Acteon at Ann Taylor

For May

If I get the sugar
would you get me

If we were to resurrect Acteon, that Greek hunter torn to bits by his own dog for gazing upon Diana bathing nude in a stream, he would find the equivalent of his divine thrill not in strip joint America, but rather in women’s clothing boutique America. While I would be the last person to deny the thrill that comes from watching a woman undressing, whether in a bedroom or to the booming of Gimme Gimme over the sound system, it is no longer the unguarded moment – it is no longer the secret of the goddess, it is no longer worth being torn apart by your dogs in the heart of the forest, the hunter hunted, the vig on the male gaze. No, the secret of the goddess has migrated to women dressing. Acteon would better look for his kicks in Sachs Fifth Avenue, in By George, in any number of upscale boutiques in the midsized to supersized urban playlands of America.

I was first taught this lesson by my friend M., back in New Haven. New Haven, in those days, was Yale University, a few streets of affluence, and neighborhood after neighborhood of mythical violence. In actuality, there wasn’t that much violence, just a severe class difference – on the one hand, the scions of America’s wealth, on the other hand, the victims of America’s wealth, all neatly folded into six square miles. At this time, in the nineties, there was – as M. told me over and over – a gross and heartless lack of women’s clothing stores. Nevertheless, she would sometimes, when bored, make the round of what was there – the Laura Ashley to Ann Taylor circuit – and I would tag behind her. This was my first real experience of watching a woman buy clothes – and it was exhilarating. Of course, the real thing was happening in NYC, and when M. and I went there, the first thing we would hit would be clothing stores.

A woman’s clothing store survives on the atmosphere it creates. It does this through a proliferation of huge posters of very pretty people engaged in celebrity moments – laughing sexily at each other; through a color scheme that tends to skin complementary pastels; through a staff that, if they know their business, will make the customer feel, on some level, the need to prove herself to them; and through the music, which will always be as though piped from some marvelous club. It is, in a word, a very dramatic place, although the drama here might seem, at first, no different than any other store. I think that if there were a totally nude culture – by which I mean a culture in which there was no body ornament at all – a culture such as, to my knowledge, nobody has ever encountered – that this culture would have no drama, no ritual. Drama begins with the tattoo, the mask, the feather, the earring. With the beginning of drama, we have, as well, the beginning of stage fright – that marginal anxiety that accumulates as, day by day, year by year, one is looked at. Looks accumulate inside a person as a sort of jury. In response to this, there’s a utopian dream of going beyond these things. This is expressed, in philosophy, by the perennial anxiety about the human as object. In this philosophical dream, nudity is a mark of purity. To the pure, all things are pure. Acteon, in this utopia, would have seen nothing but what there was to see. In fact, what he saw was that there was no exit – that even the goddess wears her nudity. There’s doubleness all the way down.

Given the choice, I imagine Acteon would have chosen to live in the world where he saw more than there was to see, even if it meant ending up in the mouths of dogs in the end. I’m with Acteon here. And certainly I’m with the women’s clothing boutique designers, who don’t need Greek mythology to go about their business. You are immersed in the gaze – in some kind of gaze – the minute you enter a boutique. If the male gaze is defined as an objectifying one, than one might say that here is the very workshop of objectification. Myself, I find this vocabulary to be so out of synch with what happens in a boutique that it is absolutely distorting. For objectification implies, of course, a cool mastery, an absence of effect, and this is just what the classical male gaze is not capable of. The male gaze wants a strip tease, not an x ray. At the heart of objectification is, as I said, drama – the drama of making the object. We are the objects that make the objects, including the object that we will be, with the clothes that we wear – it is the moment in which the body is ornamented that we become both body and the body that we are making, both master and slave, both object and subject, and there’s not a gaze sharp enough or thin enough to get between those two things. We’ll never be naked again. The theater of dressing up in a boutique, usually to the most affectless techno sound possible, is the recapitulation of the happy fall, the original sin, that moment of becoming our own double – with clumsy fig leaves or the first clothing, which was manufactured by the first fashion designer, the Elohim: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”

writing in mockingbird

Cioran supposedly began to write in French in 43, 44. As he tells the story, he was in France, trying to translate Mallarme into Romanian, when he decided to break entirely with his native language. By this time Cioran had witnessed to the full the flame out of his early, fascist dreams, what his biographer, Zarifopol-Johnston calls “the lyrical virtues of totalitarianism.” In a sense, the renunciation of Romanian for French – a language which he claimed was “sclerotic” – was his repentance. Perhaps it is the kind of punishment only a writer can fully appreciate – to be sentenced to write in another language.

The beginning of History and Utopia is couched in terms of a letter Cioran writes some Romanian friend. The friend had asked how he could give up his language – he had intimated that it was a betrayal on the deepest level.

Cioran writes:

It would be undertaking the story of a nightmare to tell you the intimate history of my relationship with this borrowed idiom, with all those thought and rethought words, smoothed out, subtle to the point of non-existence, bent under the exactions of nuance, inexpressive by having expressed everything, frightening with precision, charged with discretion and modesty, discrete even in its vulgarity. How could you think a Scythian might accommodate himself to it, that he’d grasp the fine significance – and that he’d manipulate it scrupulously and with probity? There is not a single one of them that doesn’t give me vertigo with its extenuated elegance: no more trace of the earth, of blood, of the soul in them.” (470 – my translation)

Of course, the mention of blood and soil here is rather tricky, rather flirtatious- it is one of those innumerable moments in Cioran when the political unconscious comes to the surface and prances about like a naked clown. Still, I take it that this is a serious passage. Apparently Cioran was never entirely comfortable in French, as he was in German or Hungarian – his other second languages. He gargled his French. And yet, by a tremendous act of will, he wrote a French that was as pure as Chamfort’s.

“What consumption of coffee, cigarettes and dictionaries to write a barely correct phrase in this unapproachable language, too noble, too distinguished for my taste.”

Writing in neither French nor German but my own native American, I am, in one way, a Scythian at home in Scythia. The barbaric yawp that comes out of my mouth or, nowadays, flows out of the fingers typing this, should be one hundred percent made in America.

But a language can be pulled out from under your feet – oh, you can’t trust it, and certainly not the people who speak it. When I first resolved to be a writer, I too, consumed the cups of coffee and consulted, if not dictionaries, at least arbiters of what I took to be the best style. I read Johnson, Hazlitt and Ruskin for the music. I read Emerson, Thoreau and Twain for the tartness of an American speech starting to feel that it could punch its weight in the world. I read Hemingway and Faulkner and the minor New Yorker writers – Thurber, Leibling, Mitchell – in order to be able to shift to any tone I wanted.

And as I was stocking up on how to write, the audience was stocking up on how to speak in all the tones of inspirational books and get rich quick seminars. It was staring at cartoons and slowly unlearning how to read a newspaper. It was being deafened by bullshit, a historic avalanche of bullshit pouring out every second of every day from monitors placed everywhere, as though we’d been invaded by the aliens of some 50s movie, and the system worked, the mass mind was milked of every nuance, every complications, and its ideas were replaced with advertisements. It learned to believe everything at least once. It learned that it was selfish and that selfishness was good – which was a double lie, as it didn’t have enough self to be selfish, and what it called good was just the blind hope that everything didn’t cave in before the looting was over.

Such, of course, was the 00s, a decade that we all wear with extreme shame. Myself, I don’t have time or money to go to France and start over like Cioran. I take my cue from crows, grackles and mockingbirds, and write as though I were the last of my species – a bitter keening that sounds like a stand up comic’s routine.

ps - everybody seems to be seeing through me lately! My friend Chad said he liked the first part of this thing, but... and of course he is right. It is true that a writer better learn the clockwork of the masters. But then, too, he should read the comments sections of YouTube, fan fic fuck fiction, listen to street people slag each other off and the latest slang of sorority girls and in general have some sense of the direction to which that great beast, the language, is slouching. And then, for the piece de resistance, he should burn his taste down. Torch the motherfucker. Because writing - or at least that writing which aims to 'drain the last drop of slavery from one's blood' - is always a child of arson.

the problem of the second corpse

It is a triumph of Dante’s art that we remember the nine circles of hell without really puzzling over their essential irrelevance to their inhabitants. After all, if the inhabitants of the first circle are really being punished eternally, from their point of view, it matters not if they are in the second or the ninth circle. Instinctively we suppose that the nine circles must be distinguished by greater or lesser pain, but this isn’t true. Francesca and Paolo, in the second circle, suffer an equal quantity of pain as does Judas in the ninth circle: it is not the quantitative order of pain, but another order – that of the quality of the sins – that organizes the circles.

This is a reflection of a dilemma at the heart of retributive justice. The scale of retaliation is very easily overwhelmed by the human capacity to commit evil. I can be killed for killing one person; but I can’t then be revived and killed all over again for killing a second person. The extra corpse is secretly buried beneath all of justice’s physical and metaphysical structures.

One of the motives for moral absolutism is to find some way to mark out and retaliate against grades of fault. On the one hand, we would like to say that if a man kills, or puts in motion processes that kill, 40 million people, that such a person is more evil than a person who kills one person. On the other hand, justice has no way of expressing this – there is, so to speak, a market meltdown in retaliation. Dante had to accept this logic as well – once you have decreed eternal pain for Francesca and Paolo, you can vary the pain that separates them from a usurer or traitor, but the quantity of the punishment will be the same.

The moral absolutist complains any moral perspective but one that grounds good and evil in an absolute will collapse morality. But, in practical terms, the second corpse does the same thing for the absolutist. If the killing of the first corpse is absolutely bad, the killing of the second corpse, or n-times corpses, can only be as bad. Infinity times itself is infinity. Having axed the money lender, Raskolnikov becomes no better or worse by axing the maid.

Theologically, the dilemma of retaliation has driven the design of numerous afterlife narratives. One solution to the quantitative problem is reincarnation, so that, in a sense, we can revive Raskolnikov to die twice for his victims. In the next life, Raskolnikov might be born a money lender and have to face the axe himself. The problem is, of course, that such retaliation makes us wonder about our “original” murder. Perhaps Raskolnikov is just revenging a deed in the previous life lived by the moneylender. In which case, as an instrument of justice, it is hard to see why he should be retaliated against. One can imagine nemesis as being very clever in fatal symmetries: Raskolnikov can, perhaps, be reborn as the moneylender and the moneylender as practically another Raskolnikov. However, the couple seems unstuck from the absolute moral schema, as they slaughter each other in one life after the other. If we live in the circular world of the eternal return, it would be hard to see, even, what is the after and what is the before life justifying the slaughters.
Another way out of the dilemma of lex talionis is to decree that no killing at all is allowed, ever. No circumstance, here, justifies killing. Historically, the move of absolute pacifism has never caught on. The reason seems to be that unless it catches on universally, the pacifist seems to either be headed towards certain destruction at the hands of the non-pacifist or, what is worse, colluding with the non-pacifist in the destruction of others, insofar as the non-pacifist does not resist the killing. Isn’t it funny that the absolute ethic, extended into practical life, so quickly loses its appeal? And yet, it does have such appeal that many religious leaders have preached just such pacifism. And if the leaders were successful enough to create religions, than the church’s that follow them will inevitably twist the founder’s words and come up with dozens of creative ways to allow killing.

Defending moral relativism

I’ve been reading Hans-Georg Moeller’s The Holy Fool: the case for amorality. Moeller, whose notion of the holy fool comes from Daoism, defends a radical version of negative ethics, which arises, he says, from a “disgust with ethics and its failures.” Given such a viewpoint, you would think that Moeller would be sympathetic to moral relativism.

Yet, in the midst of arguing for amorality, Moeller is careful to say that he is not a moral relativist. It is as if moral relativism is in itself a kind of contagious failure. Myself, if I am anything, I’m a moral relativist, even though I rarely recognize moral relativism in the way it is usually constructed in philosophy. It is usually assumed that if you are a moral relativist, you cannot, for some reason, condemn people who exist in another moral perspective. This, to my mind, is very weird. If you are a moral relativist, why should you pledge yourself to a universalist notion of respecting other moral perspectives? In fact, such a pledge is one possible way of constructing a moral perspective, but not, of course, the only one. Moral relativism, as I understand it, derives its power from anthropological relativism – the refusal to assume that cultures sort themselves hierarchically in terms of some value. But the refusal to assume this sorting occurs, of course, within a discourse about culture. It occurs at the intellectual level in which one studies cultures. Within cultures as historical entities, it doesn’t exist at all. Historically, cultures are always sorting themselves both inside and outside – inside, by way of changes in the symbolic mediations of the members of the culture, and outside, by way of expansions, retreats, stances of neutrality, etc. The Spanish culture sorted itself out with the Mixteca-Aztec culture by trying to destroy the latter, for instance.

Similarly, the moral relativist could well believe that the perspective in which he or she exists should sort itself out with another perspective by destroying it. Meanwhile, internally, the moral perspective, insofar as one aspect of it is actual culture practices, is of course under tension as well. All the moral relativist has to claim is legitimacy with regard to the perspective he embraces. What the moral relativist gives up is the idea that he has access to an absolute perspective. If morality is a way of making us feel good about condemning people, then I have plenty of moral equipment for condemning, say, Hitler, without condemning Hitler absolutely. The demand for an absolute here seems to mean either one of two things. It is the demand that Hitler is not just evil, but really really evil – it is an intensifier. Or it is the demand that there be no moral perspective in which Hitler could justify himself. Of course, the latter is historically falsified – we know quite well that Nazis thought that they were morally justified, which is why they acted the way they did. So what is the absolute demand really for? I think it is for a justification of annulling, or killing, Nazis. But such justification could easily be constructed in one moral perspective without being constructed in all of them.

Obviously, my version of moral relativism isn’t that thing philosophers like to attack when they claim that moral relativism is saying morality is an individual taste. Or the “you believe x and I believe y” by which people agree to disagree. However, the motive for moral relativism does arise from things like agreeing to disagree, or holding a value as a taste. The moral relativist can doubt that morality is individualistic in the sense that it is unlikely any individual creates a morality, any more than any individual creates a language, but the underlying notion that there are different moral perspectives which, perhaps, don’t compete in some agreed upon way to win is the insight that first animates the thought that morality could be relative. In that sense, taste and differences about taste are the most powerful models for the liberal utopian immpulse - the impulse to construct a tolerant society. This liberalism undoubtedly nurtures contemporary moral relativism, even though most moral relativists keep their heads down - as it is one of those terms that is supposed to be damning.

this is your captain

We are all still going down.

Bloomberg, in March, reported that the Bush-Obama plan was sailing along quite smoothly. In return for keeping our financial sector number one – and remember, at least one hundred thousand people make substantial money there – the government did the following:

"The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner met with the chief executives of the nation’s 12 biggest banks on March 27 at the White House to enlist their support to thaw a 20-month freeze in bank lending.

“The president and Treasury Secretary Geithner have said they will do what it takes,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein said after the meeting. “If it is enough, that will be great. If it is not enough, they will have to do more.”

Commitments include a $500 billion line of credit to the FDIC from the government’s coffers that will enable the agency to guarantee as much as $2 trillion worth of debt for participants in the Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility and the Public-Private Investment Program. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair warned that the insurance fund to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up because of bank failures.
The combined commitment has increased by 73 percent since November, when Bloomberg first estimated the funding, loans and guarantees at $7.4 trillion.”

As we can tell from the line about consumer deposits, this was really about Joe Public! That it had the affect of creating a little bubble for Joe Predator, the hedge funder, and all the guys at Goldman Sachs (we heart you, Lloyd Blankfein!) was an entirely happy accident. And my, what a spring they have had!

The happiness of the million dollar bonus set far outweighs any small misery caused by the destruction of the 4 million jobs since January. The deadweight, as we like to call them, may not have any insurance or any way to cover house payments or little things like that – but they are thrilled and electrified by our proud, proud financial sector, standing tall and giving itself big raises for the excellent job it has been doing.

But there is a fly, a stinking fly and a big one – in fact, it is as big as Manhattan! – in the ointment. Because it is fun to make money playing three card monte with the government. Who doesn’t see how glorious and fitting it is that the Fed loans you money at 2 percent in order for you to loan money to the government at 2.5 or 3 percent. So, so much better than just taking the money from the government by hand – that is just vulgar! It is what welfare mothers do! But as in a ship in which a big big hole has been punched, if the ship’s crew spends all its time making the first class passengers feel secure and tucked into their beds and do nothing about the hole, unfortunately, the first class passengers might well go down with the scum. Oh, it is so, so unfair.

And so that slight, ever so slight uptick in unemployment of one hundred thousand human products has started an uneasy stir. Could it be that the mercy and kindness lavished on the very sector which, in its search for high yield, fucked the globe, could it be that this is the wrong policy?

Of course not! The alternative would have been to turn that firehose of money on the populace, the people if you will, and let’s face it, these are folks who have never summered in the Hamptons! Still, the crazy lunatic left fringe who wrote that all the money in the world is not going to heal the financial sector, and that the Fed should have been making those below par loans to median income household, either through modalities set up in the present banking system or through a bank that was capitalized entirely by the government, are looking like they were right. In fact, they were so right that we aren’t ever going to talk about it – don’t look for any revisiting of Summers remark, this spring, that the “government” doesn’t know how to run a bank.

To sum up: the mangle of inequality is still eating Uncle Sam’s shorts. The astonishingly few people that almost all government activity is oriented to help – we are talking about the financial sector – have shown an amazing amount of political power and an amazing lack of intelligence. Larry Summers, who I said would be a disaster, has proven to be more than a disaster. There are even articles appearing now about how, uh, Summers ideas for making Harvard into the world’s most profitable hedge fund are now threatening Harvard’s very existence – ah, the man leaves a trail of pretty heavy corpses, at least. And we are heading into the second half of the year with NO driver of growth. The magicians have prayed to the idol of the market – a being that is as mythical as the aether – and believe, every one of them, that it is a self-correcting god. These are the words of people who have pickled their brains in the half truths of Econ 101, and pickled their lifestyles in rubbing elbows with the oligarchs.

And:
Put your head on your knees. Put your head in your hands. Put your hands on your head. Put your hands on your hips. He he. This is your captain speaking. We are all going down … together.

an overheated thesis about men and women

I always like going out with my friend S. Last night we went to dinner and then saw Public Enemy, which I enjoyed in parts, and in parts wished that the camera man had taken his anti-spasm pills before filming the big scenes. We did not go out to the cineplex to see nude descending a staircase, starring John Dillinger - and so I was not happy with the camera work that got so jiggly in the film’s big action scenes that in the shootout, it actually was almost impossible to follow how Dillinger escaped. We needed Weegee here, not Boccioni. We wanted to see a summer movie with a lot of Thompson machine guns in it, and we weren't entirely satisfied.

Anyway, over dinner before we saw the movie, we talked about men and women and history. I proposed an overheated thesis, which S. agreed with in part, or at least thought had some redeeming bits of plausibility. So I thought I’d write it down.

My thesis was that the Cold war male was cast into a situation of perpetual wars – WWII, the Korean War, the first war in Vietnam, Algeria, the second war in Vietnam, etc. – as well as having the nukes leaning over his shoulder. In that context, the cold war male was expected to be heroic and aggressive. And of course the target of aggression was the Cold War female. Now, in other generations in which war figures so heavily, destitution or sacrifice also figures. Yet one of the brilliant things about the capitalist-war machine is that war brings affluence. Given this, the aggressive cold war male’s status became tied to himself as both provider and cocksman. It is important to bring in, here, as a necessary supplementing social factor the fact that rise in the divorce rate in the post-war era was male-driven.

The result of these combinations was borne by the cold war woman and the cold war children. It was, I think, an amazing generational experience for the children to see how the marriage broke up and the provider, the heroic provider, didn’t provide. Not only was there a lack on the emotional level, but even on the promised level of affluence. These were the children of the deadbeats.

My idea is that this was devastating, on the unconscious level, to the imago of the male. Hence, the generation that was born at the end of the cold war and is having children now, both the males and the females, have to cope with the ruins of masculinity – for the father role has been thoroughly trashed. One way of coping is through a new image of passivity. However, as we all know from Freud, passivity is not the opposite of aggression.

On the social level, these are all factors in the great turning inward. It isn’t just that unions were battered to death, or the party system became so entangled with entrenched power that, in almost all the developed countries, there is no longer an organized opposition to entrenched power – it is also that the aggression, the heroic cast of the Cold war, which was oriented in so many ways to the world outside of the private sphere – as though the tips of those ICBMs were pressed up against the back of millions of heads – has now been so discredited that there’s a sense of exhaustion about public matters. Who would have predicted, in the early fifties, for instance, that the summer in which the American political establishment was gingerly debating the first step towards the socialization of medicine, that the public’s eyes would be riveted on a bunch of celebrity deaths? Or on anything that reminds one of cocooned private histories.
Obviously, I, a son of the cold war indeed, am ambiguous about the discrediting of the heroic male. There’s a definite dialectic loss there. And yet, who had it coming? Nemesis stalked the entire cocksman and coldwarsman culture, and saw how shallowly that hedonism was rooted, and how many crimes it accumulated, how much misery it shed. The strategy of hiding one’s head like a turtle, however, is not the answer.

Cutting out our tongues, and serving them up in a rich stew

I was going to devote this week on News from the Zona to news from Iraq, adopting, as I have done before, Titus Andronicus’ principle:


“Enter TITUS dressed like a Cook, LAVINIA veiled, Young LUCIUS, and others. TITUS places the dishes on the table
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Welcome, my gracious lord; welcome, dread queen;
Welcome, ye warlike Goths; welcome, Lucius;
And welcome, all: although the cheer be poor,
'Twill fill your stomachs; please you eat of it.
SATURNINUS
Why art thou thus attired, Andronicus?
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Because I would be sure to have all well,
To entertain your highness and your empress.”

Like Titus, I would like to busy myself cutting and dealing in pie – meat pie, boy pie, girl pie, the bloody pies of Iraq, which seemed, at one time, to so charm an American public that, with a cretinous smile and patriotic hearts bursting to revenge 9/11 on anybody but the, uh, perpetrators – who were away in safe havens in Pakistan to provide the cutest little threat that ever dumped money into a defense contractors hot little hand – this self same public, le peuple in all their glory, allowed itself to be led to the feast by a usurper and a fool, only to find – alas – that there was more in the cooking than could be well borne in the eating, and that the tongue grows weary of all those human all too human bones. But eat up! Eat up! There is always more meat pie.

Such was my purpose. But I am going to swerve from this rich, indigestible topic, and comment instead on news from the zona. In particular, on David Leonardt’s piece on the ‘miscalculation’ of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil – otherwise known as Obama’s economic advisors, Geithner, Romer and Summers.

“To make the case for a big stimulus package, they released their economic forecast for the next few years. Without the stimulus, they saw the unemployment rate — then 7.2 percent — rising above 8 percent in 2009 and peaking at 9 percent next year. With the stimulus, the advisers said, unemployment would probably peak at 8 percent late this year.

We now know that this forecast was terribly optimistic. The jobless rate has already reached 9.4 percent. On Thursday, the Labor Department will announce the latest number, for June, and forecasters are expecting it to rise further. In concrete terms, the difference between the situation that the Obama advisers predicted and the one that has come to pass is about 2.5 million jobs. It’s as if every worker in the city of Los Angeles received an unexpected layoff notice.”

Uh huh, as Li’l Kim might say at this point. It turns out that if you look at the glass from the top, it is full of sparkly water from the finest springs, and if you look at it from the bottom, the thing has been fucking dry for ages. The see no-s have concentrated on the great task they saw before them – to make sure that the richest level of Americans were as well off now as they were in 2007. And to this task they devoted the major portion of the government’s resources – not simply TARP, but the amazing Fed loan program – which has its equivalent in the Arabian nights tale of the hawker who bought tarnished pots for gold. And thus, and thus, my lords, was an opportunity squandered and the great squeeze put in its place. Did the treasury and the fed take the giant predatory financial sector companies and put them through the rigors of bankruptcy, such as befall the poor schmuck who gets behind on the Visa payments? They most definitely did not. Did they set up modalities in the vast and living banking system that allowed consumers to trade their own pots for gold – in other word, trading in old debts for new debts at the 2 percent rate? Oh no, for such deals smack of communism. Such deals are only meant for the Fed and its confederates, who need to be, what is the phrase? Oh, made liquid again. Yes, liquidity – the very sound has something of saliva in it, something silvery, something glittery, does it not?
And so the models, apparently, don’t understand:

“These models, which are also used by Wall Street and various research firms, do a decent job most of the time. But they are notoriously bad at forecasting turning points because they are based on an assumption that the recent past will more or less repeat itself.”

This is, of course, a smoothing out, a tidying up of why the models are bad – which has nothing to do with the recent past repeating itself and everything to do with the notion of market clearing. For the models are premised on that old hoax, the Dr. Moriarty of economics, known as the self-adjusting market. Ah, that dear old fiction, the market, which dances to the beat of an equilbrium while magically mounting higher and higher! The models, shall we say, are top down models, and find it frankly unscientific and pathetic that there should be any other. For why should the bugs have a say in the choice of the bug spray? This, and none other, is the beginning of Economics 101, taught to fresh faced predators everywhere. But my model, to which I am sticking in spite of the see no-s, is the mangle of inequality. A mangle that has enmeshed a greater and greater number of souls, as it was obvious it would not just to the Marxists among us, but also to those who have attentively studied Memlinc’s pictures of the Last Judgment.

TITUS ANDRONICUS
Will't please you eat? will't please your
highness feed?
TAMORA
Why hast thou slain thine only daughter thus?
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Not I; 'twas Chiron and Demetrius:
They ravish'd her, and cut away her tongue;
And they, 'twas they, that did her all this wrong.