Sure, Doctors for instance, need to go to school, but even that is not for the degree, it’s for the internship and the license. Same with teachers – the state requires it. But it’s not the degree that matters – you’re going for the internship (which you pay them for, and could have gotten anyway) and certification. Degrees are either hurdles to jump through, required by the state or licensing association, or they’re a waste of time. A degree that’s voluntary is sucker’s work. Like Will said, in Good Will Hunting: “you dropped a a hundred thousand on an education you could have gotten for a dime in late fees at the public library.”‘

And I say this as someone who has three degrees, all of them useless. The diplomas are stashed in a cabinet, where they’ve never been requested in any interview.

The truth is that the same attitudes that clamor for penalties to bar or limit outsourcing are the ones that oppose simplified and expeditious immigration and favor protectionist tarrifs. Why? To protect a fatter, slower, lazier, more willfully ignorant culture against one that is willing to continually strive for self-improvement. The US version of “I work hard all day” is a 40hr work week in a frigidly-cooled office with high-fat lunches, constant snacking, and plenty of breaks, meetings, and a bigger ass size each year.

The housing market went bust partly because it was a deck of cards, and partly because those homes were never worth that in the first place. The job market got outsourced because salaries and wages are so inflated compared to the value and competence actually delivered by US workers on the whole, that that’s not sustainable either.

What’s funny is the people that bitch about outsourced call centers handling luxury items. You want it made overseas, where it’s cheaper, so you can buy it at Walmart for bottom dollar, while bitching about offshore jobs that make it cheaper than you can; you don’t want to pay more than $40/year for a service contract, but you expect the people who take your call to be the ones that work for $18/hour in the US and waddle around on smoke breaks several times a day. And it’s for something that, most of the time, you don’t even need. It’s your latest gadget or toy – a luxury item.

You’re the pampered kid in the film The Toy (Richard Prior, Jackie Gleason), whining that you can’t have it all given to you – you’re exactly the reason why outsourcing works and foreign workers do a better job than you can (or will). But you’re also the classic bigot, as you bitch about outsourcing. You want your servant to hop and fetch and eat your scraps and work for nothing, but you want to abuse him over skin color, accent, and the fact that he’s poorer than you. And then you complain that you don’t have enough, because he’s taking some. You don’t have enough work, you say, and you don’t have work just handed to you, because he’s willing to strive for it and take less than you do.

And then, too, you moan about not being able to understand an accent; that’s your deficiency – not theirs – they learned English from the Brits, just like the US did, and they often speak it more correctly. It’s wondrous to hear some hick asking, “dyew have that in cone flar blew, ah need a lahter culler” and then complaining about someone’s accent, or an ebonics-talking wannabee pimp who can’t conjugate the verb “to be” talking, in broken English, about people who ‘don’t speak English’. Yep, it’s a stereotype, just like the first time you imitated an Indian accent, or laughed when it was done. Stereotypes work, because there’s some truth in them. One truth is that people speak in different accents and, by definition, they’re not universal. Another truth is that being a US citizen doesn’t mean you speak English correctly, even by ‘merican standards. When you hire a US president that can’t pronounce the countries he wants to go to war with, you’ve pretty much given up any reasonable claim to a command of the language, let alone much else.

So that’s it. Outsourcing isn’t taking “American” jobs, lazyness is, arrogance is, empty pride is, and at some point it just makes more sense to hire the better guy and listen to you bitch. The mortgage people haven’t caught onto this yet. They would rather foreclose homes and lose more money, than refinance at lower interest rates and turn a profit – because the pride is more important – the ideology that they are right is more dear. That’s OK, because now all it takes to turn a profit is someone willing to go back to financial self-interest, Adam Smith style, and he’ll kick their fat, arrogant asses. What’s funny is the number of foreclosed homes being bought up by small, capitalist, foreign investors, while communist hicks sit on their butts and twang in dummy-school English about “them forners and Chah-nees” who ‘don’t belong here’. The irony. “If the founding fathers knew…” – yeah, the ‘founding fathers’ would have approved – they’d have thought you were criminally lazy.

• Woman: “With my body, I thee worship.”
• Man: “With all my worldly goods, I thee endow.”

Any questions? Yes, yes, I’m “terrible” and not ‘romantic’ and all that. I’m actually quite passionately romantic in some ways, but I’m just not deluded that that has anything at all to do with marriage. Marriage – in the main – in the Western tradition – is exactly what Mr. Austin says it is. Yes, I know we’ve “practically” said it’s an exchange of sex for money, and therefore a form of prostitution. First, I never said “practically”. Second, I’m not the first to make this observation. I think Victor Hugo might have, too, and quite a lot of other folks. That’s what a feudal contract is, my dear – an exchange of value for value, where the obligations of both parties are clearly delineated in the ritual reading and consenting of the contract. What do you think a divorce is? You sue for divorce. It’s a suit brought, in feudal law, for breach of contract. Perhaps the husband isn’t providing and protecting, or perhaps the wife slept around. It’s only been in recent years that a wife could sue for the husband sleeping around, you know. Didn’t used to be like that, at all. So yeah, people write their own vows, and get married at the justice of the peace (a legal entity), or in Vegas (a financial one – good place for a gamble), but the feel, the vibe, the attitude when people are dating, planning their lives, or just hooking up, is generally the same equation. It is what it is – deal with it. If you don’t like it, don’t get involved in it. But let’s not pretend. Am I saying all marriages are like that? No, of course not – and every mother’s baby is beautiful and smart. No, here’s the thing: marriage, prior to feudalism, prior to the second millenium in the West, was a religious mystery, with much more emphasis on other things. The rite was very, very different. And yeah, it may seem self-serving to say that my people are still keeping that right, and I wouldn’t get roped into one of these feudal things if you paid me. Truth is, though, the Western country in which I live doesn’t just accept the mystery created in the Church. Nope, you still have to go down and get the paperwork done at some government office. So yeah, I’m in it too. Doesn’t matter what I feel – I can be sued for breach of contract, and I can be held, by the power of the state, to my feudal obligations. Like it or not, the vassal and serf thing is still going on, which is why one particular historiographical school (Read Kantorowicz “The Kings Two Bodies”) insists that there is no “modern” era in the West, that the tripartate construction of ages (Ancient, Mediaeval, Modern) – which was originally an occult fiction (read about Joachim of Fiore, and check out Strayer “On the Mediaeval Origins of the Modern State”) – is just that, a fiction – and that we are still living in a society with an essentially feudal structure and set of arrangements. Why do you think people keep doing it? Is it impossible to think of a different model? Like I say, some of us are using a *very* different model, but the state still makes us sign that contract. Keep in mind, I’m not knocking the model, if that’s what you want. There’s a logic in it. Women have an impulse to secure an inheritance for their offspring, and man wants efficacy by the seed of his loins taking shape in the world and extending his name (or identity, if he doesn’t keep the name) into the future, past his own death. In that sense, the way most people do marriage is an animal means of preserving the species, thereafter preserving desirable traits (every couple thinks some of its traits are desirable, if not every individual does), and ultimately trying to defeat death – the central philosophical and visceral/tangible problem of the world and of the West, as my people has always said it is. Not criticizing marriage, and not even criticizing the Western/feudal construction of it. I want the species to survive. I do think it creates a lot of problems – from overconsumption to urban sprawl to gender issues (there’s a reason women wore those big skirts back then – now the skirts are gone, but the limp wristedness and constantly seeking a strong (feudal) leader – like George Bush – or even Barach Obama – a strong “executive” remains. Feudalism is a cause of many serious social, political, religious, and cultural problems, and very practical ones right down to whether people starve or get medical care.

But I’m not criticizing the individual relationship between some man and some woman. As one of my fathers said, “The way of a man with a woman – who can know it?” Such a thing is utterly unique and can’t be judged. In that way, I break with the West and all its books and seminars and social chatter about how marriage is supposed to work, and what the model/ideal marriage is like (think Plato and the forms vs. the particulars). I think individual persons are absolutely unique in all of time and space, and marriage is the union or attempted union of such persons, and produces something likewise unique, whatever you think it is you’re doing, and whatever cellular contract you signed (wouldn’t it be interesting if they expired in 2years like Sprint or T-Mobile?). In  other words, the contract was never the whole story, even with people who think it is, which is something a lot of them find out after it’s assented to or signed. All of the attempts to explain it, or explain it to others, or legislate it for others (I just love it when someone gives me marital advice, or tells me we’re doing it wrong), are attempts to reduce marriage to the contract – to something transferrable – something standardized. Nope, before there was the contract, there was something else. I’m not going to preach my religion to you, here, but I’m also not taking notes from the West – it has nothing to teach us – it has said what it has to say. When it comes out of its feudalism, maybe we’ll check in again.

The blame aimed at Wikileaks is misplaced, even if you think their posting of classified documents could create real harm. The fault for that lies with a nation, and indeed global civilian-military-corporate-political apparatus (“Anglo-American establishment”, if you prefer the term), that is enamoured with secrecy. So thoroughly enamoured with secrecy that leaks are the only effective way to democratically challenge the apparatus. After all, if you charge the US government with a crime and they invoke “state secrets”, the charges cannot be pursued in any court, and even the courts cannot inquire as to the reason the privilege is invoked or see any justification. We know the original court case that established that privilege was a fraud by the US State Department – that fact is not in question anymore. So what is the recourse? The only available means of democratic intervention, of civilian protest, or to assert liberty in the face of all encompassing, dishonest, and oppressive secrecy, as an unaccountable absolute, is to leak information.

Leaking information is more than snitching – it’s an act of resistance, and the vehemence of the US response underscores this fact. They know it must be quelled before a trickle becomes a flood. Frankly, we think leaking, if there’s something to leak, is every free person’s duty. Only when secrecy is not an absolute, when it is used only in necessary circumstances, with credible oversight – not a free hand, when it is not backed by oblivion and justified only by more secrecy, can it be supported by a free people. In short, only when secrecy is claimed as an exception to something, not a rule, does it deserve to be upheld.

Here’s another truth, though: the campaign against immigrants (you can say “illegal immigrants” if you want, but that’s simply untrue – the changes in policy have actually been largely aimed at legal immigrants) are a facade for something else – a comprehensive campaign against the poor. The truth is, the most visible representation of the organized poor in this era is not labor unions, but communities of immigrants. Again, if you’ve read Sharlet’s book The Family, you know what I mean.

Look at the proponents of these changes, after all – they’re mouthing the same constructs of their intellectual betters – the one who know the way to move people is with the superficial – the verisimilitude of social and political issues, crises, motivations, and pressing needs – namely, law and order. To the degree “illegal” immigration is emphasized, it is this force at work. To the degree ‘chaos’ and rampant disregard for the law is emphasized, this is the subliminal appeal. But in reality, it’s the poor, especially the organized poor that are the target.

It’s hard to digest Sharlet’s contention that the real motivation – not  of Soccer Moms and Dads and redneck fascists and nazis – not of all those “I’m a social liberal, and an economic conservative, but when it comes to immigration, I’m with the right” purveyors of cognitive dissonance, inflicting their own internal conflicts on the rest of us – but of the necessarily smaller contingent of those who *create* issues and drive them into the public consciousness through campaigns of pretense – the real motivation is actually an opposition to the poor for its own sake – it is the polarization of power vs. its lack, wealth vs. its lack, influence vs. its lack. The rest of us, when mouthing their ready-made justifications are, in every sense of the word, merely tools.

Come numb my lips

Hot mouth at the tips

Wet frost lost cost

Drink my tongue

Hum thrum

Press your breath

To my flesh

Brush blush

Then caress

To my breast

Squeeze test

Do your best

Taste haste

Slide your hand

Down my waist

To my knees

Please tease

And at last

To my feet

While the heat

Sweet treat

Lies undressed

On the bed

Until dead

In the head

Deep sleep

Winter sweet