The ache began as I was driving home from a barbecue I attended last week. (Actually, I didn’t drive, but rather rode – a “designated passenger,” designated thus by the bottle of cabernet I helped to empty.) My right cheek felt hot, and a dull ache throbbed somewhere in the right side of my mouth. It made me cranky, but I assumed that a tooth I had filled two years had begun acting up, and so I didn’t fret too much.

The following day, however, the ache grew worse. By evening it had blossomed into real pain: no screaming, “I can’t even think” agony; rather, an unsettlingly warm, low-grade irritation. I took to chewing garlic, a folk remedy I had discovered on the Internet which, if it didn’t drive away my pain, would drive away any people who might be around to witness it. After several noisome cloves I found myself resorting to a second folk remedy — cold pinot grigio and ibuprofen. By the next morning the pain had become worse still.

I fear and loathe dentists. Rest assured, I do visit them, but given the general condition of my teeth — strong, straight, and healthy thanks to the generous waterpik-ing I give them every night– I forgo any visits at all some years.

As a child in Austria I found that, though unpleasant, visiting the dentist represented more or less an uncomplicated errand. A tenaciously anchored baby tooth I had removed by a dentist who bore an uncanny resemblance to Glenn Close. The clinic required no prior appointment, so ten minutes after my mother and I arrived I found myself in a faded yellow vinyl chair, mouth agape. Anesthesia Frau Doktor Close deemed unnecessary, claiming that it impeded the healing process, a medical opinion which I along with my parents also heard rendered by a doctor who had reattached my brother’s ear after a Tyrolean farm dog bit it off. (His screams echoing down the hallways of the dour, provincial clinic I can hear in my mind to this day. His ear did heal nicely, though.)  An ungloved hand redolent of Wurstsemmeln dipped a pair of pliers into my mouth and out came the offending tooth. I felt some pain, and my mouth tasted of blood for hours afterward, but the procedure cost nothing, and the tooth extraction was expertly done.

If addressing my current dental conundrum were as easy as walking to the nearest clinic sans appointment and walking out an hour later with a (federally subsidized) diagnosis in hand, I would have solved my problem by now. But unless you have dental insurance (I don’t), going for a diagnosis can prove depleting, both emotionally and financially. Admittedly, I enjoy better luck than most; I can afford a root canal, if it comes to it. But I don’t want to shell out money that could otherwise go to defraying student debt, funding a trip to Europe, or, well, indulging in something — anything — altogether more enjoyable. Instead of taking appropriate action, i.e., making an appointment with the dentist at the first hint of discomfort, I’ve therefore spent the last few days reading oral-hygiene horror stories on the Web and researching DIY dentifrice.

It turns out that many Americans can’t afford to visit the dentist — not a dentist’s clinic, or a dental school, or even a friendly practitioner “south of the border.” No readily accessible charity or benefactor in this country of technocrat billionaires, TEA partyers, and Wall Street grifters stands willing to trickle down any pittance in order to help them in their hour of need. They’re absolutely, completely screwed.

One woman left a message on a popular site claiming to have been out of work for the past three years because she couldn’t get her teeth fixed. The constant pain interfered with her ability to concentrate, her inability to concentrate interfered with her ability to work, and both interfered with her ability to get medical attention. I couldn’t help but think, as I read similar outcries on Yahoo! Answers and Metafilter, of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickled and Dimed. Ehrenreich writes about how for many Americans a tooth can make the difference between security and destitution. That’s right: lose a tooth in the United States and you lose your chance to live the dream. Poverty and emotional desolation follow soon upon the unfortunate loss. For in the land of veneers and gratuitous orthodontia, “untouchable” status is a shed bicuspid away.

“Most middle-class Americans — even those with health and dental insurance — tend to be more aware of the price of dental treatment because they’re more likely to have to pull out their checkbooks when they visit the dentist,” wrote June Thomas for Slate.com a few years ago. “Although dental-insurance premiums remained relatively steady over the last decade, especially when compared with skyrocketing medical-insurance premiums, between 1998 and 2008 the increase in the cost of dental services exceeded that of medical care and far exceeded the overall rate of inflation [and] Americans paid 44.2 percent of dental bills themselves.”

In the land of veneers and gratuitous orthodontia, “untouchable” status is a shed bicuspid away.

Contemplating the social and political injustice of this country’s healthcare system becomes difficult when an angry tooth rattles your thoughts. “The body in pain has its own portion of clarity,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy, “equal to everyone else’s, and distinct.” Though not exactly a paragon of clarity, my body, newly stricken with chronic pain, has distinguished the precariousness affecting equally (almost) everyone in the United States. We rarely think about our teeth, but without them many of us would be up a creek socially and economically.

This morning I caved. All my garlic chewing, waterpik-ing, saltwater swishing, and binge drinking just didn’t cut it. The tooth demands professional attention. Soon I will once again assume my spot in the vinyl chair to discover my fate. Will I get soaked for a few grand? Or will I have to catch one of those “dental shuttles” down to Juarez, sandwiched between straitened retirees and desperate livers who can’t afford to have their “Welcome to Walmart” smiles trashed. At this point what does it matter? I’m stuck in a nation where public radio risks losing funding and hard-working folks are having their benefits stripped by billionaires. I’ll have bigger fish to fry once my tooth recovers. But as long as some financier’s mistress can get luminous veneers to go with her porn-star rack, there’s always hope, right?

Ylajali would love to hear from you. Drop her a line at hansengenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

The Big One never happened (I suppose you could say it bit itself). But it did occasion a long weekend of impromptu partying (December 3, 1990 obligingly fell on a Monday, thus allowing many folks to use possible disaster as an excuse to miss work). The fact that the Big One — the really Big One — hit Japan  prompted me to recall that day of December 3, 1990, to which the band Uncle Tupelo later paid tribute in a song on their superb 1993 album Anodyne.

That song, “New Madrid” (the title refers to the Missouri “bootheel” town that lends its name to the fault that runs beneath it), blends quack science, natural disaster, and lost love into one superb alt.country song. Recent events in Japan, which I had followed obsessively, put me in mind of that song, particularly its refrain: “Come on, do what you did / Roll me under New Madrid / Shake my baby and please bring her back / ‘Cause death won’t even be still / Caroms over the landfill / Buries us all in its broken back.”

A nineteen year old on December 19, 1990, I tended to entertain fulsomely cinematic scenarios in which I Prince Hal–like would rouse myself from my malaise of base pursuits to impress some true love with the valor a disaster summoned from me. Like Jeff Tweedy sings in “New Madrid,” all my daydreams were disasters. As only a late teen can, I conjured Ragnarok for no other reason that to end my malaise.

A few years later I left St. Louis for parts west. My melancholia morphed into ironic distance and intellectual pretense, which I suppose led me to identify a theme I develop in my piece for The New Inquiry. The postmodern condition is such that we can’t even take seriously our own annihilation, and thus to warnings and portents to that effect we can only respond with antic hedonism and binge-drinking. That’s how people in St. Louis responded, at any rate, on that December doomsday. And I was among those turning tumbler bottoms heavenward to scorn the gods whom we had angered with our flip-chapeau insouciance.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.

There’s a guy who stands on a street corner a few blocks from my apartment and holds a sign advertising gold bought and sold. He’s an affable type, always sporting a smile to go with his jaunty faux-hawk. Car exhaust and motorists’ jeers don’t phase him; sympathizers and antipathizers alike get from him the same subdued wave. He plies his trade near a place I like to jog, so I sometimes chat with him for a minute or two as I wait for the signal to change. Last week I found out that he doesn’t just hold signs for a living. He is also a blacksmith with the skills of a taxidermist. Oh, and he fixes cars, too.

The diversity of practical knowledge enjoyed by the guy with the gold sign brought home to me the fact that, despite my many degrees from prestigious institutions of higher learning, I really can’t do anything. He’s a jack of all trades, I’m master of none. Indeed, the time draws nigh for me to embark on a definite career path, the realization of which keeps me awake at night wondering what exactly I can actually do. I certainly cannot forge swords, dip ducks in formaldehyde, or “drop a tranny.” And though no physical incapacity prevents me from being able to hold a sign at a busy intersection, a certain psychological indisposition does. I can bake a mean loaf of sourdough, but that’s about it in terms of my ability to intervene in the practical business of life.

In the great game of liar’s poker that is our modern economy, the jack of all trades trumps all hands.

When I consider the current state of the economy, my lack of practical skills worries me. Admittedly, many important pundits drone on about the cognitariat, the creative class, or knowledge (or “brain”) workers and how vital they are to the postmodern, postindustrial economic order; but, really, the unemployment rate among newly minted college degree holders has me thinking that little of substance grounds these pundits’ convenient, personal brand–building platitudes.

Even if brain workers have gained an edge in the employment market over workers identified with more readily visible anatomical parts (Women who pose for girlie magazines — should we call them “boob workers?”), the former soon find themselves encouraged to become as diversely dexterous with the gray matter as is the regular old worker with finger and limb. Gold-sign dude, then, seems to have the right idea: In the great game of liar’s poker that is our modern economy, the jack of all trades trumps all hands (pun intended).

A recent Yahoo! News article only serves to confirm my admittedly pessimistic outlook. Jobs may be increasing, but as the article reports they “pay less and offer fewer work hours than the ones they have replaced.” What’s worse, “even though productivity rose 5.2 percent from mid 2009 to the end of 2010, wages increased by just .3 percent. That means only 6 percent of productivity gains were shared with workers. In past recoveries, that figured has averaged 58 percent.”

I recognize that those with advanced degrees are better off than those without — at least for now (although economist Paul Krugman treats this assessment with skepticism). There’s no denying the fact that employment picture is changing in ways which do not bring me comfort. A paradigm is emerging — that of a gypsy (or Roma, if you prefer) class that takes up and drops trades as necessity dictates. They’re mobile and are not tied down by things like kids in school and pets that don’t travel well (like my fat tabby that urinates every time I put him into a carrier). Middle-class comfort, so long anathema to the “tenured radicals” of the academy (who, of course, hurl their invective from the bourgeois redoubt of the easy chair), although agonizingly, fitfully slow in doing so, has finally died. Yet from its corpse no revolutionary class has mushroomed forth. Rather we’re left with atomized biota terrified of losing everything it holds dear, too terrified to think even of reform, let alone of revolution. Cognitive laborer and day laborer find themselves equal members of an all-consuming new class category: the precariat.

In true gypsy/precariat fashion, gold-sign dude recently informed me he will quit his gig in order to take up a new one in a smithy (of all places!). Though I’m happy for him, I worry that he may regret his decision in the future, because demand for a blacksmith’s wares I cannot help but think quite low. I did learn a valuable lesson from the guy, however. I’ve been scanning the Web page of my local community college. Humanities doctorate be damned; barrel-making courses begin in less than three weeks, and there are no prerequisites.

Ylajali would love to hear from you. Drop her a line at hansengenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

Certain rock bands seem to persist as their own genre. The venerable Canadian band Rush is one of them. Perennially late to broader developments in pop music, Rush has nonetheless maintained a legion of loyalists willing to stick with them as they release album after blandly titled album — Power Windows, Presto, Test for Echo — which defiantly sell in the millions despite little mainstream notice or media excitement. Like the devotees of other cult bands, such as Phish and the Dave Matthews Band, Rush fans tend to behave as though the band’s ostentatious musicianship excuses the often indistinguishable songs of their late period — that tracks from, say, their 1993 grunge-bandwagon disc Counterparts are somehow over the heads of ordinary music fans rather than simply inaccessibly boring.

But maybe the Rush cult is right. Though the band’s music often reflects pop-music trends, Rush seems to deliberately exist outside both the hype cycle and the desperation it fosters in listeners who try to keep up with, or worse, direct it. Much of indie music’s appeal, for instance, depends on an intricate calculus of a band’s relative obscurity and signifying relevance; bands are phonemes in a language of musical taste meant to express an advantageous personal identity, to stake claim to cultural capital. Unreflexive music consumers, though not as overtly invested in status games, still rely on an act’s fashionability, its currency, to shape their listening habits. Such bands get consumed as zeitgeist, not as music.

Such is typically not the case when it comes to Rush, however. The band’s fans don’t seem to feel obliged to advertise their tastes in search of validation. No one is throwing on a Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to “Tom Sawyer” in order to impress anyone.

How did Rush get there, beyond irony, beyond cool and uncool? Originally a Led Zeppelin imitator (with a vocalist far shriller than Robert Plant in the person of Geddy Lee) content to explore the evergreen prolekult themes of working hard, horniness, boozing, and bro-ing down in functional songs like “Working Man” and “Best I Can,” Rush later rejected their manifest destiny as a barnstorming heartland rock act à la REO Speedwagon, Head East, or Kansas and made the genuinely brave choice to junior-high-ify their music, serving up increasingly intricate sci-fi fantasy opuses like “The Fountain of Lamneth” and “Cygnus X-1,” and supplying socially awkward boys with a perfect fusion of King Crimson, banshee wailing, and Piers Anthony novels that they never even would have thought to hope for.

With “Subdivisions,” Rush taught the embryonic meritocrats among its fan base that power, coldly and clinically deployed, is the best way to redeem awkwardness.

The decisive move for the group, however, came after it achieved its greatest success with the 1980 album Moving Pictures. Having built a hardcore prog-rock following and cemented their rock-virtuoso bona fides with a series of hyperambitious concept albums, Rush smoothed the edges just enough to make their sound accessible to the unwashed rock masses. But then, rather than consolidate the popularity of Moving Pictures, the band members suddenly became enamored of moody, atmospheric new wave. They jettisoned the roman-numeraled, Ayn Rand-inspired suites they were known for, cut their hair short, swapped their Chinatown junk-store kimonos and hooded robes for New Romantic-style suits, and began using even more synthesizers and sequencers than Tubeway Army. Eschewing the intricate riffing of their classic records, on the 1982 release Signals, the follow-up to Moving Pictures, Rush offered fussy, hermetic soundscapes that seemed directly inspired by the Police and very far from fellow Great White Northern anthem-mongers Triumph or April Wine.

As dramatic as was the change in musical direction, a more pertinent shift occurred in Rush’s lyrical tone. Earlier in its career, Neil Peart’s lyrics were maladroit and generally inscrutable (What is “Tom Sawyer” supposed to be about?), and when they were comprehensible, they tended to offer libertarian life lessons you might get from an accomplished member of a high school debate team: “I will choose free will”; “Live for yourself, there is no one else more worth living for”; “the men who hold high places must be the ones who start to mold a new reality, closer to the heart.” Such ideas had an obvious appeal for what would become the stereotypical Rush fan — the lonely gifted kid who found respite from relentless social anxiety in the belief that his irrepressible superiority made others uncomprehendingly reject him.

Rush – Subdivisions (1982)

Rush didn’t pander to this audience so much as epitomize it: asexual nerds, always obsessively diligent about their work and ostentatious with their learning, always seeming to try too hard, and always with a tendency to invent grandiose escapist fantasies. The band seemed to embarrass rock nabobs mainly because of the pretentious juvenilia its records were saturated with and with which critics were eager to dispense. With Signals, Rush seemed to be making a similar move, putting away childish things and embracing a measured lyrical maturity. Hence “Subdivisions,” the opening track on Signals, assumes a distant, Olympian tone toward the suburban milieu it describes, patronizing the teenagers suffering within it:

Growing up it all seems so one-sided,
Opinions all provided,
The future predecided,
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone.

Whereas Rush once brought solace to the outcast “dreamers” and “misfits so alone” by being manifestly one of them — looking gangly and hopelessly unfashionable, quoting J.R.R. Tolkien and perpetually practicing their instruments — the band now suddenly came across like well-intentioned guidance counselors surveying their core fan base from a sociological distance. The song’s chorus begins with a voice intoning “Subdivisions,” a word so uneuphonious that they didn’t bother to rhyme it or set it to melody. A clunky abstraction that establishes the analyst’s perspective and the homology between suburban housing tracts and high-school hierarchies, the word just jumps out of the song. The chorus then concludes with a dismal diagnosis: “Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth, / But the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.” The implication was clear. Rush had escaped this grim fate and now looked on with sadness at those teens who were doomed to the modern order’s either/or: “be cool or be cast out.”

Though it seemed that Rush were abandoning the misfits it once celebrated, the band was actually offering a new mode of escape, a better solution for the brainy teen’s alienation, something that, more than role-playing games or math metal, could prove legitimate in the eyes of outsiders. The detached, transcendent point of view of “Subdivisions” points toward a technocratic future for those analytically minded teens, toward a successful place in the universe of research consultancies and policymaking think tanks. They need not become bogged down in high-school popularity traumas as long as they can take the long view, can see them clearly from the outside, and can assume the ability to comment on them neutrally, as if they didn’t affect them personally at all. This subtle refinement catered to the nerdy teens’ sense of innate superiority in a new — and arguably dangerous — way. With “Subdivisions,” Rush taught the embryonic meritocrats among its fan base that power, coldly and clinically deployed, is the best way to redeem awkwardness.

Rob would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at horninggenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

Close your eyes and daydream a little about your first home together. What will it be? A modern apartment with a sweep of picture windows and a plant-filled terrace? A handsome townhouse with a private patio for outdoor entertaining? Let your mind browse around a little. This kind of daydreaming is valuable because it begins to bring into focus the kind of surroundings you want to live with.

Thus begins Betty Crocker’s 1975 book Starting Out: How to Get the Most Out of Your Home, Furnishings, Food, Money. Like many of the books intended for young people fresh out of high school or college, it offers sound advice on everything from “taking care of your refrigerator” to the “vital do’s and don’ts of credit.” Starting Out doubtless proved an invaluable resource for young people whose heads bourgeois dreams stuffed like so much Bavarian cream, but whose means — or sense — to make the decisions necessary to jump-start their ascent into cozy, middle-class life were such as to require the thoughtful ministrations of a paragon of domestic economy like Mrs. Crocker.

I picked up Starting Out at a poky little thrift store eking out its catchpenny existence in some postindustrial armpit (which in New England are in no short supply). I like such books; I’ve a collection one-hundred strong of them, along with home economics textbooks, and other such catechisms of the post-Rooseveltian reformation of the middle-class confession. Yet over time my fondness for them has curdled into dour resentment.

Thirteen years ago, when I began collecting seventies-era cookbooks, how-to guides, and life manuals, the economy was bustling along, nourished by the manna of dotcom stock jobbing profits. This manna also fueled the dullest undergraduate’s daydreams, which danced through his head enrobed in all the finery a salary in the high five figures can command. Today, however, these books sitting around my apartment seem documents from a vanished world — Work and Leisure in Ultima Thule, perhaps, or Homemaking in Atlantis — one which was pried away by force of massive low-interest leverage, or was patiently ladled out of the ship of state during various bailouts. They represent a collective memento mori of a variety of prosperity and equality that is not likely to return in my lifetime.

I remain convinced that in the fullness of time history’s testimony will lead to a single judgment: Capital, far from being the most preferable of a delimited set of economic regimes, will like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal scatter “the base contagious clouds” of convenient ideology to “be more wonder’d at” for the poison it is in its own right. Because of its propensity to churn out heaps upon heaps of goods, Capital trails behind it detritus easily obtained. It’s one thing to have to travel to a museum, or a library to peruse books and exhibits of a better time; it’s another entirely to walk into one of the many thrift shops that inhabit decimated, sign-scarred strip malls nowadays and see piles of books, magazines, and goods (made in the United States, no less) from that brief interregnum between plutocracies.

I’m reminded of the scene in George Orwell’s 1984 in which Winston Smith comes across a paperweight in a rubbish shop, which the narrator, focalizing through Winston’s consciousness, describes as “a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere…. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.” It’s an object strange to Winston, a relic from a time when individuals invested in such seeming trifles to make their homes nicer, more conducive to the everyday affairs of being human. He reflects that what “appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.”

I often find myself elbow to elbow with members of older generations capable of intoning the epos of bourgeois dominion.

Perhaps that’s why I haunt thrift shops, which luckily seem to proliferate these days, fecundated by decay like so many mushrooms or dung beetles. Unlike Winston, however, who admits people his age cannot remember a time before the revolution (which, ironically enough, flushed out the capitalists and the “few lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them” who were “the lords of the earth”), I can recall when middle-class existence seemed a reasonable prospect for me and my cohort, and I often find myself elbow to elbow with members of older generations capable of intoning the epos of bourgeois dominion.

I try not to read through my collection of vintage how-to and advice manuals. They depress me and make me lie awake at night thinking of all the prospects and opportunities that have been, and will continue to be, stolen from me and millions like me. It’s a sad, spiteful way to exist, but that’s the price of an economy run for and by banksters and their sycophants.

Ylajali would love to hear from you. Drop her a line at hansengenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

Bureaucracy. Is there a person alive capable of singing its virtues? Many have trumpeted its vices. Franz Kafka and George Orwell made careers of weaving this single dark theme into solemn, minor-chord masterpieces of operatic impact. Valkyries flew never so briskly nor The Flying Dutchman so ponderously as to match bureaucracy’s abiding menace.

In Little Dorrit Charles Dickens presents this menace as primarily appetitive. The über-bureaucratic “Circumlocution Office” looms as a ravenous maw gobbling up every unfortunate referred to it. “Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship … in motion,” he writes.

Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions, that extinguished him. It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn’t get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn’t get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap of the Circumlocution Office.

As Bob Dylan famously sang, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” The single mission of bureaucracy is to be that somebody — to everybody.

In their characteristically impenetrable way, that dynamic duo of theoretic dipsy-doodles, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, take a discursive stab at bureaucracy’s dark heart. Offering a consideration of Kafka, they find in his work not “a desire for bureaucracy” or a will “to repress or to be repressed.” Rather, they identify “the bureaucracy as desire [emphasis added], out of which flow “[t]he divisions of oppressor and oppressed, repressor and repressed.” Bureaucracies come into existence, in other words, because most people cannot deal with their desire in its most immediate form, which for Deleuze and Guattari is invariably excessive, ecstatic, polymorphous, impersonal yet deeply intimate — crowned Anarchy’s reign of a thousand years.

Bureaucracy, like everything else under the sun, will be miniaturized and digitized, so you can take it with you wherever you go.

Utopia bereft of desire gives way to bureaucracy, the former’s creaking, mechanical facsimile. The fact neither capitalist and socialist socioeconomic orders, in all their guises and permutations, ever once managed to escape the need for bureaucracy only reinforces the idea that humanity must get its libidinal act together if it’s ever to get together its political. This seems a tall order, however, especially considering the present power configurations in the United States and just about everywhere else; and the auguries of history do not favor humanity.

One theorist who manages to distill the essence of bureaucracies is the avowed deleuzoguattarian Manuel De Landa. Riffing on themes developed by his forebears, De Landa characterizes bureaucracy as a force of nearly geological inevitability. “Bureaucracies have always arisen to effect planned extraction of energy surpluses (taxes, tribute, rents, forced labor),” he writes in his 2000 book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, “and they expand in proportion to their ability to control and process those energy flows.” Whether this energy is ultimately libidinal, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, remains only of secondary importance. The larger question that begs asking is, whither the impulse to extract surplus energy? That an elaborate apparatus like a bureaucracy hulks into existence in order to meet this need only attests to the urgency with which the need is felt. At the back of it you can’t help feeling that there are dogs in the manger, denying others more sustenance than they themselves could ever consume, and to such an extent that the frisson that comes with denying others the full fruits of their efforts far surpasses the feeling that comes with satiety honestly achieved. Bureaucracy, if I read Deleuze and Guattari correctly, is the psychopathology of sadism elevated to the level of institution.

This realization as to the true nature of bureaucracy leaves you wondering just to what extent its evil pervades the social body. As Situationist paterfamilias Guy Debord observes in The Society of the Spectacle, bureaucracy’s “ultimate function” involves “continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of market society,” and this essence is none other than “commodified labor.” Revolutionary slogans become mere phonemes when sent through bureaucracy’s wringer. In fact, bureaucracy’s birth signals progress’s death, if for no other reason than progress lapses into simply the legitimizing pretext for the continued existence and function of bureaucracy, whose true raison d’être is simply its own continued existence and function. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. And if it requires harrowing heaven to do so, so mote it be.

Requisite to bureaucracy’s monolithic totality is a little accumulation of a most primitive sort. “Wherever separate power replaces the independent action of the masses,” Debord writes elsewhere,

hence wherever bureaucracy seizes administration of all aspects of social life, it attacks language and reduces poetry to the ordinary prose of its information. It takes language for its own use, like everything else, and imposes it on the masses…. That language is above all a means of communication between men is ignored by bureaucracy. Since all communication passes through it, men no longer even need speak of it: above all they must accept their role as receivers, that is, receivers of orders to be carried out in the information-based communication network to which all of society is being reduced.

If at the time of Debord’s writing this concern about the unidirectional, jussive character of language conquered by bureaucracy remained more imagined than real, today the situation is precisely the opposite. The various technological doo-dads flooding the market these days — Androids, iPads, Kindles, Blackberries — do they truly represent the means of our liberation from or our more thorough enthrallment to the top-down power relations of which bureaucracy is so telling an instance? Next time you peer into your personal entertainment device’s innocuous little touch screen, imagine for a moment that you’re clutching something from the deepest, darkest recesses of Kafka’s imagination (Odradek, if you will, or something of the sort). Does not that little machine, with all the DRM semi-sabotage it harbors within it, represent merely a means of extracting surplus energy, which today takes the form of the innumerable digitized artifacts of the general intellect, for the purpose of expanding in proportion the ability of its maker (Google, Apple, Amazon, Research In Motion) to control and process those energy flows?

Voltaire once wrote that if God didn’t exist, He would have to be invented. Apparently the same can be said for bureaucracy — and for the rent-seekers who manipulate its levers. You need only loosen up your conception of bureaucracy. The “take a number and we’ll be right with you, but first make sure you have completed the following forms” model of bureaucracy? That’s so “old economy.” In the world to come, bureaucracy, like everything else under the sun, will be miniaturized and digitized, so you can take it with you wherever you go. Now that’s convenience.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.

Most of the 1990s I spent in graduate school studying literature. I remember this period now mostly as UFO abductees remember their abduction: as fraught fragments, anxious dreams about missed lectures and forgotten papers come due. Those years form a hole in my personal history; I struggle to reconstruct the logic that led me to the choices I made. Sometimes I feel as though I had been brainwashed, as though I had fallen in with a cult whose indoctrination tactics involved forcing impoverished recruits like me to drink gallons of coffee between contentious three-hour self-criticism sessions, from which I’ve struggled over the past decade to deprogram myself.

There was a groveling intensity with regard to recondite questions of the theoretical doctrine, itself an eclectic amalgam of often contradictory tidbits — from Lacan disciples, scientific Marxists, Russian formalists, speculative linguists, etc. (as well as the innumerable literary scholars who mash them up) — that the rest of the world, even the rest of the university community, seemed to treat with benign neglect. At the time that ignorance seemed proof of the tragedy of their hopeless blinkered existence and made perfecting our own study of doctrine — honing it to a level of impenetrable hermeticism that would nonetheless somehow make it irresistible to the world — seem that much more urgent.

I was therefore intrigued when Benladen linked to this 1994 essay by Richard Webster about the “cult of Lacan,” which assesses skeptically and utterly without sympathy the life and work of the rogue psychoanalyst, compiling anecdotes that make Lacan seem ludicrous while chronicling “his inclination to make anti-establishment gestures from the safety of an authoritarian movement.” Webster discusses in particular the peculiar rhetoric of Lacan’s mirror stage essay, one of his central works, which incidentally had been assigned reading for me multiple times in graduate school:

The seeming confidence and omniscience of Lacan’s formulations is likely to lead those who read them for the first time to assume that he is referring to a coherent body of knowledge with which they should be familiar, or that keys which unlock his formulations will be found elsewhere in his writings. In an effort to find such keys they may well find themselves plunging into a deep study of Lacan’s writings.

I never made the plunge into the more obscure corners of Écrits, but I can relate to the impulse to do so, and to the thrill that’s implicit in substituting a blind faith in nominalism for argumentative logic. I made the exciting discovery that jargon can be talismanic. Wielding words like cathexis and interpellation in a seminar room gave me a distinct feeling of power. Webster argues that in Lacan’s work, “concepts which have been introduced in one place are rarely if ever clarified by references to them elsewhere in his writing. But they are continually modified and overlaid with yet more layers of complexity and ostensible significance.”

Wielding words like “cathexis” and “interpellation” in a seminar room gave me a distinct feeling of power.

Having also read recently Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker article on Scientology, I found it impossible not to discern parallels between Lacan and that other radical critic of psychoanalysis, L. Ron Hubbard, whose foundational text Dianetics is notoriously rife with similar dead-end allusiveness and interminable elaboration. (Even director Paul Haggis, who had reached the higher levels of Scientology’s hierarchy, proclaims that he found the book “impenetrable.”)

Writing at the Awl, Maria Bustillos describes Dianetics as “the ravings of a grandiose middle-schooler, very name-droppy (Hegel, Einstein, Aristotle, Schopenhauer — the names of such guys, but never their ideas, are sprinkled liberally around); it is peppered with footnotes, mostly for words the author supposes the reader might not know, such as sulfa, craven, sadism and Parcheesi.” In other words, Dianetics reads like pulp Lacan, before the fact. Webster quotes one of Lacan’s translators, Alan Sheridan, who admitted that “Lacan doesn’t intend to be understood…. He designs his seminars so that you can’t, in fact, grasp them.”

To adopt such an approach intentionally seems somewhat nihilistic, but it may also possibly betoken a rhetorical strategy gone amok. In an early review of Dianetics, S.I. Hayakawa argues that Hubbard’s book repurposes science-fiction writers’ discursive tricks to create the same illusion of certainty Webster saw in Lacan’s writing:

The art [of science fiction] consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured. The danger of this technique lies in the fact that, if the writer of science-fiction writes too much of it too fast and too glibly and is not endowed from the beginning with a high degree of semantic self-insight (consciousness of abstracting), he may eventually succeed in concealing the distinction between his facts and his imaginings from himself.

As an example, Hayakawa quotes the infamous first sentence of Dianetics‘ original edition: “The creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch.”

Hubbard, of course, was sufficiently enamored of his writings to found a religion from them, and their obscurity, judging from Wright’s account of Scientology, is instrumental in drawing believers in deeper. That Lacan of all people would lack “semantic self-insight,” however, is difficult to believe — which may be why it’s generally easier to regard him as a charlatan rather than a cult leader. Seeming to smirk at his own obfuscations, appearing to letting you in on the joke, Lacan winds into theoretical elaborations with the intention in mind to undermine, not to complete, the whole idea of theoretical knowledge.

Lacan’s hostility toward intelligibility can also seemed designed to give adherents the pleasure of being lost in a maze of esoterica, of tripping out on spirals within spirals. Webster cautions against underestimating Lacan:

It might be wrong to impugn Lacan’s sincerity or to suggest that he is engaging in a consciously calculated strategy. But his remarks are characteristic of the messianic prophet; the faithful are rebuked for deserting the ways of God and falling into the ways of men. The messiah is he who has come to restore them to righteousness. It is he who will reveal again the true Freud whom others have concealed.

Lacan’s tactics, in Webster’s telling, mimic the cult-leading strategies laid out in Carey Burtt’s classic short “Mind Control Made Easy.“

Burtt’s film fairly captures my experience of graduate school (an elaborate cult or conspiracy to secure freshman composition teachers on the cheap, as cynical university administrators might view it). Some of the statements in the film — “Join our elite mission to save the world.” “All you need is two hours’ sleep.” “A: I felt an infinite emptiness. It was terrifying. B: No, that’s good. Do it more.” “A: I don’t know who I am anymore. B: Good, now you are free. In fact, there was no you there to begin with.” — seem like refractions of what I heard in seminars about subjectivity and psychoanalytical theory and poststructuralism from fellow students and from professors who were trying to be encouraging in their own peculiar way. At the time I felt I was learning a lot, but the knowledge I was amassing was increasingly disordered in my mind, provoking questions that required more and more esoteric jargon to even articulate. I was learning what sorts of books I should be reading, but actually reading all these works that people seemed to treat as prerequisites would have added years and years to my preparatory phase. It seemed that there was an endless ladder to climb, and the further I got into it, the less I could bring myself to face the thought of ever leaving school.

I chose to cling to an impression of the university as a place obscurely designed to aggrandize my ego.

But the fact that graduate school seemed to me a cult probably says more about me and my inability to view education as anything other than “self-actualization” and personal growth. I wasn’t always discouraged from this view, but neither did I have it forced upon me. I never abstracted myself from the schooling process and would not accept it as simply a program of professionalization and preferential networking. I chose to cling instead to an impression of the university as a place obscurely designed to aggrandize my ego. I was thus made uncomfortable when any larger mission would come into view.

Webster’s description of Lacan’s personality, based on what he deduces from Lacan’s obscure texts — “an alienated intellectual who hugely overvalues his own intellect and cognitive skills, and has become almost completely cut off from the world of ordinary human relationships” — serves as a pretty good description of what I remember of myself in graduate school. His judgment of Lacan’s theory, that it is “a fiction created by an intellectual in order to alleviate his own emotional predicament,” reminds me of my perpetually deferred dissertation. I could only experience higher education as a cult, because I approached it as an earnest devotee of the most irresistible cult of personality out there, the narcissistic cult of myself.

Rob would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at horninggenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

Last Thursday I drove to the northern side of Desert City for burritos and horchata. Located amid a neighborhood of foreclosed upon houses, abandoned convenience stores, and sign-scarred mini-malls is a small Mexican restaurant famous for “buttered tortillas,” (a carby sensación if ever there were one).

I quickly came to regret my decision to make this forty-minute trip, not because buttered tortillas proved better in theory than in practice, but because of the spectacle that confronted me when I arrived at the eatery. Before me I saw dozens of dour people hunched over heaping plates, shoveling machaca tacos into joyless maws, their faces ashen and etched with lines or puffed from sodium bloat, their bodies bulging wearily against the inseams of Wranglers or Dockers slacks.

A woman and her child stand out particularly in my memory. They leaned against the red Formica counter listening for their order number. The mother, a blowsy woman — hair peroxided, watery blue eyes inexpertly mascara-ed — kept nodding off, her head lolling against her pilled green sweater. No wedding ring did she sport, nor any other symbol of belonging to another. Her child, fidgety and uncommonly sweaty (it was quite cool inside the restaurant), absently chewed a straw and frowned at the plasma television that hung in the corner.

It wasn’t so much that my fellow diners were out of shape or poorly dressed; that’s par for the course in these parts. No, what disturbed me was that they all seemed so tired — hopeless, even. No one was talking, not even the couples or families. Every so often a baby cried, or someone sneezed, but that’s about all, save the gentle din of so many munching mouths….

We could just be a buttered tortilla away from revolution.

Unemployment in Desert City hovers at nine percent. What jobs exist are mostly temporary and lacking benefits. Some 11,000 houses huddle empty, having been foreclosed or never occupied. Vast portions of the population sit idle. They have given up on the very idea of employment. The state legislature, its carving knives sharp and poised, stands ready to scrape the bones of  an already spavined public sector. The patrons of that rundown Mexican restaurant seemed the weary victims of a Titanic struggle waged over their heads, one involving the arcana of interest-rate policy and tax codes. They seemed as but flies to the gods, batted about for the latters’ sport.

In his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell treats the plight of the unemployed in the industrial north of England. While those employed in the coal mines lead grim, exhausting lives, those who lack any work whatsoever suffer crippling ennui. “But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single,” Orwell writes, “The best intellects will not stand up against it . . . . You can’t settle to anything, you can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.” He goes on to describe visiting homes where entire families lie indolent, bereft of the hope of any gainful employment whatsoever.

The only comfort preventing the unemployed from rebelling against the state comes in the form of chintzy consumables. “The two things that have probably made the greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass production of cheap smart clothes since the war,” Orwell continues.

Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish and chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution.”

The Huffington Post (which has recently joined forces with that visionary, cutting-edge Internet service provider America Online) reports that the latest jobs data represents a “classic good news–bad news situation.”

Last week, the number of Americans filing new unemployment claims fell to a two-year low. But while headlines point to this news as a hopeful sign of recovery, some economists are skeptical that the new data reflects anything other than an economy “treading water.”

The employment picture in the United States apparently leaves much to be desired. It’s hard not to think of those out-at-the-elbows citizens of Desert City. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that history has a tendency to repeat itself — so much so in fact that you could say it has a stammer. We could just be a buttered tortilla away from revolution.

I’m tempted to quaff the recovery Kool Aid, because to do otherwise is to confront the idea that we may be sliding back seventy years, back to margarine and bread for dinner and to betting on soccer in order to paper over the utter hopelessness of hopelessness and unchanging changelessness. Somehow I don’t think this is what Richard Florida has in mind when he talks about “The Great Reset.”

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Ylajali would love to hear from you. Drop her a line at hansengenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

One thing that MTV’s The Jersey Shore has impressed upon me is the utter uniqueness of that bit of seaside real estate. This realization came to me as the show’s second season unfolded. Obviously eager to capitalize on the splash the first season made, MTV rushed into production a second, where our intrepid guidos and guidettes repaired to Miami Beach to escape a particularly ferocious winter in the northeast. Though southern Florida offered an adequate wintertime facsimile of East Coast summer, something was palpably lacking. Call it Jersey terroir, if you like. Whatever it was, it proved one thing: You can’t offshore the Jersey shore.

This is presumably a lucky thing for the cast of The Jersey Shore, who have managed to turn aquatically themed dolce far niente into a career; the abortive Miami idyll only made a return to the Jersey Shore more urgently needed.

And so we find ourselves at the commencement of the third season, in which our fond guidos and guidettes return to their natural habitat. I’m interested to see just how “meta” the show is capable of becoming as its stars grow ever more conscious of their peculiar celebrity. We had intimations of this toward the end of Season Two, when there seemed to occur a wholesale transfer of mojo from Mike “The Situation” to Vinny. Vinny, a veritable ingenue in the first season, blossomed into a regular cocksman, as The Situation, perhaps realizing that six toned abs don’t one personality make, spent the final few episodes flailing about in desperation as hookup ho’s and housemates alike mutinied against his whole alpha-male trip.

We’ll know soon enough how The Situation, et al., spent their summer vacation. Of more pressing importance, at least as far as their personal finances are concerned, is how they spent the hiatus between Seasons Two and Three. It appears that The Situation and fellow guido Pauly D have done quite well for themselves. The Daily Beast recently reported that they are respectively the sixth and ninth highest earning reality TV stars of 2010. Licensed merch, publisher advances, appearance fees, and sundry residuals have garnered quite a respectable pile for our fine leathered friends.

You can’t offshore the Jersey shore.

Not to be outdone by the boys, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, The Jersey Shore‘s sample-sized sexpot renowned for bitch slaps given and received, has gone decidedly more highbrow than Pauly or Sitch, penning A Shore Thing, a roman à clef detailing the Jersey shore’s many sweaty pleasures. Author Snooki’s protagonist is one Gia Spumante, a café au lait party girl on the prowl for “gorilla juiceheads” and good times. “Giovanna ‘Gia’ Spumanti and her cousin Isabella ‘Bella’ Rizzoli are going to have the sexiest summer ever,” the jacket reads. “While they couldn’t be more different — pint-size Gia is a carefree, outspoken party girl and Bella is a tall, slender athlete who always holds her tongue — for the next month they’re ready to pouf up their hair, put on their stilettos, and soak up all that Seaside Heights, New Jersey, has to offer: hot guidos, cool clubs, fried Oreos, and lots of tequila.”

Just how hot these guidos come Snooki/Gia coyly offers some sense: “He had an okay body. Not fat at all. And naturally toned abs.” You can only admire Snooki’s spare prose, her economy of expression, as she damns with faint praise this only-meh guido. (Raymond Chandler somewhere looks on approvingly, I’m sure.)

What this guido’s body lacks in showroom pizazz, it more than makes up for in technical specs. “She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face.” There’s something surpassingly selfless — tender even — in how this guido forwent the typical corporeal ostentation for which Mike “The Situation” is justly famous. No insectile thorax for Gia’s nameless guido, no fascisculating hillocks of muscle. Rather, the more body-shot friendly contours are the ones he opts for; for which ladies like Gia and Bella ought to be grateful, as there’s little chance they’ll muss their makeup. You can’t wait to turn the page to discover if he’s amply rewarded for his consideration with some after-hours “smooshing.”

Late in his career French theorist and man about town Michel Foucault developed a theory of what he called “technologies of the self,” which he defined as any ensemble of knowledges, practices, or exercises that “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” The body-shot-ready guido of Snooki’s A Shore Thing seems to have something approaching this sort of transformation in mind.

But what about those who push it further, who want more for themselves than the nondescript planes and angles of “an okay body?” Fortunately, modern chemistry stands ready to aid them  in order “to effect … a certain number of operations on their own bodies” and thereby “transform themselves in order to attain a certain state.” I speak, of course, of steroids, that elixir vitae of transcendent guidoism. Many have quaffed from the cup, and many will find themselves tempted to do so. But for those so tempted, Snooki/Gia offers this bit of wisdom: “Any juicehead will get some nut shrinkage. And bacne. They fly into a ‘roid rage, it is a ‘road’ ‘roid rage.” ‘Roids giveth, and ‘roids taketh away. And the foolhardy guido is poorer for the bargain. At once neutered and hypermasculine, experiencing both the spring and winter of sexual being, the “juicehead” becomes a sort of walking contradiction — a union of opposites, the excluded middle. Thus rendering himself uncannily Other, the juicehead can only rage impotently at his plight: he can impress women but cannot pleasure them. Such is the Faustian bargain he has struck.

“A Shore Thing” is part moral treatise, part zaftig fantasia.

Yet guidos aren’t the only ones doomed to suffer the contradictions bred of seaside Jersey’s sybaritic milieu. Careless guidettes are made to suffer as well. Even Snooki’s gamine protagonist experiences humiliation of nearly classical tragic force. “Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show,” we read at one point. “She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky.” The furious sequence from peaches shaken to cheese cut captures in microcosm French thinker Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, an eruption of the Real into the symbolic order of “peaches,” poufs, and f*ck-me pumps, one that even the most frenzied and primordial ritual — suggestive dancing — cannot repress.

It’s these occasional darker, minor-chord variations on an otherwise decidedly sunny, brassy theme which make Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s debut novel such a deceptively nuanced work. Indeed, A Shore Thing is part moral treatise, part zaftig fantasia. The whole dizzying fugue — involving hot guidos, cool clubs, fried Oreos, and lots of tequila, each in ample measure — author Snooki composes with a maestro’s aplomb. After all, the Italians invented opera, right?

(You can read earlier thoughts of mine on MTV’s The Jersey Shore here.)

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I spent Christmas at the bottom of a canyon. This was not because of a tragic accident or a botched attempt at becoming a felo-de-se. I wanted, rather, to hide from all the wi-fi signals and cellphone ringtones and blueberries and blackberries, and a canyon seemed the ideal … er … coldspot for a little living version 1.0. I booked a room at a small creek-side inn just off the old state highway and hunkered down for a tech-free Christmas.

And tech-free it was. In that little wood-paneled room I drank wine, ate pears, and read topographical maps in absolute silence. Nothing but the dull roar of the creek penetrated my peace. I delighted, as I lay there ensconced in a cheap down comforter, in the thought of all the trash changing hands on this holiest of holidays how I had nothing in my possession at the moment save an Irish sweater, a sturdy pair of boots, a pair of jeans, a few clean changes of socks, and five library books.

The following day I went hiking on a trail that came recommended by one of the guidebooks I brought along with me. Indeed, the first three miles of it were pleasant enough: majestic canyons rose and then fell from view, Indian ruins poked up from between clumps of emerald-green shrubs, streams the color of aquamarine crisscrossed the path at regular intervals. But then I came across a teal iron fence topped with spirals of concertina wire. Attached to this fence was a white sign issuing the following warning: “Attention Hikers! You Are Skirting Private Property! Please Keep on the Trail. The Entrancement Resort, Inc. Employs Armed Guards.”

Caught off-guard (no pun intended), I turned around and hiked back to my car. The fun was over. The Entrancement Resort’s stern admonition knocked all reveries of mysterious ruins and romantic rills from my brain. It reminded me all too vividly of the world I had run away from for the weekend — a world of dubious property claims and swindles and avarice and all the other vices endemic to the corporate fascist state. I went back to my creek-side inn and spent the rest of the weekend reading Edward Abbey and getting schnockered. Inside my hotel room, and inside my head, at least, no armed guards patrolled.

“Getting away from it all” is impossible anymore. Budgets cuts have caused states to close their parks, national monuments, and protected wildernesses. The Denver Post just reported that Colorado might close its state parks and, what’s worse, lease them for drilling. “Some state parks in Colorado may be closed, while other could be opened for oil and gas drilling to raise money for the cash-strapped parks system,” the article informs us. “In the 2009 fiscal year, Colorado State Parks got $6.7 million in general funds. That dropped to $2.6 million in fiscal 2011. There may be no funding for state parks next year, according to the financial plan. The report includes a suggestion that the parks explore leasing mineral rights in limited areas.”

States are denying the public access to public land that was purchased and maintained by public funds, and are therefore effectively mooting public investment.

Colorado is not alone in its plight. Pennsylvania, New York, and Arizona are weighing similar options. What they all overlook, however, is that leasing public land to private interests is a fundamental betrayal of Americans’ collective interest. This betrayal has been happening on many levels over the past thirty years. Ten years ago it might have taken the form of a city park purposefully neglected and given over to gangs, drug dealers, and the like (thereby making it impossible for the general public to enjoy). But now the betrayal is overt. States are denying the public access to public land that was purchased and maintained by public funds, and are therefore effectively mooting public investment. The next measure seems all too depressingly clear: some sort of infernal public-private partnership whereby the last few spaces held in common by the public and for the public are turned over to the corporate state to be turn into yet another opportunity for plunder in the forms of asset stripping and equity leveraging.

It is an understatement to state that the situation is dire. Writing almost fifty years ago, Edward Abbey remarked as much in his book of reminiscences Desert Solitaire. “Wildness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives as water and good bread,” he writes. “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization.” For Abbey a world without wilderness is a world without hope for humanity.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. He will make himself an exile from the earth and then will know at last, if he is still capable of feeling anything, the pain and agony of final loss.

But it is not just wilderness that is a necessity. The wilderness is only one expression of that which is vital to the survival of the human spirit: the existence of uncommodified space. Space that can be enjoyed on its own terms, that hasn’t been “branded” or made the vehicle for private gain.

The wilderness is only one expression of that which is vital to the survival of the human spirit: the existence of uncommodified space.

State parks, national monuments, public libraries — these spaces ask nothing of us save that we enjoy them in a respectful, sensible manner (sadly, universities are already lost). The keepers of them do not try to pry into our psyches and hearts to discern how to better manipulate our covetousness. The spaces themselves do not beckon us to consume for consumption’s sake, to sicken and impoverish ourselves in an attempt to satisfy desires that do not originate in our hearts and minds but from the innumerable screens and billboards that surround us at any given moment. When we visit a park or go to the library our enjoyment is our own, and no one profits from it, or uses it to fuel an irrational and unhealthy growth for growth’s sake. No bond holder slavers when we check out a book; no financier shivers with delight when we hike a mountain trail. In these few remaining spaces — what I call “the outside”– our humanity is returned to us so that we can delight in it without consumerism’s sycophantic voyeurism, which attends most other activities.

These spaces are fast disappearing. Each day brings tidings of new austerity measures enacted to aid the federal government in propping up the banks and the ruthless plutocrats of Wall Street. And as these spaces disappear so too does our memory of them and the knowledge they allow us to cultivate — a knowledge that tells us we can be more than feeble-minded slaves to an economic regime so feculent and starved that it must crush and devour anything that is not yet under its command so as to limp along for yet another fiscal quarter.

Ylajali would love to hear from you. Drop her a line at hansengenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

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