poor people in general are more despised than gays, who at least have money and have been able to organize and fight back.

I do disagree with Goad’s politics. He writes that he doesn’t want to pay for women on welfare to raise their kids. Yet his income is marginal, and I suspect at some point he will need one of the safety net programs. He seems knowledgeable about his subject, has done some reading as well as lived it, but doesn’t know much about politics.

In fact, West Virginia has one of the lowest violent-crime rates (and highest firearms-ownership rates) in the country – Goad

Michael Moore made the same point in his movie Bowling for Columbine: gun ownership is as high in Canada as here, but violence is lower. Could it be that the liberal preoccupation with gun control is on the wrong track? Maybe it really is people who kill people. Especially American people.

The working class has plenty of reasons to be angry. Unfortunately, only the working class realizes it. – Goad

Unfortunately many do not, or don’t know where to aim their anger. Many assume government will do nothing for them, which is probably true, and they don’t want to pay taxes to help other people.

A third of full-time American workers can’t even pull their chins up over the poverty line. – Goad

The poverty line, set by the federal government, is ridiculously low, $18,800 a year for a family of four, about $9 per hour if you work full-time.

In the 1970s, according to Piven & Cloward:

American business sought to reduce the impact of these [economic] instabilities with a renewed assault against the working class. Employers mobilized to cut wages, slash workplace protections, crush unions, and discredit the very possibility of worker power with an ideological campaign threatening capital flight if workers resisted the new demands.

“Capital flight” means moving the jobs to some other country where people work very cheap. A standard threat by American employers whose workers get uppity. However, in her recent book The Betrayal of Work, Beth Shulman says that most of the jobs that could be moved, industrial jobs, already have. Service jobs, which have greatly expanded as factory jobs declined, cannot be moved to other countries, she says, because they require contact with the customers.

The U.S. Census reported that between 1973 and 1989, the real income of male high school graduates dropped by a third; the income of those who didn’t make it through high school dropped by 40 percent. – Piven & Cloward

It has always seemed unfair to me that the distribution of income depends on the amount of time we’re willing to sit and listen to people talk at us about stuff that has nothing to do with making a living.

Religion gets louder as the paycheck gets smaller…. Religion has always been a sponge mop to absorb class tensions. It’s a safety valve. – Goad

Karl Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses.

I think for some people religion is like marijuana. But cheaper. Apparently a form of self-hypnosis.

Innovation, religious or otherwise, has never come from the mainstream…. The frontier, not the city, has always been the land of heresy. – Goad

The whole purpose of the mainstream is to keep everyone in line, keep the social machine running.

Someone wrote recently that this is also the purpose of marriage.

We all want comfort.

We all get bored.

Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were shot to the ground at a time when they seemed to be transcending narrow white/black divisions and phrasing the battle in class terms.

If rednecks and blacks were ever to put aside their differences, the only remaining enemy would be the one above them. – Goad

I go through long quiet periods where I decide the less I say the more sense I make.

Oregon taxes all households with incomes over $12,500 at the top rate of 9 percent [of taxable income]. Is that fair? Oregon taxes every business, large or small, at 6.6 percent of profits. Does that make sense? – Cynthia Kokis, letter to The Register-Guard

Between 1970 and 1990, according to Piven & Cloward, the purchasing power of welfare benefits dropped nearly 40 percent.

They say that in 1995, before the so-called welfare reform act, welfare amounted “to about 1 percent of the federal budget.” It must be even less now, with so many people having been driven off welfare.

That was one of the chief lessons the old woman had learned in death – life wanted things from you. If you did not have them, or give them, then life scowled and stopped caring about you. It was temperamental, biased, and in no way fair.

Never let your past salt your meat for you. – Jonathan Carroll, White Apples

We have to get up every morning and start over.

Poem from a dream:

One hundred years

Of thin personalities

Thin to the point of

Emaciation

Ghosts in the wind

Piven & Cloward say that money from  increased taxes went mainly to social programs service providers, not to their clients. Only certain kinds of benefits were offered. What we need instead is a fairer distribution of income.

Life isn’t a series of good and bad choices. It’s harder to steer it one way or the other than most people think. You just get pulled along.

You look back and you wonder “could I have changed the course of my life?” Maybe you could’ve … but it would probably have taken a tremendous force of will. – Seth, It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, a graphic novel

Seth does “real life” comics. His book is about a quest for information on a cartoonist he admires, but mostly it’s endless introspection. He walks around cities wondering about himself, often feeling depressed, unhappy with how he’s living his life, talking to his friend Chet, also a cartoonist, and his latest girlfriend, whom he will soon abandon. He has his interests – mainly the history of cartooning – and seems detached. A quiet book.

As Pearce (1982) points out, the rate of marital dissolution has in fact not increased over the past century. But where once it was mainly through death that women or men were left alone to raise their children, now it is mainly through desertion and divorce or the failure to marry in the first place, and it is mainly women who are left. – Piven & Cloward

I guess this is accurate if they’re talking about who gets left with the kids to support, but I read a while back that in most divorces it’s the woman who leaves the man. Poverty, apparently, being worth getting away from him.

Whenever I live with others, male or female, I eventually find friction. Right now I’m inclined to think I should just live alone. It seems too stressful to try to accommodate someone else’s preferences, especially when they often don’t make sense.

Perhaps the skill of living together is something we’re simply not taught. America is all about giving and taking orders. We believe in power – until we have to live with it.

Most women, forced to sell their labor, sold it in the expanding low-wage service sector as fast-food workers, or hospital workers, or office-cleaning women where, perhaps as a result of the influx of vulnerable women workers, wages and working conditions actually deteriorated during the 1970s…. – Piven & Cloward

And also wages were kept artificially low in those jobs considered “womens’ work.”

Piven & Cloward suggest that the “breakdown” of the family, by freeing women from male control, might increase their political power.

They write about this is 1984, when the voting “gender gap” was in the news. I wonder, does the gap still exist? Are women voting any more liberal than men?

Seems to me that most women, and men, have opted out of politics.

Then again, women were always angry, disappointed or upset with men for one thing or another. There was no way of escaping it. The more they loved you, the more you ended up disappointing them. – Jonathan Carroll, White Apples

One of my long-time fantasies has been to organize poor people into some kind of political movement, to protect our interests. But Piven & Cloward say most such efforts fail. They say “mobilization” is more effective than “organization.” Instead of creating a formal organization you collect contact information, and then use a very small group of people to mobilize people on your list for demonstrations and other actions. They say that disruption is more powerful than politics, and that without disruption politics can’t work for those without power. An example would be the civil rights movement in the south, which forced the Kennedy administration to move. We need to threaten the system, make it at least temporarily dysfunctional. “In short, breakdown is often prerequisite to breakout.”

Democrats and Republicans, on the national level, have perfected the art of stalemate.

Middle-class liberal Democrats desperately want to return to a Clinton/Gore normalcy, where they can make money, save the environment and have their abortions in peace.

Sometimes I feel that younger people are living in my past. I want to offer them the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.

Do old dogs commonly pee and poop on the floor? Is that just part of the deal?

Do people when they get old?

I think there’s a lot they’re not telling us.

Part of our problem is, apart from the occasional boycott, there’s no connection between us as consumers and us as workers.

Marijuana: on a very dark night watch those synapses light up.

This is my imaginary conversation.

In that free-floating state of mind where it doesn’t matter what time it is. Almost completely in the present. Like a dog who doesn’t know tomorrow.

Free at last.

Wandering around the house at 3 in the morning thinking, what is that hum? Florescent light in the kitchen. Stayed up most of the night, had fun.

Merchants are hoping there will be more consumers like Anne Vick, who has increased her spending these past few months. – Register-Guard

Yeah, let’s hear it for Anne.

I’m reading War Without and Within by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of Charles Lindbergh and a well-known writer of the generation before mine. Her diaries and letters, 1939-1944. She quotes writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery about the rhythm of writing: “Only the conscious gets across in words, the unconscious in the rhythm.”

We talked of Americans and the Puritan background. Perhaps it is that, I said, that gives us our sense of pressure, of hurry, of being late.

Arriving back in the U.S. in 1939, after living in Paris, Lindbergh wrote:

I feel on the whole rather shocked by the material shell of America, the impact of it as you first land. The speed, the brightness, the flash and advertisement.

We’re a country on speed, and it’s not recently that we got that way.

Standing in line at an ATM a little while ago, an old man with trembling hands taking a good ten minutes at the machine, he licks his thumb and slowly counts his bills, telling us that you have to be careful. I want to do something to hurry him, my impatience rising, but clamp my mouth shut.

I often have that breathless, out-of-time feeling, even when I’m not, when there’s no need to hurry. I’m late … for something, probably something long gone. I take a deep breath and think, slow down, and, if not now, when?

Walked into the Bijou theater to see American Splendor and started laughing, remembering a date here over 21 years ago. She fell asleep in the middle of the movie, one of the clues that we weren’t going anywhere.

American Splendor is based on Harvey Pekar’s real life comic book of the same name. I liked it a lot. He used what he had, his lowly working-class life, and turned it into art.

I can tell art because it gets rid of the pressure. I no longer feel like I have to move fast and make something happen. For awhile, life becomes sufficient.

Coming out of the movie Mystic River tonight I heard someone say, “There were no innocents.” Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, a tragedy set in a fictional working-class suburb of Boston. The book struck me as literature, although the rest of his books are just crime novels. I like his use of working-class characters. Interesting interview with Lehane in the Atlantic.

… currently 75 percent of those who lose jobs still haven’t found new jobs when their unemployment benefits run out…. – Paul Krugman

Krugman says that Bush’s tax cuts will cost us almost $300 billion this year. If spent on a government jobs program, he says, that would have created 6 million jobs. The U.S. has lost 2.6 million jobs since Bush was elected.

Time goes by so slowly for the same reason it seems like a fast blur in retrospect – not much happened.

… the childlike quality of Americans I noticed everywhere on coming back from abroad. – Lindbergh, 1939

It is very strange, the innocence, the willful unknowing. Reminds me of what a very young woman told me about sex a long time ago: she had decided that if she just didn’t think about it, know anything about it, she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

Without adventure a civilization is in full decay. – Alfred North Whitehead, quoted by Lindbergh

I carry earplugs whenever I go out. Machine gun talking on the bus, distracting, hard on the ears. Oddly, I usually have no interest in listening. My book is better. For all my identification with the working class, I don’t seem to be interested in listening to them. Educated, working-class intellectual, not at home anywhere.

Well you know, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone listen to my routine conversation either. I can be boring.

I can never find enough time to read. Everything else feels like an interruption.

No American can understand the need for time – that is, simply space to breathe. If you have ten minutes to spare you should jam that full instead of leaving it – as space around your next ten minutes. How can anything ripen without those “empty ten minutes?” – Lindbergh, 1939

All the creative periods in my life have depended on not working, having lots of free time so I could wander around in a daze, thinking about things and scribbling in my notebooks. It requires open space.  And also, for me, working in bits and pieces. Some well-known poet I read about long ago, a dentist, used to write his poems on the backs of prescription forms, in between patients.

Older viewers have been writing to TV critics about this audibility problem for years; either it’s getting worse, or TV critics are getting old too. – Tom Shales, Register-Guard

See, see!