In this issue:

1. Economics
2. Charles Bukowski
3. Fear
4. Movies
5. Anger
6. Art
7. Animal love
8. Politics

My sister is in Virginia visiting someone. She found out that my high school friend Tony died around 12-15 years ago. I'm surprised that he would have died so young, late 40s or early 50s. He was such a strong, vigorous youth. He wanted to research immortality after high school and live forever. Instead I understand he ended up running his father's drugstore. When I graduated from high school, in 1958, I wanted to study rocket science and be involved in space travel.

Longevity seems to depend more on the quality of our organs and resistance to disease than on physical strength. My small, frail mother made it to age 79, and she smoked.

But none of us seemed to live anymore where we had grown up; we moved to other people's places, made souvenirs of their history. We all lived in ghost towns. -- Betsy Thornton, Ghost Towns, 2002

After our mother died my older sister, grieving, said that Mother had been the only one left with whom she shared all her memories.

Yes, but there are cultural memories as well as personal ones, and you can share them with anyone close to your age. Recently I mentioned a 1960 TV program about two young men traveling the country in a Corvette to a friend, 61, and she said, "Oh yeah, Route 66."

Indulge too many habits, and life sinks into a mind-dulling routine. Too few and coping with a relentless stream of incoming detail overwhelms you....

This sense of interior stability is consistent with one widely observable truth: the arc to any individual life is uniform over long periods of time. -- David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art & Fear, 1997

We tell the same stories, they say, over and over, in our art, because those are the stories we have to tell.

My younger sister tells me that although dogs are very loving, they are not sentimental, and will quickly adapt to a new owner who provides the necessary food and petting.

On sticking to the point: The problem is that the point moves. In fact, unless we can establish continuity, I would have to say by now it's a different point.

An old friend emailed me an article about surviving earthquakes. It said never get under anything, because you'll be crushed when the building falls down. Instead, get on the floor alongside something substantial, like a bed, so you'll end up in a triangle of safety.

A famous 1953 study by Alfred Kinsey found that 50 percent of married men and 26 percent of married women had engaged in adultery by age 40. A recent study by Ball State University reported women younger than 40 have caught up to men in adultery. Other studies show 5 percent to 15 percent of married couples have "open marriages." -- Jonathan Turley, Register-Guard, Sept. 26, 2004

Why the increase in adultery? My guess is the decline in public disapproval, and also the general wreckage of marriage in this country.

A 1988 study, the R-G reports, found that 75 percent of women and more than 80 percent of men have premarital sex by age 19. Makes sense because marriage is being postponed until later, probably because it's so hard for young people to make a living.

Economics

Take-home pay, as a share of the economy, has now sunk to its lowest level since 1929, when the government first started keeping track. In contrast, after-tax profits as a share of the economy are now at their highest level since 1929.

The passage of the Wagner Act legalizing industrial workers' right to organize only came about as the result of a massive strike wave in the 1930s. Even then the Wagner Act set up a federal bureaucracy that regulated workers' strike actions. These regulations became prohibitions – e.g., against secondary boycotts – in the 1940s-50s with Taft-Hartley, Landrum-Griffin, etc. Meanwhile the federal bureaucracy expanded into a giant force of lawyers, judges, arbitrators, mediators, etc. who take years to settle the simplest grievance – and more often than not settle it against the workers. – Pete Brown, "Liberal economists try to pump up the Democrats," Portland Indymedia

The percentage of union members in the private economy has dropped below ten percent, the lowest in over sixty years. At the heart of this decline are labor laws which throw insurmountable barriers before organizing efforts.

Over 45 million workers – one in three – do not make a living wage, i.e. under $10 per hour gross. This is insufficient for an individual to live on and certainly not enough for a family. – Ralph Nader, "A Labor Day Call for Rights for Working People," CounterPunch

Today I found out my food stamps will be cut next month by "up to" $50. I just want to make the comfortable as uncomfortable as they're making me.

Wait until a third of the baby boomers retire, after a working lifetime of just getting by, and discover they're expendable.

Then Social Security will be means-tested, so they don't have to pay benefits to the well-off, which will sound good, but then it will be a poverty program and fair game for constant benefit cuts. The low-income boomers will be too old, and too passive from years of political indifference, to riot in the streets. They will quietly die in their cheap rented rooms, watching TV and reading library books, done at last.

And the young will find themselves living in a Wal-Mart world, too poor to do anything but work.

The general, long-term effects of government policies, including economic stagnation, meager social benefits, and high unemployment, give the government great leverage, because people are desperate to work on any terms. -- Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country, 1989

She's talking about Britain, but it could just as well be the U.S. Profitability is God, because if business doesn't do well we won't have jobs.

There is no stronger cultural force than atavism.

Robinson points out that even socialist governments exploit their people. "Why do we persist in assuming that any government has the welfare of the mass of its people as an object, where neither history nor present experience encourages this idea?"

In industrial cities [of 19th century Britain] the average length of working-class lives was seventeen years.

American abolitionists, well before the Civil War or the Communist Manifesto, treated chattel slavery and wage slavery, in those terms, as one phenomenon.

Victorians, she says, defined goodness "as the opposite, not of evil, but of poverty."

A Register-Guard article says that three-quarters of Americans are now retiring on partial Social Security benefits at age 62, as I did. I suspect, like me, that they're tired, and sick of working. Also, since many of us have serious health problems by 62 and don't know how much longer we'll live, we want to get it while we can. According to what I've read, the retirement decision is a wash: if you retire early you get less money, but you get it for more years.

It gets harder to get any kind of decent job, or perhaps any job, once you get into your 60s. Employers don't want people who move slow. Notice all the job ads that include "fast-paced environment."

The article says that "life expectancy has gone from 62 in 1935 to 78 this year." So of course the politicians want to raise the age of retirement -- again. If younger people don't fight this they will live to regret it. The life expectancy of 78, by the way, is only an average. A great many of us will not live that long. Many will die before they reach my age of 64.

In John Updike's novel Rabbit Is Rich, one of the characters says they can't believe what a small amount of money they used to think was a lot. The sense of scale also changes when you move downward, in my case from working class to poor.

Charles Bukowski

I'm trying to read Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 1969. Years ago I saw a movie about alcoholics that he wrote, Barfly, and I kept hearing his name. This book is a series of columns he wrote for an L.A. underground paper, rants, fiction, whatever. I'm not sure I'll get through this. His position seems to be that human life is a pile of shit but he can play with it.

Bukowski is downright nasty. I have to admire that. "Always pretend to be understanding, even when you're not." I don't know, after a while it sort of grows on you. He's actually, I think, trying to drop all pretense. There is no way he could please us, and it would make him sick if he could, so he's perfectly willing to be disgusting. If you don't like it, drink somewhere else.

The relief comes from imagining a point at which there is nothing to lose, so you don't have to pretend. Wouldn't work anyway. We're not actors, just bad-tempered old men.

Bukowski knows that life is sad, rotten and impossible, and he makes no bones about it. He drinks, writes and tries to get laid.

He is completely un-American. None of that high living and forced optimism.

Bukowski was born in 1920, died in 1994 at age 73. One of the Beat writers, a literary bad boy.

He reminds me a bit of the cartoonist Robert Crumb, the same appetite for the bizarre grotesque. Except Crumb does fantastic and Bukowski does sitting in a crummy rented room, drinking, writing little stores about dead-end people.

all right, one night, lights all out, I awakened in bed drunk, but clear, you know, suddenly clear the unclean walls. the no purpose of it all, the sadness of everything. and I got up on one elbow and looked around and everybody seemed gone. just those empty wine bottles on their moonlit sides. gross tough morning waiting....

I wish I had his ability to be lyrical about it.

Bukowski has this sense of everything constantly falling apart. My experience also.

Fear

The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner, 1999

"People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true." -- Richard Nixon, quoted by Glassner

He should know. Like many other politicians, Nixon encouraged fear as a way of mass control. This is how so-called leaders drag their countries into war, by making us afraid of the "enemy."

Glassner runs through many of the current over-hyped fears in the US, comparing what the news media say, what we believe, and what the facts are. He says we're worrying about the wrong things, possibly because we don't want to deal with the real dangers confronting us, which are mostly economic.

Glassner says that journalists often use misplaced fear as a way of dealing with one subject while talking about another. All the news stories, for example, which exaggerated the actually low rate of workplace violence.

Perhaps because workplace violence is a way of talking about the precariousness of employment without directly confronting what primarily put workers at risk -- the endless waves of corporate layoffs that began in the early 1980s.

... about 50 percent more people are laid off each year than are victims of crime....

From 1980 through 1995 more than 42 million jobs were eliminated in the United States. The number of jobs lost per year more than doubled over that time, from about 1.5 million in 1980 to 3.23 million in 1995. By comparison, during that same period most crime rates -- including those for violent crimes -- declined. A working person was roughly four to five times more likely to be the victim of a layoff in any given year than to be the victim of a violent crime committed by a stranger.

During the economic boom of the late 1990s layoffs occurred at an even higher rate than in the 1980s.

... where the bottom 40 percent of the population is worse off financially than their counterparts two decades earlier....

The larger the gap between rich and poor in a society, the higher its overall death rates from heart disease, cancer, and murder.

Glassner writes about "metaphorical illness" such as the Gulf War Syndrome, which he says was a backdoor way of criticizing the war. I'm wondering if depression is a metaphorical illness, a way of saying that society is making us sick. Instead of confronting society with political action, we'll just take a pill. So much easier.

Metaphorical illness might even be a reaction to a wider problem, that many of us feel we've lost control over our lives, and there is no way to get it back. We have too little power. Many of us then react with risky behaviors like smoking or drinking too much, just to feel better, which drive our lives further out of control.

Glassner suggests we watch for signs that we're being had.

Statements of alarm by newscasters and glorification of wannabe experts are two telltale tricks of the fear mongers' trade.... In the preceding chapters I pointed out others as well: the use of poignant anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, the christening of isolated incidents as trends, depictions of entire categories of people as innately dangerous.

It wouldn't work so well if so many Americans hadn't simply given up on thinking.

Movies

Stepford Wives -- A light comedy about women in a Connecticut town being turned into men-pleasing robots. Starts with 1950s TV commercials showing perky women adoring kitchen appliances.

Yeah, but if 50s women were domestic robots, so were the men. What else would you call people who live their lives doing things they don't want to do? And even so, maybe 50s men were lucky -- at least they could make enough money to support a family. (Or maybe not: they had to go through the Depression and WWII to get there.)

Mona Lisa Smile -- A useful history lesson. In 1953, a Wellesley College art professor tries to show young women that they can be more than a wife. Sometimes you can only see we've made progress by looking back quite a ways.

Still, 51 years later, most of the women I know who were young in the 1950s and 60s have trouble making a decent living on their own. Of course I also know men of that generation, including myself, who have trouble making a living.

The Corporation -- Walked out of this documentary tonight when my friend couldn't stand it anymore. It does a good job of showing corporate greed, but it goes on so long, and has such a quick-cut, bang-bang style, that it's hard to take. Doesn't have the ease of Michael Moore. I would recommend it to the politically ignorant and naive. Democrats.

Dopamine is a nice romantic movie. Love is more than just chemistry. I wish, though, they had left out the obligatory smoking.

Anger

Some people loved adversity, got high on it daily, and secretly despised those who would take it from them. -- James Lee Burke, Last Car to Elysian Fields, 2003

... like all real artists, she seemed to disappear inside the thing she created....

Burke's detective, Dave Robicheaux, will not stop asking questions if he thinks someone has been murdered. People he questions try to deflect him. One way to do that is by saying there is something wrong with him: "You have an enormous reservoir of anger inside you, Dave. I guess I feel sorry for you." Yeah, the guilty always feel sorry for those who are after them. How could they be so mean?

I get the same thing in politics. The liberals don't like the radicals' unseemly anger. Can't we all just hide our anger and be nice? Just quietly let them screw us? Liberals see politics as something high-minded about the pursuit of the common good. Radicals see it as being about survival and getting our share of the pie.

There were the people we cycled in and out of the [criminal justice] system for decades, without beneficial influence or purpose of any kind that was detectable.

Yes, and at great expense. Last I heard, around $25,000 a year to keep someone in prison.

Burke is a good writer, but often violent and nasty. A very dark view of life. Some of his books have supernatural elements. The ones set in Montana, with a different main character, are not as good as the Robicheaux novels, set in Louisiana. He has an unusual, among the authors I read, feeling for place.

Art

Art & Fear, 1997, by David Bayles & Ted Orland, is based on the question, "Why do so many who start, quit?" They say that "most people stop making art when they stop being students."

The authors suggest that artists -- which includes writers, dancers, actors, musicians, painters, etc. -- have to deal with their own unrealistic conceptions, as well as a lack of social support. A large barrier is that most of us cannot make a living at it.

Self-knowledge helps. Self-consciousness makes us freeze up -- being overly conscious of the self as exposed to a hostile or indifferent society.

It's a sales society which demands that we be constantly aware of how we're presenting ourselves, how others see us, because if we don't pass the test we won't get any goodies. You have to put that out of your mind to do art, even this kind.

When you act out of fear, your fears come true.

Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error.... Imperfection is not only a common ingredient in art, but very likely an essential ingredient.... The seed for your next work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.

Asking your work to prove anything only invites doom.

Probably the imperfections give the work its resonance.

Admittedly, artmaking probably does require something special, but just what that something might be has remained remarkably elusive -- elusive enough to suggest that it may be something particular to each artist, rather than universal to them all.

For most artists, making good art depends upon making lots of art....

For the working artists, the very best writings on art are not analytical or chronological; they are autobiographical.

I just watched John Lennon's Jukebox on PBS, a brief history of 1950s-60s rock 'n roll. One musician said, regarding learning to do creative things with an harmonica,"It's like masturbation. You fool around with it long enough, you'll get the hang of it."

One of the things I learned from this program is that musicians all borrow from each other. I imagine it's the same in all the other arts. One man I knew was leery of putting photos of his paintings online because "the art world is very imitative." But what I got from the program is that this use of bits and pieces of other peoples' art to create your own is part of the creative process. The Beatles did it. It was like rock was a common language that they were all developing.

Salon des Refuses: The miracle was that after looking at the art I could see the people as art.

A romantic is someone who confuses life with art. We always want life to be grander than it is. Yet how troubled are the lives of literary characters, and therefore how interesting.

the difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable. -- Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 1969

Animal love

I just saw Edward Albee's play The Goat. Martin, a famous 50 year-old architect, has an "affair" with a goat, much to the outrage of his wife. Seemed like a one-joke play: man has sex with goat. Once you get the laugh, not much of any place to go from there.

The outrageous thing in the play was that the man fell in love with the goat. I can understand people loving animals, I have, but not romantic love. It is never explained in the play; the man says repeatedly that he can't explain it. He was simply overwhelmed by this inexplicable emotion. He has stepped completely outside the world he and his wife can understand, and it shatters their lives. But it's the love that is outside usual human reality, not the sex.

Although maybe, considering what human love has come to, we should all consider mating with goats. I'm just sayin'.

But what would we talk about?

Although I have no numbers, I don't think humans having sex with animals is all that uncommon. I've heard it's common among farm boys. After all, it's easy, available, requires no social skills, and is no more outrageous than other things we do to animals, such as eating them. If you were an animal, which would you prefer? I'm not even sure it's cruel, although I think if we could take a poll the animals would say they'd really rather not.

While I know very little about the sexual utility of livestock, I would think that a goat, due to its size, would not be the kindest choice. I've heard that cows are best, due to their size and placidity, the latter quality not being common in the human female.

In the play, Martin attends a therapy group of bestiality addicts, in which one of the participants says he uses a goose. Now that, as John Kerry would say, is just plain wrong.

Getting into the spirit, I can picture a chain of cow brothels, hailed by all decent people as a replacement for human prostitution. Christians should love the idea, as it would protect the purity of their women folk.

No one gets pregnant or acquires, I presume, a disease, unless you're screwing a mad cow.

The main character in the movie American Pie, a boy in his late teens, uses a pie. But perhaps we should not speak of such things. There may be children reading this.

Politics

The real news in this election is not the sham battle between the Democrats and the Republicans, two sides of the same corporate coin. The news is the war between the Democrats and the American left, led by Ralph Nader. In this election the gloves have come off. Democrats are no longer pretending to have any ethics or to believe in democracy. They simply want to win.

Democrats support the war in Iraq, cheap labor, medical insurance companies, corporate control and cutting safety net programs. Nader is for ending corporate control, living wages, real job programs, universal health care and getting out of Iraq.

Politically, Americans are roughly in the position of someone who has been drinking too much and needs to puke. But we're not allowed to puke, so we have another drink.

Americans seem to me like characters in a crime novel, indulgent middle-class or rich parents who have raised kids who are nasty shits, and can't admit it. Except in this case the nasty shits we've raised are running the country.

History is sharpening to a point. You either get the point or you don't.

What made him unique was the fact that he had no sense of detachment at all. He was like the fanatical football fan who runs onto the field and tackles a player. -- Hunter Thompson, The Rum Diary

That's what most activists are -- fans. We're allowed to get all worked up over our "team," but not to actually have any power. It's really a substitute for politics, which is closed off to amateurs.

The next step up is to be on some kind of Advisory Board. "Thank you for your input." Which they'll feel free to ignore.

The Oregon Supreme Court just affirmed the right of our Democratic Sec. of State to abuse his authority and keep Ralph Nader off the ballot because of tiny violations on our petitions of unwritten rules he just made up.

Kerry has the same problem Gore had in 2000: he doesn't sound real. He sounds like an actor in a TV commercial. Kerry's sense of unreality, like Gore's, is not just a personal quality. It is the result of a Democratic party that refuses to deal with reality.

Now we have two presidential candidates chosen by the rich people, both supporting the Iraq war. Democrats don't seem to have a problem with that.

Kerry's position on Iraq is widely described as "nuanced," because it is really the avoidance of position.

I read recently that Kerry only "volunteered" to join the Navy after college because otherwise he was likely to be drafted. He expected Navy duty to be considerably less risky than the Army. At first this was true, as the Swift boats to which he was assigned were patrolling off the coast of Vietnam. Later they were assigned to the much more dangerous duty of terrorizing the peasants on Vietnam's rivers. Kerry served four months until three superficial wounds sent him home. Still, according to one account, the experience was psychologically traumatizing, causing nightmares years later.

In the 1960s the Selective Service was consciously used to further what were considered national objectives. Men were pressured by the draft into fatherhood, college or less lethal branches of the military. The main beneficiary was the middle class, whose sons escaped into college.

... the sense that we could afford to embrace certain freedoms because most people couldn't actually exercise them.... -- Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library, 2004

Wake up and smell the decomposition of democracy.

... one out of every four black children in this country in our municipalities now has asthma. Asthma rates have doubled among our children over the last five years. -- Bobby Kennedy Jr., Eugene Weekly, Sept. 30, 2994

I feel the need to cry "fire" in a crowded theater because, well, it's burning.