Now, I want to suppose our man Brooks an educated man, even though he sat at the foot of W.F. Buckley. But in its “first many decades,” the U.S. “tolerated” not merely “misery” and “exploitation” of labor, but hereditary bond-slavery.
What the market "wanted" during the "first many decades" of the nation's history.
I would file this entry under the heading: “Bad Prose: Platitudes and Simplification.” For today, pundit David Brooks writes as follows: “During the first many decades of this nation’s existence, the United States was a wide-open, dynamic country with a rapidly expanding economy. It was also a country that tolerated a large amount of cruelty and pain—poor people living in misery, workers suffering from exploitation.”
Now, I want to suppose our man Brooks an educated man, even though he sat at the foot of W.F. Buckley. But in its “first many decades,” the U.S. “tolerated” not merely “misery” and “exploitation” of labor, but hereditary bond-slavery. Perhaps Mr. Brooks thinks slavery falls under the general heading of “workers suffering from exploitation.” But if he does, he has never read an honest account of the development of wealth in the “first many decades” of this nation’s existence. In 1860, one commodity alone accounted for 53% of revenues derived from exports: cotton. Which cotton, of course, was cultivated by laborers numbering in the millions (slaves), who were beaten, murdered, sold off, and raped with perfect impunity. Add to the revenues from cotton those from rice, sugar, and tobacco (all grown with slave labor) and you begin to get a clearer picture than the one our man Brooks would paint. And what did it take to resolve that problem of this peculiar form of “worker exploitation”? More than 600,000 dead in a Civil War. And then, after the Reconstruction was destroyed by white-supremacists, many more thousands dead black folk during the nations “many decades” of lynching terror. And then, finally, in 1964-65, America began to have a right to call itself a democracy.
Has David Brooks every opened a book by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, or James Baldwin? Or by James McPherson? or by George Frederickson? Or by Winthrop Jordan? Or by Philip Dray? Or Rayford Logan? If he has, it availed him nothing.
David Brooks, pundit.
Next our man Brooks writes: “The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young. Welfare policies usually direct resources to the vulnerable and the elderly. Most social welfare legislation, even successful legislation, siphons money from the former to the latter.”
Now, insofar as an abstraction like “the unregulated market” can “want” to do something, it “wants” to find the cheapest labor and resources and the least regulation it possibly can. So, it “siphons” capital from U.S. labor markets to China, Mexico, Indonesia, and so on.
I suggest that Mr. Brooks visit Detroit, unescorted, and that he ask the impoverished people there what the market seems to “want.” I suggest that he visit Iowa to see what the market “wants” “Agri-business” (so-called) to do there in its unholy name: turn an entire state into a cornfield to produce not food, but raw materials for industrial production of chemicals that are then fabricated into “food”; and to use not the sun to grow that corn, but “fertilizers” derived from the energy of the sun as stored billions of years ago in petroleum. What the market “wants” in Iowa, if we are to know it by its fruits, as the Bible hath it, is this: depopulation & destruction of communities; one of the largest underground economies of methamphetamine in the U.S.; wash-out pollution into the rivers that winds up in the Gulf, where the “market” has apparently decided that it “wants” a dead-zone the size of thirty or forty counties. As Milton puts it in “Comus“:
“If every just man, that now pines with want,
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper’d luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed
In un-superfluous even proportion,
And she no whit incumber’d with her store;
And then the giver would be better thank’d,
His praise due paid; for swinish gluttony
Ne’er looks to heav’n amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Crams, and blasphemes his feeder.
Shall I go on? Or have I said enough?”
Reading the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times today, I was struck by the gumption of journalists. First David Brooks, then Bob Herbert, then Roger Cohen. But it was this from Cohen that stood me up:
After 9/11 half of America went to war and the rest went shopping. Wall Street coined newfangled financial instruments to leverage the universe and Main Street fell for them. Division grew, fellowship withered. Everyone knew money could not really rain from the sky in the American dream factory but they went on playing their own versions of online solitaire.
Really? “Division grew, fellowship withered.” Breathtaking. I love it and I hate it, this biting off of the whole hog. Half did this, half that. Wall Street and Main Street as good-enough abbreviations for—well, it’s a stark 50/50, either-or enterprise, all the way through, isn’t it? Before 9/11, after 9/11. You, in your column, step up to the mound the opposing pitcher’s just vacated and scratch the dirt a couple of times with your foot. Now it’s your mound again. You have no time to do more than that. “Everyone knows” you have to start working, just as “everyone knew” that money doesn’t “really rain from the sky in the American Dream Factory.” So why not let the usual habits do their work? Why not take the nearest way?
Jacques Derrida, father of "deconstruction," enemy of "phallogocentrism."
Cohen is serious as he can be right here. He’s having no qualms. Louis Menand in the pages of The New Yorker is Hegelian in comparison. And then there are the clichès, “dichotomous thinking” being one example (in an infrastructural way); Main Street and Wall Street deployed as summary epithets being another; the “American Dream Factory” being a third.
Robert Putnam, lecturing to students (and to columnists).
And doesn’t the idea of “everyone playing their own versions of online solitaire” derive, unacknowledged, from another favored commonplace amongst columnists, which Robert Putnam bestowed on us all: “Bowling alone.” That’s what Americans do: they do the same things together alone.
And as for the “dichotomous thinking” we were so be-warned about in graduate school, the thinking that Deconstruction was to have taken care of, that we were all to have gotten beyond? Nothing doing. It’s the bedrock; any other kind of thinking in print or in speech is a waste of ink or breath.
But Cohen is right, isn’t he? On the whole, I mean—”Krugman-right,” so to speak. Right in a paltry, nude fashion. In a hard-headed, spit-it-out fashion. But it hurts. It makes me feel all the “invidious distinction” of my nine years in graduate school. The otioseness of me. And so I absolve myself after Groucho Marx, and say I wouldn’t want to do what Cohen does—could, but wouldn’t even if.
Martin Hiedegger
The following appears in the 8 November 2009 issue of The New York Times.
In Mr. Faye’s eyes Heidegger’s philosophy cannot be separated from his politics in the way, say, T.S. Eliot’s poetic skills or D. W. Griffith’s cinematic technique might be appraised independently of his own beliefs. While he doesn’t dispute Heidegger’s place in the intellectual pantheon, Mr. Faye reviews his unpublished lectures and concludes his philosophy was based on the same ideas as National Socialism.
Note that the phrases highlighted in bold are essentially parallel—or so one assumes on first reading the passage. And yet that second “his,” the “his” highlighted in red, seems rather to have lost its mooring. Shouldn’t the sentence read as follows? “In Mr. Faye’s eyes Heidegger’s philosophy cannot be separated from his politics in the way, say, T.S. Eliot’s poetic skills or D. W. Griffith’s cinematic technique might be appraised independently of their own beliefs.” Almost certainly the reference, here, is to the Anti-Semitic “beliefs” of Eliot and to the white-supremacist bearing of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (based on Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen). Whereas “his,” as it works in the paragraph published in the NYT, floats in reference, almost as if its antecedent were, in fact, “Mr. Faye,” which simply cannot be the case, as I read the paragraph. I run across such solecisms in the NYT fairly regularly these days.
