Browsing PBH By Articles

The Oscillation Of Capitalism

The Article: Massive Unemployment: Proof That Global Capitalism Doesn’t Work – We may be witnessing the birth of a new permanent class of the marginalized by Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman in AlterNet.

The Text: Not long ago, the city council of Ventura, California, passed an ordinance making it legal for the unemployed and homeless to sleep in their cars. At the height of the Great Recession of 2008, one third of the capital equipment of the American economy lay idle. Of the women and men idled along with that equipment, only 37% got a government unemployment check and that check, on average, represented only 35% of their weekly wages.

Meanwhile, there are now two million ”99ers” — those who have maxed out their supplemental unemployment benefits because they have been out of work for more than 99 weeks. Think of them as a full division in “the reserve army of labor.” That “army,” in turn, accounts for 17% of the American labor force, if one includes part-time workers who need and want full-time work and the millions of unemployed Americans who have grown so discouraged that they’ve given up looking for jobs and so aren’t counted in the official unemployment figures. As is its historic duty, that force of idle workers is once again driving down wages, lengthening working hours, eroding on-the-job conditions, and adding an element of raw fear to the lives of anyone still lucky enough to have a job.

No one volunteers to serve in this army. But anyone, from Silicon Valley engineers to Florida tomato pickers, is eligible to join what, in our time, might be thought of as the all-involuntary force. Its mission is to make the world safe for capitalism. Today, with the world spiraling into a second “Great Recession” (even if few, besides the banks, ever noticed that the first one had ended), its ranks are bound to grow.

The All-Involuntary Army (of Labor)

As has always been true, the coexistence of idling workplaces and cast-off workers remains the single most severe indictment of capitalism as a system for the reproduction of human society. The arrival of a new social category — “the 99ers” — punctuates that grim observation today.

After all, what made the Great Depression “great” was not only the staggering level of unemployment (no less true in various earlier periods of economic collapse), but its duration. Years went by, numbingly, totally demoralizingly, without work or hope. When it all refused to end, people began to question the fundamentals, to wonder if, as a system, capitalism hadn’t outlived its usefulness.

Nowadays, the 99ers notwithstanding, we don’t readily jump to such a conclusion. Along with the “business cycle,” including stock market bubbles and busts and other economic perturbations, unemployment has been normalized. No one thinks it’s a good thing, of course, but it’s certainly not something that should cause us to question the way the economy is organized.

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The Top Three Osama Bin Laden Hunters

3. The Ex-Con Ninja With A Home Shopping Network Knife

The sixth time he tried to capture Osama Bin Laden lasted all of three seconds. Gary’s hang-glider nose-dived and dragged him across jagged rocks. He broke his shoulder and several ribs. Gary tried it again the following year (Attempt #7) a little closer to the water this time. He tore up his shins skidding across the beach and just ditched the glider right there.

To be fair, Gary Faulkner is making progress. The first time he tried to find Osama he bought a boat—even though he had never sailed before—and set out from San Diego harbor without a lifejacket, flares, or food. His plan was to just head West until he hit land and eventually Pakistan. A hurricane had other plans, however, and lashed Faulkner’s boat against the Baja peninsula within days.

Gary Faulkner is our Don Quixote. He’s a 50-year old ex-con with failing kidneys who is probably certifiably insane. Faulkner knows bin Laden has a similar kidney ailment, so he plans to hook himself into Osama’s dialysis machine upon discovery and then escort the villain to Pakistan security forces.

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The 9/11 World And The Tentacles Of Neo-Liberalism

The Article: Global Executioner: Scales of Terror by Neil Smith by the Social Science Research Council.

The Text: The French philosopher Joseph de Maistre argued that insofar as human beings were constantly tempted to evil by their deepest passions, the maintenance of a peaceful social order ultimately depended on a single person, the executioner. It was much the same with nation states, according to Maistre, which “are born and die like individuals” and have a singular soul, a singular “race.” Reason was insufficient to combat passion, he believed, and the hiatus between them was inevitably colonized by power, whether between individuals or nations. The state takes on the role of executioner.

This conflation of scales – the assumption of a homology between individual and nation, a seamless continuity between individual and national behavior – Maistre shares with many Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thinkers alike, and it is foundational to the nation building project that accompanied the emergence of nation states in the eighteenth century. For want of a more sophisticated geography of global affairs, this ideological scale conflation retains a resonant appeal today in self-understandings of US foreign policy, whose justificatory discourse is full of recourse to nations as schoolyard bullies or “rogues.” It registers too in the defensive identification of individuals with government during times of conflict (“we should bomb Iraq”) in a country and a national culture that prides itself as anti-government.

This historical comparison is anything but idle. Maistre, a self-defined reactionary, was writing in the aftermath of the French revolution and reflecting on Robespierre’s self-defined role as executioner during the Reign of Terror, an episode that gave us the word “terrorism” to describe government rule by terror. As emerging bourgeois nation-states came to define themselves in opposition to the rule of terror, “terrorism” was increasingly redefined as non- governmental even anti-governmental, activity as in its routine epithetic use to describe postwar anti-colonial struggles, or the Red Brigade of the late 1960s. The more recent polemical discovery in the West of “state terrorism” has worked to isolate those states that combined two characteristics: domestically and perhaps internationally their governments were often (but not always) authoritarian, and economically they refused to be governed by the laws of the capitalist world market and its attendant political structures. Implicitly, however, the recognition of state terrorism reintroduces de Maistre’s sense of states as executioners.

Since September 11th when the World Trade Center was felled by hijacked commercial aircraft and a wing of the Pentagon similarly destroyed, and especially since October 7th when US retaliation against Afghanistan commenced (notwithstanding that none of the hijackers was Afghani), we have been living through a further dramatic evolution in the meaning of terrorism. Here too the question of conflated scales has been crucial. In one sense, the attack on the World Trade Center was strictly local insofar as the affected site itself measures no more than 16 acres. Yet this was obviously and equally a global event: the hijackers from several countries led multinational lives; victims were of 83 nationalities; the unfolding catastrophe was instantaneously broadcast on television screens around the world; the economic, political and cultural fallout has been global. It was not, however, a clearly defined national event in the moments immediately following the attacks. For all that they were on US soil, the targets were symbols of global as much as national economic and military power, and such obvious symbols of US national and cultural power as the Statue of Liberty, Hollywood and Disneyworld were not targeted. If indeed Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network are responsible, the perpetrators have no coherent national identity either.

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The Decade Of 9/11

The President ordered from Costco for the Osama Bin Laden watch party. Turkey pita sandwiches, cold shrimp, potato chips. The White House’s comfort food of choice to witness the end of the world’s most wanted man.

“Now entering Pakistan,” CIA director Leon Panetta narrated over the big screen. Joe Biden kneaded rosary beads. Hillary Clinton covered her face in shock. But President Obama looked on. Stone-faced.

“GERONIMO. EKIA.”

Geronimo. The code name for Osama Bin Laden.

EKIA. Enemy Killed In Action. Osama Bin Laden had been shot in the head.

A hushed silence. “We got him,” President Obama said finally, quietly. A pause. Then the backslapping, the high-fiving all around. “We got him.”

With that Obama grabbed a sandwich to go and marched upstairs to tell the nation.

Osama Bin Laden was irrelevant by 2011. Al Qaeda, decimated by Drone attacks from above, infighting from within, and reviled across most of the Muslim world. But the visceral joy was still there. That sneering, bearded mug of barbarity was shot in the head. By an American bullet.

The mystique died next. Turns out, Osama Bin Laden was not a hardened ascetic denouncing the West from a snow-capped mountain pass. Instead, he reclined on the third floor of a million dollar compound forty miles from Pakistan’s capital. He was a vainglorious media junkie who dyed his beard for his next video. He spent his time looking at a) himself on TV and b) porn.

Osama Bin Laden was protected not by legions of hardened Mujahideen fighters but two well-to-do Pakistanis and their children. A private family that kept to itself with no phone-lines. They burned their trash indoors lest anyone riffle through the refuse.

He spent his final days listening to the pitter patter of children’s feet. Buffalo crowning a yard over. And that cloudless night the incoming roar of four U.S. helicopters and then gunfire. He was shot once in the head, once in the back, before his body was unceremoniously dumped somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

A decade after September 11, Osama Bin Laden was not the savior of the Muslim world but its scourge. His name sneered, not chanted. A decade later, Osama Bin Laden was no longer the bearded totem of resistance to American imperialism. He was the crutch of Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and the region’s other loathed strongman who argued they alone could safeguard against him.

A decade after 911, America rebuilt the World Trade Center taller than ever. It is the façade of Arab strongmen that tumbled. The rusted rebar and rubble expose depraved men clinging to fists full of petro-dollars. Their towering walls of brick and mortar no match for the pixellated Facebook walls of ones and zeroes. Social media did not topple Mubarack. The audacity of Tahrir Square did. But social media helped the rage go viral. Skyping, tweeting its way from Tunis to Hama. They were felled by students, lawyers, and bloggers who knew simply there must be another way.

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Retrospect On David Foster Wallace And Roger Federer

Editor’s Note: In light of today’s great Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic match at the US Open, we found it appropriate to post David Foster Wallace’s classic profile of Roger Federer. Note, however, that the following contains an introduction by Michael MacCambridge before the actual David Foster Wallace article.

The Article: Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace, with an introduction and retrospective, Director’s Cut: Federer as Religious Experience, by Michael MacCambridge of Grantland.

The Text: The New York Times’ ambitious sports magazine, Play, was still in its early days in the spring of 2006 — one issue was published, another was about to go to press — when editor Mark Bryant persuaded novelist David Foster Wallace to write about Roger Federer.

The assignment came as both writer and athlete were at the height of their respective careers. The story (for Play’s third issue, published shortly before the 2006 U.S. Open) constituted a dream pairing of writer and subject, like John McPhee sitting down with Bill Bradley, or George Plimpton hitting the road with Muhammad Ali and his entourage. That wasn’t just because Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, was considered by many to be the literary voice of his generation. He had also proved (in both his novel Infinite Jest, and his exhaustively annotated Esquire piece, “The String Theory”), to be a spellbinding writer on the subject of tennis. Wallace had been a regionally ranked junior player during his teenage years in Illinois before giving up competitive tennis because, as he explained to Rolling Stone’s David Lipsky, “just as it became important to me, I began to choke. The more scared you get, the worse you play.”

That summer, the often-reclusive Wallace traveled to tennis’ most hallowed ground, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, to survey the masterful Federer in the midst of a four-year run in which he won 11 of a possible 16 Grand Slam titles. The resulting story, which Wallace turned in 10 days after returning from England, still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sport at its highest level.

The piece almost didn’t happen. When Bryant called Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, to float the idea, she told him it was a nonstarter (“He’s completely focused on his fiction right now,” Bryant recalled her saying). It was only months later, after another writer had bowed out of the assignment just weeks before Wimbledon started, that Bryant called Wallace himself and pitched the story again, saying, “David, I have three words for you: Roger Federer, Wimbledon.” Wallace’s response — “Oh, my god; would you would let me do that?”— showed he was game, and providentially, Wallace was already going to be overseas, at a literary festival in Italy.

Even then, the reporting of the story was an ordeal for both Wallace and Play’s senior editor, Josh Dean, who dealt with Wallace on a daily basis and was privy to the numerous calamities (and near-calamities) the writer encountered in England. At the time, Wallace didn’t have a credit card, a cell phone, or an e-mail address he was willing to share, according to Dean. He was still naïve in the ways of pack journalism, and many routine matters — how to get from his hotel to Wimbledon, how to secure press credentials, even how to enter the grounds — often confounded him, prompting calls back to Dean, some of which came in the middle of the night in New York.

Wallace landed a brief one-on-one interview with Federer during the tournament, but the setting was so sterile and impersonal that Wallace chose to confine his account of it to a lengthy footnote in the story. (Among Wallace’s notes in preparation for his interview with Federer, there was this explanation he presumably shared when they sat down: “I’m not a journalist — I’m more like a novelist with a tennis background.”) After watching Federer conclude the fortnight with his fourth straight Wimbledon title, Wallace returned to the States and wrote furiously, turned in the story on time, then worked closely with Bryant and Dean on everything involving the story’s close — including the cover treatment, the headline, and whether a stray semicolon could be changed to a period. (Per Wallace, it couldn’t.) Wallace had more ammunition than your average precious freelancer, as he was, in Dean’s words, “a remarkable grammarian,” and was on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

The “pre-article advisories” note he sent to Dean along with his first draft provided a peek into his philosophy of footnotes (“the big thing is to avoid breaking footnotes over pages — it gives readers a headache”) and his fiercely protective stance toward his own prose: “I’ve got the fucker down to like 8,400 words. Another maybe 100-200 words can come out without much problem, if need be. Cutting much more from that will cripple the piece, which I’ve worked hard on and feel protective of. (If you decided, for instance, that you want to run only like 5,000 words of it, I wouldn’t do it — I’d settle for the Kill Fee.)”

There was no chance of that. Bryant and Dean did very little editing, and Bryant even sided with Wallace and against the Times’ own fairly rigid policy against serial commas, going high up the masthead to gain approval.

Another 100 or so words were trimmed for space, and the piece ran as Play’s cover story on August 20, 2006.

Federer as Religious Experience

By David Foster Wallace, August 20, 2006

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

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